Dehydration..

Here's the new-to-me dehydrator my momma handed down to me.. it had some stuff that came with it, new in the bag.. from *1981* purchase date. Righteous! There in the last photo I took some apples and ran 'em through the blender real quick on the puree setting and let it rip for a bit till it turned into a paste.. you slap it on the teflon pages that come with this thing and leave it there til it's pretty good looking. I got 'em a bit too dry and they came out a bit too tough, but not too bad for 5 minutes work of involvement. 

Apple sauce fruit leather in progress..

I plan to try tossin' a few hops on these trays later on in the summer, and doing up some mad chili's in here to preserve those as well. All those chille's I had last year that got lost due to no good preservation method.. (sigh).

In other news..

Sa's scallions she put in the herb garden last year..

Cascades hops, just coming up.

German White garlic

The transplanted onions, three days later.

So, the onions are still alive, and look mostly OK. There's a couple in there that look a bit sad, but then again, I just yanked them and half their roots out of a tofu container and really ticked them off. This transplant was a bit more irritating to these plants than most of the others I've done. This is also the first time I've transplanted anything from under the lights indoors to the outdoor hoop house. We'll see how it goes..

Drats, killed 'em dead!

I had an extra Jalapeno that was taking up too much room and was also partially injured due to a previous accident here.. that, and a basil plant that was kicking around as well that wasn't getting any bigger in it's Dixie cup. Decided to see how 'hardy' those guys could be in the hoop house overnight. The answer: Not hardy enough. Both looked pretty much dead this morning when I took a glance at 'em. They were still standing tall last night at midnight when I got home from work, but this morning, all droopy and bent over. Pretty much killed. Heh! So much for *that* experiment.

That garlic is still looking pretty good, but still seeing only 4-6 shoots per square coming up from the 9 that were planted in each square. Hmm..

A little dirt pulled aside (dirt, or llama poo? Yikes!) from the top of the hops bed shows some green hop bustin' up action in the Cascades department. Interesting. With the 6-12" of snow predicted for this Friday, I just covered 'em back up with a pile of leaves and hope that works well enough to keep the new guys safe for this week.

All the tomatos from the propagator were transfered over to the 4 pak seedling trays, the Roma's and the Cherry's.. here's a pic of those in furious action. They're all lined up on the wet mat in the propagator still, but that's just temporary.

Roma and Cherry tomato seedlings.. 

The onions are doing well too.. they got ejected from the propagator's wet mat too, but they seem to be happy enough on their tofu trays. :)

Onion babies. Almost time for a haircut!

That's all.. gotta go prepare for the big storm now to set us back another few weeks. Drats..

Garden update.. snow, wha?

Just had a bit of a snow dusting last night. they were calling for 3-7" of it, so I threw some plastic sheeting over the top of the bed that doesn't have a hoop covering it and held it down with some bricks. As it turns out, all unnecessary.. merely an inch of snow at best landed out there, and it's mostly already gone as of this morning.

In other news, the onion "sets" I'm trying to grow are coming up like gangbusters, and the very first Roma tomato's have poked their heads up through the soil-less mix in the propagator.. we're getting close now! Lookin' forward to getting some of these plants out of my house and into the greenhouse.. I need more space under the lights! :)

Here's some pics of the babies:

Roma's just peeking out.. bad pic!

Fatalii's gettin' huge!

 I also have decided to keep the green jute twine for the dividers in my SFG setup.. I was looking for a way to replace them with a more visible and solid divider that wouldn't droop like the lines do when they stretch.. but I like the ability to move the lines around if I need to get in there and not disturb the surrounding area, like would be a problem if I had solid connected dividers. I was going to work some kind of self-tensioning thing together, with maybe some weights that would pull the lines taught as they stretched, but then I came up with another ingenious and simple remedy.. just don't tie a knot in one end of the damn string and pull it tight if it get's slack and wrap the thing tight around itself to keep it down. What the! Well, hey, it works.. sometimes, the simplest things..

Onions, in need of a haircut.

That's all for now..

Garden update..

The onions are coming up.. I'm growing, I think, 36 of 'em in these tofu containers I drilled some holes in the bottom of. I'm gonna grow 'em up to about the size of a dime in these and then transplant 'em into the raised beds to finish them off.  I just need a few to do the project that this garden is designed for, which is mostly small green salads, and a few jars of salsa, with everything grown entirely in the back yard. I just planted the Roma tomato's in the prop's this afternoon for their part in the game. Otherwise, the peppers (green and hot) are already well under way, the onions are right there in the photo, and the garlic is already breaking ground. What else is there in salsa? Cilantro, sure.. that's gonna go in the herb garden later on.

Here's a shot of my one and only Habanero this year.. I put a bunch in the propagator, but only one came up. There's a shot of it back in the day here, remember this?:

That's how she was back in the day, a month or two ago.. she's a bit bigger now:

Nice and stocky.. that'll be a good plant, I think. My Fatalii's are also coming along well now in the 4 pak containers. Along with the rest of the kids in there, check 'em all out:

Everything in there right now is a pepper, and all chili peppers, save for the Bell's in the right front portion there. Speaking of peppers, this poor Jalapeno is totally stressed out from being in a too small pot. The little bugger is sending out flowers already..

The big one: Ditting!

A funny thing happened on the way to Borders the other day.. I saw this, and needed to own it!

Next to the Europiccola to show scale.. 

That right there is my new temporary coffee grinder. It's a Ditting model KR1203. It's a bean grinder designed to operate in a retail shop like a Starbucks or similar, that goes through 25-60lbs of beans a day. It weights *88* pounds. It makes my Faema MPN look like a play toy. I got it for a song, and figured I could sell it for a few bucks more than I paid for it. It's quite an animal, I have to say.. it grinds a cup of beas in literally seconds and spits it out the bottom chute with no mess and no fuss.. it's a bag fill design with a single chute exit, so there's no doser to mess with. A real joy to play with. I'll be sad to see it go.. but Craigslist is calling me already. Rats! Here's a couple more pics I took of it.. just so I can remember her fondly.

Standard 20lb propane tank for comparison..

Standard 54lb Boxer dog for comparison.. oh, and my Faema bean grinder as well. 

Standard 38.4lb child for comparison..

Fatalii's up and garlic too

My new Fatalii seeds sprouted the other day, but I'm a bit of a slacker in getting the pics up and posted. I put six in the propagator, but so far only two have come up, and one of 'em had a bit of a problem getting it's seed coat off.. and she's a bit deformed right now as a result. In either case, here they are:

Yeah, you can't really even see 'em there. Right in front of that label, it's just barely out of the soil. But, it's alive! And here's that garlic:

Elephant type

German 'hardneck' type

So yep, looks like that Organic Elephant garlic from the store even made it over the winter, in addition to the German White from the garlic guy in New Hartford.

I just got the propagators emptied out of the Hot Cherry and Jalapenos as well, and now all the ones i'm going to be keeping for sure are in the 4 pack seed trays now and looking REALLY good.. I'll get some pics of that up in a bit. The green Bell peppers are just starting to pop up too, and I only need two of those for the salsa experiment I'm doing.. the Brussels Sprouts are planted in the propagator as of yesterday, and we'll keep an eye on them for an appearance next week as well.

The raised beds look about the same, snow covering wise, even though one has the hoop house on top of it.. but yesterday when I poked a finger in the soil there, the one with the hoop on it seems to be all freed up already, whereas the open bed has a layer of ice or frozen soil still in some places just under the dirt surface. Curious.. maybe that hoop house thing is working after all.

Score! Brewery Mod..

Went to the dump the other day and found a set of kegs off to the side, that apparently had been owned by a homebrewer before me, because they had the tops cut out already and one of them even had a ball valve and, get this, a stainless steel false bottom installed in it. What the! I grabbed that thing in about 3 seconds flat and it was in my car, paid for, and we were out of there in no time. When I got home, this is what I had:

Bargain!

After that, it was a matter of taking apart my existing mash/lauter tun and reconfiguring mine to essentially be just like this one, but with this SS false bottom installed in my kettle. Why not just use this kettle? This one has a weldless ball valve installed and it was a 3/8ths size, whereas I use 1/2 stuff throughout. The conversion was easy enough though.. here's a pictorial of the conversion:

Parts needed. Total $2.45

Gut the old setup..

Dip tube construction..

Add a collar to stop the false bottom from floating up.. 

Stopper demonstrated

Finished install!

Now, I just need to brew with the thing.. direct fire RIMS system achieved!