Beverages and More

Goddamn, four months later already? Who let me slack off this whole time?

The title is a lie, I speak solely of beverages. And even that is broad to the point of deception: I'm talking about the BEER here. Let me tell you, there is beer to be discussed. Fifty gallons of it at some point of becoming delicious in the house. In chronological order, we have:

• Amber #7
• Capitol Brown #8
• Forearms Chocolate Stout #9
• ESB #10
• Heffewinning #11
• OSB 1.1 #12
  
• Po' Ber' #13
• House Amber #14
• Cosco Busan IPA #15
• The Distinguished Gentleman Brown #16
• Cap Stout #17

It's an exciting mix of ales, which will surely get more exciting and ale-ish.

With quantity well in hand, a word about quality: we're getting there. People tell us our beer is quite good. I think they're being polite (I'm not accusing our friends of lying, so much as being nice people and good friends). Of course, nothing we make will ever live up to our expectations and that is both the reason to take the learning curve in stride and to never have children. There is, without exception, improvement from one batch to the next and 104 improvements ought to yields some good goddamn beer.

We're still mastering priming. I don't what there is say about it besides that; putting carbonation, in the right amount, in a timely fashion, in a consistent way, in beer is particularly challenging. Not so much because we don't know how to do it or are unable, but because it's a process that requires a patience, a substance I have discovered they don't sell in stores (they ought to, you could make a killing).

After priming comes my favorite part of the beer making process: giving people beer. Too many people to give beer to, not enough beer. Such dilemmas.

Maybe it'll get to a by weekly post status around here, so you, our faithful and imaginary readers, can keep up with each brew day. But I doubt it.

Growing More Food

It must be a case of mistaken expectations but I feel like the garden doesn't produce as much... produce as it should.

Consider this: our garden accounts for fully half of our water consumption, if not more. We have six beds going full blast all year, but we never seem to have that much food. Meals never come out of the garden, but are supplemented by the garden. I don't think that my entire diet should be coming out of my garden, but I do think I should be able to eat a meal strictly from my personal farm. As of now, that never happens. I once made a salad that was pretty close, but it was still just a salad.

This seems to me to be the future challenge: how do we expand the food output of the garden without dramatically increasing the labor and water demands of the garden? To add more clarity to the parameters, I'm fine with working in the garden more and I'm fine with watering more, but what I'm really looking to do is up the input/output ratio, not start my own farm (though that would be pretty dope).

Currently, the garden contains (and I again apologize for my broke ass camera and the corresponding lack of photos):

• Tomatoes
• Peppers (Jalapeno, Habenero, spicy Thai and two others)
• Kale
• Collard Greens
• Chard
• Zucchini
• Squash
• Pumpkin
• Basil

The tomatoes have a handsome input/output ratio, which we are about the reap the benefits of, and while the zucchini are a little late in the game, they too will kick out a lot of food. The squash and pumpkins are small quantities of large foods which take a long time to grow, so I'm kind of writing them off. The greens are easy and constant but not very substantive. Peppers are definitely not a reliable food source. Basil is delicious, but not much else.

The easy calls are the zucchini and tomatoes. Both are tasty and productive, requiring little besides water. Everything else feeling like it could be better, at least in the regards to the amount of food produced. So now comes the research, what else produces great quantities? Maybe potatoes? Then comes the decision about how much tasty I'm willing to give up to have more bulk.

Decision will be made, and written about at great length.

Some Creative Writing From a While Ago

My garden is full of tentacles.

The squash are by far the most tentacled, hundreds of slim digits attaching themselves to anything that let’s them go upward. Guiding them along the wire cylinders we’ve place them in is a Sisyphean task. Every morning I discover they’ve lashed out of their enclosures, searching for new objects to cling to. God forbid I should miss a day, or they’d be choking out my tomatoes.

Sad cousin to the squash, our sole melon vine seems afraid of letting its tentacle flag fly. Depressed by the mild weather or maybe just intimidated by the exploding chard situated next to it, it refuses to grow or to die. It sits there, day after day, healthy but small. I maintain that once the weather turns hot, it’ll turn into a kudzu like monster, growing several feet in a day, but until then I can’t help but feel it’s a waste of potential.

Not all the tentacles are welcome though. In fact, my little canopy jungle is situated squarely in hostile territory, between opposing walls of ivy and bougainvillea. Both are devious plants, sending their soft tendrils underground to breach in the rich soil of our plant beds. Thieving bastards.

While the struggle to contain the squash vines is a labor of love, rooting out these intruders is a war requiring ruthless efficiency and constant vigilance. I’m particularly protective of the tomatoes, because tomatoes are delicious and when the boug’ comes up in their bed I flip my lid. On numerous occasions I’ve swore to all who would listen that I’ll burn down that cursed hedge, but the opportunity has yet to present itself.

On the western front, by the time ivy leaves start showing in the garlic bed a large root base is already established and must be destroyed. Ivy’s white shoots will strangle everything above it, and so it can be shown no mercy. I will bide my time, and let the garlic bulb before I delve into the bed and tear out yards of tender roots. When I do, I’ll leave no trace of this menace, only the sweet irony of more tentacles: the bed needs vetch for cover crop.

So many tentacles.

General Update: GARLIC!

Been too long since I've done the run down, but that's a mistake I won't make again any time soon. My camera is broken so I have no proof of what I'm about to say to you, but I assure you that it is all true.

The garden has exploded. Just gone boom. I've got tomato and squash plants that are taller than I am. We're already getting ripe stupus and all the other tomatoes are covered in green little balls of potential delicious. There are collard greens trees that are pushing four feet tall and show no signs of stopping. There are bushels of chard and kale (which I keep telling Erin I'll give her) just waiting around to be steamed with a little balsamic vinegar and soy sauce and thrown over couscous. The staggering amount of biomass is shocking.

The epic garlic harvest is all out of the ground and drying today, so my dinning room table is unavailable for things like dinning. We have Polish Soft Neck, Fireball, and Bavarian Purple, the later of which came out a little disappointing. It's weighing in light and the flavor isn't, in my opinion, as distinctive as the other two. It's still good, and the other two are outstanding, so I'm not worried.

Josh and I (who are we kidding, just Josh) came up with our strategy for planting garlic next year and it goes a little something like this.

• Plant the biggest cloves. This seems simple and I don't know why it never occurred to us before. Garlic cloves are not seeds in the traditional sense, they're actual plants which is why they sprout if you don't keep them dry. So when planting, you want to select the biggest cloves to get the biggest plants. Flavor is more important than size, a perspective generally overlooked in grocery stores, but it's still nice to get the most bang for your buck.
• Cold treat the cloves. Garlic grows well in very cold climates and generally needs a cold snap to sprout. Oakland is not generally the best provider in this regard, so instead of praying for a freak two days of cold after you plant, you just throw the cloves you're going to plant in the freezer overnight before planting. Theoretically, this makes for faster sprouting and thus more growing. There is apparently a risk of over freezing them, which I'll need to do more research into.
• Try more varieties. Uh, yeah. We want to try more varieties of garlic. So we're going to plant them. Hopefully we'll find something that really likes our climate and soil. No idea what varieties yet, but we don't need to figure that out for another four months.
• Soil testing. Both Josh and I noticed that the garlic planted near our rosemary bush was smaller than the stuff further away. Could have been that they were competing with it for water, or maybe the soil is just weak in that bed. In the next round of planting, we're going to put garlic in all our beds and monitor the difference in sizes. Hopefully, we can find information about good companion plants so we don't need to do this trial and error style.

I'm going to do some reading today about when to clip the stalks on garlic and when I do clip our crop I'll post weights, total and average. We like scientific rigor in this compound and so our garlic must be measured.

The other project that is dwelling in the front of my brain right now is developing our beds. Our old compost bed is home to the squash right now, so the plan is to drop all the tomato and squash plants in that bed at the end of the season and build a box around it. At that point, it should be about read to go as a full fledged growing bed. Our other compost bed probably needs about six months of green inputs before it's ready for prime time, but I'm still excited about it. The last bed that need immediate attention is the garlic bed (which doesn't have garlic in it right now), which need a new box. We discussed expanding it and putting the lavender in the ground there, but I'm worried that having big lavender and rosemary plants in one bed will be too much competition for the plants in the bed. We'll see.

Josh is threatening to get us some bees this summer, an exciting prospect. I'll let him write that up later.

The Sweet Smell of Success (and sawdust)

Two climbing walls erected, and with chalk and rubber already caking their faces, our living room is officially a fort. No, really. It says so, there on the wall. "The Fort. No Girls." How classy is that?

With the bulk of our wall space completed, the focus of the project has shifted to the finer aspects of creating our playground, namely holds and surfacing. Holds are currently consuming all of my time and, if I let them, will do the same with my money. Surfacing the wall is equally expensive, though due to the byzantine rituals and strange, dark alchemy involved it may prove far more time consuming. Such are the trying (and karate filled) circumstances in which we often find ourselves; life will find a way.

Someday, when I get my life together, I'll add photos to this blog and make it a visual exercise in wankery. Until then it will remain a textual exercise in wankery.

Look who scraped together some building supplies

Hey, Mia for a while, DEAL!

The two largest climbing surfaces on the climbing wall are now in tact. Both the 40 and the vert wall are up. the next steps are to round the corners off to the wall giving us some slap problems and some climbing surface in the realm of 10 to 15 degrees. I Josh am hoping to complete this instead of celebrating some magical bullshit on a randomly selected day to get retards to buy each other shit!

Remember that time I called christmas folks retards, I didn't mean it! Christmas believers and doers are way more fucking useless than retards.

Who is going to make the brontosaurus sound???

Anywho. once this is done the work on the dihedral will begin. this will be very interesting and will challenge Collins and My ability to ghetto rig and make shit up on the fly a little more than the other sections. Have faith though, we take this challenge seriously.

we are also starting to think about the spare bedroom, lighting, buying holds and pads. Anyone wanna come get strong???

J

TNUTS an we love caps

T-nuts have arrived so the wall building can continue. The over hang is about 2/3 of the way complete. if school and work finally screw off some progress may be made on the rest of it. alas some more capital expenditures are due which will be handled by Senior Ledfoot Satan McGee as he was just paid, and I got the last round.

Pictures should be up soon. There are a number of them on Collins Camera. as soon as they get downloaded they should get up loaded and side loaded into your eye holes. That is about enough out of me plus it gets you up to speed.

enjoy

Beer and wall update

BEER!

The nut brown that has been fermenting for 2 weeks was bottled on Thursday night. The consistency was fairly light unfortunately. The flavor was good with no contamination. It id currently carbonating and will be drinkable in two weeks. The Amber we are fermenting will be ready to bottle later this week. Then there will be a complete blank slate. We are slated to brew three batches of beer for the upcoming tahog trip! the last weekend in November we will brew a porter, a nut brown, and an amber. the hope is to be able to keg these. Bottling is beginning to get a little cumbersome with 2 batches brewing at any given time. 5 gallon kegs unfortunately cost $100. Oh well capital budgeting. I bet the net present value of all future beer (cash) flows is win!!

Wall!

The structure for the overhanging wall is all in place. half of the paneling is up as well. The hold up is T-nuts. we have screw in t-nuts ordered for the sections of wall already up. For the rest I have an order of 1000 pound in t-nuts. we'll need to purchase more but will do that when the sections of wall are ready to go up. Things are progressing but never fast enough. As an addendum to the previously mentioned time line the ultimate deadline on the project is January 20th. This day will be spent in celebration all day by climbing and all night drinking to no more bush in office.

hanging issues still for the wall mainly consist of pads. I am not sure where or how we are going to get padding to fall on when climbing. we have a number of crash pads but I am sure that we are going to need more. we'll start scheming on that when I see what Will was able to dig up and what we have.

Wall Updates

The passing of an era has occured. due to some family ailments and ensuing shifting financial burdens, Will (coolest part-time roommate ever) will no longer be able to keep his climbing wall in the dungeon. Thus rent has been raised and Collin and I are faced with replacing the wall. being ones to not fear change but to grab it by the oversized round steering wheel, shifting it into reverse, slamming the gas, dropping the clutch, and pulling donuts in reverse while the other is wielding a semi-automatic shooting at whatever is passing by the pink cadillac in revere. . . we venture on!

Supplies have been gathered and construction has begun. To date we have been working on replacing the 40 degree overhang that Will removed. once this is fully in place, the expansion will begin. Included in the upgrades are a a verticle wall for less insane climbing, a dyhedral for stemming and a proposed top out area. A spare bedroom will be added, a good amount of storage space, and a bike rack are all in the works.

The largest and surprising cost is going to be t-nuts. we are going to spend close to a grand in t-nuts. Timeline: the overhang should be completed within the month and the rest of the walls should be up before the end of the year. hoping to have a party before the end of the year in celebration of climbing and beer!!!

The Planation, As of Now

On Wednesday, I didn’t go to work, a good idea made better by gardening all day. In the course of a couple hours, Josh and I made four wheel barrows full of dirt, potted 84 plants, put a lot more garlic in the ground, and laid out a plan for the garden for the next six months. I also built one of these. Last night it started raining, though it remained remarkably warm. Both these things point toward rapid sprouting.

The plantation is exceptionally leafy right now. A couple types of lettuce, mustard greens, collard green, kale, bok choy, chard, and more cover crop than you can shake a stick at, all sucking carbon out of the air. We’ve also, as I mentioned, got a good sized crop of garlic on the way (we repurposed a pants hanger to dry garlic on, but that’s counting your eggs before they hatch) and the planting yesterday will (hopefully) yield us basil, oregano, sage, thyme, parsley, marjoram, and peas.

The only expansion left on the near horizon is the potato stacks and the hops poles. Once we get those up and running (growing?), all we’ll have to do is water and eat. The fun part. The boring part. As we tend to our fields, the agitation for a new project will surely manifest itself.