11/1

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Frost this morning. Nothing got covered but it was a light frost. Plants look okay.

Buffy is gone. It's possible she died of natural causes as she often acted sick over the last week and was unable to lay. It could also have been a predator. Impossible to say right now. She was not the friendliest chicken [except when raising the guineas], but a very good dependable chicken. We're now down to 4.

Halloween was interesting last night. Because homes are so far apart, all of the roads were full of traffic, cars crawling with the hazards on and letting kids out at each place that had a light on at the porch. The girls got a pretty good candy haul. It was another side of Sunbright I hadn't seen before.

The ceiling insulation is done. It's made a difference, but it's still only maybe 10 degrees warmer in the cabin than outside without any major heat source. The rubber boot for the chimney should be here Wednesday, rain is forecast for Thursday, then a string of dry weather, so we'll try to get the chimney completely installed on Friday. The last section of HeatFab stove pipe hasn't arrived yet, but we can at least get the chimney done.

There are three more west windows to insulate and board up. There's plenty of more caulking to do. I need to clean out the stove pipe today with the 7" chimney brush. Bunny got clover from the garden this morning and loves it. She's getting accustomed to living solely in her play area now and has a designated bathroom spot. I was able to pet her a little while feeding her.
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10/31

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We had a good frost 2 nights ago. Laying out plastic over beds 8 and 9, jugs around the lettuce and young chard, and plastic bags around other vulnerable plants worked well - no frost damage. The mature beets and chard that went uncovered looked slightly affected by the cold but nothing major. The fig tree dropped all its leaves. We'll have to bury it in straw before the real cold hits.

Yesterday we put in 2/3 of the R 19 insulation in the ceiling and it made a huge difference. About 9 at night it was 18 degrees warmer in the cabin than outside - 61 inside, 43 outside. We'll finish the insulation today. I also caulked a few more windows, and will continue insulating and boarding up all the windows on the west side of the cabin - 5 total. Next year we'll have closed shutters and interior insulated curtains.

I got caught up on the dishes yesterday and fertigating the garden. We ordered a high-temp silicone boot for flashing the chimney to the ribbed metal roof this morning. $95 with shipping. It should be here on Wednesday. I called the chimney manufacturer DuraTech to confirm this boot could be used with their double-walled chimney. The guy said that is the $64,000 question - it hasn't been tested. But the silicone boot is rated up to 500 degrees - it's hard to believe the outside wall of the chimney would get near that hot. And in case of a chimney fire, you've got much bigger problems than the silicone boot.

Buffy is missing. Didn't see her all day yesterday and last night she was not in the coop. Buffy is our white aracona with potential 'chicken of the year' status, laying a blue egg in the nest box nearly every morning, able to fly without flight feathers, and a great mom to 17 guinea babies. She's either broody or been eaten. Or both.

Her behavior all last week was suspicious. She'd sit on eggs for a while but not lay. She was constantly in and out of the coop - usually she ranges far and wide. Maybe she was laying in a spot in the woods, maybe Claudia laying there too, and now she's got enough eggs to set on. Since we've been gradually increasing the daylight up to 16 hours with the light and timer she may think it's spring even with the cold and time to set.

We're hoping if she is broody to catch her off the nest coming to the coop for something to eat or drink, then watch her closely to see where she's setting and go get the eggs and lock her up in the coop for a while. We'll have to do a deeper search for her today than we did yesterday. But it is possible she's been eaten, and she's extremely vulnerable setting out in the woods. We need to find her today.

Had an incredible dinner last night - vegetables from the garden, boiled collards, steamed potatos, carrots and squash; buttermilk cornbread; and for dessert, toasted sweet potato bread with butter and whipped honey.

So far cold and cloudy today.
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10/29 - Night

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Our chimney parts came today via FedEx. A 5' piece of stainless steel DuraVent chimney pipe and a support box. We spent a while going over the installation manual to figure out what would work best for our application. There's one more part we need - a high-temp silicone boot to flash the chimney that will mold to the ribbed contours of the metal roof. Found one for $80 and will order it Monday. Hopefully it'll be here before another round of rain begins, but if not we'll wait.

Sunny today so the cabin is relatively warm. But tonight will be a good freeze. We covered the lettuce and young chard in cut-out water and milk jugs. A few patches of plants got torn-open plastic bags. Beds 8 and 9 were covered with a big sheet of 4 mil plastic. It's weighed down with jugs of rocks I pulled from the beds while tilling. The mature Brassicas should be fine. I also put in a 1/2" sheet of foam over the coop's west window to keep the wind out. It had to be screwed down with large washers to keep the screws from going right through the foam.

Had a lot of dishes to wash in freezing cold water, and a lot of fertigation. Bunny got a fresh batch of weeds - mostly grass seed and thistle and dock. I was going to give her a cup of rolled oats but forgot. I'll do it tomorrow.

Didn't get any time today to continue putting in insulation. We'll have to finish the ceiling tomorrow.

We took the girls this evening to a Halloween festival in downtown Wartburg. But it was pretty small with not much candy. We'll go trick-or-treating on Monday.
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10/29

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37 this morning - inside. Usually not much different from outside.

We had rain all day yesterday. The barrels are full. Today is supposed to be sunny but never hit 60. I think tonight will be a hard freeze. The forecast for the fairgrounds tonight is 32, but we're always a few degrees cooler here, sometimes as much as 5, and it just feels like the right conditions with a clear sky and the cold the rain brings.

We ran our errands yesterday and got about 1/4 of the insulation put in for the ceiling. We ran a space heater a little before bed to take some of the edge off the cold. I was going to get an electric stapler for putting in the insulation, but I already have a Porter Cable compressor and set of trim guns. The stapler gun with 18 gauge 1/2" staples works great. The compressor hardly needs to kick in at all while using the gun. A fine mist of fiberglass gets everywhere even though the rolls are faced but that can't be helped.

I'm trying to get some photos of the chicken coop uploaded but having trouble and the DSL is incredibly slow. I may try uploading them in two seperate posts.

There's a ton of things to do today. I've got a lot of fertigation to catch up on after the rain, a massive amount of dishes to rinse and soak, the rest of the insulation to put up, we need to take a trip out to Jamestown for the 7" chimney brush and a bolt of muslin for facing the insulated curtains. Also our chimney order says the rest of the parts should come today - if they do we'll have to drop everything else to get it installed as we have a string of sunny weather for cutting a hole in the roof and not worrying about rain. Then with the hard freeze tonight we've got to cover all the lettuce and young chard with plastic jugs, and stretch a plastic sheet over beds 8 and 9 since we haven't had a chance to construct the low tunnels over them yet.

Yesterday we took Kitty to the animal shelter in Oak Ridge. We never had any luck with the ad we placed for her - nobody in the country wants stray cats or dogs. Usually shelters I avoid as euthenasia dens, and would prefer to drop an animal off in the city where they've got a good chance of being taken in [city people are far more pet-oriented then country people who are more livestock-oriented]. But this particular shelter was very friendly and pro-adoption . . . a woman took pictures of Kitty and they let her wander around . . . the animal-control officer at the desk had a kitten perched on his shoulder. It was $20 to surrender the animal. Not an ideal solution . . . but not much is when it's so common for people to drop strays off in the area and we in the country have to figure out a way to deal with them. We had Kitty for about 4 months, got rid of her worms, but she was never able to fit in here very well. She's an inside cat for sure, and in this small cabin we can't really offer her that. Besides her getting in to all the food on counter and table, peeing and pooing everywhere especially potted plants and chicken food, she climbed the building continuously and tore up the housewrap and screens, dug up and shit in the garden, and terrorized the birds. Yesterday we found a pile of duck down by the shed where she may have pounced one of the ducks. Hopefully they'll find a good home for her - we can call and check.

Well . . . too much to do today, got to get to work.
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10/28

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The forecast has improved and it's only 48 this morning. Rain today and a cold night, then a long string of sunny days with average temperatures - 60s/40s. Tonight we'll cover beds 8 and 9 with the 4 mil plastic to be safe. The low is now forecast for 35 tonight so it won't be a hard freeze - may not freeze at all.

Yesterday was cloudy with a light on and off rain all day. It progressively got colder as the day went by. On rainy days the garden doesn't get fertigated, dishes aren't done [they're set in a bin under the roof by the door to collect runoff and soak] - very little if any work is done outside so it's kind of a break from the usual chores. So instead we worked on cleaning and reorganizing the kitchen, and taking anything we don't use and storing it in boxes out under the barn. The kitchen is being step-by-step permanently moved over to the northwest side of the cabin under the bedroom side of our loft area.

I've finally got a pretty good gameplan of how to develop the lower story of the cabin, with built-in counters and open shelves on the garden side of the kitchen; the fridge along the west wall; then a U counter on the addition side of the kitchen. The chest freezer will be put on casters and will slide under the counter to take less space. The one stretch of counter that comes out from the addition wall towards the cookstove will have an overhanging corbelled counter with barstools for eating; the kitchen table we hardly use will go out to the barn; the loft ladder will move over against the east wall and be put at a steep angle rather than vertical as it is now; the corner where the kitchen is now under the 'library' side of the loft where I'm sitting will become a small living room with 2 couches, coffee table, and rocking chair. The french doors out to the addition will be removed, and the walls on either side out to the addition will be cut down to demi-walls [with the post and beam frame none of the walls are load-bearing].

Since we have composting toilets in both bedrooms, there's no real need for us to build a bathroom - I'd like to get a rubber 30 gallon stock tank I saw on one farm website [only $37], and just bring it in and set it in front of the stove when we want to bathe like they did in the old days. The galvanized stock tanks are not shaped very comfortably like a tub and all the galvanized stuff we have tends to rust up rapidly. There are a couple of nicely shaped heavy-duty plastic stock tanks that look much like a tub but I hate the idea of bathing in plastic [hot water and plastic usually a toxic mix]. We may have to special order the rubber one I found from a Co-op since Tractor Supply doesn't carry it. Once the large porch is built along the garden side of the cabin we'll store the tub out there - might make it permanent out there if the porch gets screened in.

Opening up the addition wall will make the inside of the cabin feel more spacious, and allow a better flow of heat from the stove. But the girls may not be thrilled about less privacy even though we'll build them canopy beds [of course we don't have any more privacy up in the loft with only the loft railing]. The girls ultimately want to move out to the upper story of the barn once I get the board and batten siding up. I could frame out a couple of bedrooms for them out there with a safe baseboard heat. I don't know, we take it all one step at a time . . .

When the addition is not used for bedrooms, the east side of it will be an indoor greenhouse for seedlings, the west side a living room, and a large kitchen table will go where now we plan on having a small living room. I'd often thought of adding on a whole wing to the cabin coming off the addition to the west for a master bedroom, with patio, and french doors - but who knows, just an idea. Depends on where the barn is.

It's raining and probably will all day [70% chance]. Today we're going out to Oak Ridge for Home Depot, and to Walmart for muslin to face the insulated curtains. Here's the list:

Quadra cut mower blades 25

Case of caulk 15

12 rolls of R 19 insulation 180

Staples (18 gauge) 5

Gauge for chainsaw sharpening depth 5

Truck air filter 5

Insulation wands 5

Tobacco 20

Bolt of muslin 20

[280 + tax = 310]

GROCERIES

Vegetable oil
Butter
Tortillas
Milk

After a lot of back and forth emails and phone calls with Northline Express, our chimney order is now almost entirely shipped. The 5' DuraVent 7" stainless steel chimney pipe came on the truck yesterday, the DuraVent support box had been sent to them but was in the wrong box and they didn't know they had it - now shipped. The HeatFab stove pipe Selkirk had said they sent, but hadn't, and is now going to be directly shipped to us from Selkirk. So the rest of the chimney parts should be here early next week and we can install the chimney. I'm nervous about cutting a hole in the roof, and the support box should be interesting to install with the ribbed metal roof - I've also got to reconfigure the rafters to center the stove. Connecting the stovepipe to the chimney once the pipe is here should be a breeze. Then we can finally start heating the building - though as long as it's sunny with all the windows the cabin is warm.

We took two loaves of bread over to Vic and Jo and visited for a while - potato and sweet potato. Both came out very well, but the toaster oven is almost dead.

Rain is light now, hopefully it'll get heavy at some point and fill up the barrels.

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10/26

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Been a very busy last couple of days. Besides the usual taking care of animals, greywatering the garden, washing clothes, etc, I cleaned out the coop and put in three bags of sawdust since we're presently out of cover material with the mower down. I'll add grass clippings later.

I put a hinged door in bunny's hutch between her secure 'bedroom' area and her open 'play' area. Usually a rabbit will not go to the bathroom in their bedroom area. But since where we bought her she'd always been kept in a small open cage, she sees her bedroom as a latrine and only pees and poos in there and it piles up. So I cleaned out her hutch and put a door in. I'll leave it shut for a couple of weeks while her bedroom airs. Hopefully she'll develop a new habit of going the bathroom in a corner of her large play area. Then when her bedroom's reopened she'll keep it clean. Her play area has only lath, but her bedroom is solid plywood to keep her warm. But she'll never sleep in there with it full of waste.

Bunny's also become slightly aggressive and territorial, grunting and pouncing her paws at me while I'm cleaning her cage. Rachel thinks it could be that she's reaching sexual maturity and might henceforward be 'difficult' in the hutch. The other reason for the operable door to her bedroom is to shut it when we bring her weeds so we can try handling her a little and 'gentling' her. Once we have no trouble handling her we can go back to letting down the ramp attached to her bedroom so she can run about the barn for a while. We'd done this before but she wasn't suitably domesticated and was almost impossible to catch to get her back in the hutch. Then one night she escaped from the barn and we woke to her out in the grass. Luckily we were able to herd her back to the barn and catch her later in the hutch when she was thirsty to shut her in.

This afternoon I mowed a neighbor's yard for some cash. I was hoping to get some cover material out of it also, but the yard was almost no grass and mostly leaves. I did bring back about 20 bags of leaves.

The mower's missing one set of blades till I get a chance to replace them so it doesn't cut the mulch very fine and is far more inefficient. But with the next 2 days of rain we'll get a chance to go to town and pick up more blades. There's a few areas here on the property I could still mow for cover material before winter sets in. We're trying to find some cheap rolls of old hay that we can get delivered so we never run out of mulch.

I cleaned out and organized the area under the cabin - a big job. I needed to organize all the OSB scraps by size and shape as I'm using them to plug up all the windows on the northwest side of the building till we can put in shutters next year. I've done 2 windows so far up in the loft, on the northwest side of our bedroom.

I cut a piece of cardboard to fit the inside of the window frame exactly, and push it in against the glass. I fill the frame with R 13 insulation, then screw a sheet of OSB down over the opening to seal it up. I've only got scraps of OSB left so I have to use 2 pieces for each window and will have to caulk the butt joint. It's not that cosmetically appealing, but it works and will keep us warm - those windows never get direct sunlight over the winter and just leak cold air. Next winter those windows will have closed shutters on the outside, and inside insulated curtains [we're currently buying up old pillows from the Habitat - $1 to $2 a piece - for filling for the curtains since new fill is a fortune and used comforters aren't all that cheap and most are thin and worn out] to match the look of the rest of the windows.

We've got all the laundry and tents and blankets airing put up now that they're dry. Rain is forecast for the next two days, and much cooler temperatures. Friday night could be a hard freeze.

Rachel's been baking a lot of bread in the toaster oven as the last few days have allowed the sourdough to rise. The sweet potato bread with butter and whipped honey is incredible. Tonight she baked two beautiful loaves of potato bread. Like most of our electric appliances, the oven is on its last leg and runs loudly about 100 degrees below what it should. But the cook stove has an oven, and most small appliances can go in the trash.

We're getting only 2 to 3 eggs a day from our chickens. It could be the diet, could be they're laying elsewhere, could be they're getting stolen [either a rat or a squirrel - something was bothering the birds up at the coop this evening after dark - only a rat would be about then]. The chickens love Kitty's raw chicken if given the opportunity. They have high protein needs laying nearly every day. We'll have to figure out something till we can find cheap sacks of peas.

We still haven't received our chimney yet and we've waited now a month. They'd said up to 21 business days. That's about run out. Rachel's called and been stern with them to do something and hopefully that will be productive. Otherwise after we insulate we'll have to run a space heater. It looks like we'll get another hard winter - last winter there was a whole week where it barely got over 5 degrees, and kids were out of school a month due to heavy snow.

The lettuce and young chard had some frost damage from the last cold spell. We'll cover all the plants individually in gallon milk and water jugs before tomorrow night's freeze - you just cut out the bottom of the jug and set one over a plant. We've got nearly 100 jugs piled up by the blackberry and old cucumber bed.

The arugula we planted in spring reseeded and is doing wonderfully right now - much milder than the spring plants. The radishes no matter how big they get are completely mild. That's one nice thing about the fall garden - as well as less bugs - though Rachel found a bunch of cabbage worms in one cabbage and had to pick them out with a chopstick. We have one patch of turnips so thick with emerald-green foliage they're hard to water. We're waiting for the turnips to get about baseball-sized before harvest.
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The Chicken Coop

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The chicken coop was built in March in the rain and snow when Rachel and I first came up. We needed to get it built in a hurry because her mother was giving us her 9 laying hens and a mated pair of mature guineas. I picked the gazebo site because there was already an existing pad, and the large white oaks would offer the birds plenty of shade and keep the coop cool during the hot summer months. It's 8'x8', with a scrap metal roof pieced together from scraps I already had under the cabin:

The birds are following me up to the coop for a treat. A guinea's in the distance, and Goldie's on the far left. She's an aracona and lays blue eggs pretty dependably. She became very ill after the move up and we thought we might lose her. But she recovered and is doing well. She has the typical aracona skittishness and is difficult to catch. Rosy's in the foreground with a guinea - our friendliest chicken, and dependable layer. She often squats when we come nearby because she's desperate for a rooster - sometimes makes pretend clucks to chicks while she's eating. She'll also wander into the cabin to peck the floor if we leave the door open [sometimes pecks the door to be let in]:

This is the new run - cheap t-stakes from Tractor Supply, 3' chicken wire, and the gazebo wraparound screen now used for shade. The original run was just a strip in the back. We added on to it as the flock increased and we needed to take occasional trips to Atlanta and the birds needed more runaround space while we were gone:

A closer look at the coop and more guineas. The windows are covered with metal lath. The trim around the windows will be used to staple 4 mil plastic to when winter hits. The coop is south-facing:

A look inside. Claudia, our largest bird, a barred rock, is nesting in the biggest most popular nest box. Little Bit is in the plastic tub I put in for a nest box for the ducks when they're ready to lay. Little Bit's a banty and lays maybe 1 egg a week that is pure yolk. The tray is used to collect spilled feed, the homemade feed's in the trough, the little plastic containers attached to the wall have dried ground eggshell and grit:

The loft ladder and double roost. I added the lower roost after the second batch of guineas raised by Buffy started to grow. The guineas still however argue every evening about whether to sleep in the coop or in the white oak over the coop. Usually 2 or 3 will sleep in the tree. Especially if it's nice weather. They can fly very well and sometimes land even on the cabin roof:

The run door. Works very well and the latch is racoon-proof:

The back of the coop. A rain barrel to collect rain off the roof for their water. OSB shade to keep it cool. The metal can contains the raw ingredients of their feed, the plastic the mixed ready-to-use feed:

Another view of the back. I piled up random pieces of wire and lath to keep the bobcat or anything else from messing or digging on that vulnerable side of the run. If you look hard to the left you can see the rocks and concrete block that were used to hold and stabilize the trap we used to catch the bobcat:

The view down over the property from the coop:

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