Category: DIY

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Goodbye Orange Extension Cord of Doom

This month we tackled an important infrastructure upgrade for both the house and the shop. I installed a new electrical sub panel along with a generator interlock breaker to give us safer and more reliable power across the property.

The generator interlock gives us the ability to run the entire house on generator power when needed. We brought several generators with us from Florida and used them regularly during hurricane season. Having that same backup capability here in Tennessee gives us peace of mind. If the power goes out, we can still keep the essentials running and stay comfortable while we wait for service to be restored.

The new sub panel is dedicated to the shop. Until now, the shop had been powered by a long extension cord run from the house. It worked, but it was far from ideal and definitely not how things should be long term. With the sub panel in place, the shop now has proper, stable power with plenty of capacity for tools and future projects.

It feels good to replace temporary solutions with permanent ones. These upgrades may not be exciting to look at, but they make daily work safer, smoother, and more reliable. Little by little, the property is becoming more functional and better equipped for the kind of work we plan to do here.

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Protecting the orchard

It did not take long for us to learn that we are not the only ones excited about our new orchard. As the weeks passed, we started to notice signs that the deer had discovered the young fruit trees. A few nibbled leaves here and there quickly turned into a clear pattern of nightly visits.

After all the work that went into planting those trees in July, we knew we had to act fast. So this month we installed electric fencing around the entire orchard to give it the protection it needs to get established.

The setup was a learning process, from laying out the posts to setting the proper height and making sure the charger was strong enough to do the job. Once everything was in place, it finally felt like the trees had a fighting chance.

The goal is simple. Give the orchard time to grow without constant pressure from wildlife. The deer will always be part of this land, and we respect that. But for now, the trees need a little help if they are going to survive and thrive.

With the fence up and running, we feel much better about the future of the orchard. It is one more small step toward protecting what we are building here.

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It’s freezing in here!

Over the last several months, we’ve been working on a major project around the farm. We drove down to Fort Myers and picked up a 24′ trailer from an ice truck.

We removed the existing freezer unit from it since we didn’t know how old it was and I wasn’t comfortable trusting it with thousands of dollars of meat.

I split the area into two sections: a freezer section and a cooler section. I then installed a 24,000BTU window unit and a Cool Bot in the front section that will act as a cooler. Using the Cool Bot, the A/C unit is able to achieve around 34 degree temperatures.

Once the freezer equipment was installed by Ian at HVAC Comfort Solutions, LLC, we got to work filling up the freezer right away.

The cooler is fantastic to hang and age the meat and to keep it nice and firm while butchering it into smaller pieces. We’re super excited for this new addition to the farm!

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We built a smokehouse

We’ve wanted to smoke our own meats for quite some time, so after numerous hours watching YouTube videos and looking at other peoples’ designs, we decided to take the plunge and build a cold smoker smokehouse. It’s based off the design from Deep South Homestead’s videos and has worked great so far. We can’t wait to smoke more bacon and sausage.

We used tongue and groove cedar for the smoker box and constructed an offset firebox so that the internal temperature wouldn’t get too hot for cold smoking. It’s topped off with a metal roof (leftovers from another project around the farm).