Oops! - What mistakes have you encountered today?

Good Morning,



As we all know, sometimes things don't go exactly according to plan. Experiments fail, steps are missed, and sometimes luck is not on our side. I personally don't view this as a bad thing, just a fact of life. We strive for the best and want success. Sometimes it just takes that little bit more effort to finally get something to catch. I've decided to humble myself and start a thread of "Oopses" and figure that some others might want to join in on the fun.

I'll start below.

I'm working on a planting two trees badge bit for PEM (https://permies.com/wiki/211854/Plant-trees-PEM-BB-gardening).

I picked the spot, dug the hole, and planted the first tree and recorded everything appropriately.

The second one I did the same exact thing except forgot to take any photos.


Sorry honey, we are getting another fruit tree

So far so good here!
I came home from the shop rather than waiting on my supplier who then arrived an hour and half early so I had to go back down....I don't consider that my fault though.
and now my postcards are ordered for the season

I just went out to check the level in the propane tank. It's at 0%!!! So we've called and they're coming today to fill it, and the furnace hasn't stopped so it's not really dry, but we'll have to pay an extra $100 for them to do a pressure test thing that they're required to do when we run it dry. $100 isn't critical money to us, but it sucks to waste it like that. I'm really kicking myself.

Oops! I have a ton of red osier dogwood on my property, and I've been meaning to learn to teach myself to weave baskets. I learned from the Oracle (my pet name for the internet) that red osier is a wonderful basketry plant, so last spring I collected hundreds of the tallest, straightest rods I could find, and stored them upright in my gardening shed for a year. They took up a great deal of space, but as I imagined my beautiful red baskets I was pleased.

Fast forward to this year, and I was ready to soak the dried osier and make my first basket. A place to soak the seven foot bundles for ten or more days was originally a puzzle, until I remembered our creek. Temps there are not warm, but it was wet and flowing, and was deep enough to submerge the bundles. Twelve days later, I retrieved and mellowed the bundles in an old blanket, and was ready to try my hand at my first basket....only to have the rods snap and splinter as I bent them, again and again.

Which drove me back to The Oracle, searching by species this time. Eureka! Red Osier Willow (Salix Viminalis) is quite a different plant from Red Osier Dogwood (Cornus Sericea). Ahh my friends, the devil is in the details.  

I am entirely unsure what to do with my beautiful-but-useless-for-basketry bundles at this point, but it was a good learning experience. The Oracle also told me that if you take any material you wish to weave with and bend it without snapping while green, you can gauge its weave-ability, regardless of species. So I will be trying that going forward. From Oops....to Aha? Failure is such an important part of my process. The key is to keep at it, whatever it is!

Also, thank you Christopher, for the reminder to check my propane levels! May warmth be yours sooner than later.

I have learned today why appropriately dried wood for carving is important.

My poor wooden mallet that I spent so much time on was found with a split going from tip to bottom today. It won't break today, but its life is shortened by this development. I hope to get a few good wacks out of it before it is returned to the wood wall of fungi on my property.