Sunday, January 4, 2009

A winters worth of oak








12 comments:

nobody said...

Hey Silv,

I was just over at John Frampton's blog (after telling him of your adventures with the owls) and he was saying he'd popped in here and read of you lassoing deer or somesuch. You have no archive enabled here so I'm not sure how to find it. Can you point me at it?

And you burn oak? Good God. Imagine the furniture you could make out of it. There's not quite enough there to build a full-scale replica of HMS Victory but gee whiz... Don't you have any shit timber at your place?

the Silverfish said...

Yeppers, it's at 06/01-06/08(2)and I'm Sooooooo glad that I made friends with the deer around my place, I have thousands of them at my place and some 95 that call my yard home. Now all I have to worry about is keeping stocked up on peanut butter which they love, peanut butter and apple jelly sandwiches are reserved for weekend breckie. Imagine buying peanut butter and jelly by the 20 litre pail. There is another post down there somewhere about just how ungratefull these buggers are, look for it.

Oh and by the by I'll pop some other pics of my place up, every tree that you will see is oak.Every one. There are oaks on my land that you and I would not be able to put our arms around, not even close.

The woodpile in the pic measures 30'x28'x7' high and is more than anything comfort wood, Yuh know for the fireplaces and the monthly BBQ's and is all taken as deadfall oak or as you would call it shit timber, I very seldom cut down living trees with the exception being young oaks some 6"across used to culture Shiitake mushrooms. They last for a couple of years before the mushrooms have turned them into ,Yuh guessed it Mush.

p.s. there is an archive or at least there is on my page.just down a bit and to the right.

Penny said...

hey silverfish, I love the pics.. gorgeous.

though I admit, I am still waiting for the owl adventures to return.

the Silverfish said...

Soon Pen soon,right now I just have a whole crap load of work to get done.

the Silverfish said...

Also the top pic is a view leading to my office, and all of the wood work was made by self from deadfall oak taken from the property.

Like that Greatest of Canadian statesmen Red Green so elquently said "if women can't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy"

nobody said...

Sorry mate, the blog archive is right there. It just looks different to what I'm used to.

Forests of oak eh? I knew that such things existed but somehow they lived in my head as some variety of mythical thing that belongs in a Patrick O'Brian novel. And you have a lathe I see. I sold mine when I went to China. Break my heart. I used to love that thing.

Otherwise, great photes. What a spread.

Penny said...

I laughed so much over the Red Green line, OMG.

You see, I loved that show, hubby thought it was sooo stupid.

But everytime Red Green would say that

"If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy" I cracked up.

Then one day, out little nephew was doing something, I can't remember what it was, and he was like about 5? And I said , oh very good, and he said that, in his little 5 yr. old voice!

I laughed sooo hard, he said he learned it from Grandpa.


Anyway, silverfish, If I can share?
well I am going to anyway.
When I talked about my symptoms on my blog, you seemed knowledgeable about head injury.
So I got to say this f'n sucks!!!
It has been two weeks, my head still hurts, not as much, but, at the back where I hit the cement. It still hurts, there are small bumps it is super tender.
And my head hurts at the top, the front, my neck hurts, just to touch the muscles, ouch.
Ditto for my back and shoulders.
Still dizzy, but that has lessened,
still having headaches. but lessened.
But It is like I have developed dyslexia. Switching letters around in words, something I never did.
wether I type or write, it is the same. (I have already done it a number of times in this post) I just fix them up, as I go. But it is appaling. My hubby went to work and, first day back after the fall, I make his lunch, I made it in the opposite manner. ie: I put the sandwiches and fruit etc opposite of what I have always done.
I didn't notice, he did.
I have been trying to be sooo mindful of this, to correct it, can I???
It is part of the reason I tried to keep the blog up, though I didn't feel like it, and sometimes still don't. (tired and it wears me down)
To get my brain back in order, does this make sense to you?

Any input you can offer would be most appreciated, I am going to try to seem my doc tomorrow again.

Anonymous said...

Hey nice gaff Silverfish! and look at all those lovely trees. You don't have any recent wintery photo's do you? I expect it looks a little different now. Nice to see it anyway, it looks like a lovely place.

I've been on the Victory as it was near me old hometown, it's great but like all guided tours I wanted to slink off and look around properly by meself.

nina said...

I was relieved to see that riding mower in the last shot so you don't get too sweaty and keel over in all that beauty.

Mostly all we have here is Oak, too, and it makes for a longer lasting burn in the fireplace.

Excellent and interesting post, thank you. You must get up every day thanking your lucky stars to be there.

the Silverfish said...

Thank You Nina
However there is no riding mower in the pic that I can see. What is there is a 1985 Honda Big Red that I absolutely adore. I call it my yard mule and I don’t know where I would be without it. I also have a Honda Fourtrax Foreman that for the most part just sits in the shed taking up space as it’s just to big for yard work and dipsy doodling down and around the miles and miles of deer trails that I use for collecting wood.

Besides as I said I just adore my Big Red and it has done everything from hauling wood , hauling rocks and gravel used to build everything from fireplaces to a smoke house and even hauling out a full sized moose that for some strange reason just seemed to want to rest in my deep freeze.

As for the mowing I use slave labor and a walk behind mower or more accurately a ten year old girl who for the privilege of my company tutelage of life in the wilds and a good supper comes out from town twice a week and mows the two acres of yard lawn. She tells people that she does it because she loves me and that it keeps her in better physical shape than the other kids in her class at school, but she’s only ten so what does she know?

For the other seven acres of lawn I use four footed mowers called horses, they think they love me to… dumb animals. They just don’t seem to understand that the only reason I allow them to stay is that they do such a nice job of keeping the grass clipped and looking nice. Besides it’s cheaper than buying gas these days.

nobody said...

Ha ha ha ha. Such cruelty!

Matey, I only just noticed the apple trees. Do you do them pesticide free or is that not possible? The reason I gave up on the orchard we briefly owned (a wee one with a dozen trees and me the only person interested in it) was because of those evil fucking chemicals. I hated 'em and after three years I'd had enough. And as far as I knew (this all being three decades ago and me a know-nothing teenager) it was use poisons or forget about it. So I forgot about it.

And where the orchard was, there's a block of flats now. The finest peaches in creation, gone.

Never mind.

the Silverfish said...

All things here at the nest are natural, even the pesticides when needed are made from boiled rhubarb leaves. However with proper tree and garden management very little is needed as far as pest control goes.

As far as the garden goes aside of the pyrethrum gotten from the boiled and then strained rhubarb leaves, the garden can be called organic.

All fertilizer is gotten from very fresh cow and buffalo manure which is then put through a five stage bacterially fermented process where it is reduced down to a very potent tea in around five days. Great for all things growing. That and of course I have a Huge compost pile of perhaps some 20 cubic meters.

The apple trees seen in the pic are a Gootland and a Trail and for the most part just kept for the deer to eat, ungrateful bastards that they are don’t for the most part even say thanks.

Other fruit trees are kept in a different area of the property, apples such as Golden Delicious, Gootland, Spartan and McIntosh. There are also a few other fruit trees here such as apricot several varieties of plum , cherries such as Nan king, Pin and Choke and then there is always all of the wild fruit down in the valley such as wild plums, and Blueberries as well as Saskatoon’s, wild Raspberries and wild Strawberries.

Meat is taken from a small herd of Buffalo that I purchased years ago, they live down in the valley year round, require no care and cost me nothing. Tuff bastards they are and weighing in at 3500 pounds on the hoof one beast goes a long way.

All in all I eat pretty well and seldom buy foodstuffs in town, the exception would be going to the city and stocking up on really cheap spices and all manner of things good in China Town.

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