Niko Economides

Where I live we have big beautiful red oaks. I eat the acorns from them. The past couple of years I have been trying to train/encourage squirrels to collect them for
Me. I have boxes half buried and covered with brush. I put a little corn in for them as a trade. The first year I did have success, so last year I put out more but unfortunately last year was a bad acorn year.

Years ago we got one for Christmas. This year we got another one~ I took the light out and fed it to the sheep, aka salt lick.

We have a dog that gets into our outhouse and eats poo. She loves it, she will stick her head down the hole and chow away! I think it's great but my wife insists we keep her out. This means more shoveling for me. Oh well she does help me clean the dishes.

This looks like beautiful work for your first build, you are a real artist. I have several of this type of structure I built on my homestead used for out buildings. We get lots and lots of heavy snow load and I don't want to clime up and shovel of my roofs so I try to build strong and this means lots of braces. And not to short. As a general rule I like to brace every post on the outer walls and all structural interior posts. Looking at your picture it looks like your second story posts are separate from the first if this is true I would agree with B Redhawk I would brace them. Have the braces go from each corner post down to the first floor beam and joist logs, a mirror image of what's below. Filing the walls in will defiantly stiffen the place up, my woodshed probably wold fall over if I did not keep lots of wood neatly stacked between posts.

Congratulations on you're newly acquired shop/barn. Thanks for posting this, I'm very interested in building one of my own with my neighbor who is an excellent welder. Im not to familiar with rocket stoves so we would be getting the DVD. Is there any special considerations for using rocket stove fore sap boiling?

Plow out two miles of wet heavy snow and clean out the sugar shack. Spring is coming! Boil taps and scrub out storage tank sap should run Wednesday.

Sorry about that John, I guess I haven't figured out how to link properly.
If you type 2014 telluride shroomfest into the google search engine it should pop up.
The panel of ethnomycologests features John Halliday who discuses the orgasmic stink weed, funny stuff.
My wife and several of my female friends are very intrigued by our local stinkhorns.
there is an old Nanabhoozoo story about how Nanabhoozoo told the village women if they sat on this particular mushroom they could get pregnant.
So Nanabhoozoo stripped naked lay down and covered himself with leaves.
Well of coarse you know how these story's go. the wrong group of women showed up! they wer picking mushrooms for dinner.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eS.RwFEUI0IA
Check this out- all reputable ethno mycologists.

I find much pleasure in your posts, thanks. I'm getting a bit older now but I still put in a couple of hours of wintery snowy work in the balsem fir. I love to snowshoe in with my axe and saw- stamp down a work area. take of the snowshoes and thin the woods. I also like to nibble the fir, you can also nibble the old mans beard (usnea) just a little it's medicinal but don't nibble the yellow lichen.

When I was a kid my best friends family had gardens orchard and bee hives. One winter we collected the frozen bees from the snow ( I think they wer cleaning out the hive on a sunny day and froze) we cooked them up in a dry frypan and ate them in front of my friends sister just to gross her out, they wer delicious. We collected them every winter and ate them, we also collected grasshoppers crickets and ants but I remember liking bees best.