Timothy Yordy

It was a cold and windy day in early January when I got a call from my wife. “The sink is backed up and water is shooting everywhere out of the washer,” she said in a frustrated tone. Being the wise husband that I am I left work early to go home to my wife’s rescue.

Upon my arrival at home an idea occurred to me that perhaps the problem was not that there was a clog but that the drainpipe exiting the house from the kitchen was frozen. This was entirely possible because the drainpipe was buried only a few inches beneath the ground. Old farmhouses have fun things like that. Before entering the house I circled around to the backyard and discovered the terrible truth.

Water from a downspout had run downhill and washed dirt away from the pipe completely exposing a three inch section of it to the frigid air on the north side of our house.

This was not a good situation. The sun was setting and the temperature was dropping even further and with a frozen drain pipe we wouldn’t be able to use any water in the house until it thawed out. Not really knowing what to do I drove to Lowe’s hoping to find some answers. An employee showed me to the electrical pipe heaters that are meant to keep a pipe from freezing. These ranged from $20-30 but clearly written on each one was a warning to only use it indoors and not allow it to touch the ground. I tried soliciting ideas from Lowe’s employees to try and fix my problem but they were unable to offer me any solutions.

I was growing desperate at this point. It was dark out, cold, and windy. As I made my way towards the front of the store I spotted something that I thought just might work. It was a cardboard display of Hot Hands and Toasti Toes, the little bags of hand and feet warmers that people who work outside in the cold winter months sometime use. I read the packaging on each carefully. The Hot Hands actually get hotter than the Toasti Toes but the Toasti Toes don’t require oxygen to stay warm once you get them hot. For the idea that hatched in my head, there wasn’t going to be much oxygen available.

I purchased six packs of Toasti Toes, costing me about $8. When I got home I quickly went to work. I knew that that main problem was that the pipe was exposed to the cold winter air, so I needed to cover it with something. With the ground frozen I had little choice: I went to the barn and got some fresh horse manure. It was readily available and well, some of it was still warm.

Once I had removed the Toasti Toes from their packages and they got warm, I stuffed all 12 of them (there’s two in a pack) down around the pipe. Then I put a brick on top of it and dumped a wheelbarrow load of horse manure on top to seal in the heat. And then, I waited.

And waited some more. Hours passed and nothing happened. I was starting to think that I had just wasted my time and that it was a stupid idea to think that a product meant to keep feet warm could possibly unfreeze a metal pipe in early January. It was late at night and I was about to get into  bed, disappointed that my MacGyver-like home repair had failed and not knowing what I would do to fix it the next day.

Suddenly, I heard a great whooshing sound coming from down stairs.
My wife was already in bed and asked what I had done.  “It worked!”, I exclaimed and ran downstairs to confirm what I knew to be true. Sure, enough the pipes were empty. The drain pipe was unfrozen all thanks to Toasti Toes! Five hours, six packs of Toasti Toes, and a pile of horse manure were all that was needed to get me out of a bad situation.

Thanks Toasti Toes!

I have finished major construction on the chicken coop, which means that there are some smaller details that need completed but it’s finished enough for the chickens to move in. In case any of my readers are interested in building their own coop, I wanted to give a step by step of how I made mine.

I figured on four square feet per bird which is a bit generous but I figured it would give me a little extra room if we ever wanted a few more birds. So I made the coop 4 ft x 8 ft but that what I didn’t think about was that that would be the outside dimension and the finished inside dimensions would be a bit less. Not a big deal though.

This was the location we chose. It made the most sense as far as the trees and the adjacent building providing some shade in the summer time as well as serving as windbreaks in the winter. It was certainly not the easiest location to work with though.

The first step was to put in a level foundation. This was probably one of the most frustrating aspects of the entire building process. Working with uneven ground, having to chop through tree roots and using a tiny little level was not fun at all. The blocks are not mortared together and not not concreted in the ground. I wanted to be able to move the coop with relative ease should be decide on a different location at another time. Eventually I got all four corners mostly level, and came to a point where I said, “It’s just a chicken coop.”  This phrase would be uttered many times as construction continued.

The floor was made up of 4 x 4’s around the outside edge and as a center support and 2 x 4’s in the interior. I cut the ends of the 4 x 4’s with 2 inch deep and four inch long grooves so that each piece would fit into the other. Not completely necessary but I think it adds a bit of strength to the building.

Framing was relatively easy. The front wall is 6 ft high and the back wall is 5 ft high. The coop certainly didn’t need to be this tall but being able to walk inside of it should the need arise is going to be nice. The rafters are 6 ft long, so they stick out a foot in the front and back. This is for a little bit of weather protection. Had I thought of it I would have had the roof stick out a foot on each end as well.

This is a view of the back of the mostly finished coop. Eventually there will be a hatch in the back that can be opened to reach in and get eggs from the nesting boxes. Eventually there will also be nesting boxes. The metal on the roof was leftover from 25 years ago when the metal was used for the sides of the adjacent building so it matches nicely.

The window is slightly off center. That is because we decided to use a different sized window after I had already framed the building and had to move a stud to accomodate the new window. The smart thing to do would have been to move the studs on either side an equal amount, but it’s just a chicken coop. The nice thing about this window though is that it opens outward. The lines of white stuff on the walls is silicone caulk. As you can see I started using thin strips of aspenite on the wall as I started to run out of wood. Not all the cuts were completely tight so the silicone is to fill in the gaps. The foamy stuff up at the roof line is that stuff that’s meant to fill in small gaps in houses. I was at the end of my construction knowledge and didn’t know how to do soffit properly so we just filled in the holes with that stuff. The result is a bit ugly, but it’s just a chicken coop.

This is the interior. I have a low temporary roost for our little chickens. Once they’re bigger I’ll build them something proper. I have chicken wire over the window on the inside to prevent escapees and to keep predators out.

And there’s our chicks, complete with six little ones that were given to us. The large ones are our buff orpingtons, the little ones we don’t know what they are. I also put chicken wire in front of the door so they don’t run out when we are taking care of them.

There you have it. That’s my chicken coop. It’s far from perfect but it was fairly cheap compared to some others I’ve seen and it was pretty easy to build. A coat of paint and a few things like roosts and nesting boxes and it will be complete. I hope this is helpful to others who are starting their chicken journeys. Don’t worry too much about perfection and try to keep in mind one thing: It’s just a chicken coop.

I finally got my peeps yesterday, eight Buff Orpington chickens. They all appear to be healthy and are pretty fun to watch. Our son really likes watching them too. Now comes the hard part, I’ve actually got to build the coop. Once I get started on it, I will post pictures of the design and my progress.

In other news we got the garden planted today. This is year number four of our attempts at gardening. I’m thinking that this one will be our most successful yet. And since every previous year has been a near disaster, it won’t take much for this year to be an improvement.

It’s the time of year to start planning out the garden for the coming season and it’s been on my mind a lot lately. We’ve gone three years in a row with some fairly crummy gardening results and last season I was almost ready to give up entirely. But, a winter’s worth of tasteless grocery store fruits and vegetables has brought me back for another attempt. This year I actually plan to grow more than ever before so it should prove interesting to see how well I follow through with it.

Last year we had attempted the gardening method called Lasagna Gardening. It was a spectacular failure but I think part of that was our fault. Over the winter I researched some other gardening methods and came to the conclusion that I don’t need any fancy gardening method. People have been growing stuff right in the ground for thousands of years and all it took was some hard work to keep the weeds out. And keeping the weeds out is always where we have faltered. So I’m looking for some tips and suggestions that any of my readers might have from their gardening experiences that might help me grow a successful garden this year.

I’ve also been contemplating the question of what would I do if there really was a shortage in the food supply? Could we survive on what we grow? Right now the answer would be no, but I want to take a step in that direction. I am going to take one week this summer and not eat anything beyond what we have produced ourselves. There will be two exceptions to this idea. The first one will be fluids, though I will try and limit fluids to water, milk, and some juices. Nothing artificial at all. The other exception will be meat, though here again I will limit my intake during this week. We don’t produce our own meat so I can’t be too strict about that but again certainly no processed meats and I’ll probably come up with some preset amount of portions of meat that I will eat for the week. If our chickens are producing eggs by this point then the eggs will obviously be fair game.

I really think it will fun and quite healthy to exclusively live off of what we grow. I haven’t picked an exact date yet, when I do I’ll post an update. So is anyone else willing to take the Grower’s Challenge with me?

So for the past couple years I’ve been considering the idea of raising chickens. I thought it would be a great way to enjoy fresh eggs and meat. I would know where it came from and it would save me money and the food would likely be far better quality than what I can buy at the grocery store. During the past couple of weeks I started considering this more seriously and sought some advice on the matter. Some of the friendly people in the forums at Backyardchickens.com have been very helpful and have cleared up a couple of misconceptions that I had.

It turns out that it’s fairly unlikely that raising my own chickens will save me money and could actually cost me more than store bought. My eggs will be cage-free organic eggs but I don’t spend the money on cage-free organic eggs from the store now so I can’t consider the cost of those kind of eggs. Even if I build a coop as cheaply as possible, the cost of grain will make up a good amount of the cost of the eggs I get. The eggs themselves won’t start coming until five or six months from the time I actually get the little chicks.

There’s also the matter of butchering. I really don’t have the stomach for it and if I pay someone else to do it then I’m right back to where I started to it not being worth it financially. I also learned that most people butcher between eight and nine weeks which seemed awfully young to me but I’m certainly no expert.

After learning all of this I was still on the fence about whether or not this was going to be a good thing to pursue. Then another tainted food recall appeared on the local evening news. It seems that this is happening several times a year now where we can’t trust the food that is being certified as safe to eat by the FDA. When I started to think about that and combined it with the massive inflation that many economists are expecting due to the government meddling in the economic system, I knew that I really didn’t have a choice anymore. I knew that even if financially it doesn’t work out better right away, that in a very short amount of time it could be a great investment and if safer, more nutritious food is the result then that is even better. So this Spring, I will most likely have some chickens and you will have a front row seat to all of my chicken escapades.

With all of the panic driven market changes of late and the government takeover of much of the financial sector many people are worrying about their financial futures. Analysts are having to change their predictions about the future of the economy on an almost daily basis and usually not in a positive way. There are two ways for certain to come away from this economic meltdown unscathed. There are plenty of other possibilities as well but these two are certain. One is that you could be the CEO of one of these corporations that you ran into the ground and made off with millions from. In that case you are probably in pretty good shape yet. The other certain way to ride out the economic storm unscathed is to be self-sufficient

My regular readers have seen me write about self-sufficiency in the past and it dawned on me the other day that if someone was self-sufficient then all of this stuff that is going on would barely even register in their lives. Take for example the Amish, they are certainly not 100% self-sufficient but they are probably about as close as anyone in America. You know, except for some crazy cults living in the mountains somewhere I suppose. I searched the internet for articles discussing the economic downturn and it’s affect on Amish communities. You know what I couldn’t find a single article. The reason that they are unaffected is because they don’t have mortgages, they don’t have money in the stock market, and they don’t have much use for oil. They grow their own food and make their own clothes. So there are lessons we can learn from the Amish.

As I’ve discussed in the past, I am very inconsistent in my approach to self-sufficiency. The other day I had to come to terms with the reality that my house is not located somewhere where micro-hydroelectric was an option. Wind probably wouldn’t be very effective for me. And a solar system is well outside of my price range. But I also realized that I spend much more on food in a year than I do on electricity, we won’t even discuss how much I spend on heating oil in a year. Though we do grow a very small percentage of our food, if we were to increase that amount a good deal then we would gain a certain level of immunity to world economic issues.

Food prices skyrocketing? Not a problem. Another tainted vegetable scare? That’s okay. Can’t afford the gas to drive to the grocery store? Hey no big deal, there’s food right outside the door. I have no delusions of ever being 100% self-sufficient but I can build myself a layer of protection from the world’s economic woes by taking steps in that direction. And you can too, maybe you don’t have the room to grow much food (although converting your yard into a garden would be a much better use of space) but perhaps you could generate your own electricity and know that even if you lose your job in all this mess, at least the lights will stay on.

My perpetually inconsistent pursuit of self-sufficiency in regards to food yielded some mixed results this year. Our lasagna gardening was a spectacular failure. The idea of lasagna gardening is that you place a layer of cardboard over the area you want your garden to be and then layer compost, peat moss, manure, and whatever else would normally be used in a garden on top of it. This is supposed to smother the weeds or grass underneath and give you a rich growing medium for your plants. Well it was a rich growing medium alright, the weeds absolutely loved it. Really I think it was mainly our fault for not putting a thick enough layer on top to smother everything.

But our plants did grow well too, just lost in the weeds sometimes. The onions we grew from seed did great but we harvested them too soon. The sugar snap peas were thriving until one day they completely disappeared. I think some baby rabbits got through our fence. Our peppers that we grew from seeds taken from store bought peppers didn’t really grow at all, we learned our lesson there. The cantelope didn’t produce anything. Our watermelon plants managed to produce one watermelon between them all which I accidentally lopped off with the weed whacker (which gives you an idea of how bad the weeds were).

This was the third year for our strawberry patch and it was relatively weed free and yielded our biggest crop yet but even so the amount of berries we got was pretty pitiful for the amount of plants we have. This was also the third year for our grape vines and still they produced no grapes. They grew a good deal but I’m not sure what to do if they still don’t produce next year. It was the second year for our self-pollinating peach tree. Seventeen peaches grew on it, none of which developed into anything edible. It was also the second year for our two apple trees. One of which seemed to have died over the winter but just the other day I saw that it had begun regrowing from the base and now has a new “trunk” that is a couple feet tall so hopefully it will make it through the winter. Our raspberry crop was large as always though perhaps not quite as plentiful as last year.

Three years into all these gardening attempts has started to be a bit of a downer. Each year it seems something comes up that keeps us from putting the time into maintaining the garden like it ought to be. Two years ago my wife and I were each working full time jobs. Last year we had a new baby. This year I sprained my ankle and was out of commission for awhile.

There was one bright spot for the garden this year though. Our tomatoes came in wonderfully. We had tried doing tomatoes in hanging baskets which failed miserably because the soil would dry out very quickly if we didn’t watter them every day, which we didn’t. But the tomato plants that we put in the garden produced a large crop in spite of not being supported on anything and being smothered in weeds. The tomatoes and a few other vegetables from the store allowed us to make enough salsa to last a year. Before we harvested them and made the salsa I was ready to throw in the towel on gardening all together. Three years of failed efforts were piling up in my brain but the tomatoes helped place me firmly back on the course of self-sufficiency.

There you are at the office on Friday afternoon thinking to yourself that you’ve got your whole weekend ahead of you. (I’m speaking hypothetically of course. I neither work in an office or know what it’s like to have weekends off.) You know you’ve got a lot to do at home and so you begin to write out a to do list of everything you want to get accomplished. You say to yourself that this weekend will be the one where you get everything done and you can finally relax because you’re caught up on work around the house. But then the weekend comes and goes and you find that you only got a small portion of your list accomplished and your precious time away from your job was filled with fruitless hours of trying to accomplish work that ultimately didn’t get finished because real life happens and family needs or whatever have derailed your carefully planned to do list. Feeling disappointed and anything but rested you return to work on Monday and already begin to calculate next weekend’s to do list that this time will succeed!

I’ve been in this cycle far too many times. I’ve tried different methods of breaking the cycle to varying degrees of only partial success. Recently though I tried a whole new approach to to do lists. If I know that, by some miracle, I will have multiple days off in a row coming up I will try to make a big to do list several days in advance. If I don’t specifically write down everything that needs done around the house things will be forgotten, it just happens. Once I have made my list I try to get as many things accomplished on that list as possible before the days off even arrive. The goal here is to get my giant list down to just a few things before the weekend starts, so that when I do have time off from work I’m not spending all of that time working. Otherwise it kind of defeats the purpose of having time off doesn’t it?

Give it a shot and see what happens. I know that when I get off work each day the last thing I want to do is more work, but if it means a day or two without having anything that needs done to do, well then that is completely worth it.

We live in an increasingly global world and that snowball is likely to keep rolling down the hill of society and continue to grow larger. In the United States we receive a staggering amount of our goods from countries on nearly every other continent. Large corporations have been heading down this road for decades due to cheap foreign labor looking quite attractive in the face of unions in America that have gained so much power that in a lot of cases they have a stranglehold over the operations of corporations. I remember a few years ago when the Hershey Foods workers went on strike. A couple years later the company decided that they were going to move most of the company’s operations to another state and to Mexico. And is anyone surprised?

But what is appropriate for us as individuals? Should we not buy products from China because it takes jobs away from Americans and because they have poor human rights standards? Let’s take a look at the first one. Companies exist to make a profit and if they are able to accomplish that much easier by using foreign labor then they are simply acting out capitalism as it was intended to be and their shareholders I’m sure have little problem with this. So what about the human rights aspect of the Chinese government? Like many others I am not comfortable with this aspect of Chinese goods but I wonder what life would be like for the citizens of China if the United States wasn’t pouring billions of dollars into it’s economy every year.

What if you are an individual who is trying to run a small business successfully? I know that I could never afford to have a personal assistant, but Virtual Assistants from India are cheap and do excellent work. The Epson R220 printer that I use to print my cds uses six different ink cartridges which at retail in the US costs me about $80 for a full set. More than I paid for the printer itself. Thanks to the Internet I was able to find generic cartridges that are compatible and paid $10 for an entire set. And you know what? They work great. How about a writer that wants to self-publish a book. He or She could spend about $4000 for a thousand copies in the US. Using a foreign printer however the author could get the same thing for a fraction of the cost. If the author couldn’t afford local prices and so wouldn’t use local services anyway, then what has the local economy lost?

On a psychological level I am all for supporting the local economy but when it comes to real life I rarely am able to support the local economy because I can’t afford to. I can’t help that local companies charge much more for the same thing that I can get cheaper through the Internet from another part of the country or another part of the world. Dealing in a global economy does have some inherent drawbacks that can’t be ignored either though. The author getting his book printed can’t easily proof the work of the foreign printer he is using and if he gets a thousand copies of screwed up books it could be a mess that costs him even more money to fix. Communications barriers are often a bit of an issue with global dealings as well but the cost savings of all the options that a global economy has to offer an individual make it hard to not go this route at least some of the time.

As someone who supports self-sufficiency I would be remiss to not mention it here. As I said, on a psychological level I want to support the local economy as much as possible but more so I’d like to just be relying on the economy of myself. But I’m not there yet and hard economic times don’t always afford me the idealism of supporting local economy when there are literally billions of people around the world just waiting to do work for me for less money.

I don’t pretend to be an expert at managing others. In fact I don’t even really enjoy it. I’d rather be responsible for managing my own productivity than be responsible for making sure others are being productive. But managing others has been where I’m at in my career for the past several years and until I find a means of working from home, then that is likely to continue.

When I was still a department manager a few years ago I had a top notch crew that could do most of what I did and delegating tasks to them based on the needs of the business wasn’t an issue at all. But then some things changed that were beyond my control. One thing that changed was that the management above me stopped being concerned with holding anyone accountable for anything, including themselves. At the same time I experienced a good deal of turnover in my associates. So I had an inexperienced staff and upper management that didn’t care to make them do any work when I wasn’t there.

With productivity slipping and stress building I had to find a new way to approach my job. I found that new approach one day when I realized that if things were going to improve then I needed to be able to adapt. I stopped expecting my current staff to be able to handle everything that my previous staff could and started delegating according to their abilities.

I gave my staff most of the grunt work to do and left the more complex, and often less physically demanding, tasks for myself. A nice side effect of this was that my staff now needed very little supervision to do their jobs which also freed up more of my time to accomplish what I needed to. There was one eventual downside though and that was that I became so comfortable with this arrangement that I didn’t really look for opportunities to train my staff to be able to take on more responsibility.

I had been able to adapt but only to the point of being comfortable. That can be a dangerous place to be in for any person in business. Beware of making yourself so comfortable that you forget to look for areas of opportunity for further adaptation to the needs of the business. In my case the consequences of this comfort didn’t really affect me directly. They affected my replacement. I moved to a different department eventually and one of my associates was promoted into my former position. Upper management literally did nothing to train him how to do his job. I was more than willing to teach him anything he needed to know but I was so busy trying to learn my own job, for which I also received no training, that I wasn’t able to help him out very much.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that you should be able to be flexible enough to adapt when necessary but make sure that hidden within your adaptation isn’t a layer of laziness.