These are our straight pipes.  The operation isn't as environmentally unfriendly as it sounds since the water only flows from our kitchen sink, the worst pollutants are a bit of dish soap and toothpaste, and there's no way any of it can run into the creek.  Still, the cesspool is unsightly, and Lucy likes to drink out of it, which we highly disapprove of.  Time for some mycoremediation!

This is a hunk of King Stropharia (aka Winecap) sawdust spawn.  When we put in our mushroom order this winter, I asked Mark if we could experiment with a five pound bag of this new species.  I told him how King Stropharia is great at filtering graywater and is also a food source for honeybees.  But Mark still seemed displeased by my order.  "Should I back off to two pounds?"I asked.  "Nope," Mark countered.  "Double it!  Double it!"

Just in case you're curious, ten pounds of King Stropharia sawdust spawn is enough to innoculate just over a cubic yard of wood chips.  I broke the spawn down into two pound sections so that I could innoculate several smaller beds.  First, I mounded up our fresh wood chips to a depth of about six inches, then I crumbled up the appropriate amount of sawdust spawn to put on top.  I covered the spawn with about an inch of additional woodchips to protect it from drying out, then set up the sprinkler and soaked the whole operation for a while.  I'll need to check every day for the next few weeks to make sure the mushroom beds stay damp, watering them as necessary.  Then there's no work involved until the mushrooms appear this summer.

In addition to our graywater filtration bed, I'm experimenting with four other locations.  Three are under the canopy of our young peach and nectarine trees, and the fourth is out in the open but in a very damp spot.  Hopefully the spawn will take hold in at least one bed so that next year we'll know what optimal King Stropharia habitat looks like.

 

Total cost on this home made golf cart dump box was just over 5 bucks thanks to using scrap wood from the old house.

It expands the back hauling capacity of the golf cart from 2 buckets to 7, with about 3 buckets worth in between the cracks.

Next up is a wooden rack to take advantage of some space up front.

The cottage garden arose naturally over the last half millenium as British peasants planted gardens around their small houses.  These were hard-working laborers who didn't have the time or energy to spare for mere prettiness, so they planted large vegetable, herb, and fruit gardens, interspersed with a few flowers.  The cottage garden traditionally held a pig sty, a chicken coop, and bee hives as well to round out the cottager's fare.

Around the end of the eighteenth centuries, these poor peasants were joined by the first wave of back-to-the-landers.  Members of the gentry began to idealize the cottage life and to create their own cottage gardens.  This is when the cottage garden began to veer toward prettiness for its own sake, with scads of flowers often replacing the original mixture of edible plants and animals.

In either case, though, cottage gardens were beautiful.  While the vegetable patch was usually planted in bare, straight rows, the rest of the garden consisted of plants pushed together until no soil could be seen between the leaves.  This informal clumping is the signature feature of the cottage garden and can also be seen in the hodge-podge of closely packed plants in Robert Hart's forest garden.

When it snowed the first four days of March, I started feeling like maybe we weren't getting spring this year.  But then came four days of brilliant sun, and our farm now looks completely different.

As I worked more buckets of stump dirt into the garden and planted greens, I felt like I was living in the climax of How the Grinch Stole Christmas:

Not only did my heart grow three sizes, I saw two species of butterflies out flitting about --- the Mourning Cloak I captured in pixels and either a Comma or Question Mark.  The bees were foraging in earnest, though I didn't take the time to hunt down their quarry.  Best yet, Mark got the golf cart all the way out to the parking area with just a bit of encouragement.  We're back in business!

 

Dropped off the rental chipper bright and early today in Kingsport which happens to be down the road from the Mulch store.

We bought 2 cubic yards of double ground, slightly aged mulch for 48 bucks.

Anna got a bit weak in the knees from her first handful and sniff not unlike the reaction you see when a wine expert gets his or her hands on a glass of 1943 Chateau Picard.

As you've probably surmised, I'm intrigued by traditional methods of gardening and farming.  In previous lunchtime series, I've explored Central American farming, Chinese farming, and tropical forest gardens from around the world.  This week I want to look at a gardening technique that is much less exotic --- British cottage gardening.

The Cottage Garden by Christopher Lloyd is a pretty and chatty book, perfect for flipping through when you're yearning for spring.  It's nearly a picture book, and doesn't have any in depth information, but the book is a helpful look at the tradition that helped give rise to Robert Hart's forest gardening.  Cottage gardening also has something to teach anyone who strives to be self-sufficient.

Wood chips make me chipper.  What can I say --- some women like roses, but I like mulch, even if it won't be properly aged until several months from now.

We spent most of the day Saturday over at our neighbors' helping them chip the biggest pile of saplings I've ever seen.  Sunday afternoon it was our turn.  One neighbor drove the chipper over to our place with his amazingly huge tractor, and then we chipped up a storm for about four hours before giving in to exhaustion.

Despite being pleased as punch about our wood chips, I have to admit that I think the chipper rental won't be an experiment we'll be repeating.  Once I put on my wrist braces, my carpal tunnel simmered down, but it was still an awfully wearing weekend for about as many chips as we could get for free if we hunt down the utility line guys.  Add in a few hours drive to pick up and drop off the chipper, and we might have been just as well off to buy mulch.

On the other hand, we did clear up some brushy edges that needed work, and I have my wood chip piles segregated into partially decomposed (for mulching with this year), fresh pine (for mulching the blueberries next year), and fresh box-elder (for planting mushrooms in.)  The control freak in me is well pleased.  And, look, the year's first crocus!!

This short video provides an accurate yet boring picture of how the rental chipper cuts a rug.

Our share ended up being 1/3 of the weekend time which worked out to be 65 dollars.

It was a great opportunity that would not have been possible without our neighbors' suggestion of sharing the time and the aid of their tractor to pull the thing all the way back here. Well worth waking up early tomorrow morning to drive it back to it's home in the big city.

I imagine this might be the closest thing we have to participating in an old fashioned barn raising which is too bad because this neighborly cooperation thing is a pretty darn good feeling at the end of the day.

The lettuce I planted a solid month ago in a cold frame is up at long last.  Usually, we would have been eating the February lettuce by now and would have planted a bed of March lettuce to eat next month.  But this abnormally cold winter has resulted in abnormally cold soil which sets our seeds back.

Luckily, I can tell that the ground temperatures are finally rising.  Not only is the lettuce up, but our water line has started thawing during the days --- more signs of spring!

On the bad news side, I've been overdoing it and my carpal tunnel is flaring up.  That means I don't sleep well, which means I'm grumpy and my head goes wonky during the day.  I apologize if nothing I write makes sense.

 
Last week's Arctic homesteading documentary really managed to stay with me and inspired a medium sized search for another similar type story.

That seems like all there is of the free stuff, but the Homestead National Monument of America just updated the movie that plays in their Museum. It's not online yet, but if you're in or near the Beatrice Nebraska zipcode you might want to plan a visit.

160 acres of land free for the taking sounds like a good deal, but I'm not sure if I would have gone for such a dream if I were alive back then. I guess it would depend on if there were any other options at the time.

While digging around in the stump dirt Thursday, I uncovered some found art.  Lucy must have buried a carcass in the base of the stump because my scrabbling fingers turned up tufts of fur and leg bones...and then this perfect skull.

I found a very useful key for identifying mammal skulls and soon discovered the skull's owner.  The answer is after the second picture for those who want to guess.



The first distinguishing feature is the large gap between the majority of the teeth and the incisors, which determines that the animal was either a rodent or a rabbit.  If you look closely below the big incisors at the front of the jaw, you'll notice two smaller teeth tucked back into the skull.  These peg teeth are used for grabbing or cutting food and identify my skull as a rabbit.

I find skulls endlessly fascinating and once had a collection, but eventually learned that collections bog me down.  So I gave this rabbit to our winesap apple tree as a source of calcium.

 

The occasional water line damage is to be expected when your wife is just starting to learn the finer points of 40 caliber marksmanship.

The final step of assessing your stream for microhydro is doing a bit of math to determine the creek's power.  I'm simplifying a bit here because you will lose some power due to friction as the water rubs up against the inside of your pipe, but this formula is good enough for estimating whether your creek is worth looking into further.

If you'd rather have your estimated energy output in kwh/month so that you can compare it to your electric bill, continue on to this formula:

So, it's finally time to see if our little creek passes the test.  She puts out 20 gpm of water and has a head of about 3 feet.  So:

Sadly, our little creek failed miserably --- that would be enough to keep the lights on in our house, but nothing more.  As a rule of thumb, you need either a large head or a large flow to make microhydro appealing, and our little creek had neither.

On the other hand, we have several other possibilities on our property that look more appealing.  If we were willing to pay a lot for a run of the river system, or to build a big dam, our primary creek would definitely provide all of our power.  On the cheaper side, it's possible that it would be worth our while to tap energy from the spring that comes out way up on the hill, although it does stop flowing during dry weather.

Finally, I'm curious whether there would be a way to make electricity from the water running off the barn roof if we installed gutters.  I envision using tanks as a storage system and just letting the water leak out slowly, rather than buying expensive (and environmentally unfriendly batteries.)  I estimate that nearly 4,000 gallons of water flow off the roof each month, but I guess that's only 0.09 gpm.  Back to the drawing board....

Every morning this week, I've woken up to a light coating of snow on the ground.  The snow cover gently melts off by lunchtime, meaning that the soil in the floodplain has been too wet to drive on since Tuesday.  As a result, we couldn't haul in loads of manure from our neighbor to fertilize the onion beds I need to plant this week.  What could I do?

The obvious solution is chicken manure, but onions like soil high in organic matter and chicken manure melts into the ground almost like chemical fertilizers.  Clearly, I needed humus.  But I wasn't keen on the idea of carrying heavy five gallon buckets a third of a mile from the parking area to the garden.

As I stood peering around me with furrowed brow, I noticed Lucy digging frantically around a tree stump.  Four years ago, we cut down young forest in the mule garden, but we left the stumps in place since I refused to let Mark buy dynamite and blow them out.  We've been mowing and working around them ever since.

I'd forgotten about the stumps, but Lucy hadn't.  She was hard at work rooting out a shrew at one stump's base.  If I'd been in a comic strip, a light would have gone off above my head at that moment.  "Lucy digs for shrews, shrews love earthworms, earthworms love compost, and I want compost..."

I pushed Lucy aside, and ran my fingers through the rich stump dirt that had been sitting right in front of my face.  Over the last four years, turkey tail fungi had colonized the stumps and broken the cellulose down into compost.  By digging around at the soil line, I quickly came up with four beautiful bucket-loads of the soft, fluffy compost.  Thanks, Lucy!

 

We decided to make the new home made brood coop big enough to handle the little styrofoam incubator for future chick operations.


The trick will be to monitor the temperature over the weekend to see if any adjustments need to be made.

I used a few scrap pieces of 2x4 to secure up each corner, which worked nicely as a support for both Avian Aqua Misers.

The other important measurement to take when assessing your creek for microhydro is pressure or head.  The two terms are different measurements of the same thing --- potential energy just waiting to turn your turbine and make some power.

Many homesteaders pipe water from a spring down to their house, and the energy in the water line can be tapped for microhydro power.  To measure pressure directly in such a situation, install a gressure gauge in the line and read the dial.

If you don't already have a water line in place, you're better off calculating a stream's head rather than measuring pressure directly.  Head is simply the change in elevation between the highest and lowest points of a stream, and it can be measured in several different ways.  If you have a gps or watch with an altimeter, this can give a rough measurement of the respective elevations, but I found the water level method (outlined in the embedded video) to be the simplest.

To measure head using the water level method, find an inflexible length of pipe and start at the stream's highest point.  Completely submerge the pipe, then slowly lift the downhill end out of the water.  Creek water will flow out of the pipe's downhill end until it is raised level with the uphill end, at which point water will stop flowing.  Measure the vertical distance between the downhill end of the pipe and the ground and you have the change in elevation between the two points.  Now scoot the pipe downstream until the uphill end rests where the downhill end used to be, and repeat your measurement.  Lather, rinse, and repeat until you run out of shampoo...er, reach the end of the stream.  The head is the sum of all of the elevations measured along the creek's length.

The downfall of our property's creeks is their valley-bottom flatness.  Our small creek has the largest head, and even there the total change in elevation is barely over three feet.  Granted, microhydro applications can work with as little as 2 feet of head, but the setup becomes much pricier if your head is less than 50 feet.

Last year, a couple of friends teamed up and bought us a dozen beautiful blueberry plants in honor of our wedding.  We were sorely unprepared, so we only managed to whack down box-elders and open up the canopy, then roll the logs out of the way and plant the bushes in new ground.  This oversight caused a lot of problems since I couldn't really get the lawnmower around the logs, and by the middle of the summer, our blueberry patch had turned into a weed patch.  Luckily, the blueberries survived the neglect, and I promised them a more weeded existence this year.

We spent the morning Wednesday clearing up the tree carcasses in the blueberry patch to make this year's mowing much easier.  Mark's hard work with the chainsaw netted us half a cord of firewood, now drying in the woodshed, and my branch piles are growing too.  Our chipper rental date is tentatively set for this weekend, but Lucy didn't want to wait --- she did her part to increase the farm's wood chip supply while we cleared the brush.

 

There's a really good wiki-how that sums up what you need to know about sharpening your chainsaw with a hand file.

It seems the experts suggest a machine grinding at a shop after every 5 hand sharpening episodes.

You can buy small attachments for a Dremel to make the job easier, but these little hand files are a lot cheaper.

Despite wanting to consider energy efficiency first, I was still curious whether the copious water on our farm would be a good fit for microhydro power.  The first step in assessing a site for microhydro is to measure stream flow.  Scott Davis suggests two easy methods.

The weir method is used in large streams or rivers.  The water flows through a notched weir that forms a waterfall.  You can use various tables or formulas to determine the flow rate of your creek based on the width and depth of the water in the weir's notch.  I didn't feel like constructing a weir, so I moved on to option 2.

The container method consists of finding a spot where all of the creek's water runs through a culvert or pipe, then sticking a five gallon bucket underneath.  Time how long it takes for your bucket to fill up, then use the following formula to determine your stream's flow:

As you can see in the embedded video, I found a spot where a huge root mass had channeled all of our smaller creek's water into a waterfall, so decided to try out the container method of estimating stream flow.  I couldn't fit a five gallon bucket under the waterfall, but a one gallon cook pot slipped right in between the roots and filled up in 3 seconds.  Our flow in that creek is approximately:

Our smallest creek's flow is pretty low, but is definitely within the realm of microhydro power.  In fact, Scott Davis notes that you can get power from streams running as slowly as 2 gpm (gallons per minute.)

Next week, the cuteness quotient of the Walden Effect will be rising considerably.  We ordered 16 chicks as the first step in solving our chicken reproduction problem.  The goal is to start a self-sustaining flock in a forest pasture --- which I'll be explaining in much greater depth next week on our chicken blog.

After a great deal of research, we settled on the Dark Cornish as this year's experimental chicken breed.  Unlike the white, waddly Cornish Cross chickens that share their name (and a bit of their genetics), Dark Cornish chickens are wiley and nearly feral in their ability to sustain themselves on pasture.  They are also very good at avoiding predators, and one blog even suggested that Dark Cornishes can kill a marauding fox!

The only disadvantage of the Dark Cornish is that the chickens take about twenty weeks to reach cooking size, far longer than most other broilers.  But I've read that their flavor more than makes up for the wait.  If our forest pasture experiment works out, feed costs won't be an issue, so we're excited to give the new system a shot.

      Video credit goes to Anna for capturing this 38 second driveway moment.

Power usage numbers were the first part of Microhydro that caught my attention.  Scott Davis considers a system rated at 50 to 100 continuous watts to be the bare essentials level (running lights and small appliances).  This equates to only 35 to 70 kilowatt-hours per month!  The amount of juice put out by even the so-called modern conveniences level seems inconceivably low at 75 to 125 kwh/month.

For comparison's sake, the average American household uses 936 kwh/month.  During our lowest energy month ever (this past June), we came in at 270 kwh.  Running a household on 75 kwh/month seems almost inconceivable to me.

But Scott Davis makes the excellent point that artificially low electricity prices in North America have led to extremely wasteful behavior.  Specifically, he notes that electricity should never be used for making heat --- since you lose a lot of power every time you convert energy from one form to another, burning coal to make electricity to make heat is a bad idea.

His example household that runs all of the modern conveniences on microhydro deletes any heating appliances from the mix.  Clothes driers, of course, are replaced by the good old solar clothesline.  Rooms are heated with wood or passive solar while water is heated with solar hot water heaters in the summer and coils around the wood stove in the winter.  Finally, cooking is done on propane (or, I would add, on a rocket stove.)

As always, the best and cheapest way to save energy is to become more efficient, so I think we'll do some basic efficiency tricks before saving up for an alternative energy system.  Our biggest energy hogs are clearly our electric stove (which heats our water as well as cooks our dinners) and our back-up space heaters, so these seem like a good place to start.

Painters make conscious choices about their pictures' edges because the edges play a large role in the painting's impact.  Ecologists know that edges promote a diversity of species, more than can be found in either habitat which the edge joins.

I've been pondering edges as I whack back encroaching Japanese honeysuckle, sassafras saplings, and brambles along the boundary of our garden.  I've noticed that my vegetables are sensitive to even the slightest bit of shade, and that the boundary beds closest to the thicket produce about half as many vegetables as do plants in more interior beds.  These brushy edges also delight the deer, who feel safer encroaching if they can retreat back out of sight in just a few bounds.

Over the last few years, we've been beating back the edges, first clipping the woody plants, then running the chicken tractors across them, and finally beginning to mow them into a semblance of a lawn.  I don't believe in lawns for prettiness sake, but I do find them very useful as a way to keep the forest edges from encroaching on our garden, and the mixed herb pasture keeps our chickens happy.

 

    Each round of gravel shoveling yields a few improvements on our technique.

Microhydro: Clean Power From Water by Scott Davis is written at a sixth grade reading level...and that's a good thing.  I'm far from ready for an installation guide; instead, I just wanted to know if microhydro is feasible on our farm.

Although most people with an interest in alternative energy go straight to solar cells, microhydro can be a much more economical option if your terrain is right.  I've read estimates suggesting that consumer-level microhydro systems are between 5 and 40 times as cost effective as photovoltaic systems, in large part because water is much less intermittent than the sun so you don't need as many batteries.

Scott Davis divides microhydro systems into five levels, only two of which are of interest to me.  The bare essentials level will run lights and small appliances (like a microwave, radio, telephone, blender, stereo, and laptop) while the modern conveniences level adds in efficient refrigerators, freezers, and well pumps.  A microhydro system running the bare essentials can be put together for as low as $2,000 (or possibly even less if you scrounge some parts) while the modern conveniences level can cost two to three times that much.  Finally, an alternative energy source that wouldn't put us into debt!

I amused myself Sunday morning with a sudoku puzzle --- figuring out which beds each crop will grow in this year.  The process is actually quite fun, with three axes to consider --- soil depth, amount of sun, and plant family over the last three years.  As an example, I wanted carrots to grow in an area with deep soil, where carrots and parsley hadn't grown lately, with any kind of sun exposure.  In contrast, my peas don't mind thinner soil, but I want them in one of the sunniest spots since I plant them so early, and of course the bed can't have hosted peas, beans, or peanuts lately.

The puzzle was engrossing and fun, but I quickly realized that we don't have enough beds in rotation to plant all of the veggies I hope to grow this year.  Two years ago, I was working for a non-profit, trying to keep the garden going between writing grants and attending meetings.  I was so stressed out, that when I planned last year's garden, I cut out nearly a quarter of the growing area.  In farmer speak, I let those areas go fallow; in Anna speak, the weeds grew up.

The downside of last year's smaller garden is that we didn't grow quite enough vegetables to make it through this winter.  We'll probably have to buy some veggies in March and April, which is an unpleasant surprise since we we haven't bought vegetables (beyond onions and potatoes) in years.  On the upside, I managed to keep the beds that were in rotation last year well weeded and mulched and started to cut down on the awful weed population that grew up during my stressed out, non-profit year.  Overall, a year of gardening smaller made sense and was an asset to the farm (and my sanity.)

Even though I advocate no-till farming, I never manage to put down a sheet mulch a year in advance to start new  beds (or re-start fallow ones.)  So, I'm back to a bit of digging to delete the weeds from last year's fallow beds.  I like to plant potatoes in these spots, since the tubers necessitate a second round of digging in the fall, ensuring that few deep-rooted weeds survive the renovation year.

On Sunday, I dug up a few of the beds, just spading the soil enough that the chickens could get a foothold, then watched as our feathered friends went to town scratching up the soil.  After a few days of chicken scratching (and fertilizing), I'll rake the beds to pull out any big root masses, mound the soil back up, and cover the renovated beds with a heavy leaf mulch.  This method has worked very well in the past, as long as I plant the potatoes on raised mounds --- last year I flubbed by putting the seed potatoes below the original ground level and watched them rot in our wet soil.  Hopefully this fall, I'll have delicious potatoes and some newly weed-free beds.

 

If you enjoyed yesterday's documentary on Arctic homesteading then you will most likely appreciate how Robert Long and his family get by homesteading in the New Zealand bush.

It's a nice short video which takes time to interview the 13 and 16 year old kids and show how they feel about growing up in such a remote and beautiful setting.

We have a glorious moat between where we park the cars and our trailer.  There's the creek, of course, but also a third of a mile of woods --- far enough that we usually can't hear any road noise and never get trick-or-treaters or uninvited visitors.

Even when the golf cart can't make the trip and I'm stuck hauling in big sheets of plywood by hand, I never wish we lived closer to the road.  In fact, if given a choice, I'd rather be a bit more isolated --- we can actually see one neighbor's light if we stand in just the right spot in the yard during the winter.

When we come home from the outside world, the ten minute walk back to the trailer is decompression time, returning us to the present and reconnecting with nature.  I see wood ducks and great blue herons along the creek and check out tracks in the mud.  By the time I get home, my head is filled with beauty, not cars and stores.

 

Heimo Korth grew up in the suburbs of Wisconsin and when he was 18 wrote a letter to a random trapper in Alaska looking for work. He got a job as a packer, learned to love the wilderness of Alaska, and has been there ever since homesteading with his Eskimo wife Edna.

A small 3 man film crew spent 10 days with Heimo and Edna to get a feel for what it's like to be one of the last full time homesteaders in the 19 million acres of prime boreal forest that is now known as the Arctic National Wilderness Refuge.

It's an excellent documentary you can watch for free here that provides a glimpse into this lifestyle and climate. The producers don't hold much back and you learn first hand how to snare and skin a rabbit without using a knife. I really liked Heimo and Edna and felt like I was visiting them with this film. Makes our recent bout with a colder than normal winter look like a day in the park compared to the struggles they've got to go through to get by.

My mushroom identification skills are sub-par, but I know for a fact that this little guy shouldn't be growing out of the side of one of my shiitake logs.  I'm pretty sure it's a turkey tail, which is a medicinal species and a useful decomposer of fallen logs.  Unfortunately, the turkey tail's presence means that the shiitake spawn probably lost the battle for that log.

We're still relatively new to mushroom cultivation, and losing a few logs to invasions of wild fungi is pretty normal.  Nevertheless, we'll take some steps to keep our other logs turkey-tail-free.  It's good for our logs to be close to the ground for humidity, but we've propped them up on metal pipes to prevent direct contact.  After all, as I learned this winter, the soil is jam-packed with fungi.

I made the mistake of storing my hearing protection in the barn after a round of chainsawing a few months ago.

Not only did a team of mice shred the foam padding but it looks like they took out a long term lease and moved right in.

The last forest garden tidbit that caught my fancy was Robert Hart's Bouche-Thomas hedges.  He planted apple trees diagonally so that they grew into each other and created a rigid fence like the one shown in the drawing here.  Since I'm currently in the research stage of including hedges on our property, these looked intriguing.

Overall, I found Robert Hart's Forest Gardening to be a bit disappointing since it was low on how to information and on plants suitable for North American climates.  His book isn't a reference work so much as it is a dreamer's manifesto.  But it often takes a dreamer to bring an idea like forest gardening to a temperate climate.  The next generation of forest gardeners are still working to make his dream a reality.

We played hookie Thursday morning to help our movie star neighbor film an audition tape.  I was a bit daunted by the idea of reading lines with him, but was thrilled once I learned I didn't have to be on camera...and found out that we'd get some of his homegrown honey as payment.  I forgot to mention that the beeswax we used to seal over our oyster mushroom plugs also came from this same neighbor, traded for a dozen eggs.  It sure is fun to barter with like-minded souls!

When the camera stopped running, I drooled over our neighbor's Meyer lemon tree.  I posted a picture of it last year, loaded down with over a hundred fruits, and this year the tree felt like it was twice as big.  I hesitate to call it a "dwarf" anymore, although the lemon isn't tall --- just six feet wide.  "My tree is so big, I can't move it outside any more," our neighbor complained.  "That's part of the reason I want to add a room to the house, to give my lemon space to grow.  I feel like I'm married to a tree," the bachelor finished, in mock despair.

"I can take it off your hands if you want," Mark said, ever helpful.  "I'd trade my wife for two of them."

Okay, so Mark only mentioned the part about two trees when I got indignant at only being worth as much as one lemon plant.  Luckily for us both, our neighbor only had the one tree on hand, so we decided to beef up our own lemon tree's existence instead.  Our neighbor attributes a lot of his success to the huge pot his lemon tree is growing in --- it looks to be about ten gallons in capacity.  We'll have to plan on hunting down a couple of mammoth pots to give our citrus room to grow.

I finally got around to washing the mushroom wax pot last night and had some trouble.

It seems like a small amount of wax somehow leaked out and bonded with the teflon.

Next year I'll use stainless steel instead of teflon and avoid this sticky problem.

Robert Hart created mounds in his garden just like the mounds I built for my hazel trees.  He layered branches and leaves on the ground, then topped them with turf (grass-side down), compost, and soil.  He considered the mounds a method of increasing his gardening space, with the improved drainage being secondary.  According to Hart, mound-gardening originated in China and was also very popular in Germany, where it was known as Hugelkulturin.

Hart also created little bog gardens, laying down a sheet of plastic and topping it with peat.  The bog gardens allowed him to extend his repertoire to include cranberries and other bog plants.  In fact, varied habitats could be considered one of the themes of his overall garden, which contained the forest garden, bog garden, annual vegetable garden, and even a little pond.  Intuitively, Hart had latched onto an idea that every ecologist understands --- areas with multiple habitats can support more species than less diverse areas.

As you've probably figured out, we've put a halt to our building for now.  We're not quite done, but we need a few days over 50 degrees to allow us to seal in the skylight so that we can finish the roof, then the ceiling, then the floor.  And we need the same temperatures to caulk around the windows, paint the outside walls, and then paint the roof.  But that's all okay, because there's a lot to be done outdoors before the growing season really gets into full swing.

Wednesday, Mark cut down a lot of red cedar trees while I stood around and looked pretty (aka watched to make sure the trees were falling the right way.)  We've had trouble getting our apple trees to grow since they keep coming down with cedar apple rust.  The solution seems to be cutting down nearby cedar trees, which serve as an alternate host for the fungus, so we took out the ones closest to our orchard and will take out more if necessary in later years.  We ended up girdling some of the ones closest to the power line rather than risking losing our electricity --- I hope the girdled trees die quickly and don't grow over the wounds.

I'm afraid that opening up the canopy over there has made me think big again.  I know that we don't have the manpower to expand our garden area now, but I can't help wondering if we should figure out what we'd like to use that space for and do some preliminary work to keep it from growing up in brambles and honeysuckle.  I could seed it in clover and turn it into spillover chicken tractor pasture, or plant some fodder trees and figure it'll someday be part of a pig or goat pasture.  I could take advantage of the sparse canopy of tulip-trees left behind and fill the space with fruiting shrubs like hazels or gooseberries, or could plant black locusts and sourwood in the understory for bees.  So much potential, and so little time left before the growing season will make its own decisions about the disturbed ground!

 

I got this cedar tree notched and ready to come down when a feeling came over me that it might still fall the other way, which would take down one of the power lines and leave us in the dark.

Nothing our little 4 ton hand winch can't handle. We just used the ladder to secure a cable high up on the tree in question, secured the other end to another tree and cranked it in a way that left it no choice but to fall away from the electricity.

Robert Hart began his adventures in forest gardening as a plain old back-to-the-lander like us.  He had a twenty acre farm in England, most of which was pasture.  There he ran poultry, goats, sheep, cattle, and bees, but he soon found the inevitable slaughter involved in livestock-rearing to be too much and became a vegan.

Hart's forest garden was a replacement for the food he had once gotten from his livestock.  He focused on a one acre tract beside his house and began planting.  About an eighth of the garden was an old orchard, full of apples, pears, and damsons (plum-like fruits), while the rest of the area was originally a traditional vegetable garden.  Hart began planting herbs and black currants in the understory of the orchard, mulching heavily with with straw, compost, and grass clippings in the spring and early winter.  He quickly realized that the combination of mulch and perennials made the forest garden much simpler to keep up than the traditional vegetable garden, though he noted that he would occasionally have to go on a "crawl-and-claw expedition through the undergrowth" to weed.

Like traditional forest gardeners in the tropics, Hart maintained sun-loving plants in a different part of the garden.  But he was able to grow a surprising amount of food under and amid his trees --- masses of mints and other herbs, his signature black currants (one of the few temperate plants that fruits exuberantly in the shade), and a host of wild and semi-wild vegetables like dandelions, nettles, and chicory.  He also grew patches of osier and willow that he allowed his neighbors to coppice for use in basket-making.

I should have given our honeybees credit for more good sense this weekend.  I thought the bees were out scouting the woods for witch-hazel, but now I suspect they were instead out for the first real spring flowers.

Monday, I stumbled across this speedwell blooming in the yard.  Even though it's an alien invasive species, I was pleased as punch --- this blog post had about fifty exclamation marks in it before I toned the punctuation down.

The little blue flowers were closed up from the cold rain, but had clearly been in full bloom over the weekend.  Since blue is one of the honeybees' favorite colors, I think it's highly likely that our workers found the patch and sucked it dry.  No wonder they were so visible on Sunday --- our bees probably found spring's first flowers long before I did.

 

We finished up the new oyster mushroom logs today and carefully moved the old logs to the new station. This time we're using two rows of metal pipe to keep the logs off the ground, which helps to keep out unwanted fungus that's not as edible.

Credit goes to Chest of Books.com for the lovely image next to our picture.

One of my favorite parts of Forest Gardening was its in depth description of several tropical forest gardens.  In locations as diverse as India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Nigeria, Central America, and the Amazon, people have been creating forest gardens for at least a thousand years.

I've described Central American forest gardens and Amazonian forest gardens in the past, and all of the tropical forest gardens seem to be pretty similar.  These forest gardens are usually small --- less than two acres in size --- and are located around the farmers' homesteads where they serve as a kitchen garden.  The many-layered forest includes fruit and nut trees as well as plants that produce timber, fuel, medicines, and other products.  In many cases, some of the trees are cash crops --- coffee, cinnamon, and nutmeg in Sumatra, bananas and coffee in Tanzania.  Most forest garden owners had plots out in the open where they planted cereals and other sun-loving vegetables to supplement their forest garden food.

Forest gardens are often in mountainous areas where tilling the soil would lead to erosion and soil loss.  In fact, a more modern incarnation of forest gardening was developed specifically for this erosion-reducing purpose.  In the 1970s and 80s in Nigeria, B.T. Kang developed a system called alley cropping that consisted of growing cereals and vegetables in strips between leguminous trees on hillsides.  The trees prevented erosion and fertilized the crops by fixing nitrogen.  The trees were also pruned heavily, with the cut branches used as mulch in the annual garden and as garden stakes, firewood, and fodder.

Why was forest gardening so widespread in the tropics but not in temperate regions?  The fact is that many useful tropical plants will fruit in the semi-shaded understory, while most temperate fruits need full sun to grow.  In addition, the light in the tropics is intense enough to enable tropical forest gardeners to grow traditional vegetables like beans, tomatoes, and corn in the understory of an open forest, another element that won't work here.  Developing a temperate forest gardening system was the challenge that Robert Hart and later pioneers faced.

Oyster mushrooms are a lot less picky than shiitakes, so you can put them in the easier to come by deciduous softwoods rather than in the more difficult to come by hardwoods.  Last year, though, we had a few extra sycamore logs leftover from shiitake inoculation, so we went ahead and inoculated sycamore logs with our oyster spawn too.  As a result, this is the first year we're putting oyster mushroom plugs into our ubiquitous box-elders.

You might have wondered why Mark was cutting down fresh trees on Friday when our woods is full of deadfall from the December storm.  We could have used some of that deadfall for our mushroom logs, but it wouldn't have worked as well.  When the trees tumbled down in December, they were dormant and were storing all of their sugars in their roots --- the deadfall that resulted was very low quality from a mushroom point of view since it lacked any sugars at all.  Now that spring is coming, trees are starting to push nutrient-filled sap up to the branches, a process that maple syrupers take advantage of to fill their buckets with maple sap.  By waiting to cut down fresh trees in late February, we're giving our spawn a higher quality substrate, full of sugars to help them grow quickly.

Our box-elder logs were completely coated with a dense mixture of mosses and lichens, unlike last year's sycamores which were bare-barked.  I can't seem to figure out whether these epiphytes will help or harm the oyster mushrooms' growth, but they sure are pretty!

 

I upgraded the beer can from last year's wax melting kit with this bigger and stronger tin can. I also improved the heating process by using a hot water bath as seen in the photo. This allowed for much better control and a safer place to rest the can while we drilled the next round of holes for the new oyster mushroom logs.

Although Edible Forest Gardens is truly the book to read for North American forest gardening information, I'm always intrigued to go back to the primary sources.  So I checked out Forest Gardening: Creating an Edible Landscape by Robert Hart, the father of temperate forest gardening.

I have to admit that I was sorely disappointed by about two thirds of the book.  Robert Hart was clearly a dreamer, a poet, and a philosopher, not a scientist.  His book jumps around through a discussion of how important it is to eat your vegetables, how ley lines can impact your garden, and through several similar topics.  But in the midst of all that, he also documents his journey toward creating the first temperate forest garden.  As I suspected, there were some fascinating ideas waiting for me in the book --- we all have something to learn from this forest gardening pioneer.

Stay tuned for more information in this week's lunchtime series.  Meanwhile, if you haven't already, check out our series about the roots of permaculture and our how to series about planning a forest garden.

When I last checked on our honeybees, a little over a month ago, I was a bit concerned that one hive might not have enough honey to make it through the winter.  The one I worried about was a healthy hive, but I'd made the mistake of combining a very weak hive with the stronger hive that fall, and I think the double dose of workers ate through their honey stores very rapidly.  I knew that our strongest hive had honey to spare, but I decided to wait until February to do anything about it.

February came in like a lion, and just kept roaring for most of the month.  The weather was far too chilly to get into that hive, and I started worrying (and having nightmares about starving bees.)  So when Friday warmed up, the bees were at the top of my agenda.

I opened up the hives, and was shocked to see that all three seemed to have nearly as much honey as had been there a month ago!  I can't quite figure out why they ate masses of honey in December, but very little in January --- maybe they finally killed off their summer workers in the interim and had fewer mouths to feed?  Maybe the sugar water they were still evaporating from my late fall feedings had been turned into honey?  No matter --- I needn't have been concerned.  Just to keep the nightmares at bay, I moved a few frames of honey from the strongest hives to the other two hives, even though now I didn't think they would need it.

Meanwhile, the bees were so pleased by the weekend's balmy weather that they went out foraging.  They kept coming by and visiting with me as I played in the woods --- one buzzed around me at the ford (a fourth of a mile from the hives) and another landed on my notebook as I read in the woods Saturday (maybe even a little further away, on the top of a tall hill.)  Granted, my visitors could have been wild bees, but they seemed extraordinarily tame, and almost interested in me.  Or maybe it was the smell of recently peeled orange on my hands....  I wonder if they found the witch hazel blooming on the north side of the property and had a winter snack?

 

Just flipping your mushroom log soaking pool over is not enough to winterize it. This one was crushed by the weight of falling snow during the blizzard of 2009. Next year we'll hang it up somewhere in the barn.

Did you know that checking on your honeybees in the winter can be dangerous?

I tossed together this video of Friday's events to prove it.

 

Project oyster mushroom logs step 1. Cut down small, fresh, box elder trees to be carried to the new soaking station.

Tradition dictates that we plant our first peas on Valentine's Day, but the weather thought otherwise --- it snowed on Valentine's Day, and on the four days thereafter.   We finally got lucky on Friday, with a stunning day that sent us scurrying in five directions to take advantage of the warmth.

I had soaked my snow pea seeds the night before, so they were plump and ready to hit the ground running.  Without fungicidal coatings (that pink stuff on some storebought seeds), the earliest spring peas are in a footrace, trying to sprout and grow before bad fungi in the cold, wet soil causes them to rot.  Since it's supposed to be a stunning weekend (temperature in the fifties!!!), I've got high hopes for my peas.

As always, I soaked a few peas too many, so I tossed them to our four year old hens.  These girls are still laying, probably because I give them treats now and then like these plump peas or last week's chickweed.  They gobbled down my excess seeds in seconds and then stood and stared up at me --- more please?

 

It was a good day to take advantage of the nice weather and do some driveway repair.

Push with the rake, shovel, rake some more and repeat several times.

Joe Dominguez, one of the authors of Your Money or Your Life, retired at age 31 using the formula he outlines in the book.  After figuring out the true value of his time and minimizing his spending, he invested his savings in long term U.S. treasury bonds and lived off the proceeds.  Unfortunately, I don't know that his success is replicable any longer --- treasury bonds are currently only paying half of what they paid at that time, and I haven't stumbled across any other types of investments that are as safe and stable while paying such a high rate of return.  I feel like it would take a very determined person to save up a quarter to a half a million dollars of investment capital and then manage to disentangle their souls from the rat race.

While discussing the book's anticlimactic ending with Mark, he pointed out that we've really reached the same point using our chicken waterer microbusiness.  With just a few hours of work per week, we make enough money to pay all of our bills and get to spend the rest of our time pursuing our dreams.  Basically, we're retired.

If you're still working a full time job and dreaming that some day you can retire and live your dream, now's the time to rethink your priorities.  You only live once, so you might as well enjoy your hours here on earth!  Here are a few more resources to speed you on your way:

• Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin --- a bit out of date now, twenty years after being published, but most of the book is still right on track.  (There's also a new edition that might be a bit more up-to-date.)
  
• Financial Integrity website --- the up-to-date and free version of the above.
• The Ultimate Cheapskate's Roadmap to True Riches by Jeff Yeager --- if you need some more help learning to save money, this book should be on your reading list.
• The Four-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss --- this is the book that jump-started us on our own quest to leaving the rat race.
• Microbusiness Independence by Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton --- This is our own personal story of how we created a small business that pays all of our bills in just a few hours a week, along with lots of tips to replicate our success.

Last fall, I raked leaves out of the woods to cover nearly all of my vegetable garden beds.  My hope was that the leaves would keep weeds from growing over the winter, expedite spring planting, and also rot down to fertilize the soil.

Those leaves seem to have done their weed-killing job admirably.  The photo above is a bed which didn't end up getting mulched --- it's now completely covered with dead-nettles and chickweed.  The bed below was mulched --- notice the bare soil where I raked the leaves back to give me a spot to plant poppies.  The soil under the leaves was also unfrozen and I glimpsed a spider scurrying around, which is in stark contrast to the lifeless permafrost atop the un-mulched bed.

I was a bit disappointed to see that the leaves hadn't decomposed much at all, but in a way that's a good thing.  We'll add manure before planting to boost the fertility of the soil, and will push leaves back around plants once they come up to keep the weeds at bay.  I can already feel the year's weeding being cut in half.

 

We decided to go with these peel off and stick linoleum pieces for the floor of the home made storage building. They turned out to be a cheaper option compared to getting a roll of the stuff and I'm thinking a bit easier for amateurs like us. It was a smooth operation and we had most of it done before we knew what hit us.

Many people chase the almighty dollar because they think having more money will make them happy.  But scads of scientific studies have shown that people with more money are no happier than those with less (once you pass over the lowest income hurdle of having food and shelter, that is.)

In fact, affluence is a relative thing --- if you hang out with folks who barely have two pennies to rub together and you've got two nickels, you're going to feel rich.  On the other hand, if you hang out with someone who owns his own island, you're going to feel poor despite having a huge house and a fancy car and your own yacht.

The American dream tells us that we'll really be happy once we've got all of the modern conveniences that our neighbors have, but most of the time when you try to have it all, you just end up with lots of little bits of nothing.  You work so many hours that you barely enjoy your McMansion, then you're putting in overtime to save for your kids' college education and end up feeling like you're living with strangers.  How can you break out of the cycle of measuring yourself against your neighbors and always wanting more?

The trick is to learn the value of "enough" by recalibrating your financial sensors.  Throw away your television and stop listening to commercial radio --- those ads that you think you can ignore are really seeping into your dreams.  Even movies are nefarious --- have  you noticed that most movie characters have a fancy new car and all of the modern conveniences?  By watching, you're telling your psyche that these movie stars are who you want to measure yourself by.

If you can disentangle yourself from the mainstream media, chances are you'll stop wanting so much stuff.  Mark and I are barely middle class by most people's standards, but when people ask me what I want that I don't have, I honestly can't think of anything.  (Except more mulch, of course...)  By learning that "enough" for us costs very little money, we were able to quit our jobs and devote most of our time to the things we really enjoy.

I think that people who achieve financial independence and true happiness are marked by only one thing --- they can figure out when they have enough.  Are you always in search of the next raise, a new car, or a fancy gadget to make you happy?  Or do you realize that the things you really value in life are time with friends and family, time to explore your hobbies, and time to change the world?  If the latter, then you have learned the value of enough and can skip most of the Financial Integrity process --- you're there!

Hey you two...what's your secret to a smooth working team?
George W-Texas
 

Thanks for the question George. It's really hard to pin down just one thing that makes two people work well together. We try to figure out which task is best suited for our skill set. For example. Anna is really good with math, so she is in charge of measuring for this project. I've got a little more upper body strength so I usually do most of the heavy lifting.

Last but not least you should both agree on a time to stop working. A sure way to create extra friction is to have one person thinking it's 10 minutes till the end of the day and the other wanting to push through till sunset. Anna and I usually wind down around 4pm and shift into an evening chore routine.

Holding up the plywood for the ceiling is a challenge to say the least.

I eventually adopted a technique of using the upper portion of my arm along with the top of my head to hold each piece in place.


I knew having a hard head would come in handy one of these days and that day was today.

The next step in the Financial Integrity process is to keep track of all of your expenditures for a month.  Now sum up the expenditures in categories and divide each one by your real hourly wage.

This can be a bit of an eye-opening experience for many people because money is an abstract for most of us.  We often don't realize that the $500 plasma screen TV we bought on a whim last month actually represented 45 hours of work --- that's a solid week of full time employment!  This exercise alone is probably enough to tempt many people to cut back drasticly on their spending.

On the other hand, dyed in the wool skinflints like me sometimes come to another realization.  I simply don't believe in spending money on non-essentials (something Mark has worked hard to train me out of), and this step helped me realize that a few luxuries really are worth it.  I defnitely don't mind working for an hour to get to enjoy a meal with my family at a restaurant now and then, or to get a whole month of entertainment through netflix.  After reading Your Money or Your Life, I finally made peace with spending a bit of money on luxuries.

Whichever end of the spendthrift/skinflint spectrum you stand on, this step is definitely worth your while.  Try it out and watch your spending habits change.

The couple that works together, stays together...or pitches a huge hissy fit and gets a divorce.  Mark and I don't celebrate Valentine's Day, but we do spend every day living in each others' pockets, usually very amicably.  In fact, one of my favorite parts of the day is the time I spend working on a project with Mark.

Even though I grew up with a handy father, I somehow missed most of the lessons on basic tool-use.  So Mark has taught me how to use a power drill, a miter saw, and so forth.  Monday, I was putting up the last bit of wall paneling, this time around the newly re-wired electric outlets.  How, I wondered, does one cut a small rectangle out of a piece of plywood with a jig saw?

I know this is old hat to those of you who dabble (or work) in construction, but I found this technique elegant and captivating.  First, Mark used a drill to start a hole in the plywood.  Then he cut along the line, curving around each corner so that he could keep cutting until an oval section fell out.  Third, he went back and cut the corners out --- the pictures hopefully make this process clearer than my description.  It's always a good day when I learn something new!

I would like to express some appreciation here for all the comments lately, especially the tips given for the home made door frame.

I thought adding another stop plate to the hinge side was a great idea and jumped on it today while at the same time deleting the L bracket, which is no longer needed since the liquid nails has finished curing.

Would I build another door frame from scratch in the future? Yeah...it wasn't all that bad and the finished product will meet our needs for years to come.

Did you know that your job may be costing you money?  Step 2 of Your Money or Your Life involves calculating your real hourly wage, which is a very powerful exercise for folks who thought the $50 per hour they're supposedly making really ends up in their pockets.

To follow along at home, first make some notes on how long you really spend working.  Start with those 40 hours in your cubicle, of course, but then add in the hour you spend grooming, your daily commute, and the extra hour you vegetate in front of the tube to wind down after work.  Do you have to study or take classes to stay up to date in your field?  Do you end up spending a week in bed because you're so run down from work that you catch the flu?  Add it all up!

Next, add up all of your work-related expenses.  These include the gas and upkeep on your car, those fancy duds you wear to the office, every meal or $5 cup of coffee you consume away from home because you're too busy to pack a lunch, the six pack of beer you drink while winding down in front of the tube, the massages you pay for to wipe out the work stress, and the money you give other people to do your household chores since you don't have time (daycare, house cleaning, lawn upkeep, etc.)  Don't forget to include your taxes. 

Finally, use the formula below to figure our your real hourly wage.

The example at the top of the post from the Financial Integrity website shows how someone who thought she was making $48 per hour was really making $25.57.  The book includes someone who thought he was making $11 per hour who was actually making $4.  Without too much of a stretch of the imagination, I can see how working could send some job slaves into debt!

Luckily, I've very rarely had a real job, but when I did I could clearly see that the extra job-related time and money was a trap.  If you're working a real job, I encourage you to add it all up and figure out your true hourly wage.  Would you have accepted that job if you'd realized you were only making $7 per hour?

My first attempt at home mushroom cultivation involved morels.  It was a dismal failure, although I'd like to try again this year with all of the new tricks I learned during my oyster mushroom propagation semi-success.  Meanwhile, Mark talked me into adding a few morel plugs to this year's spawn order.  The spawn arrived this weekend, and I quickly set out to plant the morels.

The factsheet that came with our order made planting morels from plugs seem extremely easy.  First, find trees that morels like (apples, ash, aspen, elms, maples, or birch.)  Make sure the soil under the trees is appropriate --- no long-undisturbed soil like you'd find in a mature forest, but plenty of organic matter and good drainage.  We have six young apple trees and six morel plugs, so it was easy to decide where to plant them.

Next, push the plugs all the way into the ground with your fingers at the tree's drip line.  Five minutes later, I was done planting.  It's really that simple!

Now, the trick will be getting them to fruit.  Field and Forest Products asserts that it's quite easy to grow morels in the soil (as long as you put them near an appropriate tree.) The difficult part is getting them to fruit.  No one's quite sure how to do it, so your best bet is to plant morels in several different areas to hedge your bets, then wait and hope.  For $7.50, I'm willing to gamble.

The hinge area of the home made door frame ended up with a small gap even though I chisled out enough wood for the hinge to be flush with the frame.

A medium sized strip of stick-on foam was enough to seal most of the space.

Making a door frame from scratch wasn't as hard as I thought it might be, but I can already see how much time a fabricated frame would save, especially if you're trying to make it look perfect.

Did you know that before the Industrial Revolution, the average person worked for about two or three hours a day?  Studies from a wide range of pre-industrial civilizations show similar data --- it takes only about fifteen hours a week to provide for all of our basic human needs.  And that's using hand tools.

So why is the average American working a dreary forty hours a week?  I've heard from at least half a dozen readers who say that they'd love to live like Mark and I do, but only once they save up some large sum of money or bring their microbusiness up to a level where it can pay them some other large sum of money per year.  So, even though it's a bit off topic, I want to spend this week's lunchtime series talking about money --- how much do we really need and how can we make it without selling our souls?

Most of the information I'll present is drawn from Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin's Your Money or Your Life and the loosely affiliated Financial Integrity website.  You can find the same nine step program, complete with worksheets and examples, in both the book and the website.  (Download the worksheets and examples from the website for free here.)  Both are highly recommended!  I'm going to gloss over some aspects of the program that seem old hat to me, so if you like what you read here and want to learn more, I highly recommend you go straight to the source.

Last year at this time, the snowdrops were blooming, but this year the ground is hard and chilled.  So I set out on Sunday afternoon to search for spring.

For the first time in weeks, the bees were out on cleansing flights and the nearby wild hazel bushes were close to blooming.  The catkins had elongated and softened, but still no sign of stamens --- not spring yet!


In the forest garden, the comfrey leaves had died back into a brown mulch.  But in the center of each plant, little green tufts of new leaves were poking up.  Spring?


Down at the baby creek, I got captivated by flashing ripples over the clay streambed.  Not spring, but definitely pretty.


Then, at last, I found a flower.  Sure, it's witch-hazel (which can bloom at intervals all winter), but I'm counting it!  February's first flower --- spring!

 

The home made door frame stopping plate gets most of its firmness from this bottom corner bracket. I chisled out about a 1/4 of an inch of the floor to compensate for the depth of the bracket. This is done to avoid a bulge in the future linolem floor.

Are you looking for some more blogs to follow?  I read over fifty, ranging from personal odysseys to nonprofit newsletters, but only a few are so rivetting I want to share them.  These top three blogs are my personal picks based on: posting frequently enough to keep me hooked, mixing personal and informational in a fun proportion, and either being beautiful or well written (or both.)

Causabon's Book is probably the blog I discuss the most at the dinner table.  Sharon Astyk is a Jewish homesteader and peak oil writer who sucks you in with her tales of family life and simple living but adds plenty of meat about how to store your food and prepare for the end of civilization.  Her posts are thought provoking and mirror my own world while also veering off in other directions.  (She used to write over on her personal blog, but is mostly writing at the link above.)

Sugar Mountain Farm is "stories from a small farm in Vermont's mountains raising pigs, sheep, chickens, ducks, dogs and kids naturally on pasture."  I started reading because we're contemplating running pigs on pasture some day, but I kept reading because Walter's photos were astounding --- really the best I've seen on any blog.  It's also fun to read about someone running a successful small farm.

Not Exactly Rocket Science is a new favorite, interpreting new scientific discoveries into layman's terms.  This isn't precisely homesteading, but you need to know the science to make it all work!

What are your top three blogs and why?

 

It was a great day to take in some southern Appalachian contemporary art and well worth a trip to the big city on a Saturday. We got drawn to the William King museum to see some big names like Matisse and Picasso, but I think the local collection had more style and flavor. It was curated by Ray Kass, a painter and writer who bi locates between Blacksburg and Manhattan.

With Mark on the job, our second round of plywood hauling went much more smoothly than the first.  While I was finishing up the inside walls of the homemade storage building, he wandered off to the barn and rigged a holder out of discarded boards within half an hour.  If I hadn't overloaded it ("Surely twelve boards won't be too many to carry between us!"), it would have been perfect, but as it was we barely made it two thirds of the way home.  Luckily, that's where dry ground begins, so Mark was able to go get the golf cart and drive our load back to the building.

Meanwhile, I hauled in some more insulation using the old hoe trick.  You stick the handle of the hoe through the plastic wrapper of two rolls of insulation, pushing one roll all the way back to the hoe blade so that your head has room to sit between the two rolls.  Stuff some discarded underwear* under your coat as a shoulder pad, and it's pretty simple to carry the insulation home.  Now we're all set to start on the ceiling next week!

* "Is that men's underwear sticking out of your jacket pocket?" Mark asked in disbelief as I set out.

 

The downside to fabricating a door frame with a stopping plate is allowing for enough room for your hand to grip the knob without banging it against the frame when you pull it closed.

I decided to solve this problem with a small section of a rubber door sweep. It blocks the gap nicely while providing a smooth and soft surface for any close calls that might happen.

Due to their nitrogen-fixing bacteria, legumes are a great way to break your garden out of the nitrogen cycle.  It's almost like printing your own money, this ability to create your own usable nitrogen out of thin air.  So how do you put your newfound knowledge to use?

The first thing to understand is that your legumes are holding onto every bit of nitrogen they can.  Planting beans beside corn plants and hoping that the beans will feed the corn is mostly just wishful thinking --- the beans are going to feed the beans.  However, when nitrogen-fixing plants die, the nitrogen in their bodies will end up back in the soil, so the next crop will benefit.  Take advantage of this bit of biology by planting spring peas, then follow them with summer corn.

Legumes also shake off their nitrogen-fixing nodules when they are stressed by drought, shade, defoliation, or grazing.  Robert Kourik suggested planting a row of corn between rows of clover, mowing the clover, and watching the corn take up the off-loaded nitrogen and increase its growth.  In fact, for those of you (like me) who are a bit leery of clover taking over in Fukuoka's do-nothing clover/grain permaculture, you might get the best of both worlds by interspersing rows of clover with rows of grain.

Of course, the most common method of using legumes to increase a garden's stores of nitrogen is green manuring.  You plant a legume as a cover crop, then till it into the soil when it is just about to flower (the stage at which the plant contains the most nitrogen.)  This method, although widespread, is difficult in a no-till garden.

Somewhere in the middle of the morning Thursday, the homemade storage building began to feel like inside rather than outside.  I could tell because Mark went outside, leaving the door ajar, and I came along behind him and closed the door to keep the room warm.

And it was warm inside.  Despite being snowy and barely above freezing outside, once Mark fired up the wood stove, the building heated up surprisingly fast.  We don't even have the insulation up in the ceiling yet, but within an hour we were shedding our coats and working in our indoors clothes.  I guess we've been losing a lot of heat from our exterior wood stove to the outside!

I wonder if, rather than saving up for an efficient wood stove, we should instead make another small building and install two small wood stoves, relegating the trailer to summer use.  Not this year, though!  The garden is already starting to pull at my brain, begging me to finish up winter chores and start the pruning.

(The photos above show what I've been up to while Mark was putting in the door --- covering the walls with a nice, smooth plywood.  I find myself getting lost in the swirls of the wood grain.)

 

The do it yourself storage building now has a door up thanks to a couple more smashed brackets that work great at keeping the stopping portion of the frame in place.

So let's return to Everett's comment --- should I buy an inoculant to get my clover patch off to a good start?  If you already have clover growing in your yard (which we do), chances are good that the proper bacteria are already present.  Go out and dig up a plant, and you should be able to see little white bumps on the roots --- the nodules.

However, even if the nodules are present, your plants may not be currently teamed up with nitrogen-fixing bacteria.  The way to be sure is to cut a nodule open and look at the color.  Nodes that are actively fixing nitrogen are pink or red inside, while inactive nodes are white, tan, or green.  My nodes were white --- why?

The clover I dug up was right in the middle of our muddy mess, an area which has been waterlogged for about a month due to heavy rains and snows.  When legumes are stressed, they stop feeding their bacteria and start paying attention to their own survival, so acidic or waterlogged soil, drought, lack of organic matter, or even high soil temperatures can kill off your nitrogen-fixing bacteria.  I'll dig up another plant in the part of the yard where I want to plant my clover (currently under snow), and if I find more white nodes, I'll need to inoculate.

Why do gardeners start so many seedlings indoors when the plants nearly always do just as well when planted in a cold frame or simply direct-seeded after the last frost?  My best guess is that the same antsiness I feel as the days get longer affects everyone else too.  Starting some alpine strawberries this winter has been a good way to feed the ache without going nuts with grow lights and flats.

It took two solid weeks for my strawberries to germinate, but this weekend I noticed the first tiny specks of white as roots started digging into the stump dirt.  Monday, the cotyledons began to unfurl from the seed coats, and Wednesday the flat was full of tiny green leaves, each one heavy with a drop of dew.  I guess it's nearly time to take the lid off and let them start growing!

We're due to start some plants outside this week, too, if the ground thaws out.  People around here traditionally plant their first peas on Valentine's Day --- it's a crap shoot, but in the years when the early peas grow, everyone who bowed out is jealous.  I'll also be tossing out some poppy seeds, some for us to eat and some just for the bees.

 

We forgot to use a level when we were setting up the outer door frame of the storage building and because of that a small gap needed to be added towards the top to level it out.

Scientists have discovered that inoculating legumes with nitrogen-fixing bacteria can increase crop yields.  The theory is simple --- if your plants lack the proper bacteria to team up with, they're stuck begging ammonia out of the soil rather than producing their own.

But you can't just inoculate your entire garden with one kind of bacterium and be done with it.  Most plants that team up with nitrogen-fixing bacteria are picky about the bacteria species they move in with.  Clovers share one set of bacteria species, garden and soup beans another, and alfalfa, soybeans, peanuts, clover, and peas each have their own.  You can often buy seeds already coated in the proper inoculant, or can even transplant a bit of soil from your previous pea patch to your new one to get the useful bacteria started.

As a side note, I was intrigued to learn that legumes aren't the only plants that team up with nitrogen-fixers.  The other common, nitrogen-fixing plant in our area is the shrub alder (Alnus sp.)  I've been keeping an eye out for some wild alders to transplant into my forest garden as a method of naturally boosting the area's fertility.

Remember our huge pile of firewood?  We ran through it unbelievably fast --- first the power was out for two weeks and we had to keep a big fire going just to keep the trailer above freezing due to lack of a fan.  Then we had two weeks of below freezing temperatures and again had to keep the fire raging to keep us warm.  The result is that the 1.75 cords of wood that we thought would last all winter lasted a mere month.

So in January, we went back to electric heat.  I hated to give in to the coal-fired power plant, but our firewood supplier took our $50 down payment and dropped off the face of the earth.  Due to major environmental guilt, I keep the trailer between 40 and 50 degrees when heating with electricity, which is really quite comfortable if you wear layers (and are used to it.)

That's all a long explanation for why Joey came in his truck last week instead of his car --- he wanted to drop off a load of firewood for his poor, freezing baby sister.  The firewood was much appreciated, but the truck got stuck due to completely treadless tires.  Rather than calling a tow truck to haul Joey out, we called our mother and begged her to come pick Joey up so that Mark and I could take advantage of this opportunity to haul gravel for our driveway.  (We ordered some of that from our hauler too, but we really haven't heard from him in over a month....)

On Monday, Mark babied the truck out of the mud (now thawed and thus a bit less precarious) and took her to town to get new tires.  We thought the two back tires we needed to replace would come to about $300, but Mark came home with a receipt for only $140 --- he had discovered the wonder of retread tires!  If you, like me, have never heard of retreads, you're in for a treat.  Old tires end up in a factory where they're tested for safety and have the old tread buffed off, then a new tread is is applied.  The end result is nearly as good as a new tire (and every bit as safe), for a fraction of the price.  Apparently, at this time, only big tires (R16 and greater) are retreaded, so most of them end up going to large-scale trucking and bussing fleets, but farmers are also retread fanatics.  If you have a truck that needs new wheels, retreads seem like the way to go!

 

We've had a really good test for the storage building roof today thanks to a steady stream of rain. No leaks so far while we begin the process of measuring, cutting, and installing the plywood that Anna worked so hard to bring in yesterday.

Mark read my post this morning and said, "Everyone's going to think that I'm a slacker, sitting back and watching you carry all that plywood in!"  I said, "Of course not!  Everyone knows you were working really hard on another job and that you usually do all the hauling anyhow."  "Hmph," Mark replied.

Clearly Mark was right, since my mom just sent me this email: "Does Mark haul any plywood in?? I love the photos of you,--but, seriously, does he??  What has Mark been doing while you've been dragging?"

I'm going to post more about it tomorrow morning, but Mark was busy doing manly chores in town, talking to mechanics who won't really talk to me and moving forward on the driveway repair project.  I took the photos of myself using the timer function on the camera.  Shame on you all for not thinking that Mark does his share!

To further muddy the waters, here's a picture of the golf cart in the snow a week ago....

"Nitrogen, nitrogen everywhere, but not a drop to drink," could be a plant's plaintive song.  The atmosphere we breathe is 78% nitrogen, but plants are incapable of putting the elemental nitrogen to use.  Instead, they need ammonia or nitrate and depend on the useful nitrogen they can suck out of dead plants and animals as part of the nitrogen cycle.

Nitrogen-fixing bacteria are the flip side of the coin.  These microorganisms can take the nitrogen from the air and turn it into a useful form, but the process takes up vast quantities of energy.  Some bacteria species are able to scavenge the energy on their own, but others have opted to team up with nitrogen-hungry plants.

The best-known symbiosis is between rhizobia bacteria and legumes.  It all begins when a bacterium senses flavonoids given off by the legume's roots.  "Home for sale!" the flavonoids say, and the bacterium secretes a chemical in reply --- "I'd like to move in."  "Great!" says the root, and it curls its tiny root hair around the bacterium to make a safely enclosed root nodule.  The plant fills the nodule with carbohydrates (free energy!), proteins, and oxygen, and the bacterium responds by fixing atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia to feed the plant.  The pair lives happily ever after.

As you've probably gathered by now, we don't live next to the road.  A third of a mile of floodplain lies between our trailer and our car parking area, and during this abnormally wet winter that means a third of a mile of mud.

It's been weeks since the ground has been dry enough for the golf cart to traverse our swamp, but we went ahead and bought a vanful of building supplies last week to finish up the homemade storage building.  Since insulation is, by definition, light and airy, we didn't have a problem hauling in enough to finish the walls.  But the sheets of plywood we plan to cover the interior with were another matter.  Mark wisely asked at the store to have the four by eight panels cut in half, but even a four by four sheet of plywood is extremely ungainly.  I set out on Monday to see how many sheets I could haul through the mud to move our project along.

Attempt 1 began with me hoisting four sheets onto my head.  By the time I crossed the creek, I knew this method wasn't going to work.  Luckily, I ran into the heavy hauler halfway home, lashed the plywood down, and marveled over how wheels made the work lighter.  Elapsed time: 1 hour.  Sheets per hour: 4.

My major physical weakness is carpal tunnel, and I knew that I couldn't pull the heavy hauler through the mud again without waking up the next night with tingling hands.  So for attempt 2, I got out my hiking backpack and some rope.  Out at the van, I lashed four sheets onto the backpack and manhandled it onto my back.  The boards felt positively light, but they also went a bit akilter and I had to constantly push them back into place.  Elapsed time: 40 minutes.  Sheets per hour: 6.

For attempt 3, I got smart and stupid all at once.  First the smart part.  I realized that the pea trellis material would make a perfect sling to hold the wood together, making it easy to tie it onto my backpack.  The whole thing seemed so easy, in fact, that I got greedy and decided to haul in six sheets instead of four.  Bad idea!  By the time I sloshed through the mud and made it home, I was worn out!  Elapsed time: 50 minutes.  Sheets per hour: 7 --- but that doesn't count the hour I spent collapsed on the couch afterwards!

At least we have some wood to work with, now.  Mark has plans to fix up the driveway, which may make all of this muddy hauling a thing of the past.  More on that later....

 

A perfect complement to yesterday's solar powered automatic chicken coop opener would be this portable hyrdogen generator.

Kristie Lu Stout has an interesting post about this exciting new product that will allow everybody to generate their own hydrogen from water and store it in a safe, low pressure battery-like container. No word yet on how much it might cost, but plans are to have a tabletop model available by the end of 2010.

Getting off the grid with solar or wind has always come back to battery storage. If this technology improves, it could replace most of those expensive and toxic chemical batteries and bring alternative energy within the reach of the common homesteader.

Everett commented on my mention of planting clover to say:

I don't know why inoculant is so hard to spell, but I struggle with it too and seem to have to look it up every few weeks.  Anyway, back to the point....

If you're not a gardener, you may not realize that nitrogen is usually the limiting ingredient in many plants' growth, and is thus one of the big three components of chemical fertilizers.  Organic gardeners often add nitrogen to the soil with compost or manure, but others take advantage of nitrogen-fixing bacteria to turn the copious nitrogen in the atmosphere into nitrogen their plants can use.  This week's lunchtime series will explore how this symbiosis can be worked to your advantage in the garden.

As part of  my continued obsession with lower-energy cooking, I decided to try to make a haybox to cook my chicken carcass down into stock Sunday.  Someone (Heather?) had emailed me in response to my Dutch oven post, telling me that you can bring a pot of incipient soup to a boil, wrap it in towels, and leave it alone for the afternoon.  The cast iron and towels will hold in the heat, and the soup will cook itself.

While researching rocket stoves, I stumbled across a mention of hayboxes, which seem to work on a very similar principle to Heather's idea.  You fill up a box with hay (or other insulation), put in your boiling pot, and leave it alone for several hours.  I've seen figures suggesting that using a haybox with long-cooking recipes like chicken stock will save 80% of the energy you would use to simmer the stock on the stove.  You should leave the pot in the haybox somewhere between once and twice as long as you would have left it on the stove.  If you're worried about bacteria, bring the whole thing back to a boil for a few minutes on the stove before serving.

So how did my experiment go?  I brought my carcass and water to a boil and tucked it into an old comforter in a cardboard box.  (The image on the left shows the pot before I bundled the rest of the comforter over the top.)  Our house temperature was low on Sunday --- 50 degrees Fahrenheit --- but when I peeked in six hours later, the pot was still steaming and the stock was a lovely yellow.  Success!

What do you do if you want to install an automatic chicken coop door but you don't have electricity running to your coop?

Chicken coop door.com has recently come out with a new solar powered option that will save you the chore of letting your girls out in the morning and remembering to lock them back up at night.

The price is 324 dollars and maybe worth it if you don't have the skill and time to build an automatic chicken coop door yourself.

A few of you were as intrigued by the rocket stove concept as I was, and Roland's comments sent me searching the web for more information.  Basically, I wanted to know if I could design a slightly modified rocket stove made out of found/bought materials to simplify construction.  I was also interested in any updates to the design that might maximize efficiency.


Preheating the combustion air

The drawing shown here is Roland's suggestion for preheating the combustion air to increase efficiency, in much the way that efficient space-heating wood stoves work.  A search of the web turns up contradictory pages --- folks who have tried similar methods are split on whether it increases efficiency or not.  Many sites suggest that the conventional design already preheats the combustion air by passing the air intake underneath the burning fire, so I think I'll stick with that.


Insulation

Insulating the burning chamber is another important factor in rocket stove efficiency.  The official Aprovecho design calls for making your own fire bricks, which are rated at about R10 when fully assembled.  Roland's suggestion --- perlite --- has an R-value of 2.7 per inch, so four inches of loose-filled perlite placed between an inner and an outer wall could be a much easier option than making our own fire brick.  (For future reference, other folks mention using materials such as vermiculite (R2.08 per inch) and pumice (R2 per inch).)


Body materials

I've seen various DIY rocket stove options using found or bought materials, and the ones that caught my eye used nested stove pipe.  The image shown here is my revised version of the official design made out of one big stove pipe, two pieces of smaller stovepipe, and an elbow to connect the smaller stovepipe pieces together.  As Roland mentioned, the bigger stovepipe might be replaced by a metal bucket --- otherwise, I'd have to add some kind of cap to keep the perlite from coming out the bottom.  I'm envisioning the pot sitting on pieces of rebar stuck through the exterior walls rather than welding anything together.

There's a bit of math involved in deciding how high the interior chamber should be and how much air space should be left between the pot and the skirt -- more on that later!

  

Plumjam.com has an interesting automatic chicken waterer that caught my eye while I was enjoying their poultry project pictures.

It's a huge improvement over the regular gravity fed waterers, but still needs to be cleaned out, and it cost more than an Avian Aqua Miser.
 
I'm not sure I would trust the float not to get stuck, and would most likely be checking on it often to see if it were flowing. I never have this concern with the Avain Aqua Miser.

I would be willing to bet a box of doughnuts that if the chickens were given a choice side by side with this waterer and an Avian Aqua Miser they would forget all about those two big scary holes to peek into and start geting all their hydration from a source that will always provide clean drinkable water without nearly as much fuss.

Our homemade storage building continues to be a learning experience.  When we started out, I blithely said, "Let's put in as much insulation as possible despite the cost," and Mark agreed.  What I didn't realize is that you have to plan for your insulation needs from the get-go.

The map and chart at the top of the page show EPA's insulation recommendations for new wood-framed homes when heating with gas, heat pumps, or fuel oil.  (They recommend more insulation if you heat with electricity, and don't even give you an option for heating with wood.)  We're in their zone 4, which means we should have at least R30 in our ceiling and R13 in our walls.  The latter is easy, but the former is a bit of an issue.

Assuming you're using fiberglass insulation (which fits our wallet and our remote setting), you need thicker wall or ceiling cavities to fit more insulation.  A typical 2X4 wall will hold up to R15 --- if you try to cram R19 in, you compress the insulation and, I believe, actually get less insulative value than you would have with a lower rated batt of insulation.

Our original rafters are 5.5 inches deep, which would only allow us to put in R19 insulation up there --- makes me chilly just thinking about it (although I think the trailer ceiling has about R13.)  So we extended our rafters with some two by fours, giving us the space to increase our ceiling insulation to R30.  For future reference, here is the cavity depth you need for some common insulation r-values:

• 3.5 inches --- R13
• 6 inches --- R19
• 9 inches --- R30
• 12 inches --- R38

Most of our building project has been very forgiving of my learn-as-we-go mentality, but insulation requires some forethought.  For those who might want to try their own hand at building --- shun the fault I fell in!

Little house in the suburbs dot com is hands down the coldest automatic chicken waterer I've seen so far.

I can't prove it, but I feel like all chickens can appreciate the simple comfort of a cool drink on a hot summer day.

We've got side by side Avian Aqua Misers and one day last summer I put a handfull of ice in one of them and noticed how our Plymouth Rock hens favored the colder water.

I know it's not a scientific test, but maybe I can expand the parameters next summer to see if there's any truth to this crazy hypothesis?

As I mentioned before, Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming helped inspire the permaculture movement, but I ended up being drawn in a different direction by his experiences.  I've been struggling to develop a workable no-till system for my garden over the last three years, and my constant problem is lack of sufficient mulch.  We mow all of our grassy areas and add the clippings to our garden beds and even rake leaves out of the woods to top things off, but I still end up with bare soil and way too many weeds.  So you shouldn't be surprised that my epiphany upon reading The One-Straw Revolution had to do with mulch.

The organic gardening and homesteading movement has us all growing our own tomatoes and broccoli, but I'd say that 99% of us have never even considered growing our own grains.  And yet, grains make up a huge percentage of our diets.  Clearly, they also made up a huge percentage of Masanobu Fukuoka's garden.  Perhaps the solution to my mulch problem is to return to a more holistic gardening method.  If we grew all of our own grains as well as all of our vegetables, I'd never be in need of mulch again.

Fukuoka says that his method of growing grains uses one hour per week per person, a figure that sounds remarkably manageable.  Could we tweak his system a bit, perhaps trading buckwheat, sorghum, or corn for rice, and replicate his success?  I'm suddenly determined to find clover seeds, buy a bit of straw to prime the pump, and plant my hull-less oats in a do-nothing test plot rather than in a traditional garden bed.

Human names elude me.  Without really trying, I can rattle off the scientific names of hundreds of plants, tell you their lineage, their uses, where they like to grow.  But present me with a few people, and they blur together into a sea of faces.

I can just hear what you want to say --- "I have a hard time with names too."  Let me clarify with a short story.  When I was a freshman in college, a girl sat at my table every day, but for weeks (months? maybe even the whole first semester?) I didn't know who she was and I mostly ignored her.  Then, one day, she brought a potted heather plant to lunch with her.  "Nice plant," I said.  "Yes, it's a heather, just like my name," she replied.  A light went off in my head --- this girl's name was Heather, which was a plant, so I could remember her!  Now, to use modern parlance, we are BFFs.

I've been thoroughly enjoying everyone's insightful comments, especially over the last few weeks, but it bothers me that I have a hard time remembering which one of you is the pig farmer and which one lives on the prairie.  I considered asking you all to rename yourselves after plants, but then I came up with an even better solution!  Anyone who wants can now create an account on Walden Effect.  This will make it easier for you since your comments will post immediately (rather than waiting for me to check in and mark them as non-spam.)  You'll also be able to create your own user page, with links to your main webpages, maybe a photo of yourself, and hopefully at least one reference to a plant or animal to jog my memory.

I hope you'll give it a try!  Just click here and follow the directions to make your account and user page.  If you run into any problems, just email me and I'll make them better.  You might also want to read about all of the registered users on Walden Effect.

Don't want to share?  That's okay --- you can still post comments anonymously or by typing in your name just the way you always could.  Either way, I look forward to learning more about you!

 

The home made storage building got about half way sealed today thanks to four tubes of caulk and five tubes of liquid nails.

Masanobu Fukuoka realized that his system of natural farming wouldn't be exactly replicable in other parts of the world --- for example, we'd be hard-pressed to grow rice here in Virginia.  So he summed up his method into four principles that can be used anywhere.

First, he admonishes us not to till or turn the soil.  Although Fukuoka doesn't go into the science behind the disadvantages of soil tilling, he did mention that cultivating soil gives troublesome weeds like crabgrass and dock a foothold.  As my father can tell you, once crabgrass gets into your garden, you might as well move on.

Principle 2 is "no chemical fertilizer or prepared compost."  I know the latter may be fighting words!  But I see his point --- in nature, plant matter is naturally composted on the soil surface, a process which promotes the growth of beneficial fungi.  Fukuoka adds fertility to his soil by returning straw (and a bit of poultry manure) to the soil surface and keeping a groundcover of white clover growing at all times.

Third, Fukuoka refuses to weed by tillage or herbicides.  Instead, he uses mulch, a clover groundcover, and temporary flooding to keep the weeds in check.  In addition, his winter grain/rice rotation keeps the fields constantly covered with crops, so weeds never have a fallow period to gain a foothold.

Finally, principle 4 is "no dependence on chemicals."  All organic gardeners will agree to that.

My mindset already seems to be taking in the permaculture mantra "one man's trash is my treasure."

All through our building project, I've been letting the sawdust slip into the mud and disappear, but this week I suddenly realized it was a gold mine!  I swept up about half a gallon and wish the wood-cutting part of the project wasn't nearly over.

Shall I use my precious sawdust for making bricks for a rocket stove or for mixing with wood chips to provide our mushroom spawn a better substrate?  Choices, choices!

 

We had a box of these corner brackets that flattened out nicely with a few bangs of a hammer. Extending the rafters will allow us to squeeze in some extra insulation.

So what did Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming technique look like?  In the fall, he seeded white clover, a winter grain (rye or barley), and rice all at once into a field.  The seeds were rolled in balls of clay so that they could simply be dropped onto un-tilled soil rather than being pushed beneath the surface.

That autumn, the clovers and winter grains sprouted and grew while the rice seeds waited.  The clover formed a groundcover beneath the rye or barley, crowding out weeds and fixing nitrogen to enrich the soil.  By spring, the winter grains were ready to be harvested --- Fukuoka threshed the grains and tossed all of the straw back onto the fields, forming a thick mulch.  He added in a small amount of manure from his chickens, but no other compost or fertilizer.

Meanwhile, the rice had already sprouted and started to grow.  The young rice plants were trampled down when the winter grains were harvested, but quickly sprang back to life, growing amid weeds and clover.

The traditional method of growing rice in most of Japan and China consisted of flooding the rice paddies for the entire growing season as a method of weed control, but Fukuoka realized that rice is actually healthier when growing in damp, but not sodden, soil.  So he opted to flood his fields for a mere week in the spring, long enough to drown out most of the weeds and weaken the clover, giving the rice a head start.  Then he dried the fields back out and the rice grew happily above its nitrogen-fixing groundcover.  In the fall, he harvested the rice and once again returned the straw to the field, along with seeds for next year.

Fukuoka noted that after 20 years of using his natural farming method, the soil on his farm was much richer than when he began.  He harvested just as much grain (or more) from his fields as the commercial farmers using chemicals nearby.  And the photos in his book look remarkably weed-free --- I'm jealous.

While I'm on the subject of more efficient stoves, I wanted to do some research into efficient wood stoves for space heating.  Our exterior wood stove is a good choice for heat on our farm since wood is a renewable resource (and is cheaper than most other options), but I'm still concerned about the pollution that comes out the chimney.  Luckily, scientists have been plugging away at building a better wood stove and have developed models that can eliminate 90% of the smoke and use only about half the wood.

The new, energy-efficient stoves come in two categories.  The first, shown to the right, is a non-catalytic stove that increases its combustion efficiency using firebox insulation, a large baffle that extends the gas flow path, and pre-heated combustion air (which is actually a lot like the reasoning behind the design of the rocket stove.)

Wood stoves with catalytic converters (shown on the left) can cut emissions of even the most efficient non-catalytic stove in half, but they don't seem to use less wood.  Although I'd love to be polluting less, catalytic wood stoves aren't the best choice for most homesteaders.  The $100 to $200 catalytic converter wears out within two to six years, and you need to be relatively adept at tinkering to keep it in prime operating condition.  The startup costs are also higher

So how much does a new, energy-efficient wood stove cost?  From what I can find online, it seems like new non-catalytic wood stoves start around $1,200 and go as expensive as you can imagine.  In 2009 and 2010, there's a 30% tax credit in effect for buying wood stoves with at least 75% efficiency, which is a great deal if you can use it.  If you buy and burn a lot of wood, a more efficient wood stove might pay for itself even without the tax credit --- I estimate that we'd start saving money after about 4 years if we bought the cheapest model.

Although efficient wood stoves seem like a good idea, I'm still not ready to take the plunge.  I'm very curious about whether our current wood stove could be retrofitted to increase its efficiency.  Has anyone tried that out?

 

The home made storage building is pretty much sealed up in the upper rafter section thanks to several rounds of cutting salvaged wood to size and securing it in place.

Masanobu Fukuoka's The One-Straw Revolution is a hodepodge of advice for farming and living.  To be completely honest, I adored the first third of the book, but was annoyed by the philosophical bent of the rest.  Sure, I agree that we should garden organically, eat locally, minimize our meat consumption, eat in season, turn away from commercial farms and back to the small family farm, reject growth economics, live simply, and work to live rather than live to work.  But those concepts are all old hat now.  Since I wasn't alive while he was writing the book, I don't really know whether Fukuoka's ramblings were insightful and innovative at the time or simply derivative.

That said, the first third of the book was rivetting.  His farming method (which I'll describe tomorrow) clearly paved the way for the entire permaculture movement.  Fukuoka dubbed his technique "natural farming", and it went far beyond simple organic gardening.  He advocated working with nature and mimicking natural processes, positing that many parts of modern agriculture systems are only necessary because the farms are out of balance and we're working against nature.  As a result, he also used the inspiring phrase "do-nothing farming", referring to the aspects of modern agriculture that he did without.

Although there was still a lot of work involved in Fukuoka's farm, his do-nothing farming was unique.  He promoted no-till techniques, green manure, and mulching.  You don't hear much about Fukuoka nowadays, but I wonder whether he wasn't as influential in the birth of the permaculture movement as its self-styled father, Bill Mollison.

Rocket stoves are currently being introduced to several third world countries to help lower the pressure of firewood harvesting on native forests.  The stoves are designed to need very little wood in order to heat up your cook pot, so trees get left in place.  I love the concept, but can't help wondering --- why don't we promote rocket stoves in the U.S. too?  I'd never tell someone in a third world country to institute environmentally friendly measures I wasn't willing to put into practice in my own life.

Before I knew it, I'd penciled a rocket stove onto our ten year plan and started researching.  First, I discovered that you can't use rocket stoves inside because they're basically an efficient hearth.  So, in practice, they'll probably be part of a summer kitchen in our long term plan --- something I want anyway because I always dread turning on the stove on a sweltering summer day.

The video I've embedded above is well worth watching if you'd like to build your own rocket stove.  It looks like we could probably make one quite cheaply, though it would take quite a bit of trial and error to figure out certain parts.  The sheet metal looks an awful lot like a stovepipe to me, suggesting that we might not need welding skills (the part that scared us off building our own initially.)  Alternatively, we could buy one pre-made for around $125.

Have any of you built or used a rocket stove?  What did you think of it?

 

Another winter day at Wetknee where the snow is taking its sweet time saying goodbye.

If you've been following along for a while, you may remember my series about traditional Chinese farming practices.  The book Farmers of Forty Centuries opened my eyes to farming methods that were clear forerunners of modern organic gardening, complete with nitrogen fixing plants and massive infusions of compost.  As the name suggests, farmers in China maintained the fertility of the same garden patches for as long as 4,000 years using their ancient techniques.

Fast forward ahead just forty years after the book's publication date, and farming practices in Japan (once very similar to those in China) turned around 180 degrees.  After the end of World War II, Japanese farmers were sucked in by the allure of time-saving American "innovations" like chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.  According to Masanobu Fukuoka, author of The One-Straw Revolution, centuries of building humus-rich soil washed away in just twenty years.  Within one generation, the Japanese soil was dependent on ever greater amounts of chemical fertilizers to produce a crop.

Was there any way for Japan to return to a more natural way of farming?  Fukuoka said yes, and his book struck a chord with both Japanese folks and Americans in the 1970s.  Stay tuned for his insights in this week's lunchtime series.

I've been a bit quiet on the garden front lately because now is really the time for dreaming, not for growing.  But the garden is actually in much better shape than any previous winter garden I've been in charge of, so I thought I'd take you on a quick tour.

It's quite possible to have some greens and lettuce even in the dead of winter around here as long as you start them in the early fall and the deer don't get them.  In previous years, the deer have always eaten my greens to the ground, but Mark's deer deterrents are worth their weight in gold!  This year we still have some kale and mustard hanging on --- just enough to put half a cup in potstickers every week or two.  (No lettuce because I planted it late and didn't get it up to speed in time.)

I've always read that you can eat parsley all winter, but the deer adore it so I've never had it later than August.  As a result, I've never even bothered to plant it in the sunny half of the garden (where I put the plants which will grow on warm winter days.)  Nevertheless, my small bed emerged from the snow a week or so ago green and beautiful!  The plants tend to have short stalks in the cold, but the leaves are delicious --- perfect for adding a bit of freshness to tuna or egg salad or soups.

Of course, no winter garden is complete without scads of Egyptian onions.  I planted a couple of beds of them, and then tried to compost the extras, which meant I instead spread volunteer onions all over the yard.  You can never have too many, though --- I put the fresh green tops into omelets and egg salad and cut up the entire onions into soups.

Meanwhile, inside, we still have enough sweet potatoes and garlic for several months, though the carrots are beginning to reach the bottom quarter of the drawer and we've only got three butternut squash left.  The freezer is still full of the bounty of the summer, and the only vegetables we buy in the store are potatoes and onions (because our crops were disappointing this year.)  And now it's February, and time to plant the first lettuce bed!

 

The home made storage building passed its first heavy snow test...yes, I know, 6 inches doesn't count as heavy for some of you out there, but it was heavy enough to dominate the small talk in both the Dollar store and the Post Office around here during the days leading up to this latest visit by Jack Frost.

We've decided to wait on putting the tin around the skylight until we're forecast to have some sustained warm weather, but otherwise the homemade storage building is under roof and enclosed to the same level as the pre-made buildings you can buy at Lowes.  Of course, we've still got a lot of work to do --- painting the exterior,  adding gutters, sealing cracks, adding insulation, throwing some linoleum on the floor, and finishing the interior walls.  But I thought now would be a good time to crunch the numbers and see whether it was smart to build the structure ourselves rather than buying one pre-made.

Our building is 8 feet by 20 feet (with the last four feet on the long side being a raised loft.)  The total cost in supplies has been $1,063.39, or $6.65 per square foot. We could have gotten a metal shed from Home Depot for a similar price per square foot, but it would have only been six feet tall (which would have bumped Mark's head!)  A similar sized wooden shed on the lot at Lowes (with more adequate head room) costs three times as much, is constructed out of two by twos instead of two by fours, and only has one small window.  I think we got a good deal --- plus we learned an awful lot about building in the process!

 

Cosmic Cookout is a project that's been in the back of my head for years now, and thanks to Anna's help as webmaster it's finally ready to see the light of day.

It's a place to help me distill down some of the more interesting and fantastic information that has been gushing out of the physics of consciousness field the past few years with some attention paid to the disclosure movement.

The intention is to stimulate debate and conversation through a process of observation and questions and hopefully increase awareness and understanding and perhaps move to a higher level of consciousness.

Credit goes to Neuronarrative for the fine images above.

One of my favorite bloggers posted about the new plants she'll be trying out in her garden this year, and I thought it was an interesting meme.  So, without further ado, 2010's experiments and additions:

• New mushrooms: Winecap (aka King Stropharia), White Morel (reported to be a crapshoot, but I feel lucky), and a summer fruiting Oyster Mushroom --- just ordered the spawn from Field and Forest Products!
  
• New woodies in the forest garden: Osage-orange (for hedges), honey locust (for forest pasturing), and Korean stone pine (for pine nuts).  I'm starting them all from seed, the first two from seeds collected in the wild and the last from seeds I bought on ebay.  All are experiments!
• New fruits and veggies: Alpine strawberries, hulless oats, soybeans (labeled as edamame for fresh eating), garbanzo and urd beans (the latter for sprouting), Afghan sesame, Hungarian breadseed poppy, manna de montana amaranth, and temuco quinoa.  All are from Seeds of Change except the strawberries, soybeans, and poppies from Renee's Garden.

And, of course, there's the usual trial of new varieties of common fruits and vegetables (most of which I buy from Jung.)  What's new in your garden this year?

(This image, by the way, shows the osage-oranges I collected slowly rotting down to seed pulp for the spring.  They're already quite mushy and stinky.)

We ended up with several small gaps once everything went together with the salvaged wood for the storage building project. I was a little apprehensive about using liquid nails yesterday because I knew it was predicted to get colder today, but it looks to be setting up just fine.

If the process of threshing, winnowing, and dehulling your grains for human consumption seems a bit daunting, you might choose to start growing grains for your livestock instead.  Your animals are likely to be less picky than you are, so you won't have to go to quite so much trouble when adding homegrown grains to the menu.  I'm hopeful that as we start growing our own chicken feed, we'll begin saving money and end up with healthier chickens due to a more well-rounded diet.

Currently, we're starting a new series over on our chicken blog with all of the nitty gritty info on formulating your own chicken feeds.  If you're interested, you might want to subscribe to that blog to read all about recipes, protein content of grains, and non-grain alternatives over the next few weeks.  Meanwhile, here's a brief summary of the tips in Gene Logsdon's book about growing grains specifically for livestock.


Tips for the lazy farmer

If you're a lazy farmer, like me, you're probably interested in ways that you can feed your animals with the least work possible.  One option is to plant winter wheat (or barley or rye) at the end of the summer, around September 15.  About a month after the grains go in the ground, they will be established enough that you can graze your animals on them during the winter and spring.  With careful rotation so that the plants aren't overgrazed, you will be able to harvest nearly as much grain from these plants as you would have without grazing them.

Pigs are a great tool for the lazy farmer.  Logsdon notes that you can turn pigs into a cornfield in the fall and they'll harvest the grain themselves, fattening up just when they should.  I envision planting a small corn paddock as part of my forest garden grazing rotation and moving the pigs in at just the right time of year.


What grains should I grow for my animals?

If you're going to go the traditional route of harvesting grain for your livestock, you will probably want to grow some combination of corn, oats, barley, grain, sorghum, and soybeans.  The bulk of commerical feeds are made up of two components --- corn and soybeans --- but your animals will probably be healthier if you give them a bit more variety.

Although we tend to think of grain as being aseasonal, you can in fact plan your garden so that your animals (and you) eat nearly fresh grains throughout the year.  Rye and barley are the first grains to ripen in early summer, then wheat, oats, buckwheat, and sorghum are ripe in the fall.  In the winter and spring, you can feed the easily stored corn and soybeans.


How much grain should I grow for my animals?

Logdson estimates that a single chicken needs about a bushel of grain per year.  A hog needs 12 bushels of corn to be fattened to butchering weight and a cow needs five to six bushels.  A ewe and lamb need just one bushel of grain per year between them if they are on pasture, and goats may not need much at all except when they're being milked.


How do I prepare grain for my livestock?

Some grains can be fed whole, but nearly all grains are more digestible if they are ground.  If you're grinding grain into flour for yourself, you can use the same hand-cranked mill to grind a bit of grain for your chickens.  On the other hand, if we really get into growing our own feed we'll probably find a way to make or buy a better mill.

Old timey farmers knew that sprouting was even better than grinding.  If you're willing to put in a little extra time, you can sprout all of the grains you feed your animals, a process that makes them even more nutritious.

We're in the very early stages of our homegrown grain experimentation, but we'll be sure to update you as we test all of these methods of growing grain for both ourselves and our animals.  Stay tuned!

Like every part of our homemade storage building project, the roof was a learning experience.  We chose to reuse salvaged tin from the old house we tore down, and I wish I'd taken the time during demolition to mark the order in which the sheets of tin came off the roof.  Instead, we ended up with a mixture of pieces of tin from different parts of the roof, and when we put them up on the new roof, the holes in the overlapping ridges didn't line up from one piece to the other.  It wasn't too hard to make a pilot hole in the bottom piece of tin with a nail then fit in the roofing screw, but extra holes in your roof are never a good thing.

Learning experience two was all about lining up the tin.  Our building isn't quite square, and I decided to line up the long side of the tin with the short edge of the building and let the short side of the tin be not quite parallel with the long edge of the building.  Mistake!  By piece of tin number three, it was clear that my tin was no longer going to cover the top wooden cross-piece unless I gave in and tugged it up a bit.  I ended up with a roof with slightly jaggedy top and bottom edges rather than straight lines across.  Hopefully when we add the gutter, the jaggediness will be less visible.

Mark kindly didn't comment on my roofing inadequacies....  Thanks, honey!

 

Blue skies, sun shine, and finishing most of the roof. Another great day of progress for the do it yourself storage building.

Now that you've got an idea of which grains to try growing in your backyard and how much space you need to grow the grains, let's talk about the actual growing process.  Most of grain-growing is pretty similar to growing anything else.  Some grains are planted in the spring and others in the fall, then you weed them and hope that bugs and diseases don't do much damage.

One major difference between grains and vegetables is that grains are traditionally planted in solid blocks in America rather than rows.  Commercial farmers depend on heavy applications of herbicides to keep these fields of grain weed-free, but Logsdon suggests that the American farmer might be better off using the Chinese method of planting in rows so that your grains can be hand-weeded.  Alternatively, you might rotate your grains after a crop that's cultivated intensely for weeds like strawberries or potatoes.

The main differences between growing grains and vegetables, of course, come during the harvest.  On the backyard scale, most grains are harvested by cutting the whole plant down with a scythe when the seeds are mostly or fully mature.  You can tie plants into bundles and then into shocks to dry in the field, or bring them under cover and let them dry inside.  Either way, in a couple of weeks once the plants are fully dry, it's time to separate the seeds from the head.

The first step is threshing --- lay the plants down on a big bedsheet on a flat surface and whack the daylights of out them with a bat or stick.  Alternatively, beans can be threshed by putting the whole plants in a bag and beating the bag around.  When you're done threshing, the seeds should have fallen out and you can take away the bulk of the plants for the chickens to peck through and then to be used as mulch.

Of course, a lot of bits of chaff (excess plant matter) end up in with the seeds after threshing, so the next step is winnowing --- removing the grain from the chaff.  Logsdon advocates pouring the grain and chaff mixture from one bucket to another, either outside where a breeze can pull away the chaff or in front of a big fan.  In either case, you will need to pour each bucket of grain six to ten times to end up with clean seeds.

If you're working with wheat or some other grains, you are now done with the grain separation steps, but oats, barley, buckwheat, and rice all need to be dehulled.  These seeds are coated in a tough substance that won't be very tasty, and which is, unfortunately, hard to remove effectively at the home scale.  Logsdon suggests heating the grains at 180 degrees Fahrenheit for an hour and a half, putting them through a blender, then sifting out the hulls, but he admits his method is only moderately effective.  Southern Exposure Seed Exchange has instructions for turning your grain mill into a dehuller, which might be worth a shot.  Or just grow hull-less oats and feed hull-covered grains to your livestock.

For those of you who aren't following the cheap creek-crossing options discussion, I thought I'd showcase some of the interesting ideas our readers have suggested to get us across the creek.  Mom posted a cool video of a road-sized drawbridge in action, to which Roland responded with this image of a pedestrian-scale drawbridge.  Roland commented to let us know that these are quite common in the Netherlands --- who knew?!




This video of a really cheaply constructed rope swinging bridge also tickled my fancy.  Swinging bridges are quite common in our area, which suggests they might be one of the best options.  I'd thought they were beyond our price-range, but they might be feasible using rope and two by fours.



Roland, again, peaked my curiosity with his note that the Incas have been making grass rope bridges for centuries.  Isn't the one shown here awesome?  (No, we won't be weaving straw ropes --- I just think it's cool.)

Meanwhile, Dudley suggested two quick and dirty (and cheap) options --- using a junked flatbed tractor trailer, or using a ladder as the supports for wooden planks.  The former reminded me of the idea Mark had floated a while ago about using the frame of a burned down mobile home.

Daddy and Erich suggested using telephone poles as the supports for a footbridge --- this may indeed be our cheapest and easiest option, if we found used telephone poles and were able to haul them.

A couple of you have suggested pontoon bridges, but these don't seem very feasible for our creek --- the water goes up and down too fast, I think, and floating trees would be a problem.

Daddy let me know that my stepping stone option isn't nuts since he'd been to a park that used three foot high piers as stepping stones along a trail.

Finally, two of you drew up bridge plans for us!  The drawing on the left is Titus's plan, using the existing telephone poles on each side of the creek as anchors.  It depends on I-beams for support.  The drawing below is Roland's tensegrity bridge.  (I'd never heard of it either!  Check out his comment for more info.)

I don't think we're any closer to making a design decision, but we sure have enjoyed seeing all of these ideas.  Keep them coming!

 

Note to any future homesteading men out there. If you find a woman that will do your roofing without too much complaining then you've found a mate. Treat her well and don't work her too hard.

We certainly aren't going to jump to the level of growing all of our own grains immediately, but I wanted to crunch the numbers and see if that would even be feasible.  The first step is to figure out how much of each type of grain we eat.  That part was pretty simple since we started buying our flour in bulk last year, and thus know that we go through about 100 pounds of wheat flour, 5 pounds of cornmeal, and 25 pounds of oats in a year.  Here's my estimate of how many pecks of whole grain those pounds of flour and rolled oats are equivalent to:

As you build your own estimate of how many pecks of grain you eat per year, you might find the following conversions useful:

• 1 cup of wheat converts into just a little more than a cup of whole wheat flour, and that weighs about a quarter of a pound --- this might help you convert from the five or fifty pound bags of flour you buy to cups.
  
• A peck is equivalent to about 37 cups (and is also a quarter of a bushel.)  So if you go through one five pound bag of cornmeal each year, like we do, you're probably eating 0.5 pecks of corn, very roughly.

How much land would you need to grow your own grains?  Basically, to provide our current near monoculture diet of wheat, corn, and oats, we'd need about a fourteenth of an acre.  That's an area about 56 feet by 56 feet --- pretty big, but not unfathomable.  It would simply mean expanding our garden by about a quarter.

Why, you ask, are we out cutting wood when we're trying to hurry up and finish our homemade storage building?  Well, Monday it poured all day and the creek went up, so when we headed out to work on Tuesday, we were chagrined to discover that the screws we'd bought last weekend were on the other side of a raging flood.  Then we started pondering how to seal in the skylight over Mark's loft in the new roof, and realized that none of the roof sealants are going to dry properly at temperatures hovering around freezing.

And, of course, there's the siren song of mulch.  We got in touch with one of our neighbors this weekend and have decided to go in on renting an industrial chipper one weekend soon.  (At a lot of the rental places, you can take a piece of equipment home on Saturday morning and not have to return it until Monday morning for the price of a single day since they're closed on Sunday.)  We want to get the most bang for our buck, so that means consolidating all of the brush into a few big piles for easy access.

My mouth starts watering every time I think of the chipper, and I keep having to remind myself not to count my chickens before they hatch.  But every brush pile is already earmarked for a project.  We've got two big piles of pine limbs that I figure will make an awesome, acidifying mulch on our blueberries, and a pile of freshly cut and fallen branches that will make a great substrate for the King Stropharia spawn we plan to order in a few weeks.  Then there are the three year old brush piles that we originally planned to burn like our neighbors do, but instead decided to let rot down --- I figure that these will turn into instant, semi-composted mulch to go straight on perennials.  Hopefully, we'll have a few more afternoons to build our brush piles before the chipper comes through.

 

We finally got around to trimming a few of the downed pine trees this afternoon left over from the blizzard of 2009.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for me in growing my own grain was that I just didn't know where to start.  There are at least a dozen grains available in the grocery store, but since none of my neighbors grow any of them, I didn't know which ones are suited to my climate and to my uses.

Here's a quick rundown on the pluses and minuses of various types of grain, from the backyard perspective.  I've put the most promising varieties near the top so that you can stop reading if you get bored.

Corn is the king of high output per unit area, but low protein.  This is the only grain commonly grow in the backyard, for a good reason.  You can easily harvest corn on a small scale, picking the corn and shelling it by hand or in a hand-cranked sheller.  Corn makes up the bulk of many animal feeds and is, indeed, a cheap and easy way to start breaking your dependence on storebought feed.


Wheat is the other primary grain that Americans eat, and you can't beat the taste.  As a backyard grain, it's harder than corn but easier than many others.  It can be used as animal feed and can also be grazed by livestock in the spring without unduly affecting your grain harvest.


Oats are one of the best grains, health-wise, due to their high protein content.  They are a bit more difficult than wheat since the seeds are coated in a tough hull that is difficult to remove at home, but I plan to try a hull-less oat variety that lacks that problem.  In addition to being used as human and animal food, oats were traditionally grown as a cover crop for strawberries in England.  The oats were planted in late summer to early fall between the strawberry plants, grew for a while, then were naturally killed by frost before setting seed.  The grass-like plants fell and mulched the berries --- how can you beat a mulch that spreads itself?


Soybeans clearly aren't grains, but Gene Logsdon includes them in his book because they make up the other major portion of commercial animal feeds and are a great source of protein.  They are grown like garden beans, and can be eaten at the green stage (aka the delicious edamame you might have tried as an appetizer in a Japanese restaurant) or dried and used like soup beans.  Soybeans also make a good hay and green manure.  When feeding to animals, though, you shouldn't feed soybeans raw because the beans contain a substance that interferes with digestion and protein absorption.  As long as you roast the beans first, they are a cheap and easy way to add protein to your chickens' diets.


Buckwheat is only kinda-sorta a grain as well.  (It's in the smartweed family instead of the grass family.)  One of our readers suggested that we give this a shot, and I have to admit that it looks like a homestead winner.  Buckwheat is high in lysine, an amino acid that other grains lack, and is a dynamic accumulator of phosphate.  It can be planted in early summer when gaps start opening in the garden from spring crops, and the fall flowers are an excellent source of nectar for honeybees.  You can go the normal route of threshing and winnowing, or just pick a cup or two by hand in the garden.  Logsdon reports that his chickens love buckwheat.


Sorghum is a grain I've never eaten but one that my neighbors actually grow.  You can grow grain sorghum (aka "milo") specifically for the edible seeds or grow sweet sorghum and use the stalks for molasses and the grain for food.  Sorghum has yields as high as corn, and is very easy to harvest for animal feed since you can just cut the entire seed head and toss it to your chickens.  Threshing is also easier than other grains --- just rub the sorghum heads between your hands and the seeds will drop right out.


Millet isn't often used for human food in the U.S., but is a primary grain in northern China.  Pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) seems to have potential for the backyard since it threshes free from the hulls naturally, and chickens can be fed a whole seed head, as with sorghum.


Rye has the most potential as a pasture plant since it is very tolerant of cold weather and will stay green all winter.  Unless you love the flavor of the grain (which I don't), there's no real reason to grow it for grain the backyard.


Barley makes good livestock feed and beer, but is also not one of the top backyard grains.


Rice is, unfortunately, a backyard loser.  The grain requires at least forty days with minimum temperatures greater than 70 degrees Fahrenheit, conditions that can be found in Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and California, but not Virginia.


Wild Rice is a delicious, native North American alternative to cultivated rice.  Unfortunately, we are again outside its range.  You might try growing wild rice if you live in New England or the Midwest.

Despite swearing up and down that I wasn't going to start any seeds indoors this year, I filled a flat with stump dirt Monday and sprinkled in tiny alpine strawberry seeds.  I tossed a few in the ground outdoors, too, as a control since I believe that plants people baby indoors often do just as well when planted straight in the garden.

I'm excited to add alpine strawberries to our current repertoire of June-bearing and everbearing strawberries.  I've read that alpine strawberries can cope with partial shade and make a good addition to the herb layer of forest gardens.  Plus, the fruits are reputed to have the best flavor of all strawberries, even though they're so tiny that you probably don't want to pick too many.  Best of all, alpine strawberries can be started from seed as long as you do so indoors, which eliminates the high startup costs of traditional strawberries.

This is our second shot at starting strawberries from seed.  We grew some our first year on the farm, planting the seeds in the middle of January and eating fruits by summer.  Yields were good but, unfortunately, the variety we grew (fresca) was some sort of odd hybrid with full-sized berries that were quite tasteless.

In case you're a botany geek like me, you might be interested to know that the various types of strawberries are in different species.  The big June-bearing strawberries are Fragaria x ananassa, which is a hybrid between the eastern North American native Fragaria virginiana (which grows wild in our woods) and the large-fruited, South American Fragaria chiloensis.  Alpine strawberries were bred from Fragaria vesca, a native strawberry to parts of North America, Europe, and Asia.  Although we don't hear much about Alpine strawberries, they have been eaten since the Stone Age and literal tons are still picked commercially each year in Turkey.  I look forward to picking our own this summer!

Carolyn Roberts from house of straw.com has made a fun and informative 8 minute video that takes you through all the hoops she had to jump through to make her straw bale dream a reality. What sets this collection of information apart from others I've come across is the level of detail she shares when it comes to building codes and materials.

We considered the straw bale approach briefly, but decided against it for multiple reasons, mainly the fact that we get a lot of moisture around here, and it's not really as cheap as you might think.  Carolyn spent 50 thousand dollars and a good chunk of her precious time to finish the above home, which was way out of our price range and would have delayed our garden infrastructure building considerably. Her Walden castle is hands down more beautiful and efficient than our recycled trailer, but we would have had to go in debt to attain that level of comfort, an option that shouldn't even be on the table for anyone who prefers time over money, which goes to the very core essence of what the Walden Effect is all about.

As the next step in my pursuit of easy to grow grains, I decided to take everyone's advice and read Small-Scale Grain Raising by Gene Logsdon.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book, although (as usual) I felt it glossed over some very important aspects of bringing grain growing to the backyard.  Still, the book made me feel that growing grain was within my reach.

I have to admit that before reading Small-Scale Grain Raising, I fell into the category of folks who don't really think about where their grain comes from.  The only grain commonly grown in my area is corn, and I grew up thinking that flour came from the store.  I assumed that grain-growing was an esoteric undertaking requiring vast amounts of land, equipment, and know-how.  And could you really grow it around here?

But some rough and dirty math suggests that I could create the three cups of flour I use in my favorite pizza crust recipe from 22 square feet of soil --- about the size of one of my raised beds.  As I'll explain later, Logsdon has had success threshing and winnowing grain on the backyard scale.

Many of you are probably thinking --- why grow grain when you can buy flour so cheaply in the store?  My primary motivation is a bit geeky --- I just like knowing how to do things myself.  But growing your own grain has other perks.  When I read Farmers of 40 Centuries, I was a bit jealous of the endless rice straw these farmers seemed to have on hand for mulching.  Straw is a major byproduct of all kinds of grain-growing, and I am always on the lookout for more sources of mulch.

Growing your own grain is also the key to independence from store-bought chicken feed.  And if you grow your own grains, you can make true whole grain flours, without the healthy germ removed.  All in all, it looks like an endeavor worth experimenting with.

It's been a beautiful week of spring, with temperatures above freezing and highs in the low fifties, but winter is returning this week. 

Until finishing our water line moves its way to the top of our list, we've instated a new rule --- fill the thousand gallon tank as soon as it empties halfway.  This is harder than it sounds since there are usually only a few days a winter month when the ground is thawed enough to pump water and the creek is clean instead of flooded brown.  We got lucky and stocked up on Sunday.

Meanwhile, I've doubled the number of milk jugs of drinking water we keep on hand --- now we've got twenty eight gallons.  We should be okay on both drinking and washing water for at least two or three weeks regardless of flood, freeze, or lack of electricity.

These modified brackets help to illustrate the "use what you've got" building philosophy we've been trying to adopt for this home made storage building project.

Several of you have expressed an interest in Farm Goal '10's "Revisit the creek crossing."  I'm always interested to see what clever ideas people come up with, especially while we're in the planning stages.  (We'll be in the planning stages for another couple of months until the water warms up.)  So here's some extra info to get those creative juices flowing.

The drawing here is a top view of the creek crossing area.  As you can see, the creek is relatively shallow a lot of the time, but regularly rises to 16 to 20 inches after normal rains.  About once a month, it rises to the top of (and over) its approximately five foot high banks, at which point it washes away anything that isn't securely bolted down.

Creek crossing 1.0 is a cinderblock ford that still works perfectly for its purpose --- getting vehicles across the creek when the water is no more than two feet high.  However, we really only drive across the creek a few times a month.  This year's priority refers to the much more frequent times that we walk across.  Just so you know, we don't want a big, fancy bridge to drive across --- we like our moat.

Creek crossing 2.0 was a footbridge that we built from trees felled on the property.  It lasted for about two years, and was nearly perfect.  The only flaw was that everyone except me, Mark, and my mom refused to walk across it because the five foot drop below it terrified them.  Wimps. :-)  One option would be to rebuild a similar footbridge, but actually spend a little bit of money for treated lumber and add a handrail.  To deal with high water, it would probably need to be about twenty feet long.

Creek crossing 3.0 consists of three cinderblocks placed along the edge of the ford.  When the water is only a foot deep (80% of the time), these are actually one of the best crossing options.  You hop from block to block and keep your feet dry.  They can be a bit wobbly, but folks seem to be less scared of them than of the footbridge.  They do wash away during floods, though. 

One option we're considering is building a more high tech version of creek crossing 3.0 --- cementing stepping stones to the bottom of the creek using rebar and making them two blocks high to accommodate higher water.  Or perhaps three blocks high with half of the bottom block sunk into the creek bottom.  Not sure if we'd need to make the stepping stone four blocks in diameter like this drawing to make people feel comfortable or just two.

There's also a log spanning the creek that we shimmy across when desperate to get in or out during extremely high water.  This is vastly suboptimal, and we've considering replacing it with two ziplines --- one to take you across the creek and the other to take you back.  When I started researching ziplines, though, they looked to be out of our price range for our current creek crossing plans.  I'm not interested in spending more than $100 on the creek right now.  Plus, clearly the folks who wouldn't walk across the footbridge are unlikely to brave a zipline, so we'd have to create an alternative option anyway.

So, what do you think?  Bridge, stepping stones, zipline, or another option entirely?  I'd love to see links to other websites where people have installed low cost creek crossings.  Just keep in mind that anything less than five or six feet off the creek bottom will be washed away unless extremely securely attached. 

As we reach the rafters of the homemade storage building, we're using primarily scavenged lumber and are discovering that it has its pros and cons.

On the pro side, that old wood is hard --- Mark screws straight into storebought lumber as if it's balsa wood, but our scavenged boards require pilot holes.  The scavenged lumber also comes in much thicker sections --- no 1.5 inch lumber here.  From a very project-specific standpoint, the scavenged wood makes awesome rafters because it's already cut to the length of the tin (that we plan to reuse) and has a handy notch in just the right place.

On the other hand, scavenged lumber isn't quite so modular as those regular 2X4s.  We've had to add a spacer here and there since some rafters are thicker than others.  Furthermore, the brackets that Mark found in the barn to secure the non-notched ends of the rafters to the header would have fit 2X4s but not our old rafters.  Luckily, Mark was able to cut the brackets in half and they worked just fine.

Of course, you all know my main motivation in using scavenged lumber --- price.  It's hard to beat free, especially since it doesn't take any longer to tear the boards out of the old building than it would take to drive to the nearest big box store.  You sure do buy less when you live in the middle of nowhere.

 

We managed to get all the roof rafters installed today along with most of the cross sections on the home-made storage building.

No matter whether you've gone the cheap, at-home route of growing mushroom spawn on cardboard or carefully followed the optimal growing instructions using petri dishes, jars of grain, and sawdust, mycelium is just mycelium.  I've been talking about this stuff for two weeks, and I know you're anxious to get to the mushrooms themselves.

Mushrooms aren't like plants which pay attention to day length and then bloom and fruit on cue.  Instead, you need to give your mycelium a hint when it's time to get some mushrooms.  First of all, the mycelium has to have completely colonized the substrate --- reaching the end of its habitat is one natural cue that prompts mushroom formation.

When growing mycelium in an unnatural habitat, like plastic bags, you will also want to lower the carbon dioxide levels, which simulates the fungus reaching the outside world.  Many growers punch small holes in the bags where they want the mushrooms to emerge.  Increasing the light levels at least slightly also tells the mycelium that it has reached the surface and should send up a fruitbody.

Meanwhile, your mushroom is probably waiting for a specific season (though which one depends on the species you are growing.)  Increase the humidity to nearly 100% and either increase or decrease the temperature to signal a seasonal shift.  Oyster mushrooms are split into warm weather varieties which should be prompted to fruit at temperatures between 50 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit and cold weather varieties that need a few days at 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

If you give your mycelium the right cues, they should form what are called primordia --- little buttons on the surface that can grow into mushrooms.  To prompt the mushrooms to develop properly, lower the humidity a bit and retain lower carbon dioxide levels and moderate light.  If you want mushrooms fast, raise the temperature, or just leave the temperature where it's at and wait a few more days.  Soon, you'll be feasting on gourmet mushrooms!

If you read our rundown on 2009's top ten goals, you may be asking --- what are our major projects for 2010?

1. Revisit the creek crossing.  Maybe build solid, higher stepping stones.  Or a zip line.  Or a better bridge.  Still pondering this one.  The goal is to get us across the creek during moderate to high water.
   
2. Finish our homemade storage building.  Number two on our list, but number one on our agenda.
   
3. Experiment with ways to get humanure to our fruit trees.  We're considering building a movable "outhouse" that will let us fill pits with human waste interspersed with leaves and bones.  My goal is to safely dispose of all of the wastes, but in such a way that they'll rot down into fertilizer that the trees can grow their roots into.  We hope to develop a method which will ensure that we don't have to handle the waste.  Again, still pondering --- more on this once I read the Humanure book that I skimmed last year.
   
4. Running water in the trailer.  Finishing up last year's waterline burying expedition.
   
5. Figure out chicken reproduction.  Yeah, yeah, I know all about the birds and the bees.  But our broody hen is a terrible mother, so we'd like to give our electric incubator another try.  But our house has too much temperature variation for the incubator to work as is (we've tried), so Mark's going to build an insulated brood box to keep the incubator at more of a steady temperature.  Hopefully we can raise enough chickens this year to eat some.  Whether we'll break down and take on a free-loader rooster is still up in the air.
   
6. Figure out a way to keep a constant mulch cover over the entire garden.  This may mean buying a chipper or hunting down those utility line trucks to get a mass of wood chips for longer term mulching (once they rot down.)  Or raking more leaves.  Or getting more serious about grass clippings (maybe with a riding mower so we can cover more territory?)  Probably some combination of the above.  No matter how we do it, I want to spend less time weeding so that we can expand the garden in 2011 to grow some of our own grain.  Right now, we can't expand anything or I'll go nuts during weeding season!
   
7. Figure out mushroom reproduction.  As you've read in our mushroom lunchtime series, we're well on our way.
8. Find a temporary caretaker to check on the farm when we're away.  This isn't essential right now but is a prerequisite for any potential dairy animals.
   
9. Start fencing or hedging pasture areas for potential sheep/goats/pigs.  Big livestock are on our ten year plan, so we'd better get ready for them!
   
10. Bathing room.  Once the storage building is in place, there'll be room in the trailer to make a really nice bathtub with a view of the garden.  Maybe I could even have a supplemental bathing area outdoors for the summer months too?
    
11. Solidify the driveway with more rocks.  This mostly just means money to hire someone to haul rip-rap for us.  And tracking him down to do the hauling.  Then some rock spreading.
    
12. Fix the fridge root cellar.
    

Once again, my ability to count to 10 is in serious doubt.  But listing twelve top goals gives me some wiggle room so that if we complete ten we'll still have succeeded.  It's clearly going to be another exciting year on the farm!

 

These hens seem to be getting along better since I installed the additional 2 roosting posts.

Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms presents so many options for substrates that I got a little lost.  Luckily, the last half of the book gives specific inoculation paths that Paul Stamets has used to successfully grow various species of mushrooms.

I started out on this journey wanting to propagate shiitake mushrooms, but have since determined that oyster mushrooms are the easiest and least expensive to grow and thus my top choice.  Paul Stamets' tried and true method for growing oysters begins with mycelium on agar in petri dishes, then expands onto grain, and again onto straw (or enriched sawdust.)  At each step, the mycelium are expanded onto substrates that are 5 to 10 times bigger and are given a week or two to colonize the new substrate.  Stamets warns that it is possible to skip steps, but that doing so can result in slower colonization which in turn leads to contamination.  In either case, the inoculated substrates should be incubated at 75 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit and 85 to 100% humidity.

Want to grow King Stropharia mushrooms too?  Their spawn prefers 70 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit and 95 to 100% humidity.  Stamets goes from petri dish to grain to wood chips/sawdust.  Check out Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms for instructions on growing all kinds of other species.