Bok Choy and Cabbage gets Bigger -- Garden Update 10/30

How are my plants doing today? I removed some unproductive tomato plants because it's starting to get cold again. I think this year will be much colder than last year, so I'm taking steps to remove tomato plants before frost comes.

DOWNSTAIRS

Bok Choy looking nice

The Baltic Porter didn't make it

It comes with great sadness to announce that our batch of Baltic porter is undrinkable. When we went to transfer it to secondary, we could see and smell that an infection. It's a great disappointment to lose such a potentially good beer. However, there are some lessons learned from this.Always sanitize and sterilize your equipment. Additionally, we'll need to purchase a new bucket/airlock to replace the old one, as we don't want to risk the infection lingering in the same bucket until next batch. Here are some photos of the infection for those who are interested in that sort of thing.

Pumpkin Apple Hard Cider

It's fall again, and pumpkins are in season. As many other breweries have pumpkin beers, I too will experiment with pumpkin. It wasn't easy finding a recipe for pumpkin cider, but I found one to modify.

It isn't fall without pumpkin

Leafy Greens -- Garden update 10/22

Don't think I forgot about my garden, it's still alive. The content has been changing so much lately. Here are photos of how it looked this morning.

Upstairs

Tomato plants till alive

Lathe compound nuts

Since I still have the wreckless tendency to overtighten things, it was no surprise when I stripped the T-bolts for adjusting the compound angle on my lathe.  I obviously had too much leverage with a long 14mm wrench to tighten the nuts.  Another concern when the compound has a nut to tighten it is stripping the hex off the nut, which is no fun.  I opted to repair it by making some nuts to go in the base of the compound and secure it with an Allen screw.  This way I won't be as likely to overtighten it because the Allen wrench is much shorter than a 14mm wrench, it's also less likely to be obstructed by other things.  Also the bonus of not needing a 14mm wrench, ANOTHER VICTORY FOR AMERICA