Modern Methods Future Customs
When you own goats you soon discover that they are a quite difficult bunch to keep inside the fence, no matter how delicious and goat-friendly the pasture inside may seem.
That is why we are spending a lot of time putting up and re-inforcing fences!
Raoul ”helping out” as usual!
The room we now call the Japanese room is the first we’ve taken on renovating. It’s supposed to be used as a small guestroom, but the japanese influence kind of invented itself. When we found a wallpaper we really liked in Warszawa, we decided to continue on the asian track, and bought dark oak floortiles that would be a nice match.
The original interior was quite old and bore marks from the intrepid design choices of the 70s, as well as many years of service as a teenager’s room.
The first time we saw the room, in january 2015
We started by tearing everything down. Ceiling, wallpapers, floormat.
Our friends Filip and Yasmina came by to help us with the destruction. After a beerwalk.
Wallpaper removal
The most exhaustive moment was the restoration of the horisontal bolts we found above the ceiling. Some bolts had a really rough finish. A few axe markings can be beautiful, but splinters and miscoloured spots had to be planed away.
The exposed planks that were to became the new ceiling was extremely hard to saturate with paint. It took several hours of stroking and splashing before we decided to cover the bolts and use the spray painter instead. Defenitely a good choice, and a lesson learned before we continue with the remaining rooms.
The bolts were oiled with brown tinted chinese wood oil.
The walls, wich we had to extend 15 cm to cover the space previously hidden between the bolts, got a layer of construction wallpaper to even out the seams. After that, the floortiles could be installed.
Did I lay the tiles, or did the tiles lay me?
Application of the final wallpaper made the whole difference.
A futon style sofa, rice lamp, and a remodeled coffee table with the remaining wallpaper under the glass, adds to the asian impression.
Good thing: the old ceiling lists could be reused as floor lists without any changes.
Bad thing: there will be a real hassle to cut out the new ceiling lists with all the joints and angles. A consecuence of solving any mismatching with the wallpaper edges with the comment: the list will cover it…
Anyway, if not finished to perfection, the room is inhabitable, and a few guests as well as ourselves, can verify that the sleep is formidable.
In cheese-making, the key to a tasty, and reproducable, cheese, is keeping track of the exact pH and the temperature in the active culture. You can do this with manual tools, such as a kitchen thermometer and pH-strips, but the measurements will be crude, and depend on your constant presence. That leading to inconsistencies between batches, and difficulties in tracking errors in the process.
My diy pH-sensor is not exactly cheap either. It ticks in at about €150 in material costs. I’ve seen people look pensive when they see the casing, and subconsiously push it closer to the recycling, so a slightly pricier casing than the pet bottle might be an investment. Otherwise, the bill of materials looks like:
Sensor
With todays exchange rates, it translates to around €150.
If you’re setting up a new sensor network, you need a radio gateway and a computer to run the controller software on too
You can order everything from ebay or aliexpress through the Mysensors store, but the items listed there may not always be availible in singel packages. Anyway, you will need more of those radios.
Shipping is usually free from China (who is paying that?), but the pH-kit comes from the US, so add a few euros for shipping and customs.
Features:
Prerequisites:
Tools
Skills
Since we have quite much old straw occupying the hay loft, and the maple on the frontyard is producing a great amount of compost material each fall, we decided to try to grow some potatoes in that biomass.
The straw and leaves where put directly on the Ground in early april, as the potatoes where put to germinate inside the house. Four weeks later, when the risk for nightfrost had diminished, the potatoes where scattered on the strawbed, covered with more straw and leaves, and watered.
As comparison, a few potatoes where planted using the traditional methodologies of digging them into the ground.
The first harvest was expected 8-10 weeks after germination (middle of june), but a chilly period in may delayed it with two weeks. Maybe the cover crops method is more suspectible to cold weather since it lacks the isolating features from a thick layer of soil? We don’t know, since the soilgrown potatoes is a later kind. That’s a parameter to keep track of next year.
Reflections:
Strawbed:
Soil:
The need for watering seems to be the same with both methods. The strawbed was very moist in the lower layers, even after several weeks of draught. We watered both patches quite much after putting out the potatoes.
Neither patch has shown any signs of leaf rot. An hypothesis yet untested is that growing mushrooms among the potatoes would make it harder for leaf rot to establish. The mushrooms didn’t thrive in the heat, so we’ve prepared a mycelium to mix in the strawbed in the autumn.
Links:
The goats were really happy to see the food truck we brought them.
