First Tincture: Valerian Root

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

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

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

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

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

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

2010: A Year in Review

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

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

Anyway, on to what did get done this year.

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What accomplishments made you proud this year?

Goals for 2011

Time for another foolhardy and overly ambitious list of goals for the new year.  Publicly posting my list both spurs me to get more done each year, and also hangs over my head like lead-clad obligation.  Part of the process of assembling a list of goals is not just prioritizing among all the things I'd like to achieve, but also trying to figure out which out of all of those are most likely to see the light of day.  I haven't proven too accurate with this.  I end up doing things I didn't think I'd get to, while neglecting others that I thought would rank higher in priority.  If only I'd been clever enough to put the task I was going to do on the official roster, I'd have one more item to scratch proudly off the list.

Since this is also the time honored season for reflection, I do have some self-analysis to burden you with.  Early this year, facing another overloaded spring schedule, I experienced a sort of homesteader's burnout.  Although I thought I'd been taking projects a few at a time, it all just seemed too much.  Since beginning the homesteading venture in 2007, I've kept hoping, with each new year, that we'd get past most of the heavy lifting jobs, and reach a point where only the day-in, day-out routine and the changing work of each season needed to be done.  I dangled the excuse that all the extra projects that needed doing were once-and-done things.  But that rationalization wears thin when every new year brings an equal number of major projects.  I face each spring a year older, and lately I feel each and every year of my age.  So what I've resolved from now on is to do away with the psychological carrot - the idea that if I can just get this or that big project done, it'll be nothing but coasting from then on.  Clearly that's not going to be achieved in the coming year, so I may as well stop kidding myself.  Today all I can honestly tell myself is that at this moment, I feel up to another year of very hard work.  It may be the last year of what sometimes feels like Herculean effort.  Or, more likely, not. All I can do is take it from here and see how it goes.

Already the roster of projects to tackle this coming spring is a little daunting.  This spring needs to include the pruning of fruit trees, putting in more asparagus crowns (more below), planting one more apple tree, starting about 20' of hedgerow with new plantings, and all that goes into starting up the annual garden.  Seed starting alone is a pretty big task that stretches out over weeks.  Everything else will have to fit into the docket during the rest of the year.

One thing I'm not committing myself to for next year is a new species for the homestead.  After all, this year I violated my own one species per year rule.  We'll try again with honey bees, and hope to do better by them in 2011.  I have, however, been toying with the idea of keeping quail for some time.  While I emphatically do not want to put myself on the hook for figuring out how to house and productively keep a new species, neither am I ruling out the possibility by resolving not to try a new species next year.  Novel idea: leave myself some breathing room.  If late spring rolls around and I feel like I've got all my major projects under control, I can revisit this issue.

So, without further ado, here's what I'm going to be working on over the next twelve months:

Plant a second apple tree - We cut down our hemlock tree in the backyard this year, and even lasagna mulched a spot nearby in hopes of making the digging go a bit easier.  The intention is to replace the hemlock with an heirloom apple tree and at some point to graft some scion wood from our old apple tree onto it.  Currently our venerable apple tree is a consistent producer of fine apples for eating and cider.  But it won't last forever and the variety is unknown.  So all we can do is, in effect, clone it by adding some of it to a new tree. We'll put in an Ashmead's kernel apple tree near where the hemlock stood.  This variety is practically a legend of unparalleled flavor, and is known for its excellent keeping qualities.  It will need a few years of growth before it either bears any fruit or is ready to take a graft from another tree.  In the meantime, we'll need to find someone who knows grafting.

Start a hedgerow where part of our fence blew down - I plan to start with a few hazels and perhaps a medlar.  These plants will need some time in the ground before we plant anything else with them.  The hazels put all their early efforts into root development, showing top growth only after a few years.  We'll give them those few years as a head start and then add faster growing plants.  In the meantime, I can work on improving the soil quality along that fenceline, and on propagating seedlings of hedgerow candidates from the plants we already have on the property.  It's going to be a slow moving project.

Convert half of one long garden row to asparagus plantings - It became apparent to me this year that we don't have nearly enough asparagus plants.  Since the layout I chose for the garden this year is permanent, we can simply make one of the beds a perennial area.  Yes, this is a fairly major spring project, since asparagus likes to be planted deeply.  But spring is when asparagus needs to be planted.  If an additional 25 crowns still doesn't meet our asparagus needs, we can think about adding another 25 plants in a couple of years.  We do love our asparagus, and those lovely spears pop up when precious little else is available from the garden.

Continue to load up on soil amendments from our township - Each weekend in April and May our township will dump a frontloader scoop of mulch or compost into the bed of one's pickup truck for $10.  We got at least one load every weekend the service was available this year, and I'd like to do it again in 2011.  The addition of that much organic matter has made a big difference for our garden.  One more year of this treatment ought to pimp our garden out beautifully.

Try starting new figs and other plants from cuttings - I've never started anything from a cutting before, but the figs must be pruned, and we'll need a lot of plants to populate the hedgerow I envision.  So I'm going to try using the willow rooting hormone solution in spring.  It might even work. 

Improve over 2010's harvest tally - Okay, so 750+ pounds of harvest from the backyard seems pretty good, given the crop failure of the heavyweight winter squashes, and a kinda sucky year for potatoes.  But we should be on a steady ascent path as the perennials come into production.  Barring any weather disasters or plagues of locusts, our maturing pears, cherries, blueberries, figs, elderberries, grapes and asparagus should all produce better than they did in 2010.

Build a better apple grinder from a used in-sink garbage disposal.  This is something I read about a few years ago, though I can't say where.  So far it's never been a high enough priority to make it onto a formal list of goals.  But this fall I got an object demonstration of the difference in yields between a commercial press and the old-fashioned grinding and pressing we do.  It's profound.  Given that apple pressing is a lot of work for a fairly small yield, it only makes sense to do a one-time project that will lead to less work and higher yields in the future.

Get serious about using the rocket stove and solar oven - Basically my goal of more sustainable cooking was a a bust this year.  I managed to prepare just a few meals with these two alternate means of cooking.  The late completion of our passive solar array severely delayed my ambitions to build a cooking station for the solar oven, since the plan was to use the framework for the array as part of the station.  I didn't want to get in the way of the contractor while he was still working out there.  I have less of an excuse for the rocket stove, but it didn't get done.  I need to make it more convenient to use these alternative means of cooking in 2011 - and then use them.

Hoop house - Here's next year's burnout bait.  This is the biggest, most labor-intensive project that I'm committing to this year.  It doesn't have to be done in the spring, but it ought to be in place by late summer for season extension.  The idea is to situate it where the shunt for our passive solar thermal system dissipates excess heat into the ground during the warm months of the year.  Should be both a challenge and deeply satisfying to tackle such a project.  Then I hope to house our hens in it during the winter months, allowing them plenty of light and relieving us of the work of rebuilding their winter quarters each year.

Rig drip irrigation from the rain barrel(s) for the main garden bed and the three sisters bed.  We were able to salvage some drip hose a while back.  It would have been great to have this irrigation in place this year when it was so dry.  Of course, Murphy's law states that if we get organized with our rain water-fed, drip irrigation system, we'll have another sodden year like 2009.  Still, it ought to be done.

Continue gleaning for the hens - We did pretty well with provisioning our hens via acorn gleaning in this mast year.  Next year I'd like to match our 75 lb. haul on acorns, though I'm willing to make up that weight with hickories or perhaps even black walnuts if that many acorns just can't be found next year. 

Build at least one more cold frame and get them all planted on time - I seeded the cold frames a bit too late this year, and the plants definitely look undersized at the moment.  I know they'll resume their growth in just a few short weeks to give us early produce.  But it would have been nice to have them available sooner.  I think I need to aim for August sowing; it's just so counter-intuitive to plant in the hottest stretch of summer.  I may need to strategize some way to cool the cold frame beds when it's that hot.  My sense is that we'll be building one new cold frame each year until the oldest one wears out, at which point we'll switch to rebuilding the rotted ones. 

Learn more about medicinal herbs - I've added quite a few culinary and medicinal herbs to our property over the last couple years.  So far I've made a few salves and used lemon balm as a calming tea.  I know what to do with the culinary herbs, but not much about using them medicinally.  The easy excuse this year was that the plants were not sufficiently well established to harvest much from them.  That won't fly next year, and the reality is that I simply haven't found the time to apply myself to any rigorous study of a rather vast discipline.  I suppose it's better to have put the plants in and waited to figure out what to do with them, rather than studying up and only later getting around to planting things.  By the end of 2011, I want to know more about how to use valerian, feverfew, self heal, yarrow, comfrey, chamomile, lungwort, skullcap, sweet woodruff, lavender, stinging nettles, elder, and the culinary stuff too: garlic, sage, mint, anise hyssop, thyme, oregano, rosemary and lovage.  If you have any recommendations for books, videos, or online resources for learning about medicinal herbs, I'd welcome them.

Work on feeding the flock from our own resources - In lieu of committing to another species for the homestead, I'd like to retrench on the livestock we've already got.  I want to devote some serious thinking, planning, tinkering, and experimentation to feeding our chickens from resources internal to our homestead.  There are several specific areas I want to explore, including black soldier fly larvae "cultivated" in a homemade Biopod knockoff.  So building one of those is an official goal. Beyond that, I think it's time to expand our vermicompost bins into something larger and more productive.  At this point we should be getting some chicken feed from the worm bins, and I'd like to step up the scale by at least an order of magnitude.  There's a good chance a larger vermicompost bed can be incorporated into the design of the hoop house, so we'll see how that goes.

Finally, a couple of non-specific goals:

Continue to host volunteer muscle - The WWOOF program has been a godsend for us in the latter half of 2010.  It both pushed me and allowed me to get more things done around the homestead, without completely burning myself out.  Aside from that obvious benefit, it has given me an outlet for my pedagogical tendencies while also taking the pressure off my husband to be my second set of hands for innumerable tasks.  He does, after all, have a day job.  There's not much I can do directly to recruit more volunteers, other than being registered as a host.  But I'll do my best to work with the schedule of anyone who asks to come.  Having willing and able help has been a tremendous resource.

Improve chest freezer management - This is a token housekeeping item for my list.  It's not all that easy to quantify, but there's simply too much food hanging around too long in the chest freezer.  This year when it was time to press our apple cider, we still had a few liters of last year's cider in there.  Right now the freezer is completely full and we have a rather stupendous amount of frozen meat that we postponed eating for months because we had so much produce coming in from the garden that needed to be eaten up.  Somehow I've got to manage our frozen stores better.  I suppose a good first step is to stop buying anything that I'd need to store by freezing.

Continue to pay down the mortgage as aggressively as possible - This one is pretty self-explanatory.  Our mortgage is the only debt we carry month to month.  And it's a liability I would dearly, dearly love to be out from under.  Given that 2011 may very well be the last year my husband holds on to his job, we need to keep a tight control over our spending, and make the best headway we can against the principle.

I think that about wraps up my ambitions for the new year. Once again, the list of tasks is no shorter, despite all that we've accomplished thus far.  I could rattle off a dozen other projects I'd love to see done in 2011, including building a sauna, an outdoor bread oven, and starting miniature dairy goats.  But those, I trust, will be projects for another year.  What I've listed above, plus all the things that come along even though they aren't on this list, will more than suffice to test my mettle.

What's on your list of goals for 2011?

Sustainable Cooking: Curried Chickpeas with Tomato

I've made very little progress towards my goal of using our rocket stove and solar oven more frequently this year.  Of course I have excuses, and they're semi-legitimate, but they boil down to the universal excuses for everything that's wrong with our culture: I'm busy, and it's not convenient.  I'm working on making it more convenient to use either the rocket stove or the solar oven, but in the meantime, I need to just suck it up and cook out there anyway.

It helps that the heat has been infernal lately.  Who wants to cook inside with such weather?  So on Saturday evening I soaked a bunch of chickpeas.  On Sunday morning, I cleaned up the solar oven, and added a bunch of seasoning ingredients to the chickpeas.  The day was blazing hot and sunny almost all the time.  The dish didn't come out perfectly: I'd left a lot more liquid in with the beans than was really needed.  But they cooked through quite well and were tasty.

I wasn't working with a recipe, but here's what I did.  First I drained the soaking liquid the chickpeas were in and then recovered them with fresh water.  I chopped up about five cloves of garlic, and minced about an inch of a fat section of fresh ginger.  These were added to the soaking liquid along with a palmful of dried minced onion, and some spices, roughly in descending order of quantity: cumin, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, black pepper, cayenne, and amchoor.  I also added a good drizzle of oil and a coarsely diced fresh tomato.  This left my cooking pot for the solar oven absolutely brimming.  It went into the solar oven around 9am, and as I checked the temperature in the oven throughout the day it varied from 150-255 F (66-124 C) as the outdoor temperature climbed to 94 F (34 C) and clouds occasionally scudded across the sky.  I only added salt when the chickpeas were done cooking.

Towards the end of the day I put some basmati rice to cook in the steamer out on the porch.  I also went out to the garden to rustle up a quicky relish to go with what is essentially a beans and rice dish: roughly equal parts fresh cilantro (including soft stems) and spearmint (leaves only) along with a whole scallion, a pinch of salt, and a bit of lime juice.  Everything whizzed together in the food processor, with the sides scraped down a few times between bouts of whizzing.  This crude relish isn't shown in the picture but it added a lovely bit of green both visually and taste-wise.  Very refreshing it was too, on a hot evening.  I think adding a zucchini or two to the chickpeas for the last hour or so of cooking would have added a nicer balance of veg too.

I'd make this again but definitely reduce the amount of liquid that goes in the cooking pot.  It worked as a somewhat soupy dish because the rice could soak everything up.  But more concentrated flavor would be better.  Cooking in a solar oven is definitely an experimental endeavor for me.  It's a bit like baking in that you have to set things up and then relinquish the possibility of intervention once the actual cooking begins.  Because the cooking containers are very nearly airtight, I'm having to learn how much liquid to add.  And this is an iterative process.  Also it seems to me that flavors in solar-cooked dishes are more mellow and more diffuse than I would expect from conventionally cooked food.  The flavors in this dish reminded me of leftover curry that had been cooked a few days previously - all the seasonings had spread themselves out and reached a point of equilibrium among all ingredients.  So I might also learn to be a little heavy handed with the seasonings as I continue with the solar cooking goal for this year.

Oh, and by the way, Happy Solstice!

We Now Have a Root Cellar

The root cellar project took shape as a twinkle in my eye about the time we had an energy audit for our home, last April. In the course of discussing insulation for our basement, it occurred to me that, left uninsulated and then sealed off, one small room at the northwest end of the basement could be turned into a root cellar. So when the house was air sealed and foamed, that part of the basement was left alone, to let the heat continue to leak out through the walls. We consulted the Bubels' excellent guide, Root Cellaring, for pointers on design. My husband tackled the messy and difficult job of drilling two seriously large holes through the ceiling of this room and up through the cement slab of our front porch, in order to provide ventilation. He got this done in an afternoon with a rented impact drill.

The last pieces of the puzzle were a custom built and professionally installed door to create a good air seal from the rest of the basement, plus running a light for the room. Given the weird dimensions and lack of square or plumb doorway openings so typical to old farmhouses in this area, no off-the-shelf door was going to work. In the end this project cost us quite a bit more out of pocket than we imagined it would. On the other hand, it's a pretty big room for storing food, and the root cellar cost a lot less than a new refrigerator. I'm looking at it from this perspective: now that the root cellar is built, it will require no further energy or monetary inputs to function as long as the house exists and someone is around to use it. We spent now so that we have this valuable resource later, whether we have money or not.

I know that picture up there looks like there should be bloody streaks on every surface and manacles mortared into the stone walls. What can I say? Old farmhouse basements can be kinda creepy. The room measures about 4' by 9' (1.2 m by 2.7 m). Undoubtedly, it and the adjacent room of similar size once held coal for the original furnace of the house. At 5' 7" (170 cm) I can stand up in this room comfortably, but my 6' 2" (188 cm) husband cannot. No matter. It'll be mostly me going in there. We'll still need shelving before this year's harvest. In the meantime, my husband has promptly taken advantage of the free cooling for his beer, using scavenged wooden pallets to keep the boxes from the dampness of the unsealed floor. This room is naturally humid, and sometimes even has a little standing water in it after heavy rains. For the most part, dampness is not a problem in root cellars. Many crops hold better with plenty of humidity in the air. We may need to add moisture at times if the air is too dry.

I've been watching the temperature in the root cellar since the door was installed. Outside daytime temperatures have been below freezing for about a week now. The basement temperature, just outside the root cellar and very near to the furnace, has been around 63 F/17 C. Over the last week the root cellar's temperature has dropped slowly from the high 40's to 39 F/<4 C. That's pretty cold! I'll be very curious to see how the temperature changes over the year.

I'm planning to experiment with keeping ice in the root cellar. I started with a few plastic jugs, but found that they are thawing fairly quickly at current temperatures. I am waiting on the collection of plastic soda and juice bottles from relatives. When I have a bunch I'll fill them with water and let them freeze on the porch, then put them together in the root cellar. I'm curious to see how long ice can be kept in there. I would like to try to get a sufficiently large number of containers packed together in an insulated box of some sort. In earlier times, people kept massive quantities of ice all year long, even in warm climates, just packed in sawdust or other insulating materials. Of course, I can only fit so much ice into this root cellar, so I won't have the advantage of a large thermal mass. But it's a wintertime experiment to keep myself occupied.

The Better Angels of Our Nature

It's that time of year that encourages us to listen to the better angels of our nature. People are writing about their goals, resolutions, revolutions and projects for 2010. I know that over the past year many of the blogistes that I read regularly have inspired me to do better, do more, keep pursuing my ambitions, strengthen my community, make the world a better place.

Last night a thought came to me as I contemplated what more I could be doing. "What would Rob do?" Conveniently, Rob had just told us what he would do. He would be proud of me if I got to know my neighbors better than our current nodding acquaintance affords. Then I continued with that train of thought...what would make El proud of me? She and Ali both would encourage me to get my act together this year with regards to season extension. Kathy would be so tickled if I gathered up my garden tools, and cleaned, sharpened, oiled and organized them all so that they're ready to go in the spring, and if I finally figured out how to organize my canning lids and rings. Julie would be proud if I made a pledge to use absolutely no more plastic shopping bags - ever. Sharon would be proud if I resolved to use less electricity in 2010 than we did in 2009, and actually managed to do so. And Wendy would be proud of me if I made a commitment to source all of my dairy locally.

It's not so much that I crave the approbation of these writers. I think rather it's that in various ways these writers are the voices of the better angels of my nature. I think that's what draws me to their writing in the first place. As I sat there going through the mental roster of my blog roll and what actions they spur me towards, I realized that each one of these things are possible for me, starting right now. There's nothing stopping me from doing any of these things. Having already changed many of my behaviors that were once routine, I know that however accustomed I am to doing something, however inconvenient a change may initially seem, once a new habit replaces the old behavior, it seems normal and unremarkable to practice the new habit. It only takes a bit of short-term discipline and motivation to adopt many a new habit; after that the new habit is the routine. There are countless examples of this in my own life.

So I'm going to work on these things this year, in addition to all those other crazy projects I've already posted about. I may not succeed perfectly, but that's hardly the point. The point is to begin and to try. But what about you? Are you drawn to read blogs which sound like the better angels of your nature? Or do you read for other reasons? Would you like to make your blog roll authors proud? What are some things you could do that you think would accomplish that? I'm dying to read your responses, and you can name names, or not, as you wish!

New Year's Resolutions & the 2010 Wishlist

Setting an explicit list of goals for myself seemed to work well for 2009. I didn't accomplish absolutely everything on my list. But it certainly kept me a little more motivated than I otherwise might have been. I'm also delighted with how much we got done that was never on the 2009 list in the first place. Since the list worked so well this year, I'm trying it again for next year. Here's a list of projects and some skills I want to work on in 2010.

Start a Meyer lemon & a few fig trees in containers - I've come across a number of good tricks for growing fruit trees that can't normally survive winters in my zone. This generally involves planting in containers and bringing the trees indoors in winter, even if that means into an unheated garage. I especially like the tip about wrapping a lemon tree in Christmas lights for the nights when it gets particularly cold. Over the next few months I'll monitor the temperature in my detached and unheated garage so that I'll have a sense of just how cold it will get in there around this time next year.

Make better use of shaded areas around the property - Soon I'll order ostrich ferns for planting next year. These are the ferns that are edible as fiddleheads when they first emerge. I'll also continue to propagate the ramps that are growing well in at least one shady spot on our property. There are several other shaded areas where they will probably do well. Both fiddleheads and ramps are early crops that will come up in the spring before much else will. Natural season extension. We're mulling the possibility of adding a blackcurrant bush under the large trees that shade our house or at the drip line of the apple tree. The shade might be too deep to see good production from a blackcurrant. Though if we thinned the canopy it might work. Much to think on for this goal, and I'd love to hear your suggestions.

Plant more culinary and medicinal herbs - Since switching into serious gardening mode, I've come to appreciate the value of perennials more and more. In terms of self-sufficiency I've also begun to move beyond the low hanging fruit of food production and into the more challenging area of medicine. Herbs fit both categories. So this year I'll be adding several herbs to the mini homestead, including garlic chives, valerian, uva-ursi (bearberry), sweet cicely, evening primrose, St. John's wort, yarrow, and peppermint - in a container of course. I'm especially interested in perennial herbs that can tolerate some shade, in connection with the previous goal.

Better fruit tree pruning this year - Last year I did only minor pruning on our old apple tree that should really have had major pruning. Like many spring chores, this is one that gets by us too easily.

Add honeybees to the homestead and find a beekeeping mentor - 2010 is definitely the year for it. My only requested gift for the coming holiday season is beekeeping equipment. Though we may not harvest any honey in the first year, we should see improved pollination of our apple tree and garden plants. This should be an adventure and a serious challenge. Having an experienced beekeeping mentor is supposed to help enormously, so we'll seek one within the beekeepers association we recently joined.

Load up on soil amendments in April and May - Every Saturday morning in April and May our township sells a front-loader scoop of either compost or high-quality mulch for a mere $5 to any township resident. The scoop is big enough to nearly fill the bed of our beater pickup truck. That's an incredible deal, which we took advantage of a few times this year. For next year, I'm making it a goal to be there for every one of those eight weekends for a $5 load. That means I'll need to stay on top of unloading the truck and spreading the soil amendments each week, but it'll all benefit my garden for a very low price.

Create a master plan for the "perennial swath". This is an under-used (read: heretofore mostly ignored) area on the south edge of our property. We waded in far enough this past spring to plant two cherry trees and a few perennial herbs. The rocket stove was also built right on one edge of it and the blueberry bushes are on the other end. It got a major clearing out late this summer by my husband, who seeded it heavily with cover crops. I took one look at that big, newly opened swath and though "winter squash for 2010." But we need a master plan and a real weed suppression system here, preferably to involve perennials that will not require too much attention throughout the year. I've envisioned this as a quasi-forest garden area. But I haven't put in the time to think about it in detail. That needs to get done in 2010, even if we don't implement the plan until subsequent years.

Add one or two Herbert blueberry bushes to my blueberry patch, and arrange deer/bird protection for the entire blueberry patch - 'Nuff said.

Cook more with our solar oven and rocket stove - It took a weekend to build our rocket stove this year, and I'm ashamed to admit that it has been used only a handful of times for cooking. It did come in handy for scalding when slaughtering our laying hens. But I want to become practiced in using this super-efficient stove and our solar oven next year. As an easy target goal, I will say I'd like to prepare a meal using the rocket stove at least once per month, and using the solar oven once per week during the temperate months of the year - from May to October. That's at least 24 meals prepared with sustainable energy. This shouldn't be too onerous, but it will require us to become more organized. One thing that's held me back is the limitations of the one-burner and very-high-heat nature of the rocket stove. I'm now seeking recipes for one-skillet dishes, and preferably dinner-ish things, that can be prepared entirely over hot flame. If you have any of these, please share them. Also, I would be far more likely to use the solar oven on a suitable day if I had a space outside set up to keep it level. So...

Build a working space for the solar oven - A level, waist-high surface in a sunny area would make it much easier to use the oven, which is ideally turned a few times during the day to track the sun across the sky. Additionally I would also like a little bit of working space around my solar oven. This would let me take something out of the oven, set it down, and then quickly close up the oven again if there are other things still in there cooking. A "countertop" would also allow us to serve up right outside if we wanted to.

Add more barrels to our rain catchment system and have the roof runoff tested - In an average year, we enjoy a generous amount of rainfall. So much so that I rarely water the garden once my plants are established. But droughts can happen here just as much as any place, and climate change is a wild card. I would also like a supply of water even if the electricity goes out, or if our ground water is ever contaminated. (We have our own well.) Setting up a rain barrel collection system just makes sense for so many reasons. The asphalt shingle roof on the garage is sufficiently old that I doubt there are any toxins coming from it now which we need to worry about. But testing makes good sense nonetheless.

Get a hand pump installed for our old well - As an emergency water supply, this just makes sense.

Eradicate more of our lawn - I hate mowing the lawn. It's one of those maintenance chores that gets me nowhere, but simply has to be done over and over again to no purpose. I don't see us ever getting out of cutting our lawn entirely, because it does provide for the hens most of the year, who in turn add nutrients to the soil. Rotating the girls over the grass means that they deal a blow to the turf every few weeks or so, which slows down its growth. If we add meat rabbits in the future, that will be another "legitimate" use for the grass. But I want less lawn over all, and more of it turned to productive use. We did eliminate one difficult-to-mow patch of lawn in late summer, and put the garlic in there. This naturally suggests that we...

Create at least one permaculture guild around our fruit trees - We have a huge old apple tree and newer pear trees which could become part of the lawn eradication project. This is going to require some wintertime research on my part to be ready for spring planting. It's also going to involve a helluva lot of lasagna mulching.

Dig a swale in the back yard to handle overflow from the rain barrel system; if possible integrate it with part of an apple tree permaculture guild. This should help create an area suitable for cultivating things that like moist soil. Perhaps celery. Or perhaps there's a perennial herb that likes wet feet. (Do you know of one?)

Build more cold frames and do more about season extension - My first (modest) success with a cold frame has left me very covetous of more cold frame space. We have more windows from old storm doors to use, and we have a good location to put them in. We just need to build boxes to fit them. We also need to put some thought into building a hoop house at some point. We could certainly be more diligent about season extension with just the row cover material we already have.

Improve on 2009's total harvest tally - I'm not aiming for any specific number in terms of poundage. I just think that as our perennial crops mature and our experience grows, we should see some increase in the amount of food we harvest and glean. Since our tomato crop was nearly wiped out by blight this year, we lost out on at least 75 pounds of harvest weight which we should be able to count on in a better year.

Take a more serious approach to gleaning acorns - The acorns from the oak tree that straddles our property line have proven to be a great favorite of our laying hens. I crush and feed a few handfuls to the girls every other day, and we are rapidly depleting the 25 pounds and change that I was able to collect from that one tree. I know of several oak trees in public parks and along pathways near the creek, and that's without having really scouted for them. I'm going to make it a priority to collect acorns from areas off our property next fall. At more than 1700 calories per pound, the feed value of this free natural resource is incredibly high. Not only will gleaned acorns reduce my feed costs, but it will help alleviate the fact that I'm feeding grains to my hens that could otherwise go to feed human beings. I won't set any harvest weight goal for acorns, but I'm going to try hard to make it a good haul.

Figure out how to squeeze a couple "hazelbert" bushes in somewhere - Hazelbert - that's a hybrid of filbert and hazelnut, apparently more resistant to eastern filbert blight. We'd need at least two bushes for pollination and they get pretty large, so sufficient space is an issue. This may not be feasible unless we're willing to sacrifice one of the last few mature trees left in our backyard (a maple or a hemlock). Also, we'd have to fight the squirrels and jays for the nuts. But they're my favorite nuts and in due time they would be an excellent source of fat and protein. A perennial, low-maintenance, high-calorie crop is nothing to dismiss lightly.

Take a first aid course and stock a first aid kit - On to our few non-food related tasks for 2010. I'm going to try to get this done very early in the year, before spring begins the round of gardening tasks all over again.

Take a gun safety course, buy a gun or two, possibly get hunting licenses - My husband has been itching to buy a gun for a while now. I told him no dice until both of us had gone through a safety course and identified a range where we could practice shooting on at least a quarterly basis. Fortunately, as an engineer, he can't argue with the sensibility of these preconditions. But he's been too busy to make this happen so far. We have no children, which lessens my concern about guns in the home. On the other hand, I am home alone whenever he travels. So having a self-defense weapon that I actually feel comfortable with wouldn't bother me. That's the key though - I don't want a weapon of such power in our home until I feel completely confident that we both know exactly how to use it safely. Another item to cross off our list as early in the year as possible.

Seriously consider buying an electric-assist bicycle - These are expensive, so we will need to see how our finances look by early summer before making any decision. I rode a bicycle as my primary means of transportation for 14 years. I did it, but didn't much care for it, since I had little choice but to ride in all weather, good or bad. Biking is not a form of recreation for me. Though we could bike to several of our most frequent errand destinations, the distances are not what I was formerly accustomed to, and the terrain here is quite hilly - also not what I was accustomed to at a younger age. An electric-assist bicycle would make longer distances, bigger hills, and heavier loads far less daunting to me. But I know this is a purchase that only makes sense if we really commit to using the bike instead of the car for a lot of trips. We need to give that as well as the finances some serious thought.

Build an arbor for trellising edible vines - Of all these goals, this one's lowest on the list of priorities, since it falls, admittedly, more into the aesthetic side of things rather than the utilitarian. We'd like an arbor that will support both some table grapes and my husband's hops vines. I envision a couple of Adirondack chairs under a breezy, green-shaded arbor with a gin and tonic resting on the arm of each one. This is a long shot frankly, but that's why it's called a wishlist.


Weelllll...I had hoped that all that we accomplished in 2009 would somehow make our workload lighter in 2010. But looking at this list I've compiled indicates it ain't going to be so. How does this happen? I think over this list though, and I delude myself into thinking that if all - or even most - of this got done, surely there would be few new projects to tackle in 2011. Right? Why are you laughing?

What are your goals, resolutions, plans, dreams, aspirations, or wishes for 2010?

2009 - A Year In Review

Much of the time it feels to me like we're not making any progress on our goals. I don't know why this should be, because in fact we've made a lot of progress this year. Maybe it's because my task list is just so damned long that as soon as one project is done, another one immediately takes its place at the top of the priority list. Reading my favorite blogs does nothing to help shorten this list, by the way.

But that baseless feeling of not making any headway is crazy-making - for me, and for anyone around me. (*Cough* Sorry, Honey.) That's part of the reason I decided to participate (sporadically) in Sharon's Independence Days Challenge. But lately I've been feeling the need to remind myself of the bigger things we've accomplished this year to move towards our goal of financial independence and food sovereignty.

For the year as a whole we reduced the principle owed on our mortgage by $35,355, and my husband managed to remain employed despite the recession. We also harvested (so far) just shy of 600 pounds of produce from our backyard garden, worked mostly by myself alone. This doesn't include food that passed from hand to mouth without ever making it inside, nor garden vegetables deemed unfit for the table but good enough for the chickens. Given that it was an execrable year for tomatoes and apples, and a not so great one for potatoes, this harvest tally makes me pretty proud. And there's more out there to keep harvesting. I preserved a great deal of these homegrown and some gleaned foods - with varying degrees of success - by smoking, dehydrating, canning, curing, lacto-fermentation, and freezing.

So here's a month-by-month recounting of the deeds...

January: Can't remember much. I think I hibernated most of the month. Got the seed and rootstock orders in, grouping them with friends to save on shipping costs.

February: I made some worm bins and got our vermicompost system going, bartering for the worms. Attended the PASA conference where I learned a lot and met some local gardening folks who are becoming friends of ours.

March: We expanded the tilled area of our large garden from around 1700 square feet to about 2000 square feet. Removed ornamental trees to make room for fruit trees and berries. Dealt with the debris. Husband ripped out large patch of forsythia to make room for more perennial edibles.

April: We had an energy audit done on our home. Built permanent raised beds for asparagus root stock, making use of a narrow space behind the shed. Planted many perennial food plants, including cherry and pear trees, asparagus, raspberries, blueberries, elderberries, and grapes. Renovated and improved our mobile chicken pen and coop. Started numerous seedlings inside.

May: Added a significant quantity of free compost and mulch to our annual garden bed. Got much of the annual garden planted. I added several perennial herbs for culinary and medicinal uses. Baked and froze enough bread to supply us through the hot months of the year.

June: We built a rocket stove and continued planting, despite the horrific rainfall.

July: Following up the energy audit, my husband added some insulation to the attic. I worked on air sealing with silicone caulking around window frames. Learned how to slaughter our old laying hens. Built and used a homemade chicken plucker to help speed the processing.

August: Learned how to salvage potatoes when the plants got the blight. Built our first cold frame with salvaged materials and planted it. Set up our first rain barrel. Added a gutter to the back of the garage, (well, had one added) where roof run-off had made for a very damp patch of yard.

September: Finally made a token effort towards learning how to sew. Eradicated new portion of the lawn and lasagna mulched in preparation for garlic planting. My husband made substantial progress on turning a corner of our basement into a root cellar. Got our so-designated "perennial swath" substantially cleared and sown with cover crop. Finally had some of the black cherry wood cut down last year milled into lumber. Began harvesting acorns to supplement purchased chook feed.

October: Slaughtered our second batch of low-producing laying hens. Harvested potatoes and some apples. Had our basement walls insulated and the house air sealed. Had conduit installed for a future passive solar thermal and possible photovoltaic arrays. Planted garlic, including a new softneck variety and four hardnecks from our own seed stock.

November: Lasagna mulched several new areas for spring planting. Put the garden (mostly) to bed for the winter. Harvested and pressed apples into cider. Organized much of our stored food on shelves in the newly insulated basement. Arranged to teach an introductory homesteading class in the spring. Attended an introductory beekeeping class, as well as a meeting of our local beekeeping association; became members of that beekeeping association. Did some tree trimming of branches which shade a significant part of the garden in summer. Made (a little) more progress on the sewing competence front. Had our radiant heating system extended to our kitchen in preparation for converting to passive solar heating. Started building winter housing in the shed for the hens (and possible future meat rabbits), including a timer on the fluorescent lights. Used homegrown fruits and vegetables for every dish we contributed to the Thanksgiving feast. Began curing pasture-raised pork jowls as guanciale, a sort of Italian bacon.

December: Put the finishing touches on winter quarters for the hens and moved them into a converted corner of shed. Sourced a local, grassfed prime rib roast for our Christmas dinner. Do self-sufficiency crimbo gifts also count? I asked for beekeeping equipment for Christmas. Working on a roster of self-sufficiency skills and projects for 2010. (Post on that topic coming soon.) Inevitably, I'm already feeling the pull of planning mode for next year's garden.

Wow! Writing it all out like that really forces me to acknowledge that we did accomplish a lot this year. We have made progress. No wonder I'm tired! I don't mean to brag here, nor to make anyone feel that I'm some sort of uber-green super-achiever. Far from it. It's just that sometimes I have an overwhelming sense of urgency that makes me feel like we're way behind the curve. For my own sanity and domestic tranquility, I need to remind myself of these milestones occasionally.

I would love to hear about the milestones you passed this year. Please consider posting about them on your own blog and leaving a link in the comments here. If you have no blog, then please share the accomplishments of this year in a comment.

Recession and Revised Plans

Last year I posted about an extremely ambitious personal finance plan that my husband and I took on in July. We wanted to pay down the principle on our mortgage by an additional $50,000 - above and beyond the paydown we'd see with just our normal monthly payments - over the following 12 months.

Well, that was before it was generally known that the US had entered a recession in December of 2007. Despite the downturn in the economy, we did very well with our goal up until the beginning of 2009. We have not reached it, and as of January, we decided to change tactics and put that goal on hold. You see, right now it looks as though my husband will be out of a job at the end of June.

By any middle-class measure, he's very well compensated for what he does. But he works on a contract basis, and right now it looks somewhat unlikely that his contract will be renewed after June 30th. He had a job offer late last year that appealed to him, and which he intended to accept after June. But that offer evaporated along with the rest of the economy several weeks ago.

Having no debt other than our mortgage, and having built a cash emergency savings to cover six months of expenses, we're situated as well as can be expected to weather a period of unemployment for the main breadwinner in our household. I've been more diligent about doing the various things I do to earn money. And we can be fairly sure we won't go hungry any time soon, given the garden I have all planned out for this year. Still, it's a scary thing to contemplate: losing our income.

Right now we still have almost four months of continued income to count on, and that much time for him to look for other job opportunities, hustle for an extension of his contract, and hope that the economy recovers somewhat. In February I canceled the additional principle payments that we were making automatically each month along with our normal monthly payment. That money will buffer our cash savings for the next four months. If my husband finds another job by June, we'll be able to take that money and apply it to our mortgage as a lump sum payment. If not, well, we'll be using it for necessities.

My plan right now is to either refinance or recast our mortgage in early May if my husband has not secured another job. That will lower our required mortgage payment and let us live longer on our emergency fund. If our finances pick up again, nothing would prevent us from resuming automatic additional principle payments each month, though less of our required monthly payment would be applied to the principle. Still, if we lose our main income, that's a price worth paying.

On the other hand, we are also considering a major expenditure that's not, strictly speaking, a requirement. We've asked for estimates for a solar PV and solar thermal installation that would cut our heating bills down to almost nothing. I have no idea what those estimates are going to look like. Before we would pay out money for that, we'd also have our home evaluated for additional insulation needs.

This may sound paradoxical: that we're contemplating a significant discretionary expense when we anticipate the need to live on our savings. We see it this way though; if the economy remains so weak that my husband cannot find a decent job, we want to be able to heat our house next winter without spending much money. Heating is a major expense in our annual budget, and since we heat with oil, that expense is perilously tied to shrinking supplies of fossil fuel. I'm also concerned about the possibility of hyper-inflation. If that occurred, not only would the value of our cash savings be less, but the cost of oil and electricity might easily become prohibitively expensive. Finally, we reckon that a home with solar electricity generation and low heating costs will hold its value better than many other homes. In other words, it looks like a smart investment to us right now.

We've yet to see the estimates for such an installation, so we don't know whether we'll take that plunge. But it's on the table. And if the price is right we may be able to pay for it with a bonus we're expecting based on last year's performance by the company my husband works for. (For the record, that company is not in the financial/banking sector, nor anywhere near it.)

The smaller amounts of money from my earnings that were occasionally applied to our principle are also accumulating rather than being paid out. But part of these funds are being set aside in my mind for spending as well. Mind you, I'm not planning on any frivolous purchases, but I would like to invest in some items that will be of long-term value to us, no matter what happens with the economy. I figure some responsible spending won't be amiss in these tough times either. On my list of things to buy are some extra sets of long underwear for both of us during the coming spring sales, a solar oven, some solar lanterns, and some materials to build housing for some meat rabbits, and to modify our mobile chicken coop this spring. If there's money left after that, I'll buy another 50-pound bag of bread flour, though I'm almost afraid to know what the price has risen to. Basically, I'm looking to put about $500 into things that will hold their value and pay dividends for our budget year after year.

If we are somehow able to squeak through this year without a loss of income - and that's a big if - I would like to start another savings fund for an electric assist bicycle. I understand that these are quite expensive. But I know that sooner or later we are going to have to confront the end of affordable gasoline. A bicycle was my transportation for many years out of necessity, and therefore I've never regarded cycling as recreation, as my husband does. We live in a quite hilly area, and it's more than three miles to reach the nearest spot where we could grocery shop or fill a prescription. The bulk food store is 17 miles away along the flattest route. There is very, very little public transportation in our area, and none right now that would get us to the places we shop. It would be faster for me to walk to the nearest grocery store than to take a bus, and I'd still have to walk most of the route anyway. So far, an electric assist bike is the best transportation solution I've been able to think of to the end of cheap petroleum, and it wouldn't be much fun, or even manageable, on many winter days.

Well, that's where we're at in this recession. I'm not feeling sorry for us; I know we're better situated than many. Still, like everyone else, we are feeling the anxiety. My heart really goes out to those who are already dealing with job losses and financial disaster. If you're not yet in crisis, please think about spending wisely where you are able to do so. Remember that food banks and other charities are stretched incredibly thin right now. If you can afford it, check that box to add a few dollars to your utility bill payment to keep someone else's electricity from being shut off. Plant your garden this year, and share what you can. We're in for more tough times ahead.

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.

New Year's Resolutions & the 2009 Wishlist

I never made New Year's resolutions when I was younger. It always seemed like a set up for backsliding, guilt, and disappointment. But a few years ago, I started looking at New Year's resolutions differently. Instead of promising to lose 15 pounds, exercise more often, or start flossing my teeth, I decided that I would begin to learn new skills, or add something to my homesteading ways.

Two years ago for New Year's I decided to learn how to bake bread. Now we eat nothing but homemade bread, and bread baking is part of my monthly routine that I take for granted. Last year I resolved that I would keep laying hens. Having four hens this past year was a great learning experience, and I never want to have a garden again without also having hens. I also learned to can this past summer, though that wasn't a formal New Year's resolution.

This coming year there are several skills or features I would like to add to my repertoire and mini-homestead. All of them have something to do with moving us towards greater self-sufficiency and will ultimately allow us to live a more frugal life. Anything fairly specific that I can do which will insulate us from the vagaries of the economic turmoil seems like a great idea these days.

I've already talked about adding another species to our budding homestead. I think what I've settled on is to add a worm bin, because it's a no-brainer, and also to work on adding rabbits for meat. That will involve building a tractor to keep them on our "pasture," and doing enough reading up over the next few months to prepare myself for the new additions. I'll also need to prepare myself for slaughtering them and processing them. I would like for us to have bees, too. But that will either have to wait another year, or my husband will have to make that his own project. I can only take on so many new critters at a time. Perhaps an item for 2010's resolution list.

It's also, finally, the year to put in an asparagus bed. I've waited years and years to do this. I had a cat for 17 years who loved, simply loved, asparagus. Had I started an asparagus bed, he would have found a way to kill it in the first tender year when nothing should be harvested. Dear creature that he was, we had to put him down this past April. He is missed, but we'll look forward to asparagus in his absence. We have a small but ideal space to put two or three raised asparagus beds, just behind our shed. Several other vegetables are to be given trial runs in my 2009 garden as well, including okra, Jerusalem artichokes, two types of eggplant, Brussels sprouts and some berries under and around our white pine tree.

So far these two tasks that I've set for myself are things I am eager to do. They will take effort, but not much self-discipline to put into practice. But there is one thing I've set myself to learn that I don't particularly relish. Sewing. I recognize that this skill is a useful one, but it's just not something I'm eager to learn or naturally inclined toward. But I'm taking up Sharon's competence project challenge, and I'm resolved to give it a go. Probably it will be best to get started on this very soon, while the weather is cold and I don't have outdoor tasks as ready made distractions. I even found a worthy frugal sewing project to get me started. I would really like to find a sewing mentor who can help me learn to use the sewing machine I have on semi-permanent loan.

We'll also be putting in a few fruit trees this spring in the locations where we chopped down nonproductive ornamentals this fall. We plan on two cherry trees and a dwarf apple tree, but we may yet cut down a spruce tree that is getting rather large and replace it with either a nut tree or a self-polinating pear tree. We still need to have the stumps of the old trees ground out before we plant. If we get around to it, we may also dynamite the forsythia out and replace it with some black raspberries. (I'm kidding about the dynamite, but that stuff will be damn difficult to remove.)

In general, I would like to try to do more bartering this coming year. So far I've done very little true bartering. More often I've given thank-you gifts to neighbors who have done us a good turn. My bread is good enough that I wouldn't be ashamed to sell it. I have an agreement in principle to barter some homemade bread for the pruning of our apple tree in the new year. I know enough about cooking to teach classes regularly. So maybe there's an exchange possible there somehow. And we'll have eggs from our laying hens again in the spring. Surely I could find ways to barter for some other services we will need.

One thing I would like to do but am unsure about is to participate in the Master Gardener's program in my region this coming year. I'm unsure about it because I don't even know if it's happening next year. There was no program in 2008 due to a glut of Master Gardeners. Even if there is a program, I don't know that I would be selected. There is a screening process, evidently. And it would be an ongoing time commitment, even after the classes are over and done with. The student Master Gardeners "pay" for their instruction with a agreement to volunteer for the counties that run the program. I think the number of volunteer hours is pretty reasonable, but I would need to double check what I'm committing myself to before I sign on the dotted line. My main reason for wanting to become a Master Gardener is to learn about pruning fruit trees, and to tap knowledge that is highly specific to gardening in my immediate area.

Ever participated in your county's Master Gardener program? I'd love to hear from you if you have!

So much for the at least somewhat realistic goals. On the wishlist is a greenhouse of some sort. It's unlikely to happen in 2009. We'll have a lot of other things on our plate, and there isn't much space to devote to a greenhouse on our modest lot. One of these years though, I would love to try a mobile greenhouse a la Eliot Coleman. I'll probably be thrilled if we manage to build a few modestly sized coldframes for winter salad greens.

So to sum up the resolutions list:

Vermiculture
Meat rabbits on pasture
Asparagus beds
New vegetable trials in main garden, berries under white pine tree
Sewing (ugh!)
Fruit/nut trees
Do more bartering
Coldframes for winter greens
Master Gardener program?

-Wow. That turned out to be a much longer list than I thought it would be. Fortunately, several of these items are mostly once-and-done efforts. I'll use this blog to hold myself to these goals in the coming year.


What are your goals, hopes, dreams, plans for the coming year? What's the long-term vision that you want to serve with your goals?

Confession Time: What We Save For

I've mentioned before that paying off the remaining principle on our home mortgage is my primary financial goal. If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you've probably also gotten the sense that I'm a foodie. Good food is a huge part of what makes life enjoyable for me. And as many personal finance bloggers will tell you, you have to live life too, as well as do the right thing with your money. Sometimes that means spending some money on what you love.

Frugality is often seen as penny-pinching misery and an endless parade of joyless deprivation by those who don't practice it. I would argue that frugality is all about clearly identifying your priorities in life, and then arranging your finances to best serve those priorities. In our case, we want the mortgage gone so that we have more assurance we'll be able to go on eating good food in peace well into old age. I'm not kidding. My golden visions of the future revolve around meals cooked in a home we own outright with lots of home grown, top-quality produce, and a few luxury ingredients we can't produce ourselves.

This week we made our annual daytrip into Manhattan, taking a two-hour bus ride each way. We made our gourmet rounds to Zabar's, Neuhaus Chocolates, Murray's Cheese shop, Kalustyan's spice bazaar, and visited a little pub where my husband enjoys draft beers. We also dropped a wad for an epic meal at an astonishingly good and expensive sushi restaurant. We tried to get into the Morgan Library for a dose of book fetishism, but we got there too late, so it was an all foodie day. We didn't set a price cap to this excursion. I was afraid to look at the total damage on our credit card statement, but inevitably I had to. It came to more than $450 including transportation costs (no taxi rides though). Ouch.

For that money we got many foods that we know and love well, and which are not available to us in our immediate area. The cheeses we bought were all new discoveries made in a shop that allows us to taste everything before buying. We brought home seven different varieties, and rejected as many others. From Kalustyan's we brought home cooking and baking ingredients we'll use for many months. We did pick up a few things that we'll use as stocking stuffers for family members, but mostly we shopped for ourselves.

I wanted to include an honest accounting of our trip, in the interest of self-disclosure. Frugality is important to me, and I take a lot of measures to save small amounts of money here and there every single day. If I figured out how many loads of laundry I'd have to hang to dry to save the amount we blew in one day in Manhattan, it would probably depress me. But gourmet goodies truly make us happy. This is an authentic and self-motivated pleasure for us, not something we're goaded into by marketing. And we'll appreciate our purchases as we savor them over the next several weeks and months. In my book, this was a justifiable occasional expenditure. I wouldn't do it every month, but once a year seems reasonable.

So if there's something you truly love that costs a good deal of money, don't let anyone tell you that occasionally indulging in it is incompatible with a frugal lifestyle. The key is in evaluating whether spending your money on that ephemeral indulgence balances out with a net increase in your long term happiness. A lifestyle of week-in, week-out frugality is what allows us this very occasional splurge without jeopardizing our overall major goal, which is eliminating our debt. So we are very mindful that we earned this splurge, rather than simply telling ourselves that "we deserve it" without thinking through the implications. That money might have gone to our extra principle payment next month, but our day-to-day happiness on our way to our happy golden future is important to us too. We pay our credit card balance off in full each month, so this treat will not contribute to revolving debt or cost us anything extra in interest payments.

What do you scrimp and save for?