It’s been a long time coming, but I finally got a new wood stove for my tiny house. The Jotul 602 isn’t exactly an unknown quantity. I’ve used it many times in other people’s houses and I love it. It’s pretty much the smallest wood stove on the market so it’s pretty popular for the small houses at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. And I’m pretty sure the Norwegians can be counted on for their expertise in heating a space with wood. If you are heating a small house or single room this is a reliable and attractive stove. You do have to break them in before you can use them to their full capacity, and that’s what I’m up to in this video.
The hard frost ends the season for most garden crops where I live in Missouri. Sometimes I look forward to it just for the reprieve from garden work, but it does require a flurry of activity. In this video, I harvest some of my tropical crops and find a way to make use of dry beans that aren’t quite dry.
This is a little tour of my vineyard from earlier in the year. I plan to post another video of later in the year and the harvest soon. This was a really good season for growing grapes (though it was pretty bad for a lot of other things). The dry weather made perfect, sweet clusters of delicious grapes that will make some good wine.
There are some simple tricks I’ve found can make my garlic last all the way until the new harvest is in. It’s not hard, but it takes just a little care and effort. Last year I was using up my last garlic cloves at about the time I was harvesting the new crop.
When I got back from being away for the winter I found that my water pump was no longer able to pump water out of my cistern. In my house, I drink and use rainwater caught off my gutters and stored in an 1100 gallon cistern underground. In this video, I try to figure out why I’m not getting any water. Was it the -18°F temps over the winter or something else that caused the problem?
