Making hay while the sun shines!

Last Thursday hubby's boat pulled in and we have been busy ever since! Our weather has been fantastic, so we were able to get so much accomplished this past weekend and it looks to be a productive week ahead since he is on leave and will be home all week.

Finnegan waiting for Daddy to get off the ship (his boat is the USS Truman in the background) so we can go home and enjoy the weather!

(Nice trash in the pic, huh?!)

We had a nice surprise waiting for him when we got him back: a set of 5 gal kegs, CO2 system, and the makings of his homemade kegerator! He has been wanting to build one of these for awhile, and I must admit it makes homebrew bottling day go by much quicker than sanitizing, filling and capping all those little individual bottles! It keeps indefinitely in the keg, so I don't have to worry about using it up quickly, which was one of my concerns. Even though we love brewing beer, we aren't the kind of drinkers that drink every evening, so it was a must that it wouldn't go bad! It is awesome for entertaining, though!

Here he is taking the top of and dismantling a perfectly good fridge

These are the components: recycled 5 gal Cornelius soda kegs, co2 bottle, regulator

This was me figuring out how the CO2 works before he got home - don't know what I would have done without that laptop and the homebrewing websites!

It all fits in the fridge!

By Friday evening we had a 2-Draft tower keg!

He finished it just in time for our Homebrewing/Homesteading Skills demonstration on Saturday night. We hosted a Disaster Prep group for an evening of Homebrewing "how-to" and it was a great time! We met some really great people, and shared our love of a skill that is important to "social survival" as I call it. A diverse group that includes everyone from die-hard survivalists to people like us who simply want to live as self sufficiently as possible and whose future plans include homesteading on their own piece of land. Everyone in the group brings a bit of knowledge and skill about different areas which made for an evening of lively conversation and a good time meeting new friends. We definitely hope to see more of the group!

Here is the finished batch of Double IPA from the Homebrew Skills evening. It will be fermenting and dry-hopping for the next couple of weeks and then we will keg it and store it for another few weeks until it is aged and ready to enjoy!

We did manage to find time (I don't know how!) for the kids to dye some Easter Eggs. I forgot how smelly this project is, yuck!

Most of my seedlings are hardened off now and will be going into the garden today! Below are all of them, in their various stages. The perennials, herbs and flowers are growing slowly but steadily, but the top row of tomatoes is ready to be in their new homes. I am going to go ahead and plant them today, fingers crossed! I do have a backup, however, there is another generation of tomatoes and peppers that are about 3 weeks younger than these, so if they get stunted I can replace them, but I am hoping for success. Daytime temps here are in the 80's, and nighttime temps in the 57-62 range. They did well overnight on their rack outside, so I can only assume being planted permanently will actually be gentler on their roots and better for keeping even temps.

Close up of 1st generation of tomatoes. Brandywine, True Black Brandywine, Paul Robeson, Vorlon, Yellow Pear and the Hand-me-down unidentified Polish are the Heirlooms, and the hybrids include an Orange Wellington and 4th of July Hybrid. I had bad germination on my Red Zebra, so Baker Creek Co. offered to replace them and those will be going in with the next generation of seedlings that I am raising for the Master Gardener Plant Sale in May. Kudos to Baker Creek customer service, I am very pleased!

Off to enjoy another day of very warm (hot even, 88 forecast!) temps and working in the yard. We have been given yet another date for hubby to leave for his 8 month deployment, and it gives us roughly one month left at home, so we get as much done as possible before then! He also got my much anticipated hammock up, so I will try and get some pics of that today as well as what the garden is looking like in general! Now, if I could just find some time to actually lay in the hammock...

Here we go again... another Nor'easter expected in this afternoon to dump copious amounts of rain and snow on our area! I know there are alot of you dealing with the same weather system headed my way, I hope your garden braves the storm well. I will be busy this afternoon tying down the entire yard with 550 cord so we don't blow away, so in lieu of a seedling update, I leave you with this inspirational photo from last Spring:

Seedlings spending their days hardening off!

Don't worry, the weather will stop this relentless assault on us and we will see this soon I hope! Time to batten down the hatches yet again...

The Government Interrupted my Gardening!

Well, it has happened again!  My husband returned from 2 weeks in Arizona for his sister's wedding and was greeted with a message that he needed to be on the ship no later than midnight that same day!  Gotta love it when we are so harshly reminded that he belongs to the Navy and is just ours to borrow for a few months at a time.  He wasn't even here long enough to take a shower or see how hard the kids and I have been working on the ol' homestead!  Just enough time to pack his bag and get in the car so we could take him to the base.  So all the projects he intended to finish are in limbo for the next month or so.  I am left with half of a fence, trailer loads of compost that I have to get myself, and hoping the vines I have to cover the non-existent fence will survive in their pots until he gets back.

Those of you familiar with the deployment thing know that as soon as our beloved leaves, things break...BIG things!  Last deployment it was a water heater and a well pump, this time is no different.  We were preparing for a SCHEDULED deployment later this year by replacing our aging HVAC system, decrepit fencing that falls down every time the wind blows, and purchasing a generator for hurricane season, but NOOOOOO... last night I awoke to the sound of my well pump kicking on/off every 25 seconds.  At 3 a.m. I knew no one was up showering or anything, I checked for leaks inside and there was none, so I just laid there contemplating how bad this could really be.  As soon as it was light out, I stuck my head under the crawlspace (yuck!).  I heard it before I saw it...waterfall noise...seemed to be gushing out of a pipe and hundreds of gallons of H2O pooling up on the "vapor barrier"!  After taking a shower (what's another few gallons?) and crying, I finally shutoff the well pump and called in Joe the Plumber.  Thankfully for our finances, it was fixed in an hour with a new pipe, but Joe gives us the bad news that our pipes are really old and need to be upgraded (no surprise).  All this has transpired and been fixed and the sailor-pirate chaser-farmer doesn't even know about it yet!  Joe the Plumber was a real character, too...not much for words (or teeth for that matter) until he saw my garden and that my primary water source was a well in the suburbs...then he was all "don't get city water, the man will stick it to you" and "you should build a bunker to store your veggies".  Really?  A BUNKER???  LOL, this was kind of amusing seeing that he makes his money from those water pipes fed by "the Man".  I think he needs to move somewhere the moonshine flows and the militias are on the move!  Anyway, here is the offending pipe, all the damage came from the little pinhole on the upper right. I have no idea what the patch job is on that pic, that was before we got this place, lol.

So now that I am done venting about the above, we just started hardening off the seedlngs the other day, but have been plagued by severe weather the past couple of days, so haven't planted anything yet. 

 I finally got around to organizing my gardening papers & seeds, etc., something I have been planning to do for a couple of months.  Being so OCD, I am surprised I lasted this long with all my garden stuff strewn all over my desk!  I mulled over the idea of a bin, or file folder of sorts, but decided on a binder system.  The result rocks...I have laminated planting info, divider tabs for everything from seed types to monthly garden chores, and seed packets fit perfectly into photo sleeves.  It is the PINNACLE of my OCD/Type A Projects and here she is...

Next up... the the booby-trap for dogs...

No, it's not where all the good little stakes go when they die...!  It's to train the garden dogs to stay out of the beds!  It dawned on me the other day that my other raised bed garden is fenced in, which is why I have never had the dogs playing "agility competition" until now.  So before the plants go into these new beds, the kids gathered every unfriendly object we had laying around and stuck them in...working so far...we will see when the plants go in!

Aha!  I see I have just received an email...no doubt from the sailor-farmer who just found out about the water pipe carnage...better get that!