It’s been a while since I posted anything here, but there
hasn’t been a lot to talk about. We spent most of the summer hidden inside
because of the 100 plus temperatures. The heat didn’t do much good to the crops
either.
Because of the dry, warm spring, we had a great number of
grasshoppers this year. Watching one of the kids walking up the field with a
cloud of grasshoppers bursting up around them was a tedious thing to see. They
ate all the tops off the vegetables which lost me a good crop of potatoes and
onions. In fact we had hardly any vegetables survive the heat and insects, even
though I set up some row covers to try and protect them.
We spent most mornings working to get the hay in. After
trying several ways to cut the hay, including a scythe, a trimmer with a brush
cutter blade and a hedge trimmer attachment, we eventually finished it with a
Husqvarna wheeled trimmer. It is the cheaper version of the DR Trimmer often
seen advertised. It was all raked into
windrows and then hauled to the barn where we built a haystack. We are in the
process of pulling it from the stack to make handmade bales. We have about
thirty bales already put up in the barn and have come to the conclusion that we
have more hay than we need at the moment.
I have offered it to a few friends to use if they get desperate through
the winter.
We intend to make it a bit more efficient to make the hay
next year. I am in the process of building a small dump rake to pull behind the
lawn tractor, which will make the windrows.
Then I am going to build a new hand baler that can be hauled around the
field so we can make the bales along the windrows and then haul the bales back
to the barn with the truck. This will eliminate a lot of double handling and
sweaty evenings. I must say I have never sweated as much as I have this summer.
Another project I have been working on is making bio char.
For those of you who do not know what this is, I will explain. It is a form of
charcoal made anearobically, in other words without oxygen. The difference between
this and normal barbeque charcoal is that it has had all the cellulose and
moisture removed making It very porous. When added to soil or compost, it holds
much more water than the compost and also holds nutrients and microbes. It
stays stable in the soil for thousands of years as well as sequestering all the
carbon. It is claimed it will help greatly in reducing greenhouse gasses as
well as increase food production. The industrial sized retorts also collect bio
oil and syn gas; both being excellent sources of fuel.
