The cost-efficient, labor efficient garden

I've recently finished reading Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese.  Strictly speaking, this is a cook book, but it elaborates on many recipes with stories about Reese's experiences "making things from scratch".  The premise of the book is that some things are worth doing yourself and some things are not.  For each of her projects ranging from keeping chickens and goats to making your own fast food, Reese details how much it costs to make it yourself versus buy it, how much work it is to make yourself and whether there is a quality difference between homemade and bought.  She also gives a recommendation: make it or buy it.  As the name suggests she thinks you should make bread, but buy butter.

I cannot comment very much on this book as a recipe book (I haven't made anything from it yet), but as an analysis of the economics of making things at home, I find it very interesting.  It plays nicely into the debate Gus and I are having about the value of homesteading.  Gus points out that homesteading in its truest form is basically poverty.  He is certainly right that none of us would likely enjoy the true homesteading of the pioneer days... but today it seems almost the opposite of poverty.

Consider lawns.  Originally they were kept only by the rich, because poorer people could not afford to devote land to anything other than food production.  As people got richer they all clamored to have lawns (and the status that came with them) and soon they were ubiquitous.  Once everyone had one they no longer had status,unless you kept them weed free because that was hard to do.  Not everyone could do it...you either had lots of time (a luxury) or enough money to hire a lawn care company.  On the same note, vegetable gardening, once considered a low status drudgery, is rebounding.   Only those of us rich enough to have someone tend a garden can afford to do it.  Today's "homesteader" is someone with enough time or money to devote a lot of time to food production, while still enjoying the other amenities of modern society.  So it seems that today homesteading is the exact opposite of poverty.

Here is the thing, though....I don't want to think about my homesteading as an expensive, status earning hobby for rich people.  I want to think it is value producing....that somehow I am saving us money and improving the quality of our lives.  Which is why a book that breaks down, economically, what items are worth making is so interesting to me.  Unfortunately, while Reese covers chickens, cheese, goats and bees(things I lust over) in humorous detail, she pretty much utterly fails on things like gardening and canning.(the things I actually do). So I've decided to add a few of my own items (Reese style) to these sections.

 I think canning might just be a loss.  Canned goods are cheap in the stores and really benefit from economies of scale.  If you have lots of "free" abundance from your garden then perhaps it is worth it.  Otherwise it is almost certainly as expensive as buying it...though in my humble opinion the quality of home canning is often superior.

Where I really want to focus is where you get the most bang for your buck in the garden.  I don't have the time to do a full Reese style break down, so I'm choosing my top five grow it yourself picks and my top 5 buy picks.  Of course there is a lot of stuff in the middle...and I still grow many of my buy picks.

Greta's top GROW picks:
Rhubarb
Rhubarb is one of my kids favorite snacking foods.  They love to wander into the garden and grab a stalk which they dip in sugar.  I would grow it for this alone, but it also makes excellent deserts.

Cost: A small bunch of rhubarb at the market costs me $3.  Conservatively, I will harvest roughly 20 bunches of rhubarb (this year I will try to keep track) in a season.  That is roughly $60 in rhubarb in a single year.  I have four plants that cost me $5 each at the market for a total of $20.  The first year after they were planted I did not harvest from them so that they could establish.  The second year I paid off my investment in full and then some.  Every year after that I have gotten farther into the black.
Care:  Rhubarb requires next to no care.  You plant it once and it comes up every year after that.  It is dead easy to harvest and only needs to be watered after many days of no rain.  It shades everything near it so weeding isn't really necessary, and it grows in part shade, which is great for those of us that decided to garden on a wooded lot (oops).
Disease: Rhubarb is supposed to be very hardy.  My rhubarb has a fungal root rot.  My rhubarb is always dead by the end of July.  This does not seem to keep it from coming back in force the next year and providing us with $60 of rhubarb.  I probably should see if I can do something about the rot though.


Asparagus
Asparagus is prized in our garden (by me, the kids don't like it) because it is the first vegetable ready in the spring.  The big down side of asparagus is that you need to wait a few years for the bed to mature before you can start harvesting.

Cost: A bunch of Asparagus in peak season usually costs me about $1.50.  This year we got roughly 6 bunches from our garden...but some of our asparagus is not yet fully mature and I was conservative in my harvest.  Still that is $9 in asparagus. Last year I harvested $6 in asparagus. I have spent about $15 on roots and seeds, so I have only now paid off my investment.  If you plant exclusively from seeds you could get an asparagus patch the size of mine out of one seed packet (roughly $2-$3), but you'd wait a long time for your first harvest.
Care:Asparagus requires next to no care and is a beautiful decorative fern.  Asparagus must be planted once and watered during extreme drought.  In the fall I add manure or compost to my asparagus bed.  I weed it only irregularly and pull out only large weeds.  Sometimes some of my ferns flop over and need to be staked.  Harvest is dead easy and asparagus is the first vegetable ready in the spring.
Disease: I haven't had any. but apparently they can get rust and fungal infections.

Alfalfa Sprouts
Strictly speaking we do not grown these in the garden.  We grow them indoors in a jar through most of the winter....but they are SO worth it that I needed to include them.  They have two really major advantages.  (1) You can grown them indoors in the winter when you are devoid of fresh vegetables and (2) they are dead easy.

Cost: A package of sprouts at the grocery store costs $1.50.  We paid $5.00 for a package of organic sprout seeds which has made us many many jars of sprouts ( I can't even estimate how many).  Before we went the organic route we bought the sprout seeds at a farm supply store for only a dollar or two and the seeds lasted us years.  The return on investment here is so ridiculously good that sprouts are pretty much a no-brainer.
Care:  We put roughly three tablespoons of sprout seeds in a jar and soak them for 8 hours.  After that we rinse and drain them once or twice a day when we are at the sink (a process that takes less than a minute).  We continue this for 5 or 6 days until they are ready to eat.  That's it.
Disease:  People worry about e-coli...but I have yet to encounter any problem. Once our twice we have not rinsed our sprouts enough and they have gone funky...but we could smell it and didn't eat them.  

Herbs
Herbs are the part-shade gardeners best friend.  They also look great in front yard gardens and they are very versatile.  It doesn't get easier than looking after herbs and they are a great addition to a lot of different foods.  My favorite uses are adding them to soup broths, stuffing chickens with them and making herb butters.  My daughter LOVES to harvest her own lemon balm for tea.

Cost: Herbs at the grocery store cost about $1.50 for a couple of sprigs of herbs, depending on exactly what you are buying.  If you are like me, you need only half of what you buy and the other half goes bad in your fridge.  I usually buy herb seedlings to plant in the garden that cost around $2.  If you harvest that herb twice all summer you have paid back your investment.  Plus, most of my herbs are perennials (sage, thyme, tarragon, chives, mint, lemon balm, oregano, dill and cilantro - the although technically the latter to actually just replant themselves each year) so I only need to buy a seedling once.
Care:  I plant my herbs and water them in droughts.  If you want leafier more flavourful herbs you can pinch off the flowers.  Harvest is easy.
Disease: I haven't had any diseases that did anything worse then add a few spots to some leaves.


Zuchinni
Zuchinni has the reputation of being the vegetable everyone is trying to get rid of, largely because it is such a prolific producer.  It is also easy to harvest and incredibly versatile, which makes it a great candidate for the "grow" list.  

Cost: You can start zucchini from seed, in which case a single plant costs only a few cents.  I tend to buy seedlings because I like the heads start (and I don't have great resources for starting them myself).  My seedling cost $1.50 for four plants.  Warning: If you plant all four plants you will be eating zucchini every day until you die (of zucchini overdose).  A single zucchini at the market costs about $1, so I pay back the cost of my plant as soon as I pick my second zucchini.
Care:  Plant them.  Water them.  Pick them (which is easy).  Zucchini are aggressive and easy to care for.
Disease: Mine died the past two years...something fungal I think.  It was sad.  I still harvest enough zucchini of them to more than pay back my investment.

Runner ups: 

There are a couple other things in the garden that really struggled for a spot on this list.  The one that comes most quickly to mind is our raspberries.  We love them and they are our kids favorite snack stop in the garden... but the problem with most berries is that they are time consuming to harvest (and the birds will do it for you if you aren't careful).  If you count your labor to pick them most economic gains of growing them yourselves are lost.  Add to that that my raspberries are so veracious that I need to spend much of my summer pulling them out of the rest of the garden and...well they got cut from the list.

Garden cucumber almost made it too.  The cucumbers I've planted have produced year after year nearly as well as the zucchini and probably with a little less disease.  But cucumber is not nearly as versatile in cooking as zucchini, so the abundance is a little less useful.  Cucumber is a great pick if you like to make pickles. Green and yellow beans have basically all the same pros and cons as cucumber, although they are a little more work to pick.


Top BUY picks:

Tomatoes
Tomatoes are the signature garden plant that even non-gardeners tend to have in a pot on their balcony.  It is a little strange, then, that they are on my buy list.  While I love home grown tomatoes and attempt growing them every year, they made the buy list because they are so disease susceptible.  I`ve grown tomatoes every year for the last 7 years or so and only once did they get through the summer without succumbing to something.  That year the chipmunks really enjoyed the ripe fruit....

Cost:  These should be cost effective. I can buy a four pack of tomato seedlings for $1.50 and the internet things each of these plants should produce about 25lbs per plant.  At the 99 cents/lbs you pay in the grocery store, that is a substantial savings.  But I almost never seen that kind of harvest from my tomato plants.  Although, I suppose that the one year I did get a good harvest made up economically for the 5 years that I didn't.
Care: Tomato plants need to be pruned and staked, which all ready means they require more care than many of the vegetables in my garden.  Usually my tomatoes are growing crazy and wild by mid July. To avoid disease I need to mulch and cover the soil with black plastic,  I also plant them with ground egg shells and chicken manure to avoid nutrient deficiencies...in other words, they require some babying.
Disease:  My tomatoes has gotten sick and died ALOT.   I usually get some tomatoes off them, but not many.  Their remarkable disease susceptibility is the main reason I am putting tomatoes in my buy list.  The good news is that I recently stumbled on some more disease resistant tomatoes that have improved my yields.

Broccoli/cauliflower
I grew broccoli once.  It tasted like tires.  Maybe I didn`t water it enough.  I`ve grown cauliflower successfully a few different times, and except for the worms inside it, it tasted great.  But both broccoli and cauliflower are really space inefficient.  You need an entire plant in order to get one head of cauliflower or broccoli.  

Cost:  A pack of 4 broccoli or cauliflower seedlings costs $1.50.  They produce 1 head per plant.  Broccoli from the market in the summer usually costs between $1-$2 a head.  That isn't a substantial savings.  Obviously I could save more if I started the plants myself, but they require so much space for so little vegetable that they usually don't get a spot in my space restricted garden.
Care: I have found them easy to care for, although broccoli does require frequent watering to avoid the tire taste.
Disease: Cabbage moths!  But they can be avoided by covering your plants.  Much less beautiful but more appetizing to eat without the green little worms.


Melons
I keep trying to grow Melons.  They might be a great choice for people in tropical climates, but I find I just do not have a long enough and warm enough season to grow them.  To work, they require babying.  Start them early, and cover them in the fall to extend their season.  Give them very rich soil, lots of sun and lots of space for the spreading vines.  At the end of all that work, they are usually very tiny and not ripe.  They just can`t compare to the huge juicy melons I buy at the local farmer`s market for $3.

Cost: Again, a 4 pack of seedlings costs around $1.50.  I've never really gotten any melons worth the name so I consider that all money that is lost.
Care: They need lots of warmth, lots of sun and lots of nutrients, plus a long growing season....which basically explains why I haven't been a successful melon grower.
Disease: Malnutrition always killed my plants before disease had a chance.


Fruit Trees
Our neighbors have a giant Macintosh apple tree in their backyard.  Every fall we harvest from it and make delicious apple sauce and cider.  I definitely covet their apple tree, but even this successful tree is a lot of maintenance.  It requires pruning in often hard to reach places and attracts many wasps through out the fall season.  They spend a great deal of effort picking up rotten apples and dodging wasp stings (which is never completely successful).  I should caution, though, that some of these issues would be alleviated if they had planted a dwarf tree.

Cost:  I only ever bought one fruit tree.  A peach tree. It cost me roughly $70 to buy.  You could probably get them cheaper, but I wanted one that would produce fruit right away the following year.  I also bought $30 spray.  I was told peach trees absolutely needed to be sprayed as they were very disease prone.  My tree died before the next year and I never harvested a single peach, so that is $100 in the red.
Care: Fruit trees need a lot of space and all require spring pruning.  Most require protection from pests especially the fruit.  If you want, you can fit some fruit trees into small areas by pruning them into fans or cordons but that requires more money spent on trellis materials and labor intensive pruning.
Disease:  This varies a lot with the tree.  Most people I know with fruit trees. though, need to spray them if they want to avoid worms and pests.

Berries
 It really bothers me to include berries in this list.  As mentioned above I almost put Raspberries on my top plant list.  My yard has 8 different types of berries planted (if you could cherries and grapes). My kids love eating berries and they are expensive to buy.   But, with the possible exception of raspberries, our berries haven`t been very economical.  I`ve spent a lot of money and effort protecting them from pests and somehow the pests still seem to get most of the fruit.  Add to that that berries are very time consuming to pick and the initial plants are expensive to buy.  If your time is valued very highly than you won`t find they are particularly economical.  That said, I have no plans to remove my berry bushes and I`ve sunk yet more money into protecting them :)

Cost: I got my raspberry plants for free.  Most of my berry bushes cost around $15-$20 a bush.  A pint of berries at the market usually runs between $2-$4 depending on the berry.  How many berries my bushes produce depends a lot on the plant, but most would pay for themselves in a couple of years provided you don't factor in the time required to pick the berries.  Unfortunately, that time is the majority of the cost in the berries we buy, so it is not negligible.
Care: Berry bushes need pruning, sometimes staking and mostly protection from birds and other animals that want your berries even more than you do.  I have lost the majority of my berry harvests to these critters in spite of efforts to protect them.  I recently bought 3 great tents for protecting my bushes at $50/tent.  So far they have worked well, but now I have another $150 to pay off with berry harvests.
Disease: My berry plants have not suffered extensively from disease.

Efficient furniture

So I not so recently blogged about smaller houses being better houses.  But lots of people don't like small houses. My mother used to mention that one of the reasons she loved moving to a bigger house was that it gave her so much more space for projects.  I admit to being a bit of a project-aholic myself, so this could be a real concern.

What to do?  Efficient furniture to the rescue!  Like redesigning the floor plan, designing efficient furniture is great fun.  Unlike redesigning the floor plan, it does not involve ripping apart our entire house to turn my projects into reality.  Out of this, my newest project was born: a new activity table.

The irony is that I've never actually cared for activity tables.  I found they were often too small to function well for trains (what they seem to be predominantly used for) and the big lip around the edge made them uncomfortable to use for more regular table top activities.  They are also massive and take up all your floor space.  So I needed a table that could be large or small as needed, could be comfortably worked at while still keeping materials on the table, could serve many functions and could be easily removed when floor space was required.   Enter the ultimate activity table!

Features:

1) Switchable table tops: The most prominent feature of this table is that it stores a series of table tops.  Each top has different surfaces on it (lego surface, road ways, plain top, magnetic white board, felt exc.) that can be used for different functions.  You can switch which top is on your table by simply sliding the existing top out and replacing it with a new top.  To avoid disturbing larger projects, the front lip of the table is removable (although getting a good mechanism for adhering it has proved a little tricky).

Notice the different table tops that can be slid out of the table

2) Extendable play surface: Max plays lego almost constantly.  That means most of the efficiency of our table goes to waste because the lego surface is always being actively used.  Fortunately, the many table tops helped to solve this problem.  We can extend lower trays out 1/3 of the way providing a smaller table that can hold lego bins, or Darwyn's craft project, while Max works nearby on his lego.  This has been the single most useful function of this table in my opinion....and I didn't even anticipate it when I made the original design :)

Update: Max's lego has had to move to the bedroom to keep baby Ada from eating it, so now the table sees a much greater diversity of use.

Here is the extended table surface.  Max is playing on the lego
surface (in the foreground), while Dar builds a city in the background.

Dar playing with road surface table top

3) Comfortable to work at: Lips on activity tables are nice, but they get in the way of resting your arms against the edge of the table while you work, which makes activity tables not useful for many daily activities (art projects, meals, puzzles exc.).  My sister-in-law came to the rescue on this one.  Her table was custom built by her father-in-law and they included a low very wide rim that is quite comfortable to rest your arm on.  We copied her :)

4) Easily Stored: Activity tables are HUGE.  Ours is a little smaller than some, but still quite large.  In order to make it possible to get it out of the way, we designed it so that it folds against the wall.  Honestly, we haven't used this function much (partly because I only got around to building the shelf that holds the table in the upright position yesterday).  The table is in such constant use (and the floor under it in so little demand) that we rarely fold it up.  But at parties is could be useful and for a really small home it would definitely be helpful.

Activity table in the up right position
with a magnetic whiteboard surface

5) Vertical Play Space: The folding feature had the added bonus of making it function as a vertical play space in addition to a table.  We designed it to be two sided, so table tops can be used when it is flipped up against the wall. This allows it to function as a white board or chalk board, an easel, felt board or a magnetic surface (similar to a fridge).  I've been hatching schemes for all sorts of toys that could make use of this function, but I've yet to build any.  They should make good fodder for Christmases to come though.

6) Sensory Play:  The cool thing about this table is that it works as a sensory play table too.  The cavity for holding trays is so deep that with nothing but the bottom tray in it makes a pretty good basin.  If I were marketing this commercially I would design buckets that slide into the tray lips (ikea trofast style) so that you could store sensory bins with materials in them inside the table, just like you do trays (although the lids would need to be quite secure for when you fold it up against the wall....).  I don't have that kind of money, so we just set the sensory bins inside the table when we are playing with them and store them elsewhere the rest of the time.

The rice table

Downsides:

1) Wide table top depth: The most notable drawback of this design is that the trays make the table top very deep.  This could be helped, somewhat, by making the table hold only two trays (which still allows four different table surfaces and the extend-ability feature).  It think I would do that next time and create adjacent storage for extra trays (built in under the kids bed or something).  Of course, if you did this you would lose the sensory play feature to  some extent.

2) No long term storage of large projects: This is especially an issue for the lego structures.  They can be pretty tall and the head room between trays is 4 inches at maximum.  If you want to take out a partly finished lego structure and put in a different top, it can be hard to store it in the table.  We've wound up setting the lego tray on the coffee table.  This hasn't been too much of an issue for us, since we only usually do this when we are having a party and using the table for the kids to eat at.  After meal time, the lego usually goes right back in the table.  But if you needed to store it a little more long term, the coffee table wouldn't make the best spot :)  I think designing under the bed tray storage (or tray storage in other areas) is the best solution to this as well.  You can have much more head room over the tray then, and projects could stay under there for an extended period if need be.

3) Not easily moved: Because it folds against the wall, the table is attached by hinges to the studs.  This makes it hard to change your mind on your room layout.  The table can be moved of course, but it requires power tools, which is more of an ordeal then moving your average activity table.

Overall:
Overall, I love this table.  It gets used constantly.  We originally installed it in the kids room and then moved it to the main area because it was so useful.  I think if I were living in a truly small space, I would design a whole series of furniture to work with the system.  For example, I would make the under the bed storage I talked about and then I would reduce the width of the table to hold only two trays.  I would also design the dining table to hold two side by side trays that could be used for adult projects or to extend the dining table when there are guests.  And I would design hard to reach over the closet spaces to hold trays for long term project storage.  If we eventually move into a truly small home (or renovate ours so we can live only on the main floor), perhaps I will do all these things.  Or maybe I will just start a career in furniture design :)

Spring once more

Gus wants to live somewhere tropical.  To say that he dislikes winter would be an understatement.  Having young children and commuting by bike only make the disadvantages of winter that much more salient.  Gus has recently started some telecommuting work (in other news) that has the potential to free us up to live where ever we want to.  It is a massive freedom that few get to enjoy, but it has opened up a massive debate about the merits (or lack thereof) of winter.  It is spring finally and I am reveling in the warmth and ease of using the outside.  It is a miracle to go outside without getting anyone into a snow suit.  I have to admit it makes it easy to see Gus's side of the argument.

But spring has also started a new year and a new garden.  I'm back to dreaming outside while I clean up old beds and plant new vegetables.  I know only half of them will be really successful, but the dream is half the fun.  By the end of the season, I'll be tired.  Many of my dreams will have succumbed to blight and the rest to weeds.  The garden won't look so good anymore.  But before long it will be covered in white snow.  The blemishes will die.  Nobody will see the mistakes and I will rest.  When spring comes...I get to try again.  I get to dream a new garden and try to fix what went wrong last time.  The snow has wiped away most of my failings (although the soil may remember the blight).  I'm invigorated and filled with hope again.

Without winter there is no spring. Nothing else that I do has spring, but the garden does.  

Smaller House Better House

If I have an obsession (ok, I have many) than it is efficiency.  Nowhere is this more manifest that in my desire to make efficient use of space.  I don't like big houses.  I am always amused to find someone has designed an "environmentally sensitive" 3000 square foot house.  Don't get me wrong.  It is always nice to insulate better, use better wall systems, collect solar power and so forth, but you could escape all of that and be more environmentally sensitive if you just built a smaller house.

But besides the environmental argument, I just like small houses.  I find big houses tend to duplicate functions, cost more (to buy and to look after), require more cleaning and encourage you to fill them with even more junk you don't need.  But beyond that, small houses also feel cozy in a way that vast entry foyers and soaring great rooms never accomplished.  They feel intimate and somehow more genuine.  And most all, they feel efficient....or at least they do when they are well designed.

I suppose this latter bit is part of my obsession.  I have a knack for making efficient use of space and I find the design challenge to be great fun. And I convince myself that this is all part of homesteading, because...well...I'm making a home right?  AND being environmentally sensitive because I'm trying to live in less space.  So I've re-designed the space in our 70s bungalow from top to bottom 100 times to make it more efficient and I've tried to convince Gus that we should put all of these design changes into practice.  Usually I'm not very successful in this endeavor, but sometimes I succeed mostly because Gus is also a sucker for efficiency and he likes renovation projects...or at least, he likes them until he starts doing them.

My most recent success in this regard was moving our laundry room.  Our house has little storage space and no workshop area, and the downstairs laundry room seemed like a prime candidate for a small workshop space.  Unfortunately, the available area was occupied by a sprawling washer, dryer and laundry sink.  Upstairs, next to the bathroom, were three poorly utilized closets that were just begging to be converted into a main floor laundry.  And so began my crusade.

It would be the perfect renovation project.  It was closed off from the kids, so we could work at it at a leisurely pace.  It was directly adjacent to the bathroom plumbing, so it would be easy to install the washer dryer.  And think of the space savings!

We ripped apart the closets in a hurry, exposed the plumbing and then realized that easy and renovation don't go in the same sentence.  The plumbing was very difficult to tie into.  With much effort, Gus designed a system he thought would work and was informed by a handful of plumbers that he shouldn't try it.  Get a professional and even then it won't work...water will back up into the tub.  We thought about this for awhile.  It didn't seem like the water should back up into the tub - not as long as the laws of physics continued to be stable.  So we did it anyway.

It took a long time.  Gus had to make a separate plumbing stack through the ceiling, which involved going into the attic and tunneling through the blown in insulation.  He had to try multiple times to cut the pipes precisely enough that he could cram them into the small space he had to work with.  While he was working I went down stairs to discover that a good chunk of the ceiling was on our bed and that it was being followed by a steady stream of water.  That involved a lot of frantic patching and some tests of the strength of our marriage.  Finally, the plumbing was in.

Then we had to run the electrical, gas lines for the new dryer and a new dryer vent out the roof.  We wanted the laundry to be quiet so we painstakingly insulated all the walls including over the studs.  Then came the dry wall.  We hate drywall.  There was to be absolutely no drywall in this laundry room.  We got a panel alternative.  We put it up.  It looked like crap.  We took it down and put up drywall.

We argued about flooring and whether or not to put bi-fold doors.  Gus wanted to add carpet along the edges of the doors to further insulate against sound.  I absolutely refused this.  And then there was door jam and trim to do.  Finally, we installed the washer and dryer, the laundry sink and the storage above it.  Then we held our breath and did the first load of laundry.  It worked!  No water in the tub, nothing backing up!

The laundry room is now finally finished, two and a half years later.   We made some mistakes.  It is loud despite all our efforts because we did not sound insulate the floor.  The joists are too narrow for the vibrating of the machine and this tends to shake the whole house when the machine is on spin cycle.  And we should have sunk the dryer vent into the wall so that the washer and dryer wouldn't stick out so far....

But we love it!  It is the space efficiency dream we always thought it would be.  It is convenient, well organized, and now we have more space in the basement.  And it only took 2 and a half years!  I think we should renovate the kitchen.

Notice the dryer vent at the back....sigh

Currently there is some laundry hanging on our nifty pull out drying rack.
It drips into the laundry sink.  Efficiency!

A little nook for hanging the broom, mop and duster.
This was a real pain to drywall, but it is nice not to bang
 the broom exc. when we are working at the sink.

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.