Matt's Permaculture Experience (BRK)

Post #13 (3/28/21):

Well, it's Sunday again! You know what that means, a new photo album full of the adventures from the previous week: New Album!

This morning I spent my time reading about living in community (Finding Community by Diane Leaf Christian) and watching youtube tutorials on video editing. Exciting stuff, I know haha. I also got some pictures of cats and some cool flowers! (1, 2, 3, and 4)

Though all of that flew by rather quickly and soon enough me and Daniel were working on Phase two of preparing the remaining dishes for the Seder Dinner. For me, that meant making a vegan potato Kugel (replace eggs with potato flakes. Make one giant cake in a cast-iron skillet instead of tiny cakes) and making a vegetable soup in the spirit of matza ball soup (we couldn't get matza ball mix in time for the dinner). As a note, if you use a food processor to shred onions, don't put your face over it when you open it. Unless your sinuses are clogged, in which case those aerosolized onion bits will clear you right up!

That cooking took us a few hours, but I then had some downtime which I used to work on some current BB's and research future ones. I gotta say, the fermentation BB's page in the food preservation section looks like it could use some new additions haha.

Anyway, the rest of my evening was taken up with the Seder dinner which was a blast. The ceremony was interesting and Daniel decided to spare us and keep it brief so that we could all dig into the wonderful food. And oh boy was the food wonderful. We all discovered the joys of horseradish (freshly made by Josiah) and myself, Daniel, and Josiah had enough in one sitting to turn us all red in the face haha. Daniel especially went hard and was out of it for almost a full minute. The Baklava turned out to be amazing. Especially the grapefruit one. I didn't take many pictures of the event since I was too busy enjoying what was going on haha, But I did get a good picture of Josiah just seconds before he experiences the horseradish for a second time (6) and I have a picture of myself rockin Nine's awesome scarf (5). Its traditional for men to wear a hat of some kind, apparently, and I did not get that memo so Nine generously lent me her scarf.

Overall this week has been good, but man do they really seem like they are flying by. More and more I feel like I don't have enough time to do the things I want to haha. Oh the pains of being mortal. Oh well, I'll figure something out, I'm sure. I've started working on some longer-term videos and hope to get a couple done by next week, we'll see how that works though. The Bootcamp keeps me real busy and it's challenging to not get drawn into tons of tiny conversations with this many interesting people about.

One last note, if you're interested in taking a closer look in the world of plants and microbes, and you aren't afraid to dip into the sea of scientific jargon that comes with that, Jeff Lowenfel's Teaming with Microbes, Teaming with Nutrients, and Teaming with Fungi books are excellent. Right now I'm having my mind blown by how intricate and specialized plant cell areas I'm reading Teaming with Nutrients. I have taken several microbiology courses and the way that Jeff describes the microbes just takes my understanding to whole new levels. It does get pretty technical though, so it's definitely not a book everyone would enjoy. I'm just a bit of a plant nerd, so I'm loving it.

Well, that's all for today. I'll leave you all with this cool plant/algae thing I saw while taking my laundry off the line today (7).

Post #14 (3/29/21):

Today's post is gonna be real short, not too much happened.

This morning was more garden planning followed by another planning session and goal setting. That was pretty much the whole morning, so I don't really have pictures.

In the afternoon I went up to Allerton Abbie with Lara, Erica, Chris, and Jen and then we split up into different project crews. After Jen walked us through a couple of projects, including locating replacement handles for the window systems in pictures 1 and 2. They have a really fascinating mechanism and I'm definitely looking forward to fixing them.

After that brief session of the projects in the Abbie, I split off and got picked up by Paul, Josiah, and Fred to film them while they talked about some well related stuff. The video stuff didn't turn out the greatest but enjoy a picture I got of them marking the spot they decided on (3).  

Once that wrapped up, I returned to the Abbie to trade-off with Lara, who went back to basecamp with Paul and Fred, and me and Erica worked on grinding down the edges of some glass windows that will make the door windows on the Abbie double paned.

That's all for today, unfortunately, I didn't get a good sendoff picture for today, so enjoy the paper crane I made during the talent show, courtesy of Lara's excellent instructions.

Post #15 (3/30/21):

This morning I worked on cleaning up and sharpening some tools. Pictures 1 and 2 show the before for a hatchet that has its powder coat fully covering it. Pictures 3 and 4 show the powder coat removed. I also sharpened one of those hatchets, but I didn't quite finish so I decided to not post any pictures for that.

This evening I worked with Erica some more on installing the double-paned windows for the Abbie doors. We got one of them to fit but that will be going into a longer video that I'll post later. We also worked on installing some weather stripping on the doors of the Abbie, so here's a picture of Erica doing that (5).

Picture 6 is us prepping for Taco Tuesday. It was another delicious spread. Josiah made a wonderful avacodo salsa that didn't survive the night. I made improvements to the Vegan queso and I'm much happier with it. Roasted tomato and jalapeno add lots of flavors.

That's all for today, enjoy this beautiful sunrise from this morning (7).

Post #16 (4/1/21):

Welp, I guess I'm just really struggling to upload since this is the second time I've made a post, thought the post was finished uploading, closed my laptop, opened my laptop the next evening, and realized that the post wasn't finished uploading haha. So I guess I'm just gonna be missing days. Whoops!

In any case, this morning I worked on my garden patch next to the fisher price house (along with Nine, Erica, Lara, Dez, and Kyle). I planted some garlic, echinacea, chamomile, and a few other herbs. The rest of the time I worked on improving the path for my section of the berm. You can see the progress I've made so far in pictures 1 and 2.

After lunch, I went to do more calibration work with the sawmill but ran into more problems. First, the adjustment points used to make the calibrations on the sawmill weren't working right. So, after much head-scratching and some talking with free, I decided to pull off some of the wheels and adjust the bolts to try and reset the sawmill's position. If that doesn't work, I'll need to manually increase the length of the slots used to make those adjustments. But, I didn't have time to test if that works, since I needed to adjust all the wheels on the sawmill so that the carriage was parallel to the supporting bars. You can (hopefully) see that in pictures 3 and 4 there is a slight angle between the rail (grey metal) and the carriage of the sawmill (red metal). This slight difference in alignment would cause our vertical cuts to be slightly off, so I fixed this while I was messing around with pulling wheels on and off. You can see the finished product in pictures 5 and 6.

After that, half the Bootcamp went to get dinner out with Paul at a bar in town while the rest of us stayed at basecamp. I made a stir fry for dinner using a combination of tahini, green curry paste, miso paste, soy sauce, lime juice, and rice wine vinegar (7). It came out great and I'm not entirely sure I could recreate it haha. I also made some sourdough loves using both all-purpose and whole wheat flour. But those won't bake until tomorrow.

That's it for today, I'll leave you all with the cool picture of some of the plants I saw while working on gardening today (8)

Post #17 (4/2/21):

Okay, So I'm most likely going to be posting less consistently in the future. Things are pretty busy here and I don't have lots of time for posts. In addition, we are shooting to have a team work more permanently on the lab in the next week or two and I'm going to be on that team. This means I'll have much more limited access to electricity and internet access. Finally, the BRK posts just don't feel like a great investment of my time right now. I have lots of things I want to do here and it's somewhat stressful to add a blog to the end of the day every day. I plan on continuing to post at least once a week (Sunday update, woohoo!) and I'll probably post a few pictures or videos on other days, but I just can't do posts every day. I'm honestly not even sure how many people read this haha, but for those of you who do, now ya know what's up!

Anyway, today I got to try out driving Rex (the Excavator) for the first time and it was a blast. Honestly, it was one of the most fun experiences I've had in a long time. I couldn't stop grinning for a full minute after hopping out. Enjoy some pictures of the excavator work (1,2).

After lunch, me and Erica worked on getting some more floorboards installed in Cooper Cabin (3,4,5)

I'll leave you all with a picture of the lovely dinner Josiah made tonight alongside some of the bread I made (6).