Foot Bridge
I made a simple foot bridge to cross our small creek. It’s two cedar poles about 10′ long with 2″ thick cedar boards screwed into the poles.
Hugelkultur Garden Beds
We used some of our excess logs that we didn’t want to burn in the wood stove for hugelkultur garden beds. Below are some pictures with descriptions of how we built them.You can read more about hugelkultur from richsoil.com, here. The main advantage to hugelkultur is that as the wood rots it will hold water
We’re All In Tennessee!
My brother Brent has moved here from Texas and his new “Man Cave” finally arrived. I am looking forward to helping him work on it.
Building New Stone Sidewalks
My mother wanted a couple of sidewalks built at their place. We used stone that my brother got from his work. Ben, Brent, my dad and I worked part of the day and made good progress. It still needs some leveling out before mortar is added to set the stones permanently, but we have had
Compost Bins – Updated Design
We’ve had compost bins since April, 2014, but we’ve done several improvements since then. Here is what the original 3 bins looked like. The original compost bins worked great, but the sawdust and wheat straw cover material wasn’t protected from rain. The finished compost bins. A few of the improvements made are: * A roof
Kitchen Cabinets Done
I finally finished the kitchen cabinets in our little cabin. They are made from 3/4″ pine from our chainsaw mill with an inexpensive 1/4″ luan backer. They were super simple to build and very inexpensive. Sarah picked out the green…her favorite color. I used Kreg pocket screws to make the door frames as shown in
Sarah’s Video Tour of the Garden
Sarah wanted to document the state of our 2015 garden by recording a video at the beginning of July. She does talk briefly about the chicken coops and the compost bins as well. This is only our second year of gardening, so I suspect we will look back at this video and have a few
Carpenter Bee Trap
I am not particularly fond of trapping bees, but these carpenter bees are wreaking havoc on our cabin. Last year the Carpenter Bees made Swiss cheese out of the soffits on the cabin. My dad made a very slick Carpenter Bee trap that I hung right under the still damaged soffit. The first bee of
Homemade Clothes Dryer Racks
It is sometimes difficult to get all the washed clothes hung out to dry on the clothesline when the weather won’t cooperate. We have been running the wood stove for months now and it seemed like a no-brainer to use the heat of the wood stove to help dry clothes when mother nature wasn’t cooperating.
Winter Weather On the Homestead
We finally had our first (and hopefully last) stretch of bad weather this winter. It started with a good shower of ice pellets, followed by sleet, followed with temperatures in the teens. The next day brought an inch or so of real snow and single-digit temperatures. All of which caused school closures all week for