Primative Tarp Camping on Die Weide

Not having camped in over 20 years, I no longer owned a tent. But I've got tarps and a sleeping bag and a strong desire to camp again. I bought a lamp, and a cot to add to the supplies and Friday I left work early and headed out out to Die Weide for my first camping trip on our place.

First things first - I also purchased a Remington 597 .22 rifle for plinking and rabbit hunting (someday.) So I set up to shoot a few rounds to see how she fired. I brought a small screwdriver to adjust the iron sites, but found out that the elevation adjustment also required an allen wrench which I didn't have.  I got the windage adjusted correctly but it shot high and I'll have to adjust that next time. Once I knew it shot high, I adjusted my aim and subsequently shot pretty good groups for rule-of-thumb low aiming.

After breaking in the .22 I started the fire in the pit, but it was very windy, so I constructed a windbreak from plywood, 2x4 scraps and a left-over sheet of steel. The wind break worked great Friday evening because the wind blew consistently from the South-South-East. Below you see a photo of my bacon burgers and home fries over the fire and a glimpse of the windbreak.

As the sun settled in the west, I recalled that one of my quibbles with our house in Cedar Park is I can not see a sunrise or sunset from any vantage point from our house because there are too many houses and trees to see the horizon. However, that's not a problem in the wide open spaces of Die Weide so I captured a nice sunset photo through the picnic pecan. Nothing spectacular, but the day will come when I will be able to take photos of a stunning sunset or sunrise. After dark I threw another log on the fire and brought out my guitar to serenade the wind, fire, and stars.

Here are my Friday evening fire and sunset photos.

Bacon burgers and home fries. (Windbreak at top)

Sunset Through Picnic Pecan

Enjoying the fire at night

I built my camp site by the light of my led cap light and the lantern I purchased earlier in the week. Taking advantage of the shed and a couple of handy 2x4s I draped and tied down the 8x10 tarp into a lean-to to keep the wind off from the south and added the smaller tarp to provide privacy and further wind protection from the east. The wind never let up over night and at one point, around 2:30 in the morning, I got up and tightened up the small tarp as it woke me often flapping in the strong breeze. I woke an hour before sunrise but snuggled a bit longer in the sleeping bag due to the cool morning. A warm sleeping bag on a cool morning is one of the few reasons I stay in bed after waking. Here is a photo of my tarp shelter. (Inge said it looks like a hobo camp...)

Hobo Tarp Tent

I stepped out before the dawn and scouted for rabbits with a telephoto lens on my camera. I never saw a rabbit, but did see and hear a lot of cardinals, who have a song as beautiful as they look.

After the rabbit-less wandering I fired up the pit and cooked up bacon and eggs for breakfast. The night before I covered the fire with dirt for safety and when I removed the dirt in the morning I found a few still-smoldering coals. So for fun I built my kindling and stick tee pee over the coals, stuffed in some dry grass, blew a little and in no time flat I had a fire without a match or lighter! I feared my breakfast fire a bit though because the strong winds from the night before became stronger and swirled far more, which blew a lot of sparks around. I worried that I might set the drought dried grass afire. I resolved then to cancel cooking for lunch. (Rats! I looked forward to yummy pork chops over the camp  fire!)

The rest of the day I spent jumping on the shovel in the garden area to loosen the soil deeper than the plough reached. I only managed to cover a third of the garden as shovel jumping is wearing work. Afterward, I planted my corn and black-eyed peas and the rest I will plant bit-by-bit over the next couple of weeks. I am concerned that this might be a meager garden as La Nina has put us in a spring drought that has the soil a lot dryer than needed for good germination and growth. Although the water harvest shed and tank will hold a lot of water, it requires rain to fall first. And rain is something we've not had this spring. Inge and I have discussed and I've looked up on line several methods for putting in a shallow well as most of our neighbors have wells that produce water at 19' depth. If we don't get rain by June we'll throw in to drill a well to keep the garden producing.

Planting of Orchard and did I mention great neighbors?

I failed to publish last week even though we planted our first six peach trees in the orchard. Chalk it up to working 14 hour days and being too pooped to write.

We loaded the truck up with shovels, bags of mulch, a roll of wire fencing and so forth and headed out to Die Weide. I installed some gable trim but only did half the work because my boots were too slippery to work on the steel roof. Once I got down (carefully!) I started planning the tree spacing for the orchard. According to the Texas A & M ag web site, peach trees should have 9' foot diameter spacing and at least 18' on center from tree to tree. We mapped out a zig-zag pattern and dug holes and planted trees. As a bit of care and overkill, we put down black weed barrier cloth and covered that with mulch, leaving a space around the tree in the center as recommended in several articles. One thing a lot of articles said to do first was to kill grass and weeds around the tree area with herbicide, but I object to that and will take a chance with the weed barrier and mulch and diligent cutting/mowing of the area between the trees. I am not an organic fanatic, but don't feel comfortable dousing my land with herbicide. Our neighbor's fruit trees produce and look healthy and I don't see signs of weedkiller, so we'll see how that works out.

Did I mention great neighbors? The previous week I mentioned to Kenneth that I plan to rent a rototiller to put in a garden at the side of the shed and he said he had a plow that would turn over the sod. And there he came Saturday with the tractor and sod-busting plow. Although it took a bit of maneuvering around the shed, he plowed sod under for a 12' x 48' garden in which I plan to plant corn, greenbeans, black-eyed peas, watermelon, cantaloupe, and potatoes. He also mentioned that another nearby farmer was going to run a tractor-driven tiller over his garden and he might run it over mine too. So later that afternoon, I hear the tractor chugging along and here came Neil with a tiller to go over the freshly turned sod several times.

Here come the photos....

Inspecting the plough

 

Bustin' Sod

The green twig is a peach tree.

Critter Proofing Peach Tree (hopefully!)