Woodstove Season is Upon Us

One of the blessings we experienced early this past spring was the arrival of several pickup truck loads of free firewood and with the temperature dropping into the 40's at night, we've been using the woodstove to keep the furnace from starting up. Since the stove is downstairs, it does a great job of keeping the whole house comfortable as the heat rises. This fall before we started using the stove we, set up a double of rack of firewood under cover so we always have dry wood available. As we empty one side of the rack, we refill from the unprotected wood stacks, so we always have one side that's ready to use.

The wood we'll be burning first is well-aged and was already in that condition when it arrived last spring. In the next few weeks, we'll be getting more wood to set aside for much later in the season. We are fortunate to have found a wood supplier in the area that sells wood that is actually seasoned for at least two years, unlike the majority of sellers who think that 6 months is seasoned. Prime wood becomes hard to find as winter approaches, so it pays to stock up early.

When The Lights Go Out

It may not happen often around here, thankfully, but at least once a year, it seems, we are destined to have a power failure that lasts longer than a few minutes. Our most recent into the adventure of life without electricity was this past Friday evening and lasted from dinner time until sometime around 12:30 AM. Needless to say, our plans for the evening changed rapidly.

I had been in the middle of converting CDs of music into MP3 files on my computer, so that process obviously ended. Hubby had been watching TV and our daughter was working on her computer. They both were annoyed by the power loss and soon bored to tears. I played guitar for awhile and then let one of the oil lamps and read a book. So it goes...

But, before I forget, I should talk about those oil lamps of ours, since they make life without power a lot more bearable. I bought a pair of little glass-based oil lamps from Lehmans a few years back and have found them to be very useful. They cost about $12 at the time. They throw more light than candles and burn cleaner. A word of caution - the globe gets very hot, so it's important to avoid touching it when the lamp has been on for awhile. These take standard, cheap lamp oil, readily available - I think we got the last batch at the dollar store. The key to using these for backup light is to keep the reservoir filled and to keep them in a place where everyone can find them. In our house, that means that they're on a readily accessible shelf in my office. I also have a stock of extra wicks for the lamps, just as a precaution. While I would not recommend trying to read by candlelight, reading by lamp light is quite feasible as, despite their small size, these lamps can burn quite brightly. I consider them a must-have in our household.

Mini Harvest

A mini homestead means a mini harvest as well. Our neighbors here in the sub-division might be surprised to learn that we have peas growing out front in our little stepped garden area next to the  driveway, but they probably already think we're a bit odd anyway. Actually, they may not even realize that there's anything there at all, as the huge lavender bush blocks the view of everything behind it quite well. But, yes we have peas and so far, we've been able to enjoy them for dinner several times. Though there aren't as many as I would like, at least there are some this year - last year they did not fare well at all, so this is a big improvement over that.

The cherry tomatoes that were started indoors are in an Earth Box on the back deck and are doing well, as are the pole beans in the raised bed.

Water

We live in a small town that has very expensive water, thanks to having to pay for an upgraded water treatment plant in town. There's not much I can do about that, but at least I can save water by watering the garden using the rain water we catch in our rain barrel instead of the hose. I have one of those old-fashioned water cans with a sprinkler head and it works just fine. No, it's not quite as convenient, but the price is right. We bought the rain barrel a few years ago at the local homesteading fair and it was a great deal, so we saved some money at the time. Ultimately, I would like to set up a second barrel but for now, I'm just happy to have the one catching the runoff from the roof.

If push came to shove, it's nice to know that we have 55 gallons of fresh water on tap if needed, though it would need to be boiled for drinking probably. As it is, we just use it for watering the garden and that's just fine.

What's Fresh and Cheap

Sweet corn is cheap this week, so we took advantage of that and cut down about 50 ears for freezing. This was a mini project started by my daughter, who is really beginning to enjoy having fresh produce. Considering what the price is these days for a small bag of frozen corn, we figured that we were far ahead by putting up our own. Essentially, we set up a simple work flow, with her tending the pot of ears being blanched and me filling and sealing the bags. Start to finish, it may have taken us an hour, and we ended up with about 20 quart bags for the freezer, at a cost of about $5 for the corn. Definitely a nice savings and they also taste much better than the average store-bought frozen corn!

A word on freezing - we use a vacuum sealer for all our frozen stuff. It keeps everything much fresher and nicer that way. Ours is a Food Saver and has done a great job for us for the past several years.

Know What You've Got

I live in a house with two other packrats, though one of them, my husband, is far more of a packrat than our daughter. As a result, we have stuff all over the place around here, leading to a tendency to knowing that we have something but having no idea where in the house it might be.

In theory, I know where things are, but I am also well aware of the fact that many things are rather disorganized at the moment around here and many things could be arranged in a more effective way. So I have an ongoing project to rearrange things in a better way, knowing full well that this will not be accomplished any time soon.

An early part of this project was to make an attempt to catalog the books in the house so that those that need to be accessible to everyone are actually in a convenient spot for them to be used. That means that books related to gardening are on the shelves in the living room, closest to the back yard, cook books are on the shelf in the kitchen, and so forth. So far, so good - at least the books are somewhat in order. Next!

Part of the process have to involve deciding whether a particular item should be retained, and, if so, where is the best place to keep it. As an example, we have one filing cabinet that is used to retain important documents, and hopefully, anything that needs to be kept can actually be found in that one cabinet instead of landing in some other place.

In an ideal world, there would be enough storage in the area of the house where items need to be, but all too often, that is not possible. It would be nice if we had room to store the linens for our master bedroom in the master bedroom, but that just doesn't work in our house, so they have be fit into the hall linen closet, along with anything that relates to the bathroom, such as supplies like soap and towels and so on. At least,there's some logic behind that arrangement. There are actually two closets in our hallway, one a double closet meant for coats, and the other that small 'linen closet' afore-mentioned.

That coat closet ends up being the final resting place for far too many things, simply because it is bigger. Ideally, many of the things that end up there could be better placed on the utility area shelves, but we tend to be lazy about putting them there, as it's more convenient for them to be near at hand.

Fixing Is Cheaper Than Replacing

Let's face it - things break, and while it's often possible to replace things cheaply, it's still usually cheaper to attempt to fix them them instead of replacing the item. Case in point, we have a coffee maker than we have been using for the last six or seven years that recently had the power cord break at the back of the unit (our fault for pushing it back against the counter when setting it up each time). This particular device has served us well for many years and I haven't seen any in the stores like it, so I prevailed upon Hubby to see if he could fix the broken cord. Pretty much a no-brainer as he is nearly always able to fix the things that break around here. Though it took him awhile to access the root of the cord since it was actually embedded in the housing, he was able to repair it and it is back in use. Even if we could find another unit like it, why spend the money when we were able to fix the one we had?

Folks are all too ready to throw away things that could be fixed and, in many cases, it can be cheaper to replace rather than fix, but at least take the time to determine if an item can be fixed. Not only will it usually save money, it will also prevent more resources being used to create a new item.