Waffles!  Yup.  One of the things that we get to enjoy when we have the wood stove going is home-made waffles on the wood stove.  Now, waffles on the wood stove is a project.  The waffle iron has to get really, really hot to make waffles.  To do that, you have to take the round lid away and put the waffle iron over the hole, so that it is directly over the fire.  Then, you flip the waffle iron over from time to time to make sure that both sides of the waffle iron get really hot.  Then, when you see it starting to smoke, you open the waffle iron, spray both sides with spray cooking oil and pour ONE ladle full of pancake batter onto the waffle iron and close the lid.  Now, ask me how do I know that it only takes ONE ladle full of pancake batter to fill the waffle iron?  Wisdom comes from experience.  It took me quite a while to clean all that burned pancake batter off of the outside of the waffle iron and off of the cookstove the first time I did that.  And, how do I know that I have to spray both sides of the iron with cooking oil before pouring on the batter?  Again, wisdom comes from experience.  Once the batter is in the iron, the iron has to be flipped over once or twice in order to cook on both sides evenly.

The waffle iron is positioned over the fire.

OOO!  Yes.  Golden brown waffle, done just right.  My mouth is watering just looking at it.

One more batch of waffles and we are ready to sit down to breakfast.  You can see the fire peeking out around the edge of the waffle iron at the bottom.

You can see the two kettles on top of the stove.  I always keep the two kettles of water on the stove, as they help to add moisture to the air.  When the stove is going it keeps the house warm in the winter, but it also dries out the air.  So, keeping the kettles on the stove helps to add humidity to the air to keep the house from getting too dry.  I have two 55 gallon barrels downstairs out in front of the house that collect rain water from the roof.  I get that water and put that into the kettles on the stove because it doesn't have any minerals in it, like the well water does.  That way, when the water boils down in the kettles, I don't have to clean out the calcium deposits.

Ahhh, the joys of owning and maintaining an antique cast-iron wood-burning cook stove!  For those of you who have read, and enjoyed, the "Little House on the Prairie" series of books, you may remember the story about Laura and Mary applying stove blacking to their mother's cook stove.  In the story, there was a bit of a disagreement between them and the stove blacking ended up getting on the parlor wall.  But, I digress.  The point of the stove blacking is, that cast iron will get ugly and rusty unless it is cleaned and polished and then covered with stove polish regularly.  The stove polish basically is wax with lots of graphite in it.  That helps to protect the cast iron from moisture to prevent it from rusting.


The previous owners of my stove had just taken some black stove spray paint, like Rust-Oleum, or something like that, and painted over all the rusty spots, rather than cleaning them and polishing them properly.  So, that means that the paint that was applied is now all peeling off again.  That means that I now have to go over the whole thing with a wire brush and clean off all the loose paint, and then go over the stove with the good stuff.  Stove polish.


Stove blacking.


Yup.  It's black.  And it gets on your hands, and it stains the rag you use to polish the stove.  My wife says, don't you dare put that thing in the wash, just throw it away.  I got a spare toothbrush to scrub it on, and then that went in the trash, also.

Applying stove blacking.  You may notice that I have not bothered to change out of my dress shirt.

You can see the rusty spots are being covered up with blacking.  You can also see my hands are being covered in blacking.

This is not an endorsement for the product, but I will say that it does work very well.

Once the blacking has been applied to the whole stove, then you have to go back over it with your dampened rag and polish it to a nice shine.

I would guess that I will need to go back over the stove a few more times in the coming months to pick up some spots that were missed the first time around, but I think I got most of it.  It will still need stove polish once or twice a year anyway, just to keep it looking nice.


One more thing I want to add.  I was home all day Monday for the holiday.  I turned the furnace on to get it warm in the house since I was inside all day, as it was only up to 6 degrees above zero outside.  But, it just never felt warm, even though the thermostat was set at 70 degrees.  So, I got the fire going in the cook stove and after it got hot, the whole house felt warm.  The furnace shut off, because the heat from the stove was enough to keep the house warm.  It was amazing the difference in how the warmth from the stove felt comfortable, even though the temperature in the house was the same.


We also have a nice air tight Heatilator fireplace that works well to heat the house, but it takes a lot of firewood to get it hot, and you can't cook on it.  We have a good supply of old firewood from the previous homeowners.  Some of it has been around for several years and there's not much wood left in the sticks.  The insects have devoured much of it.  I have been working on burning up the firewood that we have, before I start cutting and splitting new stuff.  The small stuff will fit in the stove, but the larger wood will only fit in the fireplace, unless I split it.  Once I use up all the small sticks I will probably get the wood splitter out and split the larger logs so that I can use some of that in the stove.

Seems like a little overkill, but now that I have the wood cookstove up and running, I cannot wait to post and show everyone how it is working.

Here I am adding the two 45 angle pieces to get the stove pipe down to the right spot on the stove.

The big job was cutting the hole in the roof, and installing the stainless steel insulated Class A stove pipe down through the roof, through the attic, down into the ceiling adapter.  I also have an attic insulation shield above the ceiling that keeps the insulation from getting too close to the stove pipe.  The next part was installing the stove pipe from the ceiling down to the stove.

Here I am installing the sheet metal screws to tie all the parts together, to keep them from moving.

I purchased wood stove fiberglass woven gasket material that I fit between the stove and the bottom stove pipe piece, to seal it and to keep it from wiggling back and forth.  I also used some of the gasket material to seal gaps between the sections of stove pipe.

Lighting that first fire.  Most of the smoke went up the chimney.

As you may be aware, when a wood cookstove is restored, it gets painted and then it gets coated with stove blacking to make it look pretty.  That is all very nice, until you go to burn wood in it.  When all that stuff gets hot, real hot, it starts to smoke.  Then the house starts to get smoky, then the smoke detector goes off, and you run around opening the doors and windows, and waving a towel at the smoke detector.  That's how it goes the first time you fire up a wood cookstove.  Happens every time.  Well, this was no exception.  The kitchen got nice and warm at first from the stove, until it started to get smoky, and then we had to open the doors and windows to get the smoke out, and then it got real cool again.

Nice fire in the fire box.  I had to shut off the draft to keep the stove from getting too hot.

Well, as you may guess, you just can't have a nice hot stove and not cook something on it, now can you?  Of course not!

A nice fried egg.  Farm-fresh, just laid the day before.

Of course, you've got to cook that fried egg in a nice cast iron pan, and I had just the right pan to do it, too.  One that has already been properly seasoned over many years of use.  They say that cast iron is the original non-stick cookware.  And, it is true.  That egg slid around in that little frying pan just like it was a brand-new Teflon or "Super Copper" or whatever is the fad now.  I wouldn't want to put one of those pans on this stove, it would probably just melt into a puddle.  One thing I did learn from our last wood stove, is that once the fire is going, everything is hot.  Don't assume that those little silver spiral things will stay cool enough to handle.  Just assume that everything is hot, and you won't get burned any more than necessary.  I wouldn't go so far as to say you won't get burned, because once you start using a wood cookstove, you do get burned at some point.  It just goes with the territory.  But using hot pads and oven mitts every time you go to handle something on the stove goes a long way to minimize the burns.

Well, I do want to wait until I have some photos to share before making a new post.  So, now that I have some new photos, I feel that I have enough to make some new new posts.  First,  I have a new tractor.  Not a new, new tractor, but a new, old tractor.  It is a 1953 Farmall Super H.

Farmall Super H.  I have it parked in my tractor shed.

The reason I bought it is that my other tractor is a B Farmall.  It is a smaller tractor.  It puts out about 10-12 horsepower on a good day.  I have a front end loader on it that I use a lot to move stuff around on the farm.  It is very useful in that way.  The problem is that the front end loader uses the PTO to run the hydraulic pump, so if I need to run any equipment that needs the PTO shaft, I have to take the front end loader off.  That's a lot of work.  The other thing is, the B just doesn't have the horsepower to run a lot of the equipment that I use, like the mower and the hay baler.  So, getting the Super H allows me to leave the front end loader on the B all the time, and I can use the Super H to run the mower and the hay baler and it has more horsepower, about 25-30 horsepower, which is more than enough for what I need.  Fortunately, there's enough room in the tractor shed to park both of them.


This is my Kineo B in its new spot in our kitchen.

Now, on to the next topic, the wood cookstove.  We have the Kineo B installed in our remodeled kitchen.  As you can see, the stovepipe is not yet connected to anything, so we can't burn wood in it, yet.  The weather is getting colder, so we are getting a little anxious to get this all hooked up and ready to use.  Last weekend I was up on the housetop, clunk, clunk, clunk, so to speak, sawing a hole in the roof with my saws-all.  Yes, that made me very nervous.  There is something very wrong about taking a saw and deliberately sawing a hole in the roof of one's house.  Ordinarily, a person works very hard to make sure there aren't any holes in the roof, so to saw a hole on purpose is just very backwards.

Sawing a hole in the roof.  Something very wrong about this.

The next step is to install the roof flashing, and then lower the chimney pipe down into the ceiling adapter.  The problem we ran into was that the clamping band was too large to fit through the flashing, so we ended up having to put the pipe down first, and then put the flashing down over the pipe, and then slip it under the shingles.

Note the shiny double-wall chimney pipe.  We assembled a four-foot piece onto a three-foot piece, then lowered both down through the hole in the roof.

Once we had it all together, we were able to finish caulking all the seams with roofing tar and high-temp silicone.

All assembled.  The spark arresting screen had to be jerry-rigged, as it was too large for the weather cap, but we got it wired on with baling wire, the farmer's friend.

The ceiling adapter is in place.  I know, it is dusty with sheetrock dust, but it will clean up.

I still have one more piece of stove pipe to come in the mail, and we will be ready to put it all together.  I have two 45's that will bring the pipe back a few inches and then two 3-foot sections that will connect the stove pipe to the stove.  I have also ordered some special gasket material to seal the pipe to the stove at the bottom to keep it from leaking any smoke where the stove pipe connects to the stove.

This post is going to be about milling and flour.  It's been a while since the last time I wrote about my flour mill, so I will give a bit of history about my flour mill.  My mill came from a grist mill in southern Missouri that was established sometime in the late 1800's.  It was located on a small river that fed into Pomme de Terre river.  In the 1950's a dam was built and it became Pomme de Terre lake, and that location was flooded and became part of the lake.  The owner of the mill saved the mill parts, and passed them on to his grandson.  The grandson sold the mill to a fellow who was going to make moonshine, but then never quite got around to it, and made the mill available on Craigslist, which is when I bought it, about eight years ago.

This is my Nordyke & Marmon mill, made around 1900.

The case is made of cast iron.  The stones are called French buhr.  That is because they were quarried in France, in a stone quarry near Paris.  It is a volcanic stone, very hard.  It is a porous stone, so it's got lots of little holes in it.  The reason it was so valuable for millstones was because of its hardness.  It came out of the stone quarry in small pieces, so it had to be fitted together like the pieces of a pie, or the pieces of a pizza, and then an iron band was put around the outside to hold the pieces tightly together.

This is not my mill, but another N & M mill stone just like mine.  This is the "runner" stone.  It has to be carefully balanced, as it turns at 1,000 rpm.

You can see from looking at the face of the mill stone that the stone is very porous, not smooth, like limestone would be.  Also, you can see the "grooves" that have been cut into the face of the stone.  That is where the grain gets caught and ground between the two stones.  Both stones are cut the same way, so that when you put the two faces facing each other, the grooves are going opposite directions, kind of like scissors.  The grooves get shallower as they get closer to the outside edge of the stone, so that the flour gets ground finer and finer as it gets closer to the outside of the stone.

This is the bedstone.  Again, this isn't mine, but is just like mine.

By looking closely, you can just make out the grooves on the face of the bedstone.  You can see that they do go in the same direction as the "runner" stone, in the photo, above.  The bedstone is the one that is fixed in position in the front of the mill.  The grain falls from the hopper at the top of  the mill into the "shoe" which shakes by the vibration of the shaft of the mill.  That shakes the grain down into the funnel down through a hole in the center of the bedstone.  An auger on the center of the mill shaft then grabs the grain and pulls it into the middle of the mill.  Grain falls between the stones by gravity and is caught between the grooves of the runner stone, which is turning at about 1,000 rpm, and the bedstone, which is stationary.

The flour is coming out of the chute into the bin.

Once the flour reaches the outside of the stone, there are metal fingers that grab the flour and throw it around to the chute and out the chute into the bin.  The flour is warm, as it gets scrubbed between the grindstones.  You don't want it to get too hot, because that cooks the flour before you use it, and then it's no good for making bread.  Also, you don't want to burn the grindstones, or wear them prematurely.  So you have to check the temperature of the flour as it is coming out of the chute, making sure it is warm, checking to see that it is the correct fineness, but not too hot, and checking to be sure there is no odor of burning grindstones, that is, the smell of hot flint.  That is where the saying comes from "keep your nose to the grindstone."

I run my mill with a 15 hp Farmall tractor.

We take our mill to our friends' farm once a year to do a demonstration of flour milling.  I grind about 50 lb. of wheat into whole wheat flour.  I give most of it away to family and friends who like to use it to make whole wheat bread, and then the rest I use myself for making my own whole wheat bread.  This is the real stuff, whole wheat, not like the stuff you buy in the store.  It's got everything in it, including the wheat germ.  The stuff you buy in the store has the germ taken out because that is oily and it would go rancid sitting on the shelf in the store.  I keep mine in the freezer to keep it from going rancid.  Then I have to warm it up to room temperature before I use it for baking bread.

Oh, no!  Not aquaponics again!  I hate to bore you again with that subject again, but, yes, that's it, all over again.  The continuing saga of aquaponics.  The never-ending (it seems) story. 

Well, at least now it has a gutter to help divert the rain, and a piece of corrugated vinyl to help keep the rain off.

After installing the gutter on the edge of the roof, and the corrugated vinyl to keep the rain off, and adjusting the water flow on the flush tank, I thought I had the whole thing figured out.  Wrong!  Without full water flow the flush tank would not flush!  And, every time the flush tank flushes, the grow beds would get too full of water.  No good.  Even though the grow beds were draining completely when I got them first set up, as time went by, they were draining more and more slowly.  Now, they will not drain quickly enough with the full water flow from the flush tank, so that they were overflowing every time.  Very frustrating.


My only option now is to bypass the flush tank entirely, and just water the grow beds using a timer.  It still works fine, but it's too bad, after going to all that work to get the flush tank put together and getting the thing finally working.  Well, the important part is to keep the fish alive, and to keep the plants properly watered.  Since the green bean seeds still have not started coming up, I decided to re-plant.  I figure with all the flooding and drying out over the last week, they probably died.  So, new green bean seeds last night.

Nope.  Nothing to do with aquaponics this time.  No, this is something totally different.  For those of you who have been following our family lately, this is something we (that is, Brenda and I) have been dreaming about recently.

Yep.  That's right.  A travel trailer.

It's ours.  We got it about 3 weeks ago.  We don't know beans from applesauce about how the thing works, but we are learning.  It's a steep learning curve.  It's 16 feet long.  I know.  We were talking about getting a cute little old antique from the 50's or 60's.  The problem we kept running into was that the ones we could afford were junk.  The ones that were really nice, and were in really nice condition, and useable, were terribly expensive.  This one is nearly brand new.  It's only 3 years old, and the company that owned it hardly used it at all.  The toilet never got used at all.  We got it for half the price of a new one.  You just can't beat that kind of a deal.


It even has a microwave.

We took it in to an RV repair shop here in Springfield to have it checked over, since it hadn't been used for a while, and everything checked out good.  Brenda and I are going to try to take it to the lake over the weekend just to try it out sometime soon.  We are getting some RV books and videos to study to learn about how the thing works.  We need to get a membership in some RV clubs and campground memberships and stuff, so that we know where we can camp out when we travel.  We are thinking about doing some traveling when I retire next year.

The toilet will be quite an adventure the first time we use that.

The table folds up and then it makes up into a full-size bed for Brenda and I.  It has heat and A/C.  It also has a refrigerator and a stove.

It only weighs 2,000 pounds, so it will tow very easily behind the Land Cruiser.  Really, it doesn't weigh any more than the older antique trailers from the 50's and 60's and they didn't have all the nice things in them that this one has.  So, we are very pleased with this.