GardenFork – Eclectic DIY – Page 59 – How To Videos, A Podcast, and Labradors.

GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

The ground is still frozen, time to plant Peas

The Labradors and us people all love sugar snap peas. Thankfully they are pretty easy to grow. Someone has trained the pups to eat them right off the vine.

My method of planting peas is simple:

As soon as I can get a trowel in the raised bed, I plant peas. They will grow. They love cool weather.

I also throw in some legume inoculant. Some people suggest wetting the seeds and dusting them with the inoculant, but I think spreading a bit on top of the seeds in their hole is just fine.

In the picture below I am planting them where our tomatoes will be, they’ll both use the same trellis-cage. Peas grow, produce pods, and then burn out pretty quickly, so they will be done before the tomatoes need the wire cage.

That’s about it for peas, growing them does not require any rocket science. You can plant them as soon as you can dig the soil. An advantage of using raised beds is the raised beds warm up quicker than the surrounding ground. So go plant peas.

I plant sugar snap peas about an inch deep

The peas will grow up this tomato cage, then the Labradors will eat them

March 24, 2010
The Normans invaded just down the road here… GF Radio

Another week with Mike and Eric, as we talk about Mike’s new pinball mission, and how he photographs the process ( his pinball blog: ShoppedMachine.blogspot.com ) AND we talk to Theresa and Aidan about their new bed and breakfast in Northern Ireland, The River Mill ( http://www.river-mill.com ) Plus we ponder why Eric is burning his bread. Please write a review if you are listening on iTunes. thx.

The River Mill Bed and Breakfast in Downpatrick, Ireland

March 23, 2010
Honey bees bringing in pollen in late March

Its was real warm this weekend, and the bees broke cluster a while ago, and this weekend they were out collecting pollen. i think its from Maple Trees.

March 22, 2010
Replaced Doorbell

Doorbell repair by Mike

My doorbell stopped working. While it was nice that I didn’t hear sales people ringing my doorbell, occasionally friends or family would feel ignored.

A doorbell is a pretty simple circuit. There is a transformer that steps the electricity down from 120 volts to somehwere between 13 – 18 volts. There is a wire going to a momentary switch (doorbell button) and to the doorbell itself. When someone presses the button, the circuit is closed and the bell rings. If it’s not working it can only be one of a few problems. Broken wire, broken button, broken doorbell, broken transformeer, or no power at all!

Warning! Even though we should only be seeing low voltages here, locate the breaker or fuse for this circuit and shut it off whenever you will be touching the bare wires. Clearly, if you are testing voltages the circuit should be on, but if you are replacing any of the bits (transformer, doorbell, doorbell button, doorbell wiring) the circuit should be turned off. Even a 12 volt short can cause a fire and you never know, something may have been wrongly connected to a 120 volt line.

Above is a picture of what the transformer looks like.

A quick test with an inexpensive multi-meter shows here that there is 18 volts coming off the transformer. So there is power, and the transformer is OK.

This particular doorbell switch has visible leaf springs that make contact. Inspect the springs to make certain they are not broken. You can see here that the wire was showing a little bit of copper. There is no charring so I don’t think it caused a short, but this should be fixed.

Do a quick voltage test here to make sure you’re getting electricity through the circuit. This way you know the wire isn’t broken somewhere in the circuit.

I’ve wrapped some fancy blue electrical tape around the wire to cover the small bare spot. There’s no significance to the color of tape, I just happened to have blue handy.

Here is the old doorbell on the wall. Notice where the last person missed with paint. Wasn’t me!

I removed the cover (the cover just snapped off) and unless you make it a habit to dust the inside of your doorbell, this is what you’ll see. Ick. You can see that something isn’t right just by looking at it. The doorbell has a solonoid in it, which is basically an electromagnet.

When electricity flows through the magnet, it makes a steel plunger pop out of it. When the electricity is stopped, the spring returns the steel plunger into the solonoid. You can see that something is wrong with the plunger. I checked it closer and it was frozen in place, this is clearly broken and for $18 I can buy a new one.

All you need is a screwdriver. This is the flippy screwdriver thing Eric and I discussed in the “Pinball is 50v” episode of GardenFork Radio.

It’s six tools in one! I can almost dismantle my whole pinball machine with this tool.

Just to be certain that this did not break because of a short. I test the voltage at the coil. If it was showing any voltage, I would know that there is a short in the line and that would have caused my problem. Here there is no voltage so I know the doorbell probably just broke after 15 years of use.

I sent my daughter outside to press the button while I was checking the voltage. You can see that it is now registering 13.4 volts, so the circuit is good and I’m certain that this doorbell isn’t working properly. I read the manual on my camera after this blurry picture to figure out what I did wrong. I need to have the little picture of the flower on the LCD when I’m up close like this.

Here the new doorbell is in place. I just reused the same screws. One slotted and one phillips. It’s good I had the flippy screwdriver thing. Normally I’m more meticulous about things like this, but I didn’t have a phillips electical box screw handy and I have no slotted drywall screws. Someone will be complaining about me in 15 years.

Done! (I have a video of it working but I haven’t figured out how to post that yet!)

March 20, 2010
Pinball machines run on 50 Volts, Thank You. GF Radio

photo by Chelle http://www.kwajafa.com/

Garbage Disposals as composters, Grey Water for toilets and car washes, the new Food Blog Forum from Jaden, Buddy Club Gardening, Alexandra Cooks, and Mike’s pinball machine blog are all part of this week’s eclectic GardenFork Radio show. GardenFork Radio is all about just about everything: Cooking, Gardening, DIY and How-To, Green Living and recycling, and whatever else pops into our heads. As you probably already know…

Links:

mike’s new blog: http://shoppedmachine.blogspot.com

Food Blog Forum

Buddy Club Gardening

NY Times Article on too much soap in your washer and dishwasher

Alexandra Cooks Food Blog

March 19, 2010
The latest GardenFork.TV @Ford : an @FordTrucks F150

Not sure if I told you this, but I tore the rear end of my 82 Ford F150 off towing Bill’s car out of a ditch, and after that my favorite truck was no longer the same. The shackle brackets were broken, the rear half of the exhaust system was gone… you get the picture.

So I picked up a 93 Ford F150, in black of course. I drove it to work in the city, and already got a parking ticket. Thank You New York City.

March 19, 2010
Its a good thing cows don’t fly… GardenFork Radio

This week Mike and Eric talk about dishwashers : leaks and greening them. Plus feeding the bees, garden growing favorites, food you order in a restaurant, pinball machines, and more. And help us name our new listener call in phone: what to call it?

photo from morguefile.com

March 11, 2010
How to make yogurt : more info and use

Inspired by my friend Brian, I have been making more of my own yogurt. And after making our How To Make your Own Yogurt video, and our Solar Oven Yogurt Maker, i was thinking of how you could use at hand items to make yogurt.

Then I saw one of my neighbors had thrown out a styrofoam cooler, the kind that Omaha Steaks uses to ship people their frozen steaks. I took it home and saw that a heating pad blanket fit in it quite well. I cut a notch in the wall to allow for the cord.

steak cooler as yogurt fermenter

It works really well.

heating pad fits nicely in this

AND, I bought some yogurt starter, Yogourmet is the brand, to see if it was any better than just using some leftover store bought yogurt. And it is much better. The yogurt is much firmer, and i think tastes better.

Yogourmet works better than just using yogurt as starter, i think.

Wikipedia tells us about the origins of yogurt:

There is evidence of cultured milk products being produced as food for at least 4,500 years. The earliest yoghurts were probably spontaneously fermented by wild bacteria Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus native to and named after Bulgaria.

The oldest writings mentioning yogurt are attributed to Pliny the Elder who remarked that certain nomadic tribes, including the Bulgars, knew how “to thicken the milk into a substance with an agreeable acidity”. The use of yoghurt by medieval Turks is recorded in the books Diwan Lughat al-Turk by Mahmud Kashgari and Kutadgu Bilig by Yusuf Has Hajib written in the 11th century. Both texts mention the word “yoghurt” in different sections and describe its use by nomadic Turks. An early account of a European encounter with yoghurt occurs in French clinical history: Francis I suffered from a severe diarrhea which no French doctor could cure. His ally Suleiman the Magnificent sent a doctor, who allegedly cured the patient with yoghurt.Being grateful, the French king spread around the information about the food which had cured him.

What are your yogurt recipes and tips? how do you make yogurt? please tell us below:

March 11, 2010
Winter Fondant Feeding – Beekeeping 101 Video

In late winter, when you have a warm day, say 44-50 F, its a great opportunity to quickly check your honeybees and beehive. In this beekeeping 101 video, we show how we open the hive and place some fondant and a grease patty in the hive to get the bees through the last bit of winter. Links to more of our beekeeping videos at end of this post.

Note: Since making this video, we have changed our methods and are no longer using the styrofoam outer covers or fondant, but its still a good video on caring for your bees in winter. Watch our dry sugar feeding videos here.

Your honeybees may or may not have enough food stores to make it thru this last part of winter, but I am of the mind that it pays to put in some fondant. Other beekeepers will have differing opinions on this and many other practices related to beekeeping. It is too cold to feed your honeybees sugar syrup in late winter, feed them fondant.

We have produced this series of Beginning Beekeeping Videos to document our first years of beekeeping to show people how fun it really is and to demystify it, and to spread the word on raising honey bees. We are not beekeeping experts, we are still learning. Tell us your experiences below and we can all learn more.

Bee fondant and Grease Patty recipes are based on information from Cass of WVBeekeeper’s Blog and the BeeSource forums . A big thank you to Cass for his writings.

Fondant from WVBeekeeper:

Fondant Bee Candy

Fondant bee candy can be fed directly to the bees once cooled. Fondant is a good food source for mini-mating nucs because there is no drowning involved when you have a small amount of bees. It is also common to use this recipe in small quantities to plug the hole on a Queen Cage.

> 4 parts (by volume) white sugar
> 4 parts (by volume) 2:1 Syrup or HFCS
> 3 parts (by volume) water

Boil water and slowly add the syrup and sugar until dissolved. Continue heating until the mixture reaches 238°F (114°C). Without mixing allow the solution to cool until it is slightly warm to the touch. Then begin to mix and aerate the solution. As you do this the color should lighten. Pour into shallow dishes or mold and save for later use. I prefer to make the fondant thin enough to where I can work it into an empty frame of drawn comb.

Grease Patties:

I made my own based on reading thru the Bee Source forums and WVBeekeepers blog.

2 cups vegetable shortening – NOT butter or other flavored shortening

4 cups white sugar

10 drops of food grade pepperment oil or wintergreen oil

1/4 cup mineral block – this is a mineralize salt lick you can get at a farm – ag supply store. break off a chunk with a hammer.

mix this together and form into 4″ wide patties, they have to be thin enough to be placed between hive supers.

you can wrap these patties in wax paper , put in a freezer back and freeze for future use.

Read more of our beekeeping posts here and watch beekeeping videos here. Thx!

March 9, 2010
I washed my USB Flash Drive, now what?

I am famous for this kind of thing. Its always when I hear the clunk of some foreign object bouncing around the clothes dryer that I realize I’ve done something un-smart.

This time I discovered the problem early. I learned I had put my two best largest USB Flash Thumb drives in the washing machine when I was emptying the washer.

I was not pleased. One of the drives is a 16 gig flash drive that I use to transport GF video files around. And there might be a bunch of photos from our Canon EOS Rebel that don’t exist anywhere else on that drive.

After getting over the initial ‘Doh!’ moment, I remembered a NY Times article on what do to for electronic gadget emergencies. The article suggested putting the flash drives in a bowl and covering them with rice. ( I can’t find the article online right now, so no link )

So I did this. I used brown rice, as that’s what we had in the cabinet. Don’t cook and/or eat this rice afterward.

Rice will absorb water out of electronic devices

I let it sit for a few days, and then plugged the drives into a laptop.

They both turned on. wow.

Every once in a while the wind tilts in your direction.

Have any Doh! stories of your own? tell us here:

March 5, 2010
If I ask, then I wont find what I’m not looking for. GF Radio

Why do we like to wander around hardware stores? Find the answer to this and life’s questions on this week’s Gardenfork Radio. Today Eric and Mike talk about windmills, bees, home water damage, and snow. And more stuff. You just have to listen.

A very simple how to on calibrating your TV:
http://www.flat-screen-tv-guide.com/how-to.html

A much more detailed one:
http://www.lcdtvbuyingguide.com/lcdtv/lcd-tv-calibration.html

I’m pretty sure this is the wind farm we drove through. I don’t know if I said this, but the red lights on top of the wind turbines flashed in unison. It’s a really amazing thing to see at night:
http://www.earlparkindiana.com/windfarm.html
This is a short video explaining computer virtualization. It’s a little commercial but it’s the simplest explanation I’ve seen of virtualization:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/esx/esx3i.html –> Click “Watch Demo”

Harold McGee’s NY Times Article: Better Bread with less kneading

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/dining/24curious.html

what do you think? let us know below:

March 2, 2010
Fireplace Grilled Salmon : Eric’s Recipe

Grilled Salmon done with Fireplace Cooking, neat. Fireplace cooking means you don’t have to fire up the stove and your house doesn’t smell like fish or steak the next day. Watch as we grill salmon steaks with this simple recipe .

Do you cook in your fireplace? Please come tell us about it below!

Fireplace Grilled Salmon Steak Recipe:

4 Salmon Steaks, as fresh as possible

Olive Oil, Salt, Pepper

Start a fire in the fireplace a few hours before cooking, allow the wood to break down into coals, kinda like charcoal.

Place your cooking grill over the coals in the fireplace – be careful doing this.

Allow the grill to heat up and clean the grill with half an onion rubbed over the grill.

Drizzle olive oil and then salt and pepper to each side of the steaks.

Place the steaks on the hot grill, and let each side cook about 5 minutes. This time may vary depending on how hot the coals are.

Flip the fish, and check in a few minutes for done-ness. The flesh will flake easily when its done. Ideally you will take the fish off the grill just before the desired done-ness.

Please let us know your fireplace cooking recipes here:

March 2, 2010
Great Cook Books from the Library

Yum, Yum, Yum!

Eric had posted a while back about how using the library is green and it reminded me to renew my library card. I love my Forest Park Library. It’s rather small, especially against our neighbor’s Oak Park Library which is just beautiful. I can order books or DVDs online and they are delivered to the library. It close, convenient, and makes a nice dog walk route.

One of the main reasons I use the library is cook books. There are only so many celebrity cook books that I want on my bookshelf. The New Arrivals shelf is loaded with some great ones. I picked up David Chang’s Momofuku and Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. Talk about two beautiful books. The Photography from both books inspire me to take more pictures. They provided me with some great ideas and recipes, even may try ghetto “sous vide”, slow cooking in a pouch in water.

I would recommend either book. Jamie Oliver’s book is more practical. Really great recipes that are written clearly. I really like that some of the individual steps are laid out in photos. Where are David Chang book was more food fantasy for me. I love fancy food. Homey food redone with delicious flavors and colors.

March 1, 2010
Your dishwasher and indoor pollution

Seventh Generation, the company that makes all sorts of eco-smart and recycled products for your home, asked me if I’d like a box of their products to check out.

We already use Seventh Generation products, so why not say yes to some free stuff?

Charlie likes to eat paper towels and tissues.

Seventh Generation is rolling out new natural disinfecting wipes, and as part of their goal to get the word out about these wipes, they sent some to me.

It had not occurred to me to think about what might be in regular disinfecting wipes. I still don’t know exactly. But knowing this company, their wipes don’t have mystery chemicals in them.

Seventh Generation's new disinfecting wipes

What I like about Seventh Generation is that their products work and make sense. I think I first bought a roll of their paper towels, and what got me to buy them was some of the info on the wrapper, such as:

The natural color of these paper towels comes from the mix of colors in cardboard, office waste, and other paper materials recycled into this product. These materials often end up in landfills because there is insufficient demand for them. By reusing them in our products, we put them to work, not in the ground, and we help ‘close the loop’ to encourage more recycling less waste….

I wouldn’t use these, or write about Seventh Generation here, if I didn’t like their stuff.

The company also sent me a copy of Naturally Clean, The Seventh Generation Guide to Safe & Healthy Non-Toxic Cleaning. The book is chock full of footnoted information. I learned some things I was not aware of about my dishwasher:

…Researchers at the EPA and the University of Texas recently documented the dishwasher’s role as a leading cause of indoor air pollution. Pollutants released by dishwashers, include chorline .. chloroform.. radon .. and other volatile contaminants… When these materials are exposed to the piping hot water that circulates through your dishwasher as it cleans, they are easily ‘stripped out’ and evaporated into the air.

OK. Did not know or think about all that last time I turned on my dishwasher.

This book is full of info like this. Its almost too much. The modern home has lots of stuff in it that is not great for us to breathe or absorb. Makes me want to go live in a yurt. But the book does give you pause about the sorts of materials we have in our home, and what they might be doing to us.

What I like about the book are all the footnotes, most ‘green living’ books don’t cite sources.

One of our Real World Green shows talks about recycled toilet paper, and it features me juggling toilet paper. Check out the video and tell us what you think below.

February 28, 2010
“Well You Should Be Watching the GardenFork Podcast”

yes, you should. Some kind words from Life Adorned a yarn – crafter who watches GardenFork, AND also spins her own yarn, makes yarn based things, and sells them on Etsy. In other words, someone who would of course watch GardenFork.

my 2 favorite things about this podcast:

(1) eric is a trial-and-error kind of guy. many of the episodes start out with “i’ve never done this before, so let’s give it a try and see how it goes.” and, he’s not afraid to admit to imperfection. he includes all of his mistakes so that we can learn from them too.

(2) the gardenfork labradors! these cute, friendly, playful pups are featured here and there throughout the videos, and are a viewer favorite. look, they’ve got their own book!

Life Adorned hand crafted knit hat

Check out her fun blog of the craft items she makes , her flickr page, and her etsy page. Its great to see people making and doing things.

February 24, 2010
Re Queening both our hives this spring

After reading a glowing article in Bee Culture about Jennifer Berry and her excellent queen rearing program, we have decided to replace the queens in both our hives with queens from Jennifer Berry.

Why requeen? What is most important to me is the bees display what is called hygenic behavior. This means they keep the hive clean, and because of this hygenic behavior, the varroa mite population is lower.

Many beekeepers requeen every year or every two years. Queens don’t last much longer on their own. The BeeAnonymous blog lists a few reasons:

* Older queens are more prone to swarming
* Replacing a failing queen
* Better stock traits like pest and disease resistances
* And in my case, improving bad attitudes

Our hive at the Maple Knoll Farm did amazing for its first year, giving us a few frames of honey to harvest. We opted to leave the majority of the honey in the hive, and also fed both our hives a lot of sugar syrup to get them through the hard winter we have up here in NW CT. Our bees are not aggressive, but we do want a to improve the stock of our bees, as we don’t want to have to use miticides to combat the varroa mite and tracheal mites.

Feeding bees sugar syrup in the fall to prepare them for winter

The hive that is in our yard, which is in a shed to protect it from bears, did not do nearly as well last year as our hive at Maple Knoll Farm. I checked on them last month and I think I heard them in the hive. This hive will benefit from a new queen.

The hive in our shed, wrapped with a insulating blanket and a polystyrene outer cover

Our hive at Maple Knoll may not need a new queen. The hive was great last year, and we saw them doing cleansing flights in 38 F degree weather. And whenever we went to check on them, the hive was alive with energy, tons of bees coming and going.

So I am thinking that we may split this hive. A split is where you take some of the bees from a healthy hive, some frames of brood, eggs, and pollen, and place them in a new hive with a new queen. A split allows you to populate a new hive without buying a package of bees, and it allows you to choose where your queen comes from. I’ve been reading up on how to divide or split a hive and I think we can do it.

Maple Knoll bees on cleansing flights

I do believe the queen in the Maple Knoll hive has been replaced by the bees. This may be a natural thing, or it may have been due to us being clumsy when working the hive. We weren’t always good at pulling out the first frame, making room to pull the other frames up and out. We may have killed the queen, as we did find what we think were opened queen cells on a few frames in the middle of the summer. Finding this queen will be a challenge, since she was not raised by humans, she is not marked on her body for easy identification.

Finding the queen in thousands of bees can be hard

To requeen a hive:

• Find and remove the existing queen.

• Wait a day if you can.

• Put in the new queen ( in her queen cage) in the hive between 2 frames, make sure the sugar plug is pointing up so no dead attendants can plug up her exit, poke a small hole in the sugar plug to get the bees to eat through it.

• Leave the hive alone for a week.

Our new queens arrive in May, we’ll make a GardenFork Show when we do the re-queening. Jennifer Berry’s Queens are only available through Brushy Mountain Bee Farm.

Beekeepers: what can you add to this post? Please comment below.

February 23, 2010
Kinda Carbonara with what’s in the fridge

Tonite we drove to NYC for work tomorrow. Most nights like this, I go buy a burrito from the local tacqueria. The burritos are great, and healthy, as I opt for yogurt in place of sour cream in my black bean burrito.

But tonight, after getting a parking spot, I thought, why not see what I have in the fridge and cook something quick?

The basic ingredients on a Sunday night

A quick scan yields frozen peas, eggs, some Pecorino Romano cheese, and pasta. There was some yogurt too, but not much else in the fridge. So I think this is kinda Carbonara.

scramble the egg add the cheese

I cooked the penne pasta, mixed the egg with the grated cheese, drained the cooked pasta, saved some of the cooking water, put the pasta back in the pot, added the cheese-egg mixture, stirred it, added a bit of the pasta water, and some salt. I warmed up the frozen peas in the microwave and dropped them into the mix.

Add the egg-cheese to the warm pasta

Not bad. I added too much of the pasta water, and it could have used more cheese, but not bad for a Sunday night.

The finished dish, the peas added.

Charlie Pup and Henry were very interested in what i was eating. It was good.

What have you put together lately?

February 22, 2010
Beans and Toast Recipe : GardenFork.TV

I had Beans on Toast for the first time last month, at Fort Defiance in Red Hook, Brooklyn. After the first bite I knew I had to make the Beans on Toast recipe for GardenFork.TV .

Super simple, yet tastes great and is healthy as well. Lots of protein here, and it tastes even better with toasted multigrain bread. The recipe is below

Eric’s Beans On Toast Recipe

1 can of UK Heinz Vegetarian Beans

or

1 can of American Baked Beans

or

a pot of freshly cooked red kidney beans – i cook them with sauteed onions and cumin

Bread for toasting – multigrain is best i think

Eggs

Grated Cheddar cheese, or the cheese of your choice.

Toast your bread, and warm up the beans.

Fry the eggs, how many depends on how many people you are feeding. Sunnyside up or just slightly cooked over easy are best, as the yolks run over the beans that way.

Place the 2 pieces of toast on a plate, cover with 1 cup of beans, top with the fried eggs, top off with some grated cheese. The heat of the egg should melt the cheese a bit.

Then eat. and tell us here how it is. ©2010 Eric Rochow all rights reserved

February 21, 2010