Welcome to this week’s homestead update.
This week was fairly busy and my back is pretty sore. For starters, I cleared out that corner where my wife wants to plant a flower garden. I borrowed my neighbor’s tiller to tear up what was already in that area. This area is small, but full of roots from some trees and from the plants that were planted there before. I had to stop several times to untangle wire, rope or roots from the tines of the tiller. It took a while, but I got the area tore up. Now it is my wife’s turn. She’s been working on it for the past couple of days. Nothing is planted yet, but it will be soon.
Raspberry bed
While I had the tiller, I tilled up the area for the raspberry plants. This area was much easier to work since it was just grass. I tilled it up, pulled out most of the grass. I then raked the loose soil into a row down the center of that bed. I’m sure the raspberries were happy that I moved them from pots to the ground. Then is was off to the composting facility for a load of compost. That’s the really black dirt covering the soil. This bed is about 3×38′. To the right is another bed like this one. I plan on planting grapes in that bed. I still need to install a trellis system for both the raspberries and the grapes.
I did some homebrewing. I bottled the Kolsch that I brewed a couple of weeks ago. Bottling is a fairly tedious job. The same motions over and over. But it has to be done if I want to drink carbonated beer. I’ve thought of using kegs, but that just doesn’t fit my beer drinking. I like to take some homebrew with me when I go camping, I can’t really take a keg set up. I also brewed my first mead. I had no idea it was so easy, much easier than brewing beer. Just mix it up and put it away to ferment.
Seed starting rack extension
Like many people, my tomatoes are getting too big to handle in the house. I needed a taller stand to hold the lights. So I doctored up my seed starting stand. I just cut the uprights and installed 12″ extension. That’s one of the reasons that I like to build things with PVC. It is so easy to modify the project. The extensions are removable, so it doesn’t have to be this tall unless I need the extra height.
I also wrote up our first camping trip on my camping blog. I’m not putting as much effort into Camping With Fritz as I have over here. I am mainly using that blog to keep track of the places we camp. I also write up the modifications that I’ve made to the camper. That’s a funny thing with people that camp in popup campers, we like to make modifications to the camper. I also put a copy of the dutch oven recipe posts over there as well.
