Category: gardening

Construction next door to my house

Posted on by AuSable

Side Note – March 9, 2012: This was supposed to be posted about 9 months ago, so I haven’t bothered to change the tense in the wording below. Also as of this date, there still aren’t any planters.

So here is a totally random occurrence. My neighbor was down in his basement, and he heard a hissing noise coming from the water meter area. It turns out that the galvanized pipe that brings water into his house was corroded at the shutoff valve and slowly leaking. A plumber was called in, to diagnose the situation and as soon as the plumber touched the pipe, it starting gushing water (so typical).

With water rushing into his basement, my neighbor called up the water company, to hurry up and shut off his water, so that his basement doesn’t flood. The water works ended up coming out and shutting off the water. With the final solution being, that he needed a new water line run to his house.

I’ve had to replace a water line before at one of my other houses, and it is no fun…… except for the plumber who collects the fee.

So as you can see from the pictures, they really had to dig up his yard to run the new copper water main. But with a new copper line in place, that will more than likely be the last water line run to that house for at least 100 years.

Below, you can see the different phases of the dig-out, in a little bit of a before and after montage.

And on kind of an interesting side note. When I was taking with my neighbor, he has no plans to replace any of the grass that was torn out. So what is he going to do instead? He said that he was going to put in raised planter beds for a vegetable garden on the side of the house. Personally I think that it’s a good idea, we’ll just see if he actually does it.

Hop Harvest and Drying Process 2011

Posted on by AuSable

Once again the centennial hop plant has produced enough of a cone crop to use in a batch of homebrew. Check out the article on the Harvest IPA that I made, for more details on the homebrew batch.

But after all the picking was done, I had 1 lb and 4 ounces of fresh centennial cones to use however I choose. I used 4 oz of fresh hops to add to the secondary fermentor of the Harvest IPA. While the rest of the cones were placed on drying frames in the basement, and left to dry for about three days.

After the three days had passed, what started as 16 ounces of fresh hops became 4 ounces of dried hop cones. Talk about a loss in water weight! And of those four ounces, I divided them up into one ounces packets and vacuum sealed all four of them. And with the cones vacuum sealed, they’ll be sitting in the kegerator until I brew up another batch of beer in 2012.

Garden – Milorganite deal – 2011-07-16

Posted on by AuSable

As some of you might know, I’m usually not the type to really stock up on something when it goes on clearance. Part of the reason being that I just don’t have the space in my house to set-up a massive cache.

Well this past Saturday, I ended up getting up early to finish reading a business book (yes, I know this sounds very nerdy.) And after I was done with the book, I looked in the fridge, and noticed that it was pretty empty. So with an empty fridge, I started to write up a grocery list to do a little bit of shopping for the week.

With the so call “heat dome” engulfing the Midwest, I decided it would be prudent to pack an ice filled cooler in my truck. Why? Well my rational is that if I’m going to be out running errands the whole day. I just don’t see the point of going home multiple times to drop off any perishable items, when I could just toss them in the cooler.

So stop numero uno, is the Walmart on the north side of town, since last week they had 40 lb bags of compost for $0.50 a bag, and I wanted to pick up a couple of bags. Of course I come back a week later, and they are all out of compost on clearance. But instead they had something even better on clearance, which was Milorganite fertilizer for $3.00 a bag (marked down from $12.98 a bag) and they had a pallet and a half of the stuff.

When I saw that, the first thing I did was call my mom to find out if she wanted me to get her any. Since she has mentioned to me a couple of times, how much she likes this brand of fertilizer. At first she said that she was going to check her local Walmart to see if it was on clearance by her house. So in the mean time while mom was checking her Walmart. I did my grocery shopping inside of Walmart and then picked up 8 bags of Milorganite on the way out the door.

After I had already left Walmart, and was down the street at a local butcher shop, I received a call from mom letting me know that they didn’t have the Milorganite on clearance by her house. So she told me to get her 10 bags of the stuff, so I told her no problem and I hung up the phone. Five minutes later as I’m checking out at the butcher shop I get another call from my mom, and she changed her mind, now she wants 25 bags of the stuff. Yes 25 bags of fertilizer!

So I headed back to Walmart to fill mom’s request. And in the 20 minutes since I bought my 8 bags, only half a pallets worth was left! And with that, I basically bought out the rest of their inventory, except for about 5 ripped bags that I didn’t purchase. And as you can see in both sets of photos, I have quite a bit of fertilizer on my hands now. And when unloaded from my truck and stacked on a pallet, it makes for quite a large and stinky pile in the garage at my other house.

I’ve picked up some pretty good deals over the years. But to pick up about ~$450 worth of fertilizer for ~$100 has to be one of my best scores to date. Now where my mom is going to be storing her portion of the fertilizer, I’ll leave that up to her to figure out.

Garden – Mid-July 2011

Posted on by AuSable

Talk about hot hot hot, oh boy has it been hot and humid this summer. I’ve started on the weeding of the garden, and the first section that I’ve been working on is the rows between the tomato plants. I figure that if I just work at weeding the garden one small section at a time, eventually I’ll be able to get the whole plat completed.

Toward the end of June, I planted some sweet corn seeds in the back section of the left hand side of the garden. Once again, this is a task that I should have completed months ago, but hey C’est la vie. Right now the stalks are about to my knee, so it will be a while before I have any ears for harvesting.

You’ll also notice that I tossed in a bunch of close up shots of the centennial hops. And by the looks of those cones, I’ll need to plan a brew session in the next couple of weeks to take advantage of these fresh cones. I’m think about maybe brewing a Kölsch style beer, with these hops. But since I’m in the pre-planning stage of the brew session, all ideas are welcome.

Salad Table – Start of Cell 1 – June 21, 2011

Posted on by AuSable

Once again I have another planting project that should have been started at least two months ago but wasn’t and that was the salad table.

This is one of those things that only takes 15-20 minutes to plant, but I just kept on putting it off. You’ll notice that in some of the other salad table cells, are the remaining seedlings. The plan is when I visit my sister for 4th of July weekend, that I’ll give her all the remaining seedlings. Even though transplanting them in July, is way late in the season. But who knows, maybe something will turn out from this experiment.

And speaking of late season transplants, you’ll notice that I’ve transplants all the remaining seedlings from their 9-cell packs into 10 oz plastic cups. This way the plants will be a little bit less root bound, come transplant time on the 4th of July.

Garden – Mid-June 2011

Posted on by AuSable

Well, I finally bothered to transplant all my seedlings into the garden. And for it being June 12th, this is by far the latest in the season that I’ve done my transplanting. We did end up having a freak hailstorm about a week ago, but it was only very small hail. But luckily for me, I cobbled together a make-shift shelter for all the seedlings to protect them from any damage.

In the pictures, you might notice a bunch of orange flags around the garden. I’ve lost the weeding war at this point in the season so I’ve resorted to tying orange caution tape onto bamboo skewers, and placing this homemade “flag” next to each plant. That way when I finally get around to actually weeding the garden, I’ll it least know where my seedlings are in the garden.

Also, check out the centennial hops, talk about a beast! If it keeps growing like this, I should have a bumper crop of cones.

Finally I’ve added a couple of pics of my neighbor’s “garden”. Since what he ended up doing, was just roto-tiling most of his backyard. There is a little bit of rhyme and reason to the layout, but mostly it has to do with not wanting to mow his backyard, so he got rid of the grass and put in the garden instead.

Garden – Late-May 2011 – part 02

Posted on by AuSable

This group of pics is from 5 days later, compared to May 2011 part 01. Since for some reason, I ended up taking a lot of garden pictures at the end of May.

You can see, I’ve been a bad gardener this year, in that I still haven’t transplanted all my seedlings at this point in time. Call it paranoia on my part, since I’m still a little worried about a freak hailstorm. But the seedlings will be transplanted eventually, though a bit later in the season than expected.

You’ll also notice that the rhubarb and hops are doing very well at this point in the season. I’ve thought about trying to make rhubarb wine this year, so if anyone has a good recipe or tips, please drop a line in the comments.

Garden – Late-May 2011 – part 01

Posted on by AuSable

Since I had to cut the lawn this weekend, it gave me a good excuse to bust out the string trimmer, and get the garden ready for transplanting all my seedlings. It only took me about half an hour to chop all the weeds to the ground, so now the garden is starting to look a little bit more like a garden.

In just under a month after trimming out the seed heads from the main rhubarb plant, it generated two more seed heads. This plant must ready want to go to seed this year, because its generating seed heads like crazy.

The hops are still doing their whole “growing thing” up the A-Frame. I’m kind of curious this year, to see what kind of cone production I get out of the hops. Since last years diagonally hops, didn’t really produce enough cones for a 5-gallon batch of homebrew. So hopefully my fortune will change this year.

Garden – Mid-May 2011

Posted on by AuSable

These weeds are turning into the bane of my gardening existence, since they seem to be going at an exponential pace. I’ve already gone with a stirrup hoe on the left hand side of the garden, since the soil was a bit loose. But on the right hand side, which has all the onion, that soil is as firm as hell, so using the stirrup hoe was a big waste of time. Maybe next weekend, I’ll bust out the string trimmer, and really go to town on the right hand side of the garden.

But check out the hops! The Centennial is already at the ~10ft mark on the A-Frame, and its only been about two weeks since the last set of pics. Even the Golding is doing better this year compared to last year. Maybe it has something to do with all the heavy shade being provided by the surrounding rhubarb.

Garden – Early-May – 2011

Posted on by AuSable

Seeing how last year was a complete failure in trying to grow hops diagonally, I’ve reconstructed the old EMT conduit A-Frame, since it was just sitting in a pile of parts in the backyard. And the reconstruction was just in the nick of time, since the Centennial is growing like gangbusters. The Golding is going on the slow side, but so far it’s doing better this year, then it was last year.

You’ll also notice that the rhubarb has already gone to seed, which is earlier than I was expecting. But none the less, all I did was take my pruners and just cut off the seed heads, since I don’t need the seeds, and the seed head also takes away from stalk production. But as the pics can attest, I’m not really in a shortage of rhubarb stalks this early in the season.

For some reason this year, the weeds are growing like crazy in the main garden. So I’ll have to finally bust out the stirrup hoe or string trimmer one of the nights and do some heavy duty weeding to get the garden ready for the May 20th transplant date.