Well today I managed to do some fixing up on my chestnut cyclone-vacuum prototype. I think perhaps it is ready now, and i plan to test it out in the orchard this Saturday! The nuts haven't started falling yet, however I expect them to start sometime next week, so hopefully i don't discover any big issues during my test, and i can focus on finishing up other stuff i need to do. Basically, all i did today was bolt on some sheet aluminum strips to the rim of my cyclone chamber i built last year(easier said than done). After installing the aluminum sheet, my little strip of window-seal foam seems to hold in place much better, and the two halves of the whole apparatus now seem to mate together much better. So, at the risk of celebrating prematurely, I can't yet declare victory, but I have a good feeling about it. I plan to double up the catch barrels this year, since last year during my test, the big problem was that the barrel buckled under the vacuum pressure and then broke the seal. Hopefully it will hold up this way because i'm kind of running out of time to get things ready before the season, and my back is acting up again. I did also spray some foam into the gap where i had plastic-welded the two parts of my cyclone chamber together. I'm hoping this will add some rigidity here, and make things less prone to breaking when it inevitably tips over. Anyway, here are some pics:
Alan's Factory Outlet finished the install. It only took them 2 days - with a very late night finishing up on the 2nd day. I am very impressed with the result! Next step is to move in the junk, though i expect that job will have to wait until after chestnut time. Chestnuts are happening really soon now, and i still need to finish the cyclone-harvester! Anyway, this build turned out really nicely(and quick). I'm happy we went with a metal-building.
Well, I think i finished all the asphalting i had planned for this season. It ended up being a bit of a messy job, and I have too much self-awareness to post pictures showing the full extent of it, but long story short, after a couple days of bathing in all-purpose flour, i finally have gotten most of the asphalt off my skin now. It was very tight clearance, and i ended up crawling through some spilled asphalt which soaked through my clothing, and turning me into some sort of tar pit monster(very unpleasant). On the positive side, asphalting was not nearly as dusty a job as the previous digging and scraping i did to prepare the area, and i think at this point i am done in there until this winter when i plan to go back with plastic sheeting and the hot iron - this should also be a relatively clean job. On a side note, Alan's Factory showed up to construct the metal building. I'm very excited to see the end result, and start moving stuff in.
It was a little rainy this morning, and so i am waiting for things to dry up a bit before getting to work, and since it's sort of on my mind these days, i decided to do a little researching on silicosis and long disease, and the roll of salt as a potential therapy. I have found that humidity inside my crawlspace makes wearing a basic N95 mask impossible, and so I've actually been not wearing one the past couple times i have been in there. Consequently i feel pretty cruddy after getting out of there. I asked a medical-professional friend awhile back about what the best standard treatment would be for something like inhaling a bunch of dust, but i think she maybe misunderstood my question, so i ended up googling, and i think i found some sources supporting what my intuition already told me. It looks like, for extreme cases, there is no silver bullet therapy for this sort of thing. That said, if masking fails, there does seem to be a therapeutic roll for salt in treating lungs disease. Most actual therapies seem to involve washing the lungs directly with saline, however this is not practical for me, and is probably meant for more extreme situations. Dietary salt is linked to various other health problems though, like heart and kidney disease, as well as bing sited in a (small)mouse study as potentially exacerbating lung fibrosis. However i usually adhere pretty well to a low-sodium diet in my regular life(maybe), and so i think supplementing salt after an incidental exposure shouldn't really tip the scale as far as what dietary group i should personally fall under. whether or not i actually adhere to a low-salt diet is another matter. frequent dirty jobs like this kind of wreck my health routine, and it is arguable that i probably eat pretty poorly(i am overweight). So anyway, I'm running a little experiment on myself, however it's not really scientific because i you can't have a control group with a single subject(myself). I had a tablespoon of soy-sauce, and i don't think i will die imminently. I think the important goal hear is to finish the job so i don't have to go under there again any time soon, and so the carpenter ants don't eat my building out from under me. Hopefully i can find a good stopping point soon. I think perhaps if i get this job with the asphalt done, then i can do the rest in the winter, when it should be less humid, and my N95 wont water-board me. here are the links to sources- note: Cystic fibrosis respiratory tract salt concentration "...saline inhalation therapies were shown to allow short term increase in mucoid secretions expectoration..." "...The CFTR protein is a channel protein that controls the flow of H2O and Cl− ions in and out of cells inside the lungs. When the CFTR protein is working correctly, ions freely flow in and out of the cells. However, when the CFTR protein is malfunctioning, these ions cannot flow out of the cell due to a blocked channel. This causes cystic fibrosis, characterized by the buildup of thick mucus in the lungs..." "Whole lung lavage (WLL), also called lung washing, is a medical procedure in which the patient's lungs are washed with saline (salt water) by filling and draining repeatedly... ...WLL has been experimentally used for silicosis,[4] other forms of mineral inhalation, and accidental inhalation of radioactive dust..." Dietary NaCl affects bleomycin-induced lung fibrosis in mice It kinda bugs me how small this last study was(only 20 mice), and how they had 2 mice from their low-sodium group die(which i think kinda counter-indicates the findings): "...Following bleomycin instillation, two mice in the low salt group had to be euthanized due to excessive weight loss... ...Whether the excessive weight loss in the two mice indicates that in some but not all of the bleomycin-treated low salt diet mice the salt levels were too low for homeostatic needs, or an indication of other salt-dependent mechanisms that are needed for healthy repair, is unclear..." from google: "Picrosirius red staining is a histological technique used to visualize collagen fibers in tissue sections. It binds specifically to collagen, enhancing birefringence under polarized light. This method is widely used in fibrosis research and tissue analysis due to its sensitivity and clarity" on a side note, here is perhaps one reason not to ever use a neti-pot:
Asphalt is really a mess when you don't know what you are doing. I ended up going to the store today, and getting 5 gallons of asphalt paint, and then mostly failed to get it worked down into the crack at the back of the shop floor, with the exception of around the door where it really wanted to go in. i suspect the formwork i set up before hand was mostly unnecessary, however we will see when i open it up again tomorrow. I ended up running a thick wire (10ga) on a drill down the crack to try and improve flow. I'm hoping it will seep in overnight, however i did have the forethought to buy a 5 gal bucket of trowel grade, and so perhaps i will go back under there tomorrow, and try and finish the job from underneath. I included a little sketched cross-section. i did it from memory, so i'm not exactly sure about a few details. I'm hoping to finish soon, since its pretty miserable work to crawl under there. i'm hoping when i'm done it will be somewhat less miserable, and maybe i could even use it to help improve the situation with pipes, wires, ducts, etc.
I managed to get under my place yesterday afternoon to continue on my ongoing crawlspace fix-up project. It is still pretty humid under there, and my glasses immediately fogged. This wasn't too surprising since i still haven't finished bonding together all the plastic sheets i put in the this Spring, and so there are still many gaps where vapor can come up from the ground. There were plenty of bugs, though not too much evidence of rodents or snakes. it was hard to photograph and my headlamp ended up dying near the end. At this point there is still plenty to finish under there, however i'm thinking that most of the detail work related to the plastic can be done later, and right now i'm trying to focus on finishing up parts of the job involving asphalt products, since applying asphalt tends to get difficult when it gets cold. The job yesterday was an attempt to get some asphalt caulking filled in behind the floor-joist header/ledger at the back of the crawlspace where the ground level comes up to the edge of the original building's concrete pad. There is no sill plate here, and the joist header is bolted directly onto the formwork of the concrete pad of the original building. BTW, the header is partially rotten in one spot, and there is evidence that i still have some level of carpenter ants working on it. So anyway, in the end i managed to clear a small gap under and behind the header and squirted some asphalt caulk in the gap - about 16 tubes worth. It didn't really seem like enough though, and I am concerned that i might not have good coverage. I made an attempt to get some more in there using a paint spatula and a gallon can of trowel-grade asphalt, however the tightness of the space was making it hard get it to go into the crack, and after 4+ hours i was beginning to get tired, and so i finished up with a thick bead of asphalt caulk along the entire length and called it a day. This situation does seem insufficient, and I am brainstorming a bit this morning about a potential better method to get full coverage in the little void-space between the end of concrete pad and the start of my floor-joist header. Perhaps i will try pouring asphalt paint down the crack again. I actually tried doing this in the spring, but i found that the crack between the concrete and formwork was too tight to get good penetration. Perhaps if i could drill a hole in the formwork, then i can get access to pour asphalt from above. It would be nice if i can finish this part of the job without having to crawl under there again(it is very dirty in there), however, i expect i might need to get in there and install some sort of form-work to prevent leakage if i decide to go this route. I'm hoping to eventually have the whole space completely covered in a thick plastic layer, however that job seems less urgent, since both tape or the hot iron will both work in the cold, and so the job with the plastic could potentially wait until wintertime. I also still need to finish moisture-proofing from the outside, though that should be a more straight-forward job: dig a trench along the outside wall and install plastic, and backfill. Just fyi, i'm not excavating any significant dirt inside the crawlspace at this point and i can say the only dirt that has been moved inside there was to make a very shallow trench(less than 1 ft deep) to allow me to fit under the floor-joist support-beam and get back where i needed to go, and to install a drain pipe. And during the perimeter wall build i only excavated enough to get to frost depth - the perimeter wall is non-structural and all the load is carried by the posts which were installed professionally during the build and go many feet underground. I want to get this done! It has been multiple years in the making. I think we started this rebuild before Covid(2019 - i need to double check notes), and I expanded on that job my self starting last summer, and so i have been working on it off-&-on by myself for the last year and a half. At this point, i seem to have succeeded in shutting out the groundhogs and rats and i didn't see any fresh mice in my trap when i checked it inside there yesterday. There is however still significant humidity and bugs, and musty odor. I'm hoping that i can finish this up this season to a good quality, since i don't think you can really call it healthy in it's unfinished state. Anyway, i think maybe i'm getting some ideas. Can i finish the asphalt this weekend? i need to start working on chestnuts. the rest will have to wait until winter.
I checked on my bees today, and discovered that 6 of my 9 hives from this July had failed.
I don't blame the queens, though i really don't want to claim sole responsibility either.
August was dry, at this point my plate is kind of overloaded, and so maybe i didn't check
on them as much as i should have, and perhaps my splits were a bit overoptimistic to begin
with. It's too bad i didn't catch it sooner, because it looks like the moths ate some good
wax. However, the good news is that the 3 remaining hives appear strong - i did not look
inside though. Also, maybe having more of my equipment empty will allow me to make more
repairs i want to do this winter. I'm going to begin feeding the 3 remaining hive. I'm not
sure how much time i have, but perhaps i should put another box on bottom? i guess that is
the way it goes some times. perhaps i cant get these guys through winter, and spring will
be better.
west
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i = italian
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n = native(my local breed)
i managed to find some time yesterday afternoon to go do some more finish-mowing in the orchard - this was after finishing my latest little computer project(you can find more about that on the tempasta site). Notice the grace and trees are all a little brown. It didn't rained much last month - which was a bit of a change given all the rain we had earlier in the season. I am going to have to go and cut vines later this Fall so they don't strangle my precious trees. everything currently is starting to turn a bit brown though, and I am somewhat concerned it might affect the chestnut harvest. There are some trees with plenty of nuts forming, however i noticed while i was over there that it seemed like perhaps fewer trees had nuts than usual. Perhaps that will change as we get closer - it's only about 3 weeks away now. While i was over near the orchard, i found a spice-bush which was going to seed, and took some seeds to add to collection. BTW, i don't think i will be selling honey this year. The water content was too high and it all started to ferment. Supposedly, there are methods you can use to fix this if it happens, often involving some sort of gentle heating, however when i tried to warm a jar in the microwave, it ended up boiling over. The foam happened slower than the picture would lead you to believe, however it still was too much for me, and i don't think i can get the honey remediated to a quality which i would want to sell, so it's in the freezer for home use. It was a somewhat smaller honey-harvest this year anyway. I'm hoping next year will be better with the equipment repairs we have been doing. I am also continuing to work on wax candles and the greenhouse, as well as my flax idea, however i don't think any of those things will be ready for sale this season. i included some pics. I'm still working on perfecting my solar wax-melter. I remelted some old wax in them, and it definitely caught some junk, though plenty of particles are still getting through. perhaps i can fix it over winter for next summer. Also, i'm still experimenting with the best way to cover my greenhouse. Also, i included a pic of a big storm-front we had roll in at dusk. it is from the beginning of August, before things started drying up. I guess i'm now entering the mad dash to get everything ready for chestnut time. With everything that still needs to get prepared, and then considering the task of juggling everything during the harvest, i'm not sure i we will be offering our heat-pasteurized fresh nuts this year. I am also thinking that i prefer selling vacuum-sealed frozen nuts as apposed to frozen-in-a-box nuts. And so at this point i am leaning towards vacuum-sealed frozen nuts and and raw(unpasteurized) fresh nuts as our offerings this season. that is in addition to pick-your-own. All pre-picked nuts will be graded by size. FYI, i'm still working on finishing the vacuum-harvester. i'm also thinking i might try and fix up this site some more if i get time.
