Matt’s Bootcamp Experiences

Day -1:

Arrived at Wheaton Labs on Friday, 2/14, 2025 in the late afternoon. I didn’t get to do anything really, just grab food for the week from the Good Food Store and meet Alex, the other boot here currently.

There was snow on the ground and it was looking cloudy. Quite beautiful in my opinion seeing the snow piled up on the hugelkultures.

Day 0:  Saturday, 2025/02/15

Day off! Which is to say, no “work” was done by the boots today.

With that written, I actually did some stuff around the Fisher Price House. I chopped some wood and brought it into the house. I got to record my first podcast with Paul. I ran the rocket mass heater in the Fisher-Price house for a few hours.

Day 1: Sunday, 2025/02/16

Alex, Paul, and I started the day at 9 AM with the cleaning blitz. I dusted the shelves. I vacuumed and shook out the rugs. In the process of vacuuming, I realized that there was a clog in the vacuum cleaner. I was doing a relatively good job, but I thought I could do better so in the afternoon for nest labor I cleaned the inside of the vacuum doing some tool repair.

I also scrubbed the bathroom. I was cleaning out the tub, I noticed that there was a hairball in the drain. So I cleaned that out too. After the tool repair and the cleaning, I made some poly dough. And the Bill Murray fridge there’s a recipe for it. However, instead of calling that poly dough, it’s Paul-y dough. Ha ha ha ha. I thought that was pretty funny.

Paul and I watched a movie, Welcome to Happiness, in the early evening. And Paul went to bed and I made some pizza. It was a Hawaiian pizza, with lifeline mozzarella cheese, pineapple, and ham. Sorry! I forgot to take pictures. All I have is a picture of the leftovers that Alex ate today.

I also dry brined two steaks for Monday’s lunch and dinner.

Day 2: Monday, 2025/02/17

It was a busy day today. Alex and I worked on a lot of different projects and accomplished a fair bit.

We started off by trying to fix the auger in the ice machine in the Frank Zappa fridge. We then switched gears and took a look underneath the hood of Judy. There’s a leak in one of the fluidy type devices. if I recall correctly, it was the power steering fluid. So we tried to track down the source of the leak. We did find some potential ideas for the leak, but we didn’t find anything conclusive. I think that means that we’re going to be summoning a mechanic to take a look at Judy.

It was a little bit warm today getting up into the 40s° Fahrenheit here at Base Camp. I was surprised to see a spider out and about even though it was so cold.

After working on Judy, we went up to the lab to check on the cats and their food at Allerton Abbey. We found six cats there. So all of them are accounted for I think. We had to walk from the gate at the lab entrance all the way to Allerton Abbey and back. Judy and the tractor are both not working right now. So we can’t plow the roads up at the lab. while we were there at Eton Abbey, we also checked out the greenhouse. There’s some nice growers going on there. It looked like it was about 60°F in the greenhouse.

Lunchtime! I made the dry brined steak for Paul and Alex. I had my portion for dinner with some onions and potatoes. I got thumbs up from both of them. I must’ve done a good job even though I made the house smoky.

After lunch, Alex and I sanded the road so that people wouldn’t slip and fall. Then we cut some firewood that Stephen had collected with Fred I believe. Alex and I finished off the day by starting to add some shelves to one of the Rollie shelves in the classroom.

Great photos!

Thank you for sharing, I hope the snow isn't too much trouble for everyone at this time of year.

Day 3: Tuesday, 2025/02/18

Today started at 3 AM. I wanted to wake up early so that I could cook a turkey for Paul’s lunch. I’ve gotten a 12.25 pound turkey when I arrived on Friday. The first trick was finding the correct pot with a lid that fit it! This was trickier than I would’ve thought. I finally found a roaster pan but this was the third or fourth pot that I tried. I got the turkey into the oven at about 4:30 or 4:40 this morning since it was a 12 pound turkey and and I was cooking it at 325°. Expected it to take about four hours. I checked on it at 7:50. It was already too hot. I was concerned that it was going be too dry. Both Paul and Alex said that the dark meat was tasty. I’ve only eaten the white meat so far and in my opinion was on the dry side.

At 8 AM we had our daily morning meeting to assess what has been accomplished and what still needs to be done and what should be prioritized. After the meeting, I stashed the turkey in the fridge, but not before Paul got in a taste. He just couldn’t wait until lunch.

In the morning, Alex and I organize the shop. There’s still a fair bit to be done however we made a lot of progress. I spent most of the morning, organizing odds and ends, screws, nails, drill bits - that kind of stuff. I also fired up the batch box rocket mass heater in the workshop. That is kind of an interesting rocket mass heater. It’s a little bit fiddly to get started, but once it started, it runs for a long time. First you need to prime the vertical exhaust Using paper then you need to prime the heat riser. And only then can you start up your fire in the in the batch box portion. Once the fire was going though, it went for about 3 to 4 hours and burning up about four sections of a log. It heated up the workshop pretty nicely. When I started the fire, it was about 38 to 40° in the workshop. By the middle of the burn, it was up to about 60. Not bad I say.

We ate the turkey for lunch as I said I thought the white meat was a little bit on the dry side. The veggies were tasty. Onions, multiple colors of carrots, and celery.

After lunch, Alex and I finished up adding the new shelf for one of the rolly shelves in the classroom. We restocked the shelves with the stuff that had been on it. Then we took some time sharpening some chainsaws. We ended the day with doing some research on piney tar and taking out the garbage and the compost. It looks like we had some deer that visited the hugelkultur outside the Fisher-Price house in the library.

It’s been a long day and I’m looking forward to a good nights rest.

Timothy Norton wrote:Great photos!

Thank you for sharing, I hope the snow isn't too much trouble for everyone at this time of year.

We’ve gotten several inches of snow since I’ve been here. However, it’s been spread out over the course of several days and it’s been above freezing many of those days. As a result, we haven’t been inundated with snow since most of it melts.

I’m glad you liked my pictures. I’ll try to keep them coming!

Day 4: Wednesday, 2025/02/19

I didn’t sleep as well as I would’ve liked last night so combine that with the fact that I woke up really early yesterday, I’m pretty tired tonight. So I’m probably gonna keep this short.

We had a 8 o’clock meeting this morning. We talked about our plans for the half assed holiday today, Round wood furniture day. After the meeting, Alex and I went and tried to source some green wood, that is to say, a tree that was still standing that we could cut down. we found one that had been filled recently. It still had green needles on it. I wasn’t so sure that that would be green enough though for green woodworking. So we scouted around and found another tree that we could chop down. After filling it, we brought it and the tree that we found that had been knocked down back to the workshop.

With that all done, we went and chopped some firewood. There’s still a lot left to do, but the stack of cut wood is growing. Today’s lunch followed shortly after that. Paul and I ate salad with turkey. Can’t remember what Alex ate, I think it was chips and salsa, but I’m not positive.

After lunch be half assed holiday began. So the afternoon was spent in the workshop working on round wood furniture. Alex worked on a cat feeder repair using around wood. I worked on making a round wood chair with only hand tools and using Greenwood. This is my first experience in Greenwood working. It was a fun time though. To cut up the wood I used a handsaw mostly. However, when the saw started to bind some of the thicker wood, as I was cutting, I used an ax or rather a hatchet to help remove some of the wood to allow me to finish cutting the wood with a handsaw. One of the tricks that I used to do this was a stop cut. This is where you use the hand ax or the hatchet or the ax and make a vertical cut perpendicular to the wood. You can then come at an angle with the blade towards the cut. If you do it carefully, the hatchet will stop at the vertical cut that you made. Once I had the legs cut the roughly size that I wanted, I use the drawn knife and a a shaving horse to remove the bark from the legs. This is such a fun time! So the legs are made from Greenwood. The rungs of the chair are made from older dry wood. This type of wood has already shrunk since much of the water has escaped from the wood already. The Greenwood legs still have a lot of moisture in them. So as they age and dry out they shrink. If you mortise legs, and put tenons for the wrongs, as the legs dry and shrink, they will shrink on the tenants of the rugs. this causes the runs to be firmly attached to the legs without any glue or nails or even pins or pegs. This is the goal anyway. I’ve never done Greenwood working before, so I hope I get the sizing correct for the mortise and the tenons. That brought us all the way to dinner time. Period I still had some poly dough and some pizza sauce so I made another pizza for dinner. Alex and I ate some yummy pizza that had round beef and butter mushrooms. It turned out pretty good this time. I cooked the pizza at a higher temperature and for a little bit longer. The crust was had a nice crunch to it. What was soft on the inside. Quite tasty.

Well, that’s all for today. Well not quite, I also started cooking the bones from the turkey in some water. I’m hoping for some yummy bone broth which I will turn into a turkey soup tomorrow. My goal is that will be our lunch. Now that’s all for today.

Day 5: Thursday, 2025/02/20

I woke up this morning to find that even though I thought I had plugged in the slow cooker to cook the bones to make a bone broth for today’s lunch, turns out that I hadn’t actually completely plugged it in. There was an adapter that I pulled away from the socket that I had plugged into. As a result, the bones were not cooked. Since it basically had been sitting out at room temperature all night, I felt bad about giving it to anyone. I Still made a turkey vegetable soup for our lunch before the 8 AM meeting today.

All morning I spent working on the round wood Greenwood chair. I made some tenons on the rungs. Paul has some nice tools to be able to do that. I use the bit brace to form the tenons. I need 1 inch tenants. They were gonna go in the legs. I drilled my first mortise just before lunchtime. I inserted the Tennant into the mortise and it was really tight. So I twisted it. I pushed it. I got a wooden mallet and I whacked out it a little bit. I got it to go in a little bit, but not as far as I would’ve liked. It was a really tight fit. So I took the wooden mallet and I banged on it some more a little bit harder this time. It went in a little bit more, but not too much. Still not as much as I would’ve like. So I whacked at it more harder this time. it went in only just a little bit more. Still it wasn’t in far enough. So I really whacked out it hard that the last time. And I proceeded to crack the leg. So disappointing. Basically, I had to scrap the project because I couldn’t work on it in the morning in the afternoon. One of my legs was broken. And green woodworking needs to be done pretty quick after you cut down the tree. i’m not disappointed that I worked on it though. I learned a lot. It was fun too.

For lunch, we ate the turkey Vegetable soup. It turned out pretty good. I had two bowls and Paul had three! There’s plenty more since I made it in a big pot. So I can freeze some for paul so that he can have it later on.

In the afternoon Alex and I went to go check on something in the workshop. When we got in there, we noticed that it smelled a little bit like smoke. We didn’t see any smoke. It only smelled like there was a hint of smoke.This concerned us and so we went to go look at the rocket the batch box rocket heater in the workshop that we had been running before lunch. when we got over there, we noticed that there was some wetness close to the vertical exhaust. This caused us to want to inspect some other places and check to see if there were leaks coming in. We found some very slowly dripping water from the roof. So we went on an investigation to see where the leak could be coming from and if there were anymore. We only found that one. But investigating let us outside and we noticed that there was some snow that was in between the berm shed, and the classroom that was going to fall off of the roof into that small space. We also noticed that the snow was melting and getting closer and closer to the berm shed. This concerned us because water plus wood equals no good. So we cleaned away some of the snow around the berm shed and we cleaned the snow off the roof partially. Then we took a few hours and cleaned all the snow or at least most of it from in between the berm shed in the classroom. It was some tiring work because it was ice mixed in with it. So we used a pickax as well as shovels and some wheelbarrows and pulled the snow and ice out from that tight space away from there. That finished the day for us. It was 5 PM.

When I got back to the Fisher-Price house, I talked with Paul about the leak and about cleaning up the snow in between the firm shed in the classroom. Paul and I brainstorm a couple of different ideas to try to help solve the problem of having snow land in between there. We had a really nice conversation with a lot of good ideas. The one that both Paul and I liked perhaps the best, was to utilize some glass, maybe even shower pains from the waist dream to act as an extension to the roof to overhang onto the brim shed. This would we would use several of these, but not enough to cover the entire space of the classroom just every few feet used one. This wouldn’t completely remove this or prevent the snow from coming in, but it would reduce it and make it much more manageable. Since these glass shower doors were are made from glass, they got a lot of light in. This was one of Paul’s concerns about doing the obvious choice which would be to extend the berm shed or the roof to where the broom shed is so that no snow could get in there. Paul was very much concerned that there wouldn’t be enough light in that part of the brim shed. Using the glass pans, however, would not have the same problem because it wouldn’t be covering the entire space, nor it would be opaque. Glass is transparent after all. I finished off the day eating last night, pizza and talking to a friend. On the phone.

This is going to be my last entry for now, since I’m going home tomorrow. It was a short week here at wheaton labs. The time went by much too quickly. I wish I could stay a lot longer. I can’t wait until next time that I can come here.

Way to really dig in this week, Matt. Appreciate the photos and updates.

Farewell, wherever you fare, 'til your eyries receive you at the journey’s end!