So the floor re-painting project was completed in time to get the house back in order before a visit from some out-of-town friends. That is to say that all of the downstairs floor surfaces, except for the kitchen, were completed painted in yellow and a handful of our furniture was put back in its regular place. There are however some things that need to be done to complete the process.
The longview from the kitchen
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This year we are growing eggplant for the first time, and things have been going slowly but pretty well — they took their sweet old time putting on new leaves from their seedling state, then something was eating their leaves very consistently. But eventually they put on fruit and we’ve eaten a few of these cutie little globe eggplants.
Today, though, some of the leaves of one plant were looking yellowed and wilty, so we pre-emptively pulled it out, harvested the baby fruit, and sealed up the plant to be trashed and not composted
Left: full-sized globe eggplant. Right: tiny, premature baby eggplants.
I’ve been reading more about eggplant pests and diseases, and can’t recommend the Penn State plant pathology website enough: Vegetable Disease Identification. They’ve also assembled fruits and ornamentals guides. Great resource.
Anyway, I am a bit fearful that our eggplant was struck by a soil-borne fungus called verticillium — the bummer here is that MANY things we grow are also susceptible to it: brambles, strawberries, peppers….
Watchful waiting, watchful waiting.
And in the meantime, I will eat those adorably tiny eggplants. I’ve secretly been wanting to pick them too early anyway!!!
Over breakfast yesterday, we were lamenting that we hadn’t gotten as many berries into the freezer as we usually like to. We called around a bit, but it looked like the pick-your-own places we know around here and up in Butler were pretty much shot, as far as blueberries go.
So on a whim, we decided to drive north to find some blueberries and peaches. We picked a mountain of berries at a little farm in Northeast (a little town close to Erie), and then found another nearby farm that has an orchard of peaches and apples, and got ourselves a heap of peaches too.
Then once you’re at Lake Erie, you might as well go play in the water, right?
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As stated in my last post, we have song big plans. Having successfully removed all the old carpeting from our house, it is now time to turn our attention to our exterior carpeting aka our grass. Every year when we have re-edged the garden we’ve been expanding a few more inches into the yard. In addition, we have placed a number of garden items in the middle of the lawn. For a breakdown of what we’ve done, here’s an annotated photo of the garden in its current state:
We did some things in July. It’s true!!
Such as…
Harvested 48 heads of garlic!
Held our annual Torley Manor Blues + Folk Fest. I made three dozen bottles of homebrew sodas for the event including a root beer and a blueberry ginger brew. Check out those fancy labels!!
Finished this ridiculous silkscreen based around one of my favorite tales from the Peach Pitt (an old Pgh punk house). This print and others are available via my Etsy site.
Continued to paint our floors. Here I am primer-ing the front room.
And beginning to add yellow to the front room.
Since we are doing all the floors downstairs and we are still living in our house, we’ve been taking it section by section. We’re doing 3 coats of primer followed by 3 coats of paint, so it takes some time. Hopefully we’ll have the whole downstairs complete in another week and a half.
We’ve also been harvesting a lot of other great stuff from the garden and eating some great summer foods. Here you can see our beets, a selection of our peppers (the best harvest we’ve ever had), and some of our red raspberries (we only got a few handfuls this year, but its only their first year. here’s hoping they take off next year).
I’m gonna try to get Emma to update everyone on the craziness that has been her life this summer. And as for myself, i’ll try to update this thing a bit more often. Got some big plans and fun projects to discuss. Also pics of the floor when its all said and done.
After finding out that the varnish on our floor contained lead, we did a little research about the best way to handle getting rid of it. Emma hunted down a product called Franmar SOY-Gel that is carried by our local eco-friendly building supply store Artemis Environmental. So we picked up a small bottle of it and proceeded to do a test area. After initial results looked promising, we bought the larger gallon size of the stuff and moved forward with removing the rest of the cracking/chipping varnish from the middle room.
Of course, between the time we did the test area and the rest of the room, temperatures and humidity levels soared, making the process of using the SOY-Gel much more difficult. Ideally the stripper is to be left on several hours while it works its magic. Unfortunately, due to the higher temps, the stripper was drying out before it was given the opportunity to work completely. However, our main goal was to get rid of the cracking/chipping areas of the floor and to not be too concerned about the varnish was happily sticking to the wood. After several long and messy sessions, the middle room was complete.
After having gotten some floor painting advice from a couple different sources, we settled on using a Behr Porch and Floor paint. The color we decided on is called “Sunflower”, which is a pretty bright intense yellow. On Saturday I picked up the paint and supplies and got to work priming a test area (this whole project is beset with test areas as we want to make sure things work out before doing both downstairs rooms and the front hallway. Also, on July 11th we are having an event at the house, so figured we’d wait until after that to do any major sections of the floor.) Check it out…
On Sunday I picked off the first handful of string beans from the garden on the same day that we prepared to cook up the last box of frozen string beans from last year. Good timing, eh?
A couple weeks back I was looking at our blueberry bushes, admiring the many blueberries that were on the bush and being excited that they appeared to be ready to ripen. I thought to myself “probably by the end of the week some of these will be ripe” then glanced to the very tip of the bush where I saw a single perfectly ripe blueberry. I plucked that sucker and ran in to show Emma, then bit it in half and shared it with her (ain’t i a romantic sucker??) Since then we’ve been getting a handful of berries every day. Its so nice to be able to step out into the backyard to pick a handful of berries to eat. The best!!
That’s a good lookin’ berry!! So plump!!!
Then yesterday I went out to the garden to do some basic maintenance and looked over at our new red raspberry bushes (i really struggle to call them “bushes” as the largest one is about a foot tall) and what do I see? One huge almost perfectly ripe red raspberry at the tip of the one bush. There are other berries on the plants but none that are even close to being fully formed, let alone ripe. And then, then there is this one that is so beautiful. We let it on there overnight to fully ripen and then I picked it this morning. Once again, I bit it in half and shared it with Emma. So good. I can hardly wait to get more. Having raspberries in the back yard? So brilliant.
Another nice lookin’ berry. Look at the size of that thing
And because raspberries are so great to look at up close
The strawberries are pretty much done, though there is a random one out there every once and awhile. Emma told her brother that there weren’t any today while they were visiting, but then when I walked past the patch, my eye caught sight of one perfectly ripe berry. I let one of the nieces have it.
I called one of the ‘pick your own’ berry places today to find out about their blueberries. They should be ready later in the week. Then we’ll head out with the buckets and prepare to fill our freezer.
So for xmas this year my sister got us supplies for us to make our own homebrew sodas. This basically involved getting us a bottle capper, some bottle caps, some champagne yeast, a bottling bucket, and some soda extracts. She got us both root beer and cream soda extracts.
Here’s all the hardware!!
I’ve made some homebrew sodas in the past — a couple times with my friend Deanna and was also around a few times when Deanna made some batches with our friend Jim. This was years ago, but I recall having some mixed results with these attempts at soda-making.
Back in April I tried my first solo batch of root beer making using the recipe that came with the root beer extract. Results were less than spectacular. The drink was very medicinal tasting and lacked carbonation. I have been told that most of the extracts aren’t that good, but something definitely seemed off about the flavor. And regarding the carbonation, I think our house was still too cold at that time for the yeast to work its magic (house was probably in the low 60s, while the yeast prefers it in the 70s or 80s.)
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Here’s a shot of our back yard garden, taken from a second floor window. I annotated it HERE, so you can roll over the image and it’ll tell you what we’re growing and where.
Thumbs up! The annotated version of this picture is HERE.
The state of the garden? It’s pretty good, but we have some unresolved issues — something’s been eating the leaves of the bean plants when they’re tiny and just sprouted. Q planted a second go-round to fill in the gaps where they were eaten to the ground. I’m not sure who is the culprit yet, and that annoys me.
Same deal with the peas — I think it might have just been too wet for them, early on. Their leaves got really chewed up looking, but on closer inspection, I think it wasn’t eaten by bugs, but might have been a mold — in some places, the leaves weren’t chewed through, but were thinner. I wasn’t sure how to proceed, but then we had some great weather and they started growing like crazy, and seem to have largely outgrown their troubles.
We haven’t seen any sign of the mantids since they hatched back in the beginning of May. I hope they’ve stuck around and are just laying low.
The various flower seeds I stuck in the ground near the neighbor’s garage haven’t show any signs of life, which is a bummer. I think it has always rained hard after I direct-sow tiny seeds, every year, and I think they must just always wash away. Maybe next year I’ll start the direct-sow flowers inside just for good measure.
Otherwise — bumper crop of strawberries. I think the mulching with coffee grounds is working brilliantly. Recommended! Doesn’t even make the berries smell or taste like coffee. We certainly still have slug nibbles, but next year I’ll put coffee all throughout the bed, not just on the perimeter, and we’ll just see about YOU, slugs!
My maiden pruning venture seems to have been pretty successful — we’re seeing great blooms on the rose bush next door. The peony blooms suffered during the heavy rains and went from glorious to pathetic in about a minute.
Our sweet potato slips are establishing themselves pretty well, but aren’t ready to plant yet.
The most exciting thing is that our brand new raspberry canes are getting themselves settled, and the first one has tiny, hard, green berries on it. But look how short it is, still!
