Good Bye Peaches :(

This is a picture of the beautiful peaches we were going to add to our collection of food. The naughty squirrel got to them before we did :(

Building a Walnut Press, Part 1

Please don't try this at home, especially if you're stupid or clumsy. I don't want to be responsible for someone maiming themselves because they read my post and launched themselves into a project haphazardly.
I had a concept for a press for extracting oil from walnuts, which I had drawn out while we were driving to New York a few weeks ago. I cut these parts out of white styrofoam. I added some sprues (channels for getting the molten metal into the casting.)

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Here I packed the body of the press into casting sand. I picked this sand up a few years ago at a school auction, they were selling foundry equipment.

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Here I have about 4lbs of aluminum loaded into a kiln - I use a cast iron skillet to melt the metal. My guesstimate was a little short of the part, but you'll see more of that later. The aluminum melts at about 1450-1500 degrees. I use high temperature foundry gloves and a steel pipe to slide over the handle, then grab the lip of the pan skillet with a pair of heavy pliers to pour it. Once again, for the incompetent or reckless, don't try this at home.

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Here is the mold after I poured the molten aluminum into it. Fire! You can see a the muffin tin to the lower left that I pour my leftover metal into (aluminum biscuits - yum!)

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Here is the main body casting after it cooled and I took it out of the sand. As you can see the column didn't quite have enough metal to fill out. Time for some grinding!

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Here is the casting after I hacked and ground at it for half an hour. I cut a new handle slot into it using an angle grinder. I'll have to engineer a new handle design to give a little more clearance since the column turned out so short. You'll see that exciting adventure in part 2!

A Fine Collection of Mulberries

This was my brilliant idea for collecting the massive amount of mulberries that dump out of the tree - it is admittedly a little more simple than I had first conceived but it seems to be doing a good enough job. I put it up yesterday around noon - I collected the fruit about an hour ago and there is about 6 cups.

I picked up about an equal amount off the ground around the garden area yesterday, then pressed and strained them. That first batch is going to be fermented into wine, and then hopefully tainted into vinegar before the challenge starts (If I'm lucky the vinegar will be ready before Jul 17th, and I can use it to make some pickles.)

Mulberry Mania

Last post today! Just wanted to show the Mulberry tree out back that is getting ready to dump untold buckets of fruit on the ground. Every year it is a battle to clean them up; this year I'm going to build a visqueen slide to (hopefully) collect them all. My hope is to produce a) preserves, b) syrup, and c)wine & vinegar for the challenge using this abundant resource.

Wood Strawberries

Just, like, 2 more posts, and then I'm done for the day.

These strawberry-like creatures are growing over from the neighbors untamed wilds; I found out today from Wildman Steve Brill's website that they are called 'Wood Strawberries'. They taste like nothing. I ate this one right after I took the picture.

You can see Steve Brill's discussion on strawberries here; http://www.wildmanstevebrill.com/Plants.Folder/Strawberry.html. Too bad his foraging tour was rained out when we went to NYC :(

I also want to mention that I love macro-photography.

2nd Year Kale

Much like the summer bounty, I am prolific in my blogging today. While walking out to the garage today I looked over in to my 'wild garden' area, specifically at the kale plant which I left growing from last year. I had promised Sharon I would bring her some leaves to make kale chips. I looked over to see how the leaves were developing. They seem to have stopped at a 4-5 inch length, where last year's growth would grow to 10 inches or better on the larger leaves. More interestingly, where there were small flower buds before there are now long stalks with dozens of seed pods on them. I wondered if they were edible (of course I wondered that after I ate one) and found this informative blog out there on the interwebs; http://www.365daysofkale.com/2009/07/coming-back.html. The young seed pods are in fact edible, so I won't have to make any emergency room visits as a result.

My Garden Plan

I can't seem to remember to bring my camera over to the big garden, so here is a picture of my on-going plan. I have approximately 2600 of the 3000 square feet planted right now, and some of the earlier crops (lettuce and whatnot) are nearly ready for their first harvest. The remainder will be planted this coming up weekend, and a second crop will probably go in once summer harvesting starts in 2 weeks.