New Life in the Woods

Remember this picture of the garden area back in February? Well, it looks a bit different now. I started working on it last weekend. You can see in the picture that there were some metal fence posts with wire and fencing strung between them. I’m not sure what that was for, unless it was some sort of vinyard setup. There were two layers of galvanized fencing strung horizontally between the posts. Whatever was growing there has long since dried up and blown away. Anyway, I spent an afternoon taking that apart and searching the woods around the area for more of the old galvanized fencing that used to surround the garden. I have recovered a lot of it, but some is still buried or has young trees growing through it.

As you know, I’ve been working on a variety of related projects. But I have managed to turn over a fair amount of ground. This picture shows the garden area as of this afternoon. Trees to the West shade the garden from mid-afternoon, so the garden won’t get a ton of sun, but hopefully it will be enough. You can see that I plan to expand the existing garden area quite a bit, but it is slow work doing it all manually. Each shovel full of dirt I turn over takes several cuts to separate it from the grass roots around it, then I have to cut up the clump of dirt to break it up and cut the roots into pieces, about 5 slices one way and then again in the other direction. It is a lot of arm work!

Finally, by late afternoon, I got the area turned over down to the border of the strip of flowers to the South of the garden. I am actually surprised I got that much done today (see the darker overturned earth) considering all the digging I did on the spring box yesterday. I was pretty tired by the time I finished, but I seem to have turned a corner such that I no longer get nearly disabled by working hard for a few hours. I know that sounds pitiful, but remember that I had been sitting behind a desk for many years. I am definitely feeling better these days.

Yes, it took me all week to get just this little bit done, but I have a talent for procrastinating.

As I was planning this out I realized I was going to need a garden rake. Mari had given me a leaf rake, but that won’t do much with soil, or help work mulch and/or additives like Lime into the soil. There was an old garden rake head (the handle broken off) in the construction trailer, but I didn’t have a spare handle and there didn’t seem to be any easy way to get the stub of the old handle out of the rake. Still I hate to waste stuff….

On Monday I decided it was time to build the foot peddled wood lathe that I mentioned to a few of you as a project I really wanted to try. For those of you who don’t know, a wood lathe is a way to spin a piece of wood while scraping it with a chisel or wood file (or sand paper) to shape it into a handle, or banister post, or chair leg, or whatever. I read about this in one of the Firefox books and wanted to try it. I had been fretting about the lack of lumber to build something that would stand alone somewhere under the cabin, but then I realized that the distance from the cabin to the post of the porch was about right for a tool handle so I decided to go for it!

Well, as you can see I came up with a satisfactory design, except for one thing. You need something (a “fence”) to rest the chisel against or else the spinning wood keeps pushing it away. Problem is that this fence should be adjustable, and my head started spinning with various plans to make an adjustable fence that would be rigid enough to rest the chisel against and apply a fair amount of force.

In the end I realized I was procrastinating and just hand-fashioned a rough handle from the top end of a Fir tree, as you can see here. By the time I had drilled and chiseled out the old stub of a handle from the rake head and fitted the new handle to it (and rasped it, filed it, sanded it, etc.) it was getting dark… so that was Monday. Hehe

Tuesday I cut some more firewood and did some other chores and then raked the leaves away from the garden area. Since then I have turned over a little more ground each day, but (as I mentioned above) it has been slow work. This picture shows the garden extended through the area where the old metal fence posts were down to the border of the flower bed to the South. I got a lot more done today than previously. Obviously there is a lot more to do yet!

On my way down to the cabin today I detoured to the little shale rock quarry along the driveway to check out the stream bed there. The main spring and the spring box is downhill from this, but there is a “seep” that occurs just above the quarry and peters out half-way past it. I was wondering if maybe I could make a new spring box up there and move the pump, etc., up there. It would be a much shorter distance to pump water from there if it could work, and, perhaps more importantly, a much shorter distance uphill.

As you can see, there is some water flow there, but not a lot. You might also notice that I had made a little earthen/gravel dam a day earlier but it didn’t work. The water just flowed under it or sank into the ground. But what was more disturbing was that I saw something like an oil slick near the dam and that made me remember that I had seen something similar down by the spring box the day before. Then I remembered that Susan told me that a previous tenant had tested the water from the Spring area and found that it was not potable but she didn’t seem to remember why.

Now… I am seeing oily films on the water and thinking shale… oil shale? If you look closely at the rock in the quarry, you see that a lot of it has a dark, if not black, color. On the surface it all looks tan or brown/rusty. When you pick it up it crumbles and the insides of much of it has this dark, black color. So, now I am wondering if getting the spring pump working is such a good idea. It would feed that water into my main water supply. Can you filter oil out of your drinking water? Would it gum up the filters every few days? I guess I have to get this water tested. Bleh.

Most importantly, can I create my own refinery and start selling gas? Only time will tell.