Slevin's journal

Where are you and where are you going?
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Slevin
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Post by Slevin »

Long overdue update:

Sold my townhouse in Boulder, and traded for a cheaper SFH on ⅕-¼ acre in the Bay Area. Location was chosen in proximity to a wealth generation center, as well as family, etc, while avoiding the worst of the wealth excess and still living near enough to solid public transit to get me pretty much anywhere I need to via public transit (if I need to) and close enough the waste stream of an incredibly wealthy city to be able to get many high quality goods secondhand. We are also walking distance from a small town to get most goods we need including an incredible grocery store and bulk store, and 1 stop on the train or 8-10 minute drives away from multiple cities of ~60k-200k people.

House is about 1200 sqft with a garage, big enough for anybody and then some. Got a sweet deal on the house, while knowing it needed some help in terms of the exterior (paint and a roof) and being on a literal dirt lot with a couple mature fruit trees. Worst case scenario, the roof can be fixed and the house painted and it can be sold for breakeven or a slight profit after the realtor fees, but I don’t see this needing to happen anytime soon.

Plan is to build a syntropic food forest / garden to maximalize capitalization of the regional climate while also teaching me a lot about the local climate / small scale agroforestry / small scale earthworks / etc.

Step 0 is to get some little fruit trees planted and growing (worst case these can be moved around a bit in the next 1-2 years if they need to be), some dynamic accumulators planted everywhere that will take them (and I’m using this term VERY LOOSELY), some herbs going, and to take some time to understand the sun, the hot, the cold, where the rainwater sits, etc of the place.

There is a large scale drip system installed in this place, but it has been neglected for years, so I’m going around fixing it up, and as we install plants, they are going to be added to the drip system.

We need a small Fence-ish object in the front yard just to deter dogs from wandering in and peeing on food crops. I’m thinking of using woven hedges and a little bit of support to do this function, but I don’t have a 100% plan on this front.

We built 3 SIPS so far, and will be building 2 more in the next few days. These are mostly to house perennial herbs right next to the house and make watering and harvesting exceptionally easy.

We have a small patio in the backyard (just concrete slab), but for the amount of exterior living I’m aiming for this will need to be extended by about 6ft longer (and its 20ft wide), so I need some good ideas for a 120sqft patio. Using the conventional rock + sand + pavers I’ve priced it out around $500, but I’d be happy to drop that price down if anyone has good ideas of other ways of doing it.

I’m sure I have a zillion more things to point out, but just trying to get out a quick update here

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by AxelHeyst »

Cool! What side of the house is the patio on? Does it have shade/rain coverage? Is it a low spot aka will water accumulate there during heavy rain events? Any slope? Would building a raised platform/deck suit the space? (Going in the wrong direction price wise...)

I'm not an expert but I think it's hard to get a cheaper design than rock sand pavers. Could it be just gravel? Mostly gravel with strategically placed stone or concrete pavers? Those expanded concrete blocks that allow water to flow through and grass to grow?

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mountainFrugal
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by mountainFrugal »

Sounds like a cool new space. Enjoy the seasonal observations.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

What fun!

I don't really have any great suggestions for alternate patio, but a couple out of the box ideas would be just putting down a large commercial or marine carpet, stall mats, or other forms of modular agricultural flooring. or a geo grid ground grid system you can fill with aggregate or other material of your choice.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

Some advice for newbies on the forum I'm just gonna post in my journal; The goal is and will always be `Freedom To` or `Positive Freedom`, and nobody other than you can tell you what you want `Freedom to` for. Maybe it's for building a studio in the middle of the desert. Maybe it’s for living in an amazing small town with incredible nature to explore. Maybe it is for building a forest garden. Maybe it's for attending swap meets and getting insanely good deals on things and re-selling them. Maybe it's for being in a small time band. There is a plurality of potential things to do, and you have to explore and decide what you want for yourself. There can be an infinite number of answers to what you want to do with freedom to, it doesn’t need to be a fluid stable thing, but you need to develop your freedom-to sense, then build your “life” system around the needed resources you will need to do the “freedom to” thing(s) as they come up and change.

For Jacob, the “freedom to” bit I think was originally something like “spending an ecologically coherent amount of money based on his derivation from first principles, and have that money generate itself through being in the capital class so that he can work on solving interesting problems in an interesting non-consumer way”. It seems like an infinite game with a self definition like that. Then for a while, this freedom to became something like “become a stock market analyst” (this is probably the wrong exact title; sorry). Then it moved elsewhere (maybe its currently on ERE2? I’m not so sure and jacob has his own voice so he can correct my issues and mistakes made in here about intention, the details don’t matter as its just a reorientation example anyways).

Figuring out what the hell you want to do is a whole thing. Lifetimes are spent on the issue of what “the meaning of life is”, but just finding things you want to do is easy enough. Certainly, don’t WAIT until FI or something like that to try to figure it out. That’s just putting off the important bit and the way you should optimize FI, etc, anyways. Heck, many of the people here found out they don’t even need FI, and that’s amazing. Save years of your life with this one simple trick (™). Or maybe you really want to party on yachts with other people in fancy suits and need to keep a CXX job till you die to fund it. That’s fine too, if its your jam.

Understand you are a specific type of individual, and there is an extreme diversity of humans trying to give you the best advice on how to live based on their specific circumstances. A lot of it is good and well intentioned advice, and yet you need to spend your own time figuring out for yourself what is good advice that is actually compatible with you. That means turning off the tv and the podcast and the internet memes and forums and figuring out how you respond to a thing, how you feel about X and Y and Z. And not just figuring it out, you need to EMBODY some of these potentials to see if they are really a thing you want to do, or if it was just something that sounded sexy in your brain and you actually hate doing it. Many things I’ve put hundreds of hours into didn’t end up lining up with how I wanted to live my life, and that’s okay. The correct number of mistakes in figuring out your own path is many. Try to take low stakes entrances into activities you might like / want, and be fine if it ends up being a mistake. Renting paddleboards or camping gear or whatever is totally fine. So is getting really into a thing, then getting a bunch of stuff for it, and ending up having to sell it used for a loss when it didn’t work out. That’s just how it works. We keep the good stuff, re-orient, and keep figuring it out. @jim calls this a “coach built” approach. Militarists say “no plan survives contact with the enemy”. I like the term “value based reorientation”.

What we are aiming for is being a “live player” in the game. See the quote from Jacob:
jacob wrote:
Tue May 30, 2023 7:36 am
As seen in the video, the typical approach is to copy some script. "We find our meaning copying the characters in movies...", she says. Not all of us. In terms of internal development, this is the shallow end of the pool, where most humans swim around, but there's also a deep end. There's a distinction between so-called "live players" and "dead players". Read this: https://medium.com/@samo.burja/live-ver ... 24f6e9eae2 ... A "dead player" may be compared to an NPC in a computer game. However, some humans being entirely predictable are indistinguishable from dead players. However, whether someone else appears to be a live or a dead player depends on one's own ability to predict THEIR behavior. If you understand enough about their behavior to see it as a script, then they are dead players to you. Nothing about their behavior will surprise you. When the girl in the movie talks about going outside to "do something and take risks", she's trying to take the next step to go beyond the movie-scripts she knows. There are many steps beyond what she's proposing---she's essentially following another script of traveling to learn about herself, substituting airports, restaurants, and foreign cultures for her movies, just like any other first world twenty-something year old---but it's a step up in complexity in terms of deciding where to travel compared to which movie to watch and where to put the TV.

To summarize, the factor that influences this impression is basically the "eye of the beholder" and the ability to "see". For example, if I look at my book reviews, some see it as a "a well-organized and insightful work of genius" while others see it as a "rambling mess with a few tips". It can't objectively be both at the same time. However, subjectively, it is possible to be both as some readers had the mind capable of comprehending it and some did not. You will basically never be able to convince anyone who has never had to mentally solve a hard consequential problem just how much effort it takes. As far as they're concerned, it's a kind of magic that should be easy "if you're so smart". For what it's worth, this also happens the other way around when a couch potato asks "a strong young man" if they could kindly move 10 tonnes of boxes out of a storage unit. They have no idea what they're actually asking.
Seven or eight years ago I was doing cool stuff (building spacecraft) but absolutely hating the daily life and the grind in government work, and didn’t really know what I wanted or why. I found FIRE as a “freedom from” thing. “Nobody should have to go through this work bullshit for no reason” I basically thought. And I still think that's generally correct, but incomplete from an action oriented perspective. I was also working many people’s dream job. So it is pretty funny to think about how upset I was about it in retrospect. But now as I’m a bit older I understand that I need to orient towards things I want to be doing instead of just orienting away from things that annoy me.

That may mean exiting the FI path, that may mean moving, that may mean changing your identity, hair, clothing, spending X dollars, whatever. For me right now, it means a lot of digging and planning irrigation systems and learning about the quirks of a cool summer mediterranean climate in the context of building a food forest. Four years ago it meant training 30 hours per week with incredible high level athletes. Four years in the future its definitely going to mean something else different for me. That’s good, and its also fine if you are the kind of person who will just like one thing and do it for a long time. Its person dependent, and also path dependent, i.e. the path you take will also orient the results.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Wed May 17, 2023 2:10 pm
Cool! What side of the house is the patio on? Does it have shade/rain coverage? Is it a low spot aka will water accumulate there during heavy rain events? Any slope? Would building a raised platform/deck suit the space? (Going in the wrong direction price wise...)

I'm not an expert but I think it's hard to get a cheaper design than rock sand pavers. Could it be just gravel? Mostly gravel with strategically placed stone or concrete pavers? Those expanded concrete blocks that allow water to flow through and grass to grow?
The space is flat, on the North side of the house, but the house is only about 12 foot tall at the peak, but there are some trees around that interfere with the lighting in some ways. In summer months the patio has sun in the morning and then loses it in late afternoon, about 5PM or so. The extended patio would lose it about 7PM. This seems fine. I may add a shade structure in terms of a pergola-ish thing, but I'm uncertain of how to combine it with a climbing structure to be used for pullups and dips and some monkey bars as well. Probably will all have to be custom made, since all the premade bits are for children (why do kids get all the fun stuff, but adults just get boring furniture filled with despair?). Water won't accumulate there any more than anywhere else, as the whole area is flat. I assume this means having some drainage is good, but it doesn't need to be overdone. The cool concrete blocks, possible as well, just comes down to sourcing and pricing probably.

@mountainFrugal Thanks! My favorite ecological bits so far are the hundreds of carpenter bees that come forage through my enormous Salvias, as well as our yardian (yard-guardians) scrub jays that watch over the yard at all times because it is a colossal bounty of good bird food (already surrounded by 11 mature privets in the back yard plus hundreds of saplings acting as a hedgerow in one section). The bird watching can be particularily phenomenal, as whole flocks will come nest in the trees and take off, weaving into incredible patterns and formations.

@7wannabe5 Defintely interested in something like those, but I'm allergic to putting more plastic in the ground in my yard. There's already a plastic netting I've spent tens of hours cleaning up from someone installing sod some number of years ago, and I wouldn't wish it on anybody.

shaz
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by shaz »

For the patio, do you have a ReStore (Habitat for Humanity store) nearby? Ours gets in a lot of landscaping materials; you don't know what will be there on any given day but there is sure to be something interesting and inexpensive.

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Slevin
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by Slevin »

@shaz, thanks. We do have a restore near (ten minute drive away) I'll have to make sure to check it out.

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mountainFrugal
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Post by mountainFrugal »

We befriended some scrub jays at our above-garage studio. They were fiercely territorial of the dense holly bush near our stair well. They are noisy as hell which is endearing after a while. Their alarm call would alert us that a visitor was walking up the steps.

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Slevin
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Post by Slevin »

My partner and I finished up the paver patio. The whole soil structure of the area is disgustingly hard clay, so it took me about 8+ hours to just dig out the 120sqft patio. Lessons for digging up and amending all the soil here were learned along the way. Digging fork >> shovel (goes in nicer). Broad fork would have been twice as good if I had one.

Image

Total ended up being around $6.55/sqft with pavers, edging, and materials. Almost $200 of this was shipping costs, which was frustrating. I should have been able to cut $100 off that if I could have just paid for one shipping instead of two, but also this was around 10,000 lbs of stuff being delivered to my house, so it seems pretty reasonable. If I had just hand poured a concrete pad,
I probably could have paid a lot less. It would also probably look much worse and been ungodly to ever remove in the future.

I would put this in the backbreaking but pretty simple labor with very nice outcome category. I’ve also now built all the basic foundations that are used for shipping container homes, etc, and it’s nice and easy. I would do that bit again in a heartbeat, especially somewhere with more forgiving soil. Also, 24 x 24 x 2in pavers are ungodly heavy, even though they are only 90-100 lbs per pop they feel much heavier because of the size and are awkward to move around. I wouldn’t recommend it if you can’t already deadlift / squat 400+lbs normally.

If you aren’t trying to get this done quickly like me, you can probably scavenge up the paver materials over time, then just order the rocks and sand for like $2/sqft with delivery.

ertyu
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Post by ertyu »

It's looking very good! nice work

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Slevin
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Post by Slevin »

July / August update:

Been hectically busy with travel, landscaping, work, and skill building. Throwing some updates in here.

Gardening:

We've upscaled the SIP production, to the point that all of our yearly greens can come from the garden (and in our climate we can produce greens all year long). We currently harvest kale, collards, mustard greens, spinach, arugula, butterhead lettuce, looseleaf lettuce, speckled lettuce, and insane amounts of basil (which arguably isn't a green? but given how much we harvest of it, its hard not to count it here). This is generally just harvested in a cut and come again fashion. Scale needed is about 1 SIP per person (about 4 square feet). Maintainance per week is just once a week filling the SIP back up with water, and then we will add compost back into the system as time goes on.

We've also got tons and tons of herbs going in SIPS as well. We have a whole SIP dedicated to mint, and two dedicated to other herbs (one is mostly basil). We've harvested endless amounts of mint, which generally ends up in simple syrups, as seasonings, and chutneys. The basil consistently goes into pesto, which ends up being a . We've frozen about a gallon and a half of chutney, and about 3/4 of a gallon of pesto for the winter (most of this gets eaten fresh though). If you guys have other good ideas for using mint and basil, let me know!

Looks like I'll be building raised beds (or maybe just doing lasagna style) in the next couple of months, to be able to start working into the other expensive vegetables and produce. This is likely carrots, tomatoes, green beans / flat beans , peas, broccoli, cauliflower, etc.

I've planted about ten dwarf and ultra dwarf fruit trees, which should be productive in the next year or two. I don't know if this will quite cover all of our fruit consumption, especially with lemons and limes (largely harvest timing and process issues here), but I'm aiming to be producing a surplus each year. Also planted plenty of berries, which should contribute to this bulk as well.

I’ve also started some clumping bamboo in places. This is generally going to be used as a screen, but will also be harvested as a durable building good as needed for basic yard construction.

Construction:

Built some new freestanding garage shelves, currently in the process of building a bunch more furniture / a workbench / more shelving / etc. I'm still juggling training more power tool construction, vs doing more hand tool construction. I'll probably end up somewhere in the middle. Pocket holes have been fantastic, and I'm a big fan of waterfall furniture made with cleaned up 2 inch thick framing lumber. These are generally more friends of power tools. The hand tools construction bug just hasn’t bit me as hard yet.
Last edited by Slevin on Thu Sep 14, 2023 3:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

guitarplayer
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by guitarplayer »

I am so happy for you about your garden progress @Slevin. I think the only place where this could be pulled off within the administrative borders of the EU would be the Canary Islands or Madeira. You give me ideas.

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by jacob »

Slevin wrote:
Thu Sep 14, 2023 12:33 pm
(and in our climate we can produce greens all year wrong).
Freudian slip?

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Slevin
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Post by Slevin »

jacob wrote:
Thu Sep 14, 2023 1:04 pm
Freudian slip?
I mean, plausibly. More likely just my thoughts on whatever the guy in the meeting that i was half listening in on while I wrote this up was saying.
guitarplayer wrote:
Thu Sep 14, 2023 12:52 pm
I am so happy for you about your garden progress @Slevin. I think the only place where this could be pulled off within the administrative borders of the EU would be the Canary Islands or Madeira. You give me ideas.
This is a warm summer Mediterranean climate, so it should be replicable along a large amount of the Mediterranean. TBH if I was in the EU I would probably be shooting to replicate in Portugal given the great cost of living. It seems to have extremely similar climates to here (can be hotter depending on which part of portugal you measure from), but I haven't spent enough time in either to exactly judge. Here, temps generally peak below 30C in the summer and maybe dip into frost a couple times for only an hour or two in the winter (not enough to kill plants). Coastal buffers to temperature extremes are nice, but you want enough space that you still get decent soil and sunlight.

guitarplayer
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Post by guitarplayer »

Portugal has recently been trendy for such things like you do. I would still choose Spain or Italy for a few personal reasons - cost of living is not much different between these, I don't think. Where I work now, it is from home but I can only work from outside UK for 4 weeks in rolling 12 months. But DW works for a Spanish company (one of those personal reasons) and will be moving probably there (or to the US) for three months in about a year. Lots of ideas.

I would / will be very happy to spend the first chunk of time after our current lifetime moving around places like yours giving a hand with projects in exchange for roof and grazing on some of those fresh veggies. It's almost like home sitting that some people do, but better. From past experience, people who get set on and then need help with such projects (think back to the land movement, recently permaculture) often are those that bite more than they can chew, with the other big category being these who experienced some misfortune and became less physically able in short order of time.

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Slevin
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Post by Slevin »

Agreed. Spain and Italy also have wonderfully low costs of living, and would be fantastic places to set up. I'm partial to Italy (as both me and my DGf have a lot of family there), but I think both would be very pleasant.

And yeah, seems like a sweet deal moving to one of these places and helping people out in exchange for room and board (where the food is top notch). Luckily we started very small with this place, and are not too starry eyed about the costs involved (in both time and money). My sister has ~5 acres (2 hectares) with multiple horses, donkeys, etc, and I've spent time learning what goes into maintaining a place like that. Personally, we probably do have one more move in us, to an old farmhouse in a slightly more "back to the land" sort of place with a few acres straddling the gulf between the redwood forests and civilization with enough sunlight and heat to grow the plants wanting all the heat, and also the ability for me to go walking into the redwood forests for a minute. About 15 minutes away from where we live now, give or take.

Sidenote: I can't really start to describe what it feels like going into a coastal redwood forest, but if you enjoy nature it is an experience worth having. Like stepping back in time 20+ million years.

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Post by NewBlood »

Slevin wrote:
Thu Sep 14, 2023 12:33 pm
If you guys have other good ideas for using mint and basil, let me know!
Mint tea is pretty great.

Your garden plans are inspiring! I would love to see some pics if you don't mind sharing.

guitarplayer
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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by guitarplayer »

I was telling DW about coastal Redwood Forrest, she has heard. Think maybe it’s due to the Scotsman John Muir who emigrated to the US a long time ago and spend a lot of time campaigning for preservation of natural habitat.

Basil tea or infused water is great as well. Just now I am in fact having a mint and basil infused water. This is because both fresh mint and basil often end up in supermarkets’ waste stream and so I end up having a lot of them cause I integrated myself to divert the waste stream from the bin to my fridge/ window sill.

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Re: Slevin's journal

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

In Persian cuisine mint is often pan fried to crispy and used as a topping on dishes akin to bean stew. It's a subtle touch that makes a big difference. You might try planting different varieties of basil for different culinary uses. Some are sweeter, some are more lemony, some are more pungent, zingier, etc. I find that I can use up a ton of sweet basil in Thai-like recipes.

Core note from an experienced gardener would be if you are struggling to come up with ways to use any given crop easiest solution is to plant less of that and more of something else next year/planting cycle. Processing the harvest is the most labor/attention intensive part of home gardening once you have your basic infrastructure in place. However, then you will have tempted the fates to cause the previously bumper crop to fail due to some unexpected blight of wilt or woodchucks. This is why gardening becomes addictive; the variable feedback mechanism is built in :lol:

With a very basic greenhouse, greens can be grown in just about any season even as far north as the 45th. The trade-off when choosing any locale for gardening is often going to be between available sun and available water. Climate change is going to also going to increase the variability everywhere. This is why optimistic linear trend predictions that some colder locales such as mine will be blessed with better growing conditions as the planet warms up are bullshit.

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