!!!! SEPP to Boot: Stephen's Experience (BEL)

BEL #770

First off: welcome to Catherine! She's the newest Boot to join the team, and is intending to hang with us for several months. Here she is this morning, prepping the garden bed inside the Truly Passive Greenhouse for more seeds and seedlings.



This might not be as tasty a donut as I would find at Veera Donuts in town. However, it does a whole heckuva lot more to protect our trees. This "mulch donut" is nearly 12" thick.



We had plenty of different tasks to take care of today, though we were continually distracted by all the dandelions in bloom. I was driven to bread-and-fry several dandelion heads this evening as a dinner appetizer.



And hell, why not fry up a few sunchoke chips, as well?



Finally: here's a sneak-preview (featuring fellow Boot Seth) of a segment of an upcoming Willow Feeder video. We activated the outdoor sink at the Willow Bank today, and caught some footage of it in use.



That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!

Footage...groan.

Derek Thille wrote:Footage...groan.

I'll chalk up another win for the Bad Pun Bears.

BEL #771

Happy Taco Tuesday to you...!

One of the project highlights of today I want to mention is the building of the gate frame for the Bark Park: our dog pen behind the Dogstar cabin. Fellow Boot JP and I put our heads together and made some significant progress today. Big thanks go to both Amy Gardener and Coydon Wallham for their construction input on my recent shelf-building efforts, since I used the techniques they suggested to great effect.

JP and I briefly sketched-out and discussed our plans and ideas for the gate, so we were both on the same page going forward. This is pretty much an essential step.



We brought back a number of junk poles to Basecamp, then set to work connecting them together. We drilled mortises and carved tenons for the corners of the gate frame, and then drilled holes for the insertion of dowel rods that would hold the two pieces of wood together.



Once hammered in place, we trimmed the dowel rod to the appropriate length with our handy pruning saw. I think these joints look lovely. And they work quite well even without metal fasteners involved.



We connected four pieces together, added a tenon on the top and a large, rounded peg-end to the bottom, and are currently puzzling out how to connect the vertical slats to the gate so that pups don't come through. Maybe we can do this completely without metal fasteners, which I think would be a superb achievement.



Meanwhile, about 30 feet away from our work space, Black Spark's kittens - now about three days old - were catching a nap.



That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!

A thought for the infill of the gate...  If you take flexible green saplings, you could weave them into a lattice to cover the gate opening.  And you can take a sapling and twist it (not bend, twist) to mess up the wood fiber adhesion, then bend it around the frame of the gate and weave it back into the lattice.  Like in this video at the 16:09 mark: