Make My Horse Life Easier Tip #8

I thought I would do a post on how I use up hay chaff from the loft during the winter rather than letting it accumulate and get moldy.  How often I do this really depends on the hay itself; some hays are more prone to producing chaff when the bales are moved around than others.  In general, I'd say once every six weeks or so I have enough chaff to fill a muck bucket (which, packed, is roughly equivalent to one flake of hay) and make the effort worthwhile.

My barn is a monitor-style, which means it has a two story center section, where the loft is located, and wings on both long sides that contain the stalls.  The sides of the loft are open to the stalls below.  On a barn where the loft floor does not open to the stalls below, this method of mine won't work (although you could open the loft door that goes to the outside and do the hauling up and down portion that way).

First, I rake all the chaff in a pile up in the loft.  I usually do this on a day when I've throw down hay for restocking the feed room.  There is an old metal-tined manure fork (circa 1980s) kept in the loft expressly for this purpose.

Back on the main floor of the barn, I grab a muck bucket (clean, of course), and thread a longe line through both handles, then clip it to itself.

Once that's done, I take the muck bucket (and looped up longe line) to the stall I'm going to put the chaff in, and I toss the longe line up into the loft.

Having done this, I go climb the ladder to the loft, and walk to where the longe line landed.

I use the longe line to haul the muck bucket up to the loft (it's too big to go up the ladder and through the hole in the loft floor where the ladder resides).

Loosening the line by sliding the clip along it, I pull it out of the way so that the opening in the muck bucket is unobstructed.

Then I fill it with hay chaff.  One nicely packed muck bucket of chaff is roughly equivalent to one decent sized flake of hay.  Good to know so you can accordingly reduce what you give that night at feeding time.

I adjust the longe line back over the top of the muck bucket, then using the line, lower in down into the stall below.

Once the muck bucket has reached the stall floor, I climb down the ladder out of the loft, and go dump the bucket in the corner where hay goes at feeding time.

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This system does require a bit of climbing up and down the ladder, depending on how many buckets-worth of chaff is in the loft at the time.  But, I figure it has lots of benefits:

1. Good exercise!
2. Can be done on even a windy day (compared to tossing the chaff out the loft door to the ground below, then raking up and putting in the bucket for carrying to stalls).  Ditto rainy day.  Ditto snowy day.  Ditto day with horrendously muddy ground.
3. The chaff gets fed rather than piled up and allowed to mold for a once a year loft clean out just before putting in the new season's hay harvest.  So, more efficient use of hay/feed.
4. Since there's no mouldering chaff pile, the air quality in the barn is better.

I Just Want It Out of My House

 DH and I have lived at this little place here for not quite 22.5 years.  When we moved in, we had four kids.  At the time, we thought, coming from a house just around 1200 sq ft to this house with two stories and a basement totaling about 2700 sq ft, that we had a lot of stuff. 

I mean, it was six people's worth, right? Our old house had felt like it was bursting at the seams. And while it didn't fill our new house, it fit comfortably, but it still seemed like a lot.

Fast forward through four teenagers who accumulated more stuff, then four 'kids' that moved out and, except for one, moved back in again at least once, each of them bringing more stuff and sometimes more people and those people's stuff.  Not to mention the things DH and I accumulated over time: homesteading things, hobby things, crafting things. . . things we inherited when our grandmothers passed away. . .things for our grandchildren to sit in, eat on,  play with. . . things our own mothers have given to us from their own cleaning outs or helping to distribute usable goods of friends who have passed on from this world.

We did, over the course of 22 years, get rid of stuff we didn't think we needed to hold on to. Things that just didn't fit, or we already owned two of, or, honestly were not our taste. Yet, at this point, in 2026, my house is stuffed.  

Too stuffed.  Smotheringly stuffed.  I Hate It stuffed. Off and on, in the last five years, DH and I have tried to pare down what's here.  Kids who bought their first homes were told "Come get your stuff!" and, they did, for the most part, come look through what was left, take what they wanted, threw away what was unwanted/unneeded and unappealing to a second owner due to age or condition, and said "give away the rest".  

'The rest', is part of the issue here.  By leaving 'the rest', they passed on--to me-- responsibility for locating and transporting to it's proper passing on place.  There's also my own and DH's own stuff that is pass-on-able, that needs the same treatment: where to pass it on to?  How and when to get it there?

Some of it, I used to give away to various charities.  But in the last ten years or so, it seems that charities have gotten pickier about what they will accept.  You'd think a womens shelter would want clothing and bedding and towels. . . Around here, not so much.  They want those things only if brand new, not if used, and even more than brand new they'd rather just have cash.

Same with furniture, household, and children's items.  There are less places around me to give them to compared to a decade (or two) ago.  Yes, there's online give it away options, but I've found that posting things on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace these days is a real pain in the arse.  People want them, yes, but it takes time to weed through the replies, set up a day and time for pick up and then have the person no-show, so on to the next person who showed interest and start the whole process over again.

For big things, like some dressers I got rid of last summer (why have eight??? dressers in a house where only two people live?) I went through that frustrating rigamorole.  But there's such a volume of smaller things that it would be a full time job taking photos of and making postings for items then screening responses and arranging pick up appointments with people.

I just want it out of my house.  I don't want to have to clone myself in order to have time to do all my normal daily tasks plus deal with the rehoming of goods.  Honestly, there's some days I look at the piles and totes and stuffed closets and wish I had lower ethical standards and could just get a dumpster and spend a few hours tossing everything in, then happily wave goodbye when the trash company came and hauled the dumpster away.

But I can't.  Because I'm too frugal, too environmentally conscious, too aware that there are people out there, somewhere, who would love to have this stuff  perhaps even need some of it and can't afford to buy it from the second hand shops (like Goodwill, where we used to donate all our used but still usable clothes and housewares to).

I'm toying with the idea of having a 'free' sale this summer.  Although that's all the work of a garage sale with zero of the profits.  And, living in the boonies, garage sales around this little place here really don't draw a big enough attendance to solve the problem of getting rid of useful items we don't want/need anymore which was the whole reason to have a garage sale in the first place.

Earlier this winter, I did donate a large bag of coats and a second large bag of nice ladies clothing to the local food and clothing bank.  It didn't make a dent in the amount of things still here that would be perfectly useful to someone else.  I have several bags of bedding, towels, and old sweatshirts that animal rescues are happy to have.  Problem is, those animal rescues are all at least a half-hour drive from here, in directions that neither DH nor I have a reason to go in hardly ever.  And that's the moral dilemma again:

Trash?  It would be so much easier time-wise and in cost (gas, wear and tear on the vehicle used).  We hardly ever even half-fill our trash bin that gets picked up weekly, I could, over time throw away all these things without it costing more for trash removal.  But I know every item is a useful thing, and doesn't belong in a landfill yet.  Oh, the guilt of the thought of throwing it away rather than taking an hour or more of time, plus making an appointment for a specific day and time (and arranging my schedule around it) to drive it to a place that would make use of it.

Donate?  Where?  And when will I be in that area without a special trip and several hours devoted to just that?  This right here is the main reason I still have so much stuff that just needs to get out of my house.

I just want it out.

A Few of My Favorite Things

 Flannel sheets. Oh so cozy!

Sunshiny days in the winter just make me want to be outside all day!

Extended child's pose in yoga and corpse pose in yoga especially after a good flow workout.  Really, I love yoga in general for keeping limber.

Thunderstorms.  In an alternate universe I can totally see myself as a career storm chaser.

Rainbows after thunderstorms

Warm cookies fresh from the oven.  Ditto warm fresh bread.

The 2025 Vintage Wine

 I don't remember if I actually did a post last fall about DH starting a batch of wine from our Concord grapes.  I suspect I had planned to, and took some pictures intending to, but never got around to actually doing so.  Anyhow. . . 

We had a good crop of grapes last September.  DS2 came and picked almost two bushel so that he could make some wine.  And then DH and I picked another bushel-ish a week or so later (it was a busy time) when the grapes were almost to the overripe stage because after DS2 started his wine, DH decided he wanted to make some afterall.

For the first couple of weeks, I took a picture of the carboy the wine was fermenting in almost daily--I told you I had intended to make a blog post about it.  My thought was to capture the day to day little changes in color, clarity and the process the grape must goes through on the way to becoming a ready to drink wine (which takes months).  And then came deer hunting season and the holiday season and the winter weather of January. . .

day 1

day 2

day 3

day 5?

day 8?

day 10ish

two weeks?

All these months, the carboy sat on the kitchen counter in the same spot DH had set it back in September.  He never did move it down to the basement so it could continue the process in darkness, which is highly recommended.  Nope, it sat on the counter exposed to sunlight and fluctuating temperatures.  For an engineer and a (home) brewer, sometimes his lack of adherence to proper lab procedure gives me fits.  But, really, wine is a pretty easy thing to make; it's hard to ruin it.  You either get wine, good wine, or great wine; you have to be pretty neglectful of cleanliness to get bad wine.  This was clean, just not environmentally controlled.

This weekend he finally got around to racking it from the carboy (which is usually done after the first month, to get the wine out of the sediment for better clarity and flavor).  He was going to do it near the end of January, but couldn't find the tubing that fits onto his racking cane.  Then, he found the tubing, but it was pretty gross looking (old, probably not cleaned out the best last time it was used) and he threw it into the trash.  Then he had a hard time finding tubing locally in the size he needed.  But now he finally had new clean tubing of the right size, so the wine was removed from the carboy to the bottling bucket.  

And from there he put it directly into wine bottles and corked them.  Now the wine has been moved to the basement, where it's dark and the temperature doesn't fluctuate with how sunny the day is.

carboy containing only sediment-y dregs of wine

a crateful of wine

There wasn't quite enough wine to fill the final bottle, so that got poured into a couple of juice glasses for sampling. 

On first taste, it had a sorta tangy overtone that went away once you swallowed.  But once the wine had been allowed to sit and 'breathe' for a few minutes, that weird tang had gone.  It's not the bestest wine ever, but certainly not bad.  I will say it has a totally different body and flavor compared to DH's first batch of  wine from our grapes in 2023.

My Cookie Challenge

 In January I decided to change up my cookie baking a bit for 2026.  Cookies are something I make fairly often, as in several times a month, with chocolate chip being the ones I make time and time and time again.  There are a few other flavors thrown in on occasion: sugar, molasses, no-bake, white chocolate macadamia nut, oatmeal butterscotch. . . but far and away chocolate chip is the auto-pilot cookie when I reach for the mixing bowl with the intent of baking cookies.

What I challenged myself to is to make lots of different kinds of cookies this year.  No one recipe back to back, and no chocolate chip cookies twice in the same month, maybe not even in the same season.

So far, I have made cookies five times in 2026 and I have only (just this week!) made chocolate chip once.  Yay for diversity!

Despite the non-chocolate chip cookie pictures in this post, which I dug up from my files, I have made none of those cookies yet this year.  What I have made are

• molasses
• walnut/pecan chocolate chunk (used both walnuts and pecans because I was short on walnuts)
• oatmeal
• "Ritz" (Ritz crackers sandwiched with peanut butter and dipped in melted chocolate then allowed to cool)
• chocolate chip

There are lots and lots of cookie recipes out there.  So why not explore them and have a whole year of different kinds of cookies?

The Warmest Day Yet

 Yesterday was the warmest day we've had so far this year.  The thermometer on the deck at this little place here hit 64 degrees in the mid-afternoon.  I actually went out and did chores in just a sweatshirt, no coat, not even a jacket! A novelty for February in Michigan.

The vast majority of our snow has melted away and the ground is, for the most part, thawed.  The heavy traffic areas around the barn and pastures feature inches deep mud--oh joy!

The Poetess had the urge to run and play when I turned the horses out in the morning; she ran laps, trying and trying her best to get the other horses to race with her to no luck.  The LBM and Tubbs were both more interested in checking to see if any tiny blades of grass might be growing where snow was the day before than in running.  Crockett would oblige Poetess by rearing up every time she came running up to the fence line where he stood but he wouldn't do more than trot a few steps before coming to a halt again.  He's in his mid-20s, which is rather elderly for a horse, so I don't blame him for not feeling like zooming around.

Of course they all had to have a good roll in the mud during the course of the day and came in that night varying shades of dun rather than three blacks and a bay.

I took advantage of the sunshine and warmth of the afternoon to give water buckets a good scrubbing.  It was nice to be cleaning them outside without freezing my bare hands in the water while doing so.  All winter bucket scrubbing has either happened in the tack room sink where rinsing is difficult without spraying water around the room, or outside with absolutely freezing hands and still trying not to let water go wild; especially where it might freeze and create ice in a walkway.

By the horses' dinner time the 'high' heat of the day had brewed up a thunderstorm and they were more than happy to meet me at the pasture gates to come in before the rumbling thunder actually brought rain to us.

Shortly after I had them all tucked into their stalls for the night, the rain did get to this little place here.  I made it into the house before it got heavy and the hail started pelting down.  We had pea- to dime-sized hail for about 10 minutes straight.

But even while it was still hailing the sun was coming back out to the West, which meant we got treated to a nice rainbow in the East.

It was a good, and not too windy, first thunderstorm of the year.

Nothing Says I Love You Like. . .

. . . Spending several hours on Valentine's Day working in the woods together.

At least, at this little place here it says "I Love You."  Spending a warm sunny winter afternoon cutting up blow downs for future firewood is about as frugal and loving as you can get.  LOL.

A nice maple tree, lying on the ground

That nice maple tree, cut into 8' lengths and stacked on the tractor forks.

After taking the logs from that maple tree up to the wood boiler area, we returned to the woods and cut up several more 'small' (ie. skinny-ish) trees to make a second load of logs.  Some I loaded, others DH had to carry from where they were cut to the tractor to put on the forks.

He's not just good looking, he's strong!

(No picture of me, but I can carry logs about 2/3 that diameter--note the ones all ready on the forks.  I'm strong too!)

Another tree we tackled together was a huge beech that came down in the big storm we had at the end of March last year.  (You can read about house/outbuilding damage here.)  The busted off stump is about as tall as I am.  Unlike me, it was quite rotten inside. 

It is also quite big around; neither DH nor I could get our arms around it.  Maybe if we'd tried joining our hands together we could have spanned it with our arms.  Maybe.

The stump end of that big old beech tree.

If you look close to the left side you'll see a bit of burgundy. That's DH in a t-shirt about 3/4 of the way to the top of that beech tree.  It was huge in life.  In death it will be several weeks' worth of firewood.

That one was too big to cut into logs and put on the forks.  Instead, DH cut each chunk into firewood lengths and we stacked them into a couple of piles right there in the woods.  They'll age out there for about a year before being hauled in and split to use in the 2027/28 heating season.

We didn't just work all of Valentine's Day.  Well, actually, we did, because cooking counts as work in my book (it's a daily chore so that's work, right?  Not like going out to eat and being served. . . )  For dinner I made a big salad and baked potatoes while DH grilled a big ribeye steak (from the 1/4 beef we bought last fall).  We had ice cream for dessert.