Jewels Of Opar (aka fameflower). It's basically a weed here, and once you have it on your property, it pops up everywhere. It's also a pretty ornamental, so it's nice to be able to throw some leaves in a salad, too.

If you place the green tomatoes on a windowsill or other bright place, most will ripen slowly, but won't have quite the same flavor as vine-ripened.

We usually make "chow-chow" out of our green tomatoes at the end of the season. That's a kind of pickled relish that's usually made out of a variety of vegetables. Ours is mostly green tomatoes, cabbage, carrots, and onions. Goes great on sausages, burgers, etc.

You can't really go wrong with the Fisher Space Pen. The "bullet" model is pretty compact when capped (just under 4" long), but with the cap flipped around on the other end, it's a standard length pen. It'll write just about anywhere, and the refills seem to last a very long time.

Look at this guy. Just ridiculous.

#dogstr #dogs

If you're in the central Texas area this weekend, we're having our fall plant sale at our farm in McMahan (near Lockhart) this Saturday (9/30) and Sunday (10/1) from 10 AM until 5 PM both days.

If you’re in the market for fall/winter garden plants like broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, herbs, and ornamentals, selected to perform well in our cool season, have a look at our catalog at:

http://squeakyfrogfarm.com

We had some ridiculously hot weather during the sprouting and growing season at the end of this summer, which caused some germination and survival problems, so a few items are in shorter supply than we would like, but we still have a great selection to choose from.

If you can’t make it, but are in Austin, we can take an order and deliver the plants to you next week (or you can pick them up from our house in Austin).

20% discount if you pay with Bitcoin!

That looks like a great harvest!

You should definitely plant them farther apart next time. About 4 inches apart is the ideal spacing to get the most of your space, but still get larger onions. Keep the bed as free of weeds as you can, too. Onions are not very good at competing with other plants for nutrients.

Make sure the soil has plenty of nitrogen. If you're doing organic, that means lots of compost and maybe a little blood meal or other nitrogen supplement. The goal is to get as many leaves on the onion plant as possible before it starts to bulb out. More leaves means bigger onions.

Onions begin to bulb when the day reaches a certain number of hours of daylight. The actual number varies with each variety of onion, (some are 10 hours, some are 14, etc) but that's the life cycle. So to get larger onions, it's best to plant them as early as possible in the year. As soon as you're nearing the end of your frost season, get them planted. That gives them more time to grow before the days get long enough to trigger them into bulbing.

Good morning, Nostriches! Here's a photo of a teeny-tiny little green snake from my garden that you didn't know you needed today. His head is about the size of a pencil eraser.

#grownostr #snake

This relentless heat has caused our chickens to stop laying eggs, so we had to buy some at the store. They were on sale, so we thought we'd supplement our dwindling supply. Holy crap, these things are flavorless junk compared to the fresh homegrown ones! When we first started raising chickens, I didn't notice that ours were that much better than the store-bought ones, but going the other direction really highlights the massive quality difference. (We also use much higher quality feed now than we did in the beginning, so that is probably part of the difference, too.)

If you eat eggs, get your own chickens.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

#grownostr #chickens #homestead #foodstr

How dry is it here in central Texas? I had to dig up an irrigation pipe to fix a leak. This is in the middle of an open area, nothing but dry grass around, and within less than five minutes of there being a hole with water in it, this guy showed up out of nowhere. I have no idea where he came from or how he knew there was moisture, but he wasted no time getting to it.

#grownostr #frogstr #frog

His hair is so fine, everything just instantly clings to it. Then he gets very annoyed when we have to dig it all out, usually pulling some fur out with it. He's a terrier, so the chances that we'll be able to train his stubborn ass to stop doing it are pretty much zero...

Does anybody else have one of these Velcro dogs? This little dork loves to go roll in the mulch, then we have to spend fifteen minutes picking out everything that's stuck to him.

#grownostr #dogstr #dog

I'm back to working on some more #homestead automation projects. This week I installed a water meter at the head of my maze of outdoor irrigation lines. Mostly, it's there to sound the alarm when a pipe breaks (lots of leaks this summer as the ground has dried out so much, there's tons of movement against the pipes underground, pulling joints apart, etc). But it's also useful to monitor how much water I'm using on any given task, or to set an alarm to notify me when X gallons have gone into a zone or through a sprinkler or soaker hose so I can go turn it off or move it.

The next step will be to add solenoid valves to the system to automate watering even more and also turn off the water automatically if a leak occurs, but this is a great first step.

Like my other #automation projects, this uses a Wemos D1 Mini to read the output of the water meter and communicate it to the Home Assistant server. The meter is from MCS, I opted for a cheaper one that sends a pulse for every gallon that passes through it. I wasn't sure how well it would work, so I didn't want to spend a lot on a nicer meter until the concept proved itself. I'll eventually put in one with finer resolution that will be able to detect smaller leaks.

https://mcsmeters.com/products/mcs-3-4-poly-water-sub-meter-pulse

#homeassistant #grownostr

What I did was to look at the dry food I was previously feeding that had kept him at a fairly stable weight. The bag usually says how many calories per cup, so you can figure out how many calories you had been feeding your dogs, and figure out how much chicken that equates to. I think I figured that a whole chicken with skin worked out to around 50-60 calories per ounce. That should give a good starting point, then you watch their weight for a while to see if they're gaining or losing and adjust accordingly.

If your dogs are young and active, that 3% might not be enough. Or they could just be acting like they want more food because it tastes way better than the kibble!

Found this a teeny little gray tree frog sitting in the birdbath last night, eyeballing a potential snack...

Usually there's at least one or two of these guys hanging around the porch light, hanging out and hunting bugs with five or six geckos.

#nature #frog #grownostr

Yeah, we're gonna need some more information here... Is this some kind of ancient secret family recipe, or can you share it?

I do something similar - I add lemon juice and "Morton Lite salt" to my water. The "lite" salt is half sodium, half potassium salt, so it's a good cheap electrolyte supplement. I just put like 1/8 tsp in a big glass of water.

Duke has become obsessed with the wool dryer balls we use instead of fabric softener. He stole this one out of the laundry, and loves it so much he's falling asleep with it in his mouth...

#grownostr #dogstr

Seems kind of odd that the AC isn't working in only those theaters, and they didn't just move the showings to another screen. I mean, this is a movie that's proving to be a growing phenomenon; while most of the other movies out there aren't selling many tickets, this one is selling out. So if you really did have technical problems like they claim, wouldn't you cancel showings of "The Flash" or "The Little Mermaid" or some other failing turd and show the popular movie instead?

I recently built a mobile chicken coop for my neighbors. They're an older couple with some health issues, so I needed a way to make the coop easy to move without bending down. I came up with this system. The white board is the handle, about 4' long so it's easy to grab while standing. Rotate it forward until the locking bar drops into place, then repeat on the opposite side, grab the handles at the front of the coop, and away you go. The wheels are placed very close to the balance point of the structure, so one only has to lift a couple pounds of weight at the front end to move it.

Not shown in these photos is that, once the hardware cloth covers the coop, a rope runs over the top between the two locking bars. Then you just tug the rope to lift the locking bar out of the way and rotate the wheel back into the raised position.

I also built a shelf on the inside of the door, for the food and water to sit on. They can just swing open the door and have easy access to that. I'm hoping that maintaining the chickens every day gives them a little sorely-needed exercise and outdoor activity. I built garden beds for them last year, and that's helped a lot to get them on the path to healthier living.

http://nostr.build/av/6f292f9e4fd9428f15b4c47ebdcbf24c7843fe20e7b0a08287bfed28cfa0f230.mp4

#grownostr #chickens #coop #homesteading

Every female dog I've had that we had spayed, the vet always warns about keeping activity level low, not letting her jump, etc. By two or three days, they're always acting like nothing happened and it's all but impossible to keep them from resuming normal activity. Dogs are badasses. 😉