Confessions Of A Tightwad

Ann ‘knocking’ wild rice. All that green stuff behind her is wild rice.

Thought I would fill in a little about some of this years activities. Our biggest and newest effort was wild rice harvesting. We had a really good time and had a great harvest.We ended up with almost 80 pounds of clean finished rice. We thought, hey,nothin’ to it!. Since then we found out that this was a near record year for wild rice so we’ll have to see what next year brings.

We did our own processing .I used a large pan that we use to finish cooking  maple syrup in to do the parching. After the rice has been air dried that is the next step in finishing the rice.Parching the rice desiccates the outer hull so that it can be removed easier. As soon as the rice came out of the parching pan it went into a 55 gallon barrel that I cut in half long ways and then lined with a rubber mat. This is where we treaded our rice. Treading is basically walking in place on the rice . The friction between your foot and the sides of the barrel knock s off the outer hull. Sounds easy but it is like walking on loose sand. A vigorous fifteen minute walk was usually enough to get most of the rice clean. After that it’s a matter of separating the grain from the chaff. We did that by pouring the rice/chaff  from one pan to another in front of a fan several times. About 99.9% of the rice was clean at that point and we just sifted through it all by hand and picked out the remaining hulls. It worked but I don’t think I’d want to do more than we had this year using some of our methods.

Ann has been trying all sorts of wild rice recipes. I’ll see if I can get her to give up her wild rice and honey mushroom soup recipe. It’s fantastic!. Wild rice as a breakfast cereal really sticks to your ribs and with some of our maple syrup on it’s very tasty. We thought we would have some rice to barter but the way we have been going through it I’m not to sure.

Treading rice. Warm rice and a warm day made for a real work out.

I’ve been busy on a new construction project and as usual I’m doing it on the cheap ’cause that’s what us tightwads do. In this case that means I’m building the frame of the structure with poles instead of sawn dimensional lumber. Since most poles are tapered instead of having parallel sides like the lumber you buy there are several differences in the construction methods you need to use.

First off, you can forget using your standard 4 ft.  level on most of the project. Due to the taper and irregularities found on most poles, a 4 ft. level won’t work. This is where “Build like an Egyptian” comes in. How did they level the base for the pyramids? They used water. They dug a trench into the stone and filled it with water thereby creating a level mark to go from.  I’m not into doing that much digging so I use the modern version, a common garden water hose. You do have to modify it a bit of course,but it’s simple.  First, get a pair of hose repair ends, then get 4 feet of clear plastic tubing that will fit onto the hose repair ends. Cut the tubing in half so you have two, two foot pieces. Drill about a 1\4 inch hole through both pieces about an inch from one end. Attach the repair end to the other end of each piece, screw them onto any garden hose you happen to not be using at the time. Holding the two clear plastic ends, fill the hose full of water until it’s about half way up the clear ends. If you don’t have a kink in your hose you are now the proud owner of a water level. To use it ,tack a small nail into a stack at a convenient height. Using the small hole you drilled, hang one of the clear ends on the nail. I put a string around it or tape it so it doesn’t fall off.   Put a mark on the stack at the water level. This is your bench mark and the water level in the other end will be at this same level .As long as you are careful to not spill out any of the water this level is very accurate. Simply take the free end of the hose to each end of the piece you want to level and measure from the water level to the piece.    Adjust  your piece up or down until both measurements are the same. Your piece is 40 feet long? No problem ,use a 50 ft hose!

While the water level is great for leveling it is useless for getting anything plumb. For that you need another tool the ancients used and that is a plumb bob. This is almost as simple as it gets. A rock and a string = plumb bob. Of course you can get a little fancier than the rock but the principle is the same. Put something heavy on the end of a string, let it hang free from a nail or the edge 0f a board and after you stop it from swinging it is dead perfect plumb. If it is windy use a heavier weight. I usually hang it out the thickness of a small block of wood and then use a piece of the same board to gauge which way my piece has to move to be plumb. This prevents the weight from touching the work piece and being thrown off plumb.

Well, I said the plumb bob was almost as simple as it gets but there is another tool that is even simpler and just as useful. Take a piece of string and pull it taunt. No laser will give you a straighter line. The straight line has lots of uses on most construction jobs. Watch a mason lay brick or a carpenter straightening a wall and you will see the humble straight line in action. Every tool box should have a ball of good strong string.

There are two more simple tools that are necessary any time you are building. A GOOD tape measure is essential. Try to get a good one, that usually means expensive, because the cheap ones just don’t last. Then take the time to use it accurately.Measure twice, cut once .Your building will not be square and plumb and level if you do not measure accurately!

Last,but most important,a few simple math skills. There are several simple math equations that will allow you to easily check for square. Square means your corners are 90 degree angles. One simple method  is a 3-4-5 triangle.Measure 3 feet on one wall, make a mark. Measure 4 feet on the other wall, make a mark. Measure from mark to mark. When that measurement is 5 ft. you have a 90 degree corner. Another method is to measure  between diagonal corners. Compare the measurements from each set of diagonal corners,they should be identical. If you goggle construction math you will find lots if simple but very useful equations.  I’ll try to post some pics later this week.

Ann with our Sannan doe Malta and her triplets.
Babies are part of what makes homesteading worth while and goat babies are some of the most entertaining babies you will ever see. In a few days these kids will be tearing around and bouncing off the walls. Our son Dane likes to lay in their pen and let them play king of the mountain on his back.
While it has been sort of nice not having to do milking twice a day I,m glad that in a few days we won’t have to buy milk at the store! Malta’s pen mate Beta, another Sannan, is due to freshen soon too. With two of them milking we won’t be buying milk for quite some time.

New foundation wax in a frame for the brood box. This is one of 40 I repaired this week.

It has been busy around here. We are in the middle of maple syrup season, although the weather has not been the best, and we have honey bees coming next week. We did not have bees last year so all of our bee equipment was kind of beat up. Empty bee boxes are mouse condos and they really messed up our boxes. Almost all of the frames had been chewed on and very few of the honey frames had usable wax. I had a box of foundation wax so I didn’t think it was going to be a problem. Wrong!

The box of foundation wax I had is about five years old and at some time it had been dropped or had something set on it. This was not a good thing. Every sheet was in three or four pieces. If I had time and if I was not such a tightwad I could have ordered some and had it in a few days I suppose. Of course, I am a tightwad, and I couldn’t see wasting that foundation wax. That’s why it took me two days to get those boxes cleaned up and sort of new foundation put into the frames.

Foundation wax is like a guide for the bees so that they will build their honey comb in a shape that makes it easier for us to steal their honey. It is less than a eighth of an inch thick and has the standard honey comb shape pressed into it. The honey frame is made in such a way that a piece of foundation wax is installed in the center of the frame and the bees build comb on both sides of it. The problem for me was figuring out how to use those broken pieces.

I finaly decided to glue the pieces back togeather. I did that by taking a narrow strip from one of the broken pieces and heating it up. The trick was to get it warm enough that it would stick but not so warm that it would melt. That seemed to be about a 1/10 of a degree difference!  First I tried holding it over the wood stove but when you do get a piece warm enough that it melts a little it drips on the stove. Bees wax+ hot stove = much smoke.

I ended up using a gas lantern for a heat source. That worked alright except for a few small burns I recieved for inattentive wax handling. The top of those lanterns really get hot!  I did get enough frames repaired for two hives so we’re ready to go. I’ll try to get some pictures when we hive our bees.

Basic tools for sugar'in, auger,or electric drill to drill hole for the tap, hammer to drive the tap in, different types of taps we have, a bucket to catch the sap.

Some of my fondest childhood memories involve making maple syrup. I really enjoy every thing about it. I’m hoping that this will be a good year as we would like to make some sugar too but we won’t do that unless we get a bumper crop of syrup. The trees are just starting to run here so we will see how it goes.
I’ve been getting set up for the last week and every thing is ready to go. Now we just need the weather to cooperate. It needs to be warm and sunny during the day and below freezing at night. A few of the aprox. 90 taps I have in are starting to run a little. I’ve collected 20 gallons of sap so far. That will cook down to make about two quarts of syrup!

Here is my homemade cooker and pan. The pan holds about 75 gallons of sap.

Home curing meat is as easy as any other type of cooking, just follow the recipe. Yes, you do need a few pieces of specialized equipment, but nothing that has to be expensive.I cure my hams and bacons in plastic meat tubs and built my smoke house from scrap wood and steel from other projects.
The recipes I use are from a book called GREAT SAUSAGE RECIPES AND MEAT CURING by Rytek Kutas. I’ve had good luck with this books info but there are tons of sources for recipes including lots of web sites. Making raw pork into hams and bacons is cooking and no more complex than preparing any other good food. There is a fair amount of elapse time to cure meat but not that much actual working time. The recipe I use for my honey cured bacons takes about an hour to start the curing process which then lasts for three days. After that the bacons are in the smoker for about 12 hours. Slice ‘um up and chow down! This is bacon you will never, repeat, never, be able to buy anywhere.
If you can bake bread or can pickles or cook a pot roast you can cure your own meat. It will save you a ton of money, it’s enjoyable, and you can have gourmet food that you made yourself. Try it.

The top pic is of a ham as I was slicing it. I always try to make a few slices as they are a great quick meal. The lower pic is the smoke house with 4 hams just as I was starting up.

Well it’s been a while since I’ve written anything and there’s a reason for that, I was hibernating! It’s been really cold and I haven’t been able to work on much of anything but making firewood.After making firewood day, after day, after day, after day,well, you just sort of go into a zombie like hibernation. That’s my story and I’m stick’en to it. I’m all better now though. Two weeks ago Monday I went to a local livestock auction and bought two butcher hogs.

Here’s a picture of one that has one side cut up. I’ll be posting a bunch of pictures of the meat cutting and smoking hams and bacons on the PICTURES page of this blog. I had planned to take pictures of the butchering too but forgot to have anyone come to take them while I was butchering. I’m always nervous about actually killing the animals until it’s done. I believe if you eat meat you should be responsible for seeing that its life and it’s death are humane. I’ve butchered  at least some of my meat almost every year of my adult life but I still worry about getting a quick painless death for the animal I’m going to eat.

   My smoke house worked out well and I’ll cover meat curing  and all that on my next post .Now I guess I’ll get busy and load some pictures up,

   At the house we used to live in, I had built a cellar in one corner of the basement and that worked fairly well. Now that we are at the cabin we need some place to store potatoes, apples, and carrots that is cooler and more humid than the cabin but will not freeze. A root cellar was the obvious choice. Not having any heavy equipment to dig out the hole my son and I did what had to be done. We dug it by hand.

It turned out to be a bigger job than I thought it would be . We hit clay and hardpan at about 2 feet and it continued to the 7 foot depth we stopped at. It meant that every bit of dirt we took out had to be loosened with a pick first. We finally got the 10 x 16 hole dug into the south facing slope of the hill below our cabin dug, now we needed walls. I had intended to build the walls with rock since we have it in abundance but the season was getting late and building  field stone walls is a slow job. Plus of course, I’m a tightwad.

   One alternative type of construction that I have read about but never tried came to mind. It’s called earth bags. It’s just what it sounds like, bags filled with dirt and stacked to form the wall. A bag, think 100#  feed bag here, is filled about 1/3 full,then the top is folded under and the bag placed flat with the fold underneath. Run a row of these , then place two rows of quadruple barb ,barbwire on top  and sandwich it between your next row of bags. It really ties them together.

   After you have your wall as high as you need it, 5 feet in my case, build a form for concrete on top of it. Put in some rebar, drive a few down into the wall too, and pour it full. I made mine 4 inches thick. This helps compress the wall and keeps ever thing in place. I also used it to get every thing square and level as it’s hard to keep it that way building with the bags. After that you need to plaster the walls with portland cement plaster to protect the bags. I have to do that to mine yet when the weather allows. Also make sure you put drain tile on the outside of the walls.

   On top of my concrete curb I built a two foot wall and then a low gable roof. The outside of the wall was water proofed and then I back filled almost to the top of it. I used heavy clay for the top few inches and have every thing sloped away. I used styrofoam to insulate the top part of the cellar. I left the floor dirt to help keep the humidity high. The front wall is built the same but will be faced with rock. I got started last fall but didn’t get done before cold weather hit.

   We have stored potatoes, apples, and carrots in wood crates filled with leaves. So far every thing is doing great. We have had quite a bit of below zero temps. and nothing has froze. The carrots and potatoes were actually dug too early as we had to move back to the cabin sooner than expected. Despite this they seem to be doing good. Most of the apples we bought were hail damaged seconds[ can you say tightwad ] but we have had very little spoilage so far. I think I will have some ventilation issues in the summer but will have to wait to see. So far I am very pleased with the results.

If you live on property that is wooded, or have access to wooded land you can save a lot of money by using poles instead of sawn lumber. I have built several pole type buildings using poles for most of the framing. I have built all of these as portable buildings on skids since that gets me past the need for building permits and thus building inspectors. That could be different where you live so better check first.

Most people think big when they think of cutting trees to build with but you don’t want big for this method. For one thing, big also means heavy,and heavy will make your job tougher. I use balsam fir or aspen for most projects for two reasons. One, the bark peels off of both easily in the spring, and they both are relatively light when they dry. I try to cut and peel poles for any anticipated building in the spring,by mid summer the poles are fairly dry. I generally cut trees no more than 6 inches diameter on the stump and use lots down to 3 inches. I use tamarack for the skids as it is quite rot resistant although it’s heavy .

I square up the poles where ever they have to be joined using my chain saw and eyeballing them. Then I lay the pieces to be joined up against each other and run the chainsaw between them so they match each other. Doesn’t really matter if they are actually square as long as they match up. Then I just nail them togeather with ring shank pole barn nails .I put 45 degree angle braces on all the corner posts,both top and bottom.

I use poles for my nailers [purloins] too. I just notch the end so that they are all a uniform amount past the poles.  I usually use a shed roof so that is done the same way. Since most of these buildings have been fairly small the rafters run from side to side and are both rafter and nailer for the steel. I bought a large pile of used polebarn steel cheap so I’ve been using that on my projects this year. The picture shows a small [10x10] shed I built for the horse to get out of the weather. The little poles along the sides are to keep her from bending the tin up when rubbing.

This is a picture of part of our garden last year. We had another with just corn and potatoes.

It’s that time of the year again, garden catalog season. My wife and I both love it. We spend many happy hours comparing the offerings of various seed companies and nurseries. First, we go through them and put a mark next to the things we are interested in. Then ,we compare prices from catalog to catalog.  We make sure  to check each companies shipping charges. Some companies seem to want to make their profit from the shipping charge.

We garden organically to a large extent but don’t always buy organic seed. We always pass on GMO, no frankenfood for us or our animals. We try to use heirloom and other open pollinated varieties as much as possible. We like to use a deep mulch system for weed control and to control water loss from evaporation. It also leads to soil with unbelievable tilth since you are basically sheet composting continuously. I highly recommend any book you can find by Ruth Stout, who wrote several books about deep mulch gardening.

This year we are already busy marking away at our collection of seed catalogs. Any day now we’ll go to the next stage where we add up the bill for all those garden dreams. Then comes the hardest part of gardening. Figuring out how much of it we can actually afford to order and then……….what we have to take off the list for this year