evan's ant village log

Days 286-292 (part 3)

Jocelyn left us some delicious soup and veggies for the Monday Night Feast, I made grilled cheese sandwiches, and Kai put together an awesome salad. Check out that crazy romanesco broccoli!

Duck losses are so hard . We lost 7 ducks to predators in the course of 6 days. "At least" you lost mostly males, and you have a good male-female ratio. Here's hoping your new coop keeps them safe! One thing you can do to help keep the predators out would be a "skirt" of chicken wire or hardware cloth around the base, attached to the wall and fanning out from it. Even just a few inches wide should help deter those digging predators.

Your coop does look pretty safe, though. A hawk or owl might be able to push the chicken wire down and squeeze through the top, and hardware cloth is always a better choice than chicken wire, but I totally understand about limited resources!

I'm so with you on feeling those duck losses! It's really disappointing to put in all that work and feed just to have them carried off by a predator...not to mention the emotional connection. I hope your structure does the trick and keeps them safe.

Thanks for the sympathy, Nicole and Sue. Nicole, a skirt just like you described was exactly the solution Kai suggested just this evening! Great minds! I think we'll end up doing that very thing as soon as tomorrow. I hadn't even considered hardware cloth, but of course that would have made more sense. We may double up on the chicken wire, (since we already have it,) and/or add more thin wooden boards with maybe just 1/4" gaps on top of the wire. Losing those ducks has been hard, and I feel bad for allowing it to happen, but you're certainly right that the ratio could be worse.

Days 286-292 (part 4)

The Allerton Abbey thermal inertia experiment is going well. Just a few days to go before we shut down the stove and see what the temperature does. Should be some pretty sweet graphs.

Kai split a piece of firewood open revealing a funny little bug stuck in a hole in it. How he managed to avoid splitting the bug in half at the same time is beyond me.

Day 293

Jim's back! Yaaay Jim!

We got it up to over 100 in the Abbey today. It's like a sauna in there!

Kai and I have been trading off between tending the fire and working outside in the nice cool outdoors. Kai's got quite a collection of junkpoles going. He surmises that limbing junkpoles in the winter might be easier because the cold and the absence of sap makes the limbs more brittle and easier to break off cleanly. Good to know.

Observation on your limb mulch: As the season progresses the needles will fall off and continue as a fine mulch. Then the branches can be picked up and used for quick hot fires during the summer or kindling for next winter.
My favorite fire wood is large limbs from old trees. some break off every winter. They have closely spaced rings and are therefore very dense and therefore burn slower but at the same time have more volatiles than hardwood so work well in a rocket stove.

I thought my years of observation of the cycle of conifer limb mulching might be helpful to those that are new to it. I don't know if you have ants, [the insect] there in Montana, that gather the needles in large stacks for their nests. These eventually become a great source of compost. When they get big enough the bears will come by and spread them out to eat the larva.

Thanks, Hans. I haven't observed that particular behavior in the ants around here yet, but now that you mentioned it I'll be on the lookout for it. I think the limb mulch that gets thrown on the berms may help to hold the soil and later mulch in place so we may leave it even after the needles fall off, but the limb mulch that ends up on the paths seems ideal for later gathering as firewood.

Day 294

Kai and I put together a chicken wire skirt to go around the bottom of the outside of the duck coop to hopefully deter digging predators. It still needs some fine-tuning but I think it's a step in the right direction.

The heat from the experiment and also from the sunny day we had today caused a minor mud slide on the downhill roof edge of the Abbey. Hopefully once lots of growies have taken root up there such occurrences will be less likely.

On the upside, the heat from the experiment has accelerated the fermentation of my kraut and made it super delicious, especially on rye bread with a little bit of lard. Mmm... krauty.

I feel your pain. I lost my first chicken on Saturday. Possible suspects are stoats, a neighbour's cat, hawks, passing cars on their way to a barbecue (the chickens sometimes forage along the roadside) and chupacabra. I suspect the chupacabra.

Should have known chupacabra originated in New Zealand. Ya'll have all the bizarre animals.

Day 295 (part 1)

Artists Week begins!

Kai started us off right with some observation drawing. The idea is similar to observation journaling, except instead of recording your observations with words, you record them with sketches.