DIY

Our 2021 garden: building the first pea trellis

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We had a beautiful warm day today – prefect for working outside!

Our peas are among the things that require the most preparation before we can direct sow them, so we decided to focus on building trellises for them. After looking over some design ideas, drawing some sketches and making some decisions, I headed out with my baby chain saw and rifled through the pile of poplar poles we kept after doing some clean up and testing out the cordless pruner.

That baby chainsaw made cutting poles to size very fast!

In the background are the support poles, cut to 6 ft lengths. The poles on the wagon are the cross pieces. I am short a few to be able to complete all the beds, but I ran out of medium sized poles. We are saving the bigger ones for the squash trellises, as they will have the most weight on them. The smaller ones will be good as stakes, but are too thin to be cross pieces.

I’ll just have to do more clean up and gather more poles! :-)

Our purple peas have the fewest seeds, so it got the simpler trellis design.

I started by laying out the support poles near where they will be set. Each bed will have 5 support poles, with the biggest ones on the ends, and the middles.

That rain barrel in the background is the one I patched up last year, to keep water at ambient temperature near our squash beds. We will need to fill it with water soon, so it doesn’t blow away! It’s going to take all our hoses put together, to reach that far.

After finding the centre of the first bed, I started digging a post hole – and immediately started hitting roots and rocks!!

I did drag over one of the post hole diggers we found, to try it out.

I’m pretty sure it has pieces missing. :-D

It can handle smaller pebbles, but roots and larger rocks were a problem. For some of the rocks, I had to get in there and bring them out by hand, because not even the spade could get them out. We only have one spade, and I don’t want to break it! We did have a second spade. The handle broke while I was digging holes for the haskaps. :-/

First pole is in!

The pile of rocks was later added to the top of the soil around the post. The soil that was put back into the hole and tamped down was a lot softer, and sank down quite a bit.

Shortly after that, my younger daughter was able to join me, and the rest of the poles went in much faster. :-)

Attaching the cross pieces was a bit of an issue. What I really would have liked to do was screw them together. There’s no way to do that manually, since we’d end up pushing the poles around in their holes. We don’t have enough extension cords to reach this area to use a corded drill and drill pilot holes. Our cordless drill is old and the batteries no longer hold a charge – and it’s old enough that the brand no longer uses the same batteries and does not make them anymore. Once we work out a solution, we’ll go back and put in screws.

Before adding the cross pieces, we measured and marked heights at the top and bottom of each support pole, then cut flattened spots on the ends of the cross pieces and at the marked areas of the support poles. When cleaning up the basements, we found a ball of old bale twine, so we used that to tie the crosspieces in place. That twine is really old, so while it’s holding surprisingly well right now, I expect it to disintegrate fairly quickly.

Once that was done, I used the twine to weave on strings for the peas to climb.

Which took quite a long time! The ball of twine was lots of shorter pieces. I kept stopping to tie ends together and make centre pull balls, to make wrapping around the cross pieces easier. I ended up using most of the ball, so we’ll have to find something else to use for the other trellises.

This bed is now ready to layer straw and soil down. We might even be able to find something usable in the old compost pile to add to the layers. We don’t have a lot of material that can be used to build over that grass, but anything is better than what’s already here! And we can deal with weeds.

It seems a bit much, to do all this burying of posts for a temporary garden, but wind is something we have to take into consideration. Hopefully, we were able to get the support poles deep enough that they won’t be blown over.

The other two beds will have double rows of peas planted in them, so the trellises we build there will not have the cross pieces at the bottom. Instead, we will put cross pieces about a foot away from the centre poles, at about the same height as these ones. Once these trellises are strung, they will form a sort of A frame, with each row having it’s own side of strings to climb.

When I was a kid, my mother always grew peas, but never used trellises. One of my jobs as a child was to flip the rows of peas, so that the sun could reach the other side of the plants. I do remember a lot of yellowed or rotted leaves when flipping my mother’s un-trellised peas. This would have been due to lack of sunlight in the bunched up plants, and contact with the soil. There was likely fungal issues, too, but as a child, I wouldn’t have recognized it for what it was. It worked, and we always had lots of peas, but this will be healthier for the plants, and should result in better yields.

While I was working out here, I was able to hear people out and about, walking on the road, etc. The old house across the road from us has no one living there, but the current owners come out regularly. It was so wonderful to hear the voices of children, playing outside! At one point, I was even visited by a very friendly little dog. The only down side was having our vandal come driving by on his ATV, very studiously avoiding looking our way and pretending to be doing something else other than creeping on me. As if his driving over, turning around and going home again wasn’t making it really, really obvious. :-/

We definitely need privacy screens! The corn and sunflowers will help, once they’re tall enough, but when we clear the fence line so we can repair the fence, we’ll be removing what little screening we have in that area right now.

For now, I’m rather pleased with our “rustic” pea trellis. Not too bad for something made of completely salvaged materials!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: making grow bags

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One thing about our internet being a problem is that we’re really learning what browsers and websites are data hogs of one type or another. Chrome is better than Firefox, and WordPress is just awful. Not just the editor, but simply trying to view other WordPress blogs. I don’t know what they’re trying to do in the background, but it’s more than our internet can handle and they are constantly timing out or only partially loading.

Today, I’m trying a new browser, and it seems to be working MUCH better. Which is weird, because I’m using Tor right now, and it’s an onion, so you would think it would be worse, not better!

Either way, here I am, able to write a blog post!

As much as possible, we keep Sunday as a day of rest. What often happens during that rest period is that it becomes a time of inspiration. Today was one such day, and I came up with a garden solution.

When I posted about our layout plans for this year’s garden, one of the things mentioned is that our potatoes aren’t anywhere on it; we are planning to grow potatoes in containers this year.

The question was, what to use as containers?

The easy solution would be to buy grow bags. That requires money, of course. Money that would be more efficiently spent elsewhere. We had a number of things around the property we could use, but each had more negatives than positives about them.

So that problem got set aside, and we got to thinking about other things. Like how to preserve our harvest. Particularly the root vegetables. I got to thinking about the bags from deer feed and bird seeds we’ve been accumulating, and how they might be usable.

Which is when the inspiration hit.

The feed bags would make excellent grow bags!

The bags are simple tubes with seams sewn on the top and bottom. The seams are basically slip stitched, so to open them, I trim one end of the thread close to the bag, then yank. The whole thread pulls out, leaving the top of the bag undamaged. Once the bags are empty, they lie flat.

So I grabbed one to experiment.

To use them as grow bags, they need a flat bottom. To create that, I folded the ends of the seam so the points met at the middle, then stitched them in place. Because of the layers of thickness from the seam, I had to do two rows of stitches on either side of the seam. I used a back stitch, as that would hold better. The thread I used was salvaged from the inside of a very long length of paracord. My younger daughter had made herself a corset, but the lacing she got was not long enough. The lacing is the same as the outside of paracord. My husband bought a 1000 yard roll of black paracord a while ago, so we had plenty to use. It took a while, but we got the inner strands out, which we then separated into individual strands to keep for other things. It’s remarkably strong, and we didn’t want to waste it! It was perfect for this job.

This is the end result. A flat bottomed bag with sides that can be rolled up or down to the height desired. The bags will allow for drainage, and are strong enough that we will be able to move them around as needed.

They’re fairly small. The bags are more long and narrow than wide, and the bird seed bags are taller than the deer feed bags. They are large enough for just a couple of potatoes, or maybe three or four fingerling type potatoes, at most. So we’ll need a lot. I don’t mind the smaller size, since that means they’ll be easier to move after being filled. We are pretty sure we know where they will go, but if that doesn’t work out, being able to easily move them is a bonus.

I brought in the rest of the bags from the sun room, which turned out to be another 12 bags, plus we’ve got two more bags of feed on the go. Over the next month or two, we will be getting more of both deer feed and bird seed, which will likely give us another 8 bags to work with. After that, we’ll just be buying bird seed, but by then, we’ll be planting, so it won’t matter. Until we actually get the seed potatoes, we won’t know how many we’ll have, since they’re sold by weight, not number of potatoes. If we don’t have enough bags, we’ll just try some of the other ideas we were thinking of.

I’ve stitched up three, altogether, to get the hang of it, and now they are set aside. Over the next few weeks, we’ll stitch up the rest so that they will be ready for our planting in late May or early June. Being in bags, we should be able to get away with planting earlier.

The cats, meanwhile, are absolutely fascinated by these bags, and all the smells that came in with them! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Converting the fish tank to a cat proof greenhouse, part 4: padded

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Today, I found the self adhesive felted pads that I wanted to use on the covers for the fish tank.

I found them while looking for something else, of course. :-D

Here is where, on the tank, I want them to sit.

The bar across the middle has extra surface area in the corners of the ledge the covers rest on. There’s lots of room, here.

The outer corners, however, don’t have that, so there’s a lot less margin for error in positioning the pads well.

The first step was to clean off the ledge the frame rests on. An old toothbrush worked very well for that!

Since the cross pieces of the frames have an angled edge, to better fit into the space, I figured it would be easier to place the felt pads in position on the ledge first, adhesive side up, then placing the frame on top.

The felted pads I have were from a larger package with mixed sizes of circles, plus long, narrow ovals. The larger circles were used up, and all I had left were smaller ones, and some of the long ovals. I’d hoped I still had some larger circles left. If I had, I would have cut them in quarters, and fit them right in the corners, but half circles would have to do!

Once they were in position, I lined up the cover and dropped it down, pressing just enough to make sure the adhesive stuck, then removed it to press the adhesive in more thoroughly.

In this corner, you can see the pad will protect the tank’s frame from the wire. This was the edge of the roll, so no sharp bits sticking out, like the edges I had to cut, so I didn’t trim it.

And this is why I lined the pads up to the corners of the tank, rather than the frame. Yes, there’s a likelihood that the pad will get pulled off where it’s overhanging, if I leave it like that (I will trim it later), but it also isn’t sitting on the screw head. It was supposed to be countersunk, but some of the screws simply stopped and would not screw in any further. I am not sure what was stopping them but, whatever it was, I was wrecking my screwdriver’s tip, trying to get them to go in further, so I stopped. The others were just fine.

So the corners are padded now, protecting the tank’s frame from being scratched up, should a cat decide to jump onto the cover.

When I was fussing with everything to prepare for this, I did have a kitten not only jump onto one of the covers while I was there, but also walk across on the light fixture! Not a problem for a light kitten, but a potential problem, if one of the heavy adults tries to do it. Thankfully, they seem to not like the new covers and are staying off. At least while we’re around to see! The few times I’ve seen one of the adult cats up there, they have stuck to walking on the wood and stayed off the wire and away from the light fixture.

Meanwhile, the baskets and other items stored in the tank have been removed. I’ll need to take a vacuum to the bottom to clean it, then see how my seed trays fit on the bottom. That will help me decide whether the rigid insulation will be lining the inside, or the outside, of the tank. Whatever I do with the sides, the bottom will have its own layer of insulation lining it, too.

It’s remarkable how handy that insulation has been. I’m glad my daughter bought so much extra!

I’m going to need the little step ladder to be able to access the bottom of the tank. I could barely reach to get the smaller baskets out!

The joys of being short! LOL

Another little bit of progress made! :-) I can hardly wait to see how this works for starting seeds!

The Re-Farmer

Converting the fish tank to a cat proof greenhouse, part 3: covers done!

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Yes! The big tank now has its cat proof covers!

The second one was much faster to build than the first. :-D

For those who are new to this blog *waves hello* you can catch up on the project with part one and part two. Links will open in new tabs, so you don’t lose your place here. :-)

Once the second cover was done, I unpacked the light fixture, which has been sitting in its box next to the tank since the move, and tested it out. Considering what a disaster the movers were, I would not have been surprised to find the bulbs shattered or something.

It worked just fine! :-)

Of course, as soon the covers were on, cats were on it! So far, they have not tried to climb on the light fixture, but there is no doubt that they will, at some point. Hopefully, it will hold up okay.

I was concerned that the frame would create shadows in the tank, but that does not seem to be an issue at all!

Now I have to figure out how to set the time and program it to turn on and off. It’s been years since it was last done! There is time to look that up, though.

We still need to cover the sharp edges of the wire mesh, and I still want to put felt pads in the corners to protect the tank a bit, but other than that, the covers are done.

We still have the original light that came with the tank, which rested right on top of the original covers. The tanks will only hold so many seed trays. With things like the onion seeds needing to be started so much earlier than anything else, I can see us rotating trays out from the tanks and into the sun room (which should be warm enough, by the time the next groups of seeds need to be started), and using the second light there.

Now I need to figure out where to store my baskets, then line the inside of the tank with foil to reflect more light. Since this room is rather chilly, I plan to use pieces of rigid insulation on the bottom and around the sides, too. We will likely cover the insulation with foil on one side to make it easier to take it in and out, but I will see how the seed trays fit inside, first. If the insulation takes up too much space, I’ll put them on the outside of the tank.

Progress has been made! :-)

I am so looking forward to gardening this year! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Converting the fish tank to a cat proof greenhouse, part 2: changed plans

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Yesterday, I got started on making covers for our big fish tank, to keep the cats out. Today, I assembled the first one.

Of course, things did not go to plan.

Does anything ever? :-D

One of the things I needed to figure out was how to secure the hardware cloth to the frame pieces, for those inevitable times when a cat jumps on them. All I’ve got for materials is whatever we can find lying around the farm. While doing my rounds this morning, I went digging in the side of the garage where we store the lawnmowers and snow blowers. I knew there were some roofing nails in there, so I grabbed a while bunch and brought them inside.

Here is the first problem.

All of the nails were huge. There was only a single smaller size, and it was still too large. What I wanted to do was secure the mesh to the tops/bottoms of the boards making up the frame. Previously, we’ve used a staple gun to do that, but these were not for things where the wire mesh was expected to hold weight. Particularly not the sudden weight of a cat leaping onto it from above.

The mesh was going to have to be secured along the sides.

That meant cutting it with a half inch overlap on all sides.

I’m getting closer to the end of my roll of 1/8 inch mesh, and it really does not want to unroll at this stage! :-D I had all the boards on there to hold it down, and it still kept rolling itself back up again!

Once the mesh was cut to side and flattened, I affixed it to one side.

Normally, I would have used the staple gun to tack it in place, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Which is really weird, because I’m the only person who uses it!

So it had to be tacked in place by screwing in the cross piece, holding the wire as taught as I could in the process.

Then I took out one of the screws in each corner.

I had placed the wood in place on the tank and marked each one with pencil, but once the hardware cloth was in place, I couldn’t really see my marks anymore. Plus, with the cross pieces a fraction too long, I had to make sure I didn’t line the side pieces up to the other end, or the while thing would be to big.

So I quickly drilled a pilot hole in each of the other corners of the cross pieces, then went back to the tank.

This way, I could place the long pieces where they were meant to sit, line everything up, then add a couple of screws through the pilot holes to hold them in place.

Then it was back to the basement to continue.

Once each corner was secured with a pair of screws, it was time to bend the wire mesh. Since the sides would be bent in one direction, and the ends in the other direction, I first cut out the corners.

The wood pieces may have been lined up to the tank, but no matter how careful I tried to be, the wire mesh ended up uneven.

Ah, well.

Once the mesh was bent, I drilled pilot holes for each nail (to prevent the wood from splitting) and hammered them in. The flat tops of the roofing nails were perfect for securing the mesh. Very different from how I had to do it with the larger mesh on the screen “door” we made to keep the cats out of the old basement.

Time to test it out again!

Oh, dear.

The addition of mesh and nails – especially the nails – made it wider. It wasn’t so much that it no longer fit. I could have let it just rest on the nail heads, I suppose. They would, however, damage the tank’s frame.

There was a very easy solution to this problem.

Flip it upside down.

With the cross pieces being every so slight too long, I used my Dremel to take off the corners at roughly a 45 degree angle.

It now fits!

Unfortunately, the wood is a bit warped, so it doesn’t sit flat, but it should still do the job.

There are still a couple of things I need to do. One is to find some way to cover the edges of the hardware cloth, for safety reasons. I’ll probably just use Gorilla Tape, if we still have some.

The other is to find my self-adhesive felt pads. The kind that’s meant to go on the bottoms of chair legs or the like, to protect floors. Since the bottom is now the top, the screw heads are facing down, and each corner screw is sitting on the plastic ledge in the corners of the tank. It wouldn’t be an issue, if I weren’t expecting cats to jump on it, so a bit of padding would be a good thing. I haven’t seen them since we packed for the move, though. :-/

Aside from those 2 things, this cover is done.

The other one will wait for another day! :-D The earliest we should be starting any seeds is in late March, so we have time! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Converting the fish tank to a cat proof greenhouse, part 1: starting a cover

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I have spent some time thinking about how we can convert our big fish tank into a greenhouse to start seeds in, while also making sure the cats couldn’t jump in.

The original covers the tank came with would have been ideal, but the hinges on those broke long ago.

Since a piece of the filtration system broke during the move, it’s just been sitting in a corner. To keep the cats out, we cut pieces of foam core to fit across the top, then covered the whole thing with a huge table cloth. It turned out to be a great place to store baskets in, and the top became a favorite place for the cats to hang out.

Until they broke through.

We ended up cutting some rigid insulation to fit and taping it in place, which worked much better. With their jumping from the piano onto the top of the tank, though, they’ve knocked even that right off!

What this means is that the cats are used to having access to the top of this tank. If I set it up as a greenhouse to start seeds, they’re just going to jump in, unless I find a way to cover it.

The tank has a bar across the centre and, after thinking about it for a while, I decided to make a pair of wood frames with hardware cloth, that will fit on each side of that centre bar. That way, if I need to get at the seed trays inside, I just need to lift one smaller cover at a time, rather than struggling with one large cover.

I fully expect the cats to jump on while I try to do anything in there!

Today, I got started.

The first thing was to take a tape measure to the inside of each half of the top, as well as the lip the original covers used to sit on. Each side is 16 3/4 inches by 22 3/4 inches. The ends and centre bar have a 1/2 inch lip, while the sides have a 1/4 inch lip.

I then grabbed a couple of pieces of wood I’d salvaged from a shed and started by cutting the long sides. Once I had 4 of them cut, I double checked that they fit properly.

They fit just fine, with a little bit of play that will make putting them in and taking them out easier.

While I was checking the fit, my daughter came by. As we were talking, she reminded me of one of her Christmas gifts to me.

I wish I’d remembered them before I took the measurements! This thing is MUCH easier for me to read than the tiny lines and numbers on my tape measure. It made marking the distance to cut the short pieces a lot easier, too.

Another reason I wish I’d remembered them before I took the measurements.

When I checked the short pieces, they were just a hair too long! The difference is so slight, I could probably sand it to size.

But I shouldn’t need to.

This is how the frame will be laid out. The hardware cloth will be sandwiched between the top and bottom pieces at the corners. I haven’t figure out what I can use to secure the hardware cloth best. Ideally, the wire mesh would be sandwiched between wood all the way around, not just at the corners, but I just don’t have the wood to do that. Nor can I think of anything we have that could be used in a similar way. Whatever I come up with will have to not just support the weight of a cat that’s decided to lie on it, but the force of a cat jumping onto it from the top of the piano. All sorts of ideas some to mind, and get discarded just as quickly. :-/

The thing I’m holding in place in the photo is one of the supports for the light fixture. The L bars insert into ports at the bottom of the light’s frame, so where they are is where the bottom of the light fixture will be.

Once I double checked how everything was going to fit together, I moved on to the next step.

Washing the pieces of wood.

They were probably sitting in the shed I found them in for more than 10 years. My mother tells me that shed was full of lumber when she moved off the farm, some 7 years ago, so what little we found in there was the junk that wasn’t worth stealing, I guess. :-/ Still better than nothing, I suppose. Anyhow. There was a whole lot of grime on them, so I gave the pieces of wood a quick scrub. They don’t need to be really clean. I just need to be able to handle them without getting filthy, and trying to scrub them after the hardware cloth is in place is just not a good idea! :-D

So they are now all laid out in the basement with a fan on them, do dry. I will continue to work on the frames tomorrow!

One of the recommendations for using grow lights to start seeds is to have the lights very close to the soil, and gradually increase the distance as the seedlings grow.

That won’t be an option with this set up.

I’m thinking of lining the inside of the tank with aluminum foil to reflect more light onto the seedlings. It doesn’t need to be from top to bottom; just at seed tray height. Which means I could probably get away with lining all 4 sides with foil in the big tank. I will probably line 3 sides of the 20 gallon tank, too.

The other thing to consider is warmth. We don’t have grow mats, and it’s unlikely we will be able to get any. We do, however, have more pieces of rigid insulation that we can put under the trays, or even along the sides closest to the walls. The LED lights won’t generate heat, but I’m sure we could find some way to warm up the tanks enough for seeds to germinate.

Progress on the set up has, at least, finally begun!

The Re-Farmer

Crab Apple Cider Vinegar: bottling day

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For those of you who have been following this blog for a while, you may be wondering what happened with our cider vinegar.

Yeah. The stuff we were supposed to taste test 2 months ago, to see if it was done!

It’s been sitting in the old kitchen all this time.

Given how cold it gets in there, I wasn’t too worried about it.

For those who are new to this blog (welcome! Happy to see you!), you can check these posts out. All the links will open in a new tab, so you won’t lose your place here. :-)

Prepping a cap for an airlock – using the tools at hand
Making Crab apple cider vinegar: airlock or cheesecloth?
I am such a goof: crab apple cider vinegar reboot!
Crab apple cider vinegar, fermentation progress
Crab apple cider vinegar: straining day

One of the issues I had was, what to store the vinegar in? The last time I made it, I could just use a quart jar. What did I have that was big enough, easy to pour from, and that I could close? I discovered that one of our 1 gallon (4L) glass jug that we have for making mead has a top that fits the same caps from the 3L jugs currently holding hard apple cider vinegar (which is also ready for bottling), so I was able to use that.

Once I had the bread dough rising, I brought the ACV in out of the cold!

Both of them had visible mothers, floating on top. There was very little visual difference between the airlock and the cheesecloth jars. The airlock one had some condensation near the top of the jar, and that was about it.

I drew some out of each jar, using a turkey baster, to taste test.

Both of them had a mild, vinegar smell to them. Both of them were also had a VERY strong vinegar taste!

The girls taste tested them, too, and we all agreed that there was a slight difference in taste between them. The cheesecloth one (the girls did not know which glass was from which jar when they tasted them) has a slightly milder, more pleasant taste.

Meanwhile, I did a bit of research on what to do with the mother. We won’t be making this again until next fall. Can the mothers be kept for that long?

It turns out they can.

I was able to remove the mother from the cheesecloth jar before pouring, but didn’t have as much lock with the airlock jar. :-D So I put a small strainer over my funnel when I poured the vinegar into the cleaned and scalded jug. There wasn’t enough room for both jars in the jug, though. Yes, I mixed them together. I’d have kept them separate, if I’d had another small jug, but I did not.

Which was okay. I read that the mother has to be immersed in vinegar, and kept air tight, for storage. So the remaining vinegar was left in the jar, along with both mothers.

The gallon jug of ACV will go into the fridge for later use.

The jar with the mothers was sealed, and is now back in the old kitchen for storage.

I am quite happy with how this turned out. Having left it for so long, it’s a lot stronger than if we’d bottled it back in October, like we originally intended, but that’s okay. Using our own crab apples, from the one tree with the best, sweetest apples, not only resulted in a gorgeous colour, but it’s own unique flavour.

We will definitely be doing this again! Next time, though, we will just use cheesecloth and skip the airlock.

Now we just have to do a hydrometer test on the hard apple cider and see how it is. It would be awesome to have some of our own hard crab apple cider to enjoy with Christmas dinner! :-) Hopefully, I can get that done in the next day or two.

The Re-Farmer

Wood carving: completing the set

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Having made an olive server, using my new gouge, I thought it would be good to use some of the remaining wood to make a spreader and olive fork.

After cutting a length off, the first thing I did was split the wood down the middle.

Here, you can clearly see the rotted out core that I had to work around with the olive server.

The utensils I wanted to make would be well away from that core, though, so this was okay. I split off some excess wood from the opposite sides, then debarked the remains.

In sketching out the spreader and fork, I decided not to include the knot at one end. It may have added visual interest, but I just didn’t want to fight with it.

Once rough sketches were made, I rough cut away excess wood. A band saw would make the job easier, but I don’t have one that works, so I made do with a little Japanese pull saw that I got last summer, and a coping saw. The coping saw has been a problem, as it won’t lock at the handle end anymore, so it tries to rotate while I’m using it!

For the spreader, I added another rough sketch on what would become the top. I wanted a slightly wider bit at the start of the spreader blade as a sort of stopper, more for visual interest than anything else. I wasn’t too worried about matching the sketch closely, since it would depend more on how much I had to cut away from the core of the wood.

Next up was using carving blades to do more shaping and trim away excess wood at the core, to take out that rotten strip.

Then I broke out the Dremel.

After trying out different tips, I ended up just using the sanding tips. They are a course grit and did a good job of taking off the excess wood, grinding away the remaining saw cuts, and shaping it more.

Then it was back to the carving knives for more delicate clean up and shaping, then sanding.

Ready for oiling!

That knot in the blade was why I switched to the Dremel. I like how it looks in there, but my goodness, it was brutal to work around!

Next, the olive fork.

For this, I just went straight to the Dremel and used the sanding tips to rough shape it.

I then used carving knives to clean it up and work on the tines end to narrow it down even more. Once it reached the point where I would otherwise have started sanding, I made the tines.

My Dremel set includes tips for carving and engraving, and I used one of them to drill a hole where I wanted the tines to join. Then I used a cutting wheel down the length of it.

There was a knot right in the middle. The Dremel cutter did NOT like going through that knot!! :-D

After that, it was back to doing more detailed shaping until it was ready to sand.

Doing those tines was a real pain in the butt!

It actually worked out much better than I thought it would, though.

For both the spreader and the olive fork, I worked my way through increasingly fine grits of sandpaper, finishing with 220 grit. Because that’s the finest grit sandpaper I have.

There they are, ready for oiling!

You can see the edges of the knot that was cut through to make the tines much more clearly, after oiling!

The slightly wider bit on the spreader turned out to be a perfect thumb rest!

When sanding the blade of the spreader, I actually had to be a careful not to make it too sharp. It’s meant for spreading, not cutting! It’s remarkable how sharp a wooden blade can get.

A closer look at the tines of the olive fork.

Then I wiped off all the sanding dust that got onto the oiled surface! :-D

They fit! I had not actually planned this, but it makes sense, since they’re from the same piece of wood, but I’m really happy to discover they fit so perfectly inside the olive server.

I am quite pleased with these. Not only with how they turned out, but how quickly they worked up, too.

Now to think about what to make next! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Wood carving: testing the new gouge

/ Re-Farmer / 16 Comments

Lo and behold, I had an open day today! Which means I finally had the chance to do a bit of wood carving and test out the wood gouge I got a month ago.

I had a particular piece of maple from clearing behind the pump shack that I wanted to use. After looking at ideas for a while, I decided to make an olive server. Something along the lines of this.

It took me about 5 or 6 hours, but I got it done! :-D

Photo heavy post ahead! :-D

Here is what I started with.

This is about half the length of the original piece. The length was decided by a bend in the wood. :-)

I now needed to create a slightly flat bottom, and take about 1/3 off the opposite side to create the top of the bowl.

I used what tools I had on hand, which was this beast of a knife.

We’ve dragged this thing around for many moves! I’ll have to get my husband to tell the story behind it. :-D It turned out to be perfect for the job. Especially that little sunken in part of the blade, near the handle. It was the perfect width to set at an end of the wood, then I hammered it with a rubber mallet to split off the pieces I needed to remove

Then I used it as draw knife to debark it!

Once that was done, I made a rough sketch on the wood.

The narrower end is where I placed the handle, and I decided to leave a little bit of a “foot” for an extra touch of stability.

Before I started carving, though, I decided I should try and use my new angle grinder to level off the flat parts, take off excess wood, and maybe even shape that handle.

It came with 2 metal grinding wheels. Not wood.

I tested it anyhow, just to get to know the machine. All it really did was leave some marks in the wood. :-/ Ah, well!

Finally, it was time to use the gouge!

This thing is awesome! Oh, my goodness, it cut through the maple like nothing. I could also switch hands with it. I can use my right hand, but I am left dominant. The sloyd knife from my carving kit is for righties. I can use it with my left hand, but it takes some doing, and I still need to use my right hand to control the blade. I did use the sloyd knife a bit, to give my hands a break, since it is held in a completely different way. As I got deeper, though, it just wasn’t possible to use the sloyd knife any more.

Which is exactly why I wanted the gouge!

As I went deeper, I hit the middle heart wood, and discovered it was rotten!

This would not be an issue for the bowl part of the server, since I would be cutting it out completely, but would it affect the handle or the end?

The bowl portion is done!

Along with the gouge, I used carving knives to thin the wood at the top edges, which made it easier to set the gouge to go deeper.

You can see a spot of discoloration at the near end of the bowl. That’s the heartwood. It’s really small, so I’m hoping it won’t be an issue.

The next thing to do was remove excess wood to shape the outside.

I was going to use my coping saw for the handle part, but the darn thing keeps trying to spin on me. So I used a different hand saw, and a chisel to take off the wood under the handle. I almost took off a bit too much, though. !!

The next several hours were spent using carving blades to shape the handle and ends, and smooth out the inside. The handle and the ends were a real pain to work on!

Then it was finally time to sand.

Sanding the inside of the bowl was also a real pain! Getting the curved ends smooth was the worst of it, but sanding the inside in general was really awkward. Still, working my way through ever finer grits of sandpaper, I finally got it to where I was happy with it. It’s a good thing I wanted to keep some of the “rustic” texture in there!

Here it is, all sanded.

It was worth the fight! :-D I am quite happy with it.

Here’s a closer look at the handle end of the bowl.

Hmm… Do you see that little divot?

That’s the heartwood.

While shaping the handle, I did end up reaching the soft heartwood from underneath, so I was very careful not to expose any more of it.

Oiling the wood should help protect it. Before I did that, though, I made a last minute change.

I decided to drill a hole though the “foot” of the handle, for a hanging cord of some kind.

Finally, it was time to oil it! I use mineral oil, as it is food safe, and does not go rancid.

I love how the oil brings out the beauty of the wood, as well as protecting and preserving it!

Just a couple more detail shots. :-)

I have since threaded some twin that’s almost the same colour as the wood, though the hole.

I think I will give this to my brother. They may never use it, but I know he and his wife will appreciate it. Especially since it was made using wood from maples I had to clear away to fix the pump shack window. :-) A little piece of the farm!

The Re-Farmer

This year’s decorations; what’s working, and what isn’t!

/ Re-Farmer / 16 Comments

I’ve already posted photos of dehydrating orange slices and using them to make decorations for Christmas this year. I will post more on those in a moment.

The other experiment I tried was to make a baking soda and cornstarch dough (which I wrote about here), which was supposed to be good to roll out and use cookie cutters on. These are supposed to result in a bright white final product, that was also quite hard and durable, which would take paint or other embellishments well. The dough ended up way too soft and sticky, so my daughters used it to make more sculptural stuff, though one did try and do some cookie cutter ones when the dough seemed to have dried up enough for it.

After leaving them to dry for a while, we ended up having to put them in a cool oven (they were supposed to dry slowly, to avoid cracking), because… cats.

Cats who leave paw prints behind, as they do dastardly things!

All of the cookie cutter ones have had to be thrown out. They just crumbled.

Plus, the cats seem to be desperate to get at them! I had to take them out of the oven to put the decorated orange slices in, and had to get really creative in covering them, while still giving them air flow to dry. There is still some hope for the more sculptural pieces, but they will need at least a few more days to fully dry.

If we can keep the cats out.

As for the orange slices, the cats have been after them, too! They ended up knocking over the tray on the table they were laid out on.

I’m happy to say that the glue worked very well.

Several of the decorations were scattered on the floor and, while the glue was not yet completely dry, it held! This was a bottle of WeldBond that came with a case of crafting materials given to us. I have no idea how many years it was there, but it was long enough that the plastic and cardboard pieces of the original packaging came apart.

Clearly, the cats are not put off by the orange slices and cinnamon sticks.

Today, I decided to add ground spices to 7 of the 13 slices.

First, I rigged up a cardboard box that I could use to spray them with adhesive.

I also decided to use a combination of ground cloves, allspice and nutmeg, with a tiny sieve to apply them evenly.

After crowding the decorations close together, I tried to spray just the orange slices, not the strings, then dusted them with the ground spice mix.

They are now set aside for the spray adhesive to set. The box set up allowed me to put something over them in case a cat decided to jump into it.

Since I started writing this, I’ve had to go put the cover back and add weight to it, because the cats had already knocked it off.

The main thing about doing this craft was that citrus and all these spices that smell so good to humans are supposed to deter cats.

Our cats apparently did not get that memo.

*sigh*

I’m still holding out hope to having a tree, somehow, but these spicy, fragrant decorations are definitely not going to keep them away. If anything, it seems to be attracting them, instead!

Ah, well.

At least they look pretty!

The Re-Farmer