Making shelves and drying the last of the pumpkin

Overview

This is another sparsely worded post - sorry!

I went up to the farm on Thursday last week (I took annual leave) and stayed until Saturday morning then rushed back for a xmas party in Olney.  Nonetheless, I did get a few things done.  Most notably perhaps is that I finished drying my pumpkins!  I have only one left now and I am going to use it for making pumpkin leather.  I did lots of work on the caning shelves - not up yet, but they are probably one weekend away from sealing and assembly.  I also  purchased, charged and replaced the battery on the UTV  (turns out the old one was dehydrated - so I may save it yet!).  I also took up 2 cases of champagne bottles and re-bottled the Perry that I had put in the claret bottles last week.  I added some Montrachet yeast to the bottles and to the carboy.  I used a new gadget to tie the champagne stoppers to the bottles - very worthwhile having!   Oh, and I put a coat of paint on the attic vents.

Shelving

First off; oak is very hard!  I really wanted to nail the shelving together, but when I loaded up the nail gun and shot a few nails in, this is what happened:

Terrible split

Actually blew off a piece of the wood

Tried from the other side - splitting is just too bad.  I am going to have to do the old drill and bolt methods.

 

I had to cut a lot of the boards to get some usable pieces.  This is the wood that was sitting out all summer in the rain and weather.  These particular pieces will be the bracing between the narrow edges of the uprights.

Here are the uprights.  I cut them to 6.5 ft because they had issues beyond that and because 6.5 ft is plenty tall for a shelf.

Here are the uprights with the braces carriage bolted on.

Putting on the shelf holders now.

Shelf holders installed on both sides of the shelves.  Now just need to cut a bunch of shelving boards and probably some braces for the back.

Pumpkin

Here it is - the last of the pumpkin, dried and ready to be vitamixed into powder

And finally, the powdered pumpkin in the jars.  That is about 15 smallish pumpkins worth of powder.