Saturday, September 13, 2014

Movement Towards Higher Energy Efficiency

We built our off-grid homestead and beeswax candle workshop, powered by the sun, over a year ago
We have in floor heating and heat with an outdoor wood boiler.

We have now combined our solar energy and wood-powered in-floor heating, also powered by the sun, to create an even more efficient beeswax melting tank system.


We've taken another step for energy efficiency and have just modified our wax tanks to be even more efficient with our solar energy system. They will continue to run on solar energy and will also be boosted by our in-floor heating system that is heated by our outdoor wood furnace, also, ultimately powered by solar energy. This means less use of our battery back ups when the sun decides to stay behind the clouds and the horizon for longer periods of time between about October and February. We're heating the house and workshop anyway so it makes sense to share that heat with the wax tanks.

If you ever find yourselves up in our neck of the woods, please give us a call to schedule a tour of our tiny solar-powered workshop in the woods! We'd love to see you. And please let us know when we can send out your next order of our Scent from Nature; 100% Pure Beeswax Candles. We sell online!



Saturday, September 6, 2014

North Woods Garden Update: Late Summer

The straw bale garden is flourishing!
One of our pure beeswax 4" pillars rests nicely in the fast growing green bean plants



Our first broccoli!

We had our first green bean harvest yesterday
One of our pure beeswax candles next to our one and only melon to show its size

One melon. Now if I could only remember what kind it is and if I can only keep it alive now that the temperatures are beginning to dip.

Our cherry tomatoes are beginning to ripen!

The other tomato varieties are getting bigger. Now all we  need is for them to ripen.

The carrots would have appreciated being in the straw bales versus the shallow stair step containers

The zucchini has been the most productive of the plants. And yes, you can grow the strangest things in these straw bales. Contact me and I'll send you some Scent from Nature; 100% Pure Beeswax Candles "seed". ;o)
All in all, the straw bales won the north woods garden test. I like the look of the stair step container but it didn't do as well. I will add more drainage to the containers next year and see how they do. I plan to triple the size of the straw bale garden.