Falling Trees

The state game lands surrounding our property routinely drop trees onto our property. Thursday night when I got home from work Alan told me about his near brush with having a dead tree drop on top of him. He was mowing the lawn and had just finished the little strip between a large clump of lilacs and the garden fence. He did a loop through the next portion of lawn and when he drove by that little strip, about a minute later, there was a large dead tree.

The tree missed the garden fencing and the lilacs and fell exactly in between. It crossed our barn access road:

And went up into the woods.

Alan thinks its ash and has been dead a while. The wood is ready for burning this season.

A few weeks ago another tree, a locust this time, fell out of the game lands and missed the barn and fencing.

This tree fell right between the barn and a jog in our pasture fence, damaging nothing. Once seasoned this tree will provide close to a cord of wood.

The Catmometer

Lily is our catmometer. You can tell how warm the wood stove is by how close she is sleeping to the it.  Usually she sleeps about 2-3 feet away. Once the stove starts cooling down a little she moves up next to the stove.

As the stove gets cooler she moves a little underneath.

If we are really slacking and the stove needs attention immediately she is pretty much completely under the stove.

For these pictures we were letting the stove go out so we could clean out the ash. Lily was not happy about that!

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Here is my obligatory "Boy is it cold outside" post.
At 2:30 PM today the temp sat at a balmy 18 degrees fahrenheit.

The lows have been in the single digits overnight and we are about as prepared as we could be.  I bought a heated bucket to keep at least one of the sheeps' water buckets unfrozen. I have another on back order. These are the greatest and I wonder why I never had one before now. Oh yeah, something about the directions saying not to use it outside. Since this is my first winter with a barn this is really the first time I could use one.  Now I can't wait for the second heated bucket to come.

The sheep are snug in their barn. Of course they are eating a ton of hay to keep their rumens working to make heat. And, thankfully, no one has lambed yet. Those lambs are a lot warmer inside their moms than they would be outside.  But we are ready for lambing as well. We have two heat lamps, extra bulbs and our lambing kit ready to go. It would be nice if they would wait until it's not so frigid outside.

Inside, our wood stove has been burning nonstop for a few days. Alan has been getting up in the middle of the night to add more wood. It's nice to wake up to a warm house. Of course our bedroom is about 50 degrees at night since we have to keep the door shut to keep the cats out and there is no insulation in the outside wall.  But that's nothing an extra quilt and burrowing under the covers won't fix.

Yay, the wood stove is in!

I love my wood stove.  My husband loves our wood stove so much that we had to move it to the new house.  There was a Russo coal/wood stove with a metal flue in the new house, but it is really meant for coal first and we both agree we don't like burning coal.  Too dusty and we don't like the smell.  We really like our Vermont Castings Vigilant wood stove.  Bought about 20 years ago it has been the perfect size for heating our school house. Last year we didn't turn on the heat until December 23rd, just used the wood stove to take the chill off.  We don't really know how well this new house is insulated (if at all) and don't relish paying a large oil bill.  So we are hoping we can keep the house warm mainly with the wood stove.

We had our first fire last night and we were very happy with the way the stove warmed the house.  At the old house our wood stove was in a room with 13 foot tall ceilings.  It took quite a while for the heat to start warming up the first floor, even with the ceiling fan.  In the new house we could feel the heat almost immediately.  With the addition of a small fan to blow the warm air into the rest of the house we had the kitchen up to 70 within one hour.  While going down the stairs you could feel the heat rising up.  My daughter's bedroom is above the room with the wood stove and she was warm last night.  We actually had to stop adding wood to the fire around 7PM or we would have been too warm to sleep well.

I don't think I could ever be without a wood stove.  With the weather and number of power outages we get it is necessary for heat and cooking.  I use the wood stove to help dry laundry in the winter.  I have a great floor clothes drying rack from Lehman's that works great in the winter when I want to dry clothing in front of the wood stove.  A load of laundry will dry in a couple hours and the largest size is big enough to hold two large loads.  And drying the laundry in front of the fire puts humidity into the air. 

I am not the only one who is happy to have the wood stove burning again.  Lily is too.

And for the old house, we bought the exact same stove to put back where we took this one out.  It's a couple years older but the same model.  We knew the stove would fit well and I really wanted to sell the house with a stove in place.  And no we couldn't have just put the same model stove in the new house.  My husband knew who owned our stove before us and how they took care of it and how we took care of it. He was in love with this particular stove, not just any old Vigilant!