(no subject)

[unicornduke]

this weekend sure was a weekend.

I went to PA and found out as I was leaving that my older brother was bringing his new three month old shepherd-lab mix puppy. Surprise!

It was a mixed weekend for sure, as neither adult dog particularly liked the puppy. They were okay with her saturday afternoon, and there was some napping together in the living room but by this morning, they were irritated at her again. She was a smart puppy and knew some commands but still a puppy and thus, annoying. Very cute puppy.









Iggy, my parents' dog was in a mood because of the puppy and decided to try and sleep on my head all weekend. I didn't appreciate this and ended up kicking her off my sleeping bag both nights. Mara just did this:



I split wood again, then binned it in the afternoon, then took an empty tote down to the sap run, nearly got the truck stuck and then pruned blueberries. I probably did a half cord of wood.

Here's the thing, because of midday snuggle break, my lunch break was long, so I worked later than I really meant to. I finished up pruning around 6 and I ended up going ice skating at a rink about a half hour from my parents place. Public skate started at 7:30, so I ate some food, got in the truck and started driving. I made one pit stop to get the most delicious chocolate ever from Gertrude Hawk (so good! a regional company) and got to the ice rink. I paid, got my skates on and started warming up and realized I was super sore from splitting wood and pruning and had stiffened up. My back was so sore. And it really made me realize how much I use my back in skating.

So I only skated for about 45 minutes, basically until the soreness outweighted the fun. I wasn't really disappointed with the little time because it was a bit of a recon skate. This rink is a year round rink and I wanted to check it out because they have public skates listed on their schedule through May. May!!

It was also a really nice clean place, even the bathrooms were nice. It had a second rink with something else going on too.

I was super pleased with it and fully intend to keep going back while I'm visiting my parents provided I'm not super sore.

I didn't do much this morning, got up at like 7:15, which is pretty late. Walked the pups and did a slow packing of stuff. I finally remembered to bring back the deer bones for making stock and also bringing back more meat from the freezer.

Then the Isobel Cup Final was today! I timed to get back to watch and unloaded the truck just as the game started. It was intense, went to overtime and then the Whitecaps won. Such a great game to watch, although I was rooting for the Beauts.

I also got a free spinning wheel! My grandpa's partner's daughter's friend got a new one and so B brought back north after visiting her daughter. It's disassembled and seems to be missing some parts, which confuses me because it was apparently in use before it was passed to me, but I don't know much about spinning wheels. So that's a project I'm excited about.

Comments

[graydon]

Woohoo, spinning wheel!

Especially the modern designs of spinning wheel can be peculiar; hope it turns out it's all there. (Or just missing a spindle, which are often an interchangeable part so you can fill it up with yarn and remove it and put the next one on.)

Mara is really not filled with approval there.

That is really nice ash wood. (and a cute puppy.)

[unicornduke]

The main issue is that I can't find any manufacture information or name or anything on the wheel. Now that I've done some basic internet searching, I'm missing at least the drive band, the bobbins, the pedal and potentially the connectors between the pedal and the wheel. It's a free spinning wheel so if I can piece it together, I'm winning over the cost of a new one haha.

Mara is also irritated that I didn't wake up early enough for her liking. She wanted to walk.

It was a nice bunch of ash, split wonderfully. There were a few knotty bits but they got tossed on the wood burning stove pile in bigger chunks.

[dragonlady7]

SPINNING WHEEL YESSS
I forgot to look at my mom's loom or even mention it to her when I was there.

I briefly discussed where to plant flax with the farm-fam and Annie said if I wanted to do like, a 20x20' patch I could just lump it in with her flowers, as she's expanding that garden this year (that's where the silage tarps are all staked out by the road, taking over the spot near where the old barn was torn down-- doesn't hurt to be kind of an ad for the farm, as that's what you see when you drive by), but if I want to do more than that I'd have to do it up in a field where they're doing the squash and beans this year. [Orrrr I could do both, if I really wanted to. I cannot conceive of how much seed is needed for how much space, though.] It seems that flax is really just related to itself, so there's no fear of it interfering with crop rotations. I'm a little concerned about weed control, and if it's a smaller patch I guess I'll figure on using a scuffle hoe, but if it's a bigger patch I'll have to prevail upon someone who knows how to drive a tractor to cultivate it for me. I bet I could leverage my stored-up favors owed, though.

ALSO at the farmer's market, the sunflower oil guy was there (he comes every other week) and I got talking to him-- he's used his equipment to cold-press other seed oils, lately hemp, and I was the second person to ask him about pressing linseeds, and he told me that his next thing he's working on for the business is that they're upgrading all their pressing equipment to the next level of stuff, and then they're going to keep the old equipment and make it available to do custom pressing jobs for people. I don't know that we'd be interested, but linseed cakes were a really important animal feed in the region, traditionally, and if Z is expanding the livestock operation he might be interested in non-traditional feeds. The sunflower oil guy said he's really interested in the idea of linseed oil because the other person who asked about it was this private chef type who assured him it's all the rage in Europe at the moment. IDK, I just thought it was an interesting conversation. (And customers have long been asking for non-soy-fed meat, because of bad media coverage of soy, and you can apparently sub linseed meal for soy at least partially in the diets of some animals. They definitely feed it to egg-laying chickens because then the labels on the egg cartons can mention Omega-3 fatty acids, which flaxseed does have.)

(Sunflower Guy also agreed with me that he has no idea what's going on with hemp currently and confirmed there's no goddamn way he's gonna grow it himself until shit settles down, but he's happy to handle it for other people.)

(It did occur to me that if I grow the flax on Laughing Earth property I get to say it's organic, because they have most of their fields certified-- they might switch certifiers this year though, as NOFA were jerks last year. Though I think I'd have to have organic seed to start with, so uh I guess if I save seeds I can say it next year. [oh, wait, no, if there's no organic seed available then i think you're still allowed to grow the variety, you just have to make a good-faith effort to find it from an organic source? i don't recall, i'm sure they know.] Not like I have any marketing plans, but that's a long-view thought. Even if it's the same linen we're growing in two places, they get to have different labels, even if they wind up functionally identical.)

Looking at you with all your firewood processing has me like o_0 because one of the several I Should Improve Things Somewhat projects I want to do this year is that I want to clean up a lot of the fallen and cut down trees around the farm and consolidate the brush piles into a burn pile for Annie to make bio-char and a separate pile to season for firewood so I have something to burn out at the yurt in my tiny stove, and like, probably some firewood for the house, they do use a fair bit since Aaron has no other heat source. But I don't know how to use a chain saw, and they don't have a log-splitter. (Dad has one, though, which I could borrow.) And most of the felled trees are elm, which is apparently The Worst to split. Sigh.

[unicornduke]

Spinning wheel is missing many pieces but I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out. I'll probably go wander around some antique shops and see if I can find one. It's a Saxony type but no manufacturing information and I broke a part of a bobbin last night, I put one part of the bobbin into the other and it just, broke. So a work in progress lol.

According to Landis Museum, one pound does 20x20 ft, which is what you'll have. The only issue I found with looking at flax is that it can harbor Cabbage Moth, but honestly, if you have it, it's probably in the brassicas anyway. 20x 20 isn't too bad, and sown that thickly will probably only need one or two weedings when it's small and it will crowd the rest out after that. Apparently, you can walk on the plants when they're 3-4 inches tall as long as you walk barefoot and that's how they weeded it haha.

That is such an awesome conversation with the oil guy! I suspect there's all sorts of markets out there for linseed and linen stuff, it's just that getting the processing up and running can be difficult. I'm contemplating growing most of my flax for seed this year, and only holding back a little bit for processing. That way I can have a full pound for seed production every year and a pound for fiber. Or something. One site informs me that flaxseed oil goes for $12 per 8 oz, which seems expensive to me. I rarely buy oils and definitely not fancy oils, so shrugs.

Hmm, I planted two grams of seed last year and got 9 ounces (or 8 oz if properly cleaned, there's a lot of chaff in it, note to self, build that fucking seed cleaner). So I got something like 200 grams of seed grown from 2 grams planted. So that's a big increase. Well I'll think about that some more.

There is literally no way to get organic seed for this variety except maybe by buying it directly from Holland if you can find a certified organic producer and go through the hoops to deal with it all. Which would be some kind of feat to get a hold of the right people so I think you'd be fine with labeling organic. Long view ideas are good to have bouncing around because it's good to vaguely think about it. Honestly, if you start saving your own seed, then it's fine to call it organic as long as you document that you started with untreated seed. Since I doubt we'll be selling this first year's flax as organic, it's all good.

A wood splitter is the best investment ever but also not that useful if you aren't burning a lot of wood. Oh geez, elm is The Worst I hear. Hopefully it isn't Rock Elm, which graydon introduced me to recently. That's quite a task to get that all done, small progress really helps. Dad has been taking down all the dead ash trees and they split beautifully, so I've really been whipping through splitting. It might also be easier to do it in stages, get a chainsaw, do All the chainsawing that you need to, then later start doing the other stuff.

[dragonlady7]

I am really bad at figuring out how to repair broken or incomplete things, so I wish you luck. :x I wouldn't know what to do. I wish I were better about it, it'd be useful to be handier, but I'm really not. I'm good at repairing broken things if I know what it was supposed to be like, but I'm terrible at inferring what's missing from an incomplete thing.

Good info, 1 lb 20x20'. Yes. The only other source I'd seen said you could scatter 1 Tbsp over 10x10' and then you'd have to weed. Other sources had said "plant thickly for fiber, thinly for seed" but offered no info on what thick was vs thin. (The more room the plant has, the more likely it is to branch, which is good for seed production but less good for fibers.) (you also have probably seen this research!)

Cabbage moths- that's what i was thinking of! well, neither the flower garden nor the squash n beans field is near the brassicas, so neither location would worsen an infestation, likely. But that's good to know. I was kicking myself for not writing down more of the stuff I read, because that is exactly what I was trying to remember when I was discussing the rotation issues with Annie.
(She looked it up, though, and discovered one of the moths that preys on flax is called, and we're not making this up, the Setaceous Hebrew Character, which sounds like an antisemitic Charles Dickens character as opposed to a moth, which is what it is. And note it's not the "xx Character Moth", it's just the "xx Character".

I think you're right that this would be a good year to harvest, like, a sampling to process for fiber, and then let the bulk of it go toward increasing seed yields. It would be a good idea to learn how to do the labor-intensive processing and figure out what kind of results we can get, without the weight of like, A Ton Of This Shit To Get Through piling up behind that. We could even harvest the fiber in successive batches to determine at what point the fiber's at its peak, so as to come up with a more informed schedule for the future. I personally would be terrible at the necessary organization and record-keeping but I'm confident that between you (*gestures at spreadsheets*) and Aaron "Mr. Notebook" and my sister's Planner Of Doom that she consults sixty times a day, I could manage.

And oil is really just a sidebar to consider at this point, but I figured it was worth bringing up!

I would really like to do some experimenting with the fiber, as well-- because, historically, yes, you wanted linen to be fine fiber, but modern tastes are such that people might actually be interested in coarser linen fiber because it's more obviously not cotton; the linen that's allowed to go to seed may therefore not wind up entirely as waste products! (I'm thinking about how people seem to go wild for chunky, often uneven handspuns that in the pre-modern era would have been considered too coarse to use, but in the modern era things that are Obviously Handmade have a value and cachet to them.) Of course I also want to see how fine and soft I could make it, but the other end of that spectrum may not be worthless after all.

And as for the wood-- yeah, I think I might work on collecting and chainsawing whatever I can, and the bulk of my work would be the sorting, and then I'll just borrow Dad's logsplitter for the last bit of work. I could even stack it all and let it season prior to splitting, so if I don't even get to the splitting this year it wouldn't be a waste of work.
They do have a wood-chipper, I think, too.

I don't think it's rock elm, just regular elm, but boy is it rough to work with either way. It also smells terrible when burned, but honestly who cares.

And I don't know how to use a chainsaw but surely someone can teach me, I've watched them used and understand that it is not rocket science. Maybe I'll volunteer to help Dad do some work on the firewood at his house, so I can learn. I am sadly uneducated, for a woman of my age.

[unicornduke]

I planted 3ish grams per a 10x10 last year and I got branching and it was a hellish weeding, I think I had to do it twice and I still missed some. So I think by going super duper thick, it'll work out a lot better. Harvesting a little bit will definitely be good, Even an armload is a lot and I suspect we'll have more than that. I need to do some thinking on seed harvest, just because the sheer volume of pods/seeds is going to be A Lot.

Maybe once we get a good bunch of seeds built up, I can do some looking at optimal seeding rates for fiber production compared to seed production. So producing seed can be done at a lower rate but fiber at a higher rate and if you want to balance them because you don't care that much about branching or whatever.

I think the successive harvest is an excellent idea! If we've got these big patches, then it won't be too bad to pull a few handfuls on maybe a weekly basis starting hmmmm, maybe right at flower? I think there's some old flax books I can find online that might give some answers on that. But yeah, I think there is a market for coarser linen, plus coarser and tow can be spun into twine and other things, so like artisinal twine for wrapping packages or w/e. I'll dig into that, because everyone just says the later stuff will be coarser, but doesn't specify how. Like, only good for industrial purposes coarse? Or like, just a little more difficult to work with? Or just a little chunkier and more worsted when spun? Or just shorter? Pictures would be awesome. I'm making spreadsheets already :D

I'm going to pull 5-10 plants from each variety in my trial at optimal harvest time so I can do a comparison on them for retting time and a few other things. And then let the rest go to seed so hopefully we can have more options from all of the varieties.

Chainsawing as I've learned is: wear steel toed boots, make sure your feet are planted securely and make sure your legs won't be behind the chainsaw if it kicks back. I never learned how to fell trees but it doesn't seem too difficult.