Routines

I like having a cook stove in the kitchen. We have an antique glenwood, maybe an A model. It's pretty basic, fire box on the left, draft goes over the oven, down the right side, under the oven and up the back of the stove to the damper. With decent wood, it's easy to get 500 degrees F in the oven. The surface of the stove is hot enough that we use firebricks with an 2" air gap to have a warming area. I usually keep a baking stone in the oven. It's convenient, with that kind of heat sitting around in the kitchen it's easy to warm up leftovers in a skillet, make a toasted sandwich on the baking stone, etc. All that hot cast iron holds a lot of energy at the ready.

The Glennwood keeps our part of the house warm all winter. We do have a radiant floor in the bathroom, but that comes off the trap room, so it has no air flow from the kitchen. The stove doesn't run for much more than an hour untended, so things cool off by morning. But the house is comfortable for us.

It takes some doing to orchestrate it, though. Last spring, I was collecting trees and cutting wood. The tree crew for the power lines came through. Because I was available, they were more aggressive about the size trees they cut. One of the guys said he dropped his largest diameter tree yet that day. Me being there with the tractor meant they only had to get the tree down and they could drop it in the road. They would normally have to cut up the down wood. For me, they left it in the largest pieces I could take away. That made it easier for me, less handwork than picking up a lot of small pieces. It also means it's cut up the way I like it for my stove. One of my neighbors also had several trees come down. It's their second home, so they don't have much want or need for the wood and were happy to have it disappear. Between those two sources, I have at least two years worth of wood.

I like to minimally split my wood for seasoning and wait until later to split it down to kitchen wood. I am will have to handle it a couple of times to get it into the house wood shed, so keeping it in large pieces means I don't have to handle so many. In the fall I brought down this years wood to the house and stacked it in a stock panel wood shed. Now, I go out to woodshed daily and split a bunch of big chunks into kitchen wood.

We use five gallon buckets to manage wood from the shed into the kitchen. There is a rack near the stove for four buckets. The buckets catch the falling wood detritus and melting snow, etc. They are also a handy measure. Depending on the wood quality and how it's split, five to eight buckets of wood feed the stove all day.

The Glenwood has a satisfying number of controls. It loads through the eyes on top. There are two draft controls on the fire box, a lever for the diverter to send the flu gasses around the oven, a slider damper on the back of the stove and a damper in the round stovepipe above the stove. Each has it's own particular metal clank, thud, scrape or squeal. They are often uncomfortably hot to touch and I use the stove iron to hook or push them. There is an oven door temperature indicator and a flu thermometer. I can hear the draft and the tone of the fire. Standing near the stove I can feel if the fire is ebbing and the stove is cooling off. It is not unlike running an old engine that is adjusted with nudges, done by feel and confirmed by listening.

I have a routine in the morning. Up and start the fire while I make the boy something to eat. Bring in the milk cooler that skimmed over with ice overnight. Fill water buckets for the animals while the coffee steeps. Keep an eye on the stove. As the kindling warms to flu, watch for the flu to come up to temp and shift the diverter around the oven when it is drawing sufficient. Put in some small square wood that will catch easialy edge the fire up. Take empty wood buckets out to the shed on the way to the animals. Feed and water the goats. Loose the chickens and put out their grain. Bring the water buckets back to the trap room and check the fire. Put in some larger wood and set the draft for heat. Out to the woodshed, split and fill the buckets until the rack in the kitchen is full. Wash up and head out to milk. Don't forget a black coffee to make a goat latte with milk straight from the teat. Measure out the grain. Bring out Sparque who is always in a rush. Milk Heddar. Drink coffee. Relax a minute, watch the goats. Deal with any animal issues that show themselves. Put out more hay. The milk has been air chilling at these temps just hanging in the milking shed any way. Back in with the milk. Check the fire. Filter the milk into quart bottles and on into the ice bath to chill. Refill the kitchen wood buckets that got used and cut kindling for tomorrow's fire. Stop lallygagging and get to the days work.

Learn something new every day

I got a chance to try something today.

When I bought my tractor, had a chain hook welded on the backside of the backhoe bucket. The hooks on the top lip of the FEL bucket get a lot of use. I might use them for picking up a large log or a round bale or pulling small stumps or anything else heavy. The Backhoe doesn't have the same kind of capacity as the FEL. It also has a lot of leverage on the tractor. So I am not going to pickup the kind of weight with the backhoe hooks as the FEL.

I have had the tractor for a while but I haven't had much use of that hook on the backhoe bucket and I was wondering if I ever would. I moved a big blower with it once and is was kind of handy as the blower was bulky.

The power company came by recently, or at least their tree contractors. They have been cutting trees under the lines across the road from us. It has been a windfall of wood. But a lot of it was down a significant embankment. I could have cut it in place but the slope wasn't a great place to cut and it was a lot of trips to carry it out as individual peices. So I used the backhoe and a chain to lift and pull the the logs out in reasonable lengths. The boom cylinder doesn't have the right leverage to lift a log, particularly with the dipper stick extended much. But there is a lot of power to pull something to the tractor. And when it is in close to the tractor, I can get the boom vertical and the dipper can lift the log, craning it. It was a nice way to recover these logs. The weren't real big, 12 to 18 inch diameters and 10 to 12 feet long. Using the backhoe was a lot more fun than lugging them up by hand.

I definitely could have done it by hand. And it took a while to get the backhoe out of winter storage and onto the tractor. In part I want to do it this way to try out craning with the backhoe. If I don't try something when it is relatively easy, I may not have the skills or experience to do it when it is a necessity.

Underway

I spent the day cutting and splitting wood. I should have done this three months ago. I started to, but I got side tracked by the fence and then there was temporary goat fence to deal with. Then it got hot. And there's always the other things that need to be done.

I got around to it today, though. I am going to feel it day after tomorrow, too. But it's important to get it done. I've put it off too long already and I am little worried it won't be well seasoned. Less than dry wood will burn with less heat for the house as all that moisture goes up the chimney as water vapor.

I got about half of the wood down to the house. I am processing as much as possible away from the house. It's a pain to clean up all the leavings. I also feel that it attracts insects to the proximity of the house. I have a wooden house, so I avoid enticing wood parasites closer. I also went to a workshop for on farm composting. One of their suggestions was that hardwood bark is an excellent source of the fungus spores necessary for good decomposition. So I am planning to split the wood where I compost and incorporate it into my next compost pile.

Half of what we need is at the house. The rest is down and cut waiting to be split. It isn't stacked yet, but it is under cover. It is underway.

The south end of a north facing goat house

We like stock panel structures. They help us house goats and chickens, dry and protect firewood. They provide a wind break and keep their contents dry. They are easy to erect and economical on a small scale. They are easily adapted for a variety uses. They allow us to provide for our animals needs with flexibility.

Pictured above is Goat House North. It has a goat house in each end with access to seperate paddocks. There is a human section in the middle where we store a week or two's worth of hay, minerals, etc. We can feed the goats from the human side and check on things. The goat house is made from six arched 4 X 16 stock panels sitting on top of some wooden side panels that give us an extra foot of headroom. the wooden sides are attached to posts. the posts help us keep the first two feet of stock panel vertical. For this year we also added pillars at the ends and a 2x4 ridge pole to insure against heavy snow. I have been successful in the past just using bailing twine cords to keep the arch in shape. But now that we have a total of 4 goat stall houses, a green house and a woodshed made from stock panels, I decided I didn't want to have to stress about keeping the roofs clear after snow storms.

We get between 20 and 40 degrees of temperatur difference from inside the goat house to the outside, depending on how sunny it is. That often makes the difference between frozen water bucks and not. It also keeps the animals comfortable on hard winter days and nights.

So I bought this tree on Ebay

It seemed like a good idea at the time, auction for life sized Oak tree, some assembly required...



Now that I have it home, I find assembly will be more difficult than I realized. The instructions are in chinese.



Just Kidding. I am cutting up the last of the wood I think I will need for next winter's wood stack. I think this will bring us upto a little over three cords when it is all stacked. Last year we burned a little over two in the glenwood in the kitchen. I was late getting the wood in and we had to be a little more conservative than I wanted. I am trying hard to make sure we can burn what we need to next winter.



This was a pretty big tree for me to drop. Not tall, but very girthy. My saw only overlapped by about 4 inches when I cut from both sides. It's not a big tree for a professional to cut, but it was hard for me. Because I couldn't simply cut through from one side, it was a little tricky. And I needed it to fall in a narrow alley between my wifes garlic bed and some other obstacles. And it need to come down before it blew down. The tree was not in good shape and it was leaning over what will be a new fence line for the goats. Thanks to my father in law for the handmedown saw. I wouldn't want to do this with my old saw, it just wouldn't have handled it well.