The Homegrown String Band Live in The Henhouse 4/20

Here's a short video we recorded a few weeks back in our living room. We will try to get some better quality video up soon, but even more we are hoping to be out playing live again. Take care, be safe, be smart, hope to see you soon!

- "Rooster" Rick and the Cacklin' Hens

Rooster Rick Blue Chip Pick

Blue Chip Guitar Picks are hands down my first choice in flatpicks. They sound great, make zero string noise, last forever, and glide easily across your strings. The space age material used to make these picks is not only incredibly durable, it also provides the most comfortable non-slip grip I have ever found in a flatpick. My favorite model is the little Kenny Smith Signature pick in 40 or 50 thickness; with my custom imprint of course. The 40 equals a 1.0 mm pick, the 50 is about a 1.25mm thickness.

Rooster Rick Blue Chip Guitar Pick  - photo by Rick Jackofsky

www.bluechippick.net

Crazy Beans April 12, 2014

Rooster Rick, Bushman Harmonica, and Larrivee 000-50 Guitar
@ Crazy Beans Cafe  - photo by Ed Neale

Join us this Saturday night for an evening of Homegrown fun at Crazy Beans Cafe in Miller Place. Looks like we are doing the first set as a trio, (Rick Georgianne, and Annalee) then Erica will be joining in with her fiery fiddle for the second set. The show is free, keep these live music events going, support the venue by having a snack, coffee, tea, or a cold beer and support the band by tossing some cash into the tip jar. The show starts at 7:00 pm.

 Crazy Beans

 465 Route 25A

Miller Place, NY 11764

(631) 403-4954

Micro Maple Sugaring

I started my micro maple sugaring project last week with the goal of producing somewhere around two gallons of homemade Long Island maple syrup. Thursday morning I tapped six maple trees, five sugar maples and one red maple. Three of the sugar maples are big, 25-30" in diameter. The big trees have yielded as much as 2 1/2 gallons of sap a day. The smaller trees are ranging from a quart to a gallon a day. By Monday morning I had accumulated about 30 gallons of sap, time to start boiling. You need somewhere  between 32 and 40 gallons of sap to produce 1 gallon of syrup.

Inspired by Rink Mann's book "Backyard Sugarin'", I decided to build a homemade, makeshift evaporator. Rink's philosophy is to use as much Yankee ingenuity and as little cash as possible. I had some old cinder blocks laying around the yard so I used them to build a simple fire pit with a flue in the back. I lined it with gravel and put an 18 x 24 inch oven rack over the front and a piece of slate over the back section helping create draft and giving me a warming shelf. Keeping with the backyard sugaring spirit I decided not to buy a special pan and use a 12" diameter, 6" deep graniteware pot we already had.

DAY 1:

The first day of boiling was not very productive. I started late, about 10 am, and for the first few hours I didn't have the fire hot enough, so the sap was really simmering more than boiling. Even after I got the fire roaring and a good rolling boil going I was only able to cook off about a gallon of water an hour. I ended up boiling down about 6 or 7 gallons of sap and my eight hour day yielded only 2  1/2 cups of delicious, but very hard earned, grade A fancy maple syrup.

DAY 2:

After a pancake breakfast, with fresh maple syrup, I got an early start. By 7:30 am I had a nice hot fire with my 12" graniteware pot and a 6" cast iron pot filled with boiling sap. By lunch time I had already surpassed the previous day's evaporation total, but I was still limited by my available surface area to about 1  1/2 gallons of evaporation per hour. Turns out the formula, which I neglected to take note of, is that you need 100 sq. inches of surface area for every gallon per hour of evaporation. The oven rack was also starting to buckle under the intense heat and the weight of the pans. I guess my lovely wife, Georgianne, took pity on me (actually she was just afraid I was going to quit and she really liked that syrup). She jumped in the car and ran down to One Way Restaurant Supply in Patchogue and came home with two nice stainless steel steam table pans, one 12" x 21" and one 6" X 21". I now have nearly 400 sq. inches of pan space. The rest of the day I managed to up the evaporation rate to 3  1/2 gallons per hour. Now we're cookin'! By the end of the day I had managed to boil down about 18 gallons of sap and make nearly a half gallon of syrup.

Today it's raining, and I only have about 10 gallons of sap collected anyway, so this will be a day for staying inside and making music. Erica is on her way over for Homegrown String Band practice and a taste of the fruit of Dad's labor. Now I know why real maple syrup is so expensive, it is incredibly time consuming to make. The syrup I made, if I do say so myself, is the best I've ever had. Now with my new rig I should be able to boil down 30 to 40 gallons in a day for a yield of nearly a gallon of Rooster Rick's Grade A Fancy Maple Syrup.

FINAL UPDATE:

I ended up with a gallon and a half of syrup over 4 days of boiling. I never hit that fanciful 30 - 40 gallon a day mark. I think the most sap I boiled in one day was about 20 gallons. My last day of boiling I got severely dehydrated which wiped me out for a couple days. I was also running out of dry wood, so I decided to pull my taps and pack it in for this year. I had a couple gallons of sap left, so I followed a recipe for traditional New England maple beer from Stephan Bruhner's Sacred and Healing Brews. I boiled the sap down to one gallon, pitched in some ale yeast, and let it ferment in a small carboy for a couple weeks. The resulting brew was fairly weak and tasteless. If I try brewing maple beer again next year I'll boil 4 or 5 gallons of sap down to one gallon and then ferment.


2016 Maple Sugaring Blog

2015 Maple Sugaring Blog

2014 Maple Sugaring Blog

Rooster on the Rooftop

Well, we are finally dug out from Friday's blizzard. The first plow hit our street at about 4 pm on Monday afternoon. Thirty inches of snow and three days of shoveling. Saturday, we dug out two cars, two driveways, the pathways, and the twenty-eight steps leading up to our house. Sunday, I shoveled the snow off our roof. Monday, I dug a neighbor's car out of a snow bank and cleaned up the plow slop. I'm getting used to shoveling, maybe tomorrow I will shovel the whole backyard. Maybe, or maybe I will sit on the roof and play my banjo all day.

Rooster Rick on the Roof - photo by Georgianne Jackofsky

Copper Finger

A new nemesis for James Bond? No, a new clawhammer banjo finger prosthetic device. I was working in my metal shop and I got my fingers a little to close to the bench grinder. I didn't get hurt (this time) but I gave my clawhammer banjo fingernail an unwanted manicure. Usually when this happens I will use a National or Dunlop metal finger pick spun around backward as a fingernail substitute. I was never really happy with the way they felt or sounded. I would often get the edge caught up on the banjo strings. So today I decided I would make a banjo specific metal finger pick. I made a sketch and paper pattern with a nice wide fingernail the same size and shape of the one I had accidentally ground off. I cut the shape out of 16oz copper and customized it to fit my middle finger perfectly. So far I think it sounds and feels pretty good. It's also loud! I may be hooked on my new copper top banjo pick!.

Rooster Rick's Copper Top Clawhammer Banjo Picks!

By popular demand, I am now making these unique picks available to the banjo pickin' public.

 I'll give it a full test run at our show this weekend at the East Meadow Library.

Sunday, November  18, 2012 at 2:00 pm.

East Meadow Library

1886 Front Street

East Meadow, NY

516-794-2570

Two for the Road; Cajun Kate's

Georgianne and I did a duo show at The Darlington Arts Center last night. It was our third show in a row down in the Philly area. We hit the road early Friday hoping to avoid the Friday afternoon traffic we hit last week. No traffic this time; we breezed down the turnpike and got to Garnet Valley several hours early. We decided to use the time to check out the Booth's Corner Farmer's Market. We found a great little Cajun eatery tucked in amid the craft, produce, and antique vendors. Cajun Kate's serves authentic Cajun cuisine at very reasonable prices in a no frills setting. The cooks let us sample several dishes before we placed our orders. Georgianne settled on the tomato garlic bisque with pesto and garlic croutons. I went with the slow cooked pork gumbo and the gator on a stick. Deee-licious! I should have gotten a crawfish pie for the road! We rolled down the road, literally and figuratively, and did two sets of acoustic Americana for a full house at the Darlington Arts Center Coffehouse. We had a great time and met some real nice folks, including Barbara and Paul Macatee. Paul took some great photos of us including the one below and one I already put up on the Rooster Rick page of our website. We finally pulled into our driveway around 2:30 am. Long day, but lots of fun!

Homegrown Two @ The Darlington Arts Center: Photo by Paul Macatee

The next Homegrown gig is another Homegrown Two show, next Thursday, May 3, 7:30 pm at The Windsor Arts Center in Windsor Connecticut. Windsor Art Center is a place for the visual and performing arts located in Windsor, Connecticut. Begun in 2007, the Center is housed in a former freight house adjacent to the Amtrak line in downtown Windsor. Parking is free, easy and accessible.

Windsor Arts Center

40 Mechanic Street

Windsor CT 06095

info@windsorartcenter.org

860-688-2528

Ramblin Rooster Rick

I was ramblin' through some old Mp3 files on my computer and found this solo banjo piece from our first CD Blind Dog Thumpin' on the Porch (2000). It's called Ramblin' Hobo. I learned it from the playing of Doc Watson and his father-in-law Gaither Carlton. This "little ditty" is a cool tune in an odd F tuning (fCFCD). It's easy to get into this tuning from double C, just drop the two G strings down to F.

Ramblin' Hobo, to me, personifies the unique (and sometimes strange) percussive, melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic qualities of old time banjo. Playing the banjo can be a grand adventure in self expression and artistic freedom. This song lends itself perfectly to the type of individual interpretation that makes playing the banjo so much fun. It's like a puzzle whose pieces can be rearranged to form different pictures. . .  There I go ramblin' again.

Ramblin' Hobo by Rooster Rick

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