6. May 2012 by admin.

It’s been a while since we updated the blog, mostly because of spring busyness keeping us occupied. The sheep finally got sheared from their annual wool coat, much to their relief, and can happily scamper around the pasture again.

Enough time has passed since the spring freezes to see that our orchard trees will not be producing any crop this year (although we haven’t checked out the wild trees yet). The extremely warm March weather stimulated flowering way too early, then several nights of mid 20’s F. killed off the blossoms and fruit buds. Even trees that weren’t in flower at the time had their buds damaged by the cold as they were too far along in their development. So no apples, pears, plums, or peaches this year. Fortunately, we had such a bumper crop of fruit last year that we put up way more than we would normally need and can ration the remainder until next year. We still have canned applesauce, lots of dried apples and some peaches, apple and peach juice and we even made extra vinegar last year. Too bad we ate up all the dried pears already.

So given where things are now, we have time to work out a new action plan for this growing season. We will focus on our berry, grape, and melon crops instead of the tree fruits. Although some of the earliest strawberry blossoms were also damaged by the freeze, even though their buds weren’t open at the time. It looks like the later blooms are doing OK. The raspberry’s leaves took a hit, but they are fall-bearing canes and the later sprouts are looking fine. The grapes weren’t fooled by the early warmth and they look normal. The wild blackberries should be unaffected as well. So our perennial small fruits should hopefully put out a sufficient crop for us. The other crop that can help make up for some of our fruit shortfall is melons. We usually plant a fair-sized patch of watermelons to enjoy when the weather is hot, but will increase the size of our Sakata Sweet melon patch as that variety preserves well. It’s an Asian melon that you can eat skin and all. It’s terrific when it’s dehydrated and good for snacking. We haven’t tried it in any cooked recipes yet, but necessity being the mother of invention, who knows? Lastly, while not a fruit but usually lumped into that category because of its uses, we have rhubarb. We usually just enjoy this during the spring, fresh season and don’t bother putting any up, but this year we’ll be drying some to help fill any gaps in our menus.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

9. April 2012 by admin.

It was hard not to get caught up in the early spring warm weather excitement and jump the season too early this year.  But with restraint, we’ve kept to our normal seed starting and planting schedule.  Unfortunately, our fruit trees were stimulated into early flowering.  Peaches blooming in March in Minnesota is not a good thing.  We’ve got a couple of nights of mid 20’s F. forecast, so we’ll just have to see how the fruit trees come through. If a few blossoms get blasted that just helps us do the fruit thinning that we never seem to get around to. As long as temps don’t dip too low we’ll probably get at least some fruit.

Recently we added a new solar “load” to our home power system that will come in handy when summer arrives.  We installed a small 12-volt fan (surplus from a Cray supercomputer) on the gable end of our attached porch (located on the SE corner of the house, with polycarbonate roofing and windows with screens).  This fan is powered by a small, 8 watt solar panel that previously ran another fan of the same type, pushing air through a solar collector for winter fresh air intake.  The solar panel was disconnected in summer when the heat exchanger was not used.  Now it can be switched to run either fan.  The porch has a shade cover for summer, but the extra venting will help with heat buildup and air flow, as we use this space to dry seeds, beans, and grains for storage.  If you have any kind of renewable energy production system, it’s good to find all the uses you can make of the power you’re generating. Letting the system sit idle is energy not harvested/wasted.  Think of these kinds of loads as solar sponges to soak up the excess power pouring in.

Meanwhile, the bio-gas system is in place and waiting for warmer weather. And our baby chicks will arrive on Thursday. We have nearly finished their (hopefully) predator-proof coop, although their first home will be in our house in a halogen lamp heated, cat-proof dog kennel. When they are older and much larger we hope that they will provide a diligent bug patrol in our orchard, even if this may not be its best year for fruiting.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

4. March 2012 by admin.

Last fall we selected pits from some of the hundreds of peaches we harvested from our five hardy seedling trees and placed some of them in shallow pans of sand, others in perlite. We put the trays in our sauna, where temperatures could get below freezing but mice couldn’t reach them, watering them as needed to keep them slightly moist.  We also set aside a tray full of butternuts to sprout (from a neighbor’s tree).  The excess peach pits  were simply planted in the ground in a nursery area of our garden. We’ll see how much difference in germination this causes.  A couple of weeks ago, we moved the trays into the house to warm up.  This week we saw the first 1-inch sprout and transplanted it to a pot of garden soil and set it in a sunny window where it will stay until the greenhouse is warmer.  After the last frost, the seedlings will either go to a nursery bed or to an entirely new home in another homesteader’s orchard.

Growing orchard stock from seed keeps the gene pool diverse.  But for some fruits, like apples and pears, more predictable outcomes are usually desired.  That is where grafting scions onto rootstock comes into play.  The root can be grown from seed or cloned from a variety of possible dwarfing stocks.  In our case, we have apples on M7 roots, which continue to produce suckers each year.  These need to be pruned off annually, or they can be dug out and cut off from the mother plant to make more rootstocks for grafting.  We went back to our old orchard site in the valley and got scions from a Golden Russet and Ashmead’s Kernel for making copies of these trees for our current orchard.  Working with woody plants like fruit and nut trees can be an expensive hobby if you buy all your nursery stock.  But if you start with seeds or learn to graft, orchards can cost very little and will provide even more satisfaction than a homegrown harvest, as delightful as that experience is on its own.  Here’s to your own nutty and fruitful pursuits!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

11. February 2012 by admin.

With our recent blast of colder weather, due to a sudden southward dip in the Jet Stream, we have taken some time off to get more reading done. Besides the usual technical monthlies Bob checks out from the local library, we often use the library linking feature offered online to find the new releases that we would otherwise have to buy. Larisa’s latest favorite has been “This Life is In Your Hands”, by Melissa Coleman, which tells the story of Elliot Coleman’s first marriage and first homesteading years on land in Maine purchased from Helen & Scott Nearing. If you think that making a profit from the land might be difficult while simultaneously raising young children, building your homestead from scratch, and keeping your sanity intact, this book proves you right. At this point we are just happy to have the potting soil indoors and ready for starting seed trays. And we both really enjoyed the book “Feathers - The Evolution of a Natural Miracle”, by Thor Hanson. If you thought the evolution of the human eye is complex, this too will stretch your thinking processes and possibly improve your appreciation for how well “flying reptiles” adapted to so many ecological niches.

Bob has given up on the battery charger repair previously mentioned. The unit started to show more error codes, indicating that the logic board had seen some extra damage and corrosion from the brief internal insulation fire. Without a circuit schematic, further repairs would be too costly. So an unused charger of similar specifications was found on EV Tradin’ Post that will work nicely without breaking the current owner’s budget.

The big news this spring is that we are rearranging our website’s page structure to include a new page discussing textiles. I am sure that many have looked at our site and wondered why nothing was previously mentioned about what we wear, what we use to furnish our home, why we wear or utilize it, how we either make, remake, or buy it, and how this fits in with the other things we do. As you may have guessed it will deal with sheep’s wool, sheep shearing, combing/carding fleece, yarn spinning, and crochet, weaving, and knitting techniques. This will take some time to organize, but we plan to begin by photographing the many pieces of clothing and household furnishings Larisa has created over the years. And since our site is template-based and limited to 12 pages, we need to fold two current pages together. So we will soon be moving our “Harvesting Electricity” page onto our “Masonry Woodstove” page, renaming it “Harvesting Energy”. The new textile page will be called “Fibers & Threads”, and will be located at the previous URL for “Harvesting Electricity”. With spring right around the corner, best not expect too much too soon! We get very busy very quickly when the weather warms.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

30. January 2012 by admin.

It looks like we are headed toward temperatures above 40F again today with a week above freezing in the forecast. So much for that snow cover we began to accumulate! But if it really disappears it will be time for us to get back to work building the new chicken coop. Yesterday we took a road trip 2 hours northward to attend the annual seed ordering meeting hosted by some like-minded, similarly-aged, homesteader friends of ours in Menomonie, Wisconsin. But before we got indoors we got a chance to see their chickens and how they were fairing this winter. With plenty of space, plenty of fresh vegetable scraps (especially kale trimmings), some light supplementation both early and late in the day, and free access to unfrozen water thanks to a heated water bowl, the 14 hens laid 13 big brown eggs. Happy girls!

One of my (Bob’s) latest projects has been helping a neighbor with an electrical challenge. He obtained an old Planet Electric, Model T replica, electric car from the owner of a nearby, large, tax-write-off, buffalo ranch. The insanely rich owner had gotten 10 of these cars as an investor in the company and had given one to his son, who used it only around the farm, putting only 165 miles on it in 12 years. They were about to sell this car to someone for over $5000 but, when they plugged it in to top off the battery pack, the charger, located under the hood, caught fire. They figured it was ruined and my neighbor’s cousin, who manages the farm, got him the vehicle for much less.

My challenge was to see if the charger could be repaired, since it would cost over $1000 for an identical replacement and nearly $500 for a suitable substitute. The circuit board looked as if a flaming bullet had blasted through it! One output wire of its transformer had burned away and caused nearby insulation to flame off and smoke briefly. I had to carve away some warped copper circuit board traces and clean away some smoke deposits to even find where the transformer wire might have attached. I figured out the original circuit pathway and completed the circuit with some new wiring. My neighbor plugged it back into the car and it booted up but still indicates that it is not “seeing” the battery pack (possible fused output relay contacts). It’s harder to get things just right the first time without the circuit schematics. More diagnostics are in order with the unit actually on the vehicle, but we’ve made some headway.

The car is so cute and in such fine shape otherwise that I have no doubt it will find a new home somewhere. Living as far as we do from town (12 miles), this low-speed neighborhood electric vehicle (NEV) is not really practical for us. It is far from aerodynamic, reducing its range. Its open sides are not the best for rainy or windy weather. And it is primarily designed to haul 4 people, not cargo of any sort. Still, it’s just so darn cute!

As I write this, Larisa has just gone out to the greenhouse to pick some additions to lunch’s BIG SALAD - chard, celery, Chinese cabbage and parsley. With lettuce and New Zealand spinach from our indoor window boxes, carrots and beets from the root cellar, and freshly roasted pepitos from the pantry we are looking forward to a fresh feast! Anyone with south-facing windows and some pots of soil could grow indoor lettuce, but it really takes some planning and persistence to get optimal growth when light levels are fading and the window sills are cool. You can find more details about it on our website and in our book, Feeding Ourselves (starting on page 78), also available from our site.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

24. January 2012 by admin.

Well, the winter sport enthusiasts got their wish around here as the cold weather and snow have finally arrived. We now have about 6 inches covering the brown field grasses, making everything look fresh and clean. And while we have not yet gotten below -14F temperature-wise, it’s still early enough in January that we could get a surprise.

In the food storage department we used up all of the leeks we had stored upright in 22-gallon polyethylene tubs with perlite around their roots. They surely were great in soups and stews. But with a year-and-a-half backlog of stored shallots we certainly won’t run out of other allium options! The last of the red cabbages got used up as a raw shred in a huge salad a few days ago. The cabbage was a nice spicy addition to our every-other-day fresh meal of greenery. Now we’ll just be adding chopped carrots, beets, and the usual roasted pepitos (naked-seeded pumpkin seeds). In other food-related news, the potting soil mix that we make from our garden soil, our sheep compost, and perlite has been brought indoors to thaw. Our 2012 seed order from Fedco has arrived with new varieties to trial in our garden. They include Roy’s Calais Flint corn along with some other very early open-pollinated sweet corns. We’re still trying to find what works best to side-step the  pollination times of the locally-grown GMO field corns. And the only pruning left to do is on a few big, old, wild apple trees and a couple of the bigger pears.

We have ordered the five assorted-breed baby chicks we want from a hatchery in Iowa, drop-shipped to tag onto a bigger order that gets delivered to a feed supplier north of Mabel, MN (not very far to drive). We ordered one each of Barred Rock, Silver-laced Wyandotte, Black Sex-Link, Production Red, and Gold Star, all of which are prolific layers of brown eggs. We hope to sell eggs to cover our organic feed costs, mainly utilizing the bug eating services of these beautiful birds in our orchard. Their chicken coop is under construction with the insulated patio block floor finished and under cover while the snow accumulates. We found a large pile of recycled/surplus fiber-cement lap siding at our local Habitat for Humanity “Restore” (for less than half the price of new ones) which will build both the interior and exterior walls. Combining this with Reflectix bubble-foil aluminum insulation will make a nice, warm, critter-proof shelter. I just finished building the windows using some double-wall polycarbonate glazing and aluminum edge extrusions I had lying around in our shed, leftovers from making our house’s exterior winter insulating shutters. And the Restore even had a really nice, unused 6-panel, oak door in stock in a 24-inch width, perfect for a chicken coop. I guess 24-inch door widths just aren’t in high demand in homes!

And we now finally have all of the materials purchased to finish the natural gas generation set-up.  I’ve come to start calling the product “frac-free” gas, although “poopane” still has a nice ring to it. We had quite an extended ordeal in the plumbing department of a local building supply store, trying to figure out what size/type of valves were needed, how many, and where, what sort of tubing to use and what size, plus all of the adapters to get from glued joints to threads and vice versa. Hopefully this will be easier to build than it was to buy for!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

8. January 2012 by admin.

Normally we work around whatever the planet throws at us in winter, whether it’s gale force winds and subzero temperatures or deep piles of snow with a crust of freezing rain on top. But this winter promises to be another one for the records. It’s January, we have no snow, and temperatures have yet to get below zero on the Fahrenheit scale. We are often seeing days above freezing, which has been death to the local snow cover. Overall we have averaged temperatures well above normal with little or no precipitation for the past 3 months. While we are not complaining, still, it seems a bit weird!

So how have we dealt with it? For one thing we can do a lot more cooking with extra sunshine than usual. Where we would normally cook on the woodstove in the late afternoon, preparing meals for suppertime and the following morning’s breakfast (usually oat groats and apples, finished in the “hot-box” cooker), we now find that more food can be cooked using the Zomeworks Sunflash parabolic cooker (outdoors no less) and either the 12-volt electric oven or the Rival, AC-powered, 900-watt electric stovetop. And with January’s extra minutes of sunshine, and its normally clear skies, we often spend entire days using up PV power as we get it.

For instance, a couple of days ago we put breakfast out in the “Flash” cooker, switched the PV divert loads to automatically use extra amps for heating bath water and running the refrigerator, did e-mails and web stuff all morning, listened to the radio and watched TV during the daytime, then cooked buckwheat dough to make wraps for supper, cooked falafel dough (that had been soaked overnight) into patties, and skillet-cooked the rolled-out buckwheat wraps. We also ran PV power to the electric tractor and used its on-board inverter to run the chainsaw that bucked up a big stack of elm and boxelder logs. Still, the house batteries ended the day full of energy, ready to burn power using lights and TV at night.

And since the weather is so nice it has meant more outdoor walks rather than indoor workouts on the machines in our porch. Seeing some scenery sure beats standing in place! As I write this Larisa is getting a head start on pruning the fruit trees for next year. Normally this would not happen until February or March, slipping and sliding around on snow and ice. It’s much safer setting up a ladder when it doesn’t travel beneath you!

We recently discovered a website that gives weather forecasts for specific locations a year in advance. Yes, you read correctly.  You sign up using your postal code, city, or latitude and longitude. The site forecasts high and low temperature trends (along with sunrise times, sunsets, moonrises, and moonsets) on monthly graphs for the following year. And it gives 10-day forecasts on precipitation, dew point, winds, etc. That’s a lot of data for free! And it really helps with planning an upcoming event. If you pay them money you can do what many organizations do; use the service to get a reported 76% accurate weather forecast for any day in the upcoming year. What has it shown us? We may not see any subzero temperatures at all this winter. Very odd indeed!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

7. December 2011 by admin.

The snow has finally arrived to stay here in southeastern Minnesota and I certainly don’t mind.  Larisa and I have been starting to prepare for the upcoming spring’s garden by researching new varieties to try and evaluating our old standbys. We just got our first seed catalog and our first seed order was sent today. Our indoor lettuce crop is growing well, giving us fresh salads nearly every day. We are trying to finish eating the first planting since the second planting is nearly ready for picking, and the third planting will be seeded in about 2 weeks.

We continue to plan for the possible addition of chickens to our homestead once again, especially now that a flat, well drained spot is prepared next to our heavily fortified orchard for their coop. And Larisa’s days have been filled with wool combing (trying to catch up on a few years fleece backlog), spinning that fleece, and practicing the accordion.

I have been corresponding with another dowser in northeastern Poland who also dowses for energy patterns. You can see a YouTube video of him at work here. Soon I will be posting a PDF on our Earth Energies page showing drawings of some of the patterns he has found. They appear to be neither bad for humans nor good, they simply exist for some unknown reason.

And, after doing some research for another vegetarian friend of ours concerning the balance of Omega-3 and Omega-6 essential fatty acids, I was able to publish a table of Omega-3 to 6 ratios on one of the pages of our website. This was related to the recent discovery that locally grown butternuts from a neighbor’s yard have a very good fatty acid balance. We obtained some seeds from her which are now cold-stratifying for spring planting.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

31. October 2011 by admin.

This time of year often finds us busier outdoors than we are in the finest summer weather. We have nearly finished putting food away for the winter, with all of the root vegetables in insulated coolers, ready to stow in the root cellar. Our bumper crops of apples and peaches are now either in coolers (just the apples), cooked and canned as sauces, dried as fruit “leather”, or bottled as Pasteurized juice. The grains we grow (sweet corn, grain sorghum, grain amaranth, and bread-seed poppies) are all harvested, threshed, winnowed, allowed to air-dry, and sealed in jars. You can watch a YouTube video of Larisa threshing sorghum at this link. And you can find a PDF with the details of this process at this link. All that’s left in the garden is a row of leeks, some cabbage, a lot of kale, and a small bed of lettuce. Most of our fresh greens production has moved indoors to either our south-facing windows or the greenhouse beds.

Our focus lately has been in landscaping that needed repair ever since the August 2007 floods that washed a bit of our gravel driveway into our yard. We have rebuilt the beds on the south side of our house into an easier to weed configuration that is also more pleasant to look at and it should prove to be easier to harvest.

And we have just finished improving the fencing around our orchard so that we will have the option of getting back into raising and enjoying pet chickens next spring. This involved replacing multiple strands of electric fencing twine with 6-foot tall, 2-by-4-inch mesh, steel fencing, and adding 4-inch insulating “stand-offs” around the steel fencing for a single strand of electric fence wire. This combination, with 1-inch mesh steel wire added near the bottom, has proven very effective around our main garden for the past 11 years, keeping out deer, rabbits, woodchucks, and raccoons. The raccoons were the eventual downfall of our previous, mainly successful, attempt at keeping chickens and we don’t want a repeat of that fiasco! With steel fencing as the “ground” contact and the single strand of electric wire suspended 4 inches from it, any climbing animal  starts up the mesh until its head touches the “hot” wire, and it learns very quickly not to go further. We still have some fencing details to finish and then it will be time consider building a proper home for the hens, should we decide to go ahead with this.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

4. October 2011 by admin.

Summer is winding down here, with all of the sub-tropical produce harvested and just the roots and hardy greens left to go. The latest varieties of apples are still on the trees but the peaches, pears, and earlier apples are all picked and either solar dried or bottled for juice. The later apples will go straight into the root cellar. The last meal of fried eggplant “steaks” happens today. And the solar dryer is full of pear slices, eggplant chips, peach leather, and both Pink Bottom (Agaricus campestris) and Elm Oyster mushrooms. We ended up with about 7 gallons of peach juice from our bountiful and highly unusual peach glut this fall. Who knew that we’d have as much peach as apple juice? This far north that’s not supposed to happen.

After two hard frosts the local vegetation is looking a bit more sparse, with the boxelder trees mostly bare and everything looking a bit less green with more of a yellow-brown cast. Soon we’ll reach peak fall tree color intensity and we’ll remember this summer with fondness and longing. But with a pantry and root cellar full of “solid sunshine” we can still, as the singer Greg Brown says, “taste a little of the summer, ’cause Grandma put it all in jars”.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »