Repurposing Wool Fibers

Despite my interest in frugality, I'm relatively new to thrift stores.  Generally I don't enjoy shopping, but there are a couple of Goodwill stores on routes I travel regularly, so I've been stopping in there and browsing lately.  Naturally, there are some amazing deals to be had.  Probably one of the most surprising to me have been the 100% wool sweaters that sell for as little as $2, when they're on markdown.  It simply defies logic that these pure woolen items, some of them brought all the way from Scotland or Australia, end up being given away for a song. Of course, the vast majority of sweaters at the Goodwill are made from synthetic yarns.  But that only makes it a little more of a treasure hunt to seek out the wool.

I'm an occasional, largely seasonal, and not very gifted knitter.  One reason I haven't done more knitting is the incredible expense of the yarn.  It's always much, much cheaper to buy a sweater than to buy the yarn to make one yourself, even if you're paying the full retail price for the sweater.  But those occasional thrift store finds change that equation.   When woolen sweaters sell for so much less than the cost of the constituent materials, I've met my price point.  Mind you, it's not every sweater that can be taken apart by hand, so it pays to know what I'm looking for.  I learned what I needed to from this link. 

Taking apart a knitted item to recycle the yarn is a somewhat tedious task, well suited to wintertime, endless cups of tea, a BBC radio stream, and the company of a playful cat, brisking about the life.  It's amazing how much yarn comes out of a small sweater.  I cut a few cardboard pieces to wind the yarn around as I unravel the sweater.  Binding it in this way helps to stretch out some of the bends the yarn assumed when it was first knitted.  There are steps you can take to further relax the kinks in previously used yarn.  But they take time and effort, and my creations aren't so magnificent that I worry about minor issues such as slightly pre-kinked yarn.

In principle, you could take apart a knitted item made from any sort of fiber.  For my time and money, only wool or other animal fibers would make it worth my while.  I did scoop up an alpaca sweater from the thrift store, and it's waiting to be taken apart.  It's white but slightly stained.  I may decide to dye the yarn if I can't get the stain out. The beauty of acquiring these materials so cheaply is that it gives me free rein to experiment with them and learn from mistakes if I must.

I've knitted one pair of my chunky fingerless gloves, and am currently working on a second pair, both to be donated to the fundraising auction at the PASA conference, which is only days away.  These gloves are knitted with double strands of yarn, which makes them extra warm.  For both pairs of gloves I'm using the repurposed yarn as one strand.  It's satisfying to salvage and re-use this material.  The color of the sweater is such that I wouldn't choose to wear it myself, but in a double stranded item, I think it turns out quite pretty.

I'm off to the conference on Wednesday, presenting on Thursday, and enjoying myself thoroughly on Friday and Saturday.  After I'm home, I'll give my usual summary of the conference highlights, and with a little luck, relocate my writing mojo, which has been scarce of late.  Hope winter is treating you all well.

Harvest Meal: Roasted Parsnips

This winter we have a surfeit of parsnips to harvest, which is wonderful because they are one of my favorite vegetables.  But parsnips can be tricky to cook well, because they aren't very dense.  So when you roast them (one of the very best cooking methods for this vegetable) with other root crops, they tend to cook through much faster than carrots, potatoes, or turnips.  Add to this the abundant sugars in a winter-harvested parsnip, and you have a recipe for burned, or mushy parsnips, or worst of all, both conditions at once.

So I like to roast parsnips on their own, and I recently hit on a fabulous way of doing that.  It's a bit more fussy than other methods, but it produces such deliciousness that I'm willing to go to the extra effort.  The nicest thing about this dish is that all the major ingredients are either homegrown, or homemade.

I start by cutting up several slices of my home cured guanciale.  I'm sure bacon or pancetta would work fine as well, but the extra seasonings that I add to my guanciale give the dish a little something special.  If you use bacon or pancetta, one or two slices should do it.  My guanciale is small, and my slices short; I used about seven slices for two full pans of roasted parsnips.  A little bit of fatty cured pork goes a long way in the flavor department.  So the slices are cut into bite-sized pieces and gently heated in a skillet just enough for some of the fat to render out into a liquid state.  Some of the guanciale pieces begin to brown a little, but I'm not aiming to crisp them up at this point.

While the fat renders I go to the trouble of peeling several parsnips and cutting them also into bite sized pieces.  I check my quantities by spreading out the chopped parsnips on a sheet pan.  I don't want it overcrowded, but neither do I want too much open space on the pan.  The vegetables should all fit in a single layer with a bit of space around the pieces.  To each sheet pan of parsnips I add several peeled cloves of garlic, left whole, a good amount of finely chopped rosemary, and freshly ground white pepper.  I gather up the ingredients to the center of the pan, pour over the rendered guanciale fat and the guanciale pieces, and add just a bit of olive oil to the pile.  Then I mix everything by hand so that the vegetables are well coated with oil and fat.  These get spread back out to an even layer, and sprinkled with kosher salt just before going into a 375 F oven.

A single pan of these parsnips will take about 25-30 minutes to roast.  If you make two or more pans of these goodies at once, it'll take longer.  It's a good idea to rotate pans between shelves, as well as turning them 180 degrees if you're making a lot.  I didn't need to stir the parsnips around from time to time as they cooked.  With larger pieces of root vegetables I've noticed that doing so encourages more even cooking.  The smaller pieces don't seem to need it.  When the parsnips and guanciale develop a lovely browned appearance, you'll know they're done.

It may seem strange that I'm elevating what most people would consider a side dish to the status of a proper meal.  All I can say is that I tried using these roasted parsnips as a topping for pasta, and while it worked just fine, I noticed that the pasta seemed more of a distraction from the vegetables than a help.  So I gave up and next time just ate a large bowlful of the roasted parsnips.  Not the most nutritionally balanced meal in the world, but I can't stop eating them.  I'm thrilled to have stumbled on a great recipe for parsnips that uses homegrown garlic and rosemary, which is doing well by the way under protection.  We've hardly needed much in the way of season extension infrastructure with the mild winter we're having, but that's another post.

I got the basic idea for this dish from Molly Stevens' All About Roasting cookbook.  She takes her dish in a sweeter direction than mine with the addition of brown sugar.  To my mind, a parsnip that is allowed to stay in the ground through a few frosts so that it sweetens up on its own is plenty sweet enough, so I leave the sugar out.  But I appreciate the attention to detail in Stevens' book.  Hitting on the best temperatures and cooking pans for roasting all sorts of different foods is not an intuitively obvious thing, but one arrived at through much trial and error.  So I'm grateful for the sheet pan and temperature recommendation on this recipe, and the topic of the book is well suited to the season.

Anyway, I hope some of you will try this parsnip recipe, especially if you've never been impressed with this humble treasure before.  It was once the main winter staple crop of Europe, before the potato was brought from the new world.  I do wish that I could retrieve some of the ways our ancestors prepared this vegetable.  I'm sure they had some very good ways with the parsnip.  If you have a favored recipe for parsnips or other root crops, please do share them in the comments!

A Few Loose Ends

Happy New Year, everyone!  My conscience has been nagging at me to follow up with results from several things I've written about over the last year or so.  I'm not good about getting around to posting about things I say that I will.  So I figure I'll clear my backlog with the first post of the year and then I can get back to semi-regular posting.

Leek seedlings
Last spring I tried a somewhat fiddly method of starting leek seedlings, with the aim of encouraging them to grow long and tall before they were transplanted out.  The idea was that a long seedling, transplanted deeply, wouldn't need hilling to make the plant develop a nice long white section, which is the best part of the leek.  Well, it worked and it didn't.  The seedlings indeed grew long and tall.  I duly transplanted them with just a couple inches of their full length showing above the ground, and then ignored them for the whole growing season.  Disappointingly, when I dug up a few this fall, they had very minimal white parts.  It seemed to me as though the plant turned anything planted below the soil line into root.  So this was a bust.  Hilling seems to be required to grow beautifully long white leeks.  I'm still looking for the best way to do this in my long narrow garden rows. 

Tomato trellising
Remember my enthusiasm to try a new tomato growing technique that I learned about at last year's PASA conference?  I've got results.  The trellising system worked fairly well as the plants grew tall.  It took some diligence to keep up with pruning extra branches and clipping the remaining ones to the wires.  The problem came when the plants started setting fruit and bulking them up.  I had all my trellises in short rows, which meant that only two 7' stakes were holding up three tomato plants each.   Gradually the weight of the plants pulled the stakes in towards each other, making all the wires sag.  This could be only minimally remedied by adjusting the wires at the stakes.  Next year I plan to grow my tomatoes in longer rows, with stakes every ten feet or so.  Since all but the end stakes will be supporting plants to either side, the growing weight of the plants should exert equal pulling in both directions, so that the stakes remain upright.  I may try angling the stakes outward at either end of the rows to give them more resistance.  The sagging wasn't a disaster, but it looked kinda shabby and cut down on airflow around the plants, which might have been a very bad thing in a blight year.

Burdock
I've become a fan of burdock, aka gobo, for its delicious flavor and its soil amending properties.  When I wrote about them more than a year ago, there was some question in the comment section as to whether or not the parts of the taproot left in the ground would regrow in the spring and form a new plant.  The results this spring were negative - in the sense that I saw no plants emerge above ground where we'd dug out the roots.  This is a positive as far as I'm concerned though, because it means we can have our soil amendment and eat it too.  Those portions of root that are too deep to dig out rot in place, adding organic content to the subsoil and greatly improving our clay soil in the process. So burdock is not forever once you plant it, provided you harvest the root.  Those roots we didn't harvest definitely came roaring back this spring, ready to set seed.  And this is not a plant whose seed I want to save for myself, thank you very much.  It took more than one severe cutting down to the ground to encourage the plants to call it quits.  Burdock produces a fair bit of biomass in the second year, and the greens are marginally of interest to the chickens.

Acorns sprouting and different oak species
This one is owing for quite a while.  In fall of 2010, I aggressively gleaned acorns from oaks in parks and off my own property to use as feed supplement for my laying hens.  I went for a certain oak species that produced beautiful, large, meaty acorns, and I managed to gather some 60 pounds of them.  Unfortunately, it was mostly wasted effort.  The acorns that looked so big and worthy to me did not pass muster with the hens. They pecked rather half-heartedly at them after I crushed them by hand.  It was my mistake.  Since they obviously enjoyed the taste of the small, poorly looking acorns produced by the oak tree at our property line, I assumed that the acorns that look so much better to my eye would please them just the same.  Not so.  There are more than five hundred species of oak in the world.  And there's enormous variation in the tannin content of the seed of different sorts of oak tree, and even between individual trees of the same species.   Tannins give a bitter flavor to foods.  These compounds can be leached out of acorns well enough to make them palatable to humans, but that's not a process I'm willing to go through for the chickens' sake.  Some acorns are naturally "sweeter" than others, and obviously the oak on the edge of our property produces tasty ones.  So I've gone back to only collecting these rather sad looking acorns, which the hens do appreciate.  My advice is to definitely run a test on any acorn available to you before you go to the trouble of collecting more than a handful.  See if your livestock will eat the acorns from any given tree, and don't rely on appearance as an indicator of feed quality.

A note too about storing the acorns you do collect.  Do not keep them in plastic bags or buckets, even if left open and uncovered.  The acorns give off enough moisture so that the ones on the bottom will start to sprout in just a week or two.  A canvas or burlap bag will breathe enough to prevent this, as will baskets made of wire or natural fibers.


If there's something else I promised to report back on and have forgotten about, please remind me.  I'll do my best to follow up!

PASA Conference Coming Up

Here's my annual publicity for PASA's Farming for the Future Conference.  I've been attending this conference for the last four years, and have always come away excited, energized, and having learned many useful things applicable to my homesteading endeavor.  The conference is held at the beginning of February each year in State College, Pennsylvania.  If you're interested in the sorts of topics I cover here on the blog and reasonably local to PA, I suggest you consider attending.

In the coming year I'll have the honor to be presenting with the man who first inspired me to start keeping a tiny flock of backyard chickens at the PASA conference four years ago.  Harvey Ussery will be leading an all-day pre-conference track on Integrated Homesteading.  I'll be playing backup.  Harvey is more than capable of presenting a knock-out presentation all by himself, as I have seen more than once.  He's concise, well-spoken, and his talks are carefully honed.  He does not waste the audience's time.  My hope as a novice speaker is to not look incompetent by comparison.  Frankly, I'd rather be learning than teaching, but it's hard to say no to an invitation from someone I admire so much.

From now until December 31st, you can receive an early bird registration discount, and additional family members receive discounted registration as well.  There are many ways to reduce the cost of conference registration if you want to attend but need to watch your pennies; everything from scholarships, to facilitated carpooling, to a WorkShare program.  So check it out even if you think it's not in the budget.  The next conference is going to be an even better deal than in previous years, because PASA has decided to pack an extra workshop slot into the two-day conference.  So I'll be able to attend six 80-minute talks instead of five.  I look forward to all the other wonderful extras of the conference as well: picking up free shipping coupons from Johnny's, checking out the free seed-swap table, the local cheese tasting, free live music in the evenings, a free seed packet or two from various seed vendors, the great quotation posters, a wonderful fund-raising auction with so many lovely and useful items, and all the unpredictable things I'll learn from formal presentations and conversations with other attendees.

I'd love to see some of you there, whether at the Integrated Homesteading track or the main conference.  If you plan to attend, please drop me a note.  If you can't attend, I'll most likely to a summary post after the conference, detailing some of the highlights and things I learned.

More Hoop House Details

I promised another post on the features of our hoop house.  Despite the fact that it's still not quite complete, the hoop house is doing well and demonstrating its productivity.  Typically, protected growing space is some of the most expensive in any garden or on the farm.  Our hoop house was definitely no exception.  I don't have a figure for what we've spent on this project, but I'm guessing it's close to $1000 all together.  That makes it about $10 per square foot of growing space.  And given that our laying hens are occupying one-third of that, the productivity of the remaining two beds is under a lot of scrutiny.  I know we'll get many years of use out of the hoop house, and thus the cost can be amortized.  But I'm still very conscious of needing to maximize the value of that space.

The seeding of the hoop house, like everything else associated with this project, was a day late and a dollar short this year.  Mostly it got planted at the end of September and very early October.  Nonetheless, most of what I planted seems to be doing at least tolerable well.  I experimented with turnips (planted a little too early, if anything), cylindra beets and some piracicaba broccoli (probably a tad late), catalogna dandelion (doing very well, wish I'd planted more), many transplanted volunteer lettuces and cilantro from the main garden (all looking happy and gorgeous), tatsoi (happy, but seems to be beloved of whichever pest found its way into the sheltered space before winter arrived), carrots and scallions (very happy and well timed) a few snow peas (rather small, but seem to be hanging in there), some sort of Asian brassica that I got on sale from Johnny's (nice cooking green, another one I wish I'd planted more of), as well as a few perennial herbs which seem to be biding their time.  So I'm well rewarded by the sight of happy plants each time I go out to the hoop house.  That said, I mostly want to show off a bit of the infrastructure today.

The hens are once again overwintering on deep bedding.  As usual the bedding is primarily free wood mulch from the yard waste facility in our township.  This year I also put some fallen leaves in there.  These high-carbon materials will absorb and balance all the manure (high in nitrogen) laid down by the chickens during the four months or so of their winter confinement.  In my experience during the last two years, the litter never smells bad and the girls constantly scratch through and mix their wastes into it.  In the spring what is left is a rich, inoffensive, bioactive, nutrient-packed fertility mulch for my fruit trees.  I was asked whether this didn't pose a risk to these trees, since excessive nitrogen can lead to fire blight on growing trees. I haven't seen that on the pear and apple trees that have benefited from previous years' litter treatment.  My feeling is that because there is so much microbial life in the litter, most of the nitrogen and other nutrients are bound up in the bodies of living things, and thus only become available to other organisms where the litter is laid down very gradually.  This is a far cry from what happens when sterile chemical fertilizers are dumped into the ecosystem of the topsoil.  I will be watching the bedding closely however.  We've got more hens this year, and less square footage per bird.  The rule of thumb that Joel Salatin proposes is a minimum of four cubic feet of deep litter per bird.  Supposedly at that stocking density the litter will never turn nasty.  We're right up against that number, so we'll see what happens.

There are a few major benefits of the hoop house over the shed, as far as winter housing for the hens goes.  The first is that we didn't have to sacrifice one third of the space in the shed to them this year, and won't ever have to again.  The second is that the deep litter bedding in the shed, being raised up off the soil, sometimes froze solid, despite the carbon-nitrogen balance that should have provided for enough microbial activity to keep the pile generating its own heat.  This required me to get into the bedding and turn it over with a pitchfork from time to time, otherwise the manure built up on the frozen surface.  It's certainly true that we haven't seen the worst of the winter weather to come.  But given that the lack of air space under the bedding, I very much doubt the bedding will freeze inside the hoop house.  The other main benefit is the added light and warmth of the hoop house compared to the shed.  The doors of the shed face north, so the hens got no direct sunlight at all in previous years.  I did open the doors all day in all but the worst weather though, so the temperature was always cold in the shed.  The hoop house gets cozy warm inside on sunny days, even when the temperature is well below freezing.  This saves on feed costs for me, since the girls don't need so many calories to keep themselves warm.  Whether the deep litter is actually generating heat as well, I couldn't say.  I don't have a compost thermometer, so I have no way of distinguishing the sources of the heat in the hoop house.

Given the overall cost of the hoop house project, it was important to me to pimp out the hoop house for as little money as possible.   Most of the following tricks and accessories cost very little money.  While some of these were doable largely by making use of fortuitous chance, I hope some of them at least will be useful to others who have or are considering a hoop house.

In the center of the hoop house I've place a truck bed storage box - one of those things that sit across the bed of a pickup truck and provide a lockable compartment akin to the trunk of a car.  (The garbage can sitting on top of it holds the chicken feed safe from dripping condensation and rodents.)  This one came with our beater pickup truck, but we didn't need it.  I thought it would make a pretty good seat between beds.  More importantly though I noticed that it was black and that it could hold water.  Black things absorb solar warmth, and water has a high thermal mass.  So I filled the bed box with as much water as it will hold (with some soap and salt added to make sure it doesn't become a breeding ground for mosquitoes).  Now it's doing double duty as a bench and a heat sink.  The other use I might want to turn it to one day is as a large vermicompost bin.  I suspect it wouldn't be great for worms in the summer time, but I'm mulling it as a possibility for next fall and winter.  That could provide a nice homegrown source of protein for the chickens next year.

My next trick is one I've used before in the garden - reflective material along the north side of the hoop house that maximizes the natural light the plants receive.  This time I've added a cheap space blanket that I found at a 99-cents sale.  I got one for each car and our emergency kit at home, plus one for the hoop house.  Now I wish I'd gotten two for this project.  It's highly reflective and it probably also acts as thermal insulation.

Then there are the low hoops over each growing bed.  These were invaluable while the hoop project was still under way.  They were the only protection the plants had from frost for a while there, before the sheeting went on the big hoops.  Now the low hoops give a second layer of protection, keeping the temperature in the beds even warmer overnight.  In fact, on sunny days I need to get out there and raise the plastic off the low hoops lest the plants get cooked.  Fortunately, with the hens in the hoop house, daily maintenance is built into the schedule.

Predictably, before the house was completed and before the winter weather even got too severe, some rodents took up residence on the margins of the hoop house.  There were plans to place 1/4-inch hardware cloth around the perimeter of the house at ground level.  Our delay on that part of the construction allowed the mice, or voles, or whatever they are, to move in.  It's still the plan to install the hardware cloth.  In the meantime, I knocked together a trap box based on Rob's vole motel, but so far I haven't figured out what bait will snare them.  Either that or the neophobia (fear of new things) common to many rodents has kept them safe.  I know they've been through my box; the dirt tracked into either side confirms this.  If the peanut butter bait still hasn't worked in another week, I'll try something else.  So far my carrots don't seem to have taken any damage, at least not at the surface where I could spot it before harvest.  Who knows what's going on underneath though.

Here's one I'm rather pleased with.  I built myself a weeding/harvesting board with an extra cross piece that extends my reach across the beds quite effectively.  This was a scrap piece of the 2x6 cedar wood that we used to construct the raised beds.  I tricked it out with some risers and braces underneath so that it is stable on the edges of the beds and doesn't completely flatten the growing plants.  The sitting board allows me to easily reach the far side of the beds.  When I rest the cross piece on the sitting board and far edge of the bed, I can lean way out for wider access across the beds.  I put some wood sealer on the boards, a useful measure given how humid the hoop house is.

Okay, more tricks.  To use every bit of space that possibly can be used, and to eke out as much productivity as possible, I scrounged through the pile of stuff we've pulled out of construction site dumpsters and came up with a simple shelf.  I hung it from the purlin on the north side of the hoop house.  With the sun low in the sky from fall through early spring, the shelf doesn't cast a shadow on the raised bed below it, so no light lost to the growing space.  Right now I'm only using the shelf to store oyster shell for the hens and a few other items.  Come springtime, this shelf and others like it will increase my growing space.  They will be ideal spots for vulnerable seedlings in trays, keeping them well out of reach of our unwelcome rodent guests.

Our hoop house has lighting too, which is for the benefit of the hens rather than the plants.  We happened to have an extra fluorescent hanging lamp lying around in the basement, and it just so happens that the previous owner of our home ran electricity out to the shed.  So rigging the lamp from the ridge pole of the hoop house and running an extension cord to the shed was no big deal.  As I have done the previous two winters, I am lighting the hens with the help of a timer to keep them productive over the winter months.  It took quite a few hours of lighting them at first to bring them back into laying.  Right now we have mostly heritage breed hens, and they had all stopped laying for the winter season.  Now that we're getting a decent number of eggs each day, I may try slowly cutting back the hours and/or removing one of the two bulbs to save on the electricity bill.  My understanding is that it would require an enormous amount of lighting to make any difference to the growth of the plants.  That's not something I'm interested in paying for.  As far as I can see, the fact that the plants are practically in stasis is one of the main benefits of winter hoop house growing.

An indispensable accessory for the hoop house is the common broom.  A pair of brooms helped us coax the plastic sheeting over the large hoops.  It also allows me to gently push up the sheeting from the inside to coax  accumulating rain and snow off the sheeting.  I keep one in the hoop house at all times.

A not so cheap aspect of the hoop house are the multiple self-ventilating windows.  I had intended to content myself with just one of the expensive piston openers when I spotted them on sale at Johnny's.  Unfortunately, I didn't communicate this to my husband, who spotted the same sale and purchase two for me as an anniversary present.  We decided to indulge ourselves and not return any of them for a refund.  So our hoop house is going to be very well ventilated when my husband finishes installing them.  The way these work is that the piston contains a temperature-sensitive fluid that expands as it warms and condenses as it cools.  So as the temperature increases, the piston opens the window automatically, then closes automatically when the temperature drops.  It sure is a nifty trick and I admit that it saves me the need to pay a lot of attention to what's going on in the hoop house.  Still, even on sale, these things weren't cheap, and I would have contented myself with fewer of them under different circumstances.

The final feature I want to mention is one that I can't take a picture of.  We built this hoop house and arranged the beds directly over the surplus heat dumping coils for our solar thermal array.  We actually requested the placement and configuration of those coils with the hoop house project in mind.  Right now we're not shunting any heat whatsoever to the coils, because it's wintertime, and we need every bit of heat we can collect from the solar array.  So presently we have an unheated hoop house.  But come the shoulder season in spring, when our heating demands go down in the house, we will be able to divert some of the heat from the array into the ground underneath the hoop house.  The same could be true in the fall shoulder season as well. It remains to be seen whether or not this will provide any advantage.  It may be that by the time we have excess heat to vent from the array, the hoop house will already be quite warm enough.  There is an alternate heat venting system that we would use in that case.

I expect having the hoop house will change the growing routine around here quite a bit.  I'll be able to start plants earlier in the year, and keep a small number of them carefully manicured in there year-round.  I'm thinking about implementing some proper square-foot gardening in there to really max out the potential of covered beds.  I'll need to learn how best to use the extra heating that should be available in spring and fall; an unusual set-up in hoop houses that have heating available.