Product Review Monday

This week's book review is another useful homestead resource entitled "Practical Projects for Self-Sufficiency: DIY Projects to Get Your Self-Reliant Lifestyle Started."

This is an intensely practical reference book giving 25 projects that are helpful on a homestead.

The instructions and step-by-step illustrations are superb.

Highly recommended for those looking to build up a self-reliant lifestyle.

* * *

For our non-book recommendation, we'd like to showcase a piece of equipment we use constantly: a fence-stretcher tool.

By how battered and beat this tool is, you can see how much we've used it over the years. We can't imagine engaging in a fencing project without it. We've used it to tighten barbed wire, smooth wire, and field fencing.

This stretcher uses a ratchet mechanism to pull things tight.

I – cannot – even – begin – to underscore how valuable this tool has been. We've owned it for at least 20 years and it's helped us on dozens upon dozens of fencing projects. If you are ever in a position to stretch wire fences, this is a must-have aid.

(Obligatory disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Affiliate, if you purchase through those links, we earn a small commission.)

Mixed Mother's Day

Now that my mother is in a long-term care facility, I can't wish her a Happy Mother's Day. She's not really verbal anymore, and I don't think she would understand even if I were to be able to talk to her in person. It's a bittersweet realization: The first Mother's Day I won't be able to reach out to my mother.

So I'll reach out to my father instead, and will call him today. I'm certain he's feeling even more mixed about the day.

Hug or call or email your mom today, if you can.

Blueberry blossoms and bumblebees

Last year, if you recall, we harvested just short of 60 lbs. of blueberries.

This year, if the current crop of blossoms are anything to go by, the harvest may exceed last year's.

Some blossoms are clustered so thickly, they seem like they'll resemble grape clusters when ripe.

While I've seen some honeybees among the flowers, the primary pollinators are bumblebees. We have hundreds.

Picking won't commence until early July or so, and then the harvest will be spread over several weeks.

Last year, with so many berries, we ended up giving a lot of them away. I gave about 20 lbs. of frozen berries to our very nice UPS driver (whose wife also cans). Also I brought a bunch of canned blueberries to church and gave them away, the only stipulation being that people return the canning jars when they were finished.

I was speculating to Younger Daughter how many pounds of berries we might get this year, and she had a very good suggestion: Why not try making blueberry wine? Don gave me a winemaking kit a few years ago, just before we moved, and I haven't had a chance to use it yet.

I have a feeling I know where most of this year's blueberry crop might go.

Subdividing the pasture

A task we've been wanting to accomplish since getting the cows is to subdivide the larger pasture. With fairly small acreage compared to our last place, it's important that we don't let anything get overgrazed, and having subdivided pastures allows us to rotate the animals frequently.

With that in mind, we gathered everything we needed. Thankfully we weren't faced with anything nearly as complex and difficult as fencing in the sacrifice pasture. In fact, we could bring all the heavy items (T-posts, roll of fencing, pounders, etc.) in the bucket of the tractor.

We unloaded everything and got ready to run a string.

Because the pasture is sloped (everything on our property is sloped!), we hammered a stake just where the line of vision breaks between one end of the fence line and the other. Then we used the bright-pink string to mark the fence line.

(There's my handsome man on his iron steed!)

Then we dropped T-posts at 12-foot intervals and started pounding. The ground is still fairly soft, so it wasn't overly hard work. Don started at the top of the pasture, and I started at the bottom, the idea being to meet in the middle.

There was only one problem with this task: There's a ridge line of rock right where the fence line was passing through.

Don was frustrated by this impediment and started theorizing about building field-fence cages filled with rock to make gabions, which would be an enormous task. "Why not just make a jog in the fence line and go around the rocks?" I asked. Don laughed and said it goes against his thinking. "Men think linearly," he said, and admitted going around the outcrop hadn't even occurred to him.

So we jogged around the rocks. I did the T-post pounding in this section, and sometimes I had to reposition the posts irregularly whenever I hit a rock, but over all it wasn't bad. (You can see the still-unfenced garden in the center-left of the photo.)

Pounding that many T-posts was enough work for a couple of senior citizens for one day. The next day we commenced stretching the fencing. For obvious reasons we started at the top of the slope and worked downhill.

We unrolled the fencing until we got to the jog around the rock outcrop, and cut it. (Don pounded and wired some older and somewhat bent T-posts to the corners of the jog to make "king posts" for extra support. No photos, sorry.)

With the fencing unrolled, we needed to stretch it tight. We started by threading a metal bar through the fencing...

...and attached the bar to a chain. The bar threaded through the field fence allows us to impost more or less equal pressure on the entire stretch of fencing at the same time, without deforming individual squares of the field fence.

Then he attached the chain to the fence-puller, one of those extremely handy homestead tools.

The fence-puller straddles the gap between the fencing and an upright support (a T-post, in this case). By ratcheting the fence-puller, the fencing material is stretched until it's tight enough to wire the fencing in place to the T-posts all up the line.

Once the fencing was pulled tight, Don and I started wiring the fencing to the T-posts.

We fenced the jog as well, though we didn't use the fence-puller in this section for the task of pulling the fence tight.

This completed the bulk of the project. We still have some ancillary tasks (notably building strategically placed gates), but this subdivision should serve us well as we endeavor to rotate the cows through the summer grazing months.

(Bonus photos: Here's a rose bush we thankfully didn't have to work through when installing the fence.

Look at those horrible vicious thorns. Now you know why I postulated these were the thorns that surrounded Sleeping Beauty's castle.)

Nature is amazing

Everyone's heard of deep-sea angler fish, right? These are the creatures that attract prey toward them with a bioluminescent lure.

Fairly recently, this same principle was discovered in a snake. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the spider-tailed horned viper. Specifically, view the video at this link and watch its tail.

According to Wikipedia, this venomous snake lives in harsh desert conditions in Iran and uses its spider-like tail to lure in prey. When scientists described the first specimen they found, they attributed its tail configuration "to either a parasite, deformity, or tumors." Then a second specimen was found, and – whoa, Nellie – they realized this is how it catches prey.

I've never heard of this species, and I'll admit being gobsmacked. Here's a video of the snake luring in and catching a bird:

"I'm going to put this up on the blog," I enthused. "This is incredible."

"Ah, the biologist strikes again," observed Don, remarking on my past education.

The spider-tailed horned viper. Nature is amazing.

Happy birthday, Younger Daughter!

Today is Younger Daughter's birthday.

Happy birthday, dear daughter!

How people spent their time

Here's a short 50-second clip on how people spent their time, from 1932 through 2024.

In 1932, most people spent their time with family:

And today:

Notable caption on the clip: "And we wonder why society is in decline..."

Product Review Monday

Today's product review will focus on power outages, and what to do about them.

When we moved here about four and a half years ago (in mid-December of 2020), we quickly learned the electrical grid in this area is very fragile. Anything seems to knock out power: a wind, a snowfall, a Tuesday. To that end, and because we were concerned about keeping me available for my online job, we needed a dependable backup to run my laptop in the event the power went out on a workday.

Enter a backup power source called AllPowers:

This gizmo is the size of a car battery and provides 600 watts and almost 300 watt-hours. It will power my laptop for, I kid you not, about four days of continuous use. (Trust me on this.)

Indirectly, it also charged our wireless hotspot backup, which was plugged into the laptop during my workdays.

This battery powers more than my laptop, of course. It will power anything you plug into it (personal electronics, LED lights, etc.). When using it for my laptop, I have not had anything else plugged into it since I wanted to make sure I had sufficient dedicated power for my computer. However the manufacturers say the battery can charge up to eight things at once. The unit has the advantage of being portable and relatively lightweight at about 13 pounds. We keep it fully charged at all times.

The exact model we purchased is no longer available, but a comparable unit by the same company has the same (or better) specs. Highly recommended if you depend on your computer for employment and live in areas prone to power outages.

Buoyed by the success of this battery backup, we went up a step and got a larger version, a VTOMAN. This unit provides 1500 watts and 828 watt-hours. It weighs about 31 lbs. and can be charged a number of different ways (electricity, solar, car charger, etc.). It's large enough to power bigger appliances, such as a refrigerator or chest freezer, for a limited period of time. (Keep in mind a fridge or freezer can keep food suitably cold/frozen, if the doors aren't opened, on as little as an hour of electricity a day if need be.)

The advantage of this unit is its portability. It's not something you want to sling in your backpack and take hiking, of course, but Don and I took it with us on our second honeymoon trip as an emergency source of power without an issue. Highly recommended.

And finally, we bought yet another battery backup, a spectacular purchase called a Bluetti. This workhorse is much heavier (about 70 lbs.), but it's a giant when it comes to running household appliances during outages.

Again, the exact model we have has been upgraded to a newer type, one that offers a 2400-watt output and over 2000 watt-hours of use.

This Bluetti has saved our fanny any number of times. Last year, during a particularly bad series of storms with a resulting multi-day power outage, we used it to keep our fridge and chest freezer cold.

We also took the opportunity to recharge it using our generator; not because it needed recharging, but because we wanted to test whether charging it with the generator would work. (It did.)

There are multiple types of battery backups on the market, but these are the ones we've used (a lot!) and can attest to their quality and usefulness.

(Obligatory disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Affiliate, if you purchase through those links, I earn a small commission.)

Happy charging!