Living the Frugal Life

Repurposing Wool Fibers

2012-01-30T12:07:00.006-05:00

Despite my interest in frugality, I'm relatively new to thrift stores. Generally I don't enjoy shopping, but there are a couple of Goodwill stores on routes I travel regularly, so I've been stopping in there and browsing lately. Naturally, there are some amazing deals to be had. Probably one of the most surprising to me have been the 100% wool sweaters that sell for as little as $2, when they're on markdown. It simply defies logic that these pure woolen items, some of them brought all the way from Scotland or Australia, end up being given away for a song. Of course, the vast majority of sweaters at the Goodwill are made from synthetic yarns. But that only makes it a little more of a treasure hunt to seek out the wool.

I'm an occasional, largely seasonal, and not very gifted knitter. One reason I haven't done more knitting is the incredible expense of the yarn. It's always much, much cheaper to buy a sweater than to buy the yarn to make one yourself, even if you're paying the full retail price for the sweater. But those occasional thrift store finds change that equation. When woolen sweaters sell for so much less than the cost of the constituent materials, I've met my price point. Mind you, it's not every sweater that can be taken apart by hand, so it pays to know what I'm looking for. I learned what I needed to from this link.

Taking apart a knitted item to recycle the yarn is a somewhat tedious task, well suited to wintertime, endless cups of tea, a BBC radio stream, and the company of a playful cat, brisking about the life. It's amazing how much yarn comes out of a small sweater. I cut a few cardboard pieces to wind the yarn around as I unravel the sweater. Binding it in this way helps to stretch out some of the bends the yarn assumed when it was first knitted. There are steps you can take to further relax the kinks in previously used yarn. But they take time and effort, and my creations aren't so magnificent that I worry about minor issues such as slightly pre-kinked yarn.

In principle, you could take apart a knitted item made from any sort of fiber. For my time and money, only wool or other animal fibers would make it worth my while. I did scoop up an alpaca sweater from the thrift store, and it's waiting to be taken apart. It's white but slightly stained. I may decide to dye the yarn if I can't get the stain out. The beauty of acquiring these materials so cheaply is that it gives me free rein to experiment with them and learn from mistakes if I must.

I've knitted one pair of my chunky fingerless gloves, and am currently working on a second pair, both to be donated to the fundraising auction at the PASA conference, which is only days away. These gloves are knitted with double strands of yarn, which makes them extra warm. For both pairs of gloves I'm using the repurposed yarn as one strand. It's satisfying to salvage and re-use this material. The color of the sweater is such that I wouldn't choose to wear it myself, but in a double stranded item, I think it turns out quite pretty.

I'm off to the conference on Wednesday, presenting on Thursday, and enjoying myself thoroughly on Friday and Saturday. After I'm home, I'll give my usual summary of the conference highlights, and with a little luck, relocate my writing mojo, which has been scarce of late. Hope winter is treating you all well.

Harvest Meal: Roasted Parsnips

2012-01-13T11:16:00.000-05:00

This winter we have a surfeit of parsnips to harvest, which is wonderful because they are one of my favorite vegetables. But parsnips can be tricky to cook well, because they aren't very dense. So when you roast them (one of the very best cooking methods for this vegetable) with other root crops, they tend to cook through much faster than carrots, potatoes, or turnips. Add to this the abundant sugars in a winter-harvested parsnip, and you have a recipe for burned, or mushy parsnips, or worst of all, both conditions at once.

So I like to roast parsnips on their own, and I recently hit on a fabulous way of doing that. It's a bit more fussy than other methods, but it produces such deliciousness that I'm willing to go to the extra effort. The nicest thing about this dish is that all the major ingredients are either homegrown, or homemade.

I start by cutting up several slices of my home cured guanciale. I'm sure bacon or pancetta would work fine as well, but the extra seasonings that I add to my guanciale give the dish a little something special. If you use bacon or pancetta, one or two slices should do it. My guanciale is small, and my slices short; I used about seven slices for two full pans of roasted parsnips. A little bit of fatty cured pork goes a long way in the flavor department. So the slices are cut into bite-sized pieces and gently heated in a skillet just enough for some of the fat to render out into a liquid state. Some of the guanciale pieces begin to brown a little, but I'm not aiming to crisp them up at this point.

While the fat renders I go to the trouble of peeling several parsnips and cutting them also into bite sized pieces. I check my quantities by spreading out the chopped parsnips on a sheet pan. I don't want it overcrowded, but neither do I want too much open space on the pan. The vegetables should all fit in a single layer with a bit of space around the pieces. To each sheet pan of parsnips I add several peeled cloves of garlic, left whole, a good amount of finely chopped rosemary, and freshly ground white pepper. I gather up the ingredients to the center of the pan, pour over the rendered guanciale fat and the guanciale pieces, and add just a bit of olive oil to the pile. Then I mix everything by hand so that the vegetables are well coated with oil and fat. These get spread back out to an even layer, and sprinkled with kosher salt just before going into a 375 F oven.

A single pan of these parsnips will take about 25-30 minutes to roast. If you make two or more pans of these goodies at once, it'll take longer. It's a good idea to rotate pans between shelves, as well as turning them 180 degrees if you're making a lot. I didn't need to stir the parsnips around from time to time as they cooked. With larger pieces of root vegetables I've noticed that doing so encourages more even cooking. The smaller pieces don't seem to need it. When the parsnips and guanciale develop a lovely browned appearance, you'll know they're done.

It may seem strange that I'm elevating what most people would consider a side dish to the status of a proper meal. All I can say is that I tried using these roasted parsnips as a topping for pasta, and while it worked just fine, I noticed that the pasta seemed more of a distraction from the vegetables than a help. So I gave up and next time just ate a large bowlful of the roasted parsnips. Not the most nutritionally balanced meal in the world, but I can't stop eating them. I'm thrilled to have stumbled on a great recipe for parsnips that uses homegrown garlic and rosemary, which is doing well by the way under protection. We've hardly needed much in the way of season extension infrastructure with the mild winter we're having, but that's another post.

I got the basic idea for this dish from Molly Stevens' All About Roasting cookbook. She takes her dish in a sweeter direction than mine with the addition of brown sugar. To my mind, a parsnip that is allowed to stay in the ground through a few frosts so that it sweetens up on its own is plenty sweet enough, so I leave the sugar out. But I appreciate the attention to detail in Stevens' book. Hitting on the best temperatures and cooking pans for roasting all sorts of different foods is not an intuitively obvious thing, but one arrived at through much trial and error. So I'm grateful for the sheet pan and temperature recommendation on this recipe, and the topic of the book is well suited to the season.

Anyway, I hope some of you will try this parsnip recipe, especially if you've never been impressed with this humble treasure before. It was once the main winter staple crop of Europe, before the potato was brought from the new world. I do wish that I could retrieve some of the ways our ancestors prepared this vegetable. I'm sure they had some very good ways with the parsnip. If you have a favored recipe for parsnips or other root crops, please do share them in the comments!

A Few Loose Ends

2012-01-05T13:13:00.002-05:00

Happy New Year, everyone! My conscience has been nagging at me to follow up with results from several things I've written about over the last year or so. I'm not good about getting around to posting about things I say that I will. So I figure I'll clear my backlog with the first post of the year and then I can get back to semi-regular posting.

Leek seedlings
Last spring I tried a somewhat fiddly method of starting leek seedlings, with the aim of encouraging them to grow long and tall before they were transplanted out. The idea was that a long seedling, transplanted deeply, wouldn't need hilling to make the plant develop a nice long white section, which is the best part of the leek. Well, it worked and it didn't. The seedlings indeed grew long and tall. I duly transplanted them with just a couple inches of their full length showing above the ground, and then ignored them for the whole growing season. Disappointingly, when I dug up a few this fall, they had very minimal white parts. It seemed to me as though the plant turned anything planted below the soil line into root. So this was a bust. Hilling seems to be required to grow beautifully long white leeks. I'm still looking for the best way to do this in my long narrow garden rows.

Tomato trellising
Remember my enthusiasm to try a new tomato growing technique that I learned about at last year's PASA conference? I've got results. The trellising system worked fairly well as the plants grew tall. It took some diligence to keep up with pruning extra branches and clipping the remaining ones to the wires. The problem came when the plants started setting fruit and bulking them up. I had all my trellises in short rows, which meant that only two 7' stakes were holding up three tomato plants each. Gradually the weight of the plants pulled the stakes in towards each other, making all the wires sag. This could be only minimally remedied by adjusting the wires at the stakes. Next year I plan to grow my tomatoes in longer rows, with stakes every ten feet or so. Since all but the end stakes will be supporting plants to either side, the growing weight of the plants should exert equal pulling in both directions, so that the stakes remain upright. I may try angling the stakes outward at either end of the rows to give them more resistance. The sagging wasn't a disaster, but it looked kinda shabby and cut down on airflow around the plants, which might have been a very bad thing in a blight year.

Burdock
I've become a fan of burdock, aka gobo, for its delicious flavor and its soil amending properties. When I wrote about them more than a year ago, there was some question in the comment section as to whether or not the parts of the taproot left in the ground would regrow in the spring and form a new plant. The results this spring were negative - in the sense that I saw no plants emerge above ground where we'd dug out the roots. This is a positive as far as I'm concerned though, because it means we can have our soil amendment and eat it too. Those portions of root that are too deep to dig out rot in place, adding organic content to the subsoil and greatly improving our clay soil in the process. So burdock is not forever once you plant it, provided you harvest the root. Those roots we didn't harvest definitely came roaring back this spring, ready to set seed. And this is not a plant whose seed I want to save for myself, thank you very much. It took more than one severe cutting down to the ground to encourage the plants to call it quits. Burdock produces a fair bit of biomass in the second year, and the greens are marginally of interest to the chickens.

Acorns sprouting and different oak species
This one is owing for quite a while. In fall of 2010, I aggressively gleaned acorns from oaks in parks and off my own property to use as feed supplement for my laying hens. I went for a certain oak species that produced beautiful, large, meaty acorns, and I managed to gather some 60 pounds of them. Unfortunately, it was mostly wasted effort. The acorns that looked so big and worthy to me did not pass muster with the hens. They pecked rather half-heartedly at them after I crushed them by hand. It was my mistake. Since they obviously enjoyed the taste of the small, poorly looking acorns produced by the oak tree at our property line, I assumed that the acorns that look so much better to my eye would please them just the same. Not so. There are more than five hundred species of oak in the world. And there's enormous variation in the tannin content of the seed of different sorts of oak tree, and even between individual trees of the same species. Tannins give a bitter flavor to foods. These compounds can be leached out of acorns well enough to make them palatable to humans, but that's not a process I'm willing to go through for the chickens' sake. Some acorns are naturally "sweeter" than others, and obviously the oak on the edge of our property produces tasty ones. So I've gone back to only collecting these rather sad looking acorns, which the hens do appreciate. My advice is to definitely run a test on any acorn available to you before you go to the trouble of collecting more than a handful. See if your livestock will eat the acorns from any given tree, and don't rely on appearance as an indicator of feed quality.

A note too about storing the acorns you do collect. Do not keep them in plastic bags or buckets, even if left open and uncovered. The acorns give off enough moisture so that the ones on the bottom will start to sprout in just a week or two. A canvas or burlap bag will breathe enough to prevent this, as will baskets made of wire or natural fibers.

If there's something else I promised to report back on and have forgotten about, please remind me. I'll do my best to follow up!

PASA Conference Coming Up

2011-12-13T07:43:00.001-05:00

Here's my annual publicity for PASA's Farming for the Future Conference. I've been attending this conference for the last four years, and have always come away excited, energized, and having learned many useful things applicable to my homesteading endeavor. The conference is held at the beginning of February each year in State College, Pennsylvania. If you're interested in the sorts of topics I cover here on the blog and reasonably local to PA, I suggest you consider attending.

In the coming year I'll have the honor to be presenting with the man who first inspired me to start keeping a tiny flock of backyard chickens at the PASA conference four years ago. Harvey Ussery will be leading an all-day pre-conference track on Integrated Homesteading. I'll be playing backup. Harvey is more than capable of presenting a knock-out presentation all by himself, as I have seen more than once. He's concise, well-spoken, and his talks are carefully honed. He does not waste the audience's time. My hope as a novice speaker is to not look incompetent by comparison. Frankly, I'd rather be learning than teaching, but it's hard to say no to an invitation from someone I admire so much.

From now until December 31st, you can receive an early bird registration discount, and additional family members receive discounted registration as well. There are many ways to reduce the cost of conference registration if you want to attend but need to watch your pennies; everything from scholarships, to facilitated carpooling, to a WorkShare program. So check it out even if you think it's not in the budget. The next conference is going to be an even better deal than in previous years, because PASA has decided to pack an extra workshop slot into the two-day conference. So I'll be able to attend six 80-minute talks instead of five. I look forward to all the other wonderful extras of the conference as well: picking up free shipping coupons from Johnny's, checking out the free seed-swap table, the local cheese tasting, free live music in the evenings, a free seed packet or two from various seed vendors, the great quotation posters, a wonderful fund-raising auction with so many lovely and useful items, and all the unpredictable things I'll learn from formal presentations and conversations with other attendees.

I'd love to see some of you there, whether at the Integrated Homesteading track or the main conference. If you plan to attend, please drop me a note. If you can't attend, I'll most likely to a summary post after the conference, detailing some of the highlights and things I learned.

More Hoop House Details

2011-12-10T13:01:00.002-05:00

I promised another post on the features of our hoop house. Despite the fact that it's still not quite complete, the hoop house is doing well and demonstrating its productivity. Typically, protected growing space is some of the most expensive in any garden or on the farm. Our hoop house was definitely no exception. I don't have a figure for what we've spent on this project, but I'm guessing it's close to $1000 all together. That makes it about $10 per square foot of growing space. And given that our laying hens are occupying one-third of that, the productivity of the remaining two beds is under a lot of scrutiny. I know we'll get many years of use out of the hoop house, and thus the cost can be amortized. But I'm still very conscious of needing to maximize the value of that space.

The seeding of the hoop house, like everything else associated with this project, was a day late and a dollar short this year. Mostly it got planted at the end of September and very early October. Nonetheless, most of what I planted seems to be doing at least tolerable well. I experimented with turnips (planted a little too early, if anything), cylindra beets and some piracicaba broccoli (probably a tad late), catalogna dandelion (doing very well, wish I'd planted more), many transplanted volunteer lettuces and cilantro from the main garden (all looking happy and gorgeous), tatsoi (happy, but seems to be beloved of whichever pest found its way into the sheltered space before winter arrived), carrots and scallions (very happy and well timed) a few snow peas (rather small, but seem to be hanging in there), some sort of Asian brassica that I got on sale from Johnny's (nice cooking green, another one I wish I'd planted more of), as well as a few perennial herbs which seem to be biding their time. So I'm well rewarded by the sight of happy plants each time I go out to the hoop house. That said, I mostly want to show off a bit of the infrastructure today.

The hens are once again overwintering on deep bedding. As usual the bedding is primarily free wood mulch from the yard waste facility in our township. This year I also put some fallen leaves in there. These high-carbon materials will absorb and balance all the manure (high in nitrogen) laid down by the chickens during the four months or so of their winter confinement. In my experience during the last two years, the litter never smells bad and the girls constantly scratch through and mix their wastes into it. In the spring what is left is a rich, inoffensive, bioactive, nutrient-packed fertility mulch for my fruit trees. I was asked whether this didn't pose a risk to these trees, since excessive nitrogen can lead to fire blight on growing trees. I haven't seen that on the pear and apple trees that have benefited from previous years' litter treatment. My feeling is that because there is so much microbial life in the litter, most of the nitrogen and other nutrients are bound up in the bodies of living things, and thus only become available to other organisms where the litter is laid down very gradually. This is a far cry from what happens when sterile chemical fertilizers are dumped into the ecosystem of the topsoil. I will be watching the bedding closely however. We've got more hens this year, and less square footage per bird. The rule of thumb that Joel Salatin proposes is a minimum of four cubic feet of deep litter per bird. Supposedly at that stocking density the litter will never turn nasty. We're right up against that number, so we'll see what happens.

There are a few major benefits of the hoop house over the shed, as far as winter housing for the hens goes. The first is that we didn't have to sacrifice one third of the space in the shed to them this year, and won't ever have to again. The second is that the deep litter bedding in the shed, being raised up off the soil, sometimes froze solid, despite the carbon-nitrogen balance that should have provided for enough microbial activity to keep the pile generating its own heat. This required me to get into the bedding and turn it over with a pitchfork from time to time, otherwise the manure built up on the frozen surface. It's certainly true that we haven't seen the worst of the winter weather to come. But given that the lack of air space under the bedding, I very much doubt the bedding will freeze inside the hoop house. The other main benefit is the added light and warmth of the hoop house compared to the shed. The doors of the shed face north, so the hens got no direct sunlight at all in previous years. I did open the doors all day in all but the worst weather though, so the temperature was always cold in the shed. The hoop house gets cozy warm inside on sunny days, even when the temperature is well below freezing. This saves on feed costs for me, since the girls don't need so many calories to keep themselves warm. Whether the deep litter is actually generating heat as well, I couldn't say. I don't have a compost thermometer, so I have no way of distinguishing the sources of the heat in the hoop house.

Given the overall cost of the hoop house project, it was important to me to pimp out the hoop house for as little money as possible. Most of the following tricks and accessories cost very little money. While some of these were doable largely by making use of fortuitous chance, I hope some of them at least will be useful to others who have or are considering a hoop house.

In the center of the hoop house I've place a truck bed storage box - one of those things that sit across the bed of a pickup truck and provide a lockable compartment akin to the trunk of a car. (The garbage can sitting on top of it holds the chicken feed safe from dripping condensation and rodents.) This one came with our beater pickup truck, but we didn't need it. I thought it would make a pretty good seat between beds. More importantly though I noticed that it was black and that it could hold water. Black things absorb solar warmth, and water has a high thermal mass. So I filled the bed box with as much water as it will hold (with some soap and salt added to make sure it doesn't become a breeding ground for mosquitoes). Now it's doing double duty as a bench and a heat sink. The other use I might want to turn it to one day is as a large vermicompost bin. I suspect it wouldn't be great for worms in the summer time, but I'm mulling it as a possibility for next fall and winter. That could provide a nice homegrown source of protein for the chickens next year.

My next trick is one I've used before in the garden - reflective material along the north side of the hoop house that maximizes the natural light the plants receive. This time I've added a cheap space blanket that I found at a 99-cents sale. I got one for each car and our emergency kit at home, plus one for the hoop house. Now I wish I'd gotten two for this project. It's highly reflective and it probably also acts as thermal insulation.

Then there are the low hoops over each growing bed. These were invaluable while the hoop project was still under way. They were the only protection the plants had from frost for a while there, before the sheeting went on the big hoops. Now the low hoops give a second layer of protection, keeping the temperature in the beds even warmer overnight. In fact, on sunny days I need to get out there and raise the plastic off the low hoops lest the plants get cooked. Fortunately, with the hens in the hoop house, daily maintenance is built into the schedule.

Predictably, before the house was completed and before the winter weather even got too severe, some rodents took up residence on the margins of the hoop house. There were plans to place 1/4-inch hardware cloth around the perimeter of the house at ground level. Our delay on that part of the construction allowed the mice, or voles, or whatever they are, to move in. It's still the plan to install the hardware cloth. In the meantime, I knocked together a trap box based on Rob's vole motel, but so far I haven't figured out what bait will snare them. Either that or the neophobia (fear of new things) common to many rodents has kept them safe. I know they've been through my box; the dirt tracked into either side confirms this. If the peanut butter bait still hasn't worked in another week, I'll try something else. So far my carrots don't seem to have taken any damage, at least not at the surface where I could spot it before harvest. Who knows what's going on underneath though.

Here's one I'm rather pleased with. I built myself a weeding/harvesting board with an extra cross piece that extends my reach across the beds quite effectively. This was a scrap piece of the 2x6 cedar wood that we used to construct the raised beds. I tricked it out with some risers and braces underneath so that it is stable on the edges of the beds and doesn't completely flatten the growing plants. The sitting board allows me to easily reach the far side of the beds. When I rest the cross piece on the sitting board and far edge of the bed, I can lean way out for wider access across the beds. I put some wood sealer on the boards, a useful measure given how humid the hoop house is.

Okay, more tricks. To use every bit of space that possibly can be used, and to eke out as much productivity as possible, I scrounged through the pile of stuff we've pulled out of construction site dumpsters and came up with a simple shelf. I hung it from the purlin on the north side of the hoop house. With the sun low in the sky from fall through early spring, the shelf doesn't cast a shadow on the raised bed below it, so no light lost to the growing space. Right now I'm only using the shelf to store oyster shell for the hens and a few other items. Come springtime, this shelf and others like it will increase my growing space. They will be ideal spots for vulnerable seedlings in trays, keeping them well out of reach of our unwelcome rodent guests.

Our hoop house has lighting too, which is for the benefit of the hens rather than the plants. We happened to have an extra fluorescent hanging lamp lying around in the basement, and it just so happens that the previous owner of our home ran electricity out to the shed. So rigging the lamp from the ridge pole of the hoop house and running an extension cord to the shed was no big deal. As I have done the previous two winters, I am lighting the hens with the help of a timer to keep them productive over the winter months. It took quite a few hours of lighting them at first to bring them back into laying. Right now we have mostly heritage breed hens, and they had all stopped laying for the winter season. Now that we're getting a decent number of eggs each day, I may try slowly cutting back the hours and/or removing one of the two bulbs to save on the electricity bill. My understanding is that it would require an enormous amount of lighting to make any difference to the growth of the plants. That's not something I'm interested in paying for. As far as I can see, the fact that the plants are practically in stasis is one of the main benefits of winter hoop house growing.

An indispensable accessory for the hoop house is the common broom. A pair of brooms helped us coax the plastic sheeting over the large hoops. It also allows me to gently push up the sheeting from the inside to coax accumulating rain and snow off the sheeting. I keep one in the hoop house at all times.

A not so cheap aspect of the hoop house are the multiple self-ventilating windows. I had intended to content myself with just one of the expensive piston openers when I spotted them on sale at Johnny's. Unfortunately, I didn't communicate this to my husband, who spotted the same sale and purchase two for me as an anniversary present. We decided to indulge ourselves and not return any of them for a refund. So our hoop house is going to be very well ventilated when my husband finishes installing them. The way these work is that the piston contains a temperature-sensitive fluid that expands as it warms and condenses as it cools. So as the temperature increases, the piston opens the window automatically, then closes automatically when the temperature drops. It sure is a nifty trick and I admit that it saves me the need to pay a lot of attention to what's going on in the hoop house. Still, even on sale, these things weren't cheap, and I would have contented myself with fewer of them under different circumstances.

The final feature I want to mention is one that I can't take a picture of. We built this hoop house and arranged the beds directly over the surplus heat dumping coils for our solar thermal array. We actually requested the placement and configuration of those coils with the hoop house project in mind. Right now we're not shunting any heat whatsoever to the coils, because it's wintertime, and we need every bit of heat we can collect from the solar array. So presently we have an unheated hoop house. But come the shoulder season in spring, when our heating demands go down in the house, we will be able to divert some of the heat from the array into the ground underneath the hoop house. The same could be true in the fall shoulder season as well. It remains to be seen whether or not this will provide any advantage. It may be that by the time we have excess heat to vent from the array, the hoop house will already be quite warm enough. There is an alternate heat venting system that we would use in that case.

I expect having the hoop house will change the growing routine around here quite a bit. I'll be able to start plants earlier in the year, and keep a small number of them carefully manicured in there year-round. I'm thinking about implementing some proper square-foot gardening in there to really max out the potential of covered beds. I'll need to learn how best to use the extra heating that should be available in spring and fall; an unusual set-up in hoop houses that have heating available.

A Nice Barter Arrangement

2011-11-14T07:40:00.005-05:00

With the beginning of cold weather, I've been reaching for canning jars of homemade chicken stock a lot lately. So much so that I'm completely out, not only of chicken stock, but of any stock whatsoever. I don't like being without this building block of good soup, which is so fortifying at this time of year. I have a few carcasses from roasted chickens saved in our freezer, but I know they're not going to make as much stock as I'd like to be putting up right now. Buying commercial stock, even the organic brand that I used to buy, just isn't on my radar these days. As anyone who's made their own knows, store-bought stock just doesn't hold a candle to homemade.

So I started looking through the market lists of the grass-based farms in my area. Even though I'm fully aware of how much work goes into raising healthy, ethical food, I'm still often initially surprised by the prices of animal products from these businesses. My next thoughts are always the same: the prices are fair, given what I know about labor and materials costs for this type of production, and given the methods they employ which show a proper respect for the environment; and to boot, none of these farmers are getting rich on the prices they're charging for the foods they offer. Still, when I saw the price of the chicken backs and bones from other animals that I would need for making stock, I decided to try a different tack.

I asked my Farming Friend whether she might be interested in bartering finished stock for the bones to make it, a 50-50 split. I know she likes to cook with stock, but she's a very busy woman, and I figured she wouldn't mind having someone else do the work. As it turned out, the offer was especially attractive to her, because she doesn't have time to do the canning. She has typically frozen her stock, but that ends up using too much of her freezer space, which is at a premium for the meats that she sells. So I told her I'd be happy to make and can as much stock as she has bones for over the winter months. It's a win for me because I get free bones and I can do this work when the demands of the garden and livestock are minimal. As a bonus, the heat generated by the roasting, simmering, and canning processes will be most welcome in the house at this time of year. She has agreed to return the canning jars and the re-usable lids and rings that I use. And she'll send lamb and goat bones my way any time she has them on the same barter basis.

I'm always so tickled when things like this work out - a benefit for both parties. I trust her to produce good, clean food. She trusts me produce tasty and safely canned stock. I call that win-win any day, and I'd like there to be more bartering in my life. It's something I sometimes feel shy about proposing to people, even though no one has ever seemed offended by the idea of barter.

I'd be curious to hear about any barter arrangements you have. If you barter, were you the one to propose the exchange? Have you ever been turned down on an offer to barter? Any tips on how to successfully arrange bartering agreements?

Back in the Loving Arms of the Grid

2011-11-01T07:00:00.004-04:00

The freak Halloween storm that visited the northeastern US left us without power for most of the weekend and Monday. On Saturday we watched as heavy flakes of snow fell, and kept falling all day. This came just two days after the first light frost of the year, which came more than three weeks later than the historical average first frost date. We hadn't even had a hard frost yet in this incredibly mild autumn season. That meant that most of the trees were still fully garbed in their own leaves. And that meant a large snowfall was a big problem.

On Saturday afternoon we went around outside trying to keep the worst of the snow off our fruit trees, young and old, and also off the plastic sheeting of the still unfinished hoop house. This was accomplished with brooms and poles. That went well; we had no damage to those trees or the little hoop house. But the taller trees were much harder to protect, especially the very large shade trees close to the house. All through the afternoon we could hear trees and tree limbs all around the neighborhood snapping and cracking; it was like a pan of popcorn popping, so frequent and regular were the sounds. By noon we had lost power, and the phone went dead a couple hours later. Outside we watched the occasional flash of electrical transformers exploding, waiting just a moment for the sound to reach us. The audio-visual show continued well into the evening as the snow continued to fall. After each nearby crack! I checked in anxiously with my husband to make sure he hadn't been hurt by a limb coming down.

I have to admit that even though we had advanced warning of this storm and its likely consequences, I prepared less well than I did for the hurricanes of August and September. We skated through those storms with barely a blip. Not so much this time. I did make sure the dishes were done and that we had water on hand to flush toilets and for drinking. I showered on Friday night and even filled our large thermos with hot water so we could wash our faces. But I didn't gather our oil lamps, matches, and flashlights, and didn't fill the empty space in the chest freezer with bottles of water to move to our refrigerator. Now we keep plenty of stored water on hand all the time anyway, and we did have everything we needed to weather such a storm and power loss. The large chest cooler got cleaned on Sunday, loaded up with plenty of snow, and placed on the porch to accept the contents of our fridge and house freezer. We had heat from the gas fireplace insert that I had carefully laid away batteries for in case of power loss; we had our gas stovetop range to cook on; and we were well supplied with tanks of propane to keep those going for quite a while. All in all we were fine. But I still felt as though I'd been caught flat-footed.

The funny thing is that just Saturday, after listening to Nicole Foss's description of how she prepared her family for life after peak oil, I had talked with my husband about getting some deep cycle marine batteries to carry us through a few days of power outage. Or rather to support the truly essential functions of the house through a power outage. We had talked about installing some PV panels a while back, and part of that project was to include a battery backup so that we would have power in the event the grid went down. Given our budgetary constraints we decided that solar thermal was a higher priority, so the PV system could wait. And when the grid went down this weekend, so did all the benefits of our solar thermal system. It made sense to me on Saturday morning that we should ensure at least a few days' supply of electricity to at least keep our chest freezer working, to keep water moving through our radiant heat floors, out through the sump pumps in the basement, and also out of our taps. Everything else we could do without, I thought. And after 48 hours or so without electricity, I still think so. Flashlights and oil lamps were no big deal. It was an inconvenience not to have a working oven, because we were out of bread and couldn't make any more. But everything else in the kitchen was manageable with no electricity and a limited supply of water and light. Even if we never scrape up the money for a PV installation, the batteries themselves would provide a large benefit in the case of future power outages.

Although the fallen limbs caused no damage to the house, the garden or the hoop house, that's not to say we came through completely unscathed. Far from it. The entrance to our house was a scene of devastation. The driveway was blocked by two large limbs, with another heavy limb resting too much weight on our split rail fence. The fence in the backyard fared even worse. One half of a large split mulberry came down across the corner of the fence, taking out four panels. At least it spared our newly planted Ashmead's Kernel apple tree. The trellising for all our black raspberries took the brunt of the fall and is almost certainly toast, but the canes themselves probably don't care about any damage suffered during this time of the year. We needed to revamp those trellises anyway. On the other hand, the poultry schooner caved in completely from the weight of the snow. It was waiting in the garden for the tilling power of the chickens. Somehow as we were knocking snow off other structures we just didn't pay attention to it sitting out in the open there. Still, we think it's mostly salvageable, and should be good as new with a few new pieces of lumber.

The thing that struck real fear into my heart during this storm was the massive tulip poplar tree that stands where our driveway meets the road. This tree towers over our house. If it had lost even one major limb, chances were good that either the road would be blocked, or our house would be very seriously damaged. Fortunately I recognized that there was really nothing I could do about it and managed mostly not to worry about it. We've had the tree checked by an arborist who pronounced it in excellent condition, so we'd done due diligence. More fortunately still, it took almost no damage at all. It's rather stunning to compare the damage the magnolia, which stands right next to it, took. We'll be cleaning up the debris from the storm for the next few weeks at least.

Since I'm currently in a glass-half-full state of mind, I see all the fallen trees as material for a hugelkultur mound or two (something I've mulled before, but we didn't have enough wood until now), and as more sunlight next year in our front yard and the garden too. We have a WWOOF volunteer arriving this evening who will be able to help us deal with the additional work load. And we had already planned to replace a good portion of the fence anyway, in pursuit of a slow-moving hedgerow project. It may be that due to the storm damage, we get a little bit of money towards that effort from our homeowner's insurance. And of course, the storm gave me a valuable lesson in living in this home without electricity. No thought experiment or advance preparations were quite the same as actually dealing with no power.

I hope all my readers in the path of this storm came through without any harm. If you were affected by it, please let me know how it went for you in the comments.

Giveaway Winner

2011-10-21T08:25:00.002-04:00

The randomly chosen winner of the giveaway for The Small-Scale Poultry Flock is Alexis, Baron von Harlot - an Aussie reader who blogs at Lexicon Harlot. Congratulations, Alexis! Please leave your contact information in the comment section, and I'll get the book out to you just as soon as ever I can. Your comment will not be published.

Thanks so much to those of you who entered the giveaway and shared your fantastic frugality and homesteading tips. I really enjoyed reading them and hearing what all of you are up to. It's encouraging to hear about so much ingenuity and general thriftiness out there in the big world. I hope you all have checked out the tips and tricks in that comment section.

Those of you who didn't win, I recommend you find some way to check the book out nonetheless, whether by buying it or asking your local library to acquire a copy for you to peruse. In the event I don't hear from Alexis by Tuesday next week, I'll generate another number and try with another winner.

Cooking an Old Hen, with Knefles

2011-10-19T09:45:00.008-04:00

When we slaughtered the last of our broiler chickens towards the end of September, we also dispatched our two Cuckoo Marans hens at the same time. The Cuckoo Maran is a dual-purpose chicken, which means it divides its energies between laying eggs and putting meat on its bones. We found the legs on the Cuckoos quite sizable, though the breasts weren't all that much to write home about. After butchering the birds into cuts, I put the carcasses into the freezer to save for making stock and rendered all the fat into schmaltz to use for sumptuous roasted potatoes and other vegetables. Given my penchant for frugality and the amount of meat the two Cuckoos yielded, I decided to try again to make old hen meat palatable.

I had tried the time-honored coq au vin recipe with a previous batch of hens to no avail. Still, to buy myself some time, I let the cut up legs, wings, and breasts marinate in some cheap white wine in the fridge for three days. Maybe this was excessively long for marinating, but I was hedging my bets as well as simply being too busy to get to it sooner.

I had ambitions for experimenting with several different methods for cooking the meat, but as it happened the one that I managed to execute worked out pretty well. So I'll outline what did work. I started with a few diced onions cooked in olive oil just until they were softened and then lightly seared the chicken parts in the same pan. The onions and chicken went into a bowl with some of the white wine marinade (enough to come about halfway up the meat in the bowl) and then were cooked in my pressure cooker for 45 minutes, at about 10 pounds of pressure. When that was done, the meat was reasonably tender, so I gave some thought to how I might use it. And here we come knefles and to what I can only hope is a worthy divagation.

Chicken and dumplings is a time-honored American dish for good reason, and I felt like going in that direction. But it was cold outside, and I wanted something a little denser than the light biscuits that feature in the classic southern supper. So I thought of knefles, a culinary guilty pleasure of mine. I found the recipe in a fortuitous reprint of a delightful old cookbook, Cooking With Pomiane. The book is genteelly dated and well worth the read, more of a tour through a charming bit of culinary history than a cookbook for our times. But the recipe for knefles has proved an exception and earned a place in my kitchen repertoire. They're a sort of Gallo-Germanic pasta that would be considered an abomination by the Italians, which, I grant you, isn't saying much. The Italians think that any deviation from the particular pasta of their own particular region results in something fit only for barbarians. Knefles, which hail from the Alsace region, would be distinguished then by the unanimity with which Italians of every region would heap scorn upon them.

So what are knefles? Just a rough dough made with flour, milk, and egg, then scooped up by the teaspoonful. You knock the scoops of dough into boiling salted water as you make them one by one and cook for ten minutes. That's it. Sort of like gnocchi, or schupfnudeln, or spaetzle, but not really any of those things. Knefles are easier to make and less refined. You can sauce them when they're cooked, or add a little butter and cheese and bake them, or you can play around with them like I do. I like to add lots of finely minced fresh herbs from the garden to the dough. I'm fairly certain that it's incorrect, but I pronounce the K in knefles. It reminds me of Roald Dahl's vermicious knids. And how likely am I to run across anyone who could authoritatively correct my pronunciation?

To get back to my harvest meal, in this case I used knefles as replacements for the dumplings in chicken'n dumplings. So I put some chicken stock on to boil with the remaining white wine from the marinade, threw in the onions that had pressure-cooked with the chicken cuts, added some thyme and made a batch of knefles with chives and garlic chives in them. Here's the recipe, which can easily be doubled:

Knefles

1/2 pound (~230 g) flour (1 1/2 generous cups)
finely minced fresh herbs to taste (optional)
1 egg
about 1/2 cup (~24 cl) of milk

Combine the flour with the herbs if you are using them. Mix in the egg and then enough of the milk to make a thick, shaggy dough that is just a shade too sticky to knead by hand. Work the dough with a sturdy spoon for a few minutes in the bowl to develop texture. Bring salted water or another cooking liquid to a brisk simmer just shy of full boiling and begin to shape the knefles. Using the tip of a teaspoon scoop up a small hunk of the dough, only enough to cover about half the spoon. Dip the spoon into the boiling water and knock it firmly against the rim of your pot. The dough will fall into the water. (Avoid the urge to scoop more dough and make bigger knefles. The dough will expand anyway when cooked, and bite-sized knefles cook through better than large ones.) Repeat until all the dough has been shaped and put into the water. Stir the contents of the pot once very gently to detach the knefles from the bottom of the pan. Cover the pan and adjust the heat so that the knefles cook at a steady simmer for ten minutes. The knefles should have doubled in size and all be floating. Test for doneness the first time you make them, just in case you made them too big. Then drain and sauce to your liking. Serve hot.

I cooked the chivey knefles in the chicken stock and wine, adding chopped garden carrots when they were halfway done. While that cooked I took the chicken meat off the bones and tore it all into bite-sized pieces. When the knefles were finished cooking I added the shredded chicken meat, some frozen peas and chopped parsley to the pot and let those ingredients just heat through. This was all served up in a thoroughly non-photogenic mess. What can I say? The light in my kitchen sucks. But the mess went down very nicely, very tastily indeed. Since my childhood didn't equip me with nostalgia for chicken'n dumplings, I have to say that old hen'n knefles is a superior dish in my book. This definitely counts as a harvest meal for us. On our sub-acre lot we produced the hen, chicken stock, eggs, carrots, and all the herbs that went into the dish. I happened to use purchased onions for the dish, but it could just as easily have been made with homegrown leeks.

An illicit glee invariably accompanies the preparation and consumption of a dish so comfortingly barbaric. At least for me. We always have the ingredients on hand, so it's sort of surprising that we don't indulge in them more often. Knefles are about as cheap as anything you could possibly prepare at home. Even a single batch makes more than two adults will eat as a side dish. I sometimes save half the dough in the refrigerator and make the rest the next day. The dough won't keep much longer than that, though surplus cooked knefles can be held in the fridge for a few days. Put a little oil or melted butter on extras while they're still hot if you want to hold them; it will prevent them sticking to each other. Cooked knefles can be pan-fried, but if you've refrigerated them try to bring them to room temperature first and cook them slowly and gently so they heat through without burning. If you want to pan-fry freshly cooked knefles, spread them out to air dry for a few minutes so they'll brown a bit better.

If you make any similar sort of dumpling-y, comforting dish from flour, potatoes, or other starchy ingredients, I'd love to hear about it. In detail, of course.

Hoop House is Coming Together

2011-10-17T13:48:00.001-04:00

We've been struggling to get our tiny hoop house project done, racing the first frost of the season, which has been remarkably dilatory in arriving. Not that I'm complaining, believe me. This project was slated to begin in June, and technically, it did. It's simply been a series of one delay after another. Unreasonably hot summer weather accounted for some of the delay, a general gardening funk on my part contributed its own special languor, needing to stay out of the way of a contractor helped us delay some more, and then my husband's broken thumb came along, right when we really needed to get down to business.

But we're finally getting somewhere. The bones of our 12'x15' hoop house are up. The raised beds are in, and even planted. All the stuff we needed to attach to the frame before the sheeting went on is done. We used up almost an entire roll of duct tape covering up anything that might possibly wear or tear the plastic sheeting. And the sheeting is on, though not shown in the picture above. Now we just need to get the ends framed in before it's too cold to work outside. This will be a big job, and probably as jury-rigged as the rest of the structure.

I went ahead and planted two of the beds when I just couldn't stand it any longer. I was worried about missing the window of opportunity with the seeding dates. It was a rather haphazard seeding job, and a groundhog helped itself to some of my lovely seedlings, but at least there's some greenery in there for the inaugural winter. Two of the beds measure about 3.7'x9.5', and the third 3.7'x11', giving us a bit more than 110 square feet (10.3 square meters) of bed space. We'll only be growing food in two of these over the winter however.

The third bed is going to house our chickens over the winter on deep litter bedding. This saves us the hassle of rebuilding the winter quarters we've provided for them in the shed the past two years. We've built a containment system out of green garden netting in that bed,the farthest one in the picture above. This space is just a bit larger than the 30 square feet (2.8 square meters) the hens get each day in the mobile coop and pen system they're in most of the year. It includes feeder, waterer, a "bleacher" double roosting bar and a nesting bucket for them. Right now they're just testing out the new digs. They'll soon be putting in more light tilling and weeding service elsewhere until winter is well under way. In theory the chickens' body heat will nudge up the temperature in the hoop house a little bit, thus helping the plants. I say in theory because even in so small a hoop house as this one, four chickens can't possibly make much difference. But we shall see.

I've got a few more tricks up my sleeve to try out and write about in the mini-hoop house. So there will be more posts on the hoop house as we put the finishing touches on it, move through the seasons, and learn to make the best use of it. Stay tuned.

Giveaway: The Small-Scale Poultry Flock

2011-10-13T19:58:00.007-04:00

As I mentioned in my book review of The Small-Scale Poultry Flock, I received two complimentary copies of this book. So I'm hosting a giveaway to share the bounty with my readers. This is a fantastic book for all homesteaders, urban chicken-keepers, and those who have yet to acquire their first small flocks. If you haven't seen my review of it from last week, you may want to check that out. By all means, do visit the author's website, The Modern Homestead. It's full of thoughtful insights and useful information for anyone interested in moving towards self-sufficiency on a small acreage.

I mentioned that there was other news to do with Harvey Ussery. I was thrilled to hear that he would once again be speaking at PASA's Farming for the Future Conference, which I attend each year in early February. Hearing Harvey's presentation at this conference four and a half years ago was what inspired me to start my own backyard flock. But then, to my utter amazement I got an email from him a few weeks ago asking if I would like to co-present with him during his all day pre-conference homesteading track. I went through a rapid series of thoughts and reactions, all centering on my paltry amount of experience as a homesteader compared to his two and a half decades in this vocation. I was floored, honored, uncertain, hesitant, and thrilled. In the end, I provided plenty of caveats, but ultimately said yes. So! I'm going to be presenting at next year's conference if only as a junior member to a seasoned and top-notch speaker.

I've encouraged my local-ish readers to attend this conference before, and I've written up summaries of things I've learned from this event in past years. Now I can say, come introduce yourself to me at the conference. Even if you've already read (right here on the blog) much of what I'll be talking about, you will learn a lot from Harvey Ussery, and I guarantee you'll come away loaded with enthusiasm and motivation.

Onwards to the giveaway. Up for grabs is one copy of The Small-Scale Poultry Flock. This is not exactly a freebie giveaway; I want something in exchange for your chance to win. I'm asking for a comment with your best frugality, homemaking or small-scale homesteading tip. I want to see some creative ideas here, people, not the obvious beginners-level ideas you find in the most simplistic magazine articles. Tell me your secrets for saving energy, making a delicious meal on a dime, a great gardening trick, a labor-saving tip for any part of the homestead, a special recipe you use for canning, lacto-fermenting, or curing the foods you put up, or anything else clever you've come up with that fits in a homemaking or homesteading category.

Tedious stuff you should read anyway: One entry per person. Entries for this giveaway will be accepted until Wednesday, October 19th at 6pm, Eastern time. You must either be signed in to some account that will easily and obviously lead me to a way to contact you, or else leave a means of contact in your entry comment. Anonymous comments that do not include an email address will not be considered as entries for the giveaway. Winner will be chosen randomly from all valid entries, which must contain the aforementioned tip. The winner will need to disclose (privately, to me only) full name and mailing address. I'm opening the giveaway this time to readers from overseas, so get your comment-entries in. I'll announce the winner by Friday, October 21st. If I can't reach the winner in a couple of days, I'll select another and try again until it all works out.

Good luck!

Edit 10/19/2011: Comments are now closed.

Tiller Hens and a Reconsidered Routine

2011-10-12T06:06:00.002-04:00

Our hens moulted about five or six weeks ago, and are slowly regrowing their feathers. This is a calorically intensive process, and so our egg supply has fallen off a cliff. On a good day we get two eggs from four hens; on the not so good days, one or none. It doesn't help that we slaughtered the two Cuckoo Marans hens that were the more consistent egg producers with the last of our broilers at the end of September. The Cuckoos were younger birds, but my experience suggests that their egg laying becomes pretty sporadic after the first year of laying. Aside from that, the Cuckoos were much flightier than our Red Stars, who I'd made a point to handle regularly during their winter sojourn on deep litter bedding in our shed. While the Red Stars aren't exactly thrilled about me picking them up, they tolerate it pretty well instead of panicking as the Cuckoos did. I suspect it's all down to conditioning and handling rather than reflective of innate disposition of two different breeds. The breeder we got the Cuckoos from didn't habituate them to being handled.

The reason this is all relevant is that I needed the hens to do some weeding and tilling for me this fall. I knew the Cuckoo Marans would never be easily moved from one spot to another. Getting the hens in and out of the poultry schooner requires twice daily handling, since the schooner must be positioned over each garden bed and maneuvered carefully around beds that still have plants on them. The hens go back into their mobile coop each night, leaving me free to reposition the empty schooner. Dealing with hens that were terrified of me wasn't on the agenda. So the Cuckoos met their end with the last of our broilers, and went on to a useful afterlife of chicken stock, schmaltz, and a hearty dish of chicken and knefles, which I may tell you about sometime if I find the time.

The remaining hens, our Red Stars, are now earning their keep by clearing a large weed infested area for me. This is the bed we referred to as the three sisters, where we meant to grow the three sisters crops this year: winter squash, beans, and corn (maize). That came to nothing when labor was spread too thin and the bed never made it close enough to the top of the list to get weeded. What the squash vine borers didn't kill, or the birds pluck out of the ground, or the long summer dry spell didn't kill outright, was overwhelmed by weeds of every stripe. It was a jungle in there. With the help of some garden caging that is easy to move around every day or so, the hens have weeded and lightly tilled this area into submission, while adding their own manure and mixing it into the soil. Which is great; saves me a lot of time and prepares the area for some heavy-duty, remedial lasagna mulching. It also gives me a chance to see the fanciful nesting box in action. I banged this thing together this spring in anticipation of hosting a broody hen with some eggs. The hen never materialized, but the nesting box was ready to go when I needed it for this project. If they aren't earning their keep by giving us eggs, at least the hens are contributing labor and fertility in the form of their manure.

Weeded and yet-to-be-weeded areas are clearly distinguishable

The hens eagerly hone in on each new slice of territory when I move the caging every other day or so. That must mean that they've picked over the ground they've had access to pretty well. In order to encourage them to scratch and till the ground I've adopted a feeding strategy gleaned from Carol Deppe's The Resilient Gardener, which I reviewed a while back. Namely, I don't feed the hens in the morning while they're on tilling duty. Their hunger early in the day motivates them to scratch down the weeds to look for grubs, worms, and other choice bits in the three sisters area. I add plenty of garden cullings and whatever kitchen scraps we have. Then late in the afternoon I provide them with some of their purchased grain feed. That way they don't go to bed hungry and they have something to look forward to most of the day.

The afternoon feeding doesn't work with the mobile coop and pen we've been using most of the time since we got chickens four years ago. In that system, the hens go into the coop in the evening and are locked in until I let them out the next morning. I always try to let them out close to sunrise so that they're not literally cooped up and unhappy. The time before I release them each morning is the only time during the day that I have access to the pen without them in it. So I always provided their food and water first thing in the morning. I like the late afternoon feeding not only because it gives me a more leisurely cup of tea in the morning, (though it's grand, let me tell you) but also because I think it saves money on feed. The hens eat less when they've scrounged for themselves most of the day, even though they're currently regrowing their feathers. This was precisely Deppe's reasoning for the afternoon feeding time - to conserve money when times are tough. Seeing how well this works is encouraging me to consider ways of making this standard operating procedure for the hens next year. I have to think on it some more over the winter, but we'll likely need to build new housing for them next spring anyway. So it'll be a good opportunity to change things up.

Book Review: The Small-Scale Poultry Flock

2011-10-06T08:02:00.004-04:00

I've got a bit of a problem today. This is a review of a book that's worthy of all the gushing I can muster up. But there's also a credibility issue. I want my readers to trust that my opinion can't be bought, and that what you read here is my unbiased viewpoint. To that end I don't respond to offers of products in exchange for reviews. (The implicit expectation of course being, that the reviews would be positive.) While I have Amazon links to books and a few other products, these are for things I have paid for and been very pleased with, and am thus happy to recommend to others. I also link a couple of books at a time in the sidebar without endorsement, simply as books I'm reading. Few of those ever end up on my Bookshelf list, which I'm pretty choosy about.

So with that out of the way I have to disclose that I'm not wholly disinterested in the book I'm recommending today, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock. The author, Harvey Ussery, is the person I consider my chicken guru. Hearing his presentation at the PASA conference four and a half years ago is what convinced me to get started with a backyard flock. His enthusiasm for not only keeping chickens for meat or eggs, but using them in an integrated way around the homestead spoke deeply to me. A link to his non-blog website has been on my sidebar since Living The Frugal Life got started. I had the chance to see him at another small conference early last year. Speaking with me after his presentation, he mentioned that he had just secured a book contract for a title on small-scale poultry. I offered to review his book when it came out, fairly confident that I would be able to give it a glowing recommendation, which I can. He gave me his card and after that I began an intermittent email correspondence with him on poultry topics. What I didn't expect was for him to invite me to give feedback on the manuscript before it was even submitted to his editor. I was more than flattered to be asked and I happily devoured his first draft, offering what few comments and suggestions occurred to me.

Well, I had to wait for the finished copy to come out to see the pictures. The end result is fabulous; well worth the wait. Blows every other title I've seen on backyard chickens right out of the water. Harvey's view is both broader and deeper than the typical small-scale poultry guide. He considers the behaviors of various poultry species and how those behaviors are best incorporated to the benefit of the homestead and the homesteader. Harvey's approach to poultry husbandry is to build health into the flock from the ground up. Or rather, from below the surface of the soil on up. He believes, as I do, that healthy soils are the basis for all sustaining and sustainable food production. To that end, he manages his flocks so that they are able to express their full range of natural behaviors, and so they are always benefiting, rather than damaging, the soils they are on from day to day and month to month. He also has a discernible frugal streak, which obviously appeals to me. Both his frugality and his desire to provide healthy natural feeds to his livestock have led him to look for ways to feed poultry from the homestead's own resources. This is right up my alley, and a topic rarely addressed by other writers.

The Small-Scale Poultry Flock will certainly help those who are poultry beginners. Though all aspects of keeping poultry are covered comprehensively in this book, it's not the equivalent of trying to drink from a firehose for anyone who has yet to start their first flock. If you are an aspiring backyard chicken keeper, this book contains everything you need to get started, plus a great deal more. This is really a book pitched to those who already have some experience with one or two poultry species, who want to take things to the next level or beyond. I'm not speaking here in terms of flock size, but of integration - specifically, fully utilizing the labor potential of poultry, reducing the need for purchased feeds, recognizing and using the fertilizing value of manure, and choosing species, breeds and management practices to best suit a particular bit of earth. Harvey is a tireless observer of the natural world, as well as a keen experimenter. What he has to share has been learned through decades of trial and error and empirical observation of his livestock.

I can wholeheartedly recommend this title to anyone who wants to keep chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, or guinea hens on a small scale. Whether you want birds for meat or eggs, whether you want to start with pullets or hatch out your own chicks, whether you are on a small suburban lot or have a few acres in the country, whether you want to slaughter your own birds or are comfortable with running an old age home for hens past their productive years, this book should be on your bookshelf. The Small-Scale Poultry Flock makes the other two backyard poultry books I own look rather limited and simplistic.

As it happens, when Harvey's book was printed and bound I received one complimentary copy from him, and another from his publisher, Chelsea Green. Much as I love the book, I don't require two copies. So I'll be hosting a giveaway of my extra copy next week sometime. Stay tuned for the giveaway, plus some other news on this topic.

Further Thoughts on Lasagna Mulching

2011-10-05T08:58:00.004-04:00

It's fall and my thoughts turn to lasagna mulching the garden beds to retire them for the year. I've had the chance to observe the effects that a few years of lasagna mulching have had on our garden, and wanted to share those observations with you.

First off, let's review what lasagna mulching, also known as sheet mulching, consists of. The basic practice is to cut down any vegetation to the soil line, but leave all plant material lying in place. You might not want to do this if there are lots of obvious seed heads on weeds. While lasagna mulching certainly curtails weeds, I don't like to incorporate weed seeds, which can lie dormant for ten years or more, into the soil any more than is unavoidable. Any vegetation other than seed heads is great - just extra organic matter. The next step is to add soil amendments. These should be tailored to what your soil needs. I use finished compost obtained from our township, wilted leaves of comfrey grown on site, our half-finished compost, a bit of greensand to help loosen our clay soil, and sometimes fresh manure laid down in situ by our laying hens. Next comes a covering of paper, newspaper, or cardboard. If using any kind of paper, it should be thoroughly soaked before or after being laid down, to help it conform to the contours of the soil. The heavier and thicker this layer, the longer the weed suppression will last, and the less frequently you will need to repeat the entire process. Finally, a good layer of wood chip mulch covers the paper. Again, the more of this you can pile on, the longer it will last and the better the weed control.

Some gardeners will actually repeat these layers in one go - thus, multiple layers of compost, paper and mulch laid down on the same day. I have never had the luxury of having so much material to work with. But if you have a small area and sufficient materials to do so, why not? On the other hand, I omit the soil amendments when working on areas that I never intend to plant in, such as walkways in the garden and border areas where I only want to suppress weeds.

My first motivation for lasagna mulching was exactly that - weed control. This is something that the technique accomplishes with great success. There are a few weeds that can make their way up through even a freshly laid section of lasagna mulch, and some airborne seeds that will land on and germinate in the wood chip layer, but those few are generally easy to remove by hand. What I wanted to discuss today though are the additional benefits of lasagna mulching. There are several of them that I've observed so far.

Significant soil improvement is one of them. This isn't exactly surprising; it's routinely mentioned as the "other" benefit of the technique besides weed control. But knowing intellectually that it would help the soil didn't quite prepare me for the fat earthworms I've been coming across. They're not inordinately long as worms go, but they are rotund. Wider than a pencil by a long shot; embonpoint, even. I hope it's not the case that the obesity epidemic has now spread as far as earthworms. But clearly these worms aren't going hungry. Their presence is both an indicator of healthy soil as well as a guarantee that the soil will be even better over time. Every earthworm is a mobile factory of soil fertility, and I count each sighting as a blessing. I also see, year by year, healthier plants that are better able to withstand the vagaries of stressful growing seasons.

The other benefits of lasagna mulching all have to do with what I believe are leading indications of the changes that global climate weirding are going to bring to my region. More than one model of climate change that I've seen predicts routine summertime drought across much of the US. My immediate region is forecast to escape the worst of this trend, but still the summers could still be drier than they historically have been. The last two summers here certainly have been that way, whether or not they were part of an emerging new pattern. Mulching and good organic content in the topsoil are critically important for plants dealing with water stress. Mulching because it curbs evaporative loss of moisture. And high organic content because organic matter acts like a sponge, soaking up water and releasing it slowly as plants need it. Lasagna mulching provides for both of these.

The flip side of the dry spells predicted under the climate change models is a pattern of more violent storms. This may seem contradictory, but it really isn't when you look at the meteorological explanations. Namely, a more energetic (warmer) atmosphere that is able to carry and move more water vapor. And in any case, whether it makes intuitive sense or not, this is exactly what we saw this year: About ten weeks of rain too insignificant to help the garden crops followed by a hurricane and a tropical storm that washed out roads, flooded farmlands, wiped out crops, and carried topsoil straight into the waterways, not to mention killing a few people and destroying a few homes. Our garden certainly took damage from these storms, and we had standing water in the portion of our backyard that is just barely lower than our garden. But careful inspection of the garden itself proved that we lost no topsoil at all to the heavy rains. Again, I believe credit goes to the lasagna mulching.

Phallus rubicundus (yes, really), red stinkhorn mushroom

It wasn't just that the paper and wood chip mulch protected the soil beneath them. Within a few short weeks of laying down these materials I can find evidence mycorrhizal mycelium colonizing the entire area. These are networks of fine hair-like structures, the fungal equivalent of roots. The white threads are easily seen near the surface, knitting the soil together in an enormous net. I know by the wide variety of mushrooms that fruit out of those networks that we have at least a dozen different species of mycelium at work in the top layers of our garden soil. I take this as a spectacular indicator of biodiversity and the increasing health of our soil. Although I started lasagna mulching for weed control, the practice would be worthwhile even if the mycelium were the only benefit. If you wonder why I think so highly of mycelium, I refer you to Paul Stamets' eye-opening, jaw-dropping book, Mycelium Running. Fungi of all types provide invaluable services to other life forms in the topsoil. They mitigate stresses on plants, break down tough organic matter into materials accessible to other organisms, move critical soil nutrients from areas of excess to where they are deficient, and can even bind up harmful substances (such as salts) in a waxy coating so that they become inert in the soil. Truly, mycelium is a blessing in the garden, and observation has convinced me that lasagna mulching equates to laying out the welcome mat for the fungal kingdom.

Unknown mushroom. Enlighten me?

Finally, there's the fact that lasagna mulching entails a bit of carbon sequestration. That means, on balance, that we're taking carbon that could otherwise end up in the atmosphere (where it could do us further harm), and locking it into organic material in our soil (where it can do us some good). The amount of carbon that I manage to store away on our property may seem trivial. And in fact, it is. But the truth is that an acre of topsoil is capable of holding more carbon than all the air directly above it, all the way to the outermost edges of our atmosphere. But that carbon has to be stored up by and in living things working with plenty of resources in healthy soil. If the project were undertaken on a wide scale, boosting the organic matter stored in our topsoil and the living woody plants above it could go a long way to ameliorate the carbon emissions wreaking havoc with the climate; earth is populated, after all, by carbon-based lifeforms, and that's what organic matter is. My infinitesimal contribution is to do what I can with the soil I have some control over. You could do the same. I believe we will never solve the many problems stemming from industrial society's waste streams (and there are obviously many) until we look at the "wastes" we generate as resources so valuable that people compete for access to them. It's a challenge for me to lay my hands on enough cardboard, newspaper and wood chip mulch to cover all the areas I would like to, and this despite the fact that several people save their newspapers for me, and I know where to get cardboard and mulch for free.

Having outlined the benefits as I see them, I'll share a few tweaks I'm making to the way I use lasagna mulching. I've tried planting seedlings into a freshly lasagna mulched bed in the spring and found it problematic. While the plants survive, they don't grow particularly well without a great deal of hand-watering. The layers of paper soak up so much water that relatively little of it reaches the roots of the plants. The dry summers the last two years haven't helped. I have to water directly into the hole I punched through the paper layer to plant the seedling. This entails far more work than I would like. Fortunately I find no such difficulties in beds that I lasagna mulch in the autumn. By spring the paper layers have broken down enough to let water pass more easily through them, although they still provide something of a barrier to weeds. So I'm going to do my best in future to lasagna mulch my garden beds in fall, and the borders and pathways in spring or summer. I'm also sold on letting the chickens participate in the lasagna mulching process as often as possible. They enjoy their carefully orchestrated visits to individual garden beds that I'm done with for the year, it saves me that first step of having to clear the weeds, and they boost soil fertility by lightly tilling in their own manure.

One possible drawback to lasagna mulching is that the moist conditions it fosters just under the surface can be a boon to slugs and snails. This was apparent in 2009, the last wet year we had. The past two summers have been quite dry for us and I saw very few slugs anywhere in the garden. If I lived in a wetter climate I might look for some other technique to build our soil. Here in Pennsylvania I'm comfortable using diatomaceous earth to control what slugs and snails we have in wet years. And if the climate change models are correct, we're not going to be contending with wet summers very often.

Well, there are my reflections on lasagna mulching, after using this technique in my gardens for about three years. I think it's making enormous contributions to the health of my garden soil while saving me a lot of effort in weeding. I'll do my best to keep that in mind as I try to get all the mulching done this month.

Cyathus striatus, fluted bird's nest mushroom

A Good Gleaning Haul

2011-09-23T09:47:00.003-04:00

Yesterday while running an errand I noticed that the Bartlett pear tree around the corner from our home was hanging heavy with fruit. The owners of this property have put up a "free pears" sign on their lawn about half the years since we've been living here, but it hasn't been consistent. Well...I wanted those pears, and I wanted them before they all fell to the ground. Pears are best picked off the tree before they ripen. Many times the ones that fall naturally develop hard crystal-like formations in their flesh, which aren't very pleasant to eat.

We purchased a long-handled fruit picker basket last year to help us pick the high fruit from our own apple tree. It's a handy thing that extends our reach by about 9' (2.7 m). So we put it in the car along with a bushel basket (I was feeling optimistic) and went to ask after the pears. The property is just far enough away from ours that I don't consider these people neighbors, exactly. Our area is sort of rural, and sort of suburban; "around the corner" can be a fair distance in these parts. As is so often the case, when we asked politely the owner of the property was delighted to let us take the pears. He said he didn't like to see them go to waste, but that he and his wife don't use them. I mentioned that I'd collected pears from his tree a few times in previous years when he'd put the sign up, and thought perhaps he just hadn't gotten round to putting one up this year. He said that was exactly the case and emphasized repeatedly that we were welcome to come back any time for the fruit.

We cleaned the tree of almost all the fruit that was still on the branch. There were a few that even our long-handled picker couldn't reach, but not many. As a courtesy we picked up all the fruit on the ground too. Most of these had obvious damage on them, some from a lawn mower. I'll send them on with our early drop apples to my farming friend who raises hogs. The appearance of the pears makes it obvious that they haven't been sprayed with anything, so I'm sure she'll feel comfortable giving them to her animals. The fruit we kept for ourselves came nearly to the top of our bushel basket.

I mentioned that pears are best picked before they ripen on the branch. It turns out that pears are rather tricky to bring to what humans consider a nice state for eating. They need to be picked before maturity and then chilled. The chilling time depends on the variety, but fortunately the Bartlett only requires a couple of days. So these will be in our refrigerator for a little while and then I'll spread them back out to ripen up on cardboard in the front room. That way I can keep an eye on each one and no fruit gets crushed by the weight of fruit above. It's certainly a lot of fruit. I don't mind though. In fact, getting this much fruit free for the picking was a great mood booster. I've been frustrated with several things that are happening or not happening around the homestead lately. Free pears go a long way towards cheering me up. And this is a nice time of year to make jam and do the hot work of canning. Temperatures are definitely dropping off. I put aside a small amount of elderberry juice last month and stashed it in our freezer. I know what a surreal and gorgeous color even a little bit of juice makes when I combine it with a pale fruit like pears. So when the pears ripen up, I'll make more elderberry-pear jam. Needless to say, when it's done some will go to our benefactors around the corner.

I'm also planning to revisit an amazingly yummy cake recipe I found over at 101 Cookbooks. Heidi's salt-kissed buttermilk cake recipe is easily adapted to many different seasonal fruits. I tried it once with pears from the farmer's market and simply could. not. stop. eating. it. The nice thing about that is that for a cake, this one is surprisingly non-naughty: only half a cup of sugar and 4 tablespoons of butter. Buttermilk does the rest in terms of adding flavor and body to a very light-textured cake. I switched from Heidi's raspberry and lemon zest flavorings to sliced pear, minced crystallized ginger and almond extract. The salty-sweet topping for the fruit made the flavors really pop. This one went directly into my printed out recipe binder.

My husband is shocked that I don't count gleaned fruit as part of our harvest tally. I explained that my project is to demonstrate how much food can be produced by perfect nobodies on an average residential lot in our area. Since we didn't grow it ourselves and it didn't come from our property, I don't see that we should get "credit" for it as part of our harvest. I'd certainly count any weeds we foraged off our own property for consumption, but gleaning elsewhere is another thing entirely. Still, gleaning what we can is part and parcel of our overall drive for frugality, and I hate to see food go to waste. So I see his point. Maybe from now on I'll keep a separate gleaning tally for things we gather off-property. It could be an interesting adjunct figure to go with our harvest tally.

Any good gleaning going on in your neck of the woods?

Slaughter Day

2011-09-19T10:25:00.003-04:00

We sent our two largest broilers to ice camp on Sunday. We didn't have any spare clean hands to hold a camera once we got started. So I don't have any footage or even still pictures of the slaughtering process itself. We're still in the market for someone to hold a camera while our hands are occupied. But I did take some pictures just before we got under way. I thought I'd share these and also some of the videos I've turned to for help figuring it out on my own.

Obviously, if this subject is going to upset you, stop reading now. I think most readers here will be comfortable with this topic, and I think the methods we use are pretty humane. But this is a post about killing animals for food. If you're categorically opposed to such things, here's your notice.

Our setup

A place to work - This is our solar cooking station equipped with a cutting board, knives, latex gloves, and containers to receive various parts of the chickens. We save or use just about every part of the chicken except the intestines, gall bladder, oil gland and the head. What doesn't come into the kitchen gets used or buried somewhere in the garden.

Slip knotted cords - these will hold each bird by the feet. We have sometimes used a killing cone in the past, which takes care of the movement problem. With the birds hanging freely like this you need two people to stabilize the chicken; one to hold the wings against the body, and another to hold the head as they bleed out. The wings should be held closed because otherwise the bird can flap so hard that it bruises its own wings. In a commercial operation the resulting discoloration would make the bird unsalable. Stabilizing the head ensures that the movements of the bird (either voluntary or involuntary) don't send blood flying everywhere. Holding the head at an angle away from the cut also speeds the bleeding out, thus hastening death and limiting the suffering of the animal.

Wheelbarrow with mulch - We situate this directly under the cords or the killing cone that holds the bird. It will collect the blood from the chickens and be used around our fruit trees. This saves on cleanup and preserves the value of the blood as a fertilizer. For the number of birds we slaughter at any one time, even a small amount of mulch will suffice to soak up the blood; there just isn't that much of it.

Knives - A well-sharpened boning knife, paring knife and a cleaver. The boning knife is used both for cutting the chicken's jugular and for the small amount of cutting needed during evisceration. The paring knife is sometimes not used at all; it's there as a just in case alternative to the boning knife. The cleaver is useful for decapitation and for cutting through the neck, which I've always had trouble doing with a boning knife. If you don't have a cleaver, a good strong pair of kitchen shears might work for the neck. Whichever knife is used for the killing cut needs to be very sharp in order to spare the bird as much suffering as possible, and working with a sharp knife during evisceration always makes things much easier. We devote time to getting the knives ready the day before slaughter. But as you'll see in the Joel Salatin video below, there's really very little cutting necessary in the whole process.

Scalding water - A large pot is required. I use a water bath canning pot. The water should be roughly 145-150F/63-66C. I heat the water above that temperature before hauling it outside, so that it's just right when we've gotten through the first few steps in the slaughtering process. When slaughtering more than a couple of birds, I leave a kettle simmering inside so that we can top off the pot with hot water, keeping the water at the right temperature for all the birds. The birds displace a lot of water, so the pot should not be completely full. When it's chilly outside I set the pot on cardboard so that heat is conducted away a little more slowly.

DIY Chicken plucker - This works well for the very small number of birds we process at any one time. It probably wouldn't be workable for anyone slaughtering more than a dozen birds at once. A day ahead of time we make sure to have the batteries for the drill charged up. When we're processing only one or two birds at a time, we sometimes don't even bother with the plucker as it's quick and easy enough to pluck a bird by hand if you get the scalding right. We try to pluck the feathers into a garden bed that is ready for lasagna mulching. Feathers are high in nitrogen and break down quite slowly. So they'll feed the soil very gradually while adding a bit of structure for soil microorganisms. Strangely enough, yellow jackets will steal the small feathers, for the protein content I suppose, if you don't cover them with mulch right away. An older post of mine details the DIY plucker.

By the way, if you like your chicken skinless, you can skip the plucking entirely and just peel the skin off the entire bird. This isn't a great idea if you plan to roast the bird whole, since the skin keeps the bird from drying out. But if your birds are destined for other preparation methods, and you don't want the fat from the skin, you can save some time and effort.

Chilling bath - We use a cooler, filled with all the ice we have on hand and water from the garden hose. This brings the temperature of the eviscerated bird down very quickly, and can hold 4-5 broilers, but really only one turkey at a time. It's wiped down with a bleach solution before and after use.

Bags, scale, permanent marker, freezer - Once the birds are nicely chilled, I drain them as well as possible, weigh them, bag them up, and write the weight of the bird on the bag. We let our broilers live a little longer and get a little bigger than many farmers so I use 2-gallon freezer bags, which I'll sanitize and re-use just for our own chickens. I wouldn't like to count on our larger birds fitting into the 1-gallon bags. The two birds we slaughtered on Sunday averaged just over 6 pounds (2.7 kg). I put the giblets from all birds into one container, to be used when it's time to make gravy for the Thanksgiving turkey. (We grill our turkey so we don't get pan drippings to work with.) Then the birds and giblets all go off to ice camp.

Instruction

I've learned all I know about slaughtering and eviscerating chickens by watching videos and doing it myself. I've never come across a text description or even still photos that have helped me as much as video has. Here's a sampling of videos that show the process in detail. These first two videos don't show the exact method I use, and there's a lot of extra material covered, but they're definitely useful for amateurs and novices who don't have expert help on hand.

Respectful chicken slaughter - Part 1

I think it's an especially good tip to locate the chicken's jugular by feeling for the jaw. I've never been able to precisely identify where a chicken's ears are, so that point of reference hasn't been useful to me. The jaw can be easily felt. You may not make a perfect cut the first time you do it. When you get it right, you'll know by the steady stream of blood that the cut produces. Practice makes perfect, though the obvious difficulty is that homesteaders work at such a small scale that getting enough practice on a regular basis isn't easy. That's why I watch critical parts of these videos a few times over the day before slaughter.

Respectful chicken slaughter - Part 2

Good tips in this video on how to use legs and other parts of the chicken.

Joel Salatin - chicken evisceration

If you're contemplating your first poultry slaughter yourself, you might want to study other homesteaders' take on the process. Paula recently posted about her own chicken slaughter. And Kristeva had a post quite a while back with good pictures. If these videos and posts don't answer your chicken slaughtering and processing questions, I'd be happy to try despite my meagre experience. On the other hand, if you have any tips that you'd like to share, please sound off in the comments.

Update on the Comfrey Experiments

2011-09-16T12:11:00.003-04:00

I posted earlier this year about two related projects to do with the comfrey plants. The first goal was to get rid of the comfrey in the garden proper, because since it was planted the garden has expanded and the comfrey is no longer holding down the corners, but mucking up what I'd like to have as a pathway. The second goal was to create a comfrey hedge along the northern edge of the garden with some of the rootstock I was trying to get rid of.

I can say with a fair degree of certainty that the hedge is a success. The tiny pieces of comfrey root that were transplanted in late February got very little help, and yet they've grown into a row of thriving plants. I did use a hand scythe a few times to cut back weeds and grass that grew up alongside the comfrey in spring and early summer. By mid-summer the comfrey clearly had the edge and was able to hold its own. I don't anticipate that it will require any further care. From now on, and for years to come, the comfrey hedge should hold the line on any grass or weeds that would otherwise encroach on that garden border. I've run the lawn mower right up to that edge of the garden several times, shredding large comfrey leaves that hang down. As expected, the comfrey shrugs off such incidental abuse. I'm definitely thinking about where else a comfrey hedge would be of use.

The possible downside that I worried about - that rodents would make themselves at home under the protection of the comfrey foliage - has come to pass. A few times I've seen rodents darting between the comfrey hedge and the raspberry canes. But I haven't noticed any significant crop damage that I can attribute to them, and we have a prodigiously talented hunter-cat. I know he's keeping all sorts of rodent populations in check (when he's not stoned, of course). So I'm content to let that ride.

As for the eradication part of the project, that's going about as I expected it would. I have cut back lush growth in the original locations at least five or six times this year. It keeps sending up leaves, just a bit slower and less abundant each time. I didn't expect to get rid of the comfrey in a single year, and clearly I haven't. I'm perfectly fine with that. I'll keep on with the reaping next year. If it manages to hang on to sprout after that, it surely won't have much oomph in the third year of the eradication project. I'll keep you posted.

If you need more information about why I'm growing comfrey in the first place, read about its wonders.

Incidental Potato Harvest

2011-09-12T06:45:00.005-04:00

Here's a picture of most of the potatoes that came from "volunteer" plants that came from potatoes I missed during harvest last year. They're laid out to dry in the garage for a few days, and then they'll go into crates and stay down in the basement where it's quite dark, if not yet all that cool. There are still a few more volunteers to bring in, but this prodigious bounty weighed in just around 34 pounds (15.4 kg). I'm rather amazed at what we got for doing basically nothing, and from one of the smaller garden beds. It certainly brightened what was looking like a day of weeding drudgery.

Last year after this potato bed was harvested we lasagna mulched heavily. The lasagna mulch wasn't for the potatoes of course, because we never guessed we'd overlooked so many. The intention was just to improve the soil there and hold the weeds down. My surprise at the number of potatoes that poked up there this spring had as much to do with the plants (apparently effortlessly) punching through heavy layers of cardboard and a generous amount of wood chips as it did with having missed so many spuds at harvest last year. Obviously the lasagna mulch treatment meant that those potatoes that escaped harvest had some primo soil to grow in and a nice cozy layer of protection above them. Many of these harvested spuds were surprisingly deep in the soil. Which convinces me that I probably missed some this time around too. And we just lasagna mulched there again. Which suggests there might be a repeat of this event around this time next year. That would be fine by me. It's wonderful to have potatoes this early in the year.

The main crop of potatoes from those I planted deliberately this year remains to be harvested. They need another three to four weeks, I'd say. I like to keep them in the ground until the weather has cooled a bit so that they store for a longer time. We'll see if the stuff I deliberately planted produces as well as the inadvertent spuds.

Rainy Days and Stalled Plans

2011-09-08T08:36:00.003-04:00

It seems we're getting all the rain we missed in June and July in August and September. It's been overcast and rainy here for what seems like weeks. We have hurricane Lee, way down in the Gulf of Mexico, to thank for this particular storm. It strains credulity that a hurricane half a continent away could send us this much rain - six inches or so over the last few days. Given the thorough soaking that Irene left us with not so very long ago, the standing water in the low spots, soggy turf in the high spots, and road closures all over aren't surprising. The hens and broiler chickens don't seem too happy with the wet ground, though they have enough shelter to keep their feathers dry. Apparently the Cuckoo Marans hens have the benefit of being bred for fairly wet conditions. I do my best to situate all of them on what high ground we have, but it's tough when I need to move them every day. We could use a let up in the rain now.

It's all so frustrating on the one hand - this should be the tail end of the massive summer harvest, and I'm holed up inside instead. And there's our hoop house project which has been stalled by one thing after another this year. We've made a start on it, laid out the footprint, built some raised beds, and gotten them mostly planted. But if we don't actually build the structure around those beds very soon, it'll all be for naught. The plants won't survive the winter unprotected. And winter is coming. On the other hand, I have to admit, it's refreshing to have a weather related excuse for indolence and moping. There was certainly a dearth of those earlier in the summer.

To top it off, the rain check excuse coincides with a much more serious reason why the hoop house project is stalled: my husband broke his thumb a week ago. He took a tumble on his bicycle while coming home from work on wet roads. It could have been much worse; he wasn't hit by a car and he was wearing a helmet and biking gloves. But he's very sore and his left hand is out of commission for at least the next few weeks. There's still no firm timeline on when he'll have full use of his hand again. At least he's right-handed.

The rest of the hoop house construction really needs two people to complete. It's far from ideal that we put the beds in before the hoops were in place, but the plants had to be planted at a certain time in order to mature before winter sets in. That seems to be the way projects go around here - everything done at the last possible moment, and therefore done imperfectly. We'll see what we can accomplish with three hands once the weather clears up, and then see if we can corral some friends to pitch in with what we can't do by ourselves. This would be a nice time to have WWOOF volunteers beating down our doors, but I haven't had so much as a nibble in quite a few weeks.

I'll quit moping now, even though it's raining again. And I'll try to have a more upbeat, more useful post out soon.

On Nature's Wrath and Windfalls

2011-08-29T18:40:00.001-04:00

It's been quite a week; earthquake and hurricane alike in a region not known for either phenomenon. The earthquake was at least as palpable as any I experienced in 14 years of living in California. I was staggered to learn how far we were from the epicenter. In the moment it felt to me like a very local event. We took the hurricane seriously and prepared by clearing the yard of potential projectiles, storing water, getting all the laundry and dishes done, filling the empty space in the chest freezer with bottles of water, keeping the oil lamps and matches handy, and taking showers a few hours before the storm was due. We came through unscathed, with only a brief loss of power. We're near a major hospital and I suspect our grid is somehow "privileged" because of that. Our power loss may have been only a second or two; it happened while we slept. We got about as much rain as predicted, roughly seven inches (18 cm). The chickens weren't at all happy about the extremely waterlogged backyard, but the sun shone beautifully today and chickens have very short memories. All signs point to the ground drying out fairly quickly.

Hurricane Irene gave us a jumpstart on the apple thinning that our old apple tree usually commences in late summer. These apples are still undersized and have developed nothing of the sweetness they will hold in a couple of months. (We don't know the variety, but it harvests exceptionally late.) For the past couple of years I've collected the early drops and donated them to my farming friend for her hogs. We typically can give her as many as ten or twelve buckets-full over the course of a six weeks or so. The pigs don't mind the incredible tartness of the apples apparently, and my friend is happy to accept free food which she knows has not been sprayed with anything. Though her farm is not certified organic, she has a good relationship with her customers which is based on trust and integrity. She'll accept any sort of excess garden produce she has confidence in, as well as acorns or hickory nuts for her pigs.

I am happy to provide the unripe windfalls to her. At the cost of very little effort to myself, these sour fruits can provide value as food, if slightly indirectly. I don't even have to take them to her since her husband passes our home on his way to work. He picks up the buckets on his way home and returns the empties later in the week. I see this as another instance of something from nothing. This is a prominent aspect of my homesteading mentality - making an effort to prevent waste and finding a way to get value out of what would otherwise be useless.

Of course, it doesn't hurt at all that farming friend often donates to me the hog jowls that her customers disdain. We have no formal agreement on this, and I always offer her half the jowls back after I've turned them into guanciale. I definitely feel that I get the better end of the bargain. But the reality is that both of us are making an effort to reduce waste, and we both benefit. I cannot recommend it highly enough to aspiring homesteaders: make friends with small-scale local farmers! It's good to know other gardeners too, but farmers and homesteaders can benefit each other in many ways.

I'll mention also the other use of unripe apples that fall from the tree, even though I have only theoretical knowledge of it. Apples are very high in pectin, and the more so the less ripe they are. Before powdered or liquid pectin was commercially available in stores, underripe apples were used to thicken jams and jellies. Just as with most old domestic arts, this one is still viable today. If you have your own apple tree and were so inclined you could use early windfalls and drops as a free substitute for store bought pectin. I've no doubt google would furnish you with the details. If I ever become so ambitious, I promise a blog post will be forthcoming.

My Cat, the Stoner

2011-08-25T10:58:00.001-04:00

For a variety of reasons, I planted a lot of catnip this spring. It's a useful and mild medicinal, reportedly good at repelling flea beetles from garden crops, and most famously attractive to cats. I took some pains to protect the tiny live plants I ordered from Richters. I asked for a dozen of the smallest, cheapest plants, figuring that if I had many of them there was a better chance that at least some of them would survive. After planting about ten of them near each other, I laid the chicken greens feeder over them to keep the cats from either eating them whole, ripping them out of the ground, or simply rolling them to death. They had a few inches of protected headspace, but any part of the plant that grew taller than that was subject to feline depredations.

It worked. At least seven of those ten plants survived, and it didn't take too long before I was able to remove the protection of the greens feeder. Being a hardy mint family member, the catnip can now stand up to whatever abuse the neighborhood cats can dish out.

I find our cat Mojo lying between the fence and the catnip quite often. It's one of his favorite hangout spots, for good reasons: it's sunny, he can hide himself behind the herb and still have a commanding view of the whole yard, and if startled can slip under the fence to the neighbor's property. Mojo is one of the most resolutely cheerful cats I've ever known. Unless made nervous by strangers or a strange situation, he's always in a good mood, a regular Mr. Bliss. So he hardly seems the type to need routine self-medication. Or maybe I have it all wrong and he's so happy because he has such easy access to kitty dope. Maybe he'll get cranky and go into withdrawal when the plant dies down for the winter.

The thing I've noticed though about catnip is that its effect on cats seems inherently self-limiting. No matter how drugged out cats get by smelling or ingesting catnip, it only seems to last about 15-20 minutes. Repeated exposure after that has little effect. Yet Mo' will hang out in that spot for hours on a nice day. Maybe he just has wholly positive associations with that place. Or maybe he doesn't want to share with other cats, so he guards his supply.

I'm not much for recreational drugs myself, but my stoner kitty does make me ponder several questions. Is there any sense in making a plant - a natural living thing - illegal? Do cats have more self restraint than humans when it comes to psychoactive herbs? Do the ills of human society lead to addictions where a more balanced existence would allow us to use natural drugs recreationally without such complications? Or is it the added complexity of the human brain as compared with a cat's brain? Or is our tendency to synthesize natural substances into more potent drugs the real problem? I can't see that my cat comes to any harm, or creates any harm, by indulging in a profound high fairly frequently. Granted, he's not pregnant, and I have no idea how catnip would affect feline fetuses. Also, he doesn't smoke catnip, or take synthesized tabs of 'nip at a kitty rave. And perhaps if he did, the drug would affect him differently. All he can do is eat it or roll in it. Either seems to work for him. I think animals have their own wisdom sometimes, and I'm still puzzling out the lessons of cats and catnip.

Anyhow, it's nice to know I've got a homegrown supply of kitty happy leaf and that my cat can get stoned frugally. Next year I'll have enough catnip to derive some benefit from it myself. And yes, if you were wondering, this post is at least partly just an excuse to display pictures of the cat.

Harvest Meal: Chicken in a Pot

2011-08-24T12:53:00.004-04:00

I never posted about the source of the main course of this harvest meal. It was a runty broiler that my farming friend gave me when it was half-size to the rest of her broilers, which were ready for slaughter. Something was definitely off about this Cornish Cross bird, because it took me more than two additional months to raise it to a size that looked sort of ready to harvest. I finally decided on the slaughter date (Sunday) only because our own broiler chicks really needed the extra room provided in the poultry schooner, which is still in service.

Monday night's method of preparation...well, that was an experiment for which I had to work up my nerve. "Experiment" only in the sense of trying something entirely new with a precious bit of homegrown meat. I'm usually loathe to branch out too far with high value ingredients, and no food is so scarce as meat raised on less than an acre. But this Chicken in a Pot came from Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table cookbook which I found on the new arrivals shelf at the library. Greenspan is no slouch in the kitchen. The rustic appearance of this mundanely name dish appealed to my peasant cooking propensities. (But trust me when I say the cover photo of this dish is far more beautiful than the one above.) So I took a risk, and I'm glad I did. Basically, the chicken steams itself inside a cast iron dutch oven sealed air-tight with a ring of simple dough. The bird and the accompanying vegetables are pre-browned to ensure some color, but every drop of juicy goodness collects in the dutch oven. Everything turned out super moist, super tender. For copyright reasons, I'm not going to reproduce her recipe verbatim. But I will tell you what I put in the pot.

Our broiler chicken weighed just under 5 and a half pounds. Had it been any larger I don't think it would have fit into our standard size dutch oven. Aside from the bird, I put in homegrown purple potatoes, garlic, shallots, rosemary, thyme and a few boughten carrots. I browned the bird and all the vegetables except the potatoes in a mixture of bacon fat and olive oil. The dough was just water and flour, though I did add some of the leftover fat from browning the ingredients. The rest of the fat went into the dutch oven. I enjoyed the challenge of tucking as many potatoes as I could around the chicken, without stuffing it so full that it wouldn't cook through. Greenspan called for adding both white wine and chicken broth to the pot, but I omitted these, largely because I was moving 100 miles an hour on Monday and only scanned the recipe well enough to get a general sense of it. At serving time there were plenty of juices in the dutch oven; I think it would have been a swimming pool of liquid had I been more faithful to the author's intention.

The only tiny disappointment of the meal was the crust that sealed the chicken and vegetables into the dutch oven during cooking. I was surprised to find that Greenspan's recipe made no reference to it after the chicken was cooked. I wondered whether it would be worth breaking up and soaking in the abundant juices in the bottom of the dutch oven. I can't abide the thought of wasting the flour, you see. Not only did my crust end up just this side of well charred, but it also had little flavor or texture. We tried the juice soaking technique and found it really only made the crust marginally edible. If I were to repeat this dish in the future, I might try sealing the dutch oven with a loop of good yeasted bread dough. If the dough started out well chilled I can imagine it forming a beautifully browned and scrumptious ring, the perfect vehicle for dunking in roast chicken juices.

It was incredibly satisfying to tuck into a meal that was almost entirely homegrown. The carrots might have come from the garden if it hadn't been for the few that I had hanging around in the fridge, the leftovers from a spate of morning glory muffin baking. Other than that, the only ingredients that weren't produced right here were the fats, salt and pepper. This bodes very well for our six broilers, which are coming along nicely and are now out on the "pasture" full time, in the poultry schooner.

By the way, if any of you are raising birds for the table, or mulling it, and are planning to do your own slaughtering and processing, you may have pondered the same questions I did. How soon does rigor mortis set in? How long does it last? Does it adversely affect the dish to cook a bird in rigor mortis? And if so, what are the windows of opportunity for cooking the bird? The basic answers to these questions are that rigor mortis sets in very quickly with poultry, and yes, it's best to avoid cooking a bird in rigor mortis. Fortunately, it doesn't last too long. Either cook a bird immediately upon slaughtering and processing, or refrigerate the bird and wait about 24 hours for the rigor mortis to dissipate.

Some of you have asked for a pictorial guide or even video on my slaughtering process. So far we haven't had any clean hands available to hold a camera on slaughter day, but I'm keeping it in mind for the broilers we are raising at the moment. If I can corral an innocent bystander with enough intestinal fortitude into taking some pictures or video, I will certainly post them later on.

Reducing the Canning Footprint

2011-08-17T08:25:00.004-04:00

I had a minor freak out yesterday when, for a lark, I did a rough estimate of the energy costs of pressure canning. On a recheck of my calculations I found a major error that put me off by a factor of 1000. Oops! After the error was caught I was relieved to find that - provided I started with water brought up to room temperature, and used a bare minimum of water, and ran a full batch through my pressure canner - I could can salsa for about one-sixth of a fossil fuel calorie for every calorie of preserved food. If you want details about these calculations, find them in the comments.

The larger point is that this got me thinking about the carbon footprint of the food that I preserve. Obviously, it's more energy intensive than the stuff we eat fresh out of the garden. Going into freak out mode over what I erroneously believed was an absolute travesty of fossil fuel consumption made me scrutinize the food preservation process as a whole. How could I whittle down the energy inputs to the food we preserve? Here's what I came up with:

1. Can local products and minimize use of ingredients shipped from afar. It makes sense to start with foods that don't have inherently high carbon footprints before they arrive in our kitchens. Home canned food can only be as energy efficient as the ingredients that go into it. Obviously, finding a substitute for sugar grown a long way off won't be easy for most people. But we can opt to make lower-sugar jellies and jams. It'll be healthier for all of us while also lowering our food miles. Better still to can what we grow from seeds we start ourselves whenever possible. Growing your own from seed you save yourself makes you a low carbon footprint rock star.

2. Switch to re-usable canning lids. Tattler lids are re-usable indefinitely, and are made from plastic which does not leach BPA - an endocrine disruptor that mimics estrogen. BPA does no one any favors and is especially bad news for prepubescent children. Re-usable lids will entail a higher upfront cost that may not be feasible for everyone, though I believe it makes good sense both economically and in terms of energy consumption over the long term. Fossil fuels certainly go into the production of the Tattler re-usable lids and rings, but far more energy goes into the mining of metal for the single-use disposable lids, as well as the BPA-containing plastic lining on those lids. This is an investment worth working towards incrementally as your budget permits.

3. Prepare large batches so that you max out the capacity of your canner each time you fire it up. The more food you get out of one run through the canning process, the lower the energy usage per jar. Check the yields on canning recipes and try to scale up so that you fill your canner each time. Write margin notes on the recipes you use regarding the accuracy of the stated yields so that you can work more efficiently in the future. Also, make every effort to ensure that each jar seals successfully. Each jar that fails to seal and requires reprocessing doubles the energy consumption to preserve that food.

4. Bring the water needed to ambient temperature (or better) before you begin the canning process. In summer the water that comes out of our tap is roughly 59F/15C. The canning process takes that water to 212F/100C and beyond. That's exactly where the bulk of the fossil fuel is consumed - in heating water. A few hours' worth of foresight can shave off a significant chunk of those fossil fuel calories. All you need to do is fill the pots you'll need to use in the canning process well ahead of time. A water bath canner full of 59F water will warm up nicely when placed in the full August sun for several hours. Even if the pot only sits indoors on a cold stove for a few hours, our kitchen is very rarely less than 73F/23C during the summer months, and often much higher. If you're more ambitious and better equipped, you could use a camp shower bag to get the water really hot (easily 100F/33C). It may not seem like these small temperature differentials should make much difference, but heating the water is the major energy cost in the canning process. Temperature is a measure of energy, and saving energy is the name of the game here. I know planning ahead isn't the easiest thing in the thick of the summer gardening season, but in this case it's a free and relatively easy way to reduce your energy consumption.

5. As an obvious corollary to the above, use as little hot water as possible when you preserve food. Leave only the required amount of water in the canner when you're ready to process the filled jars. Extra water doesn't contribute anything to the process; it only consumes more energy for no purpose. If you're pressure canning, you can sterilize your jars in the canner with only a few inches of water and preheat the canner in the process. Just run the pressure canner with the lid on to the point that steam is being produced; you don't need to pressurize it. Leave the canner closed until you're ready to fill the jars.

6. If you happen to be blessed with a woodstove to heat your home, and are able to delay some of your canning to the cool months of the year, go for it. In doing so, you would avoid using any fossil fuel calories at all, and you'd be piggy-backing food preservation on the necessary heating of your home.

Got any other energy-saving tips to do with canning or food preservation? Please share in the comments!

Homegrown Coriander

2011-08-15T09:55:00.000-04:00

A minor frustration in growing cilantro is the plant's notorious haste in going to seed. I deal with this by planting cilantro seed almost weekly from spring through midsummer. That ensures a relatively steady supply of one of my favorite summer herbs, so essential for salsa and Asian stir-fry dishes. Still, the plants have their own agenda, which seems to be ensuring future generations of cilantro as quickly as possible, and then dying. Those future generations take the form of an abundant seed set. I'm sure most of you will know this, but the seed of cilantro is coriander. Every so often I see cilantro referred to as "fresh coriander" or "green coriander."

This is the first year I've allowed the plants to fully ripen their seed. In past years I ripped out the bolting plants to make room for other things. This year I decided to harvest the seed, both for culinary uses and for re-seeding. The technique I use is pretty basic. On a dry day I unfold a full-size newspaper section underneath the dried out plant. Ideally I manage to arrange the newspaper such that it is slightly bowl shaped, with the center lower than the edges. Then I bend the seed heads down as low over the paper as possible, and rub the dried stalks and seed pods vigorously between my hands. What collects in the paper will be a combination of seeds, stems, leaf debris, and a few odd insects. I fold the newspaper up and bring it to the covered porch, where I open it up to dry for a day or so. During this time most of the insects will wander off on their own.

Next I remove the larger, more obvious pieces of stem and other detritus. Then the seeds go into a colander with holes small enough that the seeds cannot pass through. Shaking the seeds around in there removes the vast majority of other chaff. After that I pick over what remains by hand. Medium sized bits of stem take just a few minutes to pick out. All told, it takes me only about 15 minutes of hands-on work to collect what easily amounts to a year's supply of coriander. It's one of my mainstay spices when cooking beans. And we eat a lot of beans. It's also great for curries and all sorts of Indian dishes.

I put most of the cleaned coriander in a clean glass jar, labelled it, and added it to the chest freezer. The rest of it lives in the freezer attached to our refrigerator. I'm sold on the idea of keeping spices and herbs frozen to preserve as much flavor as possible. Both the chill and the darkness of a freezer help protect the flavors of these ingredients. Considering that purchased spices are - on a price per weight basis - among the most expensive foods I cook with, it's important to me that I get full value out of them.

Fig Tree Update

2011-08-05T08:10:00.002-04:00

So we've had our three fig trees in large containers for a year and change now. I wanted to wait this long to post an update on them so that I could have some results to share. The figs are in 17-gallon containers with a sizeable water reservoir at the bottom that takes away some of the growing space. These containers were constructed along the same lines as the self-watering potato buckets I experimented with last year.

The figs are doing well. It's likely I jumped the gun just slightly in pulling them out of the garage this spring. I was overeager, and the garage was really crowded. I knew fig trees could withstand light frosts. The garage where they spent the winter is large enough that the temperature inside had never dipped below 30 F (-1 C), even though it's unheated. I pulled the trees outside in late April, though our last frost comes typically in early May. I covered them with a drop cloth when frosts were predicted, and even put bottles of warm water under the cloths with them when temperatures in the 20's were forecast. These precautions proved insufficient to fully counter my overeagerness. The trees took some damage on the higher branch tips which held up the drop cloth. I was afraid that I'd done serious harm to the trees. But true to form, the figs proved they could withstand light frosts. I waited a few months to see how much of each branch had died, and ended up needing to trim only a few inches here and there.

The soil in the containers had settled quite a bit after planting last year. In late spring I laid each container on its side, hauled the tree out, trimmed the roots that had grown down into the water reservoir, and added more soil to the bottom of the growing space. The figs already had their leaves on, but they took this disturbance in stride. It's clear that the third year root trimming is going to be necessary next spring. This is considered standard maintenance for fig trees in containers. All the plants were working on becoming root bound. The extra soil should do for this year though.

All three varieties now have unripe figs on them. I've got them positioned on the edge of the driveway, and they seem to relish the extra baking that the blacktop provides. Making sure they're well watered through the heat wave has been a priority. They are thirsty plants indeed. I think keeping them in sufficient water would be very difficult without the water reservoir. It needs filling at least every other day. I'm especially anxious to keep up with their water needs because I suspect the first few figs that one tree put on were lost last year due to lack of water.

I'm looking forward to our first fig harvest, perhaps in a month or so. I don't expect it to be huge by any means, but I think we'll see a good handful or two from each of our three different varieties. An older friend of mine who grew up in Italy told me once about a breakfast he ate every day for a few weeks in late summer. Ripe figs smeared over crusty bread, drizzled with good olive oil and a pinch of salt. His mouth watered when he described it to me, almost 50 years later. Sign me up for that. Or figs skewered on rosemary twigs and roasted over a real charcoal fire. Or fig clafouti. Or figs with soft goat cheese on a green salad. Or, or, or...

Got any favorite ways to eat figs?

Harvest Meal: Pad See Ew

2011-08-04T06:16:00.003-04:00

There are two topics I want to cover in today's post: a new variety of broccoli that I'm growing this year, and the dish I keep making with it. Let's start with the crop.

It's a Brazilian variety of broccoli called piracicaba. Yes, it's a mouthful. Say: "peer-ah-SEE-kah-bah." Piracicaba is referred to as a non-heading broccoli, but what that really means is that the heads it produces are quite small. The largest ones I've seen on my plants are the first ones formed in the center of the plant. They're big enough to divide into two or maybe three good sized spears. When that one is removed, more heads start to form on the outer branches, each one smaller than the last. The salient point here is that piracicaba broccoli was bred for its leaves, not its florets. I learned to love broccoli leaves when I lived in the city and shopped at a good farmer's market. There was a vendor who sold "baby broccoli leaves" which I used for stir-fries. Maybe that vendor was hip way back then, and they were piracicaba leaves. They were certainly addictive. So growing a variety of broccoli which can deliver a steady supply of small and tender leaves all through the summer is a real joy.

But wait, there's more. Perhaps it wouldn't surprise you to hear that a Brazilian broccoli variety is exceptionally tolerant of heat and drought. The extent of this plant's endurance is on display this summer. We've had scorching heat and very, very little rain; and the piracicaba couldn't care less, apparently. Given the way our summers are trending with the global climate weirding, this is an attribute that has my full attention and respect. Piracicaba is also fairly cold hardy. I grew some last year as a trial and found that it held on till the first frost. That did surprise me. That's still not all though. The most amazing thing about this brassica variety is that the cabbage moths (small whites) utterly ignore it. I mean they have NO interest. None, zip, zilch. The only damage I find on the piracicaba leaves is from flea beetles, and that's pretty minor.

Noticing this lack of damage from the cabbage moths last year, I resolved to grow no cabbage at all in the spring this year. My spring brassicas therefore consisted of Tuscan kale, piracicaba, kohlrabi and a few turnips. Without the cabbage in the garden to attract the moths, all the other brassicas took much less damage than usual from them. I've got my fall cabbages under a row cover now, to protect them from the depredations of both moth and heat.

Piracicaba & pad see ew ingredients

So how do I eat this stuff? That brings me to a harvest meal that's been in heavy rotation this summer: pad see ew, a Thai noodle dish. I grew to love Thai food in those years I lived in the city. Now I indulge in some of my favorites at home. Thai cuisine is well suited to summertime in Pennsylvania, since I don't want to heat my house up any more than strictly necessary. Thai cookery usually relies on lots of ingredient preparation followed by a very short cooking period which brings everything together into a delicious whole. This describes pad see ew to a tee.

This dish is not at all spicy-hot, and can include meat or be vegetarian. I've been making a vegetarian version, so that's what I'll describe. What follows will prepare a generous single serving. Scale up proportionally to feed more people.

Place 2 ounces of celophane (transparent) rice noodles in a pot. Cover with cool water and soak for at least one hour before cooking. The longer the soaking time, the less you'll need to cook them. I've seen this dish most often prepared with the widest rice noodles. These will require some heating to fully cook through. Medium cut noodles require less, and the thin cut noodles can skate by with no pre-cooking if you soak long enough.

Prepare all your other ingredients. Slice one or two shallots, and mince three large cloves of garlic, or as much as you like, according to your tastes. Wash 3-4 ounces of piracicaba leaves and florets, or an equivalent amount of any other type of broccoli. Trim them into small pieces that will cook quickly in a stir-fry. In a small bowl measure out 1 and a half teaspoons of fish sauce, and add 2 tablespoons of soy sauce. Keep both sauces on hand in case you want to add more during cooking. Beat one egg in a small bowl. Measure out one tablespoon of sugar in another small bowl. Coarsely chop several stems of cilantro. Have all these ingredients and some cooking oil laid out near your cooking area. A long handled spoon or cooking chopsticks will be useful, and you may want tongs for serving.

Check your noodles. If you are using any but the smallest of the flat rice noodles, put the pot of noodles on the burner and warm the water, giving the noodles a gentle stir from time to time. You will not even need to bring the water to a boil. (Don't put rice noodles you failed to soak into boiling water. They'll just stick together in a tangled mess.) Make sure they are well softened, but keep in mind they'll get a final cooking as part of the stir-fry. Do not overcook them or they will fall apart when you cook the rest of the dish. When softened, turn off the heat. Have a colander in the sink ready to drain them at the last moment.

Preheat your largest heavy skillet over high heat for at least four minutes. Add a generous amount of cooking oil to the pan and immediately add the garlic and shallots. Stir these only long enough to separate them in the hot oil. Then add the piracicaba and stir it very gently around the pan so that it just begins to wilt. Drain the rice noodles, shaking off excess water, and stir them to combine with the broccoli. Sprinkle the sugar over the ingredients in the pan and continue stirring until the broccoli is wilted. Push all the ingredients to the edges of the pan, forming a ring of ingredients with a hole in the middle. If the pan looks very dry in the center, add a little more oil. Pour the beaten egg into the center and let it sit for a moment. Pour the fish sauce and soy sauce mixture in a circle over the mixture of noodles and broccoli. When you can see that the bottom of the beaten egg has begun to set up, mix all ingredients thoroughly in the pan. The uncooked egg should coat the noodles and broccoli. Check the color of the noodles. They should be brown from the soy sauce. If they are very pale, add a bit more soy sauce and mix well. Cook just long enough that the eggs have cooked and excess liquid has evaporated. Turn off the heat and mix in the chopped cilantro.

If you're a strict vegetarian you can leave out the fish sauce. If you're a committed carnivore you can add small pieces of raw meat to the center of the skillet before the eggs go in. Cook the meat thoroughly and push it to the edges with the other ingredients before adding the beaten egg.

Ugly picture, yummy food

I count this as a harvest meal for us since we produced the shallots, garlic, eggs, cilantro, and piracicaba that goes into the pad see ew. The rice noodles, sugar, oil, fish sauce and soy sauce are purchased. This is another one of those dishes that I just can't seem to get enough of. Fortunately our six piracicaba plants produce very steadily. From those six plants I can harvest enough leaves every three or four days to prepare a meal for my husband and myself.

I plan to have some piracicaba plants in the hoop house this winter. We'll see how long they hold on in there, and perhaps they'll even overwinter with enough protection. Piracicaba will definitely be a mainstay brassica in next year's garden. I recommend it to anyone who loves broccoli and lives where the summers are warm. Seeds are getting easier to find. Fedco has carried them for at least the last two years.

What harvest meals are you preparing these days?

Chicks

2011-08-03T11:30:00.003-04:00

Back in early spring there was an offer of a broody hen from a local farmer I know. I got all excited and built a nesting box for the broody girl and her eggs. When late spring rolled around and we weren't hosting a hen, I put the chances of that project playing out at slim to nil. Farmers get real busy once winter is over, and with that in mind I wasn't willing to nag him about anything. Besides, if he didn't have a broody hen at the moment, he couldn't exactly produce one. In any case, I've got the nesting box all ready to go, so if and when he has a broody hen in a non-frantic part of the year, I'm ready to accept her on a moment's notice.

But having psyched myself up to host some little chicks, I reconsidered my lack of interest in getting chicks from a hatchery. In the end I asked my farming friend if I could buy a few chicks from her the next time she started another batch of broilers. She gets Cornish Cross chicks from a nursery that is fairly local to us, though they're still delivered by mail. So just over two weeks ago when her order of chicks came in, I went to her farm with the WWOOF volunteers we were hosting and picked up six day-old chicks. Our volunteers at the time were vegetarians, but surprisingly accepting of my plan to raise these birds for our table. I encouraged them to handle the chicks as much as possible, wanting the birds to become accustomed to being picked up by humans.

My setup for the brooder was pretty simple. I just covered a large storage plastic bin with garden caging and filled it with a few inches of wood shavings. Our volunteer constructed a little wooden frame with fine mesh across the top to hold the waterer. This serves to catch any spilled water in a limited part of the wood shavings, and to keep the chicks away from the wet bedding. When the chicks are very tiny, they don't tolerate getting even slightly wet as they must stay very warm indeed. I had set up the brooder with an incandescent bulb hanging from the caging, since my chick-rearing guide warned me that they need 95F (35C) temperatures in their brooder the first week. But these chicks arrived in the midst of a summer heat wave, when indoor temperatures were 80+F (27C) during the day. I turned on the bulb for the first few days and left it on overnight. From observing the chicks it was obvious they didn't need the extra heat. The bulb was positioned in the middle of the brooder, and they scattered to the four corners to sleep. So I happily turned the light off and let them bunch up for warmth if they felt the need. The crazy heat has passed, for the moment, but the chicks still don't seem to need any extra warmth.

You may notice in the picture above that I've been providing weeds to the chicks from day one. Every day I hang some purslane (which is rampant in the garden right now) from the caging, and dandelion or other weeds when they come easily to hand. The chicks seem to like the dangling plants. They jump for individual leaves and tear off what they can with their beaks. Anything that encourages exercise in these chicks is a good thing. Cornish Crosses are, in my opinion, overbred. They are noted for a growth rate so rapid that it causes leg problems because they cannot support their own weight. It's also not uncommon for their bodies to outgrow their organs. Heart failure is a feature in this breed which is typically slaughtered at six weeks when raised industrially. Because we're not lighting them at night, our broilers won't eat 24 hours a day. So they'll grow a bit more slowly and have a few more weeks of life. It should also help prevent organ failure and leg problems.

Last week, when the chicks were less than two weeks old, I started moving them for part of each day to "daycamp." This is just a wire mesh enclosure with their food and water. I place it on a fresh, shady patch of grass and let them hang out there whenever the weather is fair and I'm at home. This wouldn't be feasible for two-week old chicks in spring or fall, but it works in the summer. Fortunately our cat shows absolutely zero interest in the chicks. I'm not complaining about this or anything, but it is odd since he's such an accomplished hunter of chipmunks, baby rabbits and smaller rodents of all kinds. Perhaps the chicks smell to him like our hens, and the hens being clearly out of his range so far as hunting goes, the chicks get sorted into a non-prey category in his little feline mind. The broilers grow very fast indeed and this simple pen is going to be a bit crowded for all of them in a very short time.

I'm guessing it'll be slaughter time in another six to seven weeks. So far the broiler chicks have been very little bother at all. If the rest of the process is this easy I may plan to raise two batches of six birds each next year. That would represent a very significant portion of all the meat we eat in a year - probably something like a third to half of our total meat consumption. Knowing that we can do that much for ourselves on less than an acre would be huge.

The Horse that Threw Me

2011-07-29T11:03:00.004-04:00

Sometimes not having posted in a while becomes its own bar to restarting the writing process. My unannounced retreat from blogging began when two unexpected deaths coincided. My profoundly mentally and physically disabled cousin died the same day our cat Lucy was hit by a car. Needless to say, it was a tough time for us and for my extended family. The memorial service for my cousin took me out of state for a few days, and after that I just needed some downtime.

Left to my own devices I probably would have hibernated, but prior commitments meant that I've been consistently busy hosting and working with WWOOF volunteers through most of this month. Occupation is therapy of a sort, I realize, but it left little mental room for posting here. There's plenty to write about however. We've gotten some new critters and had the usual mix of successes and failures in the garden. I'm doing my best to shake off the summer garden blahs that seem to hit me every July. We're behind schedule with the biggest project of the year, the mini-hoop house. Deadlines for other projects are on the horizon as well. I blame it on the outrageous high temperatures we've had and my husband's heavy travel schedule for work. I beat back my garden doldrums enough to start new seedlings for the yet to be built hoop house, so we're going to have to knuckle down and get it built within the next month. Besides, the tomatoes are about to come in in earnest. Tomato crops give no quarter to the unmotivated nor the unprepared. So I'm going to have to get back on that horse.

While I've been neglecting my own blog, I've also been neglecting many of the blogs I usually read and profit from. I'm playing catchup with many of your blogs as time allows. I suspect next week I'll have time and space enough to do some catching up with my own posting. Hope summer is going well for all of you!

Potatoes in Buckets, Round III

2011-06-03T11:15:00.001-04:00

I may not be the most diligent blogger, but I'm dogged when it comes to gardening. I'm not a quick study, and certainly no expert. But I'm willing to experiment, and to persevere with empirical tinkering. For the last two years I've experimented with growing some of my potatoes in buckets. The first year, wet and cold 2009, saw all my potatoes eventually succumb to late blight, but the potatoes in simple perforated buckets held out longest and produced very respectable yields. Last year was hot and incredibly dry, and to compound matters I situated my fancy self-watering buckets on the driveway, which only baked the poor plants all the more. The yields were abysmal.

This year I'm trying a new potato-in-bucket method. I realize that those of you in the northern hemisphere who grow potatoes will already have planted yours by now. So this is just for documentation purposes. I'll do a follow up post around harvest time, and maybe some of you will choose to use a bucket method next time you're ready to grow a few spuds. I came across this technique about two years ago, somewhere on the internets. It's a very easy one to implement and may just combine the best aspects of in-ground cultivation and container growing. All you do is cut the bottom off a bucket, turn it upside down, and plant your seed potato in a prepared garden bed.

Potatoes cultivated in the ground have plenty of space and access to the huge reserves of nutrients in that soil. The drawbacks include higher susceptibility to damage from rodents and other pests, some difficulty in digging for harvest, the risk of damage from harvesting tools, and the likelihood of missing some tubers entirely. Potatoes in containers can be easily hilled, which is thought to encourage better yield. They can also be pampered with a rich mixture of garden soil and compost. My experience suggests that in a year of blight both their elevation and the ability to spread the plants out protect them from the fungus by increasing air circulation around the leaves and stems. Harvest is also remarkably easy, with little chance of missing any tubers, and no chance of spearing them with a digging tool. Simply dump the buckets in a wheelbarrow, and gather up the spuds. The downside is the need for additional diligence in watering, finite growing space inside the container and thus limited nutrients, which may limit yields.

This third potato bucket method promises to deliver most of the advantages of both in-ground and container cultivation, and few of the drawbacks. While hilling will be easy, the plants' roots will still be able to draw on the garden soil for both nutrients and moisture. To harvest, the buckets can simply be kicked over one at a time, and the tubers easily gathered without the need to dig, and therefore without risk of damaging them with shovels or pitchforks. That, anyway, is the theory. We'll see how it works out in practice.

I know of two potential drawbacks of in-ground cultivation that will remain with this method. Once planted, the spacing of the plants is fixed. If late blight shows up, the plants can't be separated to increase airflow around them, as would be possible with other bucket methods. Also, damage from rodents is still possible. With loosened soil around and below the buckets, gnawing critters might have little difficulty making inroads. This risk may be mitigated by the fact that I used the buckets directly over the cardboard layer of sheet mulching in the beds. So the rim of the bucket rests against a flat surface, at least until the cardboard rots in place. I cut through the cardboard inside each bucket in several places to prevent water from pooling in there and rotting the tubers. This also gives the potato roots access to the underlying soil moisture. I suspect that just the elevation of the potato leaf canopy creates a much less favorable environment for late blight through better air circulation. It's also a less sheltering and inviting space for rodents as compared to in-ground plants which drape their leaves to the soil. It might also help to tamp down the soil around the bucket, making it more difficult for the rodents to get in, but I'm very reluctant to deliberately compact the soil after working so hard to loosen our clay.

I had hoped to be organized enough to run side-by-side trials of the all the bucket methods I've tried. That didn't happen this year, but I did at least record the weight of the seed potatoes I planted in each bucket. I can compare those to the results I got with my first bucket potatoes in 2009. If I'm more organized and less frazzled next spring, perhaps the three methods of bucket potato cultivation will go head to head.

The potatoes are all growing well, with the bucket grown plants showing a big more growth so far than the in-ground plants. I've already hilled them once, and they're due for another. So far the year promises fair for a good potato harvest. I'm also allowing all the volunteer plants coming up from spuds we missed at last year's harvest to go ahead and grow. We had no problems with disease last year, so there's no real reason to remove them. They came up in what I intend for a melon patch this year, so they should be able to share the space nicely.

This year we're growing Red Pontiacs, Kennebecs, All Blues, German Butterballs, and possibly a few Sangres, depending on which varieties are represented among the volunteers. Are you growing potatoes this year? If so, what varieties and what methods are you using?

Chive Vinegar

2011-05-26T08:51:00.002-04:00

The chive flowers have been blooming for about two weeks now. They are such cheerful adornments for the garden. Each year I take a division from the parent plant and start a new colony somewhere, even though one plant could easily go for three years between divisions. It hasn't seemed to hurt the plants any to divide them more aggressively.

This spring I finally got around to plucking some of the flower heads to make chive vinegar. I'd been meaning to do it for years, but good intentions got lost in the whirlwind of spring chores that must be done as soon as temperatures permit. Had I known how gorgeous the infused vinegar would be I might have gotten to it sooner. Look at the color!

For this infusion I used plain old distilled white vinegar, which, having no color of its own to begin with, probably helps the color given by the chive blossoms stand out so clearly. If I'd had any of our own apple cider vinegar left I probably would have used that and not gotten so brilliant a shade. I chose chive blooms that were just fully opened, still soft and with full color. After the blooms have been open for a while they sort of stiffen up and the color becomes pale, before they begin to dry and turn brown. I worked by feeling the blooms with my fingertips, checking for the right amount of give. I washed them gently and spun them in a salad spinner, then pulled all the individual flowers off the flower head. I got the same eye-stinging effect from doing this as I do when chopping onions. Chive flowers pack a wallop!

I didn't use all that many blooms to my quart of vinegar - perhaps ten or so. After just a week of steeping, the color and flavor of the vinegar is pronounced. The flavor is oniony of course, but it lacks the pungent bite of raw onion; strong but mellow flavor is what we've got. I'll strain off the spent blooms in another week or so, by which time I expect they'll have contributed all the flavor they've got to give. I'm well aware that the color may darken and dull over time. I've seen that happen with raspberry vinegar. But I imagine the color will still be pleasant. It seems to me, though I can't swear to it, that my chives sometimes bloom again later in the year. If the color of this vinegar holds up well, or even for a few months, I may take cuttings from a late season bloom to make more chive vinegar. If I can find pretty bottles at a rummage sale or yard sale, they would make nice gifts to give away for the winter holidays. Whether the color holds up prettily or not, we'll be using this quite a bit in salads.

Early Snow Peas

2011-05-16T10:46:00.005-04:00

Just a quick report on a successful experiment started early this year with snow peas (mangetout), one of my favorite vegetables. Peas in general are quite hardy plants. They even tolerate freezing temperatures, so they can be sown before the last frost of spring. However, there's one little catch to this. The pea seeds must have favorable conditions (meaning above freezing) to germinate. If seeds are placed in the ground and never have suitable moisture and temperature for germination, they'll simply rot. Once they've germinated, the seeds are as resilient to harsh conditions as the plants they will eventually grow into.

The neat trick is that germination can take place indoors. All one needs to do is soak the pea seeds for about six hours in water to cover, and then drain them and wrap them loosely in a damp paper towel. Keep the moist towel with the seeds in a plastic bag with plenty of air in it for 2 to 5 days, checking the seeds daily and rinsing them gently with fresh water. You will see a pale little spur begin to swell under the seed coat. Eventually this spur will break through the surface of the seed as a root, but you don't need or want to wait that long. If the root emerges by more than a millimeter or so, you must handle the germinated seeds very carefully so as not to damage that root. Far better to get them in the ground as soon as you can clearly discern the root forming up under the seed coat.

I planted pre-germinated snow pea seeds in my cold frame on the last day of January this year. This was an audaciously early date. But it worked. The timing was chosen based on when we get ten hours of daylight back at our latitude. (Ten hours of daylight being a critical minimum requirement for plant growth.) I knew that all the growth from seed to emergent seedling would be fueled by the energy stored in the seed itself, not by photosynthesis. Available sunlight during that time wouldn't matter, but our winter temperatures would slow down that phase of growth. By the time the seedlings poked their heads up above the soil sometime in mid-February they'd have sufficient daylight to continue their growth so much as temperatures would allow. Though the cold frame only has about 8 inches of headroom, I figured by the time the snow peas were of a height to make that an issue, it wouldn't be necessary to keep the cover on the cold frame any more. That's exactly how it worked out. The variety I grow, Snow Sweet, doesn't even require trellising, so it's perfectly suited to being started in such a small space.

The picture above is what our snow peas look like today. I got our first small harvest off of them last night, half way through May, roughly 3-4 weeks early for this area. Typically snow peas peter out once the temperatures get too warm. I suspect these plants will continue to produce through June and possibly even into early July, depending on the weather. We're planning to build a small hoop house this year, which will provide more sheltered growing space than our cold frames, and greater temperature gain as well. These advantages should afford us snow peas even earlier in the season. My plan is to sow germinated snow pea seeds progressively through late winter wherever carrots or other crops are removed from the hoop house beds. I think I could eat snow peas every day of the year and not get sick of them. Maybe by this time next year we'll be testing that theory.

If you want to nudge the boundaries of the possible with plants on your own property, you can figure out the daylight calculations for your own latitude here. You'll need a fair degree of precision in your latitude values. You can get that by looking up your address on either google maps, or google earth, by the way.

Five Garden Favorites

2011-05-11T09:01:00.004-04:00

Deanna over at Crunchy Chicken has a post up about her top five picks among edible garden plants. I was going to just respond to her post in a comment, but then I decided to flesh the material out just a bit and make it a post of my own.

Deanna's number one favorite plant is garlic, and I can't possibly disagree with this. Garlic has been utterly trouble free for me in all the years I've grown it. It's a staple of our diet, it stores well in our root cellar, and when we grow the rocambole varieties, we get garlic scapes as a bonus crop. Garlic also fits neatly into a busy gardening year. Harvest comes in late June or early July - just when the spring planting is done and before the onslaught of tomatoes and other crops really start to become management issues. I did a write up of my garlic planting technique a few years back. I don't know if it's the technique that gives me such great garlic crops, or if all my efforts are superfluous and the garlic would do just as well on its own. But it sure is one of my favorites to grow.

A less obvious pick for my number two is asparagus. Even though there's very delayed gratification with asparagus (as with many perennial plants), it's still a favorite. Once you get past the minor hassle of planting, it's unfussy, produces for 15-20 years, and is sooo delicious. It gets bonus points for being an early spring crop. This time of year we're desperate for homegrown foods, and asparagus plugs the gap.

Culinary herbs definitely make the list, especially the perennial ones. I like anything I can plant once and harvest many times. But even the annuals will often self-seed, as the cilantro from last year has done. Herbs can be grown by just about anyone, whether you have access to a bit of earth or not. They're also completely unfussy once established (are we noticing a trend here?) Plus, growing my own herbs saves me a lot of money, since herbs are among the most expensive produce at a market. Many of them dry well. Cooking without herbs would just be boring, so I'd probably want them around even if they were more difficult to grow. And if you really get into culinary herbs, you can continue the adventure by exploring the medicinal uses of them too.

Potatoes have to be on my list. They are one of the very few calorie crops that grow reliably in my area. They almost certainly will grow reliably in your area too. Potatoes are adaptable to many climates, and as I found out two years back, even if the dreaded late blight hits there is a means to salvage a crop. While there are tales of prodigious yields on potatoes, as much as 20x or 30x the weight of the seed potatoes planted, these remain for me an El Dorado. I've been content with my 10-15x increases. Even in a truly bad growing year I've seen 5x. Beyond their adaptability as plants, potatoes are incredibly versatile as foodstuffs. There are so many ways to prepare and eat potatoes, and they're all delicious. If you choose the right varieties to grow, they store very well. They're no slouches in the nutrition department either. As I learned in Carol Deppe's The Resilient Gardener, potatoes are also surprisingly high in both protein and vitamin C.

Even though the urban legends about zucchini (courgettes for you British - or French - types) being left on doorsteps in the dead of night are legion, it still makes my top five list. Mind you, you only need one zucchini plant if your family members number four or less. Zucchini is incredibly productive, so growing too many plants is a recipe for stress if not trauma. I love growing zucchini because it is just such an exuberant plant. It doesn't ask much, and if you get a bush variety, it won't even take up that much space. My plant always gets powdery mildew, and eventually, squash bugs. But it carries on gallantly, producing until mid-summer. Frankly, by then I'm quite content to let it go and move on to eating other crops. Until that point there are just so many wonderful uses for zucchini: stir-fries, grilling, bi bim bap, and of course, morning glory muffins, zucchini bread, and chocolate cake.

So what about you? What are your favorite crops to grow in your garden?

News of the Flock

2011-05-09T05:52:00.004-04:00

It's been a while since I posted anything about our backyard flock. So some parts of this update could not in fairness be called news. But it's news on the blog, so probably worth a post. If you're a newish reader, or just want an overview of our mobile coop and pen system for our laying flock, I wrote about it in detail in this post.

Last fall we did some minor upkeep to the mobile pen with help from some WWOOF volunteers. The half of the roof that consists of plywood had pretty well rotted, so it was replaced. It and the rest of the pen got a wash of primer, and then the remainders of all the paint samples we had lying around were used to give the pen a piebald, hickish sort of charm. At least the colors are bright and cheery. We figure we'll get one, maybe two more years of service out of the pen (first built in spring 2008) before we need to build a new one from scratch. While I don't relish the work of building anew, it will at least be a chance to build smarter. The pen definitely does its job, but it's much heavier than I would prefer. I'd like to build something lighter that will be easier to move each day.

I got tired of the difficulty of cleaning out the mobile coop, so I've instituted a few changes there too. For one thing, the screened floor of the coop never worked well in allowing the manure to fall through onto the ground. The hay from the nesting box would get spread over the floor and catch the poop, so it was just one big mess, not at all easy to clean. This year I cut a piece of corrugate plastic to fit over the entire floor, including under the nesting box. When it's time to clean out, it's now much easier to just take down the nesting box roof, and pull it out along with the plastic on the floor. That accounts for about 98% of all the poo in the coop. The plastic can be hosed off, exposed to a few hours of solar radiation, and replaced in the coop.

The second change is that I now close the coop up during the day. Once the girls come out into the pen for their breakfasts, they're out all day. This achieves a couple of things. Firstly, there's a little less poop in the coop, which means less for me to deal with at cleaning time. More poop ends up on the lawn where I don't have to do anything with it. (Though to be perfectly honest, this effect is small since chickens seem to do most of their pooping overnight from the roost.) The other benefits are to do with the eggs. I no longer have to squat down to check the nesting box in the coop. Instead I mounted a new nesting box in the pen, based on the bucket nesting box they used in their winter quarters in the shed. I can check this nesting box easily without physical strain. I know I sound like a total wuss when I say this, but it's long-term thinking. Both of my parents have had joint replacement surgeries, and I want to be able to keep chickens well into my dotage. So designing now for physical ease is important to me. Eggs laid in the bucket nesting box also tend to be cleaner, since the hens are no longer walking through a manure-y coop to get to the nesting box.

As alluded to in an earlier post, we just added two Cuckoo Marans hens to the flock, bringing our total up to six laying hens. These are very different birds from our Red Stars. The various Marans breeds are all dual-purpose, meaning they put on some meat, and lay some eggs. In terms of feed efficiency, they don't put on meat as well as dedicated meat breeds, nor produce eggs as well as dedicated layer breeds. They're significantly bigger than our Red Stars, and assertive too in the ways of chickendom, which is to say rather mean. The Red Stars laid eggs with bleached looking eggshells for a few days - a typical indication of stress. Now the pecking order has been established, and the Marans clearly rule the roost.

I briefly kept a small flock of White Marans before, and wasn't impressed enough with them to keep them long. The Cuckoos have a couple of advantages on the Whites we had before. They're younger, so they are laying better than the older whites. And they cohabitate with the Red Stars, who demonstrate to the Marans that all the weeds and greenery I throw into the pen are good to eat. Thus, the Marans learn behavior that improves the quality of their eggs and reduces my feed costs. The person I got the Marans from is a hobby breeder for show. I don't think he cares much about feed efficiency or egg quality. His birds had been kept in stationary runs denuded of vegetation, so there wasn't anything for them to forage. Still, he gives me free hens, so I'm not going to complain. With a little tutelage from the Red Stars, they seem to be learning to appreciate the weeds.

While the Marans were free, there's a downside to them. They're too big to easily fit in the bucket nesting box, which is a snug fit for the Red Stars. One of them managed to lay one egg in the bucket, but the rest of the time they've deposited their eggs in the grass. It would be a good idea to add another nesting box just based on the numbers alone. A bigger nesting box could fit alongside the one we've got. I just need to figure out what could be used to provide more space while not adding too much additional weight to the pen. Meanwhile those extra dark Marans eggs lying around on the grass tell me that the worst of the egg-eating tendencies the Red Stars exhibited in February are apparently over.

I don't expect that we'll keep the Marans all that long. Right now they're quite young and thus in their prime so far as egg laying goes. They're laying decently. As soon as their production tapers off a bit, we'll slaughter them and convert them to canned meat and chicken stock. By then it may be time to replace the Red Stars with some fresh pullets as well. We are running perilously low on chicken stock at the moment.

Having recently scrounged a large plastic storage bin that would be suitable as a brooder box for chicks, I'm now considering raising a few meat birds for the freezer over the summer months. I'm not at all sure that this is going to happen, but I'm mulling it. If we decide the project is a go, there will certainly be a few posts on the topic.

First Tincture: Valerian Root

2011-05-05T17:09:00.000-04:00

Events around the homestead are running far ahead of posting, as is so often the case in spring. A lot has been going on what with the installation a new package of Italian honey bees, and the addition of two Cuckoo Marans hens to our tiny backyard flock. (Yes, I know that Cuckoo Marans sounds like a stripper's name, but it's a breed of chicken, trust me.) Add more transplanted stinging nettles, and ramps, and rootstock, plus potatoes still to be planted, and it's a bit of a whirlwind. Blog-worthy stuff seems to just be slipping right past me these days, so I decided to seize upon one of them and just get a post out already.

Learning more about herbal medicine made my official list of goals for this year. Last year I planted a good selection of the more widely available medicinal herbs. Over the winter I picked up a few titles on the subject and dipped into them from time to time. And finally today I've made my first effort towards creating a medicinal tincture. I'm really hoping I just picked one of the more difficult ones, because it was rather a tedious chore: valerian root. I planted three valerian plants last year, and spring of the second year is the latest time to harvest the roots. I could only bear to dig one of them up; I'm hoping the other two will set seed and propagate themselves so I can harvest some of those next year. You see, to make a tincture from the root of the plant is to kill that plant. That's hard for me. Beets, carrots, parsnips and turnips are one thing, but perennials are another.

That's one excuse anyway. An equally good excuse would be that valerian roots are an absolute pain to clean. Here's a picture of what it looked like after 20 minutes of hosing off outside, before I tackled the rest of the cleaning inside. It's much like being hairdresser to a sheepdog. A very dirty and tractable sheepdog. The digging took only a couple minutes. The cleaning took at least an hour. Other medicinal tinctures are going to have to be less work if they're going to get made. Fortunately, once the roots were clean enough to pass muster with me, there was very little else to it. I simply cut them up with kitchen shears, packed them very tightly into a clean canning jar, and poured over enough 80 proof vodka to cover. If I'd had 100 proof vodka on hand, I would have used that.

For the next several weeks the tincture will stay in a kitchen cabinet where I'll see it and remember to shake it every other day or so. After that it'll be strained and stored in the pantry where it will keep forever, or until it's used up. We'll see how diligent I am about making use of all the other medicinal herbs we've got around here. If it can be justified, eventually it may make sense to stock up on a case or two of 100 proof. One is inevitably drawn to wonder if it's the herb in the herbal tinctures which lends the efficacy, or is it the alcohol itself? Valerian is known as a powerful sedative, but for a lightweight like myself, so is vodka.

Valerian root has a pronounced smell which some people apparently find extremely unpleasant. I sort of like it. It's strong but not overpowering. I would describe it as somewhere between mossy forest and licorice. My cat found the scent of it on my fingers incredibly fascinating just after I finished making the tincture. I don't think this will be a tincture I've got to hold my nose to take. At least I hope not.

Oh, and if you're an herbal medicine whiz and feel compelled to tell me I was too late with harvesting my valerian root, please save it. Tell me in a month or so, if you must. Today the effort is just too fresh in my mind to learn that it was all wasted. On the other hand, if you're still an herbal medicine whiz and you have some nifty trick for cleaning valerian root, or any other herbal medicine tips you feel generous about, pipe right up.

Warfare in the Garden - Moving Comfrey

2011-04-27T13:03:00.001-04:00

In which our heroine attempts to eradicate well established comfrey plants which are tragically misplaced in the garden.

Everyone makes mistakes when they start gardening. Putting comfrey plants at what I thought were going to be the corners of the garden was one of mine. The garden has expanded twice since those plantings, and two comfrey plants are now positioned where I've decided there should be pathways. Comfrey is legendarily difficult of removal, and these plants seem to find their current locations quite agreeable.

I have a method to my madness, or so it pleases me to think. I've had a few years to observe the way comfrey grows, and how other plants behave around it. I've noticed that:

comfrey leafs out early in the spring
comfrey dies back late in the fall
one comfrey plant generally gets to about 3.5' (~1.1m) in diameter
nothing - I mean no plant - grows under the full shade of an established comfrey plant

As a homesteader, and a frugal person, I've gotten into the habit of asking myself, about most anything, "What's it good for? What can I do with it? How could it be repurposed to serve my needs?" Naturally I ask, what's comfrey good for - in a structural, functional sense within the garden? (Because I'm already up to speed on all the other fabulous stuff it's good for.) It seems to me that comfrey could well form a low hedge plant, to hold back the crab grass from the borders of the garden. Since comfrey is around both early and late, the grass shouldn't be able to get a leg up. Another tool in comfrey's campaign for supremacy is its habit of plastering the ground with all the foliage of the year when it dies back in the fall. Nothing comes up through those layers of leaves before the new comfrey shoots of spring are well on their way.

So the first step in eradicating the comfrey was to take divisions of the roots and transplant them to the northern end of the garden. This area was heavily lasagna mulched in fall of 2009. The mulch did a decent job of holding the weeds in check all through last year. But as you can see, it would need renewal this year to keep the weeds back. I'd much rather create a self-maintaining border composed of a plant so profoundly useful, and not ever have to give that area another lick of work. With the help of our first WWOOF volunteers of the year, I took some dormant root pieces and stuck them in small holes in the unimproved soil at the garden's edge back in late February, spaced roughly 3.5' apart. I did absolutely nothing to help these roots along, and after watching for about a month I only needed to put in second root divisions at two of the transplant locations. I now have obviously viable comfrey plants at each of the ten orange flags in the picture above. I may expand the comfrey hedge along the western edge of the garden at some point.

Aside from getting rid of comfrey plants where I no longer want them, relocating comfrey seems to make good sense from a fertility perspective. I think of comfrey as a miner plant. It grows a formidable taproot and pulls up nutrients from deep underground, making them available to more shallowly rooted plants. But every mine plays out eventually. These comfrey plants have been in place for four years. Putting new plants in a new area should grant access to untapped resources. Comfrey is also a plant with an extraordinarily large surface area for its size. The leaves are very broad and long, while the stems are minimal. I don't know this for a certainty, but that would seem to suggest that comfrey transpires a lot of water vapor, well supplied by its tap root even when the soil surface is relatively dry. In times of drought that moisture would be helpful to other plants nearby. At the same time, by covering so much soil, comfrey regulates temperature and slows water loss from the soil through evaporation. Even if I'm wrong about comfrey's utility to nearby plants, establishing an entire row of these plants where nothing but grass was growing before seems like a good idea. It will store carbon in the soil, provide more food for bumblebees, and serve as convenient a trap crop for Japanese beetles, making them easy to handpick for the hens.

So much for all the benefits of moving the plants. But how do I imagine I'll eradicate the comfrey from its current location? Well, I plan to take a multi-pronged and long term approach. And to be philosophical about it, rather than allowing my personal feelings to come into it. Now that I know the root divisions have taken, I'll basically just keep cutting back the growth of the parent plants. I expect to take at least six cuttings this year, and I don't expect to win the war in one year. The first spring cuttings from the comfrey will, as usual, be used to provide some extra fertility to the potatoes when I plant them. This year I may also use comfrey cuttings to give the corn a boost as well. After that, I'll take several cuttings to dry for the chickens' winter feed, and also feed it to them fresh. I will even let them have direct access to the comfrey occasionally so that they can do some damage on their own; although I know they'll be far more interested in eating all the critters living below the mulch that the comfrey creates from its own leaves. The damage to the comfrey itself will be purely collateral. Other than that, I'll just keep cutting back the top growth of the plants, so that the roots gradually deplete themselves. Without leaves to photosynthesize, the roots will eventually starve and die.

Depending on how it goes, I may experiment with solarizing the root mass at some point. This would entail covering it with clear plastic and weighting down the edges so that the roots are both deprived of water and baked by the sun. It sounds torturous, I know. The only thing that salves my conscience is knowing that I've already provided for the continuation of the plant's genetic line.

Tune in later this year to see how fares the war. And wish me luck.

Now welcome, somer

2011-04-26T08:41:00.003-04:00

Now welcome somer, with thy sonne softe,
That hast this wintres wedres overshake,
And driven away the longe nyghtes blake!

- Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parlement of Fowls

Maybe it's not quite summer here yet, but the long black nights have been driven away. The daylight hours exceed the dark. I'm trying to see April in a positive light, but it's a tough sell.

April is a month of anxiety, injury, and anticipation. First I fretted about the asparagus, which didn't show any signs of life until a few days ago. Had I killed it with the fall pruning, which some gardeners claim leads to water getting down into the hollow tubes of the stalks and rotting the crowns? I dug around in the heavily mulched raised beds, looking for little nubs of asparagus stalks. They eluded me, and I had to curb the overwhelming urge to check the bed every. single. day. Then I worried about the ramps that I planted in the shade on the north side of our shed. Were they goners? I've been patiently waiting three years now for them to reproduce themselves by division, so that I can eat some of them. They were very slow to emerge too. And I still judge that there are too few yet to harvest. Another year of postponed ramp harvest. We may yet this year receive some more ramps for transplant donated by a relative. In any case, I'm determined that we'll harvest some next year, whatever their reproductive rate. Maybe some of the seeds set last year will result in more ramps too.

And the injuries, yes. Plenty of those. I posted about my bashed thumb, which has stopped hurting, and mercifully hasn't cost me my thumb nail. But I now sport major bruises in all sorts of inconvenient spots, and my right hand and wrist are still strained from not working carefully. Spring garden work is awfully tough on a body softened by winter's indolence. This is not a season conducive to rest and recuperation. I'm getting my calluses back fairly quickly.

Oh, and rain. April's rain is proverbial. I try to see it as beneficial to the garden, and all the seeds that I've sown. It does make for easier weeding, but somehow that's not my favorite chore. And between the all too frequent downpours, we've been seeing near record temperatures in the last week or so.

So enough whinging. Spring is here, even if we're not out of the woods yet with the risk of frost. That could come back and bite us where the sun don't shine well into May. But the spring blossoms have started, and it's a joy to watch the trees of the neighborhood put forth their various hues. The maples start with a gossamer veil of red, whatever color their leaves will eventually take on. The plums are blooming pure white, while our two different magnolias have lush blooms of extravagant pink and white. The neighborhood redbuds are lovely with their thick purplish-pink blooms. Our young pear curtsies to the older pear across the way, with synchronous buds of palest pink. It's nice to see that our pears will not lack for pollination services. Other trees put their leaves on first, starting with a yellow-green haze that seems to float around the still bare branches. Our figs and hazelnuts are slowly leafing out. The irises (pure ornamentals for which I have a secret weakness) planted near the front door look like they'll blossom this year.

To prevent a repeat of this month's anxiety over various crops, I've finally started keeping a garden journal. I had thought it would be tedious, which is why I didn't start years ago, as I should have. But I find I enjoy jotting notes on what I'm doing and observing in the garden. It makes me more aware of the daily changes that happen so quickly in spring - all in a seeming blur if I don't pay attention. These notes will give me reference dates for events such as the first robin of the year, or when the violets bloomed, our last snowfall - a handy tool for next year and in all subsequent years. I can see how comparing this sort of data could become a bit addictive once you have a few years of documentation to play with. But even one year of data will remind me not to expect asparagus in early April.

Mint, Tamed

2011-04-25T06:27:00.003-04:00

Last year I decided to put in a spearmint plant. Of course I'd heard all the tales about how invasive mints are and what drastic measures are needed to contain them. Serious gardening friend said he planted his mint in the middle of his lawn so that he could use the lawn mower to tame any offshoots or new growths. But still, I was determined. Perennial herbs are so tempting, and there was no way I was going to resist adding a nice mint to the collection.

So I did a little strategizing. The first thought was physical containment. I decided to sink a 5-gallon bucket into the ground, and plant inside that. So I cut off the bottom of the bucket, while my husband dug a fairly deep hole where I indicated. I had him put the dirt into a wheelbarrow, and to this I added a good amount of compost. The bucket was placed in the hole with a couple inches remaining above grade. Then I put in the soil and compost mixture until it completely filled the bucket, and backfilled the rest of the hole around the bucket. I knew the soil inside the bucket would settle down gradually over the season. I put my spearmint seedling in the bucket and watered.

My second thought was also physical containment. I'd been looking at this fragment of large plastic pipe that we'd fished out of a dumpster on a construction site for quite some time. Its diameter was several inches larger than that of the bucket, and laid on the ground it's about 10 inches high. Now mint is known to spread just by expanding its root system, which the sunk bucket should take care of. But it has a second, stealthy means of propagating itself. The plant can just grow a long stem which then casually, oh-so-innocently and when you're not looking because you're distracted by everything else going on in the garden, falls over under its own weight until it touches the ground. That's when this double agent piece of plant tissue grows roots and establishes a beach head. The plastic pipe was installed as a collar around the bucket to prevent exactly that habit. If the mint wanted to try spreading by such methods, the stem would have to grow very tall indeed, lean itself against the collar, and then droop a considerable way before reaching the earth. It never happened in all of last summer.

Interesting thing too about the bucket and collar system. I think it creates a microclimate that is beneficial in both summer and winter. Last summer was a scorcher - very hot and unusually dry for our area. I watered the mint seedling from planting through late spring, but it was mostly ignored after that. It held up fine through that sort of neglect, and I think the shade provided by the collar reduced the soil temperature at the surface inside the bucket, and therefore checked evaporation. The bushy habit of the mint also helped to cool its feet, I'm sure. In winter, the tall collar kept some wind off the plant, and the black color helped snow melt a bit faster and provided a little extra warmth in early spring.

This spring the level of soil in the bucket is at least a couple inches below the mulch I put between the outside of the bucket and the collar to keep weeds down. I see no signs of any offshoots from the spearmint. This is good, since I plan to add peppermint and catnip (another member of the mint family) this year too, though I fear we can count on the cats to help control the latter. I expect that the bucket and collar method will keep the spearmint from taking over the world in this second year which should bring even more exuberant growth. I'll be keeping my eye out for anything that can serve as collars for my additional mints when we go dumpster diving this year. If nothing turns up, we could cut out the sidewalls of some old tires and use just the tire rims.

How about you? Do you have any tricks for keeping the mint family within reasonable bounds? Or have they gotten the better of your garden?

Spring Harvest Meal: Cream of Lovage Soup

2011-04-20T15:28:00.002-04:00

The temperature is gradually warming up, but the weather has been grey and damp and dreary lately. The herbs are all coming on strong, and the asparagus are just breaking ground in their raised beds. I got my spring haircut, so the nape of my neck is bare, which only means I don't have a great desire to be outside more than necessary when the sun is hidden. This is all a roundabout way of saying it's soup weather.

So today I whipped up a bare bones, easy-peasy cream of lovage soup. Cream soups were a staple of the curriculum at culinary school. There we were taught a formula and a methodology rather than individual cream-of recipes. Pretty much, you can make a cream-of soup out of any ingredient. Now, having told you there's a formula, you might reasonably expect me to tell you what the formula is. Sadly, the exact proportions are lost in the mists of time, at least to my mind. What has stuck are the ingredient list and the methodology, which is admittedly a bit fussy in the sense that too many pans get dirtied. It is after all, a French recipe.

When I was in culinary school "lilies" were shorthand for anything in the onion family. I believe at one time all onion relatives were classified in the lily family by botanists. In any case, the chefs just referred to "lilies" in a formula, while an individual recipe would specify which lily was called for, such as onion, shallots, leeks, ramps, scallions or even garlic. Lilies are one cornerstone of a cream-of soup, and the other is the main ingredient. Then of course there's the cream. Since this is a French recipe, it goes without saying that multiple additions of butter are also involved, one of which is likely to be roux. Roux is just a cooked mixture of flour and butter. (Enough divagations yet? Can we move on?)

So my cream of lovage soup recipe took advantage of my three-year-old lovage plant, which is up and at 'em very early in the year. Convenience came into it in other ways as well. There were those salvaged and precooked leeks hanging out in the chest freezer, and scrumptious canned stock made from our home raised turkey. Also there was some parsley butter (a convenient means of preserving last year's herbs) in the freezer. Those four convenience foods made this soup a snap to pull together in no time.

The prepped leeks were roughly equivalent to one medium leek, already chopped up and partially cooked in butter. These went into a soup pot to thaw over medium heat. When thawed, I added two bay leaves, a good pinch of kosher salt, and half a pound of lovage - the chopped up stalks first, the leafy tops initially reserved. There was enough butter in the leeks to handle the lovage stalks too. When these were nicely sweated and softened, I added the leafy tops, a quart of our smoked turkey stock, and about 2 tablespoons of the parsley butter. While that warmed through, I cooked a very thick roux with a couple tablespoons of butter and three heaping tablespoons of flour in a separate pan. I went to the hassle of straining the solid ingredients from the liquid (removing the bay leaves) in order to puree them. The strained liquid was gradually (to avoid lumps) mixed into the roux, and then the pureed solids returned to the pot. (A wand blender, if you have one, would get you close enough to the same effect with less bother and cleanup.) From there I added a good glug (1/2 a cup or so) of cream, tasted to adjust seasonings, and then warmed the soup through for serving. It was very nice, but light enough to need some toasted bread for extra ballast

If we'd had any potatoes left, they would have been a perfect addition to this soup. They'd give it some heft, turning it into a far more substantial meal, and would be a satisfying way to use up the last of the winter stores by pairing them with a bright new flavor from one of the earliest spring crops. Another option that suggests itself to my tastebuds is the addition of wild rice to this soup. I think the complex flavor of the lovage would complement the dark nuttiness of wild rice very nicely. And fully cooked wild rice is an excellent thickener when pureed. With the addition of either potatoes or wild rice, the roux could be omitted, making the dish gluten-free.

I suppose I should talk about lovage, since it's not the most familiar herb to modern palates. The taste of lovage is commonly likened to celery, but I think there's a great deal more to it than that. While I certainly taste the kinship to celery, lovage also reminds me strongly of cardamom. The later in the season, the more the celery taste recedes, and the more the cardamom flavor predominates. But lovage has something else all its own that is neither celery, nor cardamom. It's hard to describe, but lovage is a big flavored herb, far stronger tasting to my palate than self-effacing celery. The stalks of lovage are round and hollow, so some people apparently use them as straws - particularly for bloody marys, which benefit from the celery-ish taste imparted by the stalks.

As a plant, lovage has many virtues too. It's perennial and hardy to zone 4 or 5, depending on whom you believe. On my homestead it tolerates half a day or more of total shade, and actually requires partial shade in warmer zones than mine (6b). It is reputed to improve the health of many other crops when companion planted, and it provides habitat for beneficial insects, especially hoverflies. Though it can become bitter and tough in hot weather, you can cut it back hard in summer to encourage the growth of tender new stalks with milder flavor. Like many herbs, lovage is unfussy about soil type, water, and temperatures once it has established itself. In the second and subsequent years it gets tall by mid-summer - up to 5 or 6 feet, but is not an aggressive spreader. This is an herb that I have utterly ignored except for an occasional shovelful of compost side-dressing once in a while, usually in fall. It comes up reliably for us and is much appreciated at this time of year, when we crave green things. It can be propagated from seed or root division, which we plan to try next year.

So that's the run down on lovage. If you've got a shady spot that has gone begging, you might consider giving it to this early, delicious, and easy to grow herb. If you already grow and cook with lovage, I'd love to hear what you do with it.

Native Bee Boxes

2011-04-13T11:07:00.003-04:00

With the arrival of intermittent spring weather, I've been very busy lately. The outdoor projects have begun in earnest and my hands and forearms are feeling the strain of that work. Typing doesn't help much. So excuse the recent lack of posting.

But here's something I wanted to write about: nest boxes for native bees. My husband made one of these a few years ago and put it up on our shed. We've already observed that the sealing walls constructed by mason bees last year have been dismantled, and a new generation of bees is checking out the nest holes for deposits of eggs. So early in the year! It seems there's so little in bloom yet for them to feed on, but the warmth has them up and about. The nest box consists of a block of wood with deeply drilled holes in various sizes. They serve as shelter for the eggs of several kinds of bee.

We have a huge three-bay garage that came with the house. Its footprint is larger than the house itself. It's great for storing all kinds of stuff pulled out of dumpsters and projects in progress, which means it gets packed to the point of becoming unnavigable. On rainy days I've been working to triage some of the ungodly mess that has piled up in there over the last six months. I found a short length of 4x4 post and decided to turn it into more nest boxes for native bees. Small pieces of scrap wood furnished roofs to keep off the worst of the rain. These will be mounted on the scaffolding for our solar array. I'm sure they will soon be fully occupied.

Our foray into keeping honey bees last year resulted in unmitigated failure. Our longest surviving colony didn't make it through the winter. We're going to try again this year, and we hope that we'll have more success with some hard lessons under our belts. Seeing the help our efforts provide to native bees offers some consolation. These bees are under the same environmental stresses as honey bees. The human race cannot afford to lose the free services of pollinator insect species, and bees are preeminent in this work. As it turns out, some of our native bees are even more effective pollinators than honey bees. Keeping honey bees requires a significant commitment of time, labor and monetary outlay. It took me all of two hours to build these two native bee nest boxes at almost no expense whatsoever. I paid for four screws, a tiny bit of silicone sealer (leftover from energy efficiency improvements for our home) and the electricity to run a power drill. My work for the native bees ends the moment these bee boxes are mounted.

I mentioned recently how last year there was a sense of my garden and homestead finally beginning to come together. If anything, that feeling is increasing this year. When we bought this house the backyard was a monoculture of open lawn, with a border of conventional, uninspired landscaping. Now it's stocked with dozens and dozens of perennial plants, and we grow a wide variety of annual vegetables there every year, both of which supply food and habitat for numerous insects, which in turn provide food to birds and other wildlife. That's biodiversity that simply wasn't there before. Putting up these boxes for the bees is another effort towards that cause. It's the inter-species connections on this tiny piece of land that are going to make what we do here sustainable over the long term. I'm convinced that every additional species I can encourage is a strength for my homestead. I don't even know exactly what these native bees are doing here. I'm sure they venture off my property as much as they conduct their business on it. But they are a knot in the living tapestry I am making of this place. I want them here. With some scrap materials and a couple hours of labor it's easy enough for me to make this place attractive to them for decades to come.

One way of looking at this is as a token gesture of atonement for the environmental damage my actions have caused, and continue to cause; a tiny way to give back to the world that supports me. Seen another way, it's self interest. Monocultures are fragile things. By encouraging as much biodiversity as possible, I get more resilience, healthier soil, lower pest pressures, better pollination of our fruits and vegetables, and less work for me. That's what I'm talking about when I say things are coming together.

If you're interested in helping populations of native bees, you could build your own bee boxes. You could even salvage the materials from a dumpster on a construction site, thus diverting useful stuff from a landfill and saving yourself some money. For guidance on this simple project, check out this fact sheet (pdf) from the Xerces Society, a wildlife conservation organization. On their website you can also find lists (tailored to each region of the US) of beneficial plants to for native bees, including many edible plants.

A Nice Cuppa

2011-04-03T10:06:00.007-04:00

Originally uploaded by Salihan

I have a tendency to discount what I know. If I've had a skill for a long time, I take it for granted. I know intellectually that all skills must be acquired somewhere, somehow, at some point in each person's life; and that I too had to learn all these things one by one. But in many cases I figure everybody must already know all about something I know, and therefore it would be pointless if not condescending to write about it. Having volunteers around my home and garden disabuses me of this attitude quite often. And I love that. I love being surprised by opportunities to teach things, pass along skills that I haven't given any conscious thought to in years. It gives me an inkling of what it must be like to be a grandmother passing along to a new generation skills that were unremarked in her youth, but not so commonplace today.

So I'm writing about something utterly quotidian in my home - making a pot of tea. Maybe my first instinct was correct and this is quite familiar to all of you. Maybe not. I should say that my teacher in making a proper pot of tea was an elderly English lady who was old enough to be my grandmother. She had lived through the Blitz in London, and came from a working class background. Her formal education had been minimal (it would be appallingly deficient by today's standards), but she knew her way around a kettle and teapot. When I knew her, she was a pensioner living very modestly in Cornwall. I'm going to tell you exactly how she instructed me to make tea.

You will need a kettle, or some way to boil water, a teapot, teabags or loose leaf tea, teacups or mugs, a spoon, and whatever you like to add to your tea - milk, cream, lemon, sugar, etc. For preference, you will also have a tea cozy for the pot, and your cups and the pot itself will be ceramic. A timer is also handy, and you will need a strainer of some sort if you use loose leaf tea. It is possible to make a perfectly good pot of tea with teabags, provided they are of good quality. Loose leaf tea tends to be of high quality, while there is considerable variation in the quality of tea sold in teabags.

To begin with, boil a good quantity of water - more than you will want to serve as tea. Bring the teapot as close as feasible to where the kettle is heating. The saying was: "Bring the pot to the kettle; not the kettle to the pot." This old rule may seem arbitrary, almost a superstition. But really it has to do with making sure the water is at the right temperature for steeping the tea. You don't want to carry the kettle very far, letting it cool all the while; having the pot near the kettle means it will also be near the heat source, and thus stay at a good temperature as well. When the water comes to a full boil, turn off the heat and straightaway pour a modest quantity of the water into the pot, at least enough to fill one teacup. Put the lid on, snug up the cozy, and let it stand for 1 minute. If you don't have a tea cozy, you could improvise with a kitchen towel. During this time, keep the kettle on the warm burner, but with the heat off. After one minute, pour the water out of the teapot and into the teacups to preheat them. You don't need to fill each cup to the brim, but you do need to empty the pot.

Add tea to the teapot. Traditionally the rule of thumb was one for each cup of tea, plus one for the pot. "One" in this case could be a teabag, or one heaping teaspoon of loose tea. I find this produces an incredibly potent pot of tea when using teabags, but it's just about right for the loose tea. I suspect teabags have gotten bigger since my lovely English mentor learned to make tea. You may need to play around with this and see what works with the tea you prefer.

As soon as you've added the tea, pour the still hot water into the pot, put the lid on, and replace the cozy. Set a timer for four minutes. Tea needs extremely hot water to steep properly, and it needs that heat for a few critical minutes. This is why it is impossible to brew decent tea in a paper cup with water from a hot tap. It's also the reason preheating the pot is necessary. However, never make tea with water that is boiling. This is too hot, and it will produce tea with a bitter tannic flavor. Letting the kettle sit for just about a minute lets the water cool to the optimal temperature.

At some point during the steeping process, open the teapot briefly, and stir the tea leaves around with a spoon, or bob the teabags up and down a few times, then close everything up again. Tea in the pot can sometimes just settle to the bottom, so that it's very thin and watery on top. A gentle mix makes it more uniform and encourages better steeping.

When the four minutes are up, empty the water from the pre-heated teacups (you could use the still warm water to soak any dishes that need washing) and serve the tea, not forgetting to employ the strainer if you've used loose tea. There's a great deal of form to tea drinking in England. The upper classes have an absolute prohibition against putting milk or cream into the cup before the tea is added. I think adding the sugar first is possibly less vulgar, but I'd need confirmation of that from a British reader. I'm not aware of any rhyme or reason behind the horror of putting the milk in first. As far as I know, it doesn't affect the tea. It may simply be a case of a distinction without a difference, which the upper classes have decided signals a class division.

There is some flexibility with the amount of steeping time. I find some teas are ready sooner, while others take a little more time. It should never take more than five minutes though. If you find the tea is weak and thin after five minutes, you didn't put enough tea in the pot. If it's dark as coffee in less than three minutes, cut it back a bit or add more water next time. Keep in mind that how the tea looks is less important than how it tastes. Color and flavor are only loosely correlated. Some teas release color very quickly during steeping, while releasing flavor more slowly. Teabag manufacturers have a trick to their advantage. The finer the particles of tea in the bag, the faster the water will darken. And since we've been conditioned to appraise foods more with our eyes than with our tongues, this produces an attractive result. But the finer the particles of tea, the more susceptible they are to aging and damage, both of which affect flavor. It should go without saying too that very fine particles of tea are "waste" products from the processing of higher grades of tea; thus some companies buy the cheapest tea dust, knowing it will produce a pleasingly dark cup of tea anyway. So beware a teabag that produces an instantly dark tea. Taste is the real criterion. I don't say that all teabags contain poor quality tea, but pay attention if you want to use teabags. If you're very curious, you could open a teabag and examine the size of the tea bits inside. There are no absolutes, because much depends on how the tea has been stored and how old it is. But in general larger particle size will indicate higher quality.

So there you have it. Boil water, preheat the pot 1 minute, preheat the cups while the tea steeps, steep for 3-5 minutes, stir the pot once during steeping, serve hot. I've written a lot about making tea, and it may sound now like a complicated procedure. I hope not. For me it's a simple, familiar and comforting morning ritual. It's not instant gratification, but I like the process of making tea. I often think very fondly of my tea mentor, especially when stirring the tea while it steeps. An English gentleman once told me, when he observed me stirring the tea in the pot, that it reminded him of his grandmother, and that he hadn't seen anyone doing this in decades. It made me smile. I like feeling connected to old ways of doing things, even if they weren't passed down to me through my own family.

Pee in the Garden

2011-04-01T09:55:00.002-04:00

My crusty old uncle Jay told me one of his characteristically amusing yarns once while we were puttering around his garden. He looked kinda like Colonel Sanders, but much leaner, and he spoke with a lovely Louisiana drawl. (He was an uncle by marriage.) His story was about a writer who composed a lengthy poem dedicated to his beloved, who liked to garden. He entitled it, She Sits Among the Lettuces and Peas. His editor liked the theme, but suggested he come up with a more tactful title. The poet considered this advice and then submitted the revised manuscript under a new name, She Sits Among the Cabbages and Leeks. I can hear Jay's gasping sort of laughter now.

Nope. This is not an April Fool's post. I decided that this would be the year we start using pee in the garden in some sort of systematic way. Human urine contains abundant nitrogen, a key nutrient for plants and soil microorganisms. My husband has used the compost pile for the odd leak now and then with my encouragement, but we've never approached the use of urine with any organized intent.

I'd heard of the value of urine in the garden from various sources. After all, garden centers sell urea (which is actually fake urine) as fertilizer, and I know that some compost enthusiasts use pee as a compost activator. Sharon Astyk has written in her inimitable comically informative way about the renewable and cheap nature of human pee. I attended a session on humanure systems at the PASA conference last year, and was sold on the concept even though we don't have access to a good supply of cover material to make it work. I read Carol Deppe's The Resilient Gardener, which further extolled the virtues of urine. And it's not just crackpot greenies talking about this. Heck, even the Washington Post reported on the concept. Researchers at the University of Kuopio's Department of Environmental Sciences in Finland...

...concluded that urine produced by one person over a year would be enough to grow 160 cabbages -- that's 64 kilograms (141 pounds) more cabbage than could be grown in a similar plot fertilized with commercial fertilizer. They recommend collecting urine from eco-type toilets, storing it, then scattering it on the soil around the plants rather than directly on them.

After being bombarded from so many directions, the idea finally worked its way up my priority list. While we may not be able to employ a full humanure system, we can at least divert the less problematic of human wastes into useful channels. Several million pounds of nitrogen are flushed "away" in the US every single day. Homesteading is a process of learning to use what you've got, and learning to find value in what society so often treats as garbage. This is one more resource available to us that we will no longer squander, one more dependency we can rid ourselves of.

Okay, a few technical details. Urine should be diluted 1:7 with water if you keep yourself well hydrated, or 1:10 if you don't typically drink enough water. Too high a concentration of the nitrogen in urine will chemically "burn" plants. Of course, I like to streamline functions around the homestead, since convenience means my good intentions are more likely to result in good practice. So I came up with a simple bucket hack. All that's involved is marking the inside of the bucket to indicate the fill levels that represent the correct proportion of water to pee. There are two ways to go about this, depending on how quickly you anticipate "contributions" being made.

The first approach is to work out the volume of just the first pee of the day per household. Carol Deppe wrote that she uses only her first pee of the morning, since that is typically the most concentrated specimen of the day. I've been doing this off and on for a while now, so I know generally what volume is typical for me. From there one can multiply by 7 or 10 to get the volume of water, measure that quantity of water into a bucket, and mark the surface line with a permanent marker. You may need to empty the bucket and dry the inside very well to mark it. With this method you don't really need a second line indicating the additional volume of urine if your estimate is reasonably accurate. But if you want to put a second mark as a check, go ahead and add your estimated volume of pee to the water and make a second line above the first. Check your accuracy over a few days and adjust as needed.

The other approach is to start with how much liquid you want to carry in the bucket, which should take into account the distance you'll need to carry it, how you will be emptying the bucket (lifting?), and your physical strength. So let's say you're comfortable carrying the bucket half full, or a third full, or whatever. Put your first mark inside the bucket at that level. Then fill to that line using a measuring cup to determine how much liquid it takes to fill to that level. From that measurement, do your calculations - either multiply by 6/7 or 9/10, depending on hydration habits. That will give you the amount of water needed for correct dilution rates. Then empty the bucket and measure in the amount of water indicated from your calculations. Make your second mark at that line inside the bucket, which should be below the first line you marked. When you're ready to start, fill the bucket to the lower line with water, and when enough pee has been collected to reach the top line, it's time to empty the bucket. Rinse, fill, collect, empty, repeat. Free, renewable fertilizer.

There's also the direct method with no need to muck about with dilution or measuring. Over the winter months I've just been adding my morning collection directly to the compost pile. A well established and active compost pile should be able to sort out a concentrated dose of nitrogen and "digest" it, so to speak, before it is applied to the garden. This approach feeds the soil microbes directly, which then later indirectly feed the plants where you apply the compost. If you want to use this method, it's better to not let the collected pee sit around very long, especially at indoor temperatures. The nitrogen in pee is such a valuable commodity that airborne bacteria will colonize the pee almost immediately and begin exploiting it. The faster you get it into a compost pile, the more use it will be to soil microorganisms.

Now for the tedious caveats and common sense warnings, lest I fall foul of the hygiene police and the white knuckled. Human urine is very nearly sterile when it exits the body, unless you happen to be carrying one of a very few nasty diseases. Theoretically, hepatitis B, CMV (cytomegalovirus), and HIV (possibly others) are transmissible via direct contact with urine. There's no data I know of on disease transmission through consuming food from soil fertilized with urine. I regard healthy soil as a universal cleanser of toxins and pathogens of all stripes anyway. Further, it's impossible to infect oneself with any disease. Either you've got it, or you don't. You don't pick something up from yourself. If you're using your own urine in your garden, you have nothing to worry about if you're the only one consuming that food. If you're super cautious, go ahead and test any member of your household for disease who might contribute urine to the cause. Make sure none of you have any disease that could theoretically be passed on to another. As indicated above, apply diluted urine around crops, not directly on them. Finally, you probably want to steer clear of this technique if you sell to the market. The last thing you need is a frivolous lawsuit. To be on the safe side, use it on your fruit trees, berry bushes, corn (maize), ornamentals, or your asparagus crop after this year's harvest is finished.

So what are your thoughts? Is pee in the garden just beyond the pale? Do you already use urine (human or otherwise) as fertilizer? If not, would you consider it?

Making It

2011-03-29T12:22:00.008-04:00

It hit a surreal 78 degrees (25.5 C) here almost two weeks ago. Too hot in the sun to even lie in the hammock, let alone do any work. Last week was grey and miserable, with high temperatures in the 40's, and a dump of the dreaded "wintry mix" precipitation. We've had sub-freezing temps overnight ever since, and this week is sunny but cold. Sigh. Where'd my spring go?

I'm trying to make the best of it and have been quite productive lately. I got a lot of outside work done during that warm week, while the sun shone. Now there are many seedlings to attend to indoors. And I spend a little time outside during the warmest parts of each sunny day. Otherwise I've been keeping my hands busy inside while I bide my time, however resentful of the vanished warm weather. Here's a rundown of the projects I've been working on lately.

I painted the nesting box we made all from scrap wood. Bright colors of course, because if the wood needs protection from the elements, I might as well use colors that make me happy. Now that we're more or less set up for the broody hen, I'm eager for her arrival. Still no firm date for that yet.

I finished two new two planting templates - a cool looking hexagonal one for the three sisters planting, and another one for the garlic planting on 6" centers. I've been using an 8" planting template for the garlic, but after getting carried away with some 350 garlic plants last fall, I've rethought my spacing for this crop.

I also worked on finishing a few projects started with the help of our WWOOF volunteers. The first is a greens feeder for the chickens. The idea here is that you plant greens the chickens like to eat under the feeder. The plants then grow up through the caging and the girls can eat what pokes up. But they can't tear the roots out of the soil, so the plants in theory should re-grow and continue to feed them for a long time. Since we move the hens daily throughout most of the year, I plan to use this in the yet-to-be-constructed hoop house which will house the girls next winter. In the meantime though I'm also hoping it will shield some tiny catnip seedlings from the ravages of cats - both ours and the neighborhood ne'erdowell toms. The caging for this project was repurposed from a tomato cage that will be replaced with a trellising system this year.

The second is my solar cooking station. This still needs a bit more work, but it's good enough to supercharge our seedlings with tons of sunlight at the moment. It mounts to the scaffolding for our solar heating array. A piece of rebar supports a wooden countertop from the back, and a wooden upright supports it in front. It's reasonably easy for me to set it up or remove it by myself. I'm hoping that the solar array doesn't completely shade it out in summer. I'll watch this, and if need be, lower the station a bit to get it out from under the shade. All of these projects - templates, nesting box, greens feeder and solar cooking station - were made with salvaged lumber and other free materials. Only the paint, screws, nails and some other hardware were, in some cases, purchased.

Hand carved wooden spoon and a spoon blank

I carved a wooden spoon (from a spoon "blank") using the awesome woodcarving tools that my husband received recently as a gift. It's a rather addictive occupation, despite being tough on novice hands, and definitely one best pursued when the weather is fair enough to allow all the shavings to fall outside. Last year we broke our last two wooden spoons, so it's nice to be able to make some for ourselves. This one isn't very large, but it could be used with smaller cooking pots. I put a nubbin on the back of the handle end so it won't just slip into the soup if I set it against the rim of the pot.

Based on a good tip from The Urban Homestead, I made a baking soda shaker from a glass jar with a metal lid. This is for dish washing, as baking soda is a mild and non-toxic abrasive. Just take a nail and make lots of holes in the lid, then fill with ordinary baking soda. The gaffer's tape bands around the jar were my own tweak. They're there to provide a better grip to wet hands.

Also, a couple of knitted dishrags. These are made from cotton butcher's twine and based on a pattern for a baby blanket I made many years ago. Look for large spools of this stuff in a restaurant supply store. It's much cheaper than buying the small rolls of a thinner gauge kitchen twine in a supermarket. I recommend you get a couple of spools. Keep one someplace clean for kitchen uses, and the other one with your garden tools. You'll find a thousand uses for it outside, but it's not easy to keep the twine clean if you take it to the garden. These dishrags can be made fairly quickly on days when you're cooped up inside. They don't wear out as quickly as scrubby sponges, and if you throw them in with the laundry they won't abrade your clothes. Also, they're thin enough to sterilize just with sun exposure. Google for a thousand pattern options. And I'm sure there are crochet patterns as well if that's your fiber art. I may experiment with dying these later as I have a dying project in mind and these could just be added into the soak.

Pelmenyi. These are meat dumplings from central Russia. I've been meaning to make them for ages now. Some unpasteurized whey graciously donated by Sandy, defrosting my freezer, and unfriendly outdoor temps, were the impeti to finally undertake the project. And they are a project, believe me. It would be much more fun and go so much faster to have another set of hands to help with assembly. But I'm on my own this week. My recipe uses the whey plus one of our eggs in the dough, and three kinds of ground meat (pork, veal, and lamb - discovered while defrosting the freezer, and all local and pastured, of course) plus onion and spices in the filling. Traditionally these are kept in huge sacks on balconies over the many months of the Russian winter where there's no danger of thawing or spoilage. They are boiled and then served either with vinegar, or with the super high fat content smetana, to which our closest equivalent is sour cream, though it contains only roughly half the fat of smetana. Green onions are sometimes added as a garnish with either topping.

Unfortunately, while working on the greens feeder I manage to bash my thumb with the hammer. I've never been unlucky or clumsy enough to do this before, and I can assure you that it's an experience I neither recommend nor care to repeat. It didn't seem like that hard of a bash, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve. It hurt like the dickens, and still requires a lot of caution when doing everyday tasks. I'm really hoping that I don't lose the nail, 'cause that would seriously screw up the fast approaching heavy spring workload.

It's very satisfying to see a few things made with my own hands that will endure and be useful for many years, mostly with very little expense. My head is full of little homesteading projects I want to undertake this year. Last year about this time I had the sense that things were finally starting to come together on the homestead. And indeed, things did run better last year; more things turned out the way I hoped. I have that sense this year too. It's a good feeling, though hard won. If my productivity holds up (and I freely admit that it's extremely fickle), it could be a great year for progress on the homestead. We'll see.

I will probably do a post on the three sisters' template around planting time. If you simply must have more details on any of the other projects, leave me a comment and it may inspire me to get into the nitty-gritty.

Sneaky Leeks

2011-03-25T10:58:00.006-04:00

I've mentioned before how I love leeks. That's me brandishing a few prized specimens in the top left of the banner collage. Leeks take up real estate in the garden for a long time, but they are very unfussy plants, and they have the virtue of harvest-ability at that part of the year when it's very slim pickin's in the garden. I've also just recently figured out how to store leeks for a short time by freezing them. But the bottom line is they just taste wonderful.

So I'm starting an awful lot of them from seed this year, and I thought I'd share a little technique I've come up with. It starts with the knowledge of how leeks behave. That part of the leek which is below the surface of the soil will grow straight and white, and be the tenderest part of the leek. Perhaps the sweetest part too. In other words, you want to bury the seedling as deeply as feasible without completely covering it. Leeks and potatoes are the only plants I know of that respond well to hilling. But it's not really practical for me to plant leeks in a trench and then gradually fill it in over the season. That technique works beautifully, if you want to pursue it. I'd just rather not plant leeks in a single line and then tend to them that much.

Instead, I'm working on forcing my tiny seedlings to grow tall before I set them out. At this stage, they are fairly easy to "hill." Besides, leek seedlings are so floppy as they grow that they can use the support of repeated partial burials. Some sources advise clipping the tops of the leek seedlings to avoid this flopping over, but that seems counterproductive to me. I'd rather support the seedling than trim it.

My idea was to save several half-gallon milk cartons for seed starting. Leek sprouts are so tiny that they can easily be crowded into a very small space. So I use the carton in its upright position, with the top cut off and several drainage holes poked in the bottom. I also cut most of the way down the corners of the carton, so that only a small portion of the carton will hold potting soil at first, and fold the sides down to allow plenty of light to reach the seedlings. The waxy surface of the carton interior can be labeled in crayon or with a wax lumber pencil.

As the seedlings grow I progressively tape up a bit more of the sides of the carton, add more potting soil, and make another crease to keep the unfilled portion folded over to give the seedlings light. Adding more soil to densely planted and flimsy plants is somewhat delicate work, so I use a spoon and dry potting soil that scatters easily. If the potting soil bends any of the little seedlings as I fill, I just very gently pull them upright and the loose soil repositions itself around the stalks. Only then do I water with a mister. In this way I'm both supporting the seedlings, and encouraging them to grow long and tall well before it's time to put them in the ground. When the sides of the carton are completely taped up and filled with potting soil, the seedlings will be more than 4" (10 cm) tall. I'm betting that by the time it's warm enough to transplant them they'll be long enough to just plant quite deeply and leave it at that with no further hilling. I think the technique is sneaky. It's a way of shifting most of the work needed to raise superior leeks into the relatively calm period before spring has properly arrived.

The picture above shows leek seedlings and their milk carton containers in several stages of development. Just planted seeds are on the right; those on the far left are the oldest.

P.S. The homesteading books from the giveaway were mailed on Monday. Winners, you should have them in your hot little hands very shortly if they haven't reached you already. Thanks to all who entered.

Update: this technique didn't work out as hoped.

Something from Nothing

2011-03-17T15:49:00.010-04:00

Today is absolutely gorgeous. Gorgeous. The temperature outside is as warm as inside - in the middle of March. The sun is shining, and the breeze is so gentle. This weather is insane, but you know what? I'll take it. I puttered around outside most of the morning, just finding stuff to do rather than spend time indoors. I pulled the covers entirely off the cold frames, planted some burdock, smoked the bacon I'm in the process of curing, admired the purple crocuses, watched the cats chase flies, set the hammock up, and generally basked in the finest day of the year so far.

A pile of grapevine trimmings has been hanging around since my husband did a severe pruning a few weeks ago. I'd been meaning to check them out, but what decent weather we've had lately has been devoted to more pressing chores. But today - ah, today. Any excuse to be outside would do today. So I made these.

Now I know they aren't exactly works of a master craftsman. But I was pretty pleased with them. For an hour's mucking around on a balmy day, a few snips here and there with hand pruners, and not a clue as to how to go about making a wreath, I'd say they turned out fair enough. Maybe it's just that I get a kick out of making something from nothing, out of finding a use where other people only see garbage or something to be gotten rid of. It tickles me every single time I manage to pull something like this off.

If I'd had more grapevines, or longer grapevines, I could have made more wreaths or bulked these two out a bit. Many pruned vines were too short to be useful. The vines were clearly starting to dry out a bit; if I'd worked with them a few weeks ago I think they would have been more flexible. Still, the vines and especially the curlicue tendrils were surprisingly resilient. Given my total ignorance of the proper way to construct a grapevine wreath, it was a very forgiving medium to work with. Next year I'll encourage my husband to make the cut pieces as long as possible, and then see what can be done with them when they're freshly cut.

Not sure what I'll do with these yet. The nice thing is that if I decide I don't have any use for them, they can either be gifted away, or composted! Okay, now I'm heading back outside.

P.S. to those who entered the homesteading books giveaway, I haven't heard back from one winner. So stay tuned. If I don't hear from her by tomorrow evening, I'll draw another number. You still might win! And if you entered but didn't check to see if you won, well check it out.

Salvaging the Overwintered Leeks

2011-03-15T06:13:00.001-04:00

Last year I didn't start my own seeds of my favorite leek, the Bleu de Solaize. It's my favorite because it is incredibly winter hardy. I've left it in the ground over winter in previous years, and harvested it during a January thaw, when the air temperature warms but the ground is still frozen. Sometimes those midwinter harvests involve pitchforking out a frozen block of soil, letting it sit in the sun for several hours, then coming back to extract the leeks. But I couldn't get Bleu de Solaize starts last year, so I went with whatever leek starts were available at my local nursery. I don't even remember the variety.

So when late fall started turning into winter, and many leeks were too small to be worth harvesting, I didn't have a whole lot of hope for them. I harvested up until the ground froze, starting with the biggest ones first. The rest were left to winter's untender mercies. But as winter began to loosen its grip on the garden, I cast another evaluating glance over the bedraggled leeks. Some of them certainly were looking large enough to salvage. And with volunteer help around, it seemed like a good food preservation chore to tackle. Besides, that part of the garden is has a date with 25 crowns of purple asparagus in not too many weeks.

My expectations were rather modest. Our volunteer and I loosened the soil with a pitchfork and set about "field dressing" the leeks. We shook off as much of the soil as easily came loose, cut off the roots, stripped off the dirty and damaged outermost layers, and trimmed away most of the greens. There were more beautifully preserved leeks, and larger amounts of leek below the soil surface than I had imagined. There was surprising little damage from frost, even though we found bits of ice held in the layers of the upper green parts of the plants. Leeks are tough plants. I was amazed to find that the harvest just about filled my garden hod. It seems that Bleu de Solaize isn't the only leek that overwinters for us with zero protection.

The harvest tally came to over five (!) pounds (2.3 kg) of trimmed leeks. Only a small number were too damaged to harvest. It was very satisfying to remove so much food from the row, and have it all cleaned up well ahead of the asparagus crowns' arrival. We rinsed the leeks in two changes of water outside, to spare the plumbing in our old farmhouse. Leeks have many virtues, but their hygiene leaves much to be desired. Because of the way they grow up through the soil, they catch a prodigious amount of dirt in their layers. That people are known to put up with the trouble of cleaning such a plant should tell you something about the wonders it can do in the kitchen, though not perhaps the detail that these wonders are particularly on display where soups and potatoes are concerned.

After the outdoor work was done, there was still a good deal of indoor processing left to do. Trimming, assiduous rinsing, chopping, butter melting, cooking and cooling. The end result was a dozen discrete piles of sauteed leeks arranged on sheet pans lined with baking parchment. Once the individual clumps of leeks were frozen solid, I bagged them up. This way I can grab a usefully sized portion of partially cooked leeks out of the freezer whenever needed, rather than having to thaw a huge block of them all at once.

Preserving this many leeks was another task which would have been tedious in the extreme to do all by myself. Having volunteer help made the work lighter, and I had the pleasure of teaching someone about a previously unfamiliar vegetable. Another win with the WWOOF.

I've already got quite a few Bleu de Solaize baby leek sprouts started indoors. And I can't seem to resist planting more of them. I'm hoping we'll have enough to harvest starting in late summer, and still leave plenty for harvest well into this time next year.

Homesteading Book Giveaway Winners

2011-03-14T08:49:00.010-04:00

It's time to announce the winners of the homesteading books giveaway, and I do so with just a smidgen of trepidation. The delivery date for my books keeps getting pushed back, and I don't have the books in hand as I write this. Tracking reveals that my package moved from Kentucky to three different cities in Pennsylvania, two of which could obviously have been the point where it was put on a delivery truck. Then it went to New Jersey. Now it's back in my neighborhood, but in the city where it first seemed to go amiss before. There's no telling where it will go from there. This is all to say, that I'd like to promise to get the books in the mail and sent to the winners right away, but I'm waiting to see what the routing gizmos decide to do with that package.

It was great to hear from so many small-scale homesteaders and aspiring homesteaders. It struck me that an unusual number of you included blueberries among your productive plants. I can certainly see the appeal. We've got seven blueberry plants ourselves, and we hope to see our first harvest this year.

Anyway, without further ado, let's get to the winners The random number generator decided that...

Copy #1 of The Urban Homestead goes to Melynda, who blogs at Mom's Sunday Cafe

Copy #2 of The Urban Homestead goes to Dea-Chan,who blogs at Craziness and More!

The Backyard Homestead goes to Cindy Naas Stapleton near Minneapolis.

I hope that all three books will lead to more food production in backyards. Go forth, winners, and feed yourselves! But first, please leave your full names and mailing addresses in the comments by Friday, March 18th. Comments will be moderated for the time being, and your information will not be published. If I don't hear from any particular winner by this Friday, I'll generate another random number and try again.

Confidential to the element near Mpls who entered the drawing, and all the rest of you who are still reading, I would have loved for your number to come up, just so my curiosity could have been satisfied. Addressing a package to Polonium would have been pretty nifty. Or perhaps your name is Niobe Copperfield? That your identity will remain an enduring mystery is not an unappealing thought.

On the Horizon - A Broody Hen

2011-03-10T06:35:00.000-05:00

I can't tell you what a great thing it is to know a few local farmers on first-name basis. I get all kinds of benefits from my acquaintance with them, and being a paying customer for the foods they produce is just the tip of the iceberg. Last year my farming friend offered up a disabled turkey poult, and we had the experience of raising it for our table. She also sends pork jowls my way for free because her customers don't want them. So I get to turn them into guanciale.

This time we'll get a broody hen with some heritage breed fertile eggs under her. The idea is that we'll foster her and give her a place to rear her chicks. After that we might split the chicks with the farmer providing the hen. I've toyed with the idea of raising chicks before, but could never motivate myself to place an order and then buy necessary equipment to set up a brooder for them. Being a surrogate chicken mother has just never appealed. The alternative - a broody hen with good mothering instincts sounded fantastic. Such a hen is all the equipment needed to rear chicks. But my laying hens are production model Red Stars with no mothering instinct, and besides, I have no interest in keeping a rooster. I'm pretty sure my neighbors have their limits in my residential setting. So the out-of-the-blue offer of a broody hen was another fantastic opportunity just dropped into my lap through the magic of personal acquaintance with farmers.

After last year's turkey+honey bees infraction, I'm trying to stick to my one new species per year rule this year. The Black Soldier Fly is going to be this year's unglamorous species of choice. But a broody hen with chicks is all sorts of excitement without rule breaking. Chickens we know. Chickens we've done. The brooding-hatching-rearing process is entirely new to us, but it still falls within my self-imposed and sanity-preserving limitation. So I'm psyched! Our homestead will be host to a new phase of animal husbandry. At least I hope. I'm bearing in mind that old adage about counting chickens. I'm especially eager to see this process through because in the back of my mind I've thought about using a bantam hen to brood quail eggs and rear the young, should I ever decide to try my hand at quail. (Domesticated quail aren't known for their mothering skills.) Working with a broody hen ahead of time seems like the smart move.

Details are still a bit unclear as to the timing and other issues. Sometime around the middle of the month we should take delivery of a broody girl and "her" eggs. They may not all be hers biologically, but I'm pretty sure she'll feel rather proprietary about them. I don't know whether the farmer will want the hen back with the chicks, or whether he'll want us to keep her. Details should be forthcoming eventually; farmers are busy people. In the meantime, a small DIY project is on the agenda. I'm guessing she and her chicks will do best with a separate space from our layers. At the very least she'll need her own nesting box for her fertile eggs. I figure she and her chicks can use the poultry schooner while the other hens are kept in the mobile pen and coop.

I find myself wild with the hope that the brooding experiment works out. I am uncharacteristically excited about all the potential cuteness of tiny chicks. It's a good thing that they go through an ugly phase as they grow and molt for the first time. I'm not sure yet whether we'll keep any of the female hatchlings. We definitely won't keep any males, though if the farmer doesn't want them either we could always turn them into meat and chicken stock.

As for our current layers, if you were waiting for details on their conversion to canned meat and chicken stock due to the egg-eating habit, they've been given a stay of execution. Securing a small number of layers this time of year isn't proving easy, and I don't want to get rid of the ones we've got before I know we can replace them. The egg-eating has also eased up a bit lately, though I'm not at all convinced the problem is solved. I'm keeping them for at least a couple more weeks as I try to figure out where the next layers will come from.

Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease

2011-03-08T06:21:00.006-05:00

Success! It took a few politely persistent email requests, but I've now got the long coveted recipe for the lacto-fermented ketchup I sampled at 2010's PASA conference. The recipe comes from Maureen who blogs at Nourishing Traditional Cook. I know more than one reader has asked for this, and I very much wanted it myself. I'm posting the recipe now so that anyone who wants to try it out with canned tomatoes can do so. Perhaps some of you Aussie readers have fresh tomatoes still to play around with. I'll probably wait until our own tomatoes come in and then smoke a few to mimic the fire-roasted flavor of the Muir Glen tomatoes called for in this recipe.

Lacto-fermented Ketchup

1, 20 oz Muir Glen Fire Roasted Tomato Puree
2 Tbsp. raw cider vinegar
2 Tbsp. whey (liquid, unpasteurized)
1/4 cup fermented fish sauce or 1/2 can anchovies in oil
1/4 large green pepper, sliced
1-2 Tbsp. raw honey
2 cloves garlic
2 tsp. basil
2 tsp. salt
1 tsp ground mace
1 tsp dry mustard
2 pinches ea. ground cinnamon and nutmeg

Puree in blender or VitaMix. Let sit on counter for 12-24 hours, refrigerate. You may also substitute balsamic vinegar for the whey. It won't be as much fermented, but is truly delicious!

By the way, I can attest to the high quality of the canned tomatoes called for in this recipe. They're what I relied on before we became self-sufficient in tomatoes. I don't know how many vegetarians or vegans are going to be put off by this recipe. All I can say is that this ketchup rocked my world. I'd eat this stuff on eggs, beans, or as a side dish to just about anything. It was that delicious.

I will definitely be playing around with this recipe this summer, and may post an update on any successful tweaks that I find especially pleasing. I'm curious to see whether I can incorporate a bit of onion without overwhelming the other flavors. My fumbling experimentation with lacto-fermented ketchup last year definitely taught me that any addition of onion should be tiny in comparison to the rest of the ingredients. If any of you experiment with the recipe - either using canned tomatoes or homegrown - I would really love to hear back from you about any tweaks you make, or just what you think of the recipe. Please let me know!

NOTE: If you entered the drawing for the homesteading books with an anonymous sign in and no identifying details (first name + city, or email address in the body of the comment), I can't verify your identity if you win. If this applies to you, leave another comment with some details to be sure you get a chance at the books. Anonymous entries with no details will be discarded. It's great to hear about so many small scale homesteads from all of you. Keep up the good work!

Homesteading Books Giveaway

2011-03-07T06:10:00.002-05:00

In honor of a certain overreaching family in southern California, I'm giving away three homesteading titles this week. I've ordered three copies of Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen's book, The Urban Homestead. They're now shipped and on their way to me. One is my copy, and two are up for grabs. Also, I'm giving away my own, gently used copy of The Backyard Homestead. Here's your chance to win one of these great titles.

To enter the drawing for one of these books, leave a comment on this post briefly describing your homestead - either as it exists right now, or what you hope to achieve in the future. Comments must be received by 6pm Eastern time, on Friday, March 11th, if you want a chance at winning one of these books. Sorry, but this is open to US residents only. **If you're not signed in with an identifiable account, leave enough identifying information so that I can verify the prize goes to the right person. (e.g. Clare in Boston, or something similar.)** If you're only interested in one or the other of these titles, please indicate that in your comment so I can be sure they go to readers who will use these books. If the random number generator picks someone not interested in a given book, I'll generate another number. I'll announce the winners by Monday, March 14th at the latest. Good luck!

Farewell to Fresh Garlic

2011-03-05T11:57:00.003-05:00

While our first WWOOF volunteers of the year were here, one of our indoor tasks was to process what remained of last year's garlic crop. Preserving what remained involved peeling all those individual cloves, cutting them open to remove the sprouts (which are slightly bitter), slicing them finely, and dehydrating all the slices. It's a rather mindless, tedious job - one that would have taken me all day in the kitchen if I'd had to do it entirely by myself. Two extra people pitching in made the work go very quickly, and I was extremely grateful for the help. Our volunteers genuinely seemed not to mind, and to be interested in the process of dehydrating foods.

We did better with last year's crop of garlic than with any previous harvest in terms of storage. Some of it lasted until this month, though much of it was sprouty. In late December of 2008 I was already processing that year's crop because it was at the end of its shelf life. Mostly I think the improvement in shelf life is attributable to storing it in the cooler temperatures of the root cellar.

One tiny tip that I don't think I've shared here before is a way of repurposing what might otherwise end up as part of the waste stream into a convenient way of using up the dehydrated garlic chips. Some spice companies are now selling whole peppercorns (including black and white organic peppercorns) in disposable jars that are also pepper mills. These can be re-used as grinders for any spice of the right size, including dried garlic chips. When all the pepper has been consumed, the lids of these mills can be screwed off and both the jar and the grinder-cap washed. When both pieces are thoroughly dry, I fill the jar with my dried garlic flakes and keep it with my other pepper mills. The rest of the chips will be stored in a cool and dark place until needed.

I rely on this dehydrated garlic much more heavily during the garlic drought months of the year - those months between processing the last of the garlic (now), and garlic harvest (early summer). I use it in soups, pasta dishes, and have even been known to grind some directly onto a leftover roast chicken sandwich. An especially nice winter use for the ground garlic is in a cup of hot chicken broth with a small dab of white miso stirred in. Bone-warming goodness, that is. The whole chips work well in some soups and stews too, as well as meatloaf, in which it rehydrates by absorbing and holding in the juices, and long cooking dishes such as polenta or risotto.

I sent our WWOOF volunteers on their way with our old, cheap dehydrator and many explanations as to its design faults and shortcomings. I suggested they bear with the crummy version for a season or two, to see if they would actually use a dehydrator. If so, they could bite the bullet and purchase a good quality dehydrator, such as an Excalibur. I asked them that either way - whether they upgraded to a good dehydrator, or decided it wasn't for them - they pass the dehydrator on to someone curious about this method of food preservation. It's a nice thought to imagine our first el cheapo dehydrator out there in the world, helping people learn a skill and preserve homegrown food. I vastly prefer giving a not-so-great appliance away with full disclosure and a pay-it-forward agreement to trying to sell it to someone while concealing its many flaws.

Now I've got a very short breather before our next WWOOF volunteer shows up tomorrow. Good to have the extra help; it certainly keeps me on my toes!

Harvest Meal: Potato and Cabbage Soup

2011-02-28T07:28:00.003-05:00

You know what? There's no way that I have found to make potato and cabbage soup look attractive in a photograph. Admittedly, my kitchen has lousy lighting, and my camera is hopelessly obsolescent by the standards of our time. Likewise, there's no way to make "potato and cabbage soup" sound anything other than dreary. My soup tasted good, and I'll get to all that in a minute. Right now I'm just going to tell you that the cabbage itself was gorgeous, and the picture above doesn't begin to do it justice.

It was a mild Sunday, and I was out in the garden, checking things out. Little shoots of garlic poking up, pathetic looking leeks and cabbages that had never been harvested. Short rows of tatsoi that looked like they may have actually overwintered. No sign yet of the long awaited asparagus. But there among the bedraggled heads of cabbage was one that had a robust red-purple color and some physical integrity. One of its outer leaves curled protectively over the head like a bonnet. Did appearances deceive? I reached down and gave it a gentle squeeze. It was firm and dense! Maybe it wasn't the biggest cabbage, but it was ready to eat. And I was ready to eat it.

I came inside and started putting a pot of soup together. I hardly even bother researching recipes these days, because meals pretty much come down to eating what we have on hand. And late winter is lean pickin's, I don't mind telling you. So. Candidate ingredients to go with the cabbage included our potatoes and garlic, boughten onions and carrots, a tiny bit of pork sausage (pastured meat from a local farm), some homemade canned stock, and spices. From there, the recipe wrote itself.

Take the sausage out of its casing, break it into little bits and brown them in a soup pot. When that's done, set them aside and cook a big, finely diced onion in the remaining pork fat with a bit of added butter. Sweat, sweat, till soft and golden, adding white pepper, kosher salt, caraway seed, and bay leaves while it cooks. Then stir in some minced garlic to cook a bit. Add a quart of stock and a pint of water and heat it slowly, so as to have time to scrub the potatoes (purple!) and chop them into bite sized pieces. Add the potatoes (~1.25#/~0.5 kg) in the warming liquid, then finely chop half of the cabbage head. Add that in along with the cooked sausage as the liquid starts to simmer. Grate a couple carrots with a cheese grater. Pour a glass of wine, reduce the heat to minimum, cover the pot, and walk away for a few minutes. Come back, add the carrots, and taste to adjust the seasonings. A tad more salt. Perfect. Serve and eat. With crusty bread if you like.

It was good soup, even if the potatoes were not the best variety for soup. The stock made from the Thanksgiving turkey that was smoked with rosemary and apple wood chips really made the soup pop. I'll even acknowledge the possibility that without superb stock, the soup might not have amounted to much.

Good though the soup was, harvest meals over the winter tend not to be very exciting. The word "stodge" often lurks just below the level of utterance. Maybe it's the fact that we're mostly locked in to relying in a very small number of foods that don't change much for months on end. Spring, summer, and fall are different; the variety is wider and ever changing. I'm still working on learning how to eat from our own stores through the winter months, with many failures and hard lessons. But mostly I'm just ready for spring. I cannot wait for the first snow peas, and arugula, and chives, and asparagus - fresh green things. In the meantime, I practice gratitude that we have plenty to eat.

First Volunteers of the Year and Other News

2011-02-25T06:48:00.009-05:00

Spring is not quite here and already volunteers through the WWOOF program are beating down our doors. So far we have three young people scheduled to join us in March. I was a bit hesitant to take them on so early in the year, thinking that it's really not the best time to teach much about what we do here. But I decided I would just give them fair warning about weather, and the lack of many growing things, and take whatever volunteer help still wanted to show up.

What I've learned about the WWOOF program is that I have to be on my game when volunteers turn up. I do more work when they're here than otherwise, and not just because it's much like having house guests. I want to keep them busy for the agreed upon half-day of work, sure. There's no sense accepting volunteers and not making good use of the help. But I also feel a sense of responsibility to teach these volunteers. Maybe they don't expect as much as that, but I can't help myself. And in order to teach, I have to be out there, showing, talking, demonstrating. Projects have to be ready to tackle. And in order to do that, well, I've got to do my homework.

Such as ordering some new hens. You see, in the last month an egg eating habit has developed in the hen house. This is a bad habit, one of the worst that hens can have, from my perspective. I'm not sentimental about my hens. I value them and treat them well, but they're not pets. They're here to provide us with eggs to eat and to barter, and to produce manure and help control insect pests. When they eat their own eggs, they're not adding value. I don't know how the habit developed, but I've seen evidence of at least five eggs eaten this month. I don't know if it's one hen doing all the damage or if they've all learned that eggs are good to eat. To me, it's immaterial. Repercussions will be positively Old Testament; punishment will be meted out collectively. So this batch of hens is going as soon as I can replace them with new layers.

Which brings me back to the volunteers showing up early next week. One of the young men we'll be hosting specifically wanted to learn about chickens, and another about slaughtering. I didn't think we'd be able to accommodate the second interest, since our layers are still relatively young. But a bad case of egg eating changes things. So I think we'll not only be slaughtering, and processing chickens, but also pressure canning some tough birds and making chicken stock too. Good things for strapping young lads to know, I'd say.

If we get another run of bad weather, there will be minor DIY projects for the garden to pursue in the garage, and bread baking in the kitchen. Otherwise, we'll start the early spring tasks in the garden. I've also ordered a couple slabs of pork belly from one of my farmers, to turn into bacon. So I'll be able to teach a bit about curing while the lads are here. Somehow I suspect that if the guys think canning and bread baking is sissy work, they'll take a different view of makin' bacon. (And yes, I checked; they're carnivores.) It's exciting to me too; I've never made bacon at home before. I know that as WWOOF host sites go, our homestead is not the norm, and so neither are the activities that our volunteers pitch in with. Most WWOOF hosts are proper farms. Sometimes I feel a bit apologetic about this, but in the end I think what we have to teach are good, practical skills.

In other news, seed starting has begun. So far it's just the early stuff indoors, and some experimental frost sowing outdoors. I've been working on breaking down all the branches pruned from our apple tree early this year. It finally struck me as absurd that we haul our branches down to the yard waste facility, and then haul back finished compost and mulch. We'll still go for the free soil building materials, but I've decided not to part with the soil building materials we've got onsite. So I've been cutting up the very small branches with hand pruners, and spreading the bits all around our fruit trees. It's a slow job, but it's just nice to be outside for an hour or two this time of year. And the spring overload hasn't yet begun, so I've got the time.

Okay, final bit of news is a heads up for you readers. I've ordered a few copies of Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen's book, The Urban Homestead. I'll be giving away two copies here when the books arrive, but it looks as though I ordered the expanded and revised version, which won't ship out until mid-March. As soon as the order ships, I'll post a giveaway here. So check back later for a chance to win a new and improved copy of the book. In the meantime, you can check out their great urban homesteading blog.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Overwintering Rosemary in Zone 6

2011-02-22T13:11:00.004-05:00

Time to report on my experiment in keeping a rosemary plant alive through a zone 6 winter. Last fall I assembled one of Tamar and Kevin's instant mini-greenhouses, made from two window well covers, for my rosemary plant. I had previously done a little homework to find a variety of rosemary noted for its hardiness, relative to other rosemary varieties. I settled on the un-euphoniously named Arp rosemary, said to be hardy in zone 7, or only half a zone off our bit of earth.

I drilled a few small holes for ventilation at the top of my greenhouse and began covering the rosemary in November. It came through the hard frosts of late fall just fine, retaining its green leaves fresh and ready for the picking. I was pretty sure the truly cold temperatures of winter would send it into dormancy, and they did. I could see no new growth, and the leaves took on a somewhat dull tone.

The question was, would protection from the wind and direct contact with snow be enough to let it survive? With such a small space protected, there wouldn't be much advantage, if any, in terms of temperature. A greenhouse large enough for a person to walk around in would certainly do the trick. But this greenhouse was essentially a flimsy cloche; not thick enough or big enough to hold heat overnight. All I could do was wait out winter's harshness and see how the rosemary fared.

Our big dump of snow came towards the end of January, and we've had snow on the ground ever since. The snow covered the mini-greenhouse completely for several days. I went out and scraped off some of the snow, to allow a little light in to warm up the space inside. I suspect the snow that had built up around the sides then acted as insulation.

We're nearly to the end of February now. Historically the coldest month of the year here is January, though we often see more snow in other months. We're still seeing overnight temperatures substantially below freezing. But we should only be headed into temperatures that trend warmer. Today I checked the plant under there and found it looking fine. It still has a wonderful scent, and the thicker stems are supple under my testing fingers. They bend without breaking. The color of the leaves is still dull green. But green they are. I'm pretty confident saying that the rosemary has survived with the help of this protection. The plant will probably need the shelter of the mini-greenhouse for at least another six weeks though.

Now that I know I can keep rosemary alive through a zone 6b winter, I wonder how much farther north this would work. Any northern type gardeners out there tempted to try?

To keep this particular plant over the long term I'll have to keep it pruned such that it fits under the cover. Or else start new plants each year. There's enough room under there right now to accommodate another plant. I may add some early peas in the next couple weeks. But after the peas are done I might try planting some flat-leaf parsley alongside the rosemary, and see if parsley can also make it through next winter with a bit of shelter. Home grown, nutritionally dense fresh parsley would be mighty welcome through the winter months.

Of course, a little success gets me scheming about other things I could plant, other non-hardy stuff I could drag into my hardiness zone by adding a few more shelters. While it was ridiculously easy to make this mini-greenhouse from two window well covers, it wasn't exactly cheap. Not by my standards anyway. I bought the heavy-duty ten-year covers, and I think it ended up costing about $30. I expect they'll last even longer than ten years, since I'll store them in the shade for most of the year. But I'm still going to keep an eye out for any other materials that might be repurposed for the cause. I'm thinking an old skylight or the globe of a street lamp might do the trick, if I ever came across something like that in a dumpster. I could also experiment with straw bales again. I have plenty of salvaged storm windows to work with as lids for straw bale frames, and overwintered straw bales make such nice mulch in the spring.

Agricultural Learnings of Winter for Make Benefit Glorious Urban Homestead

2011-02-21T07:51:00.007-05:00

My writing muse mostly deserted me for a while there. But I feel a post on the PASA conference is owing, and I also recently attended a mini-seminar on potatoes. So I figure I can summarize useful stuff I picked up in one go. Here's a rundown of things good things that happened at the conference and things I've learned recently.

As usual, there were free seed packets to be had at the conference. I got some from Seed Savers Exchange but also found to my chagrin that they were giving away some I had just ordered from them. Johnny's, also as usual, had a free shipping coupon on offer as well as their nifty 14-month calendar, which will hold me till next year's conference. Knowing Johnny's typically gave out this coupon, I managed to hold off ordering from them until after the conference. There were also nice coupons and useful schwag such as pencils and pens from Organic Valley. Lots of good free noshy bits were available at various times too. I bid on a few lovely things at the auction, but didn't win, so I came home having blown less money than I did last year. New at the conference this year was an informal seed swap table. I picked up some cilantro and echinacea seeds. I'll try to remember to bring some of my own seed next year to give away.

I learned about a very promising technique for trellising tomatoes that involves pretty serious pruning, which I plan to try this year. I know my track record is execrable when it comes to delivering posts I promise to write "soon." So I'll just say that when it's time to put my tomatoes in the ground, I'll try to get a post or two together on this trellising technique. I should say that I put my tomatoes starts in about ten days later than most gardeners in my area, around June 1st. Then the trellising doesn't really start until the plants have grown for 3-4 weeks. If you want to play along with this trellising method on the strength of my non-existent description of it, I can tell you it will require very sturdy and tall metal posts; one for every ten feet or so of row. T-posts are preferable, but the very large U-posts can work too, and that's what I'll be using. It also calls for aluminum wire, preferably 15-, 16-, or 17-gauge. Twine is definitely not a viable alternative to the wire for this method. And you'll need something to clip the plants to the wire. Twisty ties can work, but the farmer recommended the reusable, cheap, and easy-to-use tomato clips from Johnny's. She didn't say how many per plant, but I would think 10 per plant would be in the right neighborhood.

Okay, here are a couple of bite-sized tips I can pass along from the conference. Those posts mentioned for the tomato trellising - they're not the easiest thing for one person to pound into the ground. Particularly if that post is 7' tall and that person is an average woman. There's a great tool that makes the job a lot easier. This was specifically mentioned by this female farmer, and it so happens that I already have the tool and can back up her endorsement from my personal experience. It's a post driver, and it's basically indestructible. Two people can work together to use it, and that makes things even easier. But I've gotten a 7' post into the ground by myself with this tool. Well worth having if you place posts on a regular basis. The second tip is how to get those posts out of the ground by yourself. The technique is simple. Fill a bucket full of water, and pour it all out right where the post goes into the soil. Apparently this will instantly loosen the ground up enough to pull the post out easily.

I heard about the use of horsetail (Equisetum spp.) as a natural anti-fungal compost tea spray for a variety of garden plants. It's supposed to prevent powdery mildew on squash plants, help tomatoes and potatoes resist blight, and help fruit trees resist fungal diseases as well. I don't know how efficacious it is, but this is the sort of remedy that can't really do harm. So I'm definitely willing to try it and see what happens. I'm going to hope we don't have another blight year, but I always get powdery mildew on my zucchini plants, so I should be able to test this spray this year for sure.

I attended two talks by Michael Phillips, The Apple Grower. Both of them were excellent and a bit overwhelming. What I learned about fruit trees, their diseases, pests, and health, would be very difficult to summarize even briefly here. I learned a lot though, and will be reading through his book as well as his website, very carefully. He also has another book coming out later this year. I realize that I haven't really paid much attention to my fruit trees, or taken all that good care of them. The intensive devotion to his trees that Phillips practices, as a professional orchardist, is something I will probably never be able to approach. But there are plenty of things I could put into practice that would likely help the overall health of the few fruit trees on our homestead. I'll try to write about these things as I do them. Certainly I'll experiment with using the chickens to help break pest cycles under our mature apple tree this year. I put in a suggestion at the conference that PASA bring Phillips back for a full day track on fruit trees. He obviously had a lot more to say than was possible in the time allotted to his talks.

Audio recordings are available of all workshops presented at the conference. This is some consolation for the fact that I can attend only one workshop per time slot. If only I could find a way to be in two places at once. I left a list of the workshops I'd like to hear audio recordings of with a friend who was staying later than we did. So I've got those to look forward to. Sometimes a great presentation is only a mediocre audio recording, because all the visual is lost. But usually I can get something out of them, and sometimes speakers will agree to email their power point presentations or handouts to interested folks.

I also came back from the conference with verbal permission to nag three people by email. The first is a woman at Rodale who responded immediately and positively to my inquiry as to whether or not Rodale might be interested in hosting a scion wood exchange and workshop on how to graft fruit trees. (Scion wood is a small branch taken from one fruit tree and grafted onto either bare rootstock or another fruit tree.) The Rodale Experimental Farm is not terribly far from where I live, and it has large apple orchards. A scion wood swap fits well with the sorts of things they like to promote. And it looks like they will; I've already gotten an email back from her that says they'll try to put on something like this next year. Awesome! The second person is a livestock veterinarian with a passion for raising animals on pasture. She's not in my immediate area, but has agreed to come to my tiny homestead when she's next in the neighborhood and consult with me about the feasibility of (some day) having a few miniature dairy goats here. This is something I would love to do, but I think it would take 2-3 years of site preparation to work the way I would want it to work. The third person is the woman who made the mind-blowing fermented ketchup which I sampled at last year's conference. She agreed (again) to give out the recipe. So I definitely intend, very politely, to nag her by email until she coughs it up. My attempts to reproduce the recipe last year were a complete failure. If she follows through, I'll post it here.

I guess I'm learning to maximize the schmooze potential of the conference. It really is a seething wealth of walking expertise. And there's a lot more to tap into than just the formally scheduled talks.

As for the potato class, I learned a few useful things there too. For one thing, the majority of potato diseases mostly cause only cosmetic defects. Hollow heart, and scab - these affect appearance, but not safety. We can eat tubers affected by these diseases quite safely. In fact, the instructor said that the potato has an awfully good track record as far as food safety is concerned. Humans don't tend to eat potatoes raw, and our cooking methods for the tuber take care of pretty much any microorganism from the field. This is great news for gardeners and homesteaders. We don't produce for market, so it matters very little if our potatoes aren't picture perfect.

Seed potatoes have a "clock" that determines their physiological age, as opposed to their actual age. The clock starts ticking when the parent plant dies back, or when the potato is harvested, whichever comes first. Temperature determines how fast the clock moves. Seed potatoes are ideally stored at slightly colder temperatures (34-36F/1-2C) than potatoes destined to be eaten (42-44F/5-7C). The more warmth the potato experiences, the faster it ages. The "younger" the seed potato, the fewer stalks the plant will send up, and the larger and fewer the tubers will be. The "older" the seed potato, the more stalks the plant will send up and the smaller and more numerous the tubers will be. Overall, the difference in total yield by weight is insignificant from an older to a younger seed potato. There are several other differences in the way plants from young or old seed will behave, but here's the interesting application of this knowledge... The ideal seed potato weighs 2.25-2.5 oz. (64-71g). You can cut larger potatoes down to use for seed, but it's better to use uncut potatoes if you can. So if you want to deliberately grow potatoes to use as seed potatoes, it pays to use "older" seed potatoes for your planting. If you want your potatoes just for eating, "younger" seed potatoes will give you fewer spuds to scrub per serving, and fewer small potatoes that might escape your notice during harvest. Good to know, eh?

And here's another interesting thing I learned. When potato varieties are developed, part of the process is to grow out new strains in test fields which have been deliberately infected with various potato diseases. This is done to observe resistances to common potato diseases, so as to decide which new varieties might be commercially viable. As an aside the instructor mentioned that test fields infected with potato scab virus universally clear the virus spontaneously after a few years, and thereafter it's difficult to reestablish the virus in that field. This off hand comment captured my attention quite dramatically. It has me thinking about soil biology, and how little we really grasp what's going on in there. I guess if you've got scab on your garden potatoes, you can just cut off the superficial blemishes and count on the disease going away on its own, eventually. That would definitely work for me.

Well, that's all I got for today. I'll try to be better about regular updates.

I Am an Urban Homesteader

2011-02-17T10:11:00.003-05:00

I wasn't sure I was going to engage with this fracas, but in the end I feel it's necessary. The Dervaes family of Pasadena, California have apparently trademarked the terms Urban Homestead and Urban Homesteading. They dress up this action as an attempt to protect these terms from use by evil corporations. And yet it is the Dervaeses themselves who are now sending what are in effect cease and desist letters to public libraries, bloggers, and other organizations who have used these terms, even without attempting to profit from them. They have privatized part of the commons and are now wasting no time trying to assert their exclusive legal rights. This despite the fact that there are previously published books, magazines, public service organizations and innumerable blogs that use exactly these words in their titles. At least one of them has already had their page shut down thanks to the Dervaeses.

There are many things I find despicable about these actions of the Dervaes family. Their behavior is exactly what one would expect from an evil corporation. Monsanto, anyone? It would be one thing to trademark these generic terms and then turn them over to the Creative Commons for all non-evil uses. That is not what they are doing. It would be one thing to take these actions and then actively listen to those people who have formerly supported and admired their work. That is not what they have done. Instead they have, one by one, shut down their social media pages and several of the eight websites they maintain. Recent posts on their main blog (I'm not going to link it here.) have closed comments. They didn't like what they were hearing; it didn't support their worldview. So they refuse to listen. This is a family that has solicited donations, boldly and repeatedly, for years. And yet this family of four able-bodied adults somehow manages to find the spare time to trawl the internet looking for people who have "infringed" on their newly acquired legal rights. It sickens me to think of all the monetary donations given in goodwill that are now paying for the Dervaeses to act like a corporate goon squad. Wise people recognize when they have made mistakes, admit them, and correct them. That is not the path the Dervaeses are pursuing.

I was initially only profoundly disappointed with the Dervaeses. Now I'm angry. I have in the past mentioned and linked to the Dervaes family here on my own blog. I can assure you that I will never do so again. I have removed the links that I was able to find. The food production they have managed to accomplish on a tiny amount of land is truly impressive, and by rights it should stand as a shining example of what can be done if one is determined to produce food at home. But this high-handedness over concepts they did not originate and have no moral claim to is unacceptable. They are doing damage to a cause and a way of life that should never be the property of one person, or one family. We need as many people as possible growing food in backyards large and small. That the terms "urban homestead" and "urban homesteading" are now legally restricted does no service to that cause, and may indeed mean that fewer people pursue the goal of home food production. That is wrong, whatever the law may say about it.

I'm not on Facebook, but there's a group making an effort to reclaim the term urban homesteading. Check it out if you use Facebook. If you've ever linked to, publicly praised, or financially supported the Dervaes family, I would urge you to weigh in on this matter, either on your own blog, or by sending a message to the Dervaeses. I think it pays to be civil, no matter how much you may disagree with someone, so I recommend you keep it polite. Rudeness and name-calling only make it that much easier for people who disagree with you to dismiss what you say out of hand.

Headed for the Conference

2011-02-03T09:34:00.000-05:00

I'm off to PASA's Farming for the Future conference in a few hours. I have two hopes. Firstly, that winter will give us just enough of a break to make it there and back again safely. Secondly, that I learn plenty of interesting tidbits to share with all of you, and come home with the fuel-injected sense of motivation and excitement that the conference has provided for the past four years. Honestly, I don't know how I'd get through the impending spring busy season without this incredible boost. It's worth every penny of the registration fee. I'm really looking forward to the fun!

My Thrivalist Binder

2011-01-31T09:47:00.001-05:00

This is a topic I've been meaning to post about for some time. As is the way of things, events have conspired to reveal the good advice I've been meaning to share with all of you as something I should have heeded better myself. I've been having serious computer trouble lately, and there's the possibility that I may permanently lose a great deal of information and photos saved on my hard drive. Physician heal thyself. I've never been too diligent about regular backups. The last backup performed on my computer was months ago, if not a year ago. It's a hard lesson to learn, but it brings home what I had intended to write about. What follows is the post I've been working on incrementally for a few months...

Plenty of peak oil doomers, preppers, and thrivalist types have blogged about their shelf full of reference books for Camp Teotwawki, including me. But there are an awful lot of loose, unbound, but important bits of information floating around my life that aren't in books. A great deal of it is on my computer hard drive, here on my own blog, or resides at websites that are as familiar to me as old friends. From a prepping perspective, this is a bit problematic. If something suddenly takes out my electrical supply, or the network of datafarms that stores the content of the internet, that information is gone. And that's probably when I'd most need this information.

This has been nagging me for a while and I finally started printing out important bits of information as they came to my attention. I put these pages together in a three-ring binder similar to one I keep for recipes I use over and over again. Each page is placed in a plastic sleeve and then in the binder. This has always been really handy for the recipes, since the sleeve protects the page from batter, splattering oil, wet hands, etc. It has saved me having to reprint a given recipe many times over.

So what sorts of things have made it into my thrivalist binder so far? Here's a sampling:

Our yearly harvest records and notes from the garden
A planting schedule specific to my hardiness zone, our local first and last frost dates, and the dates when we lose and gain ten hours of daylight
Some guidelines on biodynamic beekeeping
General principles of curing meat
Worksheets for each of my curing batches and a supply of blank curing worksheets
Instructions on making soap the old-fashioned way
Where There Is No Doctor - available as a free download
Instructions for caring for fig trees grown in containers in my zone
Guidelines for disinfecting water through exposure to sunlight
Homemade rooting hormone recipe, and a few guidelines on growing plants from cuttings
Sharon Astyk's recommendations for 25 plants we should all consider growing
Detailed information on growing a few specific medicinal herbs and their various uses
Planting instructions for garlic
Basic information on seed saving
A few working notes on meals cooked in the solar oven
A printout of Rocket Mass Heaters
All of our soil test results from year to year and bed to bed
Guidelines for processing raw wool
Guidelines for preparing natural dyes from plants, and a list of which plants produce various shades

Mostly this is information that's either self-generated and therefore not available in any book, or specific pieces of information taken from books that I don't feel the need to own as a whole. Some of it I may not ever need, but much of it is information I'm already using regularly, if infrequently. None of it is information I want to trust to memory alone. There are plenty of things I haven't yet remembered to print out and add to the binder. But at least having started it there's now a ready repository of information that fits the bill. I'm more likely to bother to print out the pages since the binder is there and stocked with a supply of empty plastic sleeves. And even if disaster never occurs, having the hard copy means I don't need to use any energy to access the information.

Incidentally, Kathy Harrison not long ago posted about an emergency binder of a different sort. She has assembled various pieces of critical information and legal documents for her family in case one of the adults is incapacitated, or in case of the need to evacuate her home on very short notice. This is a binder of a very different sort, but well worth putting in place, in my opinion. You don't have to be a doomer to benefit from the sorts of preparations Kathy writes about. After all, we can pretty much count on being incapacitated or dying at some point. The information she advises assembling would benefit any family trying to deal with the serious illness or death of an adult member of the family. You don't even have to live in an area prone to natural disaster to use her advice; house fires can happen to anyone at any time.

So what about you? Have you printed out information you think is valuable and put it in an easily accessible place? Care to share what bits of knowledge have made the cut?

The Virtues of Winter

2011-01-26T08:54:00.002-05:00

This is one of the hardest periods of the year for me. I've had my winter break from gardening duties, and it was very welcome. Now I'm a bit antsy and definitely missing all the summer vegetables. There is still a week or two to go before the earliest seed starting can begin, though I'm pushing that boundary with some experimental cold frame plantings. I've done a few germination tests to make sure that the seeds I put into our personal seed vault came through the year in viable condition. All looks well there, so my seed orders this year will be fairly limited. We have snow on the ground still from two separate storms, and six-ten inches of mixed sleet and snow predicted for the next 24 hours. As I write, fat flakes are coming down at a decent clip. I'm trying to see the upside in winter. Here's what I've come up with.

I used our recent -1 F (-18 C) temperature to go around the windows of our home feeling for air leaks. At that temperature you don't need any fancy instruments to find them. Bare fingers will do the trick, trust me. I'd brought in a tube of silicone caulking from the garage to warm up in the house. Then I went over all the leaks I could find, sealing them up. It made a noticeable (but not huge) improvement in our downstairs bathroom, which has two exterior walls, both of which are only passably insulated. Upgrading the insulation in these walls is on the list, but the expense will not be insignificant, so the project is not near the top of that list. But hey, a reduction of those thin drafts of icy cold is all to the good.

I've also got a tiny tip today. I call it iceboxing - turning our refrigerator into an icebox. It's easy to do at this time of year, provided there's a little extra room on the top shelf. I use empty plastic juice and soda containers, given to me by relatives. The large squarish ones with the rectangular handles are really nice for this purpose. Just fill them with tap water, put them outside and let them freeze solid overnight. In the morning, I put them in the fridge and put two more filled bottles outside so as to have swaps available when the first two thaw out. Two large chunks of ice keep the refrigerator's compressor from running much at all. I don't unplug the machine because I still want the light in there, but it certainly cuts down on our electrical usage. Easy, free, saves money. Seems like an obvious win to me.

Winter is also the time of year I most like to knit, and cold hands certainly provide motivation. I've made myself two more pairs of fingerless gloves. I finally have some that fit snugly around my wrists, like the ones I made for my husband a few years back. A pair of these gloves is a quick project that suits my short knitting attention span. They can be made fast enough to give me a quick sense of accomplishment, and that helps keep me going on other fronts.

The cold season is a tough sell, but I wouldn't give it up for anything. I've lived in places without a real winter and always felt slightly cheated. I grew up with four seasons, so snow and sub-freezing temperatures feel right to me. Winter has its austere beauty too. As a gardener, I know the value of the frost heave that loosens up our heavy soils, making them spongy and easier to work. The glory of spring in this area is part and parcel with the severity of our winter. Where I live spring explodes out of frozen winter: dramatic, lavish, electrifying. Other places have springs that sort of saunter onto the scene, a nearly seamless transition from tepid winter, or maybe even just a rainy season. Not our springs. So as I look out the window at a world drained of color, it's well to remember this. I know that in a few short months we'll feast on asparagus and enjoy the succession of breathtaking tree blossoms. Meanwhile I muse on hoop house designs and hope that this time next year will see us harvesting abundant greens as the snows come down.

Have you been making good on winter weather lately? Do tell.

Book Review: The Resilient Gardener

2011-01-20T11:19:00.001-05:00

I've just finished reading something excellent and thought I'd share. It's Carol Deppe's recent book, The Resilient Gardener. If you think you might one day want to feed yourself without recourse to purchased food, then I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's one thing to grow a garden for a few years, and even come to rely on it for a significant portion of your calories and nutrition. It's another thing entirely to really give up purchased foods, especially the cereal crops that make up such a huge portion of our western diet. And when I say give up, of course I have in mind a time when it may not be a matter of giving up, but of being unable to obtain them, for one reason or another.

Deppe is allergic to wheat, gluten, and dairy. Yet she feeds herself by concentrating most of her efforts on five crops: corn (maize), potatoes, squash, beans, and eggs. She chooses these crops for their caloric and nutritional values, storing ability, proven reliability, and resilience in the face of unpredictable weather or even the lack of attention from the gardener. It seems to me that anyone trying to feed themselves in a very large part of the world (certainly most of the US) would do well to devote much attention to those crops too. I love my wheaten foods, but there's little chance that I'll ever be able to produce even a fair portion of the wheat I would like to continue to eat. Corn is not my current starchy staple, but it's the most reliable grain in my region. We already produce our own eggs with a tiny flock of four laying hens. The other three crops consistently do well in my region too. Greens, other vegetables, and fruit are all nice for supplementing, but Deppe has clearly identified one year-round "crop" and four long-storing staples that would do the heavy lifting if we should ever need to provide all our own food.

The Resilient Gardener is not a broad book, but a deep one. And it's not a basic gardening book, but an advanced one. Deppe assumes her readers have read countless paeans to compost and mulch, and refrains from rehashing these topics. Instead she caters to those with at least a few years of gardening under their belts. Her dogged focus on these five crops allows her to recount a wealth of detail that will save many a backyard enthusiast from both errors and unnecessary effort. And I mean the sorts of errors that even an experienced gardener might make. Her long-term experimentation with many varieties within her five chosen crops is meticulous and scientifically rigorous. If you've ever asked yourself a question about one of these foods, chances are that Deppe has provided the answer in her book. She answered a few handfuls of mine.

I appreciate that Deppe discussed not just how to grow the foods, but how to store them and eat them too. While I already eat all of the foods she writes about, I don't rely on them to the extent she does. Since starchy staples tend not to be fungible ingredients when it comes to cooking, it helps to have some guidance with basic recipes. Changing one's diet is rarely simple. Even more do I appreciate her frank admission that not everything is worth doing well, or even doing at all. What she terms selective sloppiness appeals to my sensibilities. This is a book that will help you find the sweet spot between maximum productivity and minimum labor. If you want advice on how to make your gardens a beautiful, weed-free show place, this isn't it.

Although she lives and grows these crops in the Pacific northwest, the information she presents is largely relevant to most other areas of the US. The exception is her chapter on eggs, or the laying flock. Here Deppe concentrates on ducks rather than chickens. She explains her choice on logical grounds: ducks make more sense than chickens in her climate, so she has more experience with this species than with chickens. Moreover, there are numerous books on small-scale chicken keeping; Deppe prefers to cover new ground, and does so with her usual level of gritty detail. I don't think that backyard ducks are likely to rival backyard chickens in popularity anytime soon, but her contributions on the former nonetheless fill a niche.

Another very minor criticism I have is that Deppe addresses the issue of feeding the poultry flock in hard times largely by sacrificing to them portions of the other crops she grows. I think there are many other alternative feed options for those with very small flocks, even when pasture is marginal or free-ranging not feasible. Deppe's suggested feeds will certainly work for those with enough acreage to produce the extra crops. But they still put livestock in competition with humans for the same foods, as well as turning eggs into re-packaged versions of the other staples in Deppe's dietary paradigm. This would raise concerns for me about nutritional diversity and completeness. If feeding poultry from resources internal to your homestead is an important issue for you, I strongly recommend you look for Harvey Ussery's forthcoming book The Modern Homestead Poultry Flock. It'll be published later this year.

Such minor issues aside, The Resilient Gardener is truly an invaluable addition to the bookshelf for those interested in food self-reliance and preparation for a low-energy future. Due to the necessities of her own dietary restrictions Deppe has done work and research that can benefit anyone looking to produce their own food from a fairly small area and in uncertain times. I'm thankful that she has chosen to share what she has learned.

Black Soldier Fly Larvae

2011-01-05T13:48:00.004-05:00

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

I hope the title of this post doesn't put anyone off. If you're not fundamentally squeamish about insects, I promise there's nothing terribly icky about what I've got to say today.

Included in my formal list of goals for this year is the project of trying to feed our laying hens more and more with food we produce ourselves. We've already got well established routines that provide some of the chickens' food, such as kitchen scraps, trimmings from the garden, feeding them Japanese beetles and squash bugs in the proper seasons, and gleaning acorns for them in the fall. Still, we end up buying a few 80-pound bags of feed for them each year. This is grown organically, fairly local to me, and milled by the farmer that grows it, so on that score I feel pretty good about it. But it's a 45-minute drive to buy the feed, and the price (though much cheaper than the nasty pelletized chicken feed from Tractor Supply) has been nudging up steadily ever since I started buying it. This feed easily accounts for more than half of the hens' caloric intake over the course of the year.

So I've been looking a bit harder at what we might do to close the gaps in our homestead economy and nutrient cycles. Worms from our vermicompost are an excellent possibility, but I'm going to leave that project for another post. Right now I'm going to talk about the Black Soldier Fly, which is probably the coolest idea easily adapted for use by very small scale homesteaders I've come across in a long time. I have this tendency to think that if I've heard of some cool idea, then everyone else already has too. But I've gotten comments from time to time that ask for more detail on stuff I mention in an off-hand way. So I'm going to review what I know about this species and how those with small backyard poultry flocks can partner with it to their advantage.

The Black Soldier Fly is well established in many parts of the world, including most of North America in hardiness zone 7 or warmer. Though it is a fly, it's a world apart from the common housefly in terms of the nuisance factor. The adult phase of this insect's life, the only time it can fly, is very brief and devoted solely to reproduction. The adult BSF doesn't even have a working mouth, so it cannot bite or eat and is not attracted by food, except as a resource for the next generation of BSF. Even so, the mated female BSF does not land on food. She seeks to lay her eggs nearby - not on - a food source, where the newly hatched larvae will be able to land on the food and begin feeding. BSF larvae can consume small amounts of meat, but this is not a species that specializes in carrion. Mostly what she's looking for is decomposing plant matter. In fact, they may already be resident in your compost heap. Once her eggs are laid, the adult fly has accomplished her mission in life, and dies shortly after. The males also die shortly after mating. The larvae remain on the food source as they pass through several sub-stages of growth, until they are ready to pupate, at which point they seek to burrow into the earth to complete their development into adults. So you can see that there is little purpose or opportunity for the BSF to interact with humans in any way, unless we deliberately facilitate such an interaction. Indeed, even if you live in a region with a BSF population, it's entirely feasible that you have never noticed these insects before, since they have little interest in us, and such short life spans in adult form.

The point at which we would want to intervene in the life cycle of this insect is when the larvae are fully grown and ready to pupate. Clever people have designed a clever contraption for harvesting the mature larvae at just this stage. Or rather, using the BSF's instincts in order to have it harvest itself. The BioPod is a custom built bucket system that provides an exit route for the larvae leading to a closed container, which makes feeding them to poultry or other livestock trivially easy.

I'm going to post another piece soon about the knockoff BSF composting buckets I'm working on. What I want to dwell on a little more at this stage is the idea of partnering with this species. Although in my formal goals for this year I wrote that I'm not committing to adding another species to our homestead, that was an oversight. In reality, the Black Soldier Fly is another species I very much plan to work with. It may not look like livestock, just as our red wriggler worms for the vermicompost bin didn't look like livestock. Perhaps they're not. But they will be a new species for us, and partnering with them will involve a learning curve. I see the cultivation of these insects as one more item in the self-sufficiency toolbox; one more thing that reduces our dependence on fossil fuels. For without fossil fuels it would be very difficult for the farmer to harvest the grains that make up our purchased feed, and very difficult for us to go and buy them multiple times per year.

It may seem grotesque to call my intended relationship with BSF a "partnership." After all, it looks pretty exploitative from one perspective. But in reality, I don't see this as ethically any different than keeping other species for food. I will be establishing an insect where it doesn't currently exist, and responsible not only for feeding each generation, but also maintaining a "wild" population that survives to adulthood in order to reproduce and create the next generation. After obtaining a starter colony, I'll need to heavily "seed" our garden soils with ready-to-pupate larvae. This will reduce my usable harvest in the first year. But with luck, a good population will take root right in the backyard, and continue to take advantage of the shelter and food the composting buckets will provide for them. From what I've read, I will very much need to actively tend the compost buckets. I expect to derive both animal feed and a small amount of compost tea from this partnership. In other words, the BSF will become part of the system of this homestead. I'm always looking for ways to increase the diversity of species, and the connections between them, on our tiny piece of land.

Sooner or later I'll post more on the buckets themselves. In the meantime, having read this post, would you humor me please, by participating in my poll on Black Soldier Fly composting? It's on the sidebar of my blog. I'm curious how many of you have heard of BSF cultivation before, and what your attitudes towards it might be.

2010: A Year in Review

2010-12-31T08:17:00.001-05:00

It's that time again when I look back and assess progress made over the past year. Before getting in to any details, I'm happy to report that this year things seemed different somehow. At this time last year, I really felt that despite all the work we'd done, it didn't amount to much. It felt like I couldn't get much traction on the sorts of progress I was trying to make. Not this year. I feel good about where we're at, and where we're going. I can't really explain this, since I didn't work any harder or smarter, or get more done this year as compared with last year. It might come down to the work of past years beginning to literally bear fruit in 2010.

While I had my official list of goals for the year, and dutifully tackled some of them, there were a whole slew of other projects that were never on the list, but were completed nonetheless. Like laying out permanent beds and pathways in our garden, and amending the beds with copious amounts of compost from our township, and building a mobile poultry pen to fit precisely over those new beds. That project was a lot of work, and it will make a significant difference for our garden and our ability to use it more efficiently in future years. Seems like I should be able to cross that off the list with pride. Except that it wasn't on the list in the first place. I won't detail the goals unmet this year. If you're curious, a quick look at the sidebar shows (at least for the next few days) what didn't get done. Nothing left undone was absolutely critical, and only a couple of those goals are going to be priorities for the coming year.

Anyway, on to what did get done this year.

Overall: We decreased our dependence on the industrial food system by producing more of our own food, and also by buying more of our food from local sources, including fruits I turned into jam. Our passive solar thermal heating system substantially reduced our dependence on fossil fuels. This was also the year we began harnessing volunteer muscle to help with the work load, which has turned out to be a huge help in many different ways. My husband remained employed this year, and is even reasonably assured of continued employment for another year, for which we are very grateful, given the continued state of recession (whatever the talking heads may say about that). We saw the first modest harvests from several of the perennial food plants we established in previous years. Asparagus, pears, cherries, grapes, elderflowers and elderberries! It's unutterably gratifying to see what we hope are just hints of the harvests to come from these crops.

Harvest tally - This year we brought 757.2 pounds (343.5 kg) of food in from our backyard, including about 11 pounds of home-harvested meat. This figure doesn't include any of the produce we picked and ate outside, nor any sub-par stuff sent directly to the chickens. Also, we haven't yet gotten around to shucking this year's popcorn, so that hasn't been included in the tally. Our four hens gave us about 1143 eggs this year.

Mortgage reduction - I'm not going to give an exact figure, but we made substantial progress towards our goal of paying off our mortgage. We're currently 16 years ahead of schedule in repaying our principal. If we do as well in the coming year, we'll be extremely close to paying it off entirely.

January - Finished the root cellar. Researched honeybees and methods of keeping them. Placed orders for two packages of honeybees. Placed seed and rootstock orders. Began second introductory beekeeping class. Reseeded the coldframe with arugula.

February - Attended the PASA conference, a one-day seminar for beginning beekeepers, a one-day seminar on alternative agricultural strategies, and a three-day class on agricultural soils. Got our personal seed vault squared away. Two cats joined our household. Seed starting commenced.

March - Got the fruit trees pruned. Work began on our passive solar heating system. I improved my knowledge of curing meats by working with a few local grass-based farmers during their big curing day. Prepped the beekeeping equipment. Prepped large self-watering containers for fig trees and hazelbert bushes.

April - Planted 3 fig trees and 2 hazelbert bushes in large self-watering containers. Bees arrived and we installed them in their hives, beginning the drama. Started experiment #2 with potatoes grown in buckets. Began creation of a permaculture-style guild around our old apple tree, using the deep litter that the hens had been on through the winter months, as well as saved corrugated cardboard and paper bags from bulk purchases for lasagna mulching. Picked up truck loads of cheap compost and mulch from the township four weekends out of four. Dug wild elderberries and stinging nettle from a friend's property; transplanted them around our home along with ramps given to me by a relative. Renovated the chicken coop and pen. Put the hens back into rotational grazing on the lawn. Seed starting continued. Tilled and laid out permanent beds in the garden.

May - Started experimenting with lacto-fermentation. Picked up more loads of cheap compost and mulch from the township four weekends out of four. Hosted a work weekend which allowed me to get ahead of the weeds in the garden. Planted the bulk of the annual crops, including our first three sisters planting. Made my first ever successful batch of jam. Killed our first garden rabbit and ate it with satisfaction.

June - Hit a huge, community-wide yard sale and snagged a lot of canning jars, plus a stovetop wok for use with the rocket stove, on the cheap. Built a colorful mailbox hand tool depot in the garden, and a plastic bag drip-dry station in the kitchen, which together constituted my birthday gift projects. Took in a disabled heritage turkey poult, intended for Thanksgiving. Built pea trellises. Arranged to host a WWOOFer for a week, informally. Cleaned out the wreck room to make a place for the WWOOF volunteer. Made raspberry jam from local organic fruit I picked myself, and elderflower cordial from the first blooms of the elders we planted in 2009.

July - The month started out well when I managed to keep most of the garden alive through a crazy heat wave that started in June. With help from our WWOOFer, we built a very lightweight and mobile poultry pen sized to fit our garden beds, used it as temporary housing for the growing turkey poult, and caught up on a lot weeding and lasagna mulching. Then I got hit with the double whammy of a massive infection in my foot and the sudden death of a relative. Together these things kept me from the garden for more than ten days, leading to a squash crop failure.

August - A big month. Mustered the will to get back out in the garden to keep battling the weeds, salvage some parched plants, and to succession plant for fall crops. Canned tomatoes like nobody's business, finishing the month with 28 quarts of roasted tomato sauce. Cured seven more pork jowls and smoked them, turning out 12 pounds of finished guanciale. Dealt with first harvests of elderberries and our wine varietal grapes. Experimented with summer-sowing parsnip seeds as they mature. (Results on that to come in the spring.) Took delivery of custom ordered ceramic weights for improvised lacto-fermentation crocks, and started experimenting with garden produce. Welcomed our first official WWOOF volunteer, who helped with a great deal of lasagna mulching and canning. Got one cold frame built. Finally figured out a good method for making smoked chili powder from homegrown chilies and wood chips from our own apple tree.

September - Planted both new and old cold frames with varieties of cold-tolerant crops (spinach, carrots, lettuce, scallions) that tested well last winter. Painted our living/dining room, making it bit less stark and a bit nicer for having company over. Harvested the potato buckets to disappointing results. Harvested and dried first crop of hops. Welcomed a third WWOOF volunteer. Did a bit of refurbishment on the mobile chicken pen and used all the leftover paint samples to make it all piebald.

October - Hosted another WWOOF volunteer. Built a crate from scavenged wooden pallets to hold bottles of ice in the root cellar. Used the poultry schooner to let the chickens do much of my garden cleanup and prep for winter. Cut down the hemlock tree in the back yard to make room for another apple tree to be planted next year. Copied Tamar and Kevin's ingenious instant greenhouse for the in-ground rosemary plant out in the garden.

November - Winterized the beehive in hopes of keeping our struggling colony alive until spring. Started loading up the root cellar. Reconstructed winter quarters for the girls and got them back onto deep litter bedding. Lasagna mulched large swaths of garden beds, and two spots on the lawn in preparation for transplanting our hazelnut bushes in early 2012. Got on the waiting list for two nucs from Champlain Valley Bees. Pressed our apple cider and turned some of it into hard cider. Hosted Thanksgiving for the extended family without having a nervous breakdown. Bought a shotgun and got a gun club membership so we'll have a place to practice shooting once we've completed our gun safety classes.

December - Made my first batch of duck confit from locally farmed ducks, and started another batch of guanciale with free/workshare jowls from farming friend's pastured hogs. Attended a workshop on leasing farmland in an attempt to figure out what to do with our parcel of agriculturally conserved land. Based on advice from one of our WWOOF volunteers with EMT experience, assembled first aid kits for the house and both vehicles. Slaughtered our turkey fosterling, and plan to eat it for New Year's Eve dinner. Started early on the construction of a Biopod knockoff, officially a goal for 2011.

It feels fantastic to end the year with a sense of satisfaction for things accomplished, instead of my customary nonsensical feeling that we got nowhere. Primarily because it allows me the freedom to be fairly slothful for a while during the winter. I expect next year to be just as busy, and that the busy-ness will start up again quite soon. I can only hope we make as much progress in the new year, and that I feel as good about it in twelve months' time.

What accomplishments made you proud this year?