SOLD – Check out this 0.12-Acres property in Sharp County, AR!

SOLD – Check out this 0.12-Acres property in Sharp County, AR!

Check out this 0.12-Acres property in Sharp County, Arkansas. The property is located in the secluded area of Williford. The subject property is surrounded by trees, this is indeed a very great land property to invest and reside in. The property offers you it’s fresh-crystal-like-clear air that your nostrils and lungs never inhale before; its panoramic views and the States’ hospitality.  You can search the property’s GPS on Google Map or other mapping devices or just simply send us your messages for inquiries.

Grab this property now!

Asking Price: $399.00
Size: 0.12 acres
APN: 452-00125-000
State: Arkansas
County: Sharp
General Elevation: 635 ft.
GPS: 36.310391, -91.409079
GPS Coordinates:
36.310317675881,-91.409251634762 ;36.3103093708337,-91.4088969622651 ;36.3104474075413,-91.4088919209517 ;36.3104557360779,-91.4092467887468 ;36.310317675881,-91.409251634762
Legal Description: Block: 7 Lot: 6 Range: 04 Township: 19 Section: 9 Legal Description 1: HILLTOP ADDN LOT 6 BLK 7 Subdivision Name: HILLTOP ADD
Zoning: Residential
Power: In the area
Water: By Alternative System
Sewer: By Alternative System
Roads: Dirt
Terrain:  Gently Slope
Property Tax: $7.39
Time Limit to Build: None
Closing/Doc. Fees: $199

 

 

 

Urban Permaculture Swale Study

If anybody thinks of permaculture at all, which most probably don’t, they would tend to think of a rural setting or owning acreage. But it doesn’t have to be. Permaculture is ultimately a design system, and as such, can be applied, literally anywhere.

Here’s a short video showing a swale I installed in an urban setting. This swale was installed to divert rain water runoff coming down the hill from flooding my mother-in-law’s house. In permaculture, “The Problem Is The Solution”

A couple of simple homesteading projects you can do.

I have a couple of very simple homesteading projects I wanted to share with you. If you’re interested in getting started working on some projects on your piece of land, but have no idea where to get started with making any kind of preparations, these are two simple things you do:

  • Ferment naturally-occurring plants. Learning about and then utilizing plants that are naturalized to your area (therefore they grow wild and are readily available) is a great way to get started on your property. For instance, you can make a pretty decent cup of tea with dandelion roots.
    • In this case, I wanted to see if I could utilize the wild onions that sprout every spring in my yard. I tend to let my lawn revert to it’s natural, native state, and only cut the lawn when the city is on the verge of coming down on me. I pretty much let Mother Nature dictate what’s going to grow where. In this specific case, we have wild onions that grow in the yard. The bulbs grow to about the size of a ping-pong ball, but the bulbs are so strong, as to be inedible. They literally made me puke the first time I tried one. But I wondered…….”Could you ferment them to make them edible?” Fermentation changes the nature and makeup of food. And certainly, there could be nothing more organic than wild onions growing in the backyard. The lactobacillus bacteria will be plentiful on these. There are lots and lots of good guides on lacto-fermentation on the web. This is not intended to be a comprehensive guide. The only point of this article is to get you to look at foods that may be growing in your backyard right now, in a different light. The fermentation process is super-easy. .All you need is saltwater, and……..that’s it. Dig the onions up, clean them up, cut off the tops, and wash them. Put them in a mason jar and fill to the brim with salt water. They make all different kinds of airlocks and weights for fermentation, but I don’t have any of that stuff. I just filled a clean mason jar to the brim with salt water and put the lid on, and then burp it every so often.
    • It won’t take long before you start to see the biological activity begin. Maybe a few days to a week. It’s literally alive in there. You can see it. It bubbles and fizzes when you open the jar. I tried one of the onions after about 20-30 days. Now, look – It’s important to know: I’m NOT advocating serving fermented wild onions served as an appetizer  before a romantic night with your sweetie. They’re still very strong. But the taste is pleasing, and tangy. Natural fermentation may provide you with an alternative way to eat healthy, natural, organic food right out of your own backyard.
  • Another skill I’ve been working with in the last week has been cooking on natural firewood. In this case, because we live in Texas, I’ve got mesquite. I’m learning to cook on firewood. Why is this a homesteading skill?
    • Cooking on firewood is not as easy as cooking on charcoal – The firewood has to be dried out. Green wood is very difficult to burn into hot coals.  It’s hard to get lit and stay lit. The firewood will also have lots of very hot spots and some very cool spots – It burns unevenly. It can also be harder to light. You have to literally build a fire, starting with tinder, and then kindling, and then the fire. It’s not as easy as just squirting some lighter fluid on the pile of coals. And it takes a lot longer then you might think. If you’ve got a hungry tribe at 6:00 PM, you don’t want to start the fire at 5:00 PM. You want to build the fire much earlier in the day, so that there’s ample time to form coals. Don’t attempt to cook over the wood when it’s still “wood” and aflame – Better to wait until the coals are fully ashy.
    • I only put the picture of the beer in there, because I was being cheeky with a friend.

 

Look, I get that this is not the same as getting hydro-electric power to your homestead. These are two very simple projects that you can implement almost immediately on your own property, and begin to take control over your own life and your own land.

 

A Story About Chickens

I’ve had backyard chickens for probably 15+ years now. In the event that chickens ever come up in casual conversation, and sometimes they do, people who want to know more about chickens will invariably ask, “How many chickens do you have?”

Which is a difficult question to answer. “How many chickens do you have, right now?” is a better way to ask the question. The number of chickens is always in flux. Chickens come, and chickens go. Over the years, my adopted management technique is something slightly akin to “Survival of the Fittest. Only the strong survive.”

I built them a coop, and it keeps them warm and dry and a place to lay their eggs, if they choose to lay in there. Oftentimes, they will lay in the barn, or under the rosemary bush, or under the flat-bottom boat, or anywhere else they have a mind to. And they have a 1/2 acre of minimally manicured and 100% organic yard to free range in. So, I don’t feed them grain that often. I want my chickens to always be just a little bit hungry. Put them to work out on the 1/2 acre, and they’ll spend all day, scratching out bugs and pests. And I make sure they have clean water. Beyond that, good luck girls. My birds don’t get medicine, dirt tubs, oyster shells or any of this other stuff you may read about. They have the yard. Go to work, ladies.

As a result, sometimes we lose a chicken. Most notably, to predators. Even though we live in an urban environment, we have all the same predators as those of you in rural areas do, albeit in lesser concentrations than you. Sometimes, at dawn or dusk, we’ll see Coyote come skulking about. Mr. Hawk is easy to see in the treetops, especially in the winter, when the trees have lost their leaves. And if Mr. Hawk has found the flock, you damned sure better to be willing to keep the girls locked inside the coop and be willing to stand over them, until Mr. Hawk decides to go look for easier pickings. I don’t bear any of the predators any ill will, though. They all have their role to fulfill in nature’s web. They need to eat, too. Ultimately, I try and provide some protection for The Girls, in the form of their coop and lots of natural undergrowth, but there’s is, in fact a natural attrition rate to the flock.

There’s also an unexpected growth rate that happens, too. We have friends that buy baby chicks at Easter and then, not know what to do with them after they quit being cute. So we collect chickens in much the same way that a shelter collects cats and dogs. There’s always a period of adjustment when you bring new birds into the flock. Thus, the phrase, “Pecking order.” It’s a real thing. If added in small groups, the chickens will divide up into teams, based on their original order. For instance, it might be “The three” and then “The two.” But, eventually, they all coalesce into one small flock.

It’s a little bit like a riff on that old story of Theseus’ ship. If you replace the entire ship one piece at a time, is it still the same ship? In the case of chickens: If you replace the flock onesies-twosies over time, is it still the same flock?

The most accurate answer to the question of “How many?” is probably somewhere between 12-13 on the high end, and maybe 2-3 on the low end. The reason I bring all this to your attention is to tell you a story about one remarkable chicken and a tale of survival.

We were down to 4 chickens at the time. I think we had 2 Americanas from the original flock of 12, and a couple of add-ons. One evening, several weeks ago, when I went to close the coop door, I noticed there were only 3 heads in the roost. Huh. That’s odd. Chickens are both unpredictable and predictable. It’s impossible to know where they’re going to lay their eggs. But once they get homed into their coop, they’ll return there, every single evening, at dusk. In my mind’s eye, I’m designing an automated system, running from Arduino, for this exact reason. The chickens always come home to roost. Always. I did a cursory look around for #4, but I knew if she wasn’t right there with the others, the prognosis wasn’t good. I got a flashlight, and scanned around the yard, but she wasn’t there. I knew she wouldn’t be. I shut the coop up, and realized that this was just another bird we’ve lost over the years.

The next morning, I got up to look for the carcass, so I could bury it in the garden somewhere. Depending on the kill pattern, you can sort of deduce who got your chickens. Coyote will take the whole bird, leaving only a plume of feathers, while Mr. Hawk will only bite their heads off and leave the bodies behind. But on this morning, there was no feathers, no headless carcass, nothing. Which was weird – Even if it was Coyote, you can at least see the spot where the kill happened – Usually, right outside the periphery of the undergrowth of the trees and brambles.

“Well, this is something new. But, nevertheless, the chicken is gone. So that’s that.”

And when Mother Nature takes a chicken from you, you never get it back. Never, never, not ever. Never. And that’s final. After spending some years watching their behavior, I’ve decided it’s a big, cosmic joke: From Apex Predator to Lowest Prey in only a few million years. You can easily deduce that Spielberg used chickens as the models for his ravenous Velociraptors in the movie Jurassic Park. They’re just too similar. And now, through some Grand Shift, they’ve been reduced to among the most vulnerable in the animal kingdom. So when you lose one, it’s not a joyous occasion, but let’s be honest: It happens.

Except in this one particular case. The chicken actually came back to us. About 6 weeks later, we had a neighbor reach out to us. This neighbor raises chickens, also. Somehow, our chicken had been surviving out on the streets for a month and half, scraping by on scraps, and somehow getting connected to the other chicken family.

When we first got her back, she looked like Hell. Her feathers were all ripped out and torn off, and her vent was all hanging outside of her body. Boy, did she look rough. I didn’t expect her to make it. The flock wouldn’t accept her right away – She had to find another place to roost at night. The Girls wouldn’t let her inside the coop to sleep. But I kept feeding her. And when I say feeding her, I mean, dumping some scratch in the trough. I don’t mean any kind of extraordinary feeding measures. But she was hungry, and kept coming back. The first few nights, she would vanish – But come back during the day for food. And she would stick around our yard, as opposed to going back over to the other place. They have many more chickens than we do, and their yard is 100% dirt and mud, whereas our yard is mostly overgrown. Perhaps it’s because we have better grazing here?

Regardless, it looks like she’s back from the dead, and here to stay. The others still haven’t fully accepted her yet. Right now, it’s “The Three” and “The One” but they at least let her sleep inside with them now.

 

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