Picnic Table Benches...Finally!

Last winter, we spent one snowy day making a picnic table.  It's a nice table, and we've gotten a lot of use out of it.  But our benches, according to at least 50% of household correspondents, were more eyesore and lawn-mowing inconvenience than rustic and charming.

The original version was 2 x 6s on top of logs. 

Aesthetic debate aside, the original design was simple and sturdy.  Under the logs was a reliable source of fishing bait.  But despite those practical advantages, it's true that the hassle of moving them every time we mowed was a bit of a drawback.  So, making a set of proper benches got added to the to-do list.  And now, a mere 12 months later, we get to cross it off!

Like we did for the picnic table, we used our gate brace math spreadsheet to calculate the angles on end pieces--the width is 11" (two 2 x 6 boards-worth) and the height is 16", which turns out to be just about right for our picnic table.

We added a 2 x 4 to keep the legs from buckling and an angle piece for extra stability.  The span between the legs is about six feet, so the middle bows a little when we sit on it.  We'll add a 2 x 4 block to help with that if the flexing boards become too unnerving.

Admittedly, the aesthetics of the complete set may also be slightly improved.

What do your picnic benches look like?

Bee Package Box Sifter

As we were doing some spring cleaning in the garage the other day, we came across some old screened boxes that had previously contained packages of bees.  They were this kind:

Now featuring garage dust!

The originators of the boxes had no desire to get them back and, as we are definitely not in the bee package business, we clearly had no use for them.  At least, not in their current form.  We were pondering what we might do with such a contraption (other than throw it out) when we realized the screens had openings of useful dimensions.  With 10 minutes and $4 of parts, we figured we could turn them into sifters!

First step: saw them in half the long way.

Second step: drill holes and bolt them together.  3/4" bolts are too short; 1" bolts work fine.

We did two to each side, and it feels a smidge flimsy for heavy sifting jobs.  More bolts would help.  Also, make sure the hole that was previously in the top is in the center or a lot of what you're sifting might spill out the sides.

Our immediate use for the sifters was for processing biochar. But you could also use them for sifting compost, large quantities of powdered sugar, or whatever else you have on hand!

Just sifting gets rid of a lot of the ash, but a little hose water really cleans it up.

Most of the dirt that came along with it is easily washed away, too (except a few pieces of now-kiln-fired clay), leaving a nice shiny batch of black charcoal for whatever we want to use it for.

What do you do with your old bee package boxes?

Glass Storage Jar Lid Protection

Given the need for relatively small storage containers of bulk goods in our small-ish kitchen, we've settled on two-gallon all-glass jars.  They seem to be a good compromise between size, price, aesthetics, and non-plastic-ey-ness.

They also take well to chalkboard paint labels, which is nice.

We've been overall pretty happy with them, except for one small thing: the lids are fragile.

Inevitably, it happens that as we're clumsily putting them away, we'll bump something with the jar (usually the shelf we're trying to set it on), and the lid and jar will collide in just the right manner to break off part of the lid's inner rim.  With the sugar containers, we can dissolve the sugar in water, filter out the broken glass, and drink the sugar water like hummingbirds. (Which is awesome, but slightly inconvenient when we were planning to make something else with the sugar. Plus, Katie just loves it when Jake goes full hummingbird).  But with the flour containers, we've got to just toss the broken glass-contaminated flour.  Throwing food away makes us sad.

So, we've been pondering solutions to this problem for a while, and this weekend (while trapped inside by a snowstorm!) we came up with something that works well, while arguably not damaging the jar aesthetics too much.  First, we tried making a rubber o-ring with some leftover pond liner from our aquaponic grow bed, but found it was hard to get a good fit because the inner rim of the lid (the fragile part) is tapered.  Thus, it's hard to fit a sheet of rubber on to it.  Fortunately, we also had some leftover silicone caulk sealant from the butcher block counter top.

We applied a bead of the sealant around the inner rim, then smoothed it out with a flat head screwdriver.  We're definitely not professionals, but it works.  (Done is better than perfect, right?) If we were going to do it again, we'd probably tape the flat part to keep it from getting dirty, because it turns out this stuff sticks really well to glass and isn't easy to peel off.

Here's a close-up.  In the background, you can see the same stuff sealing the butcher block counter to the wall.

When it's on the jar, it's hard to tell it's there from most angles.  (Other than the fact that putting the lid on the jar is now much less...well, jarring.)

Even looking straight down, it's not that noticeable.  If we were starting from scratch, we'd probably get the clear silicone sealant, but for the sake of whatchagotics, we're glad the white doesn't look too bad.

Have you protected glass lids on your jars?  How did you do it?

Homestead Happiness, February Week 3

We're still fine-tuning some of the experimental details on our eggshell leavening, but it was otherwise a productive week around the homestead (thanks to some unseasonably warm weather!).  Here's what made us happy this week.

We got another batch of wine started, this one from frozen black raspberries.  They had been in the freezer since July of 2004!  They say a fine wine improves with age, guess we'll find out if that applies to aging before fermentation, too.  At least, the berries still tasted good!  Also, starting the wine meant Jake could clean up the mess that the berries made in the fridge while they were thawing.  That made Katie extra happy.

Outside, highs in the 50s and 60s (°F) made for happy playing in the dirt, including playing musical berries.  We transplanted dormant strawberries out to the garden where we can protect them with the motion detector sprinklers, and dormant raspberries to the place vacated by the strawberries since they weren't thriving in their original location.  Also, 'Musical Berries' is going to be the name of our new family band.

Also on the yard work list was chopping out the remaining stump from the tree of heaven, filling the hole with dirt, and planting another tree in it's place.  Some of the old stump pieces had termites, which the chickens liked a lot.  In fact, they were willing to brave a battlefield of flying wood chips to get to them, and with 100% survival rate.  We've got ninja chickens! (Never mind, we're going to call our band 'Ninja Chickens.')

In the process of our eggshell leavening experiments, we also made a big pile of wood ashes, which we'll use in a future set of leavening experiments.  The connection between these two will become apparent in the near future.

The rhubarb is alive!

The chives are also alive!  It's always nice to know the plants are starting to think springly thoughts, too.  The weather, on the other hand, is very ambivalent--after highs in the 60s on Saturday, we got a nice blanket of snow last night!

The chickens are also revving up their egg production--four eggs in four of the last five days.  Keep up the good work, ladies!

What made your homestead happy this week?

Syrup Update

Of the eight taps we have in our yard sugar bush, only a couple have been flowing significantly.  The Tree of Heaven, both Bradford pears, and one of the Siberian elms haven't even made a drip, the other elm has about a cup of sap, and the Lombardy poplar has about half a cup.  But the other two, the box elders, have been running like a gazelle.  By early Saturday morning, we had collected 38.4 lbs of sap, which means it was time to start boilin' it down!

First: a measurement.  Our sap is starting off at about 2.5 wt% sugar, according to our hydrometer. Not bad for a box elder, pretty much in line with a study from St. John's University in Minnesota.  But more importantly, with that number, we can calculate all sorts of expectations for this batch of syrup.  Allow us to momentarily digress!

This is the sugar content of the box elder sap on the Balling scale, which is essentially the same as the Brix scale more commonly used for sap measurements. (Using the same hydrometer we use for brewing wine.)

For example, knowing the wt% sugar, we can use the tables here to calculate the density of the sap and the resulting syrup (because syrup is normally 66 wt% sugar, which is very close to the solubility limit at room temperature), which will give us the volume of the sap and the resulting syrup, and our expected ratio.  Those calculations are detailed in this spreadsheet, if you want to plug in the numbers from your own sap. For us, our 38.4 lbs of sap at 2.5 wt% sugar works out to about 4.6 gallons, from which we should be able to expect just over two cups of finished syrup. (But note the caveat below.) 

38.4 lbs of sap at 2.5 wt% sugar should yield about 2.1 cups of syrup, which would be a ratio of 34.6:1.  That would be pretty good for a box elder.

We can also use other tables in that document to calculate what the boiling point of the finished syrup should be.  It would normally be 4 °C (7 °F) above the boiling point of pure water wherever we are, but that depends a little bit on what the boiling point of pure water is.  We're in the suburban Denver, where water boils at about 95 °C (203 °F) due to about 18% lower absolute atmospheric pressure. (Don't worry, we used NIST data for the Antoine equation to calculate the vapor pressure of water at that temperature, and everything checks out.  Well played, Universe.)  As it turns out, the difference in boiling point increase for syrup at our elevation is within the precision of our thermocouple reader.  Or, long story short, we're looking for a final temperature on our syrup of about 210 °F.  Time to light the fire!

We added a wind break to our Dakota Rocket Silo and started out using the widest-diameter pot we have.

As we started to build up a bed of embers, the air flow through the chimney part dropped off quite a bit, and we weren't getting much 'rocket' effect.  So, we widened out the pit, raked some of the coals to the back part, and added a second pot on top.  The direct contact of the pot on the coals got that pot boiling a lot faster than the one on top of the chimney, even when the rocket effect was strong.  Conductive heat transfer beats convective heat transfer (with air) every time!  If you go this route, though, be careful not to get ashes, etc. in the lower pot.

As a side note, if you're trying to use a lot of small-diameter wood (e.g., thumb-size branches from an unsightly, rabbit-attracting brush pile), breaking the sticks by hand might start to get old after the 50th or 60th one.  At that point, a loppers will become your best friend.

With the volume decreasing by about half, some of the minerals ("sugar sand") started to precipitate out.

Eventually, the volume got low enough to combine everything into one pot.  Time to make some pancakes!  We ended up adding one more layer of blocks back onto the wind break.

Pancakes done, sap still boiling.  We might have to modify our evaporator design for the next batch.  In the meantime, let's make bacon, too!

Bacon done, sap at ~35% sugar.  Daylight running out.  Time to bring it inside to finish on the stove.

And.....the finished product in a pint jar.  It's delicious.

Ok, so the finished product looks much closer to one cup in volume than the two we expected.  Why the difference? (Here's the caveat we mentioned above.)  There are a number of potential contributions.  The equations above are for solutions of sucrose in water, so the initial 2.5 wt% reading we took didn't account for other dissolved solids (e.g., the sugar sand that precipitated out during cooking).  That is, we might have started out with lower than 2.5 wt% sugar.  Also, there were some losses on transferring between buckets and pans, filtering, and what we took out for testing along the way.  We were also physically unable to resist trying some of the 35% stuff on the pancakes, which probably accounted for at least 1/4 cup (don't judge!).  Finally, we also ended up going a little bit over 66% sugar (closer to 70%, based on our honey refractometer's scale, which had store-bought maple syrup right at 66%), which would decrease the volume, in theory, by about another 1/6 cup.   Overall, even if we got one cup syrup instead of two, our sap-to-syrup volume ratio was still a respectable 70:1.  In general, it looks like the calculations above should get you to at least within a factor of two.

How is your syrup season going?

Butcher Block Counter From Reclaimed 2 x 4 Lumber

A few weeks ago, we mentioned that one of our main goals this year was to finish the butcher block counter (and corresponding cabinets) we built to give our kitchen some extra horizontal work space and culinary device storage capacity.  Finally, after more than a year of testing it in-place, we slapped some doors on it and put a water-resistant finish on the top.  There are a couple naggly things to finish up yet, like deciding whether we also want to finish the cabinet doors, but by and large, we think the project is ready for blog-reader eyes.

This is what it looked like a year ago.  We made the top out of reclaimed 2 x 4s (yep, pine!) that we planed clean and glued together.  The end-to-end length is about eight feet, so we made each row out of a six-footer and a two-footer, alternating the two-foot ends (i.e., one row was 6-2, the next was 2-6, and so on).  It's about 16 inches front to back. Despite our best efforts, there was a stretch in the middle where they didn't line up perfectly.  It took us about a year to acquire a belt sander, which made the job of blending the slabs tolerable.

We also needed the sawdust from sanding to make some wood putty, of which a significant amount was required to fill in all the imperfections in the wood.

For example, there were a lot of nail holes like these.

After filling with putty and sanding, the same holes looked like this.  There's a bit of discoloration around the nail holes yet, but they almost look like tiny knots.

Viewed from the angle of a typical adult human walking by, the now-filled holes look downright acceptable.  However, with a lot of board-to-board color variation like this, the sawdust used to make the putty doesn't actually match any of the wood colors perfectly.

Back in place in the kitchen, it's time to add some water resistant coating.  We could have maybe foregone the finish, but Jake does a lot of drooling when Katie's cooking.  Better not to risk it.

We used the Howard's butcher block conditioner, which is a mix of mineral oil, beeswax, and Carnauba wax.  It definitely enhanced the wood color and soaked in pretty quickly.

Finished top.  Katie approves.

There's a bit of a sheen to it, but not too bad.

Add some rustic-looking doors, and this thing is starting to get some personality!  Of course, if you build the doors while the top is off, they might not fit perfectly.

There, that's better.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention the shelves.  They're reclaimed pallet wood from the two best pallets we've ever acquired.  The top was hardwood (aspen, judging by the scent when cutting it), the bottom had some nice blue-stain pine.

Finally, seal the edge with some silicone caulk to prevent water from getting back there and to prevent potential admirers from noticing the uneven ends.

Done! (as long as we decide not to coat the doors...)

Non-Maple Syrups on Tap

It's tree-tapping season!  Since we're huge pancake lovers, we've been keen on tapping trees for quite a while.  Two potential problems, though, are that we live in suburban Denver (is there enough of a cold period to generate a significant sap flow?), and we've got exactly one maple tree in our yard, which isn't big enough to tap. (It's not even an actual sugar maple--it's a silver maple!)

We do, however, have several non-maple trees that are big enough.  And since the process is pretty much the same, we figured we'd tap what we've got and see what we get!  Several places note anecdotally (e.g., here) that other tree species can be tapped (with tempered expectations because the sugar content and/or sap volume is lower than for sugar maples), and some even talk about tapping coniferous trees!  But with few exceptions (mostly for other types of maples, birches, or walnuts), these sources don't give much in the way of what to expect in terms of yields or flavor.  Looks like a data gap waiting to be filled!  We ordered up a set of 10 taps from the internets, scored some free buckets from the local grocery store bakery, and set 'em up yesterday.

We went around the yard and measured tree circumferences at about chest height.  The diameter is the circumference divided by pi (d = c/π); and a general recommendation is to tap trees no smaller than 10 inches in diameter.  Looks like we've got two each of box elders, Bradford pears, Siberian elms, and Colorado blue spruces, along with a Lombardy poplar and an invasive Tree of Heaven that qualify.  We'll probably pass on the spruces this year.  The tapping process is not supposed to hurt the tree or affect its longevity, but the elms and the Tree of Heaven would surprise us if they lasted beyond this year anyway.

The buckets are 3.5 gallons and used to have "donut glaze" in them.  We washed them out in the bath tub, although if we had thought ahead a little, washing them outside with the hose last summer would have been a lot easier.

The taps came with two-foot sections of tubing attached, the ends of which we warmed up with hot water to make them easier to push onto the barbs of the taps.

We connected the tubing to the taps in the kitchen, before we went outside.

One last bit of prep (heh) was to add a duct tape stopper about 1.75" up the drill bit so we don't go too far into the tree.  We also drilled holes in the bucket lids; the tubing said 5/16", but it needed a hole a little larger than 3/8" to fit through.

First hole in the boxelder, and it started dripping immediately.  That's a good sign!

The two box elders that were big enough to tap are actually two trunks on the same tree.  It's also right on the property line, so we don't have access to the south side, which is the side most preferentially tapped.  The East side will have to do!

Here are the other three trees we tapped with out first five buckets.  None of them had sap running right away.  We scored three more buckets the next day, so the two elms and the other Bradford pear are next in line.  Woo hoo!  Visions of pancakes are dancing through our heads.

What kinds of trees are you tapping this year?