Homemade Dill Pickles

Pickling cucumbers chillin'

Thank You Rain

we got a nice, steady inch and a half of rain in the last 24 hours.

Firewood...

...heats  you twice so they say. But I think the guy who coined this one never really cut his/her own.

I say it heats you six times. Cutting, loading, splitting, stacking, bringing it inside and then when you burn it.

Fotos of What's Happening Here Now

current state of the compost bin:


logs with bucking stand:
 
 

Summer is Fading Fast.

some harvesting happening but mostly just busy. Cutting firewood, splitting and stacking. Getting ready for what The Old Farmer's Almanac is calling a dry, mild winter. Still want a pile of wood the size of the house. Making pickles tomorrow and canning tomatoes next week. three batches of homebrew done. Planting kale from our seed in a coldframe soon too. Many exciting things happening down on the Spotty Dog mini-farm. more soon. photos are hard to take when you are busy living life. we will try. this is an especially beautiful time of year in Northern New Mexico. Just feels like winter is creeping up on us and the wood pile needs to multiply. along with our pantry stock.

some recent fotos:

Sunflowers are pretty:

Putting Up Kale

Kale to be harvested:

Growing Food For Ourselves

harvest basket:

Chicken House

Back To Reality

We are back from our week-long Southwest Colorado Micro-Brewery Mini-Tour. We took hundreds of photos, slept right on a river and visited almost ten breweries. (that's an average of more than one a day!) The select photos can be seen here (high desert home garden's picassa web albums.)

Homebrew

two most recent batches of brew in the second stage of fermentation:

Brewed with all homegrown hops. In the past this would have gone up on The Homebrew Blog , but this just makes more sense.

Kale Makes a Comeback

Kale; bounced back from aphid infestation and looked like it was dying from the heat. Rained a bunch and cooled off a bit, and now the kale is looking better than ever.

Bloggity Blog Blog

Hopi Black Dye: