12/4

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A spell of beautiful warm fall weather has hit and should last a few days though the rest of it should be rain starting tomorrow.

It turns out the 'wild guineas' are actually owned by a neighbor and they roost in one of his pines at night. So we'll stop trying to catch them. But it's still good they spend so much time here and hopefully they'll interbreed with ours.

We've been extremely busy lately, finishing the low tunnels over the garden [11 total] and insulating the walls of the addition. Every time we put more insulation in we notice a big rise in retained temperature inside. We need to insulate the rest of the cabin before we can start working on siding the barn.

Before the last string of freezing nights we drained the well water out of the hose and overflow tank and shut the well-pump off. Dishes are now done inside with hot water from the wood stove. The garden plants in the tunnels have very little need of watering and the perennials are going dormant so we don't have much need for graywater right now. It's always best to wash out the toilet buckets with the jet from the hose, but for winter we'll just have to rinse them out with buckets of rainwater and air them sufficiently.

I cleaned the coop out and got nearly 3 full wheelbarrows for the compost bin. We'd put in an underlayer of sawdust with a grass/leaf mulch on top, which works very well, but we're down to only 3 bags of sawdust for the toilets so I just did 2 wheelbarrows of grass/leaf clippings for fresh bedding in the coop. I put dried hay in all the nest boxes. Rosy is still laying dependably, but her eggs are about all we're getting. The ducks are definitely sexually mature, but either laying sporadically or the squirrel is stealing them. We've gone back to free-ranging as we were unable to trap the bobcat and he seems to have disappeared for the moment, though the same neighbor who owns the guineas says a bobcat wiped out his chickens.

We did catch Claudia [our barred rock chicken] in the bobcat trap however. We happened to be up at the coop when she wandered in to it and set it off. I guess she'd thought of checking out the chicken bait, but once the trap door shut she just started pacing and complaining till we let her out.

We got a lot of wood cut and split yesterday from small standing dead trees and dead boughs well off the ground. Some of it burns very well, some okay. Rachel started using a creosote remover product to keep down a buildup of creosote in the chimney since we're not burning ideal wood - just whatever we come across that looks dead and reasonably dry. It seems to have helped and the creosote layer in the chimney is only a paper thin film.

A few days ago I put in bird netting over all the blueberry bushes up at the swales [there are 21 plants]. The easiest way to do it ended up being driving a 6' sapling at either end of each bed [there are 5 to 6 shrubs per bed] - which is two saplings for each 30' bed. I predrill a hole for the sapling by pounding in some PVC pipe then remove it. I drive in the sapling at an angle away from the bed so tension doesn't bow it in, then run masonry line or twine between the two saplings and pull it very tight. I cut a small notch towards the top of each sapling so the line doesn't slide up or down. Then I just lay the bird netting over this sort of like an A frame tent. One 15' x 45' piece covers each bed to the ground from the line on either side well - I used one piece per bed. This will not only protect the shrubs from being bitten down by deer [something that's kept them stunted the last few years], but also from our own chickens wandering in and digging up all the mulch and dust-bathing in cavities around the plants, and also any birds trying to steal the berries of course. The last thing I need to do is give them a very thick leaf mulch.

Today we'll get the rest of the caution tape up - it seems to be working and we haven't noticed any deer.

Very windy this morning - usually a sign of a storm on the way.
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