No Smoking, Please

While the weather forecasters were predicting a cold, snowy season, I was praying for a mild winter.  For some reason He saw fit to provide us with just that.

Even so, it gets cold around here.  The building is poorly insulated, and it would be irresponsible of us to set the thermostat for our casual comfort.  So instead of relying solely on our 60-year old furnaces, we turn to our soapstone wood stove for some zone-specific heating.

However, the ridge on the roof is impossibly high for getting a good, consistent draft in our chimney.  Far too often the smoke would either refuse to go up the flue or it would play nice for awhile, then wait till we were asleep before it would retreat out of the wind and into our living space.

Choking on smoke and smelling like stale smoke has a way of making a person feel impoverished.  So I urged Paul to purchase an electric motor draft inducer which is installed directly on the chimney pipe.  It's visible in the picture above.

What a great thing!  Aside from occasional user error, we no longer have smoke billowing where it oughtn't.  It's wonderful!

When he installed it, Paul made a couple modifications to our set-up: instead of hard wiring the draft inducer to an electric box, he attached it to a cord with a 3-prong plug.  This allows us to plug it into a timer so that the fan can be turned on and off at regular intervals when we're not attending to it ourselves.

Paul also connected the wood stove air intake to a piece of conduit that he fed through a freshly bored hole in the concrete wall.  Now the fire consumes cold air from outside instead of drawing from the warmed air inside.

A homesteading book in our library speaks well of newspaper logs.  Rolled tightly and held together with wire, they burn much like wood logs.  We appreciate how they help make the wood stretch, and the post office always has a nice stack of newspapers for us to take.  We have giving friends, too.

The door to the 3-H is on the left, and the door to the basement is on the right.

The bright green balls are osage oranges placed there to supposedly repel the bugs.  We really don't need them to come in with the firewood.

One man's trash is another man's treasure, and we treasure the cast-off wood that we've gleaned from our friends.  Fred needed some trees removed from his property, and Bill and Patsy had some demolition wood from their kitchen redo.  So did our new neighbors who just bought the property across the street.  God has blessed us with wood enough for our needs so far, and we haven't even considered buying any yet this year.

Of course, all of this is just to get us by until we can replace the furnaces with something better.  I have an idea, but I'll save that for a different post.  =)

Floating Row Covers

They might not be pretty, but Paul made them from the materials we had on hand, and they will provide the greens that extra layer of protection that they'll need when it gets very cold.

And just what are the floating row covers protecting?

Lettuce (without that little weed in the foreground; I plucked it after I saw it in the photo):

Spinach, with onions in the background:

The successive plantings of radishes:

And the mâche:

We've read that it's important to keep the plastic from touching the leaves so that the condensation won't freeze the leaves to the plastic.  Our row covers float over the large raised bed about 15 inches from the box and about 12 inches over the narrow bed.  Hopefully this will be enough to keep everything protected from both the harsh winter and the moist plastic.

Radish Tops

The radishes looked like this before we left at midday on Wednesday. Can't wait to see what awaits us in the 3-H when we get there!

Oh, Is It Autumn?

I prefer to think of it as late summer.  And under the double protection offered by our 3-H once it's completed, it will still feel like late summer.

Paul installed part of the plastic on the 3-H today.  We needed to get all the spinach and lettuce seeds in the soil today.

We also planted the first of our radishes and onions.  Only two more weekends are available for successive  plantings.  In the meantime we're waiting for seeds to plant our mâche, which is known as corn salad in the United States or lamb's lettuce in England.

If all goes as hoped, our winter garden will mature enough in the autumn for us to harvest in winter, when our boxes will be further protected with floating row covers.

Can you imagine dining on fresh homegrown salads in the winter?  We can.

As we bask in the glow of hope, it's time to call it a day.

Introducing the 3-H

Remember this?  This past spring it became this:

and this:

Then this:

and this:

What a great spot this is for growing things, and what a great blessing it is to have fresh, homegrown greens!  We've enjoyed it so much, in fact, that we decided to enlarge on it.  Now it's become this:

and this:

It's what I call "The 3-H", or sometimes "The Triple H".  I confess I can get a little funny with household acronyms, but you can imagine how cumbersome it would become to keep calling it what it is:  a half of a high hoop.  Not a greenhouse, exactly, because there won't be any artificial heat or forced ventilation; just wind protection and solar heat retention.  Then, coupled with some floating row covers or some full-fledged cold frames, we hope to someday plant some cool season crops for a winter harvest.  Paul holds out hope that we aren't too late to try it this year, but I'm not so sure.

Work is still unfolding, so I'll continue to post pictures so you can see how it all comes together.

And now that the temperatures are cooler, we have a lot of work projects going on.  I should have plenty to write about!