Weeding for Godot

Beer, Apfelwein, and Project Plans

2012-01-21T15:44:00.000-08:00

Steve is out in the garage cracking barley for the next batch of beer that he's brewing today, and if I remember correctly, it's a Mexican Amber. He finally figured out why his brews are a little on the malty side; he just bought a new thermometer to screw into the side of his brew kettle and decided to calibrate it against the dairy thermometer that he has been using and an ambient thermometer and discovered that the dairy thermometer is low by two degrees at 60F, which could translate to being exponentially off the higher he gets the contents.

The apple wine he made from commercial apple juice turned out very well. He opted not to use the second pound of corn sugar in the fermentation and I'm glad he didn't, because it's plenty alcoholic the way it is. The commercial apple juice and Montrachet wine yeast fermented into a pale, dry wine, that he carbonated like beer, and it's really a pleasure to drink. It's dry, and crisp, and has an apple bouquet, but it's not over the top in any direction. The good news is, that unlike beer, Apfelwein can be fermented over the summer. Steve wants to try an ale yeast the next time he makes it to see if it will leave a little more apple in the flavor of the wine. I'm game to try it, but I'm pretty pleased with how this batch turned out.

I decided that I needed to turn my goals list into an actual plan and attack it like a project. First I put all the goals into a master list and then listed what can be put on a punch list and taken care of quickly; the low lying fruit, in popular project-speak. Then I decided what is a major project, what the predecessors are for that project and whether or not it's an ongoing project, like the garden.

Today I added a Garden sheet to the plan, and listed out vegetables I want to grow this year, and then I noted important things about each of them: what season or seasons they grow in, whether or not they grow well here, whether or not we like them, whether or not they produce multiple harvests (important when you don't have a lot of time) and whether or not they keep well on their own, i.e., do they keep without canning, drying, or freezing. All this will help me figure out what to plant and when, and where.

In the meantime, here is a link to a cool site with a bunch of interesting ideas and a few videos.

Getting Real About 2012

2012-01-06T23:33:00.000-08:00

I suppose that when I drew up my list of goals for 2011 last year, I had unrealistic expectations of myself, even for a fairly industrious person with a lot of time on her hands. I must have figured that I had all year to get this stuff done, what could possibly get in the way? Clearly I didn't consider the possibility that I'd actually find work and have a whole lot less time in which to get it all accomplished. Even though I had half the year off, I didn't get half the list done, although I made a good start on some of what didn't get finished. I wonder if goal setting is like playing horseshoes- does close count?

I will say that, in spite of putting up my list for God and everyone to see and feeling somewhat underwhelmed by my own, what's the word…impotency works here, I still think that putting it out there is a good thing if for no other reason than the darn list doesn't get lost.

Without going over the whole, sordid year (that's what the archives are for after all) I'm going to build 2012's list on last year's list, but I'm going to try to be a whole lot more sensible about it, and try to ground the year's goals in reality.

So what didn't get done:

Build dining nook- that one I have started and the hard part (read: time consuming) is almost done. There is no reason why this can't get done this year (save me sawing off a limb or something) so it's going on the list- I might even get it done by Easter. Maybe.

Get the glass into the cupboards- I'm not sure about this one. At this point, Steve and I are really used to reaching through the doors to retrieve stuff, and only open them when they're actually in the way. The doors may come off altogether- I haven't decided. Pretty much the rest of the kitchen is in open shelving, and while dusty, it's convenient, so I'm undecided. (And before you say anything about an earthquake, Mom, cleaning all this stuff up off the floor will give me something constructive to do while fretting about why the insurance agent hasn't called us back yet.) This one's getting tabled for awhile.

Sew and hang the living and dining room drapes- speaking of getting dusty, all the fabric I've purchased for this project is pretty dusty at this point, so no rush. And having a place to sew is somewhat predicated on getting a few other things out of the way, so this is tabled for now as well.

Get the craft closet in the guest bedroom done- I did manage to get the doors installed for this but that was it. But since having a place to cram all my handwork and bill paying out of sight and locked up is pretty key to getting the guest room done, this is going on the list.

Build the guest room beds- also key to finishing the guest room, so on the list it goes.

Get the second coat of paint on the pergola - this is not actually my project because I don't paint. Trust me, you don't want me to paint. This is Steve's project and in his defense, he did get a lot of paint on the pergola last year, but it isn't finished and it should be, so this goes on the list.

Plant the pergola- some of that second coat of paint went to places on the pergola so that I could have planted it, but I couldn't make up my mind what to plant: hops? grapes? roses? I've finally decided to do grapes after all, so we can get this done this year.

Put together planting calendar for our area- now - this is a tricky proposition, because the darn climate in the PNW is really wacky, and getting more unpredictable every year. The first summer we were in this house (2009) we had two days of temperatures at 106F, with a full week over 100F. The next summer wasn't nearly as bad, although instead of starting like someone flipped on the switch on the fourth of July like usual, it waited until the week after the fourth to start. Then this last year we had hail in May, a long, chilly and wet spring which lasted until the third week of July, and the summer, when it did finally start two weeks later than usual, was in the seventies and low to mid-eighties. It didn't actually even get hot until the second week of August, and then we only had a total of three weeks of what you could call hot weather. I am more convinced that instead of building a calendar for planting, what I need to build is a greenhouse of some sort. I've experimented with various hoop-de-don't houses, which means that I've made a number of half-assed attempts, but The Mother Earth News had a great article this year about building a hoop house, so those are the plans I'm going to use. It will go over the bed that I dug up last year and on which I have a variety of things in various states of rot because I'm composting in situ. So yeah- I know what I'm doing and I know where it's going- both in terms of where in the backyard and on the list.

Eat from the garden every day- *sigh*. The garden was such a bust this year. Such a bust. But oddly, we're still doing pretty well in terms of getting use from it, even though I had a lot of trouble with it and the weather. I still have a lot of garlic and shallots, and those I use almost every day. I have a total of four celery plants that I dug up, wrapped up in paper, and planted in a pot of dirt in the garage, and those are doing great! When I need celery I go out and unwrap one of them and cut a stalk or two off and then re-wrap it. The other night we had the first of the parsnips out of the garden with leftover New Year's ham and they were *awesome*. I have a load of golden turnips out there I'll treat the same way, and we can eat the greens. I have some January King cabbages growing, so we'll see what they do this spring. But I'm bound and determined to do better this year, even while working, so how do I write this as an achievable goal? Put in a realistic garden and take care of it. I don't know what a realistic garden is at this point, but it's got to involve stuff we like to eat, stuff that grows well here, and mostly stuff that produces a lot of food for one plant or for a small space. Sounds like an entire separate post.

Find and buy pastured pork, poetry, and dairy- Steve and I really believe that animals, whether raised as pets or for food, should have reasonable lives and should be raised and slaughtered in a kind and humane fashion (well, not the pets of course) , and that raising them on pasture and field harvesting them is the way to go. Last year we purchased a grass-fed half-steer from Carman Ranch in NE Oregon, and that was a good experience. Actually, make that a great experience. The only reason we didn't do it this year is that we wanted to try pork, and a half-steer is a lot of meat for two people who don't eat it as often as the average American. However, the pork project was not as happy an experience as the beef. It was slaughtered a couple of months early (presumably because the corn supplements were pricey) so we didn't get as much pork as I expected for the same amount of money- instead of being around five dollars a pound, it was eight dollars a pound. Plus, it was corn supplemented, which made me wonder about the whole pasture thing. Then we had an unsettling and unhappy experience at the butchers where we picked it up. I thought about asking my friend Rae to grow a porker for us and our retired-farmer neighbors to our west, but she also had an unsettling experience with a different butcher she used this year. So I'm not sure what we're doing for a meat order this year, especially since we are going through the pork very slowly, possibly because it was cut so weirdly. Maybe having more of it ground up is the way to go- I dunno. We still have two of our own roosters in the freezer (thank you again, Rae) and pasture-raised eggs are not a problem because we've been buying them for awhile from the local fancy-pants grocery store down the street. So I think this year's goal should be to eat all the pork, render all the lard, use all the suet, and then figure out what we're going to do next.

Put together bug-out box for emergencies- I actually did this, but couldn't quite cross it off the list because I got flummoxed by the beer can stove instructions, and a bug out box is nearly useless without a stove. While in Florida, I did successfully make a tuna can stove and tested it successfully, too, so I'll do that one instead and get this thing done. At this point though, I need to go through the comestibles and rotate my stock. A calendar reminder for stuff expiring might also be a good idea, and setting one up for the pantry would be helpful as well, so those will go on the list. In the meantime, though, I've been backing the car into the garage every night, just in case we have to load it, and for the practice. Steve has taken to calling the garage the Bat Cave. I'll be less amused if he starts calling me the Old Bat.

Finish the bedroom- I don't know how much 'finishing' of the bedroom I'll manage this year but by golly, I am getting a real bed this year. This month even, although it will take eight to ten weeks to build. After that, everything gets moved around and I can start on the guest room, once the dining nook is done, of course. And then, once the guest room is done, I'll have a place to sew stuff for the bedroom, so finishing the bedroom has a lot of predecessor projects in order for it to be accomplished. I think I'll just call this one 'make headway on the master bedroom'- a real bed will be a great start.

Redesign and build a hoop de do for next winter- this has been addressed earlier. I'm not designing it, and I think it needs to be done earlier than for next winter if I want to have things like tomatoes and cucumbers and eggplant and peppers. And I do. I want all those things.

Spend 20% less on utilities where we can control it, i.e., gas and electricity- this is a piece of cake and we're doing better than 20%, because of the solar water heater and solar PV system Steve had done this year. He figured out a PV system large enough to send so much power out to the grid during the summer months as to make our net bill at the end of the year zero. In the meantime, we're still careful with the electricity. The big utility action we need to take this year is to get the rainwater harvesting system in- that's what the metal roof was for, after all. This one is going to be my project though, and I need to do more research. I have a general idea of how a system works, but I need to research for our needs if it will be better to have our contractor dig a big hole and bury the cistern, and whether to buy one or have him build one out of concrete or ferroecement, OR have him pour a pad and sit the cistern on top of the pad. The former would be hidden, but require a pump, the latter would be highly visible, but but most likely be gravity-fed. Like I said, I need to research this, which will involve involving Jef the contractor, but it should go on the list.

Reduce active spending- well, we're not really doing all that well here, especially since I'm working, but the new plan is to live on my income, and throw all of Steve's income at the principal and get the house paid off early. This first month of the year that won't exactly happen, because we're buying a bed, but- we'll still try to do as well as we can, and we started this back in September or October, so I can report with some cheeriness that out of the mortgage payments that we make every month (besides the extra principal), more of it's going to the principal than the interest. So I'll put this on the list instead of reduce active spending, because to do it, we will have to reduce active spending anyway, and I think this is a more concrete goal in that regard.

Reduce trash created- generally, we do pretty well in this department, although we're far from the one bag every two weeks goal. Being more self-sufficient would go a long way here, although I don't believe there is such a thing as self-sufficiency. I do, however, believe in self-reliance, so I guess I'd better get more self-reliant about the trash, not that I'll be burning or burying it or anything. The next goal on the 2011 list gets rolled into this one.

Develop several sources of income- table this- I can barely keep up with my job, although I'm grateful to have it. See me again in a couple of years after we get the house paid off though. I might be singing Johnny Paycheck's tune by then, provided, of course, that I can still remember it after I have my stroke.

Fix the irrigation- I should. I really should.

Then there are the goals I crossed off but that later failed: I need to do bees and chickens again, so those go on the list. I'd like to do rabbits, too, but I'm not starting another species until I can successfully raise the others.

I have a few things to do in the garden because I have more trees coming: I need to move the perennials to the back of the yard and closer to the hive, and then plant the hops where the perennials were. The idea here is to give the hops something on which to grow that will provide shade for summer lettuces. I also need to plant the six regular-sized blueberries that I just got at Christmas where the raspberries were, which means I also need to amend the soil there with some peat moss. And I also really want to try to grow some wheat; last year I harvested some volunteer grain that grew from the straw I was throwing into the compost pile, but it made such a pretty shock that I hung it up in the kitchen and can't bear to pull it apart. Plus, I don't really know what it is.

I also have a new project for inside the house- I want to turn the utility room into a walk-in pantry, and I've already talked to the contractor about it. It will be doable, and affordable, so win-win. Plus, we'll be able to move the grain mill out of the garage and back into the house, where it really belongs. And it may be cool enough to extend Steve's brewing year.

And then last but not least- not least, by any means: I miss having a dog in my life, badly I miss it, but I have to get the front yard enclosed first because I don't want a peeing and pooping dog in the backyard where all my food crops are. But in order to enclose the front yard, I have to get the rainwater system in first so that its construction doesn't destroy the new fencing. But a new dog is on the list. Definitely on the list.

Reviewing the list, which is nearly as long as last year's, makes me realize that I've given myself a tall order again that is not particularly grounded in reality after all. But if I can get at least half of it done, I'll be doing better than last year with less the time, so I'll still consider it a win.

Particularly if the chickens are all pullets, and the bees don't die.

And especially if I get the dog.

I'm Excited!

2012-01-04T20:09:00.000-08:00

I'm excited because, after ten years of marriage on a decent enough (king-sized Stearns and Foster) mattress on a metal frame with no head board, Steve and I are finally going to buy a real bed! Part of the reason we're finally getting around to this is that we've been lost in a king sized bed and discovered that even in the summer when we're not plastered together trying to keep warm, a king-sized bed is still way too much real estate to devote to sleeping, so we're downsizing to a queen. This will give us a lot more room in the bedroom to move some stuff around. Another reason is for the feng shui aspect- a bed that surrounds you in wood gives you more control over your career. But in the interest in local production and better sleep, we're going to buy an Englander mattress, which are manufactured up the road in Tualatin, Oregon. That is the mattress on our day bed and I l-o-v-e sleeping on this mattress. When I really just. can't. fall. asleep, I go out to this bed and fall in and asleep almost right away. Really.

And I think I found the bed, too, and I'm more excited about that than anything else. Made of sustainably forested hardwoods using old-fashioned joinery techniques (read: lasts a lifetime or more), the company is in southeast Portland and seems to have a pretty square head on its shoulders. I mean, how could you not love a guy who describes himself as 'founder and head slacker'? Plus, I just really like this bed.

All I have to do is convince Steve that this is the right one for us.

Homesteading Update 14 December 2011

2011-12-14T22:16:00.000-08:00

Things have been pretty quiet on the homesteading front lately, which is primarily due to the weather being strangely cold and dry for these parts right in the middle of the rainy season, and my working an average of fifty-plus hours every week, which doesn't include the commute. It's cold and dark when I leave in the morning and cold and dark when I get home, and I'm pretty wiped out by then anyway, so not a whole lot is getting done around the homestead. I have been working on the dining nook on and off, and have the back panels done. I probably won't pick that up again until after the holidays.

Tonight Steve bottled the Apfelwein he brewed four weeks ago using Ed Wort's Apfelwein recipe. We bought six gallons of Tree Top apple juice cheaply at Costco just for the purpose of brewing them into a potent potable. The wine should be ready in about three weeks, maybe a little longer with these cold temperatures. I'll let you know how that goes.

In other news, this month's electrical bill showed that we used 6.3 therms in December of 2011, partly because we're not using the dryer, and partly because the solar panels have been producing more energy than we anticipated for this time of year because of all the sunny days we've been having. I should say we used only 6.3 therms, because last year we used 12.7 therms, so this December's use was slightly less than half of last December's use. Pretty good.

I'm happy about it anyway.

I Didn't Miss The Turkey And Here's Why, or- The Long Awaited Red Cabbage Post

2011-11-30T22:22:00.000-08:00

Steve and I stayed home this Thanksgiving because there was some work that needed to be done on the car, and the Friday after Thanksgiving was the only day I wouldn't need it and he could get it done. And with just the two of us, I didn't feel like messing with the whole turkey dinner thing, so I made Rinderrouladen and red cabbage, and we had that with whole wheat Spaetzle (and gravy).

Rouladen just means 'rolls' in German, and they are easy enough to make. I'll give you my recipe for them, which is probably the same as everybody else's, and I'll give you the recipe for my red cabbage, which isn't like everybody elses, and I'll give you Steve's recipe for Spaetzle.

The hardest thing about making Rouladen is finding the right cut for it. Fortunately, Portland has a German deli that also does Rouladen. If I couldn't find a proper Rouladen, I would get my hands on the biggest roast I could and cut it into three-quarter inch slices, then make a butterfly cut from one side of the slice (on the small side of the slice, not the flat side) at one third the thickness, turn it to the opposite end and make another butterfly cut so that it's kind of like a capital N, and then flatten it out and pound it thin and even. Thank goodness I don't have to go that extra step, but I could if I had too.

Spread the Rouladen out on a platter and smear it with some spicey mustard (like a teaspoon, but it really isn't rocket science).

Then lay a couple of slices of bacon on the mustard, some very thinly (very thinly) sliced onions, and then a dill pickle spear on one end. I used scattered capers this time because I couldn't get at my pickles, but dill pickles are traditional and now that I've tried capers, I think dill pickle spears are better for this dish. Start rolling the beef around the dill pickle spear and roll the whole thing up.

Tie up each of the Rouladen into a little bundle.

Brown them in a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil (I use grape seed oil).

When the Rouladen are brown all the way around, pour in enough water to come half way up their sides. Grab a pancake turner and scrape all that lovely fond off the bottom of the pan. Throw in a bouquet garni (in this case fresh thyme, parsley and celery from the garden, and a dried bay leaf), put a lid on it, and simmer it for an hour and a half, turning the Rouladen a couple of times during the cooking time. While the Rouladen are cooking make the red cabbage (see the recipe below).

Remove the Rouladen to a plate and thicken the stock in the pan to make a gravy. I use a tablespoon or two of arrowroot powder dissolved in some cold water because I have a boatload of bulk arrowroot powder, but you can use cornstarch dissolved in water or flour dissolved in water. Arrowroot powder and cornstarch can be dumped into cold water and stirred up- they behave very similarly. Flour, however, you're better off starting dry in a small bowl and adding enough cold water to make a paste, and then adding enough water a little bit at a time to thin it enough to be able to pour it. If you make a paste first, you shouldn't have any lumps. (This method works great with crepe and Dutch baby batters- I mix the eggs into the flour to make a smooth paste and then add the milk a little bit at a time until it's all in- no lumps.)

Once the gravy is done, you can put the Rouladen back into the pan to keep warm in the gravy until you're ready to serve it. Just keep a lid on it on low.

So while your Rouladen were cooking, you should have made your red cabbage. I have zero pictures, because they didn't turn out, but that shouldn't stop you from trying it.

Paula's Red Cabbage

In a large saucepan on medium low heat, brown a few cut up slices of bacon or small cubes cut from a slab of bacon. Remove the cooked bacon and set aside but save the fat.

Dice a small onion and saute that in the bacon fat.

Shred a small red cabbage about the size of a very large grapefruit. Once the onion is translucent, dump the shredded cabbage and cooked bacon into the pan with the onion and toss the cabbage around in the fat to coat it.

Add the following: one cup of beef stock (or a cup of water and a boullion cube), 1/3 cup of red wine vinegar, 1/4 cup of blueberry preserves (the traditional fruit and sweetener is a diced apple and a few tablespoons of honey, but my way is to use the preserves, so you get whole fruits, and to reinforce the red color- it's not strictly traditional but it is my recipe), 1 bay leaf, 1 one inch piece of cinnamon stick, 1 piece of blade mace (or some fresh ground nutmeg), a pinch of ground cloves (whole cloves are too small to fish out later), a small pinch of caraway seeds, and four juniper berries (the last two are optional). Mix it up and taste the liquid for a balance of sweet and sour. Put the lid on it and set it to cook for an hour.

After the hour is up, take off the lid and fish out the bay leaf, cinnamon stick, and blade mace and discard them. Then take a tablespoon of very soft unsalted butter and a couple tablespoons of flour and mash them together until they resemble cookie dough. This is sort of like a beurre manie. Pull pea-sized balls of dough into the red cabbage and lightly stir them in. Put a lid on it and set it on the back of the stove to keep warm while you make the Spaetzle.

Steve's Spaetzle

Bring a large pot of water to the simmer and add some salt (like for pasta).

It helps a lot to do this in a stand mixer:

Beat together: 4 eggs, 2 1/4 cups flour, 1 teaspoon salt, freshly grated nutmeg and freshly ground white pepper (not black- if you don't have white, skip the pepper), and 1/2 cup of water. Beat it until it strings off the sides of the bowl.

It should make a stringy, thick batter, not a dough, and will be really sticky.

Spoon the batter in batches into a Spaetzle maker and squeeze it into a barely simmering pot of salted water.

When the Spaetzle rise to the surface, they're done. It will happen pretty fast so be ready for them. Remove them with a slotted spoon or spider and keep them in a warm serving dish. It helps to keep them from sticking by stirring a tablespoon of butter into them.

To serve dinner, fish the Rouladen back out of the gravy and carefully remove all that string. Plate them with the red cabbage and Spaetzle, and then ladle gravy over the noodles and beef. *

I probably shouldn't have written this post before bedtime because now I'm hungry again.

* Some people like toasted, buttered bread crumbs on their Spaetzle, and some people like some minced onion sauteed with those bread crumbs. Just sayin'.

Drying Rack for the Homestead

2011-11-27T20:24:00.000-08:00

My Homesteader drying rack from Forgotten Way Farms arrived almost two weeks ago and I finally put it together today. We're drying two and a half loads on it as I write (the other half load is on the English rack in the kitchen). It comes unassembled with instructions so that the shipping isn't as expensive as it would otherwise be.

I really like this rack! It does take up a chunk of the living room, and maybe not everyone wants to devote part of the living room to drying clothes, but that's where we had the room (this rack is huge), and we're determined to make changes in our lifestyle at the pace we want to, rather than making forced changes later in life. Change before you have to, is the maxim to which we're ascribing. We get used to living 'simply', as it were, and we'll already be used to it when supply tightens up or our incomes are reduced. If none of that happens, we'll still have saved a lot of money living this way.

But back to the rack. The only criticism I have, which is pretty minor, was that the instructions had a couple of problems where the instructions didn't quite jive with the pictures, which almost stopped the assembly altogether until I figured it out. The key is to stick with what the picture looks like, because they're right. Once I had that part done, the rest of it went together pretty quickly. Something that might make assembly a little easier for anyone thinking about getting this rack is to put a piece of ¾" wood underneath parts that don't touch the floor to make it much steadier to work on. Also, if you have a speed-loading chuck on your drill or impact driver and a phillips driver bit, it will make fixing the screws into the dowel ends go a lot quicker, and there are a bunch of them. Screwing the ends of the dowels in actually took more time than assembling the rack!

All in all, I think this is a great product, and I'm glad that I purchased the largest size they have.

Running Away For The Weekend: Seattle

2011-11-08T22:19:00.000-08:00

Steve and I ran away to Seattle for our anniversary and had a crazy good time, starting with the train ride from Portland to Seattle.

The Portland train station is in pretty good shape on the interior, and the outside is covered in scaffolding because they're working on it. It's heartening to see the train station being taken care of.

The line that runs between Portland and Seattle is called the Amtrak Cascades. We opted for business class, and I'm glad we did because aside from there being a little more room, when you check in your seat is assigned and you get to board when they call for business class. With coach, you have to stand in a long line to get your seat assignment and then you have to stand in another line to board. You also get a voucher worth a couple of bucks in the bistro car with a business class ticket. Upgrading our tickets to business class was $32 for the pair and this was for round trip, so I think it was worth it. It was very comfortable. By the way, I learned a couple of things on the train: 1) staying awake on the train is next to impossible, and 2) screaming, obstreperous children are just as annoying on the train as they are on a plane. The difference is that on the train, Mommy can cart the kids off to the bistro car to distract them, which is merciful; on a plane you're trapped. (Don't get me wrong- it's not that I don't like kids- I just really like my hearing.)

The Cascades line runs along the Puget Sound for awhile. We were incredibly lucky to get such a beautiful day for our trip.

Arriving at Seattle, I saw the cars up there on the left. They turned out to be antique Pullman cars, and I wish I'd taken pictures of them when I saw them because they were gone on Sunday when we came back. I asked about them and was told that some people have private cars that they pay a fee to Amtrak to be able to hook up and get hauled around. Which sounds pretty sweet. Actually, being able to afford to buy your own Pullman would be pretty sweet, come to think of it.

Once you get into the city, you can ride public transportation for free in the city center during the weekdays, so we hopped a free bus to within a block of the hotel, which was a cinch to find because it's across the intersection of Spring Street and 5th Avenue from the Central Library. The Vintage Park Hotel is one of those little boutique hotels, which I find I like better than the big chain hotels. The hotel itself was remodeled in the mid-nineties, and in fifteen years, it's showing a little bit of wear and the decor is a little dated, but by and large, it's still a great hotel. The staff was wonderful; after asking us the reason for our visit to Seattle and learning that we were there to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, they sent up a bucket of champagne and strawberries and chocolate on the house. The concierge handled our dinner reservations for the in-house restaurant Tulio, and when we came down for dinner, the restaurant also treated us to a glass of champagne.

Tulio is a really nice little restaurant, and they too took really good care of us. I loved the cozy and elegant interior, but due to my being a crappy photographer, I couldn't get a decent picture of the interior for you. The only picture that turned out decently was the beet salad, which was delicious, but then, I like beets. Our waiter, Alfreddo, was very attentive and helpful; he recommended a nice glass of wine to go with my duck breast; he steered us to a terrific dessert (the pistachio semifreddo with shaved chocolate and candied orange peel), and he even got the email address of the chef (Walter Pisano) so I could ask for a couple of recipes. He was there when we needed him and made himself scarce when we didn't. Probably the thing that I appreciated most was that he made us feel welcome and that he seemed to be glad to be helping us. Not a lot of waiters make you feel that way.

Friday morning's breakfast was at Belle Pastry on the corner of Spring and Western. This is a picture of the goody case. Steve had the chocolate croissant (pain au chocolat, as I learned in high school) and a ham and cheese croissant, and I had an almond croissant. This place is well worth seeking out if you're in Seattle.

Okay, yeah, we did the tourist thing. I got a picture of the sign, naturally, but nothing of the interior. Pike's Place Market is a huge tourist trap, of course, and there's a lot of kitschy-krappy stuff there, but, and this is a big but, the food stuffs are gorgeous. The fish and meats and vegetables and creamery goods were so beautiful I told Steve we are getting a place with a kitchenette the next time because I want to cook with this stuff! One of the girls at the Belle Pastry told us that she buys all her vegetables there, and I could see why. I even found nice chanterelles for as little as $6.95 a pound, which believe me, is a great price for chanterelles. (Finding them for free in the forest is way better, but you do what you can.)

This is the shop across from the market, and is really part of it. I grabbed a chicken gyro there- spicy and delicious.

Dinner Friday night was at Purple at Fourth and University, and it was good too, but the size of the dining room which was cavernous, made it really, really loud. I also experienced something a little weird that I've never experienced in a restaurant; the seat in which I was sitting, which was just like every other chair in the place, was high enough that my feet didn't reach the floor, and there was no rung on which to rest them, so they dangled throughout my meal. Not too comfortable, on a couple of different levels.

Saturday we wandered back to the market to buy some things we saw, and then wandered up Pike which was a much gentler slope and easier for me to walk. By the time we got back to our hotel, we were in need of a restorative, and we managed to catch Tulio's manager on the way into the restaurant. He was kind enough to allow us into his closed restaurant for an espresso, which we had at the bar. It was precisely what I was hoping for, which was a relaxed cup of coffee in a nice setting. Sitting there, we decided to have dinner there again that night, rather than having to go out again, so we made reservations. The manager asked where we were from and why we were in Seattle, so we told him, and were treated again to another glass of champagne at dinner, on the house. We didn't have the heart to tell them that it wasn't that night, but oh well. At least we learned that they are nothing if not extremely gracious.

The next morning we walked down for breakfast at one of the Seattle's Best coffee houses, which was unremarkable, and then popped down the block to the Walgreens drug store for a couple of items. I missed the group of Asians in leathers that Steve saw, but the fellow that checked us out had a rather feminine afro hairdo, three lip rings, and a luridly colored skull tattoo on his right hand. This probably wouldn't have been as memorable as it was if he hadn't been helping another store employee argue with an old man in a track suit about the price of the cheap wine on the shelf, and that in itself wouldn't have been so memorable if the old man in the track suit hadn't been wearing, and I am not making this up, a purple velvet pimp hat with a leopard hat band. We got out the door and halfway across the street before Steve said, "Wow- that was a freak show," to which I agreed. Freak show was the only way to describe it.

We got back to the hotel, finished packing and checked out. Because the day was so sunny, and it was all downhill from the hotel to King Street Station, we decided to walk the ten or so blocks there. It turned out to be a really civilized and pleasant thing to do and we were both glad we did. At the station, we had time to get a good look at it, and it was depressing how bad of shape it was in. Fluorescent lighting dangled on wires from what had been a beautiful, ornate ceiling.

I was really appalled.

This is one part of the station that hasn't seen too much damage from the ill-advised and ill-conceived modernization that plagued it in the seventies.

But the good news is that it turns out that the station is in the process of being restored. The station was started in 1904, from designs by Reed and Stem which was the same architectural firm that designed Grand Central Station in New York, and was completed and opened in 1906. In 2008, the station was purchased from BNSF (Burlington Northern and Santa Fe) by the city of Seattle for the sum of ten dollars, and it's the city of Seattle that is restoring it. Ridership is up in Seattle, and the Sounder commute trains also use the station. From the pictures of the plans, it should be really beautiful, and much more user friendly.

I think we're going to have to run away to Seattle again. And again and again. What a good time!

Ten Years Before The Mast

2011-11-03T08:16:00.000-07:00

The mast and me, five years in

"I had a thought," said Steve.

"Well treat it kindly. It's a stranger in a foreign land," I replied, which was something my dad always said when presented with the same statement.

"Don't say that anymore- that's old," said Steve, who knew I didn't mean it, but was tired of hearing it just the same.

"Okay. What was this thought of yours?" I asked.

"Marrying you was probably one of the smartest things I ever did."

Damn right, I was tempted to say. But really? I've been saying for years that marrying Steve was the smartest thing I ever did.

Teaching him how to yeast bake was the second smartest thing I ever did, and convincing him to brew his own beer was probably the third smartest. But I digress.

Steve and I were married ten years ago today on the front porch of a friend's mother's old victorian on the St. Johns river in Jacksonville. We were both wearing our jeans and Birkenstock sandals. This same friend's father presided over our ceremony. His sartorial splendor consisted of jeans and sneakers on the bottom half, and a tux and tie on the top half. He had renewed his notary status just for the occasion, and I still feel that our wedding was perfect.

I'd do it over and over and over again, just the same way, for all the same reasons.

Happy anniversary, Honey Boy.

Insulating Ourselves Against the Cold

2011-11-01T21:51:00.000-07:00

After the new metal roof, solar water heater, and solar PV system were installed, the very last portion of the roof project was to get the insulation beefed up, which is just what we did.

The first thing the fellows installing the new insulation did was to install the bird box baffles, which essentially provide a channel for the air coming in from the vents under the eaves (called the bird boxes) to flow into the attic unimpeded and out the ridge vent. They hold back the insulation from covering the bird boxes. Once the baffles were in, they blew in the new insulation, and here it is.

It's pretty high now. And it works really well. On most nights, with outside temperatures in the forties, we were now losing one degree Fahrenheit in warmth inside the house. On nights where it dipped into the thirties, we were now losing only two degrees. After observing this for a few days, it occurred to me that we will probably be able to heat the house comfortably with a fire in the morning, and a fire in the evening, which means that our firewood should be easier to make last longer.

There is no telling how cold or severe a winter we'll have, although by all accounts, it should be a lulu due to another La Nina event, but I think we're in pretty good shape.

Better than I initially thought, anyway.

Winter Prep

2011-10-30T15:23:00.000-07:00

I had hoped that growing hops would be the gateway plant by which I would successfully suck Steve into gardening, but it didn't happen. I did marginally better by turning over the strawberries to his care this summer. It seemed like the thing to do: his being home during the day meant that he was getting the lion's share of the strawberries, and frankly, his back is more suited to the constant bending over that harvesting strawberries requires. I basically said, "you're getting all the strawberries; here's an article in the Mother Earth News about growing strawberries, so you can do it." To my surprise he agreed.

Yesterday was a good day for readying parts of the garden for winter, and one of the things we did was to put the strawberries to bed for the winter under a blanket of straw. We stuck applewood cuttings about every foot and a half along the sides of the beds to hold the straw in place.

I had to laugh when Steve said, "it's good that we're getting the strawberries ready for winter, but I think we'd better leave the Franken Berries and Boo Berries where they are until after Halloween."

Next I picked up the potato bags one by one and lugged them over to the big plot, which is where I'll put next year's garden, and dumped their contents onto the soil. They all contained a mixture of compost, shredded leaves, and pine bedding that I used for growing potatoes this year and I wanted to compost that in place. They also contained a bunch of potatoes, which is what I'd hoped would happen when I left them where they were this summer when I harvested some of the potatoes.

I'm pretty sure I'll have potatoes next year because I didn't bother with picking out the teeny tiny potatoes, and if they survive the winter, well then they deserve to grow. If they don't, I'm still going to try to grow them, but I'll use Nita's method over at Throwback From Trapper Creek. She dry gardens, and she also produces most of what her family eats, so I'll see if her method works for me. Someday, when I grow up, I'm going to be able to produce food like Nita does. She's a for real homesteader, and I'm just a rank amateur.

The next step was to pull the buried chicken wire out of the big bed so that it (the bed) can be dug up next spring. I read that gophers and other pesky ground-burrowing varmints love garlic as much as we do, and the only way to keep them out of the garlic is to grow it in a metal basket. I managed to get the first one out, but had trouble with the second one, and Steve had to finish yanking it out after I'd tweaked my back. It was't the soil so much as the clover that grew into it that made it so hard to get out. But we finally did it, and I further raked out the potato bag contents, and then we covered that with more straw.

I hope to install sides to this bed to keep the grass from growing into it and to keep the contents from spilling out of it, but that will have to wait until later this winter. The next time Steve mows the lawn, the clippings will be strewn in there as well any leaves we pick up. Supposedly, you can improve clay soil this way, but it's going to take a long time and I'm not kidding myself about it.

We also moved the compost bin to the end of one of the raised beds so that we don't have to travel so far out into the yard this winter. Part of the reason I want to garden in the big bed is to give the raised beds a rest, and maybe even get some cover crop in them this winter. I only have four total that I can rotate crops among so we'll see. But having the compost bin over the end of the raised bed seemed like a good idea, logistically speaking.

Yesterday I also harvested the last of the tomatoes, and got a bunch of small green tomatoes off the two volunteer tomato plants. Enough that I'm making them into pickles even as I write this. Dinner last night was one of my favorites: fried green tomatoes. I have enough of them to do it again this week. We also got a bunch of red serranos picked, which I'll string up into a ristra, and then once they're dry I'll break them into crumbled chili pepper flakes for sprinkling on pizza.

So the garden wasn't a complete and total flop this year, in fact, I did get some good out of it. There are still turnips and celery out there and hopefully I'll get parsnips this winter, too. I just have to keep at this gardening thing until I learn how to get it all done.

New Garage Lights

2011-10-24T22:37:00.000-07:00

Last winter I decided I needed to wire a couple more lights into the garage because one half of my firewood was so dark that at night I couldn't really see what I was looking at. This weekend I finally got around to doing it.

This is the second of the two original fixtures. Well, you can't really call them fixtures- it's just a box and a porcelain socket- but you know what I mean. That got opened up, and I ran a length of 14/2 (that's 14 gauge wire, with 2 conductors and a ground) indoor rated wire from the old socket to where the next box is, which is a new one about eight feet away. The original porcelain socket had an old-fashioned connection which I actually like better than the new ones; you just shove the wire into the hole. The black conductor from the new wire goes into a little hole right next to where the black from the old wire was connected, and the new white conductor goes in next to the old white conductor.

This is a bad picture, but the boxes really are easily nailed to the joists.

This is the new box for the third light. The line from the old light goes in one side of the box, and the next line goes in from the other side of the box. The holes through which the wires go are called knockouts, but in this case they don't really knock out- they open wide enough to slip the wire in from the outside, and then snap back to hold the wire in place. Between the pinching knockouts and the staples, this fixture won't go anywhere.

Then the jacket gets cut off the wire to give yourself some room, and the ends of each of the conductors is stripped of its jacket. The bare copper is the ground wire. When our house was built, most of the receptacles were not grounded correctly, and although we have a new, properly grounded panel, the old fixtures in the garage were not properly grounded, so I didn't worry about it. I just connected the grounds together and shoved them into the box out of the way.

This a picture of the new-fangled porcelain socket. This is actually the end of the line fixture (I really had trouble taking pictures in the garage this weekend, probably because it's so much darker in there this time of year). For the middle of the line fixture (which is what this is), I wrapped the black conductors from the incoming line and the outgoing line around the one side, and then wrapped the two white lines together on the other screw. Once the fixture is wired in, you can shove all the wire into the box and screw the fixture to the box.

The lights below are the new garage lights. The older ones are closer to us, and the new ones are closer to the garage door. I can't really show you the difference they make because I truly am a terrible photographer, but take my word for it- I can see all the fire wood now.

The only problem with that is now I can really see how much the garage needs to be cleaned.

Our Solar Photo Voltaic System

2011-10-21T18:41:00.000-07:00

Our solar PV system was finally finished this week, and what a long, ongoing saga that turned out to be. I'll spare you all the details though. Really. You want to be spared.

Suffice to say that because the city and the county were involved, as was the local utility, the PV system took a lot longer to get done than the solar water heating system did. And the two young yokels who installed it had a bit of a problem with understanding what was my property and what was their property - nothing was stolen or anything, but they helped themselves to standing on a garbage can (and crushing the lid) and they helped themselves to my scrap lumber and pallet (which were earmarked for projects) to cover the gigantic hole by the side of the garage that they had to dig, with my shovel, which they neglected to wash off again. I realized while I was fuming that most people probably wouldn't care, but you can't help your feelings and mine were incensed. Let's just say the project manager got an earful. So did poor Steve, since it was his project, but all was made right in the end and now we're producing power off the roof.

Half the panels up, sitting on their rails

So there are eighteen 250 watt solar panels up on the roof, each of which has its own micro inverter. This appears to be the way to go with inverters these days, because the advantage is that if one fails, only that panel fails until you replace the micro inverter. They also stay cooler so they last longer. And they're also a lot less expensive than one big inverter, which is expensive to replace as well. The inverter is what wears out the fastest on a solar PV system, so if you have the opportunity to use micro inverters, go for it.

Panels all up; now the fun with the inspections begins

I think I mentioned before that we are grid-tied; Steve didn't want to deal with batteries (or their eventual disposal) so we now have a net meter, which is the meter that runs backward when you're producing power. Something interesting that I want you to remember if you decide to do solar power is that while we were waiting for the PGE (Portland General Electric) guy to come out and swap out the old meter for the new net meter, Steve couldn't wait and flipped the switch on the solar panels and we were producing power for a day or so. It turns out that meters from the seventies (and after) when ours was made were made to count the power running into them as well, because back during the so-called Energy Crisis (remember that?) of the seventies, people were messing with their meters, so long story short, we're going to have to pay for the power we were producing those first couple of days. Pretty funny.

Our panels, on a good, clean (no smog) sunny day, with zero dust on them, and the sun hitting them juuuuust right will produce upwards of 30kW a day, which will probably never happen for a variety of reasons. However, because we average about 13kW in usage a day, we should be able to produce most of our own power, winter weather not withstanding. Most of it.

The system cost around $27,000, but because of four years of federal income tax credits and four years of state income tax credits that we'll be able to take, plus the rebate from the Energy Trust of Oregon, when we're done, we'll have paid around $11,000 for this system. At the rate we're currently paying PGE for our electrical usage, it will be a long time before this thing pays for itself, but we don't know how much energy is going to cost in the future, do we? The important thing to us was to get this system installed while we had the cash and could replenish our savings because we're still working.

If the cost of energy goes through the roof, we'll be glad it's not going through ours. And if it doesn't go through the roof?

We'll just have a really cool, really expensive toy.

Unnatural Beekeeping

2011-10-19T20:06:00.000-07:00

My bees are dead.

We've had some rain and the weather turned distinctly cooler, and I thought they were just hanging out keeping warm in their hive. But today when I came home, almost the first thing out of Steve's mouth was "you need to put some Tanglefoot on the hive stand- I saw ants out there."

That didn't sound good so I asked him if he'd seen bees flying around, to which he said yes. But while I was spreading Tanglefoot on the hive stand leg, I noticed that what was flying in the door way was some sort of hornet, not a honey bee. Uh oh, I thought.

I asked Steve to wash one of our food grade buckets while I donned my grubbies and bee gear, thinking that if there had been a swarm I missed, and if they'd left any honey, I'd grab it. I admit that I wasn't prepared for what I saw when I got it open.

Starting from the back I saw nice, clean but empty comb.

Then the comb got progressively darker, but still empty. Then I finally got to one that had capped cells, but it was even darker comb and everything appeared to be dead.

And then I saw them.

All the bees were dead in a large pile at the bottom of the hive. They appeared to be moldy, but it was kind of hard to see through my hood. At any rate, it was a massive die-off, and not a swarm. I have no idea what did it- there should have been plenty of ventilation in the hive because the bottom was screened, not solid. It might have been Colony Collapse Disorder, but I don't know what that looks like. I don't know if the mold (if that's what it is) attacked and killed them or if it happened after they died. I also don't know how much of my hive I can reuse, or if the comb will be worth anything to me. And there was absolutely no honey, whatsoever. Were there not enough flowers in the neighborhood? I'm really baffled.

I thought that if I left them alone, they would do better without me, because it seemed that every time I got into the hive, I'd smash some of them moving things around. I might have been too hands off, although honestly? I don't know if I'd have been able to save them anyway.

I'm having curiously mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I'm supremely bummed, especially since now I have two livestock failures (my chickens, remember?) on my hands, but on the other hand, I'm relieved that I don't have to worry about them this winter, which I was wondering how I was going to manage. Bees need to have their food moved where they can reach in the winter; they've been known to starve to death even though food is just a little beyond where they want to go when it's cold. And in addition to keeping them fed, I wasn't sure about how to keep them warm enough, and still ventilate them.

I also feel bad about being so gung ho and going ahead with getting them when I probably should have done a lot more research before jumping in.

As it is, I'll be doing a lot of research anyway, but now I have at least thirty-thousand deaths on my hands.

No, wait a minute- make that thirty-thousand and four.

Maybe You'll Remember

2011-10-16T14:49:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I ran across a wooden clothes drying rack that I thought was pretty great, but I can't remember if posted about it, or if I found it through a link a reader included in their comments. The racks are made by the husband half of a couple who are living off-grid somewhere here in the states, and I wanted to get one of their racks, except now I can't find them.

I realize that I could only be slightly more vague, but if anybody knows what I'm talking about, please chime in....

The Winter of Our Disconnect

2011-10-11T20:23:00.000-07:00

Burning wood during more profligate times

Steve and I are playing a game of chicken of sorts these days. As the autumn season wears on, we're trying to deal with being colder and colder by putting on more layers and sucking it up, rather than turning on the furnace. Oh sure, we have two cords of dry hardwood stacked up in the garage, but I'm determined to make it last longer than last year's one cord of mixed woods and pallet of Bear bricks, which gave out some time in February. A look at this past year's natural gas bill showed that March had the highest usage of the entire year, followed by April, then February, when the wood ran out, and then May. We want to start burning the wood as late in the fall as we possibly can, so that it will last as late in the spring as it possibly can. We also don't want to burn too much gas, so it's a balance of weighing how cold it is outside, against how cold it is inside, and deciding if: 1) we're going to tough it out, 2) it's cold enough inside but still warm enough outside that we can make the house more comfortable with just a little bit of gas, or 3) it's cold inside and too cold outside to warm the house with a little bit of gas so it's time to start burning the precious wood.

You might think we're crazy to be this obsessed with paying attention to our consumption of things but it really seems to be paying off. Part of this conservation, particularly with the gas, is being borne out with the solar water heater. Last year during the month of September, we used twelve therms in a thirty-two day billing period; last month's billing period was thirty-three days and we used a total of four therms. That's a quarter of what we used last year during the same month. It's hard to say how much gas I used for cooking for either year, but I would venture to guess that the savings is attributable to our solar water heater. It'll be interesting to see how that savings changes over the course of the fall and winter seasons when it won't be nearly as efficient as it is in the summer. The collector plates still heat up quite a bit in overcast weather, but rain definitely keeps the collector much cooler, so we don't get as much heat out of it then. However, it does warm it a little bit, which means the regular gas heater is heating pre-warmed water (which runs through insulated piping from the solar tank) rather than heating cold water, so we'll gain a little bit of benefit from the solar heater, even in crappy winter weather.

When the solar PV system is finally finished, I'll tell you all about that, but right now it's a bit of a sort spot. The darn thing is taking sooooo much longer than the solar water system did, and that appears to be the fault of the project manager of the company we used, which by the way, was the same company as the water system; the crew that did the solar water heater system was really great; the crew that installed the solar PV…enh, not so much. But that's all another post, and I promise pictures and stats and all that good stuff.

The other, more difficult to quantify, kind of chicken that Steve and I are playing is with the finances. We've decided to knuckle down and try to live on my income, and throw everything that Steve makes at the mortgage principal. This might not be so scary if our incomes were more in line with each other, and since I make about half what he does, what I really mean is if my income were a little closer to his, but since that's not the case, it means that things are about to get very lean for us. Aside from getting out from underneath the mortgage that much sooner, another reason this is a good idea is that it gets us used to living a leaner lifestyle anyway. I really want for the two of us to be able to retire together, because I want to spend more time with my husband. We had a late start in life together, and I'm bound and determined to make up for lost time. It doesn't mean that the minute the mortgage is paid off we're checking out of the rat race, it just means that once that's accomplished, we need to take a look at what we're currently doing and figure out how reasonably soon we could quit working. Probably the single biggest expense we'll have once we don't have a mortgage and gainful employment will be healthcare insurance, which, if I'm being realistic, will probably be more than our current mortgage payment!

But that's the challenge for the next six months: make the wood and the money last a whole lot longer than they usually do. Think we can do it? Think you could do it?

In the meantime, I need to stop writing and crawl under the covers with Steve on the couch. I'm freezing.

A Shallot By Any Other Name

2011-10-02T21:56:00.000-07:00

It seems that every time I try some sort of new homesteading skill for myself, I learn a new respect for the folks who subsisted on the skill or who do it for a living. Take saving seed, for instance. Letting the garden go to seed is not difficult- I'm actually pretty good at that- but gathering and cleaning seed is a chore. Now, granted, the folks who do it for a living are probably assisted by mechanical devices, but it's still a somewhat mind-numbing experience to clean seed out of the seed heads of several different alliums…come to think of it, it was a tuckus-numbing experience as well, because I was at it for a few hours today and sitting on an as-yet un-cushioned bench for the duration. First I cleaned the seed out of the only onion that had a chance to develop a flower head, which didn't take too long. Then I cleaned the seed from the only leek flower head that seemed to be mature enough- the other two were still green and didn't want to give up their seed, so I didn't force the issue. Then I cleaned the seed from several (maybe nine or ten?) shallot seed heads. Which brings me to my next revelation.

In trying to find out how to grow shallots from seed, all I managed to learn is that true shallots don't grow from seed; they only grow from bulbs, and that shallots that set seed are really a kind of onion. Furthermore, true shallots are mildly onion flavored and are never strong, which also points to the 'shallots' I planted this year truly being onions, and not shallots. The first one I cut up was so volatile I felt like I was cutting up a small bag of mustard gas. So this boatload of seed I saved is not really for shallots. Even if they're little onions, they're good little onions. They were great in the pan sauce I made for the chicken last night. They were great in the oxtail soup I made tonight (which reminds me I need to write that one down because it was easily one of the best soups I've ever made and I am no slouch in the soup department). But getting back to the shallot seed, when all was said and done, I probably had around one-half to two-thirds of a cup of shallot seed. Way too much for one little garden. So you know what I did? I packaged it all up into little 2 gram packages so that any of you (okay, the first twenty-two of you) who would like to experiment with seeds that are for onions masquerading as shallots could try growing them from seed with me. It will be a grand experiment of sorts. Just let me know by dropping me a line saying so with your name and address and I will get them out to you.

I still don't know how to grow shallots from seed, but I'm going to guess that since they're probably really onions, I can grow them like onions. My success rate with the alliums is kind of fifty-fifty; I can grow the dickens out of garlic, and the shallots did pretty well, but I'm not doing so well with the onions. See the shallots in the picture in my header? That was this year's shallot crop. I sure hope I do that well with the seed, because I'm not ordering any bulbs for next year. Part of this whole homesteading thing is to learn to be self-sufficient (not that I believe in true self-sufficiency because even the homesteaders had to drive into town occasionally for things), so learning to save seed against the day when you can't get it is a good skill to have, just in case. Learning how to turn those seeds into food is an even better skill I think, and I'm still working on that one, too.

Don't forget to let me know if you'd like to try so-called shallot seeds. Offer good while supplies last, as they say.

Finches and Flowers

2011-09-14T20:25:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you learn things the hard way, and sometimes that's okay. I planted an anise hyssop and a German chamomile for making herb teas, more correctly known as tisanes. While I knew that it's the flowers on the chamomile that you want to harvest for tea, what I didn't know was that they freely reseed themselves. It's a good thing that in addition to being good for tea, they're pretty, so at this writing they're welcome to join the many weeds in the backyard.

What I also didn't know was that for the anise hyssop, you want to harvest before they flower, which I didn't do. Didn't know. So for the better part of the summer, I've at least enjoyed the purple spikes on the anise hyssop. So did the bees, until some unknown (to me, anyway) species of bee aggressively chased them off, but even that was okay because there were basil flowers right next door. I should have been on top of those too, or I would still have basil to harvest. As it was, the bees had more fodder.

Do you see six goldfinches?

At any rate, the pretty purple hyssop flowers came and went, and before I really started thinking about what happens with flowers once they're spent and the ensuing seeds they're likely to spread everywhere, I was treated to the pretty sight of around ten goldfinches breakfasting on the anise hyssop seeds. I counted at least nine anyway. They were hard to count because they wouldn't hold still. Even harder to photograph.

So next year, the anise hyssop gets harvested before it flowers, and the basil gets pinched regularly so that it keeps making leaves.

And I move on to learning something else the hard way. Bound to.

Note: I'll have a post on the solar PV in a few days. It's getting installed this week.

I Hate Clothes Shopping So Much That...

2011-09-07T20:08:00.000-07:00

....when my husband happens across a sale on the LLBean website, he encourages me to go check it out.

Hummph.

The Dead Chicken Sketch

2011-09-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

By overwhelmingly positive response, this post is going to be about slaughtering and butchering a chicken for dinner. There will be blood, and there will be guts, but it's not bloody guts, so if you can handle a gory movie you can probably handle this post. My intent is for it is to be instructional, not sensational. I also want to remind you that if you can't see the picture well, click on it so you can see the bigger version.

Ethel was definitely not a hen

I have to preface this by saying that I wasn't at all sure when I started with the chicks that I'd ever be able to kill one for a meal, but my aim with the birds all along has been that they would be livestock for me, not pets. They were intended primarily for help in the garden, with their eggs being a useful side benefit and good source of protein. Then I had to cull one that went horribly lame. That by itself was an interesting experience because I learned that I could kill a chicken if I had to. So it was with some dismay when I learned around eight or so weeks of age that the remaining birds were cockerels. They had to go, but quick, because the city doesn't allow them and rightly so. I was certain that Vivian and Violet were boys- their faces were taking on a roostery aspect and they were crowing. But I wasn't at all sure about Ethel, and even though she was the most agressive of the bunch, her head didn't look particularly roostery like the other two, and her tail was not as pronounced as the other twos'. Still, on that second morning after discovering that I had not one but two birds that were crowing, Ethel popped out the pop hole and started the morning's ruckus herself. My friend Rae still wasn't convinced they were all cockerels because some hens have been known to crow, and some hens have been known to grow spurs, and frankly I wasn't convinced Ethel was male either. But crowing, hen or otherwise, is not allowed where I live so down to Rae's forty acres they all went. When we came back roughly six weeks later I was astonished first at how big they were, and well, this here's Ethel. Definitely a rooster.

Before you get started with the business of turning live birds into chicken dinners, you want to first set up an area in which to do it. A plastic topped table is helpful because it's easily washed-- otherwise get a plastic tablecloth. You also need a large pot of steaming water. I've read that it needs to be 140 degrees, but LJ (Rae's intended) told us that if you can dunk your finger in three times and it finally hurts like hell on the third dunk, the water's hot enough. And then finally a cone of some sort placed upside down on a wall, or in this case, on a post is also helpful for calming down the bird and making the whole sordid deal for them a little easier to take. I've read that this is the most humane way to kill chickens, so I was relieved when I saw that Rae and LJ already had a cone set up. I mean, I've seen how they raise their animals and know that each species has plenty of room to wander and fresh air and sunshine and shade, depending on what they want and need, and they are living good lives, especially her hogs, who for all the world look like they're smiling contentedly while they're stretched out in the deep shade of their little woods on a hot day. I was happy to see that they would also have good deaths, and really, that's the best you can hope for in this world. We all of us want our deaths to be as quick as possible, and that's what the very, very sharp knife you're going to use is for- make sure that the knife you'll use is extremely sharp, because it will make quick, clean work of the kill thrust, as well as be a whole lot safer for you. It also makes getting the chicken apart a lot easier. The last thing you'll want handy is a bucket for catching everything. Rae and LJ thoughtfully had a plastic garbage bag stretched over a bin tote, and that worked very well.

So to the slaughtering: After catching your bird and placing it head down in the cone, give it a few minutes to rest there. My own personal feeling about why hanging a chicken upside down works to calm them is that their little tiny brains don't know what to do with all that blood rushing to their heads, but that's pure conjecture. At any rate, it works, and once they seem pretty calm you can go to it. Pull the skin at the front of its neck away from the spine- it's very loose so you can do this comfortably.

Then with the knife edge pointing down, thrust the blade into the neck between the spine and the jugulars, and with a sharp twist of your wrist pull down and out to cut the throat and open up the neck.

You can hold the bird's head away by the comb to facilitate it bleeding out, because the faster it bleeds the quicker it dies, and we want to be humane here. Once the bird is dead, cut off the head by separating it between the neck vertebrae, and unfortunately this is easier said than done, but the bird is dead at this point, thank goodness.

The next step is to dunk the bird in the hot water to loosen its feathers for plucking. I'm going to forewarn you here that they never tell you this, but after you dunked that bird it stinks. It didn't before, but when it comes out of the water it smells like a hot, sweaty bird so be prepared for that. You want to dunk the bird to the point where its feathers meet the scaly part of its legs and swish it around in there for about ~~thirty~~ ten or so seconds.

Then out it comes and you can start pulling feathers off by the handful. Our birds had just started their fall moult, so there were quite a few new feathers coming in, which made plucking them a real chore, so my suggestion is to do this whole process earlier in the summer if you can wing it (sorry). By far, getting the bird clean is the longest part of doing this, so be prepared for that. A stiff raspberry daiquiri goes a long way here. Once you have the bird clean, it's time to cut off the legs at the knees. I did not get this part documented on film, but thankfully it's not hard. As you're holding the bird by the scaly part of the leg, feel for the knee joint which is where the scaly part of the leg meets the now plucked part of the leg. Feel for the spot where the two bones meet with the thumb holding the bird and cut through the joint in between the two bones. At this point, the bird really starts looking like dinner.

Okay-- the next step is to eviscerate the bird, which isn't as bad as it sounds, but is a step fraught with peril. Chicken guts are full of nasty bacteria that will make you so incredibly sick they will put you off eating for awhile, in fact, they may put you off breathing as well, so be extremely careful not to puncture anything inside there. To do this, you want to put the bird on its back, and at the spot where every culinary bird you've ever seen has a gaping hole in it, i.e., right between the legs, grab the skin and pull it out and as taut as you can, and make a small, careful, one to two inch incision in the skin,a and just the skin. You want to create a hole large enough to get a couple of fingers in, keeping the blade well away from the cavity.

Stretch the hole until it's large enough to get your hand in, and reach into the cavity and feel around gently for a roundish, hardish thing. That's the gizzard and it makes a great handle for pulling out the guts, so grab it and pull out the guts. (I was shown as a kid how to cut up a chicken and part of that lesson included gouging out the kidneys which are nestled in the back, so I didn't find pulling out chicken guts all that distasteful. You might feel otherwise.)

Look around for the bile duct which attached to the liver. The bile duct is that little black thing that looks kind of like a slug, and it's full of really nasty stuff, so very, very carefully cut it off the liver without nicking it and throw it away. Save the liver for pate de volaille. Rae likes the gizzards, and she can have them as far as I'm concerned, and LJ likes the heart and he can have that, but everything else is garbage so throw it all out.

Lung is that dark pink thing on left

Next gouge out the aforementioned kidneys with your thumbs, and make sure you have the lungs out as well. Those are the pink spongy things toward the top of the cavity. The last thing you want to do is cut the vent off with the tail. Commercial birds have the tails on and I've never really understood this because I don't find the Pope's Nose particularly edible; it's most skin and fat and that's just icky to me. So taking it off with the vent make sense to me because it makes getting the vent off a lot easier. Give the bird a good rinse, and ice it down, or package it up and ice it down. I've never been one for the vacuum food sealer, but in this instance one makes a great deal of sense. At any rate, you want to get that bird as cool as possible as quickly as possible to keep the bacterial growth to a minimum. Chickens spoil very quickly. Leave it in the fridge for a day or two at the most to let it go through rigor before you try to cook or freeze it.

So that's it.

The de rigueur chicken puppet

The whole experience was interesting to me because I noticed that I felt curiously unsentimental and detached about these birds, maybe because they were such a huge disappointment. It also made me realize that I could do it again. This summer's garden was not the glorious success that last year's garden was; the climate in the Pacific Northwest continues to get more difficult for amateurs like me to grow in because the springs are getting longer and colder and wetter, which makes planting problematic (not to mention figuring out what to plant a lot harder) and the summers are also getting cooler and shorter. My tomatoes appear to be a bust this year; only half are ripening, and by that I mean the bottom half of the tomato is ripening- the tops are staying stubbornly yellow, and I've not clue what's caused it. So this whole enterprise of learning how to feed ourselves from the backyard just in case we have to someday is starting to look like we'll starve. I've been thinking about keeping rabbits, which were very popular during WWII. In fact, they kept the wolf from the door for a lot of people at that time, but I've also been worried that I'd start up a rabbitry, get a mess of rabbits on my hands, and then not be able to kill them. This past weekend's exercise has put that fear to rest for me; I'm certain at this point that rabbits will be part of the homestead. And if that's the case, we'll stand a lot better chance of not starving to death, if push comes to shove at some point. I also figure that if it does get that bad, I'll probably be feeding the neighborhood as well, but I'm okay with that. We all have to look out for each other, and it was in that spirit that Rae and LJ taught us to to kill and butcher a chicken.

Since it also taught me something about myself as well, I'm profoundly grateful to them for the lesson.

Editorial note: this is my 400th post, so I'm glad I was able to commemorate it with something useful.

So How 'Bout It?

2011-08-31T19:44:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in an earlier post that this past Sunday Steve and I learned how to kill and butcher chickens. We took pictures, and the friends showing us how to do it took pictures, so we have it pretty well documented.

So how 'bout it- you guys want me to post on how to do it or do you think it would be too gross to endure?

Adding Insult to Injury

2011-08-30T19:33:00.001-07:00

Today the hazelnuts were gone.

The Ups and Downs

2011-08-29T18:58:00.000-07:00

When I started this blog, I subtitled it The Ups and Downs of Turning a Home Into A Homestead.

The last three days have been such a roller coast ride I'm a little sick to my stomach.

Saturday was all about harvesting: tomatoes, boysenberries, squash and chamomile flowers. A lot of the chamomile was from two extra plants I found in the yard as volunteers (definitely a high) and while I was sitting there cutting flowers off the volunteer by the hazel trees, I found this:

Our first hazelnuts! There are roughly six on the smallest of the new hazels I planted, and it's the only European in the group. This was also definitely a high.

Then Sunday after chores we went down to my friend Rae's to learn how to slaughter and butcher chickens, but more on that later. While we were down there, the conversation turned to sauerkraut. I mentioned that I have one cabbage, and when the weather turns cool this week, I planned to harvest it and turn it into sauerkraut. I've been keeping an eye on it this summer to make sure that it wasn't starting to bolt. I looked at it every day. It was the only cabbage plant I planted this year that grew as a normal cabbage. I saw it yesterday and it was a beautiful cabbage, and Tuesday was going to be its day. Today I got home from work and found this:

There's a good quarter of it missing, and I suspect a bird, because I've never seen anything of the insect or mollusk persuasion that can go through a cabbage quite that fast.

But this was definitely a low. Quite a low.

I'm all bummed and there are people in the world running from famine and war atrocities, and people on the east coast and in the midwest whose lives will never be the same again.

I guess I need some perspective here.

Another Reason to Hate Raccoons

2011-08-25T21:33:00.000-07:00

This from the Lake Oswego police blotter:

"8/17/11 3:29 p.m. A strange raccoon entered a woman’s house, stalked her cat, opened her refrigerator and drank some of the family’s milk."

Maybe he got in through the cat door, but how do you explain opening the fridge and helping himself to milk?

You can't tell me they don't have opposable thumbs.

Not So Much

2011-08-21T15:17:00.000-07:00

This is my first potato harvest. Not quite the volume for which I was looking, or size I was expecting. I've read in several different places that potatoes provide the most calories per acre than any other crop, so anyone gardening with the view in mind to provide for themselves ought to include potatoes in the crop roster.

But clearly I have a lot to learn.

A Toast to Volunteers

2011-08-21T13:32:00.000-07:00

Volunteer wheat and tomatoes

Down in Louisiana in cajun territory, they have a special word for a little extra given, but not asked for: lagniappe. My compost pile has given me two lagniappes this summer: I have what my mother always called 'volunteer' tomatoes growing on one side of the pile, and around the perimeter, I have mystery grain that has sprouted from the straw I used in it. It's patently obvious that I've not managed this pile particularly well, because if I had, neither the tomato seed nor the grain would have sprouted. However, I'm nurturing both as assiduously as I would had I actually planted them on purpose, especially the grain. I am pretty sure that it's wheat, because I know that it's not barley, which comes as two-row or six-row; this stuff has four rows. Steve pointed out last summer when I pulled whole seed heads out of the first bale of straw we bought that we don't know the provenance of the seed, so we don't know whether it's been genetically modified or not. He had a good point, so I decided against trying to grow it intentionally. But since it's sown itself, I'm willing to leave it where it is as an experiment.

It's been my intention for a few years now to try to grow my own grain. When we were still living in Beaverton and the idea of growing our food in the backyard was still a notion, I ran across a book at the local library called Small Scale Grain Raising, by Gene Logsdon. It was out of print at the time, and I was sorely tempted to 'lose' the book, but happily it's back in print again. I won't consider myself self-sufficient until I can grow our flour, maybe not all of it, but a good majority of what we use. The grain mill we purchased this year was a step in that direction. Eventually, I want to be able to raise all the feed we'll need for chickens and rabbits too, but that's still in the very far future. I just can't consider myself self-sufficient until I'm not relying on outside sources for essential inputs to my garden.

What the volunteer grain I'm nurturing offers me is the chance to learn on a very small scale and with no real skin in the game what it's like to grow, harvest, thresh and winnow grain for personal consumption. It's still at a very green stage, and, I expect, still in its 'milk' stage, but I'll be watching for the kernels to get hard. Gene says that the wheat is ready to harvest when it turns flat yellow to a dead brownish red (depending on the variety), and that the seed heads will point down. At this point you can pull off a few grains, thresh them in your hand, blow off the chaff, and take a bite. If it's crunchy hard, it's ready to harvest; if it's chewy, it's not.

But what kind is it?

The other mystery about this wheat, if indeed that's what it is, is that I don't know if it's a red or white variety, or if it's a variety that should be sown in the spring or winter, or if it's hard or soft. I think I have the red or white question guessed pretty well- if I had to put money on it, I would wager that it's white, because white is the type of wheat most grown up here in the Pacific Northwest. That's a good thing, too, because Steve and I have discovered a marked preference for white wheat; red wheat tends to taste 'good for you'.

If this experiment turns out well, we've lots of organic soft white and hard white wheat grain to try growing. I've really learned to prefer the taste of whole grain pancakes and tortillas, but to be sure, it's because we're grinding it right before we use it. Most whole grain flours you find on the shelf were ground months ago by machinery which makes them pretty unpalatable- the machine grinding destroys the nutrition and flavor because of the heat it produces, and then the oils left in it by the germ go rancid while the flour sits on the shelf. Yuck. If you want to try whole grain wheat flour but can't stand the way it tastes, you owe it to yourself to seek out freshly milled flour, preferable ground by hand or by water. I guess in this regard we're pretty lucky that we live just around the corner from Bob's Red Mill, where we can buy twenty-five pound bags of organic wheat. Our second fifty pounds (twenty-five each of soft and hard) are cooling their jets in the freezer. By the time we go to pick up the pork, they'll have been in there for thirty days which is long enough to kill any insects and their progeny that might have been in them. The other good thing that having to grind your flour first before you bake with it does for you is that it makes you find other things to eat. We're not supposed to be eating so many flour-based products anyway, but at least most of what we do eat is whole grain.

So what do you think? I'm interested to see if I can actually get the grain far enough along to harvest it. If I can do that much, I can do the rest, and I'll have a really good idea of what it takes to put bread on the table.

I guess we'll find out together that even if I can't do eggs, maybe I can at least do toast.

Heating Water With Sunshine

2011-08-13T20:49:00.000-07:00

I was going to write that I'm not at all sure how we did it, but our last PGE bill (Portland General Electric, that is) was only two thirds of what it was the prior month. I thought it was because I wasn't home on my computer for many hours of the day, but Steve says that the laptop doesn't take enough power to account for the difference. We haven't had the Solatubes long enough for it to be that, so the only other thing I thought I could attribute to it was good old fashioned diligence. You know- turning lights off when you're not using them, and all that. But then I remembered we're not using the dryer- we're line drying again because it's summer. Now that I know what not using the dryer can do to the Garner bottom line, I've determined that we need a drying rack to go with the English clothes airer in the kitchen for winter drying, because it's too small to handle a full load by itself. But a rack should make all the difference. It will be really interesting to see what the solar PV system will do for us, and we should find out in ten short days if PGE is going to qualify us for that. I didn't realize it, but there's a whole application process we have to go through before we can even put one in, and they have the final say so. I will be severely disappointed if that doesn't go through, but I think it will.

But I can tell you that our solar water heating system is in, and it's pretty cool. It took the guys two days to get it in, and here they are. What a bunch of nice guys. If you look closely you can see the dog in the window. I got to scratch his hiney for him, which was good for both of us.

So here is the system. The fluid running through the solar collector seen here is propylene glycol, which is food grade, as opposed to ethylene glycol which is the stuff you put in your car radiator. Propylene glycol doesn't freeze of course, so it circulates through the panel, picking up heat, and then goes down into the tank and circulates round and round on the inside before being pumped back up to the plate collector. By the way, one of the things that sold us on this particular system is the fact that it's an entirely independent system; it has its own thirty-watt solar panel and generates its own electricity for the pump, so it will still pump glycol during a power failure. Pretty cool, huh?

Cold water from the house gets pumped to the tank, which holds eighty gallons, gets heated up by the hot glycol, which by the way can get up to a hundred and seventy degrees (actually, it could get hotter but there's a thermometer in the pump that shuts it down if it gets too hot to prevent it from blowing). Then the water that's been heated by the sun-heated glycol flows over to the regular water heater and gets warmed or cooled over there, depending on what it needs, and then goes into the house. The preheated water keeps the gas-fired heater from firing all the time, which saves on the gas.

Steve crunched the numbers, and since there are only two of us, we'll probably never get a pay back on this system, but that's not why we did it. We did it as a hedge against the rising price of natural gas, and the very real possibility of hyperinflation in the future. Or just not being able to get the gas, at any price. If that happens, then the system will need to be re-plumbed to bypass the gas heater.

We'll use the wood stove for cooking winter suppers a lot, so we'll use a lot less gas this winter. An outdoor pizza and bread oven is planned for the future, and I also want to build us a solar cooker for summer cooking. But that's for next year; I already have a few projects started that need finishing.

But back to the solar water heater. Wouldn't you know that the day after it was installed, the morning dawned overcast and the sun never came out. In fact, it never got higher than sixty-nine today. (This August will probably go down as one of the coolest we've ever had- we're finally getting our spring, temperature-wise.) At seven and eight this morning, the thermometer in the glycol read seventy, and the thermometer in the outgoing water line also read seventy. But at the end of a long, cloudy day, they read ninety. So even on an overcast day, the new system is going to help.

We're still working on the old-fashioned diligence- the first step to energy conservation is remembering not to use so much, and that means staying on top of turning lights off, and making sure that the laptop and phones get charges and then immediately unplugged. The new Solatubes are great…it used to be I'd have to remember to go all the way into the master bath during the day, so I could use the natural light from the window. Now I can use whichever is closest. I can't tell you how many times I've used the hall bath and reached for the light switch on the way out, only to remember that the light is coming without electricity.

It makes me laugh.

Solatube!!

2011-08-08T21:36:00.000-07:00

I came home from work today and this greeted me as I came in the front door!

Fourteen inch Solatube

The light over the island was practically dazzling! What an enormous change; this is usually the gloomiest place in the kitchen.

So of course I had to go check out the hall bathroom:

Ten inch Solatube

This was taken after the clouds had obscured the sun somewhat, so we are still going to get plenty of light in the house on rainy days. A lot more than we had before, at any rate. Jef was careful to aim the reflector inside the tube toward the south, so we get maximum light, even though both tubes are on the north side of the roof.

Heidianne- are you convinced now? There's even a federal tax credit for these things.

I'm so glad we did this.

Homesteading Update, 07 August 2011

2011-08-07T13:17:00.000-07:00

Things are cranking along in the homesteading department. I wish I could report that we're having a bumper crop of everything this year, but since I put the garden behind the coop in priorities this summer, and then lost all the chicks to lameness or being roosters, we haven't had a bumper crop of anything this year. We're not even having the usual bumper crop of spiders that we usually get, which is pretty weird, actually. Maybe it hasn't been hot enough for them.

In the good news department, though, we are getting strawberries. Lots and lots of strawberries. I went with Tristar, which seems to be a pretty popular variety up here and I haven't been disappointed.

I was originally going to go with a June-bearing variety, but changed my mind at the last minute, and I'm glad I did.

Yesterday for breakfast we had fresh ground whole wheat blueberry pancakes with strawberries. The blueberries came from the back yard as well. It was pretty decadent and I'd do it again.

The French filet green beans have been pretty good to us as well. There are only ten plants in the bed but they seem to be yielding pretty well, and we've been eating a lot of beans.

I especially like them with spaetzle and bacon and butter and a healthy sprinkling of Penzey's Bavarian seasoning. It reminds me of the Birdseye Bavarian Style green beans to which I had an addiction before I couldn't find them anymore. What a bizarre substance on which to be strung out.

Last weekend (I think it was last weekend- they're starting to run together these days) I harvested all the garlic and the shallots. This was the allium harvest for 2011 (not counting the onions, which are a long way off from being ready).

The garlic were one crop in the yard that seems to have thrived on neglect. I'd water them only occasionally, but that's also because we had a lot of rain this spring and early summer. But I also left them in the ground a month longer and I only planted the large cloves around the outsides of the heads. This year I planted the same soft neck variety I did last year, Oregon Blue, largely because they were grown at home last year, and a hard neck variety called Music that was recommended to me by Danni over at On The Way to Critter Farm. I must say, the cloves are HUGE. Everybody in the garlic family is now dealt with and drying out for the season. I think I'll be trying the Italian garlic soup recipe this autumn.

The shallots are much stronger grown at home than any I've ever purchased at the store or at a farmers market. A lot of them put out flower stalks, but there were more that didn't, and so they're much more storable. I've since learned that you do to shallots what you do to hard neck garlic that send out scapes; you cut them off, so that the plant throws its energy into making more bulb. But I've left the remainder with flowers in the beds for the bees, which seem to really like them. Actually, I'm thinking about letting the bees keep all the honey this year because I had a lot of allium and brassica flowers and I hate to think what that honey must taste like!

And take a look at my onions. Last year I grew onions from seed and the alternately warm and cool periods during our whacky spring tricked them into thinking they'd been through a winter and most of them threw up a flower stalk and attempted to set seed, which basically renders them un-storable. This year, I planted seed again, but they didn't do so well next to the kale. But I still wanted onions to grow and store, so I took a hint from my friend Rae and bought a bunch of onion sets from Wilco. The sets were planted in July. Now look at them! They are the onions on the left. They're bigger than the onions that I started from seed, which are on the right. The only thing I don't like about starting onions from sets is that you're not starting from seed, which you could have presumably saved yourself. I think the thing to do here is figure out how to grow your own onion sets, because in my part of the world, they seem to be the thing to do, especially as our springs get longer and cooler and the summers get shorter and cooler. At this stage of their growth, I can't predict how big the onions will be, but it's part of the whole experiment that my garden is.

The cooler summer hasn't been doing my pepper and eggplants any favors, either, and the tomatoes are still a long way off, but at least they appear to be covered in fruit. I don't think I'll be getting a bumper harvest of them, either, but I should be able to put up some sauce at the end of the summer.

Then yesterday, we had the winter's firewood delivered. The last couple of years we've burned one cord of wood (mixed soft and hardwoods) and one pallet of Bear bricks. Last year's Bear bricks were made by a contracted outfit and they were larger and banded in plastic, and they made a huge mess in addition to being harder for me to pick up and manage. So I am done with Bear bricks. This year I ordered two full cords of mixed hardwoods, and it was a great deal. For twenty dollars more than the place I usually deal with (Grimm's), I got two cords of fully seasoned mixed hardwoods; the other place would sell me hard and softwood. So I'll probably be dealing with Dean's Innovations until such time as we have our own pickup truck.

This

turned into this

and this

and this.

Will it last the whole winter? That's a good question. One cord of mixed soft and hardwoods and a pallet of Bear bricks didn't last the whole winter; in fact, we ran out of fuel at the end of January. But it will be interesting to see how long the fuel lasts this way. I'll report on that next spring.

And this morning I finished shelling the dried peas. The peas were something that got neglected but that didn't go to waste. I should get two batches of pea soup out of this.

So the summer hasn't been a complete waste, and although it could have been better, I seem to be salvaging some of it. I'm a long way off from self-sufficiency, however, it's better than doing nothing at all.

With that said, I need to go finish putting away the last of the firewood, and finish cleaning up the garage. The solar water heater folks are coming this week!

The New Roof

2011-07-27T20:44:00.000-07:00

The new metal roof was finished early this week, and I love the way it looks. The next step is to get the solar panels and solar water heater installed (some time in August), and when he can get to it, the contractor will finish the Solatubes. We have a smaller one set over the hall bathroom, which has no window, and one in the darkest part of the kitchen. I will be really happy once I can see in those rooms without having to actually turn on a light.

After the Solatubes and the solar installation, then Jef (our contractor) can have the new insulation done, and the whole project will be finished.

The old roof, from the front.

But we've already gained some advantages from the new roof even without the added insulation; it's already reflecting more heat than the asphalt roof did. And in the summer time, it also has the advantage of cooling off a lot faster than asphalt. That's because in addition to its being metal, it also has a continuous vent that runs along the ridge, and the roofers installed more 'bird boxes', which are wider under eave vents than we had before. They installed a few new ones, and replaced all the ones that were already there. What this means is that the attic is going to breath a whole lot better.

New roof, from the front

The other advantage to our new roof that we'll probably not live long enough to take advantage of, is that it has a closed loop life cycle. Our roof is completely recyclable, once it finally needs to be replaced, somewhere far into the future. But in the meantime, I really like the way it looks.

I even don't mind that all the plumbing stacks, fan vents (all three of them) and the two Solatubes are all on the north side of the house and you can totally see them from the street. That's because I know that someday, very soon, the south side of the roof is going to be jam packed with solar panels.

But before that happens, I need to clean the other half of the garage where the new equipment is supposed to go, like all the inverters for the PV system, and the eighty gallon tank and drain back tank for the solar hot water.

New roof, from the back

The house looks a lot more 'farmy' to me, especially from this vantage point, but this is the side that gets all the new solar equipment. It's interesting to see it from this perspective because it's like a foot and a half higher aspect than I normally get to see. That's because Steve took this picture. At the risk of making him sound like a giant, I should probably mention that the back of the yard is around two or three feet higher than where the house sits.

It will be interesting to see how much electricity and hot water we get out of the deal, because as you can see, we've been having some really overcast summer days, which is definitely not normal. Well, maybe I should say that it's the new normal. Usually, though, Oregon enjoys a pretty mediterranean summer: hot and dry.

Either way, hot and dry, or the new normal of cool and wet, the new roof is going to help. I hope you like it, because I really do!

Could I Interest You in Some Free Poultry?

2011-07-24T19:20:00.000-07:00

Larry and Kathy, my neighbors to the west of us who raised New Hampshire Reds before retiring to West Linn, came over to give my birds a look see....they can't tell the sex from looking at them, either. So they gave an old friend a call on my behalf; this old friend used to judge chickens at the fair. What did she say about crowing pullets?

"Hens never crow," was the reported response.

I know that some of you are interested to see me do the homesteading thing and slaughter these guys for lunch but I have a sticky problem with that.

The problem is simply that they are still way too small to get a meal out of but way too noisy to keep in my sleepy little burg. I call it my sleepy little burg because it's really a bedroom community, and a little more chi chi than I had bargained for. Actually, had I known ahead of time that it's as chi chi as it is, or at least pretending to be, I probably wouldn't have settled here. But anyway, the important thing to know is, I can't raise the boys to proper slaughter weight here because they are too noisy for the neighborhood.

So I needed to get rid of them as quickly as I could. Fortunately, my friend Rae was able to take them, so this afternoon Steve and I had a pleasant ride down several country roads, and now the boys can make all the noise they want to on Rae's forty acres. We watched them for a little while; the pecking order was quickly re-established, although all three of my birds didn't allow themselves to be bullied too far; a couple of combs got bloodied, but there was no out and out mayhem. Now they have much more room in which to roam, and now there are others of their ilk, should they get bored with each other's company. Rae's Buff Orpingtons are mighty pretty girls, and were I not so gun shy, I'd try again, but I'm determined that the next batch of pullets are going to be pullets (darn it!) and the only way to guarantee that is black or red sex links, so that's what's on the docket.

It was a lovely, sunny day on which to drive down to drop off the birds, and we stopped at a farm stand on the way back home. I already had a carrot salad made from the carrots I harvested this morning, and a leftover pasta salad from last night, so we bought a couple ears of corn and some green tomatoes so that I could fry up some green tomatoes, which I love. We had them with a tarragon-bacon ranch dressing and they were as awesome as I needed them to be.

This weekend was spent harvesting what I could out of the garden and prepping beds for a fall and winter garden. I read in this month's MEN that the way to get stuff to germinate in the hot summer weather is to shade the beds so that they're cooler. I was thinking I might put the stuff that I'll start in six packs, like cabbages, lettuce and kale, under the asparagus, because it's nice and shady under there. I'll have to rig something up for the root vegetables. This weekend I got some weird little cabbages, which are worthy of a separate post, some carrots, and I took out all the peas, which were done. The peas I picked will go for seed or soup. I also got a second batch of French batavian crisp head lettuces off the roots I left in that bed, and a big bunch of shallots harvested; the shallots are cooling their jets, or rather, I should say drying their jets in the garage. The garlic is very close to being ready, but I didn't want to pick it this weekend.

The next post will be about our new metal roof, which should be done in a couple of days.

But tomorrow morning I get to sleep in a whole fifteen minutes later, since I don't have chicken chores.

We'll remedy that as soon as possible.

It Gets Worse

2011-07-22T05:37:00.000-07:00

Now Ethel's crowing too. I watched her with my own two eyes as they were all slowly making their way down the ramp this morning.

It sure explains a lot of their behavior. But damn.

Three roosters?

I gotta get rid of these birds but quick.

It Just Gets Better

2011-07-21T22:01:00.000-07:00

You know I've suspected for some time that Vivian is a cockerel, and not a pullet. She's taller than the other two, and is sporting a distinctly rooster-like face. Violet is colored just like her, but isn't as tall, however, Violet has the same tail as Vivian. Ethel is colored differently- she's a much richer brown, and her tail is sassy. It's very short and curls up- not much there at all. But Vivian and Violet have much bigger tails.

Ethel in front, with her little tail, and a bro

This morning when I started my preparations for changing water and filling feeders, one of the girls started to crow. So I decided to take a look through the big south window to see if I could catch her in the act and figure out who's the budding cockerel. I peered through the window in the morning half light. Yep, it was Vivian alright. But wait a minute! Violet crowed next! Then Vivian. Then Violet. They traded off crowing for at least a full minute. Crap! One chick culled due to severe deformity, and two cockerels out of four original chicks means a seventy-five percent failure rate on my first attempt at laying hens.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but I have to get these crowing cockerels the hell out of dodge before the neighbors complain. Roosters are strictly verboten in my little burg.

Vivian and her roostery face

The funny thing is, Ethel, for all her having a much shorter tail, seems to have the same shaped comb and wattles as the boys do, but her tail is really distinctly smaller than theirs.

The boys and their longer tales

Something else nailing the lid on the boys' fate is the fact that they are both sporting spur buds, which Ethel does not have.

Anyone have any ideas for me? I'm not ready to slaughter for eating, and I would guess they are either, but I'm not sure what to do next. But I do need to get rid of them quick, and I need to look into started pullets.

But only one pullet left out of four chicks. Sheesh.

Whistling Girls and Crowing Hens

2011-07-19T05:59:00.000-07:00

....always come to bad ends.

I'm not sure about the whistling girls (after all, I whistle, and I'm still here), but one of the 'girls' crowed again this morning. My friend Rae thinks it's too early to tell, which is somewhat true, because so far the girls all still look pretty much alike, except for coloring. But their sizes and combs and all that are still all shaped the same. Only Vivian looks ever so slightly taller and her neck is slightly leaner and longer. My money's on Vivian being a rooster, which for me is going to be a poultry disaster. I'll be down to two chickens, and two eggs a day is not going to cut it for us, since we go through a dozen and a half to two dozen eggs every week.

I guess the only thing to do is to keep waiting to see how they're going to change so that I can tell which one is really doing the crowing.

Nuts.

The Dichotomies of Technology

2011-07-18T21:54:00.000-07:00

I read on one of Gene Logsdon's (The Contrary Farmer, Small Scale Grain Raising, etc.) posts recently that using a washing machine is a good way to get clean clothes clean, but that if you have dirty farming clothes, a washboard is better. He even explained how to use one (not that he admitted that he has, but evidently he's witnessed the wife doing it often enough to be an armchair expert on the matter). At any rate, it occurred to me that I've planned for laundry when things might go south, but having a good old fashioned washboard might be a big help. And Gene says they do a really good job of getting clothes clean. So I sprung for one. Bought it off of Amazon (my favorite General Store these days - really) for around twenty-four dollars.

I thought it was an interesting statement of our times to see a URL painted on the top of a washboard.

On the one hand, I'm really curious to try this thing, but on the other hand, the only way that I could fit doing laundry this way into my schedule is if the ship really did hit the sand and I don't have a job again and we're living off our soon-to-be PV system's electricity which I need for the fridge and freezer so there's no using it for laundry or anything else so frivolous. I really hope it never comes to that, but in case it does, I should have the laundry nicely covered, now that I have the washboard.

It goes with the half dozen bars of Fels Naptha soap I bought for a buck six apiece and threw into the back of the laundry cupboard. They don't take up much room and will keep forever.

The only problem I can foresee is that there won't be enough Scotch to get me through all that soap.

Homesteading Update, 17 July 2011

2011-07-17T22:45:00.000-07:00

This weekend was about getting the dental checkup (they're no worse off than they were six months ago, but a couple new fillings are in my future, probably January), marathon shopping, and my favorite unglamorous job- cleaning the garage.

In addition to everything else going wrong with the planets these days, the idea that the US might default has gotten my jitters up again, so this weekend I hauled Steve around Happy Valley to load up on things I don't think we should run out of, like toilet paper, romano cheese, butter, and wheat, among other things (vanilla, black pepper). The second batch of twenty-five pounds each of hard and soft white wheat are cooling their jets in the deep freeze for a month at five below zero, after which they'll get poured into five gallon buckets and sealed. The grinding your own wheat thing has become a bit of a revelation for us, actually. The pancakes I've been making with fresh ground soft wheat have really been pretty stellar, and Steve made a batch of pretzels recently with fresh ground hard white wheat that were pretty phenomenal. He was worried that they were going to be hard to roll, but he found them to be quite the opposite, actually, and they were easily the best pretzels I've ever had. They were really, really good. Tonight we had pizza with the soft wheat as an experiment; I wasn't surprised that it was really too tender for a good pizza crust. We both agree that grinding before you need the flour is the way to go, so I made a special effort to remember to lag bolt the bench to which the mill is bolted to the wall. The bench is much steadier now when we grind, so it should be a lot easier to accomplish by oneself going forward.

The one side of the garage was seriously straightened out today so that I can order two cords of wood to be delivered the week after next and still be able to have a reasonable hope of getting it all put away. Starting tomorrow, the new roof is going up, so the wood can be delivered the week after. Some Saturday in August we'll have a proper chimney sweep here to give the chimney a good looking after- he's even British! I just wish I were going to be home so that I could shake hands with him. Once, many years ago when I worked for the hardware store, a chimney sweep went through my line, and I asked him if I could shake hands with him, and he obliged me. I don't know if he changed my luck for the better, but I'm still here!

After the roof, and the firewood, and the chimney sweep, it will be time for the solar guys to show up. Steve has instructions to capture all of this for you.

So much to do, so little time!

Ramping Up For Bedtime

2011-07-13T17:13:00.000-07:00

Well wouldn't you know it? As soon as I report the girls are balking at bedtime they make a liar out of me.

Last night at nine-thirty, which is well past dusk and getting pretty dark by then, I strapped on my head lamp and grabbed a cup of yogurt and went out to the coop to herd chickens. There were none to be found. The girls had taken themselves to bed, so I locked up.

I guess they've figured out the ramp because they came down for breakfast, which is where I left them this morning. But this evening when I came home and asked how the girls were, Steve said they were fine, he'd brought them more water and greens (and they were appreciative). He also added that when he brought stuff out to the compost pile this morning while his breakfast was cooking around nine o'clock, he looked in the window and they were all in the coop.

Which means, of course, that after breakfast, they are going back to bed.

They really are teenagers.

Homesteading Update, 12 July 2011

2011-07-12T21:28:00.000-07:00

July garden

Pea harvest

For awhile there, the old homestead was looking like a seed farmer lives here, the brassicas had gotten that out of hand. After almost a full week of ~~work~~ paid employment, I finally got a chance to catch up on the stuff that took a back seat to the chicken coop.

While Steve graciously painted the coop (without being asked- he just took it upon himself, the prince), I ripped out all kinds of stuff on Saturday. I harvested as much of the kale, broccoli rabe, and escarole that I could, and then tore them all out along with the arugula, which I managed to get rid of just in time. Then Sunday I hilled up potatoes, and planted eggplants, bell peppers, and poblano and serrano chilies. Also onion sets. I'm a little ashamed of using the store bought starts, but if I don't, I have no chance at a decent summer garden. As it is, the weather is not exactly the essence of summer, so I may not get any of the aforementioned or tomatoes this season. Why?

Well, today it rained. Not so big a deal, you folks in the east and south are probably saying. Except that instead of being ninety-six, with the same degree of relative humidity, it was sixty-seven today. In the middle of July. This year's start to summer is even later than last year's start. This morning I got a taste of what it's going to be like caring for the chickens this fall and winter. Methinks I'd better get the feed hoppers put together. I bought the materials for them last weekend but couldn't bring myself to make them when what the girls have is sufficing for now and the garden was screaming for attention.

In other homestead news, Steve has contracted with our regular contractor for a new metal roof, after weeding out all the competition. I'm glad Jef won it because we can trust him; he's done a lot of work for us and he's a super nice guy.

We also know where he lives.

And then just yesterday, Steve announced to me the company to which he'll award the solar photovoltaic and solar hot water work. Mr. Sun Solar has been doing solar installations since 1980, and while they weren't the cheapest, they gave us the largest sense of comfort. They generally did the best job selling us the system because they answered Steve's barrage of questions, and actually came out to the house again with their electrician to check out the electrical panel. It needs an upgrade which will get rolled into the total cost of the installation, which will go into the state and federal tax credits as well as the rebate from the Energy Trust of Oregon. The other guys either said we didn't need it, or their electrician estimated it from a photograph of the panel. The best reason for doing the panel upgrade now, aside from the aforementioned credits and rebate, is that it will be done already if we decide to buy an electric vehicle later on, and we'll have had a little help paying for it.

The girls are adjusting well to their new home, and the two of us are adjusting to separate chicken chores as well. I handle letting them out in the morning and rustling up their breakfast, as well as taking care of their water needs, and Steve brings them greens and tops off their water in the afternoon. Then I take care of getting them to bed, which proves to be an interesting challenge every evening. One night we were watching a movie and forgot to get them to bed on time, and they were still down in the run, waiting for me to come put them to bed (read: bribe them up the ramp with yogurt). With today's rain, they came down for breakfast, but Steve said they went back to bed afterwards. He looked out and saw no chickens in the run, and the next time he looked out, there were two brown head sticking out of the pop hole. Then early this evening they were up and down the ramp, but never really taking themselves to bed. But every night it's the same thing: I bring out the yogurt, Ethel (Front and Center Ethel) rushes to be first, Vivian thinks about it a little bit and then follows, and Violet misses the whole thing because she's truly clueless. I have to stand out there for awhile, coaxing the girls to come on up for Yogurt Time (which so reminds me of a line from Auntie Mame), and it's getting old.

But then again, they're teenage pullets.

Maybe I shouldn't expect them to go to bed at a decent hour.

The Riders of Rohen

2011-07-05T22:15:00.000-07:00

Another pun. Sorry, I couldn't resist it. I may just lose readers over my unabashed love of puns.

Anyway, the girls are not taking to the ramp, so I will fix it just as soon as I can. Tonight I had an easier time of luring them where I could grab them because I used their favorite treat: a ladle full of milk. Vivian was the first to go, because she's the hardest to grab, and I pulled her tail (again) because she's just that fast but not quite fast enough. Violet and Ethel basically allowed themselves to be caught (although they squawked indignantly), and although I held the ladle for them again through the pop hole, they were not as interested as before. I think they're mad at me. Vivan especially.

This new job appears to be a good one, but I'm going to be working hard. However, I'm sure I'll learn a ton. What will be of the most interest to me is to see how well I'll continue to do this homesteading thing with a full time gig, like everybody else does. Tonight after getting home about a quarter after six, I made dinner, grubbed up and cleaned the garage so Steve could put the car away, as promised. Then I hilled up a couple of the potato plants with the rest of the pine shavings I had on hand, and finally got around to planting the remaining tomato starts, which are a foot tall and sporting blossoms. They were pretty sorry looking by the time I got them planted, so we'll just see how they do. Then I wrangled chickens, and by the time I was done, it was getting pretty dark.

But I have had a taste of a full day of work, and some homesteading work afterwards, and I think it'll be okay.

I just hope I'm not too busy to think up more puns.

*okay, for those of you not into Tolkien, Hensdeep is a pun on Helmsdeep, which was the fortress that the Riders of Rohan built for themselves, to which the ROR, the elves, and the hobbits repaired to fight off the Orcs, and the Wild Men. The Riders of Rohen is a pun on The Riders of Rohan. I should probably be ashamed of myself but I'm not.

Coop de Ville

2011-07-04T09:49:00.000-07:00

So it is done. After many weeks of framing, and several days of erecting, the coop. for all intents and purposes, is done. I couldn't be more relieved, as I start my new job tomorrow. Talk about your deadlines.

Here are the pictures I know you've all been waiting for:

Here's me, tamping down wire that runs under the coop and run. We later filled it in with dirt. Yes, dirt. I don't have anything as nice as soil. Well, maybe in the raised beds, but I digress.

Me again, raising the run.

The next trick was to get the west side of coop up, and then the south side. That big hole sports a window, which I may have to shade somehow later in the summer. But I'll cross that bridge when I get to it, because I currently have no ideas.

Now the east and north sides of the coop are up. That's me again in the opening for the nest box, to be constructed later. I have until September to get it done, which means I start tomorrow. Just kidding. I have to work tomorrow. I'll start it Saturday.

I built roof trusses, using my own rather unorthodox methodology, but I'm not concerned that it's not constructed like a normal roof because it doesn't have to hold as much weight as a regular roof. I merely have to be concerned with it flying off in a good gale. Hopefully I have it screwed down well enough.

Here's Steve, getting the roofing panels on. That boy performed yeoman service during the whole ordeal. I could not have done it without his help. He's doing the roof because I don't do ladders, generally speaking.

We managed to finish the coop well enough to be able to house the girls in it last night. They had a day camp on Friday when I rather optimistically anticipated being done with the coop then. We didn't finish until Sunday, and even then, the sun had already gone down around nine-thirty and I was screwing the hinges onto the west end doors in the half light. I didn't get my dinner and glass of wine until six minutes to ten last night. But I got my chickens out of my house!

Here's Violet on the ramp. She may be a shrinking violet, but she took to that ramp pretty quickly. Probably because she remembered there was breakfast in the coop. The ramp is steep, and while they can handle steep, they can't do slippery, which it is also, so I need to figure out how to rough it up. I think I'm going to go look for stair tread tape. Too bad I threw out all the asphalt shingles that were hanging out by the side of the house (thank you, previous owner). But back to Violet: isn't she a pretty girl?

This is the finished (relatively) coop and run. The nest box hole has a temporary cover on it. I still need to add some trim and paint it, but other than that, it's done. Oh, and one of the east end doors is sticking, so I have to fix that too. But it's done.

Here's the south side, with its big picture window that will be a boon on cold, sunny winter days, but may be a bit of a problem on hot, sunny summer days. We'll just have to see. You can also see the east end doors, which is where I would clean out the coop. I coated the bottom and lower eight or so inches of the coop in vinyl sheet goods, which should protect the floor and make cleaning easier.

The west end of the run, with the people door. If you look closely, you can see Violet in the pop hole. She slowly and carefully made her way up the ramp to go have some breakfast in the coop. I really need to fix that ramp today. I also put it on hinges, but Steve thinks it needs to be permanently affixed to the coop and left down all the time, so I'll work on that, too.

Happy chickens, checking out their new digs. They have forty square feet of run space, which should be enough for three chickens. Maybe next year, they'll get two more sisters, but I'm not brooding them inside the house again. I'm hanging on to the quarter inch ply I have left over from the dining nook, and I'll probably build a hover brooder out of it for under the coop. But that's next year, and I still have to think about it.

The pun I promised? Well, this coop was built to be a fortress against the raccoons we have in the neighborhood. We also have coyotes and various raptors, including bald eagles, but I'm less concerned with them. No, it's the raccoons I worry about. They are the Orcs of the natural world.

That's why I built my girls Hensdeep.

The Perils Of Being Handy

2011-06-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

Steve and I were both hungry early this morning, so breakfast was early, which means that I got an early start on the you-know-what. And I got a lot done- the north side of the coop was completely done except for installing the window, which I'll do once it's up in place. That leaves cladding the south side of the coop, which includes having to build the window from scratch still, and the floor of the coop, the door to the run, and the roof. I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I'm hoping to start raising walls on Wednesday.

But I must have gotten a lot done today, because my hands are killing me. All twenty-eight of my knuckles are aching, and one, the second on my left index finger, is particularly achy. That would be because right after I was thinking, "Gee, that's probably not a good place for my finger," I whacked it hard with my hammer. I swing a sixteen ounce Estwing framing hammer, so you can imagine the force. It swelled up so much (yes, I iced it!) that it was a little hard, and more than a little painful pulling my glove onto that hand. Thank God it's not a roofing hammer, which is bigger and has a cross-hatched face- otherwise my finger would have looked like I was trying to tenderize it.

But, yeah. I think I may have an idea of what arthritis feels like. I have never had my hands hurt like this. I mean, they ache up to my wrists. Actually, past my wrists, because my wrists ache too. Ai yi yi.

Well, enough whining for one night.

I gotta go research how to put the roof on.

The Truth About Chickens

2011-06-25T19:20:00.000-07:00

I cleaned the brooder late yesterday afternoon. Actually, I think it was officially evening by the time I got to it.

I'm sitting all the way in the living room at 7:00 PM and I can smell the chickens. PHEW!

Holy God, I've gotta get this coop done. I think we might get it up tomorrow.

But I've got to get it done.

Today was all about building the pop hole on the west side of the coop, and framing the doors on the east side of the coop. But I think we can start putting it up.

By the way, the truth about chickens?

They're really merely aggressive little dinosaurs.

Stinky, aggressive, little dinosaurs.

Good thing I loves eggs.

No Longer Free (At Last!)

2011-06-24T23:48:00.000-07:00

My friends will be happy to read that after one year, nine months, two weeks, and six days, I will be rejoining the ranks of the employed this fifth of July because I was extended an offer for employment today, which I gladly accepted. Gladly and gratefully accepted, since this was only the third interview I'd had in all that time.

And my new boss seems to be a really good guy. I'll be really busy, but I don't think he'll let me drown.

But you know what this means, don't you?

I have only a little over a week to get that coop finished!

Cooped Up To Here

2011-06-22T09:45:00.000-07:00

My life has been consumed by a chicken coop.

lots of sections

I'm framing it in sections. Evidently, I seem to know what I'm doing because my contractor was by yesterday with the contract for the roof, and he saw my work. He even offered me a job as a framer, because he's looking for one. It's a good thing I think he was in jest anyway, because I doubt he'd have offered if he knew that I: 1) cut with a hand saw, not a circular saw and 2) have to drill pilot holes for the nails because otherwise I bend them.

Which is probably why it's taking so darn long. But you know what? It's going to be sturdily built.

At one point Steve said to me, "there are people in this country who live in houses that aren't as well built as this chicken coop will be, you know."

To which I replied, "raccoons, dude."

North side of the run

Once I get all the sections up I can clad the coop in plywood, finish out the interior, and put some doors on it. I also need to build the nest box, which will hang out in order to gain interior real estate. It's taking longer than I expected, and next week's rain isn't going to help matters. I'm also running out of room in the garage. The sections will have to go down by the side of the house with a tarp on them until I can get them up. I'm not even sure the sections will fit together they way they're supposed to, but I figure that's what the big hammer's for.

In the meantime, the garden is going to rack and ruin because I don't have time for it. I manage to get one little chore done at a time. Steve, bless his heart, has taken over the raspberries, which appear to be succumbing to verticillium wilt. Great sections of them have croaked, but then look like they're trying to survive, so he is trying to encourage the survivors in the name of natural selection. Lots of stuff is bolting and going to seed, most notably the kale and other brassicas. And I haven't had the time to get things into the ground that I've already started, like the squashes.

The pullets continue to get bigger and bigger and bigger, which is a good thing, I guess, but the rate at which they are growing is alarming. So is the rate at which they're eating. I'm so looking forward to getting them out of my guest room. They are like the noisy house guests who won't go home. Mostly, I'm looking forward to having a quiet house back. They still cheep like chicks pretty constantly, but now that they're bigger, they're louder. This morning I finally heard one cluck quietly, a sound for which I've been waiting, and that's a huge improvement.

Today I'll build the last section, the south side of the run, and then the last thing I'll need to do before erection day is put together some sort of roof system. I'm still thinking about how I'm going to do that.

But have I learned not to bring home the animals until the housing is up and ready?

Yes. I have.

* Blogger appears to have the vapors again, so once it lets me add pictures I will.
**Pictures added

And Then There Were Three

2011-06-18T15:08:00.000-07:00

I had to cull a chick today.

One of the girls started wobbling when she walked a few weeks ago, then losing her balance while standing. We started to call her Doofus, because she was the only one of the four that we could distinguish from the others. Then as the other girls' personalities and coloring started differing, they acquired names, and I started calling Doofus 'Lucy', because she was still somewhat comical.

Her lameness continued to progress, and this week I realized that she was no longer able to stand up. I have no idea when the last time was that she was able to get water for herself. We'd talked about culling her previously when we weren't sure how well she'd do outside, but now it was clear it needed to be done sooner rather than later.

So after we returned from buying yet more studs for the coop and run, I set up an area in the garage for her execution. Steve helped me get the other birds into the holding pen, and then Lucy was last. I grabbed a paper towel in case she pooped on me and carried her into the garage. She was trembling. I was reminded of the Buddhist notion that 'all animals tremble before danger, all fear death', and it saddened me. But I had a humane job to do. I set her on her side on the newspaper, holding her down, and placed the paper towel on her head so that she couldn't see what was coming, and then swiftly dealt her a blow with my three pound hammer. It has a large head and is heavy, and I trusted it most to do the job quickly. I smashed her head pretty thoroughly with the first blow, but she was still trembling. I said so.

Steve said, "she'll continue to do that for at least twelve seconds." He had researched the best way to cull a chick for me this morning.

I hit her two more times to just make sure, and in a few moments it was all over. I wrapped her up in the newspaper and placed her in the plastic bag Steve was holding for me, and put her out in the garbage can. She didn't get a burial out in the backyard because the last thing I need is for a raccoon to dig her back up.

Ethel, front and center, Vivian, and Violet at the back

So then there were three. They are Ethel (after The Merm, because she's always front and center, Violet (because she's a shrinking violet) and Vivian (the other half of Lucy, poor baby). They'll be five weeks old on Monday.

Before I'd started this whole ordeal today, I said a quick prayer, thanking God for the chickens, and the lessons they provide, and I asked Him to help me learn what it was He wanted me to learn by giving me Lucy, so that I don't have to repeat the lesson.

What I learned today was that I can dispatch an animal quickly and humanely without remorse if it becomes necessary. I don't feel heartless or maudlin, and now I think when the time comes that I may be able to more easily dispatch an animal with the intention of eating it. I won't know that for sure until the time comes, but I handled today so quickly and purposefully I rather surprised myself. Farmers have to deal with death all the time, and while I don't kid myself by calling myself a farmer, I have to take all the responsibility when I take responsibility for putting food on our table. I haven't replaced all of our grocery shopping, hardly any of it in fact, but that's the intention. My eventual goal is to be able to get most of what we need out of the yard. And someday that will include meat. Someday.

But I still feel bad about poor Lucy, who never had a chance. She gave up everything by her lesson to me, and I'm grateful to her for it.

An Index of Useful Information

2011-06-16T21:44:00.000-07:00

Hey folks- quick post here. I ran across a great index of all kinds of useful information.

This might be the ultimate homesteading resource for which I've been looking. Don't discount it until you've skimmed all the titles!

And let me know what you think!

My Big Fat Greek Bunco

2011-06-16T07:09:00.000-07:00

My turn to host bunco came and went, and all I have to show for it is a clean house and a refrigerator and freezer full of leftover Greek food. I'm reveling in the clean house because the housekeeping goes to hell when I have a project, and I've had one project or another going for so long that the housekeeping was pretty bad. Which is why I started getting ready for this party last Friday, even though said party wasn't until Tuesday night.

So bunco, if you don't know, is a game of chance played with dice. A bunco party is essentially a hen party with dice, which is probably why it's fun. You start with twelve players at three tables; one of the tables is the head table (table one). The idea is to get to twenty-one points, and that has to occur at the head table to get to the end of the round. You play four sets of six rounds; on the first round you're rolling for ones, on the second round you're rolling for twos, etc., until you roll for sixes after which you start the next set of rounds. You roll three dice and count how many show the number that you're on, so if you're rolling for fours, for instance, and one of the dice shows one side with four up, and the other dice show other sides, that counts as one point and you roll again. You keep rolling until you don't roll with the target number showing (in our example, a four). Once you roll nothing up, play passes to the player on your left. Unless you are at the head table, once you hit twenty-one you keep playing. Only the head table counts the end of the round when they hit twenty-one. As I mentioned before, each side of the die that lands up counts as one point for the number of the round that you're rolling. If you roll all three numbers the same, that's a junco, and that counts as five points; if all three numbers are the same and they're the number for which you're rolling, that's a bunco and it's automatically twenty-one points. If this occurs at the head table, it's the end of that round; if it occurs at one of the other two tables, the players keep playing. When a player rolls a bunco (three of a kind of the number for which you're rolling on the current round) they get to hold the traveling token (in our case, a small doll called the bunco baby); the traveling token is taken from them by the next person who rolls a bunco. You want to be holding the traveling token at the end of the evening (but or heavens sake, don't fight over it!).

Players play as a team in pairs, with your team mate playing opposite. The team that has the most points at the end of a round advances to the next table; the opposite holds for the head table- the team that loses at the head table moves to table three. At all three tables, one of the remaining players moves to a chair adjacent to their team mate, so that when the next pair of people arrive at the table, each of the remaining players now has a new partner.

Why do all this? Well besides the fact that it's fun, different groups play for different things. Some groups play for money, and some groups play for prizes. My group plays for prizes. Playing costs each player five bucks, so there are sixty dollars with which the hostess buys the prizes (for the next party), with each prize being worth a different amount. Everyone tallies up how many wins they had and how many losses. The number of buncos are counted, and the number of juncos are counted. The person with the most wins wins first place; that's worth twenty-two dollars. The person with the next highest number of wins wins second place; that's worth fifteen dollars. The person with the most buncos wins most buncos; that's worth ten dollars. The person holding the traveling token wins traveling; that's worth eight dollars. The person with the most losses wins booby; that's worth five dollars. To play for most juncos, you have to kick in an extra dollar to be eligible in a separate pool. Whoever has the most juncos wins the extra cash, and it varies by how many are playing for it.

So that's bunco.

The party always starts with getting a plate full of food, and then play starts once everyone's settled down at a table. I served chicken souvlaki (chicken marinated with lemon, oregano and garlic, then grilled), my Greek pie (which is something I made based on a great Greek pie I used to get at the Zodiac Cafe in downtown Jacksonville, Florida, that involves spinach, onions, feta, parsley and zatar) with tzatziki sauce, and a Greek salad. Dessert was lemon pie and expensive baklava from the local mediterranean restaurant.

Here's the lemon pie recipe:

Hot Lemon Pie

1 large lemon
1 1/2 cups sugar
4 large eggs
1 stick of butter
1 teaspoon vanilla

1 9" unbaked pie shell

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Cut up lemon and remove only the seeds.

Put the lemon pieces (rind included) and all the rest of the ingredients (except the pie shell) in the blender and whirl until foamy. Keep whirling until the mixture is smooth with no lumps of butter.

Pour into unbaked pie shell and bake 40 minutes. Serve warm. It's good cold too. Refrigerate any leftovers.

Everybody had a good time, and I had a good time hosting.

I'm just really glad I don't have to do it again for another year.

Good Enough for Chickens

2011-06-08T20:30:00.000-07:00

I need a window on the north side of the coop for cross ventilation, so yesterday I looked at windows at the home improvement store. I thought they were a bit much for a little ol' chicken coop, so I spent nine bucks and bought a cheap piece of plexiglas and today I made a window from some scrap firring strips I had lying around.

I got to practice dowel joinery.

The ugly backside. I wasn't aiming for beauty- just speed.

I've seen prettier, but it's good enough for chickens. It turned out well enough that I'm inspired to buy the materials for a larger window and make one to replace the two dollar antique window I bought at the rebuilding center on Mississippi in Portland with the intention of using it in a cold frame. Ever since I bought it I've been scaring myself with visions of tripping and falling through its untempered self, and I've decided that I don't want to use it for any reason. It's just too dangerous to have around.

I nearly got the north wall of the coop section done today, but ran out of steam. I have to set the coop aside for a few days to get ready to host a bunco party on Tuesday night, so you won't hear from me for awhile, I don't think.

Try not to miss me.

Coop Frame, South Side

2011-06-07T21:54:00.000-07:00

Framing, if you're infernally weak like I am, will. wear. you. out. if you do it all day. I had to take lots of breaks. I also had to, get this, drill pilot holes for the nails I was using because I'd bend them before I got them driven home.

So that's the south side of the coop section, framed for the old window you sort of see leaning against the plywood (it's the thing that looks like a blue window), a header for the floor joists, and then a framed section that will be covered in hardware cloth under the coop section so the girls will have some shade to find on summer mornings. On summer afternoons the run will be in complete shade.

I honestly think this was the hardest side because of the window, and I'm glad I started with it.

Hard Flour The Hard Way

2011-06-06T22:28:00.000-07:00

Hard won flour

This is a little over six cups of hand ground flour. We did not grind it on the finest setting because as coarse a flour as this is, it was a bitch to get ground.

Let me be perfectly clear it was not the fault of the mill! Although I can see why people take advantage of the belt capability of the fly wheel, thigh muscles being what they are and all.

No, it was the fault of my... what's the word I want? Ambitious? Overly optimistic? ...design for a platform for the mill. When the manufacturer says that you need to bolt it down for optimal use, they mean to bolt it down to something heavy. Something heavy, like, oh say, the Rock of Gibraltar.

I like this one 'cause it's groovy *

Seriously, guys, I screwed up. Our cheap IKEA island that doesn't have a solid piece of wood in it is not going to do the job. If I had a nice, heavy Boos island like the one to the right here, I would drill baby, drill four five-sixteenths holes in it in a red hot heart beat and bolt that sucker to it, but I don't own a two thousand dollar kitchen island to screw up. (Come to think of it, if I remember correctly, all my new kitchen cabinets came to around that.)

So I think what we're going to do is have me make a really heavy kitchen table (somewhere in the future) and bolt it to the kitchen table. Because it really needs to hold the hell still while you grind your grain. Hold. Still.

The next three pizzas are going to taste really, really good.

They'd better.

* photo from here

I Can Take a Hint

2011-06-06T10:17:00.000-07:00

It was hot over the weekend- upper eighties, so we took advantage of that and worked on the coop.

The first part was building the pad and the first course of the foundation, for which I needed Steve's help. With the exception of moving the walls to the backyard from the garage where I'll build them, I should be able to get the rest of the coop done myself.

But moving a bunch of soil (read 'heavy, waterlogged clay) and getting the first course of concrete pavers down was going to need more strength and back than I have all by myself, so that's what we both did this weekend. Saturday we moved the majority of the soil and tamped, tamped, tamped it down. We also got one side of the first course of patio pavers that I'm going to use for the foundation laid.

Progress at the end of Saturday

Sunday was spent moving and tamping more soil, and finishing the first course. I decided to do it this way because there are stacks of patio pavers all over the yard. They were something the previous owner left us to find. I think there are a hundred of them. That's what I counted, anyway. It might not be the most stable foundation in earthquake country, but that's what I'm going with in spite of that. I've seen chicken coops on less.

It's level and square

I'll lay hardware cloth across the bottom, put the second course of pavers on it, and once I get the frame sitting on the second course, I'll bend up the bottom hardware cloth and nail it to the frame. Then I'll hammer concrete mesh pins in all over the bottom hardware cloth, and make sure the soil is covering the mesh. The bedding will go on top of that.

But today I am not working on the coop.

I started today by pouring hot water from the thermo carafe in on top of Steve's soy milk, and then when I went to pour the rest of the coffee from the pot into the carafe, I forgot to pour out the hot water I had in there heating it up. That first pot was almost what the French call 'jus de chaussette'. It means 'sock juice'.

Then when I went to make Steve's breakfast, I discovered that I'd neglected to take a package of sausage out of the freezer to defrost, so I had to brown some Spam for him. No big deal, except I pulled the ring off the lid instead of pulling the lid off with the ring. Have you any idea how hard it is to open a can of Spam with a regular can opener? Fortunately I managed it without cutting myself, and I did find the tiny sliver of metal in the cooked Spam before I fed it to Steve, but you know what? I can take a hint.

I will not be working on the coop today but will instead be doing much needed house work, and making more room in the garage so I can work on the coop tomorrow.

I just don't need anything else going wrong this morning.

The Coop's Time Has Come!

2011-06-03T09:02:00.000-07:00

I'm up early today, and instead of the usual dreary rain we've been getting, it's dawned bright, clear and beautiful and I have sunshine to enjoy with my coffee. We have three days of clear, hot weather forecasted, which is a good thing, because last night I decided that I'd better set aside the dining nook and build a chicken coop.

The nook so far.

I keep marveling at how incredibly fast the chicks are growing. They are two weeks and four days old today, and they barely look like chicks anymore. Their combs are starting to pop out above their beaks, and their wings are fully feathered; one is sporting the beginnings of tail feathers already. They're not even three weeks old yet!

Yesterday I had to move them from the big plastic box in which I was brooding them to the bottom half of Rufus's old crate, which is a pretty big dog crate. This will give them more room, but it's pretty obvious to me that at the rate they're growing, they'll need something bigger soon. Well I don't have anything bigger, so the coop needs to be built. And while I was moving them, one got away from me. She flew to the top of the plastic bin and perched on the edge of the bin, and while I was loudly sucking in air because I couldn't believe what I was seeing, she flew down to the floor. I hollered to Steve that one was loose and to come help me. He came and closed the door, and then we corralled her between us until I was able to catch her and deposit her in the holding cell (a big orange Home Depot bucket) until I was ready to move them all to their new quarters. That was a bit of excitement the recurrence of which I could live without for a very long time.

I am remembering a phone conversation with my mother when I got the chicks to let her know that I did. I chose New Hampshire Reds because that's the breed with which she grew up during the time that my grandfather owned the chicken ranch. She seemed concerned that I didn't have the coop built yet. That's okay, I said blithely; I have sixty days which will be mid-July before I need to move them outside. That's what the book said, so that's what I was counting on.

She could have told me that New Hampshire Reds were indeed bred in New Hampshire, but they were selected out of Rhode Island Reds and bred for early maturity! So ha ha! The joke's on me! I need to build a coop!

Getting to be big girls that roost!

I mentioned in an earlier post that one of the chickens is much larger than the other three. Although she doesn't appear to be any larger than the others anymore, she is now sporting a black streak on her head that the other three don't have, but Steve and I have both noticed that what's really different about her is that she's a klutz. She wobbles from side to side when she's walking to the point where she looks like she's going to fall over. I mean, she staggers like a drunk. She'll even stumble and stagger when she's standing still. She does tend to wobble when she lies down, and then last night she lay down on her side with one leg tucked under her and the topside leg splayed out, her top side wing stretched out as well, but eventually she righted herself and tucked everything in. Steve mentioned that he thinks she's defective, and I admitted that I thought the same thing. Nothing in the Storey's Guide says anything about this behavior.

Does anyone have an idea of what's wrong with my chick?

By Hand

2011-06-01T11:19:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I saw an interview with Vanna White, of Wheel of Fortune fame on a late night talk show. She was asked what her favorite missed phrase was. She replied that the correct phrase was 'Gone With The Wind' but that the solver guessed that it was "Done With One Hand".

Even if that wasn't right, I'm finding that doing things by hand has its own reward. I've been replacing electric powered small appliances with hand powered ones, one by one. The old fashioned egg beater I have does a good job, and costs me nothing but calories to use. The cast iron waffle iron I purchased from Lehman's is finally seasoned to the point where waffles don't stick to it anymore, but it would have been a lot better product had the handles been longer. It's still a pill to use, so consequently Steve doesn't get so many waffles anymore. Good thing he likes Dutch Babies. But it does the job when we need waffles, and I could probably use it over a camp fire (not that that's going to happen).

I've pretty much stopped using my electrical saws altogether. It turns out that I have much better control over my cuts with a hand saw than with a circular saw or jig saw. At one time, this wasn't the case, but after having injured thumbs at different times on both hands that required time off in splints, my thumb muscles have atrophied so badly that I don't have anywhere near the hand strength that I used to have. So the mitered cuts I'm making for the back of the dining nook are all getting done by hand. I think I finally have the hang of getting it done quickly and accurately, but my modern saws are not as comfortable as they ought to be. I have to take a lot of breaks.

So it was with some real delight that I ran across this website. I have to caution you that I'm a bit of a tool geek anyway; my very first job was in a swell hardware store, and I've never lost my love for all things hardware. But the stuff that this guy is making is just plain beautiful. I especially like the convertible saw of his own design. Even if you don't have an affinity for tools like I do, take a look because the tools he makes are really gorgeous, if you can believe that. His work has inspired me to make new handles for the saws that I own, which should be easy to replace, considering that they are all screwed on. I don't expect to make them out of the fancy wood that he uses; I'll probably use either oak from HD, or go see what Rockler has.

It's also inspired me to start collecting this stuff where and when I can, because I might be very glad of being able to use tools in the future that don't require electricity. They use up a lot less real estate in the garage as well. I've borrowed several books from the library, including Restoring, Tuning, and Using Classic Woodworking Tools, by Michael Dunbar, and Mastering Hand Tool Techniques, by Alan and Gill Bridgewater. I think I'm going to go look on eBay and see what kind of goodies I can find out there in the way of hand tools.

I'm not quite ready to give up my electrical saws yet, because I still have to saw through some plywood, but if I can get through it with a hand saw, I may be selling my electrical saws. I will probably not be giving up my impact driver, which I love.

But I can't say that I wouldn't mind owning some gorgeous antiques that work a charm.

Homesteading Update, 28 May 2011

2011-05-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

I'm so relieved; the peas are finally blooming! I was sure I was going to have to yank them out before they had a chance to produce peas because they are where the summer squash (zukes and patty pans) are going for the summer. Now I think I just may have been a little premature with the squash starts. I guess we'll see.

I lost all my bell pepper starts. All my Italian pepper starts, too. Slugs. I've ordered more bell pepper seeds (Territorial Seed; they're closest, so I figured they'd be fastest) instead of using the saved seed I have. I saved it from a grocery store bell pepper, which was probably a hybrid, so probably not the most ultimate bell pepper I could be growing. I ordered the California Wonder 300, which is the only open pollinated bell pepper they have besides the mini bells, which are not worth the time and space. I grew them last year. I like full sized bell peppers much better. The swell thing about bell peppers (aside from the great flavor they add to things) is that they don't require anything fancy for freezing. You don't need to blanche them or anything. Last year I just chopped them up, and threw them on a cookie sheet (okay, technically it was a jelly roll pan) and then when they were frozen, poured them into a freezer bag. Easiest thing in the world. I used the last of them last week on Steve's breakfast.

In other news, the girls are growing really, really fast. One is starting to sport her tail feathers, and they're not quite two weeks old. I think they may be outgrowing their brooder already because I've noticed some pecking, but that might be spite. So I'm thinking I'll have to stop work on the dining nook and get the coop going. Which probably means that the dining nook will not be ready by the time it's my turn to host bunco night in June, which means I'll have to borrow chairs, in addition to the table I already needed to borrow. This is all just as well, because it would take some pressure off me; there are days when the weather gets decent and I grieve because I should be outside working on the garden and not staying inside and working on the nook. I can think of a certain boysenberry bed that desperately needs to be weeded, among other things. And I have trees and a couple of fruiting plants that need to go in the ground.

And last but not least, the raccoons are back. One has loped across the backyard two nights in a row and enters the neighbor's yard from a spot in the fence where he's pushed aside a fence board. Unfortunately, it's not our fence. I haven't seen him since the night I went after him with my spading fork (which I'm thinking about sharpening), but that doesn't mean that he's not waiting for the sun to go down so that he can traverse the yard under the cover of darkness. Raccoons think like that. They use words and phrases like 'traverse' and 'under the cover of darkness'.

Sneaky, covert bastards.

The Epitome of Self Reliance

2011-05-27T10:56:00.000-07:00

"This levee protects a home surrounded by floodwater from the Yazoo River on May 18, 2011 near Vicksburg, Mississippi. The flooded Mississippi River is forcing the Yazoo River to top its banks where the two meet near Vicksburg -- causing towns and farms upstream on the Yazoo to flood."
-Scott Olson/Getty Images

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/05/mississippi-floodwaters-roll-south/100069/

The Ultimate Guide to Homesteading Isn't The Ultimate, But It's Darn Close

2011-05-26T23:52:00.000-07:00

Some months back I reviewed a book called Deliberate Life: The Ultimate Guide to Homesteading, by Nicole Faires, which I really liked. I wanted to see more pictures in it, and I wasn't crazy the way that much of the subject matter was introduced as questions, which I just found annoying. But what I did like about it was that she covered a lot of subjects that other homesteading books didn't, like getting water in the wilderness, disposing of your waste, making tools and farm equipment, how to prepare and sponge flax into linen; useful stuff like that. Then it turned out it wasn't in print anymore.

So I was delighted when the new publisher, Skyhorse Publishing offered me a copy of the book. I've read other books Skyhorse has published, and I can think of only one that I've read that was pretty good, but the others were pretty lame. I can't say it's the fault of the authors; Skyhorse seems to publish with stock photography and they splash stuff onto the page in such a way as to be distracting rather than helpful. And I did want to see more pictures in Ms. Faires book, a picture being worth a thousand words of explanation. I just don't think Skyhorse gets it.

Ms. Faires's goal for the book was this: if you had nothing and suddenly had to survive in the world by doing everything yourself, what would you need to know? What if you live in an apartment and suddenly the grocery store was empty? Etc., etc.

The new book is similar to the old book, but it's not as improved as I would have liked to see. I suspect that is the fault of the publisher, however, rather than the author. For instance, in the chapter on The Basics, on page 59, the publisher has chosen to take up nearly half the page with a useless photograph of two jacketed individuals purifying water with a portable pump filter (something you have to buy), which teaches the reader nothing, and then devotes one eighth of the page to the author's illustration of a slow sand filter, which one could presumably build oneself. The next two pages are worse; again, one eighth of page 60 is devoted to the author's illustration of a simple pot still, and a solar still, now reduced to such a scale that you need a magnifying glass to read her labels. The pot and solar distillers are intended here for the purpose of purifying water, which is pretty important to the homesteader. And yet on the next page, they've devoted nearly half of the page to another useless photograph, this time of a giant hand plastering a wall.

Honestly, the pictures are the worst thing about this edition. Instead of useful photos showing how to actually get something accomplished, it's as if they looked through a bunch of stock photography and randomly picked stuff out. It's clear to me that whoever was responsible for choosing the photos had no grasp whatsoever of what the book was about or what the author was intending. Okay, that's an exaggeration. Not all the photos were useless. The pictures of various dog breeds were. Useless, I mean. On page 361 was a photograph of antique hand tools. It was captioned 'The essential hand tools'. There was not one screwdriver. There was not one pair of pliers. There was no tape measure. There were, however, several different kinds of wood chisels, a couple of pairs of nippers, several awls, a hint at a hammer and two saws, and lo, and behold, a brace and bit, which admittedly would be essential for drilling holes if you had no electricity. But most of the stuff in this picture was not essential. Esoteric, yes; essential, no. The next page devoted half its space to a picture of a simple pocketknife. It was captioned 'the versatile pocketknife'. Now to me, a Victorinox Swiss Army knife is a versatile pocketknife, or at least a Leatherman is a versatile pocket tool that has a knife among its tools. But I can't call a knife that doesn't help me into a bottle of wine versatile. Call me picky. I just hate seeing photographs labeled incorrectly- I know better, but what about the poor person who doesn't? On page 382, there are two pictures of different plants labeled hyssop. The one on top is correct, but I'm pretty sure the one on the bottom is Lady's Mantle, or Alchemilla. Google images appears to corroborate my guess. It seems to me that in the instance of plant identification, you'd pretty much better have your photographs identified correctly, and not getting them correct is pretty inexcusable, especially when getting them wrong could cause real harm to someone.

It's a shame that a better publisher didn't get to Ms. Faires before Skyhorse Publishing did, because the right editor could have made this book a real crackerjack resource. It's a shame because Ms. Faires has done a really commendable amount of research, with only one exception that I could see, and that was her section on raising rabbits, which I found inadequate. Rabbits could be a critical food source for homesteaders, and in hard times past, definitely kept the wolf from the door. But two paragraphs doesn't cover even the basics. For instance, in her second paragraph, titles 'How do I breed rabbits?', she writes,"the males and females should be kept separately and only put together for breeding for a short time under supervision." She doesn't mention that it's important to put the doe in with the buck, and not the other way around, for if you put a buck into a doe's cage, she may fend off her territory to the point of killing the buck! If you only bought one buck (which is all you need, unless you're going commercial) then where would you be? A really good editor would have fixed this issue, but as it is, this is only one section of the book where I can criticize the author; most of the book is well researched, and there is a lot of good information in it.

At the end of the day, I would still buy this book, but only as a kind of insurance because of the breadth of oddball information that it contains that could be really handy someday. Kind of like saving stuff that most folks think of as trash but you know there could be a use for it. I have a lot of oddball things like that squirreled away and you'd be surprised at how much of it I pull out and use for something else. During the Depression folks saved stuff and found uses for it again, and I think things might be like that again in the future. And I'll be glad I have large olive oil cans and bits of wire socked away, and I'll be glad that I have this book too, in case I need to look something up. I just really disagree with its title.

I still haven't read the ultimate homesteading guide, but this one comes closer than most.

A Question For You Chicken Keepers

2011-05-26T08:50:00.000-07:00

I read that it's a good thing to move your chicks off medicated feed after the first week so that they don't become dependent on the medication in it, so yesterday, Steve and I picked up a twenty-five pound bag of organic chick starter from Concentrates on 8th in Portland, with which I am slowly replacing the Purina medicated chick crumbles that I got from the same place I got the chicks. The Purina feed has chick grit in it; the organic stuff says to supply chick grit, which, fortunately, I bought along with the chick supplies. My plan was to be able to give them chopped greens, etc., and I wanted to make sure they had enough grit to digest it.

Problem is, every time I put down the grit, the girls go nuts for it. I put it down in one of those little red caps (three inch diameter- they're not like the caps on the milk jug or anything) and the girls gather 'round it and peck at it frantically, sometimes trying to scratch in it.

Does it taste particularly good to them? Are they going nuts for it because they really need it? They almost fight over it. I poured a wee bit into every hole in the chick feeder and then took the majority of it away because I was concerned about their crazy behavior.

So what's the story with chick grit?

A Week and a Day

2011-05-24T14:54:00.000-07:00

The chicks are one week and a day old today, and it's amazing to me how much they've changed in that time. They still look like chicks, and they're still sporting fuzz, but their more grown up faces are coming out, and the feathers on their wings are getting more pronounced. Their bodies are also getting a little longer, and I can see their crops more clearly when they're full.

And one of them is definitely bigger than the others.

Lovely Day (If You Don't Count My Back)

2011-05-20T23:56:00.000-07:00

Geez it was nice today. When you have as much to get done in as short a time as I do, you have to prioritize. Luckily at this time of year, you get so few nice days that when one comes along, it makes prioritizing easy. So I finished double digging the tomato bed.

This was a chore, but I'm glad it's done. I hope to transplant the Amish Paste tomatoes into the ground tomorrow that I grew from seed (Baker Creek) and which have been cooling their jets (okay, warming their jets then) on the deck the past few days.

But in the meantime, the herbs I ordered from Territorial Seed showed up this week.....

....one of which is a bay laurel tree. I was e*x*t*r*e*m*e*l*y disappointed in its size:

Even the anise hyssop was a LOT bigger than that. I knew the pot was small, but I expected at least something that looked like a tree; certainly not a rooted cutting, which is all this looks like. I'm bummed, especially when I think of the monster laurel in my mother's back yard.

While I was hustling around in the backyard, unbeknownst to me, the wee ones were being boisterous, to say the least. Here they are the night I brought them home (and I've labeled this 3of4 because you can't see all of them):

Kind of a scary picture. Well what was scarier was that while I'm trying to be a good hen mother and keep them on paper that will keep their little legs and feet straight, they were hell-bent on destruction. I checked on them in the middle of the afternoon to find that even though their waterer was still standing up, what remained of the quart of water with which I filled it was about an eighth of an inch. The rest of it had saturated their bedding. Not sure how they managed to swamp the brooder and leave the waterer still standing but I envisioned a crazy jump on the edge of the bottom and the thing swinging crazily around, sloshing its entire contents but never actually falling over. So I set about cleaning up, but obviously I needed to prevent its recurrence. So I wired the top of the waterer to the side of the brooder and things appear to be alright. I learned something interesting. I saved the red plastic caps of the two five gallon jugs we ordered and I noticed that they went crazy on the chick grit I put down in one of them. So much so that I had to take it away from fear of them filling up on grit to the exclusion of everything else. Later today I brought them treats of finely cut greens, chopped raw sunflower seeds and oh joy! Cut earthworms. True to everything I've ready about chicken behavior, when one had a piece of worm in her beak, the others would chase her around the brooder. Sometimes they ignored the treats, or at least, they didn't seem to see them. Then I decided to try giving them treats by serving them in the other of the red plastic caps. I chopped up raw sunflower seeds and dandelion greens, and served them in the red cap. That got their attention and their eyesight pretty quickly. So going forward, if there is something I want them to have, I need to put it in the red cap. Glad I saved them.

Other than that, most of the day was spent outside working. Here is the state of things:

That last one is of the tiny pie cherries on the Montmorency.

This place is slowly coming together, but it's a journey, of sorts as well.

I'm glad I decided to take the first step.

Mother Hearing?

2011-05-18T22:53:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's mother hearing, but I can hear cheeping from the guest room, which is where I installed four New Hampshire Red pullet chicks this morning. (I'd show you pictures, but they are really hard to photograph. Either that, or I'm a crap photographer, which I expect is really the case). Speaking of crap, boy, do they crap a lot! I am already seeing a couple of pasty butts, but I don't want to do anything about it until tomorrow when I clean their brooder. Since they were born (okay, hatched then) Monday, and delivered and placed in their tub at the store today, then scooped up and put in a dark box (again) and then scooped out of the box into the brooder today, I figured that they've endured enough for their first three days. Poor things.

I've decided to go with the newspaper liner, pine shaving filling, paper towel top because it's supposed to be the easiest on their little legs. I've just found another good reason to do it. Since I definitely heard cheeping, I went to check on them. Boy, do they crap a lot! So since I won't be changing their bedding until tomorrow, when I will also attack (gently!) pasty butts, I slipped another few sheets of paper toweling under them but over the mess they made. Piece of cake. (Or pie, in my case. I'm a pie maker, not a cake baker.)

I'm a little concerned about the pasty butt care tomorrow. As with the bees, I don't want to over handle the little dears. Funny I should be talking about them as little dears when at the end of their laying life, they are to be turned into stock and fricassee. I told Steve this evening maybe I should do the rabbits sooner than later so that I'd be used to offing animals by the time their turn rolled around. Hard to think about that now when I'm feeling somewhat maternal.

Hope I get over that.

Estimates for a Self Reliant Future

2011-05-18T08:24:00.000-07:00

Things just never slow down on the homestead. While I have been building breakfast nooks and hutches, starting a new dining nook, planting transplants into the garden, double digging the tomato bed, weeding, and getting ready for chicks, Steve has been getting estimates on a new metal roof.

We don't need a new roof yet, but he's decided that getting the metal roof that we want makes more sense now, especially if it will help with how hot the house gets in the summer. We simply refuse to get an air conditioner for the house. Not gonna do it. But we will replace the roof. I'm honestly thrilled that he's decided to do it sooner than later, because I really, really want to put together a rainwater harvesting system. We're fortunate that we don't have a long dry season, but I'd rather be watering with saved water. I can't describe to you how depressing it is to stand at the window during a relentless spate of rain and think about all that wasted water that I could be saving. Plus, having a rainwater system does bring you a little closer to more complete self-reliance, which I am all for. I also want to have a good system in place in case we need to supplement (or even replace) our reliance on city water as old folks on a fixed income.

So I was really happy to hear Steve say that as soon as we had the new roof on, he was going to start looking into leasing a solar system. It will be interesting to see how much electricity we can actually generate in the cloudy pacific northwest, but something is better than nothing. Plus, I've already figured out how much electricity we use a day, so we know that whatever we do, we need to make sure that we don't exceed our current use. The freezer and fridge use the most energy in the house, and they are both energy star units, brand new last year. Since starting to eat our meals in the kitchen, we're not watching as much TV, either; it'll be interesting to see how that translates on the electric bill.

You may be wondering how we can do all this with me out of work. We are rabid savers of money. We tend to live way beneath our means. Don't get me wrong- there have been times when I've tried to contribute to the economy by buying something, but the Stern Voice Of Reason (STEVOR) has always stopped me. So lately it seems that we've been spending a lot of money, but they're all investments. Hopefully they're investments into a comfortable, low carbon future.

That's the plan, anyway.

Getting Ready for Chicks

2011-05-17T22:55:00.000-07:00

I haven't quite hit the sweet spot with the temperature yet, but by tomorrow afternoon I will have it figured out. I'm pretty close. Wilco gets split shipments on Wednesday and Friday, so I'll bring four New Hampshire Reds home either tomorrow or Friday.

I think I'd be a lot more excited if I wasn't so darn tired.

Homesteading Update, 15 May 2011

2011-05-15T11:27:00.000-07:00

This has been a busy week, and I am plumb. worn. out. Thank goodness today is a day of rest, because that is all I am fit for doing.

I got into the bee hive this week. The girls are doing great! They are still building comb, and I saw capped comb, which to me looked like brood comb. There are lots more bees than when I started, which is a good sign, I think. I'm taking it as a good sign. I noticed that they had completely emptied their food can, so I mixed up a new batch of syrup and set that in the hive the next day, barely causing a buzz as I slipped it in there. Another good sign was not seeing a bunch of dead bees on the bottom of the hive, so they appear to be doing really well, and I'm happy about that.

I also completely finish the breakfast nook this week. We had dinner there last night with friends, and breakfast there this morning. I'm glad that we have a comfortable place to eat, because now I can start on the dining nook, which I'll probably start on Monday, maybe Tuesday (I really need to get some seeds sown this week).

I also finished the hutch this week, and got it filled with my dishes. I am really pleased with how it turned out, but especially happy that now I have the dish cupboard empty of dishes, I can move the beer and wine glasses that are in the cupboard over the oven into the dish cupboard. Now I'll be able to reach my own beer glass! And once I get all the glasses out of the oven cupboard, I'll be able to raise the shelf in there, install the upright racks, and organized all my baking sheets and muffin tins and all that crap. I'll also be able to unpack the last and final box from our move here three years ago, which in and of itself, is a milestone that should bring tears to my eyes.

I mentioned earlier that I need to get some seeds sown, but that required moving seedlings off the bench and out into the garden. I planted up the bell and Italian pepper seedlings, and covered them in my water jug cloches, because they are still pretty young yet and we are having another long, cool spring. The cloches should help a lot. Since it has been wet, I hadn't been able to plant out my Amish Paste tomato seedlings, because I haven't been able to dig up the new tomato bed, so the seedlings were set out on the deck under the half-assed mini-greenhouses I inherited from the previous owner. So far, they are doing fine out there. The weather finally dried up this week long enough for me to get out there and double dig the bed, but I only had the back and energy for digging half of it. I'll need at least three or four more consecutive dry days for the ground to dry out sufficiently so that I can finish digging the rest of the bed. There is some controversy on the sagacity of double digging; some people insist that it destroys the soil structure, and some people insist that it allows plants to really dig in their roots. In most instances, I'm all for keeping soil structure as it is, but double digging is the only way to get tussocks of grass turf buried deep enough to not root again and start growing, plus my soil is crap either way. I'll mulch it for the tomatoes, and when they're done, plant a short green manure crop on it, and then I'm toying with the idea of sowing winter wheat on it as an experiment. In any case, it will be a permanent bed, and a pretty large one at that, so I'm okay with double digging it. Fighting grass where you don't want it is such a pain.

I think it will be interesting to see how well I do with the garden this year, since so much of my stuff is getting such a late start. Part of that is due to being busy with other things, part of it is due to having started lots of last year's stuff so darn early and not wanting to be too early again this year, and part of it is due to this whacky cold spring that we're having, again. As it is, it's raining again today, and pretty dreary out there, so since I'm sleepy and tired anyway, I think I'll indulge in a very rare nap. Before I do that though, I think I'll get the last zucchini bread out of the freezer, and instead of dinner this Sunday evening, we'll have tea. At the very least, maybe the zucchini bread will stimulate me to get off my duff and get the squash seeds started.

Tomorrow is soon enough for that though, I guess.

My Five Garden Favorites

2011-05-11T10:23:00.000-07:00

I was going to post about what an awesomely busy day I had yesterday, but Kate over at Living the Frugal Life posted about her five favorite plants to grow. So I'll list mine as well, although my list might look a lot like hers:

Tomatoes- tomatoes are number one because we use them the most. I still have yet to plant enough to yield an entire year's worth of tomato sauce, but for Friday night pizzas, I prefer home canned sauce to anything I can buy. I also make a batch of catsup every year, using the Joy of Cooking (1977) recipe, which is so good I'll never go back to store bought again. Then there are tomatoes in the salad, on charcoal-grill hamburgers, and barring anything else, the ubiquitous tomato sandwich on homemade bread with mayonnaise. Tomatoes are tops for me.

Kale- kale is probably more important to us than tomatoes are, but that's a hard one to call. Kale starts being wonderful by being easy to germinate, then continues by growing in all weather, including through the winter. It actually does improve in flavor by a touch of frost. The first year I grew it, it was the only thing growing in the garden through the winter months, and it was reliably ready every time I needed it. Plus, I make just about only one dish with it, although I could branch out with more, but we love the pasta dish I make with it. I plant kale at least twice a year to make sure I have it at all times. Kale is king.

Asparagus- it seems like a huge sacrifice to devote so much space (an entire bed) to a crop that comes up only once a year, but we love asparagus and the homegrown stuff soundly pales the expensive commercial stuff, which all seems to come from Mexico anymore. The flavor of fresh asparagus that's been cut moments before being prepared for dinner is truly something else, and I found that the blanched asparagus, where I grow it under a dark bucket so that it's completely white, is nutty and asparagus-y at the same time, and I understand why Europeans are all gaga over it. Plus, you plant asparagus once and it gives for years and years, and I discovered this year that the asparagus season lasts a while. So asparagus is a good choice for us.

Alliums- alliums are so important to my cooking that I can't differentiate among them, which is a bit of a cop out, but there it is. Garlic grows pretty darn reliably; this year is the first year that I'm trying it directly in the ground, so we'll see how it fares in clay. I'm growing more Oregon Blue, and trying Music for the first time. Trouble is, I forget which one I planted where. For onions, this year I'm trying Stuttgarter, which is an open-pollinated variety and is supposed to be a great keeper, but I grew Copra last year. I still have onions that are good, and I use onions a lot. I also grow leeks, because they are pretty easy, and they're expensive in the store, so they're well-worth the minimal space they take. And then last but not least, I'm trying shallots for the first time this year. They are growing incredibly well, and I'm finding that they make good dividers in the beds, so I'll continue to grow them.

Peppers- specifically bell and Italian peppers. I grow bells because they are super easy to freeze and they freeze well, and I use a lot of them. Gotta have them for potatoes O'Brien, and Sloppy Joes. They're just good to have on hand for adding a dimension of flavor most people don't think about. I like to grow Italian peppers because grilled along with eggplant, they make a stupendous sandwich with goat cheese. I also stuff them for dinner, and they are pretty wonderful that way as well. I never see them on offer, so growing them seems to be the only way to get them. I could probably freeze them, but I don't. Italian peppers are one crop that I'm happy to eat only in season.

I'm also partial to zucchini, because they are great stir-fried at a fairly high heat so that they get brown and crunchy on the outside, but barely warmed, much less turned to mush on the inside and then sprinkled with garlic salt. I'm also partial to homegrown cucumbers, because they're prolific and easy to grow, and you can do a bunch of cool (literally) things with them in the summer. Homegrown green beans are another favorite- I'm trying French filet beans for the first time this summer, because I had them for the first time in my CSA box years ago and they were really delicious. I also really like homegrown carrots, because they are sooooo much nicer than the dry woody ones from the store. Growing carrots at home ensures juicy, sweet carrots, and they were a revelation for me.

So yeah, I cheated a little. I could name a bunch of other things I like to grow. If I had much less space, I'd probably have to trade some of the favorites around with some other things; asparagus would probably have to go, for instance, so that I could grow more food. So I'm glad that I don't have to make that choice.

What are your five favorites?

Making Grow Bags From Weed Stop Fabric

2011-05-08T22:59:00.000-07:00

Today was a lousy day, weather-wise, so it was a good day to finish a job that needed doing: I sewed together nineteen grow bags for my seed potatoes from weed stop fabric that I purchased from Amazon. I wasn't up for the hand-sewing marathon that it would be and I really wanted to get them done, so I dragged out my sewing machine, set it up at the dining room table and then started cutting weed stop fabric.

If you decide to do this, make sure you get a fabric that's woven, and not one that looks like fusible lining. The stuff they use under the pots at a real nursery is ideal, but the stuff I got from Amazon worked fine as well. It was three feet by one hundred feet, and I cut it in fifty-inch lengths, so it made a total of twenty-four grow bags. $55.86 seems like a lot of cash to outlay, but that works out to $2.33 a grow bag, and that's a whole lot less than what I was able to find them for online. This is just an example. The fabric I bought is also warranted for twenty-years, and while I think my use kind of voids that warranty, I'm reasonably certain that they'll last me a few years of repeated use. Only time will tell. But in the meantime, I have a reasonably inexpensive way to grow my potatoes, which can't be grown in my clay soil. Folks with limited soil but a lot of patio space may find them useful as well.

So after cutting them in three foot by fifty-inch lengths, I folded them in half with the cut edges together. You have to use nylon thread here; cotton will rot, and polyester isn't strong enough. To save thread, take a hint from power sewing and once one piece is sown, start the next without stopping to take the first out of the machine. Just keep following each piece after the one before it, as in the picture below. Don't forget to lock your stitches at the start and end of every seam though.

I separated by every five or so bags, and then once I was done I cut them all apart from each other. Once you have each piece sown in a tube, then you make four small darts at opposite corners. Start with your seam side and then the opposite side.

Then open the bottom and meet the two darts together to find where your other darts go.

The picture above shows the first two darts met together, and then the third dart at the left. The fourth is at the right but you can't see it.

So four darts all told, on opposite corners. If you want to see better instructions, see the original Instructables video here.

I'm not bothering to start mine in the soil like they do in the video. I'm starting my potatoes in compost made in the backyard, and I'll hill them up with chopped straw. I'd prefer to hill them up with dry leaves, but I don't have enough to even fill one bag, so chopped straw it is.

The beauty for me with these grow bags (apart from them being cheap) is that now I can grow potatoes wherever it looks like a good spot to do it. And now that I have twenty-four of them, I can plant potatoes whenever I need to. Most of them need to be started soon, so I'm glad to have these at the ready. Actually, having them ready is a load off my mind.

Now I can go work on other stuff that needs doing.

Garden Update 08 May 2011

2011-05-08T09:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was forecast for rain, but we had a fair amount of sun so Steve gave me a hand and we finally got the citrus put to bed in their new pots.

Now we have a Lisbon lemon on one end of the deck and a Bearss lime on the other end. Last night's dinner included asparagus from the bed you see just beyond there and salad (which included chive blossoms from the herb bed and Moroccan mint from the deck- dressed in grape seed oil, wine vinegar and salt and pepper- it was divine!)

from this bed here.

I also got some of the spuds planted in home made grow bags, and since today is rainy I'll work on sewing more of them. I only planted the chitted seed potatoes that had the most vigorous sprouts on them, but it will soon be time to plant the rest of the potatoes, so I need a lot more bags.

The spuds were planted in compost from the garden, and as they grow, I'll hill them up with chopped straw and cover them with the edges of the bag. I've never done this before, so I don't know how well they will do or how this will turn out. And here are the other two beds that are doing fairly well in the garden.

The bed closer has Red Russian kale in it, which is ready; we've been eating it in our favorite pasta dish for a little while now. There are a few leeks from last year at the end, and Maestro peas next to the leeks. The far bed has sprouting radish greens in the close end, then little tiny celery plants on this side of the shallots, which are the spikey plants, carrots on the other, and at the far end of the bed are the Serge peas. The peas have me a bit concerned because they still haven't produced flowers, much less peas, and seem to be growing very, very slowly. They are sitting where I want to plant the summer squash for this year, and I'll need to get seed for them sown soon.

I'm not so sure about this year's garden. Last year I started seeds mid-February and some things seemed to take forever to finally start bearing (like the tomatoes). So I figured that I started too soon last year and decided to wait a little to start this year. Now I'm wondering if I've waited too long. The peas went in and I had to worry about them rotting. It's all topsy turvy, and I don't really know what to expect. I will say that maybe it's a good thing that I'm trying to learn how to do this at the beginning of the thirty-year cool spell that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is auguring in. I think it's better to learn it now, while I'm still really learning, than having to re-train myself after years of knowing what I was doing.

At least, that's what I'm telling myself.

Breakfast Nook

2011-05-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

So here's the breakfast nook:

I still need to screw it down along the back, fill all the screw holes with dowel plugs and stain those, and then varnish the whole thing, so I can't cross it off the list yet. But that's what I've been doing since Monday.

I never did get to the garden this week.

Homesteading Update, 02 May 2011

2011-05-02T22:24:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning I met Rae at KT's, and she and KT and KT's husband and stepdaughter and I all went down to Canby for the Master Gardener's Show. It was pretty cool and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. It's basically like a huge farmers market except that everyone's selling plants or garden art or the like. I found another cider gum, the same size as the other three I already had and spent $1.95 less on this one! So now I have four for the coppice. I also bought an evergreen huckleberry for the front yard- it will go in right of the driveway, and two more tea camellias, and a cilantro. I've planted the all four tea camellias I own now, and eaten half the cilantro. I also bought a Goji berry bush at the show. Goji berries are supposed to be delicious and full of antioxidants, but one of the interesting things about Goji plants is the fact that they're good for a permaculture guild because they pull up a lot of good stuff from deep in the soil and make it available in the soil surrounding them, so plants placed around a Goji berry are supposed to do well.

Then Sunday Steve and I had a good breakfast of Dutch Babies and then hied ourselves off to Home Depot. The plan was to load up on a bunch of materials for several projects at once so that we could get it all home with one truck rental. We live really close to the HD and find that the truck rental is a pretty good deal for us because getting home and back in the allotted time is very doable, and it takes very little gas (you have to top off the truck before you return it).

So what did we get? Materials for the breakfast nook, the dining nook, the chicken coop, the guest beds (day bed and trundle), and if there's anything left over, a rabbit hutch, but that's iffy. This means fourteen 2X4s, two five-eighths-inch exterior grade plywood sheets, two three-quarter-inch certified sanded plywood sheets, three quarter-inch sanded plywood sheets, two different lengths of 2X10s, and one t2X8X10, several different little molding pieces, five pounds of nails, a pound each of two different sizes finishing nails (are you bored yet? okay I'll stop)….suffice to say we spent a lot, but now I have almost everything I need for a bunch of different projects and I'm working on them. We also got two large fiberglass pots for the citrus because I changed my mind about growing them alongside the garage. Lemons and limes don't have the heat requirements that oranges and grapefruit do, but I was concerned that it would still be a little cool out front for them. I think the deck will be the best place for them, since we know that it is a warmer microclimate area for the yard, they should do much better on it. I'll just have to water the hell out of them over the summer.

Today after feeding the Steve and cleaning up the breakfast dishes, I got started on the breakfast nook. It is going to be somewhat rustic because I'm in a hurry to get it done and it doesn't have to be fancy. I got the wall supports in, which is just a couple of 2X4s lag bolted into the studs.

I had to cut around a receptacle box, which was placed inconveniently for me. I also got the bench for the long side completely cut and glued together, and sanded for the most part.

I also got the one half of the short bench cut as well, but discovered that I need another 2X8 for the front half of it because there wasn't enough left over from cutting the long bench. I'll go get that tomorrow and a can of stain for the nook, because I changed my mind about what color to make it.

Last August when I made the big rack in the garage for firewood, I hung on to every scrap piece of 4X4 left over from the job, thinking I'd use them for firewood, if necessary. I never did need to burn them, and I'm glad I didn't because the short pieces are almost the perfect length for the legs for the breakfast nook benches, and the longer leftover 4X4s look mighty like they're going to wind up as bed posts for the day bed for the guest room. Of course, anything leftover from this job also gets saved because I constantly get these ideas and then go out to the garage to see if I've material to do it. For instance, Steve said over the weekend, "shouldn't the hopper to the grain mill have a cover over it or something?" Country Living sells a wooden one, but they want $16.95 for it. I grabbed a piece of scrap pine, traced the outline of the hopper on the underside of the scrap, cut it out, cut a rabbet edge all around with my beloved Marples dovetail saw, sanded it, sealed it with Boos sealer, and popped it on the hopper.

It cost nothing but my time, which I have a lot of these days. I have an idea for a hopper extension, but it will have to wait until my big projects get done.

The garden needs attention because stuff needs to get planted or the tomato bed needs digging, plus I've several trees to get into the ground. I'm hoping to be far along enough on the breakfast nook to do some gardening on Thursday, because that will be the third of three dry days, so I should be able to double dig more of the tomato bed.

Of course, I'm asking myself how would I be getting this stuff done if I'd managed to land that job? There's nothing like keeping busy to help you forget life's little disappointments.

Grain Mill Stand

2011-04-29T23:34:00.000-07:00

So the last thing I had on my to do list for this week was make the alcohol stove for the bug out box. Did I do it?

No! I was too busy building this!:

The mill is bolted to the stand (has to be bolted or clamped to a surface), and then we have the flour bin on the flour shelf, and then underneath it is the grain bin on the grain shelf.

Steve used it tonight to crack about a half pound of malted barley because tomorrow is a brew day.

So that's malted barley in the hopper there. He was well pleased with how it turned out. I was well pleased that he was well pleased. It really seems to be a great mill, and we're both really happy with it, which is important because we're both going to be using it for different purposes. I'll be milling flour with it, and he'll be cracking malted barley with it. Next fall he'll order a fifty-pound bag of malted barley and crack it at home, and this will bring his brew costs way, way down. He'll already ordered a couple pounds of hops direct from a hops grower in Washington, which he says will last until December in the freezer (he doesn't brew during the summer- it's too hot). The only other thing I might use it for is cracking corn for chickens, but first I have to get chickens, and then I have to get a corn and bean auger for it. If you're curious about that you can go the Country Living Grain Mills website and there's a video that shows how to install it.

One other thing I want to show you is that on the flour bin, we decided that having a cover with a hole in it for the flour to drop through would be a good idea to keep the dust down because we wanted to keep our mill in the house.

Some people mill in their garage because of the dust, but I'd rather clean up than have garage dust and spiders falling in my hopper, you know? We'll see how well it works when I grind our first flour, which will be a couple of weeks yet; the wheat is still doing thirty days in the freezer, which will kill anything that might have hopped aboard it, like weevils.

Tomorrow is Saturday, and I've a date with Rae and her mother-in-law KT to go to the Canby Master Gardener Show. This is my first Master Gardener show and I'm pretty excited about it. Then also this weekend, Steve and I are going to HD to get a big bunch of lumber and bring it home in a rented truck so that I can get started on the breakfast and dining nooks next week.

But I promise I'll get that stove put together soon, maybe Sunday even, because it's the lynchpin in the bug out box.

I guess that's really more a promise that I'm making to myself.

Husbandly Duties, Prince William, and Tom Petty

2011-04-29T11:13:00.000-07:00

My husband takes some of his husbandly duties seriously and some not so much.

His role as Lord Protector is one of those not so much ones. The night before last I checked the perimeter, which is his job as the great big silverback of our small band, and found the front door completely unlocked and slightly ajar at eleven o'clock at night. He was already in bed. Some Lord Protector.

He's very good at getting stuff down for me or picking up the heavy stuff, but he doesn't miss a chance to say something along the lines of, "oh, I need a big, strong man to pick up this heavy box because I am just too weak," or, "I'm too small to reach it," in mincing tones. It makes me want to hit him, but I know he likes the fact that I need him because he's bigger and stronger than I am.

But his role as court jester he takes very seriously and is probably the major trait of his that lead me to marry him. If I'm grumpy he always keeps at doing or saying something silly and then when I smile or laugh he says, "there it is!" Sometimes he's just funny. This morning he said, "guess what song I have stuck in my head?"

To which I reply, "Don't tell me! Because your MO is to tell me the song so that it gets stuck in my head and is no longer in your head because you've passed it on. Don't tell me!"

So later in the morning he decides to do it as a joke.

"I wonder if Prince William is thinking about Tom Petty today," he muses while getting himself a snack of sunflower seeds, casually throwing down the seeds.

I confess I walked right into it. "Why is that?" I query.

"Oh my, my. Oh hell yes. Darlin' put on that wedding dress!" he answers, passing on the song and making me laugh. He grins at me, pleased with himself.

My groom amuses me.

Chipping Away At The Goals List

2011-04-27T17:00:00.000-07:00

I am crossing off another item from my goals list today because my lovely groom and I finally got around to replacing the last light fixture in the kitchen yesterday afternoon. I am going with track lighting because it is the least expensive way to get a lot of lighting where I need it. Real honest-to-goodness recessed lighting would have been swell, but it would have also required a swell budget, which we don't have, especially when cheap track lighting will get the job done and we can do it ourselves.

I can hear Steve scurrying around the kitchen as I write this post, his steps purposeful and quick. Today is a bottling day, and getting the beer safely into the immaculately clean bottles is always a stressful time for him. The slightest bit of bacteria could ruin a whole batch of beer, which aside from being a frightful waste of materials, time and energy, would also be a tragic waste of beer. But that is why there is a big stainless steel fermenter on the counter. That's Bubbles, and she's holding a German-style steam beer (called Dampfbier in German). Steve has figured out that by using a one foot hose instead of a much longer one, he can do the bottling by himself and doesn't need me to help (yay!), in addition to saving on hose costs. He puts the full fermenter on the counter over the dishwasher the night before he bottles so that the beer can come to room temperature and so he can bottle over the open dishwasher door, which does a great job keeping the floor clean. All he has to do when he's done bottling is close the door and it pours into the dishwasher anything he's spilled on the door.

Very soon I'll be able to get started on the breakfast and dining nook projects. I finished the plans today for the dining nook up until the molding pieces so that I could put together my lumber and materials estimate. The molding can wait because I'm not sure what I want to do with it exactly and molding is small enough to fit in the back of the car. I tell Steve that this weekend after I come home from the Master Gardener Show with Rae and KT that I want to go to Home Depot for my materials so that I can start my projects next week. "Oh so if I want to brew beer while you're gone Saturday morning, I need to go to Steinbart on Friday afternoon," he says, which suggests dinner in Portland to me. I mention this to him. "Sure," he agrees, "we can hit the food carts at that one corner."

So that leaves only ordering the water filter, making the alcohol stove and copying water filtering pages from my hurricane book left on my list of major to-dos for this week. I decide on Doulton water filters because Doulton has been making them for a very long time, and they are used by both the US and British militaries for treating water. In 1835 Queen Victoria had commissioned Doulton to make water filters for her household, so yes indeed, they have been making them a very long time.

I order the Doulton water filter from FiltersFast through Google Checkout because they have the best price online, the cheapest shipping, and the highest rating of all those sellers on the list (4.8 stars out of 5 from more than 4,000 reviewers). I also order extra filters, which are pricey at thirty-five dollars apiece, to say the least, because although you can extend the life of the filter by scrubbing the exterior with a stiff brush, Doulton recommends changing the filter at least annually.

Since Steve will be bottling for awhile and I can't get started on the dinner until he's out of my way, I'll go down to his office at the end of the hall and start copying portions of my hurricane preparedness book that I want to keep. I've promised the book to Tamar and I need to get it to her well before the start of hurricane season on the first of June, which I make a note to myself to do next week.

In the meantime, that leaves only the stove, which I'll work on tomorrow. I'll need something to do then.

Homegrown mint, oregano, chives, arugula and radishes in salad..

2011-04-26T21:54:00.001-07:00

....with leftover Easter turkey and dressing and carrots....

A Day In The Life

2011-04-25T17:12:00.000-07:00

Today is Easter Monday, and I am still smarting from being rejected by a recruiter on Good Friday for a job I wanted very much and had interviewed for with three people. The interview went fairly well, and I felt like I had hope, but was still trying to steel myself for not getting the offer all during the week it took them to call me back. "You interviewed very well," she said, "but we had four strong candidates and decided to make the offer to someone else." A year and a half of looking and only two interviews under my belt, and now the second rejection. Steeling myself for it didn't help.

Steve was taking a break while I took the call. He quickly came to me and pulled me into a hug. "If my unemployment runs out and I can't qualify for the third tier, can we go away for a long weekend?" I sobbed.

"Of course," he said gently, hugging me tighter.

God must want me working on my homestead, I've been reasoning to myself. He doesn't think it's time for a job yet. Still disappointed at having to continue to look for work, I transplanted some escarole and radicchio Treviso yesterday to a couple of the beds I cleaned up last week. With the days warming when it's not raining, and staying light out longer, it's truly time to get the garden going. I transplanted twenty-two Amish Paste tomato seedlings today into the paper tubes I made for them yesterday, and separated the pepper seedlings into six-packs, noting that I need to sow some more bell peppers, as three plants won't be enough. Deciding that I need to get the basil and cilantro started, I opted to sow those today as well. Then I took down my hatchet and sharpened it, and chopped another flake of straw into shorter pieces for my carbon barrel. My first early seed potatoes are chitting in an egg carton and will be ready to plant in another week or so. I needed to figure out how to cut straw for the compost pile and grow bags because the straw tends to bind up my shredder. Watching The Ten Commandments over the weekend, I got the idea to chop the straw instead. A machete might be lighter and easier to work with, but the hatchet did a fine job. I don't remember the straw pieces flying all over the place in the movie though.

The rain and clouds have moved on, and the sun and wind have taken their place. The bees are finally out now that the weather has turned better and I decide that I must get my chickens going and that they and my homestead are more important than having the house just so for when I have to host bunco in June. I decide to list all the needs and wants for the coop on a piece of paper and that I'll design something based on that and whatever I have in the garage and outdoors. There are large pieces of chicken wire and hardware cloth lying about in the backyard, and rolls of chicken wire and fencing under the bench, as well as pieces of plywood and lumber in the garage. I should try to get as much of a coop constructed as I can with the material I have, and only opt to buy hinges and latches and wheels, perhaps.

I come into the house and change back out of my grubbies and get started with mixing up pasta. Steve comes out and I show him the gigantic chicken egg that I'll use for the pasta because it's a monster and I thought it would be great for making pasta. "What do you do if you have more flour than egg?" he asks. "Well, I start with just a cup of flour and just mix the egg into the flour until it's the right consistency and then any flour that's left over I use to dust the board," I reply. Except the egg, which is huge, runs over the side of the mound of flour and I wind up having to scramble it all together and for the first time since starting to make my own pasta, I've mixed too much flour into the dough. Steve comes back in from taking out the trash and I mention to him thanks for asking, but for the first time since starting to make our pasta from scratch, I've mixed in too much flour. "It's not my fault," he says breezily and goes back outside again. I finish fixing the consistency and put the ball of dough under a bowl to rest for half an hour.

Typing this I look into the yard and see starlings, a Scrubb jay, several house finches, and a male robin all getting dinner out of the ground or fighting with each other on the fence. I'll get my dinner from the yard too, as I decided this morning that the Red Russian kale finally looks along enough to start harvesting a few leaves. I'll supplement them with a few leaves of the January King cabbage that I've left to bolt in the hope of getting seeds. Dinner will be our favorite pasta with kale, only this time I have some lovely Margenspeck instead of regular bacon for it.

I have so much work to do here that I decide God was right and I don't need an outside job just yet.

Busy Spring

2011-04-23T10:38:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't written guys- I've been up to my eyebrows in things to do.

We've had a spate of sunny days, which means the ground has been drying out enough to dig, so that's what I've been doing. I've been cleaning up beds and spreading bark in front of the hive so that Steve doesn't have to mow in front of it, even though the girls appear to be really focused on their tasks and don't really bother us.

Then yesterday I starting digging up a new bed. It's actually an extension of the bed in which the garlic is growing, but I decided that I didn't like where I'd planned to put the tomatoes, so they are going in the new bed. I spent a large chunk of yesterday cutting up sod and replanting it out front to form better lawn in the bare patches, and need to finish digging the rest of it up so that I can double dig the bed. I'm hoping to get all this done before tomorrow, which is Easter, because the next few days it's supposed to rain like the dickens, and then shower all week. Tomorrow is sow seeds indoors and cut straw day.

So much has been happening! The seed potatoes showed up so I've been hand sewing grow bags from weed stop fabric which I learned from this Instructables video. I am not putting seed potatoes in the ground, however. I don't need holes in my bark paths. I think it was last year that I told Fiona over at The Cottage Smallholder about a method my neighbor in Florida used for growing potatoes. We had very sandy soil in Florida. He'd place his seed potatoes in their beds, and then pile them up with leaves as they grew, and when they were ready for digging up, the leaves had pretty much turned to crumbly soil by then and he had no trouble at all finding and digging potatoes. And they were great spuds! So Fiona tried it, only she did it in grow bags, and she reported that she grew a lot of potatoes this way. My plan is to do the same thing, only I'll leave the rubble out of the bag. I'll grow them on top of the bark in the wider paths, so drainage shouldn't be a problem. I'm also running out of leaves, unfortunately, so I'll use shredded straw as the mulch medium in which to hill them up. As long as I keep the roots covered and the black bags fairly closed around the tops of the plants, things should be okay.

Then also this week, my grain mill showed up, but I'll leave that for another post. We're waiting on a couple of square buckets with lids from US Plastics, and once they're in I can start building the stand for the mill, which I want to keep in the house.

So now I need to don my grubbies and get outside for a torturous day of moving earth. I'll leave you with a shot of my flower border as seen through the garden gate. This is what sunshine looks like in Oregon.

Homegrown asparagus under Westphalian ham and Swiss cheese

2011-04-20T20:00:00.001-07:00

...and arugula and chive buds in salad. We also had an apple galette for dessert, but nothing homegrown in that. Maybe someday.

Bee Update 19 April 2011

2011-04-19T22:24:00.000-07:00

I got into the hive today, with mixed results. Long story short, I think all is reasonably well in there, because the bees haven't taken off and are building comb. And they're filling some of that comb with honey.

I never did actually see the queen though, even after looking for the 'rosette' cluster of bees that should have tipped me off where she was. I also couldn't tell if there was brood or not, and although I could see something in the bottom of some of the cells, I couldn't tell what it was.

Then because I got distracted and wasn't watching what I was doing, one of the combs started to fall off the bar because I wasn't holding it correctly. I righted it quickly and hung it back in the hive, but if it falls off it will be pretty disastrous. Nuts.

The good news is that I was fairly calm through the whole thing, and I was pretty careful putting all the bars back in and the lid on, so I think I kept the bee crushing to a minimum.

But really so far, I think I've done these poor bees more harm than good, and since their syrup can still felt pretty heavy, I'm leaving them alone for awhile. Maybe by leaving them completely alone, they'll actually be able to grow in numbers and make a go of it.

And if not, I'll try again next year, maybe taking another bee keeping class in the interim.

Homegrown tomato sauce, onion, and bell pepper in Sloppy Joes

2011-04-17T23:22:00.000-07:00

Homestead Update, 16 April 2011

2011-04-16T12:08:00.000-07:00

Today is a brew day, so we went into Portland after grain and yeast. Steve is brewing a stout today, and he's going to use the rest of the hops that he has, including the stuff that he grew last year that's been cooling its jets in the freezer. The brewables total came to $14.26, which works out to be a little less than $7.13 a case, because he'll get a little more than forty-eight bottles from this batch (maybe forty-nine or fifty). So even with the gas to get up there and the gas to cook it, the price is still great because he's lucky if he can find a six-pack of beer as good as his for $7.13 a sixer. Plus, it makes the house smell like brewing beer which is a smell I find slightly more intoxicating than bread baking. Mmmmm......beer.......mmmmmmm.

My goodies from our trip to Portland were all the ingredients I need for mixing up Steve Solomon's Complete Organic Fertilizer (COF), which for me were 50 pounds each of canola meal, agricultural lime, dolomitic lime, rock phosphate, and kelp meal. The bill came to $104, but $55 of that was the kelp meal, which at the rate you use it, will probably last maybe ten years, maybe even longer. It doesn't take much. Some of this stuff you use in higher quantities than others, but I'm still counting on this lasting at least a couple or three years, maybe more. I'm all set for organic fertilizer for awhile. I also picked up two more Russian Tea plants (Camellia sinensis) and three Cider Gums (Eucalyptus gunnii) because the One Green World truck was at Concentrates today, which was way cool, because it saved me a trip down to Molalla, Oregon, gas prices being what they are and all.

So today is clean the garage day, and go get some galvanized garbage cans to keep the soil additives in day, and then I'm making grow bags for my seed potatoes, which arrived on Thursday. I'll show you those in a separate post.

I also need to check on my bees for brood, and I'm supposed to making something else this weekend in addition to the grow bags, but I just can't remember what it is I'm supposed to be making.

I hate when that happens.

Homegrown tomato sauce and garlic on Pizza

2011-04-16T12:00:00.001-07:00

...for last night's dinner

Something Fishy

2011-04-14T21:59:00.000-07:00

Tonight Steve and I went out for sushi. We continue to celebrate our friend Karen's birthday even though she is three thousand miles away in Jacksonville because we got in the habit of taking her to sushi for her birthday, and she'd join us for sushi on my birthday in October. That way, we were assured of getting sushi at least twice a year, and we're still assured of getting sushi twice a year, because we are still taking Karen out for sushi, even though she's not here in Oregon.

I always get a small hot sake, and an Asahi, and Steve usually gets a small Sapporo. We usually get the expensive seaweed salad because I love it and we only get it twice a year. Our bill usually starts somewhere in the sixties, and once we got into the seventies (I don't know what we were doing that night). Tonight we eschewed tuna, because we are trying to be more conscious of what's being over fished and what's in season so we can be responsible little fish eaters, so tuna (mmmmm...Toro....mmmmm) was off the menu for us. We had mackerel instead. Not sure I'd do it again. The mackerel, I mean. Not bad, but I liked everything else better, and as I always say, not bad is not a recommendation. In any case, we had the otherwise usual stuff and number of items and were pretty well packed to the gunwales by the time we finished. But curiously, our bill was in the upper forties this time....

Can tuna really be that expensive? We didn't feel deprived, and I honestly didn't miss it because most (mackerel, remember?) everything else was so wonderful. But twenty bucks lower?

I'm not complaining, but maybe having a cheaper sushi bill is another vote in favor of not eating tuna. Sometimes doing the right thing can be hard to do. Like once Steve and I were going to buy breaded cod filets because they were on sale and because I really love cod, but then realized that we didn't know what time of year they'd been fished, or what method was used (some methods are kinder to the oceans than others) or even whether they were Alaskan cod (okay, in season) or Atlantic cod (not okay, at any time), so we didn't buy them. It wasn't going to save the fish that were already breaded and frozen on the shelf in front of us that somebody else was going to buy, but you gotta start somewhere.

So Karen, if you're reading this: Happy Birthday. We missed you, but we didn't miss the tuna.

The Sky Might Really Be Falling

2011-04-13T21:31:00.000-07:00

First let me start off this post by assuring you that I am not a gun-toting, backwoods-living, hard core survivalist, and I probably never will be. I'm not built that way. But I do believe in reading signs and taking action- if I didn't, I wouldn't be living in Oregon, and I wouldn't have the garden that I do. And I probably wouldn't know all you wonderful people. And I'm not a conspiracy theorist, although I might sound like one. Really. I'm not.

Stumbling around on Amazon the other night, I ran across a book called 'The Crash Course' by Chris Martenson, PhD, which was published just last month. It had eleven reviews, all of which were five-star. Dr. Martenson describes how our economic future is on a very quick collision course with peak oil, which is necessary for expansion and growth, and which is not going to be there. One of the reviews mentioned that you can take a quick view of the book by watching the videos on his website, which he posts there for free because he thinks that it's important for as many people to be aware of what's coming as possible. So I did, and I really hope that you will too, regardless of where you are. What he has to show you is pretty scary, and he doesn't even talk about global warming. That wrinkle is not part of the discussion. What is part of the discussion is what's coming, and what you can do to prepare for it, and guess what? Building community, not running off into the woods, is part of it as well.

I've been working these last several years trying to get ready for something. I keep thinking something bad is going to happen. I don't know what, but it's going to be big and it's going to be bad. I thought maybe the recession was it, but I don't think so because I still have that feeling that the big bad thing is still out there. After watching his videos, I have a more concrete idea of what it's going to be. Martenson thinks the next twenty years are going to be very different from the last twenty years, and he says that it's going to start in the twenty-teens. Well, that's only a couple of years away, right? He starts off by explaining how our monetary system will be part of the cause. He does a really good job of explaining complex economic ideas, theories, and policies, and making them completely understandable. So much so that I spent part of yesterday moving some investments around in my IRA. I may do some more. If you have some time, please watch his videos. There is no trickery here. In fact, he explains some of the trickery our government uses to keep us all in the dark. Do you realize that economists have been able to get away with telling us that the recession is over because they don't use the price of gas and groceries in their calculations? That prices in the consumer price index (CPI) are subject to arbitrary valuations placed on things by the practice of hedonics, which basically measures the value of something by our enjoyment of it? Really eye-opening stuff.

Today I managed to get our grain mill ordered. I've been wanting one for a very long time, and I think that if Steve wasn't planning on using it for cracking malted barley for his brewing, I'd still be trying to make an argument for it, but he relented. I did some research awhile ago and settled on the mill made by Country Living. I like it because aside from being well-rated, it has a grooved flywheel that you can use to attach the belt for the mill to a stationary bicycle or electric motor, if you like. It has steel grinding plates, instead of stone, so they'll last well. The best part is that it's fully adjustable and can go from cracking corn (chicken feed, anyone?) to milling cake flour. It's not cheap though. I got mine at the Canning Pantry dot com because the price was pretty much in line with what I saw elsewhere, maybe fifty cents cheaper, and the shipping was free. The biggest reason I bought it from them was that their prices on everything else I might need for it (spare grinding plates, emergency repair kit, etc.) were way cheaper than everywhere else, including at Country Living Grain Mills.

On the way home from some running around this afternoon, we also stopped to get some bulk wheat at Bob's Red Mill Store, which is in Milwaukie. We bought two twenty-five pound bags of organic white wheat- one hard, one soft. The next stop was the local grocery store where I picked up eight five-gallon food grade buckets and their lids from the bakery for free. I'm not planning on long term storage here because I'm going to start grinding our flour. When I need more, I'll go back to Bob's. In the meantime, I'm going to try to learn how to grow wheat. That's why I've had a copy of Gene Logsdon's (author of The Contrary Farmer) 'Small Scale Grain Raising' for awhile now. Speaking of Gene Logsdon: on his blog this morning he wrote about something he thought important and something the media isn't covering. The price of corn is skyrocketing- it's at seven dollars a bushel right now. The consensus among corn farmers is that it's going to ethanol producers, which may be the case, but it's a seriously dumb use for corn. Corn is a heavy feeder, and takes a lot of petroleum-based fertilizer and diesel to bring to market. Ethanol is a net proposition at best. I think what's going on is that the oil speculators are whacking out the prices because of the unrest in the middle east. We don't get oil from Libya (that's more Italy's problem) but that doesn't stop speculators from doing silly things, for which everybody else is going to pay at the grocery store and the pump.

This afternoon when I talked to my hog farmer (I found a pasture farmer!), I asked her what the price of grain is doing to her operation and she said that it was making things a little more difficult but she was more curious how I knew about the price of grain going up. She was surprised that someone who is not a farmer would be informed that way. She may be pasturing cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, chickens and turkeys, but she still has to feed some grain. They are turning some of their pasture over to raising their own organic grain because it's the organic grain that is really going up. You'd think that with the price of oil rising, it would make organic farming come more in line price-wise. At least make it look more attractive than conventional farming, anyway.

At any rate, I'm glad that I'm getting my half-hog, ten chickens, and a turkey at this year's prices. And that I have fifty pounds of wheat in the house, and a grain mill on the way.

We may not be able to afford them next year.

Getting It Right (Finally!)

2011-04-12T18:39:00.000-07:00

Today I decided it was high time to turn the compost pile. Guess what I found when I pulled off the plastic cover from the pile?

Compost!!

See?

I didn't add any soil. That's straight compost! I finally figured out what the secret is, the same secret that all the books and articles mention: carbon, carbon, and more carbon. Probably the best help with this particular pile came from the blog Root Simple. Erik Knutzen had spent some time with Jon Jeavons at the non-profit Ecology Action center on his farm in Willits, California, and posted a very useful video on the blog. (Actually, if you watch it, you might at well watch all the rest of them on several practices they preach at the center. I did, and I learned a lot!) I didn't put the stakes at the corners, like they do, but I did find the information about keeping the pile in a square shape to be very helpful, as well as moving the decomposing stuff in the middle of the pile to the outside of the new pile, and the still-looks-like-broccoli-and-straw-stuff to the inside of the new pile. I also think that I'm getting it done more easily with a free form pile and my manure fork- lots less heavy lifting for this old gal with a bad back, which makes a huge difference in how long I last in the yard. The Geobin is holding some older compost, and I'll let that sit for awhile longer. Eventually, I'll have to move it all to a new location, because I plan on growing heavy feeding cabbages where the piles are all sitting now. I figured that if the were going to leach nutrients into the soil, they may as well leach it where I was going to need it.

As the weather warms up, I should be able to really crank out the compost, now that I finally know what I'm doing. It only took me two years to learn how!

Homemade Seed Tape, Day Two

2011-04-12T18:14:00.000-07:00

The carrot seed in the tissue paper dried just fine over night. In fact, it all dried just fine, but the tissue paper was much easier to handle than the toilet paper, which actually started separating and spilling seed, so I definitely don't recommend toilet paper.

See for yourself:

Carrot seeds in the tissue paper

Cut tape

Tape on soil. Can you see the seeds?

This was the fastest and easiest I've ever planted such tiny seed. I barely covered the tapes in soil after laying them, and the tissue tapes were much easier to manage than the toilet paper tapes.

The proof of the pudding, of course, will be in how they germinate and how well they are spaced. I'll report on that as it happens.

Good Idea No. 11 - Homemade Seed Tape

2011-04-11T23:59:00.000-07:00

I hate wasting seed, don't you? The idea of sowing a bunch of seeds only to go back and thin them out seems to me like a mighty good way to sell a lot of seed. I've tried sowing carrots with sand, and I've tried ticking them out with one of those little seed drills that has the graduated holes, and I still wind up thinning the carrots. So when I read recently (Mother Earth News? I forget where exactly) about a method that struck me as a brilliant idea for saving on carrot seed, I couldn't wait to try it. What the person recommended from their own experience was to spray down a strip of toilet paper with sugar spray, scatter some seed on it, layer another strip of toilet paper on it, and spray it down again. So I tried it and the results were less than spectacular. I'm cheap. I buy my toilet paper at Costco, so you know it isn't the sturdy stuff they use bear cartoons to sell on TV. It was difficult to move off the counter, to say the least, not to mention made a mess of the counter. But once I got it up off the stone I could see that the person with the idea was on the right track, even if they never quite made it in to the station. The Yaya carrot seed was set on toilet paper, and it's drying on parchment paper.

For the Chantenay carrots, I tried something a little different. I save light colored and white tissue paper for embroidering projects (not that I have time for one), so I grabbed a couple small sheets of that and cut each in half. Then I brushed the tissue down with sugar syrup using a pastry brush. Already this was working out better. With the tissue saturated just enough so that it now clung to the counter, I grabbed a chopstick and flicked carrot seed out of my palm in a scatter pattern all over the tissue. You could probably use a toothpick or a skewer- I grabbed a chopstick because it was handiest. Any seed that was lying too close to its neighbor was easy to shove over into a vacant section of the paper with the chopstick. Then I carefully matched the second half of the tissue paper over the first, and smoothed it down around the seeds with a saturated pastry brush again. The tissue paper was much easier to get up off the counter and move over to the Silpat. And the seeds look good- nice and roomy.

Tomorrow, they should both be dry enough to cut into strips and lay into shallow furrows where I want them.

I can't exactly say no fuss, no muss, but I'm happy about having a fairly east way to get those tiny seeds in the ground without wasting a bunch of them. Much easier on my back.

Homegrown tomato sauce and onions in leftover goulash soup

2011-04-11T21:43:00.000-07:00

Man, I'm glad that soup is gone. It was good, but I got tired of it.

Seriously Hands On Beekeeping

2011-04-11T13:54:00.000-07:00

It seems that every morning since the evening I installed the bees, I've opened their hive every day for one reason or another. Sunday morning while it was still cold I opened them up to pour some more sugar syrup into their feeder with a turkey baster. It was a half-assed contraption of a clean leftovers container with a bunch of sticks sticking out off it. I don't know if they were too cold and lost their footing or they were dying anyway, but I was really dismayed to see a bunch of dead bees in the syrup.

Obviously I had to do something. I grabbed another short end of the same fence board that I used for the roof of the hive and attached three small equal sized pieces of wood in a triangular pattern on it, the apexes of which I left open for a bee to crawl through. This morning I removed the death trap from the hive and placed the new feeder in its place, and then upturned the same feeder can of sugar syrup that came in the bee package on the new feeder. Fortunately I'd had the foresight to mark the side of the can where the holes in the lid were, so I'd know how to line up the can.

I hope this time it works and they'll be alright because I'm determined not to disturb them again until this Saturday when I can check for brood.

Any of you beekeepers out there: how do you feel about smoking the hive? I didn't buy one, thinking that I should stick with a sugar syrup spray, but it doesn't seem to occupy them quite as I'd hoped it would.

And how do I keep from crushing the queen?

Homegrown onions in enchiladas

2011-04-10T23:01:00.000-07:00

Everything's Going To Bee Alright

2011-04-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

I spent the better part of yesterday, to the exclusion of everything else, getting ready for bees. I watched my bookmarked video on how to install bees in a top bar hive over and over, and realized that I'd missed something crucial. I had nothing planned for feeding the bees during the spring, which I would surely need to do because they had no honey stores. There were all kinds of fancy bee feeding set ups, but I didn't have a lot of time, so I settled on something free and easy. I took a fence board scrap from making the hive roof, jammed it down near the bottom of the hive on the sloping sides of the hive, and put a clean tub of sugar syrup in it with sticks sticking out of it so they'd have something to stand on and not drown in it. After getting that taken care of, I was all set for bees.

Steve stood in the long line at Ruhl Bee Supply in Gladstone to purchase all my gear, while I picked up my bees. The fellow offered me a sheet of instructions which I declined, because after all, I'd spent the morning studying what I should do. He stopped me. "This may be different from what you're used to," he said. It was. The video had explained how to get the queen cage out of the bee package, how to remove the cork with a dry wall screw, and how to hang the queen cage up on one of the top bars. In their scenario, the hole in the queen cage was stuffed with candy, and then the cork, and all you had to do was pull out the cork and hang up the cage, and the workers would later eat their way through the candy to release the queen.

The way the bee supplier in California from whom Ruhl gets their bees did it, was to cork the queen in her cage, and attach a mini marshmallow to the top of the bee package with a thumbtack. In this scenario, I had to remove the cork, cover the hole with a digit so she couldn't get out, and then yank off the marshmallow from the package and stuff it, minus the thumbtack, into the hole. Then, and only then, I could pin the cage to the top bar and get her installed.

Except the cork wouldn't come out the way it was supposed to. In fact the reason you're not getting video of this disaster movie is that I cussed most of the way through it. Mildly for me, but still. You don't need to be subjected to that. I pretty much cussed my way through the whole installation because everything seemed to be going wrong and I was high strung through the whole thing. It was not a good scene for someone trying to quit swearing, which by the way is a lot harder to do than quitting smoking; that I did over twenty-five years ago. Quitting cigarettes was easy compared to quitting cussing and I wish to hell I'd never started. Anyway, the first thing the cork did when I tried to screw in the dry wall screw and pull it out was that it crumbled and wouldn't come out. I tried it again and same thing. Then I grabbed the T-pin I'd set aside for pinning the cage to the top bar and tried to pry the cork out, which was even worse, because it just worked its way further into the cage with the queen. So without really thinking it through, I pushed the cork into the cage, looked to see that the queen could get around it (she could, but in retrospect, what was I going to do if she couldn't?), and then plugged the hole with the marshmallow. I hung her up on her top bar, set it in the hive, and then proceeded to dump the rest of the bees into the hive. That part went off fairly without a hitch. I put all the top bars in, and put the roof on, and then put the bee package on the empty arm of the hive stand so that the remaining girls could find their way to the hive. The girls were finally home, and I was pretty high on the whole experience.

The bees had been quiet on the ride home from Ruhl, and okay once I'd sprayed them a couple of times with the sugar syrup, which occupied them with licking themselves off, but they got loud when I rapped them smartly on the top of the hive to knock them all down to the bottom of the package. Now they were pretty well agitated. So things were a little hairy with them flying all around as I literally dumped them into their new home, but I felt reasonably safe in my bee jacket and gloves. Later yesterday evening when the sun was well over the hill but there was still enough light out to see, I went out to check on things. There were no bees flying around, although there were a few straggler bees outside that were definitely acting as though they were dying. I was saddened by that, but consoled myself with the knowledge that worker bees only live four to six weeks, but bees dying always makes me sad. I rounded to the front of the hive and peered at the entrance. And then I saw something that was so cute to me that I forgot all about my trevails of the day: lined up across the three inch entrance were several soldier bees standing shoulder to shoulder, guarding the entrance. I was so tickled to see that they were already entrenched in the hive that I went back into the house, reasonably confident that all was going to be right.

Then last night I got to thinking about the queen; if the hole is at the bottom of the cage, then the cork would fall across the hole, and she would still not be able to get out! I determined that I had to rescue her, and this is where things went south. This morning while it was still cool and the bees wouldn't be out yet, I suited up to go rescue the queen. I removed the bar on which I'd pinned her the day before, and not surprisingly, the cage and bar were covered in workers. What a dummy- I'd forgotten my sugar spray and my bee brush, so I ran back to the house for those. I also had to return to the house one more time because I realized I couldn't see what I was doing and needed my glasses. Steve had to unzip my hood enough so that he could seat them on my face for me. Back at the hive, I sprayed down the workers (lightly- you can't just saturate them) and brushed them off the queen cage. To my consternation, the cage was full of workers! They'd managed to eat through the candy in a single evening, which was a huge surprise to me because everything I'd read indicated that it would take them a couple of days to get through it. Because the cage was full of workers, I couldn't tell where the cork was, and I couldn't tell where the queen was. I rapped the cage a couple of times and knocked out most of the workers from the cage. Now I could see the cork, which took me a couple of tries to get out. I had to be really careful so that I wouldn't crush anybody, most importantly the queen. When I finally had the cork out and was able to see what was going on in the cage, there were two workers crawling about. No queen. No queen, and I had no idea where she was. Ohhhhh crap, was all I could think.

So I sprayed the workers down again, brushed them into the gap, and pulling the queen cage off the bar, I replaced it into the hive, and then put the roof back on. I have no idea where the queen really is, and don't know how many workers I killed in the process of trying to rescue her. I am so bummed.

As I write this, the morning has warmed up, and the sun is starting to burn off the clouds, and I can see bees flying around the hive. They have food in the hive, and a pollen patty to eat, and facing south, they are right in front of a large patch of dandelions, so there is forage for them if they want to do that. There are ornamental trees in the neighborhood that are still in bloom, and the neighbors have three large apple trees that will bloom shortly. Then, hopefully, my flower bed will starting putting out flowers and there will be raspberry and boysenberry blossoms, and then peas and eventually peppers and tomatoes and all that.

I've done everything I can as a novice beekeeper. I hope that the queen is alright. I'll give them more food in a couple of days, and then next Friday or Saturday, weather depending, I'll take a look for brood. That's if everything indicates that I still have bees.

I should take some consolation in the fact that at the very least, I get to cross off another item from my goals list. In the meantime, all I can do is hope for the best.

Hive Stand

2011-04-06T13:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a pretty nice day, weather-wise. Sun wasn't in the forecast, but we had a lot of it, so I spent part of yesterday morning finishing up the hive stand. It holds me up just fine on either side, since I planned it to hold two hives.

So now the hive is all set. I'll just buy my bee supplies from Ruhl when I pick up the bees. I think for starters I can get away with just a veil and jacket, and a hive tool, not that I need one right away. I already have the spray bottle for the sugar syrup spray.

The next post on bees should be all about the installation.