spk_0:   0:00
Hello, everybody.

spk_1:   0:00
Hello, everybody. And welcome to the show a big show show. The most important and critically acclaimed podcast that has ordered in our recliners who were not on the road today. We've got the air conditioner running full blast because that's how I roll in. Excuse me. Stay still. In case it's not even really ask. Kind of still warm. Welcome to the show. We're not in the car this afternoon. We're early evening to be. We're sitting here. We just stuff our faces with pizza. Mind was the regular kind. Hers was infected by mushroom. She had a fun guy on her. There

spk_0:   0:43
was a fungus among us.

spk_1:   0:44
This is a big not much of a fun guy fan for pizza, but I know you don't care. We've got We've got our ice cold libations. You were kicked back at work. Talk about something. It's a mystery show. My beautiful ghost space doesn't have any a we're gonna be talking about today, but didn't get Shorty knows what we're gonna be talking about. She just doesn't know she knows, and she may or may not make notes on her comfort. That is yet to be seen. Well, see. She's so She's had a long day. She can't be too bad. The pizza The pizza got delivered to the chocolate chocolate? No, Mazza rises Just chocolate. So those are good sound. How How bad could it be? So the subject of today's show is failure.

spk_0:   1:31
Oh, boy, I know some things about failure.

spk_1:   1:34
We all we d'oh and we've We're not just here to get to talk about prepper fails we have done. Although we could talk a very long time about all the zillions of you have made. Yeah, hopefully they'll be last time. Um, starting us out today are proper fails. That we've had this year that we're working on is not just the fails, but when you have a fail, um, learning from the failure and trying to get better, Um, the first failure that comes to mind stares us in our faces as we drive home from work. We both work when we drive home from work. We see failure every time we pull into our yard. Because unfortunately, one of our apple trees of the last couple of weeks it was it was right in front of the house has just absolutely croaked on it started looking really, really bad a couple of weeks ago.

spk_0:   2:36
Yeah, it started so many apples this spring. I was excited for

spk_1:   2:39
things has always been the weak one. And we've lost one here in this position before, which this is what we're talking about. Prepper failing. Um, So what we have to do is stop and evaluate what's going on. Look at the overall situation. A ll eyes and then thinks it. Or at least since you can't really get those years back of growing an apple tree, at least make adjustments for it. So going into this year, I kind of knew that this tree was a little iffy. It was a little iffy last year, but it wasn't it came out of it.

spk_0:   3:16
Yeah, I had had some disease, but then it ended up making a nice crop of apples. It didn't put a bunch of wood on it. Didn't grow in size much.

spk_1:   3:22
No, it's still pretty Randy. Um but we thought, you know, you know, the preppers three is to two is 11 is not well,

spk_0:   3:32
particularly when it comes to apple trees because they need cross pollination. In many cases in most cases.

spk_1:   3:38
The big, beautiful, healthy when we have right in front of the house that's going nuts on his apples is one that does require it's not so pollinating. It's Ah, it's Ah requires not only pollination from a different apple tree. It takes specific kinds of apple trees to pollinate it. So what we did is this year, and you can go and look up and see a little bit of our story of the, um, call the Call the people before you dig story that we did earlier this year. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. That's where we put that apple tree. That's where we were calling the utility people to find out what was running under our yard because we needed to put in an extra apple tree because I didn't want to be in a position where we have this big, beautiful apple tree and nothing around to pollinate it.

spk_0:   4:29
So we got one that will cross pollinate either of the two. We had outfront Bo Chu, both of which were healthy this spring. Apparently,

spk_1:   4:36
yeah, so and then this one has passed away. I have not yet gotten to the point where I'm today. I just decided it's gonna go. I mean, I I'm gonna I'm not gonna necessarily pull it out of the ground till the ground get soft again, but I think it's it's gonna come down. And I'm just tired of coming home and seeing a dead tree. And my friend is not with sprinkling apples, wrinkling half grand. Although I don't think it's going to infect the tree that's right. Next to it would have by now I don't see any reason to leave. Ah, plant in my yard.

spk_0:   5:12
Yeah, but I'm not an orchard just enough to know what killed it.

spk_1:   5:15
Yeah, we tried to look up all the stuff as it was, but it went south really fast. Now we've had a very, very dry year, and I suspect the dryness probably was partially responsible for putting Maur stress on it than it had last year. Last year wasn't nearly a stress because didn't have nearly We have been watering our trees,

spk_0:   5:37
but not as much as they like, because they go through a lot of water.

spk_1:   5:40
In fact, I think we need to do that tomorrow we need Thio. Pick our buckets I'm gonna do a bucket system. I've heard about this. I've never actually tried it. Um, where you take a bucket and drill a small hole or two in the very bottom. When you take a hose and you fill up the tree, Philip the bucket with the hose and slowly drains out, and that gives the treat. You know it lets it soak in good and doesn't run off. And that's the way the water the trees were trying.

spk_0:   6:09
Yeah, I don't have any more available drip irrigation lines. I can run to the trees.

spk_1:   6:15
We could yet that the trouble. But we have one corner of our house that you could put more drip irrigation on, but it's just not really close to anything we don't have. Anything is the north and west corner of the house. It just doesn't get lost somewhere to the big elm tree there. There's just not much sunlight, and we go water the elm tree with it. But why? Home Tree is not got that many years left of life anyway. But we're letting it. It got damaged in the storm

spk_0:   6:46
right onto a report that their porch,

spk_1:   6:48
but that was another non prepper fail because we had insurance, that it covered it and cleaned it up. But anyway, and we also were very careful to remain very friendly with the tree removal guy. So we were

spk_0:   7:00
the first pull heat. Yeah, that's what I was gonna bring up. That's that was another part of our perhaps is toe have good relationships. When we, ah, hire tradesmen to do special work like that, we make sure we treat them very well.

spk_1:   7:15
We do, We feed them, we water them. And most importantly, we pay them cash on the barrelhead. When they do it, there's no dinking around about the bell. There's no I know you just give him the money and they go away happy. You know, I'm saying they do a good job getting a tip. If you could help him out doing other things. That little town. I know what I will help him out like he had some computer issues and I happen to know a little bit about computers. I helped him out, and that's the kind of so what? I had to replace the air conditioner heater unit that we had go bad on us. The spring here died on it. Um, I was just having trouble getting it in long story short, there was a little bit of an issue. I get stopped by my house. Help me put it in no charge. This is the kind of thing you do in a small town. I know you hear the city. It doesn't work this way, but it also helps mitigate failure.

spk_0:   8:10
I bet no matter how big this the town is, tradesmen are more likely to show up to people who paid him promptly.

spk_1:   8:17
The last time you develop a relationship with people, if you can, especially when we're not really big on the big service is we like to try and develop. We have our Our mechanic is a shade tree mechanic, but he's good, is a guy whose family we've been dealing with for 30 years. But he's good, but he also doesn't make me wait a week to get a car in and then charge me a bunch of nonsense stuff that it doesn't need.

spk_0:   8:43
Yeah, especially being a woman and a woman whose cars were not my forte. I'm not the stupidest woman in the world when it comes to cars but they're not my forte. And, ah, lot of places, you know, by the way they're talking to you, that they're just setting up some women toe pay more of a bill, then they need to pay because they figure the women won't know any better

spk_1:   9:07
Wade world oil changes and tire rotations. And we buy our tires from a mom and pop store we've done with for years. Why? Because he's proven trustworthy. And he's, you know, he loves the fact that we come in there and we dropped cash on the barrelhead. You know, that makes a big difference people you can pay cash to and people who understand the value of cash. I'm just gonna leave it at that. People who understand the value of cash are people who you want tohave in your life. If you're a prepper because you know, money, money talks, you know what walks? So yeah, that the first preparatory I wanted to talk to fail, it took What was this tree? We've had a lot of others. We've had your tree's dying. It happens. We lost a lot of trees. Over the years, we've had fortunately a lot of G succeed And sometimes you have to really wonder what it is you're doing wrong. And we need I'm gonna use this tree as an example of how to work with and learn a failure. Now, this tree is the second apple tree to go in that spot. The spot is 15 feet 20 feet away from another perfectly healthy tree. It's substantially the same spot. It's just, you know, a few feet north of it. Same amount of light, same amount of water, same amount of same type of subsoil, same everything. So what's the difference between one spot being successful and the other spot not being successful? Obviously, we've only got a, uh, a sample size of two. Which could be coincidence, Could easily. But we've also got some correlations that may come into play, you know? So

spk_0:   10:56
you gotta work today. D'oh! Both

spk_1:   10:59
the same type of apple tree. Yep.

spk_0:   11:02
And on that strain is not going back there. They died of different things,

spk_1:   11:05
right? They died of different things. But what I've never actually is that the third tree we've ended in the 1st 1 never lived. It was never alive.

spk_0:   11:12
This is a second.

spk_1:   11:13
This is 2nd 1 Yeah. Yeah, it never lived. This one survived a couple of years. That kiss was its 30. Yeah, the other one is four years old, and it's

spk_0:   11:23
growing gangbusters and putting out apples all over the place. It's

spk_1:   11:26
never gonna be that tall, cause that's a true dwarf tree. But it's we're getting apples off that puppy, that's for sure. Yeah. Um, the new apple tree in the back looks great. It's not doing anything this year because it's a puppy.

spk_0:   11:39
It flowered, but it didn't set fruit with the puppy. Yeah, I put it in during flowering season, so I didn't expect a set route. The thing is, the first time one died, we tried the same strain because sometimes trees die. And there doesn't have to be anything particularly wrong with your choice to make one die. But when a second of the same strain dies in the same spot of something different, maybe that particular strain is not terribly well suited for the kind of soil we've got. The space we've got, the climate we've got, whatever. It also had a disease problem. It's it's first year that it made it through, but it had a serious disease problem. I thought we're gonna lose it then That is enough to convince me to move on to a different strain

spk_1:   12:23
and also is lets me learn a little bit of a lesson. Um, I think for normal people preppers air. Not normal people, I think for normal people, it might be Maura Oven Important thing Toe have trees that are specific to their favorite type of apple. Their favorite taste their favorite, you know. Wow, that's just a really particularly yummy apple. I love the color of that apple trees. You know, I love it. I love how it looks. I love the color of the God. Deana, I think for a prepper. Since I'm doing it as a prep, I think I would rather concentrate on having trees that are particularly hardy because I stone cold, want the fruit if I need it. And I would rather give up a little bit of taste and a little bit of texture, and certainly color color would care about the color.

spk_0:   13:19
And there are a couple of strains that are at least somewhat self fertile. So I favor those whatever I can get him, and

spk_1:   13:26
I don't want to be growing cider apples because, well, I might want to eventually grow cider apples for cider. But that's not what these air for. So I don't want to grow some really sour apples because we would really want. Which

spk_0:   13:42
is a shame, because the crab apples are the hardest and most productive and nobody eats self fertile apples. Yeah,

spk_1:   13:51
so yeah, they're beautiful plants to

spk_0:   13:53
I've got one of mount of place, though, because crab apples will fertilize anything. So we've got one in our orchard there. We've got what, four other strains of apple there.

spk_1:   14:05
Now we've had, you know, out of the place we had. We had some failures there, too. And we've needed to analyze them. We've got something. Some of the failures are on our not quite as far up the hill and our place. There's very clay. It's very, very clay soil. He had the nut. Trees don't seem to really do anything out there. They, except for croque, tend to die a lot if they're down below the top of the hill, they don't water drains. My theory is that water drains into them and they're just drowned.

spk_0:   14:36
And we think that because when I dig holes for the trees and come back later before I put the trees in there. There's always water in the holes. They collect water in there. And every species you look at says prefers well drained, fertile soils. Well, everybody wants a high paying job with great benefits tube life. Just a that way where

spk_1:   14:59
there's no actual work to Dogo, sit around, watch TV and get paid 200,000. Yeah, that's the kind of job already wants. Now here's us. Here's the truth. You're talking about jobs. There's a lot of people who want jobs. Could have very few people won't work. You can take that to the bank. That's my gift to you today, anyway. Any that's a failure. So failure got another failure.

spk_0:   15:24
One thing I haven't been able to get around somehow to putting the daughters on it. The place We made some progress by getting water barrels out there this year, but it's just hard for me to start a project that big in that intimidating working around my actual paid job thing.

spk_1:   15:46
Yeah, because the paint job really does cut it, too. That's not really a failure. That's just a failure to launch.

spk_0:   15:52
That is a failure, though, If you don't, if you don't get project started, they don't get done. That's something I know I have known Needed done for a while and I haven't gotten it done. So yeah, that's a fail not actually getting the project ruling Now, I let myself get distracted by other projects. That was a little bit more comfortable with, and I made good progress on those. So it wasn't

spk_1:   16:18
the water barrels out there. Yeah, we got them in place and the visa, but the moment, except for our or pick up truck. But

spk_0:   16:26
But the Prairie Restoration Project has come along in the meantime, very nicely.

spk_1:   16:31
Yeah, it has. We've had a couple failures on it, but not too bad. Couple of Martin early failures air Just a intermediate step. That isn't quite as fun.

spk_0:   16:44
Yeah, it was really ugly out there this spring because of the spring we did to get rid of the invasive grasses

spk_1:   16:52
and then the hog, we'd come

spk_0:   16:54
course we'd sweeten the the season. Prairie plants are not as, uh, as lovely as the ones we expect to take over in the long term. But it came around a lot more money but

spk_1:   17:09
directly to take over. Really, Really, Really. They flower the place up. It's gonna be beautiful with all the flowers. Yeah, but transitional year is not the year of beauty. That's not a failure. That part is not a failure.

spk_0:   17:24
No, it's just stun in progress.

spk_1:   17:28
Now, as we've written about multiple times now on the on the website were partial or nearly to the point. Not quite. We're nearly to the point where we find out if our first completely almost complete failure with our potato Ben is going to turn into success or at least hopefully some progress, at least hoping for some product.

spk_0:   17:50
Yeah, we've got a couple of posts on potato bins like the most food per square foot, because it looked like a great idea and you read it on the web, and it seems like it's gonna be a fantastic way to get a bunch food from a very small footprint. So I tried it. I built myself a potato box, and I did what my sources said to do is you start with a frame and only a couple of boards in it, and you plant your potatoes in it. And as your potatoes grow, you add more boards to make the box taller, and then you fill in more soil around them because the potatoes will plants will sprout Maur side roots and the side roots is what develops the potatoes if they have dirt touching the stem. So you just keep adding more and more dirt throughout the season, and you end up with his big, tall box, completely chock full of taters. It says so right there on the Internet right there. And that's what I tried last year. And I've got some beautiful potato plants that continued to grow throughout the season, and I was really excited for the harvest. And when I started taking it apart, I found dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt until the bottom six inches when it was chock full of potatoes. So what had happened there is I hadn't read every source on the Internet. I'd read like half a dozen before I started the project. None of 1/2 dozen I read the first time had managed to mention the fact that you can't use early season potato varieties because they set their fruit early and they don't continue to set more route more storage roots later in the season. So they did really well where they were first planted. And then they just grew really, really, really long, stems through all that dirt and didn't fill it all with taters. But

spk_1:   19:40
we did eat taters. We ate some teachers.

spk_0:   19:43
Yeah, we got about four gallons of taters out of the three plants, so that was good. It's just good. But it was It wasn't what a potato bin would do. It was what a normal planting would. D'oh. So

spk_1:   19:59
we got about $5 or potatoes?

spk_0:   20:03
Well, I kept all the wooden stuff, so it wasn't really a loss I ever used all materials this year, I after I studied up to find out what had gone wrong, I tried a different variety this year and, ah, I was a little bit less ambitious. I built the thing up for about two and 1/2 feet, which is enough to let me see if it's working without putting in quite a cz much labor as I did last time for no more gate and then at last time.

spk_1:   20:29
So if it works this time you might even push on next year.

spk_0:   20:35
Well, yeah, I'll put it in a new place. And one been a potatoes were enough potatoes for

spk_1:   20:40
But that's one of the things that you don't use the same dirt again and you don't put us. You need how fresh, sir. But that's okay, because you're taking this dirt, the old dirt and you're putting it on your garden and it's good for us.

spk_0:   20:50
Yeah, I have raised beds and they all all need some dirt edition and eat it. Anyway, we need

spk_1:   20:55
to put in a disclaimer here. Yeah, this is because we live in misery and our potatoes are Missouri potatoes. They are not Ida.

spk_0:   21:03
They're not Idaho potatoes. We would not not let you misrepresent them.

spk_1:   21:07
We do not label from Idaho potatoes we knew not call them Idaho. Potatoes were in no way the type of people that the Idaho State special potato squad needs to hunt down and do kick in raids at 2 a.m.

spk_0:   21:22
I might end end up in Idaho next week, and it is a felony to misrepresent non Idaho potatoes. Is Idaho potatoes when you're

spk_1:   21:30
serious way joke about this, but not really? Because way

spk_0:   21:36
joke about if they don't,

spk_1:   21:38
we're gonna talk about talk about a fail we saw. I remember the last time we were in Idaho. Um, we slow one of the biggest fails I have ever seen. Yes, and I know. And it was we were just kind of looking each other, trying to figure out what they were doing. Now, first I have to put a caveat. There's a giant, and I don't remember the name of it is shy. Can't humongous reservoir there in the Rocky Mountains.

spk_0:   22:07
Obviously, they were

spk_1:   22:08
enormous. Um well, look up. The name of it is about 40 or so miles from, um, Jackson Hole, while it's just on the other side of the humongous thing. And when we went there, it was so dry that the thing was darn near ity. I mean, it was like this humongous, hundreds of foot high dam person. Damn, But the reservoir was almost empty. And here's something. A lot of people don't realize that the vast majority of the water in a reservoir is right near the surface. So as the surface goes down, the volume of the reservoir stinks even more than you would think it does.

spk_0:   22:57
Just like the first foot up from the ground of a pyramid takes more stone than any other foot up from the ground in a pyramid. Same reason.

spk_1:   23:05
Just gotta have the reservoir there.

spk_0:   23:08
Oh, they have so many. I don't particularly know which one. It just ah, bunch of more on the Snake River. It might be the Hells Canyon.

spk_1:   23:16
No, it's not number. Pasta, OK, has called the Palisades. Rose board is huge. It supplies a lot of irrigation. It's on the stake river. So this was way, way, way down. So we're going up there were driving out up the off the highway and we drive on up to our location, which was up towards Rexburg. One of the things we keep seeing as how much watering is going on and we're driving through communities. And we stopped in this one town. I forget exactly which town it was. It wasn't Palisades, but it was on north of there. There was this you watering system going full board. You can see the reservoir's almost empty. Going full bore. Walk through

spk_0:   24:03
to the day in the heat of the day

spk_1:   24:05
in the heat of the day A parking lot. Now I'm not talking about watering the grass in between the I'm talking about on actual concrete parking lot and you drive past places and they were watering their driveways. They didn't have any like water Sprinkle control. So I didn't like, you know, shoot onto the grass. Only it was water

spk_0:   24:32
and they were using

spk_1:   24:33
their driveways or water slide water

spk_0:   24:35
spray 20 feet in the air. Sprinklers. It's the darkness. So that a venerable adaptation to available environment

spk_1:   24:43
You people are almost out of water. Go back there and look at your reservoir. Are you crazy? Apparently they didn't care.

spk_0:   24:52
Well, they just really wanted their green grass and that I think it was just They were refusing to face the truth of where they were there. Reservoir down 90%.

spk_1:   25:04
It may well have been no normalcy bias at work,

spk_0:   25:09
and part of it was probably a tragedy of the Commons. The tragedy of the Commons is when everybody gets to use a resource freely. Nobody get gets much benefit from stinting themselves. But everybody is harmed if everybody uses it really and degrades the resource and one of the things you kind of need to do if you've got a communal resource is find a way to avoid the tragedy of the Commons by making every person's investment in the maintenance of the Commons a direct and palpable thing. So it's not just this vague feeling of, yeah, we should take care of that. It's if I don't help take care of this, I will have a negative consequence because that's what it takes to get human beings to add. Actually, do it.

spk_1:   26:03
One of the things that what are things that we always look at this This is really a failed. We always love to go to places in the summer, but we have to consistently remind ourselves July it's beautiful, but it's July. You don't want to be here in January, and that part of Idaho is is one of those places. It's gorgeous, it's beautiful. You get up into the big hole area. Ah, a pair of Driggs, the backside of Rexburg in that whole area back there. But then you're driving through the town and you see the you see the little fireplug and it's got an eight foot fiberglass rod to it so they could find it in the winner in all the snow.

spk_0:   26:49
And if you need eight feet to find it and snow you, you, you

spk_1:   26:54
you need to like snow a lot more than I do. Yeah, but here is the other thing about this past. This is kinda I admit it. This is my phobia. But here's the other thing Was this policy It was nearly empty, so no big deal, right? But if that thing were really, really, really full, it's a big earth, and damn, I means a bigger thing. Damn. And there's a campground right underneath it.

spk_0:   27:19
It wasn't just campground. Some of those were permanent.

spk_1:   27:22
Well, well, yeah, but lenders, okay? I mean, it's a campground that you would have, like, two seconds warning if the thing that film and what got to me more than anything was the name of the campground. Calamity point. Yeah. You have a campground named Calamity Point sitting underneath the dam, not ah, 100 miles from where the Teton damn had failed. Okay,

spk_0:   27:48
Yeah. Closest to the biggest dam failure in the United States. No, I think that was bigger than Jonestown. It was just less populated.

spk_1:   27:57
I don't know if it's the biggest one. I certainly was a big one. They would've

spk_0:   28:00
built. The lake was bigger than

spk_1:   28:02
it would have been had it been completely left. Think didn't even last night. It was completely for you. Have one of it

spk_0:   28:08
was a big thing.

spk_1:   28:09
Interesting story about how not to build a dam, Google or doctor go or whatever your research is epic and I end epic search data and the Teton Damn, It's a fascinating story. Now there parts of it are still there. Um, yeah, That's not how to build a dam if you're building a dam kind like the Mulholland Damning collapsed in L. A. And it killed a lot of people. Anyway, Everybody's got their prepping paranoia with me. It's dam collapses, but I live on a hill. I live on a hill. There's no damn around here that can get us.

spk_0:   28:47
Choosing your spots wisely is there's a lot to be said for that, right? So anyway, and there's a lot to be said for making your mistakes while you can afford to make your mistakes.

spk_1:   28:58
Yeah, we're real big about that. We're real big about, you know. I can afford to lose it. Lose a tree here. This is a catastrophe. If the stuff is at the fan now, it's an annoyance that costs us money. It costs, um, years.

spk_0:   29:13
Well, to be fair, we do have another tree and everyone,

spk_1:   29:15
but, you know, that's not an accident that we have another trick.

spk_0:   29:18
Yeah, that's exactly why we put in another tree that was cross pollinate. Both of the others take the

spk_1:   29:24
credit for that one she put in the tree. But it was my idea. Yeah, I want the country. Last year. I'm like, Well, you know, I'd hate

spk_0:   29:32
what he thought we should put in that

spk_1:   29:33
I had hate to not have another apple tree. There's nothing else. Apple tree rise around here.

spk_0:   29:39
Not close enough for being

spk_1:   29:41
close enough for bees. Thank you for listening. And we'll catch you the next time