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

Stephen B. Thomas wrote:BRK #66

Another smoky, hazy day. Still adjusting to it personally, though it seems like I'm not the only one. I keep hearing, "It was a lot worse last year," so I think I still have some adapting to do. Can't shake my complex feelings about the phenomenon, but I suppose it just takes time.





Running with a light crew today, as a few boots were feeling worse for the wear and had to rest. Wednesday is a projects day anyhow, so I teamed up with Caleb and today we tackled a number of worthwhile jobs. The tractor and the excavator were lubricated. We felled a couple trees that were shading some of the solar panels on the Lab, did a little hauling, and finally we created a "chimney cricket" for the top of the classroom roof. The day was ended with some watering of the primary hugels at Basecamp.

Regarding the chimney cricket, we started by creating a few triangles with scraps in the workshop. Our geometry muscles flexed and we came up with a fairly-decent specimen of isosceles triangle.



Next, this was added to a frame, and then a test fit was made on the roof.



We then covered it with sheet metal, and secured it to the roof panels. The goal is to divert heavy snows from damaging and/or knocking over the chimney stack. Obviously this will be tested when we have some significant snows, hmm... Next week?

In lieu of a picture of the finished product, I present to you a snapshot of Hao spying us from the roof's edge.



Thank you for reading, and enjoy your day...!

Many thanks as ever for the updates, Stephen. It looks like you’re learning loads and the sunflowers look amazing. I grew sunflower Velvet Queen this year (much smaller). Here are my dahlias after the rain today that I grew last year from seed (below). Best, Gemma

BRK #67

Thursday, and another full day of work. It started off with relatively clear skies, but by noon the smoke had rolled in and a couple other boots and I resorted to wearing masks to help with breathing cleaner air while working outdoors.



Speaking of work, my day started as Hao's partner for log-splitting. There's a lot of leftover wood-too-small-or-weirdly-shaped-to-be-junkpoles, and we're chipping away at it to make kindling. While splitting a log today, I must have woken up a six-legged friend from his nap. He crawled out of a crevice to give me the stink-eye.



Finally, Caleb caught this shot of me climbing up on the arm of Rex, our excavator, during our maintenance tasks this week. ...The safety net is just out of frame. I promise.



Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!

Gemma Boyd wrote:I grew sunflower Velvet Queen this year (much smaller). Here are my dahlias after the rain today that I grew last year from seed (below). Best, Gemma

They're looking happy and healthy, Gemma! It would be excellent to see flowers like those dahlias year after year.

Congrats on having a persistent crop grown from seed. One of my last plantings back East before I came to Wheaton Labs was a packet of random wildflowers I grew as a cover crop. There were cosmos all over the place! I wonder if they had any "volunteers" pop up this season (as I didn't have a yard of my own, I worked a community garden plot last year).

BRK #68

Pollinator Edition...!

Looks like the winged assistants are out and about these days, putting in the last desperate hours of work before the first frost. There were even a few I noticed catching brief naps: sitting in the center of large blossoms, completely still. They're all working hard. I caught a few snapshots of them while we worked the hugels out at Allerton Abbey on the Lab today.

Here's a big, fat bee doing some acrobatics  on a comfrey plant this afternoon.



Here's another bee sitting - I think - within the blossoms of a Jerusalem Artichoke. In the past few weeks I learned that if you harvest after the first frost, the sunchokes have a bit more flavour. We're all holding out the best we can for the cold weather to impart that little bonus before we start gathering them up.



This yellow jacket is checking out some flowering Tansy. In general, these bugs have been troublesome to several of the boots this season, though personally I have yet to be stung. Maybe if I stay dirty enough, they'll think I'm just a moving rock or something.



Here's another bee on a flowering Jerusalem Artichoke. I've noticed that the dark purple-stalked variety seem to be flowering much sooner than the green-stemmed kind. However, the green-stemmed variety seems to grow taller. When we finally harvest, it will be interesting to see the differences in what they produce.



Another Jerusalem Artichoke, this one a birds-eye view of a flowering specimen with several more buds waiting to pop open.



Finally, here's one of the sunflowers from Swamp Castle, the one too big to fit in my last photo attempt from earlier this week. I assume that - when we return on Tuesday - it'll have completely opened.



Dez, Hao and I closed-up a few more breaches in the junkpole fence surrounding Allerton Abbey at the close of the afternoon today. Our hope is that all these plants will remain unmolested by deer, and then we'll have a decent harvest in the weeks to come. We were also gifted a large braid of garlic from the Missoula Farmer's Market (thanks, Samantha!), and those will go in the ground late next week, at both Basecamp and the Lab.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and make it a wonderful weekend...!

BRK #69

Saturday edition...! These are the days of the week I head into town to take care of personal errands. It's always interesting to try and drive my car - my tiny, beloved Toyota Corolla - after a week of driving nothing but big trucks with gear-shifts on the steering column.

This rafter of turkeys felt there was no need for me to rush into my morning, so they took their time crossing the street.



Went into town, visited the post office, and to my surprise there was a parcel waiting for me in one of their lockers. I opened it up, and it was a care package from my relatives back East, full of... work gloves! So I'll be caught up for a bit in that department. The assortment included several winter-weather work gloves, and I'm eager to test them out (though not so eager as to wish for the winter to race in and overtake the autumn).

Once errands were done, I sorted some of the recycling and picked up some supplies for the Pump House project, then did my laundry.

I took a look at my trusty, obnoxious orange hat, and Fred was right: the sun really beats down on that thing! Not sure if it shows up so well in the photo, but the interior of the hat is definitely several shades more saturated than the exterior: the side that sees sunshine on it maybe 12 hours nearly every day of the week.



After hanging the laundry, I ate a quick dinner, then decided to take advantage of the rest of the dwindling daylight and do some reading outdoors. I wandered up the roadway towards the Caldera, then took a detour after passing Raspberry Rock. Behind the rise was a lone three-log bench made by one of the SKIP participants from this past summer. Mike, Grey, and I dropped it off up there as a spot for guests to take a load off. I decided to give it a try.



I quickly found my favourite reading position: flat on my back, head resting on a fist, my book held in one hand. I looked up into the adjacent tree boughs.



No sounds of cars or trucks. Maybe some gobbling turkeys. The occasional hwooh hwooh hwooh of the ravens flapping overhead. I thought my tenting spot was pretty good, but I think I found the best seat in the house.

The sun went down, and I couldn't squint to see the words on the page any more (The Monkey Wrench Gang is getting ready to sabotage the massive Arizona coal mine in the next chapter, FYI), and I decided to turn in. A herd of deer bounded away as I descended the mountain. As they disappeared in the brush and woods, and then I heard the cackling of disturbed turkeys.

I think I'm in love.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!