For the past few weeks we’ve been afflicted by the nuisance of being bombarded by thousands of two-inch ball bearings cascading down into the yard. You might call these ball bearings “black walnuts” but we just view them as hazards of the yard and hillside to be navigated around.
Neither of us like eating black walnuts so we see nothing beneficial in their presence. In addition, many of Mrs. Barn’s plants, especially in the vegetable garden, are harmed by the toxic juglone in walnuts, walnut leaves, and walnut sap. She’s had to reconfigure the garden continuously to accommodate the magnificent trees growing just outside the west end of the fenced area.
Bombing season is drawing to a close so I will rake up the trash-can-full of these dangerous nuisances in the coming days. If only we had a better breed of squirrels to haul them all away. We’ve got gigantic squirrels here (seriously, almost as big as the cat) but the bums are too lazy to bother with our needs and clean up the yard.
With days getting shorter and nights getting cooler, the forecast for a few days of below-freezing nights had us diligently wrapping up the squash harvest. This is about 2/3 of the haul, I just forgot to take the last “all done” picture. Winter is a time of heavy soup and stew lunches, and one of my absolute favorites is her squash soup made with fresh raw milk and heavy cream. No need for dessert with that on the table.
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Combined with Mrs. Barn’s relentless earlier harvesting and canning, we are just about wrapped up for the season. There are a few more tomatoes in the greenhouse but we do not know their ultimate disposition.
When you live in heavily wooded hills like Shangri-la, the term “sunrise” can have different meanings. In the case of today’s post, it is the time when actual sunshine strikes the surroundings, or somewhere between 9AM and noon.
This tree exploded in chromatic brilliance once the sun was on it. Last week’s pic was from a grim, grey day that was followed that night with four inches of rain.
My oldest picture (very distant and blurry) of this tree was from 25 years ago and it was a sapling probably the size of my wrist. Now the trunk is the size of my waist.
Last week my brother and I laid the new 2″ HDPE penstock (pipe) for my microhydroturbine system to power the barn (and the cabin if necessary). Last winter absolutely trashed the existing pipeline of Schedule 40 PVC.
The 2″ HDPE came in giant ~6-foot coils, each of which weighed several hundred pounds. Once these were unraveled we had a rasslin’ match that looked like a monster movie with giant snakes. If you’ve never handled large dimension HDPE it is unbelievably tough and strong, slippery and cantankerous. Not to mention ridiculously expensive compared to Sch40 PVC, but I am expecting it to be worth the added investment. I got 15 years from the Sch40 PVC so this should outlast my time in Shangri-la.
Even two stout redneck brothers were no match for the Super Slinky. We wound up lashing the end to a long rope, feeding the rope along the path we wanted the pipeline to follow, and then pulling it up the ravine with my beloved little 4WD S10. The pipe was more than a match for two ~septuagenarians but was no match for 210 h.p. x 4500 lbs.
Here are the old and new, side by side. This level of damage to the old penstock was present in about 75% of the 1000+-foot length.
We finally connected the new pipeline into the system and had water flowing! I discovered that even at the bottom there was a crack in the PVC joints, so that needs to get replaced as soon as I can find the time. It’s working, now, but who knows for how long?
The work is not done by any means. I’ll let the new HDPE pipeline relax and lose its coilification to the greatest degree possible, then work the line from top to bottom leveling and lashing it. Reducing the up and down of the lay is critical to making the flow have as little turbulence as possible. If all goes well I will be able to run the system year round. Here’s hopin’.
Just as last week was all about loading up and teaching Historic Woodworking (more about that later) this week is all about unspooling, laying and connecting over a thousand feet of 2-inch Heavy Duty Polyethylene water line for my hydropower system. My brother is here for a visit and I am working him like a rented mule.
The water line is heavy but not brutally so, each of the four coils is probably about 350 lbs, but being coiled up for an unknown period of time it is set hard into the coil shape. Basically it is like straightening out a giant Slinky that wants to beat you up at every turn.
Stay tuned.
I’m not spending 100% of my time fighting the Rearrangeritis War. I still try to spend a couple hours a day writing, although not as fast as I would like, and portions of almost every day with chores around the homestead. One such chore is maintaining the driveway.
If you recall, several years ago I had the driveway to the barn rebuilt with hard packed “Limestone dust,” a pea gravel sized aggregate in common use out here in the hinterlands. (Shangri-la is immediately adjacent to a gravel quarry). The material packs to become almost concretious and serves its purpose well.
Then came the monster ice storm of last winter and the torrential rains of last spring. The frost-heave and runoff from these events took its toll not only on my microhydropower waterline, soon to be replaced en toto, but now I must spend moments of many days reconstructing the crown and shoulders of the roadway. The material is so hard it broke my hoe so I must break it down with a derelict adz, the only tool I have with the heft and robustness to accomplish the task. It was one of several old adzes I bought at a tool auction many moons ago. Two of the adzes are kept razor sharp, but this one is just a beefy hoe that I use for all sorts of digging fun. I repaired the original hoe but now use it mostly as a rake. The adz has the additional advantage of being three times wider than my pickaxe, which would have been my other option.
We’ve been blessed with a couple of days’ semi-impromptu visit from my brother and his wife, who taught school with Mrs. Barn about fifty(!) years ago. Since it was sorta last minute I didn’t have much of an activity agenda. We trimmed up the walnut trees in the yard, toured the garden and greenhouse, confirmed that the late frost had left all the apple trees fruit-less except for one small crabapple, then hiked up the hill to assess the microhydro water line in preparation for replacing it when they return in August. Goodness, the old Schedule 40 PVC line was trashed by the brutal ice storm last winter.
We walked along with me running the traveler along the ground to get a reasonable measurement of how much of the black poly pipe to order. Were two rolls of 2″ x 500′ going to be enough? Well, the rough measurement was 1,007 feet, so I will have to either use a little of the Schedule 40 at one end or the other or order another hundred feet of the black poly.
Meanwhile, just above the weir we could see a large tree had fallen across the original logging road so we walked another 150 yards to it. And what a tree it was! The amount of firewood we can harvest will be impressive.
The tree was struck by lightning and felled very recently (the leaves were withered but still green on the branches) and it was a big ‘un. At four feet off the ground the girth was eleven feet. Another very large tree had fallen right next to it, probably in the same storm.
So come August we will be hard at work. Sugar maple ain’t the best firewood but it’s better than nothing. Especially if you have tons of it.
Or as the distinguished Congresswoman from home state of Minnesota might say. “What Winter Hath Wrought, Eleven.”
Once things finally melted off from this past Snowzilla, I discovered another severe after-effect.
The stone foundation walls leading to the underground root cellar were pretty much wrecked by the ice-rain-sleet-rain deep freeze in late January. After more than a hundred years of being in place the base rocks were literally pushed out of place by the block of ice accumulating behind it. Yikes.
I’m hoping my brother is feeling strong as I plan to excavate and reinstall several hundred pounds of rock wall during his scheduled fall visit. It can’t be all firewood fun and games.
About once a month I get together with a small group of local friends primarily to talk about living in the hinterboonies and all the topics adjacent to homesteading. Lately the topic of communication has been prominent as we’ve been talking about using small walkie-talkie type tools to keep in touch in the event of the phone or power systems going down (not a crazy paranoia out here where one or the other goes out occasionally). Last week I talked about my six decades of experience listening. In that arena I’ve found listening to AM and shortwave to be useful and entertaining. Here is what I talked about, in part. I figured there had to be one or two of you interested in this topic. If I’m wrong? The sun will still come up tomorrow morning.
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If there are regional power/internet outages -– we have experienced week-long outages in both Maryland and here in Virginia, and getting news was nearly impossible – alternatives for knowing what is going on are useful. I have found that AM and Shortwave radio listening are really useful for that task. Most stereo systems have dreadful AM receivers and are not useful tools for AM listening. Instead I have tried out dozens of units over the decades and hands-down the best performance/best value are the portable radios based on the GE SupeRadio platform. Obviously GE started the platform as a consumer product but many, many other companies followed suit, either borrowing, licensing, or stealing the design and technology. I’ve seen many new models on the marketplace that look similar but have not tried them out. I would suggest looking ebay to find a gently used one or even occasionally a new-old-stock version, prices ranging from $15-75. I bought mine for about $20 back in the mezozoic era. They are still so cheap and available I honestly would not bother with anything else.
These models have good long internal AM ferrite rod antennae, and analog tuning.
A critical additional accessory is an inductive antenna, a/k/a an external tunable loop AM antenna. These devices are set adjacent to the radio, usually perpendicular to the unit, and increase the sensitivity by up to a hundred-fold by adjusting the potential of the copper wire loop with a rheostat, “tuning” the antenna to the station on the radio. They operate much like a magnifying glass for visible light, but only in the much longer RF electromagnetic frequencies. Just as a magnifying glass amplifies and focuses light, the tunable loop antenna focuses radio waves onto the internal antenna of the radio.
The loop antenna I showed was one of several I bought from Radio Shack 40-50 years ago for about $20 IIRC. I have not seen another one like it for at least 30 years. The only loop antennas I know still on the market are made by Grundig and certainly would work just fine. I’ve never looked to see how available they are. The Grundig tunable loop antenna is based on an earlier design called the Terk , a version of which is currently on the Walmart site for $45. The Cadillac of tunable loop antennas is called the Select-A-Tenna, of which I have two. I have not seen one of these since forever. Mine cost about $80 each new, and I still find them from time to time on ebay.
I cannot overemphasize the necessity for these inductive tunable loop antennas. They can make a pocket transistor radio pull in stations from unbelievable distances. Even at dusk during our meeting I was able to use my $20 radio and $20 antenna to easily pull in signals from St. Louis, Chicago and Detroit. In the middle of the night you can occasionally get stations from Canada all the way to South America.
This is an inexpensive and high-performance way to get information from a great distance away. The utility of that should be self evident.
The other radio platform I used was a shortwave receiver-only unit. This is where some real money can be spent. My experience has shown that the best quality/value brands are Sony, Sangean, and Grundig. They are not cheap, the one I showed you was probably $300 in 1980. I cannot remember if I brought my Sony 2002 or 7600 model. The Sangean 909 I showed you was bought at Radio Shack for about $200 way back then. A long lost treasure was my Sony 2010 monster portable multiband radio. Its motherboard got fried way back when. (CME? Hmmmm.) A $750 radio down the hole. It had digital tuning and I could even pick up signals from the eastern slope of the Rockies with that baby combined with a loop antenna.
Both the Sony and Sangean portable multiband radios I’ve normally used were digital tuners, many times programmable with station memories.
Very good deals on portable shortwave radios, usually referred to as “portable multiband radio” are available at ebay. I just saw one identical to my Sony 2002 (but in black rather than silver) for about $25 over there. I see a lot of similar-looking radios on the Walmart website but usually do not recognize the maker. If you know what to look for high-quality vintage radios are out there in great quantities, hundreds on ebay right now.
As with standard AM radios, an antenna accessory is critical to the performance of a portable shortwave. You gotta, gotta, gotta have a wire reel or spool antenna that can be used in concert with the retractable FM antenna on the unit. I recall mine being about $7 from Radio Shack. CCrane radio has them for about $15, Amazon has a Sangean model for about $30.
Fix the wire antenna fitting to the extension antenna on the radio, then get the wire as high as you can while running as much as you can horizontally.
And don’t forget batteries. I buy lots of them, they last for a decade or two in cool, dry storage conditions. Rechargeable batteries are also an excellent option, I’ve found the Energizer brand to be excellent. You can get 110v plug in chargers but you should also have some off-grid charging capacity.
We’re now in the middle of asparagus season. Yummmmm.
That is all.
PS My favorite asparagus treat” freshly picked asparagus, steamed and still hot, laid over a spread of Gulden’s mustard on a piece of still-warm sourdough bread toast, topped with a slice of muenster cheese melted over the asparagus.
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