Making homemade pumpkin ice cream
Looking for some more ways to use up some of my pumpkin puree, I decided to make some pumpkin ice cream. Here is the pumpkin ice cream recipe I used.
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How to make your own cheap weather station
Though the prices for personal weather station have dramatically dropped (around $100) over the past few years, I decided to work on making my own. The primary measurement I wanted was temperature given this is the specific one that could be dramatically different from my neighbors (or neighborhood weather station) given the many unique microclimates your yard can have. Step 1: Create an account and weather station at Weather…
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Using leaf mulch in your garden for weed prevention
Above is unfortunately what my vegetable garden looks like, still have some cilantro, bunching onions, bulb onions, garlic, broccoli, and spinach growing but obviously I have a blanket of tiny weeds emerging with large amount of rain we have been getting. This gives me a few options: A. Painfully pull every weed from the garden bed…repeat B. Give up on my plants and just lay down some black plastic…
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Pumpkin with 259,764J of energy smashing a car
For most people watching a pumpkin dropped on a car from a crane is good enough…though the scientist in me wants to know how much force did this pumpkin have on impact. If I have you curious as well I did the math below… WARNING MATH/PHYSIC CONTENT!!! UPDATE: It has been too long since I have thought about physics…thanks for the corrections to my incorrect memory of Weight/Mass in…
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Making a pumpkin pie from scratch
While out picking out pumpkins for my daughters I saw some nice organic heirloom pumpkins (Winter Luxury Pie) and decided to try my hand in using a couple of these to make a pumpkin pie instead of using canned pumpkin. One note make sure you are using a pumpkin labeled as a sugar or pie pumpkin, using your standard jack-o-lantern variety will lead to very watery and less velvety…
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cayenne | dehydrator | peppers
How to make cayenne powder
After letting my cayenne peppers ripen some more in the grow box I decided that this was good enough and decided to make some cayenne pepper for winter BBQs. The different stages of ripeness provides slightly different flavors, from what I have read partially ripe can give an excellent heat with a unique flavor. As you can see the color is also a little different than what you would…
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Controlling my growbox with a mobile phone
How many times have you been riding the bus and have been curious what temperature your computer growbox was running and if the plants needed to be watered? Ok maybe never, but I decided to solve this problem anyway. There is also no point in identifying that you may have a problem without having a way to do something about so I also implemented the ability to override…
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Growing basil indoors with a desk lamp
I recently moved to a new office building and unfortunately I had a lacked a few years at the company to get a window office. With a desire to have some plant life in my office, I grabbed a couple of the basil plants I cloned, dropped them in some potting soil, and positioned a desk lamp with a CFL bulb. I can’t seem to find my lamp timer…
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Summer harvest
Well it hasn’t been a great year here in the Northwest for summer vegetables but got enough tomatoes and peppers to make some salsa and get stocked up with enough jalapeno pepper powder (been great on omelets) until next year. With a larger abundance of ripe jalapeno peppers this batch of peppers have a more festive look to them. Here are the peppers ground up, as you can see…
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How to peel a tomato
I always settled on making salsa leaving the skins on, knowing there had to be a better way I did a little research and learned a simple way to get those pesky skins off with minimal effort. The process is very simple, get a pot of boiling water, drop in your tomato for 10-15 seconds ad immediately remove and drop in a bowl of ice water. This submersion…
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Ladybug in the grow box
One problem with growing plants indoors is you don’t always get the benefits of beneficial insects, but as you can see above it doesn’t always have to be that way. At least one little lady bug snuck into the grow box and seems to have found some snacks on a basil plant. If anyone is curious I also have one of my jalapeno pepper plants in the grow box…
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The winner of the Annabees giveaway is
The winner of the bottle of Annabees bee attractant is Mary C. That is the last of our current wave of contests but I am always out looking for new ones.