We purchased a Harbor Freight Portable Garage that we used as storage when we first moved here. The tarp covering eventually deteriorated to the point where even copious use of duct tape was not going to fix it. Fortunately, all the stuff inside could be put in the workshop, a utility shed or donated to […]
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High winds hit our area causing trees to snap and blow down. There are extensive power outages in the area and our electric company said to prepare for a multi-day outage. It sounded like a train was coming, but no tornadoes were reported that I’m aware of. We had a near miss on the cabin
We needed a good way to take compressed blocks of promix, peat moss, or seed starter and break it up quickly into a nice useful mix free of chunks. So, we made this sifter primarily for starting seeds using promix from our local nursery. It works great, and here is the link to the Microgreensfarmer.com video
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
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
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