Ellen Schwindt

Hello Ethan,
   It's so nice to see a neighbor here on Permies. I'm sure everybody's going to learn a lot from you.
-Ellen from South Conway, NH

Wow, thanks for that quick response, Davis and Matt.

Matt, your comment about insulation is definitely salient and there are further easy things we can do to improve the situation a bit. We may even be willing to further reduce our living space during the winter.  

And thanks for the tidbit of hearing about some people using a masonry stove on at the base of the house to heat that level and the next level up. When My husband moved here at age 5 he and his mom had a wood-burning furnace in the cellar that produced drift heat through a grate into the living room. That was the entire heating system. They survived, anyway, but I don't think it was easy. Fast forward (70 years!!) and now we want a bit more comfort.

Davis, I will certainly check out Blaze King Stoves. We do have a central chimney that goes all the way to the cellar. But we don't have easy access to that chimney on the first floor because we had a stainless steel flexible liner installed in it about 17 years ago. At least, I don't think we could DIY access that. But maybe a furnace/stove installer could access it.

Matt, if you have further information about Cellar Masonry heaters suppling heat for two floors, I'd love to know where to look.

Thanks again for the conversation,
-Ellen
P.S. I love the C.S. Lewis quotes, Davis.

Hello Permies,
    I've been peeking at Rocket Mass builds for so many years that it's a joke between my husband and me when the subject of cold comes up. But this winter, push has come to shove and said "what about it?!?"

We would like to reduce the amount of firewood we handle. Currently 7 cord keeps us chilly all winter long and especially from January onward when my husband starts worrying about how much wood we have left and rationing it and doing things like turning off the propane back-up at night so we wake to 50 degrees or even lower in the morning.

That combined with an experience a couple of years ago with our conventional woodburning/forced hot air (by electrically powered fan) heating system. On the first day of the heating season, the house filled with smoke coming out of the ductwork. It was on a teaching day for me--I teach piano lessons in my home.  Luckily for us, my husband knows all of the "old-guard" craftsmen in our community and he called a furnace guy who came and told stories with my husband while the two of them patched up the firebox with furnace cement and added a layer of firebrick to reinforce it. We're still, at least 3 years on, limping along on this undeniably ineffecient system and we both agree it's time to look into changing things for the better.

So of course I've been talking about Rocket Mass Heaters, but, truly, I'm in the beginning stages of research and I don't think one is going to suit our needs. Realistically, we're not going to take on a huge building project of any kind AND our current system is in our basement.

My first question is this: Does anybody use a Rocket Stove or wood furnace that burns the volatile gases to power a whole-house hot air system? My second is related--Has anybody used a Masonry Stove in the basement to heat the first flour of a house?

Our house is built on a slope. Our basement is a walk-out arrangement. We have two stories above that--All connected with complicated and probably home-made ducting. We have a central chimney with a metal liner installed after a chimney fire some 17 years ago or so. Our framing is post and beam, but I don't think it could support the mass of a Rocket Stove on the main floor.

Direction in choosing some next research steps will be much appreciated! Thank you in advance!

My tasty Permie garden
grows "weeds" as well as food I eat.
I love all the plants.

I would like to second the question of camelina growing. I have planted some as a cover crop with crimson clover. I won't know until spring if it survives my zone 3 winter. Right now it's 15 degrees F and no snow cover, so maybe not, but maybe.  I'd love to figure out the oil question..... Anybody else got growing experience with camelina?

Thanks for that book list and inspiration, Gina!

I want to read a lot this winter, too, but I have been hunting around for the just-right books.

As for my winter projects, I have a fleece to wash, card, and spin in small batches, lots and lots of flax tow to comb for shorter flax fibers, lots of fiber to spin, and lots of plans to make for growing more flax and small grains to be planted in the spring just after the snow goes.

There's no snow yet, and that's good, because I still need to stack the lumber from our torn-down decrepit chicken house, try to get 1000 square feet of cardboard laid down as a cover for the ground where I'll be growing flax and small grains, and one more fence made for my three-sided chicken coop. I thought (chuckling can be heard here) that I'd somehow have gotten all that done already.

Oh and there's a string quintet (different kind of string) to finish, practice, and perform, along with about 25 music lessons to teach each week. Well, nobody ever expected me to be lazy in the winter!

When somebody learned how to balance all the rich threads of life, I do wish they'd teach me. In the meantime, I'm so glad there are so many options.

I'm always trying to relate Permies conversations to my own experience. I have had great luck making hugels out of downed wood from the wooded (and for a long time) area on my property. This year, I had a sapling spring up in one of my first hugels. I decided to let it stay as a builder of soil and as a sort-of unplanned guild member. So far so good: it's still little, but I'm able to grow around it. I'm thinking next year I'll try to grow some pole beans or other viney members of a guild around it.

I don't exactly test my soil, but it is full of life and not very full at all of pesty beasties. I'm thinking this is bringing a tiny bit of the forest soil complexity into the area where I'm developing food forest plants. I also think I'm years and years away from seeing the food forest project to something like completion, and I love the idea of looking at the whole project as a succession partly managed by me and with a future that goes on beyond my management.

This is a very helpful conversation to me. I'm trying to establish some small (mostly about 10'X10') plots that I can rotate through small grain production and flax production. My main goal is to get the soil healthy after it was under plastic to kill off an "invasive" species. I have a couple of these plots that are very weedy. I originally prepared them by using a scythe to cut all vegetation off at ground level, added a bit of hand-weeding to eliminate as much crabgrass and blackberry as I could, then planted a cover cover crop of oats which winter-killed. After that I planted the whole lot to flax. I got a pretty good crop of flax that first year of desired harvest--that was 2022. I also planted rye that year and then followed the rye plot with flax in 2023 (this year). That plot had way too much weed pressure and though I did harvest some flax it was a lot less than ideal for flax production, even at my tiny level. I want to be able to plant either fall rye (with a legume and a mustard for companions) but I fear that the weeds have filled in too much. I'm curious about whether anybody is using cardboard to terminate vegetation, then planting without tilling and what results you've had. Perhaps I should start that as a thread, but it also seems like a relevant question here.

I make the smalles bales imaginable with a milk crate. I just cram the hay in and tie twine around it. It stores nicely in my shed. It's on a tiny scale, but I like feeling that I've baled a little bit of hay.

I didn't quite believe what James Freyr said in this thread until the other day. That was when I caught our new and not very bully-ish rooster named Randy sitting on the nest the girls had lately been using. Sure enough, under him were three eggs! Chickens certainly are weird. Thanks James for keying me in to the amazing possibilities of weird chicken behavior.