Repurposing Wool Fibers

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Nice Barter Arrangement

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

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

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

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

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

Slaughter Day

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

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

Our setup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Instruction

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


Respectful chicken slaughter - Part 1


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


Respectful chicken slaughter - Part 2


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

Joel Salatin - chicken evisceration



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

A Nice Cuppa

Originally uploaded by Salihan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pre-Thanksgiving Tip: Plan for Stock

Whether you're going to be responsible for cooking the turkey or not, I have recommendations for all my American readers.  Plan on snagging the turkey carcass this Thursday to make homemade stock - the very best kind.  Chances are that no one else is going to be motivated to make stock from the remains of the feast, so scoop it up!  After the larger bits of leftover meat are removed, the bones are likely to be up for grabs.  If you're around when the turkey goes into the oven and can lay claim to the giblets before or after cooking, do that too.  (Except the liver, which gives a subtle muddy flavor to stock.  But if you can't distinguish the liver from the other bits, don't worry about it.  It's subtle, as I said.)  When the stock is made, you can either pressure can it or freeze it.  To set yourself up for stock making there are a few areas in which you need to prepare - ingredients, equipment, and space.

Ingredients are easy.  Buy an extra couple of carrots and onions, plus a celery heart during your pre-feast grocery shopping expedition.  If you happen to use fresh herbs in the course of preparing your Thanksgiving feast, save a few.  Or just save the stems from fresh parsley.  They give a nice flavor to stock that rarely interferes with any other flavorings you want in the finished dish.  Leek greens, onion cores, and celery bases also are great in stocks - save kitchen scraps and you may not need to buy any ingredients specifically for the stock.

Equipment - Mostly what you need here is a big pot, a strainer, and something to put the stock in when it's done.  A colander will suffice if you don't have a strainer.  Cheesecloth is the best for those who are fussy about sediments and solids in the stock.  If you plan to freeze, you can use saved yogurt quart containers.  If canning, you'll want the usual jars, lids and bands.

Space - Turkey carcasses are big, so bring a big container, or a big bag to cover the bones if you leave them on the platter.  Make sure there's enough space in your fridge to hold the bones a day or two, unless you plan to get right down to stock making on Thursday evening.  If space is going to be a problem, have a meat cleaver on hand and plan on breaking down the bones so they fit in a smaller space.  (You can do this discreetly outside with a chopping board if it's going to freak anyone else out.  Use the excuse of needing some fresh air - with the turkey carcass as company.)  If you don't have a pressure canner, you'll need to make sure there's room in the freezer for the finished stock.  You're likely to get about a gallon of stock from a turkey weighing in the neighborhood of 15 pounds.  If space is a major constraint, break the bones down as much as possible so they'll be as tightly packed in the pot as possible,  then make a double-strength stock by adding only half the amount of water.  Freeze the stock in small quantities and mark it so you remember to dilute it to back to normal strength when using it.

When you're ready to make stock, see my walkthrough.  It's for lamb stock, but the all the procedures are the same for turkey stock.

Sewing Competency - First Baby Step

I spent far more time than I would have preferred yesterday tackling a very basic sewing project with the help of an experienced quilter and all around sewing perfectionist. I'm very pleased with the way my cloth gift wrap turned out. I think it's beautiful, and it's probably one out of the five wraps I have planned that I'm going to keep at home for our own gifting needs. Not least of all because it's probably going to be the most perfectly executed one.

The idea behind these gift wraps is that the fabric on one side, at least, is suitable for the holiday gift-giving season, while the other side is more suited for festivity in general, and thus appropriate for birthday gifts. I was talked into the purple color above as a Christmas color, because purple is associated with the Catholic season of Advent. I come from a Catholic background, so there is some relevance there. But also, I just like the color purple, and it picked up the accent color in the print fabric above. So each cloth gift wrap is essentially a perpetual replacement for paper gift wrap. Each of the wraps I plan to make uses two full yards of fabric, so I'll be able to wrap rather large gifts with each one. Getting the wrapped gifts to look neat and tidy is probably going to require some practice, or else some sturdy (and re-usable) wire-edged ribbon.

While I'm glad to be able to report some progress on my sewing competency goal for 2009, I can say with a high degree of certainty that this is never going to be a hobby I engage in for fun. That's just fine, I think. My goal was only to get to a point where I could say confidently, "yeah, I could do that;" provided of course that "that" meant a fairly uninvolved repair job, or a simple project designed to use up scrap fabric that would otherwise go for rags or into the trash (such as a colored bed sheet my husband spilled bleach on). An improvement in my ability to reduce household waste was all I was aiming for.

(Sorry for the washed out pictures: it's a rainy day so I had to use the flash.)

After the four-and-a-half-hour lesson, during which time we managed to complete just one extremely simple wrap, I now need to find the motivation to finish off the other four wraps that I purchased fabric for. I am somewhat hampered by not having, as my mentor does, a room set aside just for the purpose of sewing, as well as sundry tools designed to make the process easier. Given that I don't ever envision throwing myself wholeheartedly into things sewing, I'm pretty reluctant to spend money on such tools, useful though I know them to be. While there is satisfaction in having completed one small project, I don't enjoy the process of sewing enough to invest in more than just the basics.

Here are the fabrics that will go into the rest of the gift wraps I plan to make.

Check back with me before the holidays to see if I get these done!

Bits and Pieces

Nothing major to report lately, but lots of minor things in the works.

The weather has turned autumnal. (Isn't autumnal a great word?) That means I'm in the mood to bake again, even though we still have quite a bit of bread in the freezer. I began a sourdough starter earlier this week, since room temperatures are now perfect for sourdough. Not long ago, Hank made me insane with jealousy over his fig "problem." This reminded me that there's a special fig-anise bread in the book Artisan Baking that I desperately want to try, but first I need this starter to be ready to leaven. I also hope to get a very large supply of sourdough English muffins made and stashed away before the real cold sets in. We don't keep our house warm enough for a sourdough starter to be too happy here over the winter. Instead of discarding the majority of the dough with each refresh of the starter-in-progress, I've been cooking it in a skillet and feeding it to the hens. They seem to like it.

Our DIY cold frame, with sprouts of beets, spinach, lettuce, carrots, Tuscan kale and even some all but invisible parsley and scallions. We'll have to thin three out of the four kale sprouts in the top center. This is my first foray into the square foot gardening method.

Seedlings are up in our first ever cold frame. This is encouraging to me at a time of year I typically find discouraging. I love sweater weather; really I do. I just think we ought to have another two or three weeks of proper summer here, especially since the spring was such a bust. We didn't get much of a tomato crop this year, and there are no second chances with the heat-loving plants in the area I live. The cold frame is helping to distract me with visions of fresh vegetables plucked from the clutches of winter. I now have a serious case of cold frame greed. I want more square footage under glass next year. I had expected the soil in our cold frame to settle more than it has by now. We may have only very short scallions and kale.

I have found a sewing mentor. She's even local, and isn't charging me anything, though I'll take her part of the sourdough starter when it's ready. So all of you who have despaired of me ever doing any damn thing about my sewing competence goal for this year may have cause for cautious optimism. I've decided to try replicating Julie's lovely cloth gift wraps, inspired by the Japanese art of furoshiki. I had a bit of a shock when it came to purchasing the fabric. There weren't any cheap $2.99-per-yard, made-in-China bolts at the Mennonite fabric store. These wraps that I had planned to deliver my holiday gifts in are probably going to price out close to what I'd like to be spending on the gifts proper. I'm trying to see the expense as part of a learning process as well as holiday gift making.


In other news, I've been feeding my hens the ripened berries of the eastern black nightshade plant. Who knew that a plant with such a minatory name could produce safe and tasty berries? But beware: the rest of the plant is toxic, and the unripened berries are toxic as well. The ripe ones? They taste an awful lot like tomatoes. But since a handful is all I can collect at one time from the volunteers around the garden, and since my new girls are so finicky about so many other things, I let them have these dark fruits they seem to love so much. Pretty, aren't they?

What's new at your place?

The Planting Schedule

"Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field." - Dwight Eisenhower

There's great pleasure, for me, in planning a garden; always has been. I like to work with graph paper to give myself a spatial representation of what the garden will look like. But I also work better with a progressive list of planting dates, so I can keep track of what I need to plant when. I've already begun sprouting some seeds. Among these are crops that need the longest season to mature (onion, leeks, and celery root), as well as fast growing plants that tolerate cold temperatures very well (lettuce and kale). In my ambition to produce as much of our own food as possible, I will sow seeds and transplant seedlings from February through August this year, saving the garlic bulbs to plant last of all in mid-October. If this year is anything like last year, we'll harvest apples in November, and continue harvesting leeks throughout the winter. But I also hope to have more root crops and more cold-tolerant greens under cold frames and row covers for fall and winter harvest.

The timing aspect of sowing and planting comes down to local conditions as well as individual knowledge of the gardener. I could tell you when I plant, transplant, and direct sow my seeds in zone 6, but it wouldn't be very helpful for those of you in other hardiness zones. Fortunately, there are plenty of useful guidelines out there. Indeed, Ali at Henbogle recently linked to Kathy's Personalized Seed Planting Calendar which you can customize with the dates of the first and last frost dates in your area. Once I plugged in the relevant dates for my own area, I found it to be an excellent starting point for my scheduling. But the schedule includes some plants I won't be growing and omits others that I plan to include. Also, my own experience will guide me to diverge slightly from the suggestions of the automated schedule.


For instance, while the conventional wisdom is to plant tomato seedlings two weeks after the last frost, I prefer to plant even later than that. In my experience, exposure to temperatures lower than 50 F will prevent even the smallest, greenest fruit on the plant from ever developing into a tomato with good flavor. So I transplant when I can be reasonably certain that the nighttime temperature will not fall below 50 degrees. In my area, that means the tomatoes don't go in the ground until June 1st. It's worked well for me. I don't get the earliest tomatoes, but my first tomatoes are worthy of the name.

Also, I'll plant my pumpkins and winter squash on the late side, because I want to harvest them when outdoor temperatures are as low as possible. Warm temperatures shorten the shelf life of pumpkins, and a mid-May planting will mean a September harvest. I'd rather see them finish off in early October, so I'll wait for June to plant them. That will let me store them well into the late winter months.

Another excellent timing reference that I rely on is Eliot Coleman's Four-Season Harvest, which contains an index of planting guidelines for late season crops, based on the first frost date in the fall. The indices alone are worth the price of the book, in my opinion. Also, don't forget that if you live in the US, you have a great resource for local gardening knowledge in the Master Gardeners. You can reach these volunteers through your state's local Agricultural Extension Office. There should be one in every county in the US. These trained and experienced gardeners will have some of the most specific recommendations for your location.

While various authorities can give you general guidelines for planting dates, it's important to remember that these sources will be giving you averages. But different varieties of a given crop also vary in the number of days they need to reach maturity. Tomatoes may take as few as 55 or as many as 80 days to produce fruits from the time they are transplanted. That's a big range; more than three weeks. Lettuces range from 50 to 70 in days to maturity. Check the seed packets of the specific varieties you've ordered to find this information, in order to plan accordingly.

If you're an experienced gardener, you may well want to decide your planting dates for yourself. Here's a nice online tool I use to help me count backwards from two different dates: the average date of the first fall frost, and the date when we'll see less than 10 hours of daylight at my latitude. It will also help you count forward from a given date, based on the days to maturity for your seeds.

It's hard to compare your location to another one for several reasons. Hardiness zones reflect the average low winter temperature in an area. But within a given zone, there's a wide range in the first and last frost dates. Your last frost date might easily match that of a distant location in a warmer or cooler hardiness zone. And latitude determines day length, which also has no direct correlation to either frost dates or hardiness zones. To see evidence of this, just follow any east-west running line across that hardiness map to see how many different zones exist at a given latitude. There's a lot to learn about how the weather behaves in any given area - and we haven't even mentioned precipitation!

I know that when you're inexperienced with gardening the details can be sufficiently overwhelming to induce paralysis. Don't let that discourage you. Plants want to live and grow. They will do most of the work if you give them a decent chance. Try a wide range of plants, and something is bound to do well for you. Just don't get overeager and plant seeds so early that the seedlings get rootbound in their containers. Few plants can rebound and produce well if their roots are constrained early in their growth. Keep some notes on how things do in your garden each year, including planting dates, harvest dates, and a few weather notes, so that next year you can make better decisions. Most of all, just try it! Gardening is definitely something you learn by doing.

Green blessings for your garden this year!

Related post:
Late Frost and Tender Seedlings

February Frugal Action Item: Kitchen Competence

Time for another month's Frugal Action Item. This month, in honor of the chilly winter weather we're having in the northern hemisphere, I am challenging my readers to improve their kitchen skills. My goal with these Action Items is to provide concrete steps that both renters and homeowners can take to improve their household budgets. By the same token, this month's item highlights areas for skill expansion for all but the most serious professional cooks and homesteaders.

If you already know how to cook well, congratulations. Now skip down to the Alternative Action Items below. If you don't know how to cook well, you've most likely been using this as a ready-made excuse for eating out, or picking up ready-to-eat meals at the grocery store. Both of these practices are a serious drain on your food budget, and they also tend to steer eaters to less healthy food choices. Additionally, highly processed and over packaged foods contribute significantly to the production of greenhouse gasses, and thus global climate change.

So this month, I urge you to check out a few basic cookbooks from the library. The goal here is not to wow anybody with fancy meals or exotic ingredients. Instead, look for a few dishes that can provide a basic but healthy meal in a single item. Candidates include casseroles, twice-baked potatoes, soups, pasta dishes, fritattas, and so on. None of these dishes are difficult to prepare, and they can all be made to include green vegetables. Challenge yourself to prepare at least one such dish each week. Keep an eye out especially for dishes that use plenty of vegetables, or meat dishes that are readily supplemented by vegetables or starches. Don't be afraid to add extra vegetables to a dish with meat. These types of dishes will help you stretch your food budget farther.

If you are really new to cooking, I recommend that you begin with pasta dishes and soup. A good way to build skills is to start slow and plan to repeat dishes with some variation. For instance, this week you might begin with a pasta and tomato sauce dish. In the second week of February, make a broth-based soup. In the third week, you could prepare a pasta with an olive oil sauce. And in the final week of this month, prepare a chowder soup of some kind. So two types of pasta and two different soups in a month.

Recommended cookbooks for beginning cooks:
The New Best Recipe, by the Editors of Cook's Illustrated
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, by Mark Bittman
Joy of Cooking, by Irma S. Rombauer
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, by Marion Cunningham

I can specifically recommend the following dishes from these cookbooks. They're all delicious and easy to prepare:

Chicken with Dumplings, from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
Cabbage Stuffed with Lentils and Rice, from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian
Twice-Baked Potatoes, from The New Best Recipe
Pulled Pork, from The Joy of Cooking

If you want to try a simple meal of roasted chicken, have a look at my walkthrough of this dish at the Simple Green Frugal Co-op.

My hope is that the joy of mucking about in your own kitchen will prove addictive enough that you become an instant convert. But I recognize that not everyone enjoys cooking as much as I do, and that learning to cook may be a daunting enterprise to some. So I will allow as how the monetary savings would likely also be a powerful motivator. Or, you might find inspiration in the knowledge that you are preparing wholesome food for yourself and your family, thus contributing to better health. Perhaps parents could also show children that developing new life skills can happen at any age. In the end, there are many reasons to improve our kitchen skills.


Alternative Action Items: Accomplished home cooks are hereby challenged to learn how to bake bread, and to bake at least one loaf each week of this month. It's a good time of year to bake; you'll be warming your house up at the same time. See below for some basic resources.

If you already know how to bake bread, then I would suggest learning some form of food preservation, such as canning, fermenting, homebrewing, cheese or yogurt making, or dehydrating. (Heather had a great post on easy-peasy jelly making just a few days ago.) I include this suggestion only for those who are already quite advanced in their food preparation skill set. Canning, fermenting, cheesemaking, brewing, and dehydrating will all required you to invest in some fairly specialized equipment, and that's not an investment I think everyone should make...yet. But if you have all the cooking and baking skills you really need, it's certainly something to think about. If you're at that point, you probably don't need any advice from me, which is just as well since I'm far from an expert in all of those subjects. We're still working on canning and homebrewing.

If you already bake and preserve food routinely, your challenge for the month is to pass on some of your impressive kitchen skills to a young person. Equipping the next generation with basic skills for their own self-sufficiency is a noble task and a generous gift of knowledge and self confidence.

Suggested resources for baking skills:

Breadtopia.com - This site has fantastic tutorials on my favorite easy method of bread baking: no knead. Try this method! It's easier than you imagine and the bread is fantastic!

The Bread Baker's Apprentice, by Peter Reinhart - Highly detailed book on the fundamentals of bread baking, fabulous recipes too.


I want to hear your reports on this month's Frugal Action Item! Please leave a comment and share stories of your efforts. We're all in this together, so let's support each other.


Other Monthly Action Items:
January: CF Bulbs & Pipe Insulation
March: Rein in Entertainment Spending
April: Go Paper-less
May: Solar Dryer
June: Raise the Deductible on Your Auto Insurance
July: Stay Cool Without Touching that Thermostat
August: Repair It!
September: Insulate
October: Preventative Health Care
November: Frugal Holiday Wish List
December: Plan Next Year's Garden

First New Year's Goal Progress: Worm Bin Composting

I surprised myself over the weekend by tackling - and almost completing - one of my New Year's goals. Most of December I was in a very mañana mood, fighting off a hellacious chest cold and feeling the urge to hibernate. But I got a small burst of motivation, and so I ran with it.

I read up on the advice for starting a worm bin system on this page. After that it was just a matter of following the steps. Given the winter weather, I decided that starting the worm bin in my basement would be a good choice. My husband and I aren't exactly arm wrestling for the privilege of taking the compost out the bin lately. We have plenty of space in the basement though, and I figured we can always move the bins outside in the summer if we want to.


The first step in building our worm bin system was to acquire two matching bins made from a dark opaque material, with a capacity of 5-10 gallons each. My husband picked up a perfect set for $10 at Kmart while running other errands. I then got the power tools out and started drilling holes. The ventilation holes all along the top rim of each bin need to be numerous but very small (drilled with a 1/16" bit) so as to discourage any insects from making the bins their homes. The drainage holes in the bottom of the bin need to be bigger though. I used a 1/4" bit for those holes.



Next I needed some bedding for the little crawlies. I shredded a pile of black-and-white newspaper and gathered up a few of the leaves that still linger about outside along the fence. (In the first picture above, most of the dried leaves are in the lower bin, where they'll be stored.) I also poked around our very meager compost pile for a little bit of the most rotted material. There wasn't much there. Most of the material we would have composted over the last year went to supplement the feed for our hens. And we also tasked the girls with working the semi-mature material from compost bin into the cleared garlic bed during the late summer and early fall. Hens are right composting machines, I tell ya. So it was meager pickin's for the worms out at the compost bin. This is the gardener's dilemma. There's never enough compost to go around.

Anyway, having collected material to make a nice home for some worms, I needed the worms. And this was the sticking point. In summer time, I would simply go dig for the worms and collect them myself. I thought of going to a bait shop, but it turned out the last bait shop in town closed six months ago. So I resolved to at least try to find some worms in my own garden. Although there are several sections of the garden that I heavily mulched in the fall, and I waited for a warmish day after the temperature overnight remained (just) above freezing, I had no luck finding any worms. They're all tucked way down low in the soil I suppose. Short of luring them to the surface with a heating pad, or a freak heat wave I don't think I'll get any worms out of my garden for a few months at least.

At this point I'm working my local sustainable farming and gardening network, hoping that someone has a wormbox ready to be harvested or thinned. But I'm not having any luck so far. My frugal streak makes me very balky when I contemplate paying good money ($30+!) plus shipping to mail order a pound of red worms. There's a bait shop about a 20-minute drive away, but of course it's hard to justify a driving excursion for just one reason. There may be a second reason to head over to that town at the end of this month, so I may do that later on.

To get to this point with the vermiculture project, I've invested $10 and about an hour and a half of work, which includes drilling the holes, shredding newspaper, gathering the dried leaves, trying to find some worms, and cleaning up drilled out bits of plastic. Not bad at all for a very useful home and garden DIY project, and an attempt to cross one of my New Year's Goals off my to do list.

So for now I have a beautiful worm box composter set up, and no worms. It's frustrating, but I'm trying to take my own advice and practice patience here. I suppose the worst that could happen is that I continue to dump our kitchen scraps into the outdoor compost bin, and I wait until spring to harvest worms when I begin planting. Until I locate a source of worms, I'll leave you with a list of worm box composting benefits. If there are any drawbacks, I've yet to figure out what they might be.


Benefits of Worm Box Composting:

Reduced waste stream. We don't pay for trash service by volume (though we should), so we don't save money that way by composting. But at least we're contributing less to landfills.

Very inexpensive. A one-time expense of $10 to set up a system that can be used indefinitely with no further monetary inputs is a bargain.

Gardening Super Ingredient. We'll get concentrated worm castings for "free." There is no soil amendment more highly prized than worm castings. Only fully rotted compost comes anywhere near worm castings for available nutrient content. This will improve the quality of the food we grow to feed ourselves.

More worms. By "raising" worms in a protected and ideal environment, we'll be able to increase our earthworm populations. They won't be eaten by birds or other predators, or end up dead on the pavement after a rainstorm. As the population in our box grows, I'll thin it by returning some worms to the garden.

Time and effort savings. A trip down to the basement is faster than a trip out to where our compost bin sits in the back yard. In winter time, this is a big deal. And in the spirit of tiny tips, I recognize that opening the door less often saves us a tiny amount of heating expense.

Fingerless Gloves - Easy Knitting Project

It's getting cold again. We had a hard frost overnight. The hens' water was limned with ice when I went out this morning to feed them. Our heater is finally kicking on, even with the thermostat set at just 64. I rummaged through the coat closet to find my beloved fingerless gloves. Then I realized that I hadn't ever posted about these marvelous homemade treasures.

For those who want to be frugal and have to sit still to work or study, winter can be a hard time of year. It's no problem keeping warm when it's time for housework or cooking. But sit down for an hour or more, and the circulation slows and the chill creeps in. It goes without saying that layering up will help, and I even wear a comfy hat inside. But I found that my hands get cold as I write, type, or hold a book. And when my hands get cold and stay cold, I'm unhappy. Enter a simple knitting project!

A few winters back, I decided to turn my very rudimentary knitting skills to the task of keeping my hands warm. I found a cute knitting pattern for fingerless gloves in Interweave Knits magazine, but it required knitting in the round with double-pointed needles, which I'd never tried before. (I'd previously only knitted flat things, like scarves, baby blankets and afghans.) I wasn't sure that I could do it, but I knew that the local yarn shop would help me out in a pinch. So I invested in the double pointed needles, bought some yarn, and set to it. As with many knitting techniques, it took only a little bit of trial and error to figure out. I soon found that knitting with double-pointed needles wasn't as daunting as it had seemed. I was able to produce one fingerless glove in a long evening. And the pattern was simple enough that even I could manage to make two roughly symmetrical gloves.

After making a pair for myself, I felt confident enough to make a larger pair for my husband, who works from home most of the time and who had also complained of cold hands. I decided that his would be more snug than the pair I made for myself, which were quite loose and baggy when made according to the pattern as given. Some "fingerless" gloves actually have short, truncated fingers on them. These are completely fingerless gloves, which don't interfere with typing at all, but still keep the hands warm. For those of you who knit, here's what I did:

The pattern is worked in p1, k1 rib stitch, 24 stitches per row, evenly divided on three dp needles. For my husband's gloves I started with smaller gauge needles (US size 5, I believe) and gradually increased the size every few rows until I was working with size 11 needles. That made a tapered tube so that the part of the glove that covers the wrist is narrow, and the part that covers the hand relatively wide, especially around the thumb. The length of the gloves is up to personal preference. It's easy to just eyeball the length as you're working them. When the glove is the right size to fit on the wrist/lower arm above the base of the thumb, bind off three stitches in the middle of whatever row you're at. This will form the hole for the thumb. On the next row, cast on three extra stitches at that point and continue working for a few more rows, until there's enough material to cover the knuckles and at least part of the first bone of the fingers. If in doubt, add an extra row or two after the thumb hole. Better a little long than too short. Bind off when you have the length you want, then make a matching glove following the exact same pattern. Either glove can be worn on either hand.

Here's a picture of my handmade fingerless gloves on my husband's hands. You can see how snug they are around his lower arm and wrist.


He really likes them, even though he resisted the idea at first. Knitters with good eyesight may be able to tell that I worked both pairs of gloves with two yarns knitted together. I let him pick out the colors from among my yarns. He chose one navy blue woolen yarn and a green acrylic yarn to go with it. It took less than 1 skein of each yarn to make the pairs of gloves.

If you're trying to keep warm on a tight budget, these gloves can be cheaply made with acrylic yarn. They're also nice gifts for friends or family for the upcoming winter holiday. If you're an experienced knitter, you'll be able to knock out one glove in an evening. Less experienced knitters may take a few days to complete this project.

Wearing It Out & Making It Do: Simple Repairs

Frugality is a many faceted approach to life. It can include a huge variety of activities - from clipping coupons, to shopping around for the best deals on major purchases, and from doing it yourself, to digging yourself out of consumer debt. A lot of the time it's not glamorous, and it nearly always goes against the grain of consumerism in a culture that urges us to spend, spend, spend!

One of the lesser aspects of frugality that I was slow to embrace was the practice of really wearing out material goods, and making them do for longer than the expected useful life. I suppose this practice just isn't as thrilling as getting a good deal when it's time to spend money, or knocking an extra chunk off the principle of a mortgage. After all, it's a little bit like doing nothing: it's just finding a way not to spend any money, while making do with what we've already got.

But having come around to it, I now really see the value in making things last through small repair jobs. For instance, this is our hand-me-down wheelbarrow. There was nothing seriously wrong with it. But it had a crack about two or three inches long on the front end of the basin. I looked at the crack carefully and decided that it would be a fairly easy fix, using a basic sewing technique. I carefully burned pairs of holes on either side of the plastic, then ran lengths of small gauge wire through each pair of holes and twisted them tightly together underneath, creating a kind of suture. The twisted ends of the wires were sharp, and located just where someone would be likely to grab the rim of the basin. So I thought about how to remedy that for a while. I decided that a little bit of hot glue melted over the sharp wires would provide sufficient protection and stay in place. I got out the hot glue gun and covered each sharp point with a dollop of melted glue. Even without that simple repair, which probably took no more than 45 minutes of my time, we would have had a pretty good wheel barrow for free. The repair cost only pennies in materials, and it has kept the crack from progressing any further during the two years we've had it. I see no reason to believe we won't be able to use it for many more years.

Here's our teapot, which gets daily use year round, except for summer time when I brew sun tea in a big glass jar. Sometime last year the lid fell off as I was draining the last of the tea from it, and broke on our countertop. There was a time when I would have just gone shopping for a new teapot. Teapots do wear out eventually, I can assure you. But this one still has years of use in it. So we glued the pieces of the lid back together. It may not be as good as new, but it'll serve just fine until the thermal stress from daily hot water baths takes its toll on the body of the pot.

My husband is a handy sort. He fixes all kinds of things that would intimidate me too much to even tinker with. Things with gears, and valves, and circuits. I'm really grateful to have this skill set in my mate. It's not one that I would be eager to pursue on my own. His attitude is: it's already busted, so why not try messing with it? As a philosophy, this is pretty unassailable. More often than not, when something breaks he'll eventually get around to taking it apart and trying to fix it. It might take him a while, and the first attempt might not succeed. But usually, in his own good time, he can fix things. Recently he's fixed my leaking garden hose spray nozzle, our busted paper shredder, and an alarm clock that went on the fritz. Handsome is as handsome does, wouldn't you say?

Repairing things is one of the ways that creativity and ingenuity come into living a frugal life in a big way. Too often there's little advice available to those who want to repair things. Our disposable culture is at least partly to blame for this. "Throw it out and get a new one" has become the lamentable standard practice. It's well to remember that it wasn't always thus. Those who want to try fixing things instead of throwing them away have to summon a little gumption, and gather their wits about them. The results may not always be aesthetically pleasing. But I've found that the satisfaction of accomplishment and thrift from repairing things is its own reward. That fondness for repaired objects more than compensates for the imperfect appearance.

Canning Update: Observations, Successes and Busts

I mentioned as how I was going to start pressure canning this year. (Can it really have been more than a month ago? Where did August go?) I said planned on canning tomato sauce, borscht soup, and salsa. Well, I gotta tell you, I've had very mixed results.

The pressure canning itself is pretty straightforward and less nerve wracking than I had feared. Nothing's exploded in my kitchen yet, anyhow. But my very first foray into pressure canning left me feeling mightily depressed. After a deal of work making a large batch of borscht from garden vegetables that included our beets, tomatoes and savoy cabbage, as well as some carrots donated by another gardener, then canning it all in quart jars...well, the results looked just godawful. This is a picture of the one jar that didn't seal, probably because it was overfilled. All the others popped themselves shut. But the color was horrid in every case, and the cabbage looked like it had been boiled to death in there. Given that the jars were under 10 pounds of pressure for 45 minutes, I guess that's a pretty accurate description.

I was so dispirited. I couldn't even persuade my normally brave husband to try my experimental first run; it was that bad. Looks like we'll chalk this one up to learning the ropes. Unless someone who sounds like they know their business comes along and offers a canning-proof borscht recipe, (please?) I'm sticking my borscht in the freezer from now on, just as I did last year. Humph!

Happily, the tomato sauce went much better. The tomatoes have been coming in slowly this year. And I don't have enough equipment to make very large batches of sauce at one time. But still I've gotten 8 quarts of roasted tomato sauce put away. My intentions of making salsa have been forestalled by the sluggish production of the tomato plants. But I may well get around to that before tomato season winds down. I would guess we still have a few weeks of good beefsteak tomatoes left to us, if the weather kindly cooperates.

So, yes. Baby steps in the canning department this year. I hope to get more proficient and braver with the process as time goes on. I also plan to can some apple butter in the fall when our apples ripen up. I'm almost at the point of being ready to say, "I'm ready for fall and all the apple chores."

Got any good canning recipes you want to share? Please, please do so in the comments!

Popcorn: A Cheap Snack

Who doesn't love popcorn? I don't know anyone who dislikes it. Yet popcorn gets a bad rap for different reasons from several different viewpoints. Dieters avoid it because it's so often doused with fat. Frugalites eschew the astronomical markup on microwave popcorn. And the whole thing with corn basically taking over the American diet probably hasn't helped popcorn's image either.

But I love popcorn so much that I decided to grow some this year. It's one of the most common snack foods in our home. We pop ours right on the stove in oil. I've heard from a lot of people that they prefer expensive microwave popcorn to oil-popped corn because the texture of microwave popcorn is "just right." It seems a lot of people have trouble producing perfectly popped popcorn on their own. Well, it just so happens that I've got the oil-popped cooking method dialed in. So I'm going to share it with you. Follow these steps and you'll soon be enjoying perfectly popped popcorn, on the cheap.

Start with a fresh bag of popcorn, a 2-quart stockpot with a fitted lid, some neutral cooking oil like canola or safflower, and a serving bowl. If you want butter and salt to season the popcorn, have those ready too.

Put your pot on the burner and heat it over medium heat for about 2 minutes. Pour about 1 tablespoon of oil into the pan, and let that heat for another minute. Then pour in some popcorn. You want to add enough so that it all lies on the bottom of the pan in a single layer, without entirely covering the pan bottom. You should see the corn covering about 2/3 to 3/4 of the bottom of the pan. Give the corn and oil a swirl so that all the kernels are coated with oil. If your pan was properly pre-heated, you should see tiny bubbles forming in the oil around the kernels pretty much right away. Cover the pan with the lid.

Leave the heat on medium. (Higher heat produces tough, chewy popcorn and will contribute to scorching.) You will not hear any popping for a full minute or more, though you may hear some sizzling. This is fine. When the popping begins, give the pan another shake with the lid on. Let the popping continue. Listen carefully as the popping slows down. When you hear what you think might be the last pop, start counting out loud, "one-one thousand, two-one thousand..." If you hear another pop before you finish with "three-one thousand," start counting again from one. When you get through "three-one thousand" without being interrupted by another pop, dump the popcorn into the waiting serving bowl. This should leave very few unpopped kernels in the pan.

You should now have a bowl full of large, beautiful, tender popcorn without any burnt pieces. If there are any, you may have used too big a burner for your pan, or your stovetop may run hot. Adjust this for your next batch.

Popcorn's texture improves slightly if you let it cool for a minute or two before eating it or adding butter. So I always melt my butter after the popcorn has popped. You can jazz up your snack by adding garlic, spices, or even fresh herbs to the butter. A finely grated hard cheese is also a nice twist. For best results when adding cheese, use a microplane grater and don't add too much. I've found that ancho chili powder makes a nice addition to the melted butter. Finely sliced fresh basil is great too.

So pop your own popcorn at home. It'll save you a bundle over either the popped and packaged or the microwave variety, and you won't get popcorn lung. Enjoy.

Cautiously Stepping Into Pressure Canning

I've mentioned before that we have an especially large garden this year. It's much bigger than anything I've ever attempted before. So I anticipated that I would need to store at least as much of that food as we eat fresh. To that end I finally acknowledged that I would have to seriously consider canning as a storage method. I weaseled out of this last summer because we had a new chest freezer and a much smaller garden. What little preserving I did went into the freezer because I knew I wasn't set up for proper canning. But the chest freezer filled up alarmingly fast with a side of lamb and a side of pork, some fresh summer vegetables, as well as apple cider and apple butter from our own tree. And then this spring I stockpiled lots of homemade no-knead bread so I wouldn't have to bake any over the summer.

That's the rub with canning: it really needs doing during the hottest part of the summer. And where I live summers are formidable. But with a stiff upper lip, I placed an ad on craigslist looking for canning supplies such as tongs, jars, and a pressure canner. I lucked out right away with a call from someone who wanted to give away two old pressure canners. Free is my favorite flavor, and it's always in the budget! Even better, there was a pair of canning jar tongs included in one of the boxes. Then I picked up about 70 canning jars for just $5 from another caller.

So far, so good. But I still needed to buy the disposable canning lids, a canning funnel, and a magnetic thingamajig to fish hot lids out of simmering water, all of which set me back $27. And since I have no idea how old the sealing rings are on the (quite old) pressure canners, I decided it was a safe bet to replace those. I ordered two new sealing rings for $20, including shipping. So far I'm out $52 for my canning set up. This is not a huge amount, but neither is it insignificant. At least not to me. True, most of it went to buy things that can be used again and again. But even so, I look at that figure, and it's money that is now gone forever. I know it will be a complete waste if I do not follow through with some serious labor. Just to break even, I need to put up a quantity of food whose ingredient costs are at least equal to $52. Any food canned over and above that amount means money saved; I'll start earning a return on money spent out of pocket, and on my own labor in gardening, cooking, and canning. After inventorying my jars, I find we have 57 quart jars and about a dozen jars of other miscellaneous sizes. If I filled all those jars, I think we'd be in the black this year on the canning front.

I've decided that salsa, tomato sauce, borsch soup, and possibly beef stew would be my main canning projects for the summer. Our garden is well stocked with salsa ingredients, and my husband eats a ton of the stuff as a snack food. Tomato sauce is always good to have on hand, and I have a simple roasted tomato sauce recipe that's very quick to prepare. We love borsch soup, that hearty Russian classic that is as good warm in the wintertime as it is refreshing and cold in the summer. We have cabbage and beets from the garden, the primary ingredients in this soup. I put some away in the freezer last year, but it got eaten up pretty quickly. So this year I plan to put up at least three gallons of the soup.

I watched my mother can strawberry jam and dilly beans with the water bath method when I was a child. I vividly remember the steamy, sweltering kitchen. But she never used a pressure canner. So I have no mentor to help me figure out the pressure canning process, which frankly makes me a little nervous. But I do like to read, and I have good reference books on canning as well as the owners' manuals for those free pressure canners. I feel that learning to can is a valuable frugal skill. So I'm going to tackle it, even if I'm a little nervous about it, and dreading the additional heat.

Wish me luck. And if you have any advice, please feel free to leave it in the comments! I'll post updates of my experiments, whatever triumphs or failures are mine, along with recipes that work well, if any.