Nine hours left, final (AWESOME) stretch goal, bonus recipe
almost 4 years ago – Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 05:36:11 PM

We're in the final stretch, with just nine and a half hours left, and I'm thrilled with how far we've come. Thanks all!

Final Stretch Goal: All Content Available Online IMMEDIATELY

We're at $84,272 right now.  Reaching $90,000 in the remaining nine and a half hours isn't guaranteed, and it's not going to be easy, but it's just barely possible.

If we hit that by the time we close at 8pm ET tonight, I will share 100% of the book content IMMEDIATELY and with EVERY BACKER. Within the week I'll set up a github repo or some other tool, invite every single backer in, and let you read the content I've already got (162,000 words, or 651 pages) including advice on tractors, fences, shopping for land, chainsaws, raised beds, green houses, irrigation, hoses, dealing with weeds, and hundreds of other topics. Every single backer will get access and can watch the book develop and finalize in real time.

Tell your friends, tweet about it with a link to the kickstarter, and let's see if we can make this happen!

Steak and Blue Cheese Salad

A friend told me that he was drooling over one of the food pictures in the kickstarter, the steak salad

The salad is pretty trivial

• lettuce from garden
• tomato from same
• corn from same
• ribeye quickly seared in pan both sides, sliced
• blue cheese dressing (I'll include a full recipe in book with measurements, but short version follows)

Blue cheese dressing:

• full container of sour cream
• some mayo (optional)
• one full container blue chz crumbles
• salt
• black pepper
• 3 or 4 shakes Worcestershire sauce
• around 1 T or so dried onion powder (details on drying your own onions in the book)
• a splash or rice or apple vinegar (details on drying your own apple vinegar in the book)

I find that I like this dressing far more than any blue cheese dressing I've purchased.

Help reach the final stretch goal

I'd love to hit the final stretch goal.

Please consider helping:

• increasing your pledge from trade paperbacks to hardcover, or hardcover to Lothlórien Forest Edition
• buying an extra set of trade paperbacks for a friend or family member
• sharing this kickstarter with a friend

I expect that this is the last update.

Fingers crossed that we make it, but - whether we do or not - we've come amazingly far and I appreciate your help in making this dream real.  Every single backer, from $10 ebook purchaser to $1,000 Future Farmer of Aristillus pledge people, I thank you.

- Travis Escape the City: a How-to Homesteading Guide

One day left: Duck à l'Orange and Duck Leg Confit, Workshop Update, and more
almost 4 years ago – Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 07:27:23 PM

Duck à l'Orange and Duck Leg Confit

Homesteading life is a mix of hard work, strange skills and tools, and well earned rewards.

Back in mid April I went to my local Tractor Supply to buy baby chicks so we'd have a new batch of egg laying birds (egg layers have an effective life of around three years, and our old flock was at that point).  While I was there I picked up 10 ducks chicks for around $3 each.

Unlike factory farmed animals which live crowded lives of indoor misery, our ducks spent every single day of their lives outdoors, swimming on a pond, eating bugs to supplement their grain, and living their duck lives to the fullest.

By this past weekend the ducks were fully grown, and it was time for the next step. The nice thing about controlling the process yourself is that you can make slaughter fast, painless, and stress free.

After I'd slaughtered the ducks, my wife helped me process them.  We scalded the carcasses together, ran them through the plucking machine together, and then I gutted them and pieced them out so that she could run the vacuum sealer machine and put them into one of the basement chest freezers.

I try to use every part of the animal; you can see that I've saved hearts, livers, and feet.

Most of the meat went into the freezer, but I did hold back one carcass to age for a week in the refrigerator. This weekend or early next week I'll be cooking something - perhaps Duck à l'Orange?

"What do you build in your workshop...your workshop?"

A decade or so back a friend at an engineering firm I worked at teased me after one too many stories about organizing my workshop.  "What do you build in your workshop...except your workshop?"

The final step in building a computer language compiler is when the compiler can compile itself, but the first, middle, and last step in building a workshop is when the workshop can be used to build itself.  In addition to building tables and storage crates, turning bowls, and fixing tractors, yes, I do also use my workshop to improve my workshop.

After the ducks were into the freezer on Saturday I did more workshop organizing - I used C clamps to create improvised hoist points on my CNC machine (built from a kit from CNC Router Parts a decade or so back), then used chain hoists and a gantry crane to lift the multi hundred pound machine off of the cabinet base I'd built for it.  (I bought the gantry crane and the chain hoists to assist me in pig butchering, and they work great for that, but have other uses).

Then with the machine in the air, I could slide the base out, build doors and hang them on hinges, and rotate the base 90 degrees to make the doors face in directions that didn't interfere with the CNC machine cable trays.

Final Stretch Goal

Thanks for all your feedback in comments, on twitter, and in email about stretch goals. 

I've decided that if we hit $80,000 and 1,000 followers, everyone who backs at any level at all will get a free e-book inventorying the tools in my shop, my thoughts on them, and which I'd definitely buy again and which I wouldn't waste my money on.

Avoiding just a single wasted $100 purchase can save you more money than a hardcover set of these books.

We're at $74,968 and accelerating towards the finish line, which is just over 30 hours out.  It's going to be a bit of a stretch to hit this goal, but I think we can make it.

What you can do to make the free e-book happen:

•  up your pledge by $49 to get another set of trade paperbacks, which you can give to a friend for Christmas 
• forward this email to a friend or relative and suggest they back the project at "set of trade paperbacks" level

Please Share this Update ...and this Kickstarter !

The kickstarter is doing great, and I'd like to thank each and every one of you...but I'd like to ask one more favor - please forward this update to anyway who might be interested in the books.

Thank you!

- Travis Escape the City: a How-to Homesteading Guide

Six days left, a walk through the farm, a secret hash browns recipe, and more
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 08:25:38 PM

Six Days Left

We're 3/4 of the way through the kickstarter and into the home stretch - it ends in just six days.

Thanks to everyone who's backed the project - we've knocked down a ton of stretch goals, and I'm looking forward to putting in the hours over the next month to write all the new content we've unlocked.

In the mean time, here's another small "day in the life of living outside the city" update to whet your appetite for the country life.

A Mid Afternoon Walk

On many work days I take a break mid afternoon to walk around the farm.  It's a way to destress from juggling technical problems, let my mind wander, physically stretch out my legs and lower back, and also check in on a fairly intimate level with things around the property.

On my most recent walk I saw that we'd gotten a delivery from the feed store - straw, lawyer pellets (chicken food) and wood chips.  The local feed store we use is great - even without being asked, they unload the truck and stack our deliveries inside our barn.  Some local businesses her are great, others are ... slightly less professional.  One thing I talk about in the book is the sociology of living outside of the city.  There are some interesting differences, and I've got theories as to how and why they arise.

The corn (two types - sweet, for eating raw or quickly cooked, and painted mountain, for grinding) is doing well, but I really need to deal with the weeds in between the rows.  Weeds compete with crops for nutrients, water, and light, and there are several ways to deal with them - hoes, mulching, fabric barriers, flame weeders and more.  I talk about all the options in the book, and lay out the criteria to help you figure out which is right for your garden.

The onions are doing well (you can see the fabric weed barrier in use here that I mentioned above).  It wouldn't hurt for me to add a bit of top soil around some of the bulbs that have worked their way up out of the soil.  There are several different ways to grow onions - from seeds, from bulbs, and from sets.  I've experimented with all three, and I have a firm opinion.  I get into that in the book, and also talk about types of onions, and why Patterson is my favorite.

My wife's vineyard, where she grows a variety of cool climate adapted wine grapes, is likewise doing well.  She's been out there a few times this season pruning and the vines are doing well with all of the attention.  In the book, of course, I talk about different grape cultivars, types of trellises, pruning, tools for destemming and crushing grapes, carboys and other containers for fermenting wine, tools for bottling wine, and more.

My pumpkin plants were doing great a week ago ... but overnight they all seem to have turned for the worse.  I think the problem might be too much nitrogen, too quickly.  If so, that's my fault - I used straw for mulch, but this straw was from out of a barn stall, and was rich in ammonia , which means that the nitrogen might have been released too quickly.  I talk about this in the books.  The good news is that pumpkins can handle cold weather, and in early July, the season isn't too far advanced.  I very well might go out and replant the whole crop this weekend.

My potatoes are doing well.  I'm already intending to break my keto-ish diet and have hash browns - lots of them - this fall.  I worked out a recipe that I quite like for hash browns, mixing onions, garlic, potatoes, squeezing excess moisture out using a very simple tool you already have, and frying in a cast iron skillet in pure lard.  (And, yes, I discuss both the care and use of cast iron skillets AND rendering your own lard).

When I moved to the farm seven years ago I inherited a massive Japanese knot weed infestation - thousands of nasty, brittle, aggressively expanding bamboo like plants.  Over time I beat them back and eventually declared victory.  I improved the rocky soil by covering it with hay harvested from my pasture and letting it rot in place.  Now it's some of the richest soil on the farm.  As it's adjacent to an old-style New England rock wall, I call this tenth of an acre garden area "stone wall patch", and I planted it thickly with sunflowers this spring.  The sunflower plants are now almost 4' tall (heading towards 7+ feet).  In the image at the top of this kickstarter page you can see some of the sunflowers from last year.  Sunflowers are incredible for the rate at which they multiple seeds - start with one seed, grow one flower, get 500 seeds out.  This entire sunflower patch is grown from just a small handful of seeds a year or two back.  In the book, I talk about saving seeds and running your own breeding programs.

Not all of my daily walks are inspecting my own handiwork.  Sometimes I enjoy wildflowers or other parts of the "found" environment.  Speaking of "found", today's walk had a surpise - I was walking through a field 4' tall with hay and walked withing three or four feet of a young white tale deer fawn.  She exploded out from the undergrowth and ran right past me, headed towards her mother, I suppose.  (No picture; it was all over in about a second).

Lothlórien Forest Edition

A week or two back I announced a new tier: the Lothlórien Forest Edition.

I had a ton of interest for something hand crafted from the farm. So, at this newly created tier you get a pair of signed hardcover books - only available during this kickstarter - and a wooden slipcase to hold them.

...but this isn't any regular slip case. I'll head out into my forest, pick an appropriate tree, fell it, mill it, dry it, and hand make wooden slipcases in my farm workshop.

Limited to an edition of 5̵0̵ just 44 left, with the number carved into your slipcase. Own a small piece of Liberty Farm.

Available during this kickstarter, and never again.

On my recent walk I was scouting trees that I might mill to make lumber for slipcases, and I think I've found the right one.

If you're interested in having a copy of the Lothlórien Forest Edition, but have already pledged at another level, you can adjust your pledge right on the kickstarter page.  Do it now!

New stretch goal

As I type this we're at $63,973, and we're likely going to unlock the last stretch goal, at $65,000, any day now.

There's room for one more stretch goal.

I'd like to put in something big (content wise), and I'd like to do it if we hit two distinct goals: $80,000, and 1,000 backers.

We're at 894 backers now, and we're doing about $1,000 per day, so hitting these targets is possible, but it is a stretch.  Tell me what sort of extra content would be enough to motivate you to tell a friend...or two... or three, about this kickstarter, and sell them on it.  Extra recipes?  An expanded section on workshop procedures?  A complete inventory of tools that I use and recommend?  Homebrewing recipes for wine, mead, and cider?  Something else?

Please tell me your thoughts in a comment below!

Please Share this Update ...and this Kickstarter !

The kickstarter is doing great, and I'd like to thank each and every one of you...but I'd like to ask one more favor - please forward this update to anyway who might be interested in the books.

Thank you!

- Travis Escape the City: a How-to Homesteading Guide

Halfway there! Thanks for all of your support!
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Jul 03, 2020 at 04:01:32 AM

We've had a lot of new folks join the project since the last update a week or so back.  Thanks!  I really appreciate it!  There's not a ton to say about the project that hasn't already been said in the kickstarter page or the video, but I'll give a few updates from the farm, so you can see what life in the country is like, and what sort of content is in the book.

Lamb, Garlic Scape, Green Onion, and Zucchini Fritters 

Last night I cooked one of my and my wife's favorite recipes, a Middle Eastern dish: Lamb, Garlic Scape, Green Onion, and Zucchini Fritters.  It's based on a recipe in the cookbook Jersualem, by Sami Tamimi and Yotam Ottolenghi, but modified by us in a few ways.

Everything except the spices in this recipe comes from the farm - we raise the lamb, garlic, onions, and zucchini.  There are some plants that can be a bit tricky to grow - I'm still trying with hot peppers - but alliums like garlic and onions are fairly easy, in my experience.  One neat thing about both garlic and onions is that you don't have to wait until the growing season is over to harvest them - like mint, you can snip some of the material and the rest keeps going.  "Scapes" are the central curled stalk of the garlic plant, and it's actually a win/win to cut the scapes off while the garlic is still growing.  On the one hand, you get free food (the garlic scape tastes a lot like garlic bulbs proper, but with a more floral, vegetal tone), and on the other, you encourage the garlic to put more of its energy into building the bulb, instead of wasting it on flowering.

The green onion is likewise cut from the living plant, leaving the other stalks and the bulb to mature.  Take just one from each plant, and the crop will do fine.

It'd be nice if everything came into season at the exact same time, but zucchini isn't ready until the end of summer, and lamb is harvested and processed in the early winter (there are two reasons for that - both economic, and having to do with the proper temperature for safe aging of meat and butchering), so these two ingredients come from one of the chest freezers in the basement.  In the books, by the way, I explain the proper season for all of this stuff, the equipment you need, how to calculate how much volume you need in your freezers, and more.

Tilling Food Plots, Tractor Implements, and Maintenance

The food plots were all tilled six weeks back, planted four weeks back, and now when I wander out to check in on them, I'm mostly doing a bit of weeding or mulching.

I've still got the rototiller mounted to the back of the tractor, and I'll be taking it off soon and putting on another implement - a brush hog, to clear a half acre patch where I want to plant an orchard of specialty varietal apple trees for hard-cider.

Before taking the rototiller off I inspected it because I'd noticed that the slip clutch was  - well, slipping.

The right side of the tiller, above, had some hay wrapped around it (no big deal), but the left side had some wire that had been buried and brought to the surface by the tilling.  It was five minutes work to get it fixed.

I bring this up both to mention the small, less glamorous "day in the life" stuff one deals with, but also to mention that the book covers the differences between tilling, plowing, discing, the pros and cons of each, the impact on soil tilth of each (and why that matters), the proper technique for installing and removing tractor implements, the difference between a bottle jack, a floor jack, and jack stands, and why you want the last two when you're doing work under heavy equipment.

Forestry, Planning for the ( Medium Far ) Future 

An hour or two ago I needed a break from coding (today's joy: XML, SOAP, and a bunch of very verbose data) so my dog  Cody (also know as "Kodos", "Code Monkey", and - inexplicably "Little Beef") joined me on a quick 15 minute walk around the pastures and orchards.  Last week, though, we took a longer walk through the forest on the back forty. 

As we walked I inspected the forest, looking for areas that can support a bit of sustainable logging (I go into depth in the book not just on how much firewood a forest can sustainably generate, per acre, per year, but what tools and techniques you need to get all of your heating fuel from your own land).  I was also looking at the areas that may not be ready to log in my lifetime, like the new growth forest above, that reseeded itself after it was more or less clear cut around 15 years ago.  Not this summer, but perhaps next summer, I'd like to get back there to thin the saplings which - almost paradoxically - increases the rate at which the remaining trees grow, and kickstarts the forest.  With proper thinning (cutting down saplings) you end up with MORE tree mass a few years later than if you don't thin! (And, yes, all of this is in the book.)

I don't know if I'll log this patch myself in 20 years, or if I'm working to improve the land for someone who comes after me, 30, 50, or 70 years down the line.  Either is fine - there's a joy in maintaining, and even improving, a resource, for the next generation.

Please Share this Update ...and this Kickstarter !

The kickstarter is doing great, and I'd like to thank each and every one of you...but I'd like to ask one more favor - please forward this update to anyway who might be interested in the books.

Thank you!

- Travis
Escape the City: a How-to Homesteading Guide

One week update
almost 4 years ago – Tue, Jun 23, 2020 at 04:39:46 PM

Covered in the Wall Street Journal?

The WSJ ran an article by Ruth Bender called "Escape to the Country"  two days ago.  Coverage of this kickstarter?!?  As it turns out, no, despite the surprisingly similar headline, but it is proof that the out-of-the-city / back-to-the-land idea is in the zeitgeist right now.

The book did get a kind word in the popular Ace of Spades blog, which runs a book review / roundup every Sunday.

Stretch Goals

We hit $45,000 this morning, unlocking stretch goal feast recipes #4: how to throw a farm Christmas dinner. I'll include "olde" English recipes for Christmas goose, Christmas "pudding" (N.B. not a pudding!), and other courses that we've cooked and served.

Free Upgrade to hardcover

A reminder: if you pledge at the "both trade paperbacks" level, and tweet a link to this kickstarter ( https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tjic/escape-the-city-a-how-to-homesteading-guide ) with the hashtag #EscapeTheCity, I'll enter you in a drawing for a free upgrade from paperback to hardcover.  One upgrade will be awarded per 50 people participating.

I've Started Photography for the Books

I've promised that the books will ship before the end of the year. That might sound far off, but having written and produced books before, I feel like I'm already staring down an onrushing train.  It's June 22nd and I can almost feel the autumn chill in the air (even as I'm spending my weekends working in the 80+° weather!). I'm starting to grab photographs for the book of things that are time constrained (e.g. gardens, invasive species, etc.).

On that note, here are two pictures that will go in the "invasive species" chapter.

Life on the farm

The onions, garlic, sunflower, and pumpkins are all doing well.  My wife's lettuce is exploding, and we're eating Caesar salad several times a week, topped with c̶h̶i̶c̶k̶e̶n̶ turkey that we raised.  My potatoes aren't doing well - I'm pretty sure my compost was too carbon-rich, and is sucking nitrogen out of the soil.  I'll put many more details on this into the compost chapter, so you can learn from my mistakes.

I've spent the last few weekends building bookcases - after almost seven years on the farm, it's finally time to do some domestic improvements.  The last update had "in progress" pictures.  Here are the new bookcases deployed, holding my science fiction hardcovers.

Winter is Coming

Often at this point in the summer I'm bucking, splitting, and stacking firewood.  This year, though, I'm not - I'd like to build a lean-to shelter for my firewood (easier, come winter, than dealing with tarps covered with snow) before I start piling up fuel.  Heating oil prices are very low this year, so it's actually a fine year to skip firewood and use oil.  I've already written the part of the book where I discuss the trade off between wood heat and other choices. It's good to know that you've got choices, and can trade back and forth from year to year, as prices (and your free time) wax and wane.

Please Share this Update...and this Kickstarter !

The kickstarter is doing great, and I'd like to thank each and every one of you...but I'd like to ask one more favor - please forward this update to anyway who might be interested in the books.

Thank you!

- Travis
Escape the City: a How-to Homesteading Guide