Permaculture Certification

  Summer has pretty much passed me by. Between working on the rental house we bought in May and trying to keep up with life I barely had time to go out into the garden and look at the plants this year.
  Some things grew marvelously without me. Other things really needed my attention and, therefore, were not as strong as they could have otherwise been. Here are a couple of pictures:

From Garden

From Garden

Pretty nice, right? And this is what it turned into:

From Garden

From Garden

Jungle...

  I have learned a few things this season, which makes up for the lack of success I achieved in the beds. I think the first lesson I am drawing from this year's garden is that my tomato plants need a bed of their own in which they can just consume all the space. 

  The best thing to come from this summer was my completion of the first of my certifications in Permaculture Design. I was hesitant to take a course online due to the lack of hands on experience. But then in March, Geoff Lawton offered an online certification that promised to be incredibly comprehensive and worth the money. I have to say, it definitely was.

  I submitted my final design on September 26 and I haven't heard anything to tell me there were issues so I'm hoping that means I have a certificate coming in the mail from Australia. I'll post the design elements in my next update.

  So now I have to tear the garden apart and start several large batches of compost from the green materials in the garden and the dead leaves that will shower my yard in the coming weeks. 

  I almost forgot to mention that I also finished a Master Composter class through my local county this summer. So I know everything there is to know about municipal yard waste composting. Fun times!

The results

So the seitan was a bit rubbery. And a little too salty. But I'm working on ways to remedy this. The next time I make it I am going to try adding a couple of things. Some of the recipes I've found call for tomato paste or even flour. I'm hoping by experimenting with some of these alternatives I can control the outcome a bit better.

My Kombucha brew is nearly done. I waited the 7 days originally specified and got a little skim on the top, not nearly done. Gotta wait a little longer. I have a couple people interested in this stuff already so if you are an interested party that has not yet contacted me, let me know and I will get a batch out to ya. While I know there are folks out there selling the culture and making money on the product, I'm a big proponent of both freeware as well as socialism. I believe that if I make something and it takes very little time and energy for me to do so, the product should be something I share freely. Aside from the amount of material that my family and I need to survive, I don't need to hoard or charge for the simple results of my work. I enjoy gardening and cooking so why not show off my talents by sharing the extra?

If I give something to someone, they will be inclined to give to someone else and eventually it will come back to me.