Bamboo. Beds. Brewing. Bugs.

The Spring Internship is underway and the creative learning juices are flowing! Our focus for the last few weeks has been mostly on the gardens, composting, bamboo building, and kitchen creations.
Some California red worms were donated to us, so now we are vermiculturing with these little beauties.

We split and wove bamboo for our garden fencing, which will also be a spectacular trellis for the beans and some other vining fruits.
The cucumbers also received a lovely bamboo trellis which they are already starting to climb with vigor. Soon enough, we´ll be eating and pickling!
The interns also designed and planted a gorgeous garden, in which life is already sprouting. Green beans on the way...

Our fall gardens are blooming, which means seed saving and gathering. Here is a little fella hanging out on a carrot flower.
And the tiny grasshopers are back with their spontaneaouly-corregraphed group stem-dance. They still haven´t found our delicious gardens... yet.

In the meantime of all that gardening, to entertain ourselves on those rainy days, we have been brewing up some intoxicating concoctions. Dandelion wine: dandelion flowers, raisins, orange and lemon juice and peels, and yeasts from our wild mulberries...

And Mulberry wine....

... the leftover berries, not to be wasted, went into this little treat... Also, while we were in the fermenting mode, we went ahead and cooked up some beer. Our first attempt, and looking good!
The under-the-sink fermentation cabinet. Beer in the white buckets with their blow-off tubes, and mulberry wine in the bottles with balloons which we have to "burp" every so often. (And some olives curing in the back too...)

As for the building site (home for a little Earthen cottage), we have started digging the Hole to prep the earth for a fermentation tecnique we will be trying, as well as some earthbagging. Next week, roofing!