Breakfast for Dinner! Snow Day, December 8th, 2009

Need I say more?

Oh, alright then.  Homemade whole wheat blended banana-outmeal pancakes, with brown sugar,  ginger, cinnamin and cardomom - fried potatoes with onion and garlic - and sour dough slices with homemade gravy.  Those hot sauces go great on the potatoes!  This is day 2 of me cooking dinner.  Last night was indian: chicken curry and bhindi masala!  Sorry .. no pics ..

December 9th, 2009 - SNOW DAY! =)

Nothing like a snow day!  When I was a little boy, it was about the best thing ever.  Now as an adult, it's still about the best thing ever!  Oot where we live, it's very serene when it's a snow day, after a blizzard.  Virtually nobody on the road, save those 'jobbers' with their 4 wheel drive plow truck on their way to or from work.

For me, it's the start of the big test.  Proof that this grand experiment is worth the sweat that I and my friends and family gave to get this green house up and running. 

Here is the garden dome with a cap of snow on top from the recent blizzard.

Inside the dome, the temperature is pretty OK.  You can see the snow load on top.  One of the reasons I implemented a geodesic dome was because of it's natural structural stabilty.  Several hundred pounds of load are evenly distributed amongs the struts and vertices.

... and the temperature is quite nice!  Not very sunny today, so the boxes didn't get to heat up too much.  But it's a nice temperature for kale and swiss chard.  :)

Panarama of the inside of the garden dome.  There is some 'bending' which is an artifact of the panarama function of the camera.

... aaand a panarama of the front, after having spent 2.5 hours snow blowing and shoveling!

And lastly, a play, choreographed by my beautiful daughter, Lillian.  

Saturday, Dec 6 - 2009

It is starting to get cold up here.  And, although my understanding is that chickens are pretty hearty little creatures who are pretty cold tolerant, it's in our interest to do as much as we can to hedge against the wickedly cold days that will soon come upon us.  So, we had to seal up the chicken coop as best as possible in advance of those very cold days ahead.

The sides of the chicken coop that were once open have now been filled with hay and boarded up.  The sides that were against the interior wall of the garage have just been packed with hay.  This will create a good air pocket to insulate and give the chicken a nice, cozy place to live when the weather gets bad.

Jason, up on top of the chicken coop, securing mylar backed foam sheets to the top of the coop.

Dec 5th, 2009 - first snow, finishing up outside

Well, the first snow of the season arrived a few days ago, depositing a few inches of the white stuff all over Dane County. This spells the end of the majority of my outside work, the remainder being put off until it gets warm. There is still a good deal of work on the dome greenhouse that must be done, but it will have to wait.

However, we did get pretty far on the project. We've got a good deal of the moisture abatement underway; the rest can wait until Spring. I finally got a door on the dome. At the very least, I can plug some of the crack where drafts infiltrate into the warmer interior.

In the last few weeks I got more mesh on the outside of the tire foundation and dug a big trench along the outside perimeter, where we will lay gravel and drain tile and apply plaster to the mesh to repel water.


Saturday morning, just before 10am.


57 deg in the dome, a whopping 72 in the covered beds!!


Everybody inside seems to be doing quite well! You can even see condensation droplets on the inside of the window frames.

When we finally harvest, I will post Katie's recipe for Goddess Kale Chips. They are incredible!


Winter chickens.


Here is a cool shot of our house from across the ridge. That's us waaaay down there!