10/23

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34 degrees inside the cabin this morning, but it doesn't feel quite as cold as the air is much dryer after yesterday's sunny weather. Only the top of the garden is covered in frost, and that mostly the mulch.

Today we're going to fire up the chainsaw and start cutting firewood - mostly from standing dead trees that have no bark as we don't have time to season it. Rachel insists I read the chainsaw manual first before I start operating the saw. I will but I hate manuals.

Yesterday we did several loads of laundry with the Rapid Washer. It's basically a modified plunger with holes on the bottom and a vent cap on top. You plunge the clothes for a while in slightly soapy water, wring them out, plunge in fresh water, wring, plunge in fresh water, wring out and hang them up on the line. It works great and the clothes come out astonishingly clean. There is a spot though in the middle of my upper back that hurts from plunging all day - hopefully it will work itself out soon.

The bucket wringer method using 3 buckets all placed inside each other with the top one pressing down on the clothes with your weight on top of it - a method we found online - doesn't work any better than hand-wringing. We'll have to order an actual crank hand wringer with rollers at some point - it costs over $100.

The birds are eating everything in their new homemade all-natural diet except the large alfalfa pellets. I tried soaking them in milk but they still won't eat them. We'll have to give what they don't eat to bunny, then with the next batch try breaking them up with a stick or running them through the food processor. They're an important nutritious high-protein part of the diet . . . the only thing to replace them with would be more peas but at grocery-store prices that's expensive. Once we can get peas by the 50# sack that's more realistic for us.

Kitty finally broke down and has started eating the raw chicken which I cut up small for her.

The lettuce and chard had some slight frost damage but otherwise all the fall plants did fine. Rachel harvested some huge collard greens and for dinner last night we had them boiled, with potatoes and a little cheese, steamed squash and biscuits.

2 eggs yesterday and we made several trips to the coop. Hopefully the theft of eggs was a one-time event. Today should be a high egg number so we'll have to watch the coop carefully.

Rachel cut down the peppers and tomatoes in the garden yesterday and put them in the compost bin. Our legendary yellow pear tomato that had spread 10 feet in every direction and produced at least a thousand tomatoes had a root like a tree. She could barely cut it with the pruners. She's saved seed from it for next year. The last of the unripe peppers all had frost damage. But our peppers had done very well for us, producing a great quantity of red banana, bell, and poblano peppers. They seemed to love the duckwater/graywater fertigation.

All of the seedlings in beds #8 and 9 are doing very well handling frost as they're planted in deep furrows between hills of mulch. These two beds will soon be protected with hoop houses. The lettuce planted elsewhere we'll get a little extra time out of by placing milk and water jugs over them with the bottoms cut out.

I finished the caulking of the upper story yesterday. Tuesday we'll pick up R 19 fiberglass insulation and insulate the ceiling. We'll also start making our insulated window coverings - insulated OSB plugs for northwest facing windows, and operable insulated curtains for windows that get direct sunlight. Brooke left her comforter out in the woods when she was here for the summer - they had tied it up as a hammock and forgot about it. It's ripped and stained from being left out in the woods. We've been airing it out and will soon cut it up to start making the insulated curtains. It's a pretty thick comforter so two layers should fill out the inside of the window frame - it will be quilted to light-colored sheets on both sides.
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