This years garden

Well...I started this blog to help me keep up with my garden.  The good news is I've been doing a much better job of the garden (although I'm still behind).  The bad news is now I am not keeping up with this blog :)  Anyway, in lieu of actually spending time writing something interesting here is a photo/point form list of what I've been up to in the garden:

Plant Fruit: One of the big motivators for me to garden was sharing it with my kids, especially my son who seems to have really taken to it.  They both enjoy helping me in the garden and their favorite activity is picking and eating fruit.  Until recently all we had was a grape (which the raccoon ate), raspberries and strawberries.  These all got a lot of attention, but I figured we needed to diversify.  So this summer (and some of last), I spent my family savings trying to squeeze more fruit into our sun deprived yard.  We've now added currants, haskaps, hardy kiwi, blackberries, gooseberries, a dwarf cherry bush, and a peach tree we are hoping to fan out against the deck railing.  Of course few of these have actually provided us with any fruit and my husband is skeptical that the money was well spent.  Probably they will start producing well just when we are ready to move out!

Peach tree in the back yard.  Next spring I will prune it so it is a fan shape against the deck.

Backyard garden

Add a play set:  I want to dedicate a post to this, so I will mention it only briefly here.  We've been trying to build a proper play set for our kids out of scrap wood.  Until I get around to writing something substantial on the issue this "half-way there" picture will need to do.  Eventually the play set will include a large swing, trapeze and baby swing as well as "rock climbing" around the tree trunk and nets for hanging out in the tree branches.  Max also wants monkey bars to the sandbox, a water wall and a mud kitchen.  One day!

Finish demolishing the front lawn:  This year we finished getting rid of the front lawn (except one small patch that requires more soil).  It looks absolutely awesome and has given us tons of space to grow more veggies. What use to be wasted space that no one used, now provides us with a spot for 4 different fruit bushes, rhubarb plants, an asparagus bed, many herbs (basil, oregano, bergamot, sage, thyme, lemon balm, garlic) and veggies (carrots, tomatoes, zuchinni, swiss chard, spinach, beets, peppers, peas and cauliflower!).   I'm not sure the all the neighbours care for it, but we love it.

Front yard - Before

Front Yard - After 1

Front yard - After 2

Solar dryer- Alas...this project was actually started last year.  With any luck I will finish it in time to actually dry something in it.  I will post picture of this soon.

Spring Food (posted long after written...as usual)

Spring is always touted by everyone as an exciting and wonderful season.  They talk about the beginning of the nice weather and all the flowers and new leaves.  Like everyone else, I like those things...but representing spring by these things is like saying winter is about presents, feasts and decorated evergreen trees.

In reality, most of spring is about frustrated hope and waiting.  Hope that the snow will melt this week and that it won't be replaced next week.  Hope that this year April showers will NOT bring May showers.  Hope that your child will be able to make it from the house to the car without lying down in the mud pit you are pitifully calling a front lawn.  But the hardest part of Spring, for me, is the waiting.  I hate being so close to fresh food...but not having any of it.  In April, on the first nice days, I'm usually outside trying to convince myself that I don't need a pick ax to work the soil.  I drop the first frost hardy seeds into the ground with excitement, imagining the delicious harvest and then I ....sit there.  I tell myself SOON....be patient.  But I don't really get an abundance of produce from my garden until early July at the earliest.

Now, of course, the optimist will point out early spring crops like asparagus and rhubarb.  We did eat our first asparagus from the garden in early May, but it comes from 1 sole plant that I planted a few years ago on a whim.  I think we have already eaten the only harvest I can safely take from that plant.  I have a new asparagus bed in the making, but I will need to wait at least 3 long years to get anything from it.....more waiting.  As for the rhubarb....well you can read about my skills with rhubarb here.

If you know me, then you know that I don't care for frustrated hope and waiting, so spring is just going to have to change.  I've had a good long talk with the powers that be...he is working on global warming...but until that pans out, I need a different plan.  I need more early spring foods.  So imagine my delight when I learned that you can eat the shoots hostas send up first thing in the spring.  Not only are these shoots edible, hostas are actually cultivated in Japan solely for these shoots.

Sadly I got rid of most of my hostas years ago because I thought they were "useless ornamentals", but I have some left in spots with so much shade that I didn't know what else to do there.   I could barely wait for my remaining hostas to come up this year, so I could start experimenting in the kitchen.  I tried the shoots baked in the oven with asparagus and seasoned with oil, salt and pepper and Parmesan cheese.   They were quite tasty, but had a slight bitter after taste that I did not care for.  I tried preboiling them the next time, but that did little to remove the bitter after taste.  Any suggestions for next year?

Note the roasted hostas

A few other foods are on the spring menu.  I've been getting more into foraging lately which offers lots of opportunity for early spring foods.  So far I'm sticking only to plants I'm confident I can correctly identify, which limits things a little.  I was hoping to try fiddle heads, but the only ones worth eating apparently come from Ostridge ferns and I haven't been able to find any.  Cattails also send up some yummy spring shoots I'm looking forward to trying next year and if I'm feeling like a hard days work I can dig up the roots of the numerous giant burdock that grown along the trail near our house and eat those too.

Anyway, all my reading and researching about foraging has left me feeling greatly cheered about spring.  Now I can add finding this or that wild food to my list of spring hopes.  One of these springs I might actually even eat something!

The Economics of Homesteading and my soap adventures

After many years as a vegetarian, I have finally started eating meat again.  Not because of some fundamental change in values, but because for the first time in my life, it has become much easier to find meat that I think has had a reasonable life.  We now have many friends up at the river and some friends in town with farm connections and recently we used such a connection to acquire some pork.  The farmer asked me if I would also like the fat saved to render into lard.  I don't know anything about rendering lard, and I had the impression that lard was bad for you anyway, but I couldn't stand the thought of the fat being thrown out, so I had to say yes.

It turns out I'm not terribly good at rendering lard, even though it is supposed to be easy.  You are suppose to dump it in a slow cooker and let the fat melt.  The idea is that if it melts at low enough temperatures it will be white and odorless (the stuff you like to bake with), but if the heat is too high, it smells piggy.  Mine smelled piggy even with the slow cooker.  I was a little disappointed because I had learned that if you render your own lard it is not nearly as bad for you as lard from the grocery store.  Even so, piggy pastries didn't sound appealing.  Fortunately, lard makes an excellent soap.

Now I know nothing about making soap (just like I knew nothing about rendering lard), but the idea of having my own handmade soap thoroughly appealed to me.  So I embarked on learning to make soap.  My in-laws did not get it.  They asked me repeatedly, "but why would you want to make your own soap."  I came up with lots of fluffy answers about quality and craftsmanship, but ultimate the answer was "because I got this fat for free and I read that you can make your own lye too if you have hardwood ashes and we have some of those at the river right?  So my soap will be free!"  To which Gus replied, "oh great you will have saved us $0.75 on soap this year."

Rendering the lard

My finished "piggy" lard

My first batch of soap.  Sadly the colours faded a lot with time.

Gus was being unfair.  It is probably closer to 5 or 6 dollars, but if you consider the many hours I would spend researching how to make soap, acquiring my materials and then actually doing the "dirty" work, it is very clear that the whole thing is far from free.  And far from economical....

Unfortunately, this point really applies to much of homesteading.  The open market is quite efficient at producing products cheaply.   The soap making industry, for example, makes millions of bars of soap.  When you make that much soap you can afford to buy specialized equipment, amass specialized expertise and so forth, which makes every individual bar of soap much cheaper than my individual bar of soap.  This whole phenomenon is referred to as economies of scale and in most cases, it creates a real problem when you want to argue that homesteading is economical.

There are, of course, a few caveats.  The first is how much your labor is worth on the open market.  If you can only make minimum wage, then each hour you spend on soap making costs $10.25.  If you are highly trained in some profession and make, say, $40 dollars an hour then you are making very expensive soap.   Gus and I have discussed this many times (as we are both avid DIY) and for most of our projects, if you account for our labor costs, we would do better economically to hire it out.  (Of course, all of this assumes that you have a job/could get a job.  If you are in the middle of the great depression, doing it yourself may indeed be economical.)

So why do it yourself?  Mostly I hear reference to cost, and we've already established that it usually isn't cheaper unless you ignore opportunity cost.  But there are other reasons.

1) You like it.  This one is pretty hard to argue against.  Hobbies are hobbies and there is nothing to say that my homesteading is any worse than your golf, or video games or whatever.  Unfortunately, this also isn't very interesting.

2) It actually provides you with two commodities, the product and the skill.  I now have lots of soap.  I also now know how to make soap (more or less).  Whether or not that skill is of particular use is another question, but I definitely could not have added the soap-making-skill to my soap purchase at the store.

3) Markets suffer from imperfect information.  This one is the most interesting, so I'll spend a few paragraphs on it.

One of the big benefits of capitalism is that it can increase everyone's prosperity even if each individual is working towards their own selfish ends.  It works because in general a trade between you and me will only happen if it benefits both of us.  But capitalism also relies on an assumption that is sometimes quite false and that is the idea that in our trade we are both completely aware of what the other is offering.  In other words, we have perfect information.

As an illustration, consider our recent visit to the car mechanic.  Our power steering was seized.  Upon examining the car the mechanic informed us that the steering column was rusted and needed to be replaced.  They said that they had done a deep scan of the car and discovered that the breaks also need replacing.  We have noticed nothing wrong with the breaks.  So there are two possibilities: (1) the breaks need replacing and they should be replaced now or (2) the breaks might need replacing someday, but it isn't really imminent.  As my husband and I know nothing about cars, we have no way of determining which of these scenarios are true.  Trading the mechanic cash  for working breaks definitely benefits both us and the mechanic (capitalism at its best), but giving the mechanic cash to replace breaks that won't seize until something else breaks first only benefits the mechanic.

The only way to solve this information problem is to acquire information.  We might do this by sending our car to many mechanics (quite expensive and they are all biased in the same direction) or we might learn how to fix our own car so we can tell on our own whether the breaks work.  The latter should seem familiar to the avid DIY.

Of course, soap is a bit different.  It is pretty easy for me to tell whether I like a bar of soap.  If it sucks, I will only buy it once.  Information where soap is concerned (and many other homesteading activities) is relatively more available, so it is a little harder to argue for homesteading based on imperfect information. But you could still make the case...  Besides, I have found homemade soap to be nicer and it costs a lot more a bar...so maybe I can go back to justifying it economically.    Until then, I guess I will just have to leave my in-laws mystified at my eccentricities.