Susy Homemaker Update!

     So, I'm apparently a few days behind myself when it comes to updating you lot on recent events, so here comes a (slightly late) Homebrew update!
     Thursday, I decided I was tired of looking at our disgusting jug of juice. I won't show you a picture (too nasty) but I will describe it to you. The wine had separated into three distinct layers: on the bottom, a silt made up of zest and pulp and other fine particles (i don't even know), in the middle, the wine, which was clear and beautiful, and on the top, frothy foam, thick like sea foam, with bloated raisins floating in it. Nothing glamorous here, folks. Anyway, we decided that the thing to do was to try to siphon out the good layer, and tried to filter the silt from the other layers.
     The siphoning went well. We pulled probably a gallon and a half of wine from the jug, and had another gallon of silty goodness leftover. The silt, we tried to filter through paper towels, coffee filters, a sieve, anything. Nothing would filter it. Everything clogged up in half a second, so we abandoned the silt and focused on the wine.
     Now, let's talk about this wine. It tastes almost exactly like grapefruit juice still, except for the vapors in the back of your throat from the alcohol. Oh, and the fact that it is six hundred times more sour than anything i have ever sipped before. It's literally one of the most sour liquids I've ever consumed, it makes me take on a literal sour-face, and I eat lemons for fun. We rinsed the jug, and poured the wine back in there, but we decided to add a bit more sugar, about one cup (packed) of brown sugar. Then, we shoved it back into our canning cupboard, and ran away.

     Meanwhile, on the gardening front, I am sad to report that approximately all of our delicious hot peppers have fallen victim to... THE GOPHER!  -Dun Dun DUNNNN! This is the most sinister gopher I have ever encountered, using guerrilla warfare to taunt me. He's taken out my hot peppers,five out of six of my bell peppers, and pretty much everything related to squash. Seriously, this is one evil little bugger.

The war rages on.

     That said, he seems to have an aversion to tomatoes, so those things are going NUTS! We have a couple dozen tomato plants all popping out little greenies! YAY! before long, I'll be canning tomatoes like crazy, in about a hundred different ways, which I will tell you more about as I get there.

     Okay, that's the Suzie Homemaker Update! Does anyone have any suggestions for my homesteading projects? I'd really appreciate any advice on Baron VonGopher, and how to get him out of my garden! Thanks, dear readers!

The Sky Boom!

I realize that this picture is neither incredibly exciting, nor clear, and yes, that is definitely my thumb, but what you are looking at is an awesome rig I built for watering my garden, and I am going to teach you how to make one!

Imagine a crane that follows you around your garden, but instead of a cable for lifting weight, the crane has a hose attached to it that lets you water your entire garden without fighting the hose. That is the SkyCrane. last year, we put soaker hoses through the entire garden, one in each of the raised beds. Unfortunately, the soaker hoses decided that one year of soaking was enough, and that from now on they are Spraying, leaky hoses. Obviously, I needed to find an alternative, so I decided to run a hose and water my plants by hand. It would give me a chance to get in there and notice the plants individually, and since I already had a garden hose, it wasn't going to cost anything. Perfect!
Then I tried lugging the hose through the garden, around the corners, and getting snagged on just about everything. That wasn't going to work for me. It was about then that I invented (okay, maybe I stole the idea from a self-serve carwash, but it definitely has a cooler name now) the SKYCRANE! (yes, I know, the skycrane is a heavy-lifting helicopter, but my nephew thinks the name is cool, so we're going to go with it.)
SO! Here, essentially, is what the Skycrane is: a T-shaped boom made out of lightweight fence-pipe, a set of counterweights, and a hose wrapped to the end, all supported by a fence post on the edge of the garden. It was incredibly simple to make, taking only about twenty minutes to put together, and because I built it out of scrap from around the yard, it was completely free.

Since I am not entirely convinced that my description is concise enough for you, I present a very technical digram rendered in exquisite detail:

Hopefully that clears everything up, but if not, be sure to post any questions in the comments section, and I will answer them ASAP. Hope you like it!