#solopunk

I'm a basket weaver now!

I wasn’t sure if people would want more. But seems like we are going to be here a while so here we go again. 

- Have you binge watched all of liziqi’s videos and you are now sad. Why not watch a different person on a mountain who also has a adorable husky?  Dianxi Xiaoge also has lovely videos! (Thank you @oats-and-honeybees​ for the reminding me! ) 

- Do you like quite videos to relax to?  키미 Kimi share their life on a farm and show a lot of the cooking and harvesting. 

- Want to get started with container gardening? Urban Gardening can possibly grow anything in a container. Lots of info on vegetables and DIY garden hacks but he also propagates succulents and such! 

- Do you enjoy British television? Why not try Hugh’s River Cottage about a guy that moves out of the city to start a homestead. I really enjoy how this show really does show that community, bartering and learning from each other important. (Warning; he does run a very traditional homestead with raising animals as food) 

- Want to make your own jewellery? I love this beading/embroidery technique by   eri yamazato  

- do you like the idea of Permaculture? Morag Gamble has tons of content on plants, getting started, building things like worm-towers and interviews with other gardeners. Also I think she lives in Australia so if you are on the southern hemisphere there might be more specific info for plants that you can grow! 

- SIENCE? DIY? FORAGING? Sally Le Page has it all! Including free classes on evolution!

Again I love any tips on what more to add to the list. There is still room for a part 3. 

Combined all the dandelion flowers from my lawn with slightly less basil leaves from the seedlings growing on my windowsill, adding two cloves of garlic and mixing it all in the blender. Then I put in a dash of cider vinegar and added enough of the oil I had on hand (sunflower) to make the blitzed up ingredients look how pesto looks when I buy it.

I took enough out to have with the gnocci you can see in the bowl behind, put the rest in a pickled ginger jar I fished out of the recycling, and put it in the fridge. It should be enough for at least four more meals.

It’s actually really good. The basil is sweet on the tip of the tongue, then the dandelion has a bitterness in the back of the throat like rocket leaves, and the garlic is a punch of spicy heat. A really sophisticated mix of tastes, and apart from oil and vinegar it all came out of my garden (or windowledge.)

My Ramsons are still establishing, but maybe next year I can try it again with wild garlic instead and see what difference that makes.

While I have really only started learning about composting this spring, my family have composted way before I was born. Sort of expected, since I branch from a long line of professional gardeners... So when I started learning about composting and joined a composting group, and what I saw was rules and rigid methods and purism, I was confused and overwhelmed because they made me feel like I don't know anything and I do everything wrong unless I do everything exactly like some dude on the opposite side of the planet.

Then I realized that I already knew the essentials by heart: assign a place or bin or something for your compostables, chug things in, and nature will do its job. Rest is just finetuning, if you want to avoid stuff like smells, leaky things or rats. There's no one-size-fits-for-all solution for composting no matter what some people want you to believe. Now, I live in an apartment building which means I need a lot of finetuning, and because I already knew the most popular choices for indoor composts, vermicompost and bokashi (also what some people claim are the only options...) didn't really work for me, I decided to turn my gaze on to the composting I knew, inspect how and why it worked, and figure out how to make it work for me. So I tortured my memory and interrogated my family on how we actually deal with our bins at our cottage.

My family's cottage currently have maybe 6 composters, 1 "all goes" bin, 2 garden bins and 3 for human manure (in others words: our toilet).

This is the "all goes" bin. We compost all the common things, like veggie scraps and stuff, but we also compost meat, fish, cooked food, grains... The list goes on. If it's been alive at least semi-recently and is relatively unprocessed, in the bin it goes. Alas, meat and the like gets buried, of course, because we DO have some big predators here.

The bins at my mom's garden. These mainly receive garden scraps, but sometimes we put kitchen scraps there too, because they are closest to our main building. We rotate with them, so while one is being filled, the other is left alone to do its business.

And our composting toilet system. It's emptied from the bottom every now and then (mostly by my brother or mom, because I have the weakest stomach of us, and I think I threw up the last time I tried) to the bins behind it, and once the manure has composted on its own for a while, we mix it with compost from other bins and used gardening soil. The result we then mostly give to our non-edible plants.

Now, my own compost, the one people half a planet away are so keen to police, is in many ways very similar to the general compost at the cottage.

It gets almost all of my kitchen waste, meat and dairy included, although I don't often have to throw those away, and when I do, the amounts are usually tiny. It's smaller, just a regular storage box, so I can keep it in my apartment and later in my storage unit at the basement, while at the cottage the bin is MUCH bigger. My bin also gets all the garden scraps, dry leaves, non-coated cardboard, newspaper, etc and it needs to be throughoutly turned at least every other week, and I need to keep my eye more closely on carpon nitrogen ratio and moisture. Also, none of the bins in the cottage are specifically aerobic or nonaerobic, but to speed up the composting process and to keep odors at the minimum, my bin is clearly aerobic (meaning, the bacteria that mostly does the composting part needs oxygen to thrive, so I need to make sure they get it).

Started a compost bin with some food scraps I’ve been keeping for the past week, some dried branches for aeration, some freshly plucked weeds and grass, and some dried straw that’s out of the picture.

I haven't been updating very regularly, but I do have some things going on. It's the last week of classes so I'm rushing to get everything done.

2 cucumbers have germinated! Still waiting on the rest of the gourds to pop up. My roommate convinced her mom to pay for some stuff, so we went to the hardware store and got busy. We plan to build several trellises to support our gourds and our forest of tomatoes. Afterwards we went to the nursery to stretch the budget a little further, and bought several different types of cherry tomato. Now, I have to get my trellises built and some soil worked so I can get these in the ground!

My other project has been building a box for herbs on the deck. I need it to be mobile because of our climate, in case the sensitive herbs need protection.

I started out by breaking down a few of the recently scavenged pallets. One of them broke down like a dream, the other was really rotted and difficult to pull apart.

And here it is! It looks kind of shitty, but it was the first thing I've ever really built. It was quite the struggle. Originally, I was going to try and piece it together with what I have (a hammer and nails), but I ultimately caved and decided a drill would come in handy and would be useful for many other projects. It also took several days, I've had trouble finding time.

A good watering, some basil transplanted, and a bunch of herb seeds in there. Hopefully the dill grows around the time for my cucumbers, you know this guy likes dill pickles.

I'm building a twine trellis for some chinese long beans in my backyard (I decided I didn't have enough beans). I've been a bit worried about where to secure the twine, but luckily there are little spacers in the gutters! Perfect spacing for my trellis. I'm very excited. I hope they ship the seeds I ordered soon.

That's all I've got for now. I'll try and update as I get through the trellis building. I'm trying to power through this last week of class.