Tag Archives: nuts

Homestead weekly update

Posted on December 1, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Welcome to this week’s update.

I don’t have all that much to report this week.  My wife has kept me busy with decorating for Christmas.  She is also taking a floral design course, so that means I’m taking the kids to all their afternoon activities.

I did bottle my oatmeal stout today.   I used the same technique that I used last time.  I sanitized everything and used a storage container to trap any beer drips.  It certainly makes clean up easy.  I ended up bottling 51 bottles of beer.  The ingredients cost $44.09, so my stout costs about $0.86 per bottle.

I ordered a couple more trees to plant in the orchard.  I’ve been asked about planting in the Fall instead of planting in the Spring.  I listen to You Bet Your Garden and the host often recommends planting in the Fall.  The important thing to remember is to plant dormant trees.  The idea is to get the trees in the ground in time for the nice Spring weather.

I thought about what I wanted out of my orchard and decided that this time around I’d order some protein as well as fruit.  I ordered 2 almond trees.  One is a Hal’s Hardy almond, the other is an All-In-One almond.  Both are supposed to be hardy down to zone 5, so I should be good.  They are also both self fertile, but even with self-fertile trees, they are supposed to produce better with 2 different varieties.  I haven’t eaten either of these almonds, but the reviews that I’ve read about them say they are very tasty.  The Hal’s Hardy isn’t a true almond, it is actually a cross between a peach and an almond.  The All-In-One is a true almond and is self fertile.

Along with the almond trees, I also ordered 2 apple trees.  I ordered a Honeycrisp apple tree.  This is my favorite fresh eating apple.  It is very sweet.  I meant to order one of these last year, but they sold out before I got around to ordering.   The other apple is a Red Rome variety.  This is a baking apple.  I decided on this one because it is a good pollinator for the Honeycrisp.  It also has a lot of good reviews online about holding its shape when baked.

Since I’m building the orchard, I have been thinking about how to identify the trees.  They all ship with a plastic tag and the variety written on it.  But I find that the sun will cause the ink to fade to the point where I can’t read the tag.  I looked around and some people engrave the name on a metal plate.  That sounded like a good idea.  Then it occurred to me that a military dog tag would work great.  Most places only sell them in pairs.  But I found a company that sells them as key chains.  So I ordered 8 of them printed with the information about my trees.  They are stainless steel and come with a 4″ stainless steel chain.  I put the year planted, size tree, type of fruit, variety and where I bought it from.  I haven’t received them yet, but I’ll post a picture of them when they come in.

That’s it for this week.  Hopefully things will settle down a bit so I have time to do more than 1 post a week.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in weekly

Tagged , , , , ,

Homestead YEARLY update

Posted on December 30, 2011 by | 2 Comments

I was reading the Trace My Preps blog this morning and decided that I should also do a look back at what I have accomplished on the homestead over the past year.

I think that my first real accomplishment is that I was able to get my wife on board with building the homestead.  Up until this year, she has just humored me with my homesteading aspirations.  But in the Spring, she noticed how prices were steadily increasing.  We also talked about the increase in salmonella outbreaks.  She is now very supportive of my homesteading goals and will help me reach the goals.

Another big accomplishment is that in mid-September, I made my first post to my blog.  By launching my blog, I feel that I was adding legitimacy to my homestead.  I was finally sitting down and putting in print what I intended this homestead to become.  It also makes me accountable for making or missing any goals that I set forth.

I think those are my 2 biggest accomplishments of the year.  Without those two, there would probably not be any Homestead Fritz.  Some of the other accomplishments are bigger and some smaller, but all have helped me build the homestead.  Here are some of the other accomplishments in no particular order.

Started the asparagus bed by planting ~30 crowns.  Asparagus is a very long-term crop.  We may be able to harvest a couple of spears this Spring, but maybe not.  But it will produce for 20 or 30 years.

Increased the garden area from 12 beds to 20 beds.

Paid off one of our vehicles.  This frees up some money that we have been able to use for other expenses.  I feel that moving towards being debt free is critical to any homestead.

Began making cheese.  So far I have only made cheese curds, cottage cheese and yogurt successfully.  But I have learned from my less successful cheese making experiments.

Harvested all the garlic that we will use for the entire year.  This is in addition to the seed garlic that I planted.  I also discovered that we will always plant hardneck garlic because it produces scapes.

Built up my seed stock of potato onions.  Hopefully these will allow me to continue growing onions forever.

Harvested enough onions to last from August 1 until January.  These were mostly yellow onions planted from sets.

Preserved enough green beans and pumpkins to last us the entire year.

Processed some black walnuts from the trees along homestead border.  It was an experience and I discovered that they don’t taste good enough to make them worth while.  But it gives us another fat and protein source if we would need to make use of them.

Identified several types of weeds in the yard.  Some of these are edible.  Next year some of them will find their way into our salads.

Built a 3 bin compost bin system.

Built a low tunnel over one of the garden beds.  This allowed me to harvest salad greens until the end of the year.  I also learned that while draping plastic over the hoops works okay, I need to develop a better way of attaching the plastic.

Saved seed from my garlic chives, French breakfast radish and from my okra.  This allows me to save money on the seed.  But it also helps to develop varieties of these plants that are acclimated to my micro-climate.  It also helps me develop my knowledge of how to save seeds, and I believe it makes me a better gardener.

Began baking bread again.  I used to do this fairly regularly, but I drifted away from it.  After finding the bread in 5 minutes a day, this allows me to not use time as an excuse for not baking bread.

Finally, I have been able to make use of the produce that we produced on the homestead.  We have made pumpkin rolls and pumpkin bread for dessert.  I have made beer bread from the beer that I brewed myself.  I have made use of the zucchini that I froze to make zucchini bread.  I have even made use of scraps that I would normally throw away by roasting pumpkin seeds.

I wasn’t going to do this wrap up of the year post.  But I’m certainly glad that I did.  This really shows me how far we have gone with the homestead.  We still have a long way to go, but by seeing these accomplishments, it will really help keep us motivated.  I’m hoping to have an even more productive 2012.

→ 2 Comments

Posted in weekly

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Pictures in the garden

Posted on October 7, 2011 by | 3 Comments

I thought I’d share some pictures I took of some life that is still in the garden.

Drying walnuts

This wasn’t in the garden, and I guess it isn’t actually shots of life.  But I need to follow up on yesterday’s post about the nuts.  I put them in that bucket and filled it with water.  Then beat them up with a chunk of PVC.  I drained the water several times, then laid them out to dry.  Right now the walnuts are on that grate in the car port.  Once they are dry, I’ll see about cracking them.

Bumblebee on the basil

I was happy to see that I still have pollinators in the garden.  This bumblebee was making his rounds on the basil flowers.  Notice that there isn’t much left of the flower itself, but he went to them all.  He also wasn’t very happy with me disturbing him with the camera.  He took off and buzzed me.

Unknown caterpillar

I found a couple of these caterpillars in the garden.  This one is on an okra leaf.  I found 2 others on the basil plants.  I’m not sure of the type of caterpillar, but it kind of looks like a garden tiger moth caterpillar, but I’m not sure they are in my area.  Most of what the information I find on them talks about them being in the UK.

Asparagus

Here’s a shot of one of the asparagus plants.  I planted a bunch of crowns this Spring.  This is the biggest one.  Where I planted is kind of difficult to get weeded, so you’ll notice it is very overgrown.  I’ll make sure I get those weeds all pulled up and will keep up on the weeding next year, at least I hope I do.

Mile-a-minute weed

I also found this plant growing on the fence around the garden.  After a little research, I’m almost positive that this is Persicaria perfoliata or mile-a-minute weed.  This is an invasive species from Asia.  It seems innocent enough, but by the end of Summer, it can grow 6″ a day.  It can grow up a tree and cover it so much that the tree will die from lack of sunlight.

Flame weeder

I’m going to work to get rid of this plant.  Tomorrow I’ll work at gathering up the berries.  That will help.  I’ll also pull some of the weeds.  But next year, I’m going to pick up a flame weeder.  What man would pass up the opportunity to weed with FIRE?  This is the perfect excuse to get one of these.  But on the practical side, these things are supposed to work really well.  You don’t burn it to a crisp, you just slightly char the plant and it dies.

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Nuts!

Posted on October 6, 2011 by | 7 Comments

When I put in the orchard, I’m also going to include some nuts.  I will likely get some hazelnuts and hardy almonds.  I’m not sure the hardy almonds are as good as California almonds, but I’m going to give them a shot.

Not really nuts, but I’m also thinking of giving peanuts a shot in the garden.  They are supposed to do fairly well in this area even though I’m not in the south.  It will give me a source of some of our protein.  They are also a good source of fat.  But they are time consuming to shell out.  I did some reading and came across the Universal Nut Sheller.  This uses a couple concrete stones to shell the peanuts.  If I plant peanuts, I’m going to have to get the plans to make one of these.

But that’s all for the future.  What can I do today?  Well I have several black walnut trees around the property.  I know they are not as good as English walnuts, but it is what I have at the moment.  I decided to see what I can do with them.

6 gallons of black walnuts

My son was complaining that he wanted to earn some money, so I gave him one of my old Ale Pails and sent him to one of the black walnut trees.  The deal was that if he filled the bucket, he’d earn some money.  He filled the 6 gallon bucket without much problem.  He could have probably filled another half bucket if he’s have looked through the bushes.

Removing the husks

After he brought them up, it was my turn to do some work.  I had to remove the husks from the nut.  What I find works best for me is to lay them on the driveway and step on them.  This cracks open the husk, making it easy to remove it from the nut.  In the lower left, that black walnut has been stepped on and split, ready to be peeled open.  On the right are the husks from those nuts on the left.  There’s a lot of husk to throw away.

A box of nuts

I would peel off the husk and drop the nut into a box.  I ended up with probably a gallon and a half of nuts.  They are still very wet.  I’ll need to lay them out where the squirrels can’t get to them to allow them to dry.  I’m not quite sure how I’ll keep the squirrels out, but I’m going to try.

Stained gloves

Luckily I remembered the dye that’s in black walnut husks.  It will stain anything it touches.  My hands would have been really messy for days if I didn’t put on some gloves.  Even with the gloves, I ended up with stained index finger.  I must have put a hole in the gloves while working on the nuts.

I’m not completely sure what I’m going to do with them yet.  Maybe I’ll see how pesto tastes with black walnuts in it.

→ 7 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,