These are photos of just some of the things made recently here on the homestead.
1. Spatulas, made from cherry wood blanks on the band saw, finished with linseed oil.
2. Onesies, dyed with turmeric and annatto seed. Find the how-to guide on our website.
3. 100% recycled puppets from LilySilly toys. Available for purchase on her website or on her Etsy!
4. Maple Syrup, Grade B .vs. Grade A, a collecting and boiling labor of diligence and love. Yum!
What’s better than plain homemade yogurt? That’s right, little-bitty 8 ounce fruit- on-the-bottom maple yogurts that you can take to-go.
Here are some extremely easy and fast instructions on how-to make six jars of this stuff. Thanks to our very own Danila for this very useful innovation in the well-established field of cottage yogurt making.
SO EASY, YOU’LL FLIP!
First into a measuring cup measure out 2-3 tbsp of already made yogurt. You can use store bought yogurt, just make sure it says somewhere on the package that the yogurt contains active live cultures. More
Our friend Ali brought over a couple white baby onesies and some fresh turmeric, wanting to try out dying cloth with natural food dyes. I was like, “Right On! chemical dyes are all toxic and gross, let’s do it, and do it now!”
This deluxe onesie is dyed with turmeric, and the collage fabric is dyed with both turmeric (yellow) and the annatto seeds (lush orange). Super cute and safe for babies to snack on if they get hungry.
We also had some annatto seeds from the tropical achiote tree, which I had plucked off of a tree just some weeks ago on the Big Island of Hawai’i. So we dyed some fabric with them as well. Originally I gathered a bag full of these seeds to draw with, but I heard it works on fabric too. Since these are used often in natural food dying, you can order them easily online or get them in the international section of a supermarket.
Annatto seeds in the pod
Here’s how you do. approximately. You scrape the annnatto seeds out of the pods. Most likely though, you’ll have the dried stuff already in powder form, so you can skip this step and the next. Then you grind them up in a coffee grinder and mix it with water in a stainless steel, ceramic or pyrex pot. Smells really great! We used about 1 tbsp of powder to 3-4 cups of water. Note- as with the turmeric to follow you can add more or less to intensify or soften the color.
I wanted to make a quick post about a super easy and super cheap woodshed we built back in the Fall of 2011. Using mostly materials we salvaged from the trash or re-used, we threw up this shed in a little more than a weekend. It has a capacity of around 8 cords, but we use it for much more than just wood storage, and it now keeps our tractor out of the elements, provides storage for straw bales, and houses miscellaneous items that needed a home. Think of it as an open-air barn.
Woodshed in progress, with a big load of wood waiting for a home. Danila's taking a break from attaching pallet rafters and rejoicing that this shed only cost $50 in materials!
Creations by Bread and Puppet
We’re planning to have a party Fri the 2nd of Nov, Halloween style, with a night time walk through the woods where we will entertain guests with giant beasts and whatnot. Whatnot? Let’s make some of that – I’m talking giant paper mache creatures, interactive scary installations that we can set up among trees and brambles.
Come to our house and help me make a vision for the walk. Bring craft supplies if you have any. If not, we can use cardboard, fabric, wheat paste, sticks and whatever else we find. Get creative, have a whole woods as your stage. If you can’t come on this day, just get in touch and we can meet other times, too. Bring scissors if you have them, fabric, paint…anything you think might be useful. Bring ideas and friends, too.
Mask I made last year, modeled by our "intern".
It is no secret that here at the Dacha Project, do-it-yourself (diy), is often our preferred method of getting the things we need. Our latest homemade adventure is building our own solar panel mounts. Why would we do such a thing? It’s three to five times cheaper, which is significant given that often the mounts nearly equal the costs of the panels. In all honesty it can be a bit complicated to securely attach the mounts, but our effort has been worth it in cost-savings alone.
Building our own also allows us to add any amount of panels at a time. Our latest addition includes two new solar panels that we named Lapland and Lucy. I just made those names up, but feel free to refer to our solar panels by those names anytime. This will result in a total sum of five solar panels. With our new battery bank, and the addition of Lucy and Lapland, we will run the Jenny (our beloved generator- real name) way less. Read the rest of the post for some more specifics on the materials used. More specifics are included below, but please note that this is not meant to be a comprehensive guide on how to do this, but a general description to inform of this very real possibility.
Specifics: We are building the mounts out of 1/8 inch (beefy) slotted struts, otherwise known as unistrut, and simple hardware that can be bought at the hardware store. This is easy to assemble, once you know the dimensions of your mount. The unistrut can be cut with a cut-off saw, and you’ll want to make sure to smooth out any jagged edges.
When mounting the mount to the roof make sure to include cross-braces (not pictured below), these can be made out of thinner gage struts. You have to make sure that you brace it enough that the wind doesn’t catch it and blow it off into the yard.
One day our roof will be covered in solar panels nestled into homemade mounts, put up two to three at a time!
Thanks to those who participated in our Vision + Mission survey! We used your answers to the question “How would you describe the Dacha Project to someone?” to create this word cloud.
We used a survey sent out to oru community to ask "How would you describe the Dacha Project to someone?"
This visualization played a big role in our first Vision + Mission meeting, which we had this morning. We are using it alongside our own list of words and ideas to create a Dacha Project tag line. So far there are many in the works that we like. If you didn’t get a survey, but would like one reply with your email address!
We will surely share our new tag line and mission statement as they solidify over the next two weeks. There might even be a community vote regarding the tag line!
Danila is pointing to the blown fuse, the small glass tube with its filament no longer in one piece
On a blustery early spring day, I was juicing carrots, oranges and parsley, when my juicer suddenly stopped working. I love this juicer and did not want to throw it away, so heart-broken I asked for advice. Joe and Danila said, let’s take it apart and see what’s wrong. After a few minutes of fiddling with a Philips head, we found a blown fuse on the circuit board. You know a blown fuse when you see won, because the filament inside the glass tube is broken, and no longer continuous.
We promptly replaced the fuse with one we had lying around (.25 cents at the hardware store), and in just ten minutes my old but sturdy juicer is back in action!
Joe says: Today, many appliances are made in such a cheap fashion that they don’t even have a fuse. Still, checking the fuse, or for the fuse is always a great idea. In this case, it saved us 80 dollars.
Danila says: Tips to remember- Label your wires and keep track of your screws.
I say: Fuses come in different gages. Look for the gage number written on the fuse or on your appliance, and replace it with one of equal value. Fuses are easy to replace, you can pop one out with your finger, or a butter knife, and they pop back in easily as well.
The Dacha is the happy to announce two new solar panels to the family! A larger write-up will follow. They are 240 watt polycrystalline PV panels that will boost our maximum power production over 2x what it is now. This brings us to roughly 700 watts of solar power!
Wow, I miss the days when we still had time to make mini-films about what we were up to. Maybe soon we will acquire a media intern to help us get back on that train!
For now, check out this series from when we had a kickin’ camera, and some time. It’s all about the building of our straw-bale cottage, named the Winter Palace. Each filmlette has its own style, so watch ’em all! They get funnier as the time goes on. Let us know if you like them, and maybe we’ll make more now!
Beware- after watching these, you should be fully equipped to start thinking about building a straw bale cottage of your own.
Winter Palace Pt 1- Let’s Dig- The start of our first building. A tool shed that emerged as a palace. Here we see the first steps (well after leveling the ground anyways) of digging the rubble trench.
Winter Palace Pt 1- Let’s Dig from Lea LSF on Vimeo.
