Category: self sustainability

566 Articles
agriculture, self sustainability

We’ve been trying to keep wildlife away from crops and domesticated animals for years. These are several sad truths about the process:

  • the philosophy of letting nature take its share doesn’t work, nature will take it all and is indifferent to your survival
  • the most cost effective and sleep preserving way of dealing with “pests” it to kill them
  • the size of an animal is strongly correlated with the worth we give its life
  • if you remove an animal, another will take its place
  • nature is diverse and has a strategy to defeat every human counter measure other than gunpowder (high jump, force, stinky spray, needles, tunneling, flight).

And so for years we’ve tried everything, trapping, fencing, double fencing, electric fencing, netting, cattle panels + electric fencing, inviting different paths, hanging old CDroms for random shining, airsoft guns, UV lights, trail cameras, noise, ultrasounds, flashing LEDs. If it was on the internet, it was attempted on this homestead. And the results are mitigated at best.

The reality is that wildlife pushes, and it pushes hard. And if it can’t push when you’re around, it’ll push when you’re not, or when you sleep, or when you look away. I’ve been annoying many creatures to help them understand this wasn’t a welcoming place. They inevitably come right back a few minutes later

Could technology solve this? Could I trigger dynamic counter measures based on detection 24/7? Obviously, detection is the starting point of all this. After the first round of seeing Nicole’s gardening work ravaged by a couple of fat raccoons, I went after it with more gusto.

I figured if I could nail the detection this Summer, I could have it alert me and I’d go after them until next Summer when I could work on the triggered measures. And well, let’s just say the wildlife won this round. After many nightly outings on alert, I’ve at most bothered them into eating slightly less tomatoes.

But at least through many trials and much parameter tuning, I finally did get good detection. This means it’s accurate (no false positives), and timely.

I landed on a 3 filters approach, each less generous than the one before it.

Filter #1 the camera’s own motion trigger

This one is pretty straightforward, it’s generous in triggering, creating many images with nothing of interest.

Filter #2 OpenCV classification with MegaDetector

I created a container whose mission it is to receive images and run OpenCV on them. Once again, this would have been a tedious project a short time ago, but AI made this impossibly quick & easy. This is all hosted locally on the very Pi you’re reading these lines from. Most images do not make it through this and are immediately erased. But if an image is found to have animals detected with some confidence, then we run the last filter.

This filter processes ~13,000 images per day, or ~9 a minute. All free, local and sun powered. It is kind of mind twisting to think about extracting “intelligence” from light. Now OpenCV isn’t what we today call AI, but clearly the near future will have LLMs running on premises.

Filter #3 Hosted AI detection

Yes… I tried hard to avoid this one filter. I don’t like adding a cloud dependency with a credit card associated to it at that. But in reality it is so much more accurate than anything I could ever do with OpenCV. I’ve tried many strategies for building confidence with only OpenCV but could never get it right. False positives have a high cost, and so, AI gives the final verdict to the images which made it this far, tens of them in a day for a few pennies, sign me up!

This is essentially a trail camera system on steroids. Based on other state in the Homestead Dashboard, it will also send alerts when people are detected, might as well. Some of the shortcomings of OpenCV are made evident bellow.

And so without false positives, the trigger this year is human intervention. I guess I’m waking up at 6:25 today.

Please keep in mind there is 0 animal cruelty here, the same deer come back over and over again the same day, taking a nice hop over the electric fence which would give them more of a sting than some airsoft BBs on their thick skin. Oh, and the BBs I got are biodegradable.

I hope next year to be able to trigger something that is automated, and more efficient than anything I can do trying to be non-lethal. I think that the real test of this future solution will have to do with animals getting used to it or not. We shall see.

agriculture, preserving, self sustainability, wood

An August rainy day is a usual time for a first fire of the season. July is really the only month without fires although they are few and far between in the surrounding months. This one is more significant in that it the first time we fire the new SweetHeart, in the new almost finished kitchen. I remember clearly the first time we fired the previous cookstove. They are so important to us it’s a big deal to be introduced to a new one.

The cats knew where to be

Since it’s a better/newer version of our previous cookstove, we thought it’d likely behave the same, and reassuringly it did. It’s nice to not start from scratch. Stoves all have their personalities and we’ve learned about our previous one for 11 years. The water tank this one has would have been so nice to have when we were getting all our hot water from the stove. We moved a lot of hot water in pots by hand. It feels like a lifetime ago even though we were still doing so last Winter. It’s incredible how fast one gets used to luxuries. The oven is a bit differently shaped, non-ideally really so we’re going to have to figure something out.

Since the fire was going Nicole cooked everything under the Sun. Starting with preserving a bunch of peaches our tiny trees produced. We actually removed all the buds from them in the Spring so the trees would spend their energy on growing rather than making fruits, but there were so many we missed a lot of them. One day I saw a deer go at the trees which made me realize a lot of good peaches had gone under the radar and were now ready. Thank you I guess?

10 frozen bags and 22 preserves, not bad for a couple of tiny trees which weren’t supposed to do anything.

aesthetics, agriculture

The non-berry harvests started rolling in. Along with food, Nicole grows a lot of flowers.

I don’t care what civilization you are, you gotta have a Sun deity.

agriculture, self sustainability

This is shaping up to be a great berry year. We’re often amused that in our work toward greater self sufficiency, we never produced enough of a staple (potatoes, corn) for our family’s consumption in a year. But we’ll wolf down hundreds of dollars of berries in one day. We seem to have succeeded at overproduction only with luxury foods like blueberries, raspberries and maple syrup. It’s nice really but one wonders about priorities.

This season is notable in that we have a great read of what the plants are doing, and have managed to stay on top of them. We’ve been good a picking a little every day, a little before ripe, at good times of the day. The chaos of previous years along with our lesser experience then didn’t allow for the slow and steady approach coupled with good calls. One of the improvements is that we are no longer trying to process the quantities before they rot. Now we simply freeze it all until Fall when a day long fire can be used for 1 big canning session. Making preserves in the Summer in small batches was far from ideal.

We’ve been getting 1 big bowl per day for the past couple of weeks, that’s what’s left for the freezer after we all splurged.

When picking raspberries, it helps to be low to the ground. The best picking is when we crawl through the bushes.

The blueberries are on a whole other level.

self sustainability, wood

I started going through the massive amount of oak that was dropped in my driveway last Winter. It’s fun and fast.

Everything is massive with this oak. I excised some of the cool knots, not sure if I’ll ever do something with them but I figure they might be cool in some project. They need to dry a few years first so now’s not the time to think of what that could be.

Beyond the knots, we thought it’d be kind of a shame not to get a few boards out of such a special tree. It’s oak, it really stood out as a tree, it’s close to 200 years old, and we walked past it for 10 of them. So after researching possibilities, I bought a chainsaw mill with a 24″ bar and a ripping chain. The saw is a monster when fully equipped.

I haven’t taken it on its maiden ripping yet, all in due time. And now I’m dreaming of going deeper in the woods and building a cabin with lumber milled on the spot.

maple syrup, self sustainability

I spent the whole week end in the sugar house, maple trees have been relentless this past week. We have ~5 gallons of syrup canned so far with at least 3 more coming. The smells are incredible in the Spring, Winter makes you forget that the world has any smell at all. Wet soil hits the hardest after a long Winter, and it’s quickly followed by pine smoke and sweet sap.

self sustainability, wood

We don’t need another stove but we also couldn’t let this one pass. It’s our same Heartland SweetHeart we know really well from a decade of intense use, with a water tank, extra bells and whistles, a few decades newer, and for a good price. Since this is very much a key piece of our household, an upgrade even small goes a long way.

These things are heavy.

self sustainability, wood

The town’s been wanting to remove an oak that is rotting and is just enough on the road that they hit it with the plow sometimes. It’s a family favorite as it’s on a dirt road we often walk on, and it’s absolutely massive. It has 3 enormous trunks, and each trunk has several branches the size of the trees I usually take. It’s next to a power line, rotted and far bigger than anything I can reasonably tackle. Let’s just say I’ve been excited when I heard about their plan to drop it. In Vermont when a town or utility needs to clear trees, the landowners get to call dibs. That was a year ago and I thought maybe they had forgotten about it. And so one day, I hear some chainsawing in the distance, and when this happens, I usually follow the noise to make sure no one is poaching my trees, and because I like to chat with neighbors. To my surprise a whole crew is there, 7 guys with heavy equipment going at the big oak. In a very typical Vermont interaction I get to meet the road foreman, and I tell him I’m definitely keeping the tree. He was aware, the information wasn’t lost in the year it took for the gears to get in motion.

I tell him he’s welcome to leave it over the bank for me to come grab, to which he responds he’ll drop it in my driveway if I prefer… Yes sir, I very much prefer not moving several tons of tree by myself :). And that’s how 31 nice big chunks of oak showed up in my driveway. I didn’t have to lift a finger, and I got to enjoy a good show (watching pros and heavy machinery at work). It’s Christmas all over again.

Some chunks are massive, and there is still a very full day’s worth of work left behind in the woods. All in all there’s probably 2 years worth of firewood. But maybe some of it is worth milling, we’ll see.

self sustainability, water

It has happened, we have a normal shower inside the house, the hot water of which happens through no intervention of our own.

In reality, it’s because of our recent grid tie in that we have enough electricity to keep a hot water heater going. The showers are nicer mostly because they no longer require logistics. I moved buckets of hot water from the stove for years. Now we can just hop in and have a shower in the Winter months. Nothing beats the outside shower the other half of the year. There’s still a lot of things we want to do to be more self sufficient. Playing with an electric hot water heater is interesting, I get to see how much power it draws, and how much heat is preserved via insulation. This will instruct future improvements. For now we’re just enjoying easier showers thanks to the grid.

agriculture, self sustainability

We’ve had bad luck with peach trees dying in the past, mainly due to us not removing all the buds as they are establishing themselves. One of the dead trees went again, bellow the graft or so we thought. So I removed all the buds this time, but there were so many I missed a few. And well, they turned into small peaches :). They’re delicious, just small. We didn’t think we’d be picking peaches in October.

electronics, I.T., self sustainability, solar power

I lost a voltage sensor the exact minute thunder struck very close to the house, Nicole happened to be filming because it was an impressive mix of rain, hail & thunder. Does thunder create some sort of EMP? Could be a coincidence but the timing is really suspicious. Sorry I mean sus.

dead sensor :\

Oh, well I’ll just buy a replacement.

And fuck, I forgot we screw over allies and suck up to dictators now. Phidgets come from Canada, I never found any comparable alternatives in the realm of current sensing that goes beyond small hobbyist projects. And I don’t really want to relearn/recode a whole new deal anyway. I just want replacement parts.

Extensive searching pointed to robotshop.com having Phidgets parts in stock. So I grabbed spares for everything to get a few thunderstrikes ahead and buy me a few years. For the top 3 parts, I grabbed everything they are left.

The battery voltage sensor is actually important these days as automation uses it to make decisions on which circuits to turn on/off. So for a few days until I got the part, I moved the panels’ voltage sensor to the battery. Sensing the panels is informational and has no real consequence on function. With anything solar, I have appreciated having spares at hand so it was time to spend some money and make that true for the monitoring side of things which we became more dependent on over time.

self sustainability, wood

Only half of the work is done having felled a tree, or when nature makes a choice for you as pictured bellow. Then begins the careful process of bringing it all down on the ground. It takes careful reading of limbs, tension points, and interactions, to make safe cuts. I’ve improved this skill over the years and will work through a tree with accurate anticipation of what movement a cut will yield. The delivery of the cut can also make a difference. I’m not aware of a word to describe this process of reading a tree and releasing it fully from suspension.

The heavy root system will pull the trunk back upright suddenly past a certain point.

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