Why "Russian" Dachas all look alike

My most prolific commenter "Anonymous" posted the following comment on the previous post:

"The Russian's images are very reminiscent of some of the Ukrainian village video scenes you have been linking to."

There are reasons for that.

People who live on the knife's-edge do not exhibit risk-seeking behaviors. There is already too much "risk" hunting them for comfort. They have no reason to go looking for more risk. 

If something works, they don't experiment. If something provably better comes along (electric or gas motors, disease resistant staple food crops, LED lights, synthetic fertilizers or pesticides) they jump on-board. Otherwise, they "...dance with the one that brung-ya".

As I watch these videos of these "dacha" that have been upgraded into live-boats I see the following commonalities:

• SERIOUS fences and gates
• Poultry
• A grape arbor
• Apple trees
• Walnut trees
• Hazelnut bushes
• A multitude of small-fruit species (raspberries, currants, elderberries, strawberries, gooseberries, viburnum species...)
• Stone fruits
• Pears
• Potatoes, lots of potatoes
• Root cellars 
• Garden seedlings started in every available window 
• A well that can be worked when there is no electricity
• Cats...lots of cats
• Fishing (also feeds the cats)
• Milk animals, if not on-property then kept by a nearby neighbor (feeds the cats) 
• A dog, often small-to-very small 
• Flowers
• Flavoring herbs (often in pots to bring inside during the winter). 
• A way to heat with wood
• A way to cook with wood (often outside)
• Trailers, a way to leverage the ability to haul cargo
• Buckets, shovels, rakes, knives, trowels
• Bees (not universal, but common)
• Pumpkins for oil-seed and to grind for animal feed 
• Icons on the wall (not universal, but common) 

What I do not see

• Extensive lawns
• Garages exclusively devoted to storing automobiles
• Any signs of liquid fuels stored on the property 
• Backpacks 
• Llama, emus, ostrich, pigeons, bison, yaks, Scottish Highland cattle, water-buffalo, cashmere or dwarf goats, small swine breeds, intensive aqua-culture.
• Pictures of the current, living generations on the wall
• Large monitors (TV, computer, gaming)
• Recliners 
• Pantries filled with nutritional supplements or OTC drugs
• Extravagant consumption of alcohol or cannabis

In the for-what-it-is-worth department

I am rethinking my Juglans regia walnut trees. I have a scant handful of them on my property but never really worked to get any return on them. In my mind they have been more like minor trophies (like my 6th grade diploma) rather than as a serious investment.

Before. This picture downplays the amount of vines in the canopy.

 

After

I spent part of today pruning dead-wood and pulling vines out of the canopies. I sprayed herbicide on the vegetation beneath them and will throw some fertilizer around them in a couple of weeks. Most important, I will cobble together some kind of squirrel guards to minimize losses.

I also marked several black walnut seedlings suitable for grafting. And I reached out to a friend who is brilliant in these kinds of things and asked for a cram-course on "How do I make these trees excellent investments". 

Is it "soup" yet?

I saw Pavlo's father put a dollop of sour cream into some heated, home-canned tomatoes and eat it as soup.

BRILLIANT!!!

It is pretty easy to put up +50 quarts of tomatoes but I am not always ambitious enough to use them in cooking. But...if "cooking" means heating some stewed tomatoes, adding some sliced up tortillas for noodles and adding some sour cream...well, what the heck. I can do that.

More for-what-it-is-worth

Music makes our brains grow.

Today's Quicksilver music moment was the introduction to The Lone Ranger. Yes, I know it has an official name...but Quicksilver likes horses. Her comment as she watched the video was "His horse runs really fast." Quicksilver can learn the fancy-schmancy stuff later.

Tomorrow's music will be John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy". She objected to my singing that while I was driving because she thought I was making up as I sang it. I chose this version because the video has motion which makes a difference in terms of keeping her attention...also...it is more interesting to watch singers demonstrating the lyrics than it is to watch the singers performing on a stage.

Ouch!

Daily Timewaster

Perfect picture. Perfect title.

Looking at Archie Bunker and Redd Foxx...try adding almost twenty years to that number!

I am old enough to remember when comedians were actually funny rather than "edgy". 

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Titled "Their Eyes were Opened", from Luke 24:30,31

G.E. Mullan was born in Tyler, Texas (USA) in 1943 and died in San Antonio in 2015 at the age of 72. He painted in the "Santa Fe" style and frequently painted religious and American Indian themes.

A tip of the old fedora to Dwight Ezop for suggesting this artist 

Today will be a Two-fer

Nicolai Ivanovich Barchenkov was born in 1918 about 40 miles north of Moscow and died in 2002. 

While tireless gets the credit for suggesting this artist

Tireless on his way to the trading post to pick up supplies

 

Still here. Still working.

 

This showed up in the mail today

Also today.

Believe it or not, there are six grafts of King David apple on this tree. All marked with orange yarn. Mrs ERJ gently asked when she would be getting her refrigerator back, so I am grafting what I can and NOT putting the extra scion back into the fridge for "just-in-case" situations.

Looking due-south across the Hill Orchard from the pole barn. I have seen parking lots in West Virginia that were steeper than this...but in Michigan, this qualifies as a slope.

In a semi-panorama, this is looking west, up the hill, from the same place.

I hunted this property for many, many years. I believe that this much of it has not been mowed for at least ten years.

 

60 minutes grafting and picking up trash. 75 minutes mowing.

 

So far, it looks like we dodged the bullet on the frost-freeze last night. Time will tell. 

A man has to know his limitations

Leigh, a reader of this blog and an author of several books poses the question..."Is Homesteading a Dying Trend?" on April 2.

The gentleman who runs the Possum Ridge video channel addressed some of that question in THIS video. Very briefly summarized, everything has positive momentum when you are starting out. You have new(er) equipment, new fence, new soil and are younger. Every year you can look back and see progress. At some point, the maintenance requirements grow to exceed the "fun" level and growth stops or even reverses.

My take on the subject is that many people get sucked into the myth that they can do it all. They can be:

• Blacksmith
• Welder
• Mason
• Carpenter
• Electrician
• Plumber 
• Mechanic 
• Weaver
• Spinner
• Fix fences 
• Sheep sheerer
• Butcher 
• Tan hides 
• Doctor
• Vet
• Herbalist 
• Hunter
• Fisher
• Gatherer
• Make soap 
• Cheese-maker
• Brewer
• Winemaker 
• Baker
• Artist 
• Grafter
• Apple picker 
• Dig wells 
• Lumberjack 
• General Laborer

There was a time when family or neighbors who had mastered those skills were on-tap and available with just a phone call. If you needed a crew of 10 people for an afternoon getting hay off the field, you could find them.

Good luck with that now.

For the record, I hired my nephew to "fix the riding mower". I am not sure what it needs but I trust him. I loaned him a copy of the key to the pole-barn. He trusts me to pay him. He is a busy guy and I might not get it back before July...but it will get fixed.

"A good man always knows his limitations." Harry Callahan 

A day of rest....

 

I got a call from somebody who scheduled a pump-out for their septic tank Monday 9:00 a.m. She needed help finding her septic tank...

Note for the future: 12 feet north of the southwest corner of her house (between 9 and 10 blocks) and about 12 east.

58 minutes to mow the Upper Orchard. It will go more slowly when the grass is thicker. The fact that I didn't have to mow between the trees where I spray herbicide made it go more quickly.

I was able to mow an additional 34 minutes on the Hill Orchard before I ran out of gas.

More mowing planed for Monday.

---Note added Monday at 5:00 a.m. Our thermometer reads 30F which is MUCH better than the 24F to 25F that had been predicted. Two more hours until sunrise. Maybe we will get lucky and dodge a bullet.---

Bonus Video

 

A few pictures

 

I saw these on a persimmon tree in my yard

Chrysalis (cocoons)

From the internet

Prometheus Moth chrysalis

Luna Moth chrysalis

Seedling update

It has been three weeks since most of these seeds were started. 

 

The lovage is starting to show true-leaves.

It is not all skittles-and-cream soda

Something is impacting the older Stupice tomato leaves

Bottom of leaf

These bumps look like aphids but don't move when I scrape them. Puzzling. I am going to treat it as if it was due to excessive fertilizer (note the purple) and put them on a well-water diet for a week.

And...we lost a duck today. They found a way out of the garden enclosure and were waddling around the yard. Then, a few hours later three of the four were back into the enclosure and there was no sign of the fourth one.

Coyotes and fox have their pups and kits to feed. My fault for not addressing the Great Duck Escape. 

Hoop houses

Gromit commented on an earlier post:

The lifestyle of Pavlo's parents is rooted in the fall of the Soviet Untion, not the Ukraine / Russia war. They've farmed that area, like they do now, for years. The content that shows his grandmothers a and neighbors places show well over 40 years of rough rural living. Pavlo's girlfriend fishing for perch is much as you describe, simple rig, simple location, fill the basket with fish then watch as half the catch is preserved and stored.

A minor correction, the girl who fishes for perch and Crucian Carp is not Pavlo's girlfriend. The perch fisher is about fifteen years-old and as far as I know is not related to Pavlo in any way. Pavlo's girlfriend/wife(?) is Luba and she is a blonde who usually braids her hair.

The adaptation to "technology" in subsistence cultures is a curious thing

On this channel the main character comments "I can double or triple my harvest of potatoes and cabbage with two gallons of gas. That is a pretty good deal." (Note: Units changed to something most of my readers can identify with and he is talking about enough cabbage, beets and potatoes to feed fifteen people for a year). He was talking about using an inexpensive, gasoline-powered pump to irrigate his family's fields of staple-vegetable crops.

Another technology that pops up in many videos are "hoop-houses". Suppose you lived in a place like Iron Mountain, Michigan and you could count on a 60 day growing season. Furthermore, you don't know if that will be from June first until August first or from July first until September first. Being able to guarantee SOME production from May 1 until November 1 triples your growing season. It won't triple your production of calories but it will armor you against scurvy and rickets.

Your lucky day

I am a bit of an idiot-savant about being able to look at a stick and determine what species of tree it came from. Images from this video:

Running a gasoline powered tiller inside of a hoop-house with limited ventilation. Not so smart.

Vertical supports and ridgepoles are Black Locust and the hoops and diagonal braces are Filbert (aka Hazelnut bush) shoots, probably three-years-old. They cut the shoots green and warmed them up before bending.

I am always astounded by how dry the soil is.

(Smiling), girls-be-girls. She made sure her hair was beautiful and her clothing was flattering before recording video. That is not mandatory in SHTF scenarios.

After watching this sequence a few times, I guestimate the width of the hoop-house to be between 10' and 12', the height to be about 7' and the length to be about 30'. The ends are opened-and-closed to control temperature

They plant tomatoes and cucumbers in the house in this video which was recorded in mid-April. In Michigan (pre-SHTF), I will be planting those crops outside in late-May and early-June rather than mid-April. They will be picking cucumbers (a 55 day crop) less than a week after I plant my seeds in the garden.

What tickles me about this video is that somebody executed a hoop-house that effectively doubles their growing season with very little money out-of-pocket. The Black Locust posts and poles and the filbert shoots were probably local. The plastic film might last three seasons (more likely two) if they don't peel it off the frame and stow it out of the sunlight (UV damage) after the risk of frost is over.

The thought-process also intrigues me. "I am trading 7 liters of petrol to gain 2000 kilos of potatoes" or "I am trading two handfuls of cornmeal which will attract minnows and then allow me to catch seven perch". 

This would be a fine cottage industry after the SHTF; throwing up hoop-houses made of (mostly) indigenous materials.