We have 3 young pear trees, only two fruited yielding 60 lbs. of pears this year. We canned about a dozen pints, and the remainder made 3 gallons of hard pear cider (perry). The primary fermentation is going full bore. Here is a good article on making pear cider from PracticalSelfReliance.com. Notice the bubbles coming out […]
We have our hands full keeping up with the garden. We eat all the fresh fruit and veggies that we can and preserve the rest by freezing, canning, or dehydrating. The freezer is full and canned goods are on shelves all over our tiny house. Good problems!
We needed a simple garden bench to sit and watch our bees and just enjoy the little orchard we planted this year. I had some 2″ thick cedar lumber that I had previously milled with an Alaskan chainsaw mill. I found a plan that we liked on ana-white.com. The bench uses only five 2 x
We have 3 pear trees that we planted a few years ago, which until now have yielded no fruit. This year we have a decent amount of fruit on two of the three. We harvested 25 lbs of pears off of one tree. The other pear tree full of fruit is a different cultivar that
Last year a friend gave us buckets of grapes and we successfully made 5 gallons of red wine, which we posted about titled Adventures In Winemaking. This year we harvested enough of our own grapes to try a gallon, which we are processing the same way as last year. We harvested about 14 lbs of concord
I bought a Stihl MS250 chainsaw on craigslist for $40. The seller was honest about the condition of the chainsaw and said it had no compression and he was selling it as a non-working parts saw. He included an almost new bar and chain which would cost more than $40. It was a no brainer
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.
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
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
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 »