It's good to have savings for a rainy day and emergencies, but I've come to think it's pretty bad to stockpile an indefinite amount of money for either retirement or some vague purpose. You can either put it in a savings account and make a small return, or risk it in the markets and fuel the schemes and lifestyles of sociopaths. It's much better to put it toward productive purposes, or if you have debt, including a mortgage, to pay that off as quickly as possible.
Consequently, I've been building a greenhouse since May this year (2019). It's roughly 12 feet x 16 feet. It's a productive asset rather than a pile of Babylonian Lie Paper.
I work on it on the weekends and a couple of hours during the week after work. It's been a bit of grind lately, but the finish line is in view. I should complete it and have some plants in there by the end of August. The greenhouse is near the duck pond so I can easily pump the water from the pond there.
My original plan was for the building to be completely loaded with as many strawberry plants as I could possibly put in it, and it was going to be 100% hydroponics, but I'll probably have diverse plants in it and just use the duck pond water as fertilizer and grow the plants in soil or other media. Hydroponics works extremely well, but it's also a single point of failure type approach (really even worse than that). I'll see how well the greenhouse works through the winter. It should require minimal expense to heat since it's insulated. Even the polycarbonate has an R value of 3-4. The flip side of that is in the summer sun, the temperatures get into the 120F+ range without a fan. So I'll need to attach a shade cloth to the structure during the summer months.
It feels pretty good for the infrastructure of the farm/homestead to start coming together. There are still many things to do in preparation, and we're far from self sufficiency or a closed loop system, but there's a lot of merit to moving slowly and deliberately in such an undertaking.
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