Tomatoes

The tomatoes have been transplanted. On May 26, mom and I transplanted 10 Bloody Butcher's, 10 Big Boy's, 4 Sweet Million's, 4 Red Currant's, and 4 Cherry Bambino's. That's about a week earlier than we would normally do it, but it's been so warm, and the 10 day forecast looks promising, so if everything goes according to plan, there should be no shortage of tomatoes at the Rheaume homestead this summer.

 We will be waiting another week or so before transplanting the eggplants and peppers. The garden has been doing some serious growing in this warm weather, and the peas are starting to blossom.

All we are waiting for now is a nice rain shower. It rained about every day for a week earlier in the month, but it hasn't rained since then, and we've had a lot of hot weather. I've been watering them once or twice a day, and we have a lot of clay in our soil, so it has good moisture retention, but they're ready for a nice saturating rain. There's a 50% chance of rain on Memorial day, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Homebrew: Part 1

I finally got around to starting my first batch of homebrew. I bought my Brewer's Best Kit from Eastern Shores Brewery in Port Huron Michigan, and my first brew was a Brewer's Best English Brown Ale Homebrew Beer Ingredient Kit The process went relatively smoothly, and it took about three hours. I already feel much more confident about brewing my second batch. The fermentation process has started. I haven't timed it, but it seems to be bubbling about once a minute. About a week from now, I'll take a hydrometer reading, to see how much alcohol my yeasts have created. Even though it went smoothly, there are a few things I'll be able to change for my next brew. First, I'll boil 3.5 gallons rather than 2.5. There was plenty of room in my Granite-Ware 21 quart canning pot for another gallon. Also, I'll have an extra gallon on hand. I bought 5 gallons of water, but I probably boiled about a gallon off the pot, so my beer is going to be a bit on the strong side. I poured the trub and everything into the fermenter (I didn't really want to, but it would have only been a little over 4 gallons if I didn't get that last inch of wort into the fermenter, and plenty of people said the trub won't hurt anything.), and added the 2.5 gallons of bottled water to the cooled wort, and the water level is just under 5 gallons. Also, I will get some cheap Vodka, to put in the airlock rather than water. This is supposed to help ensure a sanitary fermentation process. Also, I wish I had dipped the head of the spigot in sanitizer before I rinsed everything. Most people seem to think the beer will be fine, but it does increase my risk of contamination. Hopefully, I will have a batch of drinkable brew in about a month. If not, my first brewing experiment was an educational process, and I'm eager to start my second batch, with all the knowledge I've gained.

Chickens

On Monday May 17, I went with Uncle Paul, Candy, and Gabe to the Marlette stockyards. My plan was to buy four mature laying hens. The selection wasn't as nice as I would have liked. One guy had a number of hens, but they looked pretty beat up. He said they just came from the Amish hatcheries, where they put them in with a lot of roosters to ensure fertile eggs. Anyone who's ever seen the rooster-hen relationship knows what a violent affair their intimacies are. I did buy two Aracauna hens from him for five dollars apiece. According to him, they are about a year old, which gives them about another two years of laying. I also bought one Plymouth Rock Bantam from some dude with no teeth. It's a pretty bird, but I wasn't really looking for banties, because their eggs are so small, but I got one for five dollars, and I'm happy with her.

Uncle Paul said he would give me a hen when we got back. When we were collecting her, I thought it looked suspiciously rooster-like, but I made the mistake of trusting my uncle, and taking her/him home. He is a little guy, but I'm pretty sure Uncle Paul knew he was a rooster, and I suppose he thinks he's pretty funny. I figured it out the first morning when he struggled to let out a few ugly crows. According to everyone, the chickens might take a few days to start laying, because the move stresses them out. I've already gotten two eggs out of my bantie, but I've yet to encounter one of those beautiful pale blue Aracauna eggs.

Cardboard Sidewalk & Bean Teepee

Two weeks ago, the big gardening infrastructure project was putting up the snow fence to protect from the deer, and to a lesser extent, the rabbits. Last week, I laid down some cardboard to mark a walking path, and to keep the weeds down. For now, I have to way it down with rocks. This is somewhat inconvenient, because it makes pushing the wheelbarrow through the garden somewhat challenging. I'm hoping once the cardboard gets packed down, I can remove a number of rocks.

 I also built a teepee for my beans. We put it on an area next to the garden where we've been stacking our compost for the last forever. It will be interesting to see what effect it has on the beans. What the teepee lacks in symmetry, it makes up for in functionality. It has five poles, and I planted about 7 beans around each pole. Dad and I will have to make some adjustments with the snow fence in order to protect the beans from the deer and rabbits. Originally, I thought I would put up two teepees for the beans, but mom planted some bush beans in the garden, and I have about 35 bean plants planted around the teepee, so I might use the space next to it for my broccoli.

Coming Along

After I arrived a couple of weeks ago, we had a string of terrible weather after a couple of days of decent weather. It was about 40 and rainy every day. That weather was not conducive to germination. Finally, we've strung together some warm and sunny days, and it really shows in the garden. So far, I've got turnips (picture below), peas, spinach, radishes, and carrots sprouting in the garden, along with the some potatoes and onions.
 
I'm still waiting on the beets and parsnips. The cabbages, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and peas that mom planted have really started to grow. The lettuce on the east side of the house is growing slowly, but looking healthy. Except for my broccoli which germinated almost immediately, all my other seeds except for sage are just now coming on strong; cilantro, parsley, eggplant, basil, and chamomile.

With all the sun, I've been watering like crazy. Especially since we got that extra length of hose, so I can spray the garden directly using the wand, rather than fill up the watering cans, and walk another 20-30 yards to the garden. I am worried a little bit about using our tap water, because it's so hard, and a little salty, but all the seeds germinated using it, and I've talked to other people who've used it, so hopefully it'll be ok. I don't have much choice. We do have a barrel for collecting rainwater, but there's not enough of it, and there's no way to realistically transport it from the house to the garden.

All in all, I'm cautiously optimistic about the garden at this point. It's growing, and starting to take shape. I've already put a number of things in there, and I still have some transplants to put in after the first of June (if I can wait that long).

Dad's Bike, Finished

After doing everything I could imaging to get dad's bike going without making that god-awful noise coming from the drive-train, I gave up on it for a while, and worked on some other things for a couple of days. I was going to take it apart one more time today, and put it back together, and hope for the best, but when I rode it up to the deck, I noticed the noise was much subdued. I made a couple more adjustments with the rear derailleur, and it's riding fairly well. I still feel a little bit of vibration in some of the gears, and it doesn't shift strongly while going up hills, but most of them feel pretty smooth, and the noise is gone for the most part. Considering how cheap the bike is, I believe it's performing at an acceptable level at this point. Gabe's put about 45 miles on it over the last couple of days, so it looks like the job is done (for now).

Morel Hunt

On Sunday May 16th, I was helping my dad bring in a little more firewood to help us get through the spring, and I spotted a little morel. Dad told me if I wanted to do a serious hunt, he had the spot. He told me, just east of the property line, where the creek flats meet the crp field, I should find a bunch of them under the apple trees. Within about thirty seconds of searching, I found this bad mama jama.

By the time it was all said and done, I had collected just short of a dozen.

 I fried them up using this recipe from, http://thegreatmorel.com/recipes.html

Bread Crumbs and Parmesan Cheese...

I forgot to tell you what I made with some of what I had found.
Ingredients:
1 cup bread crumbs
1 tbs crushed black pepper
1 tbs crushed sea salt
3 tbs parmesan cheese, fine grated
3-4 thick slices medium cheddar
1 egg for eggwash
about 15-20 medium sized morels, washed and halfed
Preparation:
Mix all dry ingreedients in a shallow bowl. Warm healthy amount of butter in small frying pan. beat egg and place in seperate shallow bowl. Dip shrooms in eggwash and dredge into breadcrumb mixture, immeditely place into hot butter. Fry until crispy golden brown, then arrange shrooms on small cookie sheet, placing a 1/4 inch strip of cheddar in the middle of each one. Place into a preheated 375 degree oven for about 4-6 minutes, until cheese melts. Remove, let cool, and enjoy. Try with any of your favorite cheeses or spice up the breadcrumbs with some cayenne pepper and minced garlic.

Dad's Bike Cont.

I got the parts for dad's bike last week. I bought the Park Tool FR-1 Freewheel Remover for Shimano Freewheels and the Shimano 7-Speed 13-28 Freewheel I pulled the old freewheel right off, and popped the new one on, and I thought it was going to be that easy. My first inclination that things were not going to be perfect was the tire rubbing against the gd v-brakes (which always give me hell). I thought I would deal with them later, and work on the task at hand. The chain was coming off the sprockets, so I used the barrel adjuster, and got the chain shifting through the range of gears without falling off. It was pedaling relatively smoothly, and shifting cleanly, so I thought I would give it a little test drive, and that's when I heard that god-awful noise; a grinding, squealing groan. I relubed the chain, repacked the rear hub, serviced the bottom bracket, and oiled the derailleur pulleys. Still making that noise. It only makes it when pedaling under load. I've spent hours on that thing, with little to show for it. I was pretty depressed by Thursday. Luckily, I had a nice productive weekend in the garden to help forget about it. I'm going to give it one more go sometime this week, and if I can't get it, I'll have to hand it over to Alpine cycles.

Week 2 To Do

To start my second week home I was greeted with a May 10 frost, but it did turn into a beautifully crisp spring day afterwords. For the rest of the week, it's going to be cold and damp until the weekend, when it's supposed to warm back up into the sixties, and possibly seventies by next week. Besides regular maintenance of checking on my seeds and plants, I've got a few special projects going this week. One that I'm excited about is trying to get my dad's bike back up and running with the help of the Bike Forums I think I figured out what tool I need, and the part to replace the broken freewheel. I ordered them from Amazon, so they should both be here this week. If I get it fixed, I'll describe it in a more detailed post.

I also started working on a three box system for the compost. Using the chicken coop as a backstop I've got three walls up, so it's kind of a 2 box system. I'd like to find one more board to use as a fourth wall, so we can stop using the garbage can altogether. I'm also going to be building a couple of tee-pee trellises for my pole beans to climb. I've located some long ash limbs. Now, I need to cut them and get them in place.

The chicken coop is looking a little abandoned, so I've got to start getting it ready. On Monday the 17, Uncle Paul and I are going to head to the stockyards, and pick up a few laying hens.
Work begets work, so I'm sure I'll discover a few more projects while working on those I've already got planned. To wrap this up on a positive note, I got my finally grades back, so I've officially got the 36 credits I need to graduate. I'm now a certified Master Librarian, or masterbrarian as I like to call myself.

Week 1 Recap

May 3 was a beautiful day, and I got sunburned on my first day in Michigan. I got a chance to help my dad plant 100 Russian Olives, and starting prepping my garden. The next couple of days weren't quite as beautiful. There was a chill to the air, but at least it was sunny. I got some carrots, turnips, parsnips, radishes, beats, peas, potatoes, and onions sowed in the garden. I also started some broccoli, chamomile, cilantro, mint, basil, and sage in the greenhouse. The broccoli germinated within a couple of days, and I have a bunch of healthy looking seedlings. The chamomile germinated shortly after. The basil and cilantro are just now showing some signs of life. Nothing in the garden has sprouted up yet. Since those first couple of beautiful days we've had some nasty, cold, wet weather. On the morning of May 10 there was frost. That's probably slowing down the germination process. I thought I had some beets sprouted up, but then noticed similar looking sprouts in a handful of other rows, so it's probably just a weed. The germination process always makes me nervous, because I can't see what's going on. Almost everything in the garden right now is a root vegetable, and I'll be planting them throughout the year, so I've got all summer to get it right. If anything does grow, dad and I got the snow fence up to protect the veggies from the dear. We're still working on a plan to keep the rabbits out.

Dad's Bike

In addition to gardening, I would like to take some time this summer to work on my bicycle mechanic skills. I've done a number of repairs on the bikes I've owned, but they are all fixies and road bikes. My dad has a department store mountain bike (Schwinn, High Timber). The bottom sprocket on his cassette is completely shredded, and the teeth on some of the others are worn down (this bike is a year old). In theory this should be a simple repair. Buy a new cassette, slip it on, and tighten it. In practice it's much more difficult, because Schwinn bikes are using this off-brand component, DNP. The DNP freehub has three tiers, whereas name-brand freehubs have one diameter from base to tip, so it's not as simple as just ordering a new cassette.
I might have to replace the entire freehub, which I've never done before. There are some tutorials online, so I'm going to give it a shot, but the problem with department store bikes is that there cheapie components don't always conform to industry standards, so the online help may not apply.

Getting Started

My mom was a major help lying the foundation for me, but the work is just getting started. Mom has already started the tomatoes, peppers, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, lettuce, and peas. We still need to wait a few more weeks before transplanting the warm weather crops and sowing some of the others like squash, melons, cucumbers and beans, but there are some herb seeds I wanted to get started in the greenhouse, as well as some frost resistant crops I wanted to sow directly.

My first step was to sow some basil, parsley, mint, broccoli, and sage in some seed trays. I put them all in there with some nice store bought top soil, labeled them, and loosely covered them with a garbage bag to retain the moisture. I then put them in the greenhouse to keep them nice and warm. It's now been a couple of days, and the broccoli is already popping up.
My next project was to sow some of the frost resistant crops in the garden. Mostly these are root vegetables which are some of my favorites. I've got beets, turnips, carrots, potatoes, radishes and parsnips. I'm already learning as I go. I planted the first couple of rows by digging trenches and then covering them with our garden soil. Our soil is well worked, but it does have a bit too much clay in it, so I was worried about stifling the plants by covering them with even a thin layer of clay. I told my mom about it, and she said I should use the composted manure we have behind the house to cover them. I will be interested to see how big of a difference it makes.
I also wanted to give a little tlc to the frost resistant crops that mom already transplanted. I went out there and covered the soil with newspaper, and covered it with straw. I hope this will help keep the weeds down, and keep the soil moist.

Mom the Helper

I would not have been able to do this experiment without the help of my mom. While I was in Miami, she got a bunch of seeds ready for me in her green house, and even planted some of the frost resistant plants in the garden.

Reacclimation

I've been back to Deckerville, Michigan for a few days now, and I'm starting to settle into my decision to leave my librarian job in Miami for a summer of working with my hands in The Thumb. This had always been my plan. I was going to attend the University of South Florida, getting my Master's Degree, while working as a librarian in Miami. I never really wavered from the plan, but I was suffering from some anxiety when it came down to crunch time. In making the decision, I was making an important investment in my future based on my socio-economic world view, and the prognostications that stem from it. I believe we are on an unsustainable path in this country, and our castle of wealth is really a house of cards. A consumer based economy, entitlement culture, personal and public debt, and a potential energy crisis are converging to make the continuation of the status quo to be unlikely. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what the fallout will look like, but I do think it's important to develop some skills that will allow me to survive in a failed state. These skills include anything that will allow me to produce and manage tangible products, because the days of us selling each other goods, made in China will be over.

My delusions don't extend far enough to lead me to believe, I'll be able to support myself with a backyard garden in The Long Emergency America. Nevertheless, the mental preparation, and hands on experience will put me ahead of the game in a nation of sleepwalking consumers. I don't know whats going to happen, and I don't know where this little living experiment will lead me, but the mystery and the challenge are what makes it worthwhile.