SolFest got so popular that it was too large for the small town of Hopland. It was cancelled in 2009, but is back on this year at The Redwood Empire Fairgrounds in Ukiah, Calif. Info: https://www.solfest.org/
Yesterday I took a chainsaw and my pickup truck, and Marco and I went into the woods to cut up the oak tree that whacked me six weeks ago (to the day). I don’t suffer cracked ribs gladly; in fact I’m a real wimp about malfunctioning body parts. As I’ve been moping around the past month, I decided I wanted that tree. I had a connection…
A few weeks ago, I rode my bike out to where the tree was, and piled branches on top of it so no other homesteader would see that here was a half years’ supply of high quality firewood lying right there on the shoulder of the road.
It went perfectly. No rangers to stop us. I cut it up and Marco loaded it. It was a fine thing to do: we cleaned up the road; we’ve got oak to heat us this winter. As I explained to a ranger one day, this is a renewable resource, so that I’m not using non-renewable resources for heat, like coal to generate electricity, or oil or propane to run a furnace,
I’m going to slab out some 1 inch thick pieces, seal it, stick it, and clamp it to dry, then make a box, or a stool. Hey, I like the idea of a stool!
Professional book packagers would be aghast at the way I put together a book. Assemble material (photos and text) for over a year, store in file folders, then at certain point pull best material out and begin laying out a spread — 2 pp. at a time. Random, no order. No plan or outline, no idea how things will fit together; just here the requirement that shelters be under 500 sq. ft.
It’s a wild mix so far — about 40 pages roughed out — and the book has now got its first trace of a mojo workin.
Book starting to run through my mind all the time. I’ve read how novelists get into a thing where they (authors) are just transmitting what their characters are telling them. Or maybe it’s muses at work. It feels a bit like that now, a natural process, a seed growing. Exciting! This is the best part of my job, watching all this unfold.
The 6th mouse I trapped in about 3 days. I think this wipes out the family. BTW, you can mummify a little critter like this (or say a dead hummingbird, if you find one) by placing it on a pie plate in the freezer, wrapped in Saran wrap with air holes punched in it, and leave it for about two months. I learned this at a workshop on bones at The Bone Room, a great natural history store in Berkeley, Calif.
Note: they have invented a better mouse trap. The Ortho 0321110 Home Defense Max Press ‘N Set Mouse Trap has a “bait well” that you fill with peanut butter, so the trap is sprung by mouse digging around in it; this solves the problem of mouse deftly removing bait without springing trap. Ortho also makes a rat trap with the same feature.
Below comment on my posting of last week revealed that the entire out-of-print book (a treasure) is available via Google. Here’s one of the color paintings (not by Sydney Jones):
“depatty has left a new comment on your post Old English Country Cottage”:
Just FYI. Old English Country Cottages is available from Google Books at https://is.gd/eLCqO for viewing and PDF download. Thanks for posting about it, it has some really nice illustrations!
Dave”
Dear Lloyd Kahn and Co.,
My 45 year-old English husband, who has a log house-building qualification from the Log and Timber School in Vancouver, and I, a 35 year-old New Yorker with excellent knowledge of gardening and gathering wild foods (notably the growing of herbal plants), are looking for a suitable training opportunity to commence as soon as possible.
I am selling the 20 sided house that I built in Topham, VT ten years ago. The house is almost round and has great southern exposure with lots of windows on the south side. It has a massive central chimney made of old concrete road culvert tiles that holds heat well and distributes it throughout the space. The main timbers for walls, floors and roof are softwood poles harvested locally. The top floor is wide pine boards, with some 24″ boards. The sole source of heat is a woodstove and the water for the clawfoot tub is heated by a gas fired on-demand hot water heater. Water is gravity fed and comes from a spring.
Joe Golden
The weather completely changed yesterday. After two months of fog every day (since July 4th), the fog bank receded out into the ocean, and it got warm. It’s warmer today. This morning I hauled myself out of bed and walked over to the cliffs to watch the sunrise. The air smells delicious.
I’ve got rough layouts of 22 pages on the tiny house done now. Doing these layouts is my favorite part of my work. It took about a year to assemble all this information, and now there’s momentum going in putting it together. This is going to be a great book!
I fell in love with Silver Seabright chickens at a county fair a couple of years ago and now we’re raising a good number of them. This is one of our teenagers. On Saturday, I offed 4 teenage roosters, one we had for dinner that night, and three are in the freezer. We’ve also got about 28 juveniles (3 months old), and that will mean about another 14 roosters for the freezer when they start fighting with each other in a couple of months. We try to keep the ratio of one rooster to every 12 hens.
“In Museo Guatelli’s central room, a former granary, the collector’s traditional farming implements have been intricately arranged into expansive, interlinked patterns.”
It’s from Museo Guatelli: https://www.museoguatelli.it/
Spotted this at: https://is.gd/ewKGx