Nine's Bootcamp Experience (BRK)

#78

#79

Some things I've been on about today:

Made gomashio - it is a delicious condiment? spice? that you can make at home very easily. Toast salt in a pan (pref. cast iron) until grey. Set aside. Toast sesame seeds in a pan until medium brown. Keep them moving or they will burn! Traditionally, put those two ingredients together and grind them with a mortar and pestle. If you're like me, you use a spice (coffee) grinder to grind the seeds then mix the two together in a jar. If you want to get fancy, add a little nori to that grind process. The ratio is 1:5 / salt:sesame seeds. The nori? I dunno. Add a little for flair. We didn't have any. I was also having math problems and may have added "too much" salt. If you ask me, it's the right amount because it's toasted sesame-flavored salt. Put that on a buttered tortilla and I'm in heaven. YMMV. In case you don't want to follow my slightly vague recipe, use this one. I took the toasted salt part from it because that wasn't given to me in the original directions I was given. "5 parts toasted sesame seeds. 1 part salt. Add nori." Anyways, we ran out of gomashio easily a month ago and I think about it longingly every week. Sometimes every day. Today I had the spoons to finally make my own. No more wistful longing. Now every day can be gomashio day. /insert celebratory binge eating of gomashio-and-butter-laden tortillas

Roots - today someone somewhere posted a link to this collection of images/drawings of roots. Yeah, roots. It's FASCINATING. You hear about how certain plants have root systems that do a thing in your soil, and you have a vague notion of what that might look like.. but now you can actually see what that plant's roots look like! I'm losing it on how cool this is. Really, it's probably Geoff Lawton's fault because he made some comment once about how the roots in the plants of your soil tell you about your soil and are actively trying to fix it, etc. etc. and now I wish there was more information about all the plants around me and more time in every day so I could sit there and get this really, painfully in depth idea of what the soil is and which plant is doing what to help it become the best soil it can be. Whew. Anyways, yeah, roots. You should check it out. Pretty neat stuff.

I noticed that Lynn Gillespie had a book in the Kickstarter (go check it out) that's happening right now, and I was curious about that book. After perusing her website, I realized that she had a video series about the topics in the book. So in my free time when I want to watch a thing and learn a thing but don't want to be glued to the screen, I go through her High Performance Gardening course and listen to it while knitting/lying in bed/playing with the cats/stretching/some other random activity that allows me to pay attention to what I'm listening to. Every so often I jot down notes on things I find useful or should probably remember later. I would probably jot things down more often if I had a writing utensil and paper nearby at all times, but that's besides the point. It's useful info. She's clear and relatively concise. I get to hear about her pesky mice and bird problems. She explains things well. And week 4 she comes out holding a cute animal. Not gonna spoil it for you - you gotta watch it find out what it is!

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Other than those neat things, my rounded half file showed up today, which means I can sharpen both of my hand sickles and take a whack at the growies on my plot tomorrow. Oh, I also picked up two varieties of local strawberry plants on Wednesday while we were in town - "Everbearing" and "June-Bearing" - and a thorned variety of "Everbearing" raspberries. You know what that means? Yep, they get planted tomorrow too. Which reminds me - while watching Lynn's videos tonight, she has a planting chart of what I should be able to plant at this point, which reminded me to go through my seed spreadsheet and add things to my Trello list of stuff to plant tomorrow. No really, I am this much of a nerd. It's also nice to have reminders of what I should be doing re: planting because otherwise I spend too much time just dreaming about all the things I want to plant and IT'S TOO EARRRLY UUUGGGHHH. BUT, it meant that I made a checklist for NEXT weekend, so I don't have to think about all the awesome things I want to plant already. They have a list. I will hide it until next week. Then I can prance around planting all those things next weekend. The struggle is real, folks.

Anyways, planting, sharpening, continue being amazing. That's what's on my to do list tomorrow.

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Oh, random side note of another thing I've been into lately. When I started the phenology journal (which I'm still totally doing I just suck at taking pictures of it), I randomly found this guy's video about doing a bullet journal. Why was I trying to find a video about bullet journaling? Because people hype things and I wanted to see if this person actually had any good advice or insight. Turns out, he's funny and I've been slowly making my way through some of his videos if the title doesn't seem too annoying of a topic. But in case you're interested in hearing some rando fella tell you about bullet journaling, here ya go:



And a previous video of him talking about how he feels about journaling:

#80

Lost my post from last night. :facepalm:

Here are some pics.

#81

Did Wildlife Cams Monday afternoon. If you missed that post, check it out over on the Wildlife thread.

#82

Gardening in the morning. Started trying to root some Bradford pears, Transparent apples, and the rootstock under the Transparents. Haven't ever rooted tree cuttings before, so we'll see how it goes!

Checked on my seedling babies, so you can check those out below tooooo! I also checked on my mini greenhouses on Sunday and included some pics of Moschata and Rapini for ya. I'm so proud of my seedling babies. At least the ones that have sprouted. One of the pots at BC hasn't sprouted at all, so I planted lavender in it on Sunday. None of my tomatoes in the MGs have sprouted. They were planted the same day as the moschatas. The rapini was planted a week later. Wtf, tomatoes. Let's gooooo...

Today was battery maintenances in the morning. Got the Millenium Falcon batteries tended to - they need to be recharged. The little solar chargers on them aren't feeding enough. Leviathon, Voltswagon, Judy, Kubota, Rex, and the Bee hut all got attention. Tomorrow it'll be Doug, Love Shack, Dump Trailer, Electric Tractor, the Rav, and all the other random batteries in the shop. Even though it seems to be one of those tasks that isn't glamorous, it's really satisfying. Starting with a battery that's all gunky and whatnot, then leaving with it wiped clean and all filled up - it's nice to get those easy, step-by-step projects that have little wins scattered within them.

This afternoon we had a half-assed holiday - May the Fourth (Be With You)! A bunch of us learned about fog harps and water harvesting, then others of us learned about mycological reproduction. I'm fascinated by mycology, so I was in that group of folks. Master Fred taught us padawans about inoculating media with mycelium culture. We talked through the process and began preparing vessels to accept our live cultures. I'm really stoked for this. He has this book, Radical Mycology, which he described as poetry.. but also informational. I hope to someday get my hands on a copy because it's so hard to read reviews online and get a feel for a book, but when someone sits in front of you and tells you the book has all the information you want and is a pleasure to read.. well, why keep looking for anything else?

After that it was Leia Buns (cinnamon buns!) and Tauntaun Froths (v. pina coladas). Lara and Fred made vegan cinnamon buns and they were so amazingly good. The bread so soft, yet supple. Not too sweet. Cinnamon-y. Probably the best cinnamon bun I've had in over a decade. Srsly. Get that recipe if you see them.

That vine growing through a fir, could it be Honeysuckle?