The last of the year we might like to forget...

Well it looks like I've broken my promise. My last New Year's resolution was to publish an update to the blog every month and I failed. You would think in this time of COVID crisis and isolation (not to mention full retirement) that I would have nothing better to do with time on my hands than update this blog.

Anyway this page will just bring you up to date on what was going on at Richmond Woods in the last part of 2020.

The Autumn brought harvest and food preservation. A visit to my friends Philip and Susan blessed me with a great bunch of muscadines. I ate fresh ones until they were coming out my ears. I decided I needed to preserve the remaining ones. I could think of no better way than muscadine jam. It goes really good on my homemade sourdough.

Our garden yielded many tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. We preserved jars of tomato sauce. We roasted and froze bags of peppers. We pickled many jars of cucumbers, carrots, and peppers. And we dried many hot peppers that we are using to season our homemade sauerkraut and dishes like curry.

I made several improvements to my water system. I added a bubble pump to each barrel. This made ozonation of the water much more efficient. A bubble pump basically is just a submerged tube with holes at each end. An air stone is lowered to just above the lower holes and the bubbles, ozone in this case, carry water up the tube and exit through the upper holes. This creates a good circulation within the barrel and promotes better absorption of the ozone. Additionally I added new ozone generator system and I brought AC power from the shop up to the waterhouse to power lights and the new more powerful ozone generating equipment.

I made improvements to my composting toilet that I hoped would eliminate the fungus gnat problem. Unfortunately, these improvements did not help. I am currently exploring the construction of a vermi-composting toilet system that would use a standard flush toilet. I'm sure this would come as a great relief to those few people who occasionally come to visit. 😉  If you are curious, visit vermicompostingtoilets.net.

A couple of other smaller projects included building a mezzanine in one section of the shop attic space in which I could store some of my mountain of junk. And the installation of a new wood-burning stove in the cabin. I plan to overhaul the old stove and use it in the shop. Also, I installed a TV antenna - remember those? Now I can pick up several stations out of Huntsville to get local news and weather.

That pretty much covers all of the visible improvements I've made around here in the last half of 2020. Of course there are all those things you don't see like cutting mountains of firewood, pumping water, and taking care of the solar panels and battery. And, because I was robbed in November by someone that I believe to be a neighbor, I have spent considerable time installing security cameras and lights.

That's it for now. I hope you all are staying safe and taking the precautions you need to. I'm already working on updates to the blog for the first couple of months of 2021. Please standby.

Summer Solstice

I started the year off with the good intention of updating this blog at the end of every month.  We've been busy.  So, here it is the end of July and I have totally missed June.  Let me summarize: Gardening, Food, Wildlife, and Projects.  Gardening has by far taken most of our time. I have a great new respect for the farmers of America.  If I were dependent on my ability to grow food for money and table, I'd be both poor and hungry.  

Our garden beds are quite fertile. The hugelkultur concept  in combination with deep wood chip mulch is working very well in terms of growing plants. So well in fact that Carolyn seems to be out there nearly every day trimming off excess vegetation.  We have great numbers of cucumbers which have been eaten on salads until our skin is becoming green and bumpy.  Many jars of pickles have been put up. Same for peppers.  And now, just when our tomatoes are about to overwhelm us with vine-ripe fruit, a blight has struck which threatens our entire crop. And this after we have fought off a variety of pests including tomato horn worms, grasshoppers, and leaf-footed bugs.  Still, the joys of planting a seed and being rewarded with something tasty to eat or beautiful to behold far outweigh the frustrations that come with it.

Some of the things we have eaten were grown here but were not planted by us. For example, these delicious puff-ball mushrooms.  When I was a kid, I took great pleasure in kicking them to watch them explode in a cloud of dark brown spores. It was only recently that Carolyn educated me that when taken young (before they develop spores) they are quite good to eat. Here I have sauteed some slices in vegan "butter" and seasoned them with a little marinara sauce.  Another fine example are these wild blueberries. They make a most excellent pancake.  Carolyn continues to experiment with delicious vegan frozen treats and I continue to perfect my sourdough bread making.  Lately, Carolyn has discovered the art of sorbet and I have discovered the benefit of proofing my bread overnight.

Most of the projects these past couple of months have been small ones such as this recycling station,  a generator "hat" or this battery watering reservoir.  Some projects were simply to provide raw material for other projects such as these planks for paneling the shop or these wood chips for mulching and "paving" walkways. Some were utilitarian like mounting these windowboxes on the porch railing, fashioning a new handle for my cant hook from a white oak sapling or extending the sides of my trailer so I can haul more chips.  Everything takes some amount of time.

I guess gardening is kind of the main intersection of all the roads of Richmond Woods - Food, Wildlife, Projects.  I've already discussed some of the less desirable wildlife - those that attack our garden.  Insects and spores are impossible to keep out.  The electric fence has so far deterred larger raiders that would love to get at the fruits of our labor.  Alas, there is no fence around Carolyn's herb garden and one afternoon, a big black bear wandered through our yard and decided to take a roll on top of her prize rosemary bush. The poor plant was totally destroyed. Fortunately, she was able to root some cuttings from the remains. Lately we have learned that there's a mama bear with two cubs in the area. Maybe that one had just had the cubs and decided she wanted a rosemary spa treatment?

Among the less destructive wildlife are these little fellows: a red salamander, a promethea silkmoth and a young rat snake of some sort who managed to trap himself in a plastic bucket on the back porch.

That's about all I have time for. I hope you enjoyed. Stay safe. See you next month.

... May Flowers

Well, here it is May already. Memorial day weekend has come and gone. Next stop - the blistering heat of Summer. Maybe. So far, it has been a pretty cool wet Spring. One of my neighbors mused, "You don't suppose all this sheltering in place is reversing the warming effects of pollution, do you?"  Hmmm - food for thought. We actually had to cover our garden beds two nights in a row due to frost warnings.

Regardless, the flowers are indeed here...

I didn't mention this last month but in early April, the Ozonator overheated and warped causing a loss of my water treatment capability.  I rebuilt it using a large canning jar and some pieces machined from a thick plastic cutting board. The violet glow is coronal discharge which is how the ozone is generated. Water treatment is back online.

We braved a week in the big city this month to take care of things around Carolyn's house, mainly trimming bushes, cleaning gutters and gardening. We only ventured out once to go to Trader Joe's, Costco and Kroger to stock up on stuff that is sometimes hard to find up here in the country.

Just before we left for ATL, a huge tree fell near one of our tent pads. We were both outside at the time down in the garden on the opposite side of the house but neither of us heard anything. We spent a couple of days after returning to the country cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood from the branches. Plus I ended up with three 9-foot sections of trunk that I will turn into more paneling for the shop.

The wildlife abounds here as it does everywhere. We had a pair of Carolina Wrens build a nest in an empty flower pot on the back porch. There were three hungry babies when we left for ATL and when we returned they had flown the coop.
	We've seen red and gold salamanders as well as this camouflaged little amphibian.
One morning, a hen turkey ventured right up close to the house. Can you see it between the uprights? Good thing for it that we are vegan.
	And last but not least, we were glad to see this rat-hunter patrolling the yard. No, it's not a copperhead, it's a corn snake. Completely harmless to humans but lethal to rodents.

And now that I have learned how, bread baking is a regular happening. Here are some loaves I've baked using my sourdough starter (which Carolyn has named Brian).  Left-to-right are whole wheat-rye, banana bread, and all-white.

April Showers...

The biggest achievement this month was getting our little plants in the ground. Carolyn had been chomping at the bit since April Fools Day and I finally let her loose three weeks later. With everything blooming and greening around us it was understandable. At least now, I have the garden fence completed with the Groundhog wire and the electric fence charger. I feel like I've done everything I can to protect my garden short of keeping a mountain lion chained up inside the enclosure.

 

Kind of an afterthought, I quickly threw together a bed for a Three Sisters planting - corn, beans, and squash. It's a native American thing. The idea is that the beans will grow up the corn stalks and the squash will shade the roots during the heat of summer. We'll keep you posted on the success (or failure) we have. Also, another impromptu planting took place at the lowest edge of the garden (right of the bed below) where I sowed a row of field peas and okra.

Besides planting a bazillion tomatoes, peppers, onions, eggplants, and cucumbers, Carolyn has been busy with her flower beds. She has dug up a bunch of lilies and daffodils from the edge of the road where they would have been mowed by the county and transplanted them near the house. Also, she has added wild phlox and some birdsfoot violet to the butterfly garden.

As you all know, the Spring weather in the Southeast can be a bit turbulent as well as perfectly beautiful. Easter Sunday we were kept up half the night by tornado and flash flood alerts on our weather radio. A week later a particularly nasty thunderstorm was threatening hail so I ran out into the storm to lower my solar panels. It was unnecessary but proved to be a reasonable exercise.

Feeling the need to be creative, I made some garden tool racks for the covered space at the north end of the house. I guess we will be calling this the garden shed from now on. Certainly the organization of the tools makes it much easier to find and access what you need. Speaking of finding tools, look what I found buried in the middle of my drive: my long-lost Swiss army knife. The recent torrential rains uncovered enough of the red handle that it caught my eye. A little scrubbing with soap and water and a drop or two of oil and its ready to go.

This was the month that we decided to taste our homemade vegan cheeses. These are basically made from nuts (cashews) or oats and fermented with lactobacillus derived from rye (check out rejuvelac). We left these in the refrigerator covered with cheesecloth for about 6 weeks. Such restraint.  They are good. They do not melt the way dairy-based cheeses do but the taste is very similar.  They are a good addition to homemade vegan pizza. We decided to extend the test by coating half of each cheese in wax and waiting another few weeks or months if possible. Of all the stuff I have given up in the name of being more healthy, I'd say Cheddar cheese was the hardest. Now I know I can have the taste without the dairy.

For some unknown reason, I ordered 50 asparagus and 50 strawberry plants with no place prepared to plant them. The race was on. The nursery won. The plants arrived 3 or 4 days before I finished a fourth hugelkultur bed outside the fenced garden area. What was I thinking?  Anyway, this is a long-term investment. It will be at least a year before we get any strawberries and two years before asparagus can be harvested. A side benefit of this was the removal of a large pile of stumps that had been accumulating along with another half dozen stumps that lay buried beneath.

So, with all this garden preparation and planting, it should come with little surprise that I spent almost no time playing at the sawmill. But still, I did manage a couple of hours. I am gradually building up a pile of oak planks that I plan to use for paneling inside my shop.

Stay safe and check in on us once in a while.