Weekend update, 1-4 March (Storm Emma!)

Well, we survived the "Beast from the East" and my first-ever snow day more or less without incident. On the first day of the storm, I arranged to work from home, but by around 9:30 the university decided to close up shop, so I got an unexpected 4-day weekend!

The view out our back window on day 2 of Storm Emma.

As someone who grew up in Los Angeles, I still get a little giddy whenever it snows even a little bit, and we had much more than a little snow this weekend. The cold weather didn't stick around in South Wales nearly as long as it did in other parts of the country, but my area did get just under two feet of snow over the course of two days, accompanied by 45mph winds. In spite of the giddiness, I confess I did worry a bit about our garden as the snow drifts rose over the tops of our raised beds and completely buried a large portion of our herb garden. I was very glad that that we'd finished the raised beds and put new cloche hoops and fleece over them.

By Sunday morning, the snow was beginning to thaw and I peeked outside to inspect the damage to our herbs, which weathered the storm without protection. Much to my amazement, the only casualties appeared to be a recently-transplanted garlic mustard and a couple of broad beans whose cover blew off during the worst part of the storm. Plants are amazing.

Weekend update, 17-18 February

Saturday was spent in the garden. The weather was finally clear enough for Steve to put the second raised bed into place. Our cloche hoops finally arrived, so I bent those into shape, and covered them with new, not-ripped fleece. Doesn't it look much nicer now?

As long as I was out in the garden, I picked a few radishes, transplanted a few that were overcrowded, and moved a few shovelfuls of dirt back into the raised beds. (We needed to clear a bunch of dirt in order to set the beds into place.) Our soil is still very, very heavy clay, but it was heartening to see SO MANY WORMS in every shovelful.

On Sunday, I intended to make pancakes, feed the worms, do some sewing, write a blog post, etc. but I only got as far as making pancakes before my brain chemistry turned against me and I became non-functional for the rest of the day. Will try again next weekend.

Weekend update, 27-28 January

As I sat down to write up my weekly update this morning, I found myself rambling on to the point where I think I maybe some of the tangents might be better broken out into separate posts. While I work on that, here's the bullet points version:

Sourdough:

• To use up excess sourdough starter during the week, I made some simple injera/dosa-type flatbreads using millet flour.
• Over the weekend, I made a batch of Sourdough Oat Biscuits for breakfast, and some Millet-Corn Muffins to go with a black bean, corn, and chicken chili that Steve made. Both of these came out... interesting. 

Garden: 

• There was only one reasonably clear and sunny day during the week, so Steve did a bit more work levelling the dirt under the pavers in the back garden.
• The compost tumbler is still rather smelly, so the hunt for more "browns" continues. On which note...
• Every weekday, I walk past a couple of small parks on my way to and from the train station. We've had a few stormy days recently so I've been picking up a handful of fallen sticks and small branches each day to add to our compost. 
• During a brief spell of clear weather, I planted out a bunch of carrot seedlings from our conservatory. Yes, January is a fantastically stupid time to be transplanting anything outdoors. Yes, carrots tend to dislike being transplanted at the best of times. This is one of those things that will take some explaining.
• Over the Christmas break, I ended up chopping a bunch of woody, dead bramble stems that were growing near the gate to our back garden. I finally got around to scattering them around the front garden as mulch, in place of wood chips. (Use what you've got, right?)

Crafts: 

• On Tuesday, I managed to pick up another skein of matching embroidery floss, so over the weekend I was able to finish the embroidery/seam treatments on my Viking smokkr! Next step: shoulder straps.
• I finished the cuffs of my nalebound mitts! I still need to make the thumbs and the flap that goes over the fingers, but they should be wearable within the next week.

Weekend update, 20-21 January

Food:
I was so pleased with the success of last weekend's sourdough loaf that I decided to try again. Twice. Once midweek, and once on the weekend, with different flour substitutions each time.

The first batch had 1 cup sorghum flour, 1 cup cassava flour, 3/4 cup arrowroot starch, and a bit of millet flour left over from another recipe. The second batch used sugar in place of honey, and about 1/2 cup each of millet, sorghum, cassava, and brown rice flour, with 3/4 cup of arrowroot starch again.

Arrowroot starch is supposed to behave similarly to tapioca, but less gummy/binding and more crunchy. The original recipe was, if anything, a little bit too stiff, which is why I swapped in arrowroot for tapioca starch. And because I'd never used it before, and wanted to see how it turned out. Millet flour also bakes up quite crunchy, and the loaf does indeed have a very crunchy crust, with a soft, very moist interior. I swapped in the cassava flour (made from the same stuff as tapioca starch) because it's tasty, and to make up for the loss of the sticky tapioca starch.

Gluten free waffles!

Both batches came out much closer in flavor to an ordinary sourdough white bread, although the first batch had a little more sweetness than I would have liked, hence the substitution of sugar for honey and reducing the quantity of sorghum flour in the second batch.

Also, I made waffles. Just because I could. At some point, I will write up my universal pancake/waffle recipe.

Garden:
It was raining most of the weekend, so not much happened. Steve planted a bunch of garlic during a brief dry spell. We rolled the compost a bit, but it's a bit smelly so something clearly isn't right. I tore up some more paper and cardboard and added it to the roller. I also started updating our seed inventory for the current year.

Decorative seam treatment on smokkr.

Crafts:
I stitched a few more rounds on my naalbinding mitts, and a few inches of decorative seam treatments on my Viking smokkr. I've run out of dark blue embroidery floss though, so I'll need to stop by a craft shop this week.

House:
During the heaviest rains this weekend, I noticed that we had water dripping from our conservatory ceiling. Luckily, we basically just use our conservatory as a greenhouse, so there are very few things in it that could be damaged by a bit of water. But it does mean that we need to find somebody to come and do some repairs. Bleh.

Weekend update, 13-14 January 2018

In the interest of actually generating some content for this blog, and as a way to boost my self-esteem (I hope), I'm thinking of changing the format slightly. Instead of only doing big, illustrated write-ups when I finish a project (which isn't very often), I'm going to try to at least jot down a quick note of what I accomplished every weekend. I'll still do big project write-ups from time to time, but my primary goal is to be able to look back on the year and see that I have actually accomplished *something* with my time. Sometimes I'll probably ramble on at length. Other times, it may just be a few bullet points.

So, here's what happened this past weekend: