Hello Everyone!
Apocalyptic Homesteading Day 424!
Almost taking another day off, Carrying poles & Building a bushcraft compost!
Although I managed to wake up early I fell back asleep again before I could even rouse myself enough to make espresso. Eventually I did wake up all the way and after putting way too much brown sugar in my coffee I fell back asleep and wound up napping until nearly noon. I had initially told myself that I was going to take a second day in a row off but the weather got so nice that I ditched that idea and got busy doing stuff outdoors in rather short order after my impromptu nap.
Since that compost project has been nagging at me, I went ahead and began working on it and actually spent most of the remainder of the day getting it to a point where I was satisfied with it. I had been thinking of using those poles that I have to make a triangle for the compost and decided to do just that. Even though I changed the plan a bit and made one really large triangle (instead of cutting the poles in half) and used those three posts to form a smaller triangle.
It came out pretty cool and the smaller of the two triangles is over a meter tall. The main triangle is roughly five meters per side and has the smaller triangle on its downhill side. In the existing smaller triangle I am thinking to store bio-char and perhaps cover material. As for the rest of the larger triangle I am considering adding more poles and creating three more triangles so that in the end I will have four similarly sized triangles inside the larger triangle. Basically each triangle would be a separate compost 'bin' and I could have smaller piles to work with instead of one or two massive ones.
Getting all the poles to that area required hiking uphill with the poles, around the shelter site and then downhill again to where the compost is located in the woods. A lot of those poles were well over six meters long and weighed upwards of fifty-plus pounds each. So, whoa did I get a work out from not just carrying one pole at a time but also the required balancing act of having the pole on my shoulder and weaving through the underbrush with it! The first few poles were a bit dodgy but by the time that I was finished I had the shortest/easiest route figured out pretty good which helped a lot.
Utilizing those three posts that I began the compost project with worked out super well with the 'split-rail fence' approach. I did not even have to remove any of the little stubs of branches on the posts themselves and was able to use a few of them to help lock some of the horizontal poles in place. During the whole process I did my best to fit the poles together as snugly as I could but I may add some vertical stakes later to help make it even more stable. As it all stands now I doubt just bumping into it would make it fall or anything but given I am going to add a bunch of weight by filling it with compost a little extra stability is not a bad idea.
Anyway, working on all that jazz wiped me out pretty good and all total I carried somewhere around twenty-one poles to that new compost area and even after taking a very long bath my muscles are aching. It was good to finally push my limits a little but I think the next few days I am going to stick to doing light-duty stuff and give myself time to heal up before taking on anymore tasks like that. Over the coming days I might take the time to dig out the base of the compost to form it more into a bowl. It should be easy to use all the dirt that I dig up to fill in around the bottom of the triangle to help keep the compost from getting washed out by runoff and to help keep any liquids from the compost itself inside the triangle.
Alright, I am going to get this entry wrapped up and get it all edited and posted. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.
https://peakd.com/c/hive-114308/created
