We can’t always do everything we want in the apartment but this year we wanted to have a better container garden. We’re going to plant using EarthBoxes. For our initial planting we’re going to use five boxes. Should be fun to see how they do on the porch. Later on, if this works well, we might add more.
Ice cream and Yogurt
We’ve been doing some more cooking. Banana and chocolate ice cream (but that’s not really cooking is it? Mixing?). Both came out very good. Yesterday Kate made her first batch of yogurt. We also made a pizza and used part of the cheese I made the other day.
Cheese failures and success
Monday night I tried for the second time to make mozzarella cheese. The first time I did it the cheese came out very good. On Monday I tried it using nonfat milk. Ick! It made something cheese-like but it wasn’t any good. So Kate went out yesterday and got some whole milk. I used that last night and it made a perfectly decent cheese. Kate’ll use the whey to make a pizza crust today and we’ll have a delicious pizza tonight!
Gearing up
I’m getting ready to start designing our temporary shelter. Granted it’s going to be several years before we even buy the property but I want to design a small cabin that we can live in for a year or more while we build the house. I have several books in addition to the Ewing book to serve as my guides. I fully expect the design of the cabin to evolve over time. I’ll set up a page on the site about the design once I get some things down.
ToDo List
I set up a system today to create and maintain a to-do list on the site. I’ll tweak it some more but for now it seems to be working fine. The new list is displayed in the side navigation bar.
Layout and tool changes
I created a new layout for the site this morning to be more like my writing site. A few differences between the sites but otherwise I have them more or less the same. The structural changes to the css file are more important — it’ll make it easier to change the scheme later.
I’ve also set the blog up with w.bloggar. It’s a handy tool for posting weblog entries. Nice interface and all of that. Although I don’t have much time this morning because I need to work on other projects I’d like to get more pages added to the site. Topics: vermicomposting, home design, and a page about our planned EarthBox garden.