Stairway to...Heaven?

   Well, just a quick mushroom note...we found another 2 1/2 pounds of half-free morels on Tuesday. Yippee! (Sorry Cindy!) We are going looking again later on. We did end up selling the three pounds of the half-free to Thad at Bacaro restaurant in Champaign (eat there and taste them!) and keeping the blondes (which we promptly devoured). I also found out that what we call a "black" morel might really be a dark-morph blonde one. Interesting tidbit.
   We are also continuing to work on projects. Here is the latest...a stairway in the small barn.

   This is the small barn. Longer ago in the farm's history it was a small milking barn. The cows were brought into stalls and milked in here. Then the milk was taken to another little building for separation and cold storage. This barn was fixed up, thanks to mom, by Jim Yoder a few years ago. It was missing the east side, on the left in the pic, and leaning pretty precariously. He did a great job with it, new roof and everything.
   The little white door you can see in the picture is the mill room door. We made the mill room a while back and it has washable walls, ceiling and floor. We mill all our flours and corn meal in there. But this is the area beside the mill room...

   We want to make this area, where the work bench is, into a veggie wash room. That way we can bring the veggies in the door where Marty is standing (on the right), to the washing contraption (still need to buy it), and run it thru. The water would drain out the old dairy floor drain out the wall to the field. To the left of the post we will build a walk in cooler. We can wash the veggies and pop them right into this cooler. It won't have to be set as cold as our other walk-in so we can store root crops over winter for seed the next year.
   But, here is Will working on the stairs...

   The upstairs, which was the old hay mow, is huge. It is all open with a very large (5' or so tall) window on the south. Gets great light! The floor is a mess and we are careful not to fall thru. But, we store stuff up there for our operation. Boxes, water jugs to put over plants, bread trays that hold squash for drying for saving seed, garlic drying area, etc. is all up there. Unfortunately we had to always climb an old ladder on the wall and hand stuff up to each other. Now...

   wha-la! We can just traipse on up there with our squash or whatever! Cool, eh? It is super great! Makes me sooo excited. I just go up and down, up and down, up and down, to get the feel of how easy it is now. Heavenly! Someday I dream of converting the hay mow to hold my loom and then have art classes on weaving, spinning, etc. ah! dreams...so many! Maybe someday!!
   Next project? We'll put a sliding door on the side wall across from this staircase. The sliding door will block off the area where we back the grain wagon in when we unload it. I'll fix the cement floor in this area and we will have a nicer area for storing our grains before milling them. We'll also begin to work on framing in the new cooler space. Keep up to date on our progress by checking back!