Table of Contents
Mother Earth News • Homestead DIY Projects
Protect your plants from winter weather with this simple, sturdy hoop house.
4 Zero-Waste Living
20+ easy, economical ideas to minimize or eliminate landfillbound trash in every room of your home.
10 How to Make Compost Try these simple ways to make compost for increased productivity in your garden.
16 Make a Self-Watering
Garden Hose Pot
Reuse an old garden hose and transform it into a beautifully crafted, self-watering container to hold your favorite herbs.
18 Build This Easy
Hoop House
Extend your garden’s growing season like never before for less than $1,000.
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24 Making Hay the Old-
Fashioned Way
A little muscle and a few hand tools are all you need to put up tons of provender.
26 Do-It-Yourself Porch Swing Everyone needs a comfy spot to relax and sip some iced tea, and this plan works even if you don’t have a porch.
31 Upcycled Pallet Projects
for the Home and Garden
Use basic tools and construction skills to discover new uses for old pallets. These seven designs are no-frills and downright beautiful.
34 Quick, Easy, and
Cheap Cold Frame
With recycled material, it didn’t take long to put this project to use.
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36 DIY Flatbed Truck
Follow these instructions to convert a farm pickup into a flatbed for the homestead.
39 DIY Wind Generator
Turn an alternator into alternative energy in as little as a weekend using hand tools, a handful of hardware, and some inexpensive car parts.
42 DIY Cob Cabin
Pallets and straw form the frame of this sturdy, durable, creative cob structure.
44 Build a Homestead
Classic: The Outhouse
For homesteaders in remote areas, a properly managed privy might be a better idea than full-blown septic system.
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64 48 Control Weeds
Without Chemicals
Practice organic weed-control methods and watch your vegetable garden thrive.
52 Portable Chicken
Mini-Coop Plans
With this unique design, anyone can keep a few chickens even in small backyards.
54 Learn to Build Boxes
Think “inside the box” to build cabinets, shelves, and more.
58 Build Your Own Beehive Create a brand new home for your bees and save money in the process.
62 DIY Beeswax Crafts
for the Home
With the increased interest in beekeeping, the use of honey and beeswax has become an artisanal trend.
64 Historical Honey Mead
Use up every drop of honey by making homemade mead from washed honeycomb.
67 How to Braid Garlic
Beautiful and functional, garlic braids will preserve the harvest and add an old-fashioned charm to any kitchen.
70 Make Your Own
Hot Sauce
You can approximate one of the world’s tastiest hot sauces in your own kitchen with three simple ingredients. 2 MOTHER EARTH NEWS PREMIUM • DIY PROJECTS
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72 Make Syrup from Birch,
Walnut, and Sycamore Trees Want to branch out from maple? Use this guide to decide which trees to tap and learn how to process tree sap into both sweet and savory syrups.
75 How to Make Your Own
Yogurt, Kefir, and Cheese
Tap the health benefits of rich, tangy fermented milk products.
78 DIY, All-in-One
Kitchen Cupboard
Use recycled or off-the-shelf cabinets to build this Hoosier cupboard for baking prep, kitchen storage, or whatever you need most.
84 Farm-Style Picnic Table
This building project is so simple that the entire family can pitch in and play a role—and it’ll last for years to come.
87 Build an Outdoor Oven
This easy-to-construct clay oven fires up quickly and stays hot for day. Cook dinner at night, bake bread in the morning.
92 Fall Garden Medicine Chest Harvest and preserve these six multipurpose plants now for maximum wintertime health.
96 Luffa: Grow Your Own
Supply of Sponges
With one seed packet and a little know-how, you can easily grow a year’s supply of nontoxic, compostable sponges in your own backyard.
100 100 Make Your Own
Homemade Soap
Follow along as we make decorative bars of soap using herbs and flowers.
102 Make Your Own Natural
Laundry Soap
When you’re the soap-maker, you’ll no longer have to guess about the mysterious chemistry in your wash.
104 The Easy-Breezy, Breathing
Easy Cleaning Arsenal
With just 14 simple, inexpensive, grocery-store ingredients, you can clean every part of your home without chemicals or packaging waste.
108 Make Your Own
Herbal Medicines
Make health simple with homemade herbal medicines, including capsules, poultices, tinctures, salves, and teas.
111 Drying Herbs:
Easier Than You Think
You’ll never buy dried herbs again after you try one or more of these six methods for drying your own herbs at home.
How to Make
COMPOST
Choose from the many easy ways to make compost for increased garden productivity: low-cost homemade bins, piles sans bins, chicken power, pest-proof tumblers—even indoor worm bins!
10 MOTHER EARTH NEWS PREMIUM • DIY PROJECTS
By Barbara Pleasant Illustrations by Melanie Powell
C
ompost is the ultimate ingredient for building fertile soil. If we all composted our kitchen and garden waste, the world would be a cleaner place, and we would all enjoy more productive organic gardens. Some folks are intimidated by this unfamiliar and seemingly mysterious process—but have no fear! Composting is nothing more than guiding the natural process by which organic wastes decompose. You simply cannot do it wrong. The only challenge is finding sufficient organic materials to make enough black gold to sustain your garden.
Many households compost using multiple methods, and you should experiment to find the composting strategies that work best for you and your garden. Composting is so worth the effort. Adding compost to your garden feeds the soil food web and provides a slow release of nutrients to your crops. Compost also vastly improves soil structure, allows the soil to better hold moisture, and improves the soil’s friability (workability). After surveying hundreds of Mother Earth News readers and checking out what our Facebook community had to say, we were blown away by the many answers to the question of how to make compost at home.
(You can follow us, too, at www. facebook.com/motherearthnewsmag). Many households compost using multiple methods, and the techniques described here are a distillation of strategies employed by Mother Earth News readers. Whether you’re raising chickens, goats, or other veggie-eating, manure-producing animals will have huge implications, because animals can figure so prominently in a composting loop. Composting with critters will get its turn, but first, let’s look at some of the most commonly used compost-making systems.
Composting Techniques Most gardeners make compost by combining their kitchen and garden waste in an outdoor compost pile and waiting for it to rot. There is no need to buy special activators or inoculants, because each dead plant and bucket of food waste added to compost activates different strains of the naturally occurring microbes that promote decomposition. Mangled coffee filters and their kin can be unsightly, however, and aged leftovers sometimes attract unwanted animals and insects in search of food. For
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Build Your Own
Create your own bee condo and save money in the process.
BEEHIVE
By Keith Rawlinson
FROM LEFT: ISTOCK/MARCIN PAWINSKI; ILLUSTRATIONS BY NATE SKOW
K
58 MOTHER EARTH NEWS XXXX/XXXX XXXX
eeping bees is a good, sure way to put some extra money in your pocket, pollinate your crops, and stock your pantry with honey. While you can purchase all the equipment you’ll need to begin keeping bees, hands-on folks may prefer to build their own hives. Not only will this save you some cash, it’ll also give you an understanding of the inner workings of the place your bees will call home. (See diagrams of the supers and covers, and bottom board, at right.) • All items within this set of plans are built with 3⁄4-inch boards and plywood. The type of wood is really not all that important, so I generally use the cheapest I can find, as long as the wood is solid and without cracks. • It is extremely important to make sure all eight corners of each super are matched up before driving any nails. After glue is applied and the joints are slipped together, match up each corner, one by one, and drive in the nail closest to the matched corner to hold it in place while you nail the remainder of the joint. This is especially necessary if working with slightly warped or cupped boards. Straight boards are generally no problem. • When nailing the top corners of the supers, be sure to place the corner nail down low enough so that it does not go into the rabbet joint instead of the wood itself. • Remember, it is always a good idea to use plenty of waterproof wood glue when assembling beekeeping equipment. It’s better to use too much rather than too little; you can always wipe off the excess, so be generous! • The deep and shallow supers are put together with what I call a “tab joint” (really a modified box joint). It’s nearly as strong as the finger joints used on commercially made equipment, but is much easier to make and requires no special tools.
Outer cover
Inner cover
Shallow super
Frame
Deep super
Queen excluder
Deep super
Bottom board
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beneficial for treating wounds, blemishes, boils, dermatitis, herpes, fever blisters, and more!” The first step, and probably the most difficult part, was finding the ingredients. I needed lavender flowers, rosemary leaves, lavender oil, and rosemary oil. For those who can get their hands on fresh herbs, Maine explains how to dry them yourself and also how to extract the oils. It was February, so I was forced to opt for dried herbs rather than fresh ones. Unfortunately, dried herbs and oils are not exactly sold at every corner store, but at least you can obtain herbs, oils, and glycerin by mail order. After I arrived home, glad to have completed my shopping mission, I began the actual process of making a healing soap. I made an infusion with the dried lavender flowers and rosemary leaves. This only took about 10 minutes, and gave A mold made specifically for soap helps in the removal of the finished product. me a sneak peek at what my kitchen would smell like all day. Then, I used a double boiler to melt the soap base into liquid form. After this was done, I added the infusion, the oils, and This recipe called for 3 cups glycerin soap base. This is the some pulverized rosemary leaves. I stirred a little to ensure equivalent of about six average-sized bars of glycerin soap, but even distribution throughout the soap, and then immeI ended up with about a dozen smaller, more decorative soaps, diately poured the liquid into the molds. Altogether, this which I gave to friends and family. process took roughly 30 minutes. I found this particular soap to be inappropriate for people Because I couldn’t wait for a good glycerin soap base to with dry skin. I do use it in the shower at times or to wash arrive in the mail, I used the glycerin base I found at a lomy face and find it works well and smells wonderful. My cal pharmacy. I don’t know whether it was the quality of grandmother, for one, is hooked. She washes her face with the soap or the molds I used, but the one problem I came it every night, claiming it makes her skin feel like silk. On across was removing the soaps from their molds after they the whole, the entire procedure is very economical, espehad hardened. cially if you pick the The soap is supposed to harden after one hour, but I left herbs and extract the Ingredients mine overnight to ensure that prying them out of the molds oils yourself. Although • 3 cups glycerin soap base would not harm their shape. each recipe calls for a • 1⁄4 cup infusion of lavender For molds, I used small ridged muffin tins. When the small quantity of each flowers and rosemary soaps hardened, it was difficult to maneuver them out of the substance, ingredileaves* molds. The longer I let them sit, the easier it was to remove ents may be sold only • 11⁄2 teaspoons lavender oil the soap. Lining the molds with plastic wrap or using a siliin larger quantities. • 1⁄2 teaspoon rosemary oil cone soap-mold might facilitate this procedure. To get your money’s • 1 teaspoon pulverized dried
Rosemary Lavender Soap
HOMEMADE SOAP Follow along as we make decorative bars of soap using herbs and flowers. Sandy Maine made her first bar of soap in her kitchen. She loved making soap so much, she eventually went on to found a small business, SunFeather Soaps, which occupied three buildings and employed 15 people. When former Mother Earth News intern Jennifer Barros saw a copy of Maine’s book, Soothing Soaps for Healthy Skin (Interweave Press, 1997), she was inspired to fill some muffin tins with homemade herbal soap. 100 MOTHER EARTH NEWS PREMIUM • DIY PROJECTS
By Jennifer Barros
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he recipe I chose for my homemade soap was lavender and rosemary soap, which is found under a section called “Soaps for Blemished Skin.” Maine gives a brief description of each soap and explains that both lavender and rosemary are “antiseptic, anti-inflammatory, and
LEFT TO RIGHT: FOTOLIA (2)/WHITESTORM, PHOTOFOLLIES
Make Your Own
Find other books on making handmade soaps on our website, www.motherearthnews.com/store. Maine sold SunFeather Soaps in 2011, and now owns Adirondack Fragrance & Flavor Farm. She continues to make soaps and other bodycare products, based at her old-fashioned farm in the northern Adirondack Mountains. Maine’s current work—soaps, body care products, and cleaning products—can be accessed at her website, www.adk fragrancefarm.com.
worth, you may even consider selling them yourself or through a local farm stand. Directions: Combine melted base and herbal ingredients, stir until blended, then pour into molds, and cool.
rosemary * Infusions are made by pouring steaming water over plant parts, 3 tablespoons dried or fresh herb per cup of water, steeped 10 minutes. Non-chlorinated water is best.
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Make Your Own Herbal
MEDICINES Make health simple with homemade herbal medicines, including capsules, poultices, tinctures, salves, and teas. By Brook Elliot
O
ne of the many advantages of herbal medicine for gardeners is that many herbs are easy to grow. In fact, a number of medicinal plants commonly are grown as ornamentals—why go to the store to buy echinacea when you can grow this lovely flu-fighting herb in your own yard? Even if you don’t choose to grow herbs yourself, the basic ingredients for many herbal remedies can be purchased in health-food stores and prepared in your own kitchen. When I first started working with medicinal plants, I discovered the trick was not in finding the herbs I needed but in knowing how to use them. Then I found Making Plant Medicine, a book by Richo Cech, the owner of Strictly Medicinal Seeds in Williams, Oregon. That book changed my life because it taught me how to make first-aid, health, and beauty products right at home. The following directions for basic homemade herbal medicines, including capsules, poultices, tinctures, infused oils, salves, balms, and teas, come from the book along with examples of easy-to-grow herbs to use for each preparation.
FROM LEFT: FOTOLIA/JEAN PAUL CHASSENET; MONA MAKELA
Encapsulating Herbs One simple way to consume medicinal herbs is to swallow them in capsules. To prepare capsules, simply grind the dried roots, leaves, or blooms of the plant and fill capsules with the resulting powder. You can grind dried plants with an oldfashioned mortar and pestle, or try using an electric blender or coffee mill. Capsules are inexpensive and available in many health-food stores; one 00-sized capsule can hold about 500 mg of a dried herb, but weigh your own to get an exact measurement. Echinacea, for example, can be effective in boosting your immunity and relieving symptoms when taken at the first sign of a cold or flu. While several species have medicinal value, Echinacea purpurea is one of the easiest to grow. For use in capsules, harvest and dry the above-ground portions of the plant. The recommended dose for treating a cold is 900 mg a day, according to the German government’s Commission E guidelines, which often are used as a standard for herbal dosages.
Poultices
A poultice is whole or mashed plant material that is applied externally so the herb’s properties can be absorbed by the skin. Poultices are often used to reduce inflammation, improve circulation, and speed the healing of cuts, scrapes, and other sores. Comfrey, for example, has anti-inflammatory and cellregenerating properties that can make an effective poultice for treating bruises and sprains. A comfrey poultice can be made with fresh or dry leaves—just moisten them and apply as a half-inch-thick layer, placed directly on the affected skin. Bind the poultice in place with a clean cloth. Note: Comfrey should not be used on deep puncture wounds as the surface can heal too quickly, trapping infection-causing bacteria inside the wound. This herb also should never be ingested, as it can contain harmful alkaloids. Used externally, comfrey generally is considered safe.
Tinctures A tincture is made by soaking fresh or ground herbs in alcohol to extract and preserve the active constituents of the plant. One of the advantages of tinctures is their long shelf life—most will keep for a year or longer. Many tinctures are meant to be taken internally (these are often diluted with water and swallowed). Others are meant to be applied directly to the skin. For example, calendula flowers make a good firstaid tincture for treating cuts, scrapes, and bruises because of the herb’s antibacterial properties. Different tincturing methods can be used, but Cech favors this approach: Begin by Use St. John’s wort as an infused oil to treat bruises and sprains, or take it as a tincture to soothe digestion.
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