Moultrie House and Garden Blog: Busy weekend

On Saturday, we harvested our first bergamot from the new tree. It was very light and probably overripe, so I didn't think it'd be worth juicing it, and frankly we have plenty of bergamocello (from commercial bergamots) this year, so no need for the zest. I decided to make a quarter-batch of Lucy's belle-mere's Vin d'Orange with it:

I also found green walnuts at the Alemany Farmers Market, and bought 4 pounds of them to make nocino:

It turned out I had a few extras, so I also made a small batch of Paula Wolfert's vin de noix:

Now I just have to wait 40 days to find out how they come out. :)

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As I mentioned last week, the yard is in full-on summer growth mode. The purple sage, in particular, is about 2 times the size it was before our trip:

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Now that our mail slot is in the person-door to the garage, rather than the vehicle door, we had to figure out a way to keep the mail from falling to the floor. We looked for purpose-built baskets and bins, but the only one we could find cost $125! No, thank you. So, we went to the Container Store (where I needed to pick up some canning supplies for the liqueur-making anyway), and found a wire in-out bin that only needed minor modifications to work pretty well:

Cam used his Dremel to cut the bottom out of the top bin, so it guides mail down into the lower one. It's not perfect -- magazines just shoot out the top -- but it's better than nothing. I think another couple of modifications might do the trick...

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We came back from errands yesterday, and found Robin on the porch, working on the tile some more. He laid down an epoxy patch over the shattered tile, and he'll come back when it's cured to sand it smooth and level with the intact tiles, and scrape out the areas where the grout lines should show through.