What with the four pullets moving in, it was time to build a new roost. This one should house nine chickens. Next up: add a nest box and an automatic door opener. The racket now starts at 6 am, and seeing as I go to sleep around midnight, I’d dearly love for the door to …
Author Archives: kaat
More Tomatoes
It’s getting a little repetitious, but there were again many more tomatoes. The warm weather continues and there are still many fruits on the vines, so this may not be the last of ’em. I’m looking forward to next summer, when I’ll have the super sunny front patio to grow tomatoes, peppers (can you spot …
Harvests
School has started up again, which might mean that I’ll be able to blog more. No guarantees. In the meantime, we get a harvest like this one almost every other day. I’ll have lots of elderberries to make syrup from, and the cukes and zucchinis will — be –pickled. The tomatoes are still going strong, …
Chicken of the Woods
Spot the chicken. They are jungle fowl after all. Amie to the rescue. And after that, we had dinner. And then dessert.
Tomatoes
Ironic, that I didn’t intend to grow tomatoes – getting plenty of them from a local farmstand and from our CSA box – but that I put in just a few seedlings that a friend gave me, and some seedlings I grew to give away but never got to, and that now tomatoes are my …
Dragonflies
We had the clothesline out on Sunday to dry out some tarps, and it was graced by two dragonflies who really liked their perch: they let us photograph them from pretty up close, and whenever they flew off, they returned immediately, so we got to try the new camera’s macro function and lens.
Earth Oven, Phase 11: Pizza
Today we fired up the oven again and made pizza. We just wanted pizza so didn’t add the rocket stove to the mix for baking. We found a good routine that doesn’t involve rushing. We burned a small fire for about 45 minutes, which was sufficient to bring the baking stone up to 850F: perfect …
Earth Oven, Phase 10: Rocket Stove!
Yesterday we built the rocket stove extension to our earth oven. The idea is to keep on pumping in heat after the fire in the oven has burned down to coals and you rake it aside to start cooking, and also to have more control over the temperature. For the bottom part we just did …
Fruit, Veg, Eggs, Honey/Mead, and Books
Quickly. Made 25 pints of blueberry jam from Farmers Market berries and another batch from 5 quarts of berries Amie and I picked at a very locally IPM place with friends one thunderstormy afternoon. We came out of the field drenched but happy and surprised we had been picking for three hours. Our tribe will …
Earth Oven Phase 9: Rebuild, Better
We demolished the Earth Oven because the inner earth layer was dropping too much dust and too many chunks into the food – we dubbed that “mushroom and mineral pizza”. There wasn’t enough clay in the mixture: too much sand. We saved and kept separate the two layers, bought 50 lbs moist potter’s clay and …