Well it looks like I've broken my promise. My last New Year's resolution was to publish an update to the blog every month and I failed. You would think in this time of COVID crisis and isolation (not to mention full retirement) that I would have nothing better to do with time on my hands than update this blog.
Anyway this page will just bring you up to date on what was going on at Richmond Woods in the last part of 2020.
The Autumn brought harvest and food preservation. A visit to my friends Philip and Susan blessed me with a great bunch of muscadines. I ate fresh ones until they were coming out my ears. I decided I needed to preserve the remaining ones. I could think of no better way than muscadine jam. It goes really good on my homemade sourdough.
Our garden yielded many tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. We preserved jars of tomato sauce. We roasted and froze bags of peppers. We pickled many jars of cucumbers, carrots, and peppers. And we dried many hot peppers that we are using to season our homemade sauerkraut and dishes like curry.
I made several improvements to my water system. I added a bubble pump to each barrel. This made ozonation of the water much more efficient. A bubble pump basically is just a submerged tube with holes at each end. An air stone is lowered to just above the lower holes and the bubbles, ozone in this case, carry water up the tube and exit through the upper holes. This creates a good circulation within the barrel and promotes better absorption of the ozone. Additionally I added new ozone generator system and I brought AC power from the shop up to the waterhouse to power lights and the new more powerful ozone generating equipment.
I made improvements to my composting toilet that I hoped would eliminate the fungus gnat problem. Unfortunately, these improvements did not help. I am currently exploring the construction of a vermi-composting toilet system that would use a standard flush toilet. I'm sure this would come as a great relief to those few people who occasionally come to visit. 😉 If you are curious, visit vermicompostingtoilets.net.
A couple of other smaller projects included building a mezzanine in one section of the shop attic space in which I could store some of my mountain of junk. And the installation of a new wood-burning stove in the cabin. I plan to overhaul the old stove and use it in the shop. Also, I installed a TV antenna - remember those? Now I can pick up several stations out of Huntsville to get local news and weather.
That pretty much covers all of the visible improvements I've made around here in the last half of 2020. Of course there are all those things you don't see like cutting mountains of firewood, pumping water, and taking care of the solar panels and battery. And, because I was robbed in November by someone that I believe to be a neighbor, I have spent considerable time installing security cameras and lights.
That's it for now. I hope you all are staying safe and taking the precautions you need to. I'm already working on updates to the blog for the first couple of months of 2021. Please standby.
