Month: October 2008

So I like to brew beer. I also have found that it’s just as easy to make 10 or 15 gallons as it is to make the normal 5.One thing I’ve learned is that it’s important to oxygenate the wort to give the yeast a boost. I do this with an aquarium bubbler. The key is to not leave it too long.

I had dinner with my sister this evening and had some yummy beers. The first was a brew that my friend Eric had recommended to me. It’s called “Black Homo-Erectus” it’s a dark IPA. It was pretty good. Nice hoppyness.I also had a Nut Brown ale, which was also very good. It was from a smaller brewery. “Dick’s Nut Brown”. Good flavor. Just to prove it, here’s the receipt. Notice anything funny about it? Click for a larger version:

One thing I’ve wanted to for a long time now is learn how to weld metal. I took a class a couple years ago but I didn’t take it very far. I didn’t have an idea for a project to provide context. Because I want to make a larger Rocket Stove, the idea of welding was recently rekindled.So I poked around on ebay and found myself a new Lincoln 175HD The other day, I welded up my first useful thing. I got a couple pieces of rebar I had lying around from an older project and made a compost aerator/stirrer. I got the idea from this. The idea is that I jam the pointy end into the compost pile and let the barbs move things around. Works pretty well, though it does require some strength. Either way, no “black man” should be without a lincoln. Well, now, I’ve got one too.

Here’s a picture of our garden stitched form pictures this evening It’s been a good season. Better than last year; Robie and I are learning a lot. Most folks I know that have a garden have noticed that the season’s been less productive than we’d like, but we’re pleased with the success we have had and what we’ve learned. On my drive home, I pass by a horse ranch Abbey Creek Stables. Although it’s not there anymore, they used to have a sign at the entrance “Free manure. We load”. Since you can never have enough compost and because I like the word “free”, I went and got some. Two loads actually for a total of about two cubic yards. Composting is one of those things that sounds more complicated when you read about it than it actually is. Websites and books talk about cabon/nitrogen ratios and all that. Some refer to it as browns/greens. I’ve generally found that what I’ve got is what I’ve got. If I have too much green, like from cutting the grass, I can’t just conjur up some leaves to balance it out. Whatever I have is what ends up in my compost bins. Having said that, horse manure actually has an optimal ratio. The manure I got is a nice mix of what looks to be sawdust and manure. Good even texture. It heated up pretty quickly. Since I was thinking about composting at the time, I did a bit of reading. One site I came across talked about a simple way of aerating the pile with perforated pipes. This is actually mentioned in a bunch of places, but the key is that the microbes that process compost need oxygen. Most sources advocate turning the compost pile, but that’s a lot of work. So I got a couple lengths of 1″ pvc and drilled a bunch of holes. I also had a couple lengths of ABS. I went to Harbor Freight and got some thermometers to track what the pile is doing and now I have two of them in the manure pile. The one in the center quickly climbed outside the working range of the thermometers (159 deg) and it stayed there for about two weeks. The other one is in the corner and hung out at around 140 deg. The active composting temp range that I’ve come across in a couple places is about 110-160 deg. Today, three weeks after I got the second load of manure, the center is at 140 deg and the corner is 120. I’m curious to see how it’ll look when things cool off and I dig around in there. The manure is under the blue tarp. The other pipes are normal compost. One thing I am a little concerned about is an ariticle I just read in mother earth news about some herbicides surviving through horses’ digestive systems. If it all works out, I’ll probably get a bunch more loads of the stuff. Oh, and it doesn’t stink at all.

This past weekend, my sister Jovan and I tried another round of soap making. The first round went well and the soap does it’s job. The problem was removing the soap from the molds.The mistake I made at the time was not using a wonderful thing called the internet. A two minute google search tells me that the trick is to freeze the soap in the mold. It worked like a charm. As always, you can click on the pics for a larger one.