Another Fermenting Aid

ReCAP mason jar lids

It's starting to be fermenting time again as veggies begin to appear in our summer gardens.
These lids may make it less messy to ferment veggies at home. Simply add a rubber stopper (with a hole in the center) onto the spout hole, put a fermentation lock into the stopper hole, and ferment away.

If fermenting (which actually INCREASES nutritional content in foods), just type fermenting or ferments in the search box located on the right column and it will bring up several posts I've done on fermenting.

Rubber stoppers come in many sizes. A #6 should fir the ReCAP lid.

One of several styles of airlocks from any brewing supply store.

The other good thing about these lids is their general use for mason jars used to store beans, sugars, flours or even vinegars that can be poured out through the jar opening. BPA free.

ps, I own NO stock in this company!

New, Improved Egg Separator

One of my friends sent me this short video and it fascinates me! Don't worry that you don't understand the language because it isn't necessary. The pictures tell it all.

 

Do you wonder what ever made someone try this in the first place? LOL

Green Wall for Summer Shade

I am building a green wall, aka "summer shading wall" about 30 inches from the house on the south end. Eventually the deciduous trees I'm planting nearby will grow up to shade that end of the house, but that will take a few years. In the meantime, I am putting up a trellis with 2 horizontal cattle panels, one on top of the other. Cattle panels are 16 feet long and 50" wide, which will cover most of that area. I plan to grow some flowering vines on it, but also some hardy (smaller, smooth-skinned edible) kiwi vines, and pole beans. I may consider putting some grape vines on it next year.

The south end of our house is narrow (the house was originally a single-wide trailer, with more house built around it). That end has no windows except one to the long front porch, but it absorbs a LOT of heat during the summer. I suspect there is scant insulation in the walls, and since it is the master bathroom, I'm not about to tear out everything (including all the plumbing and fixtures) down to the studs to fur out the walls and add adequate insulation. The foam insulation they can pipe into walls doesn't work very well if there is already minimal fiberglass insulation and/or fire-stops in the walls.

After having some sod removed for an adjacent food forest area and the post holes drilled, I started on the shade trellis. Photo above is the posts just stuck in the holes, awaiting some help to hold them plumb while I backfill. (The temporary opening in the skirting is for access where the plumber is replacing all the water pipes.)

Finally the posts are set, the area between the house and trellis has been covered with weedcloth and a heavy layer of wood chips on top, but only one horizontal cattle panel has been attached until I can get 2 people to hold it up while I hammer in some fence staples. That will happen before any vines grow that tall.


I ended up planting Japanese morning glories, 1 moonvine, Kentucky Wonder pole beans, Mexican sour gherkins and my 2 hardy kiwis along the base of the cattle panels. I cut a bunch of comfrey and sorrel leaves for a "chop and drop" fertilizing mulch, covered with some wood chips. 

The cattle panels don't cover the whole end wall... about 3 feet on each end will be exposed after it all grows and leafs out. I think I'll plant giant sunflowers along the ends for the summer, and transplant some Jerusalem Artichokes on the ends this fall.

I'll post another photo in a few weeks when stuff has grown up the trellis enough to see it.

Long White Worm of Hay Bales

A nearby field I pass on the way to my house from the interstate grows some kind of grass for hay, which is cut and baled, and then followed by a GMO corn (Pioneer) for silage. Year after year (Ugh). I had noticed his round bales encased in a white plastic over the last year or two, but I finally saw how it's done. I suspect he has the only set-up in the county to do this.

The machine accepts round bales from the back, and they get wrapped as the machine moves them forward, and at the same time the machine inches backwards so the wrapped bales drop off in line with previous bales and it's ready to accept another bale.

I found it fascinating even though I HATE that he grows GMO corn for his cows. Fortunately I think his fields are far enough away from my garden that I'm not too worried about pollen contamination, and I don;t grow corn anyway.

Where's the Sun on YOUR Garden?

Wow, what a cool app! With this Google Maps hack, you can find the path of the sun across your own garden for any day of the year. Just plug in your address in the search bar.

According to the description on the site:

    SunCalc is a little app that shows sun movement and sunlight phases during any given day at the given location.

    You can see sun positions at sunrise (yellow), specified time (orange) and sunset (red). The thin orange curve is the current sun trajectory, and the yellow area around is the variation of sun trajectories during the year. The closer a point is to the center, the higher is the sun above the horizon. The colors on the time slider show sunlight coverage during the day.

 

The default is set for the current day, but I was able to change the dates and get the trajectory for both the shortest day of the year in winter, and the longest (summer) day. Knowing the winter trajectory makes a big difference in where I should locate cold frames and a future, wished-for greenhouse. I had a good idea of the summer sun's path although I was a little bit 'off', but I was woefully off on the winter sun. Probably because I grow nothing in winter so I don't pay as much attention.

Since I have hopes of eventually doing some winter gardening a la Eliot Coleman's Winter Harvest, this little app is a treasure for planning. It gives me a great location for a possible greenhouse when I win the Lottery! Sure wish I'd had something like this when we first looked at this property... the gardener in me might have passed on buying it.

I will also use this online calculator in planning the placement of a solar collector for heating water when I can get to it as a project.

Update, just after Thanksgiving: I plugged in the shortest day and the longest day again for my house today, and took a "Grab" screen shot of them. There is a choice in the app on the upper right for a road map type image, or a satellite image, and by looking at both images on those 2 dates, I now know exactly where to plant 4-5 deciduous shade trees for optimum shading of this house in summertime. Cool, huh?

For less trouble, there is a little gadget available (photo above) that you can place in a container or garden bed for 24 hours and it will give you total sunlight hours (categorized as full sun, partial sun, part-shade, shade), although it will not tell you whether it is hot midday sun, early morning sunlight, or late afternoon sunlight. It would be handy in the garden, esp. if taller plants tend to shade another, lower plant.

Amazing "Solar" Student

http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2011/aidan.html

I may have to revise my thoughts about US education approaching failure mode. Whether it's due to the schools... or his parents and environment, a Middle School boy has discovered how to increase solar energy collected by flat panels, and has been granted a provisional patent for his work.

http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2011/aidan.html

Middle School student Aidan Dwyer applied the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical principle widely occurring in nature, to solar panel arrays in a months-long backyard experiment. He found that small solar panels arranged according to the Fibonacci sequence found in tree branches produced 20 percent more energy than flat panel arrays, and prolonged the collection 'window' by up to two and a half hours.

Here's a news story about the lad:

http://northport.patch.com/articles/young-naturalist-granted-a-patent-in-solar-energy#c

Here's an in-depth report about his research, and both the above photos are from this site, posted here for educational purposes:

http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2011/aidan.html

I've been intrigued by the Fibronacci sequence for a long time, and a few years ago I designed a house modeled on the Fibronacci sequence in a Chambered Nautilus shell.

More information on Fibonacci Numbers in Nature:

http://www.maths.surrey.ac.uk/hosted-sites/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fibnat.html

http://britton.disted.camosun.bc.ca/fibslide/jbfibslide.htm

http://www.maths.surrey.ac.uk/hosted-sites/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fibnat.html#veg

http://www.maths.surrey.ac.uk/hosted-sites/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fib.html

Just for Giggles

Photo after 24 hours of drying time. The drying greatly reduced the space between slices.

I've been doing a lot of dehydrating this summer, and cursing the energy I'm using when sunshine is free. On my post about dehydrating zucchini, I mentioned someone's method of drying zucchini on wooden dowels in a hot garage. Well, I don't have a hot garage... but my pick-up gets plenty hot when I keep the windows closed anticipating our almost daily afternoon thunderstorms.

So, you know I just had to try it! I put the threaded zukes in the truck about 2 PM, and by the next late afternoon they were perfectly dried! I only had one dowel rod long enough to span the space between the dashboard and the seat-back or I would have done more. The back window of a sedan would work great, too.

Now I need to rig some kind of support arrangement that will allow me to use the screened trays from my Excalibur in the truck, because I will be drying tomatoes soon.

Mini Retort for Charcoal/Ash

I'm in the planning stages for making a variety of cheeses, and getting my list together of ingredients like starter cultures, aroma-producing bacterial and yeast additives, colorings, and even some ash used in a goat cheese like Humboldt Fog. (Who could resist a name like that?) Ash is basically activated charcoal, and easy to make at home in a semi-retort. One less thing to buy!

In the chemical industry, a retort is an airtight vessel in which substances are heated for a chemical reaction producing gaseous products to be collected in a collection vessel or for further processing. A retort is also used to make charcoal to burn in a small forge. I have a homemade retort for making charcoal, which I inoculate and use as biochar for my garden. However, it is a 30 gallon drum inside a 55 gallon drum... far too large for making ash for cheese, and I really does not capture the gases to use as fuel for the burn in process. (That type of process is described here.)

What I want for making food-grade ash is a miniature retort-style container that will drive off the gases and totally char the wood inside. Then I can grind the char into a powder via a spare coffee grinder for later use in my cheese. 

I bought a new, clean paint can, quart-size. (I may need to upgrade to a gallon size after I see how this works.)

The wood of choice for this type of ash is a fruit or nut wood or grape vines, and I had some branches available from pruning an apple tree. They do not have to be totally dry although that is best; green wood cuttings just have a higher moisture content that will still be driven off, just requiring more time and fuel for the fire itself. The retort needs to be stacked as tightly as possible to eliminate a lot of oxygen (which creates pressure inside the can when heated) from the get-go. Then the lid needs a small hole to let the heated gases escape (and prevent the can from blowing up!). I made a 3/8" hole, which may be too large, but I won't know until I try it.

Now it's prepared for the next time I build a fire, when I will put the tightly closed can on the fire/logs/coals so that I can watch the vent. When the can contents get red hot, the vent hole will start to smoke, and soon the smoke will turn to white. The water content will start to be driven off at 212ºF, and the wood will start to char at around 500ºF. After some time, maybe an hour or more depending on the temp of the fire and the moisture content inside the can, the white smoke will stop entirely, indicating all the volatile gases have been driven off.

The next step after you think the wood had charred sufficiently, is remove the can from the fire with fireplace gloves or tongs and set on a fireproof surface to cool at least 24 hours. Now it should be ready to crush and grind to a powder.

Later: I finally 'fired' the can of twigs, with only moderate success. Here just above you can see the fine smoke beginning to trail out of the hole in the can lid.

I apparently did not have either a hot-enough fire, or too small a fire... the twigs charred appropriately on the bottom, but not all the way up to the top, even though I left them on the burning briquettes and embers overnight.

Now that I'm thinking about that particular fire, I remember I used briquettes from the same bag last fall for my first cold smoking, and they produced only a very short-lasting heat. When the briquettes became covered with ash, they cooled considerably. To fully char these apple twigs, I'll apparently need build a hot wood fire to char the apple twigs.

If all else fails, I can always buy ash, but I'm NOT giving up yet!

Hot Potatoes under the Bedcovers

Photo from jcmedinas photostream

I'm sure we all have heard the stories of putting hot potatoes, a hot water bottle, or even heated bricks under the covers at the foot of the bed to warm our feet when going to bed in a cold room that was far, far away from the wood stove. Brrrrrrr!

I want to take that 'technology' a bit farther here and apply it to cooking. What happens with a solid heated object like potatoes or a brick (technically both are a heat source) wrapped in blankets is that the heat radiates out for a long time, heating whatever is nearby... in this case, feet. To the extent that it works is dependent on a couple of factors. 

One factor is the mass of the heated object: the greater the mass, the more heat it holds, at least initially. So, if you have 4 hot potatoes and your sister only has one... who will have warmer tootsies? Another factor is the insulation around the hot potato. If the covering blankets are just a layer or two of thin cotton, they will not insulate very well, nor for very long. Pretty soon your tootsies will be just as cold as the room. However, if the cover is a thick down comforter, the heat may last for hours, continuing to warm your tootsies the whole time.

Now, consider a pot of stew cooking on the stove... actually boiling. If you have kitchen duty, you would probably turn the heat down to a simmer, add a lid, and let the stew cook under very low heat for a few hours. In earlier days, you would need to add a bit of firewood from time to time to keep the heat going. Today we just pay for some additional BTU's to keep the pot warm, and those are being calculated (and rung up) by the meter outside, unseen for the most part but a cost nonetheless.

However, if you took that same boiling pot and put it under the down bed covers, it would continue to cook... for free! It might take longer to finish cooking, depending on how well insulated the bed covers are... but you get the idea.

Now take that concept of the hot pot under the bed covers just a step farther... Construct some sort of a box (cardboard will do as a start) with a lid and place it in the kitchen, but rather than using the bed covers, line the box and lid with some really good, thick insulating material... and then when the pot boils, place it in the immediately in the box. Turn off the stove, cover the pot with the insulated lid, and go about your business. Your stew will continue to cook!

In the early 1900's, merchants sold what they called "Fireless Cookers" with great monetary success... and those were nothing more than a well-insulated box of either wood or more often, pretty painted metal to hold a hot pot (or two side-by-side) for further cooking at low temperatures, without any additional source of heat.

Urban Haybox Photo from Eithin's Photostream; (Note heat reflection but lack of insulation)

Long before the 1900's, folks with limited cooking fuel used the same principle, lining boxes with hay they had on hand for insulation, and so they became known as a "Haybox". Hay is not the best insulation material we have available now, but it will still do in a pinch. Here's a page with more information on fireless cooking.

This same principle applies today in solar cookers; they work best with an insulating barrier to the air outside the container and box, which would otherwise wick away the heat. Counteracting that heat loss is usually accomplished by enclosing the air space around the cooker with insulation in the walls. The better the insulation, the less heat loss.

Photo from thoth on Flickr

You can use that same principle to cook a breakfast cereal grain overnight in a good vacuum thermos. Measure a portion of a cereal grain (I like steel-cut oats) into a wide mouth thermos bottle. Bring the appropriate amount of water and a pinch of salt to a hard boil and pour into the thermos just before bedtime. Screw the lid tight, shake a couple of times to mix the water and grain together well, and set aside until morning. It will be perfectly cooked when you awaken!

Note: Thermos vacuum bottles vary in how well they are insulated. The small stainless steel briefcase-size one I use to keep my coffee hot after making coffee in my glass Chemex drip coffee maker only keeps my coffee fairly hot for an hour or two. The Nissan Travel mug I carry in the car will keep my coffee steaming for several hours, or an iced drink cold (and often with ice intact) overnight.

If your vacuum thermos has thinner insulation like my briefcase thermos, you could wrap it in an insulating blanket (or even a thick towel) to keep more heat contained for overnight cooking. You'll just have to fiddle with what works best with what you have.

Photo from fr:Utilisateur:Nataraja

The oriental bento box, and the stackable food delivery boxes such as the one shown above and used by many cultures could accomplish much the same thing if they were insulated.

I can see endless opportunities to reduce my electric consumption by using fireless cooking. Something as simple as some dehydrated soup ingredients and boiling water placed in my thermos at breakfast time for my lunch...a pot of rice started at noon and placed in the haybox/fireless cooker (which I WILL I build soon) for my evening meal? A meat and vegetable stew?

It may take some trial and error to see what cooks best, and what design and insulation of a fireless cooker works best, and I think this might be a fun and challenging thing to do.

Quasi-Baking on a Wood Stove in Power Outage

During our recent several-day power outage, I cooked and heated water for coffee on my wood stove, something I have done many times before. Usually I have cooked soups and stews, but generally not much more than that. Coffee is easy since I use an old Chemex pot every day anyway and it makes great coffee! All you need is boiling water to pour over the ground coffee in the filter paper.

One of the power-less days I decided I wanted a baked sweet potato. I was getting bored with hot soups/stews!  I wrapped 2 sweet potatoes in aluminum foil and put them on the hot cast iron stove top. (Ignore the nasty pot on the left; I keep water in it to add humidity to the room, and it has a mineral build-up from our hard water.) After a few minutes, though, I decided I would probably get potatoes cooked on one side where they touched the stove, or cooked unevenly even if I rolled them over occasionally.

I don't have a Dutch Oven that I might be able to bake in, so I improvised, creating a contained heated space by inverting a disposable aluminum container over the potatoes. I stuck the instant-read thermometer between the 'taters and stove top; the temp read 350ºF. Hey, it's not rocket science... but I was hungry and it worked!

Hindsight says I should have checked the temp in the enclosed air space around the potatoes, but I didn't think of it at the time. The potatoes baked just fine, although they were steamy from being in the foil. I had wrapped them only because the stove is sooty and it's hard to clean a HOT stove. I also didn't time baking the potatoes; it was difficult to read my wristwatch in dim light, and frankly I didn't much care at the time. I squeezed the potatoes occasionally, and took them off when they felt soft. 

There were 2 long thin spots along the bottom of the potatoes where they sat on the cast iron, and those places were just very slightly browned but not hard and dried out. I slathered on some butter, and YUM!

Since I am still without the oven on my electric kitchen range, I want to see if I can actually bake a cake or muffins on the wood stove, without anything more than some kind of cover to contain heat around the pans.I have a Le Creuset 7 quart French Oven on my Wish List!

Update: The above was written before Christmas. Since then, my sister has had a repairman come and fix the electric oven on the kitchen range. So, I again have an oven for convenience. BUT I still need to learn to bake on a wood stove for eventual power shortages and outages. 


Baking on a wood stove may not sound like a big deal, but if you've never tried it, how do you learn? Another option for baking is a solar oven... easy to make, and use on sunny days... but I'm not thrilled with the idea of using one on a snowy, windy day in the dead of winter. That will be a summer project!

Bluing

Blue used in Paintings

For some unknown reason, I awakened the other morning with the image of my grandmother using bluing on the whites in her laundry. Not personally remembering anything else about the bluing used in my childhood, I decided to do some research.

Bluing is made from a synthetic dye called Prussian Blue which is made from ferric hexacyanoferrate; it's basically a blue iron powder suspended in water, with an added pH balancer. It is used because white fabrics eventually turn a dingy color as the fabric never really gets thoroughly clean. A touch of blue dye gives the fabric the slightest blue tint, making it appear white to our eyes. Some laundry detergents today contain fluorescing agents for the same purpose.

So why should I be interested in bluing? Well, for starters, chlorine bleach is toxic. Bleach is particularly bad for my septic tank because it kills the bacteria that make the tank digest properly. Besides, I happen to be one of the people with skin allergic to those fluorescing agents added to detergents.

Reading more, I found that bluing has been used by farmers for over a hundred years in stock watering tanks to keep the algae down. Even in a concentrated form, bluing is non-toxic, and farmers over the years have claimed it reduces distemper and other diseases. (The farmers say that flies carrying those diseases won't lay eggs on blue water.)

While the best known US manufacturer of bluing (Mrs. Stewart's Bluing) makes no such claims, they also say that since 1883 when their business began, they have never received a single report of an animal becoming sick or dying from such practices.

In fact, according to the Atomic Energy Agency, an adult male could eat at least 10 grams of Prussian blue per day without any serious harm. I don't plan to eat any, but it's good to know it wouldn't hurt any fish if I ever build a fishpond!

Before the discovery/invention of synthetic Prussian Blue, people often added lumps of indigo mixed with starch to their rinse water. I also found it has been used in pottery glazing to identify which parts have been glazed prior to firing since any glazing doesn't show up on wet clay. In the firing process, the blue is burned away, leaving the glaze just where the potter wanted.

We all have seen little old ladies with Blue Hair... so don't over-do it!!

Terra-Cotta Flower Pot Smoker

The place where I live has an old shed that once had been used as a smokehouse. The chimney is still there, but a bare interior, so I'm not sure how they fired it for use. There's enough room to hang several hams, hundreds of feet of sausage, and still hold half a cow too. That's far more space than I want to heat for a smoker, although back in the days of farmsteads it probably was perfect for smoking enough meat for the winter for a large family.

So, I recently found some information on making an inexpensive backyard smoker out of a new terra-cotta flower pot. It is supposedly fashioned after an Alton Brown idea, and actually it's pretty simple. I plan to make one and will post photos, but in the meantime, here's the general idea:

You need a large terra-cotta flower pot (maybe 16"-18"), and a terra-cotta saucer to act as a lid. For a heat source, the heating element out of a hot plate works well. You can run the electric power for the hot plate out of the drain hole in the bottom of the pot, and you should have some spacers/feet to hold the coil itself above the bottom of the pot. (You could use smashed soda cans.)

Then you need a container to hold the charcoal, maybe an old metal pot or bowl... and a grille to hold the jerky, bacon, steak or whatever you are smoking above the heat source. Drill a couple of holes in the saucer to hold a handle or knob, and invert it for the lid. Presto! Inexpensive smoker!

I'm thinking that when I make mine, I'll look for a better temperature controller than what comes on most hotplates, or maybe change it out later, assuming of course that I really like smoking stuff.

Beans on a Cattle Panel Arch Trellis

Deciding to grow pole beans on my new cattle panel arch trellis has a distinct advantage I had not even thought about when I built it. As you can see in the photo above, almost all the beans hang down inside the arch, making picking beans very easy!

There are only a very few beans that are under leaves on the outside of the arch, perhaps a handful at most. So, that tells me I will be planting my pole beans again next year on the arch trellis! (You can also see in the photo that we've had more rain again overnight, making the creek muddy and the tomatoes rot.)

I have an additional cattle panel ready to install end to end with this one, giving me a longer arch/tunnel. I just need someone to help me. It doesn’t take any strength to bend the panel… only someone to hold it steady while I stake the first end, and then walk the free end into place so I can stake it down too. I may wire the 2 panels together along the ends that connect, just for some added stability.

I’ll try and take (and post) photos of the new panel addition. Meanwhile, I have beans to pick!

Clever Idea

I was driving down the road today and saw this sign on a chain link fence. I really thought it was a rather clever idea, even though polystyrene is made using hydro-flourochemical "blowing agents" and when designated for food containers and drinking cups, is not recyclable.