Green Pioneer

Letting the hay dry and then rakin' it up...

This hay rake is proving to be handier all the time!

This is just on our two acres at home...and look at all that great hay! Andrew is just cuttin' it with the scythe, letting it dry, and then stacking it up. It's organic and sure beats forkin' out over $3 a bale!

He also found this very handy antique hay rake over at the antiques place in Corinna for  $5. It's cool to still find stuff like this these days!

And as you can tell, Babycakes is wildly exuberant about all this hayin' stuff, too!

Andrew went over to our land day before yesterday to begin the official log peeling marathon required for our new 38 (soon to be more) logs for our log home roof rafters. He had gotten 7 done a week ago and managed to complete 24 the first day. He spent a luxurious evening eating jambalaya over a cook stove and then sleeping on the floor of the shed over there. He got up at 5 am. and managed to complete the log peeling marathon by 7 p.m.--just in time for our lasagna and watermelon picnic over at our friend's house--who happen to own 40 acres on the other side of our lake.

He uses this  bark spud to get underneath the bark. While the tree is freshly cut and the sap is still up in the bark, it all comes off pretty easily. The logs up on the top of the pile were beginning to get tougher from being in the sun, but the ones at the bottom had bark that still slipped off no problem...well, sort of no problem...OK, it was alot of work!

Once the sap begins to flow out of the bark, things get much tougher to get off. Also pine bark beetles begin to burrow into the wood underneath the bark and make holes in the log--not a good thing cosmetically speaking. They will eventually cause the bark to crumble off in time, but it's a matter of dealing with little holes in your logs or not. This isn't so much of an issue with the walls, but we didn't want to take any chances with our roof rafters. So now log peeling is complete--check! And Andrew has had the most aerobic upper-body workout he's had in quite awhile!

Hello and Welcome--we're so glad to have so many dropping by! We're continuing to get updated here and are adding new links and info. every other day or so. We have added to the About us page and given some background on our journey from the Dallas suburbs to rural Maine. We're also thrilled to have just gotten a new shipment of logs for the roof rafters for our log home this past week. So Andrew's Happy Father's Day were new bark spuds and a peavy (he made handles for himself)!

We've also added links to the Wind Power, CHP, Bio-Fuels and Self-Sufficient pages--as well as on the side bar of this blog page. There's just so much interesting, helpful, and exciting information and ideas out there it's hard to know where to start--or stop!

We're also in the process of putting together a sort of web scrapbook of our family's journey to Maine, life for four months in an RV living on our land, and the beginnings of our log home building from scratch. So keep popping by for more updates to come!

Thank you so much for dropping by! We're very excited about what we're learning and the people we're meeting who are also on a journey toward more self-sufficiency and a truly more independent, quality lifestyle!

As you can see, we're still very much under construction here, but we've got some interesting, intriguing information coming up very soon. So please put on the hard hat and keep popping in as we continue to construct what we hope to provide as plenty of encouragement, ideas, and inspiration for green pioneers pursuing the green frontier!

Also feel free to leave your e-mail address on our contact page for updates and new information. We look forward to meeting you and learning about your adventures or interests in this exciting new frontier!

In the meantime, you're welcome to catch up on our recent blogs on homesteading, life in Maine, Root Cellars, and the progress on our Log Home.

Also scroll on down and peruse the site links in the side bar below. Although we certainly don't subscribe to all the various sentiments and viewpoints expressed by the green community at large (as well as what gets interlaced into some of these web sites), we continue to glean good information where we can find it.

For more on our adventures into the homestead, homespun, home school, home life, check out Debbie's web site, The Romantic Mom.com