10/24

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Not nearly as cold this morning - 45 degrees inside the cabin.

Only 2 eggs yesterday. Little Bit sat for a while but never laid. Buffy also sat for a while but didn't lay, and has diarrhea - Buffy's been a candidate for Chicken of the Year and usually lays nearly every day. She also can fly without flight feathers, and raised a whole flock of baby guineas when their mother was clueless. The guinea mother we brought up from Atlanta [Chi-Chi] started laying again off in the woods and was eventually lost to the bobcat.

The birds aren't eating the large alfalfa pellets. We'll have to try another high-protein source in the mix.

Yesterday I made a fire and we had a long hot bath outside. We also watched the sequel to MONEY AS DEBT - PROMISES UNLEASHED.

Vic brought over a food processor and a loaf of poundcake.

We'll get the mower back today and buy a battery for the car.
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The Barn

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The upper story and roof took over a month to construct.

The door to the lower story - Rachel's design. We'd surrounded the lower story in chicken wire for a large run for the chickens once the bobcat predation's begun. But Buffy and Goldie [our araconas] kept flying over and escaping. Even with their flight feathers clipped and the barn braces greased Buffy was still able to fly out to head to the coop to lay. The chickens were also too difficult to herd down to the barn, so we had to pluck them off the roost every morning and carry them down in bins - additional stress on the birds and a pain in the butt. We eventually abandoned the idea.

The temporary roost and ladder which the birds never used.

Bunny's hutch which I built for Gwen's birthday.

Where the sawdust for our composting toilets is stored to keep it dry.

We gather a season's worth of sawdust at one time in plastic bins and garbage bags at the local mill in Sunbright. The sawdust is free - there's a mountain of it behind the mill.

Looking up at the construction of the roof. The sets of rafters with crossbrace settled 1/2" once the sheathing went on, so I constructed modified beams to help take the weight in case we got a heavy snow load.

The table and chairs my parents gave me with our sprayer for watering seedlings, and one of the many bunches of onions we grew and later cured hanging in the barn.

Black walnuts gathered at Sunbright's city park, drying on the barn floor.

Acorns also drying. Most are chestnut oak acorns gathered at Pickett State Park.

Storage on the lower story. Presently trying to sell the appliances, as the cookstove, Rapid Washer, and drying clothes on the line make the gas stove, washer and dryer unnecessary.

The beer bottles will be used as an insulating layer in next year's cob oven.

The duck pool for when we first got the ducks. It only lasted a month before leaking everywhere. It was a huge job to bucket out all the duckwater for fertigation. For now the masonry tub works for us as the ducks mostly free-range. Eventually we'll dig a pond.
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Shed and Fireplace

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I've laid down sheets of OSB underneath the tools to keep them off the moist gravel floor:

Here is the fireplace area - now where we wash our clothes, wash and air dishes, take baths from water heated on the fire, mix our duckwater/graywater fertilizer, and settle the iron out of the well water in barrels to use it for various outdoor tasks:

I built a level pad for the bathtub out of a sheet of flooring and sealed it. The bathtub we brought with us from the house in Atlanta. The stump is a counterweight.

Our dish-washing method starts with rinsing dishes with the powerful jet on the hose into the large blue bin. This provides some of the graywater. The dishes are then soaked in the galvanized tub for a couple hours in well water that's had the iron settled out of it, then washed in minimal to no all-natural soap [more graywater], rinsed in the clear bin, then set out to dry in the sun on the concrete wall of the fireplace.

There are three 55 gallon barrels to settle out well water because it takes about 48 hours for the iron to oxidize and settle to the bottom. The iron before it oxidizes appears as an oil film on the top which I skim off with my hands. Once a barrel's down to it's last 5 to 10 gallons I dump it out because it's full of iron crumbles. It's then rinsed with the hose and refilled with well water. It's a system that works well till we can afford a greensand manganese filter for the well - at least $500.

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The Fall Garden

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Here's a view of the garden from on top of the barn. The summer plants are dead and gone - the massive sunflowers are now hanging from the ceiling in the cabin to dry. The corn is gone - only Brassicas and root vegetables and chard and peas and lettuce are left:

A view from the duck pen. The masonry tub is the ducks' pool which they bathe and shit in and my source of high-nitrogen duckwater:

Here you can see the duck nest box which I built for when they're ready to lay. Wooden eggs are inside on a nest of mulch:

Brassicas. Cabbage, kale, collards, brussel sprouts, etc. The green beans in the middle are dead, soon to be pulled. This is a bed that was added onto the garden for potatoes in the spring. The potato harvest had been seriously reduced from flea and potato beetles, and a late May 4th frost. The newspaper and cardboard keeps the weeds down beneath the fence line:

Inside the garden - Brassicas and chard and peas. You can see I've wrapped the raised beds in plastic using old tarps secured with long U's of wire. This reduces erosion and keeps weeds down. There is a heavy mulch layer of grass clippings across the beds . . . a very successful garden strategy, keeps weeds down, softens rain, reduces erosion, fertilizes the beds, evens temperatures and keeps them moist. The chard was slow to get going but once established nearly indestructible - can be cut from again and again:

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More pictures

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Here's a picture of some of the guineas and Rosy [our Rhode Island Red] in front of the garden:

Here's the swimming pool that we soon need to drain. Rachel's in the background washing dishes:

The blueberries. After weeding, heavy mulching, disentangling blackberry roots, fertilizing, and being in a rotation with all the other perrenials getting a duckwater/graywater mix throughout the summer, some of them reached 6 feet high. I also hacked out and mowed a wide swath behind them to keep the blackberry back:

Our simple rainwater harvesting off the front of the cabin. The metal ceramic-lined barrels were used to ship dried tomatoes and we picked them up from the Co-op for $15 a piece. The gutter has a slightly steep angle from the center to the corners to keep the gutter clean and free of debris:

Guineas in front of the cabin. Sourdough is warming in the sun on the chair:

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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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Cabin Pictures

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Here are pictures from the lower story of the cabin.

Here's the temporary kitchen with another OSB counter added. The permanent kitchen will be moved over to the northwest corner of the cabin:


This is the Amish-made Ashland New Decade cook stove. Not yet operable as we haven't received the chimney yet:

Here is the water station where we filter rainwater for drinking and general household use. I bought a 2 gallon coffee thermos, all stainless steel inside, and filled it halfway with activated charcoal. A funnel with a muslin cloth sits at the top of it to prefilter out any small debris in the water. Once we pour the rainwater in, we let it sit with the charcoal for at least 20 minutes, before opening the spigot and let it run out into the metal container beneath. The water's then stored in the 7.5 gallon plastic jug with spigot. We've also got one filled in the freezer for emergency use:

This is the fridge and freezer now plugged in as we have electricity in the building. The freezer's over half-full with stored water, produce from the garden, and many, many bags of frozen wild mushrooms - comb's tooth, oysters, puffballs, and chicken of the woods:

A view of the loft ladder and railing. Eventually I'll either relocate or bump the ladder out to a steep angle so it's easier to use. But for now it works for us:

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