EricsProjects

2009 is starting off as a great year for the garden. As you can see here, the plant babies are growing strong. We started the plants in the green house, rather than using plant lights, and you can see by comparing these photos, just how well they are doing.

plant babies a week later

plant babies

My two youngest, inspired by the “Little House” books, decided to plant wheat. We had a section of yard where a tent was left out a little too long, killing off the grass. They cleared out the dead grass and had a perfect place to grow wheat.

Rather than purchase wheat seed, they used some un-ground wheat berries we already had. The wheat sprouted and is growing fantastically. The patch is just the right size for us to learn the entire process, from growing to harvesting, without being overwhelmed with work.

I’m sure that fresh ground, home grown wheat will make totally awesome sourdough bread.

a small patch of wheat

Last year, after reading that roto-tilling is a no-no, we started looking for alternative ways to control weeds. In last years garden, we pulled the weeds and used them around the plants as green manure. While this worked, it was quite a bit of effort.

This year, we are trying some different methods. In one area, where we have bindweed, we planted buckwheat. It’s very competitive and should smother out the bindweed.

In other areas, we have straw from the chicken barn, PVO (Peas/Vetch/Oats) and black plastic.  The chicken barn straw has chicken manure in it and works quite well, but the chickens only produce so much.  

PVO is a ground cover mix from Fedco seeds.  It’s planted in the middle section in the photo below.  Later, when we are ready to plant our actual food crop, the PVO will be turned into the soil.  

The last section has black plastic.  The plastic blocks out the light and works well, but it’s not very sustainable.  It also does not allow water to reach the soil and hard to keep in place.  We had high hopes for this method, but it was looking like it would not meet our expectations. However, as you can see by the bottom photo, there were relatively few weeds. Also, turning the spoil was much easier than if we had not used the plastic. There were many worms and bugs, indicating that the soil was still alive.

Buckwheat	3 types of weed control
Results of black plastic

I can’t wait to see how the rest of the year turns out.

This year, we are starting our plants in the greenhouse and they are growing great.  In the past, we’ve used lights to start them, but this year we wanted to see if we could do it without electricity.  

The greenhouse isn’t quite up to the task of a hard frost, so we bring the plants in if it looks like it’s going to super cold night.

So far, it’s working great.

Photo by hannes2002, from flickr.com

My son made the most fabulous loaf of sourdough bread.  So fabulous, that I didn’t get a chance to photograph it. I had to hunt Flickr for this photo.

Sourdough bread is made without yeast, or at least not commercial yeast. Instead, it’s made from a wild yeast starter.

To make the starter, my son used 1 cup flour and 1 cup of water in a 1 quart, wide mouth Mason® jar.  This made 1 and 1/2 cups of starter.  He stirred it and waited…  When the starter started to bubble (about a day later), he added another cup of flour and cup of water and covered it with a washcloth.  Once it was bubbling again (another day) he used it to make bread.

How much to add to the recipe?  That’s the easy part. 1 cup flour and 1 cup of water were used to make 1 and 1/2 cups of starter, so he used 1 and 1/2 cups of starter and counted it as 1 cup of flour and 1 cup of liquid.

The first loaf made from this starter did not work, but the second did. To make the project easier, he choose to make an over night-bread, similar to this “no knead” bread recipe from the NY Times. His actual recipe came from The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live it.

Sourdoughhome.com has some great tips on making your own starter.  They suggest that you keep feeding your starter, taking some out and feeding again for a week or more before using, to build a healthy starter.  Our experience confirms this.  The first loaves he made, did not rise. It wasn’t until after some starter was taken out and it was feed again that it really took off.

I’ve tried to run Linux off and on over the years. It’s a kind of geek merit badge, you aren’t a true geek until you can do all of your work in Linux. During my most current trial, I was having trouble with the sound. It worked until I plugged in my headphones and the headphones worked when the machine booted Windows.

Now, the Ubuntu forums have a Comprehensive Sound Problem Solutions Guide and this Google search shows that it’s a fairly common problem.

I tried all the solutions, including bringing up a terminal and typing all kinds of sudo vodo, but to no avail.

The solution was so simple. Double clicking on the speaker icon, the one near the clock brought up a volume control panel. There is a separate volume control for headphones. They were muted by default.

katbaro on Flickr.com has this photo of Laura Ingalls-Wilder’s birthplace and says:

“In case you are wondering, its not the real house but a reproduction on the actual land. Since she didn’t write the books until she was in her 60’s I’m sure the original cabin was long gone before she was popular. You can find Ingalls & Wilder graves in the local cemeteries too. “

My wife and daughter have been reading the Little House books.  The books give great insight into how people lived, without running water or electricity.  It’s nice to be reminded that they are not just stories, but real people, who knew how to live.

For a recent project, I wanted a nice dark wood stain.  Everything I found in the stores contained V.O.C.s.  Convinced it just didn’t have to be so, my wife suggested that I use water color paints, followed by a coat of oil finish.  It works fabulously.  This photo shows oak and pine boards, the pine has been stained with water colors and a shelf that was water colored and oiled.

While Malware does bite, MalwareBytes ROCKS!

In my day job, I’m a one man IT shop for a 50 user company, so I’ve seen a fair number for dirty machines.  Machines with malware, viruses, trojans and root kits.  Usually, I am able to cleanup the machines and return them to service.  Until now.  Real-Av has gotten of a few of my machines and I had to resort to format/reload Windows.

Real-AV is not nice.  It renames system files and folders, prevents normal AV programs from running, locks into the WinLogon process, Windows boot process, changes the wallpaper and creates fake AV buttons.  Once the machine is infected, clicking on just about anything causes the program to run.

Real-AV is immune to Norton Antivirus, ClamwinAV, Spybot S&D, discovery with CCleaner and manually going through files and RegEdit; however, MalwareBytes is able to remove it!

Real-AV is able to prevent MalwareBytes from running, but simply renaming the mbam.exe file to something else took care of the problem.

The only weird thing I ran into wat that during the installation, MalwareBytes sat for 5 mintues at the “Finishing Installation”.   Maybe it was Real-AV, maybe not, but it did installation complete and it did a fantastic job!

Edited to Add: MalwareBytes works great to remove AntiVirus 360 (A360) Also!

Plastic pail fermenter (actually taller than carboy)

Glass carboy (not to scale, actually smaller than pail)

This weekend, I racked (transferred) the cherry mead from the fermenting bucket into a glass carboy, to get it off the fruit and start clarifying.  I started with a bucket because it has more room top for bubbles while fermenting and it is easier to get all 12 pounds of cherries in and out.

Materials:

• carboy
• airlock and rubber stopper
• racking cane
• siphon hose
• 2 stainless steel bowls
• stainless steel strainer
• funnel
• bucket for sanitizer
• sanitizer
• clean towel (to place sanitized items on)

With all brewing projects, it is important that everything be clean and sanitized.  I start by filling the carboy with sanitizer.  After the carboy was sanitized, I transfer the sanitizer to a 5 gallon bucket.  I’ve learned is that you don’t dump out the sanitizer until you are done, even if it means that you need an extra bucket.

Once everything was sanitized, I started with a standard siphon.  This is a great time to collect a sample for tasting, and I had a cup handy. While siphoning, it is possible to lift the racking cane up, off the bottom, allowing clear mead from the middle of the bucket to flow.  It was a very nice pink, nice aroma and tasted great.  It was just on the dry side, with some tartness and some fruit flavor.

When I had all I could siphon (and taste), I put the strainer in the really large metal bowl and began dumping from the bucket into the strainer.  The bowl was filling so I stopped and dumped the liquid into the carboy and then continued until the bucket was empty.

After emptying the really large metal bowl into the carboy, I used the smaller bowl to squeeze the cherries and collect any remaining juice.  This worked really well and netted about 1/2 gallon of liquid.

This process stirs up the mead quite a bit, which is not a good thing.  I didn’t want to stir in oxygen or bacteria, so I worked as gently as I could.  After everything was in the carboy I stopped it up with an airlock and moved it to the basement.  The yeast and sediment that was stirred up is already beginning to settle.

The next part is the hardest, even though it requires the least amount of work from me, waiting until it’s ready to bottle.

Earlier this week, we were having trouble with the sump pump. To keep it working until I had the replacement, I made a splint using 1 1/2 inch PVC and hose clamps. Once I actually had the right parts, this was a pretty straight forward repair. Click here to read more.