First frost?

Cold weather weekend

First things first, we harvested a bunch of the veggies since they were calling for frost Sat and Sun nights.  

We got a good harvest of brussel sprouts:

Which we ate over the course of the weekend!  Roasted with some olive oil, salt an pepper!  Delicious!  There are more to come on the plants, we just took what was ready.

We got a surprisingly good bunch of broccoli - which I froze.

Last of the eggplants/  Some are small, but what can you do.  I harvested a cabbage for some slaw.

Last of the bell peppers.  We took them all since frost will certainly kill them.

Continuing my efforts to clear out the freezer I grabbed another pack of frozen blackberries and made another pie:

Blackberry pie.  I used tapioca  as a thickener this time.  Turned out quite nice!

More pumpkin processing!

Sliced up another eight dryer trays worth of the sugar babies an dried them this weekend.

After drying I put them in the vitamix an turn them into powder!  

A few random pictures of the place in the fall

A documentary on quarter-sawing an oak log - gone awry

Well, I wanted to do a bit of a show piece to illustrate how I do quarter sawing on an oak log, but I messed up and got into a maple log instead!

Anyway, here are some pictures of the whole process.

Trusty tractor with chipper and front forks

The logs (well some of them)

The remains of the chipping operation (I did another 2 + cubic yards and got all of the apple orchard trees mulched!)

The log

This crotch - side limb is a bit of a problem.

Great, it has a piece of wire embedded in it!

So I had to saw off the limb to try to get into the wire

And I had to dig in a bit with the chainsaw to get to it - but I got it out!  I didn't want to hit that with the sawmill

I lifted it up an marked it - in pencil.  So you can't see it.  In fact, I had a hard time seeing the marks!  I need to get some bright crayons for woodmarking. 

The other end.  It was going to be tricky making sure this thing was "even" on the mill bed!

Up on the mill bed.

Fiddled around trying to figure out the best cut - even after the markings earlier, it wasn't clear

OK, I think I got a good alignment.  Now to check to be sure the blade and carriage wont get hung up during the cut 

First cut is done - you can kind of see the cut line here.

Flipped over onto the flat side

Positioned for the next flat cut.

Second flat cut and slab removed.

Rotated 90 degrees.  

Top removed.

Rotated 180 degrees to get last side

Last side removed!  Nice rectangular cant now. 

 Its about 9+" by 14.5" 

See that grain?  It's amazing that it took me so long to realize this wasn't OAK!  Sheesh!

I decided to mill the side slabs first.  I ha some idea that this was smarter and would save the blade somehow.  I don't remember my logic at the time.  I can't for the life of me think now what advantage it would give me.

Slabs all cut up into boards.  But they need to be edged

After edging.  They still need some ends trimmed off.  Nice little boards for misc purposes.  I had realized that this was maple at this point so I saved these. Otherwise I would have probably chipped these smaller ones.

The remnants after edging.  These are going on the chipping pile.

The big cant back on the mill bed.  At this point, if I were still  quarter-sawing, I would cut this down the center to give me 2 nearly square cants, then rotation them each 90 degrees, positions them next to each other and start cutting boards.

Boards cut!  I chose to cut at 6/4 (one and a half inches thick)

These are in pretty good shape!

Nice stack of wood there!

Stickering the boards

I put the short and small ones on top.  I need to figure out how to better organize my wood stash.

Rough ends.  I think I will clean these up some day - maybe.

Side view.  I will have to restack I am sure.  I think the hardest part of operating sawmill is finished wood management!

Finally got our frost!

Got up on Sunday morning to see this:

Kind of pretty, really.

Site seeing

Finally got to go for a drive down "Summit Road" - the dirt/gravel road that runs along the summit of the mountain above our place.  Here are some pictures from the trip.

Panoramic view - looks a little weird at first.