HOMESTEADING AND PHYSICAL DISABILITIES

[Lazy Gardener]

A few SS members have mentioned that they are limited by physical disabilities. This has an impact on allowing them to follow their dreams to living a more sufficient life style. Even without severe limitations, we all have days when we pay dearly for our homesteading activities! (with joint and muscle pain at the end of the day)

This thread is dedicated to these issues. How to set up your homestead, manage your garden, tend your animals, do your daily chores with the least negative impact on your physical well being.

So, fire away. What have YOU found that makes your life easier? (don't forget to include what works with gardening, animals, in the kitchen)

I'll get things started:

1. Never carry a load when you can slide it, or roll it. I use a well balanced 2 wheeled wheelbarrow during the grass season. During the snow season, I use a plastic child sized toboggan. Tarps can be used to drag leaves, grass clippings, weeds.

Take lessons from the Egyptians. They moved massive stones over incredible distances and up steep inclines using only man and brain power. Use levers, rollers, ramps to move loads that you can't move with brute strength and ignorance.

2. Take a lesson from God. Every season, deciduous trees shed their leaf canopy to provide a luscious sheet compost over the rich, dark, friable soil underneath them. Likewise, perennial weeds die back, leaving their leaves and stems behind to nourish the soil for the next season's growth. Compost in place when ever possible. Why carry your garden debris to a distant compost bin, only to have to turn around and carry finished compost back to the garden??? Trench composting allows me to get rid of my daily kitchen debris without having to maintain a summer compost pile. Got an area you want to "tame" or keep from growing up to weeds? Consider sheet composting. Keep that soil covered!!!!

3. If you do keep a compost pile or bin, remember: Compost happens. Take the lazy man's approach and simply toss your debris into your bin or pile. No need to fuss about turning it. At the very most, you may need to wet it down if God does not supply the needed moisture.

4. In the coop/run: Deep composting litter saves money. No need to buy shavings. If you don't compost in your garden, toss all that debris into the chicken coop or run. Your birds will reward you by turning that material, while adding their own nuggets to the mix. You will be rewarded with a cleaner yard, decreased feed bill, happier chickens, and black gold. They will be rewarded with: improved gut health, improved viability, increased B vitamins, gleanings from the greens and beneficial insects. Your chicken run soil will be healthier: beneficial microbes and insects/worms will result in friable soil, decreased parasite issues, and deep healthy compost instead of the often seen fecal compacted dust bowls/mud pits seen in many chicken runs.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So, keep all areas of your yard covered with SOMETHING! Even layers of cardboard, while being a bit unsightly are of huge benefit to the soil. If you use green manure crops, consider annual rye. The plants winter kill, leaving behind a thick mat of mulch. No need to cut and till in the debris, as you would need to do if using other green manure plants.

5. Scale back. Realize you don't need to do it all. Less garden space. Less animals. Concentrate on the things that are important to you. Let the rest go. Save it for an other day. Or realize when it's too much for you to do, and get the needed help. Better to do a little and do it well, than to have a lot taking ownership of your time, mind, and energy.

 

[Beekissed]

So, fire away. What have YOU found that makes your life easier? (don't forget to include what works with gardening, animals, in the kitchen)

GREAT thread, LG! So much to talk about in this topic, lots of tips and equipment to share and also a few revelations. My health was deteriorating quite a bit and my strength and mobility was suffering due to multiple issues, but the degenerative arthritis and an auto immune issue called pseudo gout, added to old work and auto accident injuries had me in a lot of pain and was affecting homesteading activities more than anything.

Over the years I devised more ways to streamline my chores and lifting, making it easier on me as the pain increased. Then I realized that this has a bad ending....the less effort or lifting I did, the weaker I got, the less support my joints had from toned muscles, the more pain I had.

So, biting the bullet and forcing myself through the pain, I started walking daily...brisk walking, not a friendly stroll. Working up slowly in speed and distance. I had thought I was in fair shape, what with all the chores around here, but I soon found out I wasn't at all....I had been just barely maintaining.

Then I started my first diet ever...well...more of a lifestyle change, really. Lost some wt., continued to walk, started adding more difficulty to my chores instead of less...instead of carting the water, I carried the buckets and made more trips. Instead of carting the feed or driving it up there with the car, I picked it up and walked it up.

Yes, it hurt. But, I began to notice that it started to hurt less and less as my muscles regained strength. Pretty soon I could lift heavy things without knowing I'd pay for it later and for days after.

Then I started working harder, even going to the gym twice a week to lift and swim. Now that I'm old, my body has limits...some things can't be fully restored, this I know. But, the truth of the matter is that by babying my body instead of forcing it to work beyond the pain, I only created more pain and less mobility.

Now I'm not so much into ergonomics as I once was...now I intentionally look for ways to make the work harder instead of easier. After developing easier ways to do hard things for so many years, it's hard to train yourself out of it....but the pay off is tremendous. It truly is.

As my Mama says, "A body in motion, stays in motion."

Winter was my off time, a time to rest after working all year to get in wood, grow and preserve food, maintain buildings and property. This past winter I changed all of that by making a list of things that needed to be done inside the house and outside, weather permitting...and even when it didn't. Yes, I made myself go out and work in the cold and wet, made myself walk each day anyway....so much so that I still wear my boots when I walk, even now that it's summer. They add resistance to the stride...I found that out this winter.

I got a lot done this winter and it kept me moving, kept my core toned, kept me from stiffening up from sitting too much and too long in a warm house.

So...told you all of that to tell you there's a flip side to the aging while homesteading coin. I'm all for using what you can to make things happen...but not necessarily to make it easier. I found easier is a dead end road. Working harder intentionally didn't make my pain worse in the long run...it's helped it and I don't hurt near as much as I did. The exercise, the forced exercise of working, the wt. loss...all of it helped my arthritis, chronic pain, and other health issues.

 

[mischief]

After working with mobility impaired people over the years and seeing how limited their choices were and how difficult it was for their caregivers to move them, especially those in wheelchairs; I decided to make all the paths around my vegie garden 3 feet wide instead of the really narrow paths I used to have. (I'm currently paving them with concrete rubble my neighbour gave me).

I realised that I was not going to be here forever and liked the thought that anybody could grow their own vegies, collect their own fruit....get to the chook house and collect the eggs, be able to go into the greenhouse and pot up their own seedlings or just hang out there when it was wet and cold.

They may need to raise the sides of the beds to suit.... so thats why I am 'wasting' space on extra wide paved paths around my vegie garden.

I needed to make a sloped path cos getting the lawn mower up around 5 curved steps was getting a bit hard, let alone a tradesman sized wheel barrow full of woodchip.
The only really useful site I found was the American Disability Assoc and used their specifications of 1 inch up for every foot along.

Already, I appreciate not having to struggle with the lawnmower or wheel barrow.
I am 56 and think I am very fit and honestly, think I am probably fitter now than I was in my 20's, but life moves on and I would like to stay here for as long as I can and care for my garden by myself for as long as I can before it goes to the next one.

 

[Mini Horses]

I've lived alone, farm wise, for 20 years. While mom lived with me for 5 yrs, I was her caregiver, she couldn't even make a sandwich -- Big A -- couldn't remember how.

Fortunately, I am blessed with excellent health. That doen't mean I haven't slowed down some. And being a small woman, not as much muscle strength as some. Means I have learned to wrestle things, use brainpower, heave smaller loads...as mentioned in the start up post. #5 is critical. "We don't have to do it ALL" Downsizing in often hard for us but, at some point, the look out there & say "I don't NEED 10 of "whatever", 5 will do". Cuts your time for the workload tremendously.

I made the decision to purchase a tractor a few years back. It was good choice for me and my farm size. The only attachment I have an issue with is the darned bushhog. So that will most likely be replaced with a belly mower, at some point. It can remain on the unit, do 95% of the field mowing and hog used only occasionally...to reach out where wheels can't go.


So, while this was started as a "physical disabilities" thread -- I'm telling you that AGE qualifies It not only causes some of the infirm situations but, is in itself a problem with "ability" -- physical and mental! Age most often means less income, too. Another consideration as often adjusting to the issues means "purchasing" in some way.

 

[Britesea]

I was sedentary most of my life, unfortunately... but the last several years I've been getting more active and I can really tell the difference in the way I feel, both physically and emotionally. Tai Chi has been invaluable for my balance and core.

 

[Lazy Gardener]

Wise thinking ahead. No matter how young we are, or how physically fit we are today, there is no guarantee that tomorrow will bring a completely different reality into our lives. Skeletal injury can be cumulative. So, it makes sense to plan and work ergonomically, and use good body mechanics, no matter how young and fit you are. Those behaviors started at an early age can result in golden years that are less plagued by aches and pains.

 

[FarmerJamie]

The wife has multiple specialists appointments later this month. Hopefully we can get a baseline to figure out what to do.

 

[Britesea]

When I started Tai Chi 3 years ago, I was walking with a cane. I spent the first month of practice (3 times a week) sitting in a chair and moving my upper body; I would just place my feet in an approximation of the correct form. Then I started standing up for 5 minutes, finishing up in the chair. Then 10 minutes, 15 minutes. The day I was able to do an entire hour standing up is still burned into my memory! Now I do 2 hours: 1 hour of qi gong and one of tai chi, and if the C-virus hadn't shown up I was planning on trying to get certified this year. I cannot do the really deep stance yet, but my teacher says I can do it well enough to teach. My cane gathers dust behind the front door.

 

[tortoise]

I have been working on making gardening physically easier, and it's starting to make a difference.

• I started a permanent bed system. This minimizes any rototilling. The established beds (most are 30" x 30') make me able to plant rows without needing DH to help me with stakes and strings.
• I planted clover as a groundcover to minimize weeding. I don't have it in all the beds - and don't plan to.
• Hoeing daily with a stirrup hoe is the physically-easiest way for me to weed, so BTE and lasagna beds don't work for me
• I'm using thick mulch rows between beds. They are 12 - 18" wide, and goal is 12" tall. Started them with wood chips, but using garden debris and aged barn manure and such too. If BTE actually works, someday these paths will become my garden beds?? IDK.
• I hoeing out perennial weeds for weeks before planting garden seeds. This gets crabgrass under control! Virtually eliminated it, but it creeps in around the edges.
• I have DH rototill the perimeter of the garden to break up the sod to make crabgrass removing feasible.

I'm really shocked how well this is starting to work. I have spent three works sessions in the garden this spring and it's mostly under control. 1/3 of the garden for "hill" plants is 1/3 - 1/2 covered with clover! I need to dig out other perennial weeds. The rest of the garden has all the annual weed debris rakes out and almost all of it has been hoed at least once.

I'm very excited to see how this year goes. A couple more years of establishing clover should get this garden easy to manage. 😍

 

[Marianne]

Spot on! If I could give your post ten 'likes', then I would!

My health took a fast nose dive in May of 2012. Didn't take me long to pick priorities and cultivate new interests. I think you covered everything!

Do what you can. "Never give up, never surrender" used to be my rallying cry. Now it's "Never give up, never surrender...but it's okay to ask for help".