Planting Up And Starting The 2011 Garden [Gardening]

May 30, 2011  |  Comments Off  |  by Ben Czajkowski  |  Gardening

It’s hard to believe that I haven’t started any gardening this year. I’ve been an anxious onlooker as my peers have put together a nice spring crop, in various parts of the country. I think even if I wanted to, I would have been unsuccessful because of the sheer amount of rain Dayton, Ohio, received for much of late April and early May.

Last week, my wife and I left Ohio and moved to northern Baltimore. We have a sizable backyard that needs a lot of attention: there are vines on top of vines that are quickly eating the back corners. Heather and I did our best to rip out a giant section; these suckers are resilient! We made four large piles on Saturday before giving up for the weekend. Temperatures climbed into the 100s today. Eff that. It’s not even June yet! We have a yard waste disposal service that comes twice a month. So, bye bye vines!

We did make a trip to Valley View Farm to survey their extensive collection of plants. I felt like a kid in a candy store, once in the greenhouse. So many varieties and species that I had to severely limit myself to what Heather would want to eat. Otherwise, we would have 4 different kinds of beefsteak tomatoes and a dozen peppers. Since I don’t eat raw tomato very often, she would be overwhelmed.

Cayenne Pepper

Cayenne Pepper

I really wanted to start a lot of plants this year from seed, but since we were in the process of moving, I had to nix that. We picked up a decent sampling of veggies, though:

2 Bush Early Girl Tomatoes
1 Yellow Pear Tomato
1 Sweet Million Tomato
1 Ichiban Japanese Eggplant
1 Fairy Tale Eggplant
1 Cayenne Pepper
1 Pepperoncini Pepper
1 Tasty Orange Bell Pepper
1 Purple Bell Pepper
1 Zucchini Squash
1 Yellow Straight Neck Squash
1 Patio Pickle Cucumber
1 Bronze Fennel
1 Hill Hardy Rosemary
1 Sweet Bay Plant
1 Italian Oregano

Since this was a long weekend, I took some time to construct different varieties of sub-irrigated (self-watering) planters to house these veggies. We even picked up two from Wal-Mart to try them out. I considered an Earthbox, but I balked at the $50 price point. Even the new Patio Pickers at Lowe’s were unappealing: shallow and cheap-looking. The peppers are in the Mainstay Self-Watering Planters (deep, sturdy, and only $5); I have high hopes for both.

Mainstay-Self-Watering-Planters

Mainstay-Self-Watering-Planters

Later this week, I’ll be blogging about my soil choices, more about the yard, and my Cascade hops!

Bottling Of “Parting” IPA and Over-Wintered Lager [Homebrew]

May 11, 2011  |  Comments Off  |  by Ben Czajkowski  |  Homebrew

There’s nothing more glorious than waking up to have your bathroom smell like hops.

Last night, I bottled roughly 10 gallons of beer. This will be the final time I bottle beer in my Dayton rental home. Next week, I am saying goodbye to the Midwest and making my way to the coastal state of Maryland, just outside of Baltimore.

A little more than two weeks ago, I brewed my “Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow” IPA. Last week, around this time, I dry-hopped that batch with a ton of Centennial. I didn’t bother to weigh; I dumped hops into a 2oz measuring glass. Therefore, I have no idea what the actual weight is. When I removed the lid on the bucket, though, to dry-hop, the entire lid was just covered in beautiful mountains of hops. This sucker fermented vigorously. The end result was 48 bottles, which include 5-6 bombers, which are much bigger bottles than your normal size. A massive yield that will tide my need for IPAs over for a long while.

The second batch…well, I am not proud to admit this. Like with gardening and other outdoor-related hobbies, when it got cold, I got lazy and forgetful. So, this pilsner-based lager that I mixed up at the end of October has sat in my basement for… 6 months, unopened and unmolested. I thought, for sure, that it was going to be just absolutely infested with a bacterial colony unlike any other.

Nope. She was good to go. So, I bottled the pils-lager, and it produced about 2 cases. A good yield for a beer that was sitting around for half a year. I was a little weary on sampling, but I have to say, this beer went down smooth and was flavorful. No hint of infection or off-flavoring. So, I’ll try to drink this batch quickly. Since I’ll have a much larger fridge, the likelihood of this happening has significantly increased.

Oh, and why did my bathroom smell like hops? Because that is where I cleaned my two fermentors and bottling bucket before bed. All that trub got flushed, but there was some minute splash-damage that I was too tired to try to clean up. Totally worth it.

The End of the Gardening Season, 2010

October 21, 2010  |  Comments Off  |  by Ben Czajkowski  |  Gardening
Cherry tomato

Cherry Tomato

In western Ohio, the gardening season is quickly drawing to a close, and it has been a rather… fruitful year, in terms of growing successes.

And failures.

Over the next several days and weeks, I will begin chronicling my trials and errors in my gardening process, among other activities. Which may or may not include: homebrewing, literature, cooking, and coding.