Made by Hand (8 page)

Near the composter sat the remains of a large alcohol still made from a fifty-five-gallon drum. It wasn’t meant for making moonshine but, rather, for converting waste fruit into alcohol for fuel. “It’s not so easy to do, as it turns out,” said Julian. “Let’s just say we haven’t mastered it.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“You have to know what you’re doing much better than we did,” said Julian. “There’s a lot of skill involved in a lot of this stuff.”

Feeling overwhelmed, I reminded myself that Julian and Celine were approaching gardening from a different perspective than most gardeners. They wanted to learn how people could survive in a post-carbon world, a world where machinery to make juice from apples, bottles to hold the juice, and refrigeration to keep the juice fresh—anything that required remotely manufactured equipment or fossil fuels—were out of the question.

I could appreciate where they were coming from, but my reasons for gardening and preserving food were different. To me, making apple juice was an excuse to get a nifty apple press and learn how it worked, and to design labels to put on bottles of juice for friends. Yes, Julian and Celine were being more practical about the future of the human race, but I didn’t want to go there. I was interested in gardening
because
of the challenges.

I learned a lot from Julian and Celine, but I felt I needed to learn from folks who were operating on a wavelength closer to mine. I recalled a visit I’d made in late June with Mister Jalopy’s old friends Eric Thomason and Julia Posey, who run a blog about their urban-homesteading adventure called Ramshackle Solid. Mister Jalopy explained that if I was interested in DIY living, I owed it to myself to get to know them. From their 1926 house (likely built as a cabin for hunters when grizzly bears roamed the hills between Los Angeles and Pasadena), Eric and Julia and their two small kids have been experimenting with gardening, composting, crafting, sewing, growing native plants, cooking and baking and slow food, amateur entomology, beekeeping, and foraging—a life they sum up as “ramshackle solid.” Julia works part time as a reporter for a public radio station in Pasadena. Eric is an artist and a designer for Yahoo.

Eric and Julia invited me to their house, on a hill behind a gate guarded by two big pit bull mixes, which turned out to be a couple of marshmallows. Eric—tall, thin, with a couple of days’ growth of beard—shushed the dogs and let me through the gate. I ran my eyes over the property and decided that
ramshackle
was an apt word to describe it. An ancient flatbed pickup truck that obviously didn’t run sat in the yard between two outbuildings, one of which was starting to sink because the asphalt driveway was slowly caving in. “The shack is made out of old doors,” said Eric. “It’s what they call farmhouse construction, where there are no two-by-fours. The whole wall is just one-by-twelves. I don’t even know how they built it. I think they framed it on the ground and then tipped it up and nailed it together, like at a barn raising. There are no vertical beams and no roof beam. Whenever somebody who knows something about construction comes in and looks at it, they say, ‘How’s this thing even standing?’ ” He pointed up to the main residence. “The whole house is built that way, too.”

I noticed small mounds of fresh dirt around the property. Like Julian and Celine, the Ramshackle Solid homestead had a gopher. It had been wreaking havoc on the root vegetables for the past three months, Eric told me.

Picking up an acorn and gesturing to the tree above us, he said, “That oak is huge, and it’s got a ton of acorns in it.”

“Can you eat them?” I asked.

“We did last year. It’s really cool. You can get a really nutty, coarse flour, and you can mix it into pancakes. The buckwheat is also really good,” he said, pointing to a patch of pinkish flowers. “What you do is get the whole flowers and save them in a bag. You can mix them with a little bit of Bisquick and make buckwheat biscuits. They’re almost black, and they’re really perfumey. They’re good with honey.”

The property is covered with native California holly, from which Hollywood got its name. Also known as toyon, the shrubs are about eight feet tall and have reddish berries. “It makes such killer compost,” Eric said. “If I trim the leaves and mulch them, they’ll compost in three months easily. I go around and look for things that need a bit of pruning. I get the stuff together, run it through the mulcher, and end up with an almost perfect mix of dry and green that’ll cook up really, really hot.”

He led me over to the compost pile. I picked up a handful of compost—it looked like crumbly chocolate cake and had a clean earth smell. “It’s even got a red wiggler in it,” said Eric, pointing out a worm. “And there’s a worm egg.” The egg was surprisingly large.

“I planted that little orange tree over there,” Eric said. “It was diseased and curled up and had bugs on it. I was reading about organic gardening and read that the plants will get diseased if you don’t have good soil—so I just took some of this stuff and dumped it around the base of the tree, in the old wagon-wheel rim that I put around it. I filled it with compost and put mulch on top of it and watered it. Immediately it just grew like crazy. Two days later it had like four inches of growth on every branch.”

“You didn’t have to dig down to the roots to get the compost into the tree?” I asked.

“The water sent down the loam—that superfine silky stuff with the micronutrients in it. It just went crazy. Now it’s got about two feet on it.”

We headed into the main house and went into the kitchen, where Julia was making muffins and brewing coffee. It smelled wonderful.

Eric poured everyone a cup of coffee, and we settled in the living room. I asked them what they are trying to accomplish with their foray into ramshackle living.

“We’re still trying to figure out exactly what the motivation is for the decisions we’re making,” Eric admitted. “There’s an aspect of imperfection in the stuff we’re doing—that’s part of the name Ramshackle Solid. I like imperfection. I like something that’s been reworked or modified in an unintended direction and the way that that shapes the outcome of the project. It seems to have more of a . . .” and here he paused, searching for the right word. “It seems more
real
. It seems more like it’s a living thing or has a history at that point. If everything’s perfect, it’s kind of boring. And if there are modifications that have to be made or adjustments or things like that, they give it character and interest, and also somehow they add meaning.”

Eric offered the example of fixing a hinged trash-can lid. “I’m on my fourth attempt,” he said. “I tried to fix it with wire. It held together for a week. Then I got these pieces of galvanized metal, and I made little hoops and used a finishing nail for a hinge. But it wouldn’t stay on, so I taped it on, just because I wanted to be done with it, and it held for like six months. Recently I soldered it, and now I have these two rods, which is where I ended up. I’m happy with all aspects of it. I’m happy that it works now, but it’s not just about it working; somehow it’s about arriving at the solution, the trial and error. I probably never would have come up with that solution in the first place. Or, if I’d really thought about it and not been kind of half-assed the whole time, I probably would have gone to the store and bought something that’s the right piece that could screw on the end and had a hinge and maybe a bolt or rivet that let the hinge move. But it wouldn’t be as interesting as what I have now. And I also have the history that evolves with it. Every time I open that trash can now, I have a little sense of satisfaction over how it opens. I never noticed the trash can opening before.”

Eric’s experience with the trash-can lid is something I’ve heard over and over again from DIYers. They thrive on constantly challenging themselves to learn how to make things and fix things on their own. It’s an appealing alternative to buying solutions to every problem that arises. Eric invented his own solution and, as a result, he feels a connection to the trash-can lid and cares about it. In a culture where everything is built to be disposed of at the first sign of trouble, it’s harder to care about or even be aware of the objects in your life. But when you become personally invested in the care and maintenance of something, you appreciate it more. I notice this myself with the plants in our yard. I don’t really care what happens to the plants that I didn’t put in the ground myself, but I
am
interested in the well-being of the ones that I did, because they embody my time and effort.

It started getting warm in the living room, so we moved out to the big canvas tent Eric and Julia had erected on a deck to drink our coffee and continue our conversation. The tent was open on three sides, shady and breezy.

I asked them how far they wanted to go down the road of self-sufficiency. “We would love to be able to grow all our own food and be totally self-sustaining,” said Eric. “But it’s also about creating a place for the kids. It’s also about buying stuff only when we need to. It’s about making more of everything we need—not just garden stuff but making shelves instead of buying them from Ikea, or creating systems that work, like an organization system.”

“Why is it important for you to be able to do that?”

“It feels like it’s about creating a lifestyle that’s more rewarding,” Eric replied. “It’s about breaking from that consumer cycle and living a more natural life. Over the last hundred years we’ve gotten so far from that. I think it’s detrimental to society and individuals. I think it’s about trying to reconnect, not just with the land but with a more sane and sustainable way to live. Not just ecological sustainability but a sustainable way to live with the daily rituals you perform and a lifestyle that works better. For me anyway.”

Eric and Julia invited me back to their house in November. They wanted to show off the shack they’d built on the slope of their property, which Eric was going to use as his painting studio. They’d also invited Mister Jalopy, and Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne of the Homegrown Evolution blog, to come along.

Before driving to their place, I took care of a few chores around the house. I fed and watered our chickens, who were a few weeks old at that point. In addition to the chick starter mash they’d been eating, I fed them some of the green flowering buds on my basil plants. The chicks seemed to enjoy the change of diet. I also found some day-old pancakes in the refrigerator, so Sarina and I brought them to the coop to see if the chickens would be interested in eating them. They didn’t like it when we held a pancake out to them, but when we crumbled one up in a pan, they went crazy for it. When one of the chickens snatched a piece, she’d run to a corner and the other chickens would chase her, grabbing the morsel out of her beak. They’d fight for a while over the crumb, ignoring the bounty in the pan.

Back in the garden, I collected the dried flowers on the basil plants, and Jane and I rubbed them between our fingers over a bowl to collect the tiny black seeds and save them in an envelope so we could plant them next spring.

In the kitchen, I rotated the trays of persimmons that I was drying and then went into the yard to collect the pineapple guavas that had fallen off the tree. Jane and I shared a few. I was surprised that she liked the tart, exotic flavor of the guavas (also known as feijoas), because I’d thought of her as a picky eater. Strangely, she wanted nothing to do with the dried persimmons, which are as sweet and as mild as taffy.

The morning was still cool, so I went to the garden to plant lettuce seeds I’d ordered from the Seed Saver’s Exchange and garlic bulbs I’d picked up at a nursery near my house. The bag contained three garlic bulbs, and the label clearly showed the entire bulb being planted in the ground with the instructions, “Place bulbs in hole, pointed ends up.” I dug three holes to the indicated depth, spaced five inches apart from one another, and put one bulb in each hole.

I planted another couple of rows of lettuce before calling it quits for the morning. I had to wash up and get ready for lunch at Ramshackle Solid. Carla had other plans that day, so I brought Jane and Sarina with me. I filled a bag with persimmons and feijoas to give to Eric and Julia and drove over to their place. I parked my car near the chain-link gate in front of the house. As we approached, their two pit bull mutts barked excitedly. Jane scrambled into my arms, and Sarina hid behind me. Jane said she didn’t want to go in. But Mister Jalopy’s wife, Lynette, appeared and assured the girls that the dogs were simply happy to meet new visitors. Mrs. Jalopy led us to a wooden gate, and the dogs trotted up to us, wagging their tails.

Parked in the driveway was a dilapidated Airstream trailer that hadn’t been there the last time I’d visited. We went inside to find Mister Jalopy having a conversation with Julia and Eric’s four-year-old son, Emmet. Somehow he had managed to climb into a cubbyhole about four feet off the floor. It was hot inside the trailer. The built-in cabinetry was distressed, windows were broken, and fixtures were missing. Eric’s friend, a thin, intense, quiet man named Phoenix, had been spending the weekend stripping the paint from the aluminum interior walls with a variety of volatile solvents, which were lined up on a counter in the trailer’s kitchen. I started feeling queasy from inhaling those toxic chemicals inside the stuffy enclosure.