Black-eyed Susans
Last year Sarah planted a few, just a few, Black-eyed Susans under a pear tree in the garden. Now we have a beautiful explosion of Black-eyed Susans.
Garlic harvest
We planted well over 100 cloves of grocery store garlic last fall (October). In the last couple weeks the bottom few leaves have started to brown and some of the stalks were lying down, which is a sure sign they’re ready to harvest. This represents about 85% of the harvest with the rest still growing
New Bees Installed
We purchased a 5 frame nuc from The Bee Barn in Padukah, Kentucky. Installing the bees in our Langstroth hive was as easy as sliding in the nuc frames and putting the hive cover on. The hive is right in the middle of the fruit and nut orchard that we planted this spring. The bees
New Amendments To Our Garden Soil – DIY Complete Organic Fertilizer
We create our own compost every year for our garden. We also collect horse manure by the pickup truck load from neighbors and let it age for months before use in our garden beds. Our garden soil looks great and we usually grow nice healthy plants, but we thought we could do better. I ran
New Amendments To Our Garden Soil – DIY Complete Organic Fertilizer Read More »
DIY Berkey Water Filter
Our Pur water filter that was attached to our kitchen faucet broke after about 8 years of use. After some research we decided to build our own Berkey water filter. Each Black Berkey filter is rated for 3000 gallons. We used two filters in our DIY setup for a total of 6000 gallons of filter
Getting Ready For New Bees
We are getting new bees in May after our disastrous first attempt a few years ago. We are putting a fresh coat of paint on a langstroth hive to house them in rather than putting them in our old top bar hive. Sarah wanted a soft yellow color.
New Mini Orchard Planted
We bought 12 new trees in March and have them all planted out in a clearing we made leading towards the back of the property. We planted three each of pecan, peach, fig, and plum. morning sun doesn’t quite make it until later. We painted signs for each tree.
Make Your Own Bacon From The Garden – Vegan Eggplant Bacon Recipe
We love to eat BLT sandwiches and have been looking for a good plant based alternative to bacon. Here is our current favorite made from eggplant. The finished bacon freezes well although it will lose its crispiness when thawed. We refer to these as “Baconplants”. Eggplant Bacon Recipe 1 medium eggplant 2 Tbs. olive oil
Make Your Own Bacon From The Garden – Vegan Eggplant Bacon Recipe Read More »
Starting The Spring Garden
We planted seeds indoors for broccoli, brussels sprouts, red cabbage, cauliflower, spinach, and pink celery. We are trying new pots – they are designed for growing orchids, I think – they are 3″ black plastic with open slats throughout the design. The idea here is that the seedlings will “air prune” themselves and resist becoming
Adventures in Winemaking
A friend of ours gave us buckets full of red grapes. We had wanted to make wine from our own grapes, but we didn’t have a large enough harvest this year. We had already done some reading on the subject and purchased most of the equipment needed. We had never talked to him about winemaking,