Alex Abbott

My daily workhorse is the Buck 112 slim with the synthetic orange handle.

Having lost several over the years that were dear to my heart led me to buy an off the shelf knife that I wouldn’t be upset about losing.

The clip has stayed tight and grips my pocket well, the blade holds an edge well enough for daily farm use, with sharpening every couple of months or when I do something dumb with it.

I love that it can be opened one handed and that it requires two to close.

It’s bright enough to catch your eye if you sit it somewhere.

As mentioned earlier, without knowing the soil properties and climate, it’s tough to guess what will hold up more than one season.

Having gone down the route of having an arborist drop chips, it’s more work in the long run. Chips promote good things like worms, fungus, plant life- and as such, make the underlying soil much more permeable and soft! Wood chips are find for driving a lawnmower on, but any road vehicle with narrow, hard tires will cause bad ruts in pretty short order

Having walked tread this path over the last 7 years, the absolute best way is to do it right, once!

Use your resources and skills to befriend or do a favor for someone with machinery and skill. Use the correct aggregate that will lock together and make a decent road surface. Crushed stone and concrete with fines has held up great.

So, in summary, network with an excavator… give him a watermelon, offer your services in exchange for his!

For what it's worth, here is how I clean vessels that I can't get my hands inside;

I have a few cupfuls of stainless steel screws/nuts/washers that I keep in my homebrew supply cabinet. I rinse everything that will come out with water pressure, and add the metal bits to the carboys. After the foreign objects are in, I add hot water and swish them all around. Everything is sparkling clean, even if I leave yeast to dry inside, this method has never let me down!

I also have a bag full of tiny crushed sharp rocks (granite?) that I use for washing the occasional stainless steel coffee mug that gets left somewhere and grows a mold culture.

Back in my aquarium days I would grab handfuls of coarse pool filter sand in a cloth and scrub the areas of the tanks that grew mold, or got hard water scale buildup.

In summary: abrasives work pretty well in lieu of soap!

And the concert I wanted.... well we had two!
Year one: I asked for ideas in building a stage, and had the prices calculated for lumber and labor to build it. I mentioned it to one of my farmer friends (which admittedly have the simplest, best solutions) and he said "well why dontcha just put two trailers together, you can borrow mine"
So, he gracefully slid two 8'x24' trailers side-by-side and we covered them with decking to the floor was smooth!

The entertainers we had are a band called "Brotha James" and I really really suggest checking them out they are a super-positive act out of Michigan! Jeremy (Brotha James) came up with an idea to get all of the kids involved. Every kid that was brave enough to get on stage, got an instrument and played their hearts out!
The big kid in blue is a pal of mine, Dwayne; He was playing the washboard and loving it!


That fella who took fashion advice from Paul Wheaton is me. I was playing the backup to Robyn jamming on the sax!

The first year was actually held on my wife's 40th birthday, so it was a dually special celebration! I secretly (and let me emphasize how hard this was) created a 12' tall pinata! I wanted it to look like a 40oz bottle of beer

I called in a favor from a friend with a crane. We had the spotlights shining on this magnificent pinata as it appeared over the barn. It gracefully sailed over the crowd, and the kids pummeled it. I don't have any pictures of it mid-air But, here it is after it was smashed!




Year two: We moved the stage because I planted kiwi and gooseberries where it was the year before. We made a back to the stage out of recycled paneling from the house (in post 2). We fashioned it to look like we were having the concert in the basement of a church, or in your moms livingroom!



We also made a backdrop for a photo booth that you could be part of the picture.... see below!



This year I had to go on stage and pander for money. Three things I hate are: getting on stage, speaking in front of a crowd, and asking for money. I did ok.


The bag race was a success! Shout out to the big kids for keeping it fair




And we made a promo video for next year!

Grew a garden

This was last season (2017), and the garden was so tiny back then

Grew scads of calendula, made things from it! Calendula salve, Calendula beard oil, Calendula garnish... I just love harvesting the stuff, it makes your hands smell great!

Grew some Lofthouse Astronomy Domine sweet corn! These pictures are of corn that was left on the stalk to mature into seed.


And I always like to throw this one in here... we made meth! (Just kidding, but that's what I tell everyone when they see this pic )

This was an experiment in mosquito repellent. The mosquitoes are SO SO SO bad here. We have a couple of swamps and are terrible at tipping over buckets

Harvested mulberries by the bucket

And made mulberry syrup

Last year's harvest was sort of abysmal, but this year, look out! We harvested 10 gallons of berries from one tree in about 15 minutes! Our property came well endowed with mulberry trees.

Making compost:

Grass and straw from the ducks:


And got it hot!

We have about 2 acres of "grass" that we actually mow sometimes. I fashioned a stop on the mower deck to blast the clippings into windrows. Then we commandeered some help and pitch forked it into a trailer where it was destined for compost! Our property makes lots of browns but not a lot of greens (yet). Raking the grass was the best, fastest source of greens to activate the compost!

Wildcrafted some St Johns Wort

I am geeked to see this growing all over. I do like to take SJW in the winter when there is no sun for days! The wild stuff has to be better than the old stuff in the pill form, right?

Started some grape cuttings

This variety is called "Steuben" a dual-purpose wine/table grape. I struck up a deal with a friend from across town and she allowed me to take as many cuttings as I could! After bundling them into packs of 20, we ended up with around 200 sticks. These went into the crawlspace wrapped in wet newspaper, inside of a big trash bag.

In the spring, we put them into 5 gallon buckets with water and an air stone bubbling away to get some root development. This works beautifully! I'd say that we got better than 50% successfully rooted!

Prepping the vineyard:
First thing that we did was blast a hole through the wild brambles and install a gate to access the south side of our property.

Then we knocked down the tall grass and raked it for compost


After we took a good look at the dirt and terrain, it was decided that we would put the vineyard in another area that allowed us to get fewer longer runs instead of many short runs on a N/S line. This was decided because of the cost of end posts, as the short runs would take almost double the amount of end posts! So we scoped out the land, and found this spot that gets full sun, and is somewhat sheltered from the north and west winds. Also the dirt is a lot better over there!

We commandeered the help of the neighbor that just bought his tractor and has been chomping at the bit to do some work with it He cut into the sod for us, so we can incorporate some compost and amend the soil based on the soil test results (which I'm doing today!)

In the spirit of documenting some of our other projects, I will plunk them here!

Firstly we drank wine and smoked cigars. Well, it was mostly me that did all that nonsense!


In addition to cigars, we also smoked tomatoes and peppers for sauce! If you've never smoked tomatoes, I recommend that you do.... it is sooooo good!

Smoking tomatoes doesn't take long, they absorb the smoke flavor very fast. I wouldn't recommend smoking them for more than an hour. We used this time to get them hot in preparation for canning!

Also the hoop house project, this was a fun one that went together in a couple of days:


The hoop house was made with a hoop bending jig, and two pieces of chain link fence top rail per section. The hoop house was set on 2' high risers for a center hoop height of around 8'. The ground dimensions are 12'x32'. The greenhouse plastic is double-layered with an inflation fan keeping an air pillow between the layers. We also got our hands on some 66 gallon food grade black pickle buckets that we filled with water before winter. These 10 barrels were placed inside of the greenhouse with the intention of absorbing and storing some solar energy. The greenhouse (in February) would sometimes get above 80f on a sunny day! Talk about a welcome break from Michigan winters! With the barrels absorbing the heat, I can count on one hand how many times we had frost in the greenhouse.

Miles Flansburg wrote:Looking good Alex ! Thanks for the update. Have you had any time to learn more about your property?  What did you find out about fixing up the barn? Sure would be sad to loose that.

Miles,

I have learned a LOT about the property. I now know where not to put a compost pile because of the wind/soil making it tough to keep moist enough. :)
We were also able to get a survey done, which answered some questions as to what went where!

The barn, it may be a lost cause :( - I don't think it will make it through one more year. I have begun "harvesting" barnwood, stacking and covering it!

After the inside was done, we built a duck house and installed some ducks!




Somehow the ducks got into the duck-proof dog water bucket


Then we started with the logs. Everything that we pulled out  of the woods was blow-down or dead wood.

Here is a pic of my babooshka puling some wood on a log dolly I made

And here I am backed up to some red oak


And here I am walking away from the broken tractor


Broken tractor or not, sometimes you see the most beautiful things out there:


And on your walks, you find the shovel you lost.... right where you left it!


Eventually, we got them all on the trailer and off to the sawmill:


During one of the many projects, I suffered a near-mortal wound

Three-year followup:

Just like I promised my better half, I didn't do anything major for the first year... but boy did I get my feet wet doing lots of stuff right after!

My apologies in advance for any selfies.

I wasn't allowed to do anything before the house was up to my wife's standards. First I started by knocking out all of the walls seen where the studs are attached to the ceilings

This was a super long process that took place every day after work. I'll insert more pictures of the project as it happened as I find them. For now, I'll post the S'Mores I made over a halogen worklight:

This photo was taken in the crawlspace as I was working on some plumbing or electrical (whichever it was, I can't recall)

Here is the interior view after installing windows on the south wall to capture some of that low-slung winter sunshine, and the big woodwork installed


Then we started working on the kitchen. We had an idea in our heads that started with an argument about the layout.


We made a countertop and bar top out of some 3.5" slabs I picked up from my favorite sawmill




Here's a shot after we got some lacquer on everything, looking nice!



Part 2 to come!