I know, I said it was free, but as any physicist can tell you, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Free always has a price, even if it’s sometimes hidden.

Anyway, soup.

So buy a whole chicken. If you buy it from a nearby small farmer, you will be helping your local economy, your local ecology, your health, your taste buds, and your soul.

Oven roast the chicken, and serve it for dinner with your choice of sides. If you don’t have a good recipe, see if your local library has a cookbook called “Best Recipe” or one of its kin. Be amazed at how good a home cooked meal can be.

I know, soup. We’re getting there.

Put away the leftovers. Pick the remnants of good meat off the carcass. Set them aside. You can leave plenty on the bones – fat, gristle, meat that’s tough to remove, etc.

If possible, cut the bones in half, either with kitchen shears or a large knife. It’s not absolutely necessary, but it will release marrow, which will really give some life to your soup.

Put the remnants of the carcass in a big stock pot, and add a bunch of water. At least a gallon, maybe more if your stock pot is big. Add some salt — maybe tablespoon or so, and another tablespoon of vinegar. (Don’t worry if your soup smells like vinegar for a while. It’ll go away. The vinegar is supposed to help draw out some extra nutrients.) You can throw in a bay leaf if you have it. Turn on the heat. You want to keep it just shy of boiling – A few bubbles every now and then, but not a full boil.

Now, get out a stalk of celery, a carrot or two, a couple cloves of garlic, an onion, and a potato. Substitute other veggies as you see fit. In mine, I left our celery because we didn’t have any. I included a little corn, because we had some left from the roasted chicken dinner. Soup is great for using up leftovers.

Peel the papery skin off the onion and put the skin in the pot. (This will give some color to your broth.) Wash and peel the carrot(s) and potato and put their skins in the pot too. Pull off some celery leaves and put them in the pot.

Cut up all the vegetables and mince the garlic. Heat some oil in a large pan. Wait for it to shimmer. Then add the garlic and all the veg to the pan, along with a good healthy sprinkling of thyme and some salt and black pepper. You can add other seasonings if you like.

When everything in the pan starts getting tender, take it off the heat. Put it in a bowl with the meat you set aside earlier. You want your broth to cook for a good hour before you go any further, so you may want to put these veggies and meat in the fridge for a bit, depending on how your timing is going to work out.

Once the stock pot with the bones, peelings, etc. has been heating for an hour or more (more is fine), get out a big bowl and a strainer or colander. Pour the broth through the strainer into the bowl. Skim off the top of the bowl if necessary, to catch any bits that came through the strainer. Discard the bones and scraps.

Put the broth back in the stock pot, along with your sauteed vegetables and meat bits. Simmer for another 30 minutes or so. Toss in a couple handfuls of egg noodles. Then toss in another handful, because it’s hard to have too many noodles in your soup, as far as I’m concerned. Cook until the noodles are appropriately soft. Add salt or seasonings to taste, but taste it first. Depending on how you roasted that chicken back at the beginning of this process, it may be plenty salty. Or it may need a good bit of salt.

Congratulations – you just made some excellent soup. And it didn’t cost you anything. Let’s look at the ingredients: Chicken bones and meat scraps – You were going to throw them out, right? Vegetables – You had them in your kitchen already. You just used the ones that would have gone bad waiting to be used. Herbs and/or spices – That much less going stale in the bottom of the jars. Tap water. Noodles.

So maybe not COMPLETELY free, but pretty effin’ close. For a few pennies worth of ingredients, and stuff that most people would throw away, you have the equivalent of about a dozen cans of some damn fine soup.

Besides, “Free Soup” does sound a lot better than “Chicken Carcass Soup.”

–

North Carolina is a difficult region to design for because its basic climate conditions are split so evenly between too hot for human comfort 42% of the time and too cold 46% of the time. It’s only Goldilocks for 12% of the year. However as a long time resident of NC I can attest to the fact that too hot is much more of a problem than too cold. Too cold in NC means low 20s which is more of an annoyance to those living in the Northeast while it’s almost guaranteed to be over 100 degree with a relative humidity level of 85% for at least a few days out of the summer. 90+ degrees and humid is a regular occurrence for many of us in the sunshine belt.

So for those of us who live in warm climates let’s talk briefly about how to stay cool before it gets too hot. Never mind those from colder climates who will make fun of us.

1. Acclimatize. Most people living in the US today are accustomed to spending almost all of their time within a narrow range of temperature between 68 and 72 degrees. Dare I say we have become a nation of weather whiners, complaining if the thermostat reads anything outside of our narrowly bound range of comfort. The human body is capable of remaining comfortable throughout a much wider range of temperatures. The key is to transition your body’s comfort level. As it gets hotter outside throughout the spring, let the temperature in your house warm up. We play A/C chicken, trying to see how long we can go without turning on our air conditioning. Usually we can get well into June. By that point we are no longer uncomfortable with temperatures in the upper 70s or low 80s.

2. Take your clothes off. I have a friend from Nebraska who is fond of saying, “If you’re cold put on a sweater, if you’re hot take off your shoes.” It seems almost intuitive that the easiest way to warm up in the winter is to put on more clothes and of course the opposite is true in the heat of the summer. It might be against your office dress code to show up in a bikini, but shedding the layers will definitely keep you cooler; especially exposing those extremities. Remember you radiate more heat from your head, arms and legs so try to keep them uncovered if you’re out of direct sunlight. Which leads to number three.

3. Stay out of direct sunlight. This is true as true for individual bodies as it is for interior spaces throughout homes and offices. If your body is going to be exposed to direct sunlight, it makes sense to wear light-colored, breathable clothing that keeps direct sun off of your skin and won’t absorb lots of heat.

Window treatments used to reduce heat lose in the winter in colder climates have their southern cousin in strategies to reflect direct sunlight from interior spaces in the summer in hotter climates. At my home we use white, 2″ wood blinds to reflect direct sunlight. If we’re home during the day we adjust the angle of the blinds so we can still see outside and have indirect light throughout our house but without receiving all the heat from direct sunlight. If we leave we close the blinds to reflect even more heat. Awnings work well too.

Proper overhang length is a great strategy for allowing winter sun in and keeping summer sun out.

Of course there’s more than one kind of overhang.

Deciduous trees offer a seasonal shade option. In the winter they have no leaves and allow in wanted sunlight and its heat. In the summer their leaves reflect the hot sunshine. Such trees are best placed on the south or southwestern side of a structure.

Just be sure to plant the tree close enough to the home to take advantage of this strategy.

It’s also worth noting that any work that can be done in the shade should be saved for the middle of the day. Work in the full sun in the early morning and early evening.

4. Stay wet. Nothing will cool you off like a evaporation! The phase change from liquid water to vapor requires a lot of energy. Wetting my hair for instances is one strategy I use to stay cool when I am working in the sun. There are mechanical strategies for doing this. Their effectiveness will depend on your climate.

5. Use the temperature swings. In many warmer climates the temperature is still much cooler as night. If your interior spaces are loading up with heat during the day, do your best to exchange this hot air for cooler air during the night. Depending on the humidity level it might make more sense to draw in cooler air from outside as oppose to trying to cool even hotter air trapped inside your home.

6. Seal and Insulate. If you are able to bring in cool air at night or if you’re using a mechanical system to chill your interior air you’ll want to keep that air from being warmed by outside air during the day. This means sealing air leaks so that mechanical systems aren’t pulling hot air from outside through air leaks in your building envelope. You don’t want to seal you structure air tight. That would be like living in a plastic bag and would invite mold and other problems. There are guidelines on how air tight your home should be but unless it was built by exceptional craftsmen it’s likely that you’re nowhere near the level of air tightness you could safely achieve. You can check this using a blower door test. The overhead attic door is usually the biggest air leak by the way. After you’ve sealed air leaks, insulate to further reduce heat gain.

7. Bring on the wind. Moving air will help not only to take advantage of temperature swings during cooler, nighttime temperatures but the movement of air over your body will help with evaporative cooling. We have ceiling fans in most rooms – especially bedrooms – and box fans for use in certain windows on certain nights. Be sure to properly care for your fan by checking it out each season and lubricating it, and your fan investment will last for years.

Here’s an old strategy for moving air without electricity. It’s called a heat chimney or cooling tower.

Those huge wrap around porches and tall plantation houses of the deep south start to make sense from a passive cooling standpoint with this strategy in mind. The modern version might look something like this diagrammatically speaking.

8. Take it easy. Southerns aren’t slow because we’re lazy, we’re just keeping cool! Rest or do light work during the middle of the day. there’s no reason to add heat to the equation by being in a hurry. It also makes sense to move more energy intensive activities outside like cooking or drying clothes.

9. Mooch coolth. If you’re trying to stay cool but you don’t want to turn down the thermostat try taking in a movie. The theater is likely to be very cool. Or visit the library, a museum or some other building that is temperature control and can give you some relief from the heat. The natural version of this is the forest. It’s going to be much cooler in the woods than it is in your front yard. Take advantage.

10. Look after each other. There is no reasons why people should die from heat stroke or exhaustion. Be sure to take care of people especially susceptible to the heat, like children and the elderly. This is the responsibility of all of us who are healthy and better able to regulate the temperature of our own bodies.

I’ll leave you with a document (pdf warning) that describes some of these strategies in more detail. Stay cool!

http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Cooling/Shading/NCSolarCenterCooling13coolng-1.pdf ]]> http://henandharvest.com/?feed=rss2&p=636 0 http://henandharvest.com/?p=622 http://henandharvest.com/?p=622#comments Sun, 07 Jun 2009 13:23:11 +0000 Edson http://henandharvest.com/?p=622 What if you could keep your house at least 12F degrees cooler than the outside, in the height of summer, without air conditioning, fans, or any other power? How often would you even need A/C at that point? If you have a pair of scissors, an afternoon, and a couple hundred dollars or less to make it happen, read on.

There’s a material out there called shade screen. It’s like window screen, but it’s designed to block more light. Apparently it’s used most often in hot climates as a replacement for standard window screen, to cut down on sunlight. Similar products are used to keep greenhouses cool.

The window screen version doesn’t show up much in cooler, more seasonal climates. I’m not sure why. It could be because while blocking out the sun is good when it’s hot, it’s not really desirable when it gets cold. Lack of sunlight in winter can be depressing enough without any help from your window screens.

But still… commercially available shade screen can prevent 80-90% of the sun’s hot rays from entering your house. With summer temperatures here regularly over 90F, and plenty of humidity, I thought there must be a way to take advantage of this stuff without it being a giant pain, and without losing the winter sunshine.

My first thought was two sets of screens – one for summer, and one for winter. But that didn’t come close to passing the “pain-in-the-butt” test. My next thought was to attach the shade screen to the existing screen frames with velcro. That proved to be somewhat ineffective, as the sticky backing of the velcro heats up and becomes less sticky. The adhesion between the screen and the velcro wasn’t very good anyway.

Finally, I realized that most of our windows slide down from the top as well as up from the bottom. If I put the shade screen between the window and the original screen, and then pin the top of the shade screen by closing the window on it, I’d be all set. No muss, no fuss.

I removed one of our window screens and used the frame as a template to cut the shade screen. I put the original screen back in place, opened the window from the top, slid the shade screen down between the glass and the screen, arranged it to the best fit, and then closed the top part of the window.

It worked like a charm. On a hot July day, with the sun beating down, I compared the surface temperature of the window with the shade screen to another nearby window.

After ten minutes, there was a 21F degree difference!

Lucky for me, all but a few of our windows are the same size. I took a screen back out and used it as a template to cut shade screen for all the other windows. I cut it maybe an inch wider and a few inches longer than the frame. It couldn’t have taken an hour to cut enough for the whole house.

– –

You may be wondering if it would be easier to just draw the curtains or hang shades in your windows. This shade screen approach has two major advantages: 1. You can still see out, and more importantly 2. The sunlight is blocked before it goes through the glass. Halting the sun’s rays after they’re already inside isn’t nearly as effective.

I’ve found that there are a number of other advantages to this approach, along with a couple minor drawbacks.

Advantages:

• Easy to implement for summer. I’d estimate 30-45 minutes to put them in all the windows in our house.
• Even easier to take down for cooler seasons. It took me less than 15 minutes to pull them all down, roll them up, and put them away.
• If the window is open and there’s any wind at all, the bottom of the shade screen is free to blow in the breeze and let the air flow in.
• If you want the shade screen out of the way – to let a breeze in, or to accomodate house plants – you can just roll it up as far as you need and tuck it behind the window pane.
  
• You get a privacy effect. From the inside, you can see out just fine. From the outside looking in, it just looks black…
• It cost me under $200 for a 100-foot roll of 36-inch screen, and I only used half of it for the whole house – a dozen double-hung windows, plus the sliding door.

Disadvantages:

• If it’s raining and windy and you leave your window open, the shade screen will catch the water, and then fling it around the room as the wind blows the free-hanging bottom part of the screen
• You get a “wavy” appearance because the shade screen is not pulled perfectly flat. (This photo makes it look worse than it is, but you get the idea.)

Of course, my approach won’t work in every house. Your windows may not be the same as mine, so you may have to come up with a different method if you’re going to try this.

I can tell you that getting it to stick directly to glass is challenging. We have a sliding glass door that gets a lot of afternoon sun. I first tried attaching the screen to the glass door with long strips of velcro. It quickly became clear that this wasn’t going to work because of the heat. The adhesive just wasn’t holding up. I tried sewing the velcro strips to the screen, which worked a little better, but the then the velcro adhesive failed on the glass surface – again because of the hot sun. My next attempt was with some suction cups. It worked “sort of,” so I bought more of them to see if there was strength in numbers. I haven’t had the chance to try it yet, but I give it a 50-50 shot. It’s a pretty big piece of shade screen, so it’s got a bit of weight to it – especially when it’s wet and windy. If anybody has suggestions, let me know.

At any rate, with the windows open at dusk, the whole house fan pulling in the cool night air, and the shade screen keeping the sun out during the day, we can consistently keep the house at least 12F degrees cooler than the outside temperatures on a hot summer day. If I can work out a way to keep it on the big west-facing sliding door, we might even get a few more degrees out of it.

For reference, I bought Phifer SunTex 80 from Wholesale Screens and Glass. (They also sell SunTex 90, which blocks even more sun.) I’m sure other vendors and similar products would do just as well.

Well, we made it through the winter.  Winter for me here in Iowa was more mild than last year, snow wise, but much colder.  The chickens handled it surprisingly well.  I put a CFL bulb in their coop (which they did not like) for warmth (I guess it’s supposed to be a heat bulb.  Duh)  Anyway, after a few nights of them sleeping on top of the coop away from the light in super cold weather I decided they must be hardy enough and not need the extra warmth, so I removed the light.  I did however wrap their coop in the fall with bags of leaves, including the roof.  This seemed to work well enough that they weren’t in trouble through the winter.

No problems there.  Dragging out to deal with frozen water twice a day was a bit of a pain.  Especially when it was dark on both trips.  We managed.

But, now that spring is here the chickens are really earning their keep.  They’ve been pacing the walls of the dog kennel wanting to get outside to explore and eat, not unlike me in my house, although I don’t have to go outside to eat.  When I’ve let them out they have done a fantastic job of digging up the garden and working in the leaf shreds and compost I’ve put on top of the beds for them to look through.  I had heard about how good they did this, but even I’m surprised at how well they do this.  It’s kind of shocking even.  Better than advertised as far as I’m concerned.

We’ve had a mishap or two with plants and the cold frame, but there is enough other stuff for them to get into that they don’t come back after being shooed away.  They are even starting to learn that when I come after a while it means they need to get back in the kennel for the night.  They don’t seem to mind pushing back from the buffet and going home to rest for a while.

Keep an eye out for more chicken info in the coming months.  Drop a note to us on the Barnyard about your animals.

The article runs into some accounting problems, like apparently including the cost of canning jars in the cost of making preserves. If you’re doing that, what about the canning kettle? Or the stove for that matter? Canning lids I could see, but canning jars are a buy once, use forever item. The author also talks about buying organic strawberries. Were they in season? Were they shipped in from another time zone? Strawberries can vary a lot in cost and quality based on these factors.

Still, the article’s definitely worth a read. It also ties into our current lead article pretty well, and we thought it could make for an interesting discussion topic in The Barnyard. What do you make from scratch? What did you think would be hard but turned out to be easy? What did you try and give up on? What are you thinking about trying? Let us know!

The 2009 No-Cost Garden

The course is ninety-minutes long and takes place at:
9am PST / noon EST
Saturday June 13th, 2009.

It is an online course, so you will need an Internet connection

Full details here

Hyperlocavore

A huge focus of this blog is finding creative, sustainable ways to eek more produce from small spaces.  I also love growing calorie crops, especially potatoes, and furthermore I really enjoy building things.  So when a friend recently recommended the use of potato towers, I was very interested.  So yesterday I was off to buy materials for several compost bin orders I have and wouldn’t ya know?  2×6 pine was on sale.

The theory is simple – solancea plants will root from any stalk that has ground contact – I’ve seen both peppers and tomatoes rooting from their stalks.  The important part with potatoes is that they will lay tubers anywhere between the original “seed” potato and the soil surface.  Every time the potato plant gets about 6 inches above ground, add  more soil – this is why you mound potatoes in the field.  These towers just take the mounding to crazy logical conclusions – the tower is essentially a three foot “mound”.  What I like most about this kind of tower is the ability to “sneak” potatoes as the season progresses by removing a lower strip of 2×6 and grubbing around.  As most suburbanites don’t have root cellars (yet!) this is a huge plus if you are growing 100 lbs of spuds.  Also, as the sides are opaque, spud production will occur right up to the sides, maximizing space and using less water compared to wire mesh designs.  Also, the lumber avoids some concerns that may be present with using old tires.  Old garbage cans, etc would also work.

The only major change I did for mine was that I used 2×4’s for the uprights as I had 10′ of them laying around the garage and I also put a sheet of cardboard under it to thwart the quack.  Speaking of which, this could be considered a hyper productive way to sheet mulch - cardboard out next years beds, and build potato towers along them – one could get (in theory) 600 lbs of spuds form one 20-foot bed (6 towers with 18-inch spacing) and when the towers come down you have a raised bed about 2 feet deep with compost when you’re done.  Hmmmm…

Planting the tower is easy, I took four medium seed potatoes (1 lb exactly) and cut them in half.  In the spirit of science, I used one each of Kennebec, Purple Viking, Carola, and Yukon Gold to see which liked this method more.  The growing medium I used for the first layer is two-year-old leaf mold, to which I added some pelletized chicken manure for nitrogen as it looked a little “carbon-ey”.  Weather here is mild and rainy, so they should be sprouting in no time.  The only down side is that right after the photo shoot, our new adolescent dog decided that this was a fantastic play pen and tore into it with abandon – I think I found all eight seeds, but she may have eaten one or two.

The claim is that the towers will produce 100 lbs of spuds with about 1 lb planted in 4 sqare feet.  That is freakish considering a record yield for field sown spuds is about 14:1; I was very pleased with my 8.5:1 last year.  In typical culture, 100 lbs would take at least 75 square feet, but more likely 150.  I am stoked to see this work and will certainly keep you posted.  Other great advantages – you do not need any heavy equipment to grow these – and harvesting is super easy.  Just be sure to save the soil somewhere for next year – mixing it with fall leaves and grass clippings in a compost bin would be a fantastic way to rejuvenate the soil.

Couple of post-scripts. This thing is crazy overbuilt – I would feel comfortable parking a car on it if it had a cross tie across the top!  I think the prime driver of the dimensions is cost.  In the irony of modern economics, 2×6×8′ lumber is cheaper than 1×6×8′ lumber.  Also, pine rots quickly, so using 2x lumber will buy you a few extra years -though by Year Four I expect these to be falling apart.  If it works I will likely build the next one using cedar decking for the sides and 2×2 cedar for the uprights.  That should last a decade, but would cost about double.  Another advantage would be that it would weigh half as much – this thing is heavy when built!

To make it more fun, we will likely be painting the sides with the kids – I have the idea of making each side a different person, and then we can mix and match the parts each year to create silly combinations.  I would also like to enlist my wife (waaaaay more talented artist) to paint a picture of a potato plant with a “soil view” of roots on one side.

All in all the total cost was about $30 (8 2×6×8, screws, and 12′ of 2×2) and about an hour of time in the workshop -mostly becuase my kids were running the screw guns and they are 5 and 7.  If you can truly get 100 lbs of spuds that is crazy cheap – down to literally a few cents per pound over the lifetime of the tower.  Combine that with the ability for literally every single homeowner to grow all their potatoes for a year in as little as 8 square feet, this could be huge!