Ok, I think I know what my winter project is…starting an indoor citrus orchard!

http://simple-green-frugal-co-op.blogspot.com/2009/11/grow-your-own-citrus-meyer-lemons.html

I realized the other day that the next realistic steps my household might take to reduce carbon emissions are to carpool more (we commute to work together but could add up to 2 more people in our car) and to move to geothermal heat.

Geothermal systems – even with the rebates – would probably cost $15,000. That’s a ton of money. Even supposing we had $15K to spend on a system (and that’s a big “if”), would it be the best way to spend it? What would truly be the most carbon-reduction-bang for fifteen thousand bucks?

Some initial ideas:

• Help 15 households insulate their attics to R-60
• Buy super-efficient furnaces for several households
• Help 3-5 farmers build hoophouses to produce local veggies through the winter
• Invest in a “neighborhood energy startup” with a gasifier (makes heat and electricity and biodiesel), possibly with a permaculture system of greenhouses, coppice groves, etc.
• Just buy land and start a coppice grove for sustainable heating fuel production, and possibly invest in a pelletizer
• Some kind of education program? I’m thinking the actual return is hard to measure, and it’s not education about global warming that folks around here lack.

Anyone have data on any of these? Or other ideas? bonus points for things that are done once and keep on saving energy and reducing emissions without any further attention or work.

Well, that was odd. Something about the sausage from this pig makes my heart race! It’s only got pork, black pepper, sage, salt, and brown sugar. Huh. The plain pork is great (and the bacon is out-of-this-world), but the sausage isn’t doing it for me.

Luckily, I have friends who like sausage, especially cheap happy sausage, so hopefully I can convert this into a variety of spicy pig that doesn’t send my heart galloping for the door…

Naming our food is a long tradition in my family, starting with Boris the Bull, who I believed would cause my parents’ divorce (do YOU really understand how large a whole steer is? Yeah, us neither…). Last year we bought half a hog and named it Eric. This year’s participant has been dubbed Señor Porcus. No absent referent here!

We picked up our 1/2 hog from Old Pine Farm on Oct. 17th. They have a very nice farm – hogs are pastured with some supplemental feed, not confined to a muddy sty. They are slaughtered on-farm and then sent to the butcher, so there’s no travel stress for the pigs. I feel extremely grateful that we have such a farm near us, and that we can afford to buy our food from them.

Looks like we ended up with about 85 lb of meat (for $300, including cutting and smoking, so somewhere around $3.50/lb). Old Pine Farm is unusual in that they charge a flat price for your hog, no matter what size, and they do not charge extra for cutting and smoking. You get to pick how you’d like your meat cut up. Here’s what we got – showing our strong preference for sausage and pulled pork in this house! My only complaint so far is that the meat is wrapped in Saran Wrap, which I find hard to remove from the meat. Hopefully it will fend off freezer burn – since there’s no air inside the wrapping, it should do that. So long as the wrap is thick enough. We’ll see.

• Loin roast: 10lb in 3 large packages. Wonder if we should have gotten this sliced into chops?
• Shoulder roast: 20+lb in about 10 packages (will become pulled pork)
• Bulk Sausage: 18 one-pound packages
• Smoked kielbasa: 10 – two to four links per pkg
• Ground pork: 6 – 1.5 lb packs
• Bacon: 5 lb in one-pound blocks
• Smoked hocks: 8lb in 2 hocks
• Ribs, pork butt, other misc: 8lb
• Plus about 5 pounds of soup bones and 5 lb of fat for lard
• The tail, the bladder, and possibly the squeal for the Cooking with Laura Project, which I will get to in a few weeks

This filled 2 large coolers and a paper grocery bag; it takes up about 2/3 of our tiny 7cu ft chest freezer and close to half the space above the fridge.

I think this was a steal for $300. I think prices are going up for next year, and they will be worth it.

A couple weeks ago, I finally bought a thermal cooking pot. It’s been on my radar for a long time, and I finally splurged. The basic idea is that it’s a pot-in-a-Thermos. You put your ingredients in the inner pot and bring it to a boil on the stove, then put that pot into the insulated outer pot, close the lid, and the food cooks using the retained heat. It’s sort of like a countertop version of haybox cooking, and the idea is to save energy and keep from heating up your kitchen when cooking.

I’ve learned that this gizmo has definite strong and weak points. I’m honestly not sure I’d recommend buying one; they are pretty pricey and it doesn’t do everything I’d hoped it would. Still, it works really well for some things, and I can’t stop experimenting! I thought I’d post the results of my experiments to date, so if you’re considering getting one, you can make a really informed decision. Details after the cut:

Excellent Results

• 

  Beef stew. I browned a slice of beef shank and some meaty bones in the pot with a little oil and onion, then added water up to about 2″ below the top of the pot. (This is considerd “full.”) After it had boiled for 15 minutes, I put it into the outer pot and let it sit for 2 hours. Then I brought it back to a boil (which took only a minute or two) and put it back in the cooker for another hour. At that, point I had a really nice pot of beef stock. It was still steaming hot when I put it in the fridge overnight. The next day, pulled the meat off the bones and added carrots, onions, kale, barley, salt, and seasonings. Brought it to a boil and dropped it into the cooker for 30 minutes, and it was probably the best beef barley soup I’ve ever made. The carrots retained a nice “bite” and the barley was fully cooked. Usually, the carrots are overdone by the time the barley is cooked.

• Yogurt. This was the exception to the rolling-boil rule. Heated the milk to 180, cooled to 110, added diluted starter, and popped it in the pot overnight. In the morning, it was yogurt, with no attention, energy, or re-warming needed. I definitely prefer this over our previous cooler-with-hot-pack method.
• Coconut vegetable curry. Can of coconut milk, can of tomatoes, and a lot of chopped vegetables (including white and sweet potatoes). Bring to a boil, pop in pot for 30 minutes. Quite tasty; all veggies done nicely.
• Taking hot food to a potluck. It’ll keep food hot for several hours without added heat or electricity, so this is perfect for taking a pot of curry or chili to a potluck.
• UPDATE 10-31-09: Beans. I filled the pot a little over halfway with water and threw in a cup and a half of dried black-eyed peas. Soak overnight, bring to a boil, and throw in thermal sleeve for…a while. I had to go out, so mine were in there around 4 hours, and they were *perfect* when I got home. Cooked through, but not at all mushy. As an added bonus, black eyed peas do not make my heart race the way other beans do!
• UPDATE 11-3-09: Potatoes. Dice and cover with cold water (pot half full); bring to a boil and let sit in thermal sleeve for about 20-30 minutes.

Middling Results

• Chicken stock. Eventually, I did get good stock and tender chicken out of the pot, but it took several re-warmings and 4-5 hours of “steeping” time. I was also making stock out of the same batch of chickens on the stove, and to be fair, it took about 4 hours on a constant simmer. These were some tough old hens, and while the stock was great, the chicken never really got meltingly tender (even after pressure canning). I will continue to make stock in this pot when I’m doing one chicken at a time.

Poor Results

• Split pea soup. The batch was so small (1c peas and 3c water) that not enough heat was retained to cook them.
• Brown rice. I’ve tried this four times and ruined a really depressing amount of rice, both because of my own failure to measure ingredients, and the pot’s failure to cook.
  • 2c rice, unknown water = fairly crunchy rice. Hmm, did I put in 2 or 4 cups of water? Well, I’ll just add some more hot water, like I do on the stove and I’ll end up with…wallpaper paste!
  • 2c rice, 3c water = slightly crunchy rice. Um, Em? Do you remember that rice is supposed to be made with TWO cups of water for every cup of rice? No? Well, don’t you think it would be a good idea to MEASURE YOUR INGREDIENTS PROPERLY before blaming equipment failure? That’s a good girl.
  • 2c rice, 4c water = fully cooked rice floating in a lot of hot water. You see, this pot doesn’t let steam out the way a pot on the stove does, which is why the 2c water/3c rice was only slightly crunchy. I just dumped this batch into a sieve and let it drain, and it actually was the best batch to date. Not perfect rice, but it was edible. Next time, I will try cooking 2c rice in 6 or 8c water and just plan to drain it like pasta.
  • 1c rice, 2c water with complicated “double boiler” arrangement inside the pot = total failure. My idea was to put the rice and water inside a stainless steel bowl, and surround that with boiling water. I think the idea bears repeating, but by a different method – perhaps using a Mason jar on a silicone hot pad (so the jar doesn’t crack) with a lot more water around it so the inner pot can actually boil.
  • 2 c rice, enough water to fill pot half full. Let it stand for one hour and it was completely overcooked.

Lessons Learned

• You must bring the contents of the inner pot to a full, rolling boil for a couple minutes before putting it into the thermal outer pot.
• The pot works best when it’s full (80% of 4.5 liters, in this case).
• It works poorly or not at all when it’s not full.

At one point, Thermos made a 6L version of this that came with two pots. You could either cook 2 different things at the same time, or fill one with water to help the other one cook. I can’t find it now, and I’m not sure if the difference between 3L and 4.5L would be enough to, say, get my rice to cook.

Next Steps

• See if I can find a way to do a pot-in-a-pot method that will let me cook smaller quantities of food.
  • UPDATE: This hasn’t worked terribly well, though I did get a passable split pea soup by putting the soup ingredients in a small stainless steel pot and filling the thermal pot *around* it with water.
• Compare to a standard pressure cooker, which also uses less fuel than regular stove-top cooking, but does so at much higher heats. Supposedly it’s faster, too, but I’m not sure that it will be once you take cool-down/depressurizing time into account. But it might do a better job with rice and other things made in 1L instead of 4L quantities.

Just a note – instead of reposting things I’m posting over at Preserving Traditions, I’ve added a feed on the left side. As I add things over there, the title, date, and a link will show up here, and you can follow the link if you’re interested.

It’s been a very full summer for me. I’ve mentioned most of these things before, but the quick-and-dirty list of what’s been keeping me busy includes

• Increasing the garden from 200sf to about 1000sf (plus 250sf I didn’t get around to planting)
• Growing eight crops I’ve never grown before
• Learning to pickle (and putting up something like 20 quarts of pickles)
• Running Preserving Traditions events once a month
• …plus 2 preserving “work days,” the chicken harvest workshop, and a “how to stock a storage pantry” workshop
• Arranging merchandising for Preserving Traditions through Downtown Home and Garden
• Helping Mary Fox start a second branch of PT in West Bloomfield
• Having my day job blossom into a very busy and highly creative (and mission-critical) phase, including developing a course I’ll be teaching in October
• And, oh, trying to have a life with a husband and friends and family and such.

It’s been hard. I took on too much, frankly. I’ve stayed on top of the stress better than I ever have in the past, with only a few minor breakdowns, but this is in no way sustainable. I’m ready for bed around 9 every night and have a hard time getting up to exercise most mornings. I don’t feel like I have much “me” left to share with my sweetie and friends. If people need me, I get instantly frazzled because I have no reserves, even though I’m (just barely) staying on top of the day-to-day stuff.  This will continue for a couple more weeks, because I’ve made commitments through October that I won’t back out of, but I’m not taking on anything new for a while. When I do, I will be much more careful about how much I commit to.

The problem is, there is so much that I *could* be doing. Things that I really, seriously want to do. More workshops, more venues, more topics. There’s so much I could give but…I can’t. Sustainable living means sustaining me, too. If I burn out, I won’t be teaching *anything*.

At some point this summer, this phrase dropped into my head: I have done enough, for now. That might mean that for today, I’ve done enough. The dishes can wait until tomorrow. The weeds can wait until the weekend. The workshop can be planned later. Cooking with Laura will be a winter project. For now, I’ve done enough and what I really need to do is to rest.

There will always be more that could be done. I will never finish my to-do list. So all I can do is draw a circle around what part of this big Work is mine, and as they say, “Do all I can do and still get up and do it again tomorrow.”

That being said, I’ve had a weekend with lots of time to write, so I’ve “stocked up” on blog posts here and at Preserving Traditions (see the new feed on the left side) so you’ll be getting details on many of these projects in the next week or two.

Have you rested lately?

When I can move my arms again, I’ll tell you all about Apple Day at the Grange (including making cider) and the chicken harvest workshop.

It’s been a mixed year in the greenhouse. I wouldn’t call it an unqualified success, though it had its good points. Here goes:

The Good

• I got to start gardening March 1. Not a whole lot *happened*, but it made me feel good.
• The peas in the greenhouse bore fruit 6 weeks earlier than the peas outside.
• The green beans planted in late August bore about 2-3 weeks earlier than the beans outside.
• The yellow pear tomatoes in the greenhouse were the only tomatoes that produced anything at all this year.
• Topless sunbathing in late February!

The Perplexing

• The greenhouse peas took 11 weeks to bear. The ones planted outside took nine weeks.
• The hot-loving vegetables didn’t love the greenhouse. They looked pale and sickly. The okra was under a foot tall and produced five pods between two plants.
• The greenhouse only held 5-10 degrees over the outside temp during the cold months, and even less than that in the summer.

The Downright Annoying

• Aphids. Everywhere.
• More tomato hornworms than I’ve ever had in all my gardens combined. Ok, that’s still only 5, but…
• Occasional rabbits and chipmunks inside the greenhouse, snacking, buliding nests, having late-night poker parties, and generally carrying on.
• The gutters broke off in a late-season snowstorm. Even when I got them back up, they didn’t collect enough water to make water barrels worth the trouble.

So here are my theories about what’s going on.

• The soil in the greenhouse is the worst soil in my garden. I put down 4″ of composted horse manure last October and planted in that. In my regular raised beds, I don’t need to dig at all; by the end of the season, the roots and worms have done all the work. However, the clay under the greenhouse was smoothed off with a bucket loader before we built, and that clay layer remained impermeable. When I stuck a digging fork in last week, I was shocked (as in, jolted up the arms and into my bones) to discover the “soil” was 2″ deep over a rock-hard layer of hardpan clay.
• I need to water the greenhouse every day. Maybe that’ll improve when I improve the soil, though.
• An 8×12 greenhouse does not have the thermal mass to hold temperature. It heats up too fast and cools down quickly, as well.
• This greenhouse model – a Rion kit – is probably also just leakier than your standard polyfilm hoop house. I bought it because it’s pretty, but I don’t think it’s as functional as a plastic quonset hut.

What I’m going to do:

• Build raised beds inside the greenhouse – 8″ deep. Fill with composted horse manure and dig it in to break up the clay layer. This will improve the soil drastically and let the soil heat up faster in the spring. Better soil will retain water better and help the plants be stronger, both for growing and for staving off insects.
• Install a brick path down the middle to retain some heat. Even if it doesn’t work, it’ll be neat; my folks are going to loan me some bricks from the brick walk around the train station I grew up in (scroll to the bottom…), so there’ll be a little of my growing-up homestead in my adult home.
• Be better about watering next summer.
• Place bales of straw around the perimeter to stave off the freezing of the soil to extend the fall harvest.

Well, things are winding down in the garden. For the first time, it seems less like I’m racing the frost and more like I’ve eaten everything interesting in the garden. Here’s a recap:

• Over 125 lb. of produce to Food Gatherers this year!
• Peas – fabulous! Over 14 pounds of edible pod peas, between the greenhouse and the garden. My sweetie has decided they are the best raw vegetable ever and eats them in preference to carrots in his lunch when they’re available. I planted a second crop July 23 (some in and some out of the greenhouse) that is just starting to set pods – we’ll see if there’s a second crop or not.
• Green beans – also my best year ever. Nine quarts in the freezer and five pounds to a potluck, plus lots fresh.
• Carrots – planted Napolis and Danvers. One of them – I think the Napolis – branched a lot. Got a nine-pointer the other night. I still have a hard time growing carrots, but I want to keep trying because we like them so much.
• Parsnips – haven’t harvested most of them, but the ones we got (Turga variety) were good.
• Rutabagas – Very good crop, though somewhat wormy. Try covering the crop next year.
• Turnips – Ditto. Planted a second crop Aug. 25th but I think that was too late to even get greens.
• Squash – blah. Got squash bugs. Harvested a goodly number, but they weren’t very ripe or sweet.
• Tomatoes – Don’t die of shock, but I think I may not grow any tomatoes next year. I don’t really *like* tomatoes all that much, and I found I can get organic tomatoes for 80 cents a pound if I want to make a batch of salsa.
• Onions – were troopers, as always. I went to the trouble of planting out leek sets I’d bought this year, and they grew into onions, not leeks. *facepalm* I really want to grow leeks – from side shoots and bulblets, if not from tiny hairlike transplants.
• Radishes – quick, easy, and way yummy to pickle!
• Pickling cucumbers – great crop (“little leaf”), and I think I will plant the same number next year. I planted 24 plants; about 2/3 survived, and that gave us a quart or two of cukes every other day for a month. I’ll pick them smaller next year, but I think I can’t get enough to pickle a quart if I don’t have at least a dozen plants.
• Potatoes – definitely planting Kennebecs next year if they hold up well in storage. These were prolific and medium-to-large in size.
• Sweet potatoes – They are still in the ground, mostly, so no final report yet. The couple plants I did dig up already yielded about a pound of finger-sized roots between three or four plants in the greenhouse. They were tasty, baked whole with a little oil and salt.

I’ll write up a separate report on the greenhouse.