It takes one to know one…
Packs True is one of my nicknames, he he. I like it a little better than Prowess Doubter which was bestowed on me by my dear hubby. Now that it is getting a little cooler here, and raining and blowing and generally just our normal weather, I thought I better get the cookstove dunged off so I could build a fire. Never mind that I feel left out in the various Freeze Yer Buns Off Challenges going on, I can’t play because we don’t have a thermostat to turn down voluntarily… . We heat with wood, that is it. Down vests and dogs on the bed are a fact of life.
Since we can’t bring ourselves to build a fire during warm weather, we use the electric stove for cooking during the warmer seasons of the year and as a back-up during the winter. Which means of course, that the wood cookstove starts gathering stuff early on, and it stays there until I get tired of getting glared at on cold fall mornings. My other name is Wood Mizer. It’s funny how people would rather shiver and glare than put stuff away and build a fire 
So to hold off on the cold, hard looks this fall, I announced this morning that I was cleaning off the stove before anyone could tell me to do it.
Here’s the list of what was on the stove: cooked squash for ??, granola, sugared honey, emtpy butter dish, calf bottle and various nipples, calf bucket nipple assemblies, the last cucumber, the last crookneck squash, a fifth of Everclear, 5 half-gallon jars of kombucha ranging from full to just the scoby, calf probiotic, horse minerals for the calf, Depression ware pitcher, carrots, daikon radish, pimiento peppers, platters of drying pumpkin and squash seeds, boot grease, good fence insulators, coyote chewed fence insulators, 1/3 of a zucchini and miscellaneous canning jars.
I finally got it all put away, consolidated or thrown away and a fire built, and boy did it feel good. Our La Nina winter is starting off with some gully washers, 2 ¾” of rain yesterday and 1″ today – it’s wet! Good thing we don’t have any gullies.
Since I am a confirmed packrat you would think I would be a little more forgiving of this.
But, I am not. I am mad at the cats for not catching this bugger. And yes, Hank is still here, but I think the 4 cats have formed a union or something. They are hunting a little, but for some reason this packrat is getting a bye. Until last night!!
Sorry buddy, you could have existed here in the barn, pissing on stuff and I would have looked the other way, but eating my potatoes is asking for it. I guess you couldn’t resist the apple and kiwi I left for you. Ciao baby!
Food Renegade
Simple, Green, Frugal Co-op
This whole blog just totally cracked me up! Thanks for the laugh and confirming that I am not the only one who winds up with a weird stuff collection. Mine is the top of the microwave.
Petey, too funny, it’s a good thing I didn’t’ tackle the actual counter, it gets a little more interesting than the cook stove.
And the pickup, I don’t even want to go there 
This made me laugh!! I just cleaned up my counter, too, and I never thought to list the odds and ends that landed there. Add in 4 little ones, and there certainly are some unusual items on the counter. I need to get cracking on the area around the wood stove in the basement– toys are piled around it, but we are having some nice weather lately, so I think I can put it off another week or so. First time we’ve not fired it up in October!
r.e. thermostats, I can identify. Last winter was our first year heating with wood. We burned through what the new house came with and our replacement load of “seasoned” wood was totally green. So, for about a month, we used the electric heat pump. We about fell over when we saw the electric bill, and vowed never to look back. It’s a good thing, too, because the bearing in the heat-pump’s fan sounded like it was about to burn out, but I figure if I never turn it on again, I never have to fix it.
We made it through the summer with no A/C, just window fans, and now we’re heading back into the winter. I’m trying to be as diligent with the wood as I was with the A/C. In the dead of summer, we barely slept under a sheet, and wore as little clothes as possible. In the winter, though, it’s so easy to want to fire up the stove in the cold, cold morning, even if it’s going to hit 75 or 80 degrees by afternoon. The rule we’re setting is that we won’t fire up the stove until it’s at least below 60 in the morning, and not getting above the low-to-mid-60′s in the day. Until then, we can just put on some extra layers and tough it out.
Every day we don’t run the stove is a load of wood I don’t have to cut later!
Joshua, it must quite a bit cooler here, if there is a chance it is going to get to 70 we wouldn’t have a fire, that’s summer time here
On the upside we don’t need A/C though.
Woodcutting is a full time job here, always gathering wood and storing it like packrats. I won’t burn anything in the cookstove that hasn’t been cured for a year so we have to plan ahead. The furnace is a little more forgiving, but green wood just doesn’t put out much heat. I just checked my thermometer and its reading 48 – I’ll probably build a cook stove fire this am.
It helps too that I am outside a lot and active, so you keep warmer if you’re moving around if I had to work inside more I would probably like it a little warmer.
I don’t turn on the furnace until the day temps are in the 50′s or lower during the day. What I do is use the oven all day baking stuff. I fill it right right up. Baked beans, roast a turkey or a ham or a couple of chickens, yeast bread, potatoes, squash, casseroles, muffins, cookies, etc. It will put more heat into the house than you would expect, encourage everyone to hang near the kitchen and you will eat well too! You can always portion it out and freeze the excess because in a day or two the weather will turn and it will be beautiful out and you won’t want to waste those last few Indian Summer days cooking.
I wish I had a wood stove. I used to and someday when I move I will again.
Laughed about the assortment of stuff on your stove:) I can relate. We joke here about any horizontal surface just being a place to put ‘stuff’. We lit our woodstove for the first time, and only time so far, one night last week. Of course we probably would have lit it sooner had the chimney been cleaned out and the ‘stuff’ removed from the top of the stove. I’m like Joshua, the longer you put off lighting it, the less wood you have to cut.
Quite a few of our squash out in the garden had those same rat nibbles on them:(
We ended up with a mouse in the kitchen, and if you want to read about the rather disgusting end to that story…http://wyndsonfarm.blogspot.com/2010/10/of-mice-and-menand-toasters.html
Karen, any flat surface here too is a collection point. Arghh. We’re outside so much in the summer, we just plop stuff down anywhere and then now that we’re in the house more, we wonder where did all that crap come from. The cabinet by the phone is really the collector of weird stuff, I kinda scared to tackle that one!
I got smart this spring finally, I cleaned the stove pipes when we quit burning wood so it would be one less thing to do come fall. Now if I can just keep that up…
Your squash in the garden might be being nibbled by field mice (voles) they love that stuff and love hiding in squash vines.
Thanks the mouse story!
This post makes me feel that I am not alone, my kitchen is looking much better after all the things that came in during the summer. We too heat with wood and put it off until really needed. My question. Are daikon radishes just radishes and good to eat? I have planted my garden area to impove the soil and they are lush without any rain for two months. So we can eat them?
Linda, daikon are very good to eat, and expensive in the store. They may be full of root maggots though without row cover, but hopefully not. Pull one and see, and if it’s hot, peel it. The stem is actually good too if you get to it before it gets woody.
I can last longer without building a fire than anybody else in the family, so I’m generally pretty resistant to giving up the extra counter space. The top of the cookstove represents about a third of the counter area in our little kitchen!
RM, I hate losing that space too, now my counter is more crowded. And I have to quit wearing my summertime thin jeans too, I leaned up against the stove yesterday and got branded!
I just LOVE the list of what’s on your stove! It’s nice to know I’m not the only one out there with collections of weird “stuff” on the horizontal surfaces in my house. Thanks for the laugh!
Jen, actually I thought it might be a little weirder, but after I looked at the list it seemed pretty mild, usually there are found bones, antlers and cow teeth
I am guessing the ones who would rather ‘give you the eye’ , than move stuff off the stove are the males of the house?
Mine loves to fill up every available space and often tells me ‘I’ll take care of it’…
Enjoy your fire. Sounds wonderful.
klsgrem, well, actually one of each and the male one is the wood cutter so I have to be careful about returning the glare
Ah, lol. See, I’m in the same predicament, even though we don’t have anything that uses wood yet.
All mine are males though.
LOVE IT! and to think I thought I was the only one who used the stove as a collect all *wink* I am a wood scrimper, Mike makes fun, because I pick up branches from the yard and down along our property. I also save the sunflower stalks and hollyhock stems and chop into kindling sized pieces when dry
) The way I look at it, it’s killing the preverbal two birds with one stone, it cleans up the property as well as puts these items to good use 
)
Isn’t it frustrating when you have those unwanted pests, we only have one cat but thankfully she is always on duty when it comes to pests. Glad you caught the packrat before it did anymore damage.
Blessings for your day,
Kelle
Kelle, I think that’s a great idea. I am always wanting to collect branches for when we use the fireplace and hubby always tells me we don’t need to. :/
I will insist ow that I see I’m not the only one doing it.
Kelle, I was kind of surprised to see this fellow setting up camp in this barn, usually they are in the haybarn and it is far enough away I don’t worry about it. The kitties got a taste of pack rat anyway, hopefully when they get bigger they will be a little more aggressive.
Gosh, I am wood scrimper too, we have so many trees though that it isn’t too hard to find something to burn. Trees are like weeds here, fortunately.
I LOVE your wood fueled cook stove. If I built my home over, I’d have a wood stove in the kitchen … and a summer kitchen on a closed in porch with lots of windows. Glad you caught the rodent. We are a little further north east of you (N. Idaho) and expect a snowy winter this year.
Mrs. Mac, you would like a cook stove, heats and cooks good too. I like your summer kitchen plan. My cousins have a canning kitchen and I love it. It’s separate from the house and you can leave the mess there and not have to clean up to fix a meal!
Our woodstove gets all the stuff piled onto it…we had to clean it off last night as it was just tooo cold and a sharp bitter wind was blowing.
Linda
http://coloradofarmlife.wordpress.com
Linda, it must just be the human penchant for gathering and piling. When this stove was gone for restoration, we had to put a table there! Of course we filled it up promptly
Where we live it is still so hot and humid. I am wondering if cooler weather will ever come and stay. It is my kitchen table that holds all of the stuff and the just about every other counter as well. We cleaned it up and now it is full again
I wish I lived some where that I needed a wood stove. Loved the photos of all of your collections.
Pam, gosh we are the opposite here, wet and cool. I need to get to my kitchen table too – and the kitchen queen, it is a mess!
“any flat surface here too is a collection point. Arghh. We’re outside so much in the summer, we just plop stuff down anywhere and then now that we’re in the house more, we wonder where did all that crap come from.” LOL…yep!!! I can identify completely. Arghh it does get to me after while when I can’t find room to cook except in my RV corner.
I got another Templeton the other night…but mine wasn’t in a Have A Heart kind of way!!!
In fact I beat the dead rat with a stick and cussed him out for all the damage he did to my garden. Good thing no one was watching. But I felt a tad better.
Diane, what’s an RV corner?
Congrats on the rat. I usually use a leg hold trap, but I was afraid the kittens would be in it by morning, and probably the one that Jane stepped on that is nursing a sore foot to boot.
I wanted the cats to get rid of this guy, but I had to help them, they did end up eating him anyway, a tasty potato stuffed morsel! I am glad he was a packrat instead of the other variety!
You know….Recreation Vehicle!!!
But most of them are pretty HUGE today and my kitchen is so tiny I call it my RV kitchen! When the counters and the island get so cluttered all I usually have is the tiny little corner. My RV corner.
That looks almost like our stove (from 1896 and still going strong) a few weeks ago – but I caved to BC weather and fired it up early October.
We’re lucky that we have a cat that catches packrats. He usually only eats the top half tho – leaving the bottom half for us step on in the morning.
EJ, you got me beat, ours is a 1917 model, and I had to have it repaired in 1984, otherwise it has always been in our kitchen since 1917 except for it’s brief trip to the doctor. I should have caved sooner I guess, it sure feels good and it’s so much easier to cook on
I’m hoping our kittens will get the drift about catching the packrats, they have done well on everything else, so fingers crossed I guess.
I came across your blog a week ago. I’d been forced into bedrest by a badly broken leg and was going insane slowly.
I started with the first post in 2008 and have read all the way through. Your posts started at the exact same time we started our farm back up as a sustainable grass fed, pastured poultry farm. We’ve built our own small butcher shop and cold hanging room and process our own animals.
We built our house almost entirely by ourselves, passive solar/wood heat in 1983. We’ve got a pantry, root cell and 4 freezers too.
A lot of what you wrote seemed to be exactly how we felt about almost everything, except barbed wire. (Long time horse owner here.)
Anyways, your blog has kept me sane for a good while, and I really enjoyed all your posts.
And whatever happened to Not Dabbling in Normal? I tried to access it and it’s not there anymore.
(
Pam, ouch, it’s been a long time since I had a broken leg, but I remember it as not being fun at all! I wish the internet had been around then, I might not have been so crabby
Glad you liked the blog. Sounds like we have a lot in common.
I’ve been a long time horse owner too, but never have had any problems with wire (knock on wood) although one of our neighbors horses running wild down the road one day did. But a horse going full tilt hitting any fence is not going to fare too well. I would love field fence all around but our terrain & tree situation plus the expense make that a dream instead of a possibility.
Anyway, Not Dabbling in Normal is still there, but Women Not Dabbling in Normal isn’t.
Happy Healing!
LOL I’m challenging to next years “freeze the old buns off war”. Our cats have a union thing going too….what’s going on in this world anyway?
Um…you need a new home for that bottle of Everclear?
Paula, ha ha, I need to make my chickweed tincture! Now that I have found the EC I don’t have any excuses LOL
|Good thing we don’t have any gullies.
It’s like you’re reading my mind…
So glad you caught the little rat – hate the little critters! I agree – there’s nothing nicer than a de-clutter – okay – better go do mine