Lmst

Eco-Libre Life-Line v2025.10 is released

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/44063793

Jenga time!

#Firewood #Jenga #Stack #Homestead #Homesteading

A corner stack of firewood with alternating rows of split logs arranged perpendicular to the previous layer for stability. The view is from the ground up to a lean-to roof. A grape is growing over the open side.

Growing our own stevia.

When it gets bigger, I plan on drying the leaves and grinding them into a powder.

https://practicalselfreliance.com/homemade-stevia-extract/

#SelfReliance #SelfReliant #DIY #homestead #homesteading #homesteaders #gardening #hydroponics

Three stevia plants growing indoors, under a grow light, each in a net cup.

📸 Photographer, JL Werstroh (JLW) AB 🇨🇦 | Capturing life’s beauty through #Landscape #Photography
📷 Share, Comment, Enjoy 🍁

Sunlight filtering through trees on the homestead.

#homestead #sunlight #nikon
#Nature #naturelovers #naturephotographer #naturephotography
#jlwerstroh #janetwerstroh
#calgary #alberta #canada
#jlwalbertaphotography
#calgaryphotographer 🍁

Sunlight filtering through trees on the homestead.

The good apple tree in the back of the garden has dropped some candy.

What variety you ask? I call them "late sweet" because they're ripe very late in the season (we're dodging around the first frost) but very sweet.

Gotta pick them up quick though. The Nyctereutes dig under the fence regularly to steal them. Or maybe the fox. We'll find out when the new trailcam arrives.

#Apple #Harvest #Gardening #Homestead #Orchard

Three red apples on a wooden surface. They look ripe. Some have marks on them because they're not supermarket apples.

Last of the old man's firewood. It's been in this barn a very long time and the mice have lived between the logs, dragged in hay to build nests and left mountains of poop.

Basically pellet heating 😆

#Mouse #Poop #Heating #Firewood #Barn #Homestead

Some mixed firewood that's grey with age and covered in straw, hay and mouse droppings. The surroundings are a 90 year old barn with straw on the ground.

There is a ladder long enough to get to the top of the roof, but it's massive and would take at least three people to move into place, so I had to improvise. Also it's single nailed and made of sticks 😬

The wooden ladder was way better than aluminium for this job though. Less slippery when wet, but most importantly the rungs are above the beams, not inside of them, giving you a much better footrest. With the aluminium ladder you're clinging on by your toes.

#Ladder #Barn #Safety #Climbing #Homestead #DIY

A wooden ladder hanging on the beams of a pole barn, tailing off into the dark distance. It's twisting near the end. It's around 13m long and made of round sticks nailed onto round beams.

Rainy day, thought I'd fetch firewood and then do some easy jobs, like tidying up my desk.

But inside the big barn rain was falling on my head through an unauthorized new opening in the roof.

One of the roof plates had slid down, so I had to fetch some ladders and clamber up there in the rain.

A little bouncy, as the rafters have a 5m unsupported length, but obviously strong enough.

The loose plate had one only nail, which had failed. Slid back up and nailed down, guesstimating where the battens were 😁

Not my favourite job climbing around roofs, but I was careful. At least no cancer dust when wet 😬

#DIY #Repair #Ladder #Barn #Homestead #Roof

Inside of a big old barn, about 90 years old. The view is up the roof, which has some big timber framing, a few rafters, a lot of battens and grey cancer plates on top. One has an opening letting rain and light in.

Outside of the barn, with two ladders leaning against the 45° angled roof. One long wooden ladder is secured with some scrapmetal and two pole hammered into the ground. The shorter aluminium telescoping ladder has a rope hung from it. Two long sticks are leaning against the roof as well. The roof is covered with green moss and leaves. Both ladders are too short to reach the slid down tile above the wooden ladder.

The same scenario, but the two ladders are now tied together with ratchet straps, the roof tile is back in place and the firewood safe again.

I found a pile of Stihl chainsaw wreckage in the garbarn, a carburettor, a destroyed piston head and a bar cover. Along with a completely worn bar and chain for the scrapmetal bin.

Maybe someone forgot to mix their fuel, who knows how it ended up there and where the rest of it went.

Put the Stihl cover on old Oily Mac, which amuses me, because that 1997 saw is going strong while its expensive compatriot lies in pieces.

#Chainsaw #Stihl #OleoMac #Tools #Homestead

A chainsaw with dark grey and orange body. The bar is covered by a mismatching orange Stihl plastic protective cover. The sun shines through the plastic, revealing the bar inside being somewhat shorter.

Mortar cart attacks.
And fills the cracks.

Since we didn't get around to doing the full foundation job, I'm at least patching the cracks with lime mortar so it doesn't get worse in winter.

Not aiming for a pretty job, just need to finish it today as the weather will soon be too cold. It will get cast into concrete anyways 😱

#Stone #Foundation #Lime #Mortar #Repair #DIY #LogHouse #Homestead

A large builders bucket (not Sir Cracksalot this time) in a self built cart. Inside is a greyish white mortar mixed not too sloppy so it can be smeared deep and not fall off a vertical wall. Some mortar tools are also on the cart. Nearby a cable drum and an electric hand mixer.

A stone foundation on the north side of a log house with yellow planks. The soil is recently disturbed from fixing the grade and the gaps between the stones are filled with fresh grayish white lime mortar. The mortar cart stands on the far corner, now less full.

I recently analyzed a soil sample from our pasture. It is a very typical early succession/agricultural soil sample - not much life going on. There's an abundance of bacteria, mostly cocci and some bacilli. Absolutely no protozoa (my faves), very few fungal strands, and lots of mineral debris with very little organic matter aggregation.

So how do we take it from this somewhat dull pulse to a reverberating heartbeat?

Pastured animals on rotation, well-made wood-chip-based compost, worm castings, biodynamic preparations, mineral applications as needed, minimal disturbance, and following the wisdom of other land stewards past and present.

#soil #soilhealth #homestead #smallfarming #gardening

The most pointless thing we've bought here was two bags of grass seed.

Stuff grows everywhere, without seeding it, even up in the storks nest.

Time to come back and mow your nest, storks 😆

#Grass #Lawn #Stork #StorkNest #Homestead

A stork nest, now temporarily uninhabited, up on top of a concrete pole. Behind the sort of cloudy sky that had the storks flee south. Inside the nest a green bundle of grass is growing tall.

Concrete beams went surfing in the grass to my newly claimed working area behind the barn.

Got them all out of the yard (a few are still in use there) and sorted by broken/usable.

Not that many left, a lot already got reused for the two firewood stores.

#Homestead #Tractor #DIY #Concrete #Recycling

An area of mowed grass with a barn (and another barn behind it). Two lots of long concrete power pylons lay on the ground in various lengths and conditions. A small blue tractor is idling nearby after pulling them there. The grass has curving stripes of bare dirt from where the beams where dragged over it. The sun is low and the sky cloudy.

Hey there! I'm Lily, a proud trans lesbian from Conifer #Colorado, a mom of a teenage son, and a perpetual instance admin / migrator.

This is my #Sharkey account.

I'm a neurodivergent woman in tech working as a Senior SRE.

I love to be #outdoors, tend to the #homestead, play in my wood shop, hang out with my kiddo, play #videogames, play #guitar, #snowboard, and see whatever kind of trouble my wife and I can get into on the weekends.

#introduction #transbian #trans #lesbian #mom #neurodivergent #womenintech #devops #sre #k8s #kubernetes #snowboard #wlw #farm #homesteading #ducks #chickens

Our fall harvest is pretty much done at this point. Here's a small recap of the last couple of weeks.

https://blog.ohheybrian.com/2025/10/fall-harvest-2025/

#homestead #blogging

This week's storm tipped over the corn plants. No real loss there as it turns out it was all rotting from the inside anyway. 🎉

It's been a strange season. Amazing for potatoes, strawberries, beans, and pumpkins. Awful for peas, corn and cucumbers.

On paper I'd expect cucumbers and pumpkins to do equally well, but not this time. It was the timing of these crops. The weather changed so drastically that we lost the entire first sowing of cucumbers. The second one didn't make it up before the frost hit. The pumpkins on the other hand were already established enough and made it through.

Similarly I'd expect peas and beans to perform equally, but this year with it's mild winter and warm weather was pest heaven and the peas were a near-complete loss.

We always plant a variety of things because you never know what jokes nature decides to play. If you put crops with opposite needs and different timing in the same plot you'll pretty much always have some wins and the losses hurt less. This year serves to reaffirm my trust in that approach.

#gardening #homestead

Been down by the river with the angle grinder and opened up the lean-to on the collapsing shack there, looking if there's maybe some old log beams for closing up some window openings on the house.

No such luck. There is a bunch of timber in there, but nothing that size except for one beam which was on the ground and wet.

Looks like the remains of the old sauna by the river, which only an overgrown foundation hints at anymore.

I'll sort through this at some point if still possible, but it's not a priority.

#Homestead #Barn #Treasure #Wood #Salvage

A dark lean-to with a little light shining through gaps in the roof and rear wall. It's packed half full with long pieces of used timber, mostly junk, flitches, round, live edge planks, mostly grey and with nails in it. The shack is at an angle on a hillside.

Ginger bug

https://lemmy.world/post/36931572

Hawthorn of some kind.

Currently popular with the birds.

Tastes like tiny red apples. Not bad, actually. These birds got taste :)

#Fruit #Hawthorn #Garden #Homestead

A little tree with many small, bright red fruits.

Pulled this out of the former service pit, which was literally a hole in the dirt (that I want to fill in).

It's big and beefy and the welds are even somewhat ok compared to a lot of the rest of slapped together stuff.

It used to have two big wooden beams (now rotten) for driving a vehicle onto and then crouching underneath to tear on it with a big spanner while firmly believing in some deity to protect you from it falling on you.

Not sure what to do with it. Maybe recycle into a bearing press one day. Maybe get new wooden beams and a deity 😬

#Homestead #Steel #Salvage #ServicePit

#Homestead

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