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Warming Ourselves

November 9th, 2015

Now that the basement is full of wood to keep us warm this winter, it’s time to start getting our wood put up for next year. That means we spend a few weekends cutting, splitting, and stacking our firewood. This year we’re cutting an area by the main garden in the back, the trees are big enough to shade part of the garden for a decent part of the day. The roots are also most likely starting to steal nutrients from the crops. It’s always nice when one chore helps something else, killing two birds with one stone so to speak. It’s not technically working in the garden, but the work will help the garden.
firewood
It will be really interesting to see how different the garden looks without all the shade from this patch of woods. Hopefully in the future I’ll have a small orchard in the spot we’re clearing, though that will definitely take a few years of work to accomplish!

What garden chores did you work on this weekend?

3 Comments to “Warming Ourselves”
  1. Nebraska Dave on November 9, 2015 at 11:28 am

    Susy, how much wood could a Brian and Susy chuck if Brian and Susy could chuck wood? :-) Yeah, I just couldn’t resist it.

    I finished up building a sweet corn raised bed. The bed is a four foot by twenty eight foot bed lined with lime stone rocks. The bed was filled with yard waste mixture of grass and leaf mulch to a depth of about a foot. Next Spring I’ll spade up the partially composted mulch before planting sweet corn. I hope to get two more built before the weather gets too cold to work in the garden. This is part of the sweet corn fortress. It was a good weekend for garden structure work.

    Have a great wood chucking day.

    Reply to Nebraska Dave's comment

  2. Julia at Home on 129 Acres on November 9, 2015 at 2:38 pm

    We put up our firewood a couple of weeks ago. This weekend, I tackled a chore I’ve wanted to do since we moved here 3 years ago: I finally started cleaning out the stalls in the barn. The horses moved out long before we ever bought the farm, but no one cleaned out the stalls. Leaving the manure and straw in place has made me feel like a very delinquent property owner. My excuse is that making the house habitable was more important than spending time on the barn. However, now that we have a vegetable garden, I wanted some manure. So this falls under the two birds one stone category. 5 stalls cleaned out of 14. And about a third of the garden spread with manure. Hopefully I finish this before snow arrives!

    Reply to Julia at Home on 129 Acres's comment

  3. Ms. Tweetley on November 9, 2015 at 3:52 pm

    Just happened to see this posted about an axe designed for more safety.

    http://www.mnn.com/family/protection-safety/stories/weve-been-splitting-wood-all-wrong

    Reply to Ms. Tweetley's comment

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This is a daily journal of my efforts to cultivate a more simple life, through local eating, gardening and so many other things. We used to live in a small suburban neighborhood Ohio but moved to 153 acres in Liberty, Maine in 2012.

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