This is the last post in my Omnivore’s Delight Challenge week of blogging What a marathon that was. You can read all the older posts here. All the folks in my household enjoyed the Omnivore’s Delight Challenge. Turns out we didn’t have to change our eating habits much – only our shopping habits. Still it …
Category Archives: food (growing, cooking, preserving)
Tomatoes
We’re racing against the clock here. A week ago I drastically snipped off 3/4 of the leaves on the tomato vines. Many of the fruits on them have been full grown for a month, but very few of them were ripening. The pruning has redirected the plant into ripening, but I think I may have …
Local Food Experiment
I am blogging on the Transition Wayland website about a week-long locavoracious experiment! LOTS of blog posts there.
Harvests
Today I extracted some massive honey combs. My experiment with foundationless frames went a tad awry, the bees drawing out bulging combs wherever there was space because the next frames was empty. First it made for some puzzling to get those frames out of the two boxes. After using the bee escape for a night, …
Break in the Heat
After over a week of temperatures in the 90s and scorching full sun, it is cooler overcast with some mild rain (still not enough, though). I get to catch my breath. Today I weeded, pruned and trellised tomatoes. Tomorrow I may really get to the wood chip piles: add them to Wood Chip Heaven and …
Compost and Comfrey Tea and Wood Chip Heaven
After a couple of unseasonably cold and gray days that warranted warm socks and a sweater, we’ve returned to hot (+90F) and sunny again. I return to monitoring my one barrel of rain water, which is about 1/5 full (empty). The couple of rain storms we’ve had and the one night of drizzle failed to …
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Blueberries!
A whole crowd of us went picking at a local horse farm, where the farmers a decade or so ago had the foresight of converting a paddock into blueberries. This year will yield a bumper crop and the picking, in the drizzle, was wonderful. This was the same field where two years ago we picked …
SCOBY Hotel
My two kombucha Continuous Brews (one with a spiced Indian chai, the other a more subtle Earl Grey) are growing vigorously, the mothers in them giving birth to more SCOBYs (scobies?). They are starting to fill up the jars. Time for a special hold-over vessel: the SCOBY Hotel. I learned about this from the Big …
IMO I > IMO II
I tried again to capture those Indigenous Micro-Organisms, again in the leaf mulch pile, and again I got mostly yellow, pink, blue and predominantly black. It smelled sweet, though, so I decided to make a batch of IMO II, adding 1:1 brow sugar. This can be kept indefinitely in a …
Fish Amino Acids (FAA) Update
I visited the two buckets of FAA today – they’re nicely tucked away in the cool, dark basement. Amazing how it doesn’t smell awful or even fishy at all, since it’s just fish and sugar, and some apples. The apple smell dominates, along with a sweet fermented smell. The top of one had a lot …