Monsoon Season on the Homestead: Chickens, Root Cellar & Garden Updates

In this laid-back weekly episode of Occupy the Land, we share life during the dog days of summer and the start of monsoon season. The chicks enjoy their first watermelon treat while staying cool under the fan, the new rooster settles in, and we continue work on the root cellar sphere floor with soil compaction and backfilling. Donna preps acidic potato beds with sulfur, peat moss, and cardboard mulch, while Ernie runs water, repairs the bus awning (drilling stainless steel), digs orchard trenches for biochar, and tests drainage as light rains arrive. Reflections on staying optimistic with endless off-grid tasks and enjoying the rain that finally settles the dust. Peaceful progress amid the heat and coming storms! Peace.

Transcript:

So it is definitely the dog days of summer, and the chickens are huddled in front of the fan just about their and figured out this little cool yet, but they will. Like, I’ve had a couple of them in it. So today is the first time I’m going to give them a little bit of food, like people food. So I’m going to try watermelon for them.

I remember when I had before that was like one of my favorite things. Watermelon.

Grapes. They love fruit. So let’s see what happens here. Hopefully it’ll be a nice welcome treat in this hot.

Another day, another trip for water.

All right. So I’m just going to take you around real quick and show you what we’ve been doing this week. A lot more maintenance things and things we need to fix, things we need to put together. One of the things was this awning that we had on the bus. It got ripped off in a windstorm a while back, and to put this new one in has been a project, this this bus and stainless steel.

And you’re getting started. Then you have to order some special drill bits to so you could drill holes in there to anchor. Everything was just a thing. So we’ve been working on this this week. Hopefully we’ll get it done in the next couple of days and have that up, because this is where the morning sun is and it’s really hot.

It just heats up the bus really bad whenever we don’t have any shade there. So if we get that shade, it’ll kind of help keep it a little cooler. And we have the pool, which is nice. Oh, and there’s a rainbow in the background. We’ve got rain all over the valley, except here. They’re forecasting rain during the monsoon, especially in the next couple of days.

But it seems to always just sort of go around here. This is a little later in the day and it’s just sunset right now. So that’s kind of nice. But what I had to do today was go to my my whole goal today was to take the trash and get a bunch of water. Well, I did take the trash.

We have to run to the dump. And so I took a load and I still have a bunch more to go. We just haven’t been in a while so we had a lot. Also need to clean these solar panels. They would. It’s so dry here and with so much wind. I don’t know if you can tell, but it is just it’s just got so much dust on it.

They don’t produce as much whenever they’re covered in dust. So sometimes, you know, you might have this large to do list. And one of the things in living off grid is you just have to be an optimist. You have to be grateful for the things that you do get done, and not stress so much every day on the things that you don’t get done, because that can cause a lot of stress whenever you just constantly have all these things to do.

And there’s only so many hours in a day, and sometimes things just don’t go always to plan. So you just sort of have to roll with it. So another thing that Ernie’s been working on are these trenches we want to do, plant a bunch of trees here. So he’s dug a bunch of these trenches, and we’re going to put a bunch of brush in here from around the property.

You’ve already done one of these rows here a couple months back. You may have remembered that. And so he’s got, gosh, I don’t know how many ditches maybe like 5 or 6 of these ditches dug. And then another thing we have to do is go around the property and collect all of the brush to put in here so that we can burn it.

So there’s quite a bit, you know, there’s all, you know, obviously all these, there’s a lot of dryness here and a lot of things just laying around. So we need to go gather all of that and put it in these ditches so we can burn it, because this is where a lot of the water is going to flow through from the top part of our property, all the way down to this sand pond here that Ernie’s been digging.

I’m sure he’s been filling you in on that. So another thing that we’ve been working on is the chickens. Now, I know I kind of got them before I was really ready, but I really needed to get to get them in and going and grown up so that this fall we’ll be able to have eggs. So we’ve been working on kind of making that more automated.

The watering system is still have an issue with the siphon, so I got to work on that. The feeders and all of that. I do have a rooster now, and I think one of the babies that I have is also a rooster, so we’re going to see how that goes. I’ve had two roosters before. They can get along.

A lot of times they don’t. They’ll sometimes they’ll just stay in their corners. If there’s enough hens, then they both keep themselves busy with their own little flock. But having two roosters is probably not going to work very well, so we’ll see what we can do with that. They’re doing pretty good. They’re staying cool enough. I have a fan in here and a mr..

So they’re getting ready to go into there. They are all just hanging out while it’s nice and breezy and a little bit. I’m not going to say cool because it’s not cool, but it’s not as hot and it’s got a little bit of breeze to it. So the main thing that Ernie’s been working on is our root cellar.

And this has to go in stages two. Right now we’re kind of working on how we’re going to we’re going to fill this in with more dirt on the outside. And then he may he’s been working on figuring out how to do. And it probably is going to use some fiberglass fiberglass mesh that he got to put around the outside and then put the dirt in and wet it and kind of build it up that way.

We’re going to see how that works. So one other thing that I’ve been working on is prepping my garden for potatoes in the fall. Any kind of, you know, potatoes, sweet potato, different kinds of things like that. And the, the root crops, they need more of an acidic soil. So I mentioned that in another video. But I want this really.

I don’t have to wet it so often anymore. I just keep this cardboard over it. And maybe every 4 or 5 days I come in here and just soak it really good and it’ll stay pretty damp. So the soil is pretty, pretty nice and moist and everything, and I’m probably going to have to get more worms to go in there, but that’ll help aerate the soil and everything.

But I think the soil is ready. It’s it’s pretty acidic. It’s around about four on the scale. So that’s really what we need. So it’s ready to go. As long as I just keep it wet and I get some worms in there and keep it going. I think in late August I’ll plant the potatoes. So that’s about it for this week.

We’ve we’ve just been busy. We’ve got a lot of things to do. But like I said, you just sort of have to take it all in stride. Get done what you can. Appreciate it. Enjoy your land because sometimes you just need you just got to step back and enjoy.

Well, it’s monsoon season, so this is what we can expect for rest of the summer. And it’ll be off and on like this. Sometimes it just rains regularly every day for, you know, a lot of times. And then we got a little bit of rain last night. So it just enough not to sheet to where it starts going into the washes and flood the system, but enough that it, you know, got it wet.

And so we’re glad to have the dust be beaten down now. So we’re enjoying that. And Donna went for a load of water yesterday. This is what we can expect for the next couple of weeks. Now what I’m hoping is I get at least one nice little deluge so that we can test all the drainage system of the water, because the water is everything about where it goes, where it is retained, where it soaks in the check dams, the flow, what gets soaked, it doesn’t.

And there’s really nothing that I don’t want to get flooded other than the root cellar. But I use so much water in there for at the stage I am now, it can flood all at once. Now this where you see all of this, the trenching that we did here, those I’m hoping will flood and you know, they’ll get wet.

I go good. You know I want that. That’s the whole point is that that gets saturated there for the orchard and hopefully I can get it nice and soaked before we start doing the creosote burning and then the biochar and covered it back up and then amending the soil. So that’s what we’re working on. But this is what it looks like during the monsoon times, you know, and you get big clouds.

Yay. So one thing about Arizona, it’s always freaking sun amble hot and the sun’s out. So this is nice. I’m looking forward to this time of year.

Bitchute links: https://www.bitchute.com/video/48iwDMic1KwA