The Neverending Summer

It's October 15th, and my son is 6 months old! He is now sitting up on his own, but no crawling or rolling yet. Not that I'm upset, the sooner he crawls, the sooner I have to clear out EVERYTHING in reach before it becomes food!

I've been busy, doing exactly those things that I said I would do all year, and thankfully, the weather has been absolutely perfect! I rented the mini-excavator and dug the water tank holes (more on that later) and dug a large rectangular greenhouse pit, which I will be covering with plastic.

GARDEN UPDATE:
It's mid October, which is looooong past normal gardening time, but there are still some plants that are alive in the garden. All of the flowers are still alive, the sunflowers are slowly maturing, and if I had actually planted a second crop of peas, they would have produced a good crop at the end of September. Next year, I will do that. I'm not used to double cropping here in the frozen North!
Carrots are a good double cropping thing too, and I've already got my future huge garden plot mapped out, it just needs the weeds tilled under!

WATER
As I mentioned before, the real purpose for renting the excavator was to bury my water tanks, so I dug a huge hole for that purpose. Turns out it wasn't huge enough, and only one tank will fit, and that's after I got into the hole and hacked it out with a pick and shovel.
At first I pushed the empty tank into the hole, realized it didn't fit, and panicked when I saw that it needed to come back out. This is a 1250 gallon tank, 7 feet in diameter. Prolly 250 lbs. I pulled it out with the truck, by looping a rope through the top and bottom.
The bottom of the hole has accumulated about 1 foot of groundwater, which was surprising to me. I didn't realize our water table was so high! It made working in the hold a lot more difficult, until I tossed a couple of sturdy pallets down there. The tank itself will probably be resting on top of these after all is said and done.

RENEWABLE ENERGY
I finally got my new turbine blades! Today is installation day for the newly upgraded wind turbine, and not a moment too soon. The automn wind is picking up, which means $3-6 in free electric on days where the wind exeeds 20 kph, which is about every third day so far. Less windy days might produce about $1.50 in power, not a lot, but that's every single day!
I have been window shopping solar panels in the US, and on the site
www.sunelec.com, full panels can be had for $1.35/watt USD. That's a substantial discount off our local prices here, and with the US dollar at parity with our dollar, I will be able to get many panels for just a few thousand dollars.
I need about 1000 watts worth, which in the winter will admittedly only produce about half our needs, but in summer will be more than enough. Eventually, I want about 2500 watts, and an additional 8 batteries to even out the power consumption. My goal is to reduce my generator runtime to less than 50 hrs per month in the winter months, and nothing in the summer.

OTHER BRIC-A-BRAC
I still need to work on the insulation under the house, fix the storm doors, seal some of our windows, put an outside air intake on the woodstove, and a few dozen other smaller projects. Not like last year at this time, where every waking hour was spent working on the ill-fated workshop, which I have been cannibalizing for lumber, btw.
Oh, and finish off the perimeter fence. That's kind of important too.

As you can see, a homesteader's work is never done! Sometimes, it stays half done for a while.
I'll post pics of the water, when I've got it completed.