Does anyone have a supply of used brick?

With spring in full gear and the rains gone for a few days we decided to jump in and start the path that will connect the house and studio.  Since the completion of the studio we have been forced to cross the grass in the back yard and it wasn't long before we had a dirt path--which turned to a muddy mess (inside and out) every time it rained or snowed.

Well, no more!  We'll just use the bricks we salvaged during the demolition of the Wendell school a few years back.  Problem is, lots of people heard about the brick give away and we were only able to salvage half a path worth...

Fortunately Diana works at the local grocery store--which is the social center of town and, as we're quickly learning, the networking hub for everything.  One day, while running the cash register, she asked a local stone mason she knows if any locals he knows might have a supply of used brick.  "As a matter of fact, yes! he said.  Apparently several years ago they demolished the nearby King Hill School and I guess not as many people heard about it because he told Diana one lady inherited a majority of the bricks!  She is rumored to have "thousands of them". 

We haven't made contact with her yet, so our brick road remains a dream for now, but hey, how long can this lady go before she runs out of groceries?  And when she does I'm hoping Diana will be at the register so we can work a deal!  If she actually does have thousands, our pizza oven may be one step closer to reality as well!

Our Morning at the Elk Ranch... and it has nothing to do with elk

Now that we're settling back into big city society while off the road, we're reconnecting with some of our contacts in the local area.  One such contact is an acquaintance of Diana's who manages a ranching operation just outside town.  The rancher who owns the place seems to do it all, from cows, to elk, to crops, and he runs a small time wood mill where he cuts red fir into some really nice board lumber. and they have tons of scraps which would fit really nicely into our wood cook stove!  So Diana asks the manager what they plan to do with the scraps and she replies -- "just come and load up all you want, any time."

Holy cow, the mother load!  We thought we entered firewood heaven.

But wait, there's more!

Apparently the milling operators are only interested in certain prime cuts of lumber because, not only do they have the round edge scraps, there's a ton of dimensional red fir in all sizes, shapes and lengths mixed in!  We have plans now to side the studio with some of the nicer boards.

Here's the truck with a half of a load left from our first run.  Notice all the 8' trim pieces and 2x2's on the left!

And of course we recruited all hands to help unload.

We stopped at two truckloads today (about 2 cords) , but have formed a plan to return to the massive pile twice a week until we have filled our wood pile and the wood piles of everyone in town who needs it!  We will not run out of fire wood this year!

While talking to the manager of the ranch before we finished loading for our first trip we asked what they do when they get too many scraps.  She said they used to cut it up and sell it off, but that the workers are needed for other tasks now.  Instead, in the recent past they have just lit the pile on fire to get rid of it.  Can you believe it?  

Afterwards we celebrated our victory with a picnic in the back yard! 

That wood rack in the background won't be empty for long!

OK we may be a bit crazy... but

Since we're staying home this summer we figured why not, we'll get a turkey. What could possibly go wrong?

We were picking up our order of Araucana chickens to add to our flock anyway and what's one more bird, really?

We'll see how it goes, but our plan for now is to have him join us for Thanksgiving dinner.

He does already stand head and shoulders above the rest, doesn't he?  Can you pick him out of this line up?

We're really looking forward to the eggs that our new Araucanas will be giving us.  This is the breed that lays Easter eggs! (Photo borrowed from http://www.weis-family.org)

Homestead head count update:

3 Dogs

2 Cats

2 Rabbits (just had to post a picture of them relaxing in the sun)

1 Turkey

2 Roosters

10 Hens

6 pullets

1 pig

Should be fun!  We'll let you know how it goes!

 

Hammy is Here!

Took a detour after church on Sunday and picked up this little guy.  His name is Hammy (named by Diana) and he weighs in at about 35 pounds.  He has already settled in and rooted up his entire sty!  What a roto-tiller!

When picking him out from the rest we decided to try to pick the most stubborn, ugly wiener so it would make parting easier in a few months.  Didn't work--they're all cute at this age.  We're counting on the fact that he'll get uglier and meaner as time goes on since he won't be able to stay full time.

Here is our re-purposed pallet pig palace! 10 pallets, connected with 2 x 4's and lined with chicken wire.  We installed a shade awning at one end and some side wind breaks.  The top section of  the near corner facing the camera comes off and creates a step over doorway.  

Our local Nutrena feed rep gave us an easy formula to use to make sure he's eating enough to make weight by August.  He should top out somewhere around 250-300 pounds if all goes well.  The compost pile will just have to suffer a bit in the mean time.

We'll keep you updated on his progress!

Vermiculture is coming to the homestead!

So we’ve been composting for years now… You know the little stainless steel bin that sits on our counter that collects all the compostable kitchen waste?  Then we have to take it out to empty into the big compost pile out back and turn the pile from time to time.  Eventually it provides us with some great garden compost.

But then we recently caught up with some friends of ours who live in Alaska and they introduced us to Vermiculture – composting taken to the extreme!  The practice of vermiculture simply uses Red Wiggler worms (thousands of them) to do your composting for you – and in a very efficient, semi-automated way!

Here’s our new set up

Yes, it’s just a modified Rubbermaid garbage can!  We cut an access door in the bottom. Caulked in evenly spaced PVC tubes to form a shelf and viola!

Start by layering a few moist newspaper and cardboard scraps on top of the shelf, then add a layer of compostable scraps, then a few hundred worms, more newspaper and cardboard, more scraps, worms and etc. until your at the top or out of worms.  As the worms eat through the mass of scraps, they form castings (poop) which is GREAT for your garden!  As they eat, you add scraps to the top.  Castings make there way to the bottom (between the PVC tubes) where you can collect it.  Castings then go directly to the garden as top dressing!  And the beauty is that the worms constantly migrate to the latest uneaten scraps (toward the top of the bin) living in a suspended environment.

We’ve learned everything we know to this point from our friend Sandy.  She has a web site packed with information you should all check out at www.wormsandstuff.com

We’ll let you know how the project progresses as time goes on.  

...Now let the castings fall where they may!

Odds and Ends… after a long winter!

Got a new coat of paint on the garden fence… and the new bunny hutch.  Still have to pain the gable end of the studio.

Restrung some of our older wind chimes.

Put up new garden ornaments.  These are Tibetan Monastery Bells we found at a really neat shop in Nevada City California during our stay there.  I love the sound they make!  Still have to hang  our Tibetan Prayer Flags but will wait for warmer/calmer weather.

Watched the Forsythia bloom and the Weeping Willow leaf out! As well as many other trees, bushes and plants around the property.  Can’t wait for the lilacs to bloom!

Ran wire for the new 30 amp service to the 5^th wheel and buried half of it so far (man is our ground hard!  Add “aerate lawn” to my list of to-do’s.

Also have hard wire service to the studio now and will soon have the garage and garden shed wired as well.  And plan to run a 20 amp off the fifth wheel pole to power the “Streamline Trailer Guest Room”.

And more re-purposing of pallets – into a fence to keep the dogs out of our laundry line area.  Came out looking pretty good after I dog eared the slats.  (Add more painting to the list.)  Tried to install some double-swing hinges for the gate, but the $17 Chinese hinges that came from Amazon.com arrived broken (and they were cheaply made to begin with!)  I’ll have to come up with something else since I can’t find the hinges I need locally!

So much to do and so little time!

Gardening Season is upon us!

And this year it holds special significance since we’ve been unable to have a garden for the last few years.  Our canning pantry is in dire need of restocking and our bodies are craving pickled beets, pickled asparagus, fried okra and fresh homegrown tomatoes!

This year we finally found a few minutes to set up our greenhouse and cover it with some poly.  If it works out (and early indications look positive) we’ll cover it in subsequent years with a more permanent hard panel system and install venting, watering, etc.

We’re still using a raised bed system in the garden and all the beds are now set up with independent irrigation spigots that run drip irrigation.  We can then alter the drip emitters or install drip tubing or small bed sprinklers based on what we put in each bed. 

I’ve already got the first row of “cool weather crops in the ground here and the irrigation is set.

This photo shows the simplicity of my system.  The incoming water usually comes from irrigation, but since it’s not on yet for the season I have it running on city water for now.  That line plugs into a timer which feeds a manifold that supplies water to each tap at the beds.  Eventually I will install a multi-zone timer so I can run water at the beds at differing lengths of time, but for now this system works pretty well.

On our menu this year:

In the ground already – carrots, beets, kale, radishes, snow peas

In starter trays in the greenhouse – tomatoes (lots of varieties), peppers (even more varieties), okra

To be planted later (May) – beans, cucumber, lettuce, pumpkins, melons and probably more!

But this year – NO ZUCCHINI!  I’m sure we’ll still end up with enough zucchini so choke the pig!

A laundry soap update!

So you’ll have to skip back few entries to see that we decided to jump in with both feet and try homemade laundry detergent that they said could be made for a fraction of the cost of regular store bought detergent.  I think I recall that we spent around $26 for our first batch.  Our experiment started on January 1, 2013… It’s now April 3.  Here’s what’s left of the first batch

Yes, it’s still about half full after 3 months.

And here’s our very exacting scientific method for tracking detergent usage – the hash mark method (which we also screwed up a bit so ignore the black marker part). 

105 loads done so far (that we remembered to mark down) and it’s only half gone!  That means we should be able to easily break the 200 load mark by the time we reach the bottom of the jar!

Doing some math, with the help of others, I figure each load is costing us right at 13 cents!  You can’t beat that!

I know that some of you are thinking that our clothes are probably not coming clean, look terrible and it smells like they’ve come out of a gym duffel bag instead of the dryer – but you’re wrong!  I honestly have only noticed two differences between this detergent and the Tide we were using before :

#1 – The homemade detergent smells great (and several people have commented as much)

#2 – The commercial detergent has been ripping us off for all these years charging what they do!

And the great news is that now that we know how to make it we can buy the ingredients as they go on sale – which will make it even cheaper per load.  I believe the popular term is – WINNING!

Around the farm update!

Well, it’s been a very productive spring so far around our little homestead.  Let’s take a walk around and check out the latest pet projects.

Isabel really wanted to do a 4-H project with bunnies this year so we visited our local bunny farm and tried to pick out a suitable candidate.  Unfortunately the bunny lady seemed to think she could unload more than one bunny on us since we looked so gullible.  She was right.  We brought home these two

One is an Angora and the other is a New Zealand Rex.  They are both adorable and like the bunny lady said, “at least they can keep each other company.”

Isabel always thought it would be really neat to keep rabbits in her room (though her parents were hesitant due to smells) and due to the fact that the thermometer outside was hovering near zero we relented and let her keep them inside.  No one ever mentioned to her, or us that rabbits are nocturnal… and apparently they really like to party in the middle of the night because for several weeks Isabel got little to no uninterrupted sleep.  Now she doesn’t think it’s so neat to have “inside” bunnies so shortly after the weather warmed she and I constructed this outside hutch which they really seem to enjoy.

Keeping the Noah strategy in mind as we did for the bunnies (always get at least two of everything) and since we are leaving Sadie, our border collie, at home during work hours we decided we needed to find her a friend as well.  As you may know, Border Collies are working dogs and if they are not working for you, they will find their own work to do – most of which is not agreeable to the owners.  Sadie’s latest project when we’re gone is to drag our laundry through the dog door and arrange it strategically around the yard (and we have a BIG yard).  Now, we do still have Lassie, the Shetland Sheep Dog, but she just celebrated her 15^th birthday and has lost some of her eyesight and most of her hearing so her main activity after getting up for the day is to lay in the middle of the floor and sleep.

We thought that we had found a great companion for Sadie one day as Lisa brought home a Border Collie from the vet clinic that someone had dropped off as a stray.  They had unsuccessfully attempted to find the owner so she had no choice to bring it home since they had no boarding facilities at the clinic (it’s a large animal operation).  The very next day a very concerned rancher came in after hearing through the grapevine that they might have his dog.  Indeed it was his dog and we were glad to reunite the two of them.

A few days later Lisa’s Andrew called saying he had a friend who had a Border Collie and that his wife was “allergic” so they needed to get rid of it and were we still looking?  Indeed we were and now we have “Pepper”

We think she’s part Border Collie, part German Sheppard, but we’re not sure.  She started life as a rescue dog so we don’t have much history.  She’s a good one though and we’ll keep her.  The cats still aren’t sure though and they’d rather us take her back to wherever she came from.  We recently taught her how to play fetch with a ball and Frisbee.  It took a while, but after watching Sadie she finally caught on.  Now she has her ball with her everywhere she goes and she’s constantly dropping it at your feet and throwing it into your lap!  Be forewarned!

On the chicken front, since we relocated our last batch of chickens before hitting the road last spring, we sat down this winter and really researched the numbers and types of chickens we’d like to raise from this year onward and shortly after placed our order for a batch of eight sexed pullets (we pick them up April 16^th).  In the past we had stuck to single breeds but found that mixing things up a bit might not be a bad idea since each differing breed will have differing dispostions, habits and behaviors.  In the past, when our Buffs went into molt, they all went together and our egg supply dried up!  By mixing breeds we’re hoping that maybe they’ll go in shifts, according to their own internal breed schedule (?) We’ll see.  Makes sense to us, so we’ll try it.  I also like different color eggs, so we picked partially based on egg color and production levels.  And of course we ordered a couple of Auracanas to really spread the egg color spectrum (Auracanas lay eggs of varying colors from brown to blue to green, and all colors in between).  We also decided to throw in a couple of Ruen ducks this year for absolutely no reason at all! (Isabel’s idea). They should be fun to watch…

 So you may be wondering why our chicken hutch is occupied with a flock of seven hens and two roosters?  Because, as Karma would have it, shortly after we placed our order for a new batch, our neighbor called and begged us to “adopt” her flock that she and her husband were now “too old” to care for.  We couldn’t tell her no…  and I’m working on plans to expand the hen house to accommodate what will soon be our flock of two roosters, two ducks and 15 hens!

Oh, and one more thing.  This is for the soon to arrive wiener pig.

It’s a “pallet sty” made from one of the few benefits Family Dollar offered Diana during her brief stay – all the pallets you want to take!  The difference here is that, unlike our other animals, this one will come as a single and transition after a few short months into our freezer for good keeping!

With that, I think the farm is just about full!  Now we’re off to the feed store – again.

Back to the Real World!

Spring has finally arrived in our small town and not a minute too soon!  We really had a cold snap this year that drained us of our otherwise suitable firewood supply and we were beginning to think we were entering the next ice age…

Before the latest update I need to step back a few steps.  After leaving Mammoth Lakes last fall we decided to stay put in Glenns Ferry for a few years so Isabel could attend high school locally.  That is working out very well for the most part, but it also means that Diana and I need to do something to earn some extra egg money! 

To that end Diana took eagerly to the job market and promptly landed three jobs in very short order.  She started working at the “Pilot Travel Center” in Mountain Home and was enjoying the job, but not the 30 minute commute each time she worked.  Shortly after starting this job, a new “Family Dollar” store moved into Glenns Ferry (You know your town is finally on the map when you get a dollar store!).  They advertised for managers and Diana applied and got the job – sort of.  They said that they would have everyone start on the same level during the build up of inventory and fixtures and that those who really applied themselves would become managers.  After a few back breaking weeks of working at the Pilot and Family Dollar Diana found out that the Family Dollar folks had actually already hired their management team from out-of-town resources and she never actually had a chance… so she walked away.  Shortly thereafter, our little small town grocery advertised for help and she promptly started working there which cut her commute time from 30 minutes to 30 seconds (the store is 1 block from the house).  The decision from there was easy.  Though she enjoyed working at the Pilot she couldn’t beat working 30 seconds from home so she left Pilot.

Meanwhile I happened to be at the high school one day and saw a flyer advertising part time school bus driver positions!  What a great job for retirement!  Not only do I get to play an active part in Isabel’s school day as I transport her and her friends to school and back and to her sporting events, I also get paid to obtain my commercial driver’s license which will be great on my work camping resume in future years!  Come to find out I was hired to fill not only the substitute driver position, but also the mechanic assistant position as well!  So now I’m tearing apart the front and rear ends of school busses, finding electrical shorts, and performing tune-ups on a regular basis. The transportation supervisor has been very patient thus far as my learning curve has been very steep in a few areas.  We also have two compressed natural gas vehicles ( 1 van and 1 bus) which we’re having a good time learning about.

As it is, Diana and I are now both working about 30 hours a week which should keep us busy as Isabel attends public high school.  It has not, however, made us too busy to get rid of our love of other hobbies!

Read on in our next posts for more updates and some new projects!

Happy New Year! Now, let's do some laundry!

Hope everyone all had a great New Year's Eve and that your 2013 is off to a great start!  We actually stayed up last night until just after midnight -- not something originally planned, but Lisa wasn't feeling well so she and Andrew didn't attend the New Year's Eve party they had planned to.  Instead, we all stayed up and played two classic games: Stratego and Risk!  Woke up to 14 degrees and active snowing this morning.

Now on to the latest great new project.  I happened along a great new (old) recipe for homemade laundry soap posted on the "One Good Thing With Jillee" Blog.  She says this particular recipe (she has several different varieties on her site) should last a full year (maybe in her house, but I don't know about ours since we do a lot of laundry!)  And the cost?  just $30.00!  We're in! If it works well, and even if it only lasts 6 months it's worth it.

So the search for ingredients is on!  After initially looking on line and pricing everything out we found that it would cost us nearly $50 for everything we need!  Far more than Jillie's $30 budget.  Our plan never called for us buying the ingredients on-line anyway, but now we were worried since we didn't know if we could find everything we needed locally.  As it turned out we need not have worried since we DID find everything in our local stores and the final bill came in at just $26.41 !  Another testament to supporting local businesses by shopping local whenever you can!

So here it is, all the ingredients ready to be mixed: Borax, Washing Soda, Fabric Softener, Baking Soda, Oxi-Clean, and Fels-Naptha.

About the only work you need to do is to grate the Fels-Naptha bars. (and the knuckle on my thumb was just about healed from a grater accident while making Christmas Cookies!)

Next, just add the ingredients to the container.  We found that it easy to mix the batch thoroughly by adding a little of each of the ingredients at a time and stirring as we went.  It Does help the overall process if you smile like our model is doing!

Here's the finished product!

And now, on to the washer.  Instructions call for 2 tablespoons per load and we just happened to have a load (or four) of laundry we could try it out on.  Early results?  So far so good!

Our plan now is to tape a sheet of paper to the laundry room cabinet so we can tally each load.  This way we can know for sure how many loads one batch makes. (Yes, we could do the math and figure it out immediately, but our tally method just seems like more fun.)  As well, we'll update how well the soap works on a variety of laundry -- and we do have a good variety with Mom, Dad, a high school athlete and a veterinary technician who works with cows and other livestock on a regular basis!

And all that entertainment and laundry for just $26.41!