Gina Jeffries

Hi Kate, I would love to be a tester!  I've been nursing along a nice starter fed with rye flour and using it with flours from a local mill (I included a link to it if it works)  which is awesome because the grains are grown in my region in the Skagit Valley.  

https://cairnspring.com/pages/our-story  

The loaves I've made with their flour (sourdough and non-sourdough) always taste delicious but I have trouble with them coming out like a brick. I get little to no oven spring and I REALLY want to know what I'm doing wrong! I went to culinary school but it was on an injured worker program and they wouldn't let me focus on the advanced baking (I had to take the management track). I worked at a gluten free bakery after I graduated, which was a whole new learning curve and they made sourdough as well, although I only made it a few times before I had to quit for health reasons.

My husband is building me a mobile kitchen (like a commercial kitchen) on a flatbed trailer we have, so I have a separate space to make my goat milk soap, cheese, and sourdough bread. I will have a propane range in it, but for now I have an electric oven. I like to make my bread in a cast iron dutch oven but I've also made it using a pizza stone with steam generated by pouring water over lava rocks.  Anyway, I didn't just want to yell 'pick me pick me', ha ha!

I own a rocket heater. Sans mass...for now.

Melissa Lanray wrote:
I'm aware that most of you are above the equator, but down here, my species of comfrey grow to about 70cm (i don't know what that is in feet!), and then die down. I can cut it down 3-4 times in Summer alone, no problem, and it will shoot up again. It does die down in Winter, and the spikey leaves can be a little irritating to the skin if you're taking the leaves for compost / moving it for where ever you need. I tend to just chop and drop.

Melissa, that's exactly how comfrey behaves at my place! We get tons (too much) rain here but the comfrey thrives in it and I get the same multiple growths whether I leave it to fall over or feed it to the critters! I don't have clay here, just gravel and sand but it doesn't seem to matter to the comfrey

I'm in NW Washington. I went a little nuts planting cuttings from my comfrey all along the pasture fence and under many of the fruit trees.  My old girls easily hit 5 feet and spread and collapse and send up new leaves all summer long if I don't harvest some. My goats love it! In the winter, they just kind of wilt down and my geese finish them off but spring brings them back in a frenzy. I have noticed they don't seem to get as big in the shade of the trees but they still do just fine. They shade/smother everything near them so planting something like evergreen shrubs by comfrey may not work so well.

That's so funny! I prune my grapes exactly like I prune my roses which is to say, I prune them to within an inch of their lives.  I don't know what else to do, I can't seem to train them.  When I bought my home, I inherited an out of control Concord grape on the side of the garage that I didn't even know was a grape. I cut it down to the ground because it was lifting the siding off. It came back so hard and threw tons of grapes at me the next year!  I brought home 2 Table Grape plants from the feed store that were almost dead. They consistently produce dozens of bunches every year. I dug up (from someone else) 4 Pinot grape plants and pruned them back to a stick before planting them. They stretch along a 40 foot wire support and give me so many little bunches that the wire can't hold them and I have to dig through the grass to find them.

All that being said, I don't like that I can't figure out how to keep them looking like winery rows, neat and tidy. I really need someone to come here and show me, cut for cut, what to do!

This is our first year doing it. We got 2 Idaho Pasture pigs.

These are my contributions to keeping my wallet less empty. I get the pallets for free so it just costs a box of screws and and handful of T-Posts. I have no woodworking talent so fencing and walls for cattle panel shelters is about all I do.

These are bees on my dad's pussywillow trees. I love bees!  I wish I had gotten a picture of the gold plated ladybug I found in my living room a few years ago. It sat on my hand for several minutes while I struggled to get my phone camera to cooperate, then vanished right before I clicked the photo! It was gorgeous! This is what it looked like, though.



[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OGBtvZsLDSo[/youtube]

Where my horses live is sand, sand, sand and all winter is wet, wet, wet. So when I crossfenced the pasture, I sank treated 4x4's in concrete that sloped away from the post slightly to help with run-off. The very bottom of the post sat in the sand so any water that did run down it wouldn't be trapped by concrete.  This made a strong end post that I could pull fence tight against. Everything in between was t-posts.

Where my goats live is rock and gravel will minimal topsoil so we just sank the 4x4's and braced them. It works but not as well because when  tree fell on the fence, it yanked the corners UP, vertically.

Where we are thinking of moving to is high sagebrushy desert with lots of rocks, so I'm thinking the gabions will be perfect, as well as attractive, as well as good storage for all those rocks instead of all over the fields.

I hope I didn't make a mistake when I transplanted a ton of it around all my fruit trees!  It was growing in a keyhole raised bed somehow (I didn't put it there) and I wanted it elsewhere. I think I have both varieties but not sure. The original plant was a gift and it never spread beyond where I put it without my help. I have it growing all along my fencelines and under the orchard trees, partly to crowd out the grass, partly to use as chop and drop, but mostly to feed it to my goats!