I’m digging a rectangular hole, sifting dirt through 1/2″ hardware cloth on 2×4 frame into wheelbarrow.

I’m analyzing and experimenting with the consistency of the dirt.

The top layers that go in the pile are largely silt and sand. The material between rocks in the lower hardpan layer have more clay. I’m hopeful for materials that will lend themselves to cob or rammed earth without much amending.

Initially this was primarily a move to just get started on…something, building-wise. But in the couple of weeks since I started digging, I’ve made a commitment to another project that entails not building anything as part of the this project. At least not anything very substantial, for the foreseeable future.

So it will probably eventually evolve into a partially underground cob hut, greenhouse (walipini), or something. It’s got pretty good southern exposure, which will get better as the leaves drop. It’s ~150′ from the road, and power, water, and internet hookups. By comparison, the shed is about 500′ from all that.

I only do a couple hours at a time, carefully with form. I’ve done 5 sessions over the past 2 weeks and my chronic back pain has been way lower since I started. It’s also self-motivating, like pulling holly, or bike riding, with a component of inherent curiousness and gratification.

Bringing home the SD card and seeing what’s on it feels like Christmas morning.

I’ve been growing stuff. I’m not getting out there enough to keep it from bolting like crazy.

It is nice to have fresh brassicas to collect for dinner on evenings I spend in the shed.

I’ve got about a dozen redcedar, a ponderosa pine, and 3 giant sequoias started on my eastern boundary, fenced and irrigated. I have a few dozen sitka spruce started along western boundary in the forested wetland.

I’ve been refining the design and first implementations of honeycomb (the ‘dual’ of geodesic) domes made out of pallet wood.

That prototype tree net in the last photo came in useful a couple of weeks ago in an intense encounter with some bard owls.

I’ve been getting 50’+ up in some trees, setting anchor points to dangle from to build a larger tree net in one of the nicest parts of the woods.

I’d have more to report here over these past couple of peak summer months but for some big, new other projects.

May 15 was the end of the fiscal year for the cost sharing grant.

I enlisted help and did a push to get done what I could.

Jeff came out Friday and Monday to help remove Ivy.

On Tuesday I rented an excavator and Morgan and Marc came out to help.

We were mostly done with the holly I’d flagged by the end of that day.

Morgan slept in the woods and I slept in the shed.

The next day Bee came out to help and we finished the rest.

The finale was taking out a 40+ foot holly tree, start to finish, that was originally out of scope.

For the most part we did as little forest disturbance as possible.

One exception was extending the mini-truck road to a second hilltop and potential build site.

I slept the night in the shed and rented a stump grinder for the next day.

On Thursday Bee came out and helped remove the stump that blocked normal car access.

The driveway was ready just in time for Astound to come by and hook up a broadband connection.

I worked until dark then slept a third night in the shed.

The next day I took fast ferry home riding with the normal commuters, for once.

My meter base install was approved by L&I and PSE a couple of weeks ago and today I got my electric service hookup.

I stopped conserving use of my power bank once it was scheduled a week ago. I used scrubby angle-grinder wheels to buff off the grime on an industrial sink that a friend grabbed for me from a demolition site. I hooked it up to my network of commercial outdoor hose that I got from Yusef at the amazing Discount Collection Store. I’ve refined the network of hose, and put the portions that cross the drive access in ditches.

I brought to Second Use two folding cafeteria tables that were in the shed when I got the place 14 months ago, and picked up a door and 3 windows for a forthcoming tiny house.

I got rid of a cast iron wood stove that also came with the shed. It was a challenge getting it up my makeshift ramps with my hand truck into the back of the mini truck. I took it to American Northwest Recycling, where it weighed in at 340 pounds for which they paid me $31.

I made some raised beds using logs from alder that I took out to create some sun exposure.

I’ve been planting shrubs: blue elderberry, red elderberry, thimbleberry, twinberry, dewberry, mock orange, pearfruit rose, and cascara, along with the 50-ish sitka spruce I mentioned in the previous post.

It’s the time of year when it’s relatively easy to get back into the forested wetland, and I’ve been finding things that I hadn’t noticed before.

I’ve been participating in this years training for the Kitsap Stream Steward program.

The eddies I see from time to time are sinks into underground chambers.

My neighbor’s kid and I put up 100 feet of deer fence. I took out 6 alder (some dead) to decrease the odds the fence gets crushed in the near term, and to open up some southern exposure for the fenced off area.

I rented a 2-person auger for the fence post holes. I got gravel and sand from Morrison Gravel for filling in the holes around the posts. The 750lbs carrying capacity of my tiny truck doesn’t go very far.

I trimmed and bucked up the downed trunks and we placed 8-10 foot sections along the ground around the fence, both inside and out.

Switching gears to getting electric service, I needed a 3 foot deep hole to put a 4×4 post in. If I’d still had the auger, it would’ve made it easier, but it actually felt good to dig the hole by hand. At about 2 feet down I hit a cluster of dead, but still pretty solid roots. I finished breaking the handle off my root slayer (one side of the ring had already cracked), sharpened the front edge of it, and drove it into the roots with a sledge hammer.

Today I planted 20 western red cedar along my Eastern boundary. Tomorrow, I’ll underplant some sitka spruce w/ my neighbor to the West along our boundary.

I’ve been trying to avoid buying new machines and tools. I replaced the carburetor on a used 4-stroke brush cutter that I got for $70 only to find it wasn’t really that useful.

When it’s working, the 6.5 HP chipper I picked up on FB marketplace has been a huge help with the large piles of holly slash I’ve accumulated. I’ve been learning how finicky small carbureted engines can be w/ gas, and how shelf-unstable gas can be. Not long after I got the chipper back up and running, with a cleaned carb and fresh gas, a couple of bolts that connect the blade housing to the engine sheared off.

Fixing that took me 8 hours over 4 days, checking out tools from my local tool library (gear pullers), or buying them from my local hardware store (screw extractors) as I realized that I’d need them. I probably could have cut the time in half, and improved the quality of the repair, by not trying to make due without the right tools, and calling it a day once I realized I needed a tool I didn’t have on hand. Lesson learned.

Long time no update. I was out of town for most of December, and then had some commitments that kept me from getting back into land stuff until about 10 days ago.

My Kei truck stopped working while I was gone. I ended up getting it towed to Oh Kei in Buckley, then taking the Sounder Train and biking there when it was ready to pick up.

I picked up about 40 lbs worth of berry starts and tree seedlings from the Plant Materials Center and am figuring out how to keep them from freezing with minimal electric power while we have night-after-night frosts. Both the ride to Bow, WA and the best ideas on how to store them came from my friend Scotty.

I’ve coppiced about 1/2 an acre of salmonberry to create space for some of the plantings, and tallied up more hours of the cost-shared invasive removal.

I took my tree climbing gear on a trip to the Oregon coast and knocked some of the rust of my recent learnings tree-climbing learnings.

I had an electrician out to scope out getting an electric hookup for a trailer or something about 150 feet into the land. Would it be cool to do it and get the Labor and Industry permit pulled myself? Definitely. Do I have that kind of time and energy? Not really.

Speaking of, reaching out and getting help has been high on my list of intentions in the new year, and just today I had the great pleasure of getting some help from the son of a neighbor that I’ve been getting to know over the last year. We (mostly he) split some of the 10′ sections of trunk from the cedar I had taken down last year. I’m thinking I’ll use those for fence posts or something. We also got through a bunch of chipping holly slash after the video ended, but the battery died due to camera/power-bank operator error.