Table of Contents Stay cool all summer long with green home design.
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42 Simply Dill-icious Pickles
79 Easy Plant Propagation
These three basic methods put perfect pickling within the grasp of every preserver. Just choose a recipe and get started!
Anyone can be a plant propagator with these easy, traditional, and low-tech plant propagation techniques.
82 Grow Your Own Seeds
46 3 One-Hour Cheese Recipes
Experience the ultimate in self-reliance, and even create new varieties that will perform better in your garden.
You don’t have to be a professional to enjoy fresh, homemade cheese.
87 Tips and Techniques for
51 Want Milk? Get Goats 5 Green Gleaning
Use basic tools and construction knowledge to discover new uses for old pallets. These seven simple designs are no-frills and downright beautiful.
38 Reap the Garden & Market
Bounty: How to Dry Food
Dry your harvest to stock up on homegrown snacks and convenience foods for year-round eating.
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Cleaner, greener home heating options are abundant, but they’re not all equal. Compare the pros and cons before you decide which should heat your home.
103 Coppicing Trees for Sustainable Firewood
(With the Least Work!)
COVER: RICK WETHERBEE
for the Home and Garden
Your Best and Cheapest Choices
68 Grow More Food in Less Space
34 Get Crackin’
Make the most of black walnut season with these tips for husking, shelling, and utilizing the famously tough nut.
98 Guide to Greener Heating:
Determine which types of wheat you should grow, plus learn how to cultivate and process this staple for use in the kitchen.
Need quick snacks and meals? Drop processed storebought fare and opt instead for these healthful edibles that work well in a pinch.
17 Upcycled Pallet Projects
Reduce maintenance and save money by replacing your conventional grass yard with low-resource alternatives.
62 From Field to Flour: Harvest Your Own Wheat
30 Grab ’n’ Go Homemade Convenience Foods
Think “inside the box” to build cabinets, shelves, window boxes, and more.
92 Replace Your Lawn
Make flavorful sandwich bread out of quality ingredients to save money and warm a gathering or just your kitchen for the day.
Glean nutrients and flavor from bones and scraps by simmering and seasoning them.
13 Learn to Build Boxes
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White, and Rye With a Starter
26 Homemade Broth & Stock
Learn how to make your own lye from ashes, and then use it to cook up a mild, soft soap perfect for personal use.
Tap these efficient garden-watering systems to save on your water bill while still growing food despite drought and heat.
56 Daily Breads: Potato, Oatmeal,
Build your own beekeeping equipment to save money while making honey.
10 Simple Soap the Old-Fashioned Way
Water-wise Gardening
Dairy goats can supply your family with fresh milk inexpensively. The fun is a bonus.
20 Sweet Savings
Learn how to thrift like a pro with tips from Chad Sophia Suiter, who has been hunting and gathering in thrift stores and flea markets since she was a child.
You can grow firewood in a fraction of the time it takes to raise a tree from seed.
Blending the best principles of biointensive and squarefoot gardening will yield a customized, highly productive growing system.
106 8 Easy Projects for Instant Energy Savings
Implement these inexpensive strategies to reduce your carbon footprint and slash your energy bills. Spending $400 once could save you $900 per year!
74 Grow $700 of Food in 100 Square Feet!
If more of us grew a little food—instead of so much grass—our savings on grocery bills would be astounding.
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8 Great Places to Shop
A collection of gifts is wrapped in antique linens and tied with vintage ribbon, corsage pins, and jewels with old photos as gift tags.
The best flea market for you is the one that’s in your hometown; support your local stores! Because I live in Denver, my personal favorite is A Paris Street Market (www.aparisstreetmarket.com), a European-style market that features a mix of fresh fruit, flowers, antiques, housewares, and jewelry on the first Saturday of each month in summer.
The World’s Best Flea Markets 1 Les Puces de Saint-Ouen, known as Les Puces (“The Fleas”) in Paris, is worth a vacation across the pond. It is the world’s largest antiques market with a very colorful past. From the finest silver to monogrammed linens, it has everything. www.parisperfect.com/paris-flea-markets.php 2 Els Encants Vells Flea Market in Barcelona, Spain, offers vintage housewares, furniture, and assorted treasures. www.encantsbcn.com 3 The Brimfield Show, one of the world’s largest antique shows, sells vintage dishes, linens, and collectibles three times a year in Brimfield, Massachusetts. www.brimfieldshow.com 4 Brooklyn Flea has a wonderful assortment of antiques, salvage, handmade items, and homemade treats. www.brooklynflea.com 5 The Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena, California, attracts big crowds, but you should be able to find what you’re after. Go early. www.rgcshows.com/rose-bowl
3 Notable U.S. Markets 1 The Nashville Flea Market hosts over a thousand different vendors with all kinds of wares. Open on the fourth weekend of each month, year-round. www.thefairgrounds.com/fleamarket/dates.asp 2 The Melrose Trading Post in Los Angeles offers chic vintage clothing and furniture—and great people-watching. www.melrosetradingpost.org 3 Berkeley Flea Market in Berkeley, California, features wonderful finds for every type of home. Saturdays and Sundays. www.berkeleyfleamarket.com
Resources Antiques Roadshow Online www.pbs.org\wgbh\roadshow Collecting and Home Furnishing Search Engine www.collectics.com Nationwide directory of antique and collectible shops Flea Market Insiders www.fleamarketinsiders.com Flea market listings and maps Flea Market Style Magazine www.facebook.com/ fleamarketstylemagazine Thrifting tips and trends
Be Careful with Cloth Tiny vintage trophies become cozy candle holders.
Before you lose your heart completely to that vintage dinner dress, slow down. Carefully check it inside and out, and inspect trim, pleats, or ruffles for small holes, delicate webs, or areas where the fabric looks thin. These flaws may indicate moth or other pest damage. Pass on it and find another frock that doesn’t carry the risk of unwanted guests. Wash all thrift-store finds in the hottest water that the manufacturer’s label recommends before wearing or storing. Check out the following websites for more information.
The Thrifty Chicks www.thethriftychicks. blogspot.com Eco-friendly style tips The Thrift Shopper www.thethriftshopper.com National ZIP code-based directory of charity-driven thrift stores
Bedbug.com: www.bedbug.com/Page-Bedbug-tips-when-buying-secondhand-clothing_233.aspx Fashion-Era: www.fashion-era.com/Vintage_fashion/a13_cleaning_vintage_tips.htm The Vintage Connection: www.vintageconnection.net/PesteredByPests.htm 8 MOTHER EARTH NEWS XXXX/XXXX XXXX
Vintage Renewal www.vintagerenewal.com Ideas for repurposing thrift-store furniture and decor www.MotherEarthNews.com
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The Merrythought Swing Bed
DIY Console Table
Tools and materials: tape measure, mattress, 2-by-4 lumber, saw, drill, screws, rope A single pallet and some rope are all you’ll need to craft a simple swing. But, Manda of The Merrythought blog had a more substantial project in mind when she created this bed-sized swing (photo on previous page) using a pair of pallets. Manda began by measuring the twin-sized mattress that she wanted to use as a topper. The dimensions of the mattress determined how many pallets the project needed. Because two pallets end-to-end were too
short for the mattress, Manda extended the space between them by screwing 2-by-4 rails to the bottoms of the pallets, and then added an additional slat to fill the gap. If you have solid sewing skills, you can forgo the 2-by-4 extension and instead stitch a cushion to fit two pallets bolted together at their sides. If you hang your swing bed from a tree branch, be sure to inspect the tree’s health and research some quality load-bearing knots. Otherwise, you can hang your pallet swing from a metal support structure with a chain. Read more about this project at goo.gl/mB5MOv.
Tools and materials: paint, paintbrush, wax or other sealant, plank for the top, stain, screws, metal brackets When Kevin and Gina Kleinworth’s new stove was delivered on a pallet, Gina smartly remembered an awkward corner in their bedroom entryway. After installing the stove, Gina took the pallet to the backyard and painted it with a single coat of chalk paint, which she sealed with a light-colored wax. Compared with varnish, the high degree of artistic control associated with wax makes it ideal for home pallet finishes. Also, many waxes off-gas fewer volatile organic compounds (VOCs) than varnishes with high solvent concentrations. Next, Gina found a 12-inch-wide plank at a local hardware store for a top and cut it to slightly overhang the pallet. Gina then sanded and stained the wood to match the home decor. She let the plank top dry overnight. Next, she used a couple wood screws to attach the plank to the pallet. To wrap up her project, Gina anchored the console table to the wall studs using a few metal brackets. See the finished table on the Kleinworth & Co. blog at goo.gl/wLRhdE.
Tools and materials: drill, bolts or screws, wooden posts or metal pipe, hinges, gate latch To craft an inexpensive fence, you can stand a line of pallets on end and join their sides together with bolts. Siff Skovenborg’s handy project bridges the area between two outbuildings without requiring a big investment. To secure her fence to the buildings, Skovenborg first bolted boards to the wall studs. Next, she stabilized the upright pallets with 4-by-4 posts driven 24 to 36 inches into the ground. For added stability, you can seat the posts in concrete. Skovenborg then fastened strong hinges and a latch to one of the pallets to create a gate. To prevent small animals from crawling between the slats, she added welded wire fencing to the rear of the pallets. You could enclose an entire garden plot or a small field with pallets by placing a post at each corner and at regular intervals along the sides. Learn more online at goo.gl/HddTQ5.
Sassy Sparrow Patio Furniture Tools and materials: saw, tape measure, sandpaper, paint Pam Zimmerman of the Sassy Sparrow blog saw a perfect pallet opportunity in her large, empty patio area. Rather than purchase expensive outdoor furniture, she drafted a simple, 15-pallet patio design. This project requires a saw, but the cuts are straight and fast. For the seats, Zimmerman cut down each pallet to 36 by 24 inches. She then stacked those sections three high for a comfortable sitting height.
Zimmerman used the spare pieces for chair backs by pulling the loose backboards from the blocks and slats. Then, she arranged these pallet pieces vertically on top of the seats with the blocks at the bottom, so that the top would lean against the house’s wall for support. To wrap up the project, she sanded and painted the seats and backs. For a step-by-step photo guide visit the Sassy Sparrow blog at goo.gl/23iVf7.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: SIFF SKOVENBORG; GINA KLEINWORTH; JENNA BURGER; DEBORAH PIOTROWSKI; JODY BOX
Siff’s Pallet Fence with Gate
Folding Gardening Table Tools and materials: drill, heavy-duty screw hooks, heavy-duty strap hinges, chain, nails and small hooks as needed Jenna Burger designed this convenient gardening table to fold up against a home or shed when not in use. Best of all, a novice woodworker should be able to complete it in a couple hours. Before building, first obtain two pallets of the same size. On the pallet that you plan to mount vertically, drill pilot holes and sink a heavy-duty, load-bearing screw hook into the end blocks on the top, and then place screw hooks on each outside slat about 6 inches down from the top. On the pallet that will serve as the work surface, drive a screw hook into each outside slat about 12 inches from what will become the front edge. Arrange the two pallets in a 90-degree angle and join them with four heavy-duty strap hinges. Cut two lengths of chain to extend tautly between the screw hooks on the wall and the work surface. Next, drive heavy-duty screw hooks into studs on your building and, with a helper, hang the table with short lengths of chain from the hooks. Add nails and small hooks to the vertical pallet as needed to keep your gardening tools at arm’s length while you work. When your gardening table gets in the way, just fold up the work surface and shorten the chains on the hooks. More online at www.jennaburger.com.
The Arkansas Goat Shelter
Deborah’s Storage and Recycling Center
Tools and materials: 2-by-4s, corrugated roofing, T-posts, 4-by-4s Each of the three walls in this 10-by-10-foot animal shelter is a single 5-by-10-foot pallet, discarded by a northwestern Arkansas company and salvaged by Jody Box of The Tactical Homesteader. For structural support, Box drove T-posts into the ground — two per side—and wired each to a recycled 4-by-4. Metal T-posts and 4-by-4s also support each corner of the shelter. Box further braced the pallets in the shelter’s interior with a single 10-foot-long 2-by-4. Finally, the last bit of 2-by-4 framework supports the corrugated roofing. Visit The Tactical Homesteader’s YouTube channel at goo.gl/aYVC5S for a video tour of this shelter and Box’s description of the build. For another version of a goat shelter made from pallets, go to www.motherearthnews.com/goat-shelter.
Tools and materials: bolts, 4-by-4s, coat rack or hooks, recycling bins When Mother Earth News Facebook follower Deborah Piotrowski moved to a Tennessee ranch, she realized that country living didn’t include curbside recycling. To organize waste for transport to a recycling center in town, Piotrowski and her sister designed this recycling center. Piotrowski crafted the upper section by bolting together two pallets side by side. These vertical pallets rest on the back edges of two horizontal pallets, which were also bolted together side by side. The horizontal pallets are supported by 4-by-4 legs, and the upper section is secured to the garage wall for stability. An old coat rack screwed to the center of the upper section provides a place to hang outdoor clothing, while the horizontal pallets offer a place to sit and pull off work boots. Labeled recycling bins are stashed out of the way below the seat.
18 MOTHER EARTH NEWS • BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO LIVING ON LESS
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Reap the Garden & Market Bounty
How to Dry Food Dry your harvest to stock up on homegrown snacks and convenience foods for year-round eating.
By Barbara Pleasant
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any gardeners freeze, can, or give away surplus zucchini and tomatoes, but what about drying them? Not only is drying a delicious way to preserve and concentrate the flavors of your fruits, veggies, and herbs, but if dried, produce requires little
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space—and no electricity—to store, so you can enjoy it in fall and winter, too. Last year I dried peppers, squash, garlic, and quite a few cherry tomatoes, which brought much comfort when a power outage pushed my frozen treasures to the brink of thaw. The biggest revelation came in early spring, when I began using dried foods as other stockpiled veggies ran low. I discovered that cooking with home-dried foods is as easy as cooking with packaged convenience foods, at a fraction of the cost. Sweet dried fruits and crunchy veggies are great in meals, but they’re good enough to enjoy as snacks, too. What can you dry? From tomatoes and beets to sweet corn and green beans, almost any vegetable that can be blanched and frozen is a likely candidate for drying, along with apples, strawberries, peaches, and most other fruits. In times past, people waited for a spell of dry, breezy weather to dry bunches of herbs or peppers threaded on a piece of string. The first dehydrator I ever used was a parked car (just lay the goods on the dash or under the rear window). You will need only a warm oven to
DAVID CAVAGNARO (2); TOP RIGHT: EBEN FODOR
If you don’t have a garden, stock up on in-season produce from a farmers market to dry at home. You can dry almost any fruit or vegetable you enjoy eating.
dry a basket of shiitake mushrooms, but unless you live in an arid climate where sun-drying is practical, you’ll eventually want a dehydrator. David Cavagnaro compares plug-in options in “Choosing a Food Dehydrator” (goo.gl/qNSkDn), and Eben Fodor shares his expertise on how to build simple, nonelectric food dryers in the article “Build a Solar Food Dehydrator” (goo.gl/4y8kPG). (For more options, see www.motherearthnews. com/solar-food.) But back to the food. Do you want the simplicity of scalloped potatoes from a box—but homegrown? Or how about the makings for dozens of pasta salads in which everything but the noodles came from your garden or a local farm? With a stash of dried foods you really can drag through the door after work, set some dried veggies to soak, and then flop down for a few minutes, talk to the kids, or change your clothes. By the time you’re back in the kitchen, you’ll be greeted by plump, pre-cut, organically grown veggies ready to be stir-fried, sautéed, simmered, or tossed with dressing for a fast salad. You’ll see that drying foods
to stockpile is one of the easiest ways to achieve a healthy local diet. Back to the money. Organic convenience foods have their place in busy lives, but you pay for the time and energy involved in their creation. You subsidize the growing, drying, packaging, shipping, and marketing, and it all adds up to some hefty retail prices. A dried organic vegetable soup kit costs $2 to $3, and a frozen entrée can push $5. The organic “skillet dinner” category runs somewhere in between, and it’s a great example of a situation where you could make your own for about 50 cents using home-dried foods. Drying peppers and herbs can save you big bucks at the spice rack, too. And if you make your own smoky sweet paprika or hot pepper blend, your cooking improves as you discover new ways to use the blends to punch up your favorite dishes.
Drying With Attitude In Lanesboro, Minnesota, organic gardener and food-drying expert Mary Bell thinks people should look at food drying with a creative eye. Bell has invented what can only be called new foods, such as succulent “half-dried tomatoes” seasoned with basil and thyme or “Can’t-A-Loupe Candy”—chunks of cantaloupe seasoned with ginger and powdered sugar before drying. To deal with bountiful crops of hard-to-preserve eggplant, she figured out
how to cut eggplant into strips, soak them in a salt/lemon juice solution, and dry them into pasta-like strands. For overripe zucchini, she marinates thin slices before drying them into chips. According to Bell, the principle behind her book Food Drying With an Attitude is sustainability. “I want everybody to have food they can supply for themselves yearround,” Bell says. “Drying can provide a way to use things you already have instead of buying from some other place.” Bell removes ribs from big kale leaves, dries them raw, and crushes them into a jar to use as all-purpose potherbs. She also sells them at her farmers market booth alongside her locally famous fruit leathers and dried tomatoes—a springtime treat that satisfies customers’ appetites for fresh flavors. www.MotherEarthNews.com
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From Field to Flour
Harvest Your Own Wheat
Determine which types of wheat you should grow, plus learn how to cultivate and process this staple grain for use in the kitchen. By Stan Cox
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Choose a Variety After you’ve decided to grow wheat, you’ll need to make three initial choices: winter or spring type, red-grained or white-grained, and free-threshing or hulled (with the hull intact). For all the details on the different types of wheat that are available, including durum, spelt, emmer, and einkorn, see our article about wheat varieties online at www.motherearthnews.com/wheat. Winter wheats are sown in fall and then harvested the following spring or
summer. Spring wheats, which can be either common or durum wheats, are bred for Canadian and northern U.S. regions where wheat can’t survive through winter; they are sown in early spring and harvested in summer. The seasonal labels are important: A winter variety that does not experience cold weather will produce no grain, while a spring variety sown in fall will die in winter freezes (unless you’re in a frostfree region, where spring wheat varieties can be fall-sown). The choice between red or white wheat is less consequential, unless you’re growing wheat in an area with high summer rainfall. Under those conditions, white wheat
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kernels are more susceptible to premature sprouting in the head than red ones. Even a slight start on sprouting can ruin the bread-making quality of wheat grain. Depending on the region, a wide range of diseases and pests can plague wheat. Recently developed varieties tend to have better resistance than older ones. That is not always true, however, and almost every variety has an Achilles’ heel or two. If you are risk-averse, avoid varieties that are especially susceptible to diseases that often strike wheat in your area. Ask your local farm supplier or extension office to recommend resistant varieties. The hulled ancestors of modern wheats—among them einkorn, emmer, and spelt—can be winter or spring type, and either red or white. These varieties are becoming more popular in the grow-your-own community because of a reputation for good taste and quality. But if your homegrown wheat is hulled, you must accept that grain from these old-timers requires more processing to be used for food (see “Ancient Wheats and Their Pesky Hulls,” Page 64).
University professor and wheat breeder Mark Sorrells, who leads a project on heirloom organic wheat varieties. When you buy seed, it should be plump and free of dirt, weed seed, and other foreign material, and its label should include, at a minimum, the variety name and germination rate. Don’t worry that you might accidentally buy transgenic (genetically modified, or “GM”) seed; no GM wheat seed is on the market. A wheat variety is not like a corn hybrid—its
Choose High-Quality Seed
Ready the Soil
At least as important as variety selection is the physical quality of the seed you sow. “The one really important aspect that is often overlooked is that you need to start with good, quality seed that is true to type, disease- and insect-free, and not contaminated with weed seed,” says Cornell
A soil test from your local county extension office or university can tell you whether your soil is too acidic (therefore requiring lime) or too alkaline, whether it’s deficient in any of the three big nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—and whether you need to be
applying any of the minerals wheat requires in much smaller amounts. Thanks to its high protein content, harvested wheat contains large quantities of nitrogen that the plant acquires from the soil. An essential element, nitrogen must be restored to the soil in a form that can be taken up by plants grown the next season. Composted animal manure and vegetative compost, which also add organic matter to the soil, are preferred amendments commonly spread on a plot before sowing seed. These materials have relatively low nitrogen content, however, so you’ll need to use more than you’d think for optimum fertility. In his book The Organic Grain Grower, Jack Lazor recommends 4 tons of composted manure or 12 tons of rotted but non-composted manure per acre of wheat. For a 500-square-foot home plot, that would be about 90 or 275 pounds, respectively, of composted or rotted manure. A more elegant way to improve soil nitrogen and organic matter is to split the plot in half, if it’s big enough, and alternate your wheat crop with a “green manure” planting of a nitrogen-fixing legume, such as white clover, that you’ll later work into the soil. Cultivating a plot before sowing incorporates organic matter and nutrients into the soil; it’s then necessary to groom the surface layer so that planted
A wheat variety is not like a corn hybrid—replanting its seed will produce a crop of the same variety.
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: DREAMSTIME/MPETERSHEIM; SCOTT VLAUN; ROSALIND CREASY
retty much anywhere in North America, growing wheat is easy if you have a modest-sized plot of unshaded ground, the right seed, and the help of a few small implements. Depending on your weather conditions and your growing practices, a small plot of wheat—say 500 square feet—should yield 15 to 50 pounds of grain. Yes, that’s a pretty wide range, but soils, rainfall, temperatures, storms, diseases, pests, and plain luck can vary from place to place and year to year. Those forces dramatically influence wheat’s yield and quality. But your
yield starts with your choice of which varieties of wheat to sow.
Plant a handful of spelt (left) and grow a small stand of wheat, even in a backyard garden (right). Such a plot is easily harvested with a hand sickle.
harvested seed will produce a crop of that same variety when sown the next season. When producing your own seed, you can ensure your homegrown wheat’s quality during harvest and processing (more on that ahead).
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Grow More Food in Less Space (With the Least Work!) Blending the best principles of biointensive and square-foot gardening will yield a customized, highly productive growing system. By Linda A. Gilkeson
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hether you grow food on a spacious homestead or are digging into your first urban garden, ditching the plant-byrows approach and adopting intensive gardening techniques can help you grow a more productive garden that’s also more efficient to manage. These methods will open up a new world when it comes to smallspace gardening, which can be so much more than just a few lone pots on a balcony. If you do it right, you can grow more food in less space and put an impressive dent in your household’s fresh-food needs.
Beauty and productivity harmonize in an intensively planted garden when you add flowers and natural structural elements. 68 MOTHER EARTH NEWS XXXX/XXXX XXXX
SAXON HOLT; LEFT: GARDENPHOTOS.COM/JUDYWHITE
Comparing Two Popular Methods Two gardening authors and their systems of intensive vegetable gardening have been highly influential in North America for more than 30 years. Mel Bartholomew’s book on “square-foot” gardening was first published in 1981, while John Jeavons’ first book on “biointensive” gardening came out in 1974. Since these books hit the shelves, millions of gardeners have experimented
with and embraced the gardening techniques advocated within. Bartholomew’s aim with square-foot gardening is a simple, foolproof system that anyone can master (no companion planting, no crop rotation, and no soil preparation). He prescribes raised beds of only 6 inches deep for most crops, filled with an artificial mix of peat moss,
vermiculite, and compost. While this method is reliant on assembling purchased components, it can work well in urban spaces, especially where soil contamination is a concern, where digging into the ground isn’t an option, or where people are especially picky about how a garden looks (perhaps because of ordinances for front lawns). Check out “10 Tenets of Square-Foot Gardening” on Page 70 for more on this method. Jeavons’ biointensive gardening system is based on developing fertile soil in permanent garden beds that you initially dig to a depth of 2 feet. His primary goal is to grow food sustainably, using as few inputs from outside of the system as possible. He provides detailed instructions on crop planning, making compost, companion planting, crop rotation, growing crops that serve a dual purpose as food and compost-heap fodder, and more. See “10 Tenets of Biointensive Gardening” on Page 71 for the skinny on this system.
Four Principles of Intensive Gardening Adding plenty of compost is fundamental to intensive gardening.
Despite such vastly differing approaches, both techniques deliver high-yielding food gardens www.MotherEarthNews.com
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