Root cellar and garden/storage crates

If you didn’t know, we’re building a house. I don’t mean that we’re paying someone to build a house for us. We’re building it. Well, I’m doing most of the work, but I accept help from friends and family.

Anyway, one of the things we designed into our home (and, yes, we designed the house ourselves) is a root cellar. At one point in the process, I was going to build a root cellar separate from the house using the methods described by Mike Oehler in The $50 & Up Underground House Book. I still like his method (years ago after reading the book, we thought about building an underground house like he describes), and may use it for some structure sometime in the future. If you want to build a fairly inexpensive root cellar, you ought to check out this method.

We changed our plans for the house more than once (it’s been a developmental process, and it’s only gotten better with each change we’ve made to our plans). One of those changes was to make the root cellar under part of the house with access to it from the house. So, I dug a hole with the use of a friend’s backhoe and constructed a root cellar. You can read about how I built it here.

We haven’t gotten to use the root cellar yet, though. We haven’t gotten to live in our house yet either, but we’re getting closer all the time. In fact, just this week I built the stairs to the root cellar. 

The root cellar has two rooms, a larger one and a smaller one. The larger one is about 8’x13’. The smaller one is about 8’x 8’. I still have to insulate in the ceiling and install the exhaust vents in each room. Then, there will be shelves and bins to build, but I’m looking forward to being able to store some food in it next fall and winter. Hopefully, if all goes well, we’ll also be living in our new house by then.

Earlier this week, I bought some storage crates to use in the garden and root cellar. I saw them advertised on Craigslist late last week. They are really very nice. They measure 24” x 16” by 8.25”, and if filled up to the handles, they hold one bushel (based upon my calculations of volume). They are very sturdy and stack nicely. I think they will be very handy. You can buy them new from a few places, but they’re expensive. I’m glad to say I paid well less than retail price for them.

I move them into the root cellar yesterday after I finished the steps. So, they are now waiting for the coming harvest season and the christening of our new root cellar. In the meantime, we have more snow (it won’t last long, though).

The work of summer

There’s an amazing amount of work to be done every day. We keep plugging away. I’ve been devoting a lot of time to our house project. We’re making some good progress. You can check it out on my other blog, if you haven’t already.

The children and I have enjoyed swimming in the pond several times. They actually ask me if they can go in the pond nearly every day. Usually, there is no real reason not to. The pond isn’t holding water as I would like it to. Water seeps out in several places around the dam. I don’t know if this is something that will correct itself over time as the dam settles more, or not. It’s not a fast leak, but the water level has gone down a fair bit.

We’ve been enjoying some produce from the garden. I didn’t get in a hurry to get the garden planted this spring, so we’re not enjoying things like tomatoes and squash yet. But, those things won’t be too long. We’ve had some nice salads, and the sugar snap peas were awesome! We had new potatoes with our first picking of snap peas a couple of weeks ago. The asparagus did quite well this year, especially considering the small size of our asparagus bed. I think I need to set out about a 1,000 plants!

We’ve been eating fresh black raspberries for the last two weeks. We’re also getting blueberries off of our older plants. Soon, it will be time to begin picking blackberries. Some of the early ones are ripening.

Yesterday, we got the tomatoes staked up. I like to keep them mulched and hold them up off of the ground. I used to let our Roma tomatoes sprawl out, but now I stake them up, too. They are so much nicer to pick and do better this way.

I drove small posts in the ground and strung baling twine I took off of bales last winter between the posts to hold up the Romas. I’m trying a new method for the Mortgage Lifters: using livestock panels in an A-frame. I learned about this method from another individual who regularly uses it. It is certainly a quicker, easier way to stake up tomatoes.

We’re growing pole beans this year. Usually, I plant bush beans. I built a frame work using sycamore poles for the beans to climb on. I may add a few more poles. I have one more row to take care of. I’m thinking I’ll use the livestock panels that we had for the peas. I’m going to save the rest of the peas for next year’s seed. So, they are about done with the panels.

The boys have been working on mulching the plants in the garden. They mulched the potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, peanuts, sweet potatoes, and squash so far. There are still some more sweet potatoes and tomatoes to mulch. Maybe this next week.

The children, dad, and I spent some time in our small corn field this week. The crows about ruined our corn crop by eating the corn out of the ground before it germinated. I replanted between what came up the first time that the crows didn’t get, but the stupid birds ate most of that, too. I don’t know how well it will produce, but there is some corn growing in the field. The weeds were threatening to take over, though. I tilled between the rows, and then we all worked in the rows with hoes. It was hot and sweaty work, but we got most of it done. I have 4 or 5 rows to do this coming week.

I was able to haul one load of manure and bedding from the sale barn last week. This is a slow time of year for them. Also, since they had to do a thorough cleaning a month or so ago after the flood, there’s been less need for cleaning out. When I can see myself clear to do so, I’m going to start hauling some of the old sawdust from the sawmill.

Gardening and house work

We’ve begun another week of work. It is a blessing to have the opportunity to labor on our own projects here on the homestead. It involves a lot of sweat, soreness, and tiredness at times, but there is a simple joy in such work. I think I often take for granted the situation we enjoy in which there is no one dictating my activities. Reporting for a “regular job” every day with a supervisor telling me what to do would not be nearly as enjoyable.

I’ve been working on our new house. You can read a little about my efforts on my Cedar Ridge Farm blog. It feels good to be making some visible progress on it.

While I’ve been devoting time to house-building (and more extreme composting soon), the children (all four of them) have been taking on more responsibility for the garden. They’ve been pulling a lot of weeds. The boys mulched some of the potatoes the last two days and will mulch more plants today. They also pick potato bugs off of the potato plants. I do pay them a little for removing the bugs as an incentive. We’ve found that if you pick them off and then keep up with them, the number of bugs is greatly lessened to where they aren’t much of a problem in a couple of weeks time.


Here is a photo of the field in which I planted the beans for dried beans. It also has squash, winter and summer, and several rows of popcorn that I just planted this week. I also planted a small plot of red indian corn near a compost pile in another place. The Wapsie Valley field corn that I replanted hasn’t come up yet, and the crows are actively picking the kernels out of the ground.

We have lots of roses blooming. There are some light pink and dark pink ones. The children love picking them and presenting their mother and mammaw with bouquets. These roses apparently were started in years past by the residents in the old cabin and have spread over time.

A welcome rest at the end of the week

It’s been a good week. Lots of work. I’m glad that it’s the end of the week and we have a day of rest – a welcome respite every week. Normally, I don’t like to post without photos, but I decided to go ahead tonight, mainly because I didn’t take any pictures this week.

On Monday, my friend Jon came over (he’s coming over on Mondays and Wednesdays to work with me), and we dug footers for the porch and kitchen on the new house. We also planed some boards that will be used for the upstairs subfloor.

On Tuesday, the children and I worked in the garden. The potatoes were really needing weeded. The children worked on weeding Monday and Tuesday. Then, I tilled between the rows. The potatoes in this particular plot haven’t done as well as I would like. I think the wet weather after they were planted didn’t help. In the morning on Tuesday, I also bought 100 80-pound bags of concrete mix in order to be ready for pouring the footers on Wednesday.

Wednesday morning was the scheduled delivery for our coop order. Thankfully, Danny offered to get it for me. I had a few things to do to be ready for when Jon arrived. Once he got here, we began mixing and pouring concrete. Thankfully, I bought an electric powered concrete mixer from Lowes a few weeks ago when we started working on the cistern again. It worked great powered by my Yamaha generator (which is so quiet you couldn’t hear it over the noise of the mixer).

We started with the footer for the kitchen. I ran the mixer while Jon dumped the concrete and tamped it down. It took 54 bags to finish it, mixing two at a time. We used three bags of concrete for each of the porch footers (one for below each post). The mixer was just able to hold three bags worth, and we were able to position the mixer for each one so that we could dump straight into the hole. It all went very smoothly. We mixed 98 bags of concrete and got the job done. I was a little tired at the end of the day!

On Thursday, I cut some wood for the cookstove, and then the children and I worked in the garden. We planted some sweet corn, more green beans, zucchini squash, and cantaloupe and set out another 100 sweet potato slips (we now have 300 sweet potato plants growing). I also bush hogged where the cows have grazed during the last two weeks, mixed some manure with wet hay, adding to one of the compost piles, and tilled the field for growing beans and squash. The children and I ended the day with a swim in the pond, the same as we did on Monday and Tuesday.

Today, I replanted the corn field because it looks like only about 1/3 of the corn we planted two weeks ago came up. I don’t know why it didn’t germinate well. It may have been too wet. I do know that crows ate a good bit of it right out of the ground. I used the garden planter to replant today. It took a bit of work since I didn’t work the ground first (I didn’t want to disturb the corn plants already up). Hopefully, what I planted today will germinate and grow well with little interference by pesky crows.

I also planted our dried bean seeds. The rows in this field are 80 feet long (give or take 15 feet). I planted 4 rows of small kidney beans, 12 rows of pinto beans, 12 rows of red beans, and 12 rows of horticulture beans. I also planted several kinds of winter squash, some pumpkins, okra, and cantaloupe. Then, this afternoon, I went to town and bought some concrete blocks and mortar mix to be prepared for more work on the new house on Monday.

Oh, I also completed some class work (I’m teaching a six-week section during the summer session) in the mornings before everyone else got up. There are a few other things I did during the week, but the ones I’ve mentioned are the major ones. It was a good week with lots of things accomplished, and I’m glad that it’s Sabbath now!

Summer kitchen

We’ve been keeping busy around here. There is still quite a few things to plant in the garden, but there’s still plenty of time. We’ve set out tomatoes, sweet peppers, sweet potatoes, and broccoli plants and planted some peanuts, squash, cucumbers, and beans. That’s not counting the potatoes, peas, onions, and salad greens we planted earlier. We’ll be planting more squash, summer and winter varieties, more beans, okra, corn, etc. as we’re able. It rained today, so we’ll have to wait for the garden to dry out a bit. I also planted nearly half an acre of corn last evening. Today’s rain should help it germinate quickly.

I have a friend who is coming over here to work on house-building-related things with me a couple of days a week now. That helps to keep me on task so that we can get things done. There are so many different projects to do that it can be difficult to focus specifically on just one. Some things get put off when something else demands attention. With Jon coming over to work, I’m forced to focus my energy and efforts on some specific projects that need completed.

This week we worked on the summer kitchen. We’ve been using the wood cook stove on the porch quite regularly since I set it up a few weeks ago. Our plans were to enclose the porch, making it into a summer kitchen.

We built walls (only needed on two sides) on Monday. On Wednesday, we put on siding, screened window openings, put trim around the window openings on the outside, and reglazed some windows. I have seven windows that a friend gave me two or three years ago that have been stored in the barn that we’re using for the summer kitchen. We hung one window – the others will be installed in the coming week.

With the walls and screen, a lot of bugs will not have easy access. That’s a good thing. I have to do something about the leaks in the roof. The roof has leaked since I put it on when I built the porch a few years ago. I’m pretty sure that most of the leaks originate in the junction between the porch roof and the house roof. The shallow pitch of the roof also has an effect. I’ll attempt to rectify the leak situation soon. With the rain today, we didn’t have rain blow in the windows, just leaks from the roof in a few places, especially when the rain was pouring down hard.

We acquired the sink and cabinet from a friend who removed it from someone else’s house. It’s a single sink with double drain boards and a white metal cabinet. I haven’t hooked up water to it yet, but I’m going to. We’ll run the drain outside and use the water for irrigating Anne’s flower garden.

You can see my clothes hanging up to dry in the last photo. I got soaked doing chores this morning. I had to chase the neighbor’s cows (10 Holsteins and a calf) off of our property (I hope he fixes that fence sometime) while it was pouring down rain. Then, I set up some more paddocks for our cows since I was already wet.

We’re already pleased with our summer kitchen. It’s going to work out quite nice.

The kitchen floor: gettin’ rid of ugly

When we bought our farm, the only “livable” space was an old mobile home. It’s UL listed according to the 1972 standards. It was dirty, dark, and smelled of mothballs when we first saw it. It has evidence of roof leaks and leaks around windows. It’s an old mobile home.

We’ve done things to make it more livable over time. We removed the brown shag carpet from the living room. And, the original green carpet that was under that. Then, we patched places where the floor was rotted out near the walls and put down laminate flooring. That made the living room much better.

The next room we tackled was a bedroom. It had the original green carpet. In the corner of the room, the carpet was about the only thing keeping things from falling through to the nether regions under the house. We removed the old, nasty, dirty, disgusting (add your own adjectives here) green carpet, patched holes and rotted places in the subfloor, and then put down laminate. We also added some big windows to the room.

Later, we installed laminate in the hallway and remodeled the bathroom, creating a small half bath off of the bedroom. These too received new flooring.

The one room that still had the original flooring was the kitchen. It needed replaced, but I was reluctant to do so because it meant moving everything out, including the heavy wood cookstove. The old linoleum was a “lovely” gold and green color with a fascinating pattern designed to excite the senses and provide cover for dirt hiding thereon. It was also rapidly deteriorating as pieces of it were wearing off.


The thing that motivated me to replace the floor was a leak under the kitchen sink. One of the housings on our reverse osmosis water filter developed a crack. Before we noticed it, much water had leaked and had saturated the subfloor under the sink. It should be noted that the subfloor in this lovely manufactured house is nothing more than particle board, a material that dissolves into nothingness when it becomes wet.

Rather than have the horror of someday soon watching someone washing dishes disappear through the floor along with the sink, I decided to fix the problem. While I was at it, it seemed appropriate to replace the ugly linoleum with something better – laminate in an oak pattern.

My dad helped me complete the job. It took us two days and involved taking everything out of the kitchen and then tearing out the gold & green linoleum. Once it was removed, we cut out the bad sections of the floor and replaced them with something solid (new boards). Once the floor was repaired, we laid the laminate flooring. What an improvement!

Our new pond (part 2)

After the contractor left, I spent some time working on building a dock. I also used the grader blade on my tractor to take a little soil off of the shallow end. When I checked the water line on the shallow end of the pond, I realized I hadn't paid enough attention during construction. The slope and depth on a couple of the edges for several feet were not what I wanted. Just looking at it, I didn't realize how shallow the water would be along the edge of the pond.

In the following photo you can see the shallow end and the beginning of my dock construction. At the edge of the smoothed area, the bottom drops down several feet. I'm placing the dock between the deep end of the pond and the shallow end. I thought this would be an ideal location. The four posts that are set in the photo are 6x6 eastern red cedar I milled. The foreground in the photo is the shallow end of the pond after I scraped it with the grader blade. I was only able to take off a few inches of soil – not enough to make an appreciable difference, though.



The next photo looks the other direction across the shallow end. The line I cut with the blade (on the right) denotes the approximate water level. As you can see, it was going to be quite shallow.



Here’s a view of the dock construction after I set all of the posts:





The photo above shows the dock posts and the first water in the pond.

In order to deepen the pond on the shallow end, I borrowed a friend’s backhoe again. I am deeply grateful to Mike for letting me use his machine so much.



As I removed dirt with the backhoe, I put it i the back of my 1979 F250 and moved it to the slope in front of our new house.



The photo above shows the dump bed in action, a feature that makes this truck very handy. I can load up to 2 tons of material in it. That only takes 6 or 7 shovels full of dirt with the backhoe.



The photo above shows how much dirt I moved in the first afternoon and put in front of the house. It was a good opportunity to accomplish two things: deepen the shallow end of the pond and feather out the slope in front of the house.



This is a view of what I was able to get done in the first afternoon with the backhoe. I dug it down about 2.5 feet. At this point I still needed to extend the excavation out toward the middle, of course. I left a ridge under the dock dividing the deep end from the shallow end in the hope that the fish will like it that way.



This view shows the pool of water from the rain we received earlier that week. You can also see that although I got down to clay in one part of this excavation (the reddish/orange colored dirt), I was still digging out top soil. I didn’t remove all of it. I did end up digging deeper and removing a bit of the clay, though. More about that later. . .

General goings-on

Spring is approaching. Or, at least it sure has felt like it. We’ve enjoyed some nice, warm temperatures during the last couple of weeks. This winter has been different (they all are, though) in that we’ve had some frigid weather with temperatures near zero and some warm weather with temperatures over 70. I had planned on tapping some maple trees and making syrup, but the weather hasn’t cooperated to make that really doable. We’ve made syrup the last two years. Maybe next year will provide cooperative weather.

Wednesday of this week we had a windy day. The storms that moved through the central part of the country mostly missed us, except for the wind. Other places got it worse than we did, though. We only received about three tenths of an inch of rain, and all of that seemed to come within 15 minutes. That’s alright, though, since the ground is still plenty soft from the previous rains. Winter time is like that though; around here it seems that the ground doesn’t dry out until summer. It does somewhat, but it sure seems like we have mud from November to May.

Anne and mom took the opportunity to run off to Glasgow on Wednesday to do some treasure hunting. They both enjoy spending time looking for bargains in thrift shops and antique shops. Dad came over so that he and I could go over our garden plans for this summer, mainly determining if there are any seeds we need to order. There are only a few like onion seeds and some seeds for winter squash. We saved a lot of seeds from last season’s gardening, including tomato, corn, squash, okra, green bean, pepper, arugula, and basil seeds along with some others. We grow open-pollinated and heirloom varieties so that we can save seeds. We also have potatoes to plant and will start some sweet potato slips.

Yesterday, dad and I worked on pulling some cedar logs out of the woods. He wrote a post about it on his blog and I wrote one on my Cedar Ridge Farm blog. It was a great day for working outside, and the previous day’s rain didn’t make things too wet and sloppy to get the job done. I’ll have some more logs to cut and skid out of the woods.

With the nice weather, I’ve been able to work on some house projects. It’s kind of nice to be able to focus some attention on it. I’ve actually been motivated to spend some time thinking about the project and planning for different aspects of it. So, I’ve posted a few times to Cedar Ridge Farm, and I expect there’ll be a lot more posts on that blog in the coming weeks and months. It is my hope to get a great deal of the house project completed this year. So, keep an eye on my other blog, too. 

Spring and summer are busy times of the year, but there is such a richness in living the life we do. We count it a blessing every day that we have opportunities to work together, to grow good food and not be completely dependent on that which is called food but really isn’t (standard grocery/restaurant fair), and to be surrounded by such fabulous beauty as can only be found in God’s glorious creation!
     

A home heating contemplation

I’ve been thinking more about the work that I have to do on the house this year. There are a lot of details to be ironed out and a lot of work to be done. I enjoy trying to creatively approach some of the challenges of the building process, and it’s great fun trying to come up with ideas for providing some basic services in efficient and low energy input forms.

We heat with wood. We have a nice wood cook stove that is also designed to heat a home. It works well. Perhaps the biggest drawback of a wood stove has to do with distribution of heat. It’s warmest near the stove. That’s not all bad, of course, especially when you come in from outside and want to warm up. The challenge is to circulate that heat through the rest of the house in an efficient and low energy usage manner. Fans help, but they also move a lot of dust and contribute excess noise to the home environment.

So, I’ve been toying with ideas to distribute the heat from the stove into the various rooms and corners of the house, specifically the house we’re building (I don’t want to spend the time retrofitting and building a system for this old mobile home we currently live in). I toyed with the idea of an outdoor wood furnace. There are some nice things about those, primarily that the mess of burning wood stays outside. However, there are some drawbacks. They are expensive to purchase, and building one may require skills I don’t yet have. They can also consume a lot more wood than we currently burn. Additionally, most of them are connected to some kind of furnace-blower system inside, something that requires an amount of energy I don’t want to support. I want some system that will not consume very much energy so that it can be powered in the event of electrical service disruption.

I’m already planning on installing a domestic hot water system that will utilize heat from the wood stove in the winter when we’re using it and that will also have solar collectors for the summer months. We can buy a hot water coil that fits onto our stove which uses the heat in the firebox to heat our domestic hot water. The heated water naturally flows into a tank via thermo-convection, drawing cooler water from the tank back through the coil. It’s a nice system that can produce some very hot water with no extra expense.

So, tonight I got to thinking about how to draw upon this hot water source to spread the heat of the wood stove throughout the house. My idea involves radiant heating tubes installed in the floors (probably only the first floor). However, water directly from the hot water tank would oftentimes be too hot for such an application. So, I envision another tank to supply the radiant heating system. Here’s a diagram of my idea (hopefully, it’s clear enough to understand – you can see a larger version by clicking on it):

Does this look like it would work? Any ideas, thoughts, suggestions, improvements? I envision the low-wattage pumps being small enough to be run off of solar power. I would have to determine what thermostatic controls are available and that would work with this system.

I solicit all input. I’m curious about the feasibility and workability of this idea. Someone else may have had a similar one and may have developed it, I don’t know. This is just the product of my thinking this evening.

Firewood and another video

Dad and I cut a truck load of firewood this morning. He posted a photo essay about our wood-cutting activity. We used the 1979 F250, and it worked fine. It’s easier backing it into position than a 16 foot trailer. We dumped the firewood near Danny’s newly constructed wood shed. It seemed like a good thing to do. He “complained” about the work we left for him, but I think he was able to get it stacked inside. He also said that he would be willing to accept some more if we need to get rid of it.

Since yesterday evening, after putting together a video for the first time, I’ve been thinking about making some more videos. Someone asked for some with your younguns. That one will have to wait until I have material together. When talking about using Windows Movie Maker to put together the 1950 John Deere MT video, Mom mentioned the possibility of using it to put together some photos of our timber frame raising. She and Dad took a series of photos at different stages of the raising that flow together to create an animation. So, this evening I put another video together using photos. I think it turned out pretty good.

Homestead objectives (part IV)

In my other blog (cedar-ridge-farm), I detail our house-building project. In moving to Kentucky, building our own home was -- and continues to be -- one of our homesteading objectives.

We lived in a nice, two-story, brick house we bought with Bank of America’s loaned money. It had a full basement, a large living room, and spacious bedrooms. There was a 2/3 acre lot that we bought with the house. This provided gardening area. We loved our red brick house, but we wanted to live in the country, not in the city with a busy interstate a stone’s throw away.

Somehow, several years ago I came across a book about building with straw bales. I don’t remember the title of the book, but I enjoyed reading it and began considering building a homestead house using straw bales someday. I also read The $50 Underground House and considered that option.

In looking for property, it wasn’t imperative for us to build a house on our homestead; it would’ve been fine if there was an existing house. But, we liked the idea of building, and not requiring a house on the property provided more options when looking for homestead property. We even thought it would be alright to live in a tent while building our house. I’m glad it didn’t work out that way. We’ve been living in “temporary” quarters for almost six years, thankfully, not a tent, just an old mobile home.

When we bought this property, there was an unfinished, one-bedroom cabin. We gave that to my parents, and they were quite glad to seize the opportunity to have it, remodel it, finish it, and live here with us. There was also an old log cabin constructed of hand-hewn poplar logs. I don’t know how long it had been standing there, but it was not in salvageable shape, although it was lived in sometime in the last 20 years or so. We pulled this cabin down in early spring 2007.

We selected a site for our new home that overlooks our garden area down in the bottom. It’s a great location with a southern exposure and pleasant shade in the afternoons. It also will afford a nice view toward one of our hay fields and wonderful views of our ridge on the other side of the garden. It’s near the location where the old cabin used to sit.

I thought we would build the house with load-bearing straw bale walls, but we changed that plan after doing some more reading. We settled on a timber frame house wrapped with straw bale walls. This would allow the frame to hold the roof, making any future repairs to the walls much easier (the aim is for repairs to never be necessary). We developed our own floor plans which changed several times, but we finally reached a plan that suits of well. It will have three bedrooms, two baths, a mudroom, a large great room, and a wrap around porch.

After purchasing 8x8s and 6x8s from a local saw mill, I began chiseling the joints for the frame. I decided to be a purist and use no metal joinery. It took about two and a half years to get the frame ready to be raised. On Labor Day weekend 2007, several friends assisted us in raising the frame. That was an awesome experience. Since then, we’ve gotten the roof on and have begun working on the root cellar. We hope to complete a lot more work on it this year with the aim of being able to move in by Thanksgiving. God willing, I will be able to add a lot more to my blog on this house project.