Alabama Homesteading

The projects which we can do ourselves are getting wrapped up; fortunately the main homesite is finally getting leveled so it looks like we can get some concrete poured in the next month or two. We look forward to doing some work on our actual house. This video will just do a straightforward walkthrough of recent projects.

This week we begin setting up a place for our main water tank, which will supply the garden and pond areas, greenhouses, and the main homesite. It's a crucial piece of the whole building project, and we need to think this through carefully to both support the massive weight and protect against rot of the wooden platform. Last month's lesson of the trees was about eternal perspective; this one will be about choices and consequences in the here and now.

Life will beset us with many fears; we don't need to add to them unnecessarily. In today's episode, we will face a local terror of the night head-on with the help of Ecclesiastes 4 (I have spent a night out here alone, and now once with Laurie). Then we will address a common superstition that has burdened generations of our ancestors for lack of knowledge and counsel from God (cf. Proverbs 24:6).

A long week of work--the weather was nice at least--but at the end of it our projects don't look nearly completed, and we came back battered by our experiences as well. So is there another way to measure progress when you're homesteading?

Starting a homestead is like having a small child and watching him grow. There will be weeks and months when there seems to be no progress, no growth at all, and then comes a day when the child gets very irritable. The next time you measure him, he's shot up an inch and a half. It's not that there was nothing happening the rest of the time; it's just that it was internal and not visible to you. On the first day here, we walk through and decide all that needs to be done, knowing it won't all just happen right away. Then we rank these tasks according to urgency...

The best-laid plans of mice and men... As homesteaders, we would like things to go just the way it looked on paper--and it does, for about five minutes until real life shows up. In this episode, the constant delays with roots and rocks have added up until I must cut the dig short by about 6 feet. But as it turns out, that is right where I was supposed to be, as you'll see at the end.

Homesteading has no salary; so why do we do it?

Competition is fierce among forest plants and trees--for sunlight, and for the precious thin topsoil, where a myriad of roots big and small snarl around each other. The Widowmaker lives here--for now.

Camping out...I realize I haven't done this for quite a few years. And seldom completely alone, and never quite this far away from civilization in the pitch dark. No lights or amenities of a campground here. But I lived--and in the morning, there's a lot of hard digging to do. The ground is going to fight me every inch of the way. Just another reminder--if you're trying to start a homestead up from scratch, first allow yourself a lot of time to do it, and then assume that something won't go exactly as planned, so you'll have to add on another 50 percent. We'll talk more about expectations next time.

As homesteaders, we have a lot to build. And we've already bought a lot of materials. But the more you can pick up yourself, or reuse, or find for free, or saw from a tree, the less money you'll spend and that's always good. We've planned for a long time to have our own portable sawmill one day, and finally took the plunge. Also in this video: what do governments and campfires have in common?

Inoculating fallen logs with mushrooms; starting a stone shed build.

Homesteaders must learn to establish and respect borders.

December 2023- January 2024: What do you do when a project fails? Is that some kind of sign that you should just give it up? Sometimes, perhaps, but generally it's a proving ground for you, to find out what you're made of and strengthen that character and those skills. This trip we learn that when you're making something temporary and put less time into it, that doesn't mean you should put less thought into it.

September to October 2023: the treehouse is roofed and beginning to get power, as our little forest friends look for places to hunker down for the onset of cold weather. We won't be making full use of this treehouse until it warms up again in the spring; next time we work on site we'll go down the slope to start a greenhouse and clear trees for the main home. Lesson: making the right connections.

How to put a lightweight roof over a treehouse: a little protection from sun and rain. This house will not have walls or anything like that though; it’s largely open to the elements. The main purpose is for storage, a workshop, and a base for electrical power, and a place to sleep up high off of the ground away from venomous snakes. When we started I also wanted to put the water tower in it, but we have recently been given a 350 gallon water tank, which is going to be too heavy for this platform. Lesson learned this time: God’s best for us is better than our best for us.

August 2023: Laurie's arm is still healing and she can't pick up really heavy items yet, but she's working hard and getting better all the time. On this trip the treehouse is showing its final shape, with the stair and railings nearly finished, and we outlined a main garden terrace with a solid rock wall.

What is homesteading anyway? And what lesson does it have for the American church? This trip is after Laurie had a bad break in her arm, and we were forced to stay away for over two months.

Homesteading on a mountain is our choice; the animals and plants we encounter there did not choose it--it's their habitat by God's design.

You can take your table scraps, lawn clippings, and other decomposable items and throw them in a heap and have some nice soil in 2 years or so. OR...with movement and aeration, you can cut that down to 2 months and have a continual supply.

Setbacks happen when you're setting up a homestead on untamed land. Sometimes it's caused by your own foolishness, and other times it just happens. Ecclesiastes 10 tells us to sharpen our axe--limit those problems that we cause ourselves--but whatever the case and whatever the outcome, make sure that you are doing right by God's law.

When you work on a steep slope, standing is always at the forefront of your mind. A misstep will send you sliding or rolling--and yes, that does happen more often than we'd like to remember. You need a greater power than your own watching out for you here.

Knowing that our adventures in working off-grid on our mountain is likely to be of interest to the prepper community, I decided to take time in the last 2-3 minutes of this video to speak directly to them. There are serious spiritual ramifications to what we do here.

Scenes of the hillside treehouse build in Alabama, and a prepper's apologetics explained. The planting areas are taking shape.

This medium-sized tree needs to come down; both to allow sunlight down to the garden area and to get the main beams for the treehouse floor. We couldn't afford to buy such massive wooden beams, couldn't move them here in our pickup truck if we did, and would never dream of trying to drag them up the hill to this site. Fortunately they grow right here.

We need a center post for our treehouse, which will help support the center floor joists and also allow for a canvas roof that peaks in the middle. Raising it proves to take longer than we thought it would.