Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
One Our renovation project has so far generated a fair amount of scrap materials. Luckily it’s mostly wood and only some drywall, which is virtually not reusable. Of the wood DH and I have saved most: we take out the nails, tease off the drywall and have built up a nice stack of project wood …
Continue reading “Three for the Neighborhood, or How I Scored Unlimited Amounts of Horse Manure”
Kitchen Gardeners International has an interesting article on the worth of a home garden. The author, Roger Doiron, weighed the food coming out of his 1600 square feet garden in Maine (zone 5b/6) and calculated how much this food would have cost had he bought it in a conventional grocery store, a farmer’s market, or …
Yuck! I have one flat with green algae coating the surface. It started with one small spot and the next day it was all over. It shouldn’t harm the seeds directly, but it may smother them. The causes were (1) over-watering (beginner’s mistake), (2) the fact that the potting soil I’ve been using compacts too …
“Rekenen,” Dutch: to count Gasoline: doing much better at 16% Between us we consumed 20.3 gallons. That’s 6.77 gallons/person, that’s: 16% of the US national average. I have this great deal with another mom from Amie’s preschool: in lieu of my watching her kids for four hours a week, she watches Amie for two hours …
Yesterday I sowed the first seeds of the season: early lettuce (Black-seeded Simpson) in one flat; celery (Redventure), onion (Clear Dawn) and eggplant (Applegreen) in another. Amie joined me to sow the larger eggplant seeds. What a joy it was to see her nimble tiny fingers handle those seeds! Then I watered the flats and …
This is a neat idea to save energy on your fridge and freezer. It was suggested in the Riot 4 Austerity discussion group. I’m happy to have found it because our inherited fridge-freezer is an old one and we could definitely use some KWH savings there. It makes sense that it takes a lot of …
I got to bring home my first pot, which I threw last week. I had made the bottom too thin and it cracked while drying, so we gave it up as a lost cause and didn’t even trim, let alone fire it. But it was fun to bring it home to show Amie, who said: …
Friends are saving their egg cartons for us and we’ve been researching what breed and how many chickens we want to get, on the internet, in library books: And in the field, at Drumlin Farm: I was checking out their state-of-the-art chicken coop as much as I was the chickens (the photo shows only part …
A while ago I pledged to learn the great and ancient art of beekeeping. I contacted several bee schools and was about to enroll. Then I realized that it won’t be possible to have a hive this spring or summer, for the simple reason that there are no flowers nearby. We live in a wooded …
Today we finally had a chance to set up our germination/seedling area in the basement. It’s not fully done yet, but so far we have: One large Gorilla shelf rack – fits 4 standard Jiffy or Burpee seed starting flats perfectly. $87.97 four shop lights (2 sockets each), chain links and S hooks included. 4 …
Continue reading “Germinating and Growing Seedlings under Lights: Chamber Set-Up”