Sunday Reading - Almost Done with Fall

 

Looks like we are going to have a nasty, blustery slightly cold and rainy Sunday today so I will be either forced inside for cleaning and organizing or relaxing and doing nothing all day. Might actually be a good day to start de-podding all these buckets of dried beans I got lined up.

I still have about half a trellis left to pick as the rain we got last weekend dampened the pods that were left enough that I had to let them dry again and just did not quite get them all picked yet. 

Really wasn't a very good year all in all to be honest. The beans tried to bounce back after the Summer heat wave broke in late August but did not quite produce like they usually do. I questimate at least a 20 to 30% reduction of beans per average pod and couldn't even begin to take a stab at just how few less pods per plant we got this year. Seemed a very large number of the pods were just empty or contained only one scrawny bean this year too.

Nice weather to take the lummox out as I picked pods off the trellis though. He likes going to the garden area with me but is such a force of over energized  destruction I spend more time keeping him from digging and tearing stuff up than I get work done until Fall hits and I just don't care what he digs up anymore.

The repaired water tanks are holding up nicely but I think I am going to empty them and remove them from catching rain water for Winter. If we continue to get our traditional average amount of rain fall here saving enough water for current use should be possible but I still have the problem of keeping it over Winter and the layered freezing. I am just not willing to risk destroying these tanks just to see if they will survive. My guess is they probably should be able to but it is risky. A melt/thaw/re-freeze event can be a very destructive force  and the weather pattern I see being predicted this Winter warns of a possible large number of sudden Arctic dips and it's those Arctic dips that cause the re-freeze layered issues.

Stock water issues are a problem that has bothered me for years since I began the prepping/homestead life some 20-odd years ago. I originally solved it by re-opening an old concrete cistern and using a hand pump but the cistern is impossible to get into and clean plus it has started leaking. The other problem is we are far enough South that many years we go all Winter without a real freezing water problem regardless. Just dropping in a tank heater that comes on automatically has been more than enough but I would like to find a solution that requires no outside electric inputs to be sustainable.

Problem is deep freezing happens so rarely some Winters cost becomes an issue too. I could easily spend thousands of dollars for underground water storage and go years never needing it. Some Winters we never see a total freeze of open water freezing solid and one that freezes water up solid for more than a day or two has not happened that I can remember here in over 20 years.

Now that the horses are gone I am really thinking repairing the dam on the catchment pond is my best option rather than investing in under ground storage equipment. I can still use above ground storage for the other 9 or 10 months per year when freezing is not a possibility. I have also thought about switching to shallower Winter tanks too since the real issues comes only when water freezes that captures a layer of liquid between layers of ice. That is when the expansion busts my tanks and again it is a rare issue but still seems to manage to happen once or twice every Winter.

Usually just keeping track of possible up coming weather conditions is more than enough to combat such things but relying on outside imputs like weather reports still would not help in a grid down situation either.

Keep Prepping Everyone!!!!