11/16

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Heavy rain all day today. I moved all the barrels to the front of the cabin. When the ones below the gutter ends got full, I bucketed it into a barrel beside it. It only took a minute to bucket water from one barrel to another. This strategy got us 330 gallons today. When the siding's up and downspouts attached I can use a small piece of flexible corrugated pipe at the end of the downspout to move from barrel to barrel when one is full.

Cooling off rapidly now that the rain is ending. Another hard freeze forecast for tomorrow night.

We're going to get 'caution tape' tomorrow and run two bands around the clearing to try to keep deer out. There's a lot of evidence it works. We'll put one at a deer's knee-height and one at chest-height. The tape is very cheap - $5 gets you 1000 feet. 6 rolls should do both runs.

I've been working on fencing the perennials. I've tried using saplings for stakes as saplings are free. But they're hard to drive into the ground and want to split all over the place as you pound them in. I'll try sharpening the driving end into a pencil point, and get a metal cap to place on top of the sapling to keep it from splitting apart as it's pounded in. I'll also stick with thicker saplings, a good 1.5" to 2" in diameter.

The cheapest option for long-lasting stakes for something as light-duty as chicken wire is 10 foot lengths of rebar. 3/8ths is $3, 1/2 is $4. Each rod split in half makes two stakes. But I'm trying to keep fencing the perennials a low-cost effort - we've got nearly a hundred young fruiting shrubs and trees, and fencing material is most definitely not free.

Rosy's the only one laying up at the coop. We're getting 1 egg every day or two. We've put the birds back on layer pellets because we found some at the Coop at $10 for a 50# bag and the ingredients aren't that bad. The birds weren't eating the alfalfa, so the protein content of our homemade mix wasn't working. We've found a guy an hour south of Knoxville who has 50# sacks of organic peas and grains - price-wise it will never compare to the 20 cents a pound of layer pellets, but it will be better for the birds and the eggs. We have to get the cash together for a large order because he's 2 1/2 hours away from us.

Once we get the caution tape up and fence a few more perennials [working on the jujubes and fuyu persimmons now], we'll move on to the low tunnels over the garden. It's certainly getting cold enough soon to need them - temp tomorrow . . . 49/30.
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