Month: November 2009

Turkeys Get The Axe

It’s a busy week for Karen: Monday and Tuesday were spent butchering turkeys, Wednesday is the final farmer’s market of the year, Thursday is Thanksgiving, Friday we’re all going to Orycon.

Me, I’m putting in a normal work week for the first three days of the week, so I’ve got it relatively easy.

The weather is cooperating, at least. While we do our poultry butchering at our licensed poultry facility, which of course is indoors (two rooms attached to our big machine shed), freezing weather complicates things. It was sunny and around fifty today, so no problem there.

(While some people extol the virtues of outdoor butchering, I never liked it.)

After the market closes, the farm will drift into winter mode. We have some broilers we’ll keep for another week or so before butchering and freezing (they were too small to butcher for the market). After that we’ll be down to the egg side of things.

We were doing three farmer’s markets per week for a while there. Getting the number down to zero will be pleasant for a while.

I’ll be at Orycon, How About You?

I’ll be hanging out with the folks of Creation Station at Orycon, the SF convention in Portland, which is being held on Thanksgiving weekend this year.

I’m hosting two workshops:

Minimalism in RPGs (1 PM – 2 PM Friday), where I diss rules system for role-playing games in general. I explain why they mostly get in the way, and what you can do about it.

Self-Publish Your Book RIGHT NOW (6 PM – 7:30 PM Friday), where I talk about how to turn your unpublished work into an actual paperback book with a full-color cover for under $20. Most self-publishing workshops waste a lot of time angsting over the various kind of publishing options. Not me! I dive straight into the nuts and bolts of turning your unpublishable manuscript into an unsaleable paperback. While it’s unlikely to make you rich, it will probably make you happy — and impress your friends. I’ll have lost of sample books.

Hope to see you there!

Forget Newspaper Logs — Try This Easier Way

It’s tempting to burn newspapers in the wood stove, as a way of supplementing the wood supply and getting free heat. Works for me — they burn pretty cleanly and it keeps the house from filling up with old newspapers.

Where people go wrong is when they try to make newspaper logs. I remember my parents trying a couple of different methods of doing this. The results were always terrible, and soon there was a disused newspaper-log roller gathering dust on the hearth. Waste of money.

So I was pretty surprised to discover a zero-effort method of burning newspapers that works like a charm. Here’s how I do it:

  • Take a thick stack of newspapers and lay them flat on the hearth. Say, 1-3 days’ worth of papers, depending on how thick your local paper is.
  • Build a fire on top of the newspapers. Just build it the way you usually would, with tinder and kindling and logs and stuff. The newspapers are supplemental, not the main event.
  • That’s it. Sitting in a stack at the bottom of the fire, the newspapers will burn slowly, taking about as long to burn as the logs. Maybe longer. But they will burn completely, leaving nothing but fine ashes.

As you can see, there’s nothing to this trick. Simplest thing in the world. But I’ve never heard of anyone else using it. Sadly, they still mess around with newspaper logs to no great purposes, since most of these folks have enough wood on hand that they don’t need to resort to fires that use nothing but newspaper.

By the way, if you want to learn all there is to know about woodburning, I recommend Jay Sheldon’s “Solid Fuels Encyclopedia.” Like most really great books, it’s out of print, but used copies are easily found on Amazon.


Hen Lights At Last

Karen has been after me to set up hen lights this year, after a hiatus of several years. Hens normally don’t like to lay except when the day length is increasing or reasonably long or both, and neither holds true at the end of the year. Lights have been used since the 1880s to deal with this.

There’s a lot of superstition about hen lights, ranging from the idea that it somehow uses up the hens, to the idea that hens are kept under brilliant 24-hour light as a form of torture.

Lights may have been hard on the hens in the 1880s, which was before anyone knew anything about nutrition, and flocks were generally malnourished during the winter. But the bright-light idea is just silly. Hens respond to very low levels of light, and electricity costs money. Light stimulation works at levels so dim that the hens can’t see to move around. The real problem with traditional hen lights is that they’re so dim that it’s hard for the farmer to work by them. The hens have no difficulty sleeping with the lights on.

The main purpose of the lights is to shift some of the egg laying out of the spring and into the fall and winter. At best, it increases overall egg production by 15%, which is welcome but isn’t really the point. The point is to get the kind of steady, year-round production that occurs naturally in the tropics, but not in regions as far north as I am. I’m at 45 degrees latitude, and daylight lasts only eight hours on Christmas week.

My lighting system is distinctly retro. Because I use portable pasture houses, the main feature of my lighting system is a thousand feet of outdoor extension cord going from house to house. I use a single 40-watt incandescent bulb per house. The whole thing is on a timer set to remain on from 6 AM to 8 PM, which is in series with a dusk-to-dawn sensor to turn the lights off when it’s light out. This gives the hens 14 hours of light per day, which is the traditional amount to use. Traditionally, lights are used between September 1 and March 31. I’m off to a very late start.

I will post pictures later, after everything’s up and running.

Want a Great Book for a Penny?

Here comes a new auction! Every week, I auction off a copy of every book in my Norton Creek Press catalog. Two people got books for a penny in the last auctions, which closed yesterday.

Why do I do it? This is promotion, pure and simple. Bargains get people to try things they otherwise wouldn’t, and I have faith in my books. Try one, and you’ll want more.

And when a few more people start noticing the auctions, and as word gets out that these are all great books, the days when you can get one for a penny will be over. That’s good for me but bad for you. So get some insane bargains before they’re all gone!