Wood Stacks

In anticipation of our new wood stove, I bought three face cords of firewood from a local guy who delivers.  

Can I just say how much I love people who aren't afraid to work?   Who are friendly and knowledgeable?  Who chop firewood and Bring It To My House So I Don't Have To?    I love all you guys!

Lee Franklin brought us a very generous three cords and managed to back in and drop it as close as possible to where we stacked it, saving us many steps since we had planned to have it dropped further down the hill and walk it to the stacks.   Thank you, Lee!   

All of our planning brought up a lot of questions about wood and stacking wood and measuring wood, etc.   Here are some links to great information about firewood.  Hopefully you'll find something to help you, too.

How much wood is in a cord?   Here's a page from woodburning.org that tells you all about it.   We got face cords, which is enough 18" long pieces of wood to fill a rack that is 8' long and 4' high.   I'm hoping that 5 of those will get us through the winter.   [We had some wood stacked already in addition to the new stuff.]

What's the best way to stack wood?  Everyone has an opinion about that.   Here are some interesting links all about it.

• Cornell University recommends stacking it off the ground and covering with something other than a tarp.  No more than 2 layers deep [across].  We're doing it this way.   
• Stihl [the chainsaw guys] has an interesting section on stacking and shows three ways to do it, including the Shaker round stacks.
• Mother Earth News has a long article about stacking wood.

What kind of wood is good to burn?

• Woodheat.org is a great resource and has a handy dandy chart of the types of wood they recommend burning.   Note:  The important thing is to know how much heat you're likely to get out of one type of wood or another.   Hard woods give lots of heat.  Soft woods don't, but they're easier to control for things like cooking.

How do you cover the stacks?  Ideally, you put your wood in a wood shed.   We don't have a wood shed and if we did, it would be home to mice, snakes and wasps.   No fun.   Our wood piles are out in the open and we covered them with assorted scraps of metal roofing, plywood, old broken toboggans.   Some folks say to use tarps, but where we are, that keeps the wet in and encourages mold.   If we need to, we can fold a tarp and put it across the top, but not cover the whole stack.   

We stacked our wood with plenty of holes between the logs and we also oriented our stacks so the prevailing winds blow through the wood.   We put 4 feet between stacks so it's easy to get the mower between them and plenty of air circulation. These little things can help encourage the wood to dry here.

New Wood Stove

I finally decided on a wood stove.    This is the one I bought.  Vermont Castings, Encore.  [photo from their site]

Yes, it was expensive. But I got a discount for buying in July.   I went with the enamel finish because we live on a gravel road and have you ever tried dusting one of the plain cast iron ones?    I have.  Never again.  So we went with the more expensive, but ultimately easier to clean and therefore less stressful enamel.

It's a flex burn, which means we can do a super efficient catalytic burn or just a plain old burn.  Either way, it's a pretty efficient stove so we could go with the smaller size of the Encore instead of the Defiant.    I chose the brown, with a matte black chimney.    It will go against slate tile about the same colors as the mat below the stove above. 

With the money I saved from the summer purchase, I was able to get a heat activated fan that sits on the stove, a nice galvanized wood holder and a nice tool set, as well as a second ash pan so we can leave one to cool completely before we need to dump it.  

Why this stove?   I haunted forums and read dozens and dozens of reviews.   There are much cheaper stoves out there and some of them are very good.   I wanted to make this decision one time.   Everyone that I read loved this stove and it received the highest marks in consumer testing.  Also, I like the way it looks.  

Still a lot of construction to go so it will be Halloween before install.   I'll keep you updated.

Peaches, Peaches

Peaches!   Yay!    We got our first bushel from Freedom Country Store in Worthington, Indiana and they are delicious!    It's been a week of peach dumplings, chutney, pies and loads and loads of peels and pits.  

Peaches can be a lot of work.    I used a vegetable peeler to get the skins off because this batch of peaches was still pretty firm.   Worked brilliantly!

I made three batches of my favorite Peach Chutney. I LOVE that stuff.   Love it.

Really, really love it.  

Really.

I still had loads and loads of peaches cut up, so I popped them in small ziplock bags, 2 cups each, and stacked them up in the freezer.   One bag is the perfect size for smoothies and two bags is perfect for pies. 

What are your favorite peach recipes?  

First Inspection - July 2014

It's been a month since we installed the nucs in the hives and we did a one-month inspection this week.  

There are a lot of bees.  

But they are not in a hurry to draw out more comb.   Both hives had only 7 frames drawn out and had not even started an 8th.   Weird.    Since they came with 5 frames, I'm unimpressed.

Lily caught a pic of them festooning as we pulled the frames apart.  Bees festoon a lot and it's interesting to see how they hold on.  Blow the pic up for a closer look; it's really cool.

Both queens looked like they were laying well and each hive had a frame or two of honey.  We put a super on each hive to encourage some growth and we're feeding sugar water and honey for the rest of the season.

I hope the queens are busy, busy, busy because I'd like to have a lot of bees in each hive before winter. 

Bergamot

This is Monarda didyma.   It is my all time favorite summer garden flower.  It is traditionally known as bergamot, but only because it smells like the citrus fruit, bergamot, the oil of which is used to infuse Earl Grey tea.   It's not really bergamot; it's really monarda.

I love it.  The butterflies love it.  The bees love it.   The hummingbirds love it.   The hummingbird moths love it.  It blooms the same time as the orange tigerlilies [native daylillies] and the tall purple hosta flowers.  

It smells divine - a citrusy spicy scent - and it dries beautifully.   If you cut the flowers, they'll just keep branching and blooming, so feel free to cut as many as you want for drying or bouquets.  The dried flowers are great in potpourri.  You can use the whole head or just the individual florets.

It likes damp feet, so you can find it wild around ditches and along creeks.    It's reasonably tolerant of a wide variety of soil types as long as it gets enough moisture.   It does not like dry weather or drought.   We get both the red and the lavender blooms wild around here.   I like the red ones and encourage it along the creeks.