If you’re looking to add a little fun and whimsy to your garden this year consider growing a few birdhouse gourds.  

Last year we grew about ten vines and were blessed with an abundance of fruit.  

Once they reached maturity and the vines began to wither and turn brown, we collected the gourds and placed them in the attic of our barn for the winter.

Over the past few months the lime green skin of the gourds has molded and shrunk away leaving a hard, weather proof exterior.  

To turn the gourds into birdhouses, we simply drilled a hole in the large bulbus bottom using a hole cut drill bit. The interior has fibrous sections that can be pushed back if they happen to be blocking the entrance hole. You can leave the seeds, I’ve heard the birds will eat them as they clear space to make room for a nest.   

Then we sanded any bits of dry, flaky skin to smooth the surface of the gourd.  

Then drilled a hole for hanging.  

I left the bits of curly stem as added character.   

You can leave them as is, or seal with a stain or clear coat. They can even be painted.  

I decided to use some stain we had lying around from an earlier project. I think it helped enhance the contrasting pattern of the gourd and almost gives it a pottery look.  

Birdhouse gourds make wonderful presents to the gardener or bird lover in your life. I plan on giving one to my mom as a Mother’s Day present. 

To see what else we have growing, visit our farm blog at Iron Oak Farm.   

A year or so ago, I taught a writing class to folks with Alzheimer’s and dementia. On an exercise writing about travel, one gentleman commented that in England, “they have a hundred religions and only one sauce.” Well, that may have been true once upon a time. A few hundred years ago is when Voltaire first made that comment, though he cited only sixty religions. But still one sauce. Bad, bland food seems to be a pesky detail Brits have a hard time shaking. Even now, upon returning from England and telling friends (who haven’t visited the mighty island) about my trip, they instantly don a face of genuine concern before asking, “How was the food?” then wait with bated breath for me to traumatize them with tales of jellied eel and black pudding. Instead, I tell them about the fabulous vegetable gardens and spread the gospel of pickled onions. Truthfully, I don’t know how horrendous English food might have once been. Maybe pretty bad, considering its global reputation (but let’s take it with a grain of salt, especially when judgement comes from our own country that now values quantity over quality). Hubs assures me that English cuisine has greatly improved over the recent years and I have to say, I’ve not had a bad meal yet.

But regardless of food, one thing I’m certain they do right is booze. And how. But I’m not just talking about beer. With his abundance of fruit from the garden, my father-in-law puts it to good use by making his own rum and wine. Too many currants? Ferment them into vino! Tired of eating damson? Drown it in rum! His concoctions are good, though I have to say it’ll make your eyes cross. If you’re thinking of making fruit wine at home, check out this handy guide: http://www.fruitwinemaker.com/ 

And if you’re here for something stronger, I’ll pass along the easiest recipe ever. Drink the rum, and use the boozy fruit as a topping for ice cream.

Rumtopf 

Ingredients: 

1 lb. fruit (berries, peaches, plums, etc.)

1 heaping cup sugar

rum

Directions: 

• Wash fruit and cut in half.
• Put fruit and sugar in rumtopf. Add enough rum to completely cover the fruit. Mix.
• Close rumtopf and store in a cool, dry place. You can add more fruit/sugar/rum as you like.
• Wait about 6 weeks and voila! Fruit flavored rum, and rum flavored fruit!

I took advantage of the somewhat warmer temperatures last weekend to spend a bit of time in the barn working on our kitchen island project. I managed to get the door frames and panels put together and hung, and I also managed to mill and install the drawer fronts. All the pieces will need to come apart again for sanding and finishing, but it was motivating to see the progress and to better visualize what the final piece will look like. So far, all the lumber has been a windfall from the farm. Pine, standing dead for several years in our grove, and American black walnut from trees we dozed off a couple of pond dams. We milled the lumber using an Alaskan chainsaw mill and a Hud-Son homestead-sized bandsaw mill. You can read about all of this in the earlier installments here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

Now that the doors and drawers are more or less completed, I cannot wait to work on the kitchen island's black walnut top.

I cut open mortises on the stiles (upright framing members) and tenons on the rails (horizontal framing members) for the kitchen island's cabinet doors. The open mortise and tenon joint also goes by the names: "corner bridle joint" and "slot mortise and tenon." Don't you just love language? I did all of this machining with my table saw and cleaned things up with a 1/4-inch chisel.

When done well, the open mortise and tenon joint is strong and makes squaring up your door frames a snap. The table saw is a little crude for this kind of work, but in my case, crude is OK, just as long as it is strong. Before I glued the frames, I milled some 1/4-inch stock for the panels. I joined the panels using a floating lap joint -- hopefully this will allow sufficient movement to keep the boards from splitting as they move.

I glued the works up with Gorilla's wood glue, which likes to cure at temperatures above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. So, I glued and clamped in the little laundry room in the barn where the heat currently comes from the drier, which we run twice a day. I ran it for about 50 minutes during this exercise to be sure there was plenty of heat to cure the glue.

Since this entire project is based on using what you have and spending virtually no cash, I opted to hang the doors using some 1970s vintage cabinet hinges I had removed during a room-demolition project back there. These particular hinges are 3/8-inch surface mount inset hinges, and in order to make them work properly, I needed to chop 3/8-inch deep notches in the kitchen island's legs to accommodate the hinge design. Squint a bit and you can see the notches on the righthand leg pretty well. An added advantage of this is that the hinge pins are recessed and won't try to grab the person working on this, the sink-side of the island. I say that to make it look like I really planned to chop those notches from the beginning -- which I did not.

For the drawer fronts, I milled out 5/8-inch pine and screwed it to the door boxes. It took a little fussing to locate the fronts -- I used a couple of spacers to get it consistent. These door fronts still have a date with the router or one of my hand planes for final shaping. The drawer box needs some quality time with hand plane and sander as well.

There you have it. Cool, eh? I spent at least 10 minutes trying the doors and drawers and feeling warm in the 40-degree shop because everything worked as planned and looked decent to boot.

As I was admiring my handiwork on the kitchen island, Karen came out to see if I had cut and milled that black walnut for her. She has some projects of her own in mind, and I had promised long ago to grub out the raw material for her. With that gentle reminder, I sawed and planed some of the more interestingly figured pieces of the black walnut I milled with the bandsaw mill. She sanded the dickens out of it and applied a food-safe oil finish to the pieces. I was taken aback by the wood's beauty, which makes me even more motivated to get going on the kitchen island's black walnut top. Stay tuned.

Just a quick update on my kitchen island project. Last weekend I built the drawer boxes and framed one of the doors before deciding it was just too cold and damp to linger out in the barn any longer. I thought about hooking up the portable propane forced air heater but opted to let the glue cure in the barn's small heated laundry room instead. If you remember, in the first part of this project, I milled some dead pine, re-sawed and planed it and then started constructing the island's frame. In the second installment, I completed most of the frame using hand tools and in the third installment, I framed the drawer slides and milled and planed additional lumber for the ends and back. My goal is to have this piece finished by Christmas -- I might not make it, but I will try.

Here's the kitchen island with all three drawer boxes inserted  into the slides. I will make faces to cover the visible ends of the drawers once I build and fit the cabinet doors. I'm going to leave the slides as they are -- with a little sanding and waxing -- and see how it goes before considering installation of some nylon or teflon glides.

I built the drawer boxes using pine that I sawed from a dead tree. I planed the front, back and sides down to 1/2-inch thick. The bottom is right at 1/4-inch thick and it sits in a groove around the bottom of the front and sides. The back sets down on the bottom and I pinned it with a couple of small finishing nails.

I apologize for the location of the focal point in this photo -- or the focus point, more truthfully. My phone's camera isn't too sophisticated. However you can see that I joined the corners of the drawer boxes using interlocking dados and rebates. I made the cuts with the table saw and cleaned them out with a 1/4-inch chisel. It took a little dinking to get everything to fit nice and snug but once it did, the boxes pretty much squared up on their own. All the joints are glued with Gorilla wood glue. Molly the Border Terrier is my faithful woodworking companion. Here she is taking a break from tracking down rodents to look over my handiwork. You can also see that I have days of sanding ahead of me, but I find that to be fairly relaxing work.

It feels like this project is finally coming together. The drawer boxes actually slide easily and land square with the front, even with a 10-pound weight in them. I would have continued on to the cabinet doors, but the weather chased me in on Saturday. And on Sunday, I stayed indoors to write a chapter for the book Karen Keb and I are writing together. It's called Plowing With Pigs and is about all kinds of 21^st-Century homestead solutions, including making stuff with materials you can get for free. Stay tuned for more information on the book and on this project.