Hello Everyone!
Daydreaming of mountains, Tedious land research, Conducive environs, No potatoes & Sun dried pokeweed berries!
Most of the morning has passed and all that I have achieved is looking at a bunch of property listings in the mountains and mildly daydreaming about living in that environment again. Perhaps it is simply the changing seasons that have me thinking about it.. or that land is generally cheaper in the more remote places... or maybe it is just the idea of living in an off-grid friendly state that has my gears turning... but one way or another they are turning!
At some point I assuredly get fed up with all the tedious research that looking at land entails and give it a break until I can focus on it again. It is worth mentioning that although I am looking for 'cheap' places... I also know that they are usually cheap for a good reason and finding that reason is never as straight forward as it may seem.
There is a lot to all that land related stuff and one thing that I really need to keep in mind is whether the local area is conducive and/or accepting of folks living an alternative lifestyle. I know that I do not need to point out how prohibitive states and counties can be when it comes to living even partially off-grid... but it is also important to realize that it can make neighbors uncomfortable and that can be just as problematic (if not more so) as the aforementioned reasons.
Moving forward in life I assuredly do not want to have concerns over my lifestyle being in some gray area of the law nor have it be under the constant scrutiny of neighbors. In short, I best apply myself wholly to my research, be extensive in my land scouting and choose a place where those things are a non-issue.
As with most things I am sure there will be compromises along the way but I also know to have limits on said compromises and make sure that a new place is private, secure and peaceful which seems to be hard to find these days! Well, it is hard to find land at an inexpensive price that is not so remote and/or desolate that it is not worth living at to start with so go figure.
Alright, it is now a few minutes before sunset and the day has passed in a flurry of activity that has left me more than a little tired here at the end of it. This is one of those entries that is going to require an 'evening espresso' if it is going to stand a chance of being finished tonight.
A good part of the day was spent doing routine chores around the shelter site before finally retrieving more flower pots that had potatoes planted in them. I have been carrying them from the garden to the dog yard where I have been pouring them out into a larger flower pot... but none of the four that I dumped today had a single potato in them.
I think that in the future I am going to avoid growing them in pots altogether unless I can figure out why I got such a poor yield from them this time around. Having had some success with them before (growing in pots) I am once again left thinking that the store-bought potatoes just failed to produce anything besides a pretty plant!
Anyway, I finally harvested some pokeweed berries (seeds) today after they finally got to a point of being dry enough after hanging on the plants for several weeks in the sun. One thing that I noticed when harvesting them is that occasionally among all the dried berries would be one or two fully ripe (and alive) ones so I had to be extra careful not to get them mixed in with the dried ones lest they cause mold.
There are way too many of the dried pokeweed berries for me to harvest but I am thinking that I should at least get a few separate containers of them just in case mold, rot or bugs make the only jar I have of them nonviable. On the flip-side to that even one small jar of them is plenty considering how many berries one good pokeweed plant can produce by itself.
Well, I am fading fast here and am going to wrap this entry up and get on with the editing and posting. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
https://peakd.com/c/hive-114308/created
