Book Review: Personality Tests for Your Soil by Anna Hess

One of Anna’s most valuable skills as a writer is taking the information in long-winded and highly technical textbooks and distilling the most interesting and useful parts into concise, practical advice for non-scientists. This eBook, Personality Tests for Your Soil (Volume 1 in her Ultimate Guide to Soil series),  is yet another outstanding exhibit of exactly that. For example, did you know that the base of your soil’s personality was set in place thousands or even millions of years ago? Maybe it’s just us, but it blows our minds to think that the types of rocks that formed when the earth’s crust was solidifying, or that were ground up when the glaciers receded, impact how our garden is growing today. (At least, it blows Jake's mind.  Katie is often times more interested in keeping Jake from transferring that dirt into the house at a slightly-higher-than-glacial rate.)

It turns out soil has a personality.  If you can convince your dirt to be easygoing and gregarious, and yet have some hoarder tendencies, it will grow good vegetables for you.

We loved this book, but before you buy it, you should know this: if your garden soil isn’t producing like it should, you can probably remedy the problem by adding organic matter. It’s like a Snickers bar when your soil is hungry, and you can probably figure that out with a few minutes of internet searching. But if you want to know HOW to add that organic matter, Anna’s got you covered (although some of her other books have more details. And if adding organic matter doesn’t work, e.g., if you happen to have an extreme underlying mineral imbalance, Anna tells you in this book how to confirm that with a professional soil test, and she promises to tell you how to remineralize your soil in Volume 3 of this series.)

If you also want to get to know your soil better, which we hope you do, Anna tells you in this volume how to interpret what your overwintered broccoli stalks, your carrots, your soil color, and your earthworms are telling you about your soil. (The worms are probably the most articulate in that sense, with their number, size, and architectural designs all telling you something.) She also gives a number of tests to help you find out your soil type, including the online Web Soil Survey. The brief tutorial on the Web Soil Survey is especially helpful for the very useful, but not-very-user-friendly web app. (Although urbanites, with their highly-disturbed soils, might not get as much value from the Web Soil Survey as more rural folks. For example, our canning jar test looked just like Anna’s—about 7% clay—but the soil survey said we should have about 30% clay in our Nunn-Urban complex. Fortunately, we realized from reading this book that we should trust the canning jar test more!)

We learned that many gardeners assume they have clayey soil when it's actually improperly-curated silt.

Overall, this book is a fascinating and quick read, and a very useful reference guide. We love it when an eBook tells us how to harness geology, biology, environmental chemistry, and materials science to help grow food, and even though we received a free copy in exchange for an honest review, we would have gladly paid the price of admission for the information Anna has crystallized in this eBook.

Book Review: Small-Scale No-Till Gardening Basics by Anna Hess

If you follow Anna Hess' blog, or if you've read her books on gardening, you know she's passionate about dirt.  Especially the dirt in which she grows vegetables.  As a result, she's spent a LOT of time turning an eroded, nutrient-depleted patch of ground into an impressively productive garden space on her southwest Virginia homestead.

The cover shows Anna with good dirt, Anna with giant sweet potatoes, and a soybean cover crop in a solarized bed, all on a background of an oat (or ryegrass?) cover crop.  That's two positive outcomes and two tools in the toolbox, if you're counting.

 
Not surprisingly, she's learned quite a bit in the process, and is currently distilling her real-world experience and knowledge of soil science theory into an easy-to-read, highly-actionable eBook series to help you do the same for your garden.  Small-Scale No-Till Gardening Basics is Volume 2 in the series, and is an excellent addition.  By the end of Volume 1, you should know what kind of dirt you're dealing with.  In Volume 2, Anna tells you how to start dealing with it in the context of no-till (or till-once) gardening, which is hands-down the optimal way to build fertility and battle weeds (that is, optimizing speed, cost, and effort).

Accumulating organic matter and strategically using kill mulches are the backbone of small-scale, no-till gardening (after initially remedying things like compaction issues), but how to best deploy those tools depends on your specific circumstances.  The book has very detailed advice for normal-to-overly-wet garden areas, because that's where Anna has the most experience. There aren't as many tips for dry-climate gardens (which, coincidentally, is where we happen to garden), but if you are in a dry climate and not garden-space constrained, Steve Solomon's Gardening Without Irrigation is a useful complementary reference.  (If you are space constrained like we are, you may have to resign yourself to installing some type of irrigation, but minimal tillage is still a good idea.)

One possibly-confusing note is that the "plant-now" lasagna gardening technique mentions squash as a good option in this "shallow-roots-only" system early in the book, but says later on that winter squash are deep-rooted and not suitable for that system. We had to wonder, is summer squash ok and winter squash not ok?  We couldn't find much differentiation between winter squash and summer squash root systems, except slide 93 of this random, 241-slide presentation, which does indeed suggest that winter squash cultivars have deeper root systems than summer squash cultivars.  However, the same slide includes tomatoes with the deep-rooted veggies, while Anna says they work well in the shallow-root-only system.  On the other hand, this book lumps winter and summer squash together.  So, there's a bit of ambiguity on the squash front, but otherwise things seem to check out.

Finally, while there is a ton of practical advice throughout the book, we thought the recommendations might also be usefully represented as a flow chart.   So, although there are many details and insights we couldn't fully capture in a graphic like this, we put together a sort of 'quick-start guide' to help you get your no-till (or till-once) garden started this year:

If you're planning to break new ground for your garden, you might want to consider getting a broadfork.

Our overall conclusion: We liked this book a lot, and although we received a free copy in exchange for an honest review, we feel it's definitely worth the $2.99 price of admission. There are a lot of lessons from the school of hard knocks in these pages, and for all the effort and experimentation it took to learn those lessons (and write them into book form!), three bucks is definitely fair.

Book Review: How to Bake Without Baking Powder by Leigh Tate

Our last three posts were inspired by Leigh Tate's series on her own blog about baking with ash water, and she's now got an eBook available, too.  The latest volume in The Little Series of Homestead How-Tos includes much more than just baking with ash water leavening, though.  It's a comprehensive guide to understanding what baking powder is and how it works, and how to substitute for both the baking soda and acid components.

Biscuits on a fence for the cover.  We would definitely not be on the fence about eating those biscuits.

Since this is a unabashedly nerdy blog, we cannot, in good faith, mention baking powder without discussing the chemistry.  Briefly, baking powder contains a carbonate (typically baking soda), one or two types of acid (typically sodium aluminum sulfate (NaAl(SO₄)₂), various phosphate salts, and/or potassium bitartrate (cream of tartar)), and some kind of starch to keep the powder from sticking together.  The acids react with the carbonate to produce carbon dioxide gas when liquid is added and/or when the mixture is heated, depending on which acids are present in the baking powder.  The release of carbon dioxide is what causes baked goods to rise.

So, to bake without baking powder, as the title says, you need to substitute at least the carbonate and the acid components.

As you may know, your kitchen likely contains a lot of options for substituting the acid component, including vinegar, apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, sour cream, yogurt, whey, molasses, and honey.  At least some of those you could probably make on your own if you couldn't get to the grocery store (or didn't want to), or if society had collapsed but you still wanted to make biscuits.  There are also instructions for making some of them, like buttermilk (and cultured buttermilk), along with sourdough starter, which might have fit better in a future volume of yeast-based leavenings, but is nice to have here nonetheless.

Your options for substituting the carbonate component with homemade ingredients are more limited, consisting of essentially potassium carbonate and bicarbonate from wood ashes.  Calcium carbonate from eggshells doesn't work as well, although you might be able to make ammonium carbonate from deer antlers if you're not opposed to setting up a still and happen to have some potash laying around. (Who says you can't eat the horns?)

Of the 54 recipes the book includes, 33 use baking soda, one uses sodium carbonate, 10 use pearlash, saleratus (potassium bicarbonate), ash water, or wood ash, and three use hartshorn (ammonium carbonate).  The other seven get their leavening from eggs or 'emptings,' the yeasty residue that settles at the bottom of brewing vessels, but that, unlike most yeast-based leaveners can apparently be used in quick breads like a chemical leavener. So, in some cases, it's also possible to get by without a carbonate at all. It's worth noting that with a little trial and error, you can substitute some of the wood-ash based leaveners for baking soda, as Leigh did in the series linked at the beginning of this post.

Here's the recipe-leavening breakdown for the book.  Saleratus = potassium bicarbonate; other includes eggs and 'emptings.' (Click it to enlarge.)

It's also really cool to see recipes that are over two hundred years old compiled into the same book as recipes Leigh developed on her own modern-day homestead to make use of her own byproducts, like whey from making goat cheese, and wood ashes from her wood stove.  In that way, it's sort of a living history book. Reading between the lines, there's a story that develops from 'people who realized mixing these random ingredients together made bubbles, which in turn made tastier cookies,' to 'if we mix an acid and a carbonate in these ratios, we'll produce sufficient carbon dioxide to leaven the cookies and not leave a bitter taste.'  Fascinating stuff.

Along the same line of thought as that latter point, one of our favorite parts of the book is the table of recommended ratios for the various household acids and baking soda.  i.e., how much lemon juice do you mix with a teaspoon of baking soda?  How much molasses do you mix with a teaspoon of baking soda to get the same leavening effect?  That's a pretty handy resource that makes substituting ingredients much easier.

The only thing we would have liked to see more of is photographs of the baked goods!  There's a delicious picture of biscuits on the cover, but inside the book, there are only links for a few of the recipes that appeared on Leigh's blog, 5 Acres and a Dream.  On the other hand, fewer pictures to drool over means a lower probability of a shorted-out keyboard, so maybe it was a good strategy after all.

We should mention that we received a free copy of the book, not with any expectations of a review, but, well, for simply being interested enough in the chemistry to contribute some thoughts on Leigh's blog.  That said, we would have gladly ponied up the $2.99 price tag of this book.  It's clear that Leigh put in many, many hours of research on this book, and three bucks is more than fair for that effort.

In summary--How to Bake Without Baking Powder is an excellent reference and we have no qualms about recommending it to everyone.  Readers, start your ovens...ready...go!

THL Giveaway: Win a copy of Weekend Homesteader by Anna Hess!

Since we're right in the midst of the holiday season, we'd like to give one of our readers the perfect gift for an aspiring homesteader: a real live paperback copy of The Weekend Homesteader by Anna Hess. We love the book to pieces, and we recently acquired a second copy. (Thanks, Anna!)  We're grateful for the duplicate, because it allows us to host the first ever Homestead Laboratory giveaway! How exciting! (You can read more of our thoughts on the book here.)

Now hopefully, y'all are in a giving mood, too, because you (our readers) can help us out immensely with a very simple gesture. You see, the biggest item on the Homestead Laboratory wishlist this year is to grow the community here, and we can't do it without getting additional eyeballs on the blog.

So, here's the deal: take a few seconds to share your favorite Homestead Laboratory post on your favorite social media platform, then copy the link to your shared post and enter it into the widget below to earn an entry into the giveaway.  Next Monday, we'll randomly select a winner and drop the book in the mail, hopefully getting it to you by the end of next week (for United States addresses, anyway).

Thanks in advance for helping spread the word about THL.  Ok, ready, go!


a Rafflecopter giveaway

New On Our Reading List: Critter Tales

Leigh Tate's new book, Critter Tales, is out! 

In it, she chronicles her first-hand experiences with many types of livestock on her five-acre quasi-rural homestead in the southern Appalachian mountains. If you read Leigh's blog, you know that she is working to maximize self-sufficiency for herself, her husband, and their animals. Most of her livestock-related posts are on goats, chickens, and more recently, bees, but the book also covers llamas, pigs, guinea fowl, guard dogs, and farm cats.  

We're regular readers of Leigh's blog because she does very good research and combines that research with valuable insight from her own experiences. We're definitely looking forward to reading her new book.  

In the interest of full disclosure, we're helping her promote the book partly because we're hoping to win a copy.  The other part is because we dig her stuff and think you would, too.  If you're interested in winning a copy yourself, check out her announcement post for more info.

Book Review: The Weekend Homesteader

We ordered a copy of Anna Hess' The Weekend Homesteader back in January, and the day it arrived in the mail, we knew it was destined to be a night short on sleep.  Even though we did read into the wee hours of the morning, in the end there proved to be too much content to digest in one sitting.  That was a little bit surprising to us, because we could essentially go through the table of contents and check off most of the weekend projects as things we were already doing or had done in the past.  But although the projects are directed toward absolute beginning homesteaders, either rural or urban, there are gems in almost every chapter for even seasoned homesteaders.  Such is the case when a writer as skilled as Anna is writing from personal experience and the experiences of her acquaintances.  For example, tidbits we found especially intriguing:

Survey your site (April): Plan your homestead around foot traffic 'nodes' and straight lines between them.
Kill mulch (April): good candidates for first-year kill mulch plantings include broccoli, squash, tomatoes, lettuce, and greens.
Freezing food (July): Keep a chart or spreadsheet of how many servings of each food you put in the freezer during the summer and how many you take out during the winter. Use that info to tweak your garden plan the following year. (Could also be used for food preserved by canning or drying.)
Seed saving (August): Cucumber and tomato seeds have a gelatinous coating that has to be fermented off before storing.
Food drying (August): You can make fruit leather and tomato paste on cookie sheets in a sunny car.
Building a chicken tractor (August): An idea for 'fold-down wheels' on levers to make moving the chicken tractor easier, but still flush with the ground when it's in place.
Quick hoops (October): Where to find a metal tubing bender and how to keep the cover fabric/plastic from catching too much wind (or collapsing in the snow).
Plant a fruit tree (December): No-dig planting and hugelkultur prep for the tree to 'grow into.'
Soil test (January): Where to get inexpensive but good soil tests.

Also, the tables for storage and curing conditions of common storage vegetables, seed germination soil temperatures, seed starting times and techniques, and flower blooming times are especially useful references.  We would add that for the storage vegetables that like it 'warm and dry,' such as pumpkins and winter squash, undamaged specimens can make homey decorations until they get used up.

Storage vegetables as decorations.  Doesn't that look nice?  This particular arrangement doesn't make space for a whole season's worth, but the concept is scalable to some extent.

The projects can be sorted into roughly three categories: food growing (including garden and infrastructure preps), food processing, and getting in the mindset of a homesteader.  These categories are spread somewhat evenly throughout the months of the year, but the winter months are heavier on the 'mindset' projects, while the spring and summer months are heavier on the 'food growing' projects.  While most of the information is available elsewhere, much of it for free online, it is extremely valuable to have it synthesized into a single, compact reference like this book.  It's also great that where discussion outside the scope of this book is warranted, Anna gives the relevant references that readers can use to follow up if they want to get more in-depth.

We have two minor concerns:
First, some of the information in terms of food growing is somewhat specific to Anna's microclimate (zone 6 floodplain, i.e., very high groundwater level), so readers might want to check out what authors closer to their climatic conditions recommend before getting started. For example, in drier climates, planting fruit trees in raised mounds might make the roots dry out instead of keeping them from drowning.  Also, we'd wager that most readers won't have the right conditions for storing potatoes under their beds. (Brrr!)

Second, although most of Anna's criticisms of canning are justified, canning doesn't have to be done in large batches as she suggests.  See The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving for sub-quart recipes (or search for similar terms online for a number of blogs that also cover the topic).

So what about year two, once you've completed the 'weekend homesteader' curriculum from this book?  Anna gives a list of projects and tasks on her blog that has evolved into sort of an annual homesteading to-do list.

In sum, this is a great book that pulls a ton of information into an easy-to-follow volume that will be in our collection for years to come.

Book Review: Thrifty Chicken Breeds by Anna Hess

In the third book of her Permaculture Chicken series, Hess does a nice job of synthesizing chicken breed recommendations and statistics from other chicken authors (Gail Damerow, Harvey Ussery, Jenna Woginrich, Robert Plamondon), chicken surveys (Mother Earth News, Backyard Chickens forum), and hatchery catalogs, as well as her own experience.  This book has fewer external citations than some of her other books, but that may be because the content she would need to cite isn't out there--the main point of the book is that a homesteader needs to experiment for himself and find or make chickens that work well in his particular flock.

Hess is quick to note that different folks choose chicken breeds for different reasons, and folks who pick breeds for the same reasons in different climates might get different results. In short, take everyone's advice on chicken breeds (including hers) with a grain of salt: your mileage may vary. Nevertheless, with that context set, Hess' own experience is especially valuable because she's worked with many different breeds, and has refined (is refining) her flock as one big optimization exercise with the following variables:

•Egg production
•Meat production
•Foraging ability
•Predator resistance
•Flightiness-friendliness spectrum
•Broodiness/chick-rearing ability

Because there is a lot of overlap (and some mutual exclusivity) among these variables, prioritization is necessary. For example, light (weight) breeds might produce more eggs and forage well, but can be flighty enough to escape fences and wreck gardens, while only providing minimal meat after egg production drops. Are the extra eggs worth these drawbacks? If you don't like meat or vegetables with your eggs, they might be!  Fortunately, we put together a handy dandy chicken breed selection chart to help out.  It tries to combine some of the content of the book, and some from our own experiences.  Of course, some simplification is required in the conversion to flow chart format, so you'll have to read the book for more details.

The key to finding the optimum for your own flock is genetics, which Hess feels is best worked out at home. That is, don't rely solely on commercial hatchery strains to get what you want--do some experimenting on your own! A diverse flock is one way to balance these variables, and gives the homesteader more genetics to choose from when refining preferred traits across generations of chickens. Of course, many hatcheries carry their own genetic lines, and, if you're going to start with hatchery birds, it helps to start from hatchery strains that have been geared toward production rather than appearance.  Or, another way to look at choosing your chickens:

However, for all the emphasis on selecting and refining good genetics, the 'how-to' of implementing these points is the weak part of the book. Hess mentions hatcheries (especially non mainstream hatcheries), swap meets, and trades with neighbors as suitable ways to introduce new genetics, but she doesn't say which overall method or which hatcheries she prefers.

Similarly, although to a lesser extent, the section on refining flock genetics could be expanded. The book doesn't say explicitly how often new genetics should be brought in, although Hess' Incubation Handbook recommends bringing in a new rooster every year. Also, Hess clearly records a lot of observations about her chickens. Maybe it's just us and our nerdy love of data, but we thought it would have been helpful to see a photo of her 'chicken lab notebook' or a screen shot of her chicken spreadsheet to see what kind of system she's worked out to discern chicken performances in terms of feed consumption (and egg yolk/chicken fat color), egg production, and behavior traits.

However, these shortcomings are overall quite minor. The information on different breeds and the approach Hess lays out for getting the most bang for your chicken buck make this book another great addition to the Permaculture Chicken series and an outstanding value, especially considering the price. We highly recommend it!

What kind of chickens do you raise on your homestead?  Which breeds, varieties, and strains have you found to be most productive for meat and eggs?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Books Review: $50 and up Underground House Book, Earth-Sheltered Solar Greenhouse Book by Mike Oehler

First, a confession: we're huge fans of underground/earth-sheltered structures.  Cooler in the summer, warmer in the winter, virtually immune to tornadoes, nearly invisible to alien invaders...the list of perks goes on and on.  We're also cheap. (Pronounced frew-gull.)  As it turns out, Mike Oehler probably has similar tastes. 

Covers of the relevant books.  The drawing on the cover of the $50 and up book is one of the less spectacular designs in the book, but shows how underground structures can be built even on relatively flat ground.  The drawing on the cover of the greenhouse book shows many of the features of Oehler's design, namely a lower section for standing room, trapping cold air, and potentially sheltering rabbits; a back wall with thermal storage devices, and a roof with venting capability.  We found a copy of the $50 and up book here, and the greenhouse book here.

In the foreword to the greenhouse book, Rob Roy (another underground house expert with his own series of books) says,

"I've always prided myself on sharing information on low-cost green building techniques in my books, but Mike out-flanks me every which way from a Mexican Sunday: the guy builds cheap, dirt cheap, and I say this with begrudging admiration." [Mexican Sunday is another of Oehler's books.]

The books are an entertaining and immensely useful guide to earth-sheltered buildings. Oehler brilliantly mixes personal experiences of building underground structures on the cheap with curmudgeonly (to use Oehler's own words) but endearing political commentary. (How many other books have an entire chapter devoted to circumventing building codes and fooling building inspectors?)

While most other sources on underground buildings advocate the copious use of concrete and insulation materials, Oehler explains how to design and build stable, structurally sound earth-sheltered buildings (provided building codes are not viewed as gospel truth) with materials scrounged, sourced from the homestead, or readily available at the local hardware store: mainly wood and plastic sheeting.

The steps and principles of construction are simple:

1. Dig a hole, optimally on a ridge if a view of the surrounding area is desired, but optionally on a hillside or even on flat ground.
2. Construct a post-and-beam frame in the hole, making sure to place a layer of polyethylene between wood and dirt, e.g., in the holes for the posts.  Also make sure the frame is braced against itself to keep the force of the dirt that will be added outside the walls and on the roof from buckling the frame.  In the greenhouse book, Oehler also mentions that he now chars the bottom end of the posts in a campfire to further preserve the wood.
3. Add shoring on the outside of the frame in the form of lumber mill ends, scrounged boards, etc., again making sure that there is always plastic sheeting between the wood and the dirt.
4. Backfill around and on the structure with dirt, making sure to allow for proper drainage.

Naturally, there are numerous details to each of those steps that Oehler outlines in the books, gleaned through his considerable experimentation with underground structures and experience in the construction industry.

Oehler walks readers through his methodology, which is arguably based on a series of questions:

1. What do I want out of the underground building?  
2. What is the simplest (and cheapest) way I can build a structure that gives me what I want out of the building?
3. What are the problems with the simplest structure, and what can I do solve them?
4. What are the problems with the improved form, and what can I do to further improve the building?
5. ...and so on

Not only is this approach an incredible time-saver for folks like us, who tend to follow the same protocol, but the fact that Oehler has resolved these problems to a sufficient degree to live in his self-built underground houses for decades and to harvest vegetables year-round from his underground greenhouse near the Idaho-Canada border speaks to the soundness of his approach.

Criticism of these books is hard for us to muster.  Oehler calls it like he sees it, which is mostly endearing.  For example, as implied above, we learn straight away that he has a strong disdain for authority in general and especially government involvement in the everyday matters of rural life.  However, one doesn't have to read very far between the lines to guess that Oehler might be a little bit vindictive, even if the vindication comes in the form of somewhat petty remarks in the figure captions of his books.  But the cumulative effect of these comments does very little to detract from overall excellent works.

In sum, we are very happy to have Oehler's experience to draw from when we have a need for some outbuildings on our own homestead and will very likely use some of his techniques.  We highly recommend these books!

Updating the Intergral Urban House: Chapter 2

Back in November, we started working our way through The Integral Urban House, a seminal book on urban homesteading, with the objective of updating the book's excellent but 35-year-old data.  We took a few month-break but we're back and ready for some Chapter 2 action.


Chapter 2 is an introduction to the material and energy balances of the IUH, and also the trippy graphics that characterize the book.  The authors give a high-level overview of the energy flow through their homestead in terms of btu/week, the IUH's nitrogen cycle in terms of lb/week, and a number of other nutrients.   

On their 0.2-acre lot (in Berkeley, CA), the Integral Urban House was able to produce 43% of their food and 44% of their energy needs (for five adult humans) while drastically reducing their outputs to the sewer and landfill. ¹Wikipedia, ²EPA

These graphics are remarkable for two main reasons--the visualization of energy and nutrients as resources to be recycled (and ways to recycle them) instead of inputs and outputs that flow linearly through the homestead system, and the degree of quantification achieved by the authors (thorough even by today's standards!).  Along with cyclically-flowing resources, the authors also discuss the benefits of a certain degree of redundancy for generating these resources and capitalizing on the byproducts of their use.  For example, heating by passive solar energy when it's sunny, but having a wood stove for cloudy days, and having the option to send organic wastes to worms, chickens, or compost (if both the worms and chickens are full).  The same concepts were being simultaneously pioneered by Bill Mollison, David Holmgren, and Sepp Holzer, and introduced decades earlier by Joseph Russell Smith (Tree Crops book linked here), Toyohiko Kagawa, and Masanobu Fukuoka (among others).

Perhaps an update to this chapter would be a carbon balance and cycle.  Not just in terms of CO₂ consumption and emission, but soil and plant carbon balances.  Many homesteaders, both urban and rural, are continually on the search for high-carbon substances for balancing compost composition, increasing soil organic matter, firewood, building materials, etc.

It seems that a significant fraction of 'sustainable living' can be attributed to high-fertility soil, which can often be attributed to organic matter imports from outside the homestead property.  These materials are wonderful amenities now because they are readily available, cheap (or free), and often considered waste by non-homesteading-minded folks.  But for true sustainability, shouldn't the organic materials come from the homestead property itself?  Surely if everyone tried to 'live sustainably,' the hundreds of pounds of free horse manure and old cedar fence panels from Craigslist (way more exciting than it sounds) would quickly vanish, accompanied by an eventual decrease in the soil fertility/sustainability of a given homestead.

The natural follow-up question is, what is the minimum acreage required to make a 'carbon-neutral' homestead possible? The answer to that question will obviously vary widely by region--five acres in northern Georgia will produce way more carbon than five acres in the Nevada desert.  But if, like in the Integral Urban House, we convert everything to units of energy and compare with other studies, we can come to a ballpark (or at least average) number.

Figure 2-4 of the IUH says they import 150 thousand british thermal units (kbtu) as non-vegetable food, 1,250 kbtu as fuel (petroleum, natural gas, electricity, and wood), and use about 5,000 kbtu as solar energy to grow plants.  Then they import another 196 kbtu as vegetable-type groceries, 120 kbtu as animal feed, and 19 kbtu as meat groceries, bringing the grand total to 6,615 kbtu per week, or 343,980 kbtu per year.

The famous Billion-Ton Study, published by the US Department of Energy in 2005, said that of the 2.263 billion acres encompassed by the US, around 50%, or 1.132 billion acres, is suitable for biomass production (pg. 20).  This amount of land could produce 1.366 billion tons (3005.2 billion pounds) of biomass (feedstock for fuel for them, but approximating food, fuel, etc. for us) per year (pg. 17), with some modest assumptions about yields and recovery costs.  Since the combustion energy of biomass is conservatively around 6.45 kbtu/lb, that means that it should be possible to produce 8,565.4 kbtu per acre per year.  Dividing the number for the IUH by the number from the DOE gives 40.2 acres for the IUH to be perfectly balanced.  There were five people living there, so that works out to about 8 acres per person. (Using the upper range of 8.20 kbtu/lb for biomass combustion drops that number to about 6.3 acres per person).

Crude calculation for minimum number of acres required per person for homestead carbon neutrality, based on an IUH-level lifestyle and diet.

That number represents an average across the US and is a little higher than the number derived by a Swedish university organic farm last spring of a little over one acre per person.  However, the Swedish study used a base case of 80 acres, which isn't infinitely down-scalable: it wouldn't work to grow 1/6 of a cow on 1 acre, for example.  The Swedish study also put a high emphasis on food calories regardless of source, which strongly emphasized dairy and de-emphasized vegetables and meat.  Therefore, although our calculation here is a little more crude, 8 acres per person is probably more realistic, and maybe even a little low if one wants to produce his own grains, dairy, and building materials self-sufficiently.  Also, don't forget to take advantage of direct solar and wind energy, which have efficiency ceilings considerably higher than photosynthesis (which produces biomass).

Chapter 2 of the Integral Urban House ends with a hopeful wish that, much like hot rodders in the 1970s or silly television in the 2010s features folks competing to have the most aristocratic vehicles and houses (or rides and cribs, if you prefer...but tyrannosaurus rex eggs?), future mainstream endeavors will feature a sort of contest to see which crib can be most integrated and sustainable.  The authors might be disappointed with how far the mainstream has come in the last 35 years, but maybe there's a glimmer of hope?

Plus, there's always the internet, with it's endless fountains of sustainability inspiration!

Have you measured the balance of energy and resources on your homestead?  How sustainable did you come out?  What's the size of your homestead and how much organic matter do you import?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Book Review: Naturally Bug Free by Anna Hess

Anna Hess' new ebook, Naturally Bug Free, is an excellent resource for gardeners who want to combat garden pests, but not with man-made chemicals.  It has a lot of the same advice as other books like Good Bug Bad Bug, and Organic Gardener's Handbook of Natural Pest and Disease Control, but at a fraction of the price.  The main difference is that Naturally Bug Free covers only the most common garden insects in detail (and not bacterial, viral, or fungal diseases at all) , but gives a systematic approach that can be used for the rest. Also, Hess' photography is much better. 

The cover, featuring (clockwise from upper left) a tomato hornworm parasitized by a good wasp, a movie-star praying mantis, an industrious honey bee, and an aphid farm managed by ants (which sometimes make poor life choices).

Hess lays out a number of steps gardeners can take to develop a well-functioning garden ecosystem, starting with an exhortation to 'know thy bugs.'  If an unknown bug arrives in your garden, you must find out it's function.  Is it a pest?  Is it benign?  Is it a beneficial insect that moved in to feast on a pest? What and where is the pest it's hunting?  Hess gives a number of resources she uses to identify new bugs in her garden.

After covering a number of garden pests common almost everywhere (based mainly on a Mother Earth News survey), Hess moves on to methods for encouraging friendlies in the garden, from good insects and worms, to birds, amphibians and mammals.  (Spoiler alert not needed by permaculture enthusiasts: maximize landscape diversity and provide habitat for the good guys.)  Some of the beneficials Hess sees in her garden are more prominent in her local environment--with nearby wetlands and high groundwater--than many readers will find in theirs (such as turtles and underground crayfish), but she gives a few pointers that readers anywhere can try.  Hess also points out that a lot of the beneficials have some annoying quirks, such as box turtles that eat tomatoes or birds that take one bite of a strawberry, but notes that their presence is net positive after considering the number of slugs they'll eat.  Even deer, which are definitely net-negative for a garden, can be a valuable source of meat for the gardener.

Hess also gives advice for the time period between establishing a garden and having a balanced ecosystem to keep pests in check.  In this regard, judicious timing of plantings and planting trap crops can be helpful.  Other helpful approaches can be choosing bug-resistant varieties from the get-go (the same approach is  helpful for non-bug pests, too, such as fungi and bacteria) and employing more labor-intensive direct methods of pest control like row covers and hand-picking.

A couple examples of strategic succession planting that Hess uses to time harvests away from peak periods of pests such as squash vine borers and cabbage moths.

The book wraps up by pointing out that even fruits and veggies that aren't grocery store-quality (i.e., that have some cosmetic damage), can still be delicious and nutritious with a little extra trimming.  We whole-heartedly agree, and we wish more authors would tout such an approach.

An excellent epilogue is an excerpt from another of Hess' books, Homegrown Humus, which is especially appropriate given the key role soil health plays in plant health, and consequently plants' ability to fend off pests.

Our only criticism is that, because Hess advocates ecosystem-level management of garden pests by encouraging beneficial predators that depend on a certain minimum population of pests to eat (i.e., a biological equilibrium), the book would more appropriately be titled 'Naturally Bug-Optimal.'  But 'bug-free' definitely rolls off the tongue better.


Have you read Naturally Bug Free?  What did you think?  What methods do you use to naturally control pests in your garden?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Book Review: Growing Into a Farm, by Anna Hess

Maybe it's because Anna Hess' and our childhoods and childhood ambitions were so similar, or maybe it's because both of our primary life goals haven't changed all that much since age nine, but Hess' new e-book resonated strongly with us.  Her easygoing and open writing style make the book a quick read (we've read several of her books, and finished each in a single session), and for folks like us, for whom homesteading is still a work in progress, it's inspiring to read about the journey of someone who has made it for real.  And although Hess mentioned that this book is one of her more 'fluffy' productions, there is plenty of practical advice for attentive readers.

The cover, featuring Anna and her homestead's first veggies.

The book takes an autobiographical tour of Hess' life nearly up to the beginning of her full-time homesteading career.  (More details of the interim between then and now are given in her other books.)  For aspiring homesteaders (especially those seeking a secluded and rural property on a budget), Hess' life lessons are an invaluable treasure.  Some of the most pertinent tidbits we gleaned from the book are:

Factors to look for when selecting a tract of land.  If the land is $300/acre, there's probably a good reason.  It might be polluted (e.g., from mining operations), land-locked, full of invasive plant species, 90% marsh etc.  It's also worthwhile to inquire about the level of the water table, especially if you are considering an underground house.  In the end, selecting land is an optimization problem with convenience, budget, seclusion, and start-up labor as variables.

How to screen partners/mates to make sure they won't get in the way of are on board with your homesteading goals.  Some folks start out with a fiercely independent outlook that they're going to live off the land and do everything themselves, and don't need no help from no one!  (Jake may have been guilty of such aspirations.)  But not everyone is Dick Proenneke.  A second person can change the whole program in a good way.  They contribute a second brain to brainstorms, make the mundane tasks go twice as fast, and will come to look at the cool stuff you find in the woods, for example.

There will be setbacks, so stay flexible and positive!  The old farmhouse you planned to salvage might only be fit for condemnation.  Deer will devour your first crops.  A high water table will thwart your housing plans.  Your carefully planned schedule for moving to the property full-time will be demolished by unforeseen events.  But keep the ultimate goal in mind, and you will eventually succeed!  To return to the previous nugget, a second person can also make it harder to give up when things seem hopeless.

Don't wait until you move to learn the skills you'll need.  If you want to grow your own food, do what you can with your current circumstances.  Start building stuff or prototypes of stuff you plan to use on the homestead, such as cold frames and food dehydrators.  It will make the eventual transition way easier.  Joel Salatin says the same thing about farming--experience is the key to success.

How to pester utility companies so they will connect your service.  One drawback of living in the boonies, depending on your point of view (and since you're reading this on the internet, we'll assume you would see it as a drawback), is that it can be hard to convince utility companies to connect electric and internet service.  With a tight budget (precluding an off-grid setup), personal pride (not relying too heavily on friends and relatives), and the power of the internet as an income-generating tool, utility connections are, for better or worse, a high-priority item in modern-day homesteading.

There are only two minor criticisms of the book we can conjure.  The first is that some of the details on Hess' emotions, journal entries, and conversations with her future husband could have been spared.  For us, this was the 'fluffy' part of the book.  For other readers, these details might resonate with their own experiences, so we can't wholeheartedly dismiss their inclusion as unnecessary.

The second is that some of the photos are blurry and/or unnecessary.  Pictures of everyday tasks, like baking cookies at an Aunt's house, and pictures of other family members who weren't part of the main story line kind of interrupted the flow of the story for us.  It was nice to see the faces of the folks who helped out along the way, but we'd wager there's a fairly small subset of this book's readership for which the photos will have real meaning.

In all, a book worth considerably more than the price of admission, and another great addition to Hess' already great series of homesteading e-books.  Definitely recommend it.


Have you read this book?  Did you have a different impression than we did?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Updating the Integral Urban House: Chapter 1

The Integral Urban House, published in 1979, is one of the truly seminal books in urban homesteading.  The book records the experiments of the house's residents as they remodeled the house and site to minimize waste generation and resource consumption while maximizing on-site production of food and energy.  The book gives an outline for a very methodical and calculated optimization of those goals, and lays out expectations for limits on the degree of self reliance one can expect from a city lot.  Although it was published almost 35 years ago, The Integral Urban House is still one of the most comprehensive and detailed guides for becoming as self-reliant as one's circumstances allow.  The methods developed by the authors are quite keen on conserving space, but the main concepts are applicable regardless of one's available geological surface area.  However, although the philosophies and motivations have stood strong since the book's original publishing, one big catch is that, since 35 years ago, the technology and resources available to aspiring homesteaders (urban or otherwise), have changed dramatically.

The book's original cover.  A reprint in the 1990s had a green-colored version

We thought, therefore, that it would be a worthwhile endeavor, although immense, to work our way through the book and rehash the authors' research with insights from the modern era.  We also wanted to add perspective from a colder climate since the book (and even many modern urban homesteading books) are somewhat centric to areas with mild winters.  (The Integral Urban House was in Berkeley, CA).

The real meat of the book starts in part two, with chapter four covering energy conservation.  The first three chapters mainly describe the motivation and approach, which don't need much updating.  In the interest of completeness, we'll cover those as well, but with a more descriptive take.  On the docket for today: Chapter 1: Beginnings.

The chapter starts by pointing out that the book is more about the ideas of transitioning from linear to cyclic systems than the authors implementation of the ideas on their specific space in Berkeley.  The authors mention several other similar projects throughout the country, including the Ouroboros house in Minnesota, the East Eleventh Street Project in New York (mentioned here), the Institute for Local Self Reliance in Washington, DC, and (not mentioned but pertinent) the New Alchemy Institute in Massachusetts.

From there, the authors get into the motivation for the book from the (now standard) angles of 'peak oil is coming' (the book was published in the wake of the 1973 oil embargo), 'what would you do if society implodes?,' and 'modern technology has flooded our bodies with carcinogenic chemicals while allowing us to eat unhealthy food and be lazy.'  Those angles are nowadays a dead horse still being beaten, but they were quite fresh in the late 1970s.  Regardless of one's position on the availability and consequences of fossil fuels, the point was (is) that the 'urban lifestyle' as typically manifested, was (is) shortsighted, polluted, and unsustainable.  Since the authors also feel that few urbanites could, should, or have a desire to 'de-urbanize,' it might be tempting to interpret the theme of the book to be something like 'how to make the best of a bad situation.'  But it's not really that.  Other huge driving forces for the authors were the psychological and economic liberation that accompany self reliance, especially if the self reliance comes in a setting with limited natural resources.  As architects, engineers, and scientists, the authors also embraced the challenge of developing a house that was both a 'habitat and life-support system.'  The authors further acknowledged that the urban environment provided a high concentration of like-minded folks to help their community-scale projects, such as waste recycling, gain momentum.  And above all, the authors wanted to provide a model that others could work from in their own houses and communities.

The authors recognized that their ultimate goals for the house would require lifestyle and behavior changes, and identified nine factors that they observed to influence their ability to make such a change:

1. Cultural/personal taboos, e.g., working with human wastes
2. Urgency of making the change, e.g., reducing water consumption during a drought
3. Sustained awareness, e.g., frequently seeing dead plants during a drought
4. Family/community support, e.g., having a community recycling infrastructure when starting to recycle
5. Stress induced by not making the change, e.g., overflowing garbage cans because recyclables not sorted
6. Information availability on options for change
7. Immediacy of rewards for making the change
8. Self image
9. Concrete models available

Clearly, the internet has changed the game for many of these factors since abundant information and models around the world are now available with the click of a few buttons.  The internet can also provide a sort of community support and make the end result of both making and not making a change more visualizable, which can in turn influence one's self image, one's opinion of the rewards, and the stress one experiences from not making the change.

The authors also adopted a process for taking a desired change from conception to practice, which included perception of a problem, articulating the solution, visualizing different approaches to solving the problem, selecting and affirming the best approach, and finally implementing the change.  The internet has also changed that:

Differences between the approach to solving a homesteading-related problem as practiced at the Integral Urban House in 1979, and what  (some) modern homesteaders do in 2013.

 
Have you read the Integral Urban House?  What did you think of their approach?  Do you know of other 'integral' houses?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Book Review: You Can Farm by Joel Salatin

We recently finished reading Joel Salatin's You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start and $ucceed in a Farming Enterprise.  It's a good read, although at 450 pages, not a quick one.  The book is an overview of the all factors Salatin estimates to be the particularly important in starting a profitable farm.  It brings this breadth at the expense of depth, but the 'how-to' is presumably in some of Salatin's other books, Pastured Poultry Profits and Salad Bar Beef (which we haven't read yet).  You Can Farm is full of anecdotal advice from Salatin's experiences with pastured livestock (especially chickens, beef cows, and pigs, with turkeys and rabbits also frequently mentioned), which is valuable, but in our opinion doesn't justify owning the book.  Check it out from the library, take a few notes, and return it.  At times, Salatin incorporates enough of his own philosophy to make wary readers consider a second opinion--which is fortunate, if inadvertent--but the main theme (of the farming part) is happily focused on permaculture principles.  The book is especially valuable in that it weaves together farming practices and business practices to explain why incorporating these principles is the most surefire way to make a farm profitable.  It's important to keep in mind, however, that this is a book about profiting from a farming enterprise, independent of what one may prefer to grow for his own consumption.

This book is from the library.  It's clearly well-read, although we wonder how many readers have picked up their own copy after reading the library's.  The book is full of good advice and wisdom, but not the type of reference material that earns a book that coveted spot on our shelf.

Salatin focuses on raising livestock, but makes sure to point out many other enterprises that he's seen work just as well (even though he doesn't have as much personal experience in them).  He seems to have settled on the conclusion that the best return for time invested lies in pasture-raised meat and eggs. He makes use of a few primary functions for each type of livestock that complement the others, which allows him to 'stack' enterprises, or produce multiple products from a piece of land in any given year:

•Cows harvest grass and fertilize pastures
•Chickens follow cows or pair with rabbits to control pests
•Pigs aerate compost and till soil, fertilize soil, and sometimes repair earthen dams

In the summer, just about everything is on pasture, and cycles through the property to give Salatin multiple crops of each section of land every year.  During the summer, a piece of pasture can produce chickens (or eggs), cows, rabbits, and hay.  (Rabbits do pretty much the same thing as the chickens.

In the winter, the pasture is dormant and all the animals have indoor housing somewhere.  Cows go in the barn on deep bedding, while rabbits, chickens, and pigs go in the hoophouses.  The hoop houses are what many folks would consider greenhouses, with polyethylene covering a metal pipe frame.

In the spring, chickens and cows come back out on pasture to start the rotation all over again, and the pigs initially go into the barn where the cows were in order to root up the deep bedding from the winter and get it aerated.  Salatin throws a small amount of grain onto the bedding throughout the winter to give the pigs something to look for in the spring.  Then the pigs see it as a treasure hunt instead of missed time outside.

One of Salatin's most salient pieces of advice is to prioritize the acquisition of farming experience over the acquisition of a farm (if the goal is to have the farm as a primary source of income).  His opinion (which he bases on his own observations) is that doing things the other way around leads to failure, despair, and in many cases, bankruptcy.  The key, as Salatin mentions, is to not require significant income from the farm for 5-10 years.  Thus, it's much safer and less stressful to start small and part-time, and scale up from there once the farming and marketing model have proven themselves sufficient.  In short, don't go into debt to switch vocations to farming.  (As an aside, we note that similar advice could be applied to acquisition of a homestead since some form of cash flow will always be required for things like property taxes, even if no external inputs are needed to survive.)

In sum, You Can Farm is mostly full of good advice, moderately entertaining, and worth checking out from the library, but we don't intend to make room on our bookshelf for our own copy.  Have you read You Can Farm?  What did you think about it?  Are you 'stacking enterprises' as Salatin recommends on your farm or homestead?  Tell us about it in the comments section below!

Book Review: Permaculture Chicken - Pasture Basics by Anna Hess

The cover of the e-book.  Reproduced with permission from the author.  Get the book here.

 
The title says 'Pasture Basics,' and that's pretty much what this book is.  It's short and has lots of pictures, but it gives the basics of setting up a pasture for chickens.  I would have liked to see some more of the information promised in future volumes included here, but I am definitely more impatient than most, especially when it comes to information about chickens.  It would also be nice to have a few more in-line references to some of the studies she mentions and a cumulative list of references at the end. (Anna recommends several good books for further reading, but you'll have to write them down as you read.  Or, see the list below with links.) There.  The only shortcomings are out of the way, so we can get to the fun parts!

Overall, it's a great resource for readers aspiring to set up a homestead-scale free-range chicken operation.  Anna does a great job combining personal experience with outside research in this nice narrative of what goes into a good chicken pasture.  Anna briefly takes you through her early experiments with traditional 'coop and run' chicken systems, chicken tractors, and rotational pastures to motivate why she settled on a rotating pasture system as the model for her homestead.  I don't want to give too much away, but in essence, this arrangement maximizes the multi-functionality of the chickens--healthy meat and eggs, pest control, fertilizing, lawn mowing, and no-till soil preparation--while letting them 'express their chickenness' (to borrow Joel Salatin's phrase) and simultaneously reducing their feed bill.

Simple schematic of the chicken management systems Anna has mentions in the book.  The bulk of the book is about the one on the right, since that's what has worked best for them.  Click graphic for larger version.

A hybrid chicken tractor/coop (troop?) can work well on relatively flat land and provides excellent protection from predators.   Mobile fencing can be used to provide a dynamic paddock pasture system outside the enclosed area.  Photo credit: Dad and Mom for top and bottom panel, respectively.

Anna covers considerations for sizing your pasture for your flock size and climate, locating your coop and paddocks, the variety of helpful pasture crops and why they're good (sample list at the end of this post), how to rotate through your paddocks (with seasonal variations), common mistakes that reduce the productivity of the pasture, how to maintain the pasture, and how to convert other types of land into a chicken pasture, with an emphasis on cover crops that have worked well for them.  How they have dealt with seasonal variation is one of the best values of this book, since pasture productivity can vary widely over the course of the year, and 'emergency release valves,' as Anna calls them, outside of the normal paddock rotation scheme are likely to be necessary, especially in winter.  Note, however, that Anna lives far enough south (in Virginia) that she can allow her chickens access to pasture pretty much year-round--if you have snow on the ground for most of the winter, you'll need to make additional arrangements.

Graphic of what pastured chickens have to eat over the course of the year.  Local results will vary; this is just a schematic (not to scale).  Also, forest pastures aren't covered in depth in the book, so that line in the top panel is representative mostly of when nuts fall from the trees and not a particular grazing pattern.  The relative fraction of diet from pasture will also vary a lot based on the specific system--for example, Anna's chickens top out at 30% of their diet from pasture, while Joel Salatin's chickens, which get a lot of protein from bugs in cow pies, forage up to 67% of their food.

One thing to note here is that Anna has built up her system without complementary livestock, so their rotational schedule might require more maintenance (in some respects) than a system with cows, sheep or goats, and their chicken feed bill is probably not reduced quite as much as it could be.  For example, Anna uses a lawnmower to keep unused paddocks in check during the spring when the pasture grows faster than the chickens can keep up with it.  Anna also notes near the end of the book that her chickens forage for up to 30% of their feed (but more typically 10-20%, or even slightly less for broilers), while Joel Salatin's chickens, which follow a herd of cows through his fields as 'pasture sanitation,' can forage up to 67% of their feed.  Anna doesn't seem too keen on the pasture sanitation route since they don't have a lot of open pasture room on their homestead, but I'm not sure I agree that other animals wouldn't be net beneficial.  Sure, Salatin's operation is much bigger, but it can be scaled down to one or two cows and a small flock of chickens on less than five acres of pasture.  In any case, the important point is that there are lots of ways to pasture your poultry and the fraction of feed the chickens find for themselves will vary depending on your specific situation, but almost everyone should be able to see some reduction in their feed bill.

In summary, I'd like to reiterate that this book is a great resource for anyone looking to create a poultry pasture, and I highly recommend it.  I also suggest following Anna's blog, The Walden Effect, to find out when the next volumes in the series will come out, and to follow further discussion of the books in this series.

Additional reading mentioned in the book:
Andy Lee and Patricia Foreman's Chicken Tractor
Harvey Ussery's The Small-Scale Poultry Flock
Carol Ekarius' Small-Scale Livestock Farming
Bill Murphy's Greener Pastures on Your Side of the Fence
Steve Solomon's The Intelligent Gardener
Gene Logsdon's All Flesh Is Grass
Anna's Weekend Homesteader
Anna's Homegrown Humus
Anna's Permaculture Chicken: Incubation Handbook

Other related books:
Joel Salatin's Pastured Poultry Profits
Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens

Chicken pasture plants mentioned in the book:
Orchardgrass
Perennial Ryegrass
Fescues
Creeping Bent
Crested Dog's Tail
Kentucky Bluegrass
Timothy
Oats
Italian Ryegrass
Bermudagrass
Reed Canarygrass
Smooth Bromegrass
Switchgrass
Big Bluestem
Indiangrass
Little Bluestem
Side-oats Grama
Eastern Gamagrass
Ladino Clover
Red Clover
White Clover
Alfalfa
Sorgum Sudangrass
Pearl Millet

Book Review: Worms Eat My Garbage - Mary Appelhof

One of the easiest ways to responsibly process food waste if you have limited real estate (e.g., an apartment), is with vermiculture, or growing composting worms.  We've been culturing de vermi's for about six years, and from the beginning we've been referring to Mary Appelhof's Worms Eat My Garbage -- a great resource for rookie wormkeepers.  We got an old paperback edition online, and found it to be a quick and enjoyable read.  Although it's only about 150 pages long, Appelhof covers really everything you need to know to get started with a vermicompost system (or 'worm bin' if you're talking to people who aren't grossed out by Annelida species).

Apelhof makes the first page a checklist for everything you need to do to grow worms and reap the benefits of their hard work--a twelve-step program leading to minimal food waste, worm castings for your garden, and worms you can sell, trade, or put in your aquaponic system.  The chapters are written essentially as a set of answers to the fourteen most frequently asked questions by beginning vermiculturalists.  Those questions are (with how we answered those questions in our own case in parentheses),

• What should I call it? (worm bin.)
• Where should I put it? (in the living room.)
• What container should I use? (plastic totes, for now.)
• What are worm beddings? (shredded newspaper.)
• What kind of worms should I use? (Eisenia fetida, or red wigglers)
• What is the sex life of a worm? (none of our business!--although "breeders" are the ones with the raised band)
• How many worms do I need? (probably about 1 lb. to start with)
• How do I set up my worm bin? (shred newspaper, add water, add worms, add food)
• What kind of garbage, and what do I do with it? (fruit, vegetables, bad cheese, and meat trimmings, and spoiled leftovers.)
• How do I take care of my worms? (don't let them freeze, drown, or starve--we want castings and worms! definitely don't overlook the drainage aspects.)
• What are the most commonly asked questions about worms? (for us, this list)
• What are some of the other critters in my worm bin? (springtails, mites, and occasionally fruit flies and fungus gnats)
• How do plants benefit from a worm bin? (worm castings!)
• How can I treat (food) waste as a resource? (by feeding it to worms to turn into worm castings!)

Additional sub-questions for us were, "How big should it be?," "What ratio of water-to-bedding should I use?," and "How can I get rid of fruit flies when they show up?"  Appelhof addresses each of these in sufficient detail, but we would recommend planning for a bigger worm bin than you would normally need, if you have space for it.  That way, you have a better chance at being able to keep up with all the trimmings during canning season.

With minimal effort, simple and inexpensive vermicompost systems can be maintained without odors.  These bins reside in our living room (in the Worm Trunk sneaking into the upper right of the picture), and are generally well-behaved.  Appelhof says that for a given volume, a larger surface area is better because the worms will process the waste faster.  These two bins have handled nearly all of our food waste for more than a year (with periodic harvesting of castings).

 Appelhof details a few designs for making wooden bins and points out a few commercially available designs that were around when the book was published (we have the second edition, from 1997).  While the discussion of bin construction is good, the internet is a far more valuable source of inspiration for worm bin designs, in our opinion.  There are numerous examples of DIY "fed-batch" bin and flow-through setups, and a greater variety of commercially available systems than the book indicates.  Color photos and videos are also a big plus for the internet.  We've learned a few other things about worm bin design that will be easier to share when we cover our setup in the 'Projects' section.

However, in general, Worms Eat My Garbage is a classic book with timeless advice for beginning vermiculturalists.  Although some parts of the book are starting to become dated, Appelhof's process for getting a worm bin up and running will always work.  This book truly should be required reading for anyone considering Annelid-based agriculture or food waste disposal.