It took us years to establish this patch of Lilies of the Valley.
Mean Lean Milling Machine
I started going through the massive amount of oak that was dropped in my driveway last Winter. It’s fun and fast.
Everything is massive with this oak. I excised some of the cool knots, not sure if I’ll ever do something with them but I figure they might be cool in some project. They need to dry a few years first so now’s not the time to think of what that could be.
Beyond the knots, we thought it’d be kind of a shame not to get a few boards out of such a special tree. It’s oak, it really stood out as a tree, it’s close to 200 years old, and we walked past it for 10 of them. So after researching possibilities, I bought a chainsaw mill with a 24″ bar and a ripping chain. The saw is a monster when fully equipped.
I haven’t taken it on its maiden ripping yet, all in due time. And now I’m dreaming of going deeper in the woods and building a cabin with lumber milled on the spot.
Boiling Quarters
I spent the whole week end in the sugar house, maple trees have been relentless this past week. We have ~5 gallons of syrup canned so far with at least 3 more coming. The smells are incredible in the Spring, Winter makes you forget that the world has any smell at all. Wet soil hits the hardest after a long Winter, and it’s quickly followed by pine smoke and sweet sap.
The Deader the Better
The wood piles are reaching their ends so it’s time to supplement them with dead (dry) stuff from the forest. We’ve gone through a lot of wood this Winter.
Stove Life
We don’t need another stove but we also couldn’t let this one pass. It’s our same Heartland SweetHeart we know really well from a decade of intense use, with a water tank, extra bells and whistles, a few decades newer, and for a good price. Since this is very much a key piece of our household, an upgrade even small goes a long way.
These things are heavy.
Extra Christmas
The town’s been wanting to remove an oak that is rotting and is just enough on the road that they hit it with the plow sometimes. It’s a family favorite as it’s on a dirt road we often walk on, and it’s absolutely massive. It has 3 enormous trunks, and each trunk has several branches the size of the trees I usually take. It’s next to a power line, rotted and far bigger than anything I can reasonably tackle. Let’s just say I’ve been excited when I heard about their plan to drop it. In Vermont when a town or utility needs to clear trees, the landowners get to call dibs. That was a year ago and I thought maybe they had forgotten about it. And so one day, I hear some chainsawing in the distance, and when this happens, I usually follow the noise to make sure no one is poaching my trees, and because I like to chat with neighbors. To my surprise a whole crew is there, 7 guys with heavy equipment going at the big oak. In a very typical Vermont interaction I get to meet the road foreman, and I tell him I’m definitely keeping the tree. He was aware, the information wasn’t lost in the year it took for the gears to get in motion.
I tell him he’s welcome to leave it over the bank for me to come grab, to which he responds he’ll drop it in my driveway if I prefer… Yes sir, I very much prefer not moving several tons of tree by myself :). And that’s how 31 nice big chunks of oak showed up in my driveway. I didn’t have to lift a finger, and I got to enjoy a good show (watching pros and heavy machinery at work). It’s Christmas all over again.
Some chunks are massive, and there is still a very full day’s worth of work left behind in the woods. All in all there’s probably 2 years worth of firewood. But maybe some of it is worth milling, we’ll see.
Hallelujah
It has happened, we have a normal shower inside the house, the hot water of which happens through no intervention of our own.
In reality, it’s because of our recent grid tie in that we have enough electricity to keep a hot water heater going. The showers are nicer mostly because they no longer require logistics. I moved buckets of hot water from the stove for years. Now we can just hop in and have a shower in the Winter months. Nothing beats the outside shower the other half of the year. There’s still a lot of things we want to do to be more self sufficient. Playing with an electric hot water heater is interesting, I get to see how much power it draws, and how much heat is preserved via insulation. This will instruct future improvements. For now we’re just enjoying easier showers thanks to the grid.
Peaches?
We’ve had bad luck with peach trees dying in the past, mainly due to us not removing all the buds as they are establishing themselves. One of the dead trees went again, bellow the graft or so we thought. So I removed all the buds this time, but there were so many I missed a few. And well, they turned into small peaches :). They’re delicious, just small. We didn’t think we’d be picking peaches in October.
Keeping it Soft
A day spent on a tractor is a day well spent. Not really doing anything with this field yet, just keeping it open.
And the AC to DC Converter
Just found that out, this is starting to be a very expensive lightning strike.
Thunder & Solar Monitoring
I lost a voltage sensor the exact minute thunder struck very close to the house, Nicole happened to be filming because it was an impressive mix of rain, hail & thunder. Does thunder create some sort of EMP? Could be a coincidence but the timing is really suspicious. Sorry I mean sus.
dead sensor :\
Oh, well I’ll just buy a replacement.
And fuck, I forgot we screw over allies and suck up to dictators now. Phidgets come from Canada, I never found any comparable alternatives in the realm of current sensing that goes beyond small hobbyist projects. And I don’t really want to relearn/recode a whole new deal anyway. I just want replacement parts.
Extensive searching pointed to robotshop.com having Phidgets parts in stock. So I grabbed spares for everything to get a few thunderstrikes ahead and buy me a few years. For the top 3 parts, I grabbed everything they are left.
The battery voltage sensor is actually important these days as automation uses it to make decisions on which circuits to turn on/off. So for a few days until I got the part, I moved the panels’ voltage sensor to the battery. Sensing the panels is informational and has no real consequence on function. With anything solar, I have appreciated having spares at hand so it was time to spend some money and make that true for the monitoring side of things which we became more dependent on over time.
Sweetheart Rebrick
The Sweetheart is due for a rebrick after 10 years of service. Luckily I can still find parts to replace the grate.
I Need a Word
Only half of the work is done having felled a tree, or when nature makes a choice for you as pictured bellow. Then begins the careful process of bringing it all down on the ground. It takes careful reading of limbs, tension points, and interactions, to make safe cuts. I’ve improved this skill over the years and will work through a tree with accurate anticipation of what movement a cut will yield. The delivery of the cut can also make a difference. I’m not aware of a word to describe this process of reading a tree and releasing it fully from suspension.
The heavy root system will pull the trunk back upright suddenly past a certain point.
A Decade Off the Grid
Well, that’s it, we’ve been off grid (minus the internet) for 10 years. Add that to the list of things I started counting in decades. And really, I’m not sure how much there is to say about it. It’s nice to acknowledge as an… achievement? But it doesn’t feel like much of one. We didn’t go through a marathon of hardships and stuck with it through thick and thin, instead things quickly became remarkably normal. Sometimes though, my brain snaps back to an earlier era, and I’m reminded that these are all uncommon and formidable adventures, only we got used to them. It’s wonderful how little I’ve had to say about all things off grid in recent years, though I figured that the 10 year anniversary would be worth a few remarks.
Maybe it’s only coincidental timing, but it’s hard not to notice that the intensity of these adventures is directly correlated with a spur of creativity and productivity in me that went far beyond building the things we needed. And as things started quieting down around year 7, so did that energy. Maybe it’s just the ebbs and flows of aging, having knowledge and energy in my 30s. Or… maybe my brain kicked into overdrive when faced with very consequential challenges.
The amount of learning by necessity that happened these past 10 years is quite frankly amazing, and that in term has made me even more curious about everything in the world. I clearly stand on the shoulders of giants, I am deeply grateful to all the people who shared their knowledge with me. I’ve talked with so many people about so many things. Phone calls, walks over to neighbors, colleagues, any question was met with generosity and patience. I’ve learned to recognize what I’d describe as a particular breed of hands-on New Englanders. People extremely smart, sharp in their observations of the natural world, of mechanical systems, coupled with decades of practice, good common sense & practical mind. Often times with a touch of humor, sometimes a little superstition, but I wouldn’t allow myself to do anything but nod, these are extremely smart and honest people, and I aspire to their greatness. On occasion and more these days, I too get questions and I’m all too happy to do my part within this great culture of knowledge and generosity.
I remember vividly moving into our tiny “house”, which was barely up. No insulation, no heating, no water, no electricity, no internet, no nothing. So what? I thought. Was that it? When flashlight batteries ran out the day was over, it’s really not as bad as it sounds. A 50% battery on the music player and a little wine were all it took to be truly happy. These first few weeks were very freeing and felt incredible. Through the years we definitely improved and ran into many joyous firsts: first water, first plumbing, first internet, first refrigeration, and many more. The goal was not to reinvent a suburban house with all the amenities, though there are things we quickly learned we wanted back but had to do without for a few years. And then there are things we’ve learned we won’t budge on. Wood heat is amazing: it’s resilient, abundant, cheap, and gets us out in nature. Solar power is plentiful but requires some management. It’s incredibly resilient and it feels like we found a universe hack to get free energy.
Winter came that first year and with it many doubts about the integrity of the new house. Its ability to withstand wind, withhold heat, and repel water when 4 tiny walls were all that stood between us and a blizzard. I did my best to be reassuring to wife & kid, and I rationally believed it, but I wasn’t exactly at ease either. So we’d talk about our escape route to the neighbors just in case. Today the house has much more mass, with multiple sections and 2 stoves. We can be in a room that doesn’t have every side shielding the anger of a storm. And it’s gone through 9 winters just fine. These worries are long gone but the first couple of years, blizzards really felt like they were trying to pry open the house to get us.
Our house is bigger, and our systems are so much better now too. It’s welcome by all, but I know the comfort we have gained is directly linked to having fewer amazing experiences. Challenging and amazing often go hand in hand this isn’t a surprise. When we didn’t have any wood storage inside, I found myself outside at night in the dead of winter many times to fetch more wood. These were surreal experiences. I often thought of earlier people and how intense nature feels when you’re more exposed to it. I have no doubt I’d believe in the supernatural if all my mind had known were such vivid experiences. The comfort of modern life has a way of toning down the intensity of the natural world. Now we have wood storage inside the house, and then again on the covered porch, and the routines in place to stay a good 3 weeks ahead so we can ride multi-day storms comfortably, which also means without surreal experiences… But it’s ok, things are supposed to get easier, in fact we are thinking about older age and we want to stay on this trajectory. Yet I am glad for having had these experiences, and they still happen on occasion.
I’m also glad we were able to overcome all these challenges. There wasn’t anything written that said we would, and there were definitely many paths that could have led to worse outcomes. Somehow we avoided them all and were able to keep making things better for ourselves. It’s impossible here not to acknowledge Nicole’s partnership in all this, the endeavor was doomed to be a massive train wreck had she not been fully on board and pushing hard just as I was. In some way, now that I know what we are capable of, I regret not having gone deeper in the middle of nowhere. But realistically I know it is better to have neighbors and some civilization nearby.
Beyond the challenges, we had a few “oh shit” moments, but nothing ever really bad fortunately. One night I got out for wood in the middle of a blizzard, and upon walking back to the house I realized after a bit I wasn’t at all headed there. No problem, I know the land well enough to get back, but I understood then all the stories I heard of people getting lost in snow storms. We also had a couple of moments at the tail end of stove season when threw our very last log on the fire and had to go out to get a tree immediately following, preferably something dead or an ash, but hey who are we to be picky? We’re often a little behind on wood, but not that terribly :).
Where we are now is that we truly live in a piece of paradise that is very hard to leave. It’s objectively picture perfect, and we get the added dimension that we know how rough it once was, and how much sweat went into softening it. The house is still unfinished but it’s quite ok and we love it. I have stopped pushing as hard as I used to and get to just enjoy things. Slowing down + things being nice is a great recipe for happiness. What’s in the future? For now we want to keep refining and enjoying what we already have. We definitely have projects: root cellar, solar for a car, green house to name a few. Just nothing our livelihood depends on, so we’ll get to them when we get to them.
First Strawberries
It’s rare to get firsts these days :).
8 Years in the Ground
Some of the stick we put in the ground 8 years ago are starting to look like real trees. They have barely yielded any fruit so far, and so we hope that they’ll decide to produce a real crop one day. It’s been interesting to compare how well everything we bought from various nurseries performed. The best nursery by far has unfortunately closed. Another one I won’t name has given us only bad performers I’m tempted to just pull out of the ground after years of tending to. Worst failure rate, worst growth rate, worst everything, bleh.
plum
pear
