Twenty Seven

Just days ago we hit an all-time record of 26 kW-hr produced in a single day. Today, we broke 27! Clearly, I need to get outside some morning soon and hose off the panels. We haven't had any rain in weeks and they are visibly dusty.

Wouldn't it be excellent to break 28?!

Like everything else, I suppose, then I'd want 29.

Retaining Wall

To get as unobstructed a "solar window" as possible, we built our house built right to the setback line at the north end of our property. This is the highest point, which gives unobstructed sun from the middle of March to the middle of October.

The terrain behind us is bumpy and some earth moving work was necessary to set up the building site. One spot in particular needed a retaining wall to keep erosion down and to provide a raised flower bed-type area. After this shot was taken, I added another course to the top of the wall and extended the wall in both directions. Now it is all filled with good soil and Angel has planted a few flowering plants.

We still need to a lot of cleanup. In particular, the hill to the left of the photo is covered with weeds and scrap lumber. Since we're mostly done with the heating season for this year, I'll probably just re-stack that pile to somewhere else on the property that is less obtrusive.

You can see some of the deer fencing in the backgrounds of these photos. Alan, the guy who helped us with the fence had a great idea to line up the rows of the mesh. This made the fence look finished and neat.

There is still so much to do. This week I did quite a bit of heavy mowing and it's chewed up my knees pretty badly, so I need to take a few days off. Unfortunately I didn't quite finish the mowing, so I'm going to need to tough it out a bit more. We really have too much "meadow" area for me to maintain with the type of mower we own, but right now we can't afford to upgrade anything like that.

Anyway, progress is slow, but measurable. Yesterday Angel planted many more plants that neighbors who are re-doing their gardens gave her. She has had very good luck transplanting most things and we've lost very few.

Personal Best

Well, here it is near the end of April in the upper left corner. April has been a wonderful month, sun-wise. Today, I believe that we hit our best, single day energy production number to date: 26.64 kW-hr. This is from a 4 kW array, so of course that translates to a rough equivalent of 6 hours and 40 minutes of peak output. Due to angle and high clouds, I don't think we actually hit peak output at all, so really we must attribute this to the long days this time of year at this latitude. Output is certainly helped by the cool temperatures (high 50's, degrees Obsolete) and gentle breezes that help keep the internal resistance of the panels from rising.

I'm almost looking forward to receiving April's energy bill just to see how much better than March it will surely be.

The Crows Didn't Know I Was Listening

They were chuckling at the salad bar Angel and I have been installing.

"Just wait, 'til the shoots start coming up," one cackled. "They'll be tasty."

"I bet I can eat more of them than you!" bragged another.

"Ha, my cousins from Port Angeles are flying in. They're always up for a good party," remarked a third.

Right now, we've got white, translucent garden fabric stretched out on the freshly cultivated soil. This stuff is nice. It lets air and moisture in while it helps warm the soil. The crows can't seem to see through it. We've got one potato plant peeking up at least.

In a few more weeks the garden fabric will have to come up, so I went down to the hardware store and bought a few hundred feet of white PVC pipe -- the kind you use for sprinkler systems. I've used it to build a quonset hut-like frame over the whole main garden. We'll drape the entire frame with bird netting.

The crows are ticked.

Chipping

I've been splitting bark from the firewood. The bark seems to stay damp longer and perhaps absorb more water than the core wood. This makes fires harder to keep burning at high temperatures -- which is important for clean burning in the stove. So I usually split the bark off each piece with a hand axe.

This makes for lots of pieces of bark. So I rented a shredder and spent four hours last Sunday feeding the shredder with chunks of bark. I learned right away that the shredder's maw wasn't large enough, nor was the shredder sufficiently powerful, to accept the largest bark pieces, so a lot of effort went into breaking the bark into pieces that were 3 or 4 inches wide.

It was warm and sunny on Sunday here, north of the 48th parallel. This made for hot, dusty work. After a while I realized that I'd better wear a dust mask. Fortunately we had some in the garage. Of course the shredder is also really loud, so I had to wear big, ear-muff-type ear protectors too. I thought about wearing goggles as well, but decided that the built-in protection at the input of the shredder was sufficient.

It didn't seem like this should be all that heavy of a job, but I must say that after four hours of working with this beast, I was pretty much ready to sit down and have a snack.

Now, however, we have a nice pile of coarse sawdust and wood chips. The green in the pile is from a couple of pine boughs that the wind had pruned from the some of the larger trees.

I figured that it wouldn't hurt anything to have some of that mixed into the chips. Here is a shot of the pile. It's probably hard to see in the photo, but the pile is pretty substantial. I've tried screening it to use coarser pieces for mulch in flower beds. This might be a good idea, but it's also pretty important to allocate time to the most important tasks. We're getting the main garden in, and I've got to build a net over the main (16' x 20') garden area to keep the crows from destroying it.

Oh, here's a close-up of some of the wood chips. You can see that we've ended up with a nice mixture of small chips and coarse sawdust. The sawdust will be a good thing to add to the worm bins for bedding. The worm bin articles say that the little worm guys like sawdust, and I know that none of this has had fungicide sprayed on it.

Since it comes from conifers, I'm pretty sure that the sawdust will tend to make the soil more acidic if we use it as an amendment. We want to grow berries and several other plants that like acidic soil, so I think this is good to have. I hope to get this bagged and stored away before it gets rained on too much.

The Worms Are Bedded Down

The second batch of worms from the Kingston Worm Farm have arrived. While the first batch is braving the wilds of the main garden, this crew will be domesticated and live in our basement. I've built some very nice worm condos for our herd. The following outlines our worm strategy.

The basement has two parts:

A conditioned space. Radiant floor heating. Daylight through large windows. Shucks, one room (my office) has is on the southeast corner of the basement and is basically above-ground.

Unconditioned space. It is unheated -- it is on the west end of the basement and, due to the slop

e of the lot, is almost entirely below ground. This is heavily insulated from the main floor above and from the conditioned part of the basement. This unconditioned space is divided into two rooms:

1. The first room is storage, and has things like the houses network gear. Eventually we hope to put a deep freeze there as well to store extra vegetables from our garden.
2. The second room is accessed by moving through the first. The second room is the most "basement-like" room in the basement. Eventually, we hope it will contain a root cellar, a wine cellar, and worm bins.

We have a small wine rack in there. It has a few bottles of wine. Someday I hope there will be a much bigger wine rack that holds many more bottles. Someday I hope that we'll be able to cellar wine for several years in near ideal conditions.

It will be easy to add or build some shelves in this room for "root cellar" o

r pantry (or whatever you'd like to call it) functions. Again, the cool, dry, dark space should be good for storing fresh food.

And of course there are the worms. Finally, we've got the worm bins set up and the worms are bedded down. Here's a photo of the first tier of the worm bin. You can see the faucet that I put at the bottom of the bin to drain off the "worm juice". I've got a heavy cardboard (I've seldom seen cardboard this heavy) shield around the bin to keep down the light and just to keep a cozy spot for the little guys.

Now, this is the inside of the bin. I've got sawdust, shredded newspapers (several references said to use only the black-and-white pages). There is also some shredded cardboard. All of it is moistened so that it's about the dampness of a well-wrung sponge. Oh, and the really dark stuff? Well that's the "worm castings" that the worms arrived in.

So far I've only put in a little bit of food for the worm guys. All the references say that once they're well established, these guys can really chow down on the kitchen scraps. They like stale bread, rice, veggies. Pretty much anything that's not meaty-greasy-spicy. I sort of think of them as vegan worms. There are lots of worms in there......

A couple of pounds of worms can easily manage the table and food prep scraps for a family of four, so I'm sure our little colony can do well on what Angel & I produce.

A few of them crawl up the sides. I generally knock them back down when I open the lid. Once they've converted all the bedding to more "worm castings", I'll add another layer to the worm farm. It's already built and has lots of holes on the bottom for the worms to climb up. I'll fill it with fresh bedding and some food and the worms will climb out of the bottom level and into the top. After a few weeks, I'll dump out all the worm castings and use it in the garden or in houseplants. It is completely odorless (well it smells like rich, moist earth, actually) and is about as good as it gets for plants.

We'll still compost yard waste, but having our worm bins in a sealed, comfy (to worms, anyway) spot in the basement will keep the local marauding fauna from messing up our recycle scene.

Next up: The Bark that Became Sawdust!

A Certain Sense of Proportion

Good Morning, All!

News today: national unemployment figures jump to 8.5%. If you take into account part-time & discouraged workers, March came in at 15.6% of Americans unemployed, underemployed, or dropping out of the workforce in dismay of finding anything.

Oh, and you might also note that a full 10% of Americans are now on food stamps.

News yesterday: Rolls Royce orders for 2009 in the US up by more than 25% over last year's numbers.

Now, that is something to ponder. In case you were not sure about it, these numbers provide a sense of how the pain of this downturn is distributed.