Black Soldier Fly Larvae

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

I hope the title of this post doesn't put anyone off.  If you're not fundamentally squeamish about insects, I promise there's nothing terribly icky about what I've got to say today.

Included in my formal list of goals for this year is the project of trying to feed our laying hens more and more with food we produce ourselves.  We've already got well established routines that provide some of the chickens' food, such as kitchen scraps, trimmings from the garden, feeding them Japanese beetles and squash bugs in the proper seasons, and gleaning acorns for them in the fall.  Still, we end up buying a few 80-pound bags of feed for them each year.  This is grown organically, fairly local to me, and milled by the farmer that grows it, so on that score I feel pretty good about it.  But it's a 45-minute drive to buy the feed, and the price (though much cheaper than the nasty pelletized chicken feed from Tractor Supply) has been nudging up steadily ever since I started buying it.  This feed easily accounts for more than half of the hens' caloric intake over the course of the year.

So I've been looking a bit harder at what we might do to close the gaps in our homestead economy and nutrient cycles.  Worms from our vermicompost are an excellent possibility, but I'm going to leave that project for another post.  Right now I'm going to talk about the Black Soldier Fly, which is probably the coolest idea easily adapted for use by very small scale homesteaders I've come across in a long time.  I have this tendency to think that if I've heard of some cool idea, then everyone else already has too.  But I've gotten comments from time to time that ask for more detail on stuff I mention in an off-hand way.  So I'm going to review what I know about this species and how those with small backyard poultry flocks can partner with it to their advantage.

The Black Soldier Fly is well established in many parts of the world, including most of North America in hardiness zone 7 or warmer.  Though it is a fly, it's a world apart from the common housefly in terms of the nuisance factor.  The adult phase of this insect's life, the only time it can fly, is very brief and devoted solely to reproduction.  The adult BSF doesn't even have a working mouth, so it cannot bite or eat and is not attracted by food, except as a resource for the next generation of BSF.  Even so, the mated female BSF does not land on food.  She seeks to lay her eggs nearby - not on - a food source, where the newly hatched larvae will be able to land on the food and begin feeding.  BSF larvae can consume small amounts of meat, but this is not a species that specializes in carrion.  Mostly what she's looking for is decomposing plant matter.  In fact, they may already be resident in your compost heap.  Once her eggs are laid, the adult fly has accomplished her mission in life, and dies shortly after.  The males also die shortly after mating.  The larvae remain on the food source as they pass through several sub-stages of growth, until they are ready to pupate, at which point they seek to burrow into the earth to complete their development into adults.  So you can see that there is little purpose or opportunity for the BSF to interact with humans in any way, unless we deliberately facilitate such an interaction.  Indeed, even if you live in a region with a BSF population, it's entirely feasible that you have never noticed these insects before, since they have little interest in us, and such short life spans in adult form.

The point at which we would want to intervene in the life cycle of this insect is when the larvae are fully grown and ready to pupate. Clever people have designed a clever contraption for harvesting the mature larvae at just this stage.  Or rather, using the BSF's instincts in order to have it harvest itself.  The BioPod is a custom built bucket system that provides an exit route for the larvae leading to a closed container, which makes feeding them to poultry or other livestock trivially easy.

I'm going to post another piece soon about the knockoff BSF composting buckets I'm working on.  What I want to dwell on a little more at this stage is the idea of partnering with this species.  Although in my formal goals for this year I wrote that I'm not committing to adding another species to our homestead, that was an oversight.  In reality, the Black Soldier Fly is another species I very much plan to work with.  It may not look like livestock, just as our red wriggler worms for the vermicompost bin didn't look like livestock.  Perhaps they're not.  But they will be a new species for us, and partnering with them will involve a learning curve.  I see the cultivation of these insects as one more item in the self-sufficiency toolbox; one more thing that reduces our dependence on fossil fuels.  For without fossil fuels it would be very difficult for the farmer to harvest the grains that make up our purchased feed, and very difficult for us to go and buy them multiple times per year.

It may seem grotesque to call my intended relationship with BSF a "partnership."  After all, it looks pretty exploitative from one perspective.  But in reality, I don't see this as ethically any different than keeping other species for food.  I will be establishing an insect where it doesn't currently exist, and responsible not only for feeding each generation, but also maintaining a "wild" population that survives to adulthood in order to reproduce and create the next generation.   After obtaining a starter colony, I'll need to heavily "seed" our garden soils with ready-to-pupate larvae.  This will reduce my usable harvest in the first year.  But with luck, a good population will take root right in the backyard, and continue to take advantage of the shelter and food the composting buckets will provide for them. From what I've read, I will very much need to actively tend the compost buckets.  I expect to derive both animal feed and a small amount of compost tea from this partnership.  In other words, the BSF will become part of the system of this homestead.  I'm always looking for ways to increase the diversity of species, and the connections between them, on our tiny piece of land.

Sooner or later I'll post more on the buckets themselves.  In the meantime, having read this post, would you humor me please, by participating in my poll on Black Soldier Fly composting?  It's on the sidebar of my blog.  I'm curious how many of you have heard of BSF cultivation before, and what your attitudes towards it might be.

A Chilly Classroom

I'm off this afternoon to take a hands-on class on pruning fruit and nut trees, courtesy of the county Agricultural Extension Office. The cost? Eight dollars. This is great since the guy who said he was willing to barter some of my bread for the pruning of our old apple tree has never followed up. For $8 I can learn how to maintain the tree myself.

It's an outdoor class of course, and our temperature should peak just below freezing today. Add to that a stiff 20 mph wind, and this will be a test of my fortitude. And my long underwear. Good thing my sweetie got me some lovely fleece-lined leather work gloves for Christmas last year. (Yes, they've already seen some service.) What a great present!

If you live in the US and have any interest in gardening related topics, you should get to know your county's Agricultural Extension Office. There are a lot of resources (such as the Master Gardeners) for your immediate area under that roof, and your tax dollars are supporting it. In many areas they offer classes such as the one I'll be attending today. My county offered a free class on composting last year, with a free compost bin given away to each attendee. Unfortunately, I couldn't attend. Maybe they'll offer it again this year; I wouldn't mind a free extra compost bin. Our county's Extension Office also offers bare root tree and fruit seedling sales each spring. This year I'm getting four blueberry bushes (two each of two different varieties) for $32, with no delivery charge since I'm picking them up myself. Hard to beat that.

Check your local Extension Office out. You might be delighted at the resources and values you find!

Cheap Thrills

Part of frugality is learning to adapt to the opportunities and the resources all around you. There are various advantages and disadvantages available to rural, suburban, and urban dwellers, and to people of every age range. As someone living on the rural/suburban fringe, nature, or something quite like it, is one of the resources available to me. I can forage for wild greens and berries, and many friends and neighbors have sufficient space for fruit trees from which they may or may not harvest. There's enough wild game in my area that we could substantially supplement our diet with venison and rabbit if we chose to hunt.


But nature offers more than just the chance to feed myself cheaply. The natural world is an ongoing education too. We don't have children, but boy could we come up with some homeschooling lessons if we did. This lovely piece of insect architecture materialized on a branch directly over our driveway this summer. That's a bald-faced hornet's nest.

Bald-faced hornets are actually misnamed. They're really a species of North American wasp with a range that covers most of the US and parts of Canada. The salient facts to me though are that these creatures are aggressive defenders of their nests, and they can sting repeatedly (often on the face) without losing their stinger. It sure made us nervous for about five minutes. Then we reminded ourselves that the bald-faced hornets were busy - very busy, in fact - minding their own business, and so long as we did the same, our paths would never cross. We left them to it.

Then in mid-October, we had a large vehicle pull into our driveway. With alarm I watched it plow right into the branch holding that nest. I waited to see whether an angry swarm of hornets would emerge to unleash hot vengeance on anyone nearby. Fortunately, mercifully, the hive had departed. We picked up the fallen nest and brought it to the porch.

Eventually, after admiring the whole nest for several weeks, my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to cut it open and have a look inside. All my attempts to photograph it have been stymied by the infinite gradations of gray that are present in the fabric of the nest. Here's the best photo I was able to take.


This sort of construction just amazes me. I studied the layers and details of this hornet's nest for about an hour after I cut it open. I still occasionally look over it in amazement. I feel really lucky to have this sort of entertainment and education available to me at absolutely no cost. True, I don't know the scientific names of the materials and different parts, or exactly how the hornets formed their home. I could learn those things from a book, no doubt. But I now have some things that are better than book learning. I have a profound sense of wonder, the ability to actually handle this object, and direct contact with this impressive feat of construction by one of the "lower orders" of the animal kingdom.

Oftentimes I find that frugality is not about making more money or even saving more money. It's not about paying off debt, making the smartest investments, or finding the best deal on something I want to buy. It's about rediscovering the value of stuff that is already available to me, in many cases for free. In those moments when I immerse myself in the richness all around me, money becomes irrelevant. And those are moments worth cultivating.

Kill the Catalogs

Today's frugal tip is a simple one: get yourself off those catalog mailing lists! Do it for any or all of these reasons:

• You don't need anything they're selling. Really.
• Reduce your garbage bill/need to recycle/landfill contributions
• Lower your level of covetousness
• Prevent impulse spending
• Conserve natural resources
  

Frugality is easier when there are fewer temptations. And guess what? If you never see the stuff in those catalogs, you'll never talk yourself into buying any of it. And you won't miss any of it either. What the eye doesn't see, the heart never mourns.

Did you know that 60 million trees are cut down annually in the US just to create the junk mail catalogs that inundate our mailboxes? Scandalous! And that says nothing about the oil that is wasted moving that timber, that paper, and the finished catalogs around until they wind up in said landfill.

So tackle that pile of unwanted and wasteful catalogs a little bit at a time. Call a few each evening for a week. And here's a few tips. Once you get a representative on the line, be sure to ask if they maintain the mailing list for any other catalogs, other than the one you're calling about. If so, ask them to remove you from all the distribution lists they service. You'll save a call. And speaking of saving calls, don't keep calling back if you get the same catalogs two weeks after your initial call. Give it three months between fits of anti-marketing opt-out calling. It takes a while for you to be dropped from some mailing lists. So don't duplicate your efforts unless it's really necessary.

So Many Eggs

About a month and a half ago, we had some new additions to our mini modern homestead. Four Red Star hens, at the retirement age of just two years. We got them from a small farmer not too far away who needed to reduce her flock size. From talking to other poultry farmers, I knew that the eggs from mature hens would be large - much larger than normal grade AA large eggs from the supermarket. I'd also been told that two-year-old laying hens wouldn't produce as many eggs per week as younger hens. That sounded just fine by me as I like to have an egg for breakfast and I didn't think I'd mind having one slightly larger than usual.

We built a mobile coop for the girls, along with a mobile pen, just 5'x6'. We used a great deal of material pulled from dumpsters at residential building sites, which still exist here in southeastern Pennsylvania. (The housing bust isn't as bad here as many places.) The coop is small but contains a roosting bar and a single nesting box, lined with hay, where the girls can lay their eggs. Each morning I move the pen to a fresh patch of our untreated lawn, refill their feeder and waterer, and then move the coop into place alongside it. I release the coop door with a drawstring and the girls rush out for their breakfast. The pen offers shelter from rain and too much sun, but the partial mesh siding also allows sunlight and cooling breezes.

Having hens has changed our household routine a little. The care of the chickens takes very little of my time. Ten minutes in the morning and just two or three at night when I secure them in the coop against predators. Certainly keeping the hens takes us much less time than walking a dog would. What has changed is that many of our kitchen scraps now go directly to the girls instead of the compost bin. Some things that we wouldn't have composted are happily devoured by the hens, like cheese rinds and fish skins. The hens love many sorts of fresh greens. So I now am in the daily habit of picking dandelion greens for them. They also enjoy another weed, prickly lettuce. And they adore the leafy parts of some parsnips that have gone to seed in my old garden bed. There's also an old and sickly plum tree that is bearing some fruit this year but dropping much of it before it ripens. The girls are happy to peck at this still-green fruit. They even eat some of the grass they are on each day and happily scratch away at the ground, looking for bugs and insect grubs. They're helping to keep the Japanese beetle population in check. I've found that I only need to offer the hens a very small amount of store bought feed. One fifty pound bag ($14) lasted us about 7 weeks.

What I didn't expect was to get SO many eggs. Despite what I was told, my more than two year old hens are producing very nearly one egg per chicken per day. That's four eggs per day at least 6 days a week, and never fewer than three eggs per day. In other words, 28 eggs a week. This led to a minor panic attack on my part. At first I gave eggs away as a goodwill gesture to the neighbors; an attempt to forestall any possible complaints even though we are within the letter of the zoning codes and don't have a rooster. But soon I started casting about for recipes that use up eggs.

We had Monte Cristo sandwiches, which are sort of like French toast, sort of like grilled cheese, and sort of like a deli sandwich. The Monte Cristo typically has cheese, ham and turkey inside, with jam on one piece of bread and mustard on the other. Then it's dunked in beaten egg and cooked in a skillet. Some people dust the cooked sandwich with powdered sugar. These were better than we expected them to be and used egg up nicely.

I tried Asian Tea Eggs, which are hard-cooked eggs simmered again in a mixture of soy sauce, sake, tea leaves, water, and other seasonings. I wasn't crazy enough about the results to eat them eagerly.

Bread pudding has been a hit, with Marie Simmons' recipe from her cookbook, The Good Egg. She makes Strawberry Jam Bread Pudding with Almond Streusel, and it is delicious. I tweaked her version just a bit to work with what we had on hand as well as my own preferences. I made it with a mixed berry jam and cardamom in the streusel instead of her recommended cinnamon. I think it would be great with nearly any jam.

Strata, the savory version of bread pudding, is a great solution to the too many egg "problem" as well. I like strata because it doesn't require a pie crust like quiche does, and I often have heels from loaves of homemade bread lying around. Strata is great too because it's great for using up whatever leftovers you have in the kitchen. Half a can of stewed tomatoes is great, as is any cheese that isn't getting readily used for other purposes. I like to add sauteed onions to my strata, and also toast the bread and then rub it with a clove of garlic for extra flavor.

I don't worry about the dietary dangers of eating so many eggs. Our cholesterol levels are fine and the link between blood cholesterol and dietary cholesterol has largely been debunked anyway. Since our hens eat copious amounts of leafy greens, our eggs would be considered pastured eggs. Nutritional studies have shown that compared with conventionally produced eggs, pastured eggs are lower in total fat and cholesterol, higher in "good" cholesterol, higher in vitamins A, B, D and E, higher in folic acid and higher in omega-3 fatty acids. The yolks of our eggs are a beautiful dark orangish-yellow, indicating that they are packed with beta carotene.

I'm sure we wouldn't be eating so many eggs if we weren't keeping laying hens. But as we have the eggs, it makes sense to use as many as we can and sell a few for ready cash. By and large, the meals we make with eggs are extremely economical. Even if you're not getting "free" eggs, as we are, eggs can form the basis of a great many cheap and meatless meals. I recently heard that some farmers markets in the San Francisco bay area offer premium farm fresh eggs at $6 per dozen. This sounds outrageous on the face of it. Yet if you had two eggs for a breakfast made at home, the cost would only be $1 for the eggs. Throw in a cup of coffee or tea and some buttered toast and your total cost might be as high as $2. A $2 breakfast is a good deal. A serving of strata made with those super expensive eggs and lots of other ingredients might set you back as much as $3 or $4. A dinner costing $3 or $4 is a great deal.

So think about the mighty, humble egg as a cornerstone of your at-home, frugal and healthy meal preparation.

Cheap Bread with a Sourdough Starter

While reading the fabulous Tightwad Gazette, I came across an excellent recommendation for acquiring new skills. Each month, pick one frugal skill that's new to you, and try it out. This seemed like such a sensible idea that I immediately decided to learn about baking, and in particular about yeasted breads. Good bread is something my husband and I came to expect as our birthright while living in the San Francisco bay area. Since relocating to Pennsylvania, the bread pickings have been decidedly fewer, poorer and more expensive. I reasoned that I could probably learn to produce bread at least as good as that being sold for $4 per loaf at the local grocery stores.

Background reading
I've long been proficient at cooking. But baking with yeast seemed so complex and so other to me that I knew I would need the full month or more to feel comfortable with it. Once again, I turned to books and the public library for help. I found the Baker's Companion, by the King Arthur Flour company to be an excellent reference for all around baking, including a section on yeasted breads and sourdough. But I wanted something to help me really get my head around yeasted breads. The book that helped me do this was The Bread Baker's Apprentice, by Peter Reinhart. I highly recommend both of these books to anyone new to baking.

Do-it-yourself sourdough starter
As a thrifty person, I decided that I would begin a sourdough starter and leaven all my breads from it rather than have to buy overpriced packets of yeast in the stores. To get my sourdough starter up and running, I simply saved a small piece of raw dough from a pack of Trader Joe's pizza dough. This was far from a precise exercise, as I had only a general sense of what needed to be done. I put the dough into a clean plastic pitcher, added some warm water and a few teaspoons of sugar, stirred, and put the lid on the pitcher. I let that sit at room temperature for about 3 hours. Then I added a little bit of flour and stirred that around. The contents were still quite liquid. That mixture sat out at room temperature for another three hours. I put it in the fridge when I went to bed. For the next two days, I took the pitcher out of the refrigerator in the morning, added 1/3 cup of water and 1/3 cup of flour, stirred well, covered and let it sit out all day. By the fourth day, it was pretty clear from the bubbles and the yeasty smell that I had a starter going.

There's another option for frugal folk who want their own sourdough starter. Carl's friends will send you a free dried sourdough starter in the mail, no strings attached. Your only cost would be two stamps, one for your self addressed stamped envelope, and the other to get the envelope to Carl's friends. Since starting my own starter, I've sent off for Carl's starter and received it. I'm saving the dried starter in case my own should die off or turn funky. Visit the link above to get the mailing address for your own dried starter sample, as well as detailed instructions on how to get it going when it arrives.

The only caution I would extend to those creating or maintaining their own starter at home is that chlorinated water should not be used, as this will deter the yeast and their companion friendly bacteria. It's fine to use well water, but if you're on a city hook up, it might be advisable to buy mineral or distilled water.

Keeping your sourdough starter happy
You do need to pay some attention to your starter. A starter is not a fussy thing, but it can't be starved. It needs to be fed on a weekly basis, at least. I feed mine just 2/3 cup of flour and 2/3 cup of water each Tuesday and again if I'm making multiple batches of bread in a week. There are certainly advantages to having a sourdough starter. Among these is the tangy taste that all the bread produced from it has. Another is that a sourdough starter will prompt you to keep baking. Otherwise, you end up with an enormous amount of starter.

Sometimes the starter will have a darkish liquid on top of it when I take it out to feed it. There's nothing wrong with this, but it does contain a tiny bit of alcohol along with the other waste products from the yeast. You can simply stir this back into the starter, or you can pour it off. I always pour it off, to spare the little yeasties from stewing in their own waste. Alcohol is yeast piss, after all. When I pour the liquid off, I gauge it roughly and try to add that amount of liquid back into the starter, in addition to the flour and water I'm feeding it.

Baking supplies
There are also times when baking with active dry yeast is preferable or necessary. For one thing, there are far more bread recipes out there that start from dried yeast than those that work with a starter. If you wish to bake bread from dried yeast, I urge you to buy your yeast in bulk at a health food store or dried goods store. You will find the prices for bulk yeast to be vastly cheaper than for the individual packets.

If you get serious about baking bread you should absolutely check out all convenient sources of different flours. Bread baking uses up flour like nobody's business! I've never gone through bags of flour so fast in my life. Shop around and get the best prices, because you'll really start to go through it if you supply your own bread.

There are a few pieces of equipment recommended for bread bakers, but I've been fortunate in that I've successfully avoided paying for any of them. There are online companies which will be happy to sell you expensive bannetons or proofing baskets. And by all means, if you're looking for something to spend money on, have at it. I found that an old rectangular basket for serving bread worked very well when lined with a square of linen cut from a worn out article of clothing. I was also lucky enough to be given a baking stone by a relative who had two. I won't say that either of these articles are necessary for baking good bread. But they did make a difference for the better in the loaves I produce. There's another fancy gadget called a lame for slashing the top of the loaf before baking it. Needless to say, I haven't shelled out for this. I can hold a razor blade carefully enough in my hand for the one or two moments each week that I need to use it. In my opinion, this gadget might make sense in a professional bakery making thousands of loaves each day, but not for the home baker.

The breads!
For the last six weeks or so, I've been cranking out double-sized loaves of bread about once a week. I've been splitting these with my father, as my husband is often away on business travel and I don't want the bread to go to waste. The bread has gotten rave reviews, and I'm happy to see a steady improvement in the texture of the bread. I've also started making English muffins from sourdough starter and these get even better reviews from friends and family. English muffins cost out to about 10-12 cents each, and my monster-sized loaves of bread start at around 85 cents in ingredients costs, depending on what I put into them. Olive oil and fresh herbs can easily double or triple the ingredients costs. And that's why I'll be growing sage and rosemary in pots pretty soon.

So try your own homemade breads! Don't be shy or nervous. It's a very rare loaf of freshly baked homemade bread that doesn't get a lot of appreciation around the house.

Here's a flickr link showing some of the yeasted breads and other items that I've prepared recently.

Books for Tightwads

I've always been an avid reader. For a while I worked at a bookstore, which has left me with a backlog of reading material that should last for years. When I felt the need to embark on a more frugal lifestyle, my thoughts turned immediately to reading about frugality. That led me, of course, to the library. I thought I would devote a post here to some of the books that have helped me make many, many changes toward a more frugal life.


The Tightwad Gazette, by Amy Dacyczyn. These three books are certainly the best combination of cheering squad, frugal philosophy, meticulous research and nitty-gritty, practical advice. Written by a Mainer mother who raised her six children on a single modest income, this is advice from someone who's been there. If you read only one author on frugality, make sure it's the incomparable Amy D. All three of her books are now available bound into a single volume: The Complete Tightwad Gazette. Very highly recommended as an excellent place to start reading about this lifestyle choice. Also the best source I've found of practical and specific money-saving tips.

One of the most crucial frugal skills is home cooking. Many people with little skill in the kitchen view cooking as some sort of quasi-mystical, arcane art and feel daunted before they even begin to learn. Yet cooking is a common, age-old practice, developed over the centuries by illiterate peasants as much as by three-star Michelin chefs. You don't have to be naturally gifted or professionally trained to prepare healthy, nutritious, thrifty and tasty meals - trust me. I'm going to recommend two books for novice home cooks who feel lost and unsure about how to begin mastering their own kitchens. The tried-and-true Joy of Cooking has been around so long for a very good reason: it works for both beginning and experiences cooks. You can rely on the Joy of Cooking to give you a good recipe for just about any basic dish that would be prepared in an American home.

A slightly updated approach to simple yet tasty home meals is provided in the America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook is a fantastically practical and very thorough guide to preparing more than a thousand home cooked meals. There's a nice blend of shortcuts and from-scratch preparation in this book, and the photographs are a valuable resource for cooks who are working their way across unfamiliar ground. I highly recommend this book as a source of well tested recipes and a general reference for almost any topic that would be of interest to the home cook. The ATK Family Cookbook is published by the same press that produces Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country magazines.

I've had an old copy of Stocking Up on my bookshelves for almost as long as I've had my own bookshelves. This book is a fantastic guide to preserving and storing food when it is in season, and therefore abundant and cheap. It provides detailed and authoritative instruction on techniques ranging from simple freezing, to canning and even as far as building your own root cellar. Stocking Up can provide you with invaluable information to help you trim your food budget and shift to a healthier diet at the same time.

Baking at home is a complementary skill to home cooking. While there is more money to be saved by cooking lunch and dinner for your family yourself, the savings to be had by baking bread and also breakfast items should not be ignored. But yeasted bread baking can be mystifying to an experienced cook or even professional chef. The best book I can recommend on the topic of yeast breads is The Bread Baker's Apprentice, by Peter Reinhart. This exhaustively authoritative book contains an incredibly detailed breakdown of the yeasted bread process, as well as some wonderful recipes. There is probably far more information in this book than you need or want. But I've come across no other book which so thoroughly explains what happens when we bake yeasted breads. Also, there are a nice number of recipes for bread made from a sourdough starter - the frugal baker's choice.


More thumbnail book reviews to come!