Going, going, soon to be gone

It's spectacular how quickly the snow is melting off. In just two weeks we've gone from over a foot in the flats to bare ground.

The driveway is holding up well but it's obvious we'll need to order stone again this year. I try to budget for a certain amount every year and I think we're going to have to play some catchup. Definitely some real mud holes out there.

The streams are running bank full after a night and day of good rain. Cold temps in the late day means things freeze back up overnight and the runoff slows down. It's a great way to have the spring thaw happen - reduces the time spent in mud season.

Stream from the settling basin

Same stream heading into the woods

He kept the coffee safe though

We burned slightly more than average of our firewood. It was an early winter with snow hitting late October and temperatures staying wicked cold. December wood burning was more akin to February levels - three fires a day for a constantly burning stove load. Usually it's just a fire in the morning that we let die to coals, then another fire at night. Unfortunately, February was seasonably cold so lots of wood consumption occurred then too.

Hopefully the last year it's stacked like this

We're scrambling to finish those projects that seemed like we had all winter to do. Closet doors on the dressing area, pottery, sewing, weaving, building bee hives - great things to do while it's still cold and wet outside. Still, it'll be spring planting time soon. The garden is completely clear of snow and even the ground ice is thawing. Who knows, I may see garlic shoots coming up soon!

Cooper says fewer photos and more walking

Garden, future pit greenhouse, and stone pile for wall building

The chickens love getting out and scratching around. It was a bit cold out there but we managed to get all the way around the house. Plenty of time in the woods and I'm hoping they're eating lots of ticks.

A girl and her chickens

More bling for the tractor - forks!

Our primary heat source is our wood stove. And we love it. What we don't love quite as much is handling the firewood. Our business process improvement background tells us to streamline the process. In this case, that means minimizing touches. How many times do you touch (move) the wood? How can you reduce those touches?

You touch it when you cut it down, when you buck it up, when you split it, when you stack it, and when you move it from storage to use areas. And there is inevitably a pile step or two in there also.

Last year's overflow wood

That's a lot of touches

We decided a good way to reduce touches would be to change how we stack and store the wood. And to do that, we needed to make a small capital investment in tractor bling. We bought forks for the bucket. 

Getting in position to put on the forks

We have lots of wooden pallets - you can get them for free if you're willing to scrounge around a bit - and we used some to form an open-front wood bin.

Cooper helped

Ta da! A wood bin, or pod as we're calling them

 Then we moved it next to the wood pile.

Carefully positioning the forks 

Carefully placing it by the pile

We filled it up and then moved it to the front porch (our "use" area).

Wood on parade!

Attractive? No. Easy to reach from the front door? Yes.

We typically kept two 10-foot long wood racks on the front porch for easy loading to the wood stove just inside the door. It would take 5 bucket loads to fill each rack with Chris getting the wood from the storage area, bringing it around to the porch, dumping it on the ground, and leaving to get another load while I filled the rack. It'd take nearly two hours to fill both racks and it always seemed to be miserable out when the racks needed to be filled. Now? Yes, it took a bit of time to fill the pod, but it was easy to pick up and drive it around, easy to set on the porch, and no unloading was necessary. 

We'll continue this method for this year - load the pod from the storage area, move it, use it, repeat. But! Here is the awesome part. Next year when we gather firewood from the forest, we can bring the pod with us and load it in place. Then we can simply put it in the storage area and grab it when we need it. Yes, we'll need lots of pods, but as mentioned, pallets are easy to come by. 

We're finding that a full pod is a bit heavy for the tractor bucket (it's way out there remember, so the leverage ratio is a bit off). We'll likely have to only fill the pods 2/3 full to make that easy to move. But I think it's going to be so much easier in the long run. Many, many, fewer touches. Woot!

What's been going on (or miscellaneous stuff)

We've been working on a variety of projects that needed finishing up or that will continue for a long time and just needed a bit of progress.

Firewood is always a biggie and we've actually been working on it since March. We now have 680 (136 feet long times 5 feet high) square feet of wood versus the 648 (162 x 4) we put up last year. I realize that this isn't how anyone else in the entire world calculates wood volume but it seems to fit with our stacking methods. This way we don't have to worry about carefully keeping dimensions consistent we just measure when we're done. Close enough is good enough.

The garden and CSA have been keeping me busy with preserving and cooking. My cucumber patch produced prodigiously this year and I've been putting up sweet pickles and even succumbed to the lure of a new dill pickle recipe (I stink at making dills). I also cooked down and froze pizza sauce pucks (an idea I got here), made peach jam, picked and froze blueberries, and struggled to keep up with all the fresh veggies from the CSA. Let's hear it for lo mein and quiche for using up lots of produce.

Canning sweet pickles

Everything in the fridge lo mein

We continue to work on laying the stone patio. This is a project that will take a very long time to complete so we just keep chipping away at it. It helps to be using huge stones. Unfortunately they are also usually thick - we managed to partially split this one and it's still massive.

At least it covers a lot of area

While all the furniture was out of the house for the great floor re-seal I took advantage of the space to do some planning on the mudroom. We intend to do built in cupboards and boot benches and all that nifty stuff. Pinterest has been a huge help here and has given us lots of ideas.

Storage behind, boot bench in front

Varying depths for cupboards

Cooper has been her usual helpful self. She keeps occupied while we're doing boring stuff like floors and trim...

One focused dog

What she's focused on

So very close...

...but she's always willing to lend a paw to help out. I laid out a down comforter to look for spots that needed repair and she got involved immediately.

Am I helping?

I've also been working through my project stash in an attempt to actually get a few things done before starting new projects. Each Sunday I pull out three things that need finishing touches or small amounts of time (mending in particular) and try to get them done before the next Sunday. I've managed to get quite a few nagging projects out of the pile and put away. Doesn't always work (I knit very, very slowly), but it does focus my attention.

Preparing for winter

Yes, I'm well aware that it's early-July. But when you heat with wood you start winter prep early. We've actually been gathering our firewood since early Spring and now the pile is large enough to get the splitter in here. 

Last year we put up 162 feet (4 feet high) and ended May with 50 feet left. We tend to have a wood fire at least once a month during the summer if only to dry out the house when it's cold and wet out. Makes me laugh to have every window open and a fire going in the wood stove, but it does wonders for humidity control (this only works if it's one of those cold and clammy days, not when it's 90 degrees and 88% humidity). 

Anyway, we're planning to put up another 100 feet and we'll see how far this pile gets us. We have the hardest time telling how much stacked wood we'll actually get from a big pile of bucked wood, but we're hoping to take some measurements so we can do better estimates in the future.

Ready for splitting

Unusually cold

So, it was 43 degrees when I got up this morning. Now, I realize that I live in upstate NY and that we get cold weather - but 43 in September??? Seems a bit cruel.

Fortunately we got all of our firewood split and stacked! Yes, that is correct - a total of 162 feet of wood has been put up for the winter. We didn't bother calculating cords since the racks we use on our porch are 10 feet long. We just fill them up and keep track of how many we use. That gave us an estimate of how much wood we wanted to put up for this coming winter and we decided to do half again extra so that we'd have carry over into next year.

Basically, we planned for 150 feet, 4 feet high and we ended up with 162 feet. Not too shabby. We'll track it again this winter to confirm consumption levels and plan for next year's usage. It's a really good feeling to look out and see all that wood banked. And we've already used a bit of it with these cold temperatures.