Tech Talk Tuesday

Hey All! Guest Author Girl Child here posting in response to a few emails we've received. Some folks are having some trouble posting comments on the blog, so I've put together a post to walk you through the options available. If you're a tech-guru, here's a picture of a sleeping kitten to tide you over...

Okay, so at the bottom of every post there should be a little blue link which says something about the number of comments. I've highlighted it in the image below with red:

When you click on that link, it will bring up an option bar like this:

You should  be able to see previous comments but also be able to add your own. It's important to click the "comment as:" drop down button as that determines HOW you can leave a comment. If you are already logged into your gmail or google account, it will automatically allow you to publish a comment that way. 

Just click "preview" if you want to see what your comment will look like or "publish" to send it into the series of tubes that is the internets. 

If you don't have a gmail or just plain don't feel like sharing that information (which is totally fine), the drop down menu will provide alternatives. 

Like the "Google Account" option, if you have an account with any of the listed websites or programs, you CAN log in that way and use that as your comment "log-in," if you will. 

LiveJournal is found here: link

Wordpress is found here: link

TypePad is found here: link

AIM (Aol Instant Messaging) is found here: link

OpenID is found here: link

All of these sites are free, the first three are kinds of blogging platforms similar to blogger. AOL is a chat platform and OpenID seems to be a one-stop-shopping for internet log-ins. You create one OpenID and you can use it to access any number of websites.

The Anonymous option is easy, just enter your comment and it will be submitted with no fuss. You're welcome to sign your name or internet handle in the message box like 

"Comment... - Guest Author Girl Child" 

or just leave it blank! We love feedback either way!

The Name/Url option is another easy way to personalize your comment. 

This box will pop up giving you two type-able fields: name and url. You just enter whatever you would like to be called in the "name" box and if you want to include a link to your personal website or blog, paste the http:// link into the URL box. If you don't want to include a link, you don't have to! Go ahead and leave it blank like I did, and click continue. It will take you back to the comment box, like so...

Once you're happy with you comment- click "publish." 

Because the internet is full of goblins, trolls, and robots, you will get a pop-up like this:

Prove you're not a robot! Sadly, these things are often testy and don't believe you when you swear vehemently to your status as a homo sapien. Don't worry, just respond the best you can. If you're not sure, just click the little circle arrow button at the bottom, that will refresh the word so you can try again. If you prefer (I usually find it easier) click the "sound" button to the left of the ? box. It will play an audio file of a word or some numbers, just enter what you hear. But make sure your sound is on first!

Once you've proved to blogger's satisfaction that you are not a robot, click "publish." 

Because the internet is full of goblins, trolls, robots and mean people we have the comments for the blog moderated. This means that they will not appear immediately after you click "publish." 

Instead, you will receive a message like this:

Rest assured, as long as this yellow box appeared- we have received your comment! The main blogger, namely my mum, will receive an email notification that you have commented. 

That looks like this: 

We can publish your comment directly from email, or log onto the blog and do it from there.

One comment!! YES! 

As co-moderator, I can publish comments too.

Hopefully this helps clarify any comment related questions you may have. Feel free to try it out! 

Click on the comment link below this post and let us know what you think :D

Snapshot Sat-er Monday!

Happy belated Saturday! The weather is fine and our schedules are opening up a bit more, so we'll be back (again) to weekly posting pronto.

Here's a view from the barn up the hill to the pasture. There's no way our walking lawnmower could even dent the mass of foliage up there. Right now, it's waiting for a riding lawnmower but until that happens it looks like something out of a Miyazaki movie!

View from the barn down towards the house. The fenced structure in the bottom left is the new dog kennel. The green house and raised veggie garden are off screen to the right. 

The other side, you can't quite make it out on this image but there's fencing in the woods in the top left. The wood frames in the center are the remains of the previous tenants' grape vines. It's so totally overgrown and rotted that you can't get access to anything. Sounds like a future project to me!

This guy has been lurking around the property, I want to clean and paint him eventually as decoration for my apartment, but I can't decide on a design.  The spiky plant of pain to the right is one of the prolific raspberries that torments- I mean resides on the property. They are everywhere!!

 We have so many ferns in the recesses of our property that some areas seem like it's Jurassic!

Where's Jeff Goldblum when you need him? 

 We currently have mountain strawberries, wild raspberries and wild blackberries blooming around the property. We will even have some blueberries, as the barrels mum planted last year have finally matured!

A better view of the dog kennel (complete with dog house and dog deck!) as well as the garden shed.

I spy with my big hetero-chromatic eyes... a tiny bench and a summer project! The house is set up with little sprinkling systems, but there's a fault in the line somewhere so they just make a mess. Mum plans on fixing them, but wants to do some research first. 

Big bowl o' chives! It needs to be split and r-epotted, but in the meantime it smells divine!

Everything is in bloom now- these rhododendrons are especially volumous outside the game room window

Close up of a blossom- so pretty!

We hired a survey company to reassess the far edge of the property last week. Our neighbor made a bunch of assumptions about the line between our properties and ended up damaging the treehouse in his attempt to "reclaim it." All is well now, but we opened up a dialog and got a legit survey crew out ASAP. We asked them to make really obvious markers of where our property ends and at this point we have to take their word for it, because their hefty 2x4 in cement markers are completely obscured by brush! One is so far down by the water, we couldn't find them even after some exploring. Up in the hinterlands of Jurassic river access, I found some really interesting remains. Completely clean, the head shape is to angular to be feline but much too large to be any rodentia we have seen around. Maybe weasel? Will research and let you know!

Belated Garden Sunday

Life has been crazy-crazy! Guest-Author-Girl-Child here, in the midst of dead week and prepping for finals. After this next week, I am officially in my last year of university!! YES.

Anyway, here is a belated "Sunday" post of the projects mum and I did last weekend. 

The sun has come out and STAYED out these last few days. Gorgeous weather just begged for some veggie planting and mum, having finished her national board projects (HECK YES!) reactivated her green thumbs and joined me in the garden.

You might remember our raised garden bed project from before, I filled it partially with a mixture of compost and peat a few weekends back. Together we filled it the rest of the way in preparation for some new veggies mum picked up as well as some seedlings I grew in the greenhouse. 

Mum arranged the new veggies by future size and spaced them accordingly. Tomatoes will be tall, so we put them in the back so they won't block the sunlight from the other veggies. Those are spaced about 8-12 inches apart. In front of them are peppers, spaced 4-6 inches apart. And at the front of the box, are radishes, spaced 2-4 inches apart. Once everything was arranged to her liking, we took off their shoes and got them comfy in the veggie bed! 

Completed! We filled in the open areas with the seedlings I grew from the green house (more tomatoes, peppers, and radishes as well as some carrots and a mystery plant). Mum pushed in some of her tomato cages, ready for when they get a little bigger to make sure they have the structure they need. 

A lot of the seed packages in the garden shed are old or of unknown origin, so mum and I made some temporary planters to test them out. We labeled them (much better than I did  last time!) and we'll see what sprouts. If nothing sprouts in a week or two, we'll know those seed packets are done for and toss 'em. If they grow, we'll repot them and let them thrive in the green house until our next veggie box is ready. 

Project 2 we started was a door for our new fence. Project puppy-time meant fencing off a good section of the property and we cut a preliminary section out to attach a door. As I have the most experience with power tools, mum measured and labeled the wood and I cut. 

For the record, we did not cut on the bed of my truck. That is a major saftey no-no. This was just a perfect photo opportunity while mum went downhill to research how to adjust the blade allowance. I took woodshop and metalshop in college, and the experience is totally worth it. We covered table saws, skilsaws, jigsaws, lathes, mig welders, tig welding, and oxy-acetylene torches - all are excellent tools to have a good know-how about. In any case- the door we were trying to build was like this one:

This is one dad and the boy-child put together for the dog kennel they built. We picked up an extra hardware set (hinges, frames, handle, and lock) from our local hardware store and laid everything out. 

The fencing seen here is the bit cut from the actual fence, I think it's a smidge to small to actually cover the door frame so we're contemplating using spare hardware cloth. 

We ended up not finishing the door project that day, ran out of daylight and 1/8th inch drill bits! We called it a night when the one we had broke off in the uncooperative wood panel. 

We picked up some more today, and hope to finish the project in time for the next Sunday post!

Gardens - Green House Prep

Guest Author Girl-Child here, with another weekend update. While Mum was visiting our Sailor in Port Townsend, I got a few projects done around the homestead.

      It's just the right time to get veggies going (or so my green-thumbed madre assures me) and once her National Boards is through- she's itching to get back into the garden and play. To help prep for that, I decided to take a day to clean out the green house. Oh yes! The green house mentioned here is up and sturdy and full of life. Just... the wrong kind of life. *cue psycho shower scene music* Eek! Dandelions! Aphids! and Baby Black Widows! Oh my!

     If you remember last February, mum mentioned a bunch of new plants she wasn't quite ready for. Well, Washington proceeded to rain, and rain, and rain, until all of her lovely new plants either drowned, were eaten by chickens, bowled over by raccoons, or molded. The ones that survived, were stashed in the green house and promptly forgotten about. As you can see below, there's a lot of plants to wrangle and pots to sanitize before anything new can start living in here. 

 Gloving up, I grabbed an empty bucket and proceeded to delicately clip-n-catch the dandelion heads with some garden shears. After about ten minutes of this, I recalled my heritage and dashed inside to put on sunscreen.  Very important! Then I doused the bug infested greenery with distilled white vinegar and hot water before tearing them out by their roots (or as close to the roots as I could manage).

The pots were all plastic, aside from some organic/compostable ones (which were pretty thoroughly moldered and tossed into the compost heap), so I got the go ahead to save the soil. If you look in the far back of the above photo, there are some half-wine barrel type garden barrels on the right hand side. They all contain good soil now, ready for re-purposing. The pots were rinsed and arranged by size on a low table, to be sanitized at a later date before rejoining their fellows in the Garden Shed. Plastic labels and tags were washed and put in that white plastic three drawer tower in the Shed for the next batch of lovelies!

Much better! Now that there's room for seedlings, I re-set up Dad's veggie trays.

The carrots and sweet peas are first to show!

 The other project I was able to get to before papers swallowed my weekend, was the raised garden bed. The boy child hauled these bags of peat and compost from in front of the Garden Shed to here. We don't have a wheel barrel big enough, so we would have to mix 3 bag compost with one bag of peat by hand. We weren't certain what was the best way to go about it, so I opted to experiment a little with this handy dandy twirly ground aerater doohickey (yes, that is it's official name, or at least it is until I can ask mum).

It took a bit of work, but the compost and peat mixed perfectly. Mum still wants to add another row of boards around the edge (we're all tall folks here, leaning over will be easier), but that can be added later. For now, we've got a good soil base for any goodies Mum feels like planting! Only two more weeks to go!

Snapshot Saturday

Took a minor homework break to enjoy the sunshine (90 degrees, say what now?!) and the new blooms!

What you see above is the view from the master bedroom balcony. Mum found some gorgeous cling-art mimicking stained glass at Home Depot and it works perfectly to add a little privacy to what otherwise would be a straight shot view of the bathroom. When the sun hits it just right, it just glows.

We joke about mom retiring to the "cave" to work on her National Boards, but really it has a gorgeous view!

The bleeding hearts bloomed all at once, I didn't even know we had them! But mum assures me they were planted last season, she just wasn't certain the chickens had left them alone enough to bloom.

the Sailor was able to sneak home last weekend and with the weather so good, cleared some trees. The section to the left just needs the stumps removed before it begins its new life as an herb garden.

The photos are a little blurry, but on her way back from Port Townsend Mum stopped by this nursery- Far Reaches Farm - and picked up a few new chicken approved additions to the garden.

The white flowers are the first bloom of a Rhododendron who endured a hard-core pruning, cutting back 12 years of growth to basically the ground. It was mostly trunk with little green, now reversed!
In front of it are Iris bulbs and yet more alpine strawberries (they're everywhere!!)

Ganymede taste tested the new delphiniums and opted to leave them alone. Thank goodness.
Behind the delphiniums is a new project- bishop's weed! Yeah, that's got to go...

Last year, Peter Rabbit and his hungry cohorts decimated mum's "spilled milk" flower arrangement.
This year even the chickens are leaving the sweet allysum (Lobularia maritima) alone!
The lone purple stems are a new addition to the mystery plant pile- the label's washed off!
Irises on the far right, Peonies and Purple Vinca round out the rest of the bed.

Pieris Japonica- has been blooming for several weeks now and the chickens love to siesta beneath it.

Japanese Red Maple and a Rhododendron, this one blooms pink but the petals fade to white. 

And yet more alpine strawberries!

 Another rhododendron- but you can see a snippet of the dog kennel and the garden shed!

Another view of the Japanese Red Maple and Rhododendron- the structure to the left is the bbq hut. Beyond those trees is the river!

A better view of the green house and raised garden bed- and our deathstar! It's a rolly-compost ball :)

The ladies insisted on following me around as I did my little photoshoot-  the Easter Egger is Circe, the Cochin is Artemis, and the golden-laced Wyandotte is probably Tequila  but the 'Twits are hard to tell apart.

I leave you now with the view of my homework chair- I've got two six page essays to write and two presentations to prep for, but at least I can't complain about the view!