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

BRK #552

Tried to pack everything into my mountain view this time.



The GAMCOD plot is taking shape. We're building a hugel on a 8'x25' plot. We finished two tiers of dirt-on-wood today.





Finally: the four of us took the ebikes up to Allerton Abbey in the afternoon to work on a busted section of junk pole fence. They're fantastic machines, and we successfully packed all our gear either on the trailer or on the bike baskets.



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

BRK #553

Here, Ben and I dismantle one of the abandoned structures of Ant Village, out at the Lab. We call this one Skeleton 1, because there's not much left of it.



Here are some of the many (many) screws and bolts we recovered from Skeleton 1, so far.



Though this wasn't the only log Brian and Ben peeled today, this was one of the first. And it was actually green wood, so the peeling went much easier than their first experience.



One of our upcoming construction projects is the Bobra Line, which will help provide some additional shade to the Classroom and Berm Shed over the summer. Here's the tree that gave us a log for the project.



Brian felled it, and it landed just where we needed it to.



To wrap up the day, one of our last projects was to finish these boxes we'd started earlier in the week. They're destined for Cooper Cabin. Nice job, team!



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

BRK #554

A smashing end to the Boot week...! More details on the door to Allerton Abbey tomorrow. Today, I have photos of our first-ever foray into making fruit jam. Lotsa rhubarb around - fresh as well as frozen from our previous season - so we took up Paul's suggestion of preserving as much as we could. Between dehydrating and making jam, we sorted out maybe 25 pounds of the fruit today.

The kitchen was a busy place, and full of activity this afternoon.



Here was Brian's main station today, where he cooked-down and reduced the rhubarb with sugar and a little lemon juice.



Ben took care of most of the chopping of rhubarb into inch-long chunks, and then prepping jars for canning. Trace was the main force behind dunking and withdrawing the jars full of jam from the canning pot. I basically stayed out of their way and even went outside to add mulch to the garden. ...And led taste-testing.

Seriously though, there's more rhubarb also in the dehydrators. Here's some we took out today, which we had started earlier in the week.



And here are some of the finished jars of jam. We carried out two recipes today: one traditional canning recipe, and then one from the 1930s that goes straight in the refrigerator. And no, we didn't separate green and red stems, we just mixed them all together. That's how we ended up with a caramel-brown colour instead of something looking more like rhubarb.



I often say that when one may lack skills, experience, and training, nearly all this can be substituted with gusto. So we have a lot of gusto. But we had gusto together. What a day.



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

Thank you so much for the Allerton Abbey door upcoming update! We just heard about the door issue. Allerton Abbey is booked for a stay in a few weeks. You guys are lifesavers!

To make rhubarb jam look more rhubarby, a lot of people add a couple drops of red food coloring! I processed the first harvest of our rhubarb yesterday, and it's in the freezer waiting for a night when we want rhubarb cobbler.