A home, a yard, a never-ending adventure

A home, a yard, a never-ending adventure

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Sage Osterfeld
I’m just a guy with nearly an acre of dirt, a nice little mid-century ranch house and a near-perfect climate. But in my mind I’m a landscaper survivalist craftsman chef naturalist with a barbeque the size of a VW and my own cable TV show. I like to write about the stuff I build, grow and see here at Sage's Acre.

Articles

302, 2020

Rain Barrel Follies Part 3

By |February 3rd, 2020|Categories: Garden, Tools|Tags: , , , , |1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago I was all proud to show off my newly installed rain barrel. However, I forgot to close the drain valve, so when it rained. it dumped 55 gallons of water directly under the rain barrel, causing the ground to sink and tipping the barrel to one side. Then it rained again and re-filled the now heavily listing barrel. I thought I was going to have to dump all that water as well, until I figured out a better method that let me save the water and empty the barrel at the same time. Here's the [keep reading...]

2701, 2020

Sage’s Homemade Ketchup Recipe

By |January 27th, 2020|Categories: Recipes|Tags: , , , , |0 Comments

Making real ketchup is super simple and the results are delicious. Make your own once, and you may never go back to the store-bought stuff (TL/DR: Click here to skip straight to the recipe) It’s mid-winter and as usual we’re still sitting on something like 1,329 jars of preserved tomatoes from the summer. Not surprisingly, we’re always looking for new ways to use all these tomatoes before the new crop starts to come in late spring, so when we ran out of ketchup a couple weeks ago, I announced, “I’m going to make some ketchup!” I didn’t actually make ketchup [keep reading...]

2401, 2020

What to do with a Cherimoya?

By |January 24th, 2020|Categories: Photos|Tags: , , , , |0 Comments

A while back I bought a Cherimoya (Annona cherimola) sapling from a local exotic fruit nursery. At the time, the plant guy said it probably wouldn't produce fruit because it needed some sort of month to pollinate it. Fast forward to today and the tree is doing quite well and it has lots of fruit on it (moths must be nearby). A few days ago it started dropping fruit. They're the size of softballs and quite hard. I swear I almost got a concussion from one that dropped on my head. I'm not really sure what to do with them. [keep reading...]

2401, 2020

Keyhole Garden Progress – January 23, 2020

By |January 24th, 2020|Categories: Projects|Tags: , , , , |0 Comments

A bit of rain followed by warmer weather from what I call our "fake spring" (it always gets really warm here at the end of January, then snaps back to cold) has the vegetables in the keyhole garden growing like crazy. All the garlic is now well along and the romaine lettuce, cilantro and dill are getting close to harvest. Maybe another week or so.

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