Lookee what I did during Sofía’s nap yesterday.
After spending the morning at the gym we trekked to The Roof Center and bought (yes, bought -sigh-) wooden shingles and roofing felt. I really wanted to make my own shingles out of our cut logs, but never got around to ordering a froe (shingle-making hand tool)… it [...]
I recently traded with a friend who had too many tomatoes and no time. Since I had the opposite, it was a perfect match. I made 8 quarts of crushed organic tomatoes and kept half; and two weeks later it was time to start again. I supplemented by buying a few pecks of “seconds” tomatoes [...]
Fall is growing ever nearer. Tonight it was full dark at 8pm; where did the summer go? Not that I’m complaining about the cooler, drier days, you understand. But I can’t remember a summer flying by this fast since I was in grade school and clinging to every passing day before school started up again [...]
I got a lot of work done on the shed over Labor Day; Josh agreed to watch Sofía all day, so I came inside extra-sore but super-happy.
(The camera’s perspective makes it look a bit wonky; it’s not. All posts are plumb, square, and level.)
It is built good and strong. All four (Freecycled) posts are sunk [...]
I’ve been trying to think up a name for our little homestead here for a long time now – a year, to be precise. I guess I can be pretty creative, and Josh especially so, but nothing we came up with seemed right.
Back when we lived on the outskirts of DC I used the label [...]
I don’t know if it was the homemade chili-garlic bug remedy, the light dose of neem oil, or the recent drenching of eggshell calcium-water, but my peppers and tomatoes have perked right up (despite the persistence of the darn squash bugs!). They look so much better than they did only two weeks ago. No new [...]
I have hit my limit with the handmade-ness of the toolshed. I wasn’t happy with how it was coming together; the gaps were too big for my liking (remember the cladding was split not cut, so the logs bowed out and in as well as left and right) and I just wasn’t fully loving its [...]
I got the first bit of cladding done today.
Only the far left log is nailed in place; the others are all loose like puzzle pieces, getting moved and turned this way and that, to see which way they fit best before being trimmed and nailed in place.
My borrowed sawzall really helps trim up the sides [...]
Old-fashioned marigolds, not doing a very good job of keeping squash bugs off my pepper plants.
A meadow of pink, yellow, and blue weed flowers among the white buckwheat.
I don’t know what these flowers are called, bu they’re such a beautiful shade of blue.
Plain-Jane but oh-so-important peanut flowers!
Pepper and tomatoes need plenty of calcium to keep them healthy through the growing season. I usually plant mine with a mixture of crushed eggshells, sugar (for beneficial soil bacteria), and epsom salts (for magnesium). But this year I forgot!
The plants’re all starting to look a bit sallow. It could be all the attacks by [...]