In the building and fixing department, there’s always a queue. Jobs are usually one of three degrees of urgency: Right Away (fix it or we can’t go on!), It Would Be Really Good To Have This Done Soon, and When There’s A Little Extra Time (and that’s often, all the way to Fall). Today, it’s finishing a Right Away job: making up more wooden stakes for the tomatoes. Last year, I bought for very cheap a pile of scrap wood, 10-12′ lengths, rough cut to around 2″ square, from a local sawmill. This year, we found pounding stakes made from this stuff a foot or so into the ground took an insane amount of sledgehammer effort, especially when driving into dry soil. Cutting them down just a bit made a HUGE difference. Using a table saw out in the barn yard, we shaved about 1/2″ lengthwise off each width, winding up with maybe 80 1-1/2″ square stakes. It took a couple of hours overall to save many more in the field, not to mention energy, sweat, frustration. The little things do indeed make all the difference! (Also in the pic, painted white, an old door scrapped during the Milkhouse Extension, and a nice, solid pallet (probably from the seed potato delivery), both to be reused in the composting toilet enclosure, an IWBRGTHTDS project.)
lumber
Wood pile
It’s too wet today for fieldwork, and the seedlings are all set till starting squash, cukes and melons in a few days. There’s always lots of other stuff to do, like building an enclosure for the new composting toilet (a modern outhouse in the field). For that I did a quick inventory of scrap lumber. This outdoor pile (there’s more in the barn) comes mainly from the demolition when we extended the old Milkhouse last fall. Some of the wood is over 50 years old and in fine shape for framing. Building and fixing the stuff you need is a natural part of tiny farming. It’s even more satisfying when you can use materials you have on hand—recycling that you can actually see in action! It makes sense!!