What a difference a week makes! This week, the snow drops bloomed and the daffodils buds mature into flowers. Down in the valley, 1,000 feet below us, the cherry trees and Bradford Pears are blooming. We’ve had warmish days and chilly nights, some of which were below freezing. I’ve been taking advantage of the improved weather to work and play around the homestead this week.
For example, I shot up the premium ammo in my carry gun, something I try to do at least a couple times a year, and ran some drills. This included drawing and shooting out of my vehicle window, something that you should try a few times with an empty gun before going live. I also practiced exiting the vehicle and shooting in multiple directions while using the vehicle as cover.
Firewood
Like always, firewood continued to play a big role in our daily lives. I received our third cord of new wood, re-split the larger logs—about a third of it—and stacked it so it will dry for use next winter. The supplier says it is a cord, but I am not convinced. Still, at $220 a load, it’s a good buy, so I’m not complaining.
I also continued to cut and split wood from our downed trees. Most of this is tulip popular, which is light and burns quickly. The purchased firewood is mostly red oak, which is denser and burns much longer. It needs to be dry and well-seasoned, which is why I like to let it dry for a year before I burn it.
Oak, locust, and cherry are my favorite local species for firewood, followed by hickory (which we rarely see) and maple, but I won’t look our “free” self-produced firewood in the mouth. It’s worth every penny, plus it makes for great kindling.
Since the weather has warmed up, I have cut back on using the wood stove. We use it only at night now, although on a dark day with freezing rain, we kept it burning. My 2025 rule of thumb is to light it when the room falls to 65°F. As a result, we are burning far less wood than we did when the highs were rarely above freezing, and the need to carry wood inside has dropped significantly. We are also burning the wood stored in the garage, which is the “emergency” supply we kept on hand for use in the middle of a snowstorm. We will get more snow, but we are not expecting a blizzard or snow that will stick around for several days.
Chicken Feed and Fuel Storage
I picked up four more bags of chicken feed, replenishing our supply to fourteen. We need to keep a minimum of twelve bags on hand to avoid running low, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina.
I also refilled two empty five-gallon gas cans and added Stabil to keep the gas viable for up to two years. This is only one can left that is pre-Helene, meaning older than six months.
I have not yet built my fuel storage bunker, but now that the warm weather is here, I am running out of excuses. I plan to start on it within the next 30 days.
While I am unlikely to use the gas-powered weed whacker or the mower during a lengthy grid-down scenario in which we have no gasoline re-supply, things like chain saws, the log splitter, generators, and even the new water pump depend on gas. We’ll need most of them in our next grid-down emergency. That’s why I want to keep 50 gallons of gas on hand.
Firefighting Progress
We picked up a second IBC tote. I filled the original and added almost a cup-and-a-half of bleach to the water. We filled it with our spring-fed household water, which is drinkable, even though we are not planning to drink from the tote. I am adding the bleach to prevent algae from growing in the system. Where the tote is positioned, it will get some morning sun, so I felt bleaching was a good preventative measure. I plan to keep an eye on it as well.
On the plus side, we are getting rain a couple times a week, usually one heavy rain and a light shower or two. This is helping minimize the risk of fire. Hopefully, it will also help some of those seeds we sprinkled on our landslide scar to germinate and grow.
Beehive and Frame Maintenance
After checking my bees last week, I had six empty hive bodies, two of which I had removed from active and (hopefully) growing hives, and four that came from my dead-outs. Out of the sixty frames therein, fifty were in good shape, three or four were not fully drawn out, and the rest had some wax moth damage. Almost all can be reused later in the year.
If you are new here or not a beekeeper, then know that my Langstroth hives have ten frames in each hive body. (Multiple hive bodies, or boxes, are stacked together to create a larger hive.) The bees use the frame as a guide when they build, or draw out, wax comb. They then use the resulting honey comb to lay eggs, store nectar and convert it to honey, and to store pollen and bee bread. Because it takes as much energy for bees to produce a pound of wax as it does for them to produce seven pounds of honey, I want to save all the drawn-out frames I can. This will help maximize honey production.
I made a stack of hive bodies and their frames on a bottom board in my garage and added a package of mothballs inside it. The mothballs will keep the wax months from destroying the wax. The key here is to use para-dichlorobenzene mothballs, not the traditional, or old-fashioned, kind that are made from naphthalene, as the latter will render the wax unusable.
I was worried that the entire garage would smell like grandma’s closet, but that wasn’t the case. The smell was neither strong nor that bad.
Erosion Control
I have ten or eleven bales of straw staked onto the mountainside to control the water as it rushes down the scar left by the landslide. We’ve had two heavy rains, and so far my diversion is working. Still, we have not had the deluge we sometimes get. Only when we successfully weather one of those without significant erosion, will I be satisfied my bales are doing their job.
Bales of straw had doubled in price since I got here in 2020. Talk about inflation!
I have also set up many of the pallets that make up our new landslide mitigation fence. During Helene, much of the landslide was stopped when it ran into our five-foot high, double-rows of firewood. Some wood got enveloped in mud and portions of the firewood were knocked over, but most of it held and stopped the landslide. By adding the pallets right before the firewood, I am strengthening this barrier. To anchor the pallets, I have driven five-foot T-posts at least a foot into the ground. Each pallet gets two. Between the strength of the buried T-post, the height of the pallet, and the weight and bulk of the firewood behind it, our hope is this will stop the next landslide before it can take out the carport or knock the heat pump compressor unit askew again.
It’s not pretty, but neither are three to five feet of mud and rocks.
Winter Returns
Despite the warming trend, we had a storm roll through that brought cold weather and snow flurries. I fired up the wood stove and that afternoon my wife lit a fire in the fireplace insert to keep the rest of the house warm. Snow fell but didn’t accumulate.
I took advantage of the warm weather to open the safe, check the batteries in my optics, and oil all the AR-15 style weapons I own. Doing so, I realized that the weapons I had greased in the past still had a coating of white grease on the rails and parts the bolt that need lube while those that had been oiled ranged from bone dry to barely moist. I’ve always been a fan of oil, but I may switch over to grease, especially for those guns that will be in storage for a while.
I am pleased to report that all of my optics with red dots, green dots, or illuminated reticles worked. There were no dead batteries or other issues. There shouldn’t be, but it is good to check.
Power Outages
Speaking of batteries, we are increasingly thankful for our solar power system and batteries. We had four power outages over five days this week, and two of them were lengthy. The outage on the day of the storm was no surprise, but the others were not weather related.
After one outage, a utility worker drove up to the house in his bucket truck to check on us and make sure our power was back on. We were surprised, but he said it was because my wife used the app to report the outage. The outage was just down the road and affected only 24 people, but “You call, we come,” he said. He was a friendly fellow, and we had a pleasant chat in which he told us we live at the end of a long circuit and therefore are prone to outages. “Oh yes, we know!” we told him. “That’s the reason we got the solar power system.”
