Gardening, Fishing, Tires, Chicks, and more...

We've been very busy the last ten days or so. I took a couple of days off to spend with my son in Kalispell. He and his wife are starting a garden this year so I brought my tiller down to work the ground up for them. The garden spot is in the pasture area so It was tough work breaking up the sod. I made several passes to get down as deep as the tiller would go.  I'm a bit envious of their soil.  They have about a foot of rich, black topsoil.  We have about two inches before we begin adding compost!

The rototilling was only a small part of the reason for going.  He took me out on Flathead Lake to do some fishing.  Naturally, when I'm along the fish mostly stop biting but he managed to catch six.  He was a little disappointed but in the afternoon when we checked in at the boat ramp he had the largest catch of the day.  They only had fourteen fish total.  Everyone except one guy only caught one and the other guy got three.  We were down about two-hundred feet which is why the fish's belly is extended.  When they come up that fast they don't have time to adjust for the pressure difference.  He was still good eating though.

The weather was overcast and cool with a little wind.  This lake can get ugly real fast so I'm glad he has a large boat.  He was telling me about a boat that he saw flipped by the wind.  Fortunately there were others nearby who fished them out of the water.  The boat sank in 200 feet of water though. 

One of our daughters was having sewing machine problems so she sent it home with us to see if I could fix it.  I took the opportunity to hem up some jeans while I was testing it.  It worked perfectly for about 20 minutes then started messing up.  I looked it over very closely and finally found a broken part.  We ordered a new bobbin holder off the Internet.  When it gets here I'll find out if that fixes it or she needs to take it to someone who knows what they're doing.

I did some re-arranging in my "toy box" and Scott helped.  My toy box has my muzzle loading supplies in it along with a few other things.  Scott had a special attraction to my tin skillet I use when camping "primitive."  I was getting my shotgun wads out so I could go turkey hunting this week.  I'm using my 12 gauge muzzle loader this year.

The wood shed is empty so I'm working out of the outside pile.  That means I have to split a wheelbarrow load of wood every day.  (Actually, I have a couple of days supply split and stacked in the wood shed "just in case.")  This is the amount of wood we go through every day.  We'd be using less except I'm still boiling down sap for syrup so I have to keep the stove going all day.

Something tore through the fence around the chicken pen so they've been entering and exiting at will.  I think it was the dog but it might have been the rooster.  I've never had this problem before so I don't think the hens did it.  At any rate, I put a double layer of wire over the hole this time to be sure that they stay inside unless I let them out.

We have one hen that's broody.  She's been on the nest for a couple of days now.  She's got five eggs under her.  I mark them with a crayon and when she gets to about ten or twelve eggs we'll start eating them again.  I'll leave the marked ones there for her to hatch out.  She's kind of protective so any time I check to mark or gather eggs I get pecked several times.  It's mostly bluff though and doesn't hurt.

The last couple of nights have been down to about 26 degrees with heavy frost.  I checked my blog from this time in 2010 and we still had snow on the ground then.

For now though the ground is clear and thawed out so we've been getting the garden ready to plant.  This compost is a couple of years old and is perfect for the garden.  The dog is acting as an observer.  You can't see him but Scott is riding in the backpack carrier on my back.

Our old strawberry bed wasn't doing much so I tilled it up this year along with some other spots we're going to get planted.  Susan is going to put onions in the places I've tilled up.  The ground is deep, soft and rich but it's taken years to make it that way.

Scott is observing while I scatter compost.  He likes to stand up and swing way over to the side so that he can see better.  It's good practice for me to keep my balance!

We're putting in a greenhouse here this year.  Nothing fancy, just some raised beds with PVC pipe ribs and plastic sheeting.  We'll put tomatoes in when we plant it.  It is new ground though and will take some work to get it level.  You can't really see it in the picture but there's a large hump in front of the tiller that needs to be leveled.  Note the stump in the upper right corner.

Finished!  Note the pile of rocks next to the stump!  I have the tiller set for a shallow cut to take off about two inches at a time.  I used a Miner's pick to loosen the ground and probe for rocks.  I don't like hitting rocks with the tiller for obvious reasons.  Once I've found and extracted the rocks I run the tiller over the ground to pulverize the soil.  I put the blade on the tiller and used it to push the dirt from the hump to the low spots to get everything level.  It was about two hours of work total.

It began raining lightly as I worked.  By the time I finished the clay was sticking to everything including the blade and tires (and my boots).  I kept working until I finished though.  This time of year you do what you can when you can because I've seen the rain move in and stay for a month at a time. 

Susan is pruning blackberry bushes.  We'll be moving these this year.  They're in a bad place and we get scratched up every time we walk past them.  They'll be living in the far corner of the garden soon and away from high traffic areas.

Scott is "helping" Susan weed the garlic.  He's also stepping on the little plants so we'll see if it hurts them any.  It's hard to get things done because someone has to be with him all the time which often cuts our production by half while one of us watches him.  He's worth it and we love him dearly but it does make life a bit more challenging.

Obviously Grandma didn't want these covering the plants so Scott decided to play musical frost frames!  It isn't going to hurt anything though so we let him play to his heart's content.

The partially weeded garlic patch with the plants we put in the ground last fall.

It was time to get the studded tires off and go with regular tires for the summer so I jacked up the car and dismounted the studded tires and mounted the summer tires then put them all back on the Cherokee.  I'm glad to have that done.  For once the beads seated easily which makes the job much more pleasant.  My little Harbor Freight tire machine has paid for itself many times over the last couple of years.  It would have cost us $60.00 to have it done at a tire store.

We're getting down to the last 20 gallons of birch sap.  We've had cool, rainy weather this week which made it nice running the wood stove since we needed it to keep the cabin toasty warm (instead of blistering hot!)

We went for a bicycle ride last night.  Susan rode hers to a fire department auxiliary meeting during the week while I took care of Scott so she has more "ride time" than me this week.

Scott's favorite play area is near the thetherball.  There's lots of sand to dig in.

Here he's helping his mom make dinner at her house.

Now he's watching Sesame Street reruns on Netflix at home.  In case you haven't noticed, he loves climbing on things which sure keeps us on our toes.  (No short jokes please!)

16-24 April, 2012, Feed Grinding, Tire Swapping, Birch Syrup, and the IRS

Another busy week (plus) going on.   The weather has been great (mostly) so we've been outside a lot.  Susan has done more trimming and raking in the yard.  I've been completing some of my  projects too.  I got the tiller running and made a couple of passes in the garden but it's still too wet to work up.  Susan trimmed up her raspberry bushes, cutting out the dead stems so the live ones will produce better. 

We have a relative who's having problems with the IRS over identity theft that's been going on for many years.  The IRS has got to be one of the most incompetent organizations in the entire world. It's a good thing he's saved every scrap of correspondence with them because every time we try to deal with them they don't have any records of previous correspondence.  So, after today's conversation I'll have to re-scan more documents and resend them to yet another IRS clerk who is looking into the matter.  Hopefully this bozo will enter the information into their computer ... but I'm not holding my breath!  A word of advice, save FOREVER everything and anything that has anything to do with income taxes!  I can guarantee that if they ever investigate you they will have no record of previous correspondence.  Another tip ... if you happen to mention that there's a reporter from a major news network looking into your situation the IRS clerk will adopt a much friendlier attitude.

I plugged the holes in the Birch trees and quit gathering sap for the year.  We have enough stored in buckets in the root cellar to make probably another quart of syrup.  It takes about 100 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup.  I thought when I began that it took a lot less than that.  If I'd have begn earlier it would have been better because we could keep the stove going hotter all day.  Now it heats up the house too much and with the nice weather and dry ground we have things to do outside.  I checked out some You Tube videos and Birch syrup sells for about $35.00 per pint.  I may do it again sometime but It will be earlier in the year and I plan on having a "sugar shack" to boil down the sap. 

The days are much longer now which means we have lots of extra electricity even though we've plugged the refrigerator back in and are now running it.  I switched the angle on the solar panels to the "summer" position this week.  We were watching Netflix shows on the television in the evenings between supper and when Scott went to bed.  (If you try to read or do anything productive he wants to do it with you so it's easier to just watch television for a bit until it's bedtime for him.) We finished up the "Out of the Wild - Venezuela" series but it's light late into the evening now so we won't be watching much on TV for awhile.  We'd rather spend the time outside.  In a few weeks we'll be going to bed before sunset and getting up after the sun rises. 

A neighbor dropped by and we swapped some of his tires around.  Turned into a bit of a problem so we had to stop while he got some more tires and a tube.  The tires he had were picked up on a trade and they had bad sidewalls.  When we got them mounted they wouldn't hold air.  He bought a radial tube for the best one but when he tried to put it on himself he ruined the bead on the tire so he brought the stuff back here to finish it up.  We ended up removing the tire with the broken bead and tube then removing a different tire from a 4-hole rim and putting that tire on the rim that had the tire with the broken bead which meant we had to put a new valve stem in the rim (lucky I had one left!).  We took one of his tires with  the bad sidewall and put the tube in it so now he has the two tires he needed to put on his truck.  I still need to swap the studded tires on our Cherokee for non-studded ones. 

We had a scare with Susan this week.  She had one eye cloud up for no apparent reason on Sunday.  We contacted the eye doctor on Monday and they got her in.  The local optometrist wasn't sure what was going on so he sent her to a specialist in Kalispell.  She went through a bunch of tests there and she had some broken blood vessels in her eye related to some floaters that had broken off.  He thought it would clear up but there's no guarantee.  Her vision in that eye is still 20/20 but it's like looking through a foggy window.   Our emergency fund is also lighter by over $350.00.  (But then, that's why we have one!)  At least most places give you 10 percent off for paying cash.

Scott is relaxing on swing while he watches Saturday morning cartoons.  Of course in our case they're on Netflix, DVD or VCR tape.  He doesn't sit like this very often.  He's sort of a perpetual motion type of guy.

Time to grind more chicken food.  This is an assortment of outdated food we had on hand.  Most of it came from stuff we got after Y2K.  We helped an elderly couple move into town and they had a pickup load of food that they'd stocked up on for Y2K.  This was several years after Y2K and they wanted to get rid of it.  The last couple of years we've been using some of it for chicken food.  There are beans (white and pinto) rice, wheat (in the red can), a wheat, barley and oat mix in the brown bag, boxes of old macaroni and cheese and a couple of containers of egg shells we've saved since the last time I ground chicken feed.   We mix it as we grind it and I ground about 40 pounds before quitting for the afternoon.

I had a little help though.  Scott loved dipping out the wheat ...

and pouring it into the hopper ...

or sometimes pouring it near the hopper.

We rode bicycles up into the state land south of us to see if the snow is gone yet.  I have some trees spotted that I want to cut for firewood before someone else gets them.  It's about 3 miles (one way) by road.  The snow is gone so I just need to get a permit.

We've been trying to keep a hat on Scott so we have them around him most of the time.  He likes them (which is good) but obviously has his own ideas of how they're supposed to be worn.

This is the turn-around point of our latest bicycle ride.  We lost the license plate on our little trailer last fall somewhere along a ten mile stretch of Highway 93.  We parked the Cherokee and rode along the highway looking for it yesterday afternoon.  We average about 10 mph on our rides so this as about an hour after we started.  We took a half-hour break primarily so Scott could get some exercise then we headed back for the car.  We never did find the license plate but we picked up a roll of duct tape and a Leatherman Sidekick in like new condition.

We had a meeting at the fire department afterward.  Susan is part of getting an Auxiliary set up so this was an organizational meeting where they mainly went over the bylaws and mission clarification.

After hours upon hours of sap collecting and boiling we have two pints of the best tasting Birch Syrup you can imagine.  After making it I fully understand why it cost $35.00 a pint! 

We got the wash tub out for Scott's bath but he didn't want to wait for the water.  He tossed in his bucket of toys and climbed in after them.

We ordered a helmet for him and it finally arrived.  We checked a lot of reviews before choosing this one.  We mainly wanted it to fit well and stay where it belongs.  It does a fine job of both and he loves wearing it.

If he keeps driving forward while looking backward he's going to need a helmet!

9-15 April, 2012 - Birch Syrup, More Snow and Trucks Mired in the Mud

I posted a couple of pictures on last week's blog showing the taps I made for harvesting Birch sap to make syrup.  It's been a learning experience!

I've been using quart jars for my "buckets" on all of the trees except one.  I used an old plastic juice bottle for this one and I like it best.  I tapped the tree then tied a section of baling twine around the top of the bottle for a hanger.  I cut a hole in the back of the bottle and slid the tap into the hole.  The nice thing is that it keeps the debris out of the bottle.  We're going to be saving these up next year so I can make greater use of them next spring.

We wondered if cold weather would stop the sap from flowing but it doesn't have much effect. The ice builds up around the inside of the jar and over the top but the sap keeps flowing.  Those are birch sap ice cycles hanging from the jar.

This is Scott on one of my early morning rounds.  He got up early that morning and wanted to go with me so we bundled him up and I took him along.  It was the morning the jars had ice in them.  I took this picture around 6:33 AM.  The temperature was about 25 degrees.  He's not usually up at this hour.

When I bring the buckets of sap in I strain them through our canning funnel using a coffee strainer.  I fill the jars with clean sap then either dump them into the kettles or into a clean bucket for storage.

Most of the debris is pieces of birch bark or leaf fragments.

This is what it looks like when you put a fresh batch into the kettle.  We added another larger kettle to the stove top.  We keep a low fire going non-stop in the wood stove trying to keep the sap just barely simmering and evaporating.

You keep adding sap as it boils down and the mixture keeps getting darker until if becomes a beautiful mahogany brown.  This batch needed to go a little longer but we couldn't wait.  It smells and tastes wonderful!  It takes probably at least fifty to sixty gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup.

We're storing the extra sap in buckets in the root cellar.

We took the bicycles for a ride during the week and explored a new road.  We couldn't get where we wanted to go because the road was too soft and waterlogged so we took a side road across a section of National Forest.  That's Susan and Scott by the railroad crossing.

This is looking north from where Susan and Scott were in the previous photo (which I took from the hill on the right side).

We found out that it made a loop through the National Forest and came out behind the Fortine golf course.

I welded up the sides on the trailer.  I'd made them where we could take them off but we've been using it awhile now and never took the sides off so I made them permanent.  Before they rattled like crazy on our road.  Now it's a lot quieter.

We went to Kalispell yesterday and Scott was playing with my hat trying to keep the sun out of his eyes.

Scott meets our oldest daughter's horses or horse and a half horse as I classify them.

Scott was up early again and is helping me check the storm reports on my computer.  I'm from Kansas and they had several tornadoes roll through last night.  None where my mother or sister live though.

I've been wishing all week that the syrup season arrived during a colder part of the year because running the stove keeps the cabin too hot and I got my wish.  It snowed about three inches last night and this morning. 

This is one of my sap bottles this morning.

This is what the yard looked like.  We got about three inches total.

I'm writing an article on vehicle recovery and needed to take some photos so ... against my better judgment and in the pursuit of cash I intentionally drove my truck into the mud.  Unfortunately I got it a little more stuck than I'd planned on!  The axle is dragging in the mud on the right front wheel.  The tires kept sinking in the clay and even when I was winching it out the tires rolled the mud behind the wheel instead of rolling out of the trench.

One of the tools I'm illustrating is using a Hi Lift jack as a winch.  They work great for this but you're limited to moving the vehicle only about three feet before you have to re-set everything.  My jack's release pin stuck and when I went to relieve the pressure to re-position the jack the head flew down the shaft and blew the foot off the bottom.  I had enough pictures of it already so I went to the come-along to finish up.  I have an 8,000 lb. Warn winch but the article is about using manual (low priced!) equipment.

Odie is surveying the trench I cut.  The shiny place on the ground just beyond her and on the other side of the trench is where the front axle dragged on the ground.  I drove into the situation earlier in the day but as the sun warmed the ground it made it soft and the tires just kept sinking deeper.  I broke one of my chains but I got some good photos (and a lot of exercise!) out of it.  It's the first time in my life I got stuck on purpose!  Hopefully it's the last time as well.