A garden shed

 Finally built a garden shed, as the garage was getting rather crowded.

A lot of the material was scrounged, or leftovers, or bought at random intervals, mostly from a friend who had to end his sawmill days and clear out the inventory before moving. So, some odd choices, but it made it more interesting to design as we went.

I had read about the wood preservation technique of Yakisugi ( or shou sugi ban), as mentioned in a post from last year. That is one of the bigger experiments in this adventure. Turns out to use a LOT of propane to do the treatment. That, or perfect the traditional method, which is quicker, but trickier. We decided to just do part of one wall with this method, and wood shingles ( also made by the friend from pine on his land) and metal for the rest.

Flat land is hard to come by here, so we had a contractor flatten an area near the house. The drop off was still rather much, so I am building a retaining wall to stabilize things. I've used tires for walls in the past. While they can be had for free, they require lots of labor and are time consuming, so went with the easy landscaping blocks. each weighs 82 lbs( 37kg). 

Since I was rather in a hurry, and not getting any younger, I actually hired a young fellow for the day to help. First time I had ever done that, and it went well.

 A harbinger of things to come??

Next up is a greenhouse. Will report on that when it is finished.

hazelnut lessons learned

 This year's hazelnut harvest is the largest yet, as the trees continue to come in to full production. 

It was a real challenge for just my wife and I hand harvesting, since the ripening nuts start falling to the ground a couple weeks after ripe enough to harvest, and they are impossible to gather once on the ground in the tall grass. The window is narrow with all the other things going on. Research is being done to mechanize harvest, but likely we'll be hiring help for the near future.

Harvest is a one time pass through, and all are harvested even if some of the husks (involucres) are not drying back yet. The genetics of these selected hazels is still variable, so they don't all ripen at the same time. Multiple picking passes would be quite onerous, so we put in drying bins for a couple weeks to finish drying, making the husking effort  much easier.

After husking they are bagged and hauled to where the prototype shelling equipment is, a five hour drive from here. This equipment is far quicker than hand shelling, but again, the genetics of these hazels is still a work in progress, so the equipment has to handle a large range of sizes and properties.

Hazelnuts as a new food crop for the midwest is slowly progressing, but in a low energy future, perennial food crops will be much more central to our diet. Us early adapters and permaculture advocates hope eventually millions of acres of corn and soybeans will be switched to trees like hazels, but the current system does not want to change. 

Here are photos of the processing and kitchen experiments.

These are kernels back from the sheller. Note that in the real world, food is not all cosmetically perfect, and one uses their own judgement as to how much funkiness is acceptable.

Not the greatest photo, but these are hazels that have been toasted a bit and lightly coated with maple syrup, salt, and pumpkin pie spice. Crunchy and tasty.

This is some nuts being turned in to nut butter in a melanger. Normally, melangers are used to take cocoa nibs and make very smooth cocoa liquor, but it works fine to break down the nuts. This this has granite wheels that spin around and thoroughly grind the kernels. I've also made a batch of hazel and chocolate spread to replace Nutella, which is yummy, but environmentally poor. We are calling our stuff "chazel". It has hazelnuts, cocoa powder, and sugar- that's it. No palm oil or other stuff.

Here is some nut oil fresh from the press, with fines and water/oil emulsion settling out. I'll pour off the clarified oil and store it that way. The Piteba press works optimally if the nut are at 10% moisture. I checked moisture content, adjusted, and pressed, so this emulsion results. I boil the water off and filter to get there rest of the oil.

Some lessons learned: The nut butter has an odd mouth feel, way more stick to your mouth compared to peanut butter. We will do more experiments with added ingredients.

The nuts are around 30% oil, but this home scale press only gets a little over half the oil. The rest stays in the press cake. We are using the press cake in baked goods, and if nothing else, food for the chickens, who love it.

The volume and weight ratio of harvested nut in the shell with husks still on to the shelled kernels is crazy. Lots of effort to get to useable food.

Snow and rumination on acclimatization

 

Got a wet, clingy snow this past week, and it really hung on to the trees and caused drooping and breaking of limbs.

We hiked the trails through our woods, and reveled at the transformed landscape, but had to really tunnel though in spots where the crusted vegetation blocked our way.

Got me to thinking once again about how not just plants and animals have figured out how to get through winter with all its challenges, but what about those hardy souls that walked across the Bering Straight and lived here for thousands of years once the glaciers receded and the land recovered?

We've domesticated ourselves in the last few centuries, and we've gained a lot of knowledge, but lost some as well. As we try to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, and are forced to move from the lifestyles that are really only a very recent thing, what will we relearn? 

I recently read a book that had some accounts by early European impressions of the indigenous folks who got here first. They were seeing the lifestyles of people that had not yet been altered by the brutal imposition of the European replacement. Anyway, the writer was watching some kids playing on an iced over pond, with scant clothing, and having a ball, seemingly unaffected by the cold.

So humans have an ability to acclimatize, maybe more than most of us in coddled modern lifestyles realize. All warm blooded animals strive for homeostasis, and that is one aspect of it.

To give an example, we had an early cold snap here this winter, and so I got a lot of acclimatization done early. Yesterday, a relatively warmer day at 38F/3C, I did some work outside finishing up a shed I had built this fall. After a bit, I had to take off the coat, hat and gloves to feel comfortable. Two months ago, I'd have been chilled to the bone at the same temperature.

We heat the home with wood primarily, but have propane heat backup for the upstairs bedroom. We set that thermostat for 50F/10C and are quite comfortable with a good comforter on the bed. (Admittedly, it seldom gets that cold except on very cold nights, 55F-60F or so is more normal).

As the end of fossil fuels continues and becomes more evident, turning down thermostats, intentionally acclimatizing to the seasons will not just save energy and cost, it will prepare us for the future that is coming.

Sugar from sugar beets- homestead style

 Our experiment with sugar beets has concluded. These Lovecraftian beasts were what our crop looked like on harvest.

So we're not doing that again ( for now). When studying the crop on line earlier, ( see my Feb. 10 post ) the roots looked so smooth, uniform, tidy, and big. Since this was an experiment, I only planted about twenty seeds. Germination was not that great, and ended up with a dozen plants.

I did water the plants occasionally this past summer, and weeded them, but I'm generally trying to find food sources that can handle minimal inputs and management. During the summer, the tops looked vigorous and large, much larger than regular beets. No clue why the roots got so gnarly and feral looking. The soil had fairly good tilth and organic content.

These guys needed more peeling, cutting, and trimming than I had thought, but that was not the clincher. I just didn't get that much sugar for the effort. Running through a food processor to shred, throwing in a pot to boil a bit and then straining the water though cheesecloth, and then cooking down to a syrupy consistency, it was a fair bit of work to do at small scale, for not much reward.

Taste was ok. You could tell it was not your regular sugar, but I got no strong added taste, and when used to sweeten my last batch of granola, could detect no hint of earthy beet taste.

Did my technique need improvement? Could I have gotten a lot more sugar out with a tweak to my process? Maybe so, but for now, I think I'll stick to the maple syrup we tap and cook down. And of course, as with most of us, I could eat less sugar.

Porous borders

 

In my college studies to be a civil engineer, we were taught how to solve for the forces and resulting stresses by drawing a boundary around the item or area in question, and then systematically identifying and accounting for all forces that crossed this boundary. This was called a"free body diagram". 

This is a tool to break down complex systems so individual elements can be analyzed and quantified. It is also a tool that doesn't work well with a good bit of the real world. A beam connecting to a column is laughably simple compared to ecosystems.

This famous quote by John Muir is more like how things interact:

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

I was thinking about this as I wondered just how far we've come on our journey to self reliance here on our homestead.

Not very far. 

Now, I realize that to be completely self reliant is impossible and a very unrealistic, even counterproductive goal. But, ever striving to reduce dependance on the fossil fuel enabled economy and logistical chains is I think prudent.

So here is a rough first cut at defining the "free body diagram" for our home, and acknowledging all the dependencies that remain.

Crossing the boundary:

Sunshine, air and rain are givens of course.

Food from the grocery store as there are still many things we don't grow ourselves.

electricity- We generate a fair portion here, but the grid is the 24/7 backup and supplement. 

Feed for the chickens- It's organic, and they forage a certain amount, but the majority of their calories are still from the feed store.

Building materials for the various projects and regular maintenance.

Information from the internet that would otherwise be very difficult to find so quickly.

Seeds- We do some seed saving, but more than half our garden, and all the tree seedlings are from suppliers.

Chickens- We haven't pushed the incubating and hatching like we could, so still buy chicks every so often.

Gasoline- to run the brush mower, tiller, chain saw, and of course the cars that get us to town and haul things for us.

Money- Our savings and income leave the home in exchange for the above purchased items.

All manner of personal goods- Clothes, cleaning supplies, medicine, all the "normal" household goods we so easily acquire today, coming from hundreds and thousands of miles away.

I'll even count water, as the domestic water is from our deep well. It would be inaccessible if not for electricity and the well pump. Till now, we are only capturing a small percentage of rain from the roof, to use for watering trees. So much more to be had.

Just pausing to think about losing one or more of these connections should make one deeply appreciative of the flows across our boundaries that sustain us.

So where do we fit in here?

The egg report

 Update on the egg  storage experiment.........

From my March 29, 2021 post, we get an abundance of eggs in the spring, when the hens start back up after taking the winter off. I stored some eggs in half gallon mason jars covered in a water-calcium hydroxide ( pickling lime) solution.

This late winter and spring 2022, a year later, we have tried them out and find them to be fine for most things. They are quite edible, with no off taste that I could tell, ( and I'm still alive) but the consistency has changed a bit. The whites have a bit less body, and the yolks have a tendency to settle next to the shell, and sometimes stick to the shell a little. This means they are fine for scrambled eggs or baking, but are tricky to use if you want sunny side up fried eggs.

All in all, a success I'd say, and storage for a year is quite impressive. Again, these are unwashed, unrefrigerated eggs fresh from the hens, I don't know if store bought eggs would fare the same.

We have also been hand rolling egg noodles and drying them as another way to store eggs. Just this week, we used the pasta extrusion attachment on the KitchenAid, and the macaroni turned out pretty good. We ate some macaroni fresh, but have dried some also, and will see how they cook up later.

From bees to beets

 To bee or not to bee, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the hive to suffer the mites and diseases of outrageous nature, or....................to grow beets.

I've come to accept that for now at least, I do not have the husbandry habits to be a beekeeper. Chickens? Pigs? Other critters, yes, but bees seem to be a combination of bother with protection, non chemical hive health management, and remembering to tend  them with some regularity that it's not working for me. They seem so self sufficient most of the time, and it just slips my mind, or when I do think of checking on them, I just say one more day won't hurt.

 Keeping bees alive through Wisconsin winters and dealing with colony collapse, varroa mites and other pests requires more attention and interest than I have been able to give. Even long time beekeepers lose a lot of hives each year.

But I also know that I have an incurable sweet tooth, and there are a reasonable number of native pollinators that can do the honors in spring when the flowers bloom.

I've been tapping a few box elder and maple trees for a bit of syrup, which been great, but it's good to have redundancy in as many things as you can.

So, letting the hives stand empty for now. I plan to try growing sugar beets for the first time this next garden year. I've read up on it a bit, and found some methods described to extract and distill the sugar ( they are 20% sugar content by one source) that don't sound too tricky. 

Wash, shred, boil in water, strain, cook down, how hard could it be? We'll find out this fall.