Onions and apples

I harvested the onions, Molly is harvesting apples.

Onions need a nice dry airy shed with lots of circulation, so I made chicken wire shelves.

Meat and veg

It's the time of year when we have to begin to keep up with the harvest. Unfortunately for us, the college season begins before the harvest season ends. Before it even really gets going.

Rather poor planning, that.

That really makes life in the beginning of September pretty busy. There's been a small hiatus of sorts these last three weeks, with weather too rainy to work outdoors every day, and no harvest work yet. Aimee and I have kept busy getting ready for the college term. We're not officially on the payroll until next week, but every judiciously spent hour now in prep time is an hour of time later for farm work, an hour we don't have to be at school.

Today I didn't bother with college. The garden is starting to produce, and we need to keep up with it pretty much daily for the next few weeks until it's all in. I hiked with Haggis in the rain on Mount Harris, moved the MOFGA sheep to a nice patch of clover, again in the rain, cleaned up the MOFGA operation a bit, and then came home to harvest. Todays haul was about eight pounds of broccoli, two red cabbages which are not pictured because they're drying off on a rack in the garage prior to being refrigerated, a couple of pounds of tomatoes. Also pictured are red potatoes and cucumbers from yesterday.

About 20 pounds of veggies.

In order to make room in the freezers and fridges for this stuff, I cleaned out. This is me making lard out of that last of our pigs from two years ago. I like to keep the fatback for this and other country cookin' purposes. I grew the poor old pig -- Braeburn was his name because he liked apples -- he died for my carnivorous sins, and I'm going to eat as much of him as I can to redeem myself. The lard will keep in the fridge, and save me a bit of freezer space. I also made three quarts of dill pickle slices, and one lonely half-pint of pickled Hungarian wax pepper slices, which are canning right now in the water bath canner.

Actually, if I look I probably have a picture of good old Braeburn. Yup. There he is. In his prime. A very good pig, was he.

Scientist by a nose

I've mentioned that my better half is such a dyed-in-the-wool scientist that she keeps exceptionally detailed data on farm produce. Here she is weighing eggs! Every egg gets weighed and recorded. Our record is 125 grams!

She hates to have her picture taken, so I got chased for my temerity with the camera The last picture is just as I was getting caught!

Deeply bedded

Here's a series of shots of today's farm project: cleaning out the Womerlippi barn with the small 12 HP Kubota tractor.

It's a small barn, so you need a small tractor. I'm a big guy, so I look pretty silly on a tiny japanese tractor. But it works well.

This is a custom-designed system, and the barn, the tractor, the pig sty and the garden all work together in linear fashion, a compost assembly line. We will build a similar system into the new college barn.

The material being "cleaned out" is actually being prepared for use, to be prized as next year's main agricultural input to the garden and potato patch.

This is deep bedding for the sheep from last winter. We use a modification on a European farm system called "Swedish deep bedding," that I learned about in ecology class field trips as a schoolkid, in which fresh bedding is added each week to cover last week's accumulation of manure. This doesn't smell bad like a regular barn does, and it helps concentrate the soil nutrients and capture fertility that is otherwise lost. The sheep do their deep bedding job for about 5-6 months of late fall, winter and spring, after which the pigs and chickens get to go at it. The pigs have been working it over now for about four months, and so we started to clean it out a few weeks ago, but it's getting very concentrated and ripe and even just a little smelly for the very first time, and is attracting flies, so it's time to move it all out!

Deep bedding is a great system for a small farm/garden combination, especially if you use a secondary processor like our pigs. You'd think that pigs would be upset to have to live in and sleep on used sheep bedding, but they love it, and dig and root in it for all kinds of unmentionable piggy treats, which keeps them happy pigs. They really enjoy the day we push out a fresh pile of bedding into the yard, and Ophelia, the livelier pig, goes skipping around in it like a piglet.

The Kubota tractor can move around in the 20 by 30 foot barn, especially if it has no rototiller or other rear attachment on, and so it does most of the heavy work. Still, cleaning out the edges and corners is hard work. About two hours was all that was needed to get 3/4 of the material out into the outdoor sty, where it will compost rapidly in what remains of summer. Next spring we'll till the finished compost into the garden using the bucket loader and the custom Kubota tiller that came with the tractor. There'll be too much so we will put some in the herb garden too, and possibly gives some away to the neighbors. That seems to me to be a lot less work than cleaning it out weekly, and a superior compost product is the result. The Kubota uses a small amount of diesel -- less than half a gallon -- to do this job.

Although I am a little tired from my exertions. Nicely so. That green gym workout again.

The toad work...

It's August 3rd, and time to consider the various things I need to do before college starts up again -- early this year, first day the 27th.

One reason I wanted to be a college professor was the annual schedule: the only professional job I can think of where you can have time each summer to homestead. Of course, I'm supposed to be doing research and public service activities during this time, and I do (really -- promise I do!). But I enjoy the long days in the garden or working on household and other projects. This summer was my first real summer off in four. The previous three were contaminated by work, two by full time work as Interim Provost of Unity College, the third by a late start while the permanent provost came on board, and then by the need to keep checking back in to uncover files, help solve problems, provide information for the transition. That was last summer, and we still managed to build the barn between July 1 when my interim contract ended, and the end of August when school started up. This summer we've completed any number of smaller scale but equally important projects: the new septic, the porch, the bathroom, the herb garden, etc, etc.

All good things must come to an end. Said Frost,

Toads

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts-
They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.

Biogas experiment, stage II

Here's Abraram on the loose, not a problem, since I wanted to move the sheep, he was intentionally free. But moving at a fast clip. Action shot.

Then the motor and digester for the biogas genny. The shredder blade fell off the motor after a bit of cutting with the stick welder. It wasn't cut through, just red hot enough to loosen the heated fit.

I made a lid for the digester out of Lexan sheet. Since this is a science project, students need to see the poo fermenting inside. The connector is a threaded brass pipe fitting which cut it's own tread in the Lexan, secured by a nut on the other side.

Then I got some small helpers. For some reason, the chickens like the inside of my workshop. It makes for a little chicken crap in the place, but I like the company.

Woefully unproductive

This is a good photographic record of yesterday's activities -- and difficulties.

First up, when I went out around 6am to let the dogs piddle, I noticed that my firewood pile had come crashing down in the rains last night and I had the best part of a cord to tidy up. I've been resting my duff knee for a couple days since tripping over the lawnmower deck and spraining it, so this was not a happy sight. But I put it off until the afternoon because I'd been planning a trip to Bangor to see some Listeroid diesel engines for sale at Central Maine Diesel. These amazing super-efficient low rpm utility engines, built to an ancient British design by Messrs Lister & Co, now defunct, are cloned in India, and will run on diesel, kerosene, waste veggie oil, and biodiesel or various mixtures of all of the above. They also look to me to be capable of conversion to CHP (combined heat and power) uses, since, although they come without a radiator, they are water-cooled, and so I could run the waste heat through household hot water baseboards. I want one to build a stand-by genny, and to experiment with household CHP, and I'd been looking forward to this trip for days and no woodpile was going to spoil my fun.

Next up is my biogas generator project stage one, the motor retrofit. This is a 9hp pull-start Craftsman, probably made by Tecumseh, since it looks just like the one on the rototiller, and once I even switched out the carbs while I waited for a rebuild kit to come in the mail, and the tiller worked fine. Anyway, this now has a dicky carb which probably only needs a clean-and-rebuild, but attached as it is to a rusty shredder blade (its original purpose), it's no good to man nor beast. Gotta get the durn shredder blade off.

Back in the day, when small equipment was mostly pully driven and pullys were secured with hex bolts or woodruff keys, they came off easily. But far too many entrepreneurial farmers just reused engines when equipment died, and so the companies switched to direct drive and used taper shafts and put the drive end on hot so they shrink to the shafts, and they can be murder to get off. In this case, I picked up new pully-puller in Bangor, but that didn't do the job, the soft steel blade bent easily without coming as much as a millimeter off the shaft. so I started cutting through the blade with the stick welder until I ran out of rod. I didn't want to get back in the truck, having spent all morning in it, so decided it could wait until today.

While in Bangor I also picked up the bits needed to build the biogas reactor, and some literature on tankless (on-demand) hot water heaters. I plan to run an analysis of our current propane-powered tank heater to see if it can profitably be replaced with a tankless, either propane or electric. I expect it can cost effectively be replaced with an electric system, since our propane costs have gone up from $62 every six weeks or so, to $75, while Central Maine Power is promising to keep electricity prices stable for five more years. We get 100% Maine hydropower through a green tariff system, so our electricity is squeaky-green, while propane is propane and a petroleum distillate.

And then finally, some success. I harvested about ten pounds of potatoes for dinner, dutifully recording the quantities in Aimee's little black book. My wife is a scientist through and through, and keeps a record of all data pertinent to homestead operations, especially yields and harvests. She has one book for veggies and another for animals. Somewhere hidden, she probably has one for me, for the amount of work I get done every day.

Today's would have been a small entry, since I did nothing that could be considered vaguely sueful by Aimee's standards except pick up a mess of fallen firewood and pull some spuds.