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| RIP my little Blackberry. You were my favorite duck and much loved. I miss you every day. | |
Week 13
30 October 2012
So, we built a rocket in our greenhouse this week. It works great too! That whooshing sound when the engine lights up and begins to burn good is amazing to listen to. Okay, okay, okay ... so don't go calling NASA or anything, we aren't planning a trip to outer space or anything. The rocket we built is a rocket mass stove heater and it boggles my mind. You build a fire in it ... but the fire doesn't burn straight up like normal fires do ... and there's no smoke that comes out the chimney ... and you only use sticks ... and you can cook on it ... and the heavy mass of it retains the heat and releases it slowly during the cold nights to keep the plants nice toasty despite the freezing temps on the other side of the thin plastic sheet. No, don't ask me how it works, I don't really understand, but I know it does work. Somehow in the mechanism of it all the smoke is completely burned off so that all that is left is a little CO2 and some steam. I also know it gets really really hot. The steel can we have over the heat riser literally burned red hot during the burn time. It's a beautiful thing ... thank you my friend Debbie Norvelle Henderson for introducing me to them.
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| This is it at the moment because we ran out of clay for the cob covering. I'll post a pic later on when we get more clay on. |
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And speaking of the greenhouse ... we've already had three major hard freeze nights here in northern Oklahoma. Normally that would signal the end all of end alls to our gardening, but with our lump of a greenhouse, we actually ate fresh green beans for supper tonight. And the bean plants are still blooming! so I guess there's more of them on the way. Maybe we can have fresh green beans steamed with onions and bacon for Thanksgiving dinner along with our homegrown turkey. Wow, what a thought! We also have zucchini squash setting on nicely with no squash bugs to be seen and tomatoes. Yeah, tomatoes!!! We also have several types of brassicas growing - broccoli, cabbage, and brussel sprouts - plus an avocado tree, a ginger plant, lettuce, and a cucumber specially grown for greenhouse conditions. Our next trial is to try potatoes ... mainly because we have potatoes sprouting in the potato bin and we thought "why not?"
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| Fresh green beans for supper the end of October |
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| One of several handfuls of tomatoes set on 5 plants |
Last, but by no means least, is the sad sad loss of my beautiful duck Blackberry. I posted a pic of her as a baby which shows you exactly why I fell madly in love with this duck from the first day I saw her. She was one of a kind and her loss is felt by not only us but by her duck pals as well. I wish I knew what happened to her. I'll spare you the details of the discovery ... it wasn't pretty and frankly, I cried all the way to work that morning ... but she was killed by a predator of some kind. We're guessing it was the possum that killed our turkeys poults last spring that came back and got her but we aren't sure. So now the ducks get moved inside for the night to their new house. So far so good. We've had no new losses. And I quickly stuck all of the duck eggs we had gathered into the incubator to see if maybe, just maybe, we could hatch out another little Blackberry. Fingers crossed.
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