MOTHER EARTH NEWS • Autumn on the Homestead
Quick hoops extend the growing season by protecting plants from freezing cold and deep snow.
6 Eat in Sync
With the Seasons
You can enjoy better food and support local farmers by buying meat, eggs, and produce in season.
10 Grow Your Best Fall Garden Here’s expert advice for the next half of the gardening season.
16 Quick Hoops: Easy-to-Make
Mini-Greenhouses
Stretch the growing season to savor fresh, homegrown veggies all year by using these nifty quick hoops in your winter vegetable garden.
18 Eight Easy Projects for
Instant Energy Savings
Implement these inexpensive strategies to reduce your carbon footprint and slash your energy bills.
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25 Go Solar for
Free Hot Water
Solar water heaters are an easy entry into renewable energy, and will save you big bucks over time.
30 Choose a Wood-Burning
Stove for Your Home
When converting your home to wood heat, you’ll likely recuperate the remodeling costs in a few short years.
34 Firewood At a Glance
Find the best firewood types for your needs with our handy BTU comparison chart.
36 Avoiding Creosote Buildup Heating with wood is a joy. Understand how creosote forms and your joy will also be completely safe.
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37 Emergency Power Options With the right generator, you’ll be prepared when storms or blackouts leave you without electricity.
42 Sweet Cider Roundup
Make delicious cider with this advice on the best cider apples and how to press them.
45 An Electric
Cider Press Idea
Make the squeezing easier this season with this cool concept.
50 Sweet and Savory
Pumpkins and Squash
These tasty fruits-of-the-vine offer loads of color, flavor, and nutrition.
COVER PHOTOGRAPH: LIQUID LIBRARY
Table of Contents
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66 52 The Tips You Need
to Grow Great Garlic
Use this season-by-season guide to cultivate a treasure trove of fat, flavor-packed cloves.
54 Build a Basement
Root Cellar
Storing root crops in a passively cooled cellar is one of the most efficient ways to preserve food.
56 Outdoor Root Cellars
Try these five ways to store fresh food for winter right in your garden.
60 Homemade Bread:
Truly Easy and Delicious
These tips and simple bread recipes will inspire beautiful loaves and a whole new outlook on baking.
86 66 Homemade Butter: The
Best You’ll Ever Have
Once you start using homemade butter, you won’t look back.
71 Brew Your Own Beer
Homebrewing is kettles of fun, and it’s the perfect way to make your own uniquely flavored, affordable drinks.
77 Twenty Crops that Keep
and How to Store Them
Stash a winter’s worth of delicious, homegrown produce in the cool corners of your homestead.
82 Freezing Fruits and
Vegetables from Your Garden
Tap these straightforward freezing tips to turn your garden harvests into sensational, off-season meals.
92 86 Choose Fermented Foods
for Health and Flavor
Humans have used fermentation for centuries to preserve food. Today, we know that fermentation also makes some foods more nutritious.
90 Got Cabbage?
Make Sauerkraut!
This fascinating fermented food is delicious, easy to make, and good for you.
92 Grow and Make Your Own
Simple Medicines
Tend a medicinal herb garden for ready access to a multitude of safe, healing remedies.
95 Additional Resources 96 Earth Words
Say goodbye to the intimidation factor in baking delicious, homemade bread.
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EAT IN SYNC With the Seasons By Joel Salatin
A
ll fruits and vegetables are more abundant in some seasons than others, and although not everyone realizes it, the same is true for meat and eggs. As a farmer who sells directly to my customers, I think a lot about these seasonal cycles because getting supply to match demand is one of my biggest challenges. One of the best ways to even out the flow is to find customers who eat seasonally — buying extra at some
times and not demanding seasonal products during the hardto-produce times. Often, this means freezing and preserving for later use rather than eating an abundance of “fresh” tomatoes or squash in spring. When it happens, this synergy between season, farmer, and patron is a dance that honors the natural ebb and flow of production. Cyclical menus stimulate an awe and respect for local food connections. And such conscious planning is good for the pocketbooks of both farmer and patron.
Meat Is Best Seasonally Tremendous money and effort are expended maintaining production anti-seasonally, but meat is best in certain seasons, just as produce is. When are the deer fattest in your area? Going into winter. Forage-fattened beef is also best in the fall. After the frost has killed flies and sweetened the grass, cows are more comfortable than at any other time of the year. They naturally ramp up their forage intake and back fat in fall to get through the lean, hard winter. On the other hand, spring is when chickens lay enough eggs so there will be extra for raising broilers. Seasonally speaking, it makes sense to eat chicken in the summer and beef in winter. When buying meat from local farmers, you’ll find that eating the whole animal is a related issue. Remember that a chicken consists of something
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: LYNN KARLIN; ISTOCK; RICHARD LORD/ELLWOOD THOMPSON’S LOCAL MARKET; ISTOCK
You can enjoy better food and support local farmers by buying meat, eggs, and produce in season.
besides a boneless, skinless breast. The only way those can be offered in the supermarket is because the industry grinds and reconstitutes the rest into chicken franks, lunch meat and McNuggets, using low-wage labor and high volume to justify the sophisticated machinery. In the supermarket, boneless, skinless chicken breasts necessarily require an industrial approach to food preparation, but at home, it’s a different story. You can eat the chicken breast, and also cook the rest of the chicken for casseroles, and freeze the broth for stock. The same is true of beef. I once had a chef ask me for 200 beef loins per year to use for steaks in his restaurant. My jaw dropped, and I asked him: “Do you know how much chuck roast that is?” Less than half of a cow can be used for topend steaks. The rest is chuck roast and ground beef, and that meat has to go somewhere. Steakhouses have only been possible in our culture since the advent of the hamburger joint.
Eggs Are Seasonal, Too
That’s the bird’s natural production cycle. But other factors play a key role in production, which, at its plateau, can be five to seven eggs per week. One factor is temperature. A chicken has a high metabolism. In cold weather, a bird uses all the calories it can ingest just to keep warm, so there aren’t enough left to produce an egg. The second factor is day length. Light stimulates the glands that secrete hormones that make the hen lay eggs. As days get shorter, production wanes. On our farm, Dec. 21 is a red letter day because it’s the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. After that, day length and egg production increase. Egg production drops off again in the fall.
Seasonally speaking, it makes sense to eat chicken in the summer and beef in winter.
As an example of how deep seasonal cycles can go, let me describe the egg production cycle. It starts when little chicks hatch and begin growing. These pullets (young female chickens) begin laying at about their 20th week. At first, they lay what are called pullet eggs, which are small. Then the size increases, so that within about a month, more than half their eggs are large. The birds lay for roughly a year before molting. That’s when they lose feathers, stop laying, and essentially go through a two- to four-week dormancy period. Then, sporting a new suit of feathers and looking rejuvenated following this rest period, they begin another production cycle. As with nearly all biological systems, the egg production cycle follows an escalating curve early on, plateaus for a couple of months, then gradually drops during the molting period.
Author Joel Salatin on his PolyFace Farm in Virginia.
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GROW YOUR BEST FALL GARDEN
By Barbara Pleasant
R
What, When, and How
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: LYNN KARLIN; DWIGHT KUHN (2), FOTOLIA/SEVER180, DWIGHT KUHN (2)
Here’s expert advice for the next half of the gardening season.
ight now, before you forget, put a rubber band around your wrist to remind you of one gardening task that cannot be postponed: planting seeds for your fall garden. As summer draws to a close, gardens everywhere morph into a tapestry of delicious greens, from tender lettuce to frost-proof spinach, with a sprinkling of red mustard added for spice. In North America’s southern half, as long as seeds germinate in late July or early August, fall gardens grow the best cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower you’ve ever tasted. In colder climates it’s prime time to sow carrots, rutabagas, and turnips to harvest in the fall. Filling space vacated by spring crops with summer-sown vegetables will keep your garden productive well into fall and even winter. Granted, the height of summer is not the best time to start tender seedlings of anything. Hot days, sparse rain, and heavy pest pressure must be factored into a sound planting plan, and there’s the challenge of keeping fall plantings on schedule. But you can meet all of the basic requirements for a successful, surprisingly low-maintenance fall garden by following the steps outlined here. The time you invest now will pay off big time as you continue to harvest fresh veggies from your garden long after frost has killed your tomatoes and blackened your beans.
Cooler temperatures will make your fall vegetables taste crisp and sweet. You will harvest the best carrots, broccoli, cabbage, beets, and kale after the first frost. If you properly protect these vegetables, you can continue harvesting fresh, crisp produce through several fall and winter months.
1 Get Seeds Started Count back 12 to 14 weeks from your average first fall frost date (see “Fall Garden Planting Schedule” on Page 14) to plan your first task: starting seeds of broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, and kale indoors, where germination conditions are better than they are in the garden. Some garden centers carry a few cabbage family seedlings for fall planting, but don’t expect a good selection. The only sure way to have vigorous young seedlings is to grow your own, using the same procedures you would use in spring (see “Start Your Own Seeds” at goo.gl/w3RSB). As soon as the seedlings are three weeks old, be ready WWW.MOTHEREARTHNEWS.COM
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8
EASY PROJECTS FOR INSTANT ENERGY SAVINGS
18 MOTHER EARTH NEWS • AUTUMN ON THE HOMESTEAD
18-24 Energy Saving Projects.indd 18-19
Prioritizing the Projects When you start scrutinizing any group of energy-saving projects, you’ll likely find a huge difference between them in terms
Energy Reduction Per Year
CO² Reduction Per Year
Personal computer power management
$27
$178
1,780 kwh
3,560 lbs.
Install compact fluorescent light bulbs
$50
$117
1,170 kwh
2,340 lbs.
Seal and insulate heating ducts
$45
$75
940 kwh
480 lbs.
Reduce infiltration losses (seal home’s air leaks)
$50
$156
1,980 kwh
1,010 lbs.
$5 to $20
$63
630 kwh
286 lbs.
Insulate windows with Bubble Wrap
$38
$75
960 kwh
490 lbs.
Eliminate phantom electrical loads
$70
$57
570 kwh
1,140 lbs.
Use electric mattress pads
$125
$186
2,320 kwh
1,150 lbs.
Total
$410
$907
10,350 kwh
10,456 lbs.
Vent dryer inside during winter
ISTOCKPHOTO/MIKE CLARKE
C
utting your home energy use is the best of win-win deals: It lessens your carbon footprint while simultaneously saving you big bucks on your energy bills. That’s especially exciting if you consider that many home energy improvements are fast and easy to do, and that they’re also inexpensive. Often the savings from an individual project will be small, but if you start putting them together, they add up quickly. My family set a goal of halving our total energy use, energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions, and we were able to meet that goal through this series of simple projects. We found these reductions in our energy use easy to accomplish without making any significant lifestyle changes. The details: We decreased our total energy use from 93,000 kilowatt-hours (kwh) per year to 38,000 kwh per year. (We calculated the kwh equivalent for all energy sources, such as propane.) This saves us $4,500 per year in energy costs, and it has reduced
our carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions by 17 tons! Our rate of return on the money we invested in these efforts was more than 50 percent — tax-free. Altogether, we took on 22 different projects, including two solar heating efforts that have also appeared in M E N (see “Solar Heating Plan for Any Home,” goo.gl/98CD5 ). You can find specifics about all of the projects we’ve done at our Montana home on my website, www.builditsolar.com, but the ones I’ll explain in the following pages are the fastest, most accessible of the lot. These eight DIY projects cost about $400 and will save at least $9,000 over the next 10 years! (EDITOR’S NOTE: Numbers will be different in today’s market; this article was written in 2008, but the concepts continue to apply.)
Savings Per Year
The Top 8 Projects
Implement these inexpensive strategies to reduce your carbon footprint and slash your energy bills. Spending $400 once could save you $900 per year! By Gary Reysa
Initial Cost
of bang for your buck. In our case, the simple things — such as controlling the amount of power that our computers use and implementing basic insulating strategies — were the ones that resulted in especially good payback. On the other end of the spectrum, the solar photovoltaic project we intend to do in the future will cost as much as all 22 of our other projects combined, yet it will only account for 2.5 percent of the total energy reduction we’re aiming for. Why was the total payback on these smaller-scale, simpler projects so good? These were the keys to our success: • We dedicated time to doing quite a bit of homework before we got started. We evaluated each project for what it would cost us and what it would save us, and we threw out the ones that wouldn’t pay well. • Some projects cost almost nothing but returned big savings — you can see on the chart above that several paid for themselves many times over within just the first year. Such projects tend to increase the average return of the overall effort. • We are do-it-yourselfers, and this can make quite a difference in the costs involved in some projects. • Some of our energy improvements qualified for rebates or tax
credits, which further reduced the amount of money we had to spend to do them.
Electricity, Coal Plants and Greenhouse Gases Beyond purely the monetary savings, there’s another important reason to undertake these energy-saving projects. Cutting down on electricity consumption is particularly effective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, in the United States, most of our electricity comes from inefficient coal plants. Coal is a high-carbon fuel, and, compared with other sources of energy, coal-fired plants produce a lot of carbon dioxide relative to the amount of energy they generate. If you want to reduce your contribution to greenhouse gases, you’ll likely find many hundreds of kilowatt-hours that can be saved easily and cheaply with minimal lifestyle adjustment. We get our electricity from a coal-fired plant, so all of the projects we did significantly reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we produce. Notice that the projects that saved electricity cut down greenhouse gases by about 2 pounds of carbon dioxide per 1 kwh of energy saved. For example, putting our two home computers on a power diet saved nearly 1,800 kwh per year and 3,500 pounds of greenhouse gases. WWW.MOTHEREARTHNEWS.COM
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Outdoor
Try these five ways to store fresh food for winter right in your garden — it’s as easy as tossing a bagful of leaves over a patch of carrots!
ROOT CELLARS
By Steve Maxwell and Jennifer MacKenzie Illustrations by Mike Biegel
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ou don’t need an underground room to have an effective root cellar — you can simply use soil, mulch, and a few other tools to store vegetables and fruits without them ever leaving your garden. Based on your winter weather and your available space, choose from these five ideas for outdoor root cellars to store your harvests through the snowy winter months.
The Organic Garden Blanket The earth holds a surprising amount of summer heat in its mass. If you can trap this heat with some kind of fluffy organic blanket — leaves, clean straw, sawdust, or even banked-up snow — it’s entirely possible to keep soil from freezing for months longer than if it were left bare. In areas with mild winters, you can even keep soil soft enough to dig in yearround, allowing you to harvest snapping-fresh, cold-tolerant vegetables while everyone else is relying on produce from the grocery store. To make handling the blanket easy, tuck your leaves or other material into recycled trash bags before you lay them over your root crops. Vegetables that can be harvested when the soil is covered in snow include beets, Brussels sprouts, cabbages, carrots, endive root, Jerusalem artichokes, kale, leeks, parsnips, and salsify. After the first hard frosts mark the end of the growing season, nestle your crops under an organic blanket and they’ll keep reliably down to about 25 degrees Fahrenheit. They might even be OK at somewhat lower temperatures, depending on snow cover, the soil moisture level and the variety of vegetables involved. (You’ll know the weather has gotten too cold if the vegetables are soggy and soft when they defrost.)
produce from your trench silo right through winter and into spring. Because your vegetables will be deeper underground after you replant them in a trench silo, they’ll be better protected against winter temperatures than if you simply covered them with an organic blanket. How low can the temperature get? That depends on snow cover (the more, the better — snow is a good insulator) and the type of soil you’re working with. Frost penetrates deeper into heavy, wet clay soil than it does into dry, sandy soil. If you live in a region that has cold winters during which the soil freezes too hard to dig, you may have to leave your root veggies cozy in their trench until spring before harvesting them. If your climate is mild enough to allow you to dig into the soil year-round (perhaps with the help of an organic blanket over the trench), you can harvest as needed throughout winter. In that case, be sure to mark the ends of your trench silo with a couple of stakes so you can find it easily after snow starts to fall. When you’re ready to harvest something, simply dig down, take what you need, replace the soil (and blanket, if you’re using one) and move the stakes so you know where to dig next time.
A root pit is really just a glorified hole in the ground — but it will keep your potatoes fresh for eating all winter!
The Trench Silo
Trench silo Root crops come from the soil, and soil is wonderful at keeping them fresh. This is the power behind the trench silo, and a shovel is all you need to make one. Start by digging up your beets, carrots, parsnips, and other long-keeping root crops, cutting the tops down to about 1 inch. Next, dig a trench 6 to 10 inches deep and 18 to 24 inches wide. Replant your vegetables close together in the bottom of this trench, replacing the soil around them and heaping it 6 to 10 inches above them, burying the crops completely with soil. A variety of crops can be kept in the same trench. The temperature and humidity levels below ground are perfect for preservation, so you will be able to harvest crisp, living
The Hole-in-the-Ground Pit The human race probably wouldn’t be around today if preserving food were technically complicated. A root pit — nothing more than a glorified hole in the ground — offers simplicity and economy of construction in exchange for a certain amount of inconvenience. Pulling potatoes or other root crops out of a pit during a February blizzard may not be the easiest thing, but at least you didn’t have to invest much in building a structure to keep those spuds in good shape — and they will be in good shape! Root pits work well as long as they’re built according to some basic but essential parameters. The first parameter is a location with good drainage. Sandy soil is best, because the particles that make up the soil are large, allowing water to drain quickly. Find a slightly elevated spot if you can, as the slope will encourage surface water to run away from your pit as it percolates downward. If your wintertime temperatures drop below 25 degrees, dig your pit deep enough so that your stores will be well below the soil surface. As you dig the hole, flare the sides to keep the soil from caving in. You’ll need more flare to stabilize light soils, less for heavier ones. Line the bottom and sides of the hole with straw or dried leaves. Cover the hole with a three-quarter-inchthick wooden lid, and then cover the lid with soil. WWW.MOTHEREARTHNEWS.COM
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HOMEMADE BUTTER
It is sweet as early grass butter in April. — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851 By William Rubel
O
f the sweet cream butter I’d made earlier in the day, my Italian visitor said, “It tasted heavenly.” Sweet cream butter is churned from cream that has not been acidified by the conversion of milk sugar (lactose) into lactic acid by lactobacillus bacteria. Think of it as butter straight from the cow. The butter I served my friend was unsalted; so, in the slightly confusing language of butter, it was sweet sweet cream butter (neither salted nor acidified).
The Best You’ll Ever Have
PAT AND CHUCK BLACKLEY; OPPOSITE: MATTHEW T. STALLBAUMER
Sweet Cream Butter Sweet sweet cream butter is the purest butter — it most cleanly expresses the essence of the underlying cream. It was April when I made dinner for my friend, so the cows were eating from spring pasture. Spring pasture butter is more delicately flavored than the rest of the year, and yellower because spring and early summer grasses are the most nutritionally complex, containing the highest levels of beta carotene. Indeed, the butter I made for my friend was sweet and bright yellow. Prior to the industrialization of butter manufacturing in the late 19th century, butter sales were local, and butter customers were connoisseurs in a way that we are not. Early spring butter commanded a higher price than any other. Modern dairy practices ignore seasonal differences by feeding cows an unnatural diet of year-round grain. If you often make butter from good cream, you will notice changes as the seasons progress.
no refrigeration, so the cream was simply stored in a cool room. Because raw cream is naturally full of beneficial bacteria, raw cream ferments and sours on its own, without the addition of a bacterial culture. Fermentation by lactobacillus bacteria changes the chemistry of cream, making its flavors more complex. Among other changes, it produces lactic acid, making the cream less “sweet.” Of even greater importance to butter-makers working hand churns, culturing helps make churned cream “break” faster into the two products of butter-making: butter and buttermilk. When sweet cream butter was first introduced in the United States in the late 19th century, there was consumer resistance because, as described in one 20th-century text, “Flat flavor is noticeable in butter made from unripened cream.” Now this flat-tasting butter is the standard butter in the United States, Canada, and England. In comparison to cultured butters, sweet cream butter will always taste flat. But it has special qualities of its own. Fresh sweet cream butter is the taste of the cream unmediated by the butter-maker. It often has a lovely, milky taste.
Difference You Can Taste Whenever the taste of butter as a condiment is important — such as when spread on bread or melted over vegetables — homemade butter will make a difference you will taste. Where butter is a significant ingredient — such as in bread and pastries — you’ll find an astonishing difference in both the ease of making the pastry and in the texture of the finished product. That’s because homemade butter is usually about 86 percent butterfat. Commercial butter is usually 80 percent butterfat — the U.S. government’s minimum standard. Once you start using homemade butter, you won’t look back. It is so different from commodity butter — even premium “European-style” cultured butters — that they are almost two different foods. As a rule, use homemade butter within a week of making it. For baking, use it the same day you make it, before it is refrigerated. The buttermilk, that other product of butter-making, is also entirely different from cultured buttermilk. Try it in scones, soda bread, gingerbread, corn bread, and pancake recipes.
Culturing Butter Sweet cream butter can be heavenly, but after you begin culturing butter, I predict you’ll find that you like cultured butter even better. Culturing brings a depth of flavor to the butter, and lets you become
Our Buttery Past In the 7,000-year history of butter, sweet cream butter is comparatively new. In the few hundred years prior to the industrialization of butter-making, cream was cultured before it was churned. Culturing was the consequence of the universal practice of accumulating multiple milkings before churning. There was
Spring and summer pastures yield the most delectable butter — if cows get to eat the grass! www.MotherEarthNews.com
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