State of the homestead address

The arduous task of getting the plumbing set up has begun. My dad and I have spent my last three days off getting basic trenches dug and finding out where the old pipes come in and split off.

In this picture my dad is hitting pay dirt. We found the old cutoff valve for the house about ten minutes after this. Of course he found it somewhere we didn't expect at all, under about 6 inches or soil, where it will obviously be of the greatest use. I wasn't really worth much during this process because on the second day I ended up being sick. Luckily I've since gotten over what I suspect was just a head cold (is there any other kind? Maybe the flu I guess.)

This is the aforementioned buried treasure, (AKA my cutoff valve) this almost made it unnecessary to install a new one. If it hadn't been for the fact that outside faucets weren't affected I would have left it alone altogether. 

The trench that eventually housed brand new pvc pipe. 

So much rain.

Normally Texas is one of those states that people think of as being really hot and dry. Usually I would agree with that assessment. This last month or two though have been really rainy. Several inches a month. But the last 7 days have been particularly nasty. We got about 6-8 inches in just one week. That is not small feat down here.

My first international visitors

As I sit here in my office chair, I have discovered the first page views from a country outside of the United States. They happen to have seen my page from my favorite international country, France! This is almost making me wish I had kept up with my French language studies from high school and college the first time around. So I would like to say bienvenue to everyone who reads my blog. If you like it please leave me a comment, and if you really enjoy it tell me what you would like to hear about.

On another note I have officially made it to 100 pageviews. This is pretty exciting stuff. I hope you all enjoy visiting.

It doesn't always work out like you want.

Life is one big experiment. And like all others this one does not come with a map or a guarantee of success. My raised bed went together like clock work which is great. Its just the after that is giving me a hard time. I planted it out and everything was going fine for a while. Now it seems that I counted my chickens before they hatched (before I even got them as the case is for me). Either the rain has gotten to my plants, which I doubt, or I used too much of the manure and humus mixture in combination with the topsoil I filled the bed with. This is more than likely the case as I planted some backup tomato plants about two weeks later in a different bed and those seem to be doing fine. What has caused my problems? I think that the levels of nitrogen are way to high from an overabundance of manure. This has caused my roots some problems and is killing my first planting. If this is the case then eventually I will pull the failed plants and some of the soil in the raised bed and remix it with an amendment of native soil and in an attempt to balance out the npk ratio and the percentage of organic matter. If nothing else this will be a lesson learned on my journey to growing my own food. Hopefully by this time next year all I will need to buy from the grocery store are the meats, dairy, and some fruit that I cannot grow my self (at least until I have some more land...but that is still down the road). The one thing I am certain of is that my thumb is green. The herbs that I am growing and the fruit and vegetable production class I took way back in 2013 have proven that much. That and the fact that I helped my dad garden as a kid, and even created a producing garden for his house this year are definitely reassuring. I'll have some more pictures here in the near future.