Putting Up Wood

We heat with wood and split most of it by hand. Yesterday my buddy "Timber" Dick Dupre spent a couple of hours at Dragonwood with his splitter. Sure made easy work of a good five face cords. It would have taken us many hours of hard labor to split by hand what we were able to do in less than three hours with the machine.

Photos, Top to bottom: "Timber" Dick Dupre running the splitter, KII rolling a log for me to "buck up" with the chain saw, and the bottom photo shows me gathering kindling.

The Cabin at Dragonwood

The Simple Life: A Value Liberals Share with Libertarians

I stumbled on this article by Everett Sizemore. It ran in, of all places, the Huffington Post. A good read. I can't seem to post this as a hyper link so copy and paste, Sorry!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/everett-sizemore/the-simple-life-a-value-l_b_290660.html

Fall 2010

The last week of October we enjoyed three days of "Indian Summer" with temps in the 70's and a lot of sunshine. Here are a few shots taken at Dragonwood over the last couple of days. A look up the driveway with all the autumn leaves. Also a couple of fall garden shots including our fall crop of leaf lettuce, leeks and one of our just planted garlic beds. This year we planted over 150 garlic cloves of six different varieties.

One photo is of a small lake just down the road. Deb has painted this scene a couple of times and sold both originals. She also did a print from one of the paintings that has since sold out.

Will be up this weekend to cut and split more firewood. We will also begin putting things away for winter. Next week will be the beginning of November. Here in the Tug Hill region that means snow will be on the way soon. I will box up the solar panels and put away a lot of the garden tools etc. . I have seen things crushed by the weight of the snow. One year a garden cart was left out. The weight of the snow that winter all but destroyed it.

"Rock Run"

A Good Haul! KII and I never pass an opportunity to grab some good field stones when we have the chance. We have numerous ongoing stone walls and other stone projects as well as some Andy Goldsworthy style sculptures planned for the gardens. You can't have too many rocks. We have several piles in various places around the property. These get sorted every now and then into "rounds",corners,flats, uglies, etc.. This makes it easier to find the right stone for a given need.

We plan to clear about an acre for additional gardens and some fruit trees. Pulling stumps and bulldozing should produce a bounty of choice specimens next spring.

Stone Wall Detail

I thought I would post this close up of one of the many stone walls that I have put up at Dragonwood over the years. This one is a little over 10 years old and look at the moss and lichen. It looks as though it has been there much longer. The stone work at Dragonwood is a never ending project. I hope to do some stone spirals and towers in time.

Summer at Dragonwood

One of the many butterflies and moths that we see daily during the summer. The second photo is a hummingbird moth that likes the Bee Balm or "Oswego Tea" and at the bottom is a Lobelia Cardinalis, a.k.a. Cardinal Flower that grow wild around the pond. This year we have had a real problem with Deer eating our prized Hosta collection. In the past they have browsed the Hosta in the fall at the end of the season, so we really didn't mind, but this year for some reason they started munching in June. Not good. Deb is trying a variety of concoctions to dissuade them from eating our babies. "Senator Muskie" our new resident in the pond this year is a young male muskrat. He ate all of our pickerell and I think most of the arrowhead as we have hardly any this year.