From the magical to the practical, our orders fell off in the spring to the point of almost getting scary, but we put the slowdown to good use by converting a rarely used, high maintenance swimming pool into the beautifully productive vegetable garden we’ve always wanted. We got a great deal on 48 yards of the blackest, richest topsoil we’ve ever seen, enough to fill the pool about halfway.  Since there was no way to get equipment into the pool, and it all had to dumped at one end, it had to be moved and leveled by hand with a shovel. It took a couple of weeks of shoveling steady for 30-45 minutes every morning and evening. Nice workout! Built a nice set of stairs down in it, a deluxe double chambered compost bin of concrete block, some raised beds, some frames for climbing plants, added seeds and water…………BOOM! …a jungle!

Six foot tomato plants, ten foot pole beans, peppers, greens, turnips, parsnips and  more…, all loaded with fruit and bearing nicely. All organic, clean and healthy. And now, as we are enjoying the fruit of our labor at every meal, an avalanche of orders has got us rolling wide open in the shop. Life is good.

On to the bluebirds….. The winter before last we acquired a bluebird house. We read every thing we could find about their likes and dislikes, general habitat, predator protection, etc. We set to work with a will, adding a copper roof with a generous overhang, designing and making copper predator baffles, mounting it precisely at the prescribed height on a copper post set in concrete, at the furthest point possible from the trees which surround our house (which happens to be the exact center of our front yard), in short, we labored to produce the Taj Mahal of bluebird houses. We even took pains to have it all done by mid February, which is when all the literature said they start home shopping. Sure enough, a couple of weeks later, a handsome young couple toured the facility and we felt all the effort was worth it. Then they disappeared.

Another week or two passed and we noted more activity around the bluebird mansion, but it wasn’t bluebirds building a nest, it was titmice. Now we love our titmice and think they are some of the cutest birds going, but they certainly weren’t the bluebirds we expected. So we swallowed our disappointment and let them raise their family unmolested. We did carefully monitor their progress and when they moved out, we cleaned out their nest in hopes of a later bluebird arrival. We waited in vain all summer.

During the winter, from mid December to late February, we had small flocks of bluebirds almost continually inspecting the premises and felt sure this was going to be the year. Then they disappeared again. The titmice immediately set to work rebuild their nest. Soon the frequent comings and goings let us know the babies had hatched. In the midst of all this, a pair of bluebirds returned to take possession and were greeted by irate titmice. There was a brief but ferocious battle of flutter and feathers before the bluebirds retreated in defeat and were seen no more. Our cat let us know when the babies were leaving by sitting motionless under the nest and staring at it by the hour, apparently in hopes that one or more of the maiden flights would fail. But none did, and a fresh supply of young titmice joined the throng at our feeder.

We lost heart and didn’t even bother to clean out the box. Then on Mother’s Day, the bluebirds returned! To our surprise, there was no need to clean out the old nest because they immediately set to work removing the old nest themselves, one beak full at a time. Now the process has reversed, and they are taking in nesting material more to their liking. BLUEBIRDS AT LAST!!!!!!

But as time went on, and the freebies slowed to a trickle, we were forced to rob parts from our older machines to keep our most productive one running. It now has a lot of hours on it, we have virtually no spare parts, and our backup machine is a primitive early model that ran so poorly it has never been more than a backup. We dreaded the day when we would have to rely on it to get our work done. We had even been studying how to build one from scratch ourselves. New machines cost $9,000 each and in this economy we are already stretched pretty thin.

Then, out of the blue, the manufacturer called to tell us they were closing one of their facilities and had a couple of low hour demo machines and a bunch of new pumps and parts they would let us have under their cost. They weren’t kidding. The two machines and enough spare parts to keep them running for years cost us less than a third of one new machine! So the heart of our little operation has been reinforced and we can keep the Waterfired Copper coming!

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Thanks,

D. & Kendall

P.S. – To our wholesale customers: The wholesale side of the site is no longer available. Please contact us directly for new ordering procedure.

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