Hello again, Hive friends, and welcome to another installment of 'What's Been Happening Around the Homestead'! I'm feeling a little lazy about posting again, so tonight's post will be more of a social installment than a DIY guide. If that's not your thing, I won't be offended if you back out now and keep scrolling. If that is your thing, get comfortable, because I'm not watching the word count on this one 😁.
If you're one of the dozen or so regulars to the blog, you know the rocket stove rebuild has been running for some time now, so a lot of my winter work has been about getting firewood. With lots of overnight lows in the single digits, we've been keeping quite cozy with the rocket stove going full time, and lighting the kerosene heater at night. Once I have the rocket stove piped into the old furnace ducts, I don't think I'll need the kerosene at night any more. I'm burning a little more wood than the previous build did, but that's just fine with me... I have LOTS of trees to cut down that are too small, curved, or contaminated (nails) to make lumber with. The pile below is from a few trees that needed to come down around the driveway. It would have been nice if I could have let these grow, there is red maple, black walnut, red oak, shaggy hickory and ash in this pile. These lengths are all 12" or less, and this pile only measures about 2' tall by 7' long. This is about 3 days worth of firewood.
I've had some significant cracking on the outside face of the stove, but there is still 2" of solid material on the inside, so this hasn't affected performance at all. I have enough wood ash now to build this front up a bit more robust, but I'll have to wait until I have a few days in a row with temps above freezing.
Naturally, there's plenty of things going on indoors as well! Early seedlings are started under the new lights on the seedling shelves, and so far nothing has gotten leggy, even with the lights 2' or more away from the plants. So far luffa, walla walla onions, broad london leeks, shallots, Tom Thumb tomatoes, thyme, and some peppers I don't remember the name of have all sprouted. We also have cuttings started from a volunteer mystery tomato that came up unexpectedly. It's probably a large red cherry tomato, an heirloom variety we picked up a few years ago with remarkably hardy seeds. We haven't plated any since the first year, but we've had some come up every year since. If I ever take the time to do some computer shopping, I'm going to get another set of these lights to finish setting them up on every shelf in the seedling stands.
I had d.buzzed a bit about the fun time I had fixing the old snowblower to deal with the recent storms. If you've ever cleaned a carburetor, this picture will likely make you cringe a little. The float bowl was actually full of frozen water when I removed it, and it's a miracle I didn't break the float in the process. It took the end of one day and the beginning of another, but I did get this 17 year old classic fired up and running well enough to clear the driveway and a path around the side of the house. I want to do a post about this project some time, it's a real classic $5 resurrection of a machine that has been sitting in my driveway for about 10 years.
Despite my luck with the snow thrower, the snow has rendered the 3 wheeler practically useless until I get some tire chains for it. This made my wood moving a lot more labor intensive than I had hoped, but I got through it, just slower. Even hauling the cart manually, I could only get enough traction on the hill to move one layer of logs at a time. It is a lot more trips to do things this way, but all that cardio helps keep me warm.
I think these trees are quaking aspen. Whatever they are, they don't burn well, the wood isn't strong enough for most projects, and they're covering a lot of area where I would like to be growing food. Everything you see in this picture that isn't a tree has some kind of thorn on it, so this a slow and tedious task as well, even without the snow. There were a couple decent looking saplings under all this that I may keep. I enjoy finding more useful trees already growing where I want them, because once I cut down their competition they will grow much faster than anything I bring in and plant.
This little guy that was hiding out in the tangle was a nice surprise. I believe that this is an eastern red cedar from the Arbor Day Foundation that I planted about 3 years ago, which I though had died. I'm now revising that assessment and thinking that I just kept looking in the wrong place to check up on it. The wild roses that grow around here will pop up fast, and they are a very effective deterrent to human movement.
Don't get me wrong, the roses aren't all bad. When they all flower out, the smell is absolutely amazing, and this year there was a great crop of rose hips. These tasty berries will keep all winter on the bush like this, so my clearing process is slowed down even more because I'm trying not to cut down all the berries just yet. I'm not really sure why, I've already harvested about 2 lbs. of them, which is probably 1 lb. more than I'll use this year. Next time I venture out into this particular patch, I'll harvest some to throw to the chickens. If they like them well enough, I'll cut them down and just let the chickens pick it all over for a day.
I have fairly thick skin, literally, and I've learned some tricks about dealing with brambles over the years. Still, they almost always find some new and unexpected way to make me bleed. I got this unpleasant jab hours after I was done cutting down roses for the day. A thorn had torn free from one of the cane, and lodged itself near the opening of my pants pocket, just biding it's time. I reached into my pocket to empty them out before getting in the shower, and buried that little straggler all the way into my finger. It stuck so hard, I lost my grip on it the first two times I tried to pull it out. Hurt like hell, but this one big drop of blood was all I parted with.
Is this thing getting long yet? It sure feels like I've been typing a long time. Of course, just talking about doing work in the snow makes things feel like they're taking longer. Snow makes everything take longer. Sometimes I like the extra little break, but mostly it's just another inconvenience to schedule around. That roughly translates into 'less time to blog'. Crawling on the ground is definitely a lot less pleasant in the snow, or even when the ground is frozen. Right now, my ground is both frozen AND covered in snow, which means the repairs on this exhaust are going to be very unpleasant. For now, I just pulled off that hanging muffler so it doesn't attract quite so much attention when I'm going down the street (with my expired inspection).
The $500 Honda could actually use quite a bit more attention. The driver side window has been off the track since I got it. I can wedge it in the door frame so that it mostly stays up, but it seems to have a bad habit of drifting down just a few inches every time it snows. It also needs the door locks fixed (they lock fine, but can't be unlocked from the outside) and a headlamp replaced, as well as new suspension and a bunch of the lower plastic covers replaced. A new exhaust front to back would also be nice, but until I can lock and unlock the doors I don't really care how loud it gets.
Lots of repairs to do on the Suzuki as well. She needs a new gas tank and fill tube, and unidentified multi-wire plug repaired, and tow hitch added, and hopefully this year I can finish the lower part of the engine rebuild. It also needs a bit of body work, and a good cleaning. For now, I'm trying to get all the wheels spruced up. The one in the picture below is the second one that developed a crack in the steel rim. When I have an extra $1000, I'd like to get a nice set of aluminum wheels for it, and get some studded tires to throw on these old steel wheels for winter. Until then, I'm trying to make the wheels I have go from this...
...to this. So far I have two done, three more to go. The last two haven't cracked yet, so hopefully they won't be quite as much work when I get to them. The other one that's finished has a few rust spots on it already, probably due to rust that didn't get removed during cleaning. I found a good used sandblaster that I was able to use on this one so far it still looks perfect. The paint and repair job on this wheel is just about 11 months old now, the other one that is showing rust is about 14 months old. The wheels on this vehicle have an internal tire pressure monitoring system, which is something that I'd like to fix which I haven't really worked with before. The sensors are easy enough to replace, but I may need to buy a special tool to get them to communicate properly with the rest of the system. This isn't necessary to operating the vehicle, so that project will keep getting pushed back, probably until they outlaw my gasoline powered vehicles.
Ugh, all this talk of work is feeling like... work. I had another dozen pictures to blab about, but I'm getting sleepy now, and want to send this thing out before I fall down for the night. Thanks for your interest, and patience. Wish me luck, this one's going out without proofreading, because honestly, reading through this again isn't going to fix anything right now.
Good night, Hive. Be well. I can't wait for us to get a chance to do this again!