Geothermal

We dug the trenches this week for the geothermal heating and cooling system.  The idea is that you bury hundreds of feet of pipe several feet underground, and pump water through it.  When it comes out the far end, it will be at the temperature of the ground, which around here is something like 55 degrees year ’round.  That water has a lot of heat in it.  Extract the heat from it, pump it back out, and the ground will heat it back up.  Rinse and repeat all winter long.  Basically, it’s a solar water heater – it just doesn’t rely on the sun that particular day, but the average sun all year long that warms up the earth.  Somewhere around 70% of our heat will come from the sun through this system.

A closed-loop geothermal system like this does require a good bit of land, though.  We had to dig 5 trenches 6 ft deep by about 150 ft long.

Wouldn’t you know we would have to put the trenches in this small field next to the house.  The Healing Harvest folks and myself spent hundreds of hours clearing this field, which wasn’t a field at all when we bought the farm, but a tangle of pines, roses, ailanthus, and dying locust.  We had BIG burn piles going pretty much all summer and fall here last year.  The topsoil is a good 12 inches deep, and we did everything we could to preserve it.  When we finished clearing it, I planted yellow blossom sweet clover on it and had a really nice stand going when it was decided to dig it all up.  So we decided to first scrape all the precious and beautiful topsoil away into a windrow first, and then dig the trenches.

Next week, we’ll lay the pipe into the bottom of the 6′ trenches, cover them with 2′ of subsoil, lay another run of pipe, and then fill in the ditches with the rest of the subsoil, compact it all down, then cover everything again with the topsoil.  I’ll then disc it and plant it again, this time probably with a mixture of annual rye, three types of clovers, and timothy, as this field is likely to become horse pasture.

Making Hay

It’s been a great hay-growing year.  We’ve had more rain this spring than any in the past 5 years or so.  And then we had one blessed week break about a month ago where a lot of folks were able to get up their hay.  We missed that window, but were able to get ours up in small stages in between the rains.

Making Hay

In the end we got about 150 round bales.  Not too bad, but too bad everyone got a lot of hay this year, and the price for hay is severely depressed.

More Bullhog land clearing

Whenever I get depressed about all the work to do to clear the land at CRF, I call the Sutherlands to come out with the BullHog for a few days.  It instantly cheers me up.  It’s just so amazing what they can do in such a short time.

Had them come out last week to do a few things.  First up was to clear the old home site of Noah Moore (see the History section).  I plan to rebuild a log cabin on that site very soon and needed it cleared out of the multiflora rose and other brush.  The result was just amazing to me.

Old Home Site Before

Old Home Site After

We also had about 2 dozen big (12″-24″ diameter) white pines in pastures that we needed to get rid of.  Some fellers were clearing a lot just up the road who had humongous equipment, including a tub grinder that would turn everything wood into landscape mulch.  They said they could get rid of the pines for about $2,500 – not really a bad deal at about $100 per tree.  The Sutherlands had a better idea, though, which was to cut each of them down, drag them all off to one spot, use the BullHog to grind down the tops and side branches, and save the logs for the sawmill.  Total cost – less than $1,000.  And on top of it, they ground down the stumps in the pasture to dirt level.  What a blessing.  Initially they didn’t think they could do it efficiently, but we timed it and it proved to be very efficient – only about 2 minutes per stump!  Can’t beat that at all with a stump grinder which can take up to a half hour for each.

24" White Pine Stump Before

Stump 2 minutes later

John and his son JR also cleared some other hillsides of rose and bullpine where we plan to plant trees next spring, and rose and buckthorn patches in the woods along the driveway on this job.  It just lifts my spirit so much every time they come out that I have to do it in stages to keep from being overwhelmed.  They’ll be back in the fall to clear some  woods of rose after I’ve killed this all the Ailanthus growing all through it, and probably clear a fenceline and more of the steep pasture for tree planting as well…..something to look forward to….