A hard week

Last week I was able to go home for the whole week. I was a witness for the state of DE in a felony construction fraud case, but they worked out a plea bargain, so I had the whole week free. Email me and I'll tell you about it. Or you can read some about it at the blog Inferior Building Services.

I couldn't waste the week lazing around with a whole two-acre microfarm to fix up, and I managed to keep myself fairly busy. Let's start out with a summary that should make all my motorcycle buddies groan, especially Jack. I wrote a poem about the week:

My "Vacation" from "Work"
Slaving away under noonday sun
Sawing up planks—I've just begun.
Building raised beds for our vegetables green,
The finest raised beds that you ever have seen.
Fifteen low squares each four feet by four.
Please, dear wife, don't ask for any more!
Fill them up with dirt and I'm still not done:
I have to build a fence for the chickens and their run.
Fifty feet long and six feet high,
Neighbor dogs can't see them and the chickens can't fly.
I worked and toiled and sweated like a man,
But I lost five pounds and I gained a nice tan!

I also got to dig a trench that became a nice asparagus bed. It was a productive week.

Click to enlarge

Speaking of chickens, here's a shot of the interior of the addition to the chicken coop, which we call the sun room. Val painted the trompe l'oeil. The room serves as a retreat for hens with newly-hatched chicks. We have three hens sitting at the moment; they should be good for maybe 20 more chickens. Come fall we'll be swimming in eggs, if you'll pardon the awkward metaphor.

It was daytime, so it's hard to see the little yellow flame

If you follow this blog, you might remember a series of several posts recently about biochar. The series starts here.

Biochar is homemade charcoal. You powder it up and mix it with your garden soil and it encourages the growth of beneficial microorganisms. It also sequesters carbon, permanently. Good stuff. I had four nice bags of sawdust from a neighbor's woodworking project I had saved all winter so I could make another batch. I managed to burn up a lot of scrap wood, and the barrel of biochar turned out nicely. Lots of nice fluffy charcoal that wouldn't need to be crushed into powder. I hosed down the contents of the barrel until I was sure everything was nice and wet, then turned in for the night. This was my first project for the week, and it took all day. I have several pictures on the previous posts, but here's one showing the gases escaping and burning off.

Chickens and some scrap wood

The next morning I checked the barrel to find, to my chagrin, an inch or two of charcoal in the bottom! Lesson 1: I needed more water. The charcoal was above combustion temperature, and when the air worked down to some still dry charcoal, it ignited, drove off the water, and it all burned up. Lesson 2: I should have spread out the charcoal immediately so it would cool, maybe onto the area I wanted to enrich, and hosed it all down more thoroughly. It was a lot of effort down the drain. However, we still have a lot of scrap wood to burn. Anybody out there got a big pile of sawdust?