Year 4 of the blueberry orchard, the plants finally look like more than a twig in the ground. The first year going from 1 branch to 2 isn’t particularly exiting even though the plant doubles in mass, this year on the other hand was remarkable in the growth they took. We pick up a large bowl every day, we eat berries copiously and have some left. Next year we’ll have enough for this and canning.
I just love the idea and the details.
We had another brooder this year. Instead of letting it go by, Nicole got fertilized eggs from a neighbor and 3 chicks were born without any need for incubators. This is the second time we get a brooder (who could very be the same as last year), and the first time we get chicks this way. It’s quite cool to see her introduce the chicks to the flock, she was extremely defensive the whole time, barely getting out to eat. Now that the chicks are out and about, she cuts us some slack and lets us get close while most definitely keeping an eye on us. She lost them in a thunderstorm when they couldn’t get back in the coop, I’d like to think I scored some chicken esteem points getting them back in.
Also interesting, while the rest of the flock is usually a source of danger for young chicks. In this case, they seem to not push at all and leave mom completely in peace. Even going as far as defensively joining a ruckus we caused around the little chicks.
Kind of gets you thinking about the reputation for being dumb we give chickens so that they’re easier to justify mistreating and eating.
Tall grass & Dirt Baths, a chicken paradise.
We just took a giant connectivity leap moving to fiber.
DSL was pretty ok really, but the service had other issues which made the lower bandwidth harder to bear. Hosting on the solar powered Pi is finally a very viable option with a symmetric uplink which makes the incredible assumption that households may be more than entertainment gobbling cattle. And so I no longer cache large assets on AWS. And I will most likely repatriate Mandalagaba and other things which found their way to the cloud because of bandwidth needs.
The magic box which makes it all possible
We updated our outside shower to something honestly quite amazing. It’s missing finishing touches but we have most likely found the final location and configuration.
Quaint! And private, I don’t care if a coyote sees me bare assed.
Now before I get into the details, the one big gain here for us is infinite hot water, at will. I know it doesn’t sound like much but believe me, to us it’s the most amazing thing in the world.
First of all, this is water we do not move by hand, which is a first in 5 years. How does it works in the middle of the woods? Well we improved an abandoned beaver dam to buffer some water in the stream. Stream water can be murky so we made a siphon between the beaver buffer upstream and a giant tub downstream. The tub is one more opportunity for sediment to settle. I tried to make the water run down a long hollowed out pine tree but we couldn’t get the level quite high enough. Turns out a siphon is a thousand times better anyway.
From the giant tub, a simple 12V pump pumps the water into a tankless heater.
The water pump, some things still need proper places.
I had enough spare parts for a whole other solar setup. 1 charge controllers, 3 super dead lead acid batteries I revived with the water trick, and finally 1 charge controller. It’s not much of a solar setup, it’s what we started with years ago, but it’s perfect for 1 water pump in the woods.
It remains to be determined if we’ll consume more electricity than we’ll produce with this 1 panel in this 1 spot. We used to have a second extra panel but I tractored it by accident :\.
This pump is setup to stop when a certain pressure is reached. So it keeps the line to the tankless heater pressurized and then stops drawing power. When you call for water, the pressure drops and it starts up automatically. The tankless heater lights up and you get hot water.
The really incredible device tying all together: an outside tankless heater.
There is literally no work to the whole operation, no moving water nor applying heat with a fire like we did before when we wanted hot water.
The whole setup
Now the one imperfection of this system is that heating is done with propane: a fossil fuel not from our land. I’m sure no one in the family will dare disparage the approach given how much time we all spent taking hot showers. The kids especially spend extra long in a small tub, toys have been replaced with various forest things we find and throw in the water (ferns, sticks).
It’s worth mentioning that hot water is a mixed blessing. On the warm days, there is nothing better than being forced to take a uncomfortably cold shower. It really cools you down for several hours. With this luxurious shower it’s impossible to resist the temptation of comfortable warm water, this does nothing to help you bear the oppressive heat of a Summer day. I’m sure there’s a moral in there about easy choices not necessarily being the best ones. I choose to ignore it from the depths of my steaming hot water.
Funny language anecdote: shower is quite funnily “douche” in French, and so when we used solar heated camping water bags years ago, we inevitably called them douche-bags. This new one’s been dubbed mega-douche.
We found this guy deep in the woods on a new trail we’re making. Good climber!
It doesn’t look like much, but it took a lot of moving big rocks and big trees to get to this little bridge:
Ever since we moved to the land, we’ve tried to get access to beyond the stream with the ATV, and later the tractor. A good 70% of the land is beyond the stream and it’s the 70% with the most trees. Being able to get there with the ATV means a lot of easy pickings for firewood. We also would like to build a little retreat of a cabin up there, far from everything.
This little bridge allows for glorious moments of trail blazing such at this:
We are actually very close to being able to close a nice loop of trails around the land. We’ll try to make a push for it this year but they will take several more to be nice trails, most are currently pretty rough.
