Projects
Batch 20 Hot Sauce – Entry 4
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
Make a DIY Bucket Air Conditioner
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
Hot Sauce Batch 20 – Entry 3
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.
Keyhole Garden Update – Sept. 21, 2020
It's day 548 of production for the keyhole garden. The recent heatwave ended what was left of the tomatoes and most of the sweet peppers, but the squash is doing great. Plus, I discovered some garlic.
Hot Sauce Batch 20 – Entry 2
2nd addition of peppers was a full pound split between Hidden Lake Hot and Culebra Negra (see photo). This should be more than enough to get a good ferment going before I pitch it to the barrel and add 10 - 15 pounds of fresh peppers over the next 10 weeks.
Hot Sauce Batch 20 – Entry 1
Batch 20 of my 6 month fermented hot sauce begins with 5oz of Hidden Lake Hot, a Cayenne/Thai cross, and 7oz of Culebra Negra, a Central American pepper I got from a friend.
Keyhole Garden Update
After 521 days of continuous production, the early summer veggies in the keyhole garden are all played out, but the mid-summer crops--beans, squash, and pumpkins--are doing just fine. The second half of summer and most of early fall is brutally hot and dry, so I'm going to give part of the bed a couple week's rest before transplanting the late summer and early fall stuff.
Build a Bee Hotel
Here's how to build a "Bee Hotel" to welcome native bees (which are solitary, stingless and great pollinators) into your garden.
A Rustic Steel and Cedar Window Box
A little time and less than $20 made this cool window box planter (TL/DR: Click here to skip straight to the instructions) Our house is a 1950’s single story California ranch. Long and low, it has lots of big windows that bring in fresh air and light keeping the house cool in the summer and naturally lit in the winter. The guest bathroom has a large window with a view out across the deck down to the orange grove. The glass is frosted to provide privacy, but most of the time it’s wide open and people don’t realize that anyone [keep reading...]
Garden Path Refresh
I turned a drab wood walkway into a cool, colorful path through the tropical garden in a couple days for under $20. Here's how I did it.