The Best Cabin-building blog

http://rebuildingtitcomb.blogspot.com/2011/07/wrapping-up-season-with-floor.html

Mosquitoes and Mowing

I like mowing grass, even though we have way too much of it. So I keep plowing into the woods to cut more. I know I'm just creating more work for myself, but I guess that must mean I like it.

Cutting the grass does help by removing some of the places that mosquitoes can hang out. And I'm pretty sure I don't like mosquitoes.

Minnesota is well known for mosquitoes. We have an established "season" that goes from late spring to early fall. So as short as summer is, and as much as we relish its limited duration, if summer in Yin, then mosquitoes are definitely Yang.

The only place I've ever been that The Biters are worse is Fort Yukon, Alaska. I made the mistake at the start of The Season there of driving the 4-wheeler out through the woods to a place along the shore of the Yukon River. I came back with welts all over my forehead. The next time out I wore one of those nets over the top of my head and had lots of DEET.

There must be something in the biology of mosquitoes that says they thrive in a place that has very cold winters and relatively hot summers. And I wonder why they even exist, given their place in the food chain.  But at the Fort, Bentley was fond of saying "Mosquitoes gotta eat too".

Anyway, I've started to think about adding more logs to the cabin. I got an old used door for 20 bucks, but to use it, the walls will need to be higher. And if the walls are higher there will need to be a roof because it would look funny without one.

Last summer I ran out of dead trees of a suitable size for house logs. I also ended up with a really good log that's really too heavy to lift. I figured out yesterday that it was from a Norway Pine, and all of the other logs I've used are Jack Pine. Must be they have different densities. Nearly all of the Jack Pine trees around the house are in some stage of deterioration, and it must be a bug infestation. So I think I might as well cut down enough Jack Pine to finish the cabin walls. The trees that are most healthy looking are either Norway's or spruce. And the spruce seem eager to fill in where the Jack Pine have eventually fallen down.

[Technical note:  jack pine density is subscribed to be about 29 pounds per square foot, and red (Norway) pine is about 32.  For that Norway log to feel so much heavier, it's probably due to moisture content.  The bark is still stuck on there pretty good, so it probably wasn't dead and drying for very long.]

Soundscapes

Retreat Packing List

CAMPING
• Hip boots
• Air mattress, air pump
• Sleeping bag
• pillow
• pots, dishes, silverware
• Rain gear
• Coffee pot
• Tripod
• Notebook, pen
• Camera and extra batteries
• walking poles
• backpack
• matches
BOOKS
• The Zen of Recovery
• Walden
FOOD
• Water
• Juice
• Peanuts
• coffee
• Ginseng
• Peeps
• pre-cooked crock pot soup & stews

[updated source link]

RETREAT!!

Definitions, retreat:  

1. an act or process of withdrawing especially from what is difficult, dangerous, or disagreeable...
2. a place of privacy or safety
3.  a period of withdrawal for meditation, study

After 40 years of smoking and chewing the stuff off and on, but mostly on, I've decided to take a different approach to quitting.  It's probably not a way a lot of folks would want to do it, but I figure there might be some that would.  So for those of you that MIGHT, you can follow this blog segment if you're interested, and maybe learn from what I end up doing right or wrong in the process.  I'll be the guinea pig.

MN DNR Camper Cabin

Yesterday I made a reservation with the Minnesota DNR for 3 nights at a camper cabin.  It cost me $50 a night plus an $8.50 registration fee.  There was no problem with availability this time of year, since it's at least a month before the tourist season.  This one is at the Big Bog on the northeast side of Upper Red Lake.

MN Parks

I've never been there, but it's not too hard to imagine what it might be like just from the name of the park.  Pretty sure it's a big bog... ;-)





Stay tuned..!!  (to be continued)

Cabin FEVER..!

Is it spring yet?

Over on the Northland Food Sovereignty Community blog there's some stuff on ROOT CELLARS, and in particular there was a picture of an olde tyme cellar that looked quite a bit like the partially completed log cabin we started last fall.  Since (I think) I'm getting motivated to plant a garden in the spring, it occurred to me that maybe the cabin could rather become a cellar to store root vegetables:  Chinese cabbage, turnips, beets, sweet potatoes?, rutabagas, parsnips, green tomatoes?, and the like.

Before the snow fell, we had the cabin up to 5 courses (one more than in the picture), and were having a hard time finding more 13-foot logs without cutting down live trees.  But from what I've been reading about building a root cellar, what we have now might be a really good start on a fairly GINORMOUS food storage.

Looks like what it would take is to dig down a few feet inside, put on a door, some steps going down, and a good roof over the top.

Maybe the roof could be basically poles with a waterproof sheet and sticks and dirt on top for insulation.

The whole thing would have to be sealed up pretty good to keep it cool in the fall and in the spring, and to keep it above freezing during the long winter up here.

cabin fever...

The reason that root cellars work is that the vegetables are still alive when you pick them.  They keep taking in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide until you cook them.  The cold slows down the process and helps to counteract the deteriorating effect of their own "body heat" (at 32 degrees, 1 pound of broccoli produces 2 Btu of heat a day).  Earth is a good insulator because the soil temperature underground stays fairly constant. At a depth of about 12 feet in wet soil, the temperature changes only about 7 degrees throughout the year, remaining close to the average air temperature for that locality.  (That's the basis for geothermal heat pumps.)


I'll have to do some more studying on the subject to help insure that it works as intended, and it might take a season or two of experimentation to get it just right.  But having a long interest in gardening and self-sufficiency, it seems like something I could have fun at.  Borrowing our neighbor's backhoe would probably add to the "fun" compared to shoveling it all out by hand.

Anyone with experience in root cellars, please chime in!