Chores: Preparing Firewood For Next Year

While most folks, who are already prepared, probably have a couple years of firewood split and stacked, we are now preparing for our next winter season. Once the new Autumn begins it is too late. So get cracking!

We have so many chores to do on the farm, even without animals. On a rainy days you can work outside in the rain, do machinery maintenance and repairs, or work in the shed on other projects.

Here the field was too wet work in so we dropped a couple old dead oak trees, cut and split them up.

 Keep your chain sharp. Even this cheapy sharpener can keep you going on a long a day of sawing logs... especially after you hit one of your wedges.

Yes.. our young Paul Bunyan is smiling because he is sitting down instead of working... geesh.

You can see one tree down and the one with fire damage ready to go.

That is a lot of tree to cut up. Don't kill yourself trying to do it all at once.

sss

I split up a cart full in the shed while it was raining this day. This is from some seasoned wood though, not the fresh cuts above.

This is what you like to see. Split and stacked for immediate use.

I like to stack my firewood loose. This allows more airflow between for quicker drying. It does take more space, just something to consider.

Your gas or liquid fuel furnace requires an electric fan or pump to move air, steam or water. How will you keep your family warm when the power grid fails?

Fixing a Wagon Wheel

One of the rear wheels on my wagon has a slow leak. I figured I would find the hole, plug it and post the process of plugging a tire here. Unfortunately, there were no nails, screws or anything to be found sticking out of the tire. Although that would normally be a good thing, in this case there is a leak and the easiest ones to fix are a screw or nail hole.

I took the wheel in to the shop and poured a water and dish soap mix on the tire, around the bead and around the valve stem.

And you can now see the leaking area around the bead.


Here you can see it leaking around the valve stem.


The best fix for this is to remove the tire, replace the valve stem and use some bead lock to stop the leak during re-installation. In our case, this is not a critical high speed wagon. It rarely meets the blacktop. I waited for a warm day, and one that I would be using the wagon, and filled the tire with some fix-a-flat from the local auto parts store.

So far, it's holding.

Drilling Holes for the Hop Trellis Mainline Poles

With the field layed out and marked with flags, we we're able to drill the holes. If you're doing this sort of digging or drilling... call JULIE first. With underground directional boring these days, you can't tell if there is something down there. In some cases, it's not even supposed to be there but you won't know unless you hit it or JULIE finds it.

A Bobcat skid-steer with large diameter auger bit here. These make short work of digging holes.

Here nearly all the holes are complete. It looks like a prairie dog ranch.

That's a 4-5' deep hole. You wouldn't want to step into that.

It was a long cold day and with equipment failures we weren't able to complete all the holes; we're just fifteen short. Next we'll be relocating, cleaning the underground contact portion and coating them with a copper sulfate treatment.

Laying Out the Hopyard

We used a long tape, a long string and a lot of orange and white flags to layout the position of our poles, end anchors and fencing.

At 15 rows by 300+ feet each, this is quite an area to layout.

Next we'll moving the poles and getting them prepped for underground contact.

Best Product of the Month 12-12

Oh yes, it is a life saver.

It's not the grill, it is the aluminum foil. In this case it allowed me to turn a grill into a smoker on Christmas day. I smoked a 13 pound turkey on this grill at 300 degrees. Without the foil I couldn't have kept the tempature above 270 with all the burners on high. It didn't help that the outside temp was in the twenty's. With the foil I used the far right burner on low.

Thanks Aluminum Foil!

Tamarack Poles

A semi truckload of tamarack poles for the hop trellis. Our friend Randy up at Wildland Hops in Wisconsin sent a few poles down to get us started.. oh my.

Yeah, it was a bigger truck than I thought it would be.

 

Now those are going to leave a mark.

Over the Winter we'll be setting those poles in a grid out in the field. The first hopyard will take up just over an acre.

Stay tuned or sign up for automatic update to see this trellis go up!

Worst Product of the Month 11-12

Thats right. The dreaded measuring cup from Walmart.

Only use this to measure dry stuff. If you try to pour a liquid out of it, it will dribble down the measuring cup and onto your counter or whatever you happen to be holding it over at the time.

Get your frustration device here.
Anchor Hocking 4-cup Decorated Glass Measuring Cup

That's not even my review.. lol.

P.O.S.