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

BRK #100
(first milestone...!)

Over the weekend, I made my first batch of candied ginger. I buy so much of it at the grocery that I decided I'd have a go at making my own instead, and perhaps save a few thousand dollars (...it's a verified habit).

I was tremendously excited with the results, however I realized that they might not be everyone's cup of tea. A typical candied ginger can sometimes be off-putting, but in the case of my homemade batch I felt a more significant warning was in order.



...Meanwhile, we did some gardening work today at Allerton Abbey, up at the Lab. Most of the time, it was harvesting of the sunchokes we have up there. It would be a bit too difficult to harvest them when covered with a foot or two of snow and/or ice, so we gathered what we could find today. In general, the harvest was good. Lots of lumps that looked like these:





Today it felt like I was "closing down" the hugels I'm responsible for. The growing season is pretty much done, and only the Greenhouse and the Season Extender have a solid chance of producing more food for us. So for now, it's about building the soil and perhaps conserving a bit of the heat that comes along in the afternoon. So both Cricket Hill and Swamp Castle received some extra helpings of organic hay today (primarily where I had dug out the sunchokes).





Tomorrow is Project Day, and I think we'll be on a potato hunt this time around. There are several ways to preserve them, and while burying them in the sand in Arrakis wins my vote, it seems like everyone's interested in storing them much closer to the house so we can actually cook them (and again, not have to dig them out of a foot or two of snow). So stowing them in the pump house up here at Basecamp seems to be the go-to strategy this year. We'll see how tomorrow turns out.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!

Hopefully, they won't live up to their nickname "fartichoke," but we'll see. Maybe the way you prepare them has a lot to do with this.

I understand that fermenting them into lactic acid pickles will prevent that.  The problematic carbohydrate will then already be converted and not be fermented in the colon by bacteria or yeast that produce gas.

BRK #101

Project Day today, which featured a lot of harvesting. Chief among the crops we took in today were potatoes, and I learned and observed a fair amount. I'd like to share a bit of it here.

First off: potato berries. I was familiar with these prior to coming to Wheaton Labs, but I typically threw them back into the garden bed (because do not eat). However, Grey let me know that they can be opened up and the seeds can be soaked prior to planting, which may result in some different varieties or different traits from the parent plant. The process can be a bit tedious and I still have new-tent stuff to do, so I may not come along for the ride on this one but we'll see. We collected about a dozen of these berries from all the different plants, so now we don't know which came from which. This might make for an interesting batch of TPSs, or True Potato Seeds.



Here's a photo of Grey harvesting potatoes from Basecamp 1, one of the hugel berms I was caretaking this season. In general, the harvest was all right from this hugel. I think these classic yellow/Russet potatoes are not the best variety for this region/climate/etc. More regarding this later.



Paul had an interesting idea for an impromptu root cellar for our taters: the pump house at Basecamp. So here's our arrangement. We're currently using stainless steel buckets lowered into the pump house (as there is no ladder down there), connected to cords and twine bits to an array at the opening. When we are searching for spuds we can just grab a bucket. The buckets each hold a specific variety, as we had separated them by colour. Hopefully this method holds us over for the winter. It would be excellent to have a convenient root cellar at Basecamp, but it's not happened yet. Until then, the pump house it is.



Finally: a question. There were a few potatoes that had white spots on them. I'm more curious than I am intimidated by them, but I figured someone might know the story behind their appearance. Fred suggests nematodes or some other plant disease. Beyond this cosmetic issue, there seems to be nothing else out of the ordinary with these few potatoes. Anyone else out there with some ideas?



I intend to spend another post discussing what I've observed with our potato harvest, including variety, yield, and most-effective growing area on hugels. That will likely be later this week.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!

BRK #102

I wanted to feature the Pump House project today, since it's really picking up steam and we had a productive day today.

Caleb was very busy with the chainsaw today, prepping wall timbers. I showed up and helped with maybe the last third of the lot. Between him and me (mostly him), likely five dozen timbers like these were sawed-off on both ends so they could be easily attached to the frame. We'll use these scraps for some of the rocket mass heaters over the coming cold months, for sure. The sawdust is likely destined for a willow feeder.



This photo shows the frame of the pump house in the pit. We actually shifted the position of the frame inside the pit using Rex, the excavator. Once it was moved to the side, Grey attached and cobbed the wall timbers. Once all four walls are complete, plastic sheeting will be wrapped around all four sides of the structure to provide resistance to moisture invasion.



Finally: here's a photo of Grey on the other side of the pump house structure as we attach straps to the bucket of Rex. Caleb was in the cab, operating the excavator to lift the frame and nudge it a bit to the right, while Grey and I were outside finalizing the frame's position.



Two last items to mention here:
1. Congrats to Grey on his nearly-a-clean-sweep victory tonight in The Quest for El Dorado...! We have board game night nearly every week, and there's no game that's hit the table as much as this one. There are apparently a couple expansions for it, and I think they would be a worthy investment.

2. I've received a fair amount of feedback regarding the size and loading-speed of the pictures in my BRK thread. My apologies for those experiencing long loading times, as I host the photos on a site other than Permies and they seem to take a bit more time than usual to load large graphics. To attempt to remedy this, I'll be saving the photos in the same size as the thumbnails for the Permies-hosted photos. Hopefully this will help by decreasing load times and present fewer "broken" links to images I post here.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy your day...!

BRK #103

Happy Friday, everyone.

Spent a fair amount of time at the Lab at the start of this rainy, cloudy day. ...Yes! We had rain! It was spitting down just a bit prior to lunch time, then finally decided to keep going mid-afternoon. It's still coming down as I type this.

I actually enjoy dreary, rainy days like this one. There's wind, there's clouds, there's precipitation, it's markedly cool. When I lived on the east coast, these were my favourite days to visit the shore: no one else was on the Boardwalk, so I could bike on it as long as I wanted.



While I was spending my time changing the oil in the tractor*, Grey and Caleb were busy doing most of the hard work. The Pump House project is still moving forward, and they were setting up another wall, and then using the excavator to shift the structure back to its central position.



Meanwhile, I wandered over to Allerton Abbey and watered the trees. While passing through, I saw more of those shaggy Lion's Mane mushrooms I documented earlier this month. There were two larger patches, but I must have missed their prime by a day or two, because they looked like they were on the way out.



Finally: since it was requested, here's an obligatory photo of a cat. Mark the date: this is likely the first time Frances was ever bashful.



Thanks for reading, make the most of your weekend, and enjoy your day...!

*: I'd changed oil plenty of times in a typical car. However, there's nothing like your first oil change with a piece of heavy equipment to make you feel like a complete novice (read: imbecile) all over again.