With stout posts driven 36″+ into the ground I was ready to move forward and ordered the requisite 1/4″ hardware cloth to cover the entire floor space (to keep out all the little rodents that make Mrs. Barn’s gardening life one of frustration) and the pile of 2x8x10′ PT/SYP to build the knee walls and other components. Now that was a shock, as the price was 3X more than the last time I ordered any meaningful quantity of construction lumber. Those who are Inflation Deniers clearly do not comprehend either the definition of the term nor its manifestation. But Don, are you saying you are smarter than the President and Secretary of the Treasury and Chairman of the Federal Reserve and all those other “experts”?
Yup. Why that is would be another blog post, or better yet, in some other universe of discourse. Hint: it all boils down to the “Austrian” strain of economics.
I laid the hardware cloth and began screwing the 2x8s to the posts. I bought enough material for a four-course wall but Mrs. Barn decided three was better, so I managed to build my reserve inventory of that supply even more.
With the three courses in place, I fired up the chainsaw and lopped off the posts at the top of the knee wall. Carpentry by chainsaw is definitely a thing. Those scraps will become bench legs in the greenhouse configuration.
Setting the edge with string I lined up all the sill plates on top of the walls and posts, readying everything for the addition of the cattle fence panels that will form the arched roof structure.
Frequently, for both relaxation and edification, I watch videos of chainsaw magicians felling trees. Big trees, troublesome trees, trees leaning the wrong way, trees in the wrong place. As my own tree-felling is part of life on the homestead (I am confident in my ability to fell trees the size of my thigh, not confident in felling trees the size of my waist) I try to watch and learn. Other times I just watch to be captivated by the skills of these men doing this dangerous work with caution and confidence, sort of my version of ASMR.
This video documents the felling of the largest tree I have even seen, executed by a barefoot lumberjack working without eye or face protection for the most part, with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth a hundred feet in the air. Since I watched this with the sound off I am not really certain of the context of where or when this occurred.
We are smack-dab in the middle of a fortnight-plus stretch of simply spectacular weather, sunny days in the 60s and nights in the 30s and 40s. we are taking full advantage of the opportunity to get tons of outside work done. Matter of fact I have not been in the shop for nearly three weeks other than to package orders for mailing out.
Thanks to our connection to a stout young local lad, we’ve been able to keep up with the routine yard work much better than years past. One of the things we really appreciate is his mowing of the large hillside area directly above the garden. It keeps the underbrush under control and the expanse of green is a delight.
A picture from eight years ago when I first got the beast.
In order to expand that vista and perhaps make more space available for other things, an orchard is in the discussion, I spent several days with my DR Brush Mower whacking away at the ~4 acres of hillside adjacent to this mowed area. It’s the brown-ish area just beyond the green. I can only work on this about every third day as my shoulders need a lot of recuperation time these days.
For the first time since we bought the property almost 25 years ago that section of hillside is all cleared except for the woodland we are keeping. With this step our young fellow is certain he can keep that area mowed as well. There is definitely a difference between a cautious old man with a $4K lawn tractor and a fearless 16-year-old with a $10K lawn tractor.
In addition I cleared a 1-1/2 acre section between the driveway and the creek, an area we always called “the orchard” since there were a few apple trees there. That field is chock full of large rocks and I walked it ahead of time, marking each big rock with fluorescent spray paint. It was still several hours of arduous work, with many more hours of work yet to come.
In no particular order here are a few updates that may be of interest to you.
During one of their interminable Updates to “improve” their platform WordPress changed the protocols for both the Contact and Comment functions. Webmeister Tim tracked down those changes (they were not self-evident), and I know at least now the Contact function works. I am less certain about the Comments utility.
I’ve been told that the first shipment of the back ordered Woodfinishing DVD is being shipped this week. Cross your fingers. Oh, the travails of using fulfillment service providers in Florida, a/k/a Hurricane Alley. Whenever the DVDs arrive I will immediately package and ship them to those three dozen of you who have waited so patiently and graciously for your order.
I’m keeping an eye on a batch of Mel’s Wax I made and packaged several months ago and will open the jars next month. If they are okay it will probably be back in the Don’s Barn Store around Christmas. The formulation is purposefully designed for archival properties rather than shelf life, so it’s always a knife’s-edge proposition. I could add stabilizers and preservatives and such, but then it would not be Mel’s Wax.
Finally, Webmeister Tim and I are in the planning and implementation stages for a YooToob channel featuring less formal “at the bench” type short videos (3-5 minutes) about projects and techniques. Right now, we need to settle on a cheap (free?) meat-and-potatoes editing application that is simple and easy enough for me to use but can still integrate two video feeds with the sound feed. At one time I had a long menu of formal videos I wanted to make, but since I cannot even finish editing the Gragg Chair video I am exploring this new path.
Stay tuned. For at least another week the weather is expected to be beautiful in Shangri-la so the outside/homestead work will take precedence over the in-shop time. Today I hope to finish up removing the detritus from the shack up on the hill, a project that was so rudely interrupted several years ago when the wheelbarrow broke my hip.
My latest and longest (almost 45 min.) interview with Brian Wilson for his Now For Something Completely Different podcast is now on line at his web site and Substack. Yes, he is “retired” after five decades of broadcasting but he can’t kick the habit.
Because of our brutal drought this gardening season (no meaningful rain from April until September) Mrs. Barn spent untold hours delivering water to her thirsty garden, generally twice a day. Some of the plants still suffered but still she managed to grow and gather quite a bounty.
Here is a wagonload of spaghetti squash, one of our favorites. Maybe enough for all winter.
The winter’s inventory of squash resides under the vintage encyclopedias in the dining room
And a portion of the canned veggies and salsa.
We are very much looking forward to next gardening season with the new greenhouse fully in service. Real construction begins tomorrow!
Last Saturday was an exciting eventful day at the homestead as a long-delayed project got off the ground (well, in the ground).
A few weeks ago I was chatting with my friend KC about our way-behind-schedule plans for building a greenhouse on the terrace we had cut into the hillside two years ago. From my perspective one of the big hurdles was building up the enthusiasm and energy to dig 14 three-foot-deep holes for the 6-inch fence posts I was planning on using for the foundation to the knee-walls.
“No problem,” sez KC, “I’ll just bring over my post driver and we will get it done in a snap.” As a farmer/rancher with probably miles of fencing, KC owned a portable pile driver. It probably should not have surprised me, but I actually did not know such a machine ever existed.
Last week I laid out the greenhouse footprint and cut points into one end of the posts. This made it much easier to get them into the ground straight, provided we didn’t encounter a large subterranean rock during the driving. Ironically the first post was the only one that drifted crooked during the whole process.
He showed up at 9AM as promised and left around 90 minutes later. I suspect it would have taken me a month or two to accomplish the same work by hand.
We placed the posts where I had marked the ground, set up the machine to capture the top, used a level for both the X and X’ axes, he threw the switch, and the ground started shaking. BAM, BAM, BAM with the speed of a jackhammer.
Like I said he was done and out the driveway about 90 minutes later.
The project will resume as soon as I can get a truckload of pressure treated SYP delivered to build the knee walls.
Given my forays into the woods for cutting firewood I must necessarily haul all the tool requisite for the task. For a full day or two or three of cutting this includes stuff like cant hooks (the tools for rolling over logs), ropes and blocks for yanking on large logs, lotsa fuel and bar oil, and sometimes sledge and wedge and occasionally even a digging bar to get a big rock out of the way. And there are lots of rocks as they are this region’s dominant agricultural product (just kidding, it’s cattle).
But there are other times when all I’m doing is a couple hours of clearing the understory or clearing a path to a larger trove. This is especially the purpose of my new box.
A fitted plastic case for my chainsaw is useless for anything other than protecting the chainsaw. I wanted to chainsaw container to do a lot more. At the same time the molded plastic case has the advantage of being lightweight and I like that feature a lot. To accomplish this I made the box out of 3/8″ plywood, not as light as the molded plastic but light enough. Combined with glue, glueblocks, and lots of triangulation it is a tough, stiff, “lightweight” carrying container for everything I need for a brief chainsaw session.
The box holds my chainsaw with a quarter inch to spare in length, four replacement chains, two quarts of lubricant oil, two quarts of fuel, my gloves, some sharpening tools, a roofing hatchet, ear muffs, Kevlar chaps, and probably a couple more things that do not come to mind right now.
BTW, the box is painted orange not out of Stihl brand loyalty, but rather I paint everything that goes into the woods with orange paint so I can find it quickly when I mislay it. Which happens a lot.
About once a month I walk up in the woods, almost always incorporating a survey of the microhydroelectric waterline. About three weeks ago we had a frog-choker of a rainstorm, probably the residue of one of the tropical storms. Since it had been very, very dry this summer I was looking forward to by hydro turbine picking up the pace, but instead it stopped altogether. I knew what that meant and so last week I trudged the quarter mile to the top of the systems to find the problem. Every time I service or repair the system it requires about four trips up and down a quarter mile of uneven terrain with a 10% incline. Quite a workout.
I’d hoped it was just leaf cloggage, but there was nothing wrong at that end.
So down into the ravine I went to gingerly navigate my way to the bottom and find the problem.
Here it is. During the rainstorm a tree came down and cracked the PVC penstock. PVC is comparatively cheap and easy to work with compared to polypropylene, but it is also comparatively brittle and I encounter some sort of break a couple times a year.
So I grabbed my penstock repair bag and returned to the scene of the crime, after first walking to the top again to turn the entire system off. I cut out the damaged area and grafted in new pipe with couplings and PVC cement, and in a jiffy it was as good as gold.
You might ask why I have my pipeline sitting above ground rather than buried. Well, given the nature of the terrain I can give twenty five thousand reasons, all of them named “Dollar.”
This year I am thinking about a deep dive into configuring the water line system to enable it to work all winter long. Gotta get the incline perfect, though.
Not a day goes by that I don’t spend a little time noodling around my favorites on youtube to see if there is something interesting and educational for me to watch. Here’s a list of those pages, in no particular order.
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