I managed to get a dump run today, then kept on going to town to pick up a few things at the grocery store. Particularly recycling bags, having just run out. Of course, I’m not going to drive all that way for just one thing.
This is what $142.86 looks like.
Okay, so I did splurge a little.
The clear recycling bags, XL size, were $12.99 I got a 4pk of energy drinks for $10.99 – saving a whole 30¢ by buying a case. The enviro fee was 4¢ I also got a case of Coke Zero for $7.49, plus 12¢ enviro fee. Tea – Early Grey Creme: $5.49 Butterscotch chips, 2 packages on sale for $4.99 each (which also earned me extra loyalty points) Ketchup: $3.99 (house brands; I just realized I accidentally bought low sodium. Ah, well.) Popcorn seasoning, White Cheddar flavour, on sale: $3.99 Popping corn, two 1kg size packages, $3.79 each (I need to do a test pop of our own popcorn again, so see if the kernels have dried enough) Whipping cream: $6.79 Ice cream, house brand, on sale: $3.99 – we have all those little melons, and my daughters want to make melon bowls with ice cream 😊 Whoops. I really should read the labels better. The receipt says ice milk, not ice cream. 😕 mandarin oranges, sale price: $8.99 bananas: $2.01 Marble rye bread, 2 loaves, plus multi-grain, 2 loaves, all on sale for $2.49 each. Vitamins, all half price. The receipt lists them differently from other sales. B12, regular price $19.49, minus $9.75, Zinc, regular price $16.28, minus $8.14 and D3, regular price $9.99, minus $5.
Last of all was my “big” splurge, while I was waiting in line near the floral department.
I got a coffee plant. A “premium” coffee plant, no less. 😄 On sale for $16.99 That’s for the girls. It would be cool if we actually got coffee beans, eventually, but at least it’ll be a pretty house plant!
I also got a $10 lotto Classic pack (1 Lotto 6/49, 1 Lotto Max, 1 Extra), using a $10 win I got from a ticket I got from a free play win. So the win from a free ticket paid for the new tickets. 😄
Sub total: $134.27, plus $3.58 GST and $5.01 PST
As I was slowly going through the aisles, looking for things I might have forgotten to include on my list, I went past a woman looking at the pasta. I’d given the section a quick look myself, and even the ones that were on sale were ridiculously expensive. Walking past her I leaned over and asked, “remember when pasta used to be cheap?”
Oh, boy, did that get a reaction! She looked at me with a slightly stunned expression and said, “I’m an American!”
Yeah. I got it. Instantly. Food prices in the US are so much cheaper than here! When I commented on that, she told me about shopping in this store for the first time after moving here, and how shocked she was by the prices. Even taking into account the exchange rate. Yeah, that would have been quite the culture shock. She wasn’t just seeing higher Canadian prices. She was seeing small town prices. She showed me a package of spaghetti that was over $3. That same package where she was from sells for under a dollar. Our KD (Kraft Dinner) is getting close to $2 a box. They’re 75¢ where she’s from (I didn’t think to ask where that was). Boxed cereal was another one she saw a really big difference.
We had an interesting chat about it, and how it really doesn’t make any sense for our prices to be so much higher. A lot of the current increases are directly related to our federal government adding tax after tax to things like fuel, making the cost of just getting food to people so much higher but, even before our current dictatorship went nuts, Canadian food prices were a lot higher than in the US. There isn’t much reason for that, overall. Lord knows, the farmers sure aren’t’ getting much of it. It’s all in those layers between farm and store. That’s without even touching on specifics, like government price controls on things like dairy and eggs.
I think she really, really appreciated being able to actually talk about it with someone, even if for just a few minutes! She was really nice, and I quite enjoyed talking to her, too.
Anyhow.
This is was my small, but expensive, grocery top up.
Hopefully, one of those tickets I got will be a winner of something substantial!
I found out last night that, when my daughters headed outside while it was still light out, they got visited by Butterscotch! She came right up to them, wanting pets and cuddles, so casually, they assumed she’d been back for awhile.
When I found out, I headed outside to see her, but there was no sign of her.
There was, however, a massive racoon sitting on the threshold between the sun room doors that were tied off partly open. No surprise that all the kibble was gone.
This morning, while feeding the cats (I counted 36 or 37), I looked for her, but still no sign. As I continued my morning rounds, though, I started hearing meowing in the distance. Of course, I went looking. I had gone into the outer yard by the fire pit, when she came running!
I was even able to pick her up and cuddle her as I walked. I brought her to the food and set her on the cat house roof, but other cats were still eating, and she ran off. I caught up with her again and cuddled her, but she won’t go near the other cats.
Hopefully, that will change, and she will stay close, like Nosencrantz now does
Meanwhile, this gives me hope that Marlee will come back, too.
Okay, so I did finally make it outside yesterday to do some work. I may have been mentally drained with all the BS going on with our vandal, but not going out was actually making me feel worse. It was later than I normally would have gone out, but the weather was still good, and there was still enough light.
For a while, anyhow.
My first task was to fill the wheelbarrow with material to add to the bed. The compostable bag of kitchen scraps went in, along with the Spoon tomato and pepper plants from the old kitchen garden, and all the squash and pepper plants from the main garden bed. I also pulled up the potato plants from the grow bags, which meant the Purple Peruvian fingerling potatoes would need to be harvested.
All that material went on top of the straw layer, followed by a layer of leaves and finally a sprinkling of grass clippings.
The grass clippings were more to keep the leaves down for when I tromped all over it, after this picture was taken. Then the whole thing got a thorough soaking. After that, I emptied my last half bag of manure over the grass clippings.
My plan had been to empty the soil out of the kiddie pool the melons were growing in, then use it to collect the soil from the potato bags while harvesting those. I got one load in the wheelbarrow, but the soil in there was very damp, sticky and heavy, and I was starting to lose the light. So I just emptied the one load into the bed, then shifted gears.
One thing about spreading even that small amount of soil onto one end of the bed: those layers REALLY start to sink under the weight! The bed looks over full in the photo, but those layers will probably settle to only half the bed, by the time the soil is added.
The feed bags used to grow the potatoes in are good for only one year’s use. They were all starting to tear apart as I tipped them over and dumped them out. The straw from the top and bottom of each bag could be easily set aside, leaving just the soil to sift through and pile up before moving on to the next bag. I got a decent amount of potatoes out of it. More than either of the other two varieties, and they were decently large for a fingerling potato, too. It was so dark by then, it was getting hard to find the dark purple potatoes in black soil in fading light! I will not be at all surprised if I find ones that got missed, when the soil is transferred over to the new bed. I did try to get a picture of the harvest, but it was a sucky flash picture, so I won’t inflict that on you. 😄
Today has turned out to be a less pleasant day, weather wise, so I’m extra glad I got as much done yesterday as I did. This morning, as I was finishing my rounds, I harvested some Uzbek Golden carrots to go with a roast I was wanting to do today. A nice big hunk of beef roasted with all three types of potatoes that we have, a whole bunch of our smaller yellow onions, and the golden carrots. Those were so big and juicy that, as I was cutting off the tops and tails, several of them would suddenly make a popping noise, and split from end to end!
I checked on the roast before I started this, and it was done – and the house smells delicious!
My daughters pulled an all nighter last night. Aside from my older daughter working on her commissions, they did the usual cooking and cleaning, and my younger daughter baked an amazing zucchini cake with cream cheese icing. She’d baked one while house sitting, using zucchini from my brother’s garden, but we had to buy zucchini for this one, since our summer squash barely survived the slugs and didn’t produce much this year. Oh, she also did laundry and ended up spending two HOURS taking care if this…
This happened while I was clearing bush to access the tree I needed to debranch and cut to size. These are tiny burrs from a weed that has the prettiest, daintiest flowers that become these horrible things. I’ve been pulling them up every time I see them, but once the flowers are done blooming, they’re really hard to see.
Turns out I missed quite a lot of them.
I’d tried to rub out as many as I could before putting them through the wash. Once through the drier, the tiny burrs are a bit easier to rub out, but I ended up putting them back in the washing machine, to be included in the next load. Which turned out to be my daughter’s bedding. She didn’t realize what was on them until she moved things to the drier. Rather than risk burs ending up all over her bedding, she instead started picking them out, mostly one burr at a time!!
I would never have had that patience!
They’ll need to be washed again to hopefully remove the last little bits.
Then, since they were both up anyhow, they let me sleep in a bit and took care of feeding the outside cats for me, and I could do my rounds a bit later. I had to change the batteries on the trail cams today, including the solar powered one. I’ve had to change batteries on that one only once since we got it, and that was because I accidentally left it on “setting”, which meant it spent and entire day and night draining power while waiting for buttons to be pushed. The solar panel would have kept it going during the day, but once it was dark and the batteries were being used, they were completely drained.
As for me, I was glad to have that extra sleep and, to be honest, I’m fighting the urge to go back to bed. It’s gorgeous out there and there is lots of work to do, but I’m feeling quite drained.
With yesterday’s chill, I was planning on getting some crochet done after having a late lunch. I was just settling in to eat in the cat free zone (the living room) when the phone rang. Of course, the living room handset wasn’t in the living room at the time, and I didn’t get to it before it went to machine. It was my mother, and telling me to call her back, and she did not sound good at all.
So I called her back right away and found out why.
Our vandal had just showed up at her place, out of the blue, and he was in a full rage, apparently, He was yelling at her at her door, so the entire building could hear, going on about how she “gave” me the farm. Where he got that notion, I have no idea, because the property was signed over to my brother, not me. This was directly because of our vandal harassing her to change the will and give it to him. With the farm off the will entirely, he would not be able to contest it. In some messages he’d more recently left on her machine, he went on about “squatters rights” and how the property now belongs to me, but Canadian law no longer recognizes squatter’s rights, and hasn’t for a very long time. Not that we’re squatters in the first place. We have an informal arrangement, but an arrangement nonetheless. I don’t know who got it in his head that the property now belongs to me (and just me; apparently, the rest of my family doesn’t exist), but that’s his current thing.
To my mother’s credit, she told him outright, it’s none of his business. He already managed to get what would have been his inheritance more than 20 years ago, but he wants more. He started going on about how he worked on the farm, too (as if my siblings and I didn’t??). He is absolutely convinced he’s somehow entitled to the property, and seems to believe my mother can somehow still give it to him? It makes no sense, but we’re not dealing with a rational person, here.
Also to my mother’s credit, she finally told him to never come back. Previously, she’s sabotaged our efforts to protect her from him by actually phoning him and inviting him for tea or to go out for lunch or something. There seems to be a huge guilt factor motivating her efforts to make peace with someone who used to be so close, but has become completely irrational. I think feelings of guilt are behind his behaviour as well. My late brother’s death really destroyed him. I think a part of him recognises how much he’d taken advantage of my late brother, and that they weren’t anywhere near as close as he’s invented in his mind since the accident. He’s been taking it out on my mother, in particular, and since my father passed, has been using both of their deaths to cruelly abuse and manipulate my mother. That he has failed just seems to eat at him and is causing him to double down. A newer manipulation he’s using on her is that he’s apparently dying of cancer one day, or can’t walk anymore on another (as he stands at the door, having walked into her building…). He likely does need hip surgery again, but how is that my mother’s fault? Oh, right. He’s blaming his hip damage on all the work he supposedly did at the farm. Back when we were still close, I was the one that advised him to keep at the doctors about how much pain he was in, after working aircraft maintenance, on concrete floors and crawling around inside the craziest of places, looking for hairline cracks. The doctors didn’t want to do it because he was “too young” and it would need to be redone every 10 years. Well, it’s been a lot more than 10 years, so he’s likely in a lot of pain right now. And now he’s rewritten his own memory as to the cause and using it against my mother for… what? What does he expect her to do for him? Probably give him what’s left of her money, instead of the land. Though he has vowed to use every penny, even to the point of homelessness, to sue my brother and I. For what, I’m not entirely sure.
My mother is the weak link and the soft target. He hasn’t been going after me anymore. Our restraining order is expired, but he knows that I am willing to go to such efforts to stop him, which seems to be enough to keep him from going back to his past behaviour. Mind you, we did have a trail cam stolen, as well as the old sign with my father’s name on it, while the restraining order was in effect, but he technically did not have to go onto the property to do it, and we have no actual evidence that it was him. Still, when I mentioned it in court during mediation while trying to get the restraining order (he was not present for that), his lawyer and the judge were both nodding along going, “yeah, it would have been him.” There’s simply no one else that would have done it. So far, I’ve only seen him on the trail cams driving by. He no longer gives the finger to the cameras, nor comes up to the gate to shout down our driveway, while clearly drunk again.
Anyhow.
My mother hadn’t actually wanted to talk to me about it. She wanted to talk to my sister about it, as my sister still has some civil contact with our vandal. Well. Her husband does, anyhow. She couldn’t get through to my sister by phone, so I promised I’d send her an email, which I did immediately after getting off the phone.
Then I messaged my brother to update him, and we ended up chatting for quite some time. There isn’t a lot we can do about it, but we need to be aware, in case this is a sign that our vandal is losing it again and might decide to cause us problems here on the farm again. As for my sister, she did get through to my mother, then sent our vandal a message that probably didn’t do any good at all, but I guess it was worth a shot.
By the time all that was done, my food was cold and my tea was tepid. I also had to move on to other things and never got to my crochet at all.
I still feel completely drained and have no desire to go outside and get work done. The chances of him harassing me from the road are next to nil, so that’s not the issue. I’m just tired. Mentally and psychologically tired.
Of all the struggles we have found ourselves dealing with since the move, our vandal turning from friend to foe is the one that is the most unfortunate and difficult. That he goes after my mother like that… Ugh. My mother may be pretty abusive and cruel herself, but that doesn’t justify his abusive behaviour towards her. Especially over something that is none of his business. Blaming the actions from both of them on mental illness – as accurate as that may be – cannot be an excuse to accept the behaviour.
So… that’s where I’m at now. I really need to get outside and get some work done, while the weather is good, but I have zero motivation and zero energy. I’m simply out of spoons.
Last month I did a garden tour video on Sept. 10, which is our average first frost date. At the time, forecasts still had us looking at frost free nights well into October.
We got light frost over the next two nights after I recorded the video.
So when we got a harder frost exactly a month later, I figured it would be good to do another garden tour video. I managed to get it put together last night, started uploading it to YouTube, then went to bed. I got up a few times (drinking a liter of tea before bed was probably not a good idea) and checked on the progress, removed a kitten from the keyboard and repaired her editing of the description box, before finally falling asleep for the rest of the night.
When I checked my computer in the morning, I found it had been restarted.
Thankfully, whatever caused it to restart happened after the video finished uploading, so I didn’t have to start all over again. I just had to finish going through the settings and hit publish.
Here it is! I hope you enjoy it. 😊
In other things, once I was done my morning rounds, I grabbed our water jugs and headed into town to refill them and get a few groceries. The post office and the store it’s in closes at noon today, so I made sure to stop for the mail on the way out. I knew my husband had a package waiting, but I had one, too – and a lovely surprise it was!
My absolutely awesome friend sent me a new thermometer! I just love those nice, big, easy to read numbers! The hygrometer is going to be handy, too. Especially when it comes time to start seeds indoors again.
The reading on here is straight out of the box, after being in the car for a while, so it doesn’t reflect the ambient temperature and humidity of the house in the photo.
While in town, I popped over to the garage briefly, since it’s just across the street from the grocery store. I wanted to let our mechanic know how much we now have available as a down payment. Probably still not enough for that truck, but there were a few SUVs I looked at along the way. One, I didn’t bother checking out as it was too small for our needs, but there were two others that caught my attention. One turned out to be sold already, and the other was a new acquisition that he hadn’t even gone over yet, so he had no price for it, yet. From what I could see, though, it’s probably outside of our budget, anyhow. Ah, well.
Getting a vehicle in October seems very unlikely but, in November, we’ll be able to contribute more towards a down payment, so that might finally get us to monthly payments in budget. My daughter does plan to contribute towards the monthly payments but, with her income being mostly commissions, I’m not going to count it in my numbers.
It’s a cooler day today, and it’s been trying to rain all morning, so I will be focusing on indoor stuff today. The next few days are supposed to be warmer, sunnier – and drier! – so I hope to catch up on things outside, then.
Today looks like a good day to make a pot of tea, pop on some videos and catch up on my crochet!
I was so excited when the phone rang, and I saw the plumber’s name on the call display.
Then confused, when there was nothing but dead air.
It took several calls like this, until I finally made sure my cell phone was on Wi-Fi calling (it keeps turning that off of me!) and got through to him that way. He’d tried calling another number in our area, with the same prefix, and had trouble there, so it seems like it’s a regional problem.
The important thing is, he was able to come over shortly after calling, and get the new tank installed.
Here, you can see his handy little pump draining the tank. We had turned off the breaker but never drained it or shut the water off, so that if we happened to turn on the hot water tap out of habit, it would still work. We just wouldn’t have hot water.
Looking inside, he thought that maybe the bottom element had burned out and said it could possibly be fixed, but I saw no point in that. This tank has already lasted two years longer than expected!
The weird thing was this.
This is where the electrical wires are tucked in, after the tank is hooked up. The plumber could not understand how water got in here!
After switching the tanks and starting to fill the new one, we talked about our well pump. It turned on while the tank was being filled, of course, but was having a hard time filling the pressure tank fast enough, so it started to make that grinding noise that worries me so much. I told him, we have a new pump ready and waiting, but with the possibility of the foot valve breaking, no plumber has been willing to change switching it out, because we’d end up with no water. He agreed with that assessment! I asked if he happened to know of any companies that serviced hand pumps, but he couldn’t say for sure. It’s entirely possible, we can change out the well pump and not have any problem at all, but when I said I didn’t want to risk it until we got the hand pump checked out and working again (if all it needs it new leathers), he thought that was a good idea. If we find ourselves with a worse case scenario, we at least can haul water to the house! Part of the problem is that the pipes in our well are a size that isn’t used anymore, so if the foot valve goes, we’d have to either find the old size somewhere or, if there are none to be had, get a new well drilled.
While the tank was filling, he was careful about using the valve to slow down the flow of water, giving the well pump a chance to catch up.
It takes quite a while to fill a 40 gallon tank!
Once it was full, he got me to turn on a hot water tap – which we have right in the basement, where the laundry used to be – to get the air out of the pipes and the water flowing. Once that was done, we could turn the breaker back on.
It takes a while for 40 gallons of water to heat up!
But heat up it did, and we now have hot water again! He recommended to check it a few times to make sure nothing is leaking, which I’ve done. Hopefully, this tank will last longer but, just in case, I’m hoping that we can pick up a “spare” tank, because we won’t be able to replace a warranty tank with a warranty tank again!
The whole thing ended up costing just under $235, after taxes. Thankfully, my daughter had already provided funds for most of that. Otherwise, I would have had to go into funds set aside for a down payment towards a new vehicle! We’re good, though, and I am very grateful!
It turned out to be a gorgeous day today – we reached 12C/54F this afternoon, which was several degrees warmer than forecast. I took advantage of it – and of having the cardboard from the box the new hot water tank was in – and started filling the trellis bed.
The cardboard almost completely covered the bottom of the bed, leaving gaps small enough that I’m not too concerned about it. After laying out, stamping down and hosing down the cardboard, I added the bark shavings from the poplar poles that will make up the trellis supports, followed by a wheel barrow load of wood chips. That got tromped down and soaked before the next layer was added – tomato, bean and melon plans pulled up from the garden. Finally, I added straw that had been laid out on this area when it was a Ruth Stout style garden bed. Another tromping and a soak, and I stopped for a while. These layers are just enough to cover the bottom logs, but they will settle down once the soil is added. I started adding scraps of wood into gaps as chinking, from the inside, so the straw could be used to hold it in place. There are more gaps that need to be chinked before more layers are added. It will get kitchen compost added, as well as leaves and grass clippings, before soil is finally added to the top. I’ll be using the soil from the melon bed and the grow bags, but those still need to be cleared.
With that in mind, I harvested the last of the onions in this area. There were just a few yellow onions left in the high raised bed, plus the Red of Florence onions sharing grow bags with the peppers. Last night’s frost was too much for the peppers, but some of the larger unripe ones were salvageable. I harvested the last of the peppers in the wattle weave bed, too, along with the two little eggplant that could be picked. We’re at 8C/46F right now, and supposed to drop to 6C/43F overnight, but there’s really nothing left to cover and try to protect anymore.
I’m happy with the progress on the trellis bed. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get that bed filled and set for the winter, and still be able to harvest more logs for the second bed. I’ll worry about the trellis supports later. That part can wait until next year, if need be.
Well, I’m quite happy with how our Thanksgiving dinner turned out yesterday. The main reason is, just about everything on our plate was from our garden!
Starting from the top, going clockwise:
Uzbek Golden and Naval carrots, steamed, then tossed with butter, salt and pepper, and a touch of brown sugar.
Red Thumb fingerling potatoes – these are most definitely a mashing potato! – with butter, cream cheese, mayo mashed in, seasons with dill, salt and pepper.
North Georgia Candy Roaster squash. The squash was quartered and the cavity was coated with a mixture of ghee, brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves and a touch of salt, and roasted with the spatchcocked turkey. If we’d done the turkey without spatchcocking it, we wouldn’t have had room for both! 😄
Finally, at the top left, is the quick pickle of both types of carrots, turnip, radish and garlic, spiced with whole cloves and whole cardamom seeds.
I look forward to a time when the meat is also from our own animals.
Unfortunately, I completely forgot to cover the peppers and eggplant yesterday evening. By the time I remembered, it was past midnight and we already reached freezing temperatures, though of course, none of my weather apps agreed. When my daughter and I went out with the covers, there was already frost just starting to glitter on the ground. It was chilly, but the stars were incredible! So many, and so very bright!
Heading out this morning, the frost was still heavy on the ground. At the last minute, I decided to take video for another garden tour. It will probably be the last one for the year. I’ll start putting that together in a bit, as I wait for things to warm up a bit more before going back outside. The forecasts for a milder October have all changed, though we’re still expected to get a few days at 10C/50F and above – though again, that depends on which app I’m looking at. It’s still nothing to complain about. After all, we could be having snow right now!
The turkey is almost ready, so I thought I’d make a quick post.
It’s not the only thing that’s quick today. From this morning’s harvest…
… of orange and yellow carrots, turnips and radishes to…
… a quick pickle! A few carrots, turnips, radishes, garlic, whole cloves and whole cardamom. I made this first thing, so it would have a few hours to pickle before being included in our dinner.
I hope it’s good. 😆 I am no fan of radishes, but I will try it.
I’m going to pay for today, tomorrow! It’s a good thing it’s Thanksgiving, so I’ll have a break to recover.
My goal was to get the felled tree that was stuck for so long, cleared and cut to size and, hopefully, start clearing access to the other tree my brother cut down for me that is almost completely hidden by the underbrush.
The first task was to clear away a small spruce tree I had to cut to allow the felled tree to drop. It was such a perfectly straight little tree, I ended up debranching in and setting it aside for future use. There were a couple of other dead trees plus underbrush to clear before I could reach the broken tree top that was laying across the trunk. The tree it was from had lost its top at some point, so a pair of branches grew upwards to create a double top. The whole thing was too big and heavy to bother taking out completely. Instead, I cleared away some of the branches, then cut it away from either side of the trunk I was after, giving myself enough space to work. I was able to use the mini-chainsaw for this, so once it was clear, I kept cutting away branches from the trunk I now had access to, until the battery died. I was already on my second battery, and the first one hadn’t had time to recharge yet, so I switched to the loppers. This part of the tree extended outside the north “wall” of the spruce grove, and I was able to use the loppers to clear all the way to the end.
The next step was clearing access to the bottom of the trunk. Between a machete and the loppers – our weed trimmer isn’t heavy duty enough for what was grown back since we were last able to work in this area – I was able to make a path. There was still the top of a dead tree I’d harvested before, laying on the undergrowth, that I dragged out. It’s straight enough, we might be able to use parts of it. Then I had to clear the trunk itself, which not only meant clearing underbrush around and branches on the trunk I was after, but even some low hanging dead branches from the spruces the trunk was wedged in between.
Once everything was finally clear, I measured off and marked 10′ from the base of the trunk, then the next 18′. The 18′ length will be for the next trellis bed. There’s still at least another 18′ of trunk left, but the closer we get to the top, the less straight the trunk is, and the more full of branch stubs it is. It will likely still be used; just not for the side walls of the next trellis bed.
Once everything was accessible and de-branched, I was finally able to cut the 10′ length.
Then I had to drag it out.
Good grief, that log was heavy!
As I’ve done with most of the logs, I dragged it out by a rope tied to one end. Getting it out of the spruce grove was quite a challenge. I even tried wrapping a plastic bag around the far end to help it slide better across the ground, but this time, it made no difference. I ended up taking it off again, as it seemed to actually make things worse.
Once it was out of the spruce grove, I left it and went into the barn. I found some scrap pieces of wood that were used as spacers between some old salvaged lumber we’ve been scavenging for various projects. The pile used to be a log bigger, before we got here, so there were quite a few of these scrap bits.
I decided to store the 10′ lengths beside the garage and lay the pieces on the ground to keep the log from direct contact with the soil. Then it was back to the log!
It wasn’t long before I gave up trying to drag it. It was not at all co-operative! I ended up simply rolling it the rest of the way.
Here it is!
The very first 10′ length of what will be the vertical supports for the roof of our future outdoor kitchen.
Only 9 more to go.
I wonder how much that thing weighs? I just tried looking at some log weight calculators, but they either require information I don’t have (oven dried weight and bark??), or they don’t have black spruce in their species list. I’ve tried a couple of species of spruce, but they don’t grow here. I also tried tamarack, which does grow here, but I think tamarack is a denser wood. The results ranged from just over 140 pounds to over 200 pounds. That’s a huge range! Plus, this tree has been dead for a very long time, so it’s very dry. If I had to guess, after looking at the calculators, I’d put it at maybe 150-170 pounds. Which isn’t really a lot. I’m definitely not as strong as I used to be! 😥
The other felled tree that I need to access looks like another big one. I have no idea how tall that one is, but I’m hoping I’ll get another 10′ length, and 18′ length again.
Anyhow.
Once the 10′ length was cleared, I went back and measured out the 18′ again, then started cutting it. With the top of the tree still hovering above ground, I was expecting its weight to drop at the top, which would have made for an easy cut.
Of course, it didn’t go easy.
Instead of the top dropping, the entire trunk slid down a couple of inches, pinching the chain saw’s bar. The chain was still free and could spin, but the bar couldn’t move any further to finish the cut. It could only just rotate in place. In the end, I had to take the bar off the chainsaw. I was then able to get the bar out, but the chain was still stuck. I had to find something large enough and strong enough to lift the log – a steel pipe my brother had found and used when the tree first got stuck on him! – high enough to open the cut enough that my daughter to pull the chain free.
At which point, I was done for the day! It was starting to get dark, anyhow.
So I almost got the tree cut to size!
I’m not actually sure how I’m going to get the rest of it out, though. The top of the tree, once free, will be easy to drag clear. This 18′ section, though, is right in between three other trees. They’re dead, too, and slated to be cut down, but they don’t have clear paths to fall. There are other dead trees that need to be cleared out, first.
I never imagined that one dead tree would be so difficult to harvest! It’ll get easier as we clear away more of the dead trees, but these first few just don’t have a lot of space around them. There’s still more than a dozen more dead spruces to cut down, and some of them are quite a bit bigger. These ones that my brother cut down for me were specifically chosen because they were smaller and more suitable for the trellis beds!
So… yeah. I’m pretty tired now! 😄 I also forgot to take painkillers before I started this. I’ve taken some since then, but by the end of it, it was getting hard to move! My daughter had to take over removing the sheets we’re using to cover the peppers from the clothes line, because I was having such a hard time of it – then did to covering of peppers for me, too!
And now it’s almost midnight, already! Where did the time go? Time to try and get some sleep. Tomorrow, we feast!
Taking a break for some food. Here are just a couple of pictures of what I managed to get done so far, today.
The first trellis bed is done. Had to mess around to get the ends of the sides the same height as the three end cap logs. Finally, just in case, I sprayed the holes each rod and rebar with clear sealant I got for the eavestroughs. The hollow rods in the middle end cap log I put in today had to be inserted at an angle, which would allow rain to drain right into the holes in the logs. The sealant isn’t made for something like this, but it’s what I had, and I think it should help. The bed is now ready to be filled.
I finally got the stump chair near the chain link fence built. Then, after adding another coat of paint to the sun room door, I painted the seat as well. Both will need one more coat.
While the day is still nice and the light holds, I’m going to tackle the felled trees in the spruce grove next.
The Re-Farmer 