Powerline & water system update

So as I wrote previously, the springhouse power line has some new issues and we're working towards a replacement solution. After dreaming up a few variations and exploring them for both viability and feasability we've come to a few decisions. I'll attempt to outline a few of our options. For baseline of what I'm talking about, see my earlier post about the current state of the water system. 

Options we considered:

Restore overhead powerline to previous condition

This was the least palatable choice. 

• Nothing about the powerline was to code. 
• The guide cable was installed in a way that doesn't take all the stress off the wire, 
• The blackberry is so thick around the base of the poles that we can't see how they're anchored other than the guy lines
• There are a few more trees waiting to fall like the oak did.
• It's ungrounded!

Install Solar PV setup on springhouse to power existing water system

This is clearly the most desirable scenario, use solar power to pump water. Though this is ultimately what we want to do, we're going to hold of. These reasons are:

• Cost: The complete solar setup with panels, mounting the panels, batteries, charge controller, etc plus a new 48v pump and a cistern to pump the water into would be in the neighborhood of $5000 
• In the process of exploring our options we discovered that the current springhouse is so close to the creek that it's in the flood hazard zone. This tells us that whatever future system we create needs to be further away from the creek. Installing a $5k solar system in a location that doesnt make sense long-term didnt seem like a good move. 
• In addition, the location of the springhouse is the best for solar on the whole property but even if we had solar there we have no way of getting it back to the house. 

Which leads to our 3rd option

Run new underground powerline from house to workshop

We opted to start actively working towards this option today. We'll get a permit on Monday to start the work.

The springhouse actually gets it's power from the workshop right now. The overhead line in question runs from the house to the workshop where there's a relatively new subpanel and a new underground line out to the springhouse. So we'll dig a trench straight across the field, about 450' and bury a new powerline in conduit.

The bummer: it's not solar, yet. Even though we'll use this new trenched line to supply power to the workshop/springhouse now, in the future we'll hopefully use it for delivering solar power *from* the workshop to the house.

In the process of exploring the electrical work on the outside and inside of the house we realized that replacing this line would require a few electrical upgrades that in the name of safety would want to perform this summer before moving in anyway. This means that we're going to lump a few more to-do's into this permit:

• PG&E upgrade from 125 amp to 200 amp service (modern standard)
• Replace main panel on outside of house with something modern
• Replace large electrical wire from main panel to subpanel inside house (current one lacks ground)
• Upgrade inside outlets to 3-prong with real ground, GFCI in the usual places, and replace fixtures with grounded ones. 

So that's the plan. We'll do the service upgrade and work on the house mains first. Once that's done we could (might?) start work on the inside wiring and the trenched line at the same time. I'm thankful to have some smart friends helping out on this too :)

Treewalk and exploring beyond our boundries

Last week I was fortunate enough to meet with Daniel our orchard pruner and his assistant Adam.  They were happy to take me on a arborist's tour of our property. I know some of my trees but am still learning. Walking around with these guys for an hour was quite enlightening. Our farm has many different kinds of trees! Here's the list that they helped me identify:

• Maple
• Chestnut
• Black Locust
• Walnut
• Black Walnut
• Wild Cherry
• Pears (Comis, D'anjou)
• Apple (lots of Red, some smaller yellow crabapples)
• Wild Hazelnut
• Hawthorne
• Oregon Grape*
• Sweet Cicely*
• * not trees but were cool to learn about. 

 

Since their primary work was on the pear and apple trees we started there. This tree above is about to lose this large limb leaning to the right. We need to craft a brace for it relatively soon before it has to bear the weight of fruit later in the year.

 

Here's a cluster of chestnut trunks that were coppiced quite a long time ago. I'm excited about the chestnuts we'll collect later in the year.

 

I'm told that this is a black locust and that the wood is really dense and straight, great for tools and building.

 

This was a really exciting find, a red Trillium flower that Daniel tells me is quite rare. It's a native of Nevada County and really quite beautiful.

 

Here's Daniel clearing away the base of this apple tree. His concern is that over the years that soil has built up around the root crown.

 

Sure enough, there's about 6" of built up soil that will eventually kill the tree. The root crown should be right at ground level. This is really important since the soil build up laying against the trunk will lead to rot and disease or pest introduction. Gotta clean around the orchard trees :)

 

After walking with Daniel I headed to the very rear of our property and just kept walking. There's a BLM meadow that abuts a state park directly east of us that continues for a few miles. This area used to all be orchards from 100+ years ago and this BLM land is dotted with old overgrown pear and apple trees. I followed some of the game trails to find my way around and ran into this huge old apple tree with a sweet circle of green grass around it.

 

To the north is the wetlands and creek that flow west towards and through our property.

 

Here's another old apple tree...

 

...and an old pear tree?

 

On the far side of the meadow I found another forested area with huge manzanita and madrone trees.

 

My walk back was beautiful watching the sun set in the west. Our farm is at the far far end of the meadow in this photo.

 

Another 3 old fruit trees, clearly lined up in what's left of a row of trees.

 

The wetland looks just a bit marshy but the water was flowing pretty quickly and the ground through the whole pasture was moist if not down right wet.

 

When I returned to the farm I stopped at the workshop to poke around and discovered that someone has been trying to break in! Good thing this door was chained shut from the inside for other reasons :)

New chicks in the house

 

We have chicks! Over the weekend we picked up 6 chicks from the feed store. Nicole fell immediately in love with them.

 

Three of the chicks are Buff Orpingtons like this one.

The other three chicks are Black Australorps

 

They're all eating an organic chick starter mix. It's already really amazing how much they eat.

 

This little Buff is named Pyongyang. The kids suggested it and it stuck.

Here's our current setup for the chicks. They'll stay under the heat lamp for at least 4 weeks or so. Now time to sort out our chicken coop needs :)

Treefallen!

Since we bought the property in January I had been eyeballing a large, dead oak tree on the other side of the creek. It was ominously leaning towards the power line that feeds the spring house. I had hoped to get a solar system installed this summer that would make the power line obsolete. 

Nature had another plan. Last week we got a solid 5 straight days of heavy rain and then snow after that and it was all too much for this dead and leaning oak tree.

 

The spring house is middle right with the fallen power line there in the foreground. This part of the line made a 90-degree turn at the spring house to run over to the workshop (left side of the photo). This was a terrible design but it worked to our favor here. When the tree hit the line the line broke free from the power pole at the corner of that turn which gave the whole line enough slack to not pull out on either end or sever the line at all. 

  

Those poles used to point straight up!

 

It just barely missed one of the beehives near the creek!

 

The whole tree was doornail dead but had soaked up a lot of water making it really quite heavy.

 

There's some lovely fungus and lichen eating away at the tree.

 

More bent power poles!

This is the backside of the house. The line on the right is incoming PG&E power, the line on the left is the downed line to the spring house.

 

It appears that this ancient block breaker will cut power to both the house and the spring house power line.

 

This is an old concrete bridge that spans the creek. This is the highest that I've ever witnessed the creek level but there's lots of evidence to show that this big rainstorm had the creek level all the way to the top of the bridge.

There are two really good outcomes from this. First, we wanted that line out of there anyway. There are probably 4 other dead trees just waiting to fall in the same way this one. We're working on a plan to bury a new electrical line in a trench across the field so having this power line be a non-issue will be nice. Second, we learned an easy lesson about deferred maintenance!

Forest thinning and chicken shacking

 

So this is the backside of the barn. The small building addition on the left was most likely used as a chicken coop or "chicken shack" as our kids have dubbed it. The siding and roof are in clear disrepair (the photos do make it look worse than it is). It has a concrete slab floor and for the most part the bones are pretty good which makes it worth fixing up again.  Today we mostly just took an inventory of what that project will look like. I'm not sure when we'll start working on it but now we have a good idea what will be involved.

 

Our property has about 7 acres of forest which hasn't seen a natural forest fire in some time I'm guessing. This lack of fire has allowed the incense cedar trees to choke out a lot of other flora with it's acidic needles and prolific saplings. What's worse is that the saplings are all mostly dying for lack of sun under the canopy of their enormous parent trees.  

We spent the better part of a weekend day cutting down these little saplings. You can see in the photo above where I cleared them out on the left side and where I hadn't yet cleared out the right side. The little trees don't have much chance without any sun and they end up being shade scorched and dead. We'd probably leave them all alone except the ground cover of the saplings creates a dangerous wildfire situation where the saplings become a ladder for fire to get up into the taller trees. When we're all done with our forest maintenance we'll shove most of the trees into a chipper and use it for mulch.

We used some of the larger trees to line the trails in the forest, something I really enjoy. We're in the process of defining what trails we want to create and lining the paths with logs we cut down is really satisfying. :)

NCRCD chicken workshop

 

Last night I attended another great workshop put on by the NCRCD. They put on at least one workshop a month on various topics and each is only $5, good deal. The speaker for the night was Janey Powers, a really dynamic woman who's really passionate and knowledgeable about all the in's and out's of raising chickens. The workshop was 2 hours long and covered a lot of material including breed selection, raising chicks, feed selection, housing requirements and precautions just to name a few. I took 5 pages of notes in 2 hours which is pretty high for me.

I've been interested in having chickens for some time now but this overview has me really excited about it. We know our family can eat lots of eggs and we have plenty of friends to share the excess with. Chickens are great insectivores and have useful manure as well.  Here's some good chicken reading. :)

Orchard pruning

Daniel giving one of the big pear trees some pruning love.

Today we met a local orchard pruner out at the farm. Our trees are visibly old and haven't been pruned in at least 6 years, maybe more. We didn't have any sense of how old the trees are or how much longer they'll last so we called Daniel out to check them out and give them some love.

This first tree is one of our largest so he tackled it first. Daniel informed us that despite their gnarled appearance that most of our trees look quite healthy and may have 30-40+ more years of life in them! Also, by his estimation the tree are 100-120 years old. I knew they were old but was blow away by that. 

After about and hour of pruning love!

Daniel had a great bumper sticker on his truck :)

Daniel will take a few days this week and next and get all our orchard trees trimmed up and back in shape before they start to bud over the next month or so.

See all the dead branches on the ground after the pruning? Daniel is going to make neat piles under each tree but not dispose of them. I feel a group work day coming up. Guess I need to find a wood chipper to borrow!

Winter planning

 

Now that the snows of winter have finally arrived my thoughts keep turning towards planning what we'll plant in the garden beds after they're finally gone :)

I have to admit that beyond a desire to grow our own food we haven't made much of a vegetable garden plan yet. This year will be a bit awkward for gardening since we're still learning about our land and will be working on a million other projects. 

Tonight we're going to sit down and work on two things our annual vegetable list and outlining a plan for a earthen bench/stove that we're building at our daughter's preschool in the spring. Hopefully more on both of those later.

One other bit of news, Nicole tells me that she found a local fruit tree pruner to come out and look at our overgrown orchard next Thursday, yay! Busy, always busy. :)