My astonishment at the genetic diversity here is diminishing. In its place: astonishment at the genetic paucity of the suburbs.
Our camp laundry plunger thingie came on Friday, and Marsh has been figuring out its cunning ways, including an attack of shoulder-strain…
…but we’re really religious about clean clothes.
I shared this on facebook, too, but we’re watching this ruffed grouse “nest” to see if more eggs are laid. Trying to keep the dogs away so the mama isn’t spooked. As I fell asleep last night, I was thinking of building a protective scrim…
We have many, many brambly shrubs approximately in the raspberry/blackberry/black-raspberry family. A few are extravagantly in bloom just now. Hope for fruit!
We decided to mix in purchased vegetable starters with our seed-planting. Here are the tomatoes.
To get usable soil (which we mix with horse manure) we sift earth from each bed as we go. It is full of stone. The sieve we’ve been using (top) is 1/2″ x 1″ mesh, and lets through quite a lot of these bluish slate shards. It seems okay, but today we found some 1/4″ square mesh on sale, and I made a second sieve. Next chance we’ll run the earth through twice and see how it goes.
One of the beauties of this exercise is we get gravel as a by-product, which we used at first to create a 10-foot path to the camper entrance, to cut down on the pine needles we track in. But now we’re reserving new gravel by-product for eventual use in creating a foundation site for a shed. Very homestead-ish, we are.
Similarly, I’ve set aside salvaged lumber from our demolitions — mostly rough-sawn 2x6s and 2x8s.
Those pictured above have had all their nails pulled — I long since lost count. Good exercise!
And there’s more salvage to process.
Last but not least, I cleaned up the kitchen in preparaton for meeting tomorrow with a kitchen contractor, and marked out the plan we’ve been operating from in easier-to-see black tape. On left, sink, on right, stovetop and in-wall dual ovens.
Far corner, where the back door will be; on right, refrigerator (approximate).
Fridge and additional fragment of counter and cabinet to its right, against where the next support column will be.