Month: June 2009

Off for the weekend

Posted on by AuSable

I’m taking a break this weekend for a little R&R…..yeah just kidding. I’ll be busting my ass most of the weekend helping out my sis with her garage sale and general repairs around her house. But don’t worry I do have a couple of posts in the pipeline that I’m wrapping up and will post next week. Here are the draft titles:

-Weeding the garden – Week 2 June 2009 – Johnny Storm style
-Making the Hershey’s Kitchens – Ranch Style Shrimp and Bacon Appetizers
-Cinder block smoker or compost bin?

Later gang.

My salad with chicken, and not a chicken salad

Posted on by AuSable

I don’t understand what people see in the mayo version of chicken salad; you know what I’m talking about, crap like this! Something about “normal” chicken salad just makes me wonder. It doesn’t even look appetizing to me, just a big white pile of mush. Kind of like American style potato salad, which doesn’t hold a candle to warm German style potato salad. But that is a story for another time. Personally I’m not a big salad fan to begin with, due to a couple of bad personal experiences. But I haven’t written off salad completely, it just makes me pickier about the salads that I do eat. Continue reading →

Heavy Hops = String breaking

Posted on by AuSable

Now that the centennial hops are really starting to fill in. I thought that it might be a good idea to replace the two year old twisted poly-string holding up the hops with a 3/8” braided rope. Well I came up with this idea just a tad bit late.

After I lowered the hops to the ground, the plan was to use the old string to pull the new rope up and through the top shackle. Well about half way up the trellis the old string broke in mid-air. So now I have to put on my thinking cap to come up with a solution.

The trellis is about ~18’ tall and I can’t lean my 20’ ladder against it, since it won’t hold that kind of weight. And when I stand on top of the multi-ladder that I own, I’m short at least 4’ from the apex. So with those two options gone. I had to run a couple of scenarios in my head about how to get that rope threaded through the shackle at the top of the trellis. And the only one that made sense was to take off the top part of the pyramid. After about 10-15 minutes of muscling off the top part of the pyramid (the easy part), then putting it back on (the hard part), I got the new rope threaded. Now that the new rope is run for the hops, let hope that it holds up.

Ciabatta pics version 4

Posted on by AuSable

The forth time around they turned out a little bit better. I had a little bit of a deflation when the plastic wrap became stuck to two of the rolls. I need to come up with a better method to cover the ciabatta to let it rise before baking. I’d get a proofing cover, but I have a tiny kitchen and what else could a use a proofing cover for other then proofing bread? Continue reading →

Rhubarb – Start of June 2009

Posted on by AuSable

Well cutting off the flowers was a good thing, because the rhubarb monster is back in full force. As you can tell in a couple of the pics, some of the leaves are the size of elephant ears, and not the deep fried kind.

Out of the transplants I originally thought that “in the end, there can be only one”. But it appears that out of the six cutting two are going to survive the move, one in the hop garden and the other with the green monster. Since only those two each have a new stem emerging out of the ground. Thank you heavy rains……you may have killed most of my seedlings, but the rhubarb is loving it.

Digging up the garden – End of May 2009

Posted on by AuSable

This year I’m going to double the size of the garden, so it will be going from 8′ x 16′ to 16′ x16′. The rhubarb is going to take up a lot of space this year. About a 4′ x 8′ section of the garden is already being used up by the rhubarb.

I finished about half of the digging last weekend, and about another quarter this weekend. I ended up using a mattock it dig up all the grass. If I owned or had rented a roto-tiller, this would have been done in a couple of hours. I guess I’m a glutton for punishment.