Farmer baby is satisfied with the garlic inspection.
Black gold
From one Vermont hill
To our Vermont hill
Featuring: some guy with a giant ass tractor
Compost is gold, we haven’t been so good at making our own and the raspberries haven’t grown so well. This year we’re trying to pamper them more by weeding them more aggressively and making sure they’ve got more than enough nutrients in the soil.
Room flooring
This is a bedroom a kid will grow up and become a teenager in, I laid tongue and groove pine because I could use the hardest of woods, there will be holes through it. I figured it’ll be easier to be ok with the damage if it’s not super expensive wood. The result looks great but it will wear faster. I love the angles in that room, Robin has not been in it for weeks, we’re keeping it a surprise and will have a ribbon cutting ceremony in a couple of days.
The old crowbar helping straighten up recalcitrant boards
Working in tight spaces
Construction baby managing the crew
A first in 3 years
A nicely finished room, no visible insulation, studs or vapor barrier. It is incredibly satisfying to work on finishing a room. Since we now have enough space in the house, all the others will follow. We are done making temporary arrangements.
A guide for the circular is incredibly useful for making rip cuts.
How trims are born
Finer work is super satisfying
I opened the windows and discovered the view a few weeks ago, giving them a nice frame makes it all the more enjoyable.
Maple seedling
Something is making this year an excellent one for maples to come out of the ground. Maple seedlings are everywhere.
Marking rocks to save mower blades
I’ll pop them out when the backhoe is attached. I took a lots of rocks out and these are the last ones :).
Oddly fascinated by the leaves
We’ve been watching an excellent crowdfunded documentary series called Woodlanders. It brought to our attention a guy working to reintroduce the chestnut tree to American forests. We couldn’t believe it was even possible to acquire young chestnuts so we pretty much had to place an order. It arrived this week and to our surprise it still had leaves from the season previous. This is when it hit us what it meant to be planting this.
Spring finally showed up
We’re moving the garden to an area closer to the house and with much better soil
Found a few carrots from last season 🙂
Added 18 blueberry plants to the ~40 we have now; 18 more to come in 2 weeks.
As green as it gets
I threw the last logs in the stove and promptly went after a couple more small ash trees. For a brief moment, we were all out of firewood.
We’ll take all the drying we can get
This is the greenest we’ve burnt, literally minutes between tree to firewood. Ash is seriously impressive.
Solar monitoring back online
The solar instrumentation has been lacking for a couple of months since the solar panels’ current sensor blew up. It took 2 months because there has been a lot mistakes and learning along the way. It should have been simple, replace the 30A sensor by a 100A one right?
Well it wasn’t. First I ordered the wrong 100A sensor, meant for AC use. Then I had a myriad of issues around calibration.
- at the 5V input port, a 0V reading didn’t translate to 0A, this sensor goes from -100A to 100A so it is 2.5V which translate to 0A.
- with the skew from miscalibration, the value I was getting made no sense for what I know the panels can make
- orientation matters as again, this sensor can read negative values
- a cloudy day makes fluctuations hard to detect
- moving the sensor from one interface kit to another after calibration resulted in another skew.
All these little things I could have picked on their own, but together they conspired to make me thoroughly confused and left me seeking support from the Phidgets forums. I was once more impressed by Phidgets, the help I got was fast and efficient. Phidgets are more expensive but I was proven once more that they are worth every penny. They have many other advantages, I have nothing but good things to say about them.
Calibration, I really need to tidy things up in there
I’ve learned a LOT of lessons with this one. Not the least of which is to be ok with the imperfections of analog data. I’m a discrete data type of guy, it doesn’t come naturally to accept skews & variations.
Too early for berry
Winter is clinging on this year
The blueberries which showed up in the mail will have to wait a few days in the greenhouse.
Sugaring over
This has been an amazing year for sap flow but we did not make the most of it. I was doing the heavy labor by myself, wood was running out, Winter had been long, boiling days unpleasant. So we pulled the plug being satisfied with 6 gallons which will suffice for our yearly consumption.
Shiplap all over
Shiplap shipment
This little guy is about to get a very nice bedroom
Just in time fire
We’ve had no wood reserves for 2½ months, what little left we had was consumed by the unexpected or trying to make starting fires quicker. It’s ok though we’ll be warm, fuel literally grows on trees. All it takes to harvest is a bit of exercise, a beautiful day doesn’t hurt.
Ash trees have a special place in our hearts given how many times they saved our bacon. It’s a shame they are getting ravaged by the emerald ash bore, what will the future ill-prepared homesteader do when their wood reserves don’t meet the tribute demanded by Winter?
Working my way up to the canopy
I was taught to not waste a branch, I moved the canopy elsewhere for later processing, for now I need the quick yield of the trunk
Big logs going for a hike
A fair amount for the time spent.
The tire technique
A few swings later, splitting small to help the burn
Straight into the firebox it goes
If yum was a color
The syrup gets darker as the season progresses
The operation is still on hold pending more clement weather.
Sugaring paused
We’re at 3 gallons of syrup so far.
The usual dusk collection
3 days boiling outside into the night, I just want to go home.
Pulling the plug
Snow storm forced a break, good 🙂
Light construction week end
Finally finished the insulation & vapor barrier upstairs, got started on the staircase.
Mud season has officially started and this little path will make trips to the well a lot easier.
More solar lessons
I always wondered why the solar array never produced more than 30A, especially after I added 3 more panels to it. Well, I got my answer yesterday when the array took an unexpected dive.
I had forgotten that the amperage sensors I got back in 2015 are only rated for 30 Amps, way overkill at the time :). So it’s entirely possible the array was producing more and I simply wasn’t able to “see” it. Also, the extra panels pushed the sensor over the edge and fried it.
I put in the order for new sensors rated for 100A, it will be interesting to see what the graphs look like. Their design also makes it so if they fail, the production won’t be impacted because they aren’t part of the circuit.
It’s surprisingly difficult to find such sensors rated for high amperage. Phidgets are expensive but they pretty much have the only industrial IOT sensors. In my experience they are robust and easy to deploy thanks to great documentation & code samples.
Super Moon Chimney Smoke Snow Shadow
There are many spectacles for which I’ll want a low light camera at some point.
