Splitting Wood

I'm not an expert at this--at all.  However, expert or not, I needed to start splitting some wood fast when I moved last year (at the end of November, into a house with no central heat). I had two pieces of equipment when I moved in: a manually-operated 10-ton splitter like this one, and an 8-pound maul.  I also had the rack of oak logs that had been cut the year before.  Splitting with the maul was a mixed bag.  Some pieces readily split, but others only gave up after an extended battle.  Eventually, I started pre-splitting the larger pieces with the 10-ton splitter, then finishing them with the maul.  The 10-ton seldom split the wood completely; its range of motion was limited.

That worked relatively well, although it was slow. I have since gotten a second maul, as well. When it comes to using the wood to generate heat, problem #2 was that the winter was very wet, with  heavy rain December-March.  The wood was fairly wet; I wasn't covering it very well initially.  Problem #3 is that the chimney, visible in this post, is pretty short.  It doesn't necessarily draft that well.

However, manual wood splitting was viable, if slow. I learned that if there were a lot of branches coming off the piece I was splitting, it disrupted the grain and splitting was harder.  Also, some types of wood split more easily.  I have a friend in the landscaping business who soon supplemented my wood supply with a lot of mixed pieces, but he warned that some was sweetgum, which has a reputation for not splitting well.

Some sweetgum pieces split easily, but others were fibrous and stringy, requiring a lot of effort to separate.

 

 

This spring, I had to have an oak tree taken down; it was dying and right next to the garage, and also within falling distance of the power lines and house.  The big parts (large branches and main trunk) were left by the loggers.  Some of those are as much as three feet in diameter; they'll have to be chainsawed (either cut with the grain or across) before splitting in any fashion.

So I have plenty of wood on the property at the moment, but was interested in speeding the splitting process up a bit.  One option was (and still is) to rent a towed gas-powered splitter; they are readily available from independents and places like Home Depot.  A quick check showed that a 24-hour rental was about $100. Another option is / was buying a splitter.  In addition to gas splitters, there are electric ones, as well, ranging from 4-10 tons.  Gas-powered ones are typically in the 20-30 ton range.  So electric ones have their limits and are relatively weak compared to those that are gasoline-fueled.  There are YouTube videos of people splitting very large logs with 5-ton electric units, but the specifications for electric splitters typically say up to 10"-12" depending on motor and hydraulic ram size.

Cost is a factor.  Gas-powered ones are generally $1300+, while electric ones are roughly $250-$850; most are in the $200-$400 range.  Ones like the manually-operated splitter mentioned above generally cost around $120-$150 but are frequently on sale for $100 or so.

I decided to give an electric one a try and settled on a 7-ton model.

 

So far, it seems to be working okay.  it's definitely slow compared to a gas model (my one experience with those came a long time ago with a friend whose father used one to split a mountain of cottonwood in an hour).  However, the wheelbarrow load shown below took about 10 minutes, which isn't bad.

There are some small-diameter sawed pine pieces at the top right; those came from a dead pine branch that fell into the driveway.  The rest is mostly sweetgum with some hickory.

So far I haven't used it on anything bigger than the 10" recommended, but it is handling that size well.  I do have some wood to split that is larger.  Shown below is more sweetgum. Even though the sweetgum mostly showed the same characteristics described above, the wedge forces enough of a split to make it easy to separate the pieces.

As long as it doesn't break, it'll be very helpful.  It's substantially better than my previous approach.

Bread Comparison

FWIW, here are two loaves:  on the left is one made with all white flour; the one on the right was made with a 50/50 blend of white and white whole wheat.  Both turned out extremely well (or as extremely well as things get with me).

Everything else is the same (except the amount of water used in making the dough). I generally use 3 3/4 cups of flour, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1/4 cup sourdough starter, and about 1 2/3 cups of water. Baking is 35 minutes at 475 followed by 15 minutes at 450 with the lid off.  I bake it in a Romertopf clay baker. It initially rises in a large mixing bowl with plastic wrap over the top.  I put it in a proofing basket with a liner for the final brief rise (I'm not a Breadtopia affiliate and get nothing from anyone buying things there; the links are for reference only).

The countertop rise is about 8-9 hours at ambient temperatures, though when it's cold in the house I either let it rise for a longer period of time (up to 12 or even more) or put it in the oven on the bread proof setting, which keeps the oven at 100 degrees.  After forming the loaf, it rises about another 25-30 minutes while the oven is heating to 475.

Another Bread Post

I seldom bake white bread.  While it has its pluses, overall I prefer some whole wheat flour.  Since I just baked a loaf of 100% whole wheat, however, I decided to go the other way and do a loaf of white.

Temps for the overnight rise were rather warm, probably about 82 or so, and rise it did: over about 8 hours, it bumped up against the plastic wrap covering the bowl.

This has happened before with all-white flour dough, and it has always been in the summer when it has done this--I have never seen anything this explosive with dough mix that includes any amount of whole wheat flour.

Ordinarily, a vigorous pre-baking rise seems to portend poor oven spring, and that may have actually happened in this case.  However, the volume of the dough mass that went into the baker was so large it didn't really matter.

What came out of the oven was pretty nice.

I haven't often (or maybe ever) used a ruler for scale, but this loaf has a bigger cross-section than anything I have ever baked with whole wheat (even with vital wheat gluten added).  That's just the way it usually goes.  For a semi-useful comparison, here's the 100% whole wheat loaf again from the last baking session:

Back to the white loaf:  the structure shows that the rise, while pretty dramatic in comparison, was well-controlled and uniform (unlike what I was getting last winter when I let the dough sit out overnight at 60 degrees then switched to the oven for a couple of hours at 100).

So it was a success.  Maybe it's easier to be successful with white flour, but I usually get at least decent results (if not serve-to-guests-good) with some blend of whole wheat, despite occasional spinouts.

Sediment, Continued

As I noted a while back, the water from my well has sediment.  A lot of sediment.  The filter I was using previously, a one-micron wound string unit, worked pretty well, but some clay got through.  My filters are mostly nominal one micron, not absolute: the difference is explained here, in a document by the University of Nebraska Extension Service.  Essentially, with a nominal filter, some particles larger than one micron will get through--the standard indicated in the publication is 85% of particles with the size of the filter rating.  That being said, clay particles can be smaller than one micron: the Nebraska piece indicates they they can be as small as 0.2 microns.

I do have an 0.5 micron absolute filter cartridge that I may try sometime.  For now, I'm getting good results with nominal 1.0 micron filters.

The water is pretty good, without readily visible sediment, as I noted before.  Dishes and white clothes look okay to me, although with time they may look sandblasted (in the case of the dishes) or red-tinted (for the clothes).

That being said, as with the toilet tank, evidence of what's getting through can be found.  The picture shows what happened when I wiped out the detergent dispensing tray from my washing machine.  Even though the water flow rate is pretty high, unmistakable evidence of clay can be found.  A reverse osmosis filter could remove even more, but that would require a much larger filtration setup--multi-stage--that might impact throughput too much...for negligible gain.

A Nice 100% Whole Wheat Loaf

...Nice for summer, that is: the house is cooling down a little, but was still about 80 overnight during the rise.  With the newly fine-ground wheat from the Mockmill, the loaf turned out decent (no vital wheat gluten).

The first rise was about 8 hours and the second one was about 25-30 minutes.  It's white whole wheat, so the flavor is pretty mild.  The first two slices were rather small, but that's typical of 100% loaves--and much better than the nasty disaster of a couple of months ago.

Murine Recidivism

Trigger warning: this post discusses ways to trap mice and contains homicide scene photos.

My current house is older than the previous one I was living in, and it has a crawlspace (the other one was on a slab).  I'm not exactly sure where all of the gaps are, but mice can get into the house with little apparent difficulty.  When I was remodeling the place it was largely empty, and I was surprised to see mouse sign in the house in the fall and winter.

The picture is overexposed and out of focus, but clearly shows a mouse running around in what would become the master bedroom.  In the background, along the wall, is a spring trap baited with peanut butter that was never of any interest...that was my first (and unsuccessful) attempt at eliminating them.

Also in the background you can see long boxes: those contained blinds.  I had to replace one that the mice got into before installation; it/they snipped a bunch of the cords for use in a nest.

I then upped my game.  Maybe the peanut butter was no good the first time (I assume mice wouldn't like old rancid peanut butter any more than humans would; maybe it wasn't fresh--I got some single-serving PB containers to haul up to the house before I was living there and didn't try it on my own to see how good it was).  I got some Mini T-Rex mousetraps  (the link takes you to Shawn Woods's YouTube channel; he knows more about mousetraps than I ever will).  I got a 12-pack from Do-It-Yourself Pest Control.  The traps have mostly proven effective.  I also have set a number of Victor Tin Cat live catch mousetraps (I like the ones with see-through lids, although some have alleged the mice can chew through the plastic and escape).  I have continued to use peanut butter for bait; it does eventually go bad but seems to be palatable for some time if fresh when deployed.  Mice also like it.

I have a number of each kind of trap set out, and can go months with no mice.  Then all of a sudden, I'll get a spate of captures in one of the live catch traps.  I can catch mice in T-Rex traps in quick succession, too, but the streaks are more of a problem with the live catch traps.  Last December, I had a mouse in the same trap every morning for about five days in a row.  You can see where this is going...

I would release the mice far from the house--in some cases over 100 yards away on the other side of the road in front of my house.  Mostly I have caught deer mice.  They are supposed to have a range of about 0.5 hectares, aka 1.25 acres; a circle 262 feet in diameter is all the farther they should travel.  I thought.  You can see where this is going...

The spate of December captures ended when I released a mouse on the last day and inadvertently killed it. It started running back toward the house and I blocked it with my foot; it ran around the block and I tried to block it again, coming down on top of it by mistake.  So that was the end of that mouse and the end of the break-ins.  I began to wonder if I had a recidivism problem.

The next time I caught a mouse in a live catch trap was not long ago.  I had put one in the attic (baited with pecans) and one morning heard insistent tapping sounds, which were the mouse pushing against the box trying to get out.  I released it on the other side of the road.  A few days later I caught one in a different live catch trap and before releasing it, marked it with a magenta paint marker.  I drew a line or two on its fur and the mark wasn't very apparent, so I marked it more heavily on its left haunch, then released it and chased it into the undergrowth on the other side of the road.

Three days later I found this by the water heater.

When I took it outside, I flipped it over and saw this:

Two observations: First, it was the mouse I had caught before and marked.  You can see red streaks on its fur.  Second, I obviously caused a big problem with the heavier marking.  The mouse pulled out its fur.  My bad.  At any rate, the return of the mouse was disheartening.

It's even worse than I thought.  A mere 100 yards in no way gets it done.  I didn't read the above-linked article carefully enough.  It notes that, "Individuals that biologists have marked and then displaced have returned to their nests, on traveling 3.2 km (2 mi) in two days."  Two miles?!

This means the options are kill traps only or relocation far from my house.  I'm not averse to the latter; I can easily dump the mice out 10 miles from home.

Another option is poison, which I'm not wild about using.  I'd have to combine it with the live-catch traps, because rodents that eat poison bait and then leave the bait station to die are hazardous to predators. Compared to all of this, the kill trap is quite humane.

More Bread Developments

Back in July I wrote about the worst loaf of bread I had ever baked.  It might not have been the very worst.  I have had some rye loaves turn out pretty badly, too.  But July's loaf was definitely a D- (at best).

I noted in July that "I might need to adjust the stones in my mill."  That was indeed the case.  My emmer grain is all gone for the moment, but ordinary white hard wheat was on the table for last week's bake.

I finally checked my Mockmill and found that it was indeed grinding coarse.  It had drifted to about setting 3 (1 is finest and should be calibrated to where the stones just barely touch when the mill is running empty).  I moved it back to 1 and was pretty pleased at the fineness of the grind.  It wasn't as powdery as some commercial whole wheat flours, but it was comparable to some (e.g., King Arthur red).  This was probably the finest whole wheat flour I have worked with in several months. 

It's still summer here, so the house was very warm.  In the overnight rise, the dough almost filled the bowl. That's usually not a good omen for the loftiness of the final loaf, so I was prepared to be disappointed.  I think I got the dough form a little misshapen when folding it over and getting it ready for the proofing basket.  During the second rise in the proofing basket, once the oven was warming, the loaf got a little more distorted. Normally there isn't much rise because I have cut the second time short to just the preheating time: about 25 minutes.  However, this time it did noticeably bulk up.

The final product was pretty good, if asymmetric.

As you can see, the rise is very decent and the crumb is okay (or at least as okay as it ever is with my efforts).  There will be substantial slice size variation, but I have long ago learned to be satisfied with asymmetry and sandwiches of all sizes.

I'll have to wait until the next baking session to see if this was just a serendipitous confluence of factors that can't be replicated or if it is something I can do going forward.

Update: the next baking session has come and gone, and the results were similar--a pretty good loaf.

This I can definitely work with.  The first rise was about 9 hours and the second, as normal, about 25 minutes.