With the help of some visiting family members we doubled the size of the wood shed on Saturday. I’ve nailed in some additional framing (it needs some more, plus a roof) but it’s good enough to start putting in the firewood. So on Monday morning we tossed down a bunch of bark to keep the …

The surprising thing is, there’s another ten feet or so of wood extending out to the left of this shot. It goes behind the BGF, though, so you can’t see it all. Of COURSE I just had to go out this morning and re-stack Woodpile #5 that tumbled down last week. I figure we’ll have …

So I pulled up into the driveway after getting the new chickens & supplies last night and this is the sight that met my eyes. I’ll describe the hens and goodies later. But now to bewail: Wood shrinks as it dries. This stack has been standing boldly, nobly and independent for better than a month. …

Down by the garden we had a dead white fir two feet thick at the base and about seventy feet high, with a double top, each of which is the size of a good regular conifer. Jess wants more firewood in before the weather turns, and this tree is a prime candidate; but it’s surrounded …

I want to be considerate of the few neighbors we have; so I debar the use of power tools before 9 am. This precluded my getting to my firewood as early as I would have liked last Friday morning. But other things can be done without disturbing the neighbors; so I took the seats out …

Woodheat.org says having woodpiles drying in the summer sun is like money in the bank. If the average bill for heating a home in our neck o’de woods is $300 a month, my stash of firewood will be worth around $1800. It even earns interest, in that the longer wood sits out in the sun …

Daughter 1 asked if we could ever have a treehouse up here. No, probably not. All strong trees around us are conifers, meaning principally one main trunk, which is hard to build a treehouse in. (Well, come to think of it, if we had a dead tree with a wide circumference we might pull it …

One modification to the parameters I set up for this blog: I can write 15 minutes only on those workdays when I’m in the office. So you’ll probably not see any posts on weekends. One aspect of homesteading is having to do lots of things for yourself that you used to pay others to do …