Hay Hook and Straw Bale Root Cellar
Posted by garth on 05 Oct 2008 at 11:58 am | Tagged as: Blacksmithing, tools
Inspired by Throwback at Trapper Creek’s straw bale root cellar, we’re going to take a crack at building our own to store potatoes and all the apples that blew down in last night’s windstorm.
We went to the feed store and picked up “as many straw bales as will fit in this truck”* and I asked Lauren if I was allowed to buy a hay hook because, well, I am no longer twenty and bucking bales does not come as easily as to once did. She said yes but, due to lack of hay hook at the store, I was foiled.
And then I remembered I have a forge! And a pile of iron! So after I got home I cranked out the following local-heritage-artisanal hay hook (Appellation My Backyard).
I am reasonably pleased with it. I hammered and twisted it, aligned everything perfectly, and quenched it in water to test if it was the right shape. I was pleased with it and decided to anneal the tool. The process of annealing is used to soften a piece of metal. When I quenched the hook in water to check the fit (*ppsssshhhhh*) I set the molecules and it became brittle. To cure this, I needed to heat the metal up and let it cool down slowly.
So I returned the perfectly aligned tool to the forge to let it heat up. Unfortunately, I left it in the heat to long and it got all saggy and crooked. Oops. Oh well, at some point I’ll heat it up and straighten it out again. In the meantime, I can report that I’ve got a perfectly functional tool, if somewhat lopsided.
* Six bales in a Toyota pickup with a topper. Topper, for the record, is what Wisconsinites call a canopy. Also, we eat frozen custard.
April 2009 UPDATE: We noticed a lot of folks are finding this post via Google, so we wrote an update on the success — lack thereof — of the straw bale root cellar. Read it here.
Where did you get your bushel baskets? I’ve been looking high and low for some and having NO luck. Somewhere local I hope (so that I can get some too!)?
We paid entirely too much for a bushel basket at our local feed store/nursery. Subsequently, I found the bushel baskets at Grower’s Solution where they sell a dozen for around $40. They have some other, smaller baskets that they sell in 100 ct. packages. Let us know if you’re looking for a smaller quantity than they sell and we can talk about a group buy.
Those things are awesome (the root cellar and the fancy metal work). Yay!
[...] many people get here by searching for “straw bale root cellar,” which is something I posted about earlier after shamelessly stealing the idea from Throwback at Trapper Creek. It’s a Futurama joke. [...]