GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

  • How To Make A Homemade Dog Toy : GardenFork.TV video

    Dog toys are expensive, here is a video & plan for a simple homemade dog rope toy. Our Labs love this toy, and after they destroy it, we can easily make another one. Moose and Charlie Pup are the tug of war toy dogs in our house, the others are tennis ball fixated. I came up with the idea of this homemade rope toy at the hardware store while looking at the different rope they have for sale. I bought a 100 feet hank of 3/8″ nylon rope and started experimenting with different dog toy designs. The dog toy we show you how to make in this video is the most popular and its simple to make.

    Briefly, to make this rope toy:

    1. cut 3 or 4 lengths of rope about 4 feet long.

    2. bunch together one end of each rope in your hand, so the all the ropes hang down from your hand holding the rope ends.

    3. while holding all 4 ropes together, tie an overhand knot at one end of the ropes.

    4. continue tying overhand knots along the length of the ropes, making sure the space between knots is not large enough for the dogs to get their head stuck.

    5. play tug of war with your dogs.

    Do you make your dogs rope toys, or other homemade toys? let us know below, we’d like to see what GF viewers are doing.

  • Always Outsource Floor Sanding, OK? : GardenFork Radio

    How not to sand a wood floor is just part of this week’s GardenFork Radio. We also talk about hydroponics, aquaponics, composting, chainsaw safety, and some new viewer mail! Call our Listener Voicemail 860-740-6938

    Mike's Bag Garden
    Mike's Bag Garden

  • Cast Iron Cookware Reinvented by Borough Furnace : GardenFork Radio

    Cast Iron Cookware hasn’t changed much since the turn of the century. That’s about to change as Jason and John, owners of Borough Furnace, bring cast iron cookware into the 21st century. John and Jason have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to build a modern day foundry to create cast iron cookware and more, and I talked to them by phone for GardenFork Radio.

    Here is the link to Borough Furnace

    Here is their Kickstarter Campaign

    Thanks to The Kitchn and Monica for telling us about these guys.

  • How to Chainsaw Tree Logs

    Here Eric shows you how to use a chainsaw to cut up tree logs into firewood. Keep in mind Eric is not a professional lumberjack, just your average DIY guy who likes to use his chainsaw to cut down trees, and cut the logs to fireplace length. Use this information at your own risk. Always follow all the safety instructions that came with your chainsaw.


    Proper placement of the chainsaw relative to your body, especially your legs and feet is real important here. Think about how the chainsaw may slip down, or up and what part of your body it may hit, which would be a bad thing. What may seem like a comfortable position to hold the saw, especially while you are kneeling to cut up trees, may not be the best way to do something. Steel toed boots are a must have when cutting firewood.

    A sharp chainsaw chain is mandatory, if your chainsaw is spitting out fine sawdust while cutting, its time to switch out the chain with a sharp one. A sharp chain makes large wood shavings when its cutting, not fine wood dust.

    You can watch all our how to cut down a tree chainsaw videos here
    Do you have some chainsaw adventures to share? or some more safety tips on the proper use of a chainsaw? please let us know below

  • Anonymous is not anonymous on the internet : GardenFork Radio

    Cast Iron cooking startup Borough Furnace, bag gardening with mike, anonymity on the web, Table Saw safety with SafeStop.com from an article on NPR.org, and viewer mail! acadia’s book is at www.acadiamcgee.com

    call our listener voicemail line with your thoughts or comments. 860-740-6938

     

     

  • How to Cook Radishes : GardenFork Radio

    how-to-cook-radishes
    Today we learn how to cook radishes

    Chef Erica Wides joins us today to talk about how to cook radishes, how to use soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and toasted sesame oil to enhance your home cooking, and to answer the question that vexes us all, why does restaurant food taste better than my home cooking. Plus Erica’s thoughts on knife sharpening, good saute pans, and more.

    You can find Erica on twitter here, and on facebook here.

     

     

    photo by roganjosh

  • How to plant tomatoes : GardenFork Radio

    Priscilla, tomato expert and my neighbor, joins us for another talk on how to grow tomatoes. we talk about how to plant tomatoes, and the different varieties we like. Priscilla grows a ton of tomato seedlings and sells them at her roadside stand, and all our tomatoes come from her. Our favorite tomato last year was Juliette, which grew really well despite the poor weather.

    how-to-plant-tomatoes
    Summer Choice is one of the tomatoes i planted last year

    More cool stuff on our site, www.GardenFork.TV

  • Cool Manhattan Time Lapse Video

    I spent a lot of time in NYC, lived there about 25 years, and I saw this really nice time lapse video by Josh Owens, and wanted to share it with you.

    Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

    I was pointed to Josh’s site on Twitter by @katiemo and @nerdist
     

  • Protect Your Email, the world is reading it! GardenFork Radio

    Want to protect your email and make it secure? Listen as Eric and Mike and Monica talk about email security, email scams, gardening, starting carrots, and making sure your passwords are safe. Mike is what i call an expert on email security, and Monica and I use email, so this is a good topic.

    photo by dancerinthedark

  • New beehives in our second beeyard, bearproofing the beehives

    We have a real bear problem in our town with bears, and bears really like to tear apart beehives. So to hedge our bets, we decided last year to start a second beeyard in another part of town. Our second beeyard is near the center of town, right next to the cemetery. The honeybees and their hives are on the edge of a large hayfield, where they are protected by the prevailing winds and get excellent daylight throughout the day.

    We hived two new packages,  using medium supers on these hives. I put our hives on small tables. The height of the table makes it much easier to work the hives, and we can grease the legs of the tables to keep carpenter ants and other insects from entering the hives.

    We use a few techniques to bear proof our beehives. First we have a solar powered electric fence made by Premier 1 Supplies. Premier 1 gave us the electric fence they sell to protect beehives from bears. So far it has worked. Its also very easy to set up and move. You can watch our how to bearproof beehives video here.

    Second we use a ratcheting strap to strap together the beehives. The thinking here is that if a bear does get to the hives, the straps may keep the hives together despite the bear trying to take the hive apart. I’ve read where this has worked for a few people, so it doesn’t hurt, I don’t think. We may need a heavier ratchet strap, the kind used on semi trucks.

    Newly hived bees
    Solar powered fence from Premiere 1 Supplies
    I like the rectangular net pattern of this electric fence.
    wide view of the hayfield where the beeyard is

     

  • HoneyBees making burr comb after hiving the package

    Its only been a week since we hived all the bee packages, and our bees are already firing on all cylinders. When you hive a package – you can watch our how to hive a bee package here – you pull out one of the frames to make room for the queen cage that will fit in that space.

    The queen is in a separate cage so the worker bees can slowly become used to her unique scent. The bees in your package more than likely have been pulled from a number of hives, and the queen they are paired with is not one they are familiar with.

    One end of the queen cage has a small hole plugged with sugar candy which the worker bees will chew through to release the queen into the hive. It takes a while for the workers to chew through the candy plug, and that allows the workers be become acclimated to the new queen’s scent.

    You usually leave the bees alone for a week to allow the bees to release the queen and become accustomed to their new surroundings. But, while we are waiting, bees will fill any spaces in their new hive larger than 3/8″ with honeycomb. Which is exactly what all 4 new hive packages did this year.

    Every hive we opened had 3 or 4 big pieces of burr comb where the bees had filled up the space around the queen cage. Here are a few pictures showing how industrious the bees are. Nature hates a void.

    Burr comb is honeycomb the bees have drawn down that is not on the frames. It messes up the working of the hive, and most of the time your remove it. We’ll use the burr comb to make candles.

    Burr comb that surrounds the queen cage
    this beeswax comb is less than a week old. note the very light yellow color
    The queen cage in the new hive. You can see the space around it that the bees fill with burr comb

  • How to replace your car or truck fender : GardenFork.TV

    Need to replace your damaged car fender? Learn here how to replace that car fender that hit guard rail, or got mashed by someone who couldn’t stay in their lane, or whatever accident damaged the fender, learn here how to replace your truck or car fender with a replacement from an auto recycler or a new fender from a auto body supplier.

    Have you done any body work on your car? Let us know some good tips on repairing the bodywork on your car or truck below, thanks.

  • Super Seed Potatoes, Growing in the Garden

    Last fall I helped a neighbor dig a bunch of potatoes, and we were given a few bushel baskets of potatoes for our efforts. The potatoes were pretty darn simple to harvest, as the garden soil was nice and loamy, it dug easily with a garden fork. The hardest part was not hitting the potatoes with the fork, there were so many of them.

    I took our part of the potato harvest and put it in bushel baskets in the basement. I didn’t clean or was the potatoes before storing them, I think its best to leave them caked in dirt for the winter. Pretty neat to be able to walk into the basement to pull our of a basket some dinner.

    It ended up we didn’t eat all the potatoes we had harvested, and this spring, I noticed pale sprouts coming out of the bushel basket, aiming for the basement window.

    Found this in the basement..

    I wasn’t sure what to do with the sprouting potatoes, as I hadn’t planned on growing potatoes this year. Last time we grew them, we had the Colorado Potato Beetle Invasion, watch the video here. Then this weekend I decided to put them in the garden. If you’re wondering how to plant potatoes, its not rocket science, and potatoes are pretty forgiving, which is a good thing, considering I’m the one planting them.

    The potatoes had become a tangled mass of sprouted seed potatoes, a giant ball of roots, potatoes, and sprouts.

    I dug out part of one of our raised beds, added some time release fertilizer and azomite, a rock powder, and gently planted the seed potatoes.

    laying them in the bottom of a raised bed

    As I covered the seed potatoes with dirt and leaf mulch, I tried my best to get the potato  sprouts to point up thru the soil.

    gently covering the potatoes

    Not sure what’s going to happen, but I think the potatoes i planted will be good. I’ll mound the potatoes once or twice with mulch  or some straw or other compost like material, and I’ll work on the Potato Beetle problem.

    We made a GardenFork.TV video about how to hill your potatoes, its the first one we shot with Henry, one of our Yellow Labradors, when she was a puppy. Its fun to watch.

    What do you think is the best way to plant potatoes? Let us know below:

  • How to make Pesto, Parsley Pesto : GardenFork.TV Video


    Looking for a pesto recipe? or how to make pesto? Watch our Pesto Recipe with a new twist, we’ll use parsley instead of basil. This same recipe works great for basil pesto BTW. Parsley is super healthy and easily found in the store or your backyard garden.

    Eric’s Parsley Pesto Recipe

    1 bunch of flat leaf parsley

    2 cups grated Romano cheese

    1 cup walnuts, whole or chopped

    1 clove garlic, crushed

    quality extra virgin olive oil

    Grab your bunch of parsley and swish it around in a large bowl of water or you salad spinner filled up with water.

    Cut off about 2 inches of the stem end off the parsley bunch. Then cut the parsley bunch into thirds, drop into a salad spinner and spin away. You want to remove as much of the water as possible. If you don’t have a salad spinner, you can roll up the parsley leaves in a dish towel to dry them out.

    Add the parsley to your food processor, and pour in about 1/4 cup of the olive oil. About 6 glugs, I think.

    Turn on the food processor and get the parsley cut up and mixed in with the oil.

    Take the walnuts and toss them into a pan and toast them lightly. Don’t forget them on the stove, as they burn easily. I know this from experience.

    Take the grated cheese and walnuts and crushed garlic and add to the food processor.

    Top off with more olive oil, 6 glugs or so, and turn on the processor. If the machine sounds like it is bogging down, add more oil. Process to the consistency you like. I like it not over-processed.

    You can now add this to pasta or spread on bread or garnish soups with. Its real good.


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    What do you think? Do you have a pesto recipe or suggestion or idea? Let us know below:

  • How to start a homestead : GardenFork Radio

    Steve and Scott join us today to talk about how the are starting a homestead, what they are planning to do, and where they are getting good information on homesteading. Their homestead will be in Northern California. Scott has a fun blog called Holy Crap I’m A Hippie, and Steve produces several podcasts at the Farm Cast Network site. The books we talked about on our how to homestead show include Build It Better Yourself, which is out of print, but you can find them for sale used.

  • Mike Is Now A Ford Guy : GardenFork.TV

    Mike and Eric talk about Mike’s Ford Bronco from the mid 80s, and then Eric joins us to talk about aquaponics, which is a pretty cool system for growing food and fish. His aquaponics blog is here.

    You can listen to Rick talk about how to set up an aquaculture farm here on this GF Radio show. Rick has rented a large greenhouse and starting up an aquaponics greenhouse.

    Then we move to viewer mail about being prepared for disasters , eric’s idea for floating houses, and the listener call in line. neat. call us 860-740-6938

    photo by gracey

  • Our Apple Trees Blossom

    This hasn’t ever happened before, but all our apple trees are blooming this spring. Usually there are a few that don’t bloom. At least two of our trees bloom biennially. Here is the oldest tree in a view from our house. Last weekend was rainy with fog, so it looks great in the yard.

  • Jack in the Pulpit appears in greenhouse

    I had dug up a few sage plants last fall and managed to get them thru the winter in the greenhouse. The trick I’ve discovered is to not let the soil dry out. Even though the greenhouse is not heated, it can get pretty warm in there on sunny days, so paying attention to the soil worked out.

    The sage leafed out again, and then I noticed two other plants growing in the pot. A Jack In The Pulpit and some Lambsquarter. What fun. We have some Jack in the Pulpit growing in the woods, but this is a rare random appearance.

    And the lambsquarter is one of the new edible forage plants we talked about in a recent GardenFork.TV video. You can watch our wild and urban foraging video here on How to Eat Lambsquarter.

    What happy accidents have you had happen in your garden this spring? let us know below: