The transition from Winter to Spring here happens so fast it’s like flipping a switch. The onions have sprouted, my lemon trees have begun getting there leaves back, and I am planning to grow an unusual crop this year.
I get the wild grape wine bottled, and go over how the pallet planters from last year have fared over the winter.
Now the onions have all sprouted up it’s been a couple of weeks all doing healthy this soil is still nice and wet damp so it doesn’t need any more water yet I just came to give it a check I did have to do a little bit of weeding and
Uh give some more water to these uh lemons as you can see they’ve gotten their leaves back being under this bright light down here so that’ll work out okay this one’s not quite as far along as the other two are I’m not too worried about them fully recovering cuz
This is going to end up getting cut off anyways cuz uh these were grown from seed uh but I’m going to graft on uh some from a a dwarf Meer lemon tree I have so I really just need them to to stay good and alive that will allow them to be
Producing lemons maybe not next year but the the year after so I’m I’m happy with that um it’s getting close to time to start planting uh our other stuff down in here uh for transplants out in April uh this is just now uh the first week of March
So yeah I think our average last frost date here is uh April 15th so that gives me 6 weeks to get whatever going to transplant out in the garden sprouted so later on the day we’re probably going to go to the store and pick out what seeds for the plants we want to
Grow also I’ve ordered some seeds for some giant cusos corn from Peru and I’m hoping to grow that this year I think it’ll be the perfect thing for our garden Soul Outside these stocks grow huge and corn is normally a heavy nitrogen feeder but um this old Peruvian corn
That grows huge actually puts off aerial Roots um from what I understand and they um actually collect they have a a bacteria that they live in a symbiotic relationship with that lives on those roots and extracts nitrogen directly from the air and because they are such big plants
I’ll be able to just chop and drop them after I harvest the corn to a lot of both nitrogen and organic matter back to the soil ironically grow a plant that normally depletes soil of nitrogen so that’s going to be a fun experiment the real reason I’m wanting
To grow them is I’m wanting to make uh the original 1800’s recipe for corn nuts which uses that giant Peruvian corn the kernels end up being about the size of a quarter you know about the size of a homon corn so that should be good I’m
Hope they they grow and I get a decent Harvest I’ve been preparing a plot outside for that it’s still quite Mucky out there right now it’s been raining all week um I’ll give you an update on that when I get out there and till on it
Again show you what I’ve done there to try and improve that little patch of soil but as for now I’m done checking on this down here I got to bring some bottles up cuz today it’s time to finally bottle my homemade wine started back in October so that’s going to be
Fun all right it’s time to bottle the wine I’ve gotten 24 of these bottles uh washed out and sterilized with some lfree sterilizer now I’ve got my siphon all set up with my bottle filler I’m just going to set the bottles down here in a chair and get to filling that’s down
Going that smells good take in a little bit closer I think these bottles will be nice and pretty they are swing top bottles as able to get them the local Dollar Store I think they’re about dollar or two a bottle my fa bottle filler one I know swing top bottles aren’t the
Best kind of use But well they’re cheap and the end of the day if I need to use them again I can always C them if the swing tops happen to Fail all right so there’s the yield I got one to put in the refrigerator me to enjoy now so I got 22 full bottles those are going to be good now I back sweetened this a week ago and then I put in the potassium sorbate and some more pottassium made by
Sulfate to help with oxidation and to stop the yeast from uh restarting fermentation since I res sweetened the wine and I put it back in the car boy for a week um just to make sure it didn’t start ref fermenting um I didn’t see any
Bubbles so I think I’m good but one nice thing about these Bales is these bottles can’t blow up um if the pressure gets too high in the bottle if fermentation does restart it’ll just bend the wire and push the pressure out hopefully um being a a sweet dessert
Wine I’m not really worried about uh these keeping for you know 10 20 years without spoiling they just aren’t going to last that long they’re going to get drank before then so there’s that maybe tomorrow will be nice and dry and I take you out in the spot I’m preparing in the
Garden all right so is where we’re going to be planting the giant corn or at least in part of It probably about half of it move the portable Planters over in one nice row here we’ll get some other stuff planted in need to top this one up uh fortunately I have enough uh compost mixed up at the garage we got sifted out so we get these topped
Up get our potatoes chitted so we can uh get them planted in here um next season and we get to see how these are doing I actually built the pallet for this one to sit on and it has weathered the best um when I went to move this one you can
See down there it broke and I poked a whole in liner so this one probably isn’t going to hold water much on its own anymore and will need to be watered more often uh the other two they’re they’re doing fine so I guess a lesson for the future is if
I’m going to build these I need to build the pallets myself um the uh the pine pallet wood just doesn’t last long enough sitting on the ground and it’s not thi enough to look like it’s going to last very many seasons that’s enough of that so to prepare this um first off up
Here see a little Hole a couple years ago neighbors had a uh tree taken out by the power company and I asked them to leave me all the wood chips and I just let them sit here for a couple years and rot down so that got sprinkled over this I tiled it in along with some
Ashes and then I did a Sol test and calculated that I needed approximately 300 lb of lime for this little plot to uh make the soil a little less acidic so I’ve got that put in tilted in and then I went around the yard and up in the woods even with my Lawn
Sweeper and gathered up as many leaves as I could and spread them out and til them in and here’s where we are now oh so it’s getting decent but it’s not quite there yet I’m planning on using the Sawmill a little bit later uh I’ve got
To reblock it as you can see I got nice stack of logs here to Mill but I’ve brought some cinder blocks out to put on the corners of the trailer uh these these Jacks I installed just aren’t working they just they were supposed to be heavy duty as you can see 6,000 lb
Rated and they’re nowhere near this trailer doesn’t weigh 6,000 lb now that does The Sawmill or any log I put on but they’ve all just buckled under the weight of the trailer itself so I’m going to take them off and just stack some cinder blocks under the corners to get it
Releveled and then we’ll be ready to use the Sawmill again so that’s it for the garden so far I’ve got to go fix a little exhaust leak I got in my car and then we’re going to go into town and look at what seeds we want to plant this
Year don’t have to grow much got freezers good and full but I think I want to grow some at least a few squash and zucchini plants for fresh eating we’ve got our onions going there in the basement of course I’m going to be growing the fancy
Corn but I think I also might want to grow a little bit of regular sweet corn and I might do that in the other half of the Plot and a few pepper plants I pulled some of my Peppers out of the freezer the other day and I couldn’t use them they they’re freezer burn they just tasted horrible all right so I found my exhaust leak just doing some spring maintenance on the car I went around and greased the uh
Grease fittings checked the oil uh checked the wheel bearings make sure they’re all in good shape checked all the other fluids and I finally got around checking my catch can um I should have checked that a long time ago I guess driving around in the winter time you get a lot of more
Condensation in the cold weather than you do in the hot weather cuz that is that’s a lot of water a little bit of gas smell a little bit oil but it’s mostly water and knowing the way these are are routed it’s all coming from the intake manifold
Here um and mine being so small that’s uh there’s no water in the oil so that’s all from intake air condensing so just a friendly reminder if you do run a catch can make sure you check it more frequently in the winter time and empty it all
Right so I got down off the lift and I started it up to check everything and I found my exhaust leak I have a plug that goes right in here you can see it back of the exhaust manifold it’s kind of hot right now that’s where there used to be a
Crossover pipe between here and the original intake manifold for emissions um now that I’m not running it to on the original ECU or the original intake manifold I had to have that plugged off and um the plug had just worked loose so all I’ve done is I’ve taken and
Put a little Teflon tape on it now that Teflon tape shouldn’t melt it should be able to resist the high temperature of the exhaust manold and just to help hold it in better so I’m just going to thread that in and that solves that problem I
Looked all over the exhaust for it this is the oldest are the exhaust the only Parts original here in the downpipe everything including the cadic converter all the way back is new anyhow I’ll get this fixed up and that’ll be that I’ll be ready to go to the Store