Today we take a break from earthbags to get ready to cut our wood for our gate and window openings on the outer garden circle. Then we start the Shou Sugi Ban process before running out of time.
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We are going to take a few minutes now that we're back and I'm going to intro...
Okay, I'm going to take a few minutes now and reintroduce you to our goats who are due any day
now. Guys, we are so close to having babies here on the homestead so let's go meet the goats. This
is Faye and she is the queen of the herd. She's the oldest and she's not friendly until she has
babies. Over here we have little Mabel. She's got the tiniest legs of any goat I've ever seen.
She's adorable. She's a Nigerian. And then back here we have troublemaker. This is Bailey.
She's our only mini Nubian. She is not pregnant yet but she will be sometime in the fall.
And this is Cupcakes, the least friendly cat we have. So on our week off we also had time to
reorganize our feed shed. Do you remember this wooden door here that we built not too long ago?
Let's take a look inside and see how we rearranged for when we get to milk again.
We have our alfalfa here in the corner and also the cat's favorite place to take a nap.
Tiger and Took. We met Cupcakes earlier. So here we have two trash cans full of our layer feed
and then we have alfalfa pellets and our goat grain for when we milk. And Doug Judy. Now over
on this side we have bedding, extra minerals, and things that we need for the goats and chickens.
And this is our milking stand. We have a little step up here for Mabel because she's so short.
And just your typical head gate. I still need to get our little feeder. We're gonna get a new little
feeder there for them. And all of our milking supplies right there next to it. So I like the
flow of this much better than what we had before. So very happy with it. So now that we have all of
our supplies back from Lowe's, we are gonna go ahead and make the frames for the outer circle,
burn that wood, put them together, and then we're ready to lay more bags. Welcome back to
Tiny Shine Tuesday where we get to shine a light on a company or a person doing something cool.
And today I get to tell you about my new hat. I found this company on Instagram called Dungeon
Forward and they have these cool hats. I'm always losing my pencil when I'm working with wood,
measuring things. Look, you can stick your pencil in your hat. It's amazing. Why have I not thought
of this? Actually I really did think of it. I thought about having a headband that I could do
that too. But anyway, Dungeon Forward solved my problems. I bought this hat and yes it is inside
out because I have a big head and lots of hair and it didn't fit. So it's inside out so that I
can still use this. Even though it's a little small, I still love it because now I'm not going
to lose my pencil. Also this is not a sponsored thing. We pay for this hat and we like it. So
we're telling you about it. Go check out Dungeon Forward if you're interested. All the pieces are
cut which means it's time to burn things.
Because I know a few of you are going to ask who are new and haven't seen us burn this wood
and maybe don't understand why we are. It is an old Japanese technique of preserving wood.
So the idea is we burn it, char it really good. You want that, you want the wood to like really
crinkle and char. You don't want to just like barely go over it to where you just see the grain.
After you char it, you're going to go back with a brush. Kind of like a tire brush is what we use.
The idea is to get that char and smear it. Get that char off but it also presses into the pores
of the wood. And then after using the brush and going over it on all the sides, we'll seal it
with a mixture of linseed oil and mineral spirits. And that is just a way that we preserve wood out
here in this harsh desert environment. So we are not going to get to the scraping and the sealing
of the wood tonight. We are running out of time. We got a few more things we need to do.
Guys that was a good start for day 67. We're just getting back in the swing of it guys.
So more tomorrow when I'll see you at the chicken garden.
