DIY Leather Dressing

My leather work boots are almost three years old and are still in good condition and water resistant thanks to the leather dressing I put on every month or so. Winter weather sees me using a lot of this so I am making some today. I have tried several commercial products and find this homemade version at least as good and a lot less expensive. At least part of the reason this stuff is effective is because it is inexpensive so I slather it on thick and often. I make up a large batch once a year. I make two versions, one with and one without the neatsfoot oil. The version without neatsfoot oil gets a lot of use too. I rub it onto wooden spoons, and other unfinished wood items to help protect them.  I also use it to coat steel items that are prone to rust when not in use. I rub down the column and table on the drill press and the table saw table. A very thin coat is all that is required to keep them rust free. This is basically bees wax with enough mineral oil added to make an easy to apply paste. The exact ratio is not exact!. About half and half, if that is too stiff add more oil, if it's to thin add more wax! I put the mineral oil in a pan, let it heat up, and then stir in bees wax. You should use a double boiler for safety. For the boot dressing,  I do the same thing except after I have removed the mix from the heat and it has cooled enough to start thickening I add in a generous dollop of the neatsfoot oil. Again, no exact recipe here, I just dump in a half cup or so in a batch that is about two cups. My work shoes used to fall apart due to rotten thread at the top of the sole. This stuff soaks into the threads and water proofs them as well as sealing the leather to make it shed water. They are still leather though so if you use them for waders you are gonna get wet feet!

Sad Day at Forest House Farm

 Yesterday was a sad day on our homestead. Despite spending the last several weeks trying, we were not able to find enough hay, at a price we could afford, to keep our milk cow. We have already spent more than three times our normal hay budget and still needed more to get us through the winter. It was a tough call but we had to put our cow on the cattle buyers truck. We sometimes raise calves up to butcher or to sell for butcher but the family milk cow falls in a different category. If we were still milking a herd it would be different too. When you have a milking herd there have to be some decisions made based strictly on profit motives or you will not be farming for long. When we got Sissy, our cow, we expected to keep her for a long time so we treated her more as a pet than we would have otherwise. Any animal we have is treated with respect and cared for gently but those we are going to part with are kept out of our heart. We hadn't planned on parting with this one.
 On top of all that there is also a feeling that we somehow failed, that we didn't plan well. We have been buying hay for winter feed for years and never had to sell of livestock before to keep going. This year the prices are two to four times higher than what we paid last year, I certainly didn't plan for that. Then ,the big jump in fuel prices over the last week, made hauling hay in from areas with no shortages, just as expensive. All of this has left a bitter taste in our mouths  and a lot of doubt about the direction we should go with our homestead.

Pruning Apple Trees

Apple trees, as with many fruit trees, should be pruned while they are dormant. I do mine about now because soon the maple sap will start running and from there on it seems we just get busier and busier. My pictures didn't turn out very good so these will have to do. In this picture I am indicating a sucker or shoot coming up from the base of the tree. Always remove all of these. The basic principle  to keep in mind when pruning your apple trees is to open up the center of the tree. Those branches that go towards the center of the tree should be removed.

Branches that form a very sharp "v" should also be removed since they will be weaker than a more square joint and more likely to split under the weight of a good crop of apples. Cut the limb off with a very sharp pair of shears. Make your cut just past a bud that will grow in the direction you want, away from the center of the tree. All of the decisions are made in light of the fact that many apple trees are what is known as " spur bearing'. This means the apples are on spurs  rather than on the actual branch.

If you prune off a lot of spurs you will reduce the yield considerably. I try to limit the height of my trees somewhat by pruning off the leaders and forcing the tree to grow horizontally  instead.Other spots to consider are branches that are to low, branches that are rubbing another branch, and branches that are very close to another branch. Often you have to decide which is the main objective since doing everything would leave you with a  lone stalk! Yearly pruning gives you a chance to correct faults before they are a big deal.
This last picture is of all the scion wood I saved to graft onto root stock later this spring. As long as the tree you are pruning from is not patented stock it is perfectly fine to save these and do your own propagation.  Root stock can be purchased for a variety of purposes including cold hardiness, dwarfing and semi-dwarfing.

Speckled Alder Firewood

One of the biggest disadvantages of heating and cooking with the same stove is that occasionally we want enough heat to cook with but the cabin is already warmer than we want. Other than having two separate stoves there is not much to do about that but the right type of wood can help. When we want to fry up that bacon and those eggs we need high heat but only for a little while. If we put in some  good dry oak or hickory we will get the heat but also a nice big bed of coals that will have us opening the doors and windows to get the temperature in the cabin back down out of the 90's. What we need is wood that burns hot, fast, and leaves few coals.  Speckled Alder, Alnus rugosas, fits the bill perfectly. A small tree that abounds in our area,it seldom reaches 30 feet tall and 3-4 inches in diameter. It likes wet areas and often grows in the sunny parts of swamps and marshes. It forms large stands in much of our area and sends up rapid growing shoots from the stump.I cut the pile in the picture in about 3 hours using the tools in the picture. Once it is cut up it will be 3/4 to a full face cord of the perfect cooking wood. It drys fast when cut in the winter and will be ready to use in a couple months if we need it. Since the swamps are froze up now it is a good time to harvest some. I take just the larges trunks from each clump leaving the smaller trunks for another year.

DIY Box Trap

We are over run with snow shoe hares here this year as well as a lot of cottontail rabbits. I have only seen a few coyote tracks and no other predators seem to be in the area to take advantage of this bumper crop of bunnies. Since both of these rodents will present a problem for my orchard and my wild berry patches I will have to take the predator job for a while. Both of my adversaries can out run me and hide better than me. My solution, in part, is using these box traps. Buying box traps is an expensive proposition so here's my DIY version.

Here is a sketch of how the trap works. The tin can you  see in the top picture contains what ever bait you want to use. It hangs from the top of the cage and is able to swing front to back. Looped around that is another wire[yellow] which holds the door open until your victim enters and wiggles the bait can. This allows the door,which is spring loaded to snap shut. The little kink in the top wire is to enable adjusting the length slightly if needed. You could just leave the end of the wire the door sets on straight.

I like this loop on the end because it slides easier to let the door snap shut. I use the coil springs from a rat trap for my door springs.  I use heavy cage wire since it makes the trap more versatile as far as what I can use it for. This trap will work fine for almost any small critters except raccoon, they would simply eat the bait and then lift up the door and leave, smart and strong! Mink,weasel or skunk could all be caught in it though as well as rabbit and squirrel. Local law would determine which, if any, of these you could trap.

 Here is a view looking in the door which might help a little. The door should overlap the opening on all sides and fit tight along all edges when shut. Make sure to smooth the edges of the door opening since you will be reaching in to put in bait and to set it. This trap is 91/2 inches high by 9 inches wide by 24 inches long. I bend as many joints as I can and fasten every thing together with either cage clips or small pig rings. If you don't have those you could just wire it together too.

Maple Syrup Season...Soon!

Tapping season is just around the corner and all over the north woods people are starting to get their sugar bush in order. The big time operations are putting up lines taken down by windfalls and fixing all the spots squirrels chewed. Small hobby syrup makers like us are getting our gear in order too. We have built up our inventory of equipment over the years which has led to quite an assortment of taps. Here are four different ones, the plastic one being the newest type. These are designed for use with tubing such as the big producers use but they work fine for us too. I use to run a section of tubing into a bucket with a lid.

On a large tree that had several taps they could all go into one bucket through a small hole near the top of the bucket. That method also works well when there is a clump of maples with several taps. The closed bucket keeps the sap nice and clean.Unless you tap a lot of trees a hand auger with a sharp bit will do a fine job. We put in up to 300 taps with this auger and a hammer to tap them in. We used every type of plastic bucket we could get our hands on for years but last year we added sap bags to our collection. I had wanted to use them for years but the holders were to expensive for me.

Last year I made a bunch of holders from pvc pipe. You will find two post about that in the archives so I wouldn't go over all that again.One article is a how to for anyone interested. I like the fact that the bags keep the sap clean and are relatively cheap.. The biggest problem we have had is that the bark sometimes rubbed holes in the bags.This seemed to be related to poor quality bags but I don't know how to judge that until it is to late. At least I can afford to go in and buy more bags when they are needed. New buckets are expensive and in a area with lots of hobby syrup makers used buckets are

scarce. Here is our sap pan, an entirely home made affair.The pan is 3 foot by 7 foot by 6 inches deep and bent from a 4 by 8 piece of sheet metal. The fire box is a frame of steel tubing enclosed with pole barn steel siding. The fire box area is indicated clearly by the areas the paint is burned off of. The rear sloops up towards the top to keep the heat against the pan. The floor of this area is steel siding with a couple inches of sand on it. Hopefully this will be a better year than last. I have a few repairs to make on our sugar shack so I better get to work. Tapping season will be here soon.