Fruit tree change of mindset

February 10, 2013 at 7:43 pm (Organic gardening, Permaculture, Starting a garden)

I’ve been getting hung up lately on “where do I put the fruit trees?” and even “what trees do I want to have?” The south part of the yard is what we see from the house, and I want it to look good and be functional. And the south sun (especially full sun) is extremely limited, so it feels like I need to be very careful about what I plant. And it seems like I need to get the whole thing figured out before I start planting. I’m getting a brain cramp from thinking about it. This is not the fun way to garden.

Well, I found a way around that today: I just decided to throw a bunch of stuff into a different part of the yard, a corner we don’t see except when going in/out the driveway.  This will be a quantity, not necessarily quality or pretty, orchard. Throw in a bunch of stuff, in different varieties, give it the minimum care to get it established, and see what happens. Don’t worry about arranging it for beauty; just make sure it doesn’t take over the powerline cut. Plant enough so I might get some after the critters dine. Just get things in the ground, so five years from now I’m not wishing I’d started five years ago.

Here’s the list of species:

  • Serviceberries (aka saskatoons)
  • Hazelnuts
  • Raspberries
  • Bush cherries
  • Bush apricots
  • Red mulberries
  • Cider apples
  • Hardy pecan
  • English walnut

The areas I’m planting this stuff is pretty shady. Some of this stuff is supposed to have full sun, but you know, I’m not trying to optimize yield. There’s already an apple tree back there, and it was more productive than the entire commercial orchard down the road this year because it’s under the canopy and protected from frost. So what the hell. I’ll toss some stuff in there and see what happens. It’ll be fun. And if I get some fruit from it, great! I’ll sure come out knowing what can handle a laissez-faire gardening style!

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Boiling water on a Hearthstone stove

February 3, 2013 at 7:17 pm (Uncategorized)

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Usually, I can’t get water to actually boil on the stove – but I found if I stoke the fire and get a full load of wood crackling, I can actually get a full, rolling boil on the soapstone stove.

Fwiw, I’ve also found that a lot of the cooking I do doesn’t actually need boiling temps.

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New house = super energy-efficient!

January 29, 2013 at 7:59 pm (carbon budget, Energy, green living, Passive solar house)

Total carbon production June 2012-January 2013

Total carbon production June 2012-January 2013

I continue to be thrilled by how energy-efficient (or really, carbon-efficient) the new house is! In the summer, we only needed air conditioning in July (when it was over 100 for several days, and over 80 at night, and we hadn’t sealed off the sunroom well yet). In winter, we have only run the propane furnace in the last week or so, and that only for an hour or so a day to take the chill off before the wood stove kicks in. Otherwise, we’ve heated with local wood. This saves not only the propane, but a rather significant amount of electricity, too. (See below.)

Electricity usage June 2012-Jan 2013

Electricity usage June 2012-Jan 2013

I think I can now say that at our old house, 125kwh was used for heating water, 100kwh was used for the furnace, and 200kwh was for everything else (cooking, laundry, lighting, electronics,  etc.).  In this house, hot water is from propane, and we essentially haven’t used the furnace. So the ~210kwh/month we use is for “everything else” plus the sauna. We used the sauna two or three times on this billing cycle, and our usage didn’t really jump at all.

Propane is probably the most astonishing reduction. In the chart below, 2008 was the first year in the old house that we burned wood in the fireplace insert. We still used over 300 gallons of propane in January alone. This year, we used 25 gallons. I know wood is not a perfect fuel – even with our efficient stove, soot is an issue – but it’s local, renewable, and isn’t dependent on fracking or other damaging extraction methods. I think next year, we might even be able to source from the farm around the corner that harvests almost exclusively deadfall from storm damage instead of less eco-friendly practices like land clearing.

Propane use 2012-2013

Propane use 2012-2013

I’m not sure if we’ll be able to keep the furnace off for February and March. It was really cold at the end of January and our thermal mass is now very cold and working against us. But who knows? A week of sunny days could reverse that.

Overall, we are on track to use this year:

  • 36% of US average gasoline
  • 23% of US average electricity
  • 25% of US average heating fuel

It’s not exactly Riot levels, but I’m pretty happy with the electricity and heating fuel, especially.

 

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Very simple succession planting for zone 5b-6

January 24, 2013 at 10:24 am (Organic gardening, Starting a garden)

Succession planting is the idea that you plant your garden in stages, so there’s always something to eat and you don’t get all your green beans in a 2-week window. There are tons of books and guides out there to help you figure this out, but I thought I’d share what I’ve figured out that works for me. What “works for me” means the most food for the least amount of fussing. Tweak as you see fit.

Some assumptions:

  • The only things I start from seed are things I can direct-sow in the garden: peas, beans, squash, root vegetables, sunflowers. I don’t start my own tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, or onions. I buy all those things as transplants on one warm weekend in May and call it good.
  • The one exception to this rule is kale. I’m a kale fiend, and picky about variety. So I do generally start some kale indoors in about March. And oh, while I’ve got the lights up, maybe some other brassicas like broccoli or cabbage.

There are certain things that start early and end early, and only so many things that you can start late and have any kind of harvest. So I tend to think of these things as “pairs” in the garden bed – the early crop and the late crop. For example, after I pull the turnips out, I always then put in bush beans.

  • Early crops: Turnips, lettuce, onions, peas, radishes. These are all things I can plant mid- to late-April, and they will be out of the garden by July 4th.
  • Late crops: Bush beans, fall crop of kale, fall lettuce, spinach, garlic (plant in October). Bush beans planted at July 4th will usually set a crop before frost. Lettuce and kale might need to be started indoors, or under shade, because they don’t like hot weather at all. But if you don’t get those started by August, you won’t have much of a fall/winter crop. Spinach planted after October will really get eaten in the spring, but it’s totally worth planting that late because it’ll be the first thing you eat in June (even without a greenhouse).

I also like to minimize the number of times I’m planting things. So, instead of planting 1/4 of my total bean crop every 2 weeks for two months, I’ve found it works great to plant a row of bush beans and a row of pole beans at the same time. They will start to bear a week or two apart, usually. Then I plant some more bush beans when one of the early crops comes out, and that usually covers me for the whole summer. Other pairings for extending the harvest:

  • Bush + pole beans
  • Indeterminate + determinate (i.e., “patio”) tomatoes
  • Short + tall snap/snow peas
  • Early + late potatoes
  • Everbearing + June-bearing strawberries
  • Early + late “storage” carrots

Your seed catalog should tell you days to maturity and/or key words like “earliest bean we carry” or “great for storage” or “determinate tomato concentrates harvest over two weeks” or “harvest all summer long.” Using these kinds of pairings lets you plant at the same time but harvest at different times.

So – what I recommend for truly simple “succession” planting is:

  • Pick some early/late pairs: for example, turnips + bush beans; lettuce + late kale; peas + garlic – and plan to put those in the same space in your garden. Once you figure out a couple that work for you, you can use the same pairings each year.
  • For other crops, pick varieties that will mature at different times and plant two varieties as indicated in the list above.

That’s it!

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Which is greenest? Shower, bath, or sauna?

January 21, 2013 at 10:49 am (Energy, green living)

We have a big bathtub, a standard bathtub, 1.85 gpm showers, and a sauna. When I’m feeling the need to soak my body in some serious heat over the winter, which is the most eco-friendly choice*?

Assumptions:

  • Showerhead: 1.85 gpm x 15 min = 27.75 gallons
  • Standard bathtub, waist-deep: 20 gallons water
  • Non-jetted spa-size tub (no heated recirculation), waist-deep: 30 gallons
  • It takes 83,000btu (.9 gallons propane) to heat 100 gallons of water from 55 degrees to 120 degrees
  • It takes 4.5 kwh (15,354 btus) to run one sauna session (heat for 40 mins to ~150 degrees, then residual heat only)

Results:

  • 15-minute shower: 23,240 BTU + 28 gal water
  • Standard bath: 16,600 BTU + 20 gal water
  • Spa bath: 24,900 BTU + 30 gal water
  • Sauna: 15,354 BTU  + 2 gal water + 1000 BTU to heat water to 95 degrees (quick rinse shower after)

So – if what I want is to be very warm for as long as possible, the sauna is by far the best bet. Warmer than a standard bath, and I can stay in as long as I can stand and it’ll still be warm. Add to that the fact that my husband will usually join me in the sauna (but not the bath), and it looks like an even better option.

This is pretty much the opposite of how I thought this would pan out – I’m really glad I did the math!

Resources:

* I am fully aware that doing any of these is a total luxury and “none” is the greenest answer…but if I’m going to do something, I want to know how these options compare

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Staying changed

January 21, 2013 at 8:42 am (Changing habits, Health, Musings)

So, in my last post, I talked about how I’ve made some changes in my life, and how resuming my old routine didn’t quite “fit” anymore.

I have been waiting for this for the better part of a year. Heck, maybe two.  I’ve known that I needed to rest, to move houses, to recuperate, and at some point, I’d feel like I’d rested enough.  Well, I think I’ve turned that corner. Here are some of the signs I’m noticing:

  • I concede that there may actually be things outside of my own house that are worth my time and attention.
  • I’m wanting to see people.
  • I’m wanting to create things, try new things, learn things, build things.
  • I’m fretting about things that aren’t actually a problem and probably won’t become a problem. For example, money. We have plenty right now, and relatively good job security. We have several very large expenses coming up (residing the house this spring, a new car in a couple years) but given how far inside our means we live, we should be able to save for those things and we might not even need to take out loans for them.  And if we do need to take out loans, we should have no problem getting approved, and we’ll probably pay them off well ahead of schedule. There is nothing here to worry about, but I find myself poking at the numbers repeatedly to see if I can make them more firm or for the savings to happen faster. This tendency to make mountains out of molehills is one I see in myself a lot, and in smart, bored beings in general. SAHM’s with a now-empty nest, people of extraordinary privilege, and zoo animals all show this tendency – they’re problem-solvers with no problems to solve. So we create problems.
  • A friend recently announced a huge life shake-up. It reminded me that things that seem like they’ll always be the same can still change. It also helped me see that I’ve been focusing on smaller and smaller things lately. Instead of “I need to turn my brain off tonight, or I’m going to have a nervous breakdown,” I’m at the “I’m not feeling completely centered at the end of every single day” point. This, my friends, is pretty much the definition of “being well.” It is time for me to move forward again.

Ok, so, clearly, time to move on. But on to what?

That has been surprisingly hard to answer, and I can see that I am reflexively trying to fill that space with whatever’s at hand, or whatever filled that space before. Work. Chores. Concern for my own well-being. Fears related to any number of old bugaboos. Busy-ness. One dog I’m  not letting back on the bed right now is the desire to save/fix/help the world at large. Not sure if that one is going to come back, but it sure needs a lot more energy than I’m willing to give it at the moment. Maybe ever, because I’m more and more thinking it’s too late, anyway. Coping, not fixing are more the order of the days ahead. So – I don’t want to just refill the spaces with the same old junk. At least I can see that I’m trying to do that, and able to say, “Um, no, I don’t think so.”

But what do I want to fill that space with? The answers – and I’m sure there are more than one – are coming slowly.  One thing I did this weekend was to cook some Indian food.  After years of flirting with Ayurveda, occasionally fascinated and occasionally repulsed, I finally bought an Ayurvedic cookbook over break and I’ve been reading through it and dog-earing recipes. Since mindful, nutritious cooking is one of the things I’d like to have more of in my life, when I found myself with a Sunday mostly free for whatever I wanted to do, I decided that instead of stripping the shower tile in prep to re-seal it, I would go ahead and take the time to choose a couple recipes and make a complete meal from this cookbook.  I’ve not done much Indian cooking, and it doesn’t come easily to me.  Add to that the seeming fussiness of Ayurvedic cooking: the actual measurements of seasonings and sometimes over-involved cooking methods – and this adds up to a pot of beans and rice that took almost two hours for me to complete.

But it felt good to take that time: to give a task my attention, to learn, to have the cooking be the activity, to tie food actively to my body and soul. And it was tasty, too. :)

So I think I need to make myself a list of specific things I can do when I feel like I have time on my hands, to make it easier to move forward toward my list of “things I want in my life” instead of just bringing the old crap back in.  The specificity helps: instead of just saying “Yoga,” I list “Try a new yoga routine from my Christmas DVDs.” Instead of “make some lunches for the freezer” (an old chore), I list “try a new vata-soothing recipe” (which could also result in leftovers for lunch).

I still don’t know where this path is going, but I do feel like there is now a path, and I am starting to move down it.

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Making changes

January 16, 2013 at 8:51 am (Changing habits, Musings)

So I’ve known for a while that I’ve wanted to change some things about the overall shape of my life. I was fried too much of the time. I was accomplishing a lot but never felt at ease or rested. I had pulled back some from 2011′s two speeds of “dead run” and “asleep,” but I still wasn’t feeling like I could ever get out from under a “must-do list” longer than my lifespan.

The first helpful thing I did was to phrase this in terms of things I wanted – not just things I was running away from. I don’t think I ever wrote this down (though maybe it’s in a journal or on a scrap of paper somewhere), but it was along the lines of:

  • Reclaim my time from the obligations of my job, and the obligations I’ve imposed upon myself
  • Feel tranquility around me and within myself
  • Re-find and occupy my center, so I can move deliberately when I choose to do so

These things were, by and large, things I wanted to feel, not things I wanted to do.  Though I did want to feel like doing certain things, too:

  • Feel like cooking is a pleasure and a conscious act of nourishment, not just “preventing hunger”
  • Feel like I can do things because I want to do them – “leisure activities” instead of “work” (including work at home)
  • Feel like engaging with other people, not just hiding from them because interacting takes so much energy
  • Feel like exercising – not forcing myself, but actually wanting to do it

And there were some things I wanted: this house, fittings for the house, and now gardens and fruit trees. (Can you believe I went an entire year when the idea of putting plants in the ground didn’t excite me? Or even felt like “just another duty”? Yeah, I was that wiped out.) Even just admitting that I wanted things and that it’s ok for me to want things was kind of a leap.

So…I feel like I’ve done a lot of this stuff. I’m “over the hump” at work, and each subsequent hump will be smaller than the ones before. We bought and settled into the house, and over break I was able to draw a line around “enough” in terms of what the house needs to be functional and “done” for now. And then we also finished those things – the smoke detectors, the superfluous but very pretty heat register covers, etc.

Now I’m past the vacation, and going back to work. And the interesting thing is how I am watching myself heading right back to my accustomed way of doing things. Those customs don’t actually fit anymore.  I no longer have to spend disproportionate amounts of my energy at work – but I have to remember how to move more slowly, and with less dire urgency.  As that energy has returned, just coming home, making dinner, and reading all evening doesn’t feel like enough to be doing each night. Before, it was fine, because each evening, I was also trying to replenish my depleted stores of rest and energy. But now, I can tell I’ve got some energy left, and some inclination to use it for…something.  That’s a big change.

And that’s the topic for another post.

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What I did on my winter vacation

January 13, 2013 at 2:50 pm (Health, Musings)

I had a marvelous holiday break. We went to see family the first few days, and after a “stressful but could have been worse” return home (I wasn’t feeling well and we were flying into a big snowstorm), we had twelve blissful days of being home with no real agenda. We took one day trip (musical instrument store and zoo), went to one gathering (New Year’s Eve – came home at 11pm) and that was pretty much it. I slept a lot, did a fair amount of yoga (but nothing crazy), and worked on some sort of project almost every day. Except the days I didn’t feel like it, in which case I read most of the day.

It was heavenly. The projects were things I’d been wanting to do for quite a while. Some were fun (spend my Christmas money on yoga DVDs and a 6′ square mat), and some were tedious (finish hanging smoke detectors). I actually did a fair bit of canning – I’d received a big box of grapefruit from a colleague, and I had a bunch of chicken and beef I wanted to turn into stock and beef tips. (Twenty-four quarts of stock/meat plus half a dozen jars of citrus – the pantry is groaning!)

I actually had goals for this stay-at-home break. Without some idea of what I want by the end of the break, I tend to fritter away time, become a couch potato, and I generally feel like a slug after four or five days. So, each day, I tried to:

  1. Rest – sleep enough, but don’t lay slugabed past 8:30 or 9.
  2. Feel tranquility and appreciation. Serenity is a presence, not just an absence of stress. I now live in a place that oozes tranquility from the earth, the trees, the very air. And I realized that I’d not been noticing that nearly so much now that it’s gotten colder and I’m in moderately high gear at work again. So: take time and notice the peacefulness each day.
  3. Go outside. I didn’t actually do so well on this one – several days, I was only outside to get wood from the garage.
  4. Do some slow, deliberate movement. Yoga or qigong fit that bill.
  5. Do some project work. This ended up not being the same amount each day, and some days I didn’t do much at all.
  6. Vigorous exercise 5 times over the break. This was things like running on the elliptical, taking long hikes, or more vigorous vinyasa yoga at the gym or home.

This worked really well, and it was one of the best vacations I’ve ever had. I went back to work on the 7th and found I not only had energy to do the work (and wow, it was a “hit the ground running” return to work…), I wasn’t fried by the end of the day. And that continued through the whole week. Now it’s Sunday, and I didn’t really feel like I *needed* the down time of the weekend. Which should mean I’m not depleting myself, and going to wind up in exactly the same spot a few weeks down the road.

I feel like I’m actively changing the shape of my life right now. I’ve had a fair few thoughts on this process…more on those later.

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Make-in-jar beef broth

January 6, 2013 at 1:25 pm (Food preservation, recipes)

I like a good bone broth. I think it has more flavor and minerals than broth made with just meat. Making and canning broth takes a lot of time – 2-3 hours to make the stock (or an hour or so in the pressure cooker), then 25-90 minutes to can.

I found myself wondering if you could pressure cook and can stock with bones right in the same jar. I found that it’s safe to can meat with bones, and of course raw-packed meat is safe to can. Stock (with or without meat) only needs to be canned for 25 minutes, though meat (with or without stock) needs to be canned for 90 minutes. I’m still not exactly sure where you draw the line between “meat with stock” and “stock with meat,” but I figure if half the jar (or less) is meat, you’re probably in the “stock-with-meat” range.

So what I decided to try was to put 2 beef short ribs – each a chunk of bone and some meat – into a quart jar, top with boiling water, salt, and seasonings, and can it for 90 minutes. For the “plain” jars, I added a squirt of Bragg’s and half a teaspoon of salt; for the “ginger” ones, I added two thick slices of fresh ginger root, a tablespoon of Bragg’s, and a big clove of garlic.

The result is a scant quart of ok broth and just enough meat to make the soup register as “meat soup” and not “plain broth. The stock is not incredibly rich; I’m used to stock so flavorful that you can add a quart of water to a quart of stock and have two quarts of really tasty soup. This broth can’t really be diluted, and of course there’s a lot less of it. It does taste good, though – so, we’ll see. It’s definitely a lot less work, but I’m not sure it results in enough of the kind of food we want to really be worth the savings.

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Wood stove-assisted canning

January 3, 2013 at 1:25 pm (Food preservation, Gear)

Because I’m a big dork, I have spent a lot of my holiday vacation working very hard. :) Actually, I love it – the freedom to do all the household fixups and food preservation I want without having to interrupt my Work for my job is rather luxurious.

This break, I decided to can a whole heck of a lot of meat and stock. I had three stewing chickens (small roosters, about 7lb total) that a friend raised, plus nine pounds of chuck roast and 5 pounds of beef short ribs from Family Farms Co-op. From that, I got eight quarts of chicken stock with meat, eight quarts of beef stock with meat, and eight pints of stewed beef. Twenty-four meals in all from about 21 pounds of meat and bones – I’m learning that this is a pretty respectable ratio, and I promise you, there’s nowhere near a pound of meat in each of these meals. Bones weigh a lot!

This time around, I experimented with using the wood stove to assist with as many steps as was practical. I did the actual canning on my kitchen stove; canning meat is too finicky and potentially dangerous for me to feel comfortable doing it on the wood stove just yet – I really don’t know much about regulating the temperature yet. Here’s what I did:

  • Pressure canning a chicken. I browned one stewing chicken and an onion in my 6-quart pressure cooker on the wood stove. I then added about 4 quarts of water and waited for it to heat up. An hour later, it still wasn’t boiling, so I threw it on the electric burner until it boiled and came up to pressure. Then I put it back on the wood stove for another hour. It kept enough pressure to remain sealed, with a little steam escaping, but not enough to “rock” the weight. After an hour, the bird was fall-apart tender. I removed the meat, put the bones back in the broth, and returned it to the electric burner for half an hour. This made really wonderful stock that gelled in the fridge when it was done.
  • Stewing chickens. For the second two chickens, I browned them (with onions and ginger root) on the wood stove, then added water and salt and let them simmer all day. The water never boiled (it was generally around 180 degrees) but after 5 hours, the chickens were very tender. Again, I removed the meat, returned the bones to the pot, and simmered them again (wood stove) to get the last nutrients out of the bones.  This stock also gelled when chilled.
  • Preheating water. For some of the beef stock, I needed to pour boiling water into my jars. I preheated a big pot of water on the wood stove, then finished bringing it to a boil on the electric burner.

I think anything that would work in a slow cooker will cook nicely on the wood stove, but I don’t think I’ll ever get it to really boil water. One interesting side effect of this sub-boiling stewing is that the both is amazingly clear. The Joy of Cooking says not to cook your stock at a boil for just this reason, but I could never be bothered to fuss that much when making soup on the stovetop.

It also requires a totally different cooking rhythm than what I’m used to, since I’ve never really cooked with a slow cooker. Making stock became an all-day affair – though really, on the stovetop, it takes 2-3 hours, anyway, so it’s not like it’s either “instant” or “all-day.” Preheating the water wasn’t difficult – in fact, it was nice to have that pot off the stove and out of the kitchen – but I did have to remember to do it early on in the canning process.

And, needless to say, using the living room wood stove would really bite in the summer. But for this cold-season preservation, it worked really well. I’ve never really determined how much electricity canning uses, but if you figure I kept the stove off for at least seven hours when it would otherwise have been on constantly, that’s gotta amount to something.

I also hit on a new way of doing beef broth, which saves a lot of time and energy. I’ll write that up in the next couple days.

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