Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Harvest time!

The final harvest is here! All of the plants have have been killed by the frost and I still have lots of green tomato's! So I pulled all of the plants and cleaned out the beds and picked tomato's that were left over. The Deer earlier in the season munched my plants down so they got a vary late start, so I have allot of Green tomato's. Actually I only got a few red tomato's from my plants but that didn't stop me from preserving my tomato's for winter time stews and chili.

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Well here's an up date on how the tomato ripening tray is working it works great!



As you can see I'm storing them a way for a cold day, when hot chili will taste good.


Next year I think I will try canning, freezing works good but it takes a lot of room in the freezer.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

So many projects under the sun so little time (Update!)

Well I have a small step towards energy independents! I took the VW solar panel and retrofitted the ODBII plug with a set of Anderson power pole plugs so I could charge a 7.2 Amp hour 12 volt sealed lead acid Battery. I then took an old Pampers diaper wipe box and put the battery in side and mounted a cigarette lighter socket in the side of the box. After that I cut a chunk of wood to screw the cigarette liter socket to stiffen it up, then I screwed two four bladed terminals blocks to the other end of the chunk of wood.



With that done I connect the battery and the cigarette lighter socket to the terminals and made up another set of Anderson power pole plugs to connect to the terminal and ran them out off the side of the box to plug in the solar panel into for charging the battery.



The best part of this set up is I can use the Anderson power pole plugs to charge the battery from the solar panel or plug battery from the box into a radio or any thing else with Anderson power pole plugs on it.




Well I conclusion have made a small step towards energy independents because i can charge my cellphones from the sun and all the other small gadgets like my ipod and other stuff. In the design I have only a few concerns, one I think I need to vent the box because of heat. Also I'm not sure if the terminal blocks will heat up on the wood block under heavy load could be a problem. The last one is the charging circuit was for a car battery not a small sealed lead acid Battery. It does work I can charge my phone so I guess I will test and let you know what happens in a later update.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Time to harvest the tomatos! But there Green!


Well it is time to harvest my tomato's, But what do you do with green tomato's? We've have had at least 3 hard frosts and it end of October. I tried to cover the tomato's so the frost wouldn't get them. It worked OK, but I keep forgetting to put the cover on at night and take it off in the morning. So for this year I gave up because the plants were half dead and full of green tomato's. Plus a lot of them are splitting because there big. So what to do? Well I remembered mom putting tomato's in a paper bag to ripen but that was one at a time. I know if you put tomato's in the sun the outside will turn red and look ripe but the inside will still be green. So i did some research and found tomato's ripen from the inside out and from the bottom up and they don't need sun to do that. I Guess you can just put them in a warm dark place and the will ripen on there own. Well that took me to my next project a tomato ripening tray!
Basically the tray is an optional pot tray from my kitchen cabinets that i never installed. I used it so if any of the tomato's got rotten the mess would be contained, I also put some plastic in the bottom of the tray so if any did rot then the tray would be protected. Then I cut a paper grocery bag down one side and all way across the bottom and put it in the tray and cut another to go over the top this way it keeps it dark and holds some heat plus protects them from dust or any thing else. So far so good it works well! I did find out a few things a sense tomato's ripen from the bottom up turn them over that way the weight is on the part that ripens last and it won't get mushier. Also as they ripen i keep the green one on side and the more ripe one on the other side not sure why, but they seems to ripen then at the same pace. Ya I know it doesn't make sense but what can i say.