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The New Coop 27 Apr 2012 11:32 AM (12 years ago)

So here's a project that's taken up far more of our spring time than I would have imagined.  It's our spankin' new chicken coop.  As you can see, it's an A-frame and a rather large one.  The seed ideas for the design were mostly mine, but in the course of constructing it with the help of our WWOOF volunteer, design became very much a collaborative effort.

Our previous coop-and-pen system was our first attempt at providing mobile housing for our laying hens.  It served reasonably well for four years, but we built in plenty of flaws because we didn't really know what we were doing.  We had to build chicken housing before we'd ever kept chickens.  Some of these flaws were remediable, and we fixed what we could; others not so much.  My two biggest complaints were that the coop wasn't easy to clean out and that both the coop and the pen were quite heavy, making it hard for me to move them by myself sometimes.  A lesser issue was that we had no way of providing a dust bath for our hens in a mobile system.  So they tore into our grass to cool themselves down in summer, thus leaving significant divots in the lawn.  I didn't care so much about the aesthetics, but rolling a heavy coop and pen around was hard enough to begin with.  When the wheels fell into some of these divots, it became really difficult.

So the new design had to eliminate the difficulty of cleaning, shed excessive weight, and offer dustbathing possibilities for the birds.  I also wanted easier access to the interior, and room for at least two nest boxes.  We started with one nesting box for four hens, which was reasonable, especially since the box could hold two hens at a time if need be.  But over the years the number of hens we've had at one time has varied considerably, with nine being the upper limit.  This resulted in the occasional queue for the nesting box, and the occasional egg laid outside the nest.


Here you can see the elevated dust box in the back.  Since it's raised up this way it doesn't take away any area of the lawn.  This also shows the articulated door, which folds down so I can access the feeder and waterer, or throw treats to the girls without giving them too much temptation to escape.  When I need access to the inside of the pen, I can open the entire door and get inside without much crouching or discomfort.

The nesting boxes are situated towards the peak of the new coop.  The girls don't seem to have any aversion to laying their eggs so far off the ground.  Since they have to make three jumps from the ground to the nests, their feet seem to be cleaner.  The eggs I've been getting have been mostly pristine.

Here are a couple of pictures of the wheels and the slight advantage we gained by not placing them at the very back edge of the bottom frame.  You'll notice that they're on a lever bar that can be propped into place when it's time to move the coop.  The rest of the time the frame rests almost in contact with the ground.  By moving the wheel slightly towards the front of the coop, the weight of small portion of the coop behind the wheel acts as a counter balance to the rest of the weight.  This makes it easier for me to move.  I don't quite have the technical vocabulary to describe this, but the idea was described in an excellent article about the Chinese wheelbarrow in the Energy Bulletin a short while ago.  The article will fill you in on the principle, if you're interested.


Here you can see the lever bar positioned to raise the coop off the ground to make it easier to move.  We're still tinkering with this a bit since our smallest hen scooted right under the coop while I was moving it one morning.  We have a few ideas on how we might fine tune the system.


Here's a shot taken after the main construction was done that shows most elements of the interior.  We have diagonal bracing in a few areas to strengthen the wooden framing.  After painting was finished, the whole thing was sheathed in chicken wire.  Then an old billboard was used to cover the sides/roof and most areas of the gable ends.



I've already been asked, "Why purple?"  My standard response is, "Why not?"  My tendency to splash bright colors around my garden is already on record.  It helps curb the impulse to paint something loud on the walls of our home.  Deep purple was one color not yet represented in the garden.  It all looked so pretty until it was time to put that used billboard on as roofing material.  I'm hoping that I can find an artistic soul who might paint something attractive on it.  After all, it looks like nothing so much as a blank canvas to me, just waiting to be filled up with something whimsical or chicken-related.

I will say this for the ugly billboard.  It is very sturdy stuff, designed to be out in all weathers.  The white backing of the advertisement should help keep the coop from heating up too much in full summer sun.  Oh, and it was free, by the way.  The billboard companies give them away for nothing once they're taken down.  I know a man who used this material in lieu of roof liner when he built his own home.  I expect the billboard to hold up extremely well, and thus protect this coop from the elements for several years at least.

The only thing missing from our new coop is a clever name.  My husband calls it the "land yacht."  I sometimes refer to it as the "purple menace."  Neither moniker seems to really capture the mixture of charm and clunkiness of our new coop.  So what say you, readers?  Got a clever name for this behemoth?  I have no prizes to give away and make this a contest, but I'd love a snazzy label for our newest piece of homestead infrastructure.  All suggestions will be gratefully received and considered.

Resurfacing 23 Apr 2012 3:37 AM (12 years ago)

Apologies for the long radio silence.  And thanks to those of you who sent kind inquiries about my absence.  All is well at the homestead.  While spring is always a busy season that gets in the way of writing, that's not my excuse this time.  The difference now is that my husband is more or less retired, and thus home all the time.  This is almost entirely a good thing.  The only exception to that is my habit of writing when I have the house entirely to myself.  The writing "mood," as it were, comes to me most easily in solitude.  I find it very hard to reach that state with distractions around me.  So, if this blog is to continue, I'll need to figure out a routine or a method that will provide verisimilitude for being alone at home.  This will probably be a challenge, but I'll work at it.  If I manage to find time to write, it'll probably mean I find a way to catch up with many of your blogs as well.  I've missed keeping tabs on what many of you are up.  There's so much inspiration and so many cool ideas in the gardening/homesteading blogosphere!

In the meantime I should provide some thumbnail sketches of where we're at and what we've been doing.  First off, my husband's "retirement" is really the loss of a job.  Since we've known this was coming for quite a while, we could plan for it, which I know is an advantage many people don't get.  Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.  Our advance notice let us, just barely, pay off our mortgage entirely before his employment ended.  So we are now without an income, but also debt-free.  Mostly that's not scary at this point.  It feels pretty good, I have to tell you.  We've taken a few extra efforts here and there to shave expenses in an already pretty frugal existence. 

We've already hosted a number of WWOOF volunteers this year, and our first one brought with him an impressive amount of construction experience.  He helped us build a new mobile chicken coop to replace our clunky and deteriorating pen and coop system, which served honorably, if inelegantly, these past four years.  The new rig is an A-frame that provides a bit more area to the chickens and should require almost no cleaning, ever, since there's no floor. All the poop ends up directly on the lawn. The girls seem to have taken to it quite happily.  I think it's just about the most awesome chicken coop ever, if I say so myself.  I'll try to get a detailed post on this one up soon.  (Yes, I know my track record with "soon" is execrable.)

Other recent efforts have entailed a lot of digging and planting of rootstock.  The hedgerow project got moved way up the priority list by last year's Halloween snowstorm from hell.  The storm took out a major section of our fence in the backyard.  We're going with the strategy of leaving what remains of the old wooden fence where it is, and replacing what came down with livestock panels and the plants that will form the hedgerow.  Frankly, this looks ugly at the moment, and doesn't provide any of the privacy of the wooden fence.  But eventually, the livestock panels will be mostly hidden by the plants, which will give us privacy, and should look a lot better than the wooden fence.  Should we ever decide to use that space for dairy goats, the dual-element hedgerow will constitute a real barrier to the animals, while looking pretty and offering some browse.  So far our hedgerow plantings include rugosa roses, Siberian peashrub, cornelian cherry, a dwarf willow tree, and a golden elderberry.  It's likely that our black raspberry patch, which sort of backs into the property line, will become a hedgerow element too.  I have three tiny hazels and a ginseng plant that will be coddled for another year or two in containers before being added to the hedgerow.  We lucked out with the goat panels, finding them used for a small fraction of the price for new ones, which is considerable.  Right now a picture of the hedge project wouldn't really show much.  I'm hoping that by late summer or fall a second picture will provide an impressive contrast.  We'll see how it goes.

We also planted several new fruit trees, bushes and vines this month.  We're starting both table grapes and hardy kiwis on trellises, and experimenting with a new growing technique for several fruit trees.  The technique is called Backyard Orchard Culture.  The good folk at Root Simple blog wrote about it, and you can check out a summary at the website of the tree nursery which developed it.  Basically the idea is to cram normal fruit trees into places where they either won't have enough space to develop to their normal mature size, or where such full growth is undesirable.  Then you radically prune the tree as it grows to keep it very small.  Planting multiple fruit trees very close together is another part of BOC.  Doing so forces the trees to compete for resources, which helps keep them small.  While trees maintained in this manner will obviously never produce as much fruit as trees which realize their full growth, there are other advantages.  Having many small fruit trees means you can have a succession of harvests that are each just large enough to keep you in fresh fruit for a fortnight or so, without providing any pressure to preserve the bulk of an enormous harvest.   The six Asian pears and two extra apples we just planted in this way should (eventually) give us modest quantities of fresh fruit over a three-month span from mid-summer to early fall.  (We'd ordered two more apples which would have extended the season through mid-fall at least, but they were sold out.  We may add them next year.)  Since BOC trees are kept very small, maintenance and harvesting are very easy.  There's no need for ladders.  I expect that when I'm another twenty or thirty years older, the ability to do such work with both feet on the ground will be very appealing.

We've got a few broiler chickens going already this year.  My feeling is that last year we let our batch of six go far too long.  I wanted to use up the second bag of feed that I'd purchased for them, and that meant letting most of them live for ten weeks.  It gave us bigger birds, certainly.  But it also meant that by the end I had to move the birds three times per day just to keep them out of their own filth.  The Cornish cross breed that accounts for the vast majority of chicken meat in this country isn't genetically modified, but judging by how fast they grow, they may as well be.  At nine and ten weeks of age, even broilers that were kept on grass, not fed for 24 hours per day, and allowed plenty of space to move around, pretty much couldn't and didn't.  The speed at which these birds grow is an undeniable advantage for those who want to fly under the radar with backyard meat production.  You can finish the birds before anyone notices they're there.  But it's pretty much their only virtue.  This year I'll raise two batches of four birds each, and only until each batch finishes off an 80-pound bag of feed.  I expect that to mean slaughter at roughly seven weeks old.  Thus smaller birds, but more of them as compared with last year.

Finally, we've just started work on a tiny frog pond to be added to the center of our garden.  This is the only suitable spot we could find for it - one that's not on a footpath or directly under a large deciduous tree that will dump too many leaves into it in autumn.  Work sort of stalled with this after the hole was dug, as mild weather brought on many spring tasks very early.  But I want to get this done soonish, so that it can provide many benefits to our growing space this year.  I know for a certainty that adding a bit of water to the garden will bring a great deal of additional biodiversity, which can only be a good thing.  What I'm really hoping for though are some toads, which are supposed to be fantastic for slug control.  The lasagna mulching method I'm so fond of does tend to encourage slugs, though we've had such dry conditions the last couple years that it's sort of been a wash.  The plan is to stock the pond with duckweed for multiple uses, and probably a few goldfish for algae management.  If frogs or toads don't show up on their own, I may go looking for some tadpoles.  I know where to find some of these locally in the correct season, but I'm pretty sure that window has closed for the year. 

Hope spring is treating you all well.  Drop me a line and let me know what's new with you and your garden.

Repurposing Wool Fibers 30 Jan 2012 8:07 AM (13 years ago)

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 13 Jan 2012 7:16 AM (13 years ago)

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 5 Jan 2012 9:13 AM (13 years ago)

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 13 Dec 2011 3:43 AM (13 years ago)

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 10 Dec 2011 9:01 AM (13 years ago)

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 14 Nov 2011 3:40 AM (13 years ago)

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 1 Nov 2011 3:00 AM (13 years ago)

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 21 Oct 2011 4:25 AM (13 years ago)

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 19 Oct 2011 5:45 AM (13 years ago)

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 17 Oct 2011 9:48 AM (13 years ago)

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 13 Oct 2011 3:58 PM (13 years ago)

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 12 Oct 2011 2:06 AM (13 years ago)

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 6 Oct 2011 4:02 AM (13 years ago)

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 5 Oct 2011 4:58 AM (13 years ago)

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 23 Sep 2011 5:47 AM (13 years ago)

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 19 Sep 2011 6:25 AM (13 years ago)

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 16 Sep 2011 8:11 AM (13 years ago)

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 12 Sep 2011 2:45 AM (13 years ago)

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 8 Sep 2011 4:36 AM (13 years ago)

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 29 Aug 2011 2:40 PM (13 years ago)

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 25 Aug 2011 6:58 AM (13 years ago)

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 24 Aug 2011 8:53 AM (13 years ago)

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 17 Aug 2011 4:25 AM (13 years ago)

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!