12/11

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It's been an incredibly busy week - let me try to summarize it all.

The birds have been out free-ranging with no losses so far. The trap is set out beside the run and I just noticed the other day the bait is missing - something must have run off with it without setting off the trip plate.

The 11 low tunnels we have up are working great. We've had hard frost every night - low to mid-twenties, but the plants are fine. They take a good bit of monitoring though on sunny days to make sure the tunnels are well ventilated. The chenille method allows us to tug up the sides, and the tension on the twine generally holds them in place - though adding a few clothespins to hold up the plastic always helps. No matter how cold and windy it is, if it's sunny the tunnels quickly get up to 80 degrees. And once the sun begins to go down, the temperature in the tunnels plunges fast. Usually they need opened a couple of hours after sunrise, and closed a couple of hours before sunset.

We had our first snowfall last week. The snow covered everything, but there wasn't much accumulation before it started to melt away. By the next day it was mostly gone.

About 3/4ths of the cabin is now insulated. It makes a huge difference in heat retention inside. If Rachel's baking and needs the stove good and hot, the cabin gets so warm especially up in the loft we open a few windows. We have a fan upstairs above the stove we run constantly to blow the hot rising air back down into the kitchen and addition. It actually works pretty well - without it most of the heat just sits up in the loft and downstairs is far cooler.

Only the southeast facing wall and floors still need insulated.

I've built an improved kitchen counter over on the northwest side of the cabin. I put in the large cast iron sink that's been sitting under the building for years - it's not hooked up to running water, but we just bucket in rainwater for wash and drinking, and will put graywater buckets under the sink for drainage. The garden out under low tunnels still hasn't needed any watering yet, so the graywater/duckwater mix for now is going out to the perennials in rotation.

Once the new kitchen's finished, I can move the loft ladder over against the southeast wall at a steep angle with a handrail - more of a stairway. This will be far more convenient than the ladder we have now which is out in the middle by the stove and vertical. Rachel fell from the ladder the other day and her back landed right on the corner of the wood stove - her back hurt for a couple of days and she had quite a bruise but she's okay.

All of the perennials are protected in some way from deer pruning. I ended up stringing fishing line for the large lower blueberries, strung between sapling stakes pounded into the ground every 10 to 20 feet or so. So far it's worked great, though the bottom runs of line I put in to keep the chickens out occasionally rip loose - probably the chickens.

Almost all the caution tape is up around the property - there's only one small section to finish along the road. There's no question it works. We haven't heard or seen any deer since it went up. One of the A frame bird netted setups over the blueberries up at the swales got torn and blown down - I thought maybe a deer had trampled it but after checking it out it was more likely just the wind. It took a only a few minutes to set back up.

We looked at a couple of jersey cows the other day a few miles down the road. One was very gentle and 5 years old but dry and bred just a couple of months ago. The guy doesn't really want to sell them and wants a $1,000 per cow. We're going to keep looking online a while longer till we get the pasture fence up around the lush hillside down from the barn - the pasture is about half an acre and will include some of the creek and woods and will also be used for free-ranging the birds. Rachel found a woman online about an hour from here on a family cow forum who's invited us down Monday morning to learn how to hand-milk . . . this is very generous and helpful as neither of us have ever had a cow though Rachel has milked goats.

There was some interesting mouse drama last Thursday. Rachel and I were out cutting and splitting wood in the front yard. One of the logs was hollow. Once we'd carted up the wood in the wheelbarrow to the front door we kept hearing squeaking sounds while unloading it. We eventually found two baby mice who'd been nesting in one of the hollow logs.

Rachel put them in a small plastic container with bedding inside to keep them warm. They were still blind but had fur - so were about 2 weeks old. We set the container up under one of the lamps to keep them warm.

We went to Gwen's play at the school and stopped on the way home for ingredients for a baby mouse formula Rachel found online. At home Rachel worked with trying to feed them using a dropper - she got them to take a little milk though they were pretty stubborn and resistant. It was amazing how frisky and active they got once warm even though still blind.

I went downstairs and saw a mouse shooting around under the couch, and asked upstairs - "Are the baby mice where they should be?" They were and it was the mother darting around looking for her babies.

So we took the baby mice and set them on the bedding in front of the wood pile. We then all backed off to watch from a distance. The mother kept darting around everywhere looking for her babies. Eventually she went back to the wood pile and found them. She grabbed one and rushed into the hollow log they'd been living in. Then she found the other and took that one in. She grabbed all the bedding and packed it in around them. After an hour or so we took the log and set it in one of our plastic bins with a big piece of insulation, and carried it down outside to where we'd gotten the log from.

Country living . . .
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