Reduce! Reuse! Recycle! Root Cellar?

Hello!

Today is a gorgeous day. Sunny. Upper fifties. Very odd. But I am getting the chance to catch up on a lot of the things that kind of got shuffled to the side in the "real" fall while I was running around and spending a lot of time up in Erie. I;m almost done taking down the frame for the trampoline. My dears, everyone who lives in the country has a trampoline. Everyone. Do not ask me why. I'm going to be pulling some husks off some nuts later since they're nice and wet and squishy from last night's rain. But the real reason I'm here today is to spread the word about root cellaring. I also have bread to bake, and I started some springerle cookies yesterday. Bread is it's own lifetime's worth of storytelling, and springerle cookies belong in posts about Christmas cookies which are certainly forthcoming.

Because I can't just get down to brass tacks, I'm going to tell a story about seeds instead. There are lots of different kinds of seeds, but I'm talking onions, carrots, and potatoes today. If you plan on eating your own "roots" all winter, it's important to choose seeds for "storage varieties". I planted yellow onions -- Johnny's Seeds Frontier Hybrid to be exact -- but I lost a lot of them to drought and naughty goats, so I don't really need to think about storage. A brown paper sack under the sink will about take care of them. I also planted Napoli carrots for sweet snacks and Bolero for storage, And I love potatoes. I love them. They are the best food ever. So I planted three varieties: Yukon gold, some kind of pink potato and Kennebec. The Kennebecs were supposedly going to be my storage potatoes, but I only harvested the Yukon gold and ate every single one of them! Late summer floods didn't really do that much to me out on the hill, but my second two varieties of taters rotted in the ground. A tragedy!

So, what I have now is bunch of carrots that need to be dug out of the garden and stored somewhere. It is possible to leave them in the garden. If the ground is not frozen, they are as well off there as anything. BUT, I also like to work my gardens over a few times a year since I don't use a rototiller. It's past time for my upper garden where the carrots are to get turned over, composted, covercropped, and put to bed for the year.

I have read of any solutions for creating a root cellar. Underground is really an ideal situation because it's cold but not freezing, and that is the natural condition for root crops anyway. You can actually dig into a hillside and construct an outdoor storage area. You can convert a portion of your basement in yoru house into a root cellar. One way to do this is use a set of outside steps that will be probably covered in snow and unsuable for the winter anyway and just stack your storage crops in baskets and bags. Also, wall off an area near a basement window and let some cool outside air in just in this spot. I have a partially finished basement, and one room is dirt floor. When the door to this room is shut, the space is very chilly and would be idea if it was also not very wet and full of wood.

We heat our house with a wood furnace in the basement, and the unheated wood room is not good for storing anything unless you think mold is yummy. So, I needed to think about outside solutions. I kept reading about buckets or even large plastic wastecans. You can layer the vegetables by variety or in different directions and put the bucket or chan in the garage. I suspected that most of these people saying that their garages stayed near freezing but did not go below very often living in slightly milder climes than I do. I struggle for a good two or three months to keep unfrozen water in the garage and the shed for the cats and the goats. Chances are good that my carrots will freeze, too.

Then, I read about how you could take one of those cheap plastic garbage cans and dig it into the ground and keep the vegetables insulated that way. Now, I know those cans are cheap, but I'm cheaper. I just couldn't muster up the seven dollars for a big garbage can. Luckily I didn't have to.

My old camping cooler, my companion of many a roadtrip and many a festival took its last trip last summer. The screws in the lid just came out one too many times, and the lid just wouldn't hold anymore. And besides, I'd been coveting one of those coolers that supposedly keep things cold for five days in hot weather. My old cooler seemed to have lost some of its integrity and was getting kind of melty during those July days sitting back in camp . Instead of a trashcan, i decided to drop my old cooler in the ground instead of just tossing it out.

I dug a hole in kind of a shady area on the edge of the yard. I filled in around the sides to pack it in good. I thought long and hard about the different storage options suggested by about twenty different books, and I went with damp coarse sane inside the cooler. laid in the carrots, and buried them.

Things did not exactly go as planned.

Problem #1: We had an abnormally warm year last year. Even after I waited until last fall to put the carrots in the container, they still grew new tops while in storage. I think this took nutrients and quality out of the roots. I may be crazy.

Problem #2: Access. When the weather was okay, it was easy to get the carrots. But there I was in the middle of a snowstorm, wanting carrots, and my carrot cooler was buried under a lot of snow. I did go out a few times in the winter and dig down through the snow to find them, but it was messy and I couldn't get the lid back on tightly because of the snow in the seal which leads to ....

Problem #3: Even though I had trouble getting into my carrots in the snow, obviously my friends the mice did not. Do not ask me how they got into a sealed cooler. I can't say. I can say that at least two or three of them never made it out. When I did get in during the winter, I had to chuck mouse corpses out on several occasions. I felt a little leery of eating the carrots raw after they had root cellared with dead mice for who knows how long.

My solutions:

1. I know I can't control the weather. I'm holding off storing my carrots until it looks like it will stay reletively cold.

2. I plan on using scrap wood and panelling to build some kind of roof over the place where my coolers are in the ground so I can get to them even when it is snowy.

3. Note that above I did say coolers, plural. I worked recycling at a music festival over the summer, and that is like dumpster diver's heaven. Grills, chairs, air mattresses, blankets, clothes, tents, even full cans and bottles of beer. People just throw stuff away at the end of the weekend, especially if it is muddy and wet. So, I found another large sized cooler with the exact same broken lid problem as my old one. I'm putting it into the ground and trying a little scientific method. I'll keep the sand in my old cooler but leave it out of the new one to see which bunch of carrots makes it through the winter better: sand or no sand.

4. I'm hoping that this year isn't such a bad mouse year, because last year was like a plague of mice. It was rediculous. I live trapped many many mice and tossed them outside. I was trying to be all nice and Buddhist about it by not using real mouse traps, but my adopted cat Syrup, who I got from my brother who really is a Buddhist, is not a Buddhist. He is a cat, and he eventually figured out that when I went down to the swamp with the live trap, I was carrying stunned mice with me, and he started following me and eating them before they had a chance to recover from their ordeals. But these mice may have deserved it, because they made my kitchen unsafe with their droppings and made my oven smell bad and chewed my bags of flour and evaded almost every trap I set for them until I got the mouse sized Have-a-Heart. Made in PA. Hooray!

Other than hoping there aren't any mice, I also think if I managed to keep snow out of the seals on the cooler lids but building a cover over them, maybe I could keep the mice out that way.

Included at the top of the page is a picture of my blackberry bushes, in bloom, in early November. They have had a rough year and been all confused by the weather, but I want to talk about berries later, too.

Weather predicting

Right now, it's raining. Typical November weather. But I can also hear rumbles of thunder in the distance. Not as usual for this time of year. We've already had one good snow fall of about six inches. Even with all the rain, there is still snow in the long grass and in the ditches. Up closer to Erie where the real lake effect snow set in, they have quite a bit of snow on the ground.

Lake effect snow, for people not familiar with it, is practically unreal. There are only a few places in the US that get lake effect, generally downwind of the Great Lakes. When the lakes are unfrozen, in early winter, late winter, or in some mild winters when the lakes don't get cold enough to freeze over, we see lake effect snow. The cold winds from Canada come in from the west and north and gather water vapor off the open water on the lakes. When all that wet air gets back on land, downwind of the lakes, there can be really heavy precipitation. Usually right by the lake is okay, but as soon as there gets to be a little elevation and distance from the lake, snow starts falling.

The lake effect show sets up in "bands" that follow geographical features. Right by the lake or even a few miles away, it can be a sunny day with no snow and a nice breeze. If you are driving on a lake effect day, you can see the bands as you approach them like a wall of white. In the bands, you can be getting so much snow, it's as dark as night, at rates of many inches of snow per hour.

People like to exaggerate about snow, but there are lots of great lake effect snow stories without even needing to make them up. I was in Fredonia, New York once and we got thigh-high to waist deep snow in an afternoon, and it got even deeper farther away from the lake. I have been in lake effect storms as far as sixty miles inland. The bands shift and drift with the wind and don't follow regular rules because they aren't really fronts or systems, more like freak accidents.

Anyway, even though we had snow, the thunder this evening reminds me of some weather things, we always say in our family. The real common thing is the wooly caterpillars. The more black on these common little orange and black guys, the worse the winter will be.

My dad always says: Thunder in fall, no winter at all.

Also, the height of the hives. If you find wasps and hornets nests built up high in the trees, then it will be a bad winter. I've seen two high hives this year. Last year I only had one low one. We had a mild winter, but a cold spring.

When I went to the feed store the other day, I got a free calandar with an almanac for weather predicting for each month, also. I'd like to see how accurate it is, but I need to wait until January for when the calandar starts.

Pure Seeds

I had a very exciting weekend!
On Friday, I had a job! (I substitute teach.) On Saturday, I went with my Mom and my sister's family to the Erie Zoo and did Zoo Boo. It is really a nice thing to do and a major fund raiser for the zoo. And I got kisses from my favorite zoo animals: the llamas!

Sunday was the best, though, and my mother and I went to hear one of our longtime heroes Dr. Vandana Shiva speak at Mercyhurst College in Erie. We are both very inspired by her. My mother loves reading her inspirational words about the importance of reserving natural resources like water and plants for the free use of all peoples. I'm inspired by her political activism and her efforts to save the seeds of native species of food and spices in India, often raising the ire of international corporations who are trying to commodify the seeds and make the farmers dependent on purchased seed instead of saved seed. There have been countless thousands of farmer suicides in India because the farmers are being driven further and further into debt to buy seed and there are actually laws passed to keep people from practicing traditional farming and make them dependent on modern seed varieties which cannot be grown without expensive pesticides and equipment.

I'm an entirely nonmechanized gardener, getting into hopefully large enough growing to sell next year or the year after at local farmer's markets. In a way it is a choice, but there is no way that I could afford to buy gas powered equipment. I have a shovel and some hoes and rakes and cultivators that I got used from my grandmother and that's what I use. As I get larger scale, I'd like to stay committed to not using powered machines in my gardens, but my point is the cost of tools is the most prohibitive aspect of my current scale of gardening.

In honor of Dr. Shiva, I decided to write today about seed saving.

I'm a bit on my own here, so I've only done a little of this, but I read a lot and I have the internet, so a lot of this information came from many sources. The most important part of any project I start is the initial trip to the library, however. I was a public librarian for a few years, and just by having that job, I learned a lot about the resources available through the library. Please, use any opportunity and any project to stop by the library. Get to know the reference librarian and definitely explore the stacks. You can get tons of free or almost free information and give yourself a good background in almost everything you try before you start actually spending money on books, plans, materials, or equipment. Dr. Shiva advocates a traditional planting system where seven, nine, or twelve varieties of traditional seeds are planted mixed and co-supporting each other in the field. Because of different structures and plant maturation times, there is actually no way to do this mechanically. The plant varieties represent a complete diet which is also the traditional diet which has supported humankind up to this point.

In seed saving, you have to know that there are certain kinds of seeds you can save and others that you cannot. Don't try to save seeds from your fruit at the grocery store. Most grocery store produce is from hybrid plants which means that two varieties have been cross bred. The seeds probably won't grow, and if they do they will not grow "true". Hybrid plants are really useful for a number of reasons. They take on the hardier characteristics of their parent species and are often resistant to diseases and blights. Also, hybrid plants are often bred with shelf life in mind. They will not bruise as easily and they will keep a long time in storage, so they will still be fresh when you find them in the produce department.

There are drawbacks to hybrid plants, however. The first is, that you can't save the seeds. If you grow hybrid plants in your garden, you are dependent on the seed company every year for new seed. That's fine for hobbyist, but if you are economically dependent on the seed, it allows the seed companies to control the market. Secondly, hybrid plants may be tougher and the fruits and vegetables may last longer than the old varieties, but they are often not as tasty. Hybrid plants and storebought things become the normal thing that people expect, and the old varieties which were often tailored to a specific growing area might be lost. Loss of diversity is very bad in the plant community, even in the domestic plant community. Essentially, when you deal in "monoculture" -- planting lots and lots of the same thing all in one place -- you are actually jeopardizing the food supply. One disaster or one disease can wipe out everything. Planting many vareities of the same plant is better. If something like a drough happens, you won't lose everything.

I have saved flower seeds just about my entire life. That's a pretty easy one. You see flowers you like. if they develop seed heads, pop them off and scatter them somewhere else you want them to grow. There are more involved forms of seed saving, but that is basically the idea for anything that has exposed seeds.

Saving seeds from the garden for food plants is a little different. First, you need some source for the seeds. I order from a lot of different places: Pinetree Garden Seeds, Johnny's, Jung's, and Burpee are my main sources. Johnny's and Jung's are very strict about not allowing genetically engineered seed into their inventory. (Another day, my friends!) They have lots of varieties and also their testing facilities are in the northern US, so I know they grow their seeds under similar conditions compared to where I am growing. I'd like to get into seed exchanges and that sort of thing, but I just haven't yet. Mainly, because I've not had seed to exchange up until this point.

If you plan on saving seeds, make an effort to choose what they call "open pollinated" seeds. Also look for things like "non-hybrid" or "heirloom" seeds. These are all things that can be saved for seed. Dr,. Shiva referrs to these things as "pure seed", meaning a distinct breed of plant that has not been crossed with another variety.

Last year, I planted three varieties of green beans. I took a lot of grief for it from my uncle who has a very nice, well established garden with tons of different things growing in it. I grew a bunch of beans. I grew a bush bean and green and yellow varieites of skinny french beans. Saving peas and beans is bascially the same. After you get what you want from the plants, leave a certain amount of the pods on the bush and let them grow, grow, grow until they start getting yellow. Ideally, the seeds should be loose and dry inside the pods and rattle when you shake them. This year, I pulled my selected plants a little before that because we had a rainy patch and they were starting to rot in the field. Pull the plants up and sort them. Save really healthy, really loaded plants. The healthier the seed the healtheir next year's plants. Let them hang up under some kind of cover in a garage barn or shed until they dry the rest of the way. Last year, I shelled them out by hand after they were dry, but I've also read that you can put just the dried pods into a feed sack and stomp on them to break them up and sift out the chaff. That's what I'm trying this year

My slacker cats did not do their job, and little mouse got into the cupboard where I kept my seeds, and took, oddly enough only the bush bean seeds, so I had to rebuy some of those. They left the French beans alone, and quite interestingly, the Japanese beetles also do not like my French beans. So, other than my lost bush beans, I was able to replant the Frenchies without buying new seed. They were a little droughty, and the yellow ones didn't get enough sun, but really it did work.

Today, I went out into the garden and picked up some of the heirloom style tomatoes I had set aside for seed. I tried for really ripe or even overripe tomatoes for seed. I planted many varieties this year. Of hybrids, I had some grape tomatoes, new girl, wayahead, San Marzano (a big paste tomato), and a salsa tomato from Burpee that I used for a couple of batches of salsa and sauced the rest. My heirlooms were Amish paste and Olpaka, a Polish variety, and Radiator Charlie/Mortgage Lifter. These last are a bit of a disappointment to me, but a few of them my ripen enough to save fore seed and try again next year. They basically turned into mutant blobs. The Amish and the Olpaka's are little paste tomatoes. The Olpaka's aare really bright red and the Amish pastes are a little bigger and oranger. They both made really nice sauce, I mixed them about half and half with the round salad tomatoes. I used directions from the Ball canning jar company's canning cookbook, but any public library is going to carry a million and a half books on preserving food, and I'll save sauce for a different day.

To save seed from tomatoes, you need a knife, a spoon, a cup and a little water. Since I was saving two different kinds of seed, I also took a piece of tape and wrote on each cup what I was saving. Cut the tomatoes in half and use a spoon to scoop out the middle parts with the seeds. Add water to the cup and set it aside. Let the seeds soak for three to five days, Every day, you need to pour the water with the pulp off the top of the cups and add fresh water. Eventually, the pulp will be gone and the seeds will be clean. Viable seeds sink to the bottom! Pour away the seeds that don't sink!

Let the clean seeds dry on a piece of news paper or paper towel for a few days and pack them up.

This seems like a lot of work, but really, think how much work it takes to earn the three or four dollars it costs for a packet of seeds. Also, you are participating in the active preservation of a seed variety which may be hundreds of years old. There is also the idea that if you save seed from your garden and grow from the same line of seeds year after year, eventually those seeds will be tailored to take advantage of the conditions and soil composition which is local to your garden. It's an interesting notion, and I would like to see if thing do tend to get healthier in years to come.

Before you try and plant seed that you save, you really need to test for germination. I'll get to seed testing a different day. i like to do it in the middle of winter, a litle before the seed catalogs start arriving.

Also, I have quite a few other plants I want to save seed from this year including flowers, melons, and some non hybrid green peppers which will hopefully ripen up before the frost. look for further posts on saving these seeds and also on more advanced techniques like stratifying and scarifying. Planting season starts the end of March! That's just five short months away.

That's all for now!
Britt.

Knitting Travels

Hello!

Wrapped up grapes yesterday. I jarred up about a gallon and a half of grape juice which joins with 20 pints of grape jelly and about 25 of elderberry jelly that I have for the fall craft shows. I'm dragging a box of my knitting out to the Pennsylvania State Championship Fishing Tournament on Tidioute, PA this coming Saturday. My old hometown! They have a nice craft show at the firehall, and I've been selling socks, mittens and hats there for the past few years.

This year, I hope to have some birdhouse gourds finished before Saturday, but time is running out! They may have to wait for my November craft show in Erie.

This weekend, I'm babysitting my niece and nephew in Erie and while it seems like I won't be able to get anything done for my upcoming show since I didn't bring my giant bag of gourds -- my most successful planting adventure from last summer -- or my spinning wheel, I do have two big bags of yarn and a bunch of different kinds of needles.

My current endeavor involves funny looking hats. I made one for myself over the winter using fat yarn and big needles. When I wore it at a spring music festival in North Carolina, I was asked to make another one which I sold over the summer. That was a nice weekend. I was volunteering at a music festival and so I didn't have to pay to get in, and I sold a hat and a pair of socks over the weekend and actually came out ahead!

School:

This is a short recipe for a hat that I think is just the perfect project for getting into knitting in the round. Knitting in the round is exactly what it sounds like. You cast on your stitches and, using either a circular or double pointed needles -- which look like a sharpened pencil on both ends, you just knit around and around like when you build a clay pot using piles up "snakes".

To do this you need:
1. A 16" Circular knitting needle in a big size. I use a 10. 16" refers to the size of the little connector between the ends of the needles.
2. A set of double pointed needles in the same size as your circular needle.
3. An assortment of "fat" yarn. Plymouth Yukon or some kind of Icelandic. I'm working with that and with some Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride doubled (two strands at a time). When I do these hats, I tend to use what they call "singles" meaning it's just one fat piece of yarn and not two or three pieces twisted together. I also tend to use all natural fibers, though I know the Yukon has a pretty hefty acrylic content.

I cast on for about a 22 to 23 inch head. The way I knit, that's 51 to 55 stitches.
Cast on the circular needle. Follow the cast on edge around to make sure there aren't any twists before you join the stitches. If you start knitting with a twist, there is nothing you can do to save it!

Joining the stitch:

Some people just start knitting the next stitch in the round. This is a less neat join, and your first row is kind of hanging in the breeze. You'll have to sew up the gab when you weave in your ends. I like to line my needles up and join the round by slipping the first cast on stitch from the left needle to the right needle and then passing the last cast on stitch from the right needle over the newly slipped first cast on stitch to the left needle. You get a neater, more secure join that way.

Tip:

When joining into the round, make sure your cast on tail end is at the front facing you and your working yarn is at the back. It might be possible to stuff your yarn through your work if it's on the wrong side, but probably not!

Making the hat:

After however much ribbing you like to see on a hat, do a few rows in just stockinette stitch. In the rounds, all that means is knitting. You only work on the right side when knitting in the round, and you will hardly ever purl!

After three or so rows, start shaping your hat. Do this by increasing at regular intervals. If you want a hat that balloons out fast like a beret, increase every three or so stitches. For more gradual shaping, make fewer increases over more rows. This one is really up to the knitter. So is color. Change as much or as little as you want. Color rows do not have to go the whole way around. You can just pull some yarn off the skein and decide to knit until you run out. You might use a regular pattern. Just remember: All those color changes will have to have their little tail ends woven in before the hat is finished.

Finishing:

Begin decreasing after the hat gets about six or seven inches tall from the cast on edge. If you did a lot of increasing a the beginning, you might want to work in a few decrease rounds in the middle just to give is a more rounded shape before you start decreasing in earnest.

When you're ready to make the crown of the hat, start decreasing at regular intervals. I usually start by doing a round of knit 6, knit 2 together. Then, knit a plain round. Then, make the interval between the decreases one stitch smaller each round: knit 5, knit 2 together, etc. Alternate with a plain old knit round until about the row where you are knitting 2 and then knitting 2 together. then, just work the decrease round.

As your hat gets fewer and fewer stitches, you will have to switch to the double points. When the yarn is too tight, take a double pointed needle, and use it as your right hand needle and knit stitches onto the double point. When the first double point gets fullish, just keep grabbing a new needle until all the stitches have been transferred to the double pointed needles.

Decrease until you have about 8 stitches left, and draw the end of the yarn through with a big yarn needle.

Weave in the ends. Blocking is optional, I always think, and you have a silly hat!

I have made four of these things in different sizes and colors over the past week. My knitting production really picks up during football season. Go Steelers!

Coming soon:

Pictures of finished knitting projects from my Erie weekend.

First Post! It's grape jelly day!

Hello there!

It’s a beautiful sunny day in Northwestern PA. I can’t believe I’m taking time out from my busy busy to spend time on the computer.

As this is my first post, here’s kind of a mission statement:

I’m really interested in the traditional ways of doing things. I picked the name “Folk School” because it’s funny. You figure out why. And because I hope someone actually reads this thing and learns something from it.

I hope to include recipes, how-to’s, pictures, and craft ideas. I’m also a political junkie, and I can’t keep my mouth shut. I’ll try to avoid alienating all three people who read this. But, I apologize in advance.

I’m located in Northwest PA Amish country in Erie County, about 150 yards from Crawford County and three quarters of a mile from Warren County. I don’t have a “real” farm but I do have two dogs, a cat, and two Angora goats.

Now that that’s out of the way:

It’s grape season in NW PA. Finally, all the trimming and japanese beetle flinging and covering the vines from last spring’s late frost is paying off! Two years ago, the first year I lived here with my grapevines, the vines were stressed from neglect and drought. They had not been trimmed off, and there were too many grape bunches. The grapes fell off the vines before they were even ripe. I got one good bucketfull and made one little measly batch of jelly.

Here comes the school part:

How to manage grape vines

In early winter, trim off about 80 per cent of what they call the fruiting wood. That’s the wild viney stuff that is really leafy and hanging all over the place by the end of summer. Be aggressive. They are forgiving, and too much is better than not enough and having messy, stressed vines. We get snow, ice, and cold temperatures down to minus fifteen or so in the winter, and the vines have been fine. If your winters are colder and you’ve lost grapes, it is possible to train your grapes to come off the prop wires. You can lay them on the ground and mulch them with straw or dirt. This is a lot of work and really, only do it if your weather has a track record of getting so cold you’ve actually lost grapes.

Okay, two years ago this winter, I did all of the above, except the laying down and mulching thing. Everything was just fine until last year, a week before Memorial Day, we had a freaky late May hard freeze. The temperature was in the low twenties two nights in a row. It snowed. This happens here about once every five years or so. that bad part about this was the fruit on the grapes was already set, and I lost every single bunch. No grapes and no jelly last year.

Last fall, I did the 80 per cent trimming thing. In the spring, I really watched the weather and moves about every sheet and blanket in the whole house out a couple different nights to cover up the grapes during the late frost. The fruit set, and I had tons of little bunches of grapes.

More school:

Thinning grape bunches

After the fruit sets, you can’t just let every bunch grow. You have to pinch them off. After trimming back the vines over the winter, you get to know your vines pretty well. Follow each strand and pinch off little bunches until there is about one per cane. Again. Be aggressive. If you decide to let too many grow, your grapes get stressed, and you lose the fruit before it gets ripe.

This year, my work paid off, and I had bunches and bunches of sweet Concord grapes. I lost a lot to bug and bird damage, but I still have plenty. I’m doing three batches of jelly today and about two gallons of juice tomorrow. All yummy and free of any chemicals and sprays! And (kind of) free of money cost, too, though I did have to buy sugar and jar lids.