Projects are those activities I track over time. It can be planting lists, growing cycles, design and construction projects, even food if it needs to age or ferment. I do it all here because its easier than sorting through paper notes.
Gardener’s Log : Keyhole Garden day 610. Weird weather--hot days, near freezing nights--has put a squeeze on the keyhole garden's output.
The best green bean casserole calls for fresh picked green beans, so we're picking the last of the pole beans. It's not easy to keep them growing this late in the year, but I've found that these Forex beans will produce right up to Thanksgiving
Short of the turkey, everything for our family's Thanksgiving feast is grown here at The Acre. It takes a few days to harvest everything and bring it all together, so we always start with the stuff we need to dig up. This morning is was sweet potatoes, red and white varieties. This is way more than the four of us will eat, so we'll store the small ones to plant is spring, and share the extra big ones with our [keep reading...]
It's been a little more than six weeks since we began the fermentation on Batch 20 of my hot sauce. Today I'm popping open the fermenter to see how it's going and give the peppers a stir to keep thing moving.
Gardener’s Log : Keyhole Garden day 585. Well, if you want to hammer a keyhole garden into submission, making it rain followed by high winds and near 80° heat, followed by overnight lows that dip into the 30s, followed by more near 80° temperatures again, is certainly one way of doing it. 40 degree plus temperature swing in 24 hours The poor pumpkin, which was thriving a couple weeks ago, is done in, as is most of the [keep reading...]
Batch 20 of the fermented hot sauce hit 5 gallons of fresh peppers 8 weeks early, so I'm bumping up to 10 gallons by splitting peppers between 2 fermenters. As for what I'm going to do with 10 gallons of finished hot sauce next spring, I have no idea.
Gardener's Log : Keyhole Garden date 569. Now that we're several weeks into fall, the temperatures are making their annual wobble between hot and cold. The days are still in the 80's with the occasional tip into the low 90's, but the nights are now dipping into the mid-50's and flirting with the upper 40's a couple days a week. For most of the plants here, those big temperature swings and longer nights are a signal to wrap things up [keep reading...]
Just put week 4's fresh peppers into the fermenter for Batch 20 of the fermented hot sauce. With the brine, looks like we're about 2/3rds of the way to getting a full 5 gallons before we send it off to spend the winter aging with oak
Build a simple and efficient portable room air conditioner for about $30 with a couple of buckets, some pipe, a jug of cold water and a cheap desk fan
It's the first day of Autumn and the peppers are coming in hot and heavy. I'm picking around one pound every couple of days right now, which means I'll be moving the peppers to the five gallon fermenter this week. The weather has been very warm so the initial ferment is off to a good start. It smells spicy and yeasty, which tells me the lacto ferment is happy. Once I pitch it to the big fermenter, things should really take off.
