Dawn419 & doc's LSTA: Confounded Computer!!!

[Dawn419]

Hey All!

Just wanted to let you know that I'm still alive and wasting oxygen...The Acient One aka my computer has been acting up a lot here of late so that's why I haven't been around. Doc and I ordered the fixin's to give her an overhaul so y'all with be stuck with me again soon!

 

[dragonlaurel]

Sorry about the computer aggravation but at least it's looking up now. We'll be happy to be "stuck" with you.

 

[snapshot]

Looking forward to you being here again!

 

[Dawn419]

Need to find a cool hot rod smiley as I've been zooming around on the interwebs for about an hour now on the new rebuild. Don't worry, I've got on my helmet and seat belt on and just hoping I don't get pulled over for speeding!

Quick update:

Still haven't figured out what has been spooking around after our birds. Lost 2 more hens this week and found a tear in the chicken wire. Feel really bad about it as replacing that wire was on the "to-do" list but it managed to get pushed aside with all the other to-do's . Well, got one half of that old chicken wire replaced with hardware cloth today. Got the other half battened down with a heavy wire cage and a heavy duty wire shelf and it'll do until I it get re-wired on Friday.

Mom gave us 2 watermelons the other week so we decided to attempt some watermelon wine. We bought a third melon and still hadn't gotten wine made before we were back at her place again when she gave us 4 more watermelons. Doc is finally working his regular four-man schedule and had this past week off so we did the melon wine on Sunday. Since we don't have a lot of room in the camper, it's been easier for us to do a 5 gallon batch at a time. Plans are in the works for expanding the hobby to doing 1 gallon batches in the near future, though. (Insert evil smiley)

I spent 2 weeks researching h2o melon wine recipes and was beginning to get discouraged as alot of people have had this one spoil brfore fermentation can begin. Learned that we could give fermentation a kick start with a yeast starter and that it was possible that the acid in lemons would help in preventing the juice from spoiling so we added both and am glad to say that we have watermelon wine fermenting happily as I type this.

Here's the album I started for this batch and will add pix and descriptions as we go through the process.

No good news from the veggie garden, with temps well above 100 all summer the tomatoes did nothing until about 3 weeks ago and since I was growing mainly slicing tomatoes I figured I'd never get ripe fruit so I've cut them back to the ground. I'd have let them go for green tomatoes but we still have plenty of them canned at mom's from last year plus I've got 5 pounds of garlic to get planted in that bed. Didn't plant fall peas, like I'd hoped but still plan on doing fall greens, radishes and carrots so we can have fresh winter salads again this year.

We joined the Ozark Chinquapin Foundation a few weeks ago as we are wanting to add more native edibles to the land. When my aunt found out about our interest, she told us that these trees were growing on their land 30+ years ago but were killed by the blight. We took Bubba out with us to her place yestrday to see if there were any chinquapins possibly sprouting from the old stumps. Didn't find any trees or sprouts but found tons of Persimmons that she'd forgotten about and Bub had a great time running the place (200+acres), playing with her Corgi and swimming in the several ponds on her land.

Stopped by mom's on our way home and Bub got to play with her two dogs. "It was a fantastic day to be a dog", says Bubba!

We hope to get back out to my aunt's with Bubba and some buckets to harvest persimmons. We'll store them in mom's freezer until we have enough to try a watermelon jelly/persimmon wine. We've got the winemaiking bug bad!!!

Woke up to a tarantula in the camper today! Freaked the fire outta doc and it was a fast bugger, too! We lost him several times before I was able to scoop him up and turn him loose back outside.

Still got some fine-tuning to do on the computer but I'll get back to journeling our journey with pictures as soon as I can!

It's great to be back without a computer that keeps freezing up!!!

 

[TanksHill]

The watermelon wine sounds tasty. Good to hear your up and running again.

G

 

[JRmom]

Will definitely be following along on your wine making. This is something I would love to learn how to do, being a wino and all.

 

[Dawn419]

Wanted to share a few cute fur-kid pix before I get back to journaling 2010.

Smoke guarding doc's humidor:

Pix from Bubba's Big Day. This is him and Dutchess having a large time around one of the several ponds on my aunt's land.

Dutchess saying, "C'mon big boy, wanna play!"

Bub says, "Can we? Huh, huh, are ya sure?"

Heading to the next pond with my aunt:

Well, the garden is in the shade so I'm gonna get off of here and see about getting something accomplished.

 

[Dawn419]

Back to the journey!

February 2010:

Smoke says, "Let it snow!" :




Had a small flock of Meadowlarks come visit the feeding station:




And we had more snow:






But the plastic picnic table coldframe survived, even though our outdoor kitchen "gazebo" and pvc hoop coldframe didn't:








The chickens were glad for the cleared pathways at this time and really wondering why we had to move here:






The guineas were thrilled with all the snow so far this year, too:




By the 17th, we were able to get back to working on our clearing for the garden. I cut down saplings and small trees using my bow saw, doc took care of the bigger ones with the chainsaw. We saved the larger, straightest trees to use for building our raised beds. I learned the first spring that it would have been better to let them dry out first as the "trees" kept sprouting, even though they'd been cut down. :







This is looking NE from the highest point on our land. Thinking about building the stone house up here as we could dig into the hillside for our basement/storm shelter/wine cellar. We'd have excellent southern exposure and could benefit from wind-generated power up here, too! :

 

[Dawn419]

March 2010:

Since I could finally find the "coldframe to 4377", I got some mesclun mix, radish and carrot seeds sown.




Pepper Anne enjoying the sunshine:




And our wet-weather creek is running, thanks to all the snow. We found several springs along the route of the creek that we didn't realize we had. :




And I got to go on my first Arkansas Easter Egg hunt!




"Meh, I'm still hibernatin'!":




Sproutage!!!:




Did more rock work in front of the coldframe to keep me out of the mud:




Cut up more of the last large brush/tree pile from the clearing we did in '09.






Worked on burning out stumps in the garden, got pallets for the compost pile and started putting up the fence (we "recycled/reused" the hoop run from TN.






Added more nesting space in the chicken coop (the "hay" is from native grass that grows on our land, hand harvested with a pair of scissors).




The creek is running good after some rain.








East, north and west sides of fence are up:




Chickens thoroughly enjoying the lack of snow!




Smoke finally comes out of hibernation but has a rude awakening! Stretching out at the edge of the seat cushion can cause a cat to completely wipe out! Unfortunately, I was laughing to hard to get a picture of her totalling out on the floor.






It only took 3 years, but we finally got the Chick-n-Barn roof covered with tin (used scrap left from covering shed/future cabin).




Our first salad greens of the season:




Mesclun mix and radishes:

 

[dragonlaurel]

Great pics!
Nice job on the cold frame. The first greens of the season are always so welcome.
You don't see it till you click on it, but Smoke's eyes were saying oh $h!% in that 2nd shot.