Andy's Idea Factory

For those of you who follow this blog , our socials (links below), or our YouTube , I've been slacking on posting some of our big ideas for the year because, well honestly, there's kind of a lot going on, to say the least! In a perfect world, with an excess of free time, great sleep, and the modern conveniences, we'd keep you updated here... but it's not a perfect world, and none of those things have been in excess for us right now!  So creating a new blog post or YouTube for all the fun things we've learned, tested, built, tried, failed, and rebooted this year... just hasn't been possible. Instead... I'm going to summarize, like the video above, and if you want me to elaborate on one of the projects, message me or comment below and I'll start there! It'll help me with the motivation if you do! Because I'd LOVE to be documenting this journey better, it's just for lack of time that I don't!  For background... what we're building is the...

Hey gardeners, if you spend your days dragging around hoses to make sure every beloved plant gets watered, then this PSA tidbit is for you. That was me, for 7 years  –  moving hoses like a mule. We moved into our house in Steamboat II in 2013, promptly put in a new perennial bed along our front walk with the cardboard-lasagna method , and began taking divided plants from friends and the You Dig It program to fill it in. It’s a long bed, the length of our 40-50’ walkway, and about 5’ wide, so yes, that meant I was dragging around hoses to water it because the water pressure in our older home isn't strong enough to push water through more than one 3/4" hose. Mondays it was the front of the bed, Tuesdays it was the back of the bed, and so on. We even put in 2 berms at the edge of the yard, to reduce our grass acreage, but because of our lack of a watering system, those fill-dirt piles sat there for 4 years without water or plants, an eyesore to the neighbors, I'm sure. Ov...

In October we posted when we first got our Tower Garden . Now it's time to share a little about what we've learned! A quick summary and recap: What's a Tower Garden ?  First, it's compact: It's literally a 4 foot tall by 1 foot wide white tower with 20 net pots that sits atop a 1 foot by 3 foot 20 gallon reservoir. Next, it's water and energy efficient: A pump inside the reservoir distributes water with nutrients to the plants' roots that hang from the net pots. In recycling the water every 15 minutes, the Tower Garden uses 10% of the water that traditional gardening does. It's also on a 125 watt timer (included), so it waters the roots every 30 minutes for 15 minutes, meaning no work for you, and costing about $4 per month to run. So on to what we've learned - Chapter 1 Seeds and Lights ... For anyone who says they can't garden - either born without a green thumb, devoid of space (apartment owners), or simply without the time, Tower...

Ever since the first time I saw one of these systems, I thought, "yes, one day you will have one of those."  The day has arrived. That first time was three years ago, when the Juice Plus Company first released The Tower Garden ® as their newest product of their short list of healthy living items, and a friend came in to the Yampa Valley Sustainability Council 's monthly meeting to show it off.  It wasn't just me. Everyone in the room went, "oooooh," "ahhhhh." Granted, this was a warm audience - a room packed with gardeners, local-foodies, and health nuts - but we oooh'd none the less. For lack of space in our previous quaint home, we held off even though the Tower Garden takes up a total of maybe six square feet.  But as soon as we moved into our new home in December I knew, come fall, we'd be putting together our first Tower Garden®.  And we just did. Let me backtrack a little; we love  to garden.  As soon as the snow melted thi...

In parts 1 and 2 of this series I discussed the insides and outsides of your body as an aspect of Healthy Living. Read the label of your bath and body products to avoid harmful toxins and improve physical and mental health. Same goes for your food labels and choices and healthy eating, in the post prior to this one on Healthy Eating . But for me a big part of how I live healthy is the health of my environment and my personal sustainability. The overall health of your environment reflects on your overall health. First, I have spent years perfecting our home's energy- in Chinese Medicine the flow of the home is central to the personal health of those dwelling in it. Read up on Feng Shui if you haven't heard of it, but the finer points are easy: remove the clutter, create movement, balance the dark space with light, bring in greenery, and pay attention to electronics (turn them off regularly!) and other potentially energetically harmful items, locations, etc. Such as, d...

Last week I shared last year's salsa recipe, but we're still getting tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and you can't just make salsa! Last year was our first year in the CSA, and every time we got a new bounty, I went online and searched recipes by ingredients. But we had extra single ingredients too... and made pickles out of the extra long italian cukes, parboiled and froze okra, green beans, and diced potatoes, and made pesto out of all that arugula. But next to salsa, our second favorite recipe that uses everything is the Gazpacho. It brings me back to summers in Chicago growing up. I can't take claim for the recipe (although as always, a little altered!), but the fresh CSA vegetables, uncooked and melded in flavor, speak for themselves! So much so that a local chef tasted our first batch with yellow tomatoes and said it was the best he'd ever had. Palisaide Colorado, Grown With Love, baby! Thanks Cameron Place! Joy of Cooking's Gazpacho with Colorado...

It's that time of year.... The CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) club we're in has peaked! Last week we brought home a truckload of tomatoes and peppers peppers peppers! and so it's SALSA time again! Last year was my first canning/jarring experience. It was grand. Despite learning a valuable lesson about shielding my eyes, nose, and nails from those spicy peppers, and burning myself once or twice on that steam from the boiling jars, I had a very successful yield of about twenty jars of salsa that became our family Christmas presents! I sampled several recipes in order to use all our vegetables, and chopped my heart out.... this is what we came up with: Chinacat Salsa ** 12 cups* cored, chopped tomatoes [ i use some yellow tomatoes to sweeten it up ] *(or about 14-15 medium toms) 2 12 ounce cans organic tomato paste 3 cups (or 4medium) chopped onions 2 cups lemon juice (or 8medium lemons squeezed) 8-10 jalepenos, seeded, finely chopped 4-6 long green or red chiles, see...

This summer we're trying that "as seen on TV" Topsy Turvy Tomato grower because our growing season is ridiculously short and we needed to be able to bring them back inside in September easily. Right now ours isn't very heavy, and we only put in 1/3 of the dirt to keep it light as well. We'll see how heavy it gets in late August! But it brought me to wonder, can't you build one of these on your own? It's essentially a plastic container with a hole. The topsy turvy is a round cylinder, hole at the bottom, wires at the top holding it up. It drains a lot of water so it needs to be over a towel or outside. In thinking of what plastic containers have holes and handles, you could easily build one of your own with a milk jug (best for its handle maybe), 2-liter bottle, or a wide cardboard tube lined with a garbage bag. The TT came with a styrofoam bumper for the hole so water and dirt wouldn't drain out- so cutting one of those is a good idea too, although...

IDEA: This summer I made a temporary vegetable storage "device" in my master bathroom window. The premise is that we joined a vegetable co-op last spring that brought fresh organic veg up from Palisade, CO every week from June until December, and while we got just enough of some items, potatoes, squash, peppers, and others were so plentiful we had to start thinking about storage. We have a small ranch style house with a carport and minimal storage. No basement, attic, garage, etc. We have plenty of closet space, but after further research with thermometer and humidity gauge, the closets weren't optimal for storage. Temperature and humidity are the key to storing home grown vegetables. The three combinations for long-term storage are cool and dry (50-60˚F / 10-15˚C, 60% relative humidity), cold and dry (32-40˚F / 0-4˚C, 65% relative humidity), and cold and moist (32-40˚F / 0-4˚C, 95% relative humidity). In ideal circumstances, vegetables can store up to 4 to ...