MamaStories

101 jars. Top row, left to right:

• 3 pints pickled cucumbers
• 6 8 oz cranberry peach preserves
• 9 8 oz fig preserves
• 8 pints apple sauce
• 5 pints basic tomato sauce
• 7 pints green bell pepper
• 7 8 oz peach salsa

Bottom row, left to right:

• 9 quarts green beans
• 6 pints peach pie filling
• 8 8 oz peach butter
• 6 pints peaches in light syrup
• 7 pints peach chutney
• 4 quarts + 1 8 oz apple sauce
• 16 blueberry jams – several recipes

Canning was one of the hurdles I cleared this season. As a teenager I witnessed my mom making and canning crab apple jam, but can’t remember participating. There really is nothing to canning, but it’s one of those old/new skills that was a bit intimidating to me. Nevertheless, wanting to work on our food self-sufficiency, I knew it was something I really wanted to do, so I started collecting jars early on, through Freecycle, Craig’s list and from the landfill. I still have many cases of empty larger jars. I only had to buy 8 oz jars, and lids and screw bands.

The shelves of the canning pantry were already there in our basement. I think the lady who lived her before us kept her own jars on them, because you can see some ring marks. I like it that they’re not deep, so I can see and check the jars at first glance. I’ll have to add some shelves if I keep this up, and also because I want to start adding things like flours, sugar, etc. The pantry is close to the furnace but the temperature fluctuations are minimal. Our basement is a constant 65 F, give or take a degree. It is always dark, except in winter, then I use the same space to grow my seedlings in winter: I will have to install a curtain for the pantry when those 16/24 lights come on

Like most of us in the States this year I was expecting a lot more from my garden then what I really got – bad weather and inexperience contributed. So I turned to the Farmers Market for produce (blueberry jam was my first attempt) and began hot-water bath canning in my large stockpot. I was already having fun when DH bought the high-pressure canner (the biggest Presto) for my birthday and helped me out on my first run, and then I was truly off. I use the Presto for the hot-water bath, since it is now my largest pot and it has a nice rack which keeps the jars from falling over.

I use the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving for recipes and instructions, as well as the manual for my canner. I use my glass top electric cook stove. It takes a lot longer to get that big pot of water boiling than on a gas stove, but that’s how it is for now. I have no trouble with the glass stove top as my canner has a flat bottom and I’m extra careful when I put it down (so as not to break the glass).

As I wrote earlier, canning (especially in a hot kitchen on a summer’s day) is heightening my appreciation for food production as much as growing the food does. Peeling, coring, chopping up, boiling, straining and processing 12 lbs of apples takes about 2 hours of work and comes to 4 quarts and 2 8 oz jars. A quick run to the shop takes 15 minutes and could come to hundreds of jars of applesauce!

Then there is the financial issue. Those organic apples at my Farmers Market were about $7 for a bag of 6 lbs (much cheaper than the apples the grocery store). So let’s say I made 5 quarts of sauce, that’s $1.40 per pint, which doesn’t calculate in the cost of the jar (okay, free in this case), lids and screw bands, electricity, water, sugar, spices, and my time. The organic applesauce in my grocery store comes to $2.64 per pint. I think the jar, lids and other ingredients can easily fit into that $1.24 difference… but not my time.

But that’s applesauce. On the one side there are the so-called more added-value foodstuffs, like fig preserves, salsas and pestos, which will come out quite a bit cheaper home canned if you can source the key ingredients cheaply. On the other side there are things like basic tomato sauce, which will be much cheaper from the supermarket shelves. My $1.99/lb organic tomatoes made a shocking $4 per pint home canned basic tomato sauce (so again excluding jar, other ingredients, electricity and time), while the supermarket organic tomato sauce is only $1.14 per pint. Another factor is organic vs. conventional: if the raw materials are the latter, then the price compared to non-organic store bought cans will likely be against the home canner.

So let’s say it all comes out in the middle, like the apple sauce: it comes to the same, except for the time. Then the question is: is it worth my time?

I believe it is, for a variety of reasons. I am preserving not just apples, but a skill as well. I enjoy working with food (especially if I’ve grown it, or if I’ve come to know the farmer who has). I fear that in the future the supermarkets might not be so well-stocked on applesauce and I want to know how to fill that gap myself. I can be certain of the “local-ness” and “organic-ness” of the raw materials. And I know exactly what went into my handwashed jars: the apples, sugar, spices, water and lemon juice of my choosing and making – no Bisphenol A, no neglected bacteria and other contaminants, no “manufacturing oils”.

Heads up:

October 18

Roxbury, MA

Bill McKibben, Frances Moore Lappé and Mel King

The major goals of the conference are to educate, inform, and empower Massachusetts residents to take actions in their communities to help build the local infrastructure and institutions needed to provide economic security in a changing world. The conference will help clarify, catalyze, and coordinate the emerging efforts across the Commonwealth that are blazing the trail for community-organized energy, finance, banking, budgeting, healthcare, food, education, retail, service, manufacturing, and more.

click on image to see flyer.pdf

I bought the book. Nowadays when I want to buy a book I get it from the library first. After a couple of weeks of perusing and handling it, I might think differently about spending $15 on it… Not so with Coleman’s Winter Harvest Handbook. It’s full of hard practical advice and it’s beautifully made and I couldn’t wait to underline and make notes and set exclamation marks in the margins.

We are about to build a “cold house” (an unheated hoop house) out of pvc pipe and plastic cover, that will cover four beds (dark blue). Inside the hoop house each of these beds will be covered with an extra layer made of row cover. In these doubly-covered beds I’ll grow lettuce, spinach, broccoli, chard, kale, parsley, carrots, arugula, leeks, mizuna, mustard greens, scallions and beet greens.

Some beds (light blue) we’ll cover with row cover at first and an extra layer of plastic during the coldest months. This double protection is one of Coleman’s three components of the winter harvest. In those I’ll grow the most hardy crops (mache, mizuna, tatsoi, pak choi) for Winter and early Fall harvest, and I’ll tuck in arugula, pea, carrot, beet and onion seeds for overwintering and germination early in Spring.

I’ll try some of those crops in the small glass covered frame (dark blue in front of the house), which I want to convert into a hot frame, heated with decomposing horse manure. I just found out that my source – a horse owner right around the corner from our house – uses wood shavings for bedding, which Coleman considers detrimental to vegetable soil, so I might only use it in the hot frame, where it will not be mixed in with the growing soil but will only be used to heat that soil from underneath. I still need to find out exactly how that’s done… (Good news is that the horse is on no medication whatsoever.)

The hoop house will be light and portable and the idea is to get four people together in late Spring to pick it up and move it to another collection of four beds, where it will create a nice environment for the usual greenhouse plants, like tomatoes, eggplant and peppers. In the Fall we’ll pick it up again and move it to the Winter Garden beds.

This means I’m going to have to be a lot more careful about crop rotations than I have been. I must say that crop rotation is a problem for Square Foot Gardeners. This year’s problem with blight made that clear: if you had blighted potatoes and tomatoes scattered all over the place this year, you might not want to grow any Solanacaea at all next year. I did some SFG this year, but I think I will move to more conventional beds and row next season.

This is, of course, yet another grand experiment, but so worth a try. I had no spinach whatsoever in my first garden: my spinach seedlings bolted in Spring and I’ve been craving it ever since. If only the spinach works out, I’ll be happy!

Independence Days was somewhat hindered by a sorry head cold, but here’s what I did before -

Ah——tshoo!

Rhubarb

Plant. Two 1-year-old rhubarb  plants: I know it’s not the season to plant them, but they look very healthy and were cheap so it’s worth experimenting. Seedlings are still patiently waiting for the hoop house.

Harvest of 21 September 2009

Harvest. Kale, chard, green beans – those beans just keeps on giving! When cleaning out the dry bean bed, I found 1 straggler fava bean – needless to say it never made it into the kitchen. Coupla tiny onions and carrots. Celery: the stalks are slim but the flavor is intense. The last of a very disappointing crop of Salem potatoes.

Peachy Preserve. Canned cranberry-peach preserves (6 8oz), peach salsa (7 8oz), peach butter (8 8oz). That and some munching took care of my half bushel of peaches.

Peach butter

Waste not. The egg man at my Farmers Market (eggs so fresh, they still have feathers stuck to them) sells them in used cartons, the half dozens he sells in dozen-cartons cut in half. I asked him if I should bring back the cartons from last week and he said yes, please, he’s always running short. So today i brought him the 50 or so egg cartons I had saved in anticipation of our chickens. That will now only happen next Spring, and by then we and our friends will have saved up enough new ones. I’m also saving all those peach seeds to be put in once I feel better – what are the chances I end up with a peach orchard? I also started saving the celery and carrot greens for veg stock – why hadn’t I thought of that before?

Want Not. The stores are putting away their canning stuff, so I stocked up on extra pectin and lids – not because they were on sale (they weren’t :( ), but to have them handy.

Build community food systems. Nothing much in particular, definitely no “building,” but here’s a thought about the Farmers Market. I make it a point to buy something at each stall at my Farmers Market (it’s a small market). I buy most of my produce there for 3 reasons: (1) reduced food miles, (2) I can ask the farmers personally about their pesticide use and employment policies, and (3) to support local and small agriculture. That last one is important: in the future we will want these farmers to still be in business, we will want that farm land to be still in use.

Eat the food. We ate all of the food we harvested – the harvest is a trickle at the moment, too little to can. The plan was to bake bread, but the dripping nose, 0% taste and splitting headache made it less than appetizing.

Thought for next year’s garden: tea plants and elecampane!

—

This is the general plan for the Fall and Winter garden (click for larger):

The idea is to put up a small hoop house that will be dismantled next Spring (blue). It will cover a rectangle of two large (8×4) and two small (4 x 4) beds, which will each have a row cover – so double protection. These will have spinach, lettuce, kale, mizuna, broccoli, carrots, etc. The cold frame (smaller blue rectangle) in front of the house will either harbor the most hardy veggies, or I might experiment with a hot frame with fresh horse manure… My copy of Winter Harvest arrived just in time!

The orange/brown beds are in, the light yellow ones still need to be dug – hopefully this Fall. The yellow rows at the bottom left will be rows (not beds). I’m putting winter rye in all the unused beds this winter, except for Bed 12, which will have the rhubarb and garlic, and Bed 13, which might become home to all those peach seeds – I’ll transplant whatever erupts in Spring to pots.

Amie draws worms and a little girl watering the grass with the complete and barely-used artists set found at the landfill. Mm, something else seems to have come along from the landfill (click to enlarge) (*)

Warning: there’s a lot of “didn’t do” this week – it’s been a bit of a down-week…

Plant: Amie and I planted peas and favas in pots – they’ll be moved into the hoop house. I’m still waiting for the Fall seedlings to reach a good size before setting them out into the rain-burst and slug-eaten world, or more safely into the hoop house if things speed up on that front. I planted the Bountiful Harvest compost crop (fava, vetch, wheat and rye) in the largest terrace up front.

Harvest: New on the menu are peas and lima beans – so sweet straight out of the pod, they never make it to the pot! A few cherry tomatoes are still coming in, but not many: they too are eaten out of hand. The kale is really liking the chillier weather, and the chard is liking the absence of those huge cherry tomato plants looming over them. More tiny carrots and some nice, chunky radishes, and parsley. And the usual: green beans, the last dry beans, cucumbers and eggplants. I rummaged in the Salem part of the potato bins and was not pleased – maybe Salems, being med-season potatoes, weren’t the right kind for the bins. I hope the late-season Bintjes will have performed better.

Preserve: Gave the canner a rest this week, mostly due to the paucity of produce at the farmer’s market (tomorrow’s Farmers Market promises half bushels of peaches at reduced prices, and pears). But have been “minding the store”: checking the seals on the jars, stirring the blueberry/basil vinegar.

Waste not: The Starbucks coffee grounds have filled up all our compost bins – must make more (bins) because more (grounds) will be coming in. At the landfill I picked up bags and bags of perfectly fine board games, Mecano sets, a kid’s artist set, and, as you saw, a fat cockroach (*), as well as a small satellite dish that DH wants to turn into a solar oven. I got some more gardening tools through Freecycling. We’re continuing with all our usual stuff.

Want not: Bought a large bag of sugar for the stores.

Build community food systems: Unfortunately I wasn’t feeling well enough to execute the brilliant plan for our crazy-popular block party on Sunday. It  was to leach the tannins from the acorns Amie and I picked and to make muffins out of them (Straker from Doomstead Diary pointed me to a great EatTheWeeds video about acorns). Imagine everybody’s surprise at the accompanying card: “These muffins are made from acorns foraged right here.” Next year, or earlier, of we do some food related event before then. Did get to chat with lots of neighbors about our garden and our plans for next year. Made contact with a beekeeping couple in my town, and they offered to help me set up a hive in Spring. They’re also interested in the Transition Initiative I am trying to get going here!

Eat the food: We emptied a jar of the home-grown basil pesto I froze some weeks ago – yum on pasta and spread on bread! As usual ate a lot straight from the garden (see harvest), as well as some of the frozen burgers and sausages – there’s some room in the freezer again. We have a great freezer-system: a sheet stuck to the side of the fridge with four columns: the date something was “entered”, the food stuff, the packaging it’s in. I can see what we have and what is getting old at a glance.

(*) Geen zorgen, Oma, ‘t is maar nen plastieken kakkerlak!

(*) No worries, Oma, it’s only a plastic roach!

Plant: Still waiting for the “Fall planting” seedlings (lettuce, spinach, chard, etc.) to graduate to planting-out size. “Unplanted” most of the tomato plants (one chilly day and night and they succumbed fully to the blight). Also planted sustainable lawn seed on our erosion-prone slope: curious about the result!

Harvest: Finally harvested the first carrots (which as you can see are tiny, even after being in the ground for 4 months) and the first edible  radish (they are supposed to be the easiest to grow, but my first batch produced only diminutive maggot-eaten and awfully bitter knots). Also more yummy green beans, dry beans, extra sweet peas, kale, chard, cucumber, eggplant, more cherry tomatoes from potted plants, which are still successful against the blight.

Preserve: After the frenzy of the last two weeks and because we arrived late at the Farmers Market, I bought only green beans to supplement our own beans and pressure-canned all those, making 7 quarts. Brewed up some blueberry-basil vinaigrette. Bought meat and fish on sale at the grocery store and froze it.

Waste not: More freecycling of cardboard boxes. Scored several wooden pallets they were throwing away at the local elementary school, and two water tanks (don’t yet know what to do with those). Still picking up Starbucks coffee grounds and collecting acorns. Today also chatted with the neighbor who owns the horse and she will start using our property to get to the conservation land behind us. This means the horse manure is now for the taking. Now I need to find a way of transporting the manure and assign an area for its composting (those pallets could come in handy for that). It would be good to get some finished or going at least before it starts freezing (in about a month and a half), or maybe we could stick it, fresh, in the new beds for next Spring.

Want not: Anything more and we’ll have to start the small (freecycled) chest freezer downstairs. Washed and stored away extra blankets. Organized our firewood, stacking some in a manner that’s better for drying.

Build community food systems: Had a great chat with a local inventor/entrepreneur who is building a 95% sustainable house right here in my town and gives sustainability classes. He’s keen on joining our Transition effort. Also making local-food-related plans for our immensely popular neighborhood block party next weekend.

Eat the Food: Ate everything out of the garden, and some of the canned apple sauce and jam, and we didn’t croak.

This month there were no shifts in the household: just the three of us, which makes the reckoning much easier.

Amie feeds the compost tea some molasses

Gasoline: 27%

This stayed the same as last month. The school year hasn’t started yet, so DH is spending more time working from home and Amie isn’t daily being driven to school and back, all of which save on gas:

33.9/3 gallons of gasoline = 27% of the US National Average

Electricity: 8%

306 KWH = 8% of the US National Average

We’re now routinely careful with lights and appliances and we’re inching down (from 10% last month), but honestly I doubt we can get it any lower without investing in some expensive solar battery-charging equipment. But then again DH is looking into building a deluxe solar oven, which will save some more electricity, especially as the temperatures drop and stews and soups come back on the menu – though we hope to use the woodstove cook top for those. Anyway, right now it’s just chipping away.

I’ve been canning a lot, and getting that 23 quart canner up to 10 lbs of pressure really puts my electric range to work. That will show up in next month’s Riot, though.

What strikes me now about this number is how easy it was to get our usage down to within 10% . We run our laptops all the time, and we’re not ruining our eyes to candlelight at night. I run my dishwasher every other day, and my washer once a week (never my dryer)… That is, we’re not deprived of electricity at all. With a little bit of effort everyone in the States could quite easily get down to, say, 20% of what they’re using right now. All it takes is some vigilance.

Heating oil and Warm Water: 22%

13.6 gallons of oil = 22% of the US National Average

This is down from last month but warm water is still our Achilles heel. We still haven’t insulated the boiler and the pipes – one thing after another happens and distracts us from such simple measures. No excuses: it will happen this month!

Trash: 4% or 493%?

The big bill finally came in: we had rented a dumpster for the trash generated by our remodeling project that we weren’t able to recycle.  We don’t know how much it weighed after we were done with it, only that it was under 2 tons. 2 tons, that’s 4000 lbs! I can’t  believe it was anywhere near that, so I estimate it was about a ton, but I really have no idea.  So let’s say a ton, the dumpster plus our usual household garbage, which came in at 5 lbs per person per month.

666 lbs of garbage per person this month = a whopping 493% of the US National Average

Ouch. Does the US National Average include construction debris, dumped cars, etc? If not, then I can write:

5 lbs per person per month (= 4% of the US National Average)

But it’s only fair to count it. Most of it ended up in the landfill, after all.

Water: 17%

During our brief dry spell I watered only with rain water, and all our compost tea was made with rain water (as it should: the chlorine in the drinking water kills the benificials). And at the beginning of this month we installed our new flushing method, which paid off: we lowered our water consumption even more (from 20% last month), to

506 gallons of water per person = 17% of the US National Average

Consumer Goods: 10% ?

Stuff we bought but that I won’t count,  because they are for purposes in accordance with the Riot: canning rings and lids and some canning jars – though most I got through Freecycle and Craig’s List – and the canner itself, of course; a substantial investment in our new wood burning stove,  one of the most efficient stoves on the market and to be used judiciously;  the (poorly designed and useless) solar lamp we purchased  from – and will return to – IKEA.

Most of the furnishing in the renovated room are either stuff we had or things we got from the landfill (a nice desk and a chair). But we did have to buy some tools and lot of building materials for it. We also replaced our beaten up old porch roof with a new roof – which necessitated a surprising amount of caulk. Sigh. I hadn’t so far, but now that I am counting the renovation waste, I’m thinking I might have to count these costs as well… And then we’re talking several thousands – sometimes things are so necessary that you just stop keeping count.

If I’m not counting these, then I could write $80, spent on books for Mama, DH and Amie:

10% of the US National Average

Food

It’s been a while since I visited this category. It still boggles the mind how to calculate it, but I can at least say that we’re eating a lot out of the garden. I am canning a lot, so that will lessen our impact during the months to come. (See the last Independence Days)

But our garden failed to produce onions,garlic, peppers, lettuce… Those I buy at the Farmer’s Market, along with the honey: all local. I have many plans for improving the garden next Spring.

It all feels good, but we can do so much more. For instance, buy bulk wheat berries and grind our own flour, or the least I could do is bake my own bread. Get chickens so we can make our own pasta. Get a chain of homemade yogurt going, with local milk. Start mushrooming. Find a good storage place for the many potatoes we hope to harvest, and for apples from a local orchard…

So many more steps to ween ourselves off the supermarket, which is increasingly more expensive. Only last week I bought a gallon of organic milk: $6.99! But if we had a couple of goats…

{Reset} Since I started again last week, I’ll call this week 2.

Plant: Transplanted mostly lettuce seedlings in the old potato bed, but I’m afraid they drowned in  last week’s downpours; luckily I didn’t put in all of them, and I have many more waiting on the porch. I did drop a tray with mizuna seedlings, but I planted more as seeds directly in the garden.

Harvest: More green beans, dry beans, many more tomatoes, 1 cucumber, most of the basil. Amie and I collected 2 bags of acorns from our garden and the neighborhood and will experiment with processing them soon – though they already seem to have been re-purposed.

Preserve: Canned 8 more pints of apple* sauce, 14 more pints of blueberry* jam, 5 more pints of fig preserve, 6 pints of basic tomato sauce (half the tomatoes from my garden, half from the Farmers Market), 6 pints of peppers*. Froze 5 pints of pesto. Figuring out now what we’re going to do with the many potatoes we’re expecting from our potato bins.

Waste Not: On his return from work, DH is picking up coffee grounds from the local Starbucks again. Cleaned out basement of cardboard boxes, freecycled all of them, but the moldy ones. Computed our Riot for Austerity (post coming tomorrow).

Want Not: Purchased First Aid necessities, enough for home stash and two preparedness backpacks. Purchased 2 large bags of baking soda and 4 large bottles of vinegar (as that’s what I’m cleaning with now), and 5 lbs of sugar (though most of that’s gone now, after making all that jam). I also bought 4 humongous bottles of Ecover laundry detergent (206 loads each!), because they were on sale and I had coupons, though I had also stocked up on washing soda, Fels-Naptha soap and Borax, thinking to start making my own once I ran out of my last bottle of commercial detergent; they’ll keep.

Build community food systems: Contacted a couple who have been keeping a beehive for the last 30 years, quite close to where I live. They’ll help me get started in the Spring, if I’m ready – that is, if the garden is ready (no flowers!). Got the ball  rolling (some more) on a possible Transition Town in my town (about that later).

Eat the food: Ate some (or most) of everything in the garden, and those jars that didn’t seal (one because there was a nick in the rim – missed that one – and one for unknown reasons), and those jars that didn’t fill up totally.

* = Farmers Market.

So behind, it’s shameful. Forge ahead, anyway!

Plant: Fall garden of spinach, kale, broccoli, purslane, various lettuce, chard, mizuna, mustard greens, all as seedlings, and in the ground peas, more green beans, chard and carrots.

Harvest: chard, kale, cucumber, potatoes, various tomatoes, beans both green and dry.

Preserve: apple* sauce, peaches* in syrup, tomato-apple* chutney, blueberry* jam, fig jam (figs on sale at grocery store), freezing dry beans. (* from Farmers Market)

Reduce waste: We’re still in our Riot for Austerity mode, so we never produce much waste. Our renovation project required a small dumpster, which came out at under 2 tonnes: lots of the wood was salvaged. We replaced the 50-year-old old yellowed porch roof, which we’re reusing as roofs for our wood piles.

Prepare and store: had our wood burning stove installed; got more mason jars from the landfill; bought large bags of sugar; large bottles of vinegar and big bags of baking soda for home-made cleaning products; am collecting glass bottles for water storage (once I have a bunch I’ll wash them en masse and fill them up). Installed rain water barrels and investigating the Berkey filter system. Purchased and began studying Kathy Harisson’s Just in Case.

Build community food systems: chatted with farmers at the Farmers Market (got a nice deal too), and someone from the Food Project about their Build-a-Garden program. Contacted a local beekeeper. Still plotting Transition.

Eat the food: ate most of all that we harvested and even some (already) of what I preserved.

I can cross two more items off my “Tools/Toys” list in the sidebar. “Lookit” (*) what arrived yesterday, one after the other:

My Presto 23 quart high pressure canner, present from DH for my birthday

Our new wood stove, present to ourselves for our 8th wedding anniversary

That’s two big pillars of self-sufficient living right there! I haven’t used either of them yet: it’s 90 degrees and the gauge hasn’t been calibrated yet. But I have canned, as promised:

5 1/2 pints of (hot water bath processed) blueberry jam, present from me to my family

The jars popped right on cue as I lifted them out of the water and the seals have held, so they’re good to go into the pantry. What a good feeling! And Amie watched the entire process, explaining that she had to see how I did it because then she would know it too.  So right!

(*) I don’t know where Amie picked up this “lookit” business, but now I’m saying it too!