November 17, 2009

Cloudy all day but a nice day to work, I cut and split 2 truck loads of wood. Near the end of the day on the second load I caught a tree limb with my splitting maul and the thing came back and smacked me at the top of my forehead taking my cap off. I didn't have my hard hat on as I wasn't cutting standing trees today so I guess a lesson was learned after I got the bleeding stopped. There is probably some formula that I didn't learn in school that would explain how hard the limb hit, something about the object absorbing the energy and then releasing it back to where it came from, me. I finished splitting after I took an ax to that limb.
My buddy Greg Osterhaus came out from Roanoke at lunch and we went to Hema's in Rocky Mount for some of their Egyptian made Italian food, good stuff. We grabbed some desert at Edible Vibe and I remembered to get a sack of feed on the way out of town.
All of the wood cutting got started because of the original project of patching the fence around the big pasture to the east of our house at the grave yard. A large tree had fallen over the fence and had to be cut out of there, no way around it. If the rain holds off I will start putting in more posts and cutting brush tomorrow, with my hard hat on. Yes I wear safety glasses and hearing protection.

November 15, 2009

Nice sunny morning, the hurricane gave us over 4 inches of rain and things will be muddy for awhile. Dusty the horse decided to break his fence down and go walk-about on the farm. I tracked him through the fields and finally found him. I had an ear of corn so he came at a gallop when he saw it. I now have to fix fence today, maybe a strand of electric to get his attention for awhile. Once he knows it is there, he doesn't mess with the fence any more.
Chicken world was in turmoil yesterday as Ernie, the king rooster was dethroned by Wooster the fighting game rooster who has lived in peace with Ernie since spring but suddenly decided to kick his butt yesterday and take over the title of king and all the hens that come with it. He will need a more royal sounding name I guess.
The 4 hens that keep venturing out into coyote country just out of rifle range have been confined to the small coop as they are big yellow chickens and don't run fast enough or fly well so they are prime coyote food. The young game roosters can fly like a pheasant so they have a chance of escape and continue to go out in that area though it isn't the best place to be, I don't have a place to put them right now other than the freezer.
A project that has been moved up the list of importance is the connecting of the generator to the house as we are depending a lot more on the freezer for food storage. Of course power for the blower on the wood furnace and the water pump at the spring are nice to have working in a power outage as well. So after finding that the switch to connect it to the house and disconnect from the grid will cost more than the generator, I have decided to connect the generator to a separate breaker panel which is in no way connected to the grid. From this panel I will run wire to where I can manually unplug each device from the grid and onto the generator. Not as easy as throwing one switch but cheaper as I already have a lot of what I need to do this. The main thing is safety as I don't want to shock a power company worker on a pole somewhere by just plugging in and back feeding like some people do.
All of the young chicks have been out free ranging this week and have adjusted well. They go back to the chick coops at night. The older groups have joined and roost together now so that we have one group of 10 and another of 16, including the mother hens. Some are turning into game roosters and already challenging the other roosters, just what I need, more fighting roosters.

November 5, 2009

Tis' the season for wood cutting and splitting and stacking and hauling and burning. Cleaned up the backup saw yesterday and tried it out on a couple of trees that are shading the corn patch. Today I will get the new saw into shape and finish up the job. I also made a new handle for the cant hook and have a new "unbreakable" handle for the 16 lb hammer.

We are letting the two oldest groups of chicks outside of their pens to get them used to the outside world as they are getting big and can fly and run fast. Still one group of 15 that have a few weeks to grow before they get released.

The chicken coop got cleaned yesterday and new hay put on the floor so it is nice for the moment. The younger hens are starting to lay which is good as the older girls seem to have stopped and just eat and enjoy themselves.

October 27, 2009

Raining today. I need a rest after the fence building yesterday. Dusty has a new large pasture all to himself with grass that hasn't been grazed since spring so he is busy eating. Just fired up the wood furnace for what looks to be a cool damp evening.

October 25, 2009

The garden is plowed and ready for some chicken manure to be spread. I also plowed a new strip for a corn patch next year. I got the blade on the tractor (1954 Harry Ferguson) and graded the road going from the house to the main road. Over the years it had lost all slope towards the ditch and was sending water down the road along with gravel and mud. It seems that I need to know how to do so many different things living out here, just before grading the road, I was performing chimney sweep duties. I am working on web site work some today since my sunnybrookfarm.us site expired yesterday and I don't want to spend any money on it after spending so much on horse tack over the last month. Anyway I am going to use the free Google sites and see what I can do with it. It looks like a different approach from what I am used to but then it is free and works together with all the other Google stuff. They are even coming out with a Linux based system next year and their photo organizing software had a Linux version. Windows 7 is not out yet and already has security patches to download, what a joke. So if you try to get into my web site, it ain't gunna happen until I can get the new one up.

October 19, 09

First frost this morning along with ice on the water troughs. The calf broke through to his water but the chickens were baffled as chickens will be. Feeding extra corn with the regular grain for the pig and calf to give them some more energy for the cold.
The heating project is a success, I just need to put in a couple more vents and make it look pretty so we can move furniture back in place. I am getting in the routine of waking up at 3am without an alarm and putting a load of wood in the furnace then back to sleep. I am looking forward to spring already.
It is time to put the garden to bed for the winter so I am going to put up a temporary fence for Dusty the horse so that he can eat and tramp down the garden area. I will then clean out the stable and chicken coop and put the manure on before plowing. We put the wood ashes on all winter along with more manure and rotted hay. I am planning on fencing in a large area for heirloom sweet corn this year as I was able to save a lot of seed. A corn patch of Indian corn will also be attempted for animal feed and corn meal if I can get the new ground worked up.
I saved a lot of heirloom tomato seed as well as blue lake pole beans so the corn, beans and tomatoes will be my main crops next year. I saved a lot of the Liana yard long bean, they aren't quite a yard but 20 inches or so. Very good to stir fry with. I got the original seed from Vermont Bean Seed company, they have a lot of great heirloom seed and are online. We are striving to be independent from the hybrid seed that is becoming the rule these days. This is the second year that we have not used any pesticide and had more vegetables than we could eat and can.
Our egg situation is recovering from a low of 3 per day, we aren't sure what happened other than we may have old chickens. The younger hens are starting to lay so now we are up to 5 a day. soon we will have too many I guess, that seems to be the way things go.

October 10, 09

Cloudy and windy this morning, looks like a good day to continue the tunnel digging under the house. I am almost to where I need to be in order to cut a hole for the duct to go upstairs on the north side of the house. In the late 1700s when the log part of the house was built, they just put down some stones and set the logs on them very close to the ground. They had no reason to go under the house back then for pipes, wiring or insulation so it has made it hard on modern upgrades and is always the reason why we can't do something. At least it is a reason for anyone we try to hire, so I am investing the time to dig a trench at least to where I need to go and give better access to the whole front of the house. The south side of the house has a lot of room as it follows the contour of the hill so it may have been used as a storage area, I haven't explored it yet as it will be easy to run the duct through there. Anyway it is slow digging as I have to drag all the dirt back out through the tunnel and dump it since there is no area under the house. It is interesting to see the hand hewn logs under there, they flattened 2 sides but left the bark on the other 2 so it would be easy to see what kind of trees they were using. Some of the main load bearing logs are fairly good size and trimmed up square but most appear to be what I would call young trees that are possibly 30 or less years old. These logs are supporting the floor and are not connected to the side logs but are supported by their own stones, kind of free floating. They may have been installed when the house was expanded to the north and replaced the original floor of the log cabin. I am not finding any artefact under this area so I may be digging through fill from where they excavated for the north addition or there just isn't anything under there. The clay seems to go down several feet and has about a 6 inch dark topsoil of loose material. I will expect to find some artifacts on the south area if it was a root cellar storage area of some kind but I haven't had time to look yet as it is getting cool and I need to put the duct in. This is all going back over to the north west corner of the modern cellar where the wood furnace is located.
Did I mention that I worked in Archaeology when I got out of school, if you are bored, don't read the above. :-)
Major accomplishments over the last few days are:

1. We got the corn fields gleened after the cutting and ended up with a pickup truck load (8' bed) of field corn. I shucked it and stored most of it in old paper feed sacks and the rest in a chicken wire bin that I have been using for several years. The corn has a high water content so it has to dry so that I can run it through the hand sheller which removes it from the cob. After that it will store easier and can be put through my hand crank grinder for animal feed or corn meal.
2. I made repairs on the truck to where it passed inspection so after 5 months it is back on the road just in time to start getting more firewood.
3. I found a guy on Craigslist who was bailing square bails a few miles from here and selling them for $2. So what with a legal truck again, I was able to get 100 bales put into the stable the other day so winter feed for the animals is not a problem what with the hay and corn.
4. Another item from Craigslist was 7 free roosters from a nearby egg farm, no need to feed roosters. So I went and got them, they are real pretty birds and I think I can uses some of their feathers to tie flys with. I was surprised that they didn't get into any fights with our dominate roosters, I guess they are not stupid. Ernie the king rooster has 2 inch sharpe spurs.
5. Carrie's riding lessons have been on hold for several weeks because I needed to give the saddle back to the Whitesides who were really nice to let me borrow it for a few months. Now that we see that Carrie is into riding, it is time to get some equipment so I found a used saddle on ebay and we are ready for a Sunday afternoon lesson if the weather works out.
6. Carrie is taking Clarenet in school so I have been helping her practice since it uses the same music as my trumpet. She is getting pretty good and I am learning to play again. I will know we are getting good when the dog stays in the house with us.