Where There’s Smoke
When we started this podcast, we thought it would be a chill low-key show about homesteading. But 2020 has been so insane, we find ourselves having to address “breaking news” more and more.
So today’s episode is about the current disaster that everyone’s talking about… the West Coast is on fire. It’s affecting us here in Los Angeles, with dangerous air quality from the Bobcat Fire, and the huge Creek Fire is filling our property with wildfire smoke up in Mariposa too.
We can’t be anywhere indoors because of the pandemic and we can’t be anywhere outdoors because of all the smoke. At least we’re all wearing masks already? Boy oh boy, the future feels bleak. But it is what it is… all we can do is stay on our toes and do the best we can with every day. The future is about adaptability.
But let’s talk about our latest property visit for a moment. Over Labor Day weekend, we went up to Mariposa with our skoolie friend! We installed a chain gate and did some surveying in preparation for the arrival of the bus, and we also poured some more concrete bricks and did more work on the greenhouse. But we also just wanted to show off our property to someone… not just the hard work we’ve done so far, but the natural beauty of the land itself. It was very exciting.
On the second day of our visit, though, everything changed when Vince spotted smoke on the horizon. We tried to stay calm, loaded our valuables and flammables into the car, and drove into town to check it out; although we learned that the Creek Fire was about 50 miles away, we decided to cut our visit short and dedicate the rest of our time to firescaping.
But the more I think about it, the more at peace I become with wildfires… part of the reason we have so many fires now is because we have so much “fire debt” built up since we decided that Fire Is Bad over 100 years ago. So in a sense, California is just trying to find its way to healthy forests again. Wildfires are a natural part of life in the West and we need to rethink our entire philosophy on how we coexist with fire.
Last week, Governor Newsom held a press conference where he admitted that we need to be smarter about forest management and declared that “the climate change debate is over.” And there’s an exciting update on something we mentioned in our last Fire episode… Newsom signed a bill to help allow inmate firefighters become professional firefighters after getting out of prison! Time will tell if the bill will actually help, but it’s a step in the right direction. At this point, we’ll take whatever small bits of good news we can find.
WHAT WE BUILT:
A gate with a 25-foot chain secured to metal posts on each side with a lock.
We raised the greenhouse’s floor level with some more bags of sand and installed vent covers. We ended up needing 2.5 tons of sand in total! That’s a big sandbox.
We also did a lot of firescaping: around the greenhouse, we broke down branches and removed forest litter, then raked the ground almost down to bare earth. (As a bonus, as long as our property isn’t destroyed by wildfire, the ground in that area is now ready for planting seeds.) Vince also took down a huge dead tree with his good ole Milwaukee chainsaw.
You can find more pictures and details on Instagram.
