With all the rain you talked about, make a rain catcher and store the water. Rain water is worm and virus and bacteria free. Rain water is considered soft water and won’t have the minerals that tap or well water will have though.

A mild solution of bleach and rainwater sprayed on mold spores kills them and keeps them from colonizing.

Native Americans lived in tipis, yet traded for white man’s goods and there was no shame to it. You could do the same. Trade yardwork, etc for bleach or other items you need.

Wood ash contains lye (hard woods contain the most potash lye) and spreading the hard wood ash around the exterior part of the raised floor of the tipi might keep the earwig problem to a minimum. Salt water would kill them, too. Salt water kills grass though. Old motor oil kills bugs, but pollutes ground water. Use very sparingly, if you do use old motor oil.

I’m not too concerned about bugs in my tipi. It’s rattlesnakes and copperheads that concern me. I keep anything that might attract anything a snake eats sealed up or burn it in the fire. I roll up my bedding and stuff it in a sack that I seal, so a snake can’t get into the bedding while I’m out running a snare or dead fall line either day or night. I keep a cat around to run off snakes, too.

Pitch the tipi with a bit of a slant towards the bedding area. This gives you more room in your bed without butting your head on a pole. Even a tiny tipi like yours could use an ozan ( a tent within a tent ) to make sleeping more comfortable during a rain storm. Plus you could put a mosquito net up around the ozan, too. I live in the Deep South and the West Nile virus is killing more people every year. My sister’s ex-mother-n-law died last summer from WNV. My tipi will always have the mosquito netting around the ozan.

Hope that helps. My tipi isn’t much larger than yours, but I live in a much dryer climate. Oh, and never pitch a tipi directly under a tree or have large tree roots exposed under the tipi. Trees attract lightning and widow makers can fall off a tree at any time and pierce right through canvas like a sharp knife.

Woods Woman and Bubba the Cat
Semi-fictional short stories about our lives over at Writing.com

chalk the tipi up as a Feral Failure and get some credit in Penny’s club. i’m glad you tried it. it would have been awesome if you could have made it work, but even though you couldn’t, you still learned things and you still stretched yourself away from the civilized norm.

i’m with rory on the “Trying is more than anything anyone else is doing”. we’re fighting a huge machine in trying to break free from the civ. snap-backs are part of the fight. so you get your water from the tap. just because you live in a house instead of a tipi doesn’t mean you have to drink from the faucet. you can still shower and drink from rain barrels if you want to.

by the way, i like the numbered foraging picture. very instructional. if i ever become a foraging and rewilding teache… I mean a “fine, upstanding high school teacher” (looks around to make sure nobody heard the subversive slip up) then I may use your idea for some instructional slides for our Yummy Yummy Yard Munchies lesso… I mean our “Microecology of the suburban lawn” lessons.

now go make your fucking burn bowl already.

Tipi: It sounds like it pretty much sucked, but I am glad you went through. First, b/c I had thought about a tipi, but after seeing you I changed my mind. It is very wet and humid here too. Second, adversity builds character, not that you are lacking as a character.

Civ reeling you back: This one sucks, but this is the world we live in now. I think the biggest secret to rewilding/primitivism is to realize we can’t be them(real H-Gs). We can be the halfway or intermediate steps. All you can do is try, and remember: Trying is more than anything anyone else is doing.

You know we’ll all be there for you, bro. Good Luck!!

Don’t get stuck worrying about using civilization if it gets you out of it. Worrying somehow just makes it harder to leave the asphalt. Hunter/Gatherer is not Earner/Planner.