Desert Neighbors & DIY: Backhoe Work & Laundry Soap!

In this episode of Occupy the Land, we dive into a busy day on our Arizona desert homestead! With the tractor back from maintenance, we attach the backhoe to help a neighbor dig a septic tank, reinforcing community ties with a promise of mutual aid. We trade our broken Ram 1500 for an F-150 and plan for a three-quarter-ton truck upgrade. Donna trims creosote for compost, using bunny manure from a neighbor to enrich garden beds, while experimenting with hedge-like growth. Meanwhile, we craft homemade laundry soap with borax, washing soda, and Castile soap to save costs, showcasing our off-grid ingenuity and sustainable desert living!

Transcript:

Welcome to occupy the land. Occupy the land org. Well, we got the backhoe on. We’re going to go over to one of our neighbors and help them with their septic tank. And getting that thing on is just a pain. But line it up and everything. The reason is, is because you’re on uneven ground. What you really need is a concrete pad to put all your attachments on, and when the back wheels of the tractor comes up, it lines up everything to where you got it off.

That’s the secret. So that may be a happenin. But after this weekend, we get caught up with all the stuff we had to do with the tractor, and then we start doing more layers of doom.

Well, we got the tractor back. I went to a neighbors and fixed the road for them. And, we’re going back with the backhoe to finish his septic tank, dig for him, and, and of course, the promise is they’ll come help us do whatever. We just want to be a good neighbor. Now, we, had to give up the Ram 1500 because it took a dump.

The water pump went out, and it just messed it up. And, when we took it to the shop, I’m going, damn. You know, and I had the trailer, and we’re getting Donna’s Polaris. And, one of the mechanics happened to have a truck. He said, you give me that, ram and $1,500 and you can have my F-150, and it’s working out pretty well.

So that worked out well. I mean, you know, we still are shopping for a three quarter ton truck. Donald is making that decision, and we’ll go ahead and get that. But what we’re going to be doing today is I’m going to take off the back blade and, then put on the backhoe and then you’ll see us use that and dig a septic for a neighbor while he’s like ten miles away.

But, you know, we’ll get him taken care of and you get to visit with them today. So that’s what we’re going to be doing.

Okay, now this is an upgrade from the trimmer that we had during the summer. Donna took and all the roads that I cleared and so on. All of the creosote that was hanging, scratching vehicles and so on. She took care of that. And that’s where a lot of that pile comes from. And that piles got like 3 or 4 times that peg before we chipped and so on.

Now, a friend of ours that, Steve that was here a week ago or so, he said that these if you just trim them down to the root and then let him pop up and grow, that you can find, like a hedge and his look really dense and bright, like a, like a hedge, you know, and he goes, you can do that with these if you trim them back really hard.

Now what I did here is just did it flat across just to see if that’s what will happen. But what I really wanted to do was to make sure that we, Get all this dead stuff out kind of in the stack. And you got to be careful when you do that. This stuff is really sharp. And, you know, put holes in tires lickety split, so, you know, they’re left.

But, I don’t like all this dead stuff. Like, this one’s a really big ramble, you know, it’s nice and healthy and everything, and it’s got all this dead wood and we could use that, you know? Plus, it’s just little.

Jewelry. So I just go around and trim a lot of this stuff to break it up. And this will be more compost for us and it’ll get a lot greener and it’ll be a lot less Deadwood like over there. You know, that looks unseemly. I don’t like it. So we’re going to go ahead and start trimming these up.

Certainly around the house pad and different areas that esthetically we just, you know, want to clean it up. But Steve was saying, man, if you just cut it down, you know, try it on some. So we’ll do a couple these I, you know trim those back really heavy. There’s some brush out there. So just lay it flat, let it grow and then start trimming it like a hedge.

We’re going to see if that works or not. And we got this. We had one before and it did Miles. And it was a model Ryobi cordless that was below this one. I was shocked it went as far as it did. You know, I’m sure some nylon gear or something went out. This one is the bigger, you know, 40 volt.

One has a, you know, rotating handle and, more power and bigger. Instead of doing a half inch or three quarter inch that’s supposed to be able to do an inch branches, you see, how are these going to break it? How? Well, it says it could do a lot bigger than that. So I’m like, okay, I’m going to find out.

You’re just filling in the layers of the the groves here. Underneath is a bunch of larger wood and smaller wood. And then we’ve had this straw sitting in a pile over there composting for about a year. So Ernie just mixed it up with a little bit of dirt, shoot it up and everything. So this will be really good for right underneath the soil.

And I’m going to put in. And the soil I’m going to use is our neighbor’s compost. He has bunnies. They have show bunnies. And so they have really good compost over there. That’s going to be good for the top layer of this compost. It’s bunny manure. Body manure. But it’s supposed to be really good for this. I don’t have chickens right now so I don’t have any chickens manure in our garden, all the time.

But we don’t have chickens yet. That’s that’s next on the list. So what’s down? Looks like you got wire down there. You did chicken wire on the bottom? Yeah. There’s this. There was some leftover of this coated, chicken wire. So this is going to rust if I put it under there because it’s coated. So I put that I mean, you know, there’s probably rodents that can still get in there, but it’ll it’ll help.

And then the larger pieces of wood, some smaller stuff for firewood. Oh, we have tons of wood. Some of this is even from that tree that I just cut down. And then I put some dirt in here. But I need to put a little more dirt. And then the straw, and then the bunny poop is going to go on top.

Well, let’s go check out the bunny poop. Let’s go ahead and go check out the compost so people can see that. And then we’ll go ahead and, I go get bunny poop. Yeah. We’ll try to find, yeah, some grubs. I saw some really nice big fat grubs in here. So we’ll try to, like. Let’s go.

Well, we got the tractor back. Still had some issues, but, you know, working it out with the, service guys. Well, whatever. You know, it’s working. So we’re going to go ahead. And I just finished doing all the roads. It’s better to done it like a week ago or so after it rained. So you can have the moist soil.

You’ll make so much dust and you can carve it better. And, I really got to get on that sand pond more and build up the over there is the, the house platform, you know, the pad. So we’re going to go ahead and, you know, got to do more layers this week on the dome. We got to build that.

We got all our stuff and trying to do the electrical and everything. But Donna wanted to get food started. So you just go check it.

This is where we had the compost. I have the wash over here now. Floods. And when it rains, I put some more auger holes in there to help it penetrate. But you could see, man, when it rains, it gives green, green, green really fast. The whole desert is green. And you got this dead wood that we can use that for composting.

But, you know, the flow comes this way. We’re kind of trying to hold this back and divert it into the sand pond over here. Now, this is made this way so that when it does flood, it comes around and it floods all this compost. So this is straw. And that shredder chipper underneath that tarp over there is what we do when we do this.

When we got absolutely nothing else to do. Now all I did is I came in with the tractor and just kind of, you know, tossed it a little bit and put it over here for Donna. She sees some nice yummy grubs, you know, but it’s it’s doing well. And it gets a lot of moisture here when it’s done like this.

And it just fills in. So this is our compost. Now we can add more to it and work on this. We got enough going that we could do what we wanted to do immediately here. And, when we were first clearing the land, we went ahead and got all the, you know, chipping and stuff done much as I could stand.

I mean, you know, it’s a thing. And, but we got enough that we could do some garden beds. Well, Donna wanted to do that, and then she she got her ranger, you know, and that was making her happy. You like your Ranger? Ranger? Okay. Helps me. Just like a tractor helps you. This helps me do a lot of things.

And I got a tractor, so she. She’s jealous. Yeah, she needed to have that. So we’re, at a stage. Now’s a good time to do a lot of gardening stuff, but, man, we just gotta get, you know, having the tractor gone and all the other stuff to do and so on. We haven’t really been doing the, the bill, and but we’ve been able to order a bunch of stuff, we know what we need and we got that.

So that is, you know, this week, this week and next week now that it’s finally cool, weather has even got down into the 80s, you know, 90s. Oh, it must be winter, you know, for us. But the but the down in the 80s during the day for weeks on end and it being in the mid 50s at night, that’s awesome.

You know, that’s the best. Now you can see where we are zooming. There’s the freeway that’s probably about 4 to 6 miles away. And that’s I-10 going between Phoenix and LA. And we’re south of that hour. Many miles. We are far enough. It’s summer. You might not make it feel walking, but, it’s, We’re isolated. We’re out here.

And the service department and the tractors, some of the problems are still there. Hey, you know, there’s warranty work, and I had to pay for some stuff, and I’m like, man, really? You know? So, they were willing to come out here, and Donna wanted them to come out. She’s like, make them come out so they can see how far we got to go jerking around, having to put the tractor on the trailer and stuff.

So we made do that end of the week just for a lesson. But, we’re busy. I still got to work on the, shipping container. More I got, I got it, I got it. We got a bunch of stuff to do, but we want to get, further along on the build. So that’s what we’re going to be working on this week after Dawn gets this done.

So this is a big pile of the bunny compost. It’s been here for a while and it’s really.

Compost down quite a bit.

There is going to grab a bucket and bring it over.

Well, Donna’s ranger makes a good sauce. Now, I need to cut these chip boards down for shelving that I’m installing back here.

So now I got to cut out the notches and so on for them. I just need to be able to store stuff on these 24in shelves and then up top I can put stuff and this would be the storage area. And then in the back I have some pegboard and I have a little worktable back here and so on.

Make use of the space, but I need to get all the stuff out of the way so I can organize all that.

So this morning I’m going to make my own laundry soap. I would normally buy this zoom brand, but it’s very expensive. $18 for 64oz and that’s just too much. So I can pretty much duplicate it by using these simple ingredients. We have borax, washing soda, and Castiel soap, distilled water or regular water. It doesn’t matter. And, so you just basically heat up some water, mix the powders and let that dissolve, add the Castiel soap, and then whatever essential oils you want to add.

If you want to add lavender, eucalyptus, or nothing at all, that’s fine. My water is ready to go, so I’m going to start mixing the powders.

I’ve added the washing soda and the borax to this almost boiling water. It just has to be hot. Hot enough to dissolve it. And you mix this up and let it sit for a while till it cools, and then you’ll be adding the steel soap and the rest of the water. And that’s pretty much it. You just let it cool.

You put it in your jugs, containers, glass jars, however you want to store it, and there you have your own laundry soap. Looks like there’s still some chunks in there, so I’m going to mix those up. But that’s how you do it.

You know. Okay. So everything has homogenized. The powders have dissolved in the hot water. So I’m going to add the Castile soap, the rest of the water and some essential oils. Because steel soap is what really gives it the cleaning power. The others are boosters, and they work really well at doing what they’re intended to do. So that is adding the Castile soap thickens it up a the.

And the rest of the water and the essential oils I’m going to add when it cools off a little bit, they can evaporate if, if the mixture is too warm. So I’ll just wait till that cools off and put, I don’t know, just 15 drops or so, or however much you want or none at all. I really like your laundry soap to smell and that’s it.

Basically, when this is cool, I’ll put it in these jugs that I’ve used before, and this makes about a gallon. And you enjoy this?

The laundry soap has cooled enough now that I can put it in the storage bottles. So basically just take it and pour it in. I use this funnel, cut the bottom out of it so that would fit over the top of this jug and just pour it in there. This will make about a gallon and it’ll last us about a month.

Desert Neighbors & DIY: Backhoe Work & Laundry Soap!https://t.co/AEPuVDATLV

— occupytheland (@occupy_the_land) October 25, 2025