Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
The first one is sauerkraut. It is my first deliberately fermented food. A huge cabbage head came in our CSA box a couple of weeks ago. What to do with it? As I was reading Sandor Katz’s The Art of Fermentation, I couldn’t resist. My mom and I went looking for a good crock, but all the right …
Continue reading “Two Ferments: Sauerkraut and Comfrey Liquor”
Here’s the West Garden, put to bed with the indispensable help of my mom and dad, who were visiting from Belgium the last two weeks.  Thank you, Oma and Opa, also for helping me extract another 25 lbs. of honey, totaling the honey harvest from Hive 3 to almost 50 lbs! I keep saying this is …
I lost it somewhere in the middle of August. There was too much to do for Solarize Massachusetts, for Transition Wayland. So I lost the garden. The plants kept on growing, but so did the weeds and the pests. I stopped watering the tomatoes and peppers in the hoop house altogether. We never managed to put …
Three yolks, two of them homegrown. Smaller, yes, but so much tastier than the big one! Getting two a day now!
This morning Amie and I were so thrilled when we opened the nest box. There, on the bare plank (I hadn’t put any bedding down yet), was the cutest egg you’ve ever soon, a tiny pullet egg. We couldn’t tell which of the four ladies laid this egg, but Pecky was the one who protested …
For my birthday I got many great presents, but this one was the most joyful: eggs from a friend and neighbors’ chickens, until mine start laying. In exchange I gave a jar of honey. I love to barter! And a small miracle occurred. For a few days in a row there was no information booth, …
This year I’m not weighing the harvest. I used to enjoy it and would still enjoy it today, but I no longer have the time or the need to do so. I hope it’s not too arrogant to say that, in my fourth year, I have a pretty good idea of how the garden is …
We are having a friendly competition here on Robin Hill. DH built a solar parabolic cooker and I built a solar box oven (we helped each other, of course). You can’t really compare the two because the oven is, of course, vastly superior in that it has many more functions: it can cook as well …
Continue reading “It’s a Two-Fer! Solar Oven and Solar Cooker”
Yesterday I spent six hours in the hot kitchen (but I had a good fan) canning about half of my half bushel of peaches and 8 pints of blueberries. The yield was 16 8 oz. of blueberry jam and 15 8 oz. jars of peach butter. Today I canned the rest of the peaches into …
Just for my own satisfaction (sanity?), a reckoning of the elements in place or about to be in place here at Robin Hill Gardens: Veg gardens, all grown from seed (reasonable harvests, gardener needs more experience) Hoop house (12’x20′) Solar PV array (5.1 Kw – supplies 100% of electricity) Medicinal herb garden (minimal, needs more …