In Part 1, we covered the different types of garden fences you can choose to keep deer away from your vegetable garden — like wood, welded wire, electric fences, and natural/chemical repellents — along with detail on the planning phase, including how to determine your fence line and choose materials. Here in Part 2, we'll give you our full recipe for the heavy duty, half-invisible/half-very-conspicuous DIY wire mesh fence we made for Thunderbird Disco, with step-by-step instructions to follow.

Deer can jump over regular fences up to about 6 or 7 feet high. But with the installation of a tall, heavy duty, and reliable deer fence, you can create a barrier that will effectively keep these beautiful jerks at bay. At first, we got some insanely high professional estimates to build our fence, and while they would've completed the job in a weekend (it took us closer to two years; tough to carve out the time), we built our garden fence ourselves for a fraction of the price, using the materials we wanted, and today the finished project is extremely satisfying to look at. Here's what we did to DIY it.

Fresh off a recent power outage, our wood burning stove has been putting in work. Winter storms and heavy winds often trigger falling trees on our property, so we've got a solid amount of seasoned wood saved up to burn in our wood stove. These things can kick out a surprising amount of heat, so we try to get a fire burning when it's cold in order to help with heating costs. Plus, it looks cool.

The benefits of our woodland homestead are many, but one drawback is that trees are known to fall, and every so often, they fall on power lines or other electrical things, and suddenly, hey, the lights are off. If we’re lucky, it’s a quick flicker and then back to Netflixing, but with larger storms, we’ve experienced power outages lasting a week or longer. This is when portable power stations come in super handy.

Yes, Food and water insurance. Because I get it: you don't want to be the person who buys a “food bucket.” So my suggestion is merely to add a couple small one-time expenditures — covering EMERGENCY FOOD & WATER — to your insurance portfolio.

After we got a quote for $6000+ to install a water softener system to address the sediment and heavy metals issues in our water, we instead created this custom 5-stage water filtration system for less than $1500 installed. Here’s how we did it.

From March 7-9, 2020 (the weekend before the Covid-19 pandemic forced us into lockdown), I did a research trip of sorts to the Louisville Survival Expo & Gun Show. It was bleak. But in my conversations with preparedness experts across the political spectrum—including survivalist Bob Gaskin, emergency food purveyor Teri Whisenhunt and archeologist/author Chris Begley, I learned a lot about how people in this country are approaching and preparing for an ever-shifting reality.

When we found this "Visible V8 Engine" building kit from 1960 in my in-laws’ basement, in near-perfect condition, in July 2020, the dog days of the pandemic…we figured it'd be a good opportunity to keep busy and learn the basics of how an engine works. Won’t you join us on this journey of frustration and super glue…

Around Weeks 10-14 it’s probably time to harvest your cannabis. This is not as simple as cutting and consuming, it’s a multi-week process, a stage unto itself. You’ve come this far, and it really pays to properly CHOP, TRIM, DRY and CURE your product, so you can avoid any last-mile problems and get the most quantity and quality from your harvest.

Sometime around Week 5, your ladies will begin to flower. In case it’s not clear, the cannabis plant’s flowers or “buds” are what most people harvest and consume, so this stage is all about maximizing the yield, size and quality of these flowers to ensure the best possible harvest.

By week 3, your cannabis plants should have entered the vegetative stage. This means you’re starting to see more of those laughably stereotypical fan leaves, and the plant is doing its job, and your job is to try to create the best conditions for it to keep growing and producing those leaves. Here’s what that means and what you need

Ok, so you’ve got some cannabis seeds that you found on the side of the road, or were maybe gifted from a friend in the same state. Nice job! The next step is to germinate these seeds. Again, I’m growing outdoor, in soil, and was gifted three autoflower strains, so everything below is specific to those parameters.

Laws vary greatly from state to state, and some of them are draconian or downright silly, and it’s important to only undertake this effort legally and responsibly, or at least know exactly what you’re getting yourself into.

Tomatoes ended up being one of our most successful crops during our first growing season (2020). We spent the early months of the pandemic building raised beds, filling them with our hugelkultur/soil mix, and getting Spring plants in the ground, so with that late start we ended up buying some seedlings or “starts” from some local garden stores. You can plant seeds (see below) but the main reason to use starts is TIME.

The Zone Map looks at our property in terms of use and accessibility. Our Master Plan is a flexible, sketchy vision of what we want to do at Thunderbird Disco.

I enjoy a good brine. So for the holidays I got this beginners fermentation kit from Soligt Fermentation. I get incredible bread from Wholly Schmidt Sourdough so don't need to dip into those waters, but I tried my hand at pickled vegetables, sauerkraut, and hot sauce. It's easy, a fun way to get kids involved, and mostly involves doing nothing.

Most permaculture sector maps mark the pathways of natural elements like: wind gusts and flowing water, manmade products like noise or smoke or crime, destructive animals, insects or plants, underground networks of utilities (water, cable, electrical, etc.).

At the start of pool season, Jack got it in his head that we could heat up the water with some combination of pumps and tubing and buckets and fire. He gets a lot of these ideas—they keep him up at night—and sometimes he organically shifts to a new project or else I can redirect his energies, but this one stuck around for weeks. He kept presenting me with new hand-drawn schematics and eventually I had to admit, "I. DON'T. KNOW. HOW. TO. DO. ANY. OF. THAT." Nevertheless, he persisted.