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.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Monday, April 6, 2015
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.
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.
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| Notice the dryer vent at the back....sigh |
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| Currently there is some laundry hanging on our nifty pull out drying rack. It drips into the laundry sink. Efficiency! |
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| 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. |
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
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!
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.
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.
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!
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| Peach tree in the back yard. Next spring I will prune it so it is a fan shape against the deck. |
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| 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.
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| Front yard - Before |
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| Front Yard - After 1 |
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| Front yard - After 2 |
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
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?
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!
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?
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| 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!
Monday, April 14, 2014
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."
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.
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."
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| Rendering the lard |
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| My finished "piggy" lard |
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| 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.
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Outdoor Kitchen
At long last, here is the promised post about the outdoor kitchen...
Back before the age of air conditioners, heating up your house in the summer was a bad plan, which meant cooking indoors was definitely out. In the early 20th century it was common place to have an outdoor kitchen and an indoor kitchen which would allow you to switch cooking location depending on the season. No doubt it was an inconvenience and when heating your house (by cooking) while simultaneously cooling it (with an air conditioner) became an option, the outdoor kitchen fell out of style. If the last sentence sounds a little ridiculous to you, then you will understand where we were coming from when we decided we wanted to build our own outdoor kitchen.
Typically I am opposed to duplicating room functions. Nothing drives me more crazy then having both a family room and a living room, for example. But besides the major heating and cooling benefit or having two kitchens, an outdoor kitchen also allows you to drastically increase the amount of time you spend outdoors in the summer.
We had spent a few summers limping along with a lone barbecue as out "outdoor kitchen". I made a valiant effort at cooking everything from cookies to stir fry on the barbecue, but it had some major down sides. It doesn't maintain temperature, so if I was baking I had to watch it constantly (something I am terrible at). If I had enough baking that I needed to cook on the bottom rack, the food was always burnt. It only had one side burner and it tilted alarmingly every time you set something heavy on it (like a vat of canning). And if it was raining, all bets were off. And so, when a great outdoor gas stove complete with griddle and oven fell into our lap this winter the "outdoor kitchen" was born....or at least its vision. (I have lots of visions. They turn into lots of work for Gus.)
Vision: We would cover the deck with a roof, so that we could continue to eat and cook outside even if it was raining.
Problem: We want to put a lot of windows in the back of our house in the future to let in the light and beautiful backyard views. A roof would destroy those. Also, I wanted to grown my grape up over the deck and a roof would shade it.
Solution: We put on a clear roof to let the sun through for light and for the grape. And we sloped the roof toward the house (instead of away form it) to take in the nice backyard views.
Result: We kept the existing trellis structure to build the roof and the result was a big beam in the middle of our view....that's not so great. Also, it doesn't keep the rain off as well as we had hoped. We anticipated some rain would get in with a driving rain...but we figured we could sit near the back of the deck closer to the house. We did not anticipate that in a hard rain, water would bounce of the house roof and into the back of our rain sheltered area. So in a storm we have a 1 foot strip down the middle of the deck that stays dry.... Oh well...we will install a bar.
Patch job: We will stick more clear roofing along the back of the roof to prevent back splash and eat inside if their is a driving rain.
Vision 2: We would get the huge heavy gas stove up on the deck and hook it up instead of the barbecue. Then we will build counters out of leftover materials to make a usable kitchen.
Problem: The stove was roughly the weight and size of a large elephant.
Solution: We will push really hard when we move it and hope the stairs don't break.
Result: This actually went well. Gus and his dad got the stove on the deck and nobody died. We built beautiful counter made from boards leftover from the old deck roof, left over concrete form plywood and metal drip pans we inherited years ago. The counter were a smashing success and the gas elements and grill are amazing to cook with. The oven doesn't work so well. You can't tell what temperature its at and it doesn't regulate well....we are still working on that issue.
In spite of the draw backs, the kitchen is a smashing success. After the roof was built, we cooked and ate almost every meal outdoors (rain or shine). The roof soars above us giving a wonderful airy feel and the new stove and griddle handles like a charm. Too bad we finished it in time for the summer to be over....
Back before the age of air conditioners, heating up your house in the summer was a bad plan, which meant cooking indoors was definitely out. In the early 20th century it was common place to have an outdoor kitchen and an indoor kitchen which would allow you to switch cooking location depending on the season. No doubt it was an inconvenience and when heating your house (by cooking) while simultaneously cooling it (with an air conditioner) became an option, the outdoor kitchen fell out of style. If the last sentence sounds a little ridiculous to you, then you will understand where we were coming from when we decided we wanted to build our own outdoor kitchen.
Typically I am opposed to duplicating room functions. Nothing drives me more crazy then having both a family room and a living room, for example. But besides the major heating and cooling benefit or having two kitchens, an outdoor kitchen also allows you to drastically increase the amount of time you spend outdoors in the summer.
We had spent a few summers limping along with a lone barbecue as out "outdoor kitchen". I made a valiant effort at cooking everything from cookies to stir fry on the barbecue, but it had some major down sides. It doesn't maintain temperature, so if I was baking I had to watch it constantly (something I am terrible at). If I had enough baking that I needed to cook on the bottom rack, the food was always burnt. It only had one side burner and it tilted alarmingly every time you set something heavy on it (like a vat of canning). And if it was raining, all bets were off. And so, when a great outdoor gas stove complete with griddle and oven fell into our lap this winter the "outdoor kitchen" was born....or at least its vision. (I have lots of visions. They turn into lots of work for Gus.)
Vision: We would cover the deck with a roof, so that we could continue to eat and cook outside even if it was raining.
Problem: We want to put a lot of windows in the back of our house in the future to let in the light and beautiful backyard views. A roof would destroy those. Also, I wanted to grown my grape up over the deck and a roof would shade it.
Solution: We put on a clear roof to let the sun through for light and for the grape. And we sloped the roof toward the house (instead of away form it) to take in the nice backyard views.
 |
| You can barely notice the roofing in this picture, but it is there. Building this was a bit of a challenge for Gus. He made sure to screw on the roofing on the upper edge when I was not around to have a heart attack. |
Result: We kept the existing trellis structure to build the roof and the result was a big beam in the middle of our view....that's not so great. Also, it doesn't keep the rain off as well as we had hoped. We anticipated some rain would get in with a driving rain...but we figured we could sit near the back of the deck closer to the house. We did not anticipate that in a hard rain, water would bounce of the house roof and into the back of our rain sheltered area. So in a storm we have a 1 foot strip down the middle of the deck that stays dry.... Oh well...we will install a bar.
 |
| The view from the house. Note the big beam in our way. |
Vision 2: We would get the huge heavy gas stove up on the deck and hook it up instead of the barbecue. Then we will build counters out of leftover materials to make a usable kitchen.
Problem: The stove was roughly the weight and size of a large elephant.
Solution: We will push really hard when we move it and hope the stairs don't break.
Result: This actually went well. Gus and his dad got the stove on the deck and nobody died. We built beautiful counter made from boards leftover from the old deck roof, left over concrete form plywood and metal drip pans we inherited years ago. The counter were a smashing success and the gas elements and grill are amazing to cook with. The oven doesn't work so well. You can't tell what temperature its at and it doesn't regulate well....we are still working on that issue.
 |
| Counters and gas stove |
In spite of the draw backs, the kitchen is a smashing success. After the roof was built, we cooked and ate almost every meal outdoors (rain or shine). The roof soars above us giving a wonderful airy feel and the new stove and griddle handles like a charm. Too bad we finished it in time for the summer to be over....
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Harvest
I guess this blog has worked, because this is the first year where my garden hasn't been a disaster by the time it hit September. The regular rain helped...I hardly needed to water at all. My son's enthusiasm for gardening was another bonus that kept me at it. We actually managed to pull in a decent harvest this year.
Success:
- The herbs in the front garden are ridiculously large (and need to be dried/frozen for winter). I have so much I don't think I could use them in the next 5 years. The whole front garden wound up looking really amazing (I know I should have a picture, but I don't). The landscaping isn't quite finished because we ran out of free compost, but it should be finished with pictures next spring. The front yard also proved to be a good area for growing, with good sunshine until late August when the sun got to low on the horizon. I have lots of plans to make better use of the space next year.
- My cucumbers were abundant and I even managed to have enough to can some relish.
- The tomato and pepper harvest has been modest (it was a pretty cool year), but the plants are healthy and continue to produce.
- The peas all did well and produced all season (because of the aforementioned cool year). They would have done even better if Darwyn did not continually ravage them.
- The baby carrots did well and are delicious. I wish I had planted more.
- The raspberries were reliable as ever. They produced a bountiful harvest all July, much to my son's delight. He was an excellent raspberry picker. Hopefully he will stay that way as he gets older :)
- The strawberries did not produce very heavily, but they were delicious and a huge hit with the kids. Next year I think I will decrease the amount of garden space spent on them and transition to only ever bearing varieties.
- The lettuce and spinach harvest was good, but short. Next year I will need to make more effort to stagger my plantings and plant earlier. The spinach was definitely planted too late.
- I wasn't sure whether the rhubarb was a failure or a sucess. It got sick and died of the same thing that killed it every other year, but it lasted longer this year than any other year. Also, everyone else's rhubarb died this year too. Apparently it was a bad year for rhubarb. I got some more plants which I planted in the front. They have been attacked by the same fungus, but apparently they have been more resistant to it than everyone else's rhubarb...so perhaps that is a success?
Failure (although this isn't completely fair because I still got a harvest off these plants):
- I planted a variety pack of carrots in the front. The carrots did well and look great to look at but they taste somewhat bitter, especially the peel. If we peel and cook them they are still quite good, but I usually enjoy carrots raw and I was disappointed that these were not tasty without cooking. Did I do something wrong?
- My beans and zucchini did not produce much, which is unusual. The zucchini was ill, but actually the illness rained it in so we got just about the right amount of zucchini. I'm not sure why the beans didn't produce much. They are usually very successful and they look healthy.
- My onions were a total flop. The spot I planted them in did not get enough sun and the onions never got bigger than a golf ball. They made a delicious baby onion harvest though.
- I was really excited to try growing Florence fennel after I tasted it this spring. My fennel is huge, healthy and gorgeous, but it has no bulb. I'm not sure why...if anyone has any insight I would love to hear it.
- I was really excited about my grapes. They grew large and beautiful and I had many bunches start to turn purple...but we left to visit my sister right about harvest time and when we returned a local raccoon had harvested half of them for us. He came 4 times in the first evening we were back to visit the grapes again (much to my children's delight) and every time we had to scare him away with a broom. I got concerned that he would polish off all my ripe grapes before I went to bed and so I went out and picked them all (save two or three hard to reach bunches) so that they could finish ripening inside. Turns out grapes don't ripen off the vine. I had a lot of unripe sour grapes on my hands....so we made raisins. They were quite tasty, but they took 3 days in an electric food dryer to turn from grapes into raisins. And there were almost none. The box you see pictured below made about 1/2 cup of raisins. Oh well, at least the raccoon lost too.
I still have a planting of kale growing in the garden for harvest this fall. I may have planted it too late in the season....we will see how it goes. I loved the garden this year and I am already dreaming about what I will plant next summer, so I guess that is success enough.
Success:
- The herbs in the front garden are ridiculously large (and need to be dried/frozen for winter). I have so much I don't think I could use them in the next 5 years. The whole front garden wound up looking really amazing (I know I should have a picture, but I don't). The landscaping isn't quite finished because we ran out of free compost, but it should be finished with pictures next spring. The front yard also proved to be a good area for growing, with good sunshine until late August when the sun got to low on the horizon. I have lots of plans to make better use of the space next year.
 |
| Crazy Herb harvest (and some green tomatoes). These herbs represent only a small fraction of what is in my garden. |
- My cucumbers were abundant and I even managed to have enough to can some relish.
- The tomato and pepper harvest has been modest (it was a pretty cool year), but the plants are healthy and continue to produce.
- The peas all did well and produced all season (because of the aforementioned cool year). They would have done even better if Darwyn did not continually ravage them.
- The baby carrots did well and are delicious. I wish I had planted more.
- The raspberries were reliable as ever. They produced a bountiful harvest all July, much to my son's delight. He was an excellent raspberry picker. Hopefully he will stay that way as he gets older :)
- The strawberries did not produce very heavily, but they were delicious and a huge hit with the kids. Next year I think I will decrease the amount of garden space spent on them and transition to only ever bearing varieties.
- The lettuce and spinach harvest was good, but short. Next year I will need to make more effort to stagger my plantings and plant earlier. The spinach was definitely planted too late.
- I wasn't sure whether the rhubarb was a failure or a sucess. It got sick and died of the same thing that killed it every other year, but it lasted longer this year than any other year. Also, everyone else's rhubarb died this year too. Apparently it was a bad year for rhubarb. I got some more plants which I planted in the front. They have been attacked by the same fungus, but apparently they have been more resistant to it than everyone else's rhubarb...so perhaps that is a success?
Failure (although this isn't completely fair because I still got a harvest off these plants):
- I planted a variety pack of carrots in the front. The carrots did well and look great to look at but they taste somewhat bitter, especially the peel. If we peel and cook them they are still quite good, but I usually enjoy carrots raw and I was disappointed that these were not tasty without cooking. Did I do something wrong?
- My beans and zucchini did not produce much, which is unusual. The zucchini was ill, but actually the illness rained it in so we got just about the right amount of zucchini. I'm not sure why the beans didn't produce much. They are usually very successful and they look healthy.
- My onions were a total flop. The spot I planted them in did not get enough sun and the onions never got bigger than a golf ball. They made a delicious baby onion harvest though.
- I was really excited to try growing Florence fennel after I tasted it this spring. My fennel is huge, healthy and gorgeous, but it has no bulb. I'm not sure why...if anyone has any insight I would love to hear it.
- I was really excited about my grapes. They grew large and beautiful and I had many bunches start to turn purple...but we left to visit my sister right about harvest time and when we returned a local raccoon had harvested half of them for us. He came 4 times in the first evening we were back to visit the grapes again (much to my children's delight) and every time we had to scare him away with a broom. I got concerned that he would polish off all my ripe grapes before I went to bed and so I went out and picked them all (save two or three hard to reach bunches) so that they could finish ripening inside. Turns out grapes don't ripen off the vine. I had a lot of unripe sour grapes on my hands....so we made raisins. They were quite tasty, but they took 3 days in an electric food dryer to turn from grapes into raisins. And there were almost none. The box you see pictured below made about 1/2 cup of raisins. Oh well, at least the raccoon lost too.
I still have a planting of kale growing in the garden for harvest this fall. I may have planted it too late in the season....we will see how it goes. I loved the garden this year and I am already dreaming about what I will plant next summer, so I guess that is success enough.
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