Well, good morning from our playground out here north of Joliet.
I just so enjoy coming out here.
Last night we had some showers come through,
kind of dampen things down. But you know, the following
mornings are always so crisp and clean.
This morning, I don't know if there's a cloud in the sky.
Maybe way, way north you might see something on the horizon.
The Meadow Larks are still talking.
The last few days I've been coming out,
I'm seeing that they're starting to bunch up, so they're
getting prepared to head south.
This Montana area is more of a breeding season for Meadow Larks.
They don't stay year round,
and they're getting ready to pack their bags and become snowbirds.
They're headed south, probably into Mexico.
But you can see here behind me I've got a pretty good pile of firewood.
I've got it all split up all my logs are blocked up, split up,
trying to clean up this mess, because it does create a lot of snow drift.
In the winter time, when we get those Southwest winds,
that's where the drifting really comes from,
so I'm trying to clean this out so it doesn't drift in my
stock shed and my water tank and all that so much in the winter time. when I put this little
When I put this little shed together a couple years ago
my intention was for this end of it to be for my split wood.
It ended up being that I needed a place quick to put some
small square bales that I took off the top
and so this has had hay in it the last couple years. I have moved it out
and I'm going to bring my Bobcat up here,
scoop up some of this split wood, bring it over and
try to get this stacked up.
Mrs. E is coming out here sometime
and she's going to give me a hand on stacking this as well.
A couple of years ago I had a friend that was cleaning up some construction debris
from some housing projects he was doing,
so I ended up bringing this out. This is more of the kindling nature,
and I just brought out my cordless Makita skill saw and
chopped all this up into smaller pieces.
We actually have a wood burning cook stove
in our building here.
This is what this will be mostly intended for cuz it
takes smaller pieces to cook with.
Well earlier this spring I did a little experiment
through the course of the summer.
And it's down on the bottom where Farewell Creek runs through our place,
kind of subby down there.
I'm going to go show you, and find out for myself, if this experiment really worked.
Well, by now you're probably well aware that I really don't mind older equipment. my tractor is
My tractor is a 52, this Bobcat is a 92,
my 4Runner is an 88.
I'm not all wrapped up in having to have the
latest and greatest gadgets. I just like them to run.
So I've got maybe a third to a half of this pile over.
Before I get buried, and I can't get in there, I'm going to stack a little
I'm going to stack a little bit, then I'll move a little bit and
maybe Diane will be out here sometime to help me out.
How are you guys this morning?
Coming up to see what all the commotion is, huh?
Kind of a nice cool morning.
This morning we were 47 at just about daylight.
Getting down to that fall temperatures.
Hi little girl.
I just about blocked myself out here.
Well, there's not all that much that exciting about stacking firewood,
so I won't bore you with all this.
I'll spend the next few hours just putting wood away for the winter.
It just helps being closer so I don't have to run it back and forth by a wheel barrow.
And, look who's here! Recruits have shown up.
Well, we got it all filled up.
If we have our measurements right I'm 10 by 6 by 8.
We should have 4 and a quarter cords in here.
We'll be set for the winter out here.
We still have some left on our pile.
Probably have another
half, 3/4 of a cord. I don't know if it'll quite make a cord.
But we'll take this to the shop and to the house,
burn it wherever we need to.
So we're going to head down to the Farewell creek bottom.
We've had an experiment down there of a potato patch,
to see if it would survive the summer
without having to do any irrigation on it.
I checked on it a few times and it seems to be doing well,
but we might go down and dig those potatoes and see what we've got.
So this is the bottom of Farewell.
This is kind of the head of Farewell Creek.
And we put a triangle of hog panels over the top of our
potatoes to try to keep the cows out of it.
They're starting to die back, so I think it's time that we should probably dig these potatoes.
Yeah, I didn't do anything all summer.
I didn't come down and weed them. We've got some thistles in here.
We didn't baby them at all.
I just wanted to see what they'll do
There's a little bit of life in some of them but I think we're about to that digging point.
This where it was?
Still nice moisture in the ground. Oh, look at those!
Wow! Very nice.
Some more there.
Yeah, there's nice moisture in that dirt yet. Look at those!
Those are dandies.
There's another one.
Another one there.
A little one there. Oh, a couple of them.
Nice bunch of potatoes.
Oh, I stuck one.
That was way out from the plant.
One big one, and that was it huh?
There's another.
Very nice.
Wow.
Stuck another one right there.
I'm amazed how much moisture is still in this ground.
Oh, look at that rascal.
One there.
Haven't got down to the big ones yet here.
There's the big ones.
Nice and moist yet.
I think we got those.
Nice and cool.
There's another one there. See the edge of it.
I got too close again.
That one was less productive maybe, huh.
These the grasshoppers got too early before I sprayed them.
Stuck another one, ah.
There, we've got two more.
That's a funny one.
Yeah, looks like two grew together to be one, huh.
Well, the last one.
Too close to it again?
Oh there's another one.
Very nice.
I think it had a dozen plants out here.
Very nice.
Nice bunch of potatoes.
Yeah, didn't do a thing except plant them in the spring.
So, that was our experiment for the summer,
just to see how well these would do.
I do have some thistle here that could be dealt with,
but we put a teepee triangle over top of it.
We used 3 ft hog panels if I did it next year, which I probably will,
I'll probably put 4 foot cattle panels on it,
cuz as these grew,
the leaves did come out through the panels and the cows could have munched on them.
I did block them off of here,
but now that we're dug, we can turn the cows back in here
and they're going to like this bottom ground.
We're now mid September,
and this is all kind of a swamp grass type,
but they seem to really like it.
They come down here in the fall, when the rest of the hills are all turning brown,
and they like to just camp down in here.
So I'll turn them down and let them have their fill.
Anyway, I appreciate you following along on the projects for the day stacking some wood,
and just seeing what the result of our experiment was this summer.
I think it went really well.
I don't know how many pounds we got.
We'll maybe weigh that up, but nice size potatoes,
very minimal care. All I did is just come down and look at them a few times.
Anyway appreciate you following along.