Started plastering the kitchen Sunday, 28-Aug-22 20:49:51 CEST

Leakage at the chimney is fixed Sunday, 11-Sep-22 19:50:59 CEST

Sunday, 04-Sep-22 22:44:19 CEST

Fruit harvest with surprise

Plastered the kitchen and harvested fruit from the garden.

Monday 29 August

This morning I discovered another Phlox in the flower garden! I tried to find the exact moment in the blog when I sowed Phlox in a tray, but I have not written about it. It happened in the first week of May. It is a mystery why I did not blog about it. I talked about Lobelia several times but did not bother to mention Phlox. When I transplanted the Phlox seedlings, it was too early, and they almost suffered a cold, so I had already lost many Phlox plants there. I had four Phlox plants left when I started weeding reed and then lost another couple of Phlox plants because the reed had grown under the Phlox. It is a pity because it is a colorful little flower. Next year I will do this much better with Phlox.

DW raked after she cleared things with the brush cutter. I plastered the kitchen.

Tuesday 30 August

This evening I took a break from plastering because we had friends coming for dinner. DW and DD made an excellent dinner together. It was a great success, and I liked it very much that we did something together with DD. We have much more social life in this house compared to the old one. Our guests brought a steam juice pan and bottles I could lend to try out making juice.

Wednesday 31 August

Today DW had a wool art friend coming for a visit. They spun wool together. This was the lady that gave us 10 pumpkin plants this spring. We planted them on our old compost, and only 2 survived, but they produced a lot! She was surprised by the result that her pumpkin seedlings had produced. I was glad she gave them to us because otherwise, we would have much less garden growth this season.

On Wednesday afternoon, I plastered the kitchen again. I discovered a surprise: The gypsum plate above the sink had not been screwed in the middle! I was plastering screw heads, and that plate had no screw heads. It was only screwed around the edge. We had forgotten to do the screws in the middle and forget about it. I am so surprised we have not looked up a single time to see it. The plate had sagged a little, so DW and I had to push it up before we could screw it in place.

At this point, I have done three buckets of MP75 plaster. That is two kilograms of plaster in each. After today's bucket, we went to a hardware store to buy two wood beams for our drying rack build. Then the beams stayed at the back of the car for the rest of the week. The beams were sticking out between the front seats, and more than once, I hit my elbow on the beams. You would think I took the time to make an action point of moving out the beams from the car, but no.

Since so much energy went into plastering, I was tired this week. Throughout the week, I blogged very little. I got sitting scrolling shorts on YouTube. A really useless pass time.

Thursday 1 September

The garden is doing fine. Some seeds of the autumn seeds have not germinated in the new sowing bed, but there are enough to make me happy. It stayed warm throughout August, so the sowing bed has had plenty of time to get a good start.

The foundation of a new house is created on the southwest side of our property. We are not direct neighbors of the new house, but the house is, to a large extent, hidden behind our direct neighbor's house. A pole driver machine has been working for two days. We are curious about what the house will look like, but it will most certainly be concrete because of the many poles used.

I recorded the pole driver machine in action; perhaps I will be able to make music from it one day.

Something else happened this day: In the afternoon, a car came driving on the dirt road slinging from one side of the road to the other side. What are people thinking? In the car, two people in suits had a good time laughing at what they did.

This evening I plastered another bucket, weeded a little in the sowing beds, and then moved the sheep fence. I removed the temporary fence on the southwest side of the property. It moved to the northeast corner of the property.

 

Friday 2 September

We moved the sheep this evening, and their home base is now the huts on the north side of our house. From there on, they have the north and east border of the property. The ground is dry; it is like concrete right now. I have to use a hammer to get the pins into the ground. Now we hope they will be able to stay here for a week. We might make minor adjustments to the net already earlier.

Now we surrounded the drying rack with a sheep fence. It will be interesting to see if it can be finished. Are different plans colliding with each other? I do think I can work on the drying rack this weekend anyway. We will see.

It was really late on Friday evening when we were done with the sheep fence. I was exhausted this evening. I wanted to blog, but I could only sit and scroll through those YouTube shorts.

Saturday 3 September

This morning, when I woke up, I first made a teapot. Then I blogged about the entire week so far.

The tea bag asked, "Of what music do you become happy." I think I am happy with Swedish folk music but also EDM. I play the violin, and a couple of years ago, I created house music on my computer. I hope I will be able to do that again. It would be cool to make a song from the pole driver recording. I also have recordings of helicopters that I would like to use for a song one day. So many ideas, so little time. One thing is sure, the walls need to be finished and plastered before I can start sitting and making music.

The teapot was found at the recycling center in the bucket for concrete. It says, "What are you looking for?" What is it that tea products are talking to you?

In the morning, we harvested the summer apples: Alkmene, that we planted on 16 May 2020. The first year we harvested the apples too late. They got eaten by wasps.

Today I wanted to try the steam juice pan we borrowed from our friends. I wanted to make juice from the grapes we grew in the grape wine. I started preparing the juice by heating the bottles to a temperature between 72 and 75 degrees Celsius for 25 minutes. I heated the bottles slowly to ensure I would not overshoot the maximum temperature. It took some time to get that done. When I had three bottles sterile, I was ready to go and harvest our grapes.

Then I discovered the grapes were gone; I harvested about ten grapes instead of eight to ten bunches. I have no idea who took them. I had made many preparations, and now I wanted to try this, so I changed my plan and picked what we had in our shrubs.

I took sea buckthorn, rosehip, and apples and lots of sugar. The apples that did not look that nice went into the sieve.

The system has three sections. At the bottom is something that looks like a regular pan. I filled it three-quarters with water. In that bucket fits the juice collection pan. It has a funnel in the center letting through steam. It also has a tap for the finished juice. The topmost section is a sieve for the fruit and a glass lid.

DW did not like this machine, but I was thrilled to make use of berries we would otherwise not use. It sure takes a lot of effort to create one bottle of juice. Since the setup had taken so much effort, I tried to find berries for another batch of juice. This time I decided to use Sorbus berries. We had several trees with properly riped Sorbus berries. They must be appropriately riped; otherwise, they are mildly poisonous. For now, I was busier with making juice and not what kind of chemicals the berries contained, so I was happy that they were okay to try.

I thought that you steam the fruit and let the steam extract taste from the fruit, and then the condensation water would be collected together with the taste of the fruit and the added sugar. Consequently, I wanted that the steam pan to boil and produce steam. DW thought all the moisture originates from the fruit, and it was just necessary to boil the pan mildly to start the juice extraction process. She suggested I let the pan boil at a lower temperature. It is difficult to know what is actually going on inside the pan. Both thoughts could be accurate at the same time. The Sorbus berries contained moisture, but it was not that much though. There would have been more moisture in the pan if I had gotten ten bunches of grapes.

The Sorbus juice tasted interesting. The sea buckthorn and rosehip juice were nice. It had lots of sugar in it, though. It has to be diluted with water before use.

While I worked on the juice, DW cleaned wool from our sheep. When all the machine parts were cleaned, I was more than done with this experiment. I still grappled with the idea that someone stole our grapes. It was a complete mystery to me.

Then I pottered around in the garden. The sowing beds got water. They look nice! I do realize that there will soon come a time when I am standing cleaning salad every evening. Last time I liked it because it tastes so well. It takes more time to eat from your garden, but it is well worth it up until now.

DW cut my hair. We sat in the garden where we had cut the sheep's wool. They looked at us, and I saw them thinking, "what are they doing?".

Sunday 4 September

In the morning, we harvested the peers. It is the first time we harvest fruit from these peer trees. It feels fantastic that we get our own peers. We got the trees on 20 August 2020. Last season they produced nothing, so it is about they produce some fruit, and this is a good harvest.

The next task for today was to go to a Spelmansstämma. It is a party for musicians playing Swedish folk music. It was great fun. I had not practiced anything, so I had to use my ability to play music by ear, and that went fine.

It was late when I went home from the party. It was a beautiful evening, and I enjoyed being together with other people playing Swedish folk music.

In February next year, I will attend another course at Austerlitz. The last time I went was at the beginning of March this year. I am thinking of setting up a challenge for myself: Would it be possible for me to practice playing music so that I can make people dance for 30 minutes? It would be possible to try the challenge at the course in Austerlitz.

I also have another task ahead, inviting people to our new house to play folk music there. We will see how this goes.

 

Here ends this week's blog. See you next week!