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

The bee is cool!

Great job with the truck and tractor towing the load!

The baby robins are precious!

Oooooo...I love those cards! Thanks for the intro to them!

You are super appreciated for all you do at Wheaton Labs!

I'm really enjoying your posts on all the bigger projects you are getting stuck into, some amazing talent showing up.
Lucky having robins so near you can observe them up close.
The pics on carding wool were interesting I've not see that done from scratch before.

BEL #621

The final day of the 2024 PTJ has come to pass. To say I'm surprised by a completely unexpected gift from the attendees and friends would be the understatement of the year... But more about that tomorrow. Meanwhile, I have a few photographs of things I observed today.

At the start of the day, Beau reveals the state of the Mycelium Blocks project.



We all had rocket-oven pizza for lunch today, and although I am mainly vegan in diet and haven't eaten meat in a couple decades, even I had to admit that this meat-laden pizza was cosmetically perfect in every way. Big thanks to guest James for being my oven assistant and timer for all the baking...!



I had a chance to take a look at this year's progress for the Sepp Holzer Root Cellar project. It's going to be a cavernous root cellar once it's complete...! I chatted with JR about his plans for next year, and how we ought to shut down the construction site for the rest of this year.



As part of the roof, several of the logs will be notched and fitted so they help keep the walls and roof safely fastened together.



Finally: the sweet potatoes in the Truly Passive Greenhouse are so large and healthy that they're spilling over the sides of the basin, and climbing up the heat-travel pipe. I'm grateful to see these plants doing so well.



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

BEL #621

The day between the PTJ and SKIP... Not really a day for a break. But it started beautifully.



I spent time shuttling guests to the airport today, and eventually focused on event prep. That said, I still felt compelled to visit the acre I want to steward, and attempt to record some of my thoughts on the sudden appearance of the start of the willow feeder I want on that plot.



Of course, I ended up blubbering like a baby instead of coherently discussing my thoughts. So I've already deleted that video and it's unable to be posted.

To sum things up: it's been a long, long two years. Many, many people have come and gone. I've done a lot of work to help Wheaton Labs be successful. Also, I've made plenty of mistakes, many missteps, and uttered plenty of misspeaks. And still, there were a dozen people on-site, and an unknown number of donors, a countless number of hours of gathering the materials and building this frame late into the night during a special event here, which made the Poo With A View possible. These folks cared enough about me and the leaning-in I've done here to surprise me and catch me completely, authentically flat-footed with an incredibly generous gift.

I'll always remember this, and the generosity of these good and interesting people, every time I stop in front of this window in the Poo With A View.



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

BEL #622

SKIP is here...! The enthusiasm of the first day of the event is contagious, and with a temporarily-larger Boot team and a smaller population of guests, things seem more easy-going and less-anxious,

That doesn't mean we're without challenges, however. One of the significant issues that emerged - but of course - Friday last week (the last day of the PTJ) was the loss of function of water up on the Lab. Since then, we've raced to ensure that SKIP guests have plenty of water and are responded to as quickly as possible.

When it comes to the plants we want to keep alive, we've brought Judy back into service, with the addition of a "turtle tank" on her back.



We have the capability now to apply 400+ gallons of water on the hugel berms at Allerton Abbey, during the hottest, driest month of the year. I hastily concocted the plan when I woke up Sunday morning, remembering how we irrigated the Abbey hugels prior to pressurized water up at the Lab. I then went to the Lab, added the tank to Judy's back (smashing my nose with it in the process), and tried to track down maybe 80% of the required components to make it all work.

Here's the tank:



While currently missing a crucial component (a specific "fire hose" connector that links a garden hose with the large outlet on the back of the water tanks), we were still able to make things work, particularly with the turtle tank.



Fortunately I was able to find The Apparatus, a four-outlet hose connector we built a couple years ago. I want to carry out a search tomorrow for that connection adapter so we can have flawless connections between the tank and the pressure pump, and then experiment with powering the pump with the VoltsWagen: the solar generator up at the Abbey.



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