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!

The Berry Modulus

In many fields of engineering, dimensionless numbers are used to compare the relative contribution of two simultaneously-occuring processes or phenomena, irrespective of scale or units (which allows for an easy comparison of experiments done at different times, in different labs, etc.).  For example, the Reynolds number (Re) is used to compare the relative roles of inertial and viscous forces as a fluid flows through or around an object (which in turn are important in calculating energy losses due to friction or drag), and the Thiele modulus (Φ) is used to compare the relative rates of a chemical reaction and the diffusion of reacting molecules to the site of reaction (which are important in determining catalyst activity).

We had the idea that it would be useful on the homestead to have a similar metric to quantitatively compare the relative productivity of different berry patches, or of a certain berry patch from one week (or year) to the next.  Thus, we have adapted the concept of the Thiele modulus to a new dimensionless number: the Berry modulus (ß).  In essence, it compares the rate of picking berries in a given area to the time spent looking for them, or rather, it answers the question, "when moving through a berry patch, are you more limited by your walking pace or your picking pace?"

Starting with a generalized equation for the Thiele modulus (for a first-order reaction), we can adjust the units to something easier to measure for berries and simplify the equation:

where f is the frequency of picking events (i.e., the number of berries picked divided by the time spent picking) A is the area covered, and D₀ is how long it would take you to search the area for berries but not find any.  For D₀, we suggest a standard value of 0.25 acres per hour, which works out to just over three square feet per second (imagine yourself walking along a row of strawberries, brushing back bushes and looking to look for berries).

Therefore, calculation of the Berry modulus requires knowing simply the number of berries picked, the time spent picking them, and the amount of land covered in the process.  The time part is easy--just look at your watch (or sun dial) before and after.  In order to find the number of berries picked, you can either count them as you pick them or figure out afterwards how many you picked.  If you prefer the former, you should also get yourself tested for OCD.  Otherwise, it's possible to approximate the number of berries picked based on how many fit in a (small) known volume or mass, and the total volume or mass picked.  Here's how we calculate the total number of berries picked:

Place a quart jar on a kitchen scale and tare it (adjust the dial to zero).  Fill the jar with berries, counting the number added.  When the jar is full, record the weight.  Remove the jar from the scale, and add one cup milk and a tablespoon of honey, if you're so inclined.  Blend with stick blender into delicious smoothie.  All you actually need are the numbers in the first step: if you measured your total picked quantity in volume (quarts, cups, etc.), multiply that total volume (converting to quarts, if in another unit) by the number of berries in the quart jar.  If you measured your total picked quantity in mass (pounds, kilograms, etc.), multiply that total volume by the number of berries in the quart jar, divided by the mass of berries in the quart jar (again keeping units consistent).

Calculating the area searched can be a little bit tricky.  Fortunately, Google maps is pretty awesome, and there are lots of smart people out there making it even awesomer.  If you have a berry patch that you can work through completely, you can find the area of the patch using Acme Labs' Google Planimeter, and plug that area directly into the equation.  If you're out wandering through the woods, but not really covering a specific area, you can find the distance you traveled with the Map Pedometer (make sure to select 'straight line').  Assuming a continuous search field width of about three feet (left to right in front of you), and the total distance in miles, multiply by 5,280 feet per mile, multiply that by three feet wide, and divide by 43,560 square feet per acre.  There's your area covered in acres!  Ok, now we've got everything we need to calculate the Berry modulus.

We can see from the equation above that the higher the frequency of picking events for a given area, the higher the Berry modulus will be.  That makes intuitive sense.  However, we can also make it easier to see whether the outcome of the picking is determined more by searching, or more by the speed at which we can pick.  For the Thiele modulus mentioned above, a related parameter called the 'effectiveness factor' is often calculated.  Using an analogous equation for the Berry modulus, we can calculate an 'emptyness factor,' since at low values of the Berry modulus (i.e., for poor picking yields), the factor will be higher.

Here, tanh is the hyperbolic tangent function.  Ok, how about some examples?  This last weekend, we went out to a pick-your-own strawberry farm and picked about 14.5 pounds of strawberries in 45 minutes.  Our quart jar held 21 strawberries, which was equivalent to 14 ounces, or 0.875 pounds.  Thus, in total, we picked about 16.6 quarts, or 348 strawberries (not including what we ate in the field!).  Using the planimeter above, we calculated that we worked an area of about 0.05 acres.  These numbers work out to ß = 92.8 and ε = 0.011:

The Berry modulus can be extended beyond just berries, as well.  Actually, the approach is amenable to just about anything that can be hunted or gathered.  For example, we spent four hours (walking 2.6 miles or covering about 0.96 acres) in search of morels this spring and only found one little one.  That works out to ß = 0.96 and ε = 0.777.  As you can see below, that outcome was clearly determined more by the searching than by the picking.  But we still made off better than some of the National Geographic explorers looking for thought-to-be-extinct tropical amphibians like the Stubfoot Toad--they spent many months searching to find just one!

The relationship of the Berry modulus, the Emptyness factor, and the yield-controlling processes during berry-picking expeditions.

How might you use the Berry modulus in a sentence while talking to other people?  Here are a few examples:

"Our raspberry patch has been doing really well!  We're getting a Berry modulus of about eighty this week, while neighbor Joe down the road says he's only getting about fifty from his.  Heck, even the folks from the pick-your-own farm say theirs are only at about seventy-five!"

"We went out picking elderberries last weekend, and calculated our Berry modulus to be close to a hundred!  The same patch has never been that productive in the past, so this must be a good year for elderberries."

"The Berry modulus for our blueberries is only at about seventy and there are still quite a few unripe ones, so we're probably not quite at the peak yet.  Normally we're already a little past the peak by this time of year, so it seems like the effects of the late spring are still lingering."

There are a few caveats to the Berry modulus that should be mentioned.  First, it doesn't take into account differences in selectivity or speed between pickers.  On a normal day, Katie would probably generate a slightly lower Berry modulus than Jake, not due to any differences in the berries they're working, but just because she's more selective about what goes in her bowl.  Similarly, berry quality is not factored in.  Sure, it's possible to achieve high Berry moduli at a commercial farm or (heaven forbid) a grocery store, but the berries might have been sprayed with pesticides or be of a variety that ships well but has lower nutritional value.  So there are other factors to consider as well.  Also, if abbreviating the Berry modulus, please use the Greek letter beta (ß) and not 'BM.'

Still, the Berry modulus is a new and exciting way to quantitatively compare the productivity of your berry patches, both wild and domestic.  It can also be used to compare many other hunted-and-gathered foodstuffs.  Let's spread the word and bring the Berry modulus into the mainstream lexicon!

How are your berries doing?  What kind of Berry moduli have you achieved in your berry-picking expeditions?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Avoiding the Straight Flush

Of all the coming crises we're supposed to look out for these days, one that often doesn't get as much press as others is the looming shortage of fresh water.  While the majority of water is consumed by industry (probably a lot of it for things we don't even like!), individuals are also being encouraged to take conservation steps.  Storing rainwater, recycling greywater, and putting flow restrictors on faucets are all good ideas, but one household appliance gets a consistently bad rep for its water usage: the one that goes 'flush.'

It seems that most models these days drain 1-2 gallons of clean, pristine, drinking water every time that seemingly harmless little lever is pressed.  However, there are at least three easy ways to reduce the amount of good water that goes down the tube. 

The first is the old adage, "if it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down."  However, if you've let it stay yellow for more than a few days, you know that there's nothing 'mellow' about it.  We've tried.  It works to a certain extent, but certainly is not a silver bullet.  Plus, it seems like the hard-to-scrub deposits that form at the waterline in the bowl are more prominent when there's been yellow mellowing for a long time.  Still, as long as you're judicious about, um, mixing colors, this method can help reduce water usage quite a bit (maybe two-thirds or so, based on our schedule).

Visual approximation of the interaction of a normal olfactory system with fresh (left) and four-day-old (right) 'mellowing yellow.'   Good management is required to keep your harmless rubber ducky from becoming a t-rex.  Photo credit: Wikipedia for mellow and unmellow.

The second fix is to turn off the water line that automatically refills the tank, and fill the tank manually with collected rain-,  grey-, or other non-potable water.  We do this, too, and it's easy to control the amount of water per flush (it's not necessary to fill it all the way up).  But, it's kind of a hassle to haul in a bucket of water from the back deck, take off the top of tank, pour in the water, and then flush. It helps, but also not a silver bullet.

Filling the tank with collected rainwater.  This fix gives good control over the amount of water used and doesn't require potable water, but is kind of a hassle.  Be careful not to get your seed catalogs wet (doesn't everyone store them on the back of the loo?) or they might sprout.

Finally, it's possible to modify the tank so each flush automatically uses less water.  It's as easy as putting a quart jar or two in the tank.  One gallon tank?  Put in a quart jar filled with water, and water consumption is automatically reduced by 25% per flush.  How low can you go?  To some extent it depends on how much force is needed to...er...wash everything past the check valve. Combining all three of these methods, we can stretch our collected rainwater by enough to reduce our toilet's usage of potable water by probably 85% or more (although we haven't quantified that).

Quart jar in the tank.  We can only fit one of these, but we could maybe add smaller jars around the edges, or look for a bigger jar.  When we flush, the jar stays full, so that water isn't lost!

Of course, if you are lucky enough to have access to a place to put composted manure (i.e. a piece of land to call your own), you can go completely water-free in this regard, and gain a valuable fertilizer to boot.  There are lots of resources (see also here) out there on the internets for how to process your own humanure safely, responsibly, and odor-free. (or at least as odor-free as a regular arrangement!)  Check back in the future for our experiments to that end.

How have you cut down on your water usage?  Do you have another trick for making your toilet use less water?  Tell us about it in the comments section below!

Macaroonog

If you've been following our blog, you might have noticed we're kind of on a mission to spread the joy of eggnog, that delectable nectar, throughout the whole year.  We set about to find at least one holiday in every month that is worthy of celebrating with eggnog.  So far we've got Hog 'Nog, Green Eggs and Nog, and Earth Nog.  But the month of May is almost out, and we haven't yet designated an eggnog holiday!  Fortunately, May 31 (tomorrow!) is the perfect day to celebrate with eggnog because, as we're sure you know, it's National Macaroon Day!  Macaroons are commonly made with egg whites and coconut (says even the dictionary), but what happens to the leftover yolks?  We humbly suggest a macaroon-flavored eggnog.

Two common flavorings for macaroons (other than the sugar and eggs) are almond and coconut.  For our purposes, we wanted extracts, since we're making a liquid treat rather than a solid one.  We had almond extract on hand, but not coconut extract.  Also, real coconut extract is ridiculously expensive, so we decided to make our own.  It's not hard--pretty much as easy as making a cup of tea, except it needs to steep for several days.

We filled a half-pint canning jar about three-quarters full with shredded coconut, and then added rum up to the bottom of the threads.

We let it steep for about five days and then filtered out the large pieces of coconut.  There are still small coconut particles, which could be filtered out with a a piece of cloth or something, but we don't mind them.  It adds a little extra coconut flavor.  Also, the filtered coconut pieces are now soaked with rum, so they can be used to 'spice up' cakes, shrimp stir fries, or a breakfast bowl of oatmeal.

For the recipe, we followed the first part of our recipe for Earth Nog, where the big bowl in the middle is the six egg yolks and first 1.5 cups of milk heated to 160 °F, and the other ingredients (second 1.5 cups milk, 0.5 cup sugar, one tablespoon each coconut extract and almond extract), are about to be added to it.  Technically, the order of addition to the hot milk/egg yolk mixture should be sugar (which will dissolve faster at higher temperatures), then milk (which will cool the mixture down some), then the extracts (which would lose more potency from evaporation at high temperatures), but in practice, it probably doesn't make much difference.

We tried garnishing the 'nog with some of the filtered coconut, but it didn't stay on top very well.  Probably we should add a dollop of whipped cream, then garnish that with the coconut.

But we don't have any whipped cream made up, so we'll just add a strawberry and call it good. :-)  Definitely tastes like a macaroon (other than the strawberry).  Good stuff, Maynard!

The recipe:
6 egg yolks
1.5 cups milk
another 1.5 cups milk
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon each coconut and almond extract

Beat egg yolks and 1.5 cups milk until uniform.  Heat mixture to 160 °F, stirring often.  Add sugar, then add rest of milk and extracts.  Garnish with whipped cream, coconut, and/or strawberries.  Chill and drink.





How are you celebrating National Macaroon Day?  Can you think of other uses for rum-soaked coconut, or other ways to garnish macaroon-flavored eggnog?  Let us know in the comments section below!

Salmonaragus Chowder

We've been kind of giddy this spring ever since we realized that adding the suffix '-aragus' words makes them sound much more fun and interesting.  It's turning into kind of a hobby to make a meal with asparagus, then name it a silly but clever (by our estimation, anyway), asparagus-suffixed portmanteau.  Last week we got a batch of asparagus and were foraging through our cupboards and freezer to see what we had go with it.  We were lucky enough to discover some potatoes and a couple pieces of salmon from Grandma. (Gralmon?  Katie says, "ok, Jake, settle down.  Also, thanks Gramma!")  If we could add a nice white sauce, we'd be in the chowder business!

We started by melting about 6 tablespoons of butter in a big pot.

Then we added the chopped onions and asparagus, and moved the spoon to the other side.

While the onions and asparagus (and wooden spoon) were sauteing, we turned some potatoes into cubes and cooked them in the microwave.  It also works to bake or boil them, but the microwave is so much faster.

While all that was going on, we didn't want our oven to feel left out.  So we put a couple fillets of salmon on a cookie sheet and sprinkled them with pepper, garlic powder, thyme, rosemary and basil, and baked them at 350 °F for about 15 minutes.

Once the onions were translucent and the asparagus started to soften, we added about 2 cups of that ham broth we'd been saving since Easter and brought the mix up to a simmer for about 20 minutes until the tough parts of the asparagus weren't stringy anymore.

Then we mixed a quarter cup of flour into about 2.5 cups of milk and added it to the pot, bringing it back up to a simmer until thickened (another 15 minutes or so).  We also added the potatoes to the pot at this point.

Meanwhile, the fish finished cooking, so we broke it up into pieces and took out any bones.  This also went into the pot right after the milk and flour.

The finished product.  A creamy, delicious bowl of fishy asparagus-ey goodness.

What goes well with chowder?  Crusty garlic toast is a good start.  We also did some kale and wine.  Mmmmm.  Caution: eating seafood chowder with crusty toast may cause those who are predisposed to talk like a pirate to do so for the rest of the night.

 
The recipe:
0.5 lb asparagus, cut into bite-size pieces
7 or 8 medium potatoes, cubed
3 small onions, chopped
1 lb salmon (or other fish)
2 c broth
2.5 c milk
0.25 c flour
6 T butter
0.5 t each pepper, garlic powder, thyme, basil, rosemary

Saute onions and asparagus in butter until onions are translucent.  Add broth and bring bring to simmer.  Mix flour and milk, then add to broth mixture.  Return slowly to simmer and cook until thickened.  Meanwhile, cook potatoes in microwave until almost done.  Season salmon with pepper, garlic powder, thyme, basil, and rosemary to taste, and bake at 350 °F until done.  Shred fish (removing any bones) and add to broth/milk mixture while it's coming up to a simmer.  Serve with crusty garlic toast and maybe talk like a pirate for a while.

What's your favorite chowder recipe?  What else have you paired asparagus with (and what did you call it)?  Tell us about it in the comments section below!

Shaving with a Garden Knife

On Sunday, we tried applying the Scary Sharp method of knife sharpening to a straight-edge garden knife, and found that it only took a half-hour or so to get it from "found-in-the-silverware-drawer" dull to "easily-shaves-arm-hair" sharp.  Since our ultimate goal was to be able to shave with it, our natural next step was to take it into the bathroom and see if our success with hair on the corporal extremities could be extended to the chinny-chin chin.

It's working!  It's working! Ha ha ha!  For some reason, we forgot to take a 'before' photo, so we have to jump to the halfway point.  Should I stop here, Katie?  "No, someone might confuse you for Harvey Dent."

The finished product.  OK, the process could not exactly be described as 'pleasurable,' but it's a clean face produced by a garden knife we found in the drawer a couple hours prior.  Solid A-minus work.  (Edit: Katie says, "But it took you an hour to shave, you didn't get as close as you do with the normal razor, and you've got lots of nicks--more than usual.  It is pretty cool you could take a random knife and make it sharp enough to shave with, but still...B-plus tops.")

Admittedly, the knife is definitely not as sharp as a normal 4-blade cartridge razor, and it's probably good the shaving cream has lots of aloe in it.  This was a first try on the straight blade shaving, but there's definitely more missing than just operator inexperience.  So...what do we need to improve for the next attempt?

Quick searching of the internets suggests several details of preparation that experienced straight-blade shavers tend to, even when they're using the proper tools.  In many fields of research, there is a saying that, "an hour in the library can save a month in the lab."  In the Homestead Laboratory, it also seems that five minutes on the internet can save an hour in the bathroom.  But anyway, what did we do wrong?

1. Not fine enough honing.  We topped out at 2000 grit sandpaper.  Some sources recommend working up to a surface with at least 4000 grit, and even up to 8000 grit.  Given the difference in the ol' arm hair test between 1500 and 2000 grit, this alone could account for a lot of the discomfort.
2. No stropping.   Even after honing with a very high-grit sandpaper, stropping with canvas and/or leather is required to straighten out the micro-teeth still present on the cutting edge from the abrasives.  It's advisable to work sequentially down to the point where just the bare leather strop (or, more precisely, the silicates present in the leather) are able to quickly put a finishing edge on the blade.  Chromium oxide is commonly recommended as a 'stropping compound' (with grit between sandpaper and leather silicates), although some folks also claim success with the more DIY-friendly wood ashes.
3. Insufficient beard prep.  Keeping a beard warm and pliable is a whole 'nother ball game compared to arm hair.  If it takes an hour to get from one ear to the other, there's a lot of time for the beard hairs to cool down and decide they don't want to be shaved, after all.  This was definitely part of the problem, even with frequent re-warming.  Still, the current blade would probably work fine for eyebrows, if we wanted to shave them off for some reason.
4. Wrong tools.  Well, maybe.  Using a random garden knife to shave certainly didn't make things any easier, but folks who know what they're doing seem to be able to make just about anything work.

 How do you shave sustainably?  Do you have any other suggestions for us?  Let us know in the comments section below!

SCARY Sharp

The second law of homestead thermodynamics goes something like 'sharp things will always tend to become dull.'  This is especially true if the sharp thing is a blade on a tool you need for the next task on your list.  We we were reading about ways to sharpen blades a while back, and since blade sharpening one of the skills we wanted to develop this year, we figured we should probably get around to it (it is almost June, after all).

The best description we've come across of how to sharpen a (flat) blade is this tale of the Scary Sharp method.  Even if you don't have any blades to sharpen, it's worth a read.  Make sure you're not drinking anything at the time, because you might accidentally spit it out.  Basically, the technique involves a hard, flat surface (like a piece of glass) and increasingly fine grades of sandpaper.  Pretty simple, eh?  The method works best with straight (as opposed to beveled) blades, but it was good enough to get a beveled hunting knife back to factory sharp last fall. (Not quite sharp enough to shave, though, which was another one of our goals).  So we decided to try the same technique on another knife with a flatter blade in hopes of being able to rediscover Jake's face!

*NOTE: We could not be considered experts in blade sharpening by any stretch of the imagination.  We are simply chronicling our experiments in learning to sharpen blades proficiently.  If you're searching for a way to sharpen your own blades, please don't use us as your only source of information. :-)

Here are our materials and our setup.  Sandpaper: 400, 600, 800, 1000, 1500, and 2000 grit.  A pane of glass from an old window (came with the windows we got for free for the coldframe), and a knife.  The knife is a one-edge straight blade, stainless steel (the blade style is more visible in the next picture).

Here it is after the 400 grit.  We sanded all three faces: back, front, and cutting edge.  Since the cutting edge had coarse marks in it from the factory grind, this grade of sandpaper took the longest (about 15 minutes).  We wanted to get it to the point where all we could see were the scratches from the 400 grit sandpaper.  When sanding the cutting edge, it's very important to keep a consistent angle between the knife and the sandpaper.

After the 600 grit.  It might not look much different, but for alternating grades of sandpaper, we try to use a different sanding pattern.  For one grade, we move the knife in straight lines back and forth (parallel to the handle for the front and back, and perpendicular to the handle for the cutting edge); for the next grade we move the knife in a circular pattern.  That way it's easier to see when scratches from the current grade of sandpaper have erased scratches from the lower grit.

After the 800 grit.  You know we're getting serious now because the sandpaper has switched to black.

The 1000 and 1500 grit looked pretty much the same as the 800 grit, so we skipped to the picture of the 2000 grit, where we've gotten a sort of mirror finish on the blade (reflecting the sandpaper box on the flat part).  Must be sharp now!

The classic test to see how sharp it is (other than cutting a piece of newspaper or something more reasonable) is to see if the blade will shave off a few arm or leg hairs.  After all, the closest piece of newspaper was like, ten feet away.  Looks like it will take off some leg hairs, no problem!  (Edit: Katie says, "Jacob!" [uh-oh...she only calls me that when I'm in big trouble.] "Did you shave off a random patch of extremity hair just to see how sharp your knife was...again?!"  Response: "Yes, but this time it will still be covered by my shorts, so I won't have to wear long-sleeve shirts for two weeks!"  Re-response: *eye rolling.*)  Can't wait to see how it works on facial hair!

Tune back in on Thursday to find out if the newly sharpened knife works for shaving facial hair!

Do you have a favorite technique for getting knife blades razor-sharp?  What is your preferred test of knife sharpness?  Tell us about it in the comments section below! (so Jake can stop having random hairless patches on his arms and legs!)