Dan at DR Blog Now a YouTube Channel

In order to broaden the audience for what's going on at Dancing Rabbit, I'm turning this blog into a YouTube Channel and website, Hardcore Sustainable. My hope is to educate people better about what I'm doing at DR and give them better hands on how-to information on sustainable living. I also would like to give people thinking about moving to DR a better idea of what life is like here.

It is my hope to turn this project into something that can generate income for me and for others in the village. Living in a small town far away from economies and people sympathetic to our mission and goals, it can be a challenge to build an economy.

Looking at how our Mennonite neighbors have built their economy here over the last 40 years or so, we can see the way our cultures differ and the challenges that creates for us here at DR. Mennonites started moving to this area from other parts of the country when their growing populations, and scarcity and increasing price of farmland, drove them to Missouri's much more affordable acreages. Since then the Mennonites have built a self-supporting, thriving economy. They have their religion to set the boundaries of their community and that community is a captive customer base that supports their Mennonite businesses.

They have a culture that values procreation and increasing population through reproduction. Economies depend on people to participate as customers and producers, and if there are abundant resources, the more people, the more the economy thrives. The Mennonite economy has been able to grow and thrive through their hard work and their constantly growing population. Even though there were few families here in the beginning, more were arriving all the time from elsewhere and all of those families were abundant with children.

As their population has grown they have built businesses that produce all the things their community needs to supply itself. There are wholesalers of meat, dairy products, processed foods, all made locally by Mennonites. There are furniture makers and other craft makers. They have retail businesses to sell value added products. They have service businesses in construction, repair, automotive supplies, and farming supplies. All of these things have a value beyond the Mennonite community and the Mennonites are happy to take business from outside their community. This outside market only makes their community economy stronger.

The population factor in building a healthy economy is no different for us at DR. The challenge for us is that the “population” we rely on for a customer base has to come from the internet and new members moving to DR. We can't rely on the locals to support our businesses. Why not? The long and short of it is that mostly they are either not interested in what we have to offer, or they are not willing or able to pay what it's worth.

We also can't rely on procreation to build our customer base. We do have children here and more being born from time to time, but given our concern for the impact of human population on the earth as well as the culture most of us grew up in, we are more comfortable with small families or with having no children at all. In order to get people to move here we have to attract them to a lifestyle that requires giving up a lot of the luxuries of the modern fossil-fueled society. Once they are here, they have to find a way to pay the bills, and that can be difficult.

We also live in a completely different economic paradigm here, one that largely lacks the main engine of all other global economic growth—fossil fuel. Under our covenants and other rules created in the interest of sustainability, we are not able to take advantage of things that most businesses take for granted: abundant cheap fossil fuel used in manufacturing, production, and transportation of products, cheap building materials, and chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Products that we would want to produce here, that value sustainability over affordability, are a hard sell locally.

If we were near a population center that valued the sustainable practices we value, which unfortunately we aren't, we would be able to tap into them as a customer base for the things we might produce here. There are some enterprises, such as Alyssa, Sara, and Teresa's midwifery business that serve the local community beyond DR. (It's ironic that a business we are not as likely to participate in (making babies) is something that we are exporting here). Not long ago we had a chiropractor living here, and she found abundant customers locally. There are some business sectors that have much more demand than supply. There is a deficiency in some of these high dollar services in the area because most people that offer those services would prefer to go where the money is--and it ain't in rural Missouri (our local dentist is in his 80s and it's uncertain who would be interested in taking over his rural practice when he retires).

But many businesses that have been started here that have NOT found their customer base over the internet, have struggled. I tried growing organic produce for part of my income but did not find a local market for it outside DR, and found the market at DR was way too small and in constant flux to support such a business. At local farmer's markets “organic” does not demand a higher price, and you may be competing with someone who just bought what they are selling at Walmart. Unless our population grows, given the lack of local interest in sustainable products and services, we are going to be dependent on the independently wealthy or the internet for the lion's share of our economy.

This is not to say that we can't eventually build a thriving economy mostly independent of unsympathetic local populations. There is nothing wrong with building our economy by trying to attract people with secure and portable incomes here, but it isn't easy.

We are beginning to realize that some of our greatest assets as an ecovillage are our knowledge and skills in sustainable living, and the model we've created for a new economic and social paradigm. There is no other place like Dancing Rabbit, and when people come to visit after seeing other ecovillages they say we are unique in our dedication to hardcore sustainability and practicality. We have over 30 natural buildings, the most of any one location in the entire Midwest, we have the only microgrid of any ecovillage, and the only microgrid in the US powered entirely by renewable energy. We also have the only car sharing group that comprises all vehicle usage of it members of any community in the US. And we have a thriving local currency that accounts for a large proportion of all economic transactions in the village.  Our biggest problem is that most of the country doesn't even know we exist.  I'm trying to help change that with this YouTube channel.

You can help by subscribing to my video updates, sharing links on social media, and by following my videos and implementing what methods and technologies you can in your life.  If  you need any help, don't hesitate to contact me through my website.

Farmers unwittingly adjust to climate changes

The Ohio wine industry has been getting more and more dependent on French grapes over the last 30 years. The vinifera, or French grape, the species of grape known to produce the world's best and snootiest wines, is very tender, which would make sense since it is adapted to a Mediterranean climate. But for the last few decades Ohio winemakers, and those in many other temperate regions, have been planting more and more vinifera to replace the good old American grape varieties they used to grow. American grapes, like Concord, the grape juice grape, and French-American hybrids are much hardier in the normal Midwestern winters—or what used to be known as normal winter. But American grapes are better known for producing juice or sweet wines, while hybrids have never been able to compete with the old French standbys in wine quality in the eyes of the Wine Spectator crowd.

 

An Ohio vineyard testing the limits

 

Regions like the West Coast have climates much like that of France, and it's in places like this where vinifera thrives. But before climate change began to bring milder winters (devasting floods and hurricanes) to the rest of the country, wineries were forced to look to American grapes, and to breeders to develop cold hardy French-American hydrids, in order to have productive vineyards to base a business on. Vinifera vines could not survive most Midwestern winters without a down coat, only questionably able to survive as low as -10 degrees F at their hardiest.

But as the climate has changed over the last few decades, the tender vinifera has crept into the locally-made wine market in the Midwest. It started out as a sort of testing of the waters, with a few renegades planting small vineyards and finding the grapes could survive most winters in the new era of 400 ppm. After a few were successful, they attracted the attention of others who saw dollar signs. Ohio wineries realized that their hardy native grapes didn't produce the kind of wine that demanded top dollar, and didn't produce what is the socially-accepted definition of good wine. So they scrapped their American vines and replaced them with the much more valuable (and vulnerable) French vines. It's unlikely that any of them suspected they were only able to grow the vines now because the climate was changing and the world was gradually warming.

All primary buds on these vinifera were killed. Secondary and tertiary buds sprouted. Many vines died back to the ground.

 

Then last winter, Ohio winegrowers were surprised by a sudden change in their mild winters. The warming arctic had pushed the polar vortex from its normal position atop the globe. Huge acreages of the state's vinifera vines were wiped out by the frigid winter. Those that did survive died back to the ground, saved only by a thick cover of snow that insulated their roots against the far below zero temps.

The Amazing and Versatile Sorghum

When I was living in Madison, I had the opportunity to garden alongside many Hmong people in the city's community gardens. The Hmong had come to the US as refugees of the American secret war in Laos during the Vietnam War. They brought with them many of the crops they'd been accustomed to growing in the mountains of Laos. They'd brought to this country their own varieties of vegetables like cucumbers, onions, chili peppers, yard long beans, sorghum, and even opium poppy. Because I was so interested in their unique vegetables, I asked for seeds so I could grow them myself.

The Hmong sorghum was a sweet sorghum, a plant not unlike sugar cane that produces a sweet liquid in its stem. The Hmong gardeners would use the plant by simply cutting down the stalk and then cutting the stem at each node. The hard surface of the stalk was then peeled, exposing a liquid filled pith that could be chewed and sucked dry of all its sweet nectar. I'd eaten sugar cane before then, long ago when I was in Nicaragua, but never sorghum.

Growing out the seed of the sweet sorghum, I discovered that the seed head was reminiscent of a grain I'd remembered seeing grown locally where I was in Nicaragua. It's seed heads were much more compact and the grain much larger than the other kind of sorghum. Though I didn't know it then, I'm pretty sure that was a variety of sorghum grown to be ground into a flour and used like wheat or other grains.

Fending off disposeability

I recently fixed Julie's dehydrator and thought of how many people must have things break down on them that they simply throw away. Some things are big and expensive enough it's worthwhile economically to hire someone to fix them, but by and large I would guess most products that break get thrown away. Fixing these products would take a few circumstances aligning—understanding how the product works, knowing how to troubleshoot the problem, and being able to find a replacement part for the part that went bad. Many, probably most, products made these days were never intended to be fixed; yet another great characteristic of our short-sighted capitalist system is to ensure customers are always in need and coming back for more.



The fried dehydrator thermostat

 

I have to say the situation's gotten really bad.  And it seems that every year things gets worse and worse with the planned obsolescence.  Products these days don't last nearly as long as those made even ten years ago. If you read product reviews in trying to make a purchase, everyone says, “the last one I had lasted 15 years, and this one lasted a few months.” That most products are made in China isn't helping. As more companies move their production overseas it becomes more difficult to find anything of good quality. Outsourcing production saves on labor costs and reduces costs related to workplace safety and environmental regulations etc. The increased profit margin must make these companies foam at the mouth for even more profit. While they're at it they figure, "Why not take the opportunity to cut costs by reducing quality?". 

Local food year round

An abundant harvest shouldn't be a bad thing, but at times it can be overwhelming. I was just reading a blog post by Gene Logsdon where he passed on the wisdom of years that taught him not to overdo things by planting more than you can deal with. I've given up on my pickling cucumber bed in the vineyard because I can't handle the amount of food coming out of it. Next year I'll plant far less. This was an experimental year in large scale farming and although I was cautious, I didn't anticipate the level of productivity a little bit of manure could yield. Even the sweet corn is getting overwhelming and I only planted two 30 ft beds of it. I've canned about 25 pints already! And after so many jars of salsa (fireroasted is the best kind), pickled cucumbers, corn, sauerkraut, and tomato sauce, I'm sick of canning.

This is the time when I start fantasizing about having a couple pigs to feed all the oversized summer squash, cucumbers I can't sell, and rotting, rain-cracked tomatoes. I could also feed them all the byproducts of my canning projects, grape pressing, and crop waste. I really want to make that a reality one of these days.  On top of that, there's the tons of whey from cheesemaking I could be feeding them; nothing like turning food waste into more food.
 

But isn't it nice that there are crops you don't have to eat fresh that store easily without any canning and the associated energy consumption and hassle? I have really grown to appreciate crops like flour corn, popcorn, sweet potatoes, onions, carrots, garlic, winter squash and dry beans.  Winter squash, garlic, onions, and sweet potatoes just need a dry place to be stored.  I was using last year's garlic all the way up until I started to get the first harvest of this year's crop. Storing it at room temperature hanging up in braids or in a mesh bag keeps it halfway through the winter until it starts to get drier, then I move it to the root cellar so that it can retain moisture and experience cold temps to keep it dormant.

The Cutshort Bean

 

You've probably never heard of it, but you've heard of dry beans and green beans. Well, the cutshort, or “greasy” bean, is like a cross between the two. It used to be grown extensively in the South, but now it is less known. The cutshort is a type of bean that is unique in its ability to maintain a tender hull far into its development. As such, it can be harvested well after its seeds have swelled to the size of dry beans, and its hull will remain tender long after a green bean's hull would have become tough and inedible. Green beans also have very little nutritional value or flavor compared to cutshorts.
 

It's funny because the cutshort is kind of the equivalent of the sugar snap pea, a relatively new and quickly adopted version of the shelling pea that features an edible pod. The sugar snap pea made it so you didn't have to spend so much time shelling your garden peas to be able to enjoy them. Of course, slightly different from the cutshort, the snap pea became much more of a raw finger food perfect for snacking, while the cutshort is simply a richer, and faster cooking version of the dry bean.
 

Cutshorts are ideally harvested when the seeds inside the pod have swelled to a very large size and the hulls are beginning to pale. Unlike dry beans, but like green beans, they are eaten fresh (unless you string them up for Leather Breeches, which I'll get to) The pods do have tough strings along the seams, but with a little effort you can remove the strings and everything you have left is perfectly edible. This makes for a much bulkier harvest than dry or green beans, and because the seeds inside are so much more developed, a pot of cutshorts is far more nutritious and filling than a pot of green beans. Green beans are fine for a side dish, but cutshorts make a respectable main course. The final product ends up tasting a lot like a pot of green beans and dry beans combined, with the hulls adding a satisfying mouth feel to the dish.

 

Season of abundance

It's been a pretty good season so far. I think I bit off more than I could chew with the amount of space I chose to garden this year. I started a small CSA here and so expanded my garden. I also purchased a couple of tractor implements to make it possible to do agriculture on a larger scale out on our ag land. Before this season, most of my gardening was done on smaller hand-tended plots. More and more though I have been finding that doing things by hand is very time consuming. As much as I like the idea of simplicity, and as much as I dislike what conventional and large scale agriculture have done to our valuable agricultural lands, I cannot compete with the scale of fossil fueled agriculture by doing things by hand. Humanity gave that up by and large thousands of years ago, so it's not surprising it couldn't compete today. Hand gardening might be fine for the hobbyist who wants to grow a few supplemental veggies during the season, but if you are trying to sell your stuff or grow most of the food you eat, you are basically just wasting your time because it is so much less efficient. I've kind of known this and had never planned to try to make money selling vegetables, but here I find myself, at least partially trying to scrape a living doing something I love.

Onions growing between rows of grapes

There is virtually no market to speak of around Dancing Rabbit. We live on an island of awareness in a sea of people who don't understand the value of what we have to offer. Considering that we want to reduce our impact, it seems a little in error that we located the ecovillage so far from people who would be truly interested in and supportive of what we are doing here. We'd have to travel pretty far to get any products we produce to a market that appreciates them. This means extra fuel in transporting them. And for that matter, people have to travel pretty far to visit and see what we are doing. But this is the situation we have to overcome or accept. There are other reasons this location was chosen for DR.

Why I Eat Rabbits at Dancing Rabbit

I realize that there are those who think it's just wrong to eat animals and I don't have any argument with them, but for those who are open to the idea, I thought I'd explain the reason why I eat rabbits here at Dancing Rabbit.

From what I understand, Dancing Rabbit got its name before the people who started it even bought the land in Missouri where the future ecovillage was to be located.  When they eventually moved here, they were surprised to find rabbits running around, possibly dancing (maybe if you squinted your eyes a bit), everywhere. So the name was never some kind of tribute to the abundant rabbits found here.



Rabbit in the pressure cooker

My first experiences with rabbits here were fairly positive.  I liked seeing them hopping around but always thought of bunnies as fuzzy cute things, never as food.  After gardening at Dancing Rabbit for a while, I came to realize that the bunnies made things very difficult.  They are pretty much the reason people have to fence their gardens.  If you don't have a fence, it will be difficult if not impossible to get most vegetables going, and forget about edamame or carrots for the entire season.  And they always seem to find ways to get into fencing and devastate your crops. Although rabbits eat all of some tender plants, they have a pernicious habit of lopping off the tops of anything you plant and just leaving the top sitting there uneaten. 

This habit has been incredibly destructive in the vineyard where, even though I protect the trunks of the vines, when it snows enough in the middle of winter, I'll find a year's worth of growth hanging free from its trunk on the trellis.  The vine will take at least another year to recover. Sometimes rabbits just damage the trunk and crown gall sets in, strangling the vine slowly over a few years if it isn't pruned to the ground.  It's setbacks like these, that a rabbit does seemingly on a whim, that are the most frustrating. "Oh, maybe I'll hop over here and set back his vines a year doing something that takes me about a half second to do---and then not even eat the vine at all."!!?

An Energy Efficient Method of Making Mysost Whey Cheese

Have you ever eaten a popsicle and sucked all the sugar water out of the end, leaving only flavorless white ice behind?  Well, I used a similar technique recently in making a batch of Mysost, a whey cheese that tastes a lot like caramel.   Mysost is the name for Gjetost, which you are more likely to have heard of, that's been made from cow's milk whey instead of goat's milk whey.


Whey, after sitting outside in subzero temps



The concentrated lactose solution drained off the above frozen whey

 

When you think of Mysost, think of maple syrup production--a dilute sugar solution, maple sap, is boiled down to concentrate the sugars into a syrup.  Whey has about 4% lactose in it.  So when you boil it down, you concentrate the lactose sugar. I've often thought about making Mysost from the leftover whey since I have an abundant supply from my cheesemaking endeavors.  A couple years ago I was able to trade whey for pork with a local hog farmer, but since then I've just had to dump it into the compost pile.  I feel bad about it because whey has a lot of nutrients in it, but there's so much of it and it isn't nearly as tasty as milk to drink straight. 

Mountain View bounty

Julie and I went to the Bean Festival in Mountain View, AR recently, and though the festival was pretty amazing, the best part was scoring a bunch of wild foods.  The first day of the festival we parked downtown behind some of the main street buildings in an area designated as public parking.  We went to check out the music and see what else was going on and then returned to the car later in the day.  We noticed two women with bags picking something off the ground near our car and we asked them what they were doing.  They said they were gathering pecans.  I never would have even thought to look for them because I've never seen a full grown pecan tree in person.  I suppose it's possible that before the festival was over I might have noticed some of the trees around town or the one under which our car was parked, but I was grateful to have had the two women bring them to our attention.  Upon looking up we noticed the only large trees shading the parking lot were pecans.  Julie's eyes lit up and I thought she might pee her pants when she realized the amount of free pecans that we could potentially get.


Looking around we noticed two more stately and venerable trees on the other side of a chain link fence where there were more cars parked.  After Julie started gathering pecans I began to wonder if we were ever going to get back to the festival.  I seriously thought she had forgotten about the festival entirely and was now determined to spend as much time gathering nuts as possible.  Julie loves getting free food in this way--gleaned from wild plants.  She has been known to go nuts gathering autumn olive berries. 



Our total wild fruit and nut score--including a heaping bushel basket of pecans

We did get back to the festival, but only after spending at least an hour and a half picking and gathering pecans.  The husks on the nuts had just begun to open, dumping delicious pecans on the ground.  With the help of a stick we were able to knock even more nuts from their shells onto the ground.  Some of the neighboring trees were climbable so we climbed up and picked the nuts directly.  A man came out to tell us that the parking area was his land and though he didn't mind us gathering the nuts, they wouldn't be any good if we picked them before they opened.  It turned out this wasn't true.  All the nuts we got turned out to be fine and all of them have been delicious so far.

Homemade pot rack

I made this pot rack recently out of some metal from an old harrow that was sitting rusting out on our land.  I'd been searching for some scrap metal to fill the purpose when I finally got the inspiration from the antique field implement half buried in the ground and fully obscured by the underbrush.  With a couple of chain lengths and some hooks I was able to put together this more or less upcycled pot rack.  I really like the way it turned out aesthetically, but more important, having the rack has freed up a lot of space in my cupboards for storage of other stuff.  It's also much easier to get and put away pots when they are hanging above you.

 

 

Growing my own onions sets for next spring

You can see where one variety had poor germination

 

I usually grow onion starts in the late winter and have a serious problem with damping off killing or weakening many of the seedlings before they can get very big. Once the onion seedlings get big enough they seem pretty indestructible, but before that they are very vulnerable to cold, wet conditions—something that's hard for me to avoid growing them in my house in late winter. Often I've had to resort to buying onion sets at the local store to ensure a good harvest. The only problem is that these sets aren't organic, and they are not known varieties. I have no idea if they are good storage types or not, so I usually eat them first so they don't have to store long. I'd never thought of growing my own starts because it seemed like a big industrial agriculture mystery. My girlfriend Julie told me that she'd grown her own sets in the past and that it wasn't hard at all, so I thought I'd give it a try. The great thing is that you can grow enough starts to supply you with more than enough onions in a very small portion of the garden.

I planted a section of a bed in thickly seeded rows of three different varieties. It was a pretty dry time of year so I made sure to keep the bed moist until the seeds had germinated. There was no hassle with disease and most of the seed came up thickly. I planted New York Early, Varsity, and Copra, all good storage varieties. I think Varsity was older seed (Fedco sometimes sells seed that's older than it should be and I was ordering mine in mid-summer)and didn't come up well, but the other two did. Planting them thickly ensures that they won't get too big before the end of the season, but it also conserves precious late season garden space.

 

They have been growing strong with regular watering and hoeing ever since. As it nears the end of the season they should be ready to harvest and dry down for the winter. In the spring I will hopefully have more onions starts than I've ever been able to grow. Next season I'm considering planting more onions than ever for sale here in the village. This is something that just wasn't possible starting onions from seed in late winter, because I could never reliably get a large number of starts. As long as the sets make it through winter in my root cellar, I should have some easily planted, strong and healthy sets to plant out in the spring. Though sets are pretty cheap, I can probably plant over $10-15 worth of sets in a tiny section of my garden, and they are all of the varieties I want.

 

I think I actually wasted a lot of space in here and will probably plant them thicker in future years

The Mid-winter Locovore

So this is a meal Julie and I had last night that consisted of tamales, carmelized carrots, and salad.  Everything except the butter in the tamales and some of the ingredients in the salad dressing were grown in my garden.  The tamales were my first experiment with grinding my own masa from the Abenaki flour corn I grew in my garden last year.  I treated the dried corn with pickling lime before grinding it in my new hand-cranked mill. This is the nixtamalizing process I talked about in a previous post. The masa did not grind up as finely as I'm used to, but I liked the texture and they held together just like tamales made from finer masa. Even the corn husks are from my garden. They were the same husks that covered the cobs of the flour corn. We dipped the tamales in salsa made entirely from ingredients I grew in my garden as well.

Keeping busy in winter

We froze most of the venison we got this season, but a bunch of it we've been turning into jerky.  I have always liked jerky though I've not eaten it much in my life because I was a vegetarian for so long and because it is usually so expensive.  I never realized how simple it is to make.  All you do is cut the meat thin, sprinkle it with the cure, and dehydrate it for a few hours.  We dried it in Julie's dehydrator, but you could do it in a solar dehydrator or in a smokehouse.    That is my long term wish--to have a smokehouse. 

 

Eating Locally

 

I have been gradually working towards a more and more local diet since moving to Dancing Rabbit.  I've spent large parts of the season trying to grow my own food, which is part of the reason it's taken me so long to finish building my house.  I've got the vegetable gardening down pretty well and am able to produce a lot of my own veggies throughout the season and even into the winter such that I rarely, if ever, buy vegetables from the grocery store.  I rarely buy fruit, but will stock up and preserve it when it is available locally or on farm.  Strawberries, black raspberries, grapes, and gooseberries are the only things I've been successful with so far.  A few crops like peaches, seem really difficult to grow here organically.  Pears and apples are slightly easier, but my trees are only just getting to fruiting age, and I know they have problems with disease in wet years as well.



Abenaki Calais flour corn

This season I experimented a bit with growing flour corn, with the idea that I might try to produce my own grain to take the place of the rice I buy on a regular basis.  Corn is a crop that is fairly easily grown here, can be productive, and can be stored for use throughout the year.  I do eat corn a lot in my diet already and imagine I could shift my diet pretty easily to have it replace rice.  People like Michael Pollan rant against Americans being entirely made of corn because of the large amount of high fructose corn syrup found in the foods they eat.  I don't think my desire to increase the corn in my diet is deserving of the same critique.  Corn was a staple food of Native Americans living all over North America for thousands of years, and although they didn't chemically alter it to extract corn syrup, they did chemically alter it to make it more nutritious in some ways, by a process known as nixtamalization.

Nixtamalization involved boiling dried corn kernals with wood ash and leaving them overnight.  Then they would wash out the ash and grind the corn into a wet flour.  The boiling and soaking with ash caused the corn to break down somewhat, making it easier to grind.  It also gave the corn a distinct flavor that was the result of the combination of the corn and the lye in the ash.  If you've ever tasted the difference between corn in cornmeal or cornbread and that in tortilla chips or tamales, you probably know the flavor I'm talking about.  Above is some of the corn I grew this season.  I ended up with about a gallon of grain from a small bed of corn, and I plan to nixtamalize it and use it to make tortillas and tamales.  I am just waiting on getting the right kind of flour mill for the wet corn kernals. I could dehydrate the corn after nixtamalizing it and then grind it into dry flour, but I've heard it is much better to make food from the freshly prepared kernals.   In Nicaragua, the women get up at the crack of dawn every day to make tortillas.  I remember watching the family that took care of the farm I worked at nixtamalizing corn over an open fire. Maybe someday I'll have enough corn to do this on a regular basis.

This season: a review

 

Pug the pug visiting my house and looking for handouts

 

I haven't really been posting much this season because I've been concentrating on other things, but I do have a lot to talk about now. I've been gradually finishing projects on the house and am now pretty much done with it. There are a few other finishing touches to add, like a stove for the kitchen, the first floor ceiling, a bit more soffit, and the railing for the stairway, but pretty much everything else is done for now.

 

I had to spend some time resurfacing the earthen floor since the light clay straw insulation sort of failed and had sunk about an inch all around and was cracking in many places. I'm hoping the floor had sunk all it was going to sink, so that when I added the layer on top it wouldn't sink again in time. We'll see, but everything looks fine so far. If it doesn't work this time I'm going to tear it up and put in foamboard insulation.   The picture above shows the entrance pad with tile laid into the earthen floor in the higher traffic area.  I also laid tile into the kitchen area part of the floor.

 

 

I finished all my curtains myself in the early spring and got them all up.  It was good to refamiliarize myself with a sewing machine.  The warm windows fabric does make it a lot easier though.  I'm really happy with how they turned out and how they work!  They make the place have much more contrast and give me a sense that I'm in some other country, which is what I was going for.  The picture above also shows the wood rack I built for my firewood, with bin on the bottom for the big stuff and shelves for kindling above.  Of course I've only lit a couple fires so far this year because the weather has been either warm or sunny, and my thermal curtains are keeping the cold out.  I reorganized this part of the downstairs for the winter, complete with comfy chair for sitting by the fire.

More Winter Activities

April finished one of the windows on the strawbale walls.  I now have six thermal curtains out of a total of twelve done and up.  I'd really like to get the rest of them up before the end of winter.  But it looks really good.  Recently I was working on linseed oiling the sills where I'd done tiling.  This should toughen them up so they can resist wear and tear. 

I started some of the earlier starts a little over a week ago. Peppers and eggplant seem to grow the slowest and since I'm able to plant them in the hoop house so early, I had to start them really early. Onions are another early one, but I start those so early because they are the first thing I plant usually.  I'm guessing we will be able to get in earlier than ever since we've had such a mild winter. 

I bought a soil block maker this year so I can do away with the plastic containers I've been using for years that are falling apart.  I'd recommend this method to anyone.  It's really easy and you can make unlimited numbers of blocks. The air space between the blocks supposedly keeps the starts from becoming root bound because the roots just stop when they hit the edge of the block.  I made up my own soil mix out of compost, sand, and a small amount of ash.

This is my first attempt at gouda cheese.  The 4 pound wheel was covered with beeswax and aged it for about 2 months in my cheese cellar. I don't know if it is really gouda, but it tastes good.  To me it tastes more like a mild swiss cheese. I love that it looks like such a professionally made artisan cheese.  A few days ago I started making another wheel of it.  I may try using real cheese wax next time instead of beeswax because though the beeswax did protect the cheese during aging, there was still a pretty healthy mold growing on the rind.  We'll see what happens if I do it differently this time.

Winter Projects and Foods

Winter is probably the least interesting season for me.  Sure I like being able to slow down, read some books, and plan and think about the coming season.  But I think I'd rather everything be green and growing and be able to be out in it.  Of course, thanks to climate change, we have had a record warm winter, so there have been many days in the 50s and 60s in January and February so far. 

This winter I've been working on various finishing touches on the inside of the house.  I was racking my brains to find some good finish for the window sills of the deep wells on the strawbale walls.   I wanted something like tile, that would hold up better than earthen plaster to the wear and tear the sills would be subject to.  The commercial tile I was finding at the store seemed really boring, and the interesting Mexican tile was really expensive and not available at the local stores.  Then I stumbled across some more natural looking slate tiling.  Every piece was unique in its color and surface pattern, but they were all the same earthen hues.  I had the idea to cut them into shapes that would make them more interesting than just one foot squares.  The one foot square fit perfectly in the window sill with enough room to spare.  I cut the slate with a circular masonry blade. 

Progress on the House This Season

I made a fair bit of progress this year on the house.  The first part of the season was taken up by gardening and tending the grapes, so I wasn't able to start working on the house until about June, when I started by finishing the last section of earthen floor.  Last year I wasn't able to finish the section of floor under the batteries below the stairs, so I moved the batteries and finally finished that section.  Finishing this section was key to being able to continue the interior construction of the bathroom, which was to be tucked under the stairs.

Another project I worked on fairly early in the season was doing the fascia and soffit and the shingling on the gable ends.  The scaffold had been set up all winter and I was anxious to get it out of the way so I could see the house.  It was a while before I could move it though.  But I'm really pleased with how everything turned out.  I did this fishscale design with the wooden shakes.  It wasn't that hard to shape each piece of wood and nail it in place, and it added a lot of character to the house.

Gathering Food

It's been a while since I last posted something here, so I'll probably just try to do some posts bit by bit to describe the busy season I've had raising veggies, tending the vineyard, and finishing building my house. Fortunately I've been taking pictures, so there is some record of what I've been doing. I just haven't taken the time to update the blog this season. I wish I could be as prolific in my blog posts as Ziggy.

This season, there was a bounty from the garden in many ways.  Because I end up with so much of some crops I try to come up with ways to preserve what I can't eat right away so I can extend the bounty through the rest of the year.  Not so long ago, before the advent of refrigeration, everyone grew their own food and knew special ways of preserving it for the rest of the year.    Pickling in brine was a great way of keeping veggies edible for the winter and inspired so many delicious new foods.  These foods were fermented like saurkraut and could be stored without refrigeration in a cellar for many months.  One pickle that I like to make is the Korean kimchi, which is made with Chinese cabbage or radish, scallions, really hot peppers, and if desired, small fish like anchovies.  I like hot pickles and one of my favorites is a hot pickle mix of cucumbers, carrots, and hot peppers.  In this pickle everything becomes infused with the heat of the peppers adding a kick to the cukes and carrots.  This was a good year in the hoop house for pickling cukes, so I made a big batch of hot pickle mix.