Ditch Digging

A long time has passed since I last posted anything here at Greg's List.  The summer has been relentless with tons of things going on, weeks of crazy heat early in the season .. seems like there hasn't been a whole lot of time to put together a worthy post.  On top of that there wasn't anything particularly note worthy to post about.  

It is very likely that the following post is also not note worthy enough to post on, but I shall regardless.

Well, we are in the midst of a pretty large house project.  It has come to our attention that water has been making it's way into our basement.  This has been an issue since we've moved in, but recently there has been another breach and all sorts of silt and mud are collecting as the condition worsens.  There really is no damage to speak of, but if the issue is not addressed damage will ensue.

I took a few videos to document my progress,.  So far I've spent 6 hours digging with a total of 9 hours total.

One of the problem areas is here on the right side where at one time there existed a doorway into the basement.  At sometime the door got bricked up and had concrete poured in and then dirt filled in over the top.  Water at the base of this structure seeps in when it rains hard.  The job now is to excavate until the bottom of the door is reached.  At that point we will scrub the joints clean and apply ample amounts of hard setting tar.

The previous owners when they decided to seal up this door way had decided apparently that it would be a good idea to dump in as many spare bricks and rocks as fill for the hole.  The biggest hassle of this job has been trying to pull these mini-boulders and bricks back out of the hole.  The job is utterly back breaking.

The new water breach looked like it was created by erosion from roof water run off.  That and possibly a burrowing animal.  We decided to put in a french drain around the back of the house that leads toward the back deck where there is a water catch system in the making already beneath the deck.  Eventually the plan is to have this water tiled down past the front of the house where it will be carried away toward the culvert on the edge of our property.  The project is a lot of physical work, but it will be well worth it to not have the moisture in the house.

We took some time this season to and do some staining and rudimentary landscaping.  I never did get around to finishing the staining, but we did manage to stain the kids' play set and back deck as well as a few of the wooden items in and around the back garden.

The garden took a beating during those very hot 100+ weeks, but there are still plenty of goodies.  Here is some basil that is looking good.

Seems like the last few years our peppers have not been producing as well as I would like.  There is still time, though, so I hope they all hurry it up and get some growth!  This jalepeno plant is loaded with peppers!  I can't wait to stuff them with cheese and bake them!  Or throw them in with beans and rice or in a chile .. 

The grapes in the green house have kicked butt this year.  We have a bunch of them washed and frozen in the freezer and they are awesome! They are chewy, icy, intense grape explosions!

A panorama of our semi-cluttered yard .. 

.. panorama of the inside of the green house ...

Hops, Morels and greens

Two and a half years ago I built a simple trellis and planted some hops that I purchased an Jung Garden Center in Fitchburg, WI.  I picked up four varieties, Cascade, Mt. Hood, Nugget, and Willamette.  The first year, as expected, did not see much of any growth.  During this time the hops got themselves established.  Last summer my Cascade was completely overrunning the trellis and I harvested a nice amount, but I was too busy with the roof to attend to the drying and curing and thus lost the harvest.

 

This spring, however, I am taking the task more seriously.  All four varieties have come back this season with a vengeance and I got a wild hair that my calling may be in raising hops, so I have taken to propagating these four varieties.

All four plants are going nuts and little shoots have popped up everywhere.  I have taken these and am trying two approaches to rooting them out.





Well, this idea didn't turn out so well.  You can propagate many plants by simply taking clippings or their shoots/suckers and put them in water.  Within a week or two they form roots!  Not so with hops it seems.  Or maybe some other condition wasn't right.  Regardless, I killed half a dozen decent shoots.



This next method of propagation I learned from reading a few articles online and so far it seems to make the hops shoots and cuttings very happy.  The mix is mostly perlite and vermiculite mixed with a little Foxfarm planting mix for nutrient.  If these babies all make it, I'll have 40 plus hops plants ready to put in this summer.  They won't be productive this summer, but they'll be in a good place to put on weight and hopefully bare fruit next season.

Everything else in the greenhouse is doing really well.  The grapes are really taking off and tiny little grape bundles have formed everywhere.

Kale and lettuce are all doing nicely.  We have begun thinning out this bed and replanting many kale in other free beds in the greenhouse and outside.

 

Kale, lettuce, thyme and .. lambs quarters??



Lillian found morels at Nana's place in New Glarus!  


And, of the last bit of news I would like to show you my latest creation, which is a honey mead that I just started last week.  There is about 16 pound of honey in this thing.  In about two weeks I will add about 15 pounds or so of juiced strawberries!  Then it will sit until after it has become winter .. the nearest this should be opened is probably New Years Eve .. better to wait a whole year!

Winter dome work

Oh, it's been another long winter.  Not as long as some in recent memory have been, thankfully.  In fact, the weather in January and February this year have been some of the warmest on record.  This did not pass by me unnoticed, so it was with little hesitation that I decided to get busy on finishing work on the dome.

When I left the dome last .. Spring??  Wow.  Time just flies .. regardless of the fun level!  When I left the dome, it was pretty much as you see in the picture below.  I'd recently devised a way to mount the Solexx panels by 'sistering' custom cut cedar boards onto the existing pipe.  But, it was at that time that we got the news that it was time to put the new steel roof on and gut the kitchen, both of which superceded all other project.




But, with the awesome unseasonable weather, I was able to start on finishing the dome exterior.  I'm not certain of the exact count, but at this point I think I had about 80 cedar boards yet to fashion and probably close to 60 triangles to cut.  My process was getting more efficient at this point and I think i was able to produce about 16 of these boards in 4 hours.  16 triangles took about 1.5 hours to cut.  Add about 3 to 4 hours to mount the parts.  This worked out to .. oh .. somewhere like 30 or 40 hours to finish the job of covering the dome.

Those days we're almost surreal.  We'd just gotten a fairly heavy snow storm which left us with a good 6 or 7 inches of snow, but the sun was out and warm!  It was simply irresistible to not be outside working, so with my 'Droid and a small set of speakers and a few layers to keep warm I would work outside through the weekends and through the weekdays in the evenings.  I shot this little video to try and capture some of the feel.

Now, only a few weeks later, the days are reaching into the 70's and temperatures are getting into the 90's and 100's in the dome - and it's only MARCH!  Windows and basic ventilation are next on the docket. 

    

Roof! Roof!

Our kitchen is starting to fall into place. Slowly we are getting the walls prettied up and getting the rest of the flooring into place. The flooring that we choose is Traffic Master - Alure Ultra. They are 48"x7.5" pieces of vinyl that snap together. Very durable and it looks like real wood! I just have to get up in the attic and move some electric moved around, finish wiring a light switch and a few boxes, get some drywall up and we're pretty much done. Eventually, probably more in the dead of winter, we will complete the floor so that it extends into the guest bedroom down the hall.

Did I mention that we have been replacing our roof? Our current shingled roof has been getting messed up in the recent wind storms and there are a couple of leaks in the lower roof over the band room. The roof is in desperate need of repair - I've been up there so many times to replace shingles and it was just getting worse. Shingles are being blown off .. leaks .. time to replace the roof.

We did some research and decided to go with a steel roof. After doing some shopping around to find companies who would come out and do the work and considering our budget, we decided to do it ourselves along with some hired help and bartering.

It took us a little time to get the hang of what needs to be done, but I feel that we are gaining momentum. Here are some shots of our "practice" roof. The hardest part seems to be the prep work that is required before you can lay boards and doing the valleys. The ridges are a little tricky, too. Pretty neet material to work with. It should all look pretty good when it's done - and I won't have to worry about it until forever.

One of the really nice things about this roofing system is that we don't have to a tear off of the existing shingles. The boards can be applied directly over the current roof. :)

So, with all of this house building going on, you can pretty much guess what is happening to our poor garden. I do plan on having a good guerrilla weeding session SOON!!

Our grapes are coming, though! Next year .. less house work stuff .. more grapes ..

Devil's Kitchen

So, we thought we'd tear apart our kitchen and build a new one. My parents have new cabinets and said they'd kick their old ones down to us. We hated our old kitchen and decided to get a dumpster and kidnap someone to help us tear it all out!

Here is a panoramic shot of the kitchen with most everything ripped out. Where the light is was where a bathroom once was. It was one of those 3/4 units and it was just taking up space and it just ended up being a repository for things we couldn't find places for, which is usually a sign that you need to do some serious throwing of stuff away.

Say hello to my leetle friend!

Often in my house refurbishing projects I like to leave a message for future generations. Somewhere in the attic I have left cryptic messages about 2012. In our bedroom somewhere up in the attic I left some messages about a hidden treasure located somewhere on the premises. Here, I just want to save my own soul from being cursed by the next potential owners of this house that if perchance they thought our kitchen sucked and wanted to throw it into a dumpster, that should they discover the crude construction of some of it's walls that I personally would not be blamed for the foul order of things.

This is where old kitchen cabinets go.

This is where non-burnable kitchen refuse goes. This thing was filled to the hilt when it left our property.

Here is a panoramic shot of the kitchen in a much better state. We've built new walls, ran new electrical circuits and prepared the floor for finishing.

While the other house projects have grown and taken precedence, the other projects that I usually prefer to handle have been put on hold somewhat. Finishing the greenhouse most likely will not happen until mid-fall, when we hope to be able to get our cold weather crops in there along with some custom made cold frames.

On a whim I was tricked into starting to work on a new set of raised beds. I should have known that there was no way that we would have enough time to even think about a reasonable design, let alone actually doing the work of prepping and build the raised beds.

These new raised beds will be terraced and will contain bushes of some sort. We bought the bushes as well, but haven't been able to do anything with them. We'll probably just pot them for the season and replant them next year when we have time.

My hops is still going better then ever! We'll see if I have time this Fall to brew some yummy beer. :)

Various beans and peas and weeds.

Peppers and eggplants along the paths and beans on the right.

Mmm .. string beans ..

Pepper plant getting ready to go!

Currants! We have 4 currant bushes. Every year we are getting more and more currants. Eventually these guys get pretty big I am told, so that is what I am looking forward to.

Inside the greenhouse, we have two grapes vines that are kinda getting out of control. Next year or this fall we need to clip them back and maybe extend where they can grab onto. The grapes are numerous and are looking pretty good! I think next year I would like to try and put more grapes in right behind the dome.

It was the 4th of July and the kids wanted fireworks! And so did I. :)

Oh yeah - our kitty had kitties. We kinda let her have kitties as an educational thing for our kids. It was very educational in a veterinary medicine kind of way because our kids watched the entire process. My wife helped one of the kittens out by removing the sack that it was stuck in. Pretty real, gritty stuff!

Rapture Food!

Waiting for the rapture can make a guy hungry! That is when I decided to cook up something that was hotter than hell and a little smokey, to get me prepared for those enternal flames!

I started with some Spanish Rice. About 3/4 cup of white basmati and 3/4 cup of brown rice, sauteed and lightly browned with 1/2 a medium red onion on a medium heat. Crush in 4 gloves of garlic after about 5 to 10 minutes. Later I'll add pureed jarred tomatoes, veggie boulian, paprika, cumin, black pepper and chipotle powder.

I backwards engineered a recipe that my friends Stef and Jimer turned me on to, which is a salsa/chutney made of carrots, red onion, ginger, lime, pineapple and habenero. I am going for more or less the same thing here, except I am using a bag of frozen yellow pear tomatoes from last years garden.

Put that whole mess into a blender ..

.. and put it on the stove to simmer and render down a bit. Also present is an enchilada sauce I whipped up from jarred tomatoes from last years garden and the Spanish Rice. I cheated on the enchilada sauce and used one of those French's taco seasoning powder mixes with my one quart of jarred tomatoes. In my defense, I would like to say that I did customize the sauce by adding about 1/4 cup of diced red onion, basil, oregano and black pepper to dress it up a little. Another quart of jarred tomato, the spices and about 2 1/2 cups of veggie boulian went into the spanish rice, we're it simmered until the rice was done. I put in a little extra salt I think, too.

Most of the pots stayed on the stove all evening while we we're out weeding, being stirred every so often. Then, I threw together enchiladas that had chili and kidney beans, cheddar cheese, and a line of that enchilada sauce on them. The enchiladas we're then drowned in the rest of the enchilada sauce and covered with cheddar and set to bake at 350 for about 30 minutes, when the cheese begins to brown.

Serve the enchiladas (forgot to get a picture of that) along side the rice with a tablespoon of sour cream or plain yogurt with a laddle full of the pineapple/ginger/habenero/pear tomato salsa/chutney over the top of the enchiladas.

This may very well be the best cooked meal I've ever created.