Stone Baerm Adventures

Those are beautiful eggs Cam.  Do you know what kind of bird will hatch from them?

I love the picture of you looking in the hole.  You look kind of ominous.  Not really who you are but great for a hip-hop album cover!

I love your new dog.  She looks very happy in her new home.

Hail! We were just talking about how I am experiencing just about all the weather. We've had very chilly weather, followed by a heat wave + minor drought, followed by a microburst of rain, followed by a hailstorm. It's like a buffet where you get to take a sample of every type of weather. Not sure what is next. Tornado? Hurricane? I'm not putting it past mother nature at this point.

I checked on the plants afterwards and there was some damage. Two or three of my mystery seedlings got badly torn up. I hope they'll make a comeback but I'm not sure right now how they'll fare. Several other seedlings in a tray got ripped right out. Can you guess which plants were the most resilient, with not a single one showing any sort of damage? It might surprise you. It was the friggin tomatoes. They're normally known to be all picky and needy, but it turns out that in hail storms they fare extremely well. Even the ones in the tray fell over but I see no signs of snapped stems like I saw on the other seedlings. Colour me impressed.

Earlier today I planted some more zucchini and squash in the big hugel bed. They all fared well in the storm. I'm planting them on the side of the hugel, but in little divots so the water doesn't just run off and instead collects there a bit. It should help them keep water there long enough for it to be absorbed instead of evaporating or flowing away.

Other than that today was relaxed. I took a bit of a break, because yesterday I emptied out two stalls in the barn. Gotta give my muscles and my nose a break.

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Lorianne Haslehurst wrote:
Those are beautiful eggs Cam.  Do you know what kind of bird will hatch from them?

I'm not 100% sure, but I think they're robin eggs. I do really like the colour of them.

Lorianne Haslehurst wrote:
I love the picture of you looking in the hole.  You look kind of ominous.  Not really who you are but great for a hip-hop album cover!

Yeah it's good to have just in case I ever get into hip-hop.

Lorianne Haslehurst wrote:
I love your new dog.  She looks very happy in her new home.

Yeah she's a cutie all right. She's getting more mischevious now. Last night she ransacked the container of empty toilet paper rolls, then some q-tips, then some garlic cloves, then the compost, then the garbage. She also tried to steal some eggs. She's officially a mischevious little stinker but she is very cute still. She likes the ponds too. She'll stick her face in the water up to her eyes, and blow bubbles in the water. It's pretty cute. The important thing is that she's really good with the animals. Last night I had her out for a walk, and we ended up sitting and watching the goats for about 15 minutes. Last week they would have been wary the whole time, but this time they basically just did their thing.

My baby hands are growing tougher! These poor appendages have spent their lives mostly writing and typing, with a some harder work interspersed in between. So when I took an axe to a good size tree today, they could only go so long before they started blistering like crazy. I'm in the process of getting a log for the top of the arbor at the entrance to the garden. I tried sawing it, but the blade kept getting jammed. So I got the axe out and started to chop. The tree is already down, I'm just taking a 10 foot log out. I chopped and chopped and it is now cut off. I messed up one end and it splintered, but the other end I finished with the handsaw and it looks much nicer.

Once I had it cut, I had to get it out of the forest. Now I already got a good workout from the chopping, but removing the log was ANOTHER great workout. It was way too heavy to lift on my own, so I "walked" it instead. I'd squat down and pick up an end, pivot the log on the other end, and drop it. Then move to the other side and repeat. I had to make sure I was keeping my back straight because it was heavy. Now that it's out it both the log and I are taking a break. The next step is to clean up the splintered end, then to cut notches out so it'll rest on the two posts nicely. That'll be done with the bowsaw and the chisel. Phew.

I did more tree removal today. It was fun  - I took some technological ideas from the Egyptians to make things a little easier. I found two other logs that were about firewood length, and I used them as rollers. It wasn't perfect as the ground was very bumpy, but it still made things far easier then just straight dragging. So after about 40 minutes of pulling, stopping, and moving logs, I had the log up by the house.

Unfortunately I grabbed the wrong log. It's supposed to be another post, not the top of the arbor. And I actually pulled it farther away from where it needs to be than it already was. Oops. But tonight I helped get a much bigger tree out of the bush with the truck. It was leaning but not fallen over. It needed to dragged down, then cut. The first tree we tried was too well dug in, and the rope snapped. So we tried another one that was slightly smaller, and it gave way after some tugging. I got to tie the knot that would hold the log while we dragged it to the front of the property. I did exactly what I first did with the comfrey, before I learned about the slipknot. I did a surgical knot, then wrapped the rope around and just did a shoelace knot but without the loops  - there's probably a name for that but I don't know what it is. It held just fine despite my lack of confidence in it.

Using the rollers got me thinking about a whole bunch of simple machines. I ended up watching some kids videos tonight on pulleys, levers and other simple machines. That's some seriously useful stuff, and the kids videos explain things so simply anyone can understand it.

Today was a good full day. It started with putting up a couple more hooks in the barn to hang the feed buckets  which will make chores easier. Later on we did a dump run - $30 flat fee for a truckload.

The big project was moving 'the cube'. It's a giant container that was once used industrially to hold hay fertilizer. It is now being used for water storage and to serve as a point to water plants by gravity feed. You can see how big it is in the photo with the spade for perspective. We lifted it some, and rolled it a bit downhill until we had it in place. After that we set up some hoses and a hand pump to drain some rain barrels on the side of the house down into the cube. Two barrels have been siphoned into it so far - it can hold a LOT of water.

Other than that, today was relaxed. We did some weeding, and I brought the pulled weeds to the goats for a buffet. I crushed some more bones and eggshells (that crusher works very well!!), and chased Curragh around the garden a bit.

I also threw some knives! I'm not sure if I mentioned it in an earlier entry, but I learned a couple weeks ago how to throw knives. Tonight I did another session and I am getting the technique down. It is so satisfying to hear the 'thunk' when the blade bites into the wood.

I am seriously ticked off. I got my first tick today. I'm not actually angry, just had to make that joke. It was pretty small, probably only a few millimeters across. I spotted it after I slapped a mosquito that was on my shin while I was reading on the deck tonight.

Nothing about it or its removal really hurt, but it was kind of weird. The way its head was buried entirely in my skin made me think of an ostrich burying its head in the sand. Or that the tick was having a very stressful day and had to just get away from it all, so he stuck his head inside my skin and took a break. Or maybe, just maybe, ticks are actually a sophisticated form of non-lethal ammunition. Stay with me here - they get blown out of a blow gun or real gun and get lodged in the skin, where they harvest some blood and give a non-zero risk of contracting Lyme disease. Okay that isn't actually that scary, but wouldn't it be cool? I might be overtired because all these ideas are coming to me effortlessly.

Other than that today was pretty relaxed. I did some more knife throwing, and I'm getting more consistent. We also moved some rain barrels around. I think last night I drank some tea that I thought was caffeine free but it wasn't, so I had a later bedtime than usual. So today I was tuckered out. Tuckered out and ticked off.

That makes me sad to see the little seedling so destroyed.  They are like babies.

Oh your hands look sore!  Can't wait to put your tree cutting skills to use at Tilden!

I LOVE the egg crusher!  We are now keeping our egg shells in a separate container under the sink so that we can crush them before adding them to compost.  The bucket fills fast when dad makes egg salad with 17 eggs (or there about ;)

So no post last night as we had some lightning happening so the internet was off. It's been a good couple days. The first thing is about barn swallows. We've had a nest in the barn above one of the goat stalls for quite a while now. It was cute to watch the parents come feed the hungry chicks. The thing is, two nights ago the nest either got knocked down or just fell off the wall. When we came down for morning chores I noticed the chicks on the ground in the triplets' stall. Fortunately no one had been stepped on, and the triplets were paying the chicks no mind. We decided to get a small cardboard box to put the nest in, then to attach the box back up to the wall. So we did that, and I carefully placed the chicks back in their makeshift nest.

This morning we came down and the parents would hover by the nest but they wouldn't land on it. DW was keeping a close eye on them which didn't help. We realized that at the current height of the box, DW could jump and grab onto the box which was no good. So we took the box off with the chicks still in, and put in on another wall with no nearby beams for DW to jump from. Hopefully the parents will land now that the nest is out of the cat's range.

In other news, Curragh has been walking over Hugh and Gill. So I put up a little roundwood fence to keep her out of it. When I say roundwood it sounds sort of fancy, but I mean that I stuck sticks in the ground to make a makeshift fence. I think it works well because it keeps her out, and when the end of the season the sticks can be pulled and tossed on the bed. Gill is fully fenced but Hugh still needs some more work done.

Today I chiselled out the notches on the log that is going to become the top of the arbor. I used a pickaxe head, an axe, and a saw. It was pretty satisfying watching the chunks of wood come flying out.

And last night we got a photo of me carrying Peaches to bed. The other two triplets don't mind being carried, but Peaches actively seeks it out. She'll run up to me, then wait there expectantly until I scoop her up and carry her in. It's already cute, but sometimes she burps while I'm carrying her and I start laughing. She's a cute one.

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Lorianne Haslehurst wrote:
That makes me sad to see the little seedling so destroyed.  They are like babies.

They should be alright - the weather is being a lot nicer now. Milder temperatures and more frequent rain. So their chances are better. We'll see though.

Lorianne Haslehurst wrote:
Oh your hands look sore!  Can't wait to put your tree cutting skills to use at Tilden!

The calluses are forming! They sure were complaining after the chopping. The rest of my body was fine, and that was a real good workout swinging that axe around. My hands were whiny, but they're tougher for it now.

I'm learning about roundwood building so I can definitely experiment up at the cottage. It's woodworking except you don't use dimensional lumber, you work with round wood. I've made a few coat hooks out of branches, and a big mallet out of what was a log. My mini fence to keep Curragh out got my creative juices flowing too. Each stick's shape determines how I use it, instead of the usual way of coming up with a use then shaping the wood to fit that use. It's a neat reversal to the usual way of thinking.

Lorianne Haslehurst wrote:
I LOVE the egg crusher!  We are now keeping our egg shells in a separate container under the sink so that we can crush them before adding them to compost.  The bucket fills fast when dad makes egg salad with 17 eggs (or there about

Me too. Not only was it very simple to make, it works very well. The fact that it's all scrap stuff thrown together makes it cooler too I think.  

It's good to hear dad is still helping out! His pistachios and egg shells are serving the garden very well

I love the fact that you start with the wood and then figure out what to do with it.  What a great perspective change!
I"m glad your hands are feeling better.

Everything you are doing sounds like a lot of work. You must be getting stronger every day.
I love the fact that you are taking pictures of your activities. This is quite a journey you are on. Thanks for sharing your posts!