Garden Review

It's the time of the year that we're wrapping up the bulk of our gardening activities for the season.  When the frost threatened in mid-October, we picked all the remaining tender veggies, protected the hardy greens, and started putting the garden to sleep.  The fall greens will continue to trickle in, but the majority of the harvesting is done until spring.  And now that we've had a few weeks to let the fervor of vegetable processing subside, we wanted to take a look back and see how we did!

First, what did the garden look like?  This was our general setup: 15 beds at 3' x 9', or about 400 square feet of growing space.  However, we harvested basically nothing out of six of those beds due to poor germination, inconsistent irrigation, or marauding varmints.  So, we were actually working with more like 250 square feet.

Second, what did we grow?  Mainly tomatoes, squashes, potatoes, and onions, it turns out.  We totaled a little over 150 lbs total.  Back in January, we had set an arbitrary goal of harvesting 100 lbs of food from the yard, so blowing past that mark by more than 50% was satisfying.  It might not sound like much when some of our electronic friends are growing more than 225 lbs of butternut squash alone, but hey, we gotta start somewhere!

Third, how did it compare to our meal plan?  Most things were quite a bit less, but the summer squash and zucchini exceeded our plan by a lot.  We didn't have any delusions of being able to grow all our vegetables in 250 (or even 400) square feet of growing space, but we hit about 20% of our total annual vegetable demand (or about 50% during the harvest season).  That is, over the summer, we were bringing in about 7 lbs/wk of produce from the local farmers market, and harvesting about 7 lbs/wk from the garden, which was about as much as we could keep up with.  Those 14 lbs/wk through the whole year work out to 728 lbs of veggies.  For what it's worth, our meal plan called for about 675 lbs of vegetables over the course of the year (not counting garlic powder, onion powder, or herbs, if we wanted to make those, too), so not too far off.  Is it just us, or does the fact that our theory and our experiment line up so well make you really excited too?  ...Just us?  Ok, nevermind.

We'll just finish up then with a few pictures to show you how the end-of-growing season frenzy played out here.  This is the 25 lbs of veggies we brought in right before the frost.  It's about 80% green tomatoes.

These are the volunteer potatoes we dug a few days later.  The volunteers made up about 60% of our potato harvest, probably because they got to start growing right away in the spring while the rest of the garden was still too wet to dig and plant until early June.

Part of putting the garden to bed is pulling out the delicious weeds, like these dandelions.  But wait!, you say?  You're harvesting and eating the quintessential spring green that supposedly turns irreparably bitter after blooming, in October?  Why yes, dear readers!  Soaking the greens (and roots!) in cold water removes most of the bitterness any time of year.  It's great!

All the damaged volunteer potatoes ended up in this casserole, along with some freshly smoked bacon, some of the damaged tomatoes, green beans, some onions and garlic, and a creamy plain yogurt sauce.  It doesn't look terribly colorful from this angle, but the flavor was great!

The sweet potatoes, nearly all of which were damaged on harvest, ended up in this quiche, along with more tomatoes, onions, garlic, and plenty of herbs.  Yum!

We had made buffalo-seasoned cauliflower before, but then we got the idea to try it with other veggies, too.  The eggplant, with its spongy, sauce-saturated texture, was the best, but the summer squash and zucchini weren't bad, either.

We made multiple types of pizza; these two had a buffalo-type sauce, except with spicy salsa instead of Frank's hot sauce.  Our recipe needs some tweaking yet, but the concept is good, and the pizza was delicious!

How is your gardening season wrapping up?

Homestead Happiness, November Week 2

It's been a while since we posted a HAP post, but with our schedule finally settling back to normal after several crazy months, it's time to get back on track.  Here are a few things that made our week.

The chard and kale, protected by the row cover chicken tractor, survived the first couple snows of the winter.  The temps only dipped down into the upper 20s (°F), so the real test will come later.  But so far, so good!

Some of the unprotected dandelions survived, too, including this audacious specimen!  The last few days it's been warm enough for the bees to fly, too, and this little guy has very little competition for their pollination services.  Well played, dandelion.

We finally got the broilers their own setup in the shed, with some pasture space outside.  Better for them with more space, better for us because they're easier to take care of than when they're inside the brooder box.  This batch of broilers, although almost 20% had to be terminated early for various reasons, was a lot cleaner and more rambunctious than previous batches.  They even wandered away from the feeder to explore the pasture at times!  They all went in the freezer on Saturday, which means we're about ready to close the books on them and write up the stats.

Did you know that the bottom grate of a Smokey Joe grill fits perfectly inside a Lodge 12", 8-quart dutch oven?  That's an important discovery considering how many chickens we now have available to roast.

What made your homestead happy this week?

Fun with Green Tomatoes

In years past, we've covered our tomato plants with tarps through the first frosts of the fall, and eventually brought them inside to let them ripen up through Thanksgiving or so.  But some never ripen, eventually shriveling up into tomato raisins.  Others go bad.  And even the ones that do ripen seem to lack the pizzazz that fresh summer tomatoes have.  And this year, we planted a lot more tomatoes than in years past, so there would have been sacrifices of counter or garage space.  Most importantly, however, when we started experimenting with green tomato recipes last fall, we realized that we were only brushing the surface of our green tomatoes' potential

It was a perfect storm such that when frost threatened in mid-October this year, we gleefully picked all the tomatoes and got to work processing them right away, ripe or not.  Here's what we tried this year.

This bowl is just the Romas! It's about 15 lb. worth.  The green Black Krims, Mr. Stripeys, and volunteers made up about another 7 lb.

As we did last year, we didn't scrimp on the salsa making.  The batches all come out pretty good, but we haven't found a home-run recipe yet.  When we do, we'll for sure post it on here.  Our favorite uses for the salsas new this fall: nachos (of course), corn bread (both for part of the recipe and on top), and eating straight-up for sinus clearing.  Katie requires any homemade creations with more than about 2,000 Scoville units to be labeled as hot.  As a point of reference, all of the red color in the right-hand jar comes from cayenne peppers.  That kind of heat will keep you feeling warm and fuzzy inside all day!

We also made a green tomato jam (with vanilla and ginger), mainly following this recipe, but chopping everything with a stick blender in the pot, and ignoring the advice to remove the tomato seeds.  It's pretty good, but we feel like the long cooking time lets the ginger and vanilla flavors (especially the vanilla) start to dissipate.  Next year, we'll probably add some pectin and make it like regular jam.  The site we got the recipe from says it's good on plain yogurt, which it is, and it's also good on a sandwich with peanut butter (the way jam is meant to be enjoyed!).  Katie says the ginger flavor is a a little strong for her tastes, so you might want to cut back on that if you're somewhat ginger-averse.

The jam recipe also makes a pretty mean fruit leather.  It's got a molasses-type flavor, but the ginger still comes through strong enough to deter Katie.  (But she says she's not a bigot, and that some of her best friends are gingers.)

And last, but not least, mince filling!  We had never had a mincemeat pie before, but will definitely make it again.  We followed this recipe for the most part.  On its own, the filling kind of tastes like a spicy apple butter.  When mixed with an oat-and-almond crust, it tastes kind of like a Fig Newton. 

All told, those green tomatoes contributed to 14 pints worth of food, not including the test samples taken above.  Pretty good!

What do you do with your green tomatoes?

Green Onion Powder, Take 2

A while back, we wrote about our green onion powder, which turned out to be a great way to preserve green onions when we had too many to use up fresh.  Earlier this summer, we found ourselves in a similar situation with some overwintered onions that suddenly bolted.  And, as with everything else around here, the process is constantly evolving.  So, here's another couple ways to make green onion powder.

Onion stalk overload!  Ahh!

Cleaned and chopped, they look much less intimidating.  We mentioned that our makeshift solar wax melter only reached about 155 °F, which wasn't very good for melting wax, but is just right for drying food.  We're still working on making dehydrator trays to fit our Langstroth boxes, but the regular dehydrator trays stacked inside give a visual approximation.  Not shown in this picture, but also dried in this batch were some chopped garlic scapes and dandelion roots.

A few weeks later, they're nice and dry.  They probably didn't need so much time, but we got busy with other stuff and had to let them go that long.  The onions probably would have been good for grinding straight from the dehydrator, but we had the unfortunate scheduling demand of taking them out first thing in the morning, when it was cool and damp.  So, in the oven they went at 150 °F for an hour to re-crisp them up.

For the grinding, we turned to the grain mill, which we've now used on eggshells, sugar, sea salt, and green onion powder (also garlic scape powder and dandelion root powder), but not yet grain.  As with the other substrates, it makes a nice, fine green onion powder.  It works really well on the garlic scapes and the dandelion roots, but the chunks of onion we had were a little too large and flimsy (even when crunchy) to really feed into the grinder well.

So, after a while, we turned to the blender (a food processor or spice grinder would also work here).  It doesn't get everything chopped up perfectly, but for many applications (like soups or casseroles, for example), the larger chunks would be fine.

We sieved out the big chunks anyway to get some fraction of fines that make a good powder, and the rest we saved for cooking when the size doesn't matter.

Just for comparison, on the lower left is the grain mill powder, on the upper left is the fines from the blender, and on the right is the coarse fraction from the blender.  All perfectly useful in their own right, and all filled with that excellent green onion flavor.

How do you make green onion powder? (Or regular onion powder.  Or other powdered garden things.)

Bee Reset: Honey, Mead, and Sterilizing the Hive Bodies

While our capers with shook swarming and wax rendering have been great, one other main benefit in pressing the reset button on our bees is the edible part.  We humans aren't going to catch the foulbrood, so if the bees can't eat their honey, we might as well!  We just need to extract it.  Fortunately, this post will be a lot shorter than the others.  Heck, we can even throw in the sterilization of the hive bodies for good measure, and wrap this story up!

As a reminder, here's the overall process we're working with.

We did the honey by a whatchagot version of the crush and strain method, since we were working mainly with brood frames, which meant honey around the outside, brood in the middle.  That is, we didn't want to extract whole frames, just select chunks of comb.  Our setup is two buckets; the top one has holes in the bottom.  A t-shirt goes between the buckets to strain out chunks of comb, etc., and the comb gets mashed with our hands and goes in the top bucket.  In this particular case, the bottom bucket also had holes, so the whole setup is in a cookie sheet for secondary containment.

Once the comb is crushed up, the honey will eventually drain out.  It took several days, but it's a low-tech, low-effort system!  Of course, some honey will end up stuck to the comb (probably more than if we had a centrifugal extractor).  We washed the comb through with water, to recover any residual honey for making mead.  Some of the YouTube videos we saw in the research phase of this post showed people washing their wax before extracting it and just throwing out the water--so this is similar, but we keep the water for something tasty!

The water won't be concentrated enough to make a very strong mead as-is, so we added sugar to boost the final alcohol content (hence the name quasi-mead, since this stuff isn't made purely from honey).  Also, the wine yeast need more nutrients than just the (diluted) honey and the sugar can provide, and the mead will need some tannins to keep it from tasting like vodka or cough syrup (depending on how much residual sugar there is), so we added some very strong rose petal-and-raisin-tea.  We might forego the rose petals next time, since they didn't seem to be a very good source of tannins.  Hopefully we'll have a post soon on our approach to making fermented beverages.

Our final yield was about 4.5 quarts of honey, or about 14 lbs. (There is a quart jar-and-a-half missing from this photo because Katie is part pooh bear.)  Note that if you are extracting uncapped honey (as you may be doing during a bee reset), check the refractive index of it to make sure it has a low enough moisture content that it won't ferment in the jar.  Below 20% is normally the standard, but other sources say 17-18% is a better target.  Those other sources also say that if it's a little higher moisture content than that, keeping it below 50 °F can also prevent spoilage.

Finally, sterilizing the boxes.  Some say to heat everything, especially the corners and other nooks and crannies, until the wood is a uniform deep coffee brown color.  The bacteria that causes EFB (Melissococcus plutonius, although it was originally called Bacillus pluton) is inactivated above 65 °C, which isn't enough to turn the wood brown.  But heating until the wood is a little charred is an easy visual to make sure we're in the safe zone for killing EFB (and any other diseases that might be hanging around).  Sort of like roasting a giant wooden square marshmallow, but from the inside (the paint on the outside doesn't need to change color).  By far, the easiest and fastest way to do this would be with a propane blow torch.  But if you don't like the thought of all those difficult-to-recyclable propane canisters, you can get a similar effect with a little alcohol-fired camp stove.  Definitely not the OSHA-recommended protocol, but it works!

Once all the parts the bees have touched are uniformly charred (minus the extra-resinous parts, which saw the same heat, but didn't turn color), we should be good to re-use the box.

 How do you extract your honey and sterilize your hive boxes?

Bee Reset: Wax Rendering v2.0 (and 3.0)

We wrote a couple weeks ago that we used the shook swarm method to put our bees on fresh comb and hopefully help them shake their case of EFB.  So the bees got some new digs, but what happened to the rest of the hive--the honey, combs, frames, and hive bodies that were contaminated? The whole process would make for a very long blog post, so we'll break it up into a couple posts.  But to whet your appetite, here's the overall schematic:

This whole ordeal is a zero-waste process, which is nice.  On tap for today: frames and comb, in particular, wax rendering.

We're continually adapting our wax rendering process.  Version 1.0 we wrote about before, and was more of a treatise on how not to render wax.  Version 2.0 is a solar melter frankensteined together from parts of our cold frame.  The back is a piece from the brooder box, and the places they don't fit perfectly together are plugged with fence panels.

Inside is a regular Langstroth box with a couple 9" x 13"-ish aluminum pans, each with about an inch of water in the bottom (to keep the wax from sticking to the pans).  On top is our winter-time bee feeder...

...which is lined with an old t-shirt and has another Langstroth box stacked on top.

The combs to be melted get piled on the t-shirt, and the melter is covered by the windows from the cold frame, which are stacked to make a double-glazed top.  The windows should be washed to maximize the amount of sunlight that gets through (ours weren't), and every crack and crevice should be sealed tight because when it starts to heat up, every honeybee within smelling distance will be drawn like a magnet. 

We set the whole thing up on the garage roof since it gets intense sun for most of the day.

A few days later, the combs are mostly melted down...

...but the yield of wax is a little disappointing.  A couple things probably decreased our yield.  First, the t-shirt filter held up a lot of the wax itself.  Other folks have had better luck with a paper towel.  Second, the temperature should have been higher.  We added some reflective insulation around the walls, which helped, but not enough.  More insulation and a more airtight construction would have been better.  We could have washed the windows, which would have helped even more.  As it was, we got readings up to ~155 °F inside the box when the glass was on.  Good enough to melt the wax, which happens at ~145 °, but hotter would be better.

Also, when we tried a deep Langstroth box full of frames, we only got minimal melting

Plus, during the time spent with all our rejiggering, we found out that bees aren't the only bugs interested in the wax.  Ants and earwigs love it, too.  But at least there's a silver lining: if you want bespeckled wax, the sprinkles are free!  The final takeaways from version 2.0?  There are some kinks to work out, but there's good potential.  Significant improvements wouldn't be too difficult if we could find the time to properly build a solar oven (which is on the to-do list anyway), but that will have to wait until a future date.  Also, some folks have noted that from some old combs, solar melting, even in a well-designed system, doesn't cut it.  Those combs need steam to release the wax.

Enter version 3.0.  It's inspired by a few other designs we've seen and Keith's comment on our original wax melting post.  The core is a big pot with some water in the bottom, and an aluminum pie pan boat.

That goes on top of the rebuilt Dakota Rocket Silo, which is burning the contaminated frames (and other wood).

A t-shirt filter is secured to the top of the pot.  The combs go in the filter.  The idea is that the steam rises up and condenses on the combs to melt the wax.  The wax is supposed to drip off the lowest point on the t-shirt into the pan below.

The first part of that works well.  The wax melts in half an hour to an hour if the fire is really roaring.

Unfortunately, it also runs down the side of the pot, so in addition to the nice wax cake we get in the pie pan, there's also a layer in the outer pot.  (This picture is from the following morning, after everything had cooled down.)  What we really need is some kind of impermeable insert in the top of the pot that prevents the t-shirt from contacting the pot directly, but that has a hole in the middle to direct the wax to the pie pan.  Probably could be done with aluminum foil. 

Also, we should point out that the wax accumulating on the water in the big pot can be a little dangerous because when a full layer of wax forms, it prevents the water from evaporating normally.  The result is that the water gets super-heated and instead of boiling steadily, it bumps violently, and then does nothing for a few minutes, before bumping violently again.  (The same thing can happen in your microwave if the water is very still while heating.)  When the bumping was happening in our setup, it was actually able to move the pot around, and if we hadn't been watching, it could have tipped over into the fire.  Since the wax is flammable, that would have gotten exciting quickly!

In any case, the melted wax and water can be poured into a pan to cool down.

The wax will form a cake on top, which can be easily removed.  We had a lot of comb to melt, so we ended up with several of these cakes.

To make them more compact, we built a makeshift mold, lined it with aluminum foil, and stacked pieces of the cakes inside.

When the summer heat had broken, we melted it in the oven at ~150 °F.

On cooling down, it solidified, at which point the foil and wax can be removed from the box.  The foil should readily peel away from the resulting block, leaving a nice chunk of purified beeswax to play with.

The stuff that got filtered out (slumgum) can be composted, used to start fires, or used to make swarm traps more attractive.  Since we started this whole ordeal to get rid of EFB, we won't be using it in our swarm traps.  We tried a few different ways of making slumgum fire starters, including packing it into paper egg cartons, wrapping golf ball-sized portions of it in old phone book pages, and packing a thin layer of it between layers of paper grocery bags.  In our experience, it's the residual wax that actually starts burning, and the rest of the slumgum burns, but does more to inhibit the wax burning than to really support combustion.  So, adding additional dry, combustible material like paper, sawdust, or wood chips helps a lot.  Also, getting that extra combustible material to wick up and/or be coated in the wax helps it work under wet conditions.  Once we had everything packed in like we wanted it, we put it in a 200 °F oven for an hour or two to melt the residual wax and get it to soak into the paper. The egg cartons are easily divided, but the slabs with the grocery bags we cut into 1"-2" squares.

The t-shirts themselves can also be cut up to be fire starters, or saved for future use.  Since we don't want to transfer EFB to any future batches of wax, we're going with option #1 for the t-shirts this time.

We did a quick trial run of all four of our different kinds of fire starters (clockwise from top: t-shirt, egg carton, phone book, and grocery bag), and we noticed that the phone book page-wrapped slumgum balls were hard to light and keep lit, the wax-soaked t-shirt lit the fastest and burned up the fastest, and the egg carton-slumgum and paper grocery bag-slumgum fire starters had good longevity but could still be easily lit by a match.

Finally, a quick note on cleaning up the wax.  Many folks caution that it's nigh-on-impossible to clean up cookware items that have been contacted by the beeswax, but we've not found that to be entirely true.  First, the thin coating that forms on pots and pans will eventually wear off in continued use, and beeswax is inert in the human digestive tract, so one approach is to ignore it; no harm, no foul.  Second, we've found that mixing beeswax with some kind of vegetable oil (olive oil, canola oil, soybean oil, etc.) when both are above the beeswax melting temperature (~145 °F), makes a blend that can be cleaned up with soap and water, even when cooled back down to a touch-safe temperature.  And third, a scouring powder, in particular Bon Ami, which doesn't have anything in it that we would be worried about contacting food, cleans things up pretty well.

There you have it!  Our current procedure for processing contaminated wax and frames, waste free.  How to you render and clean up wax?