Our efforts to make our landscape more edible suffered a couple of setbacks today. First, our beautiful, bountiful basil crop, which we were all set to harvest today and turn into puree to keep us supplied throughout the winter, got zapped by a frost last night. By this morning, more than half of the leaves had turned a sort of bruise-colored brown, either all over or in spots. I pulled the plants and salvaged what I could, but by the time Brian had picked it over and processed it, we only had enough puree to fill about eight compartments in the ice cube tray. So I guess we'll have to ration ourselves to one or two basil cubes per month if we want this to hold us through the winter. Makes me feel like a real dope for not checking the weather report last night and rushing out to get it picked sooner.
Then, these days, we finally started the way of turning the remains of our forsythia bushes into mulch?And fast located the sensible boundaries of our little secondhand chipper. It cannot take care of some thing loads larger than a finger's width in diameter, and it regularly stops in mid-mulch and desires to be cleared. Brian in the end decided that the crack within the housing, which we might first attempted to attach near and then patched over with duct tape, changed into catching maintain of stick fragments and inflicting them to jam the mechanism?And the crack itself modified into growing steadily larger as increasingly sticks had been given wedged into it. So we had to call a halt to the mulching method till we will figure out a extra steady way of repairing the gadget. Brian has decided that it needs to be patched on the interior, not virtually the out of doors?Which shall we out duct tape, due to the fact it would fast peel off and gum up the motor. On the opposite hand, we cannot use whatever too rigid, both, due to the fact it might now not adhere properly to the curved housing, and if it fell off it'd get stuck inside the blades. I confused whether or not a few form of plastic may be molded to the case after which melted into location, but Brian considers that idea unworkable. So it seems we are going to must (a) determine out a way to repair the chipper, simply so we will (b) honestly fix the chipper, in advance than we can (c) end processing the hedge into mulch. And despite the fact that we've got floor up all of the small bits, we're going to nevertheless must (d) package deal deal up the larger sticks that the chipper cannot manipulate, and (e) try to steer our pal with the fireplace to take the stumps.
Oh well, no one ever said this developing meals stuff might be smooth.
