Putting the final piece of tin on the roof sort of feels like the last piece of a marathon jig saw puzzle.


We recently upgraded the WaldenEffect blog camera from the Fuji Finepix S1000fd to a beefier Canon Power Shot SX20. I can already tell a difference, but will wait for more experimentation before I give a full report on how awesome it is.

So you've made some charcoal.  How do you get it into the soil in such a way that it helps your plants grow?  The embedded video in this post walks you through using biochar in your farm or garden.

While hanging out with other farmer geeks last week, I discovered that there is a cool new cover crop making the rounds --- radishes.  Everyone's glowing about the way tillage radishes, oilseed radishes, groundhog radishes, fodder radishes, forage radishes, and daikon radishes mellow clay soil, adding copious amounts of organic matter and tilling through hardpan.  If you play your cards right, you can even graze your livestock on the radishes a time or two during the fall since most of the cover crop biomass comes from the roots.  What really caught my interest, though, is news that these cover crop radishes winter-kill here in zone 6, meaning that they work perfectly with no-till systems.

I clearly had to give a radish cover crop a try, but which one to choose?  A little research made the choice simpler since all of the names I listed in the last paragraph refer to the same species (Raphanus sativus.)  Now, to be fair, cabbage, broccoli, and collards are all members of Brassica oleracea, so it's clearly possible to come up with multiple subspecies that act quite differently.  But in the world of cover crop radishes, there is really only one huge distinction --- the daikon radish has been bred to be eaten while all of the others have been bred primarily for biomass and are types of oilseed radishes.  Groundhog radish and tillage radish, specifically, are terms that plant breeders have trademarked for their line of oilseed radishes.

The differences between the varieties seem to come down to the roots.  Many people want a long, thin taproot like that found in the tillage radish, but we don't have hardpan, just heavy clay, so I chose to go for a more branched root instead.  That said, cover crop radishes are so trendy that the ones I wanted the most were sold out and I had to settle for a generic oilseed radish from Johnny's Select Seeds.

Before you go out and seed your front lawn with radishes, though, I should warn you of one factoid I noticed on every website.  When oilseed radishes freeze and rot over the winter, the resulting smell is quite foul.  Maybe it's best not to plant them beside your front door.

The internet is chock full of articles glowing about biochar's potential, but I seldom find any useful, hands on information.  The Abingdon Biochar presentation we attended delved into the nitty gritty.

Today's video highlights methods you can use to make biochar on any scale.  I was especially intrigued by the idea of modifying a rocket stove to produce biochar while cooking your dinner.

I thought the drying season had left us behind, but this week the sun came back out and let me test a few tomatoes in our automotive dehydrator.  It tickles me pink to be drying vegetables in a totaled car, even if it is running fine and useful for ferrying supplies back and forth rather than being up on blocks in the front yard.  My test tray dried nicely, so today I'll add more tomatoes to the drier.

My goal is to make Mark stop talking about our movie star neighbor's sun-dried tomatoes and start talking about mine.  Hollywood sun-dried tomatoes (as I've decided to call the delicious concoction) are so tasty you can't keep them in the fridge or they'll be gone overnight. 

Part 1 of the recipe is simple --- slice plum-sized romas or other small, meaty tomatoes in half, sprinkle the cut side with a hint of salt and pepper, and dry until slightly moist (like a dried apricot).  Stay tuned for the taste explosion of part 2 once I have enough tomato morsels dried to show you the steps.

Roland made a good safety point on my post yesterday that sent me back 25 years to Mr Beaver's woodshop class in High School. Yes...that was his real name.

The Pro-Tech 10" bench saw was a hand-me-down and already had the splitter removed. I think I've got it in the barn somewhere.

I decided to take Roland's advice and look into what it might take to replace the splitter, which is a piece of metal that prevents the cut wood from drifting back to the blade.

The above picture is from The Woodshop.com, a great website that has encountered this problem due to the original splitter/guard being too flimsy. They came up with a strudy do it yourself version that looks easy to replicate. The guard only functions to prevent scraps from being dropped onto the blade, but the splitter seems like it should work better than the original.

Part 2 of our biochar video series covers the benefits of biochar.  One backyard enthusiast calls the charcoal "condos for microbes," and biochar also has a host of other beneficial properties in the soil.  Julie Major from the International Biochar Initiative and Rory Maguire from Virginia Tech point out biochar's most impressive features in this short video.

I've been known to tell people that swiss chard is the easiest vegetable to grow since nothing seems to eat it.  I won't be saying that anymore. 

You see, an absolutely adorable, striped insect showed up around the swiss chard this summer, and I left the critter alone because it was so cute.  Only weeks later did I catch the chomper in action and figure out why it was so plump.

The disillusionment made me so mad at my buddies that I smashed every single one, so I don't have a photo to show you (nor can I figure out what the bad bug was.)

Even though it set me way behind my frozen greens allotment for the summer, my swiss chard insect taught me a good lesson --- identify, identify, identify!  Now, whenever a new insect shows up in my life, I pull out the books and figure out what it is right away.

During my weekly bug picking and smashing expedition Monday, I came across these fascinating grey scales shingling a dead asparagus twig.  Ten minutes later, I knew that they were mostly harmless --- just katydid eggs to serenade me to sleep next year.  Thank goodness!

This 10 inch Pro-Tech bench saw has made some of the really hard cuts for our latest building project a breeze.

I would say it's a must have if you want to get clean and crisp cuts without wearing out your arms using a hand saw.

You can use a reciprocating saw to do most of these applications with a lot less accuracy and neatness. Once you get a taste of the table saw you'll feel like you can't live without one if you want to make the occasional building project painless and fun.