Getting a new dog

20th edition; 14.06.23

With our son now spending three days of the week in kindergarten, things have changed yet again, and as parents, we are finally settling into a more equal and fulfilling routine. Though for Jackie, she has essentially gone back to a regular job. Since we got married, we’ve kind of been swapping places in terms of who carries burdens. Back in Germany, it was me who made most of our money, while Jackie worked part-time and studied part-time.

We’ve both had a break from regular work since we moved here, living off our savings, working on our land and raising our child, but that could never last forever. For now, it’s Jackie who must work to earn our money, whilst I work to improve our living space and look after the child on his days at home. Eventually, we’d love to diversify our income, Jackie can move to part-time work, and we’ll all have more time to spend together, but we’re not quite there yet.

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Water:

The water system is constantly improving, giving us more possibilities and ease of use. The new solar pump has been a massive game changer, and now we are improving our water storage system by building a dual-purpose space. With the help of our two volunteers, I’m building level foundations and moving three of our IBC tanks into position between the house and garden. I’d initially got the math wrong, believing that increasing tank capacity would increase pressure, but that’s not how it works. Still, the benefit is that pressure will be maintained for longer, which is also a good thing.

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A big dead tree:

In our mixed woodland, there is a large Pine tree. It must have been sick for a while, but during the last few years, it has given up on life. It now stands sentinel above the forest like a tombstone wanting to tip over. The tree is slowly rotting and leaning, so it’s not a question of if it will fall, but when… Given the direction of the lean, it looks like it will cause some serious damage to several oaks when the time comes, and I’d rather avoid that.

The solution: fell the tree and try to modify the fall to be less destructive. If the direction of the fall can be changed by ten to fifteen degrees, then the impact on the forest can be reduced. There are a few lower branches in the way, I’m ok with cutting them to clear a fall path. Below the tree is a flat bottom terrace which was over grown with Bramble, Bracken, Elder, and Alder Buckthorn.

I cleared away the Bramble and Bracken, cut a young Alder Buckthorn from the fall path, chopped up a gnarly dead fruit tree along with a few smaller dead Pines, and now the place is a beautiful terrace with lots of potential. During the rainy seasons, a stream appears and flows across the space, cascading off the other side in a little waterfall, before crossing the next bottom terrace and gushing off of that one as a much bigger waterfall.

I’ve cut down a fair few smaller trees now, since we moved here I’ve learned about felling trees and using the chainsaw, but I’ve never cut a tree this big before. A new friend from a nearby village is going to come and help with this job. He’s the same guy who sold me the sheep and is lending us the ram. He works as a Bombeiro (fireman) and part-time as a logger. The plan is to fell the tree in July, then cut it into firewood.

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A new dog:

It’s been months since Caat disappeared. We gave up hope a long time ago that he would turn up again. As I was laying in bed the other night, a message popped up on my phone, it was in a large group chat for people in the area of our local town. Someone’s dog had a litter of five puppies, and they still had one in need of a new home.

He’s just turned three months old, he’s very small, and will only grow into a medium-sized dog. We drove out to meet him on Monday and introduced him to our son, I think they’ll get along very well. This puppy was the most relaxed of all the puppies there, easy going, and came to me when I called him. I think that this dog is a perfect fit for our farm, especially since a calm, easy-going dog is essential from day one because of the sheep.

The sheep are only up near the house overnight or when the rain is pouring down, and then they are in their pen. The plan now is to build a kennel for the new dog, and a small run where he can spend his time during our occasional absences from the property. It will be important to train him to be obedient, so that he doesn’t cause stress to the sheep when they are anywhere close to each other. His attentive nature should make this easier than it would be otherwise.

For the time being, he will either be separated from the sheep by a fence, or on the lead. Eventually he should be trained to keep a safe distance from them, perhaps even help to drive them up the mountain. He’s not a sheepdog breed, so I’m under no illusion that he’ll be running circles round them and doing my job for me, but gathering and driving sheep are different things, and he might be useful in driving them. Since he’s so young, he’ll have plenty of time to learn.

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Stewarding the land:

This is a sample of an extra newsletter that I wrote for paying subscribers. In it, I talk about the ways that animals — including humans — effect nature. The full post has footnotes for clarification. If you’re interested in the topic, you can consider upgrading your subscription or sign up for a free trial.

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We Homo-Sapiens are quite special. Since the cognitive revolution, 70,000 years ago, we’ve driven other life forms to extinction. It all stems from our ability to communicate with each other, allowing us to organize and apply ourselves in novel ways, at scale. Because of this, we’ve become one of just a few species that is able to completely overhaul a natural environment.

We can reclaim land from the ocean, fill a valley with water, destroy a forest, grow a forest, create wastelands where there was once abundance. The list could go on as far as we can imagine… This makes us special, for better or worse, or more likely both. But we’re not the only species on the list.

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Take the beaver, this creature can also radically and intentionally transform a place, very much like us. By creating dams from debris and mud, they can make dry land into wetland. Once a family of beavers create a dam and a “lodge” in which to live, they will regulate the environment to suit their needs, which has a series of knock on effects that create the conditions for a huge and diverse collection of other lifeforms.

By creating a reservoir, the flow of water across the land is slowed down and seeps deeper into the earth, recharging the water table. As the sun raises the temperature of the water, a number of different microbial organisms can thrive, which forms the basis of a new ecosystem, existing within and dependent on the entirely artificial habitat of the beaver dam.

The resident beaver family will carefully maintain the balance of life in the habitat by regulating the level of the water. The beaver lodge, which is like a house, constructed by the family, has its entrances below the water level, which serves as a front door and home security measure. If the dam becomes too porous and allows the water to drop to a point which exposes the entrance of the lodge, then the beavers will promptly begin collecting mud, stones, and sticks to patch up the dam, thereby increasing the level of water and closing the entrances to the lodge.

Beavers don’t have the ability to communicate with each other in the way that we do, so their social systems are instinctive, they have coevolved with their neighbours for millions of years, which has made them into efficient ecosystem engineers.

It seems to me that the beaver’s habitat is both natural and artificial. Natural since the beavers act purely instinctively in conjunction with other lifeforms that they evolved alongside, but at the same time artificial because their environments are physically engineered by the beavers. It’s almost paradoxical but makes an interesting kind of sense.

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We humans could be the same as the beavers in this way, we too could engineer our environments so that it suits both us and our natural neighbors, but we stick for the most part to building wholly artificial environments that don’t really benefit nature.

The consequences of that culture are playing out before our very eyes — for those who can see it — the climate is warming, our local environments and ecosystems are no longer able to handle that fact.

The genocide of insects through chemical contamination and temperature variation is undermining the food chain because they are one of the lowest links of that system, and also considering that insects have been pollinating our food crops this whole time, our modern agriculture is essentially self-destructing, so far in slow motion, but speeding up fast.

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Though I could write much more about the ways in which we are destroying our home, I’ll leave it at that and get down to the real points that I wanted to make… keep reading

To read the whole post about stewarding the land, join the community of supporters by upgrading your subscription, here is a 20% discount.

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As always, thank you for reading. Sorry again for the lack of photos. I could take more, but I’m just not organized enough… it’s something that I’m working on improving.

Till next week - Zak