Ah, to be in NW Pennsylvania, in the Springtime...with goats!

Hello!

It’s spring, and everything is bursting with life, kind of. It’s actually been very cold and wet and here we are a few weeks before when the gardens are supposed to go in, and I haven’t planted most of the stuff that says “plant in spring, as soon as you can work the soil”. The soil has been constantly wet, and with the high content of clay we have in the soil, it’s better not to touch it. I did rent a rototiller for a day and got the main gardens turned over. I wanted to break up some sod to add a wildflower patch, but it rained the second day I had the tiller and that was that.

I like having the truck, because I never would have been able to just on a whim decide to throw a tiller in the back of the car. Also, we bought a load of bulk mulch which was so cheap it was practically free, but again with the car, you need prebagged and they won’t just dump a yard of topsoil in the back of the car with a front loader.


A properly concealed garden border

We had just enough nice weather to complete a new garden project. When we moved in, there was this decorative rail fence right next to the driveway. There were some rose bushes and a few flowers there, but mostly it had been overrun with some angelica that had been used as some kind of ground cover. I’ve been fighting with that darn stuff, but also the garden was too close to the drive, and gravel was wandering in and and topsoil was wandering out. I’m fairly shy of garden edging, because I’ve seen too many gardens where the edging was not place into the ground deeply enough and was there, just flopping around on the surface. I gave in, though and we placed some garden edging around what we now call the “hitching post” to keep it straight from the snake rail fence that we put in on the other side of the yard. A lot of the plants, like tulips and daffodils were kept in place. Last year, I reduced the among of angelica and pulled up a lot of roots, but I need to get going on that. So, right now, we have a mix of mostly bulbs and the garden is probably going to keeps it’s role as an overflow for any annuals that don’t fit in with the strictly annual garden at the side of the house.

My plants are doing quite terribly. The cold weather kept them indoors much longer than usual, and when I finally got the greenhouse pitched, we of course had a patch of the only warm weather we’ve had since last September. We had 80 and 90 degree temperatures and high winds which caused the plants to tip over because they were all spindly and weak from not enough light inside, and then the sun baked them. The biggest loss was some red onion plants which ha been damping off and the polygonum which luckily had enough seeds in the pan that had not sprouted that have sprouted since then that I will have plenty to dress up the rail fence garden with this year.

Since then, the weather has been quite awful. Cold and windy. Last Saturday my greenhouse actually blew down with a lot of plants inside. Only a few things were a total loss, but some of the peppers were scrambled and the cabbages that I replanted after the hot weather killed them were also smashed. Ah well, maybe this fall. I need a permanent green house, but I’ll have to get it someone impractical, possibly in the same area we are clearing for the orchard, mostly because I don’t want to block the view from the upper yard.

We’ve had an ongoing battle with some kind of upper respiratory infection with our cats this year. The poor things are so inbred they don’t have good immune systems and the four new kittens are all suffering. One of last year’s cats died, but everyone else seems to be suffering from the snuffles and that’s it, except one of our house cats Boots who has been sick off and on. But the puppies are healthy and big and getting better behaved all the time. My sister swears little Spencer is my old dog Zora reincarnated, but think that Weimaraners have a distinctive personality, and even though he’s a mix he has that great prance and that not so great constant hypervigilant thing going on where every noise is something he needs to either chase after or stare at, poor little guy.




We also got the goats sheared, which is always a task. Here’s Matty with his new short coat. He's a little knicked up, but the spots on him are red kote and not blood, which is like industrial strength Bactine plus dye for livestock. The goats are usually pretty easy to take care of except for shearing. They weigh about 120 pounds apiece and they do not want to get sheared. My sister’s husband’s cousins just got some goats and asked if I would shear them, and I said I would loan them the shears and cheerlead. I talk to goat people all the time, and they make it seem like shearing angoras is not a big deal, but I’ve also discovered that my goats are a smidge bigger than average. I have runty cats and giant goats.



A lot of people get into goats kind of by accident. I know that we did. The idea was to get some to eat down the brush in our friend’s horse pasture. You’d need a lot of goats to eat down that much brush, though, and the goats like landscaping a lot better. They are little escape artists, too. Mostly you just have to feed them, but they also need to have their hooves trimmed, ideally about once a month. Unlike horses, goat hooves can be done without calling in a professional. you can even do them with a good pair of garden trimmers, though we also keep a set of hoof nippers.

if a goat’s toes get too long, the stress on their joints can give them arthritis You can also control foot problems by giving the goats some rocks to stand on an walk on in the pasture to grind down the hooves a little. Other than catching and holding the goats down, the hoof trimming is not that much more than trimming your own toenails.


Around here, it’s so wet the goats constantly battle hoof rot. In the case of hoof rot, trim away as much of the rotten and damaged hoof as possible, even to the point where the hoof may start to bleed. There are a lot of hoof rot products on the market, you just need something with a drying agent and a little antiseptic. The stuff we use comes in a bottle with a little spout you can shoot right up into the hoof. If possible keep the goat in a dry, clear area for a while after treating the foot, and do it daily until there’s improvement. After the foot is trimmed back, I usually give the goats sa snack on the driveway and just shoot hoof rot treatment on their feet while they’re standing around and don’t bother to try and throw them down.

Goats are nice little creatures with lots of personality. They can do some damage to your favorite trees and flowers and the plants in your garden and your house plants and your car. they also live a long time, about 10-15 years. I would much rather someone get a cat or dog on a whim than a goat because of the difficulty of getting hooved animal rescue, but I do like the goats, and they are a great pets because they are low maintenance in the main and getting an ill advised goat is loads better than getting an ill advised horse!

Come on, Spring!

Spring is coming slowly to Northwestern PA this year. Usually, there are a few days between February and April that warm up into the 60’s and 70’s, but that has not really happened this year. It has been wet and cold.

Surprisingly, the damage from the winter has not been too great, considering we had almost two feet of snow the week before Halloween. I had some carrots which ended up over wintering in the garden. Most of them were not really storage carrots so they were no good, but some Bolero carrots went just fine with a pot roast just a couple weeks ago. I’m planting those for sure again. Also, I never got my strawberries mulched, and it seems they are not going to make it this year. that is also fine, because I never like the location they were in. they were a permanent feature of my lower vegetable garden that had started on the edge but had somehow gotten into the middle after a couple garden expansions. My neighbors are nice kids, but they use herbicide between the little row of arborvitae they have planted as a property line marker, and my strawberries suffered mightily from deformations cause by herbicide blow off. Not sorry to see them go, though I still have not decided where a new strawberry patch should be placed.

Seed starting season is here. I have a good selection of really fun sounding plants this year. I ordered from a lot of different sources. One of the seed companies I order from sent the order really late along with a note of apology. It seems they needed to hire a bunch more people because so many people were ordering garden seeds this year. I feel like my orders were really conservative, actually, about equivalent to last year, though I also ordered a fancy potted plant which was a splurge. I’m working full time. I should have a fancy dwarf pomegranate, right?

Right now, all I have started is my onion plants and some slow to germinate herbs and flowers. I’ve never started onion plants indoors before, but that is how they sell them at the farm coop, in big clumps of pre started plants. You can get sets, too of just really normal types of plants, but for specialty things like sweet onions, they sell plants. My onion plants are for red onions which are also supposedly good storage onions. I am a little tired of never having red onions for summer salads, so this is plan C 2.0.

We are getting into some landscaping plans this year. I have a raised bed I’ve never been happy about, and this is the year it gets new sides, a fresh load of topsoil and compost and hopefully a new lease on life. Right now, it’s full of stove ash, and the cats have been using it as a littler box. Except for the one kitten my old dog Zora chomped, we still have all of last year’s kittens. The girls Bili and Boots have been moved into the house and spayed. Our regular vet has turned out to be a great advocate of kitties and is willing to accept the wild cats from the garage for spaying a neutering as long as we can get them in. One of the cats has already been spayed. We kept it in the house right after the surgery to keep it clean, but it appears to be a combination of very scared and very stupid, and hasn’t gone back outside yet. I’ll be going downstairs in the middle of the night to take care of the fire and I’ll see it crawl up into the ceiling of the semi finished basement room or it will fall out of a closet when I go to hang up clothes. We keep leaving the basement door open for it, but no luck.

Speaking of pets, I took the plunge after saving up money all winter for another Weimarnaner puppy. I had a couple of kennel visits lined up and more cash than I needed to get my truck last year. By chance, I was at the bank and one of the neighbor girls who just moved to a house down the road from me mentioned she was getting a puppy, and I said I wanted a puppy, and the other bank lady said her son just got puppies, and I said I wanted a Weimaraner, and she said, these were Weims, at least their mom was, and there were a lot of them, and they were cute.

So a couple days later, I went down to see some half Weimaraner and half chocolate lab puppies. Interestingly enough, some of them were female and dark brown but most of them were black with a little really dark brown on the ears and male. One of the little brown females was still there and, she was really pretty. According the the lady we got them from, the last of the little brown females was actually going to some relatives in Texas.

One of the males, a kind of chunky labby-looking boy crawled right into my mom’s arms the second she knelt down by the puppies, so I had to get that one for sure. Then, I picked the prettiest one I could find who looked most like a Weimaraner despite being almost black! That was also a male, so I’ve spent the last month and a half having my house torn up and laughing my rear end off at these crazy boys!



Spencer is the little goofball on the left, and Bruce is the handsome “angel” on the right!
I wish one as the good one and one was the bad one, but mostly, they just take turns! It’s good having young dogs again! I actually use my back yard now to make the dogs run around. I barely walked back there for months!

Other than puppies, not a lot going on right now. We went to the outdoor show up in Erie a few weeks ago, and that was nice. you can always visit with land management people, but I missed the retriever demonstrations. My mom chatted up a guy who sells deer plot who recommended clover and chicory as a good seed for our wet back field. I found yet another taxidermy person, but this time we were actually able to get my uncle’s tiny bear skin to him. I personally love fur and would probably trap or shoot something for fur except it grosses out my mom, so I only get to indulge myself at things like outdoor shows or fur trapper re-enactors. There’s this newer arts festival they’ve had out in Russell the last few years which I consider like a “man” craft show with lots of furs and blacksmithing and things like that. Possibly an idea for a future entry!

Also, I can’t keep my mouth shut about a couple of issues in the news I’ve seen recently. One was under the headline: “Alternative energy quest threatens birds” and was about how domestic energy production like growing crops for fuel and windfarms threaten birds’ lives and habitats. Lumping in with this, bafflingly, was mountaintop removal coal mining. Now, logically, you can look at a toll of birds randomly hitting obstructions at wind farms, or habitat displacement due to more corn farming for ethanol as a change that will have a toll on birds, but none of these could possibly compare to the complete destruction of mountaintops in WV and KY and the filling in of miles of streams in the valleys in terms of habitat loss. And when did coal mining become alternative energy anyway? I’m not against even strip mining in a lot of cases. You can fix that once you get the coal off the top layer, but the tops of mountains can’t be put be back on and no one but no one is going to do the work to restore the streams once they’ve been filled in. And I know the Obama administration’s EPA has recently put on hold a lot of these permits to do his mountaintop mining, but it was also the Obama administration’s EPA that grouped mountaintop removal mining with wind farming as a threat to habitat.

From the EPA to the FDA: There is no stopping a proposal that has been floating around the FDA and the Agriculture department to have all farm animals marked with microchips and RFD tags. People who keep livestock, eventually at any scale, ae going to be required to report on the location and condition of the livestock using electronic monitoring and questionnaires on the internet. All of this is going to be done at the owners’ expense, which will be considerable for small “homestead” type farmers and basically only benefits big producers. The idea is the keep the food supply safer by tracking livestock from the farm to the slaughterhouse. It’s of course vastly counter-intuitive since most of the contamination takes place in the slaughter house after the individually monitored animals have been mixed with hundreds if not thousands of others. This is basically expensive window dressing to relieve factory farms of liability for who knows what, but it is also looking to add significant costs in money and time to small farmers who possibly only produce meat for their own consumption.

No time today for links to either of these issues, but google both of them, and you can see that it is real, AP news type outlets which are reporting on these and not just conspiracy theory people, sitting in little houses, in the middle of nowhere, trying to decide how many tomato plants to start this year because we’re getting lulled into sheep-like complacency by government agencies which dictate the sugar content of processed food to guarantee a certain amount of sleepiness, obesity, and disease in an increasingly failing effort to distract and occupy the rich, vital energy of our people!

The Holiday Season Begins, and I Make My Own Soap (Kind of)

Hi!

It is still snowing!. We had a little break over Halloween, but since then, we have had a few major snow storms. My adopted hometown of Corry, PA actually made it onto the Erie news as a trivia question a couple of days before thanksgiving in a kind of “Guess How Much Snow They Got?” capacity. The answer then was 58 inches, but we’ve piled on a little more since then. We've had a bit of a melting period, however, where a lot of the icicles broke off the house and the snow has settled a little so that it’s about knee deep instead of waist deep. I’ve been pretty annoyed lately with the whole weather service which will predict snow when we don’t get any and also an inch to a coating when it will turn around and give us half a foot. Today is the first day of deer season, and it is an unofficial holiday. The road is covered with snow, and it was just ice yesterday, but the only answer for it is slow down and try to stay on, since the guys who run the plows are all out hunting today. Sounds like a war zone out there.

One more thing about the weather and then I’ll go on to the next thing I’ll ramble about. The almanac predicts heavy snows in the northeast the 12th through the 15th of this month. I’m going to hold them to it!

I did Black Friday shopping this year in Erie, even going into Walmart. (I didn’t buy anything. I just carried stuff for my sister.) I kept hearing a lot of horror stories about how bad it would be, and I guess in other places, there were deaths and injuries from people trampling to get inside the store, but in Erie, it was just crowded. I recently went to a “Twilight” book and movie party at the bookstore there, too, with a younger cousin, and my aunt ( her mother) was not keen on going because she thought it would be a lot of shrieking. In fact, it was mostly giggling. We’re from Northwestern PA, and we are kind of stand-offish. We want the cheap DVD players and laptops, but it’s just not nice to bump into other people to get them.

Getting down to brass tacks, here is another edition of “I Try It”.

Everytime I go through my recycling, I’ve been noticing the greatest portion of my junk is those stupid plastic containers that some genius thinks that cat food should come in now and laundry soap bottles. I can change brands of cat food and if I fee the need for a plastic container I can buy or reuse one I already have, but I was pretty much stuck with laundry soap. I keep trying to use powder or even those little dissolvable tablets that I think come from Amway, but powdered soap just doesn’t rinse out well enough, and underclothes are enough of a bother already without added itching factors.

People have tried to overcome this whole laundry soap thing for a while now. they have double concentrated soap which is an okay idea. I remember back in the ‘80’s for a little while you could get little super concentrated things of soap that you dumped into your old bottles and mixed up with more water. That didn’t last too long, but it was a good idea. I’ve seen little containers of homemade laundry soap for sale at the Amish store, but it was powder based and also had bluing in it, which I’ve heard of but never actually used. Which come to think of it, is probably why most commercial laundry soap is colored blue even though the color really does nothing.

In a recent issue of Countryside magazine, however, I noticed this part at the beginning where the readers write in with questions and tips a recipe for homemade laundry soap. I tried it because I actually had all the ingredients on hand anyway.

The recipe:

1/3 bar of Fels-naphtha soap, grated
1/2 C. washing soda (not baking soda, though it is made by Arm and Hammer)
1/2 C. Borax
1 Tblsp. essential oil (optional)
2 gallon jugs (vinegar jugs)

How to do it:

Grate soap into a large pan with 6 cups of water, heat until the soap melts. Add the soda and the Borax and the scent. Stir to dissolve, heat another 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Take of the heat, let it sit another 5 minutes. Divide this in half into each of the gallon jugs. Fill the jugs halfway with plain hot water. Shake and then fill to the top. Let the jugs set overnight, and it will have a gelly consistency, and you can use 1/2 to 2/3 cup per load, letting the water fill up the machine with the soap in it first and then adding the clothes. Add 1/2 C. vinegar for fabric softener.

Now, this is basically the information contained in the original rec ipe. Shopping tips: Fels-Naphtha soap is actually pretty easy to find. You can keep it in bar from and rub it on as a stain remover. The book that I read called “Little Heathens” about little kids growing up in the Depression describes wash night where the grandmother grated up a whole bar of Fels-Naphtha soap and put it with water in the bottom of the hand crank washer. First they would do sheets and then underclothes and then basically work their way out from nicest to dirties so that everything was washed in the same water, but barn clothes were washed last and needed least to be clean. I’m guessing the formula of the soap was different back then because of laws about phosphates and things like that, but it’s still a nice, retro cleaning experience. Likewise, washing soda and Borax are usually available in the soap and cleaning sections of most grocery stores even if you haven’t noticed them before.

I have vinegar bottles on hand because when I’m ambitions about making yarn, I do some dying. I’d guess with all the hot water that water or milk jugs would not be p to the task, but old bottles from commercial soap are. And you definitely need a funnel. I also invested a dollar on a separate grater so i wasn’t mixing food and soap, though I did just use one of my junkier pots and made sure I had all the soap rinsed off it really well. Essential oils can get expensive, and I chose orange, because it was cheap, but a person who really wants to personalize everything may love a project like this because you can create your own customized laundry scents. it also smells just fine with no scent.

But how does it work?

I’d say, not bad. Things seem to come clean with no problem. The least successful washing I’ve done with the soap has been a thermal undershirt I had to wash a couple of times after I swept the chimney in it, and even after I bleached it, it didn’t really come clean. Soot is more like grease than it is like dirt. The homemade soap is also a lot cheaper than buying soap. A bar of Fels-naptha costs about $2, washing soda about $2.50 and Borax about $3. That is plenty of ingredients for three batches of detergent, that’s six gallons for about $10. You don’t need scent but if you want it that adds about a dollar a batch in costs. One time purchases include a grater and a funnel.

I have actually made a second batch of soap and plan to keep on using it. Please let me note that this was mostly because I hated having soap bottles clog up my recycling sorting place in the garage and not because I think there is some kind of imminent threat based on the recent elections where Barack Obama is going to take away soap. I talk to all kinds, and one of the things I’ve noticed is people who didn’t like him during the election are now afraid that he is going to take away _____ (fill in the blank) with guns, coal, gas, cars, money, God, etc.

Speaking of gas, cars, and money, I had a recent rather heated discussion with an individual at my place of employment where people were just shooting the breeze and someone mentioned using biodiesel. I reminded them that they were still responsible for paying fuel taxes if they were using the roads, that there were taxed and untaxed uses for fuels, and that more than a few people who were cooking up biodiesel or who had converted their vehicles to run on used cooking oil were finding themselves with tax bills because they had not been using their vehicles for untaxed purposes. This particular person (who is a lazy SOB and can’t be bothered to brush his teeth judging by their condition, let alone whip a mini biodiesel laboratory in the garage) went absolutely ballistic, insisting that sales tax paid on cooking oil was tax enough. As if someone would rush out and pay $6.50 a gallon for vegetable oil to get out of paying for gas. Which just goes to show you the average person will argue til they’re blue in the face about nothing they know anything about. Which just goes to show you that it’s a lot easier to talk than it is to go do stuff, and as writing is akin to talking, I’ve done enough timewasting today, and I’m off to do something!

Saying Goodbye to Fall

Hi!

It’s been while since I did this, and of course a million things have happened that I could go on and on about. I’m still cleaning up the tail end of my gardens. The other day, I fenced in some of my landscaping trees and bushes to avoid their being eaten to death by bunny rabbits, which almost happened the first year I had them because I thought the rabbits would not be so bold as to come up into the year area and snack on the tree. I was wrong, and I did not exactly lose my fancy Siberian quince bush, but I lost a good portion of it. Luckily, the rabbits went in on top of the deep snow and instead of ringing it at the base, they got the top portion of the tree instead. The rest has been recovering nicely for a couple of seasons now, but I’m still putting wire fence around it this year.

My berry bushes got a little neglected this year. We had a lot of blackberries, but they mostly went to snacking and a lot of them didn’t get picked. The rule of thumb on all kinds of blackberries and raspberries is to cut the spent canes as soon as they bear. I’m not sure if I’m repeating myself about berry bushes, but if I am, bear with me.

Trailing berries like blackberries and raspberries grow in a two year cycle. The first year, the canes are called “primocanes”, and they sprout and grow over the summer. The second year canes I just refer to as the fruiting canes, because I can never remember what they called. I know it’s not “fruitocanes”, though. When the canes bear fruit and are done, they die off. It is very important to trim off the spent canes and dispose of them. “Garden Magic” says by burning. Don’t put them in the compost. Berries are too susceptible to disease, and you should not let spent canes and fruit lay in the patch and decay.

The one exception to this rule is the “everbearing” varieties of raspberries. An everbearing raspberry actually gets a small crop of fruits on the tips of the first year canes, right up until the frost. A lot of books about berries will tell you to plant a patch of traditional berries and a patch of everbearers. Use the traditionals for your summer berries and the everbearers for year fall crop, lop off the canes as soon as they both bear. I think it is sufficient to just trim the tips of the everbearing first year canes in the fall, though. The spent tips should still be burned, but the middle and lower parts of the canes will bear fruit in the summer. I would guess that the same holds true for ever bearing raspberries as it does for strawberries. You get the fruit at two different times, but all added together, the total amount of the harvest is about equivalent to the same as you would get with a traditional plant that bears all at one time.

In the fall, when I trim off the spent blackberry canes, I occasionally notice a few of the new canes that have a lot of thick, bunched up leaves:



Last fall, there were quite a few of these. I trimmed off most of them and experimentally left a few. This year, I have been very aggressive with them, however, since I did find orange rust on some of the canes. The only thing you can do for orange rust is chop out the effected berries and burn them. The crinkly leaf problem is like one of those corollaries: not every plant with crinkly leaves got orange rust, but every plant with orange rust had crinkly leaves. I’m not sure whether the leaves area preliminary of orange rust or the rust took advantage of a weakened plant that had another problem, but pruning back plants is kind of like deciding if you want to have a man around. If you’re not sure, the answer is probably no.

There are still a few more berry patches n the lower part of the yard I think I can fence in. Why am I just sitting inside and typing on the computer when there is all this yard work to be done? Because we are in the midst of our second major lake effect storm of the year. I think the weather has arranged itself to be extra terrible since I have to drive out to Jamestown for work now. This is a picture from our first major storm of the year, which was actually a few days before Halloween:



I have fooled the weather, however, since the first thing I did when I had money from my job was not shop for clothes or buy videogames or even sign up for broadband by satellite internet. I went a got a big truck. With big mud tires. Which of course my mother drives every day while I get stuck in the snow. But, one of these days, I’m going to read the weather report before heading off into the dark, snowy night to listen to people from Hawaii complain that their broadband internet is not broadbandy enough (oh, boy is this definitely not the kind of job that you take home with you and worry that you did well enough!), and I’ll be able to use the truck to get home and actually make it up the hill. It just hasn’t happened yet. Though that night I spent in the parking lot at the public library wasn’t too terrible, considering. And I had a rental car with these crazy performance tires on it that were absolutely impossible on anything but dry road. Because I’ve already hit a deer this year and had my car in the shop for a couple of weeks. I literally have not had to ever do the radiator flush and fill winterizing thing on that car, because the front end has been bashed out by deer twice now.

The same week, we got snowed in for the first time, I also had to have my dog Zora put to sleep. I’ve had her for more than 12 years, which is impossibly old for a Weimaraner. I almost lost her about a year and a half ago when she had a horrible hepatitis. As a younger dog, she was just hell on wheels crazy and lots of fun, too. Since she was about seven, she mellowed out and really got (for her) affectionate and cuddly. In the last few months, she had a little neuropathy in her feet and couldn’t hear very much, but she still went for walks with my mother for miles just about every day. She must have had a stroke overnight, because she was having trouble standing up, and that’s why we decided to call it a day, but even the day before, she was barking and hopping around and picking up my yarn and throwing it at me, so I can’t really complain about that. I’m looking to get one or two Weimaraner puppies to take her place. Right now, some of the garage cats have moved into the house, and I’m about ready to throw them back out again.

I took this picture about a week before Halloween which is when we had to take her to the vet:



I know all about the whole don’t buy from pet stores or breeders, get shelter dogs, they’re just fine thing, but I’m a little shallow about these things, and I want a pretty dog, not some goofy looking stray. Weimaraners are the prettiest dogs, and Zora was the prettiest of the pretty, and someone else can have a bug eyed hound-pit bull-jack russel mix that came to us here at the shelter because it ran away from home and was too dumb to find its way back, thank you very much. I’m getting the one that looks nice and was bred by insane perfectionist Germans to be the all around best dog in the field there is. Weimaraners are miles smarter than labs. They have better stamina, they point and retrieve, and they are physically sounder. Labs are better in the cold, but that is the one advantage. And labs are just not as pretty.

Beyond that, though, I’m going to have to do a couple entries here about using over the counter remedies and first aid tricks for dogs, since, between Zora and her naughty sister Peaches (who was a very pretty yellow lab but so phenomonally stupid she’s now legendary) who ran away into a summer’s night last year never to be seen again, I have a whole arsenal of things to do that can reduce trips to the vet for any number of injuries and incidents.

On a happier note, it is getting around toward holiday time again. Every year, I always come up with whatever the trendy crafty present is and make a ton of them for my nieces and younger cousins. A couple years ago it was those tie ended fleece blankets. I made a pile of those, they were really fun. This year, it is felted “Lucy bags” from “Two Old Bags” yarn patterns. Those are those bit, round purses with a short strap that flips over the long strap and holds it closed. I bought the paper pattern from a local yarn shop, but I know they have a web site, too. Hopefully, the next time I sit down a the computer to type mindlessly, I will have some examples. One is done but not felted, the other, I just started.
Speaking of which, Martha Stewart is on, and I’m going to knit and watch Martha! What else is there to do on a snowy day?

We Can Do It! Don't Get Scared! (How did I become the cheerleader for optimism?)

Hi!

Okay. The “they says” are taking over. I know that people are stressed and everything because of the stock market, etc. But look at the short term. Gas is down. That means food will go down. And is anyone really not going to Christmas shop? Really? My sister and I have been roiling our hands waiting for the Black Friday ads to come out on this special website she goes to where they post all the flyers as soon as they go to press. Except no one’s posting them this year! I know, I know. Buy Nothing Day and all that. I have Buy Nothing Year, and I actually like to shop the day after Thanksgiving. It’s like a giant party. With DVD’s for $3.00 that usually cost $20.

Anyway, I keep hearing all this horrible stuff. No one will be able to get a loan. No one has cash to get paid. Blah, blah, blah. Did anyone really not get a pay check last week because there was no cash? I think we would have heard more than just the random “they says” about it. The whole thing reminds me of this story that we read in 4th grade about the Depression. (I know it was 4th grade, because that was my favorite year of school. my teacher gave me a pile of her textbook samples and a couple reading books from the high school side of the building and told me to finish them by the end of the year. It was the last year I learned anything in school. She also gave me great books to read like the ones about the little kids who smuggled the treasury of their country out from under the Nazis buy sledding the gold bars one by one down the hill to the port. That was a great one.)

The gist of it was a guy had a hotdog stand and was doing good business and went out and worked hard all day and sold all he could get. When he went to expand and maybe hire someone to run another stand, all he heard was about how there was a Depression, and he shouldn’t spend money. So he didn’t expand his business and he cut back on what he bought to sell, and he didn’t go out to work as much, because there was this Depression, so he didn’t make as much and wouldn’t you know it, the Depression ruined his business. The moral of the story being, don’t believe the “they says” until you see if for yourself. Don’t be reckless or anything, but if you’ve got a good thing going, go with it until you see something different.

I have been preparing for the “next Great Depression” since I was about eight. It’s not weird. I grew up with stores about how my grandfather only got an orange for Christmas and had to go and live in a CCC camp in Pittsburgh so he could send money home to his mother. He served stateside in the war, so he didn’t have any WWII stories he could repeat over and over. And, again, most of my teachers in elementary school were kids during the Depression, so they had some really harrowing “when I was your age” stories. At least they sounded awful to a seven year old.

Needless to say, student loans have ruined my finances, have for years, and I was able to finance an older truck at a good interest rate and, contrary to what the TV news was saying this morning, I was also able to finance a warranty plan for it. You don’t need $3100. You don’t need a 700 credit score. Yes, I had to join a credit union. It was one extra piece of paper I signed when I picked up the truck. If I’d listened to the “they says” I would have been paying high rates at a U-Pay-Here or I would have been roped into buying a vehicle that cost two or three times as much as the one I ended up with. I am not Miss Optimism. But Plan A worked this time, and if it hadn’t? That’s why there’s 26 whole letters in that alphabet.

Speaking of which, about Plan M came through on that goat shed, and it’s done. Except for a door. Here is my mom with her fantastic architectural creation. (And some appreciative goats who will not have frost on their furry behinds this year!)




But, in response to the “they says” I’m going to have a little episode of what I call “They Say if You ....” I have a couple of these up my sleeve, so I’ll label this one:

Experiment #1: They say you can make your own vanilla, and it’s cheaper than in the store.

Yes, it’s true. Kind of. If you use a lot of vanilla, which I do.

How to do it:

1. Plan ahead. Save an old vanilla bottle. My mom threw mine away, so I actually bought an empty bottle at the Whole Foods Co-op. It also takes about 6 weeks to get started, so if you expect to have homemade vanilla for holiday baking, START NOW.

2. Get 2 (or so) vanilla beans, some vodka, and a pint jar. Later, you’ll need a funnel and a coffee filter. The vodka should be okay, nothing too expensive.

3. Slice the vanilla beans from end to end. Stuff them in the jar. Fill the jar with vodka. Shake.

4. Put the jar in a dark place. A cupboard, closet or pantry should be fine. Give it a shake every few days. After about a month or so, you should have vanilla-y vodka in the jar that you can use in recipes like normal vanilla.

5. Line the funnel with the coffee filter and pour the liquid through so you don’t get beans and seeds in the finished product.

6. When you end up with more vodka than vanilla, fish out the beans, and add fresh beans.

Is it cheaper? One ounce of fair to middlin brand name vanilla extract costs about $7.00. To get set up with vodka, vanilla, and a funnel, it’s about $15-20. I buy the beans in bulk for a couple of bucks a piece. If you don’t have bulk vanilla available they can be a lot more, though the expensive ones that come sealed in glass taste better and last longer. You get a lot more than an ounce when you make your own, though. I run through about one bottle of vodka every six months. I bake everything at home, and I also make a lot of vanilla flavored frosting for cakes. I definitely save money. Tastewise, they are about comparable if it’s real vanilla extract and not imitation. But if you’re short on cash and all you can get is imitation vanilla, you’re better off using that than nothing or not baking at all.

There are a ton of things out there that are like this, and I’ll definitely be trying some more “You can make your own ___” experiments in the future. But on this one, “they” are right!

Wood Burning Heat, Pt. 2

Hi!

Here’s part two of my ongoing story about wood heat. Which I am writing as I should be actually moving a load of wood into the house. I’m sure the gorgeous fall weather is not going to hold. and there’s the wood, just sitting there!

If you’re going to burn wood and not pellets, the whole woodburning heat scene gets a little complicated. You can go about getting wood a lot of different ways. You can buy loads of just long logs that you cut and split yourself which have to be delivered on a log truck. You can buy precut and split wood. You can get “slabwood” which is basically the leavings from when sawmills square off the trees they are cutting for boards. Again. the slab can come in long planks or cut. Ideally, you can be cutting firewood all the time from your own wood lot or one closeby where you live where you have permission to cut downed trees.

There are a few considerations when deciding where you’re going to get your wood, the most important being, will it burn right? Do not use evergreen wood in your wood burning stove. The wood is full of pitch and sap, and that will gum up your stove and chimney when it burns. A gummy, flammable chimney is a very bad thing. You can get hemlock slabwood a lot of places around here because it’s a good rough framing wood (our new goat shed -ha! ha! We did get something done around here! - is made of rough sawed hemlock) but I asked my uncle who is my mentor on all things wood, and he said don’t burn hemlock slab.

The next consideration is if the wood is dry enough to burn. Ever since we’ve started with the wood heat, and we’re going into our fifth winter now, we’ve burned trees from summer blowdowns about three year s previously. We live in a wooded area, there is at least one bad windstorm a year, and the big trees that com down during those storms are excellent firewood after they are on the ground a couple of years. My uncle does maintenance on a wood lot for his neighbor who is a retired forester, and they get along really well. You would never guess that the woods around the house over there were actually really heavily utilized, providing heat for about five different households. All he does though is cleans up down trees and trees that are unhealthy or hanging.

The wood had to be properly seasoned for a couple of good reasons. Wet wood doesn’t burn as hot, and isn’t as efficient. Also, the greener the wood it, the more creosote will build up in your chimney. Creosote, as my stove man has told me many the time, is the solid form of natural gas. It’s like a shiney, bubbly, glassy layer that builds up in the stove pipe if you’re burning green wood at lower temperatures, and it is the reason that chimneys catch fire. Even a little creosote burning can make a greasy, tarry buildup in the chimney that can never really be scraped off. I’m not sure if the creosote buildup have something to do with greener woods just never reaching the temperature of burn they need to be at or the chemical combination of the wood before it has aged, but firewood needs to be seasoned.

If you can feel a dampness in a newly split piece of wood or notice a big color difference between the inner core of the wood and the outer layers, the wood could be dryer and should be set aside long enough to dry out better. Seasoned wood can have been rained on, and still burn fine, but you need to make sure the moisture is dampness because of rain or dew and not “tree juice.”

Guessing how much wood you need is tricky and kind of scary if you are going to rely on wood heat entirely. it’s one of those things that you really can’t have too much of, though. If you’re cutting from your own wood lot, just keep cutting. It won’t hurt to have like a year’s supply of wood on hand just in case something happens, and that way you’ll never have to worry about a lack of cut, seasoned wood. My grandfather was a poor planner when it came to wood, and tended to get enough wood to last right up into the middle of winter. My poor mother and uncle were traumatized as children having to scrape snow off logs and get them in the house so they could get some heat. We’ve never really hit the right formula for getting a whole winter’s worth of wood yet. Our old stove ate wood so much that even twelve pickup truck loads was not enough. With our new stove, I’m thinking ten will be plenty, but of course I only got eight last year and ran out in March.

When you buy wood, it is generally measured by the “cord” which is an even stack of split wood 4’ wide by 4’ tall by 8’ long or 128 cubit feet. A “face cord” is a little more subjective: 4’ tall by 8’ long but only as deep as the individual pieces of wood, which brings me to a really important point:

You need to know what size wood fits in your stove.

If you have a door, the wood needs to fit in. If you have an open fireplace, the wood can’t just stick in kitty corner or it could fall back out. Find out what size wood your stove should burn and made a “template” either a stick or a dowel or a piece of yardstick that you can hold up against the wood to make sure that it fits inside the stove.

You can always ask for advice about how much wood you need to get to make it through the winter, but I guarantee that you will not get the same answer twice and those answers will be so far apart that it’s not even funny. The answer should be: get as much as you can get someone to bring to you fro the price you can afford. If it’s too much, you can always burn it next year! If it’s not enough, just make sure you have a backup heat source.

If you get your wood delivered already cut and split, you will pay a lot for it. If you have a chainsaw and can get a triaxle to deliver logs that you cut yourself, it costs less. You can also have the logs cut to size and then spilt them yourself. I’m five feet tall and a total wimp, and I can split wood., so anyone without major physical disabilities should be fine with this, if they’re motivated enough.

To split, you need exactly two pieces of equipment (three if you count work gloves): a splitting wedge for tough pieces and one of the best tools ever. The head of it looks like an axe on one half and a sledge hammer on the other. In the south, they call this a “maul” but in PA, we’d call a tool like that a “go-devil”. These come in different weights, and I have kind of a medium weight one at 8 pounds. It’s little heavier than some of the ones I’ve used that belong to a lot bigger people than me, but I also don’t put as much oomph into it as a bigger person can, so I need to make up for that in weight.

Splitting is one of those things that someone should just show you. Essentially, there are little stress cracks in the logs. Hit a crack really hard. If that doesn’t do it, hit it again. Try to hit the same place. If the wood doesn’t split, use the hammer end to pound in the wedge and just keep hitting that wedge. They have mechanical splitters which is definitely an option if you’re doing a ton of wood and you have health problems, but you can split a lot of wood with a go-devil before you need to think about getting a hydraulic splitter.

Getting around to splitting, this is as good a time as any to talk about exactly what kind of wood to use. Again, never burn evergreen in your stove or fireplace.
Ash splits the easiest and makes a nice fire. Locust wood, if the tree is too big for fence posts can be burned pretty well after it’s seasoned. Locust has a distinctive green stripe in the wood grain. All the nut woods are okay, but they split hard. Hickory burns really hot and had a great smell, but it splits hard and also really tends to pop very forcefully, so if you have a rug or an open fireplace, it might cause some problems to have coals explode out of the fire. We have mostly red maple and sugar maple this year, and as long as they are nice and dry, they are both good wood. Sugar maple splits hard, though. Cherry wood makes decent firewood. I have burned cotton wood, too, and it’s okay. Of course, you never cut down a walnut tree or a cherry tree for firewood. Plenty break and fall down all on their own, all people need to do it clean it up after it already falls down.

Edwin Way Teale in his book A Naturalist buys an Old Farm has a really sweet chapter about wood and his fireplace, and he gets into all the different colors and sounds and smells of different kinds of wood. The book is not terribly exciting, but it is really nice and kind of a good depiction of the sorts of things that people do to amuse themselves when they have a lot of nature around.

There is also a nice web site called woodheat.org (copy and paste, I don’t feel like trying to make a link). It’s obviously propaganda placed on the web by a stove dealers’ and chimney sweeps’ PAC, but the information is still good.

I guess there are a lot of rules and regulations about whether or not you can have a wood stove if you live in town. And you are not technically able to have a mortgage or house insurance unless you have something other than a wood stove for your primary heat. I’ve talked to more than a few people who were fiercely against wood heat because of pollution, but if a stove is smoking enough to cause bad problems for people in the neighborhood, there’s a problem with the stove. A hot fire in a well built stove and chimney will be nearly smokeless. And if there’s not a problem with the stove, the complainers are just never going to be happy about anything anyway!

That’s why we live in the country. We can light anything we like on fire and shoot guns in the yard. Yes, it’s a little hard in winter and the roads are bad and all that stuff, but I can fish in the back yard, and the kids next door walk all of about a quarter mile from the house to go deer hunting, and I have room to plant anything that comes into my head, even if the rabbits just eat it. And I can also drag the chainsaw back into the swamp and cut down some trees to keep my house warm for a while.

First Frost, Garden Wrap-Up, and a Woodstove Primer

The first frost of the fall season was the other night. I was coming home from my incredibly silly job, and there were quite a few cars parked out on the street with a lot of frost on them. It seems very counterintuitive, but on those clear, still nights in fall, the cold air just lays in the valleys and they get a harder frost down there than we do here. It was 29 when I passed the bank at 3:30 AM, but I think it was a hair warmer up at home, because I was able to get my plants moved in off the porch without them getting frost damage.

In my Three Sisters garden, most of the pumpkin leaves withered up and called it quits. I only have a few pumpkins down in there, though I was still picking ears of corn. We had some with Sunday lunch yesterday, and it was okay. I planted “Incredible” this year, and it turned out really nice. My grandmother planted some freebee corn seed I got for ordering early from a seed company. They sent peas and beans and corn and cukes and something else which I can’t remember. Oh, yeah, tomatoes! All the varieties were really good, small and tender. Unfortunately, they were just labeled “Early Experimental” so unless they come out and say what they were that was that for those.

Tomatoes have been over for a while. I still have some corn standing, and it seems that the goats have eaten my popcorn, so I won’t be trying that this fall. Three are still some peas and spinach in the garden, both of which have not bee affected by the frost. I need to dig potatoes and carrots, but I haven’t resolved my carrot storage issues from last year. That, and I dug a whole bunch of carrots for a snack a while ago, and one of the kinds I planted tasted just like dish soap. Awful! I need to find out what they were and make a black mark in my garden notebook about that one.

I don’t know what the problem is with the pumpkins. I have had no kind of luck with them. next year, I’m going to just have to load the hills with every kind of manure I can find. I’m also thinking about getting bees, and if I do, I’ll park those hives right by the pumpkin vines. The vines got lots of flowers, and on vine crops like that, you can see the little balls that will become fruit at the bases of the the female flowers. The baby pumpkins on my vines just got yellow and fell off, though. Just like they did last year and the year before that and the year before that and the year before that. I think this was a difficult year for pumpkins and for pollinators, though, since it was hot early and when the growing season actually started kicking in, it was cold and wet, then hot and wet, and then very dry and neither hot nor cold in August when things should be growing out really well. When the weather is wet, understandably, things don’t get pollinated like they should because bees and other pollinating critters are hunkered down in their hives and hidey holes.

My uncle has been bringing firewood a lot this fall. Ever since we moved here and started heating with wood, we’ve been kind of silly about it. We just kind of pop off into the winter all half cocked and end up running out and having to do things like go down to the swamp in three feet of snow and cut damp snags or make a run out to the sawmill and bring loads of slabwood home in the back end of the station wagon. i know a lot of people are thinking about heating with wood this year, because everything is going up, but it is something that needs more planning than a lot of people are used to. I mean, if you’re going to use gas or electric, you just turn it on and hope you can pay your bill. With wood, you need to actually go out and get it or find some one to bring it to you or you don’t have heat.

We have a plain firebox that can be used for coal or wood. You can get stoves that are either EPA rated for emissions or not. The rated stoves are more expensive, but according to my stove guy, the difference between them it the rated stoves are approved for a longer burn time, and the non-rated ones just have a few extra draught holes drilling in the door so they burn faster and don’t have to be EPA rated. Of course, we don’t care what the EPA says (just kidding) but we do want to be able to leave the stove for eight hours and still come back to a live fire. To get around the cost issue but still get a longer burn time, you can try to go through a dealer that also stocks repair parts and have them sell a non-EPA rated stove with a replacement door with no extra holes.

A lot of people are putting in pellet stoves, which is kind of a nice choice. They burn these little pieces of pelletized sawdust that you can have delivered by the ton or get a few hundred pounds at a time. The town where I used to live has a pellet manufacturing business, and they are absolutely thriving. With pellets, you don’t have to chop wood. They’re clean. They are also regulated so that you get a specific amount of heat from a specific amount of wood. When you are burning raw wood, you get vastly different amounts of heat from different kinds of wood. Also, most pellet stoves have an electric hopper that feeds a controlled amount of pellets into the stove which regulates the temperature and keeps the fire going when you’re not home. You can even get a little adaptor which allows you to run the electric hopper off a car or boat battery for several days in the case of power outage or national emergency when nefarious government forces cut the electric in midwinter to freeze the rebellious population into submission.

The drawback of pellet stoves it that they only burn pellets. A few winters ago, when the pellet stove craze really took off, there was a bad pellet shortage, and a lot of people were stuck with no way to get fuel. Similarly, there was a big craze that year for corn burning stoves, which has backed off a lot since corn has gone up so high. Another problem with corn burning stoves is their propensity to Explode! if the chaff isn’t cleaned off the corn and the dust builds up inside the stove. This isn’t just one of the things that “they say” can happen. My sister’s husband works with a guy whose corn burning stove blew up, luckily with no injuries.

There are also these outdoor stoves that look like little outhouses which you can hook up like a boiler. You can use them to pipe heat into multiple structures, but they are not cheap, they use a lot of wood, they take a lot of electricity to move the heat, and you still have to have a backup furnace installed in your house to get insurance. I have also read a couple different places (and this is a “they say”) that outdoor furnaces can burn up and still take your house with them, that some states won’t give you insurance if you have them, blah, blah, blah, but I think that might be kind of like conspiracy theory stuff. (ha.)

You can get really nice and fancy stoves. Really pretty ones that also have like built in cook tops and brass picture windows so you can see the pretty fire. You can also get stoves that look like a plain old heater but they open up and have a fire inside. You can get really high tech ones like the “woodchuck” that, if I read the literature right, will completely vaporize the wood at high temperatures and convert every bit of that wonderful stored solar energy into heat for your home. You can get blowers and thermostats and everything that you expect from a regular furnace but just have wood as your heat source. I don’t have any of that. I have a box with fire in it that sits in the basement. Warm air goes up stairs and up through a vent in the floor of one closet. It works for me. Of course, it has only frosted once or twice and daytime temps are still in the fifties and sixties, so I haven’t needed to run the stove, have i?

In our next episode, I’ll talk about what types of wood to use in a wood stove or fireplace. And it really does matter!