Tag: repurpose

Zach demonstrates how he plants garlic that he’s gathered from various places. Luke lends a paw. 

Zach takes advantage of the predicted rainy week and gets his fall seeds planted. We also see how that dewberry propagation is doing. 

If you are the newest of noobs when it comes to seed saving, this video is for you. Caroline walks you through some super basic ways that she saves seeds for next year’s garden.

Zach found a good deal on a lavender grow kit recently and shows you everything that’s in the kit and how it all works out. 

As I was perusing the interwebs one evening, I came across someone showing how she used a pre-made small table round to create a food display board. There weren’t really instructions, she just held up the board and stated how she got it. I thought, “Cool, I can do that,” and then I set out to do it. I went to the hardware store and bought an unfinished table round similar to this and some food safe butcher block finish like this. I sanded the board down with sandpaper that I had at home and applied a few coats of the butcher block finish, sanding between coats after allowing them to dry.

A few days later Caroline came over with some steel wool and gave it a really good sanding, getting it much smoother. At this point, I turned the project over to her because I hate sanding things. Caroline likes sanding things, so it all worked out.

After letting the board dry for 72 hours after the last coat of finish, I washed and dried the board per the finish’s instructions. I’ve used it as a cutting board and as a food display board (what most people call “charcuterie” even though charcuterie traditionally means the assembling of cured meats and meat products like prosciutto, salami, rillettes, and/or mousse. If you put it in Google translate, it just says, “deli.” You might have a couple of other items on the board to accompany the meats, but the meat is the center show. Now everyone calls cheese boards and everything else “charcuterie,” which kind of gets on my nerves unless you’re saying it ironically, but I think that 99% of people truly believe that “charcuterie” means a catch all for “finger foods” and that really grinds my gears; thanks for coming to my TED Talk, whew.)

Anyway, you can see pictures of the process below, including the board being used to display food for one of our celebrations of the Sabbath. Caroline assembled it and it was pretty. And that smoked salmon from Costco was amazing. 

There are several ways to grow more plants from plants. Here Zach shows how to propagate a dewberry vine by the layering technique. 

Zach and April went foraging for pawpaws, a fruit native to our area, but one that not many people know about due to its short shelf life. They got more “fruit” than they bargained for when they collected something that they thought were pawpaws, but were definitely not pawpaws. They’ve since figured out what the mysterious fruit is. Do you know what it is? Would you have made the same mistakes? Let us know!

Last Christmas Brittany pulled my name in a Secret Santa exchange and part of her gift was a mushroom growing kit. From start to harvest it was under two weeks. After I cut them off the box I put them in my Ninja Foodie and used the dehydrator setting to dry them out overnight. The next morning I put them in a bullet blender and ground into a fine powder that makes for a good umami kick to many dishes.