Last night. Yep, I had to go and talk about it, didn’t I….
Archive for September, 2010
First Frost
27 September 2010Blogs
26 September 2010Reading survival/prep/homesteading blogs is 90% useless when it comes to prepping. You might come across a good idea now and then, but you’ve got to call it what it is: entertainment. Those of us who have been paying attention for more than a few months know what we have to do. For most of us, it’s just a matter of doing it…and the future belongs to those who just get it done.
Moved a rainbarrel down to the basement today so it will catch the discharge of the condensate pump on the furnace/air conditioner. I hope that’s a good idea. I realized as I was doing it that when it’s full, the water level will be well above the pump. The pump must have a check valve on it, right?
The advantage to this is if there is a sudden loss of electricity, or intermittent electricity, we’ll have 55 gallons of not-too-bad water available for flushing, washing, or filtering and drinking. (With regard to quality, I was prepared to filter and drink rainwater off the roof, right?)
The disadvantage is that no water accumulates if the furnace or A/C does not run.
Popcorn
25 September 2010I harvested all the popcorn today. Got one 5-gallon bucked filled with husked cobs from 15′ of row.
The quality of the cobs varied greatly, with some only 10-20% filled in, dependent, as far as I can tell, on the quality of the soil in which they grew. Pretty much what you’d expect, but the results were striking:
Also dug 20 gallons of coffee grounds and 4 gallons of kitchen waste into the west beds.
The growing season this year has been very long, with our warm, early Spring and not even a light frost yet. We’ve almost always had some very light frost by mid-September, but not this year.
Beginning of Fall
15 September 2010Today I dug 5 gallons of coffee grounds and maybe five gallons of grass clippings into the bed along the east fence where the meal corn was. That’s very sandy, gravelly soil, and it will be interesting to see how good I can make it.
I also chopped down all the sweet corn stalks in the west bed and gave that a rough digging. If you go in there with a sharp machete, you can chop up the stalks as you chop them down quite easily, as long as they haven’t fully dried yet.
Harvested some self-seeded amaranth from the west bed. I didn’t get any amaranth grain from last year — couldn’t figure out how to separate the grain from the plant. We’ll see if I can figure it out this year.
Spread about 10 gallons of grass clippings on top of the dug-up area in the west bed. Dug a trench near the top of the bed, where the soil is most gravelly, and buried 5 gallons of kitchen scraps.
More on Water
14 September 2010No, not moron water, I mean another post on water. Specifically, winter drinking water.
Okay, so I put a rain barrel in the basement. I run some of that flexible plastic hose, maybe 1″ diameter, from its watertight connection near the top of the rain barrel to a spot in the pit, ending in an upward-pointing funnel. Into that funnel, but with an air gap, I direct one of the downspouts.
The trick would be to get the height of the top of that funnel to be slightly less than the height of the top edge of the rain barrel in the basement, and to mount it in position securely and permanently. Then, whenever it was above freezing and the downspout was running and the basement barrel was not full, water would flow from the funnel to the barrel. When the barrel filled up, water would back up in the hose and the funnel would overflow. You’d have to make sure that no point in the hose was higher than the top edge of the barrel.
Ending and Beginning 