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Monthly Archives: March 2014

Feeding the worms

The garden plot with compost freshly tilled in … and the chickens working it Increasingly we think less in terms of fertilizing plants and more in terms of feeding the worms, on the grounds that if your worms are abundant and well fed, the plant life will flourish. Part of this process is compost. The […]

Culture for lunch: $5.99

If Southerners still ate traditional Southern cuisine cooked at home, the statistics on our health wouldn’t be what they are. You only have to look at what people have in their carts at the grocery store to see that almost nobody cooks from scratch anymore. I have a lot of doubts about whether young people […]

New gate for the new chicken lot

As of sunset today, the chickens’ new habitat is ready. They now have three grazing and scratching areas, each separated by gates: the garden, the orchard, and a section of woods. Six chickens can do a great deal of damage to grass, and we want the strongest possible turf in the orchard. When it became […]

Birds, everywhere

Who can identify this bird? Photo by Ken Ilgunas. Update: We think this bird is a pine warbler. It’s amazing how many birds there are around the abbey right now. Partly, no doubt, it’s because we’ve been feeding them. Partly, no doubt, it’s because it’s spring. But the birds are not just near the feeders. […]

Wheat: Proceed with caution

Previously in this blog I’ve expressed the opinion that the prevalence of gluten intolerance is exaggerated. Less than 1 percent of the population has coeliac disease. Still, gluten sensitivity seems to be increasing. Something must be going on. What could that be? Recently I came across an article about a renegade MIT scientist who has […]

How many days until Spring?

Everywhere you look these days, there’s a cardinal. This photo was taken from an upstairs, west-facing window at the abbey.

Changing domains: Not for the faint of heart

About four months ago, I moved out of the crippledcollie.com domain into this domain — acornabbey.com. Not only is a domain change a tedious and challenging process, even for a nerd. There also is the risk of losing readers. Frankly, I didn’t do the best of all possible jobs. I went to quite a lot […]

Nerd post: Hewlett Packard 3456a digital multimeter

One of the tragedies of being a nerd is not being able to afford the toys one would like to have when those toys are new. But, thanks to eBay, we can go back in time and find bargains in some of the cool things we’d have liked to have many years ago. A recent […]