This Blog is about me and my family's trials and tribulations as we create a viable homestead. That will feed the entire family itself using as many "green" ways as possible, we won't always be using them but we will do what we can.
We've been silent on the blog as we
have not been able to get on the net as much as we'd like too. So an
update to things going on here. Well we've had crazy weather again.
For 3 days we've had spring-ish temperatures, yesterday we had severe
weather in the form of severe thunderstorms and some tornadoes.
Today the forecast is for occasional snow flurries and what ever our
temperature this morning at 6am would be our high for today. It's so
nice to see winter coming back, and I'm serious as I do have flowers
that I don't want killed off due to the weather being wonky. Due to
the rain yesterday our “pond” (which is still not finished being
dug) is filled to the current spill over.
We have finally come to a good place
in working with our wood stove, we have it burn new wood at the coal
stage only and we have a smoldering fire all day and night. We don't
“burn ourselves out” and it stays toasty enough. We also seem to
have hit the spot in the wood pile where the densest wood seems to be
at. Which is good for long burning anyway.
In the last week I have gotten up at 3
am to bake bread, I have to say I may be doing it more often. The
bread I have made these last two times has been heavenly. Good
flavor and just the right “weight” (if that makes sense), silver
told me today that I need to get up at 3am every morning now. Guess
that means he likes it huh?
We have made a small discovery that we
hope will work like we think. Loews sells “blown in” insulation
that is “green”. This insulation is made from shredded recycled
paper. Silver has been wanting to do papercrete on the interior of
the dome to insulate it. My only issue had been, where do we get
that much paper. Then we noticed that insulation, we are planning on
buying one bag and trying to mix some papercrete up and see if it
does well with the insulation. If it works out I will let everyone
know. Silver is also looking for a way to combine the wall flue of a
Russian Masonry stove and a rocket mass heater. Any Recommendation
would be helpful.
I'm not sure how many of you know this, but we've been trying to dig a pond since last fall. I had secretly hoped to get it done before the end of fall so this spring it would have filled up with rain water. No such luck. We have however had some luck now in digging it. The "red thing" is my daughter's sweatshirt, but this is the space we are putting the pond in. The lower right of the picture is one of the spots we are digging in. We are also digging just past the sweat shirt where we have a fallen tree broken into two pieces.
There is a little bit more space to the right and left of the picture that will be included in the pond as well. As I said in an earlier post, the dry ground has made digging a little bit easier as since we are digging it by hand the pick we are "cutting" the ground with is going right through it like it's nothing.
This spot is a fairly natural depression in the ground we came upon when we first cleared this area of trees. Right about where I was standing to take this and to the right of the image is where we are going to put in a small waterfall to help aerate the pond. The side with the fallen tree will be our shallow end and where we'll have cattails growing.
We are also going to get some fish when it's done and filled, I read in a book that it's a good idea to get a bucket full of water from a local pond to make sure you have the right microrganisims (spelling?) in your water. Good thing there is a pong across the street that I can get some from then. I also have permission from the people who own the spot across the street to transplant some of thier cattails into my pond when it's done.
I imagine it'll probably take all summer to finish digging the pond out, but I'm not fully sure on that. We might get done in a month if we keep at it good and not skip a clear day digging. I guess it's a good thing we needed to fill in the root cellar we were digging as we're putting the dirt there.
Now first I'd like to mention I have found a site that lets me do a free web page through google (yeah) here is the link to what I set up yesterday check it out:
I do not plan to stop posting here any more than I stopped when I got the wordpress blog. Eventually I am hoping to buy the real address and have it a separate entity, but for now this is our web page.
I also want to make a wave to Phelan and her current post as a MUST READ!!!!!!
I'm sure a few of you may remember this cook stove we made last year. Well we are going to re-build it and surround it in cob. We did learn a few things about our construction of this one.
#1 when using cinder blocks, you need to make sure you DON'T need to move them after they get hot and then rained on. Cinder blocks break after repeated heatings and rains.
#2 when filling them with gravel let them "settle" so you don't have to go back and refill them after they have been heated or you get #1
#3 if you get breaks/cracks wasps WILL build nest(s) inside your cinder blocks and it will cause a problem if you need to take it apart for any reason.
So with that knowledge we are re-building it, and going to be putting in a cob-ish oven next to it. It will have elements of both cob ovens and rocket stoves, and we will be using a barrel for the "cooking" chamber. We are going to one similar to this one:
It's a cool design and I like how wide the cooking area is with the barrel. Thanksgiving is getting so big (the Tom turkey btw) that our not standard size oven prob won't fit him when it's time to cook him.
So here is what we have done so far:
This is if you can't tell the pile of clay from our ongoing root cellar dig. This is going to be the base for both the wood stove and the oven. We are hoping to have a space between the two for us to store wood in. Which my son's new daily chore till school starts is to chop up the cut wood into pieces small enough to use in a rocket stove... maybe it will put some muscle on his scrawny frame.
Anywho... the "front" half of the clay pile was hoed flat and then smoothed with both the hoe and a mini garden rake. Silver took at least 20 minutes making sure it was as smooth as he could get it. Course... that did not last long after the cats came out (hahahahahaha), we'll have to clean up a bit in a few days once everything here dries out from the rains we just got.
This is of course is the next step, Silver put out the metal squares from the old stove, to which we did have a good sized wasp nest inside of. Thankfully no one got stung.
Silver set them both out as you can see, played around with which direction to put them in. Then made it level... perfectly level. What can I say he's a perfectionist. He checked the "level" across in this spot then on an angle in each corner then across the other side.
Oh, this level? It's a 6ft level that we bought at Harbor Freight Tools for $14 before we left New York state. I do have to say I like their stores! I will also say that I personally think that every homesteader whether you are "urban" or not should have a 6ft level. It is very useful when working on a big project. Course you should have a few different sized levels... but that's going off on a bit of a tangent.
Ok, now a few more steps along as you can see. First Silver used 4 pieces of the broken flat cinders from the first stove and placed them in the corners of the squares to hold it in place. Then he added rocks then covered it in gravel from the driveway.
Then he asked the kids to put a rock (remember all those rocks we dug up?) along the front to make it look nicer and to help prevent the clay from washing out. Which he then went back over their work and filled in or found better fitting rocks.
After that he went and added a layer of gravel to the "base" surface. Now the plan once it all "settles" and dries out... to put concrete dust over all the gravel and rock and wet it down to harden. This will give a nice firm base for the oven and make the stove base solid and hopefully the front with be secure. We are also hoping for the added benefit due to the gravel for there to be "rivulets" for water flow to go out when it does rain. the plan is to make the stove and oven water proof.
The plan for the start of the oven is to possibly use earth bags if we can find enough of those heavy duty feed bags that people don't want. In the past we have reused our's as garbage bags, but after watching many youtube video's on cob ovens we noticed the person who has done the most. Uses in almost all of his, for the base; earth bags. From what we have seen, based on youtube videos (which as I don't have books on cob I have to us youtube) this particular one is a semi-expert as his job is building a myriad of things with cob.
So that is what we have done so far and the "plan" for our first step on the oven. Will update as we do.
