In an effort to feed the wild 'food friendly' gray kitty who has regularly visited us since April, we have taken to leaving our big cat’s leftovers in a bowl on the front porch. Sometimes we catch a possum or a raccoon cleaning the plate if gray kitty doesn’t swing by for a late supper snack. But last night it seems something went horribly wrong.

At 3:01 am, Cog woke me up. “Honey, wake up. Do you smell that?”

Thankfully I have been fighting off a slight cold which has left me unable to smell. “No,” I replied. I may have made reference to the time and indicated he was plum crazy. Not to be deterred, he attempted to gain my consent to lock the cat door in case Tramp had been sprayed by a skunk.

“Absolutely not!”

By 3:30 am we were fully awake, laughing and joking at the hilarity of the situation with coffee soon to follow, since sleeping was now out of the question. Apparently a skunk had sprayed something in the vicinity of the front door. Cog’s superior smelling snout was thorough enough for both of us as he shared his agony over the torturous odor. I now suspect he may have been a blood hound in a former life.

Sporadic snow squalls have not deterred us from continuing to cut and stack wood. Cog now checks the weather forecast for days when there is no rain or significant wind expected in order to plan his cutting. Unfortunately, the cold does not seem to change the ability of poison ivy vines to make Cog itch, and those vines love the locust trees he is now tackling.

While early snow and sleet has already roared in several times this fall, we have been fortunate enough for sunshine and warmer temps to quickly follow on its heels. After each rapid melt we were able to get back out and continue to salt our stacks with even more wood. We are hopeful we can progress at this rate before a consistent deep freeze sets in so we may conserve on our hot cocoa consumption.

With the late fall weather and shorter daylight hours we are finding more time to be at our desks. Cog is working closely with TIF member Morpheus to coordinate the publishing of his 'Skyception' three part series on TIF. Also in the pipeline is another amazing group of essays by On the Beach to follow up on his 'Antidote' work.

Once Cog is able to purge the quasi-permanent stench of skunk from his olfactory system, I am hopeful he will also finish a handful of his own pieces he has worked on periodically. On occasion I have found if I 'push his buttons' with an outrageously flawed proclamation regarding human behavior, he can hammer out an entire article of rebuttal in a single day. But please don’t tell him I said that. ;-)

The cold weather has emboldened the deer, who we see more frequently now. They seem to sense Cog is not a threat and have allowed him to get quite close for pictures and videos.

As a follow up to my 'Amps Times Volts Equals Watts' article, posting the article on ZeroHedge ended up being quite productive since many people chimed in with technical suggestions and ideas. Several mentioned a hand pump different from the ones we had already investigated that can be installed next to our existing pump and used in times of emergency.

A small 12 or 24 volt DC motor can be added to the pump which is powered by a small solar panel and batteries. Best of all the motor has no electronics in it making it EMP proof. Cog is meeting with the man who installed our current submersible well pump system prior to our purchase of this property for a look inside the well casing. We will know what is feasible in short order. Thanks so much to everyone for your input while we thought through this situation and considered the alternatives.

by Mrs. Cog

Over the past week, as my tennis ball saga continued I learned a number of valuable lessons. If anyone missed my accidental discovery and initial wonderment over black walnuts appearing in our back yard, you can find it here.

First lesson. It hurts to get clunked in the head by green walnut pods free falling from heights of 70 or more feet. I now understand why people wear motorcycle or football helmets to gather them, especially when the nuts are ripe and falling while the wind blows.

Second, the pulp between the outer green husk and the inner hard nut shell is a powerful black dye. If anyone knowledgeable in this area knows how long this will remain on my hands or a substance that will remove it, please contact the webmaster to share. In my defense I did wear nitrile gloves to remove the husks, but every hour to hour and a half I would notice a finger had torn away and exposed my fingertip. It was cute at first; with one discolored index finger I resembled an Iraqi voter. Now all my fingertips are blackened.

Third, the process of “using the whole buffalo” as it applies to black walnuts is extremely time consuming and potentially frustrating if one doesn’t know what to expect beforehand. Working for three whole days in order to end up with 3 ½ five gallon buckets of nuts still in their shells, six 4 oz. jars of black walnut salve and an enormous new pile of organic compost (far from the garden) which will act as an organic herbicide as it degrades, may seem like an outsized commitment. In the end, I found the experience completely worth the time, effort and challenges because I now have three powerful items (healthy nuts, medicinal salve and natural weed killer) which cost me nothing except my time and labor and more self-sufficient confirmation endorphins.

Just for the record, here is what I did. In order to crush the majority of hulls to extract the nuts, I spread some out over a tarp on our gravel driveway and proceeded to run over them repeatedly with our lawn tractor. For some reason Cog found this highly entertaining and took video footage which I promise you will never see.

Next I plopped down on the tarp and swatted at the aggressive bees as I pulled each sticky nut from its hull. As I freed each pulp coated and goopy nut from the hull, I would take a break every 75-100 nuts and pressure wash them in a wooden box with a screen mesh bottom. After getting most of what would detach from the nut shell off, I would spread them on the gravel driveway to dry for several hours and return to the tarp to de-hull the next batch. I did this for two days.

As I was hauling the unused outer portions to a place where they could decompose safely away from other plants they could kill, I was conked in the head with fresh falling tennis balls. After finishing the second day of work, I gathered a five gallon bucket of fresh fallen ones. I smashed each of them once or twice with a hammer, extracted the nut and put the fresh hulls into a kettle.

Once inside I cut many of the freshest green rinds with their pulp into bite sized pieces. I then crushed a small handful at a time into paste using the mortar and pestle. As they turned to mush, I added them to coconut oil I had simmering in a stainless (non-reactive) pot on the stove. The paste and pulp stained everything it touched. I was careful to use disposable craft sticks to stir the concoction and make sure nothing touched the counter-tops.

After the oil and walnut hull paste had simmered gently for more than an hour, I drained it in a fine mesh colander lined with cheesecloth into a glass bowl. It was a dark green-blackish color with a fine sediment settling at the bottom.

I gathered up six 4oz. mason jars and in each I added:

• 2 Tablespoons organic beeswax pellets
• 6 Tablespoons of the black walnut/coconut oil
• ¼ Tablespoon liquid Vitamin E
• 5-6 drops clove essential oil

With two of the small jars, I added an extra Tablespoon of coconut oil to one and two extra to another so I could experiment with the firmness and spread-ability of the final product. I found that a 1:4 or 1:5 ratio of beeswax to oil makes a good consistency.

One by one, I put the small jars with all their ingredients into less than two inches of boiling water in a pot for about two minutes to thoroughly melt the beeswax. I stirred several times while it melted with a wooden craft stick I could throw away when finished. When the jars were finished melting, I placed them on a towel to become cool and firm over several hours.

Does it sound like a lot of work for a few jars of ugly green goopy salve? Because the real work has not yet begun.

Black walnuts, the nut itself, cannot be opened with a nutcracker. There are only two options I have found. One is a hammer which often splatters sharp nut shells in every direction. The other is a mounted vise like one finds in a wood worker's or mechanic’s shop. Once cracked the meat of the nut is not easy to extract.

I have 4-8 weeks before the nuts have dried enough to begin opening. I look forward to spending many hours in Cog’s workshop later this fall, sitting at his vise while he works on various projects. And here I always thought it was Cognitive Dissonance who was the tough nut to crack.

By Mrs. Cog

If you had told me five years ago I would have more fun on top of a wet and foggy mountain than playing in Manhattan I would have said you were nuts. While I realize I am still on a steep learning curve moving from city girl to country gal, I am blown away by how unexpected gifts just fall from the sky....literally.

Late yesterday morning I was pushing the wheelbarrow towards the corner of our property where we dump our non-compost organic piles. It was full of prickly rose bushes clipped for the winter and branches of withered blooms from butterfly bushes that were never deadheaded after their prime. As I approached the opening in the woods where I intended to deposit my cuttings I lost my balance and almost fell down. When I looked to see what I had stepped on it appeared the grass was covered with tennis balls.

Now we’ve been up here on the mountain for about 16 months and I know better then to become excited about unidentified objects because I am usually disappointed. The wild rose bushes I found everywhere ended up being an invasive species that have caused me enough scratches and punctured fingers to boost the band-aid market considerably. The nuts I found on the ground throughout the woods were pig nuts, a type of hickory that are not appetizing. So today I knew better then to get worked up over unexpected tennis balls strewn about.

I was able to smash one open and found it quite goopy with something that resembled a small peach pit inside. I brought it with a few other unharmed tennis balls to the front porch to identify via Google and promptly forgot all about them.

Late this afternoon, after I had grabbed a bite to eat and collapsed into my office chair, I finally thought to ask Google......and Oh My Goodness......to my great surprise I found they are black walnuts!

You may be familiar with the more common English Walnut, often sold in grocery stores in the shell or in pieces for baking. Black Walnuts are different. A cousin of the walnut, they have a much stronger flavor and people seem to either love them or hate them. I am familiar with them only from books and the internet because their medicinal healing powers are off the charts.

Scanning a few webpages I quickly learned black walnuts should be promptly gathered when they fall from the trees before the squirrels can get to them. Also the tennis ball covering contains a sticky dark substance which is a powerful herbicide, killing many plants that would otherwise rob the tree of its nutrients. The black pulp surrounding the walnut shell inside its hull stains clothes and hands alike so thoroughly it was once used as a hair dye.

Bouncing with happiness at my discovery I barged into the garage/workshop where Cog was working. Patiently listening to my nut babbling, he interrupted his task and followed me with my five gallon bucket to the scene of the gathering as we began to collect tennis balls. I was thrilled to fill the bucket ¾ full with our new free medicinal green balls of protein. There were some left at the very top of the 70 ft. tree, but most had fallen to the ground during the recent storms.

Neither of us had noticed any other area on the property strewn with tennis balls, but when we were finished I grabbed an empty bucket and walked across the road to check. I would hate to let something so yummy go to the squirrels if there were more just laying about. And sure enough there were many more. I needed a bigger bucket. Not only did it seem like there were ten times more on the ground at this new location, but they were hidden here and there among the colorful fallen leaves, making nut gathering into something like an Easter egg hunt.

After I had filled my buckets and gone back home twice to empty them Cog again quietly materialized to help. He deadpanned that I was having way too much fun.

With the buckets once again emptied, and with Cog returned to his project, I set out alone to walk down the road a bit just to make sure we didn’t have another unnoticed tree. I stayed near the road and kept my eyes peeled. I discovered a few apple trees I hadn’t noticed before, but no nuts. And then there it was. A single tree, at least 110 feet tall, with all of its tennis balls on the ground. I quickly texted Cog that I had indeed hit the mother load. Within five minutes he appeared with the tractor towing the swivel dump cart behind it.

I then texted the child unit to get into old clothes and hustle down the road to help out the old folks. “You’re doing what?” she asked, noting this was an unscheduled activity. As the light began to fade we filled the cart nearly to the top. I was almost giddy with excitement over my windfall.

“You’re having way too much fun,” Cog reminded me.

For those of you unfamiliar with black walnut trees, they grow mostly in the Eastern US and are not prolific because the wood itself is quite desirable. Also the walnuts are an extremely difficult nut to harvest. First the nut must be removed from the staining, goopy hull they grow in. The easiest way to accomplish this is to run over them with a car, truck or tractor to separate the soft hulls from the shelled nut. This is practical because the shell of the walnut is hard enough to withstand the pressure and isn't damaged in the process. After washing the walnut shells and letting them dry for 2-4 weeks, one needs a vise or a hammer to open each one. Then the meat of the nut is difficult to pry out as the inside has more nodes and walls than the regular English walnut.

But what a delicacy! Without waiting for them to dry, I took a hammer to several and enjoyed them very much. I am looking forward to getting all of them processed for storage. Vacuum sealed or frozen, the nuts should store for up to two years. Black walnut trees only produce every other year, so it’s a good thing we went a bit overboard. This is also why we didn't realize we owned black walnut trees since they did not produce last year, our first autumn on the mountain.  :-)