State of Maine agricultural fairs, there are twenty five last count that start the end of June and run until October.
The number of local community members working year round on Maine fairs is staggering. Pitch in, find areas you can add something to is a common pursuit of many small town local Maine community members. Here is more on Maine state fairs. And for dates and times of fairs around Maine, visit this schedule link.
Maine Four Season Recreation. See Maine On An ATV ITS Trail Ride, On A Snow Sled, Hoofing And Hiking It.
Why are Maine state agricultural fairs so much fun?
Because they are family orient, there is something for everyone. From 4H exhibits from photography to cooking and the ability to walk through the stables to visit with goats, chickens, cows, and to attend horse shows, truck and tractor pulls, the list of why fairs in Maine are attractive is a long one. I relish a foot long Italian sausage with the fried green and red peppers, the grilled onions in a fresh bread roll. Walking through the Midway if the state fair is lucky enough to have rides and game exhibits, you feel like a kid again. And you realize how important, how special this fair is when you consider the rides through a pair of eight, ten, twelve year old eyes. The Ferris wheel to look over all that
Midnight Madness In Houlton Maine, Aroostook County Seat Or Shiretown.
gets set up quickly by the carnies and the locals who join forces for a state fair.
Once fireworks were legalized in Maine, it seems the ground and sky shows took on a new level of excitement.
More competition, more options all out in the open for the consumer and communities alike. The fireworks cost came down as the legality improved to remove the black market sales and to regulate the sky shows and ground displays for safety sake. What it is about a state fair that makes you come back year after year? Proud to be an American and 4th of July displays hit a patriotic nerve? Or hands on displays of simple living or reminders of why you live in Maine rubbing shoulders with your fellow man part of it?
Food, fun, fair rides, games, horse shows, farm animal and tractor exhibits all add to living in Maine.
Animals, People Of Maine Get Along Just Fine. Because It’s Not Crowded. We Need Each Other.
The Maine state fairs often have a theme and beside local and national music acts, the state of Maine gets in on the action. Take for example the Common Ground Fair… there are hands on demonstrations for living off the land. Better living with farm to the table food that you know was never gassed or sprayed with who knows what to push production. New ways to live better, healthier, to squeeze more joy, to increase awareness of improved living options.
The Common Ground Fair is in September in Maine. You are what you eat, your lifestyle is up to you. Your kids are watching and learning from the example you set for them to 5, 6, 7, 8. Plus you always get a neat t-shirt, something in the take away from a state of Maine fair experience stays with you.
Or you work a component of it to make the experience extra special for others. Holding down a tent location or working behind the scenes in a state of Maine agricultural fair exhibit. It is all about others and sharing what you and I have learned. Comparing notes, helping improve others life by sharing, caring and making an effort for your fellow man. That’s what it’s all about. Hey. (Said, sand, recited to the tune of Hokey Pokie.)
Would You Take Driver’s Education From This Demolition Derby Driver?
Antique car shows, everything from souped up lawnmowers to race to demolition derby crash up car competitions. Maine state fairs offer more than beano or bingo, fair food vendors and carnival rides. Buying a raffle ticket on a worthwhile local cause. Little Miss or Mr Fire Cracker competitions. Local talent, there is lots in a Maine small community.
If a small Maine town is still able to be a state fair venue, it is a sign of strong local volunteers that work tirelessly year after year to sustain and improve the event.
Liability insurance if a big expense. We live in a time where some people sue for a living, for revenge and there are fewer and fewer honest mistakes or good Samaritan acts.
The local Maine weather can wreak havoc with the best laid plans on the fair brochure line up. Lots of planning, plenty of seed money goes into the line items for a state of Maine fair venue schedule.
State fairs of Maine, is it the dough boys with white confectionery sugar or cinnamon dusting?
The Carnival Food, Fun, Games, Rides. Did You Get Your Fill This 4th Of July In Maine?
Is the horse show, the animal exhibits, the fireworks, the carnival midway rides and games that make you return to see what you are missing? Our local Rotary Club used to man the gates into the state fair. You did your shift, met lots of local folks coming through the gates and it was like old home week with your relatives that were in the mix of people heading in to the state fair. Here is a video of one local Maine state fairs, usually the first on the list. The eager beaver in Maine in my home town of Houlton, the oldest town in Aroostook County.
I am spoiled because I live in Maine. I am a local, a native and have access to all the wonder that happens year round, season after season up here in the northern most New England state wedged up against Atlantic Canada and Quebec. This summer and early fall I pledge to visit some of the state fairs in Maine I have missed and to report back to the readership. To post a blog post or video clip and some imagery to showcase what you are missing faithful Me In Maine blog post readers. To display what happens at each of the unique state fairs, the agricultural presentations that dot the state of Maine. That put each vibrant community and area of one of the sixteen counties of Maine on the map. Maine is the way life should be.
Maine homes are more often than not surrounded by big lawns
If you have company from across the pond, this fact is one of the first observations someone from say London or Paris noticed. Back where they hail from, something that big for a wrapper of land surrounding a home is tilled up and farmed. Something besides blades of grass kept crew cut short is what the generous helpings of land are used for… it is tilled or something with four legs grazes on the grass, clover, whatever else good looks good to eat if you are a farm animal.
Maine Lawns Are Bigger Than Most. Cats Enjoy The Vegetation Around The Lawns To Hide Out.
What is the reason for such large lawns? Maybe it is because not so long ago, everyone lived on small family farms in Maine. We all farmed and mowing large lawns now gives us a feeling of haying once a week spring, summer, fall. Now that many of us chase the dollar working for someone else 9-5.
The rolling lawn in front, to the sides and out back of a New England farm house is pretty when it is kept free of burdocks, red brackle and small poplars that take hold quickly. Even fiddle heads show up around houses and the more moist areas around a property in Maine. If you don’t keep the land mowed weekly or at least bush hogged once a year or the land hayed.
Some of my best thinking is done riding the John Deere or Cub Cadet International garden tractor with the large mowing deck.
You can see what you did when you tuck the mower away in the barn or garage and there is a sense of accomplishment, of property pride. You notice birds in the trees, you check of the home and the countryside as you gawk around mowing. Because it is not a hard, mind bending exercise.
If No Lawn Grass, Something Other Than Brush, Burdochs Needs To Be Growing In Open Space In Maine. Like Lupines. A Pretty Weed.
Fresh mowed lawns. It is relaxing to mow, to see the rows in the sequence and all of us in Maine were taught by expert lawnmowers. It was not racing around in circles but trimmed around the trees with a hand mower or weed wacker combined with the power mower exercise. It was done right or time to do it over.
Big lawns, how large should you mow? Some folks check the watch, mow for an hour, give or take depending on how big a time pledge they want to put to keeping the grass trimmed. And when they get to that pre-determined time, that’s it. Shut off the mower, pull up the deck and be line back to the storage area until next week. Or earlier if sunshine, plenty of rain means you need to repeat the lawn mowing more than once some weeks.
Lawn mowing is contagious. You like to get the property mowed before the weekend, prior to long holiday spans. It is something your parents instilled in you as a young grass chopper in Maine.
Mowing by hand is great exercise.
Victorians In Maine Have Big Lawns Wrapped Around Them. Landscaped Grounds Add Sparkle To The Big Homes.
Up and down hill slopes. Back and forth, alternating the angles to make it new and different for the travel pattern. Instead of a treadmill at the gym, just pull the cord of a hand pushed, not self propelled model and see the wright drip off slow by sure. Working around the weather makes mowing hard when three days of rain elevated the blades longer than you would like. The clubs of dead grass clippings clog a mower, make it work Cherry, harder and look like yard hair balls.
Mainers love to mow lawns.
I have had properties for sale where sellers are out late at night applying weed and feed and in one big private competition to make sure their landscape is picture perfect. They act like it just happens on its own but deep down inside are pretty competitive with neighbors around the hood where they hang their hat.
You can use gang reel mowers behind a tractor or four wheeler to mowing large level to rolling stretches of green grass. If not grass, apple orchards are planted, wild flowers are encouraged with meadow in a can seeds broadcasts. Planting something for flowers or vegetables is always a personal choice for what grows around a home in Maine. Ornamental and fruit trees help showcase a property. We are brought up in Maine that is 91% forestested to plant trees, not cut and harvest them only. Being a good steward of Maine trees means thin them out, don’t clear cut or leave nothing to grow when the over story is removed. Hardwood ridges, so many trees to study and enjoy hiking in Maine.
Cherry, apple trees, raspberry bushes. Landscaping your lot in Maine is a delicate but rewarding process to plan out what goes and grows here or there. The attraction of birds, the sound of wind in the pine or fir needles vibrating with a low hum. Trees know the meaning of patience, time. Maples grow fast but can decay later on. I have a bunch of maples along a circular driveway that are ailing.
Cedar hedges look scrawny when you pull them out of the swamp and place the roots in burlap bags for transport and to be kept moist. But other than trimming, they are way way better than erecting large expensive fences that heave with the frost and need paint or stain or other maintenance. White birch trees are pretty and frail. Yellow birches are better for fire wood believe it or not. Beech, ash, not so many oak trees though all round out the choices you or Mother Nature will supply on open Maine land. Don’t forget the patch of rhubarb, high bush blueberries, elderberries, black berries, and herb garden to add to your flower beds, vegetable gardens on our patch of Maine dirt to enjoy.
Today one American farmer feeds 165 people. Our country has a cheap food policy and the grower, whoever raises your food gets about 16 cents from every dollar spent on whatever a farm produces. Roughly 2% of our national population are farmers, ranchers. Like many things, bigger happened to squeeze out the family farm way of life.
Maine Is Real, Peaceful, Not Crowded. One Of The Lowest Crime States.
Consolidation, volume production because the food prices do not keep pace with inflation, and the higher cost of farming made the lifestyle not so economically attractive. Most would agree the work ethic learned on a farm is a valuable lesson. But few are so positive that breaking even is considered a good year and just being excited to get to farm again come spring just won’t cut it.
So if eight out of ten people live in the city, if small rural populations are shrinking, what causes the longing for living off grid, for starting a small farm?
Ask yourself if you live in an urban center what you don’t like about your lifestyle. Too much commuting or time wasted trying to get from “A” to “B”. Fear of personal safety because the nightly news has some pretty gruesome stuff flashed before the audience tuning in to learn “that’s the way it is” for another day. Noise, high cost of housing, fast paced living that robs personal satisfaction and just lacking the freedom to be your own boss.
But being a farmer, living off the land is no picnic.
Work around the clock, hard labor and set backs due to the weather, poor markets or your own personal health. Physical labor helps you get in shape, sleep better nights when you shut off the lamp on the nightstand. But worry about staying on that family farm can cause nightmares. Farming can be a lot like gambling when you blow on the dice and hope for snake eyes or whatever is needed to come out on top to win the wager. More on living off grid.
Day Is Done, Cue The Stars, Crickets, Mister Moon.
Living off grid… is power that expensive or is the idea of not being plugged into a utility for juice part of the independence? Is burning a renewable natural resource like wood from your own land, cut and gathered and split, stacked to heat your home part of the attraction? To get away on dependency on foreign oil or natural gas? We’ve blogged about heating your Maine home with wood before and know the merits of being a son of a birch. Could you build your own cabin to live off the land?
Is living off grid a bit of a knee jerk over reaction to the pressure cooker of city living?
Is the romance of working the land, building your own home, the out buildings to go around the farmstead like a drug? Something to dream about to help fulfill the empty spot in a life that is lived but not rich or rewarding or natural. Being resourceful, learning new skills that have been untapped because you specialize in one and only one thing. And hire out pretty much everything else that depends on the credit card or write a check.
Simpler living means removing the money needed to keep it complicated. When it is a personal choice to step back, buy the Maine land and plan you cutting ties with the city to make the leap to work the dirt is not as scary because it is self inflicted. When the Great Depression caused drought, a dust bowl where nothing grew and the locals packed up to move away with little hope in their sails, the need to create a living besides farming meant industrial jobs, learning a trade besides the managing acreage.
How much land do you need to start a Maine farm?
Once fertile acre of Caribou loan will grow 32,000 pounds of food. That’s a square just shy of 208′ x 208′ and Maine land is cheap. Small rural Maine is the 4th lowest for crime statistics. Your fun is low or no cost when the outdoors with fresh air, clean water and missing the wall to wall sea of unknown faces city dwellers maneuver around daily. Would it be a shock to the system? Do you easily make the transition to small country living without much thought when it is your kids welfare that gets considered as the most important goal in your life? What’s important does change when you start a family and start to study where you can do it best for your children.
What’s Brown And White And Surrounded By Green? You See Lots Of These Among Maine Farmscapes. Start Of Living Off Grid, Starting A Farmstead?
New solar lightning, advances in batteries, LED lighting that uses less energy make living off grid more feasible. Wind generators have popped up around the landscape even here in small rural Maine. By living off grid do you mean unplowed roads and stuck way up in the woods far from town? Is there a happy medium of being on a dead end road not so far from town conveniences without all the added work of making a road, maintaining it by yourself. Neighbors are not bad but keeping them at a distance helps the fondness. Don’t fence me in was not just a Western notion. Too many people too tightly jammed together is a recipe for tension, emotions to boil over and it is all due to your personal space being invaded. Feeling you have no space of your own if you share it with every Tom, Dick and Harry.
Feeding yourself first and just keep your expenses low to the ground. Life is more enjoyable when you are not chasing the dollar to keep the wolf from your door. Feeling satisfied with personal success raising farm field to family table is also healthy for your body. In a day and age when cancer and other diseases are prevalent, you have to wonder about the toll stress, what we eat that should not be put down the gullet causes to the body we were given to care for the best we can. Do you feel you treat yourself the healthiest way possible? Or is it give me something to forget how unhappy or empty you are? That’s medicate the symptoms but not tackling the root of the problem.
Fixing up old ME farmhouses and all the buildings around the homestead.
Country living housing projects require plenty of skill, lots of home work study and boat loads of patience. Building construction on older agricultural properties are definitely labors of love. It is best if you the home owner can tackle as much of the rehab work yourself to save money and for the joy of a real estate fixer upper restoration project.
Fresh Hot Coffee, Whatever Meal Tastes Improve After Maine Farm Chores Are Done.
The older homes that were once the cornerstone of vibrant small Maine farm families present a challenge though from the two extremes.
The never had any repair places are original. But the damage caused from lack of maintenance means the repairs are more than just addressing the surface of what you can see on the inside. Deep down inside the bones of a Maine farmhouse you will can be forced to replace or repair the sills, the floor stringers, any dry rot that is hidden until you start swinging a crowbar.
The replacement materials in your re-construction of the country home that has fallen from grace sometimes means making the woodwork or hardware supporting it by hand. Because you can not just trot into a big box building supply outlet to move it from a shelf aisle into your shopping cart. Often finding another farmstead that is being torn down is a source for what you need on the construction project. Re-purposing from a salvage pile of another deceased farm home dwelling with the property owner’s permission to pick through the rubble. Or locating someone that did save the yesteryear materials that were once part of an older farmhouse that is no longer standing straight and sound. Who piled them up to store under cover for their own re-building project that lost steam or they simply had more than their needed and now want to gladly free up the storage space for other trinkets.
Referring to the historical building notes on the New England, whatever style homestead is part of learning curve in the housing restoration maneuver.
To determine what exactly is needed once the reconstruction project gets underway in good shape. Study of floor-plans, the cut away more detailed diagrams, watching videos on the repair of vintage older housing. Talking to the old time now retired tradesman that all add up to combine and help guide the rehabilitation efforts. All are essential in combination for the know how needed to tackle the many loose ends the old farmhouse can present. It is delicate finish work in the hammer and nail but also to bring the major operating systems of the country home into present day.
Coffee Early In The Morning The Old Fashion Way! Get To Maine, Relax, Breathe.
The home in rural Maine that has gone through many owners adding their own creative talents to the Walton’s type housing is in some ways even harder to bring back into line. The past owners did not work together toward the same goal. Instead of just a few areas needing immediate attention and small ongoing detailing to make it like the original structure, there can be too much lost that resembles what the place looked like back in the year it was built. The attention to detail can make the re-construction scope pretty much every single room no longer mirrors what the original builder put together from the ground up.
The fixing up old historic farmhouses in Maine is slow tedious work and often too extensive to hire out because of the hundreds of hours, thousands of dollars to fix or repair or replace what ails the homestead.
But as long as a bank mortgage underwriter is not pushing for the place to be complete before closing. And you have a partner that is equally patient in the undo, redo, make do as the house with all the land around it returns to what it originally looked like. The this old house story can have very few scary chapters and a happy ending at the end. Making it better than it was when you first started many moons ago.
The what to do first is usually like any house project triage. Selecting the repair or replace the roof or heating system ahead of the installation of a new to you old Monson and Maine slate farmhouse long sink. Or removing to replace the kitchen cabinet hardware, electrical light fixtures and switches to match the period of this particular home era it really belongs. To get it back like the Beatles sang about being where you once belonged. Buy a farm house, whatever type of property where the renovation can be done in stages.
If you are buying to hang onto the place and are invested, the repair this old home movie is a long one with sequels.
You can buy a home you can not afford if it needs work, you are your own general contractor and you go slow. And hire out when you absolutely have to and recognize you are over your head. But stay on budget and pull back, extend the time to completion when something pops up you did not anticipate but that needs immediate attention and some funding to correct.
The saw horses in one room where the lath and plaster is being removed to hang new sheet rock after insulation, electrical and plumbing lines are put into the wall cavities. The peeling back multiple floor layers of old linoleum to get back down to hopefully a solid sub-floor or hardwood/softwood finish level. You don’t know what you are going to find the deeper you go into the many projects that spring up in the fix and repair of the old farmhouse you signed on for when the deed to the land under it was recorded in local registry of deeds.
Houlton Maine, Shiretown of Aroostook County. The Early Years. More Farmers Growing Potato Spuds, More Lumberman Sawing The Timber Logs!
Study of online imagery from others who embarked on the same repair your farm residence journey just prior to you can be encouraging.
The before and after images on any housing rehab can scare even the homeowner holding the camera to snap the shots and reviewing them in the progress album. Once you get started, there is no turning back. And when you run out of money or the projects to repair are large ones, the timetable to completion can be pushed ahead many months or even years on the calendar hanging in the old farm style renovated home kitchen.
The original acreage can be part of the missing puzzle piece when you decide to pick a farmstead residence real estate mission to accept if you dare. Too many times the land around the home was sold off by the widow of the last farmer on record to own the place. A neighboring agricultural grower that rented the land makes the purchase of land, no buildings to absorb the fields, pastures and woodlots into their down the road operation.
Buying back land from one or multiple land owners around your investment can be costly or require waiting until the timing improves. Strongly held and currently cultivated farm land does not get sold off but remains cut off from the original spread it use to surround on the family farm in Maine. Fewer but larger farm operations in Maine are the trend but my state does show promise in reversing the trend. More than four times the national average of micro farmers are showing up in the US census information from the last Q & A done on the local population. No farmer, no food is a sobering thought no?
Other things to prepare for that you might not have thought about in the housing repair exercise? Pet smells, the kind you may not remove and definitely are not going to gloss over with some sweet masking replacement odor. Perfectly good walls, floors and other building components can be marred deeply by animals inside a the home that should have been out in the farmyard or in the barn, machine shed, whatever building circles the main dwelling.
Farm Fresh Locally Sourced Food From Maine. Get Healthy Inside And Out In Maine Vacationing In Maine. Ever Thought Of Owning A Maine Farmhouse, Lots Of Land!
The best smell is none. Although the fragrance of flower beds, the smell of a woodshed, a summer kitchen where root cellar shelves create a winter draw grocery at meal time is not to be discouraged or can not be replaced. Burlap in a granary, leather in the tack room and saddle soap. Or disinfectant used to keep clean the milk parlor on an old Maine dairy farm with all the cattle stanchions and box / standing stalls for the smaller animals.
Making sour into a mixture of sweet works with chicken at the local Chinese restaurant. But lighting a candle or baking oven brownies won’t even begin to mask terrible pungent odors that linger in old neglected country homes of Maine.
The nose knows and your sense of smell is the strong of the five we all possess they say. Once the construction projects complete, it is time to move on to the finishing touch that does involve more than what you can see. The sounds of the wind chime on the front open porch, the colorful pinwheel that works in tandem with Mr Scarecrow out in the garden to discourage predatory gleaning. The crackling wood fire in the old Clarion or Home Comfort or whatever brand kitchen cook stove. A grandfather clock ticking in the front parlor. This is part of the lifestyle of country living in your old Maine farm property.
Pantry cabinets that need refinishing, finding original style or genuine imitation door knobs and Christan doors, trim to match the rest of the rooms in the old home out in the Maine countryside. Double wood storm windows with felt and numbered to help know which opening they go to in the fall get ready to a Maine winter ritual. All part of the bring it back to the way it was in the re-construction time machine that you pilot.
Outdoors, That’s Where People Hang Out In Maine. More Land, Lots Of Wildlife, Less People, No Crime, No Pollution. Want Some Of ME?
A working farm of your own or a gentlemen operation where the fertile fields and pastures are leased out to someone else with the headaches and backaches.
Of watching the weather and hoping for a profitable market to peddle what is grown or raised. You watch others till, plant, cultivate and hoe leading into the fall harvest. For the winter storage and slowly selling off what the good old Earth provided with seed, water, fertilizer, lots of sweat and toil.
The old farm house DIY renovation with a little hired out help along the way can mean putting the rear apartment for the grandparents back into the layout. Or adding a home office so the out of state farm buyer who appreciates the open space and fresh air around it more than a native. So he or she or both can bring their old job online with them and telecommute.
Ever thought of repairing an old Maine farmhouse and be honest. Have you ever caught yourself looking at the Maine farm tractor and machinery section of Uncle Henry’s or on Craig list? I am guilty as charged and am lucky to own the family farm In New England I grew up on. That my Dad and mom purchased from a great uncle who’s first name I use for a middle one. That along with my Great
The Maine Barn Sitting Back On Its Haunches. Leaning, Straining And Recently Went Down Completely Like 52 Pick Up.
Aunt Hettie a world war one nurse made a good living on the patch of dirt. Investing wisely the spoils of the toil with a Bangor Maine stock broker named Banks. It was her pension check though from serving as a Florence Nightingale on medical cases all over creation in and out of Vacationland that put in the running water bathroom plumbing. Into the farm in Maine located up here in the Crown of Maine that had a two holer out in the north end shed. Up here in Houlton, the oldest town in Aroostook County dubbed “The Shiretown” where the glacier gave us an edge blessing growers with Caribou loam soil to play in with the horse than tractor dragging longer and longer lengths of machinery.
Country properties are a special kind of Maine real estate offering.
Looking out when you do up the supper dishes and watching another setting sun at dusk. Sipping lemonade or slurping hot coffee on the open or glassed porch at the rural property with no neighbor in sight. That’s off the main drag and where road noise is missing from too much traffic that city dwellers get tone deaf to with the constant exposure.
Read up on the topic and learn this is how they did it on this style of property in this particular period of time. If you hanker making it original again or as close as your wallet or available spare time will permit.
Heading North to Maine. Heading into the North Maine woods
What is the magic of just the location, that one word North? Heading into the North Maine woods. Pointing whatever you drive or piling in with a group of friends to head North to ski, snow sled, hunt, fish or get out on the water.
North Sign, What’s The Buzz, The Big Deal About Up North?
On a compass or a map, the first thing the user wants to determine is where is North. Because the needle better seek north. Not have a mind of its own. And after rolling out the tightly curled up map, you look first and foremost for the arrow pointing in the direction of North. The orientation of North trumps all the west. You have to know where is North first to get your bearings and avoid vertigo.
The North star, Polaris used for navigation unless pesky cloud cover messes up the exercise to know if you are still heading in the right direction.
Up North in Maine. Each quadrant of the circle conjures up an image or two of the other regions. Causes the dream maker insider all of us to consider what if we headed in that particular direction armed with knowledge from the grapevine. Just hearing, seeing, thinking about one word from books, the boob tube or conversations.
West, heading out west.
Panning for gold. Laying claim to free land, a new start for your family in the wagon train. Or smelling like soot. Riding the iron rails in the steel horse gnawing on beef jerky. New unspoiled fertile land, heavily wooded with incredible scenery out West awaits you. All aboard.
Someone in your family’s past headed West to make their fame and fortune right? Hoping they were not a gun slinger or horse thief. Cowboys, rodeos, branding irons, lasso roping scared little Hereford calves. Waving a branding iron for the circle K tattoo. Surf boards, 409’s, Rodeo Drive, Route 66, Area 51 are what you find out West. Hope we don’t have one big final Earthquake.
Pass me that harmonica Cookie. We get to the Rockies by night fall tomorrow if the bag balm works like a charm on lame old on Lightning here. I got a dose of the joint paint myself. Hand me that little green square tin will you? (Rattlesnake sound, hungry wolf howling, cactus shadows around campfire perimeter). Another splash of coffee or a long haul on the flask filled with the recipe?
South, down south.
You might picture mint juleps, Southern hospitality, cotton and tobacco and moonshine. Gray colored material pitted against dark blue. Sitting a spell on a huge mansion porch held up by large pillar columns. Pleasant weather in the sunny South where snow shovels are not needed. Kentucky blue grass music fills the air. Is that a banjo in the mix?
Chasing white golf balls, fishing for red snapper, liberally applying sun screen on your kids at the sandy seashore. Visiting glove wearing cartoon characters at the Magic Kingdom. Pour me another tall glass of the orange juice Anita Bryant. Leave in lots of the pulp and make it country style. Boll weevil and termites and Tennessee walkers. We’re down south.
East, Far east.
Sounds exotic, I can hear zitars and harp strings and pan flutes. Where we have a serious shortage of four legged chairs. Lots of pillows though all over the flooring. You might think about spices, smooth shiny silk, the fragrance pretty blue lotus flower and sitting cross legged clearing your mind. (Snap) Need another pair of chop sticks to chase your rice cakes and raw fish around the plate? Those waxed paper thin sliding house doors would not stand up to a gale force Maine wind.
North. Due North.
Unfortunately for some, the first thought that pops in your head is snow. Lots of white stuff. Maybe reindeer that go air born. The cheerful short round guy dressed in red velvet / white fur trimming. Ho ho ho Santa, Mrs. Claus and their low to the ground gang with the pointed ears. Dog sleds and float planes for transport and igloos for housing. Polar bears of white riding on ice floes.
Heading North, Hitting The ITS Trails In Maine.
Maine is parked up North.
But you can go way way further climbing up the lines of latitude on the spinning globe. Extreme north can be the vision of Maine for those who have never set foot in the Vacationland state. Maine shares borders with Canadian provinces which causes a cultural exchange missing at the North Pole. There are no polar bears in Maine.
When you live in Maine, West becomes Jackman, Sugarloaf Or Sunday River. Your South orientation becomes the Wells, York Beaches, the Old Port, Kittery Trading post.
Your Downeast Maine a winding trip up US Route One to get your fill of lobsters, steamers filled with clams and fresh native corn on the cob. Look, was that a distant lighthouse, hump back whale or eagle spotted off the bow of the schooner?
I live in Northern Maine.
Snow Is Not An Evil Four Letter Word. Not In Maine.
But where I blog from you can travel two hours north and still be in Maine. Up in the St John River Valley in the Crown of Maine. Aroostook County is the largest of Maine’s sixteen. Aroostook the garden of Maine known for its potato fields. The heavily wooded forest land, the clean lakes and rivers. The fresh air and winter is just one of the four months. And there is lots to be said about your wood burning stove, the charm of winter living in Maine.
What is your image of Maine? Hopeful more than winter snow flakes, icicles and hand knit mittens and hat. Sample ME for yourself. You fill up your mental slate with experiences in Maine. Any chance you can get, sneak or steal away to Maine. Easy to find and always due north from most places. Define Maine in your own words and from personal experiences you collect and cherish any of the four seasons.
The Norwegian Designed Cast Iron 118 Model Wood Stove Has Old Country Designs But Burns With Modern Techniques To Maximize Your Fire Power.
There are so many reasons to heat your Maine home with a wood burning stove.
Often what drives a home owner to feed a wood burning heater stove or furnace is the spike in the cost of other fuel options. When heating oil, natural gas or electricity bills soar higher, the natural fall back routine is to fire up the wood or coal burning stove.
Today it is smart to have more than one heat source combination so you can adjust to seasonal fluctuations. To play the energy market if you have more than one fuel system to maneuver. Let’s face it, if the talking head news reporter signals a shortage of oil or natural gas production, brace yourself. For the here it comes. Suddenly blip. It is a helpless feeling. When the beep beep beep Maine winter heating routine fuel delivery truck is backing into the driveway too often to hook up the expensive hose.
Next Year’s Wood Pile In Tree Life Form. Ready To Knit On, To Slowly Cut And Split Into Just The Right Stove Lengths. Mainers Stay A Season Ahead With Their Wood Stash.
So burning wood, heating your home with rock maple, beech, white and yellow birch, ash, oak and other hardwoods.
Maine is ninety one percent wooded and with all those vast timber resources increasing in cordage yearly right out your back door, why not? And not just to save money. Wood burning provides lots of other perks besides the warm your bones. You cut up a few blow down tree limbs off your back yard. Or venture into the wooded sections of your land acreage to hook on and haul out to a yard whatever did not make it through the last winter ice storm. Slice and dice to fit your wood stove heater box and often the big limbs don’t require a split down the middle to crack them open faced.
Your Maine house yard is cleaned up in the spring and the stacks of wood created are part of your fuel stored for the following winter. Or to use to take the chill off a Maine home in late spring, early fall. Before the wood heater stove is put into round the clock action. Some folks burn wood only when they are home and awake. Others build a smug to heat the house floors with a small cellar wood heater when the temperature sinks low in the glass tube. To supplement whatever the kitchen wood cook stove does not do to increase the warmth in that very important space in a family home.
Heating a space in a Maine home using a wood heater, but not keeping the entire house to the same temperature is economical.
Does to mean you are going to be wearing your snow suit inside or that you can see your breath. Or won’t be able to have house plants. Just things are going to be a little lower temperature than seventy degrees in the second floor bedrooms or down in the formal parlor used on special occasion. Like funerals at home in the original days when the Maine home was young. Or when gentlemen callers came to call.
More Modern Woodheater Stoves Used In Norway! The US Jotul Stove Buyers Like The Boxy, Square Stoves With Norwegian Animals And Winter Scenes, Lettering.
Wood furnaces keep the wood chucks in the cellar where they are stacked and racked to prepare for the seasons of snow flakes and thick sheets of ice. The central wood furnace can be hot air or hot water and tied in to work in tandem with the oil or gas unit. Making sure the chimney is lined, solid and not tapped with lots of “appliances” That are vented into the same heating stack which is a no no.
The clean burning wood pellet stoves that use the pallets of forty pound sacks that a fork cliff delivers in ton increments like the kerosene K-1 monitor type heaters are direct vented out the home’s exterior sidewalls. Woodstoves need more than just cleaning the chimney, emptying the ash pan and using fire wood that is not twenty minutes old green green green. Which is the kind full of creosote and that causes the house fires that roar loudly up the burnout in the stove flu. Cementing in fire brick, replaced a handle that breaks, and always studying for any cracks or danger that lack of repair can cause with any wood stove or furnace heater.
Nothing wastes wood for heating more than a Franklin wood stove or a fuel hog fireplace.
The hypnotic smell of a wood fire outside as you head indoors. Combined with the sound of your boot crunching, compacting the new soft snow underfoot. Sometimes it is the dancing, crackling wood fire romance you want and not to squeeze every renewal heat source BTU out of your Maine log timber tid bit. Especially at a seasonal lake camp after ice fishing or ski chalet when the boards are removed that you used to carve the groomed down hill gravity ride. Or cross country slide and glide to end up relaxing in your front den. The fireplaces that have a woodstove insert that are air tight or the stone / brick chimneys that have blowers and heatalator grates can pull their weight lots more efficiently. Helping heat the inside of a Maine home to keep it warm as toast. To greet you when you decide to come in from all that fresh air, the beauty of new fallen white snow that transforms your location.
I am very partial to Jotul wood stoves because my Dad was a dealer who believed in these Norwegian tried and tested gems.
Jotul North America employs about seventy five people and produces roughly seventeen thousand woodstoves, wood and gas fireplace inserts. About nine thousand stoves are imported from the mother company in Fredrikstad, Norway. Jotul is a major player in the cast iron woodstove parts market. The Norway main operation has been producing wood, coal, gas heater stoves since 1853. Jotul Gorham Maine’s operation started in 1980. The same year my Dad linked up as a wood, coal, fireplace insert distributor to sell the stoves put together from the parts floated over from across the pond.
The small but mighty Jotul 404 wood cook stove does an amazing job as a cast iron heat producer. But the smaller fire box means foot long wood to whittle down to from a cellar feeding a wood furnace using sixteen and longer lengths. And little box means more trips to stoke the flame, tend the fire. That goes out shortly after the led lights do in the old farmstead located west of town in Houlton Maine.
Old Maine Farmsteads Create Fresh Veggies, Fruits, Produce. Nothing Sweeter, Healthier Than Close To Home Food. The Homesteads Heated, “Fueled” With Wood From Your Own Forest Land Too.
What are we toying with buyer for a Jotul woodstove and why not consider any other brand, or a sleek sexy soap stone model that is out there to tempt us? Because my family’s exposure to Jotul woodstove has been an over the top positive one. My oldest brother heated his Bangor Maine home for years and years with a Jotul #4 unit.
This model wood heating stove has a front door that can open up, push down and slide under so a fireplace screen can be added for open blaze effect. Another older brother swears by his years using a 602 and 118 Jotul model outlined in the same previous model link you just passed in the read read read. Slow burning like a cigar to make the fuel burn clean, even, and more completely. Not headed up the chimney in wasted heat that does not benefit the inside of a Maine home sweet home atmosphere.
My Dad sold a slew of Jotul stoves using all fuel sources and fireplace inserts too!
The farm neighborhood neighbors that had the amazing 602 heater kept them. They did not leave them in a house when they moved. You get attached to your Jotul woodstove because you know as the slogan goes “Jotul woodheaters have been fighting the Norwegian winter cold for 160 years”. Wood is a little more precious in Norway where wars, too many centuries of burning wood and more people all tapped the tree woodlot hard. That’s why these cast iron wood heater stoves are so so energy efficient. The tall coal stove Jotuls were not as popular but folks who bought them still use them which speaks volumes. Made to last and too heavy to move when you consider cast iron that needs three men and a small boy to wheel in and out of the Maine home.
Heating with wood gives you a good stewardship feeling deep down inside.
When you have your winter wood all cut, split and ready for the next heating season, it means you are prepared. No worries. And if the power which is rare to lose goes off, no one misses a beat with the wood fire routine. You really feel self sufficient like a homesteader living off grid in Maine.
This Spot For Vacations Is Not A Place To Open Up A Wood Heater Stove Store. But Air Conditioning, Something With A Lime, Siestas Help Handle A Different Kind Of Heat Inside / Outside Your Grass Thatched Roof Hut.
There is an independence when no matter what foreign oil prices shock and awe to new for new price levels, you keep chugging along with your wood heat routine in your Maine home. These Jotul woodstoves are a timeless Norwegian craft. And I bet, chances are you will if you have not yet heard of them first hand in your lifetime. Like rooting for the Red Sox, Patriots, Boston Bruins sports teams, you no doubt feel strongly about your brand of wood stove that keeps your toes from freezing. That heats your home and warms your soul.
Vermont Casting models of all kinds fill the properties that get listed for sale in my area. The Intrepid, Resolute, Defiant models in all colors of enamels. Neat names too for fighting the winter cold. Other woodstoves out there too! Lots of home made ones welded from steel, fashioned from shop trailer truck tire rims, fuel tanks and 55 gallon barrel stove wood heaters. Plus the dependable Ashley or Suburban models square models that are not fancy but work like a charm.
And don’t forget the old Home Comfort, Clarion, Glenwood, Atlantic and other smasher wood cook stoves too heavy to take apart and lug off still stand guard in many Maine country farmsteads and in-town Victorian house kitchen parlors. Some are rough and you find them in Uncle Henry’s, on Craig’s List in searching for Maine treasures in the buy, sell, swap guides. Others have been re-nickeled and have all their parts, are working stoves not just conversation pieces.
Your appreciation for how well your wood stove heater works increases.
You fall in love. Get more attached to the wood heaters you stoke and stroke. That you spend lots of alone time with over the peaceful, lazy winter months. Or those wood cook stoves, outdoor wood boilers that take monster sized tree pieces that you use more often than just the snow calendar months. The former for serving up your Saturday night brown bread, soldier or yellow eye or Jacob’s cattle baked beans in the oven section. While topside another cooking show is playing. Grilling the neat rows of red snapper hot dogs on stove top mingling with the sliced onions like “upta Maine camp ayuh” Chummy.
The really old woodstove parked and forgotten much of the year in the dark of the log cabin retreat in T this R unorganixed township. That’s used for R and R, for hunting, fishing, reading, sleeping and snow sledding or four wheel ATV trail fun. With the woodstove almost driving your out as you play fifteen two, four, six and one point for last card high spirited cribbage matches. Chasing up and down the rows with your wooded match stick marker replacement because the one that came with the board turned up missing. And whoever made the board is gone. Pegs by Porter. RIP Paul Porter a local accomplice to Torrey Sylvester a retired attorney who has made many an exotic wood cribbage board for camp fun.
F-45 Jotul Greenville Wood Heater. Simple, Powerful, Made To Last Norwegian Woodheater.
Heating with wood is an old time tradition in rural Maine because it saves money, heats more completely and gives you healthy exercise year round.
Nothing is wasted when the limbs and blow down trees are cleaned up so it is a win win scenario. Maine is a state not flush with cash, without money to burn so anything along the lines of practical, frugal, we’re all over that. The study and slow impulse control to do your home work is part of the thrifty living.
Like anything, is this model the best value, is this size the closest fit to what is needed based on the specifications of your home for safety clearances to keep the fire marshal and insurance adjuster away from your doorstep.
And that won’t be too much or too little to do the job of heating your Maine home for the maximum comfort for your family. To hang yours mittens next to, to position the wooden rack to dry other clothes a little snow covered from playing or working outside in Vacationland. Every household in Maine’s dry fluffy snow winter climate could use a little moisture inside generated from the drying clothes. And with a wood heater stove, there is always a kettle of hot water for a spot of tea, to make your fresh press hand ground coffee.
The Jotul F-45 Greenville model is a sweet stove that could be a good candidate for replacing the old trooper Jotul 404. Will never sell or get rid of the black beauty smaller cook stove. But the Jotul F-45 is a wood stove under consideration. There is a $300 Energy Of Maine tax credit rebate too which improves the taste for burning with wood to heat your home.
