ALL THE OLD TURKEYSONG POSTS ARE THERE AND MORE, CHECK IT OUT!
The short version of this year: Felt like shit most of the year, didn’t get a lot done, stopped growing stuff intentionaly for the farmer’s market due to unreliable health and too many wasted crops, switched most of my energy and time over to trying to figure out health issues which occupies about 2 to 4 hours or more of research on most days and much of my thoughts. But, even though I sat on my ass for about 80% or more of the great majority of my days, the pictures I took this year do show that I did get out a little bit.
I’m in a full on war to regain my health. It takes a lot of thought and time, so I haven’t done as much cool stuff as usual. Once I figure that out, I hope to be a fountain of useful output, but until then I’m running on fumes. This year, I was really just getting by most of the time with little spurts of energy here and there which I generally use to do something interesting so I don’t go fucking crazy, often with piles of dishes and laundry as a result. Give me a choice between a pile of dirty laundry with a pile of charcoal, or just a pile of clean laundry, well… I’ll just be adding some charcoal stained clothes to that dirty laundry pile son. Let me tell you, a life of leisure is just not for me!
The spring ran on through the worst drought anyone can remember. It was pretty slow, but there was still more water than I ended up using. The spring really does make it all possible. I feel like I should build a shrine or something. Seriously amazing.
I actually got around to filling my deer tag this year! Skippy the deer is mostly eaten up now, and good riddance. He was busting down fences, messing up fruit trees and generally being a juvenile delinquent. I was half expecting to find graffiti somewhere… DEERZ RULEZ! on the water tank or some shit like that. The plan was to do a year long educational video series following the processing of Skippy into all kinds of cool stuff, but it proved too large of a challenge to pull off on my own and just getting him cleaned and in the freezer had to be enough at the time. Maybe next year.
My ex partner and currently business and land partner Tamara Wilder has been back more this winter bringing some help in the form of work traders and such. It’s a bit of a challenge to have people here after living in solitude for a year and a half or more and I’m generally not up for managing anyone, but maybe some stuff will get done.
I’ve been a little more focused this year on video and hope to continue that trend. I still want a better camera, but I have an okay consumer camcorder I can use for now. I am pretty excited about the great potential of video and the opportunity to reach a lot of people around the world with it. You can visit my fledgling youtube channel here. It’s always helpful to get comments, likes and subscriptions, hint hint! So this year it’s two for one, The Year in Video and The Year in Pictures. Or more like two for none, what a deal!
I’ll let the images and captions tell the rest.
Watch in HD if your rural connection is fast enough.
A 6 year old apple tree frame-worked to a new variety. Edward’s Fine Winter just didn’t perform well enough, so I changed it over to one of the Etter red fleshed apples. This was taken in spring. When I grafted it, the tree was already starting to flower. Yes, that’s okay to do.
scallions for market, Scallions and carrots are my market mainstays. They hold in the ground for a while, so I don’t miss the crop window if I can’t make it to the market.
They just kept hatching more all summer. Probably just because they’re happy free range chickens driven to fulfill their biological purpose. These two chicks made it. Mom moved them into the coop after most of their siblings were killed in a raccoon attack one night. The price of freedom.
Alligator lizard foreplay. They’d probably be less than thrilled to know they were modeling for exhibition on the web. They’ll run around like this for a while before they can get it up (cold blooded low metabolism as work). I’m sure it’s totally hot to be bitten on the head if you’re an alligator lizard chick. She looks stoked.
ALL THE OLD TURKEYSONG POSTS ARE THERE AND MORE, CHECK IT OUT!
It’s been a challenging year. My love and best friend moved away in the spring, leaving a hole in my life that still feels like it will never close all the way. In classic bad timing, I was also embarking on diet and lifestyle changes in yet another attempt to improve my crappy health which I had made worse the previous season by going on a very restricted low carbohydrate diet called GAPS (shudder). My new approach included, as importantly as anything, stress reduction, but with a broken heart, very little money, no energy and pretty much on my own for the first time in forever without anything resembling a reliable income, that didn’t happen so much. I got pretty low functioning for a while but managed to squeak through the worst of it.
I was only able to make the farmer’s market, my main source of income, about once a month where I average less than 100.00. I was as chubby as I’ve ever been in my life and pretty damn weak. I remember killing a chicken to eat and having to rest 3 times in order to finish processing it. I started plucking it, but it was too much work so I just tore the skin off. Another time I prepped for the market the night before, and finished washing carrots in the morning. By the time I was ready, I was too exhausted to make the trip, so I had to blow it off. A bunch of produce, including a cooler full of amazing carrots, the best crop of the year, went to the chickens. That sort of thing was not unusual for me unfortunately, but doing it alone was. I almost never slept more than 5 hours consecutively,usually less, and often only managed to get 4 or 6 hours of sleep total over 24 hours.
Fortunately this nutcase/genius,
Matt Stone‘s advice on improving my metabolic rate has paid off in the long run, in spite of some circumstantial bumps in the road. Regardless of all of the difficulties, my mood was greatly moderated throughout by listening to my body and eating whatever I felt like, whenever I wanted, and then some. I also stopped working unless I felt really up to it and drastically cut my consumption of liquids, especially the holy elixir of eternal youth, plain water. Over the last couple months I’ve lost fat and gained muscle while continuing to follow that basic approach and adding a very small amount of body weight exercise.. I still have some way to go to be really high functioning, but I have a pretty normal body temperature for the first time in ages, and I feel good with increasing frequency, not just not bad, but actually good, always a great rarity for me and valuable beyond words. On new years eve I wore a t-shirt outside until about 11:00 pm because my metabolism was so jacked up that it felt like I was pushing the cold air away by radiating heat. My personality has definitely changed for the better, and I’m more convinced than ever that the severity of peoples emotional and phychological issues is often, if not usually, rooted in physiological dysfunction. A resilient physiology makes for a resilient person.
Other things have helped me along the way, but this is the ONLY approach that has ever felt like it’s given me a real foundation on which to potentially build back true health after 15 years of lyme related issues, as well as being kind of messed up for most of the rest of my adult life. Throwing supplements, exercises, superfoods or whatever at health problems is largely a waste of time if the baseline of the organism, the production of cellular energy, is compromised and replaced (as it always is when compromised) by a stress response chemistry. Metabolism is where it’s at folks. Low body temperature = an unhappy body.
At this point, I’m pretty much letting my body do the driving, doing my best to make it feel safe, well nourished and well rested, and trusting it to sort out what to do with the resources I give it. I’m pretty sure now that it’s smarter than me. I’m hoping that I will continue to improve so I can more fully realize my potential to kick some serious experimental/educational butt in 2014, but everything will take a back seat to gaining and retaining a healthy state, whether I get there or not.
Even with all the challenges and a major lag during the summer, I still managed to do some cool stuff and take a bunch of pictures. I’ve broken the year in pictures up into two parts of which this is number one. Hopefully next year it will be in 4 parts!
Erlicheer at the Ukiah Farmer’s Market. This smelly small double narcissus, was a big hit. It looks like little roses. It doesn’t seem like a good candidate for my tree understory system, because it comes up too late, but it draws a lot of attention as a cut flower, so I’ll probably continue to expand plantings of it all over the place.
ALL THE OLD TURKEYSONG POSTS ARE THERE AND MORE, CHECK IT OUT!
Chickens have been a constant source of amusement here for the past year and a half or more. We have been testing out various breeds and just seeing how chickens might or might not integrate into the homestead. We are learning a lot, but the main product so far has been entertainment! More on chickens later, but here are a few frozen moments from our year of Chickens. brrrrrraaaaaaauuk.
Welcome to the Turkeysong blog! Turkeysong is a homestead in the beautiful coastal mountains of Northern California. This awesome section of land I care-take is something like a canvas and a laboratory on which to live, create and experiment. I have spent many years building ability and knowledge, studying ancestral and basic living skills, and teaching and writing about such through Paleotechnics. Figuring that stuff out is the greater part of my life. The goal of this blog is to provide practical, useful homesteading related information which has been sieved through the crucible of experience, and to chronicle experiments and ideas in country living, and technologies related to human self reliance. Experimentation and creative adaptation are always on the menu! Expect me to push the envelope a little and deliver innovative projects and ideas with enough detail and background for you to move forward. Turkeysong’s sister site, Paleotechnics, explores skills and ideas in the more primitive realm. gobble gobble.
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