!!!! SEPP to Boot: Stephen's Experience (BEL)

BEL #684

This Sunday brought along with it a number of guests. Welcome to Kay, Kiki, Leesa, and Sergio! Two SEPPers, two Boots: all four interested in helping with Harvest Week.

I touched-up the Red Cabin today in preparation for our guests. Here's the current state of the Rocket Mass Heater in there. This past year, Uncle Mud visited and facilitated a number of changes he and Paul discussed in an effort to manipulate its efficiency levels. Paul and I chatted about these various changes today while I grew accustomed to how it behaved.



The finish coat of plaster will be added during the Rocket Week theme week, in early October. The wood feed is smaller than I recall, but burns well just the same.



And Black Spark was there too, making sure I was safe and sound.



That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!

BEL #685

The first day of Harvest Week... And hey, it lived up to its name.

Thanks to everyone else here today (Ben, Chris, Leesa, and Sergio) who prepared tonight's dinner, comprised chiefly of stuff right out of the garden. There was a rogue butternut squash up there on one of the hugels, onions, green beans, radishes, and an assortment of greens. It was delicious!!!



Meanwhile: other things addressed today include the placement of the new Cat House up at Allerton Abbey. No one's living inside it just yet, from what we could see, but that will change soon enough. Tomorrow we'll put in a few blankety-type things to help keep them warm overnight, then the cats will move in.



We did an exploratory delve into the bed where the sweet potatoes have been growing. In one corner, this (very) little guy was found. We think this is a promising clue, so sometime later this week we'll uncover the rest of the bed and see what kind of yield we end up with.



Rebekah...! I snatched up the roots from this echinacea plant [EDIT: correction, chicory plant] today, and more will be harvested later this week. I remember you mentioning I ought to chop it up before drying it. Any additional tips?



Finally: we also added labels to potato and sunchoke plants today. The idea is to leave them in the ground as long as possible, and then whenever we want to cook with them on a warmer winter's day, early that day we'll dig out what we can. We're trying to see if in-the-ground storage works well, so we can increase our laziness factor.



That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!

Hi Stephen. I don't know if your photos show the true colours of berries and flowers. Those flowers you said were Echinacea look much too blue for Echinacea flowers, to me they look more like chicory flowers. And the tree with the berries you showed a few days ago looks like a Rowan tree, but Rowan berries are more orangey reddish ...

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:Hi Stephen. I don't know if your photos show the true colours of berries and flowers. Those flowers you said were Echinacea look much too blue for Echinacea flowers, to me they look more like chicory flowers.

Ah, you're absolutely correct! For whatever reason I had echinacea on my mind, but I did mean chicory. When Rebekah was here last, she and I had a conversation about drying and roasting the roots as a coffee alternative.

I still have no idea what that tree may be, however the digital camera i'd been using has a scratched lens and that might cause some excessive "bloom" in my photos. My apologies. Not sure how to address that short of replacing the lens (which has been an option I've been strongly-considering lately).

In any case, thank you for the clarifications, Inge...!

BEL #686

Happy Taco Tuesday to you...!!!

Here's how mine started:



Lots of progress on many plant-based fronts during this second day of Harvest Week. It's been a pleasure having these folks around to make things interesting, plus pitch in.

Today, Leesa and I made some firestarters. These are intended to be used in the Red Cabin, which has had its primer re-designed. It'll be interesting to try these out and see how they do. It was also the first time either of us had ever made these, so it was a new experience for both of us.

We set up a J-tube rocket stove just outside the Classroom, and set to work melting this wax over a low fire.



After the wax was sufficiently melted, we added several handfuls of sawdust.



Sergio soon joined us, and he and Leesa finished most of these. After pouring the mixture into a paper egg carton cup, you insert a thin wood shaving and make it protrude from the starter, to serve as a wick.



I also checked-in on Ben and Chris, who were using our new (to us) hand-powered grain mill to grind some Sepp Holzer Grain. We hope to add this rye flour to some poly-dough at the end of the week to make some nice, thick slices of rye bread. It'll go great with the rhubarb jam we're also scheduled to make this week... Maybe as soon as tomorrow.

Thanks to Clay and Cassie for donating the hand mill to us...!!!



That's all for now. Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!