!! In the quiet hours of the bootcamp grind, I found myself: Esteban's Bootcamp Experience

B.E.L. Post # 155

Another good day under the Montana sky…

The morning kicked off with the usual cleaning blitz — there’s something about working alongside everyone, knocking things out together, that just sets the tone right. It’s simple work, but it builds rhythm… and a bit of pride in the shared spaces we’re all part of.

After that, I wandered over to the Solarium and spent some time tidying up the living quarters a little more. Bit by bit, it’s coming together — small touches, small efforts, but they add up and you can feel the space getting more dialed in.

Later on, I made my way to the shop and started breaking down the old cat house from Cooper Cabin. Gave it a second life by cutting all the good woody pieces down to 16 inches, then hauled them back over to the Solarium. Always feels right keeping materials in use instead of letting them go to waste.

Wrapped up the workday processing some aluminum cans with a fellow sepper — nothing flashy, just steady, honest work.

Ended the day on a good note, meeting a couple of the new boots and two WWOOFers. Fresh energy coming into the lab is always a good thing… new stories, new hands, new perspectives being woven into the place.

All in all, another full day… the kind that leaves you tired in the right way.

B.E.L. Post # 156

Today had one of those steady, satisfying rhythms that make this place feel alive in a deeper way.

We gathered in the library for the morning meeting, and it felt different—in a good way. The boot crew is growing… more hands, more energy, more momentum. You can feel things starting to build.

Afterward, my team was sent out to tend to the young fruit trees. We hauled watering jugs up to the little ones by Raspberry Rock, over at the season extender site, and along a couple of berms. There’s something grounding about that work—quietly making sure those trees get what they need to keep pushing forward. It feels like investing in the future, one jug at a time.

Later in the morning, we joined up with Seth’s crew inside the gated garden by the Fischer Price house and got potatoes in the ground. Good, honest work. Hands in the soil, simple and real.

After lunch, we split into three groups. Shawn, Lorenzo, Melissa, and I teamed up. I had Lorenzo and Melissa going around straightening up the junkpoles—bringing a bit of order back to the edges—while Shawn and I focused on laying pickets at the Ant Village gate. Bit by bit, tightening things up, making it sturdier.

Once that was wrapped up, I turned to a bigger task. I felled a live tree, around 60 feet or so, to harvest some horizontal supports for repairing a couple sections of junkpole fencing. It’s always a moment when a tree comes down… not taken lightly. But knowing it’ll go right back into the land as structure and function makes it feel like part of the cycle, not an end.

By the end of the day, there was that good kind of tired—the kind that says something real got done.

Another solid day out here. 🌱

B.E.L. Post # 157

The day started like most others out here — gathering in the morning, coffee in hand, going over the plan while the land slowly woke up around us.

After the meeting, we split into two crews. My team headed back to the junkpole rebuild, picking up where we left off. There’s something satisfying about returning to a project like that — seeing yesterday’s effort take shape and knowing today’s work will carry it a little further.

Lorenzo and I paired up to work on adding horizontal supports to a couple of panels. We settled into a rhythm pretty quickly — measuring, setting, fastening — the kind of steady, hands-on work where you don’t need to say much, but everything still gets done. Meanwhile, Stephen, Melissa, Shawn, and Tracey were out gathering small-diameter junkpoles for the Cooper Cabin gate, bringing in the raw materials that keep everything moving.

Right before heading off to his 11 o’clock meeting with Paul, Stephen took a look at the Cooper Cabin gate frame that Seth and I had built. He spotted a failure point — one of the mortise and tenon joints had given way. Not exactly what you want to see, but part of the process. Seth and I will circle back to it and decide whether it’s worth repairing or if that section needs to be rebuilt stronger.

We pushed through the rest of the morning with that in mind. By lunch, we had repaired two panels, filling them in solid, and dismantled a couple of older crisscross-style sections that were due for an upgrade. Each one needed new horizontal supports, so I went out and felled another live tree to keep the supply going — turning standing wood into something functional always feels like a full-circle moment.

After lunch, the pace shifted.

We traded tools for seeds and moved into the garden. We finished planting the remaining potatoes and put some seeds from the seed library into the soil — a quieter kind of work, but just as important. There’s a different kind of satisfaction in it… less immediate than building, but deeper in its own way.

As the day wound down, we harvested sunchokes and walking onions, getting them cleaned up and ready for soup. It’s one of those moments that really ties the whole place together — building, planting, harvesting — all parts of the same rhythm.

We wrapped it all up with Taco Tuesday at the classroom, good food and good company after a full day’s work. Hard to beat that kind of ending.

B.E.L. Post # 158

After the morning meeting, Seth and I were tasked with repairing the Cooper Cabin gate after Stephen noticed some damage yesterday that could’ve affected the integrity of the gate down the road. Once we removed the gate and brought it in for a closer look, we realized the damage was more serious than expected — the wood had checked at nearly every mortise and tenon joint, which is definitely a no-go in our book.

So instead of trying to patch it together, we decided to do it right and essentially rebuilt the entire gate from the ground up in the classroom. We worked steadily on it all the way up until lunch, taking the time to make sure everything fit solid and true.

After lunch, Lorenzo and I were tasked with building protective cages for the fruit trees over at the Abbey. We gathered up the necessary tools and headed down toward the Pond within the lab to collect materials. From there, we cut six sections of cattle fencing down to 9-foot lengths and hauled everything over to the Abbey, where we assembled and installed the fencing around six trees.

Another good day of balancing repair work, craftsmanship, and stewardship around the lab.

Do you have an idea of why the damage might of happened at the joints and how to prevent it in the future? Or perhaps it is semi-inevitable for the size of the gate and just needs periodic maintenance?

I'm very green to wood working so I'm not very experienced but I love what you folks did there. I would love to swap my dimensional lumber gate for something more.... natural?

If the wood is green, it's going to check.  If it's dry, it'll've already checked.  At least then you'll know how bad and where the checks are I guess. Orienting them downwards would help when the rain falls on them.  I think beefier logs for the mortise (hole) pieces would be helpful

General best practice is to use thoroughly dried pieces for the tenons. This would allow selection to avoid any that check excessively and to form the tenon after the wood has shrunk. If the diagonal piece were anchored to the vertical posts just above and below where the cross pieces are connected, those three pieces could serve exclusive tenon duty, only the verticals would have call to be green for mortise purposes. Also, if they were cut in the dead of winter, they would have less sap to evaporate and less severity to the checking.

In an arid environment with more limited insect activity like the lab, I'd be tempted to try leaving the bark on those vertical green mortises to slow the rate of moisture evaporation from the wood and hence the severity of any checking. Perhaps also some sort of removable coating on the bottom or both ends for the first year...?

Dry tenons in green mortises should cause the wood to shrink such that it will secure itself and not need pegging. I also wonder if the pegs used here could have been a size or two smaller?

After Seth and I pulled the Cooper Cabin gate apart, we quickly realized this was less of a “small repair” and more of a “the patient is technically still alive but all the bones are broken” kind of situation.

For context, we harvested the trees just a few days before building and installing the gate frame, so we were very much working with fresh green material right out of the woods.

Nearly every mortise and tenon joint had checked, and when we opened it up, the worst of it was right where the loads and movement all concentrated at the joints. Some of those cracks honestly looked like the wood had spent the winter working through personal issues.

After reading through everyone’s comments here, the picture is getting clearer. It’s not really one single culprit — it’s wood doing what wood does, just under less-than-forgiving conditions. Rapid drying from freshly felled material, constant weather exposure, and a gate that’s always under load all stacked together. The result is basically what happens when a material that wants to move is locked into a structure that doesn’t.

Mike’s point about roundwood behavior really resonates here. If you use green wood, it’s going to check as it dries. If you use dry wood, it already checked somewhere else and you’re just inheriting the story it brings with it. Either way, movement is part of the deal — the question is whether the design can accommodate it or not.

Coydon’s explanation about dry tenons in green mortises also feels like a key lesson. Letting the mortise shrink onto a stable tenon instead of both members changing size at the same time would likely have reduced a lot of that stress. The idea of slowing drying with bark or thoughtful harvesting timing is also something I hadn’t seriously considered before, but it makes sense in hindsight.

I also think Mike is right that some of the members were probably a bit undersized for the job. Once you combine load, movement, and early-stage drying, light sections don’t have much margin before things start expressing themselves as cracks.

Stepping back, the main takeaway for me is pretty simple: this wasn’t a single failure point, it was a system where very fresh greenwood movement outpaced the design’s ability to accommodate it. Roundwood really does feel more “alive” than dimensional lumber — which is part of the appeal, but also means it doesn’t quietly tolerate being ignored.

That said, this rebuild ended up being one of the better teachers we could’ve had. Every log has its own behavior, and sometimes the only way to learn it is to come back later and see what it decided to do on its own.

And Timothy — if you ever decide to replace your dimensional lumber gate with a natural roundwood one, I’d absolutely encourage it. Worst case, a few seasons later you get to stand around with friends having very serious conversations about cracks in wood like they’re meaningful clues instead of just… wood doing wood things.