Monday, December 17, 2012

Christmas means....CANDY!

At least at the Lehrman house, that's what it means.  We've been making an assortment of candies for Christmas for several years now.  Today was the big day for getting that done (a week or two behind our normal schedule, but who's counting?).  Jeremy made him amazing fudge and candied nuts.  I made divinity and peanut brittle.  There will likely be another batch of divinity and another batch of fudge yet this year, but this gets the bulk of it done.



In other news, we've planned out where the garden will go for next year and we're hoping it will be close to the size we removed from our house in town.  The veggie mix will focus on things that don't need daily maintenance since we likely won't be living at the farm full time for the entire garden season.  Some things we're just going to grow for seed for the following year due to their harvest requirements (green beans fall in this category - we likely won't have the hours needed to pick, snap and can or freeze them this year, but we can grow out enough seed to plant a big crop in 2014).  We'll have our garden mainstays though - tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, lettuce, chard, onions, garlic, leeks, spinach, celery, sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, corn, black beans, cabbage, broccoli, green peas, melons and some other things.  It will be wonderful to have fresh vegetables again!

Along with the usual garden planning and seed selecting, we're having to devise a fencing strategy.  Not only are there plenty of deer and cayotes on the farm, but our neighbors have wonderful free range ducks and chickens that would also love our veggies.  Since we hope someday to have our own ranging poultry, I'm not complaining at all!  Just pointing out that we have to be realistic about where we're at.  ;-)   Many options are being discussed and weighed against each other, but we haven't landed on the exact right solution yet. 

There will be more details on this upcoming as we set up our seed starting stand again and go through the renewed annual rythm of the garden.  I can't wait! 

Monday, December 10, 2012

Resurecting the greenhouse

Since we'll be staying in our house until Spring, we decided to put our mass driven home greenhouse back into production.  This is a process since we had removed all of the "mass" from our greenhouse which rendered it much less temperature stable that we would like.  Here's how the process went:

First, we went to the farm to pick up the six 55 gallon plastic water barrels that go along the back wall of the greenhouse.  These provide the thermal mass to prevent the greenhouse from freezing.  They are painted black to absorb as much solar energy as possible on sunny days (thus heating the water) and they release that heat slowly through the night and on cloudy days.  The greenhouse itself is very insulated on 3 sides (north, east and west) to retain this heat.  While we were at the farm, we picked up the shelves that sit on top of the barrels and provide a convenient grow bench.

Second, we unloaded the barrels and lined them up in the spots in the greehouse.  This involved rearranging a few things, but was pretty quick.

Third, we started filling the barrels.  The water will start out around 55 degrees which should be warm enough to prevent a freeze anytime soon.  This step took forever since we had about 330 gallons of water to add.
Filling the first barrel

Lastly, we put the shelves on top of the barrels and moved the potted plants already in the greenhouse up onto the shelf.
Shelves lined up

First shelves on and plants moved in


Sometime in the next week or so, we'll start filling trays of soil and planting greens.  By past experience, we should be able to eat salad from the greenhouse all winter long, although it will take several weeks before what we plant is big enough to start eating.  We plan to plant some root crops (carrots and radishes most likely) in the front planting bed also.  I can't wait to have food growing again!

We are also trying to figure out what kind of garden we can handle for next year.  I would dearly love to have a garden the size of our former home garden, but we aren't sure if we'll have the time to tend a garden that size while building.  There are several things that will have to get settled in our lives before we make a final decision so for now I'm happy looking through the newly arrived seed catalogs and dreaming of what I could grow. 

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

More Cedar!

Its taken me a bit to get this posted, but the Tuesday after we got back from Arkansas with the first load of cedar trees, Jeremy and Scott went to pick up another load from a gentleman south of town.  He is clearing several acres of cedars from his property and we offered to buy the trunks from him for a reasonable price.  his aren't quite as long or as large as the ones we got from AR, but some of them are pretty nice.  Most will make great fence posts if nothing else.

Anyway, the upside is that these are much closer to us.  The down side is that there is no equipment to help load the logs.  It took everything Jeremy and Scott had to get all these loaded onto the trailer (as well as a come along and a litany of words I will not be re-typing here).  Thank goodness for awesome brothers!
The loaded trailer

One of the bigger logs - about 16" across

The unloading, of course, went much more smoothly.  The little ones were dropped off at the farm and the big ones were unloaded at Tim's with the excavator.  One of these days, we'll get to mill them into the appropriate timbers.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Logging again

Never ones to take a long weekend totally off, we did some work over Thanksgiving weekend.  We were in Arkansas near my grandparents farm that my uncle now owns and operates.  We've been looking for timber sized cedar trees to use for the sills of the house and greenhouse and my uncle, Dwayne, had some he wanted cut out of his field - a match made in heaven!  We spent most of Friday and some of Saturday morning turning 6 trees into 6 logs and loading them on our trailer.

First the felling.  Most of the trees came down without a lot of fuss, but there was one exception.  This one took no less than 2 chain saws (it pinched one of them), 2 wedges, an axe and a rope to get down. 

It doesn't look any different from the rest...

Its cut almost all the way through and won't fall.  Lets pull this way



How about we pull this way?

Dang.  How is that tree still standing?

Finally... Down!

Once the trees were on the ground, we had to cut the limbs and tops off the trunks. Some of these are LOGS!
Felling and limbing 6 trees is hard work.  Time to go home.

By the end of Friday, we had all the logs cut and drug up together by the gate (we couldn't drive the truck and trailer into the field where the trees were).
The logs.

Saturday morning, Dwayne used his tractor to help us lift and manuever the logs onto the trailer. We missed having Jeremy's grandpa's skid steer, but the tractor was light years better than loading them by hand! Did I mention that some of these were big?

The biggest logs were lifted on one end by the tractor...

Then we backed the trailer under them....

Then we chained and lifted the other end and backed the trailer the rest of the way to load them.

Unfortunately, while loading them we discovered that one of the biggest logs had a rotten spot all the way through the middle and one of the smaller ones was bent enough that we weren't going to get the timber we need out of it. This required pulling the big one back off the trailer and leaving the little one in the field. We'll come back another time with the chainsaw mill an get some boards out of them, but we didn't want to haul them back with this load if they weren't going to work for the house. There was enough weight on this trailer as it was!

Did you see the bad spot in the log on the right?  Crap.  Time to unload it...

Dragging the next log to the trailer

We got back to Lawrence on Sunday afternoon and took the logs to Tim's (the miller) on Monday morning. Unloading went as smoothly as ever and the logs will wait at Tim's until a reasonable day when we have some time free to go turn them into posts and boards.

Unloading with the bobcat.
 
Moving the last log into the pile.

 

Sunday, November 25, 2012

The big reveal.....CASTLE!

We're finally ready to present the project that has been consuming our lives for the last month.  Feel free to follow these links and check out the awesomeness for yourself:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/castlefoundry/castle-the-modular-construction-system?ref=live
www.castlefoundry.com
www.facebook.com/castlefoundry

This is the brain child of Jeremy and his friend William.  They've been working on it off and on for over a decade (since 2000).  About a month ago, they decided that it was time to see if it was going to succeed or not by launching it on kickstarter. 

For those not familiar with what kickstarter is, here's a quick run down.  Kick starter is a crowd funding website which means that you can look over projects posted on-line and invest in them just like the big money investors do.  The key difference is that no one person has to put a lot of money in - you can invest $1 if that's what you want to do.  The power of the site is that by pooling the resources of 100's of people together, some really cool things can happen!  You can check out their past projects to get a flavor of what all has gone through the site.  Typically, different levels of funding will earn you prizes/rewards so it often works like a pre-order.  Every project has a goal for funding and if it doesn't reach its goal, no one has to fork over any money.  If the project does get funded (reaches its goal), then the company has a year to get all the product to the people who signed up.  There isn't any guarantee though, so you are truly investing and you have to do your research.

Once the decision was made to go for it, it became very clear that we needed to get this up IMMEDIATELY.  Two things led into that.  First, we didn't want it to run over Christmas if at all possible.  Second, we need to be able to order product early next year if its going to be ready to sell at the summer conventions.  That should also give us time to prove out the supply chain and the website so that we will be positioned well for next Christmas.

That has meant that the last few weeks have been spent frantically getting all the details ironed out, advertising videos made, kit lists finalized, costing nailed down and a ton of other activities so that the kick starter campaign can go as smoothly as possible.  There's an amazing team working on this and everyone is doing absolutely amazing work.  Its been an honor to be a part of it.

I hope that you'll like it too and please let anyone and everyone know about it!  The goal is to raise enough funds to pay for all the initial set-up costs (tooling is expensive), go to the major game conventions, build a solid e-commerce site and really have an awesome launch of this product through 2013. 

And if all that succeeds and everything goes amazingly well, we may even get a paid for farm out of it...   *wink*

How to make turkey stock

As usual, we (by "we" I mean Jeremy) volunteered to carve turkeys for the Thanksgiving feast at Raintree this year.  He brought home 4 pre-cooked turkeys on Monday afternoon and carved them Tuesday evening (they had to thaw).  For the last several years, we've made our own turkey stock from the turkey carcass and it has enriched countless meals for us throughout the year.  This year, I thought I'd do a quick how to for anyone else interested in making their own stock and preserving it to use throughout the year.

First, a quick apology.  I didn't have the idea to write this up until we had already made the stock, so I don't have pictures of the beginning part of the process.  Please try to imagine!

1.  After removing all the meat (well, almost all - some always stays stuck to the bones and that's ok), put the bones into a large stock pot (2-4 gallon pot).  Break up larger bones if necessary to make them fit in the pot.  We usually put the bones from 2 turkeys into each pot, although we've done it with 1 and 3 in a pot before.

2.  Add vegetables.  We use celery and onions typically.  As a note, you can use parts of the vegetables that you don't normally eat for this.  We'll put our celery leaves and little bits in a ziploc in the freezer during the year and then use those for stock.  Same for onion skins/bits.  You can use carrots, potato peels or anything similar.  Add as much as you would for a pot of soup the size of your stock pot.  For us, that's at least half an onion and a cup or so of celery bits.

3.  Add salt.  This is a matter of personal preference and depends a lot of what you're making the stock out of.  Some meats are already salted pretty heavily (like ham) and don't need additional salt.  Others (like chicken) tend not to be.  Salt to taste - there's no wrong amount to use.

4.  Add other seasonings if you'd like.  We stick to the above and then season whatever its going into later.  Do what makes you happy though!

5.  Cover everything with water and bring up to a boil.  Reduce heat to low and let simmer for 3-4 hours covered.  It should smell rich and wonderful steaming out of the edge of the pot.

6.  Scoop out the big pieces from the stock.  You can sometimes pick out another cup or so of meat bits at this point and they are great in soup or (our personal favorite) turkey and dumplings.  When most of the big pieces have been removed, pour the rest through a strainer to catch any smaller bits that remain.

(if the stock seems watery or not strong enough, boil it down now.  Reduce it until it is a rich brown color and has the flavor you want.  It can take another couple of hours.)

7.  Refrigerate the stock. This time of year, it can sit covered in a garage overnight if you don't have room in the refrigerator.

8.  Once cold, the stock should be fairly solid.  The fat will have risen to the top and can now be skimmed off.  You can either keep it to flavor something rich, or discard it.

At this point, you can choose to freeze your stock or you can can it.  Instructions for canning follow.  I'm going to assume you can freeze it on your own.  :-)

Canning supplies laid out


1.  Set cold stock on stove top over medium heat to bring to a boil.
Stock simmering after fat has been (mostly) scraped off

2.  Prepare pressure canner (wash and fill with 1-2 inches of water).  Put the canner on the largest burner you have.  Wash jars in warm water and place in the canner.  Add lids to canner.

3.  Set the heat to high under the canner and boil jars and lids for at least 5 minutes with the lid of the canner on but not locked (i.e. let steam escape freely during this process).
Jars and lids being sterilized

4.  Remove jars and lids from canner and set on an insulated surface (folded towels work well, I usually use old rags).  Leave the canner boiling on the burner.

5.  When the stock is boiling, ladle it into the hot jars.  Each jar should be filled to about 1 inch from the top (1" head space).

6.  Wipe the jar rims and put on the lids and rings.  Tighten rings just until snug - don't overtighten.  If you have a helper, they can do this step while you ladle stock into the other jars.
 
 

7.  Gently set each jar into the still boiling canner.  I recommend placing the jar into the water at an angle to prevent an air bubble from being caught under the bottom of the jar.  If one is trapped it will sometimes break the jar during processing.

8.  When all jars are loaded in the canner, place the lid on and lock it.  Do no put the weight/gauge on yet.

9.  Let the canner come up to a boil so that you see steam coming out of the vent.  Let boil like that for 5-10 minutes.

10.  Add the weight or gauge and let the canner come up to 10 lbs pressure for a weighted gauge and 11 lbs for a dial gauge.  Reduce heat to keep the canner at that pressure, but not increase it.  Set a timer for 20 minutes.

11.  When timer goes off, remove canner from heat and allow to cool.  Ideally, let it cool all the way to room temperature (this will take several hours).  If you don't have that much time, then give it until no more steam is coming out and you can't hear any sounds of boiling inside (1-2 hours usually).  Remove the weight/gauge and lid. 

12.  Take the jars out of the canner and put the on an insulated surface to finish cooling.  Label each jar with the date and what kind of stock is inside and put them on the shelf to use at your leisure!
Delicious turkey stock ready when we need it!

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Finally pictures of the dirt work!

Yes, its true.  We finally made it to the farm with the camera and took pictures of the dirt work behind the greenhouse and the new pad for the second greenhouse.  Take a look!

 
Here is the new parking area behind the greenhouse and the newly reshaped slope.  Notice the cool rock retaining wall that happened to be buried in just the right place!  ;-)

The new greenhouse pad.

Looking up at the greenhouse and the rocks from on the new pad.

The rock shelf behind the greenhouse ended up being in just the right place, so we left it.  Mr. Bowen cleaned the dirt out from in front of the stone a bit and we may go back and do a bit more to make it look really nice.

We'll be seeding the slope back to native grasses and flowers this fall.  The parking area will get some gravel to keep it driveable at the same time that we do the driveway and the new greenhouse pad will have some domestic grass that's easy to kill later seeded on it.  With a little luck, we'll even have some water fall from the sky to help the grass grow!

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Christmas has come early!

After some farm down time where we've been nearly entirely devoted to another project (details forthcoming soon, I promise), we received our early Christmas present today.  Its our timber framing tools!  We ordered these hand forged chisels from Barr Tools (check them out!).  These are heavy and well balanced chisels that should last several generations if properly cared for.


From left:  2" chisel, 1.5" chisel, corner chisel and slick.  The ruler on the right is a 2 foot ruler for scale.

The house plans are also coming along so we should be ready to start cutting timbers once this other project calms down a bit. 

In the meantime, we're studying up on organic grape growing so that we can get our mini-vineyard up and going next year (hopefully).  Winter is a great time for rest and getting ready.

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Moving dirt and house plans!

We've had a few big projects going this weekend.  First, we had Chad Bowen of Bowen excavation come out and start working on the drainage behind the greenhouse and creating the pad for the second green house.  As of the first day, he's done amazing work.  If you need excavation/dirt moving work done in the Lawrence area, I would highly recommend him.

I didn't have the camera to capture the start of his work, so you'll have to imagine.  First, I marked out a 45x105 foot rectangle to be leveled.  Then, Chad scraped off the topsoil from that whole area and piled it up out of the way for us to use in garden beds later.  Next, he scraped of the next few inches to the side around the pad and did some leveling before starting to remove material behind the greenhouse.  He's cutting about a 12 foot wide flat space behind the greenhouse and then reshaping the hill.  After he's done, we'll seed grass over the space to hold the soil.

Chad Bowen with his excavator

Progress today behind the greenhouse

Larger view of the new pad

HUGE rocks from the hillside


While hanging around watching (marvelling) at Chad's artistry with the dozer, I started working on the final plans to the house.  We're using a plan from one of our timber frame books as a baseline and then making modifications.  In order to start doing the timber frame joinery, we need fully dimensioned prints so that we know where to put the joinery.  I've finished the main side view drawing and am currently working on the end views.  Its only been 14 years since I did manual drafting, so this has been a bit of a blast from the past.  For those wondering why we aren't doing this in some kind of CAD program, I have 2 things to say.  First, are you really surprised that we would do this old school?  Second, most CAD packages are quite expensive and that's a problem.  I would actually prefer to have this done digitally, but this will work.


House sketch

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Stocking the Pantry workshop - Success!

It was a sold out class on Saturday in Manhattan and we had a blast!  We went over the complete 72 hour emergency kit, how to purify water, how to store all kinds of food long term, developed individual storage plans and finished it all off with a wonderful made-from-the-pantry meal cooked by chef Jeremy.  Feedback was wonderful and everyone seemed to have a good time.  There's talk of inviting me out to Junction City to teach this workshop again and maybe going back to Manhattan to teach canning and garden planning.  Woot!  Have I mentioned that I love teaching? 

On the home front, we spoke with Chad Bowen of Bowen excavating about getting some dirt work done around our farm.  We hope to get the estimate back from him this week so that we can get started on the first of those projects. 

We're gearing up for Halloween too.  I finished Catherine's Hogwart's robes tonight (she's going to be Hermione Granger from Harry Potter).  We're working on Jacob's outfit still.  He chose to be FDR (as in Franklin Delenore Roosevelt) for Halloween.  Unfortunately, boys suit jackets are not cheap and we haven't had any luck finding a used one.  I bought a pattern to see if I could sew one for a reasonable price, but I think the fabric would be just as expensive as buying a new one.  There's also the tiny detail of my not being a very good seamstress.  The search continues.

For the last couple of weeks, we've been devoting large amounts of time to a project that we can't quite talk about yet.  Hopefully, we'll have some good news on that front in the next week and we can let the rest of the world in on the newest craziness in our lives.  Until then, sorry for the radio silence - we haven't slowed down, just redirected.  ;-)

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Planning and putting the garden to bed

We had a pleasant afternoon at the farm today.  It was a beautiful day.  We took the opportunity to clean up the garden from the frost.  There were lots of cantaloupe vines and partially ripened melons to add to the compost along with tomato vines and sweet potato vines.  We had hoped that the sweet potatoes would have had enough time to make a few decent roots, but there weren't really any to speak of.  That said, they made a good amoung of material for the compost pile.

Many lost melons and sweet potato vines
 
We had planned to plow a swale above the greenhouse, but the tractor had other plans.  The front tire is now flat and won't hold air.  We'll get to make a trip to pick up the tractor on our new trailer and tow it down to the tire shop to have the tire fixed.  *sigh*  
Flat tire!

We took some more time to walk the farm and narrow in on exact placements for future buildings.  Our mental plan for the farm continues to take shape and its going to be awesome!

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Cleaning, stacking and fixing

That's been the story of this week.  First, we had to clean out the spot for the wood from Colorado (as mentioned in the last post).  Here are some pics of how that went and what the wood looks like now:

Before cleaning and organizing....
 
After cleaning and organizing....

Latest load stacked and drying.

Homemade spacers cut from our sawmilled wood.
 
We also had to do some quick re-work on our scaffolding shelves.  We discovered that the pointed feet will sink about a foot into the ground!  Naturally, this does not a set of level shelves make.  So Jeremy took everything off, lifted the scaffolding back out of the dirt and put a board under the feet to keep them above grade.  Problem solved!

Our next challenge was that our tall door into the greenhouse is about a foot too short for the RV to get in.  In order to make it possible to back the RV into the greenhouse, we will be cutting the sill under the door, digging out a trengh about 8 feet wide, 15 feet long and a foot or so deep and then re-filling it once the RV is inside.  *sigh*  We've started the prep for that and work will continue on it as we have time.  Fortunately, the RV is safe where it is and we have the time to work on it.

In other news, we're starting to purchase the tools we'll need to do the timber frame joinery.  The design for the cabin is pretty well finalized so the final plans with dimensions are in process.  It feels very slow, but we're moving forward!
Sunset at the farm.

Friday, October 12, 2012

A Weekend in Colorado


Jeremy made another trip to Colorado to pick up lumber and move more logs to the miller out there this past weekend.  Because our trailer was not highway worthy (one of the rear lights doesn't work), we took the 12 foot trailer that Jeremy’s uncle Rob has been incredibly generous about loaning us.  Jeremy met up with his father in Salina and they finished out the rest of the trip uneventfully.
For those who may not know, Jeremy's grandpa, Ott, had 2 heart attacks this summer and had a stint put in.  He’s an incredible guy and you wouldn’t know anything happened to look at him and talk to him now, however, we had planned to let him rest and do all the loading ourselves.  This was part of the reason for Jeremy’s dad going along – the idea being that 2 were better than one in getting Ott to take it easy.  We underestimated his determination.
As they pulled into Tanglewood Acres where Ott and Phyllis live, guess who was blocking the road at the gate? None other than Ott Lehrman. He drove in front of them up to the point in the road where one of the piles of logs were and basically ordered them to back up the trailer so they could load it that evening. There was no arguing with him about it – he blocked the road and there was no way to back the trailer all the way back out of Tanglewood! So, Ott climbed onto the skid steer with the biggest grin you’ve ever seen and proceeded to load the trailer with logs. It took about 10 minutes.
It was a beautiful day to work - 53-65 degrees and sunny!

Load #1

The next morning, Jeremy and Dean (his dad) drove the first load to the miller’s. Over the day, the loaded and ferried 2 more loads. After the last one was unloaded, they loaded up all the already milled wood (about 1300 bd ft) and settled up with Dave Roscoe (the miller). The lumber is beautiful –we couldn’t be happier. The 3 loads from this weekend should come very close to getting all the rest of the wood for the house. 

Time to trim this down a bit...

Our miller, Dave Roscoe unloading logs

3 generations of Lehrmans - (left to right) Dean, Jeremy and Otto 

The trip home was slow due to the load, but otherwise uneventful.  We stacked all the lumber in the greenhouse to cure on Thursday evening (thanks for helping Scott!).  Unfortunately, we forgot the camera, so you'll just have to use your imagination.