Sandy's new kitchen

It doesn't look like much yet, but Sandy is standing approximately next to the future kitchen island. That's a rake in her hand, not a broom.

If you look carefully you can see the driveway that comes up to near the future front door, just to the left of her, and, behind her, another section of the driveway that ends at a parking area.

As soon as the last piece of earth-moving equipment (also visible through the trees behind Sandy) is gone I'll post pictures of the driveway.

The fields are alive

Here are just a few of the flowers on the property these days:

Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa)

Missouri Ironweed (Vernonia missurica)

There are many ironweed varieties. "Missouri" was selected due to the large number of flowers on the flower head.

Common Marsh-Pink (Sabatia angularis)

Hoary Mountain Mint (Pycnanthemum incanum)

UPDATE: My sister, the hortoculturist, found the name of this plant. The top few leaves on each stem appear to be spray painted white, same color as the flowers.

Baby nibbler

Look closely. This little guy hasn't eaten much, yet, although he might be the one who loves the gazania flowers


Taken from the second floor of the barn apartment.

Apparently we are not alone

I walked down to the house site last evening. Just off the path from the barn to the site I noticed something unusual. Who ever they are, they are very handy with wood.

Remember the frogs?

In late May I wrote about tree frogs but had no evidence then that they were breeding nearby. Last week, while Kira was painting the water trough we noticed the frog eggs were back.

They're not easy to see, but there are many of them floating with some sunflower seeds and a few drowned bugs. We also noticed some large tadpoles in the water so there must have been other eggs laid some time ago.

Speaking of frogs, we've been camping out the last few nights near the large pond. The frogs have been very noisy with at least three types of frogs heard almost all night long.

Two weeks of grandkids - week one

My grandkids who live in Germany visited last week. Kira is recently nine and Lucas will be seven in August. The week flew by quickly and we took them to meet their grandmother on Friday night.

While they were here they painted the side of the large trough. Sandy had primed it with a light blue background and here's Kira working on her design for the art work.

I took Lucas one day to the cave nearby. There was too much water in it for him to get down the hill, but he tried sliding down a fallen tree 'til he realized it was too steep.

I wish I had taken lots more pictures.

How we spent the Fourth

On June 29th, after an early morning meeting in Indianapolis to discuss our passive solar plans, we left for my sister's new home in Milford, Delaware. After approximately 13 hours we pulled into her driveway. She has gotten much of her belongings unpacked and placed in the house, including all the furniture for one of the guest bedrooms which we soon put to use.

On Tuesday and Wednesday Sandy and I helped around the place, I installing curtains and shades, and a few plants we took with us from Greene View Springs and Sandy with more unpacking and organizing.

Thursday morning found us on the road again heading for my son's place in Durham, North Carolina. Also there were his two kids, our grandkids, on a summer visit from Germany.

The next day we all drove to northern South Carolina for a rendezvous with my other son and his family, nine of us altogether. The motel we chose was a compromise to reduce the drive time for son 2. We spent Friday afternoon and evening together, mostly in the motel's pool. On the Fourth we drove to Myrtle Beach for a day in the surf and an evening trying to find the best fire works in the area.

Here's the happy group, except for me and Sandy who was seated across from me, at dinner at the Golden Corral.


Finally, on the fifth, Sandy and I headed home with the grandkids. We got back before midnight and took little time to get to sleep.

The Energy Fair

Leaving on Thursday, June 18, Sandy and I drove to the Midwest Renewable Energy Association's 20th annual Energy Fair. We left on Thursday because it's about a nine-hour trip and the first workshop started at 10 AM on Friday. Along the way, near Baraboo, Wisconsin, we stopped to visit the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center, a Platinum LEED certified building with lots of great ideas we were interested in examining. We got there a full 2 minutes! before the 4:30 closing time, but the staff was generous and allowed us to poke around inside and outside until about 5 PM.

Michael Beczkiewicz, an active member of the Southern Indiana Renewable Energy Network (SIREN) made arrangements for many of us to camp together at the MREA-owned campground near the fair site. In all, about 20 Bloomington-area folks were at the event and about half camped with us.

Each of the three days there were six one-hour workshop slots. And during each time slot there were at least a dozen different workshops from which to choose on topics like passive solar design, solar water heating, wind power, efficient home building, transportation, local food, and many, many more.

Most useful to us were workshops on earth-sheltered homes, window insulation, timber framing, alternative building options and others.

In addition to the 200-plus workshops there were more than a hundred booths with books, products and services where we picked up information on many things we hope to implement in the new home.

Here's a picture of the crowd waiting for the gate to open on Friday morning and a long shot of some of the dozens of tents for workshops and vendors.


This was one of the best run events I have ever attended and well worth the long drive.

Updates coming

Tonight I'm going to try to catch up on over a month of activities.

We have been to Wisconsin for a weekend energy fair and back to the east coast on a long trip to Delaware, North and South Carolina over the Fourth of July weekend. Our grandkids who now live in Germany visited us for nearly a week and the grandkids who live a lot closer are here for this week. Earth work for the driveway for our house was started today. All this and more in the next series of entries.

Storms

It's been a rainy day so we spent time organizing our storage shelves in the barn. The rain reminded me I hadn't posted a picture taken last week looking southwest from a second story window. It speaks for itself.

In and out of business in 4 days!

About a week ago we went into the moving business to help my sister move to her new home in Delaware. She had some household items stored in our barn, the bulk of her things in storage in Memphis (from where she moved), and a few new items to pick up in North Carolina. Four days later we unloaded the truck, retired from the moving business and came home on Amtrak.


Here Sandy and Judy hold back everything we had stuffed into storage last fall when she sold her home. Note there is only about one inch of space left at the front of the storage area. We had had to hold the box spring back and quickly shut the door when we had it all in.




This is the truck we stuffed it all into, a 26-ft rental from Penske.











And here's the route we took, more or less, nearly 1500 miles. You may need to click on the "minus" box on the map to see the whole route.

Now, back to our regular programming.

Open up!

We now have at least three woodpecker families coming to our suet feeders. A few days ago I found a baby downy woodpecker hopping in the garden. It didn't seem right because of the way it was hopping and the minimum effort it seemed to be putting into announcing its location. It was easy to pick up and I put it into the thickest growth in the garden, a mix of flowers and vegetables, to provide it as much cover as possible.

Later that day the father and a baby downy appeared on one of the feeders and the dad proceeded to feed the baby, right there.

Our windows aren't really that dirty. The birds aren't real neat when they're picking at the suet.

There's only one channel!

OK, this one's got nothing to do with Greene View Springs, but I just had to post it. One of our grandsons was fascinated with our front loading washing machine and sat down to watch it for almost 10 minutes.

The return of the tree frogs

The frogs have been making a racket for the past week. Yesterday Sandy was working next to our large trough which I have lined with billboard tarp and this little frog showed up. We think he or she is checking it out for a place to deposit eggs as they did last year.

There are a four "pond" choices this year up here near the barn, though only two of them are "safe" right now - the pictured trough and the plastic pond above the driveway. One of the down spouts on the barn goes into a smaller trough, but it overflows heavily during a rainfall. The fourth is the larger pond I am digging but I can't work on it when it's wet, and it's been wet for the last three weeks! Until it is finished and lined, water seeps completely out of it in less time than a tadpole can mature.

Stand by for egg and tadpole pictures if I'm home to take them.

The garden so far

I took a few shots of the raised garden we've been building. All of the sides have been made from used lumber scavenged from an old barn that was being torn down within two miles of us. The first picture is taken from below the archway we were given.

Just below the satellite dish you can see the large plastic "tote" in a metal cage I got at an auction for $30. I added about $6 worth of fittings and connected it to a garden hose. It holds over 350 gallons of rain water that drops in from the south side gutter. Now we get water on demand by just squeezing the hose's nozzle. The pressure is low, just whatever gravity provides, but one doesn't have to run to the outlet to turn it off when done with it.

Last week I found a source for more totes and bought two for only $10 each. They need to be cleaned out and I need to buy more fittings to make them useful. Then they will be "installed" on the north side of the barn as high on the hillside as possible so they will provide a lot more water pressure.

The pathway between the upper and lower beds is slanted to the east and to the south and dries off quickly after a rainfall. The upper beds themselves slant a bit to the south and a bit more to the east so water that comes off the gravel and large rocks above gets distributed without help from us.

The lower beds are a bit more level, though that was more by accident than by plan.

The second picture is the same hillside but from more toward the west end. In the middle, next to the archway, are two persimmon trees that fruited last year. Also in the center are two metal grates with peas climbing them. Our hummingbirds are back and we can't keep the two feeders filled. I'm trying to find a large jar that will screw into the feeder openings so we could put out two or three days' worth of sugar water.