Making End of Season Fermented Vegetables

Using basil and tiny eggplants from my rooftop, along with green plum tomatoes and grape leaves from the community garden, I'm trying Sandy Katz's recipe from his book "Wild Fermentation".

Clockwise, starting from the upper left corner: Dill seeds and black pepper, green plum tomatoes and baby Green Thai and Little Fingers eggplant. Garlic, grape leaves, basil and one little hot pepper.

All packed in a plastic container. Not having a glass, or ceramic, crock, Katz's advice was to use a "food grade" plastic container.

The brine poured in and the veggies held under with a plate. I'll check for mold, skimming it off the surface if present, and wait 1-4 weeks for them to cure at room temperature.

Do It Yourself

 (via)

HoshiGaki

I saw this post on Hoshigaki by our friends at Root Simple and knew what I wanted to do when I found persimmons at our local veg market -- I bought 6 and started making it (them?).

The left and right ones in the top row are a little mushy. Not sure if they're going to dry properly.



This Instructable has even more detailed, well, instructions.

How to Raise Chickens Without Buying Grain

I've had chickens for 3 years and have always fed them "chicken" feed, which isn't all that cheap, or practical.



I like the solution in the video but wonder how I could adapt it to my urban setting.

Nelson Mandela – Prisoner, Rooftop Food Gardener

“A garden was one of the few things in prison that one could control. To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it and then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction. The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a taste of freedom..."



Via City Farmer.

Bending Metal for a Community Garden Trellis

H2's nephew asked if I'd help build a trellis for their community garden, Roots and Rays, in Pilsen.  They wanted to make it out of metal but had no idea how to do so. It will serve as an entrance to the garden as well as a support for hops, which they plan on using to make beer.



(Double click on any image to make it larger.)

A rough sketch. We've modified the design by adding another pair of hoops as well as more cross pieces to stabilize the entire structure.

I'm bending a piece around a jig to get the desired finished radius of 5 feet. I made and tested several sized jigs before finding the right one. The metal tubing is 1"x1" square and the walls are 1/8" thick.

Leaning up against my house, we'll weld more curved tubing on the bottom of each end to get the desired shape.

There are a group of gardeners who want to learn some fabrication skills and will be helping me put it together. We'll weld the pairs of hoops together, strap them on the side of my work van and drive down Ashland Ave to the garden. It should all happen in the next couple months.



For a good tutorial on how to bend metal tubing by hand, check out this post.



A short helpful video is here.

Community Garden Trellis: Initial Fitting and Welding

Once the pieces were bent around the jig, I laid out my arc and began fitting and welding.



Unfortunately the jig didn't give repeat bends "exactly" the same. So I used a oxy-acetylene torch to gently heat, then bend, the pieces until they conformed exactly to my layout lines.

This is the first of four pairs of hoops. They'll then be stood up on site and joined by 3.5 foot long straight pieces of tubing to form a tunnel roughly 15' long.



More later.