Amie and the Fedco catalog
Homemade rice pudding in one of my pots.
Garden planning (in Plangarden)
Pouring Myself a Soda
Can’t call it ginger soda anymore. “Ginger champagne” is more like it, as it’s definitely alcoholic and tastes a little like champagne. Foams like it too! To your health!
A friend asked me to bring her a couple. I declined and said she’d have to come and drink it here. I’m not driving around with these projectiles in my car!
One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall… Bottling Ginger Soda
DH’s buckets with the wine grapes had company: my ginger soda carboy. The trouble in our house is that there is no place where the temperature remains constantly warm enough. My 1 gallon carboy was being moved from next to the wood stove, to next to the radiator, to next to the gap between fridge and wall, to a spot in the sun with a black t-shirt thrown over it. But as our thermostat is set at 60F, and as the solar gain nowadays gets us to 62F, the heat doesn’t come on, and it’s only when we fall below 62F in the evenings that we get the wood stove going. We keep it going till we go to bed, and in the early morning the heating comes on perhaps once to keep the cooling house to 60F.
Anyone who bakes bread knows that yeast is fussy about temperature, and my poor yeasties were not happy with the cold gaps and the temperature swings. My ginger bug died on me the day I made the wort (bug? wort? read all about it here), so I cheated and spiked it with bread yeast. It was bubbling away within an hour and I added it to the wort in the carboy, along with the juice of an orange.  Five days now I’ve been trying to keep it going, by moving it around and stirring it to aerate it to prevent it from turning alcoholic, and it remained a sluggish one.  The longer you wait to bottle your ginger beer, the more chance there is that it becomes alcoholic, but you also want to make sure the fungi have done enough of their thing that they don’t go berserk in your bottles, over-carbornate and then explode them (it happens!).
Today after the wood stove heat  got the bubbles going again I tasted the decoction and to my surprise found it already too alcoholic, so it was time to bottle.
Not having a siphon, I strained out the “lees” or sediment (ginger and dead yeast) through several layers of cheesecloth. My 1 gallon carboy yielded eight 12oz. bottles. I found that capper at the give-and-take at my town’s transfer station: thank you! The bottles are from root and ginger beer that I’ve saved up over the past year.
As for that plastic bottle, a great trick is to keep some soda into a plastic bottle, so you can squeeze it to check on how tight it’s getting in there. This plastic bottle, the same volume as my glass ones, will see good use because I never buy plastic bottles (except for, painfully, milk containers). I’d rather be thirsty than buy one. Yet, I learned my lesson the last time when I opened a bottle of soda. And for that reason, as an extra precaution, this is where the capped bottles went:
In a wooden case with a sheet of plexiglass in front of it. I then turned it and placed the plexiglass side up against a cupboard. If any explodes, it’ll be a mess, but a contained mess.
Other happening ferments: I am baking bread again, using the BreadMan that we got for our wedding (12 years ago), and a friend is growing a kombucha mother SCOBY for me. I’ll go pick her up next week.
Neighbors
Discovered over the last couple of months:
- neighbor who can help me identify wild edible mushrooms
- neighbor who can help me dispatch a chicken to my freezer once the time comes
- neighbor who can darn the holes in my favorite ten-year-old sweater
- neighbors with whom to share seeds and gardening schedules
- neighbor who can take care of all kinds of wild creatures
- neighbor who can identify birds
- neighbor who can knit
- neighbor who makes her own colloidal silver
- neighbor who knows trees and how to drop them
Pressing Wine
Yesterday evening we took the next step in making our wine. We picked up the grapes in early December. They’re from Behm Vineyard in California and get shipped here as part of a wine club. We got a Cabernet Franc and a Merlot.  The grapes come crushed – so with skins and pips – and frozen in five gallon buckets. You thaw them out and once they’re warm enough you add  a packet of wine yeast. That and the yeasts already present on the grapes will get to work and after a few days you can smell that yeasty smell. To keep the yeasts invigorated you need to stir the bucket once or twice a day.
A month later (that was yesterday) this primary fermentation is finished and it’s time to get rid of the pips and skins by pressing the grapes. We simply used part of my honey extractor: a five gallon bucket with holes at the bottom. A lot of juice just pours out and then you put some pressure on the grapes to squeeze out more. Each five gallon bucket of grapes yielded a little more than a 3 gallon carboy of juice. Every carboy got a handful of oak wood chips and was inoculated with a batch of malolactic acid bacteria to convert the stronger tasting malic acid into lactic acid. In a month we’ll rack or siphon the wine to get rid of the sediment, and then it’ll sit in the carboys till September, when we bottle and either drink or let the wine age in the bottles. We’ll get 30 bottles of wine out of this.
The must. The bucket in front has a plate covering the big hole where my honey spinner’s axle fits.
The first juice pours out easily and is clear.
Then there is still some juice trapped in the grapes. This you have to press through the sieve.
That pressed juice has a lot of sediment so isn’t that clear. It’ll settle in the carboy and will be left after racking.
The cake of skins and pips that’s left over. Compost!
Malolactic bacteria go in.
Special French oak chips, medium toast!
Two times three gallons and a little leftover for topping off the carboys after racking. Airlocks to keep oxygen out.
Garden Goals for 2013 (and Beyond)
Ah, it’s 2 degrees out, but bright and sunny and in between running out to swap out the chickens’ frozen water I am dreaming of the garden. My goal for 2013 is to do more work on the homestead, because I realized what an opportunity we have here, to build a place that is a model of resilience. This it can only be if it is integrated into the community, and that it can only be if I do do a better job of balancing my community work and my role as a homesteader.
One important facet of the integration of my garden into the wider context is its place in the food shed. Our 2012 CSA just ended, and we have to wait until March 20, when our new, 48-week farm share starts (at Siena Farms). I want to grow food here with that in mind. The CSA box  is always packed with lettuces, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, squashes and fennel, more than a family of three needs. But it is low on some favorite foods, proteins and carbs, and has no fruits. Those will be mine to grow then! But first…
Irrigate – irrigate -Â irrigate!
I shamefully admit that the failure of much of my garden and especially the tomatoes and peppers in my hoop house last year was due to my neglect in watering. It is especially shameful because we had a small irrigation system sitting in the shed. All we had to do was assemble it and hook it up. This year we’ll invest in more tubing as well as in the 275 gallon ICB toters that I have been meaning to buy. The idea is to irrigate the entire vegetable garden, the elder, currant and gooseberry bushes in the back, as well as all the new plants, bushes and trees that are going in. Two additional parts of the water catchment system will be swales and a pond with an overflow.
I also need to put in a good water solution for my bees. Some of my neighbors had too many winged visitors to their bird baths.
And fence – fence – fence!
The chicken wire fence we put around the veg garden needs to be replaced with a fence that is stabler (read: posts sunk in properly), higher and sturdier (needs food growing on it). This fence could be more chicken wire or it could be something natural – only we don’t have enough materials here on the property to do that… I would love to learn how to build a brick or stone wall – preferably brick, for trapping the sun’s heat.
Protein
I can’t tell you how happy I am with my chickens. Â The four hens are still laying three eggs a day, on average. What more could I ask for? Two more hens, of course! The idea is to add two new chickens every day and in year three to start culling two. We”ll also up the learning curve and the fun by hatching our own as of now. Extra eggs will be used for bartering with friends and neighbors.
Seems like the only reason I go to the grocery store nowadays is milk. It hurts to have to buy it in plastic jugs too. Two tiny goats would do it. I’ve got room for them. DH is warming to the idea, but I doubt it’ll happen in 2013. Still, doesn’t hurt to research.
We have always wanted to put in a pond to catch the significant run-off from our roof after the rain barrels have filled, and because the presence of water is soothing and inspiring. But ponds can also mean FOOD: edible water plants and fish, of course. This year we’ll work on putting the pond in and establishing  the plants, getting the hang of that, and researching fish for 2014.
Starches, beans, grains
The CSA is short on some of the foods I really love, like potatoes. Once in a while there are some fingerlings, but never enough for a family of three that includes one potato-lover. So I, the Integrated Homesteader, might make the radical decision  to grow NO TOMATOES, ONLY POTATOES. Due to them being the same family and sharing the same very bad  blights, it’s not a good idea to grow both of them in a small garden anyway. Also entirely missing in the box are dry beans and drying peas. I’ll grow many of those.
As for grains, I’d like to grow corn again. I tried it last year but they went in too late. Nevertheless they are very interesting plants to grow. Maybe a bed or two of corn would be a worthy experiment? As for other grains, like wheat, I know we don’t have the space, though I could possibly plant a whole patch in our town’s Community Gardens?
Spring and Fall gardens
I have that wonderful hoop house and have as yet to really utilize it to have grow outside of the season. Task one: add doors! Then, grow cold weather crops – lettuce, spinach, and even plant some peas in there.  Outside the hoop house I’m planning a big crop of  fava beans and peas. As for Fall, thanks to my CSA, I’m no longer afraid of parsnips and turnips. I love them roasted or mashed and they are such good keepers. I also want to give carrots another go, as well as the brassicas (broccoli especially).
Some veggies that will make a comeback: LOTS of  escarole (for cannellini bean and escarole soup), tromboncino squash (which is turning out to be a great keeper), our favorite haricots verts, celery, chard, and perhaps 2013 will be the year I conquer spinach.
Fruits
But this year I mainly want to make work of fruits. Grocery shopping is for milk and fruits (I buy local and in season as much as possible): that is just a clear indication of what we need to grow here. Also, most of my canning is of fruit: jams, jellies, sauces. Last season’s blueberry jam and peach butter, apple sauce and peaches-in-syrup are finished already. Time to start doing something about this.
We already have lots of berry bushes in the ground  – hundreds of strawberries gone wild all over, 5 gooseberries, 4 elders, 5 red and 5 white currants, 1 highbush blueberry, 1 jostaberry,  2 serviceberries, 4 roses (for rosehips), 6 grapes. But almost none of them are doing well. The currants, elders and gooseberries in the back need more water and are defoliated every year by I-don’t-know-what. Even last year, when I covered them in remay, they were eaten. This will be their third Fall in my garden and I feel it needs to be a good one for them to survive. All the other bushes – along with the witch hazel - will need to be moved to better spots, yet to be determined. I also need to find way to protect them from defoliators and chipmunks stealing all of the harvest.
The sour cherry tree has not grown very much since it moved in. It needs a good pruning and a guild around it (around all of them, really), with 90% nitrogen fixers and dynamic accumulators. I have four hazels, two of which are doing marvelous, two of them not so (need moving), and each year all of them get defoliated as well. The raspberries can stay put in their patch, but need pruning.  (I got this pruning book, by the way). My two female kiwis are going absolutely berserk. No flowers or  fruits yet, but any year now. They very much need pruning!  The male kiwi, however, which is needed to pollinate the females, needs to be moved to a better spot and also given a planter. The grapes too need to be pruned, moved and trained. In pots I have two figs, which will need pruning, and two paw paws, which can be transplanted into the garden.
Once we’ve cleared the last of the downed tree trunks for firewood, we will have a lot of room for more trees and berries. That was our promise: for every tree we took down, we’d plant another one. I am also going to devote some beds where veggies won’t grow for fruit trees and bushes. I might buy and plant some of these this year ((*) in the list), though for some others the timing probably won’t be right and we’ll take a year, first, to work on the clearing and the soil first and then plant in 2014. So far, my general shopping list is for:
2 pears: 1 to espalier against our house facade (*), 1 next to driveway (*)
2 apples: next to driveway (*)
2 peaches: north side of veg garden (*)
2 plums: next to driveway (*)
2 Asian pears, 1 quince, aronia bushes, blackberries, honeyberries (also called hascaps)…
I’d also like to start learning the craft of taking whips, cuttings, and grafting.
Flowers
So far, I was never able to grow sunflowers, for munching seed and seed butter. Chipmunks would behead them even before they flowered, let alone made seed. This year, though, I want to try again, maybe put some protection around them. I have a lot of perennial medicinal flowers going already, some of which (in the large medicinal herb bed up front) I’ll have to move, cut and divide. I want to add more pollinator flowers for my bees.
Trees for firewood and tools (coppicing)
I’m also starting to research trees for coppicing for stake and other materials, including hardwood for tool handles. I’ve been recommended the black locust, mulberry and hickory: all hard and fast growing. They also burn really hot, and firewood too is on our minds. If we are careful and the climate cooperates (cough!), we have enough fuel (firewood and two tanks of oil) for three years. We’ll need to do more clearing up front to plant the larger orchard and the biomass trees, and that might give us another year worth of wood…
Outdoor living and working
If we’re going to make this place work as a model of resilience, abundance of food, life both human and other, we’re going to have to spend more time outside. Â Hence the recent obsession with the Pattern Language for redesigning the front of the house on top of the hill. One of the larger parts of this project that we want to accomplish is the extension of our front balcony, about which in a later post.
…
Seems feasible, no?
Reading Together
Clarity, In Pieces (iii)
So I asked myself that: So what? So what if I feel that I need it or that I somehow deserve it?
The dream of childhood, of  what we were “promised”:  a happy life that can only be better, faster, bigger than what came before. A world where problems (ecological degradation, economic shortfalls, social injustice, health problems) and inconveniences (having to get water or grow food, or having to wait more than a second for an internet connection) will be solved by technology, science and reasonable action. That is what humans do, isn’t it? Thanks to us, life will always be better, faster, bigger. It goes without saying!
No.
That was a dream so taken for granted, sustainable only thanks to several delusions, chief among them the delusion that no one, human or other, had to suffer for what I felt was rightfully mine. How desperately I clung to that, thinking that if they suffered, it was their bad luck but not my good luck because luck had nothing to do with it, right? Even when I feared that yes, luck does have something to do with it, I had a way out: I’d be a fool not to take it, I actually can’t but take it, because here it is, given, and anyway if I don’t take it, somebody else will, or it will go to waste. And anyway – round and round I went – I worked for this, or my parents did, and now I deserve it, somehow.
Was it a crisis of the imagination? For I could not  even imagine that it could all go away, that there could be problems – even problems of our own making – that could not be solved: predicaments. Despite the thousands of stories and images of those who dreamed just like me but who had already lost it, the dreamer clung to her vision of the future as one where the problems will all go away, or it won’t be so bad after all, or it won’t affect me… It became harder and harder to keep that up. I can’t pinpoint the moment, quite a few years ago, when the last straw punctured the bubble. Suddenly I imagined it, that my luck was running out, and I realized it was possible, that all this could be taken away from me. A lot of what you can read on this blog is the result of that realization.
That was not the end of it. When the bubble bursts the bottom falls out as well and instead of round and round you get to go down and down. It took me a while to figure out that what was going on was not just the fear, anger and grief that come with this new vision or the sheer logistics of preparing for a new future, but another, more serious crisis that was yet to be resolved: a crisis of gratitude.
A Pattern Language for Building for Life: Positive Outdoor Spaces
I got Christopher Alexander(et.al.)’s A Pattern Language from the library a few days back and am just blown away by it. This man had such humble, democratic insights into the task of the architect and a real feel for natural, beautiful,  human and humane living spaces. His book first proposes patterns for building cities, towns, neighborhoods. About the latter, we writes:
14. People need an identifiable spatial unit to belong to.
You can see that I devoured this because there is so much there for the Transition worker. Then it continues on to groups of buildings, houses and gardens, rooms (indoor and outdoor), alcoves, seats… smaller and smaller. Here’s one of my favorite patterns, one that, now that I have tended the fire for over three year, makes me nod and smile:
181. The Fire: There is no substitute for fire.
Alexander stresses the communal aspect of fire as he does for all his patterns. The patterns are always in service of people-living-together, whether in towns, neighborhoods, houses, room and gardens. It is about people of all ages, communing, playing, celebrating, working and learning together, letting each other into their lives and homes, and about the privacy and solitude that a social human being also craves. Another favorite,
94. Sleeping in public: It is a mark of success in a park, public lobby or a porch, when people can come there and fall asleep.
(A friend remarked that this is what gets you arrested these days, “for breathing while homeless,” then asked if he should get off his soap box. I said: “If your soap box isn’t comfortable enough to sleep on/in…”)
It’s no wonder that this Pattern Language is used in Permaculture design: it is all about niches for humans in society, built environments and nature, with a minimum of competition and a maximum of cooperation and joy. Published in 1977, the book is at times old-fashioned when it deals with materials and technologies, but it is for the most part timeless. And as an object it feels good: heavy in a handy way, 1171 thin, crackling pages, like a Bible, or the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, and of course I got it for my library. This website has all the patterns in their sequence if you want to explore.
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What I am most interested in at this point is invitations. How do you make a place inviting to potential visitors and even to the people who live there? That someone owns a place or works in one, that he walks in and out every day, doesn’t automatically mean they were invited in. The majority of buildings we live and work in are dead to some degree that no rugs or framed prints can make them alive. What to do with these buildings that already exist?
Alexander’s architecture is democratic: he wants the average person to be able to build, and rebuild.  His solutions are small ones, though they are not to be confused with easy ones, like the facile throw of a rug or the hanging whatever print is trendy – for those, consult Cosmopolitan or Martha Stewart. Alexander’s solution do require work, that is, thought and labor.  Raising pillars, creating ceiling vaults (with burlap!) and building bed nooks require tools (hammers, nails, hands), resources and some handiness. And often times it is clear that he takes it for granted that one person can’t do this: to reclaim our buildings from cheap functionality or cold self-aggrandizing, it takes a village…
There are some good things about our 1200 sq.f. 1950s ranch: it’s small and compact and by some lucky stroke it faces mostly south and the chimney runs down the middle of the house. But it’s so boxy and straight! I marvel at the lack of organic fluidity – no wonder I love my pudgy wood stove with its rounded corners. Slowly I will start working on this, rounding my house. But first, I want to make it more inviting.
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105. South Facing Outdoors:Â People use open space if it is sunny, and do not use it if it isn’t, in all but desert climates.
This is perhaps the most important single fact about a building. If the building is placed right, the building and its garden will be happy places full of activity and laughter. If it is done wrong, then all the attention in the world, and the most beautiful details, will not prevent it from being a silent gloomy place. […]Â Always place buildings to the north of the outdoor spaces that go with them, and keep the outdoor spaces to the south. Never leave a deep band of shade between the building and the sunny part of the outdoors.
We do well by this pattern. Our house faces more or less south and it has a large stretch of land in front of it. We have a large stretch in the back as well and that is sunny too, since we have only a one story house which doesn’t cast much shade.
Nevertheless my observation over the last four years is that we hang out almost exclusively in the back. In the back is the screened-in porch (where we sometimes eat dinner), the paved  patio (more meals under the umbrella, grilling, and summer carpentry work), the small lawn (ripped up by too much badminton) and beyond that, at the edge of the trees, Amie’s play house. To the right is the shed and the kiwi trellis, which invites you to the chicken coop and the wood piles in the east. To the left, in the welcome shade and between the rampant hostas, are the rain barrels, and then, around the corner of the house  lies the vegetable garden to the west. All around the edge of all this activity is a rim of towering, mature oak and pine. Beyond our property line in the north there is a narrow wooded stretch of conservation land and then it goes down the wooded hill. We spot the lights of our neighbors down there only in winter when the trees are leafless.
All our outdoor activity then, all our play, work and food, happens in back. Â None of it up front. When we come up from the street, either walking or driving up the driveway, we head inside or around back immediately. Most plants grown up front get watered last or are downright neglected. The two rain barrels I had up front are used last. I’ve written about the challenge of this area before.
view south-west from our living room window
When it’s warm we keep the “official” front door from our balcony straight into our living room open, but that and this view out the window is about all the interaction we have with that huge stretch of property south of us. Why is that? Â It has to do, in part, with pattern 106.
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106. Outdoor spaces which are merely “left over” between buildings will, in general, not be used.
There are two fundamentally different kinds of outdoor space: negative space and positive space. Outdoor space is negative when it is shapeless, the residue left behind when buildings – which are generally viewed as positive – are placed on the land. An outdoor space is positive when it has a distinct and definite shape, as definite as the shape of a room, and when its shape is as important as the shapes of the buildings which surround it. Â […] Negative spaces are so poorly defined that you cannot really tell where their boundaries are, and to the extent that you can tell, the shapes are nonconvex. […]Â Make all the outdoor spaces which surround and lie between buildings positive. Give each some degree of enclosure; surround each space with wings of buildings, trees hedges, arcades and trellised walks, until it becomes an entity with a positive quality and does not spill out indefinitely around corners.
All the positive space on our property is behind the house, where one has a feeling of safe and well-defined enclosure by shed, planters and trellis, treeline and fence lined by berry bushes. The space in the front of the house on the contrary is ill-defined.
Upon approach up the driveway a large asphalt circle opens up with to the left the bisection of the property by the long, straight length of the house. Turn west and in front of the house is an open space hardly dissected by an amorphous medicinal flower bed, a weedy slope downward with toward more weeds, some trees along side. The only things that draw your eye when you’re up near the front are the three beehive boxes to the west.
When you look up at our house on the hill from the street the negative aspect of this space is even more evident:
It looks better in Spring, like this:
Still, this picture is a case in point, as the only time we actually get to enjoy this view is when we walk down there to take a picture. The solution, then, is to turn all this wasted space into positive space by giving it more definition, by dividing it up and enclosing it with soft edges punctured with inviting gateways and entrances. How we’ll do that involves some more patterns.
Riot for Austerity – November and December 2012 – 49-50
OVER FOUR YEARS OF RIOT!
Four year summary coming soon (I know, I keep promising)
This is the Riot for the months of November and December 2012 for, mostly, the three of us. My summary of our first three years is here. Edson fixed the calculator: all go tither to crunch those numbers!
Gasoline. Â Calculated per person. There were two trips, one to Providence, one to NYC, which brought up our usual consumption of gasoline:
17.7 gallons per person
43.1% of the US National Average
Electricity. This is reckoned per household, not per person. We cook on an electric stove. According to our solar meter, we produced 6897 kWh since the system was turned on, that’s only 420 kWh over the last two months (makes sense, these being the darkest months - compare to 302 in October, 615 kW in August – you can follow our solar harvest live here). It was also the first time I had to pay NStar  – meaning the credit we gathered last year through our overproduction is finished. The bill came to $1.38! This means we used 420  + 58 kW (November) + 207 kWh (December) =  685 kW for two months, which is
342 kwH monthly
18.9%Â of the US National Average
Heating Oil and Warm Water. This too is calculated for the entire household, not per person. This is for heating water and space heating, which we mostly do with our wood stove, except for the guestroom (thermostat at 45F – no guests in there, obviously), at night and when we’re not home (thermostat at 59F).  In December the temperatures finally started dropping and we had to turn on the heat. This number is going to change soon because we’re going solar hot water soon (but the Riot calculator, I now see, has no provision for solar hot water).
18.5 gallons of oil
30% of the US National Average
Trash. After recycling and composting this usually comes down to mainly food wrappers, though this month there was some unfortunately not-recyclable packaging of holiday gifts, so I’m adding a pound per person to our usual.
7 lbs. pp per month
5.2%Â of the US National Average
Water. This is calculated per person. We used more than in November and October, but still, this is about our usual.
481 gallons pp.
16 %Â of the US National Average