play park

my wood cutting area has morphed into a complex and dangerous play area.
ramparts and bridges divide the separate "rooms" (rounds).

very dangerous.

the kids balance has improved ten fold since this "park," as the kids call it, has been here. toly's domain is usually on the actual stump and he traverses to the fell log. kassi and tristan flit across the rest of the play area in such a graceful fashion that i plan to incorporate some of this concept into a new play area for them.

i have been making some serious progress on cutting, splitting and stacking some of this tree. other duties of the daily nature supersede this activity. i have to steal away every second to get this task done.


the greenhouse has been flourishing.

the kale and swiss chard are really beautiful.

just a couple of more days until we'll be eating salad from these beds.

i love swiss chard.

i like it steamed with a touch of salt the best. greens like this aren't especially popular to most people that i encounter in person. it is difficult finding a common conversational denominator when my mind continually wants to chat about our glorious greens. politeness usually forces me to chat about hunting. don't get me wrong hunting is great and all but our greens are really cool.


we just had a little visit by the local johova's witness. david is a really nice guy. today i just drug him around and showed him stuff, how the greenhouse is doing. a captive audience forced to admire my greens. he hadn't been by to see my finished root-cellar either. he left his cohorts in the car and just basically took a tour of the omelay spread. other than the bible in his hand, a subliminal message, no other message was foisted on me. i really like david, we understand each other. he got to save face with his car bound accompaniment while we had a nice visit. best of all i got to brag on my beautiful greens;)

useful tools on a farmette

all tarps are not equal. this tarp is like the kind you can buy at the local farm store.

the plastic that is used is actually woven as the tarp.

as you can see here it frays under mild repeated stress. these kind of tarps are not designed to hold up under rugged conditions. in-fact, in less than a year out in the sun they will be of little value. their lifespan will be shortened further if they are exposed to any stress like wind or rain.

i use tarps for everything around here but the kind i use are entirely different and not readily available. they are recycled from billboards and are very heavy at larger sizes. a thirty feet by thirty feet tarp can weigh over seventy five pounds. i got one once that was seventy feet by thirty feet. i couldn't pick it up by myself.

their makeup is vinyl coated rip stop fabric and wont tear except under the most extreme conditions. this tarp has been on my previously very leaky barn for three years.

the wind whips that excess flap. it has finally begun to tear through at the corners.




here i have used them on my chicken tractors as sides and covers.



this is a wind break that i made for the pigs. it flapped and then they started to tear at it by biting it.

this is all the damage they could do to it over the three months that they had it exposed to them.

sometimes i screw boards to them to make them not flap in the wind. this is a shade for the current pigs.


here i have fashioned a tarp and a cattle panel to make a winter pig hutch.



here a zip tie holds it tight. the zip tie will not outlast the tarp.


here we are using them to keep the weeds from the center of our okra rows. they mostly lay flat even during stormy weather because their weight.


this is my square bale feeder. it has a steel roof but directly under the purlines i stretched a tarp as a secondary barrier.



interior walls for a chicken coop?

chickens are dirty and i wanted to be able to hose the walls down occasionally.
the tarp cuts to size with my very sharp pocket knife.

here i just stapled it to my studs.

this is my first chicken tractor. the tarp has been weather exposed for three years and i will take it off and reuse it for something else.


this pile of chat has been on this tarp for two plus years. chat mixed with the grass makes my mower unhappy.


this tarp covers a pile of lumber. it will stay cozy and dry until i can use it.


this is part of a larger tarp that i use for everything.

it is very thick and won't fray even at this raggedly cut edge.

regular updates

tabitha, my lovely wife, has committed to blogging every day this month november. go over and visit her blog if you don't already read it.

today i mowed the yard the highest setting possible to chop and bag the leaves. i put the leaves on the northern most garden bed. it took about twenty mower loads to heavily cover the bed. since our chickens are on the loose in the evenings i had to further protect my efforts with plastic and flat cattle panels. the plastic was left over from the sweet potato bed and some other tarp scraps.

i also worked up a bunch of that huge log setting in the side-front yard. i am anxious to get my ginkgo planted. pablos is too enviable. i also had to sharpen my chainsaw. i cheat and use this it uses my dremmel tool. i wish i had a battery powered dremmel just for this purpose.

before i left the house i helped tabitha clean and sanitize the house. i scoured the bath tub. there were crayon marks that were near impossible to remove without serious elbow grease. we also teamed up on the kitchen floor. she scrubbed and wiped while i dried with a few diapers.

busy day..

halloween thwarted = mumps

a person might think that diagnosing a simple childhood disease wouldn't require a CT scan. escalated to a fear of bone disease a huge dose of IV antibiotics were applied. ok, our doctor is great but tragically uninformed about any childhood disease of yesteryear. i spent friday night with tristan in the hospital. we are home now hunkering down for ensuing onslaught of the mumps for the rest of the kids. we won't be going to the hospital anymore for this...

i slept like the dead last night with a slight interruption to further medicate tristan. today i hope to catch up on farmstead duties. i still need to plant our ginkgo tree. that will require a bit more of work on that huge log sitting in our side-front yard.

the house is a wreck and sick people make it worse. tabitha will need some of my help getting a leg-up on it before the onslaught. we'll see if i can get anything else done.

rome in costume

tabitha made link (legend of zelda) costumes for the kids. yes they all wanted to be link for halloween. rome is really cute in his. tabitha just finished making it. she had made all the kids costumes and rome's was the final one.

the swords that i made a few weeks ago are also part of the costume. i pity any marauding enemies on halloween night.

happy halloween!

courage

i finally mustered the courage to cut that leaning tower of pisa the electric company left in my front yard. no matter how many times i cut a tree with a larger diameter than the length of my chainsaw blade it always freaks me out a little. my saw didn't really meet the radius length either since it was more of an oval than a circle i barely managed.

i cut the stump about chest height. any lower and i wouldn't have been sure to get it down. as it was, when it started to go i stepped away from it for safety and it leaned to fill my notch and stopped right there--hung. a couple of rakes from my spinning chain across the newly revealed notch and it fell.

tristan had been helping me all morning. he is learning to stack wood. he stacked that whole smaller row. sure it is only the first layer but most of that wood came from across the yard. he can move a wheelbarrow flush with wood. mostly he loaded the wheelbarrow completely full with wood and i'd come and wheel it over to his pile and dump it there, where he'd stack it from. it is surprising how much that frees me to get other dangerous stuff done.

these stacks are ten feet by five feet tall. this wood sitting right here is likely enough to get us through next winter. oh, but that isn't the half of it. we'll have several more stacks like these before this tree is completely worked up.


i chased tristan off while felling the big log. when i was done i discovered him collecting acorns.

he was getting them for the pigs. they get so excited over acorns. he took it upon himself to provide them with some excitement. such a good-natured boy.

the acorns were falling heavily this day. you could hear them pelt the steel roof of the chicken coop every few minutes.


tabitha was out getting groceries from the yard.

these turnips ended up as part of the most glorious turkey-pot-pie. it had sweet potatoes, acorn squash, chard, onions, carrots and garlic. nearly all the ingredients were from our little farm, sans the turkey. it was so good that i ate a second huge helping and almost exploded.

we have to burn-carbon today. that is what we call it every time we drive anywhere. i must attend a seminar on our heath care. the state health care is changing affiliations and i need to understand the new stuff completely to make informed choices for my family. the whole family will go to springfield with me. we'll run all those errands that get queued up and likely end up in a fabric store or two. we love our new van. it has been such a blessing in disguise. don't get me wrong being in debt really sucks. none-the-less we love our van and are happy as things are.

greenhouse 1.2 filled

i got up early and started filling the raised beds with dirt. we decided to save the final compost for the top layer. i dug the dirt from around the compost bins and some by the door of the old hog pen. the dirt was great, as good as the compost that i was saving back. i managed seven full wheelbarrow loads. tabitha picked rocks, weeds and japanese beetle larvae. we moved our jasmine plant and a few herbs into the back.

we hope for a big jasmine bloom this next summer.

tabitha dug the red swiss chard and handed them to me.

i carefully loaded them into the wheelbarrow.

here is our first load and the dug up bed.

tabitha grabbed some dill too.

we put the dill against the wall since it will grow taller

tabitha densely packed the swiss chard.

here is the bed of toscano kale that we moved in to the greenhouse.

here it it all planted.

the open area on the left is direct seeded lettuce mix and arugula. we left a third of that flat area open for successive seedings. there will be rows of shelves will be filled above here with deep boxes of dirt for more successions of greens. we are really going to try to get a full season of greens in our diet.

greenhouse 1.2

we cleaned out the greenhouse. it had a huge castor bean plant and a large fruitless tomato plant in it. i took out the old shelves and we loaded all the pots and seed starting stuff into the wheel barrow. with the floor clear we discussed a layout for the raised beds that will host our greens. i set a row of block across the back and closed in that end. i cut an old piece of plywood and zip tied it to the back.

i folded the surplus plastic across the plywood in the back and screwed and even older/ scrappier piece to hold the plastic in place.

very secure and cozy for winter. i plan to seal up the front door area a little better with some surplus bubble foil insulation. if that doesn't keep the breezes out i might install a secondary plastic wall with a overlapping slit pass through just inside the existing storm door. only as a last resort though because it will take considerable effort to make that happen.

i went to the local lumber yard and got a couple of (two by twelves). i opted for the pressure treated stuff because greenhouse 1.2 probably be there until the planned addition is completed. greenhouse 6.0* will be attached to the south facing wall of the addition.

there is about twenty inches of planting space on either side of the walk. the walk way is twenty four inches wide. there will be four (one foot by eight foot) wire shelves against the north wall, on the left. that will afford a bunch of sunny space for seedlings this late winter.

i'll fill the bed area with dirt tomorrow. i have some compost in a few locations that might go a distance in filling that area. had i been feeling better i'd have gotten that done today. it is funny how illness slows things down so much. i'm feeling a little worse for the wear right now.

luckily tabitha made an excellent dinner tonight. it was a gourmet meal made from our pantry. tomato and meat pasta with extra garlic. she baked two focaccia breads. one of them has fresh rosemary garlic and coarse sea salt. a fresh salad picked five minutes before we sat down. it was fabulous.

we commented on how removed we are from the standard method that most people have a meal like this. all the fresh ingredients and quality of preserves from our garden, the fresh baked bread, our own meat pork and beef, we feel so blessed. meals like this really makes us appreciate the simpler things in life more fully.

i asked tabitha to take a photo of her lovely focaccia. she got a little distracted and we have no proof for further braggin' rights. you'd have to take my word on how it tasted so what's a little more of a leap of faith?

* 6.0 because advances in technology will be so vast that several version numbers must be skipped