Clifford Gallington

We use a plastic bucket that was originaly used for dry wall compound or something, it is small, maybe a gallon or so but it gets dumped each morning  in the compost when My wife goes to the chicken house.
The chickens have a different bucket that they get saved up for them .

sweet potatoes did good this year, I think we did 8 or 10 plants that my wife started from a sweetpotatoe she got at the store, then we tried corn this year also, it did prety good, we have a mill so we will use it as corn meal if we like it.
topmatoes and peppers did not as well and squash bugs took out most of the squash, the oakra did prety good but not as well as previous years.

some resemblance to this one
https://permies.com/t/18822/homemade-wood-stove

WE wound down the second year of our garden recently here in Topeka Kansas (north east Kansas), it was just grass before and a patch of very poor soil that may have been brought in years ago to fill an old systern or septic tank, the first year of the garden we mulched with grass clippings for a while then switched to hay to keep the weeds down and to hopefuly help the soil condition, then in the fall we cleaned out the chicken house and it was scattered around and then we covered the entire garden with leaves about 6 inches deep and let the chickens in all winter, the leaves and hay broke down really well, we then plowed it under in the spring.  This year we have added about two yards of composted stuff from over last winter and this summer as well as chicken house hay and the leaves again, my wife has rabbits and we have been adding that waste to the garden all summer when available and will continue doing so when she clans the bunny barn out.  We tested the soil with a little kit from the store and it shows the nitrogen level to be very low.
Our goal is to improve the soil from its poor clayish form to a consistancy that will be workable with a fork and avoid plowing or tilling if possible and have a good health levels of twhat makes a good soil.
Our garden produced ok each year so far but not what would be expected from other gardens I have had in the past.
What steps should we change or add to improve the nitrogen level without getting some commercial bagg of manufactured stuff?
the soil consistancy has greatly improved from it's almost concrete hgard state when we first brok the ground so I feel we are making improvements.
Should we add something different over the winter?

Thanks
Cliff

Cam Haslehurst wrote:So tonight I attempted the make a center punch

In shop when I was in school all of the projects was to make a cold chissle out of a piece of rolled steel, shape and harden the cutting surface, the grade was pass or fail, when you finished our teacher would take a nail and lay it on the anvil and then use your new chisle to cut it in half, if it cut the nail without damaging the chisle edge you passed, if it made any indention in the edge you failed and started over.  one fella had hardened to far up the shaft of the chisle and when the nail was cut it also broke the chistle.  The reason your punch is not hardened all the way to the end is it would be like that one fellas and brake, the softer steel alows it to absorbe energy both when being hit and the equal reaction from the object being cut.
we hardened the edge by cooling it in used motor oul after heating it.

K Eilander wrote:Saw this and it seems like a useful trick.

Apparently they make welding filler rod made of high-strength tool steel!

this has been around a while, we used to take the valves out of a water pump on a water well drilling rig and build them up like this and then have them machined back down so they would seal up propperly.
they had to be hard surfaced like this because these pumps carried a lot of sandy muddy water through them and wore down if not a hard surface.

This was definantly worth letting folks know about for sure!

here is a link to a post in the frugility section I did a couple of years back showing how I patch dennum jeans.
this is how mom did it for jeans worn out from loading hay bales, some times the whole area from the thigh to just over the knee was cut out and patched .
https://permies.com/t/19028/patch-jeans

At the time that this oportunity came my  way I was set on getting a couple of pieces that would be suitable to make a flintlock rifle stock out of because I have been working on a piece of walnut pre cut for a stock and have it in my mind I can do one from scratch someday , what I had understood a decent starting thickness for blanks was 3 inches which alows for shrinkage and then gives plenty of room to to remove what does not need to be there.  When I talked to the man who had a setup to mill lumber using a chainsaw he said he would get me as much usable slabs as he could and this is what came out.
I had read that it takes quite a few years to cure lumber this think so I felt no pressure to hurry and get busy, some times I just go down there in the shade and sit on the stack and enjoy the smell of the wood and ponder what could come of these pieces.

My neighbor gave me pick of what was left over after the tree service guy took the huge pieces away so I went back to his wood yard and picked out two large pieces and he brought them over while he had the skid steer handy, these were quite heavy we estimated that the two pieces would be around 1500 pounds.

I have heard that good quality walnut stock blanks are hard to come up with if you want the full length that the early flintlocks have, the two that are narrow I believe these are what he thought I would like the best.

These are various thicknesses ranging from 5 quarters or 1 1/4 inch,  7 quarters 1 3/4 inch , 9 quarters 2 1/4 inch and 16 quarters  3 inches. I think I may make a bench out of the one of the thinner slabs but I do not know even how long they need to dry yet.
I do agree they are beautiful.

Anne Miller wrote:Clifford, what are your plans for those slabs?

They look very think so maybe benches? They look to think for tabletops and other things I can think of.

Or do you plan to make lots of smaller boards?

Those slabs are seriously beautiful!

Joshua States wrote:In the knife-making world, we call that a serious score.  Nice heartwood walnut like that makes excellent handle material. How thick are the slabs?

Yea that sure is a serious score for a bunch of knive handles for sure!
These are various thicknesses ranging from 5 quarters or 1 1/4 inch,  7 quarters 1 3/4 inch , 9 quarters 2 1/4 inch and 16 quarters  3 inches.

Mike Haasl wrote:Hi Clifford, I don't think I hit water but I'm not sure why water was disappearing down the pipe.  I tried some other spots without success so I've kinda given up on the sand point...

My dad was a well driller and windmill man, I grew up in the late 70's early 80's working with Dad.  

If you hit some formation like sand stone, gravel or maybe even sand the water would soak into that, this could be why your water dissapears.

Do you know what the average depth is for wells in your area?  are there any wells on neighboring property?  
We lived on a crick in SW Nebraska and had several wells that were 19 ft deep  the folks further away from the creek had no water on their property.
it is possible you are above water table and just need to go deeper.