We Can't Get No Dehydration...

One of the best forms of food preservation has remained elusive to us for the past week. Just as we were preparing to introduce an exciting and new form of food-drying, our tried and true method bit the dust. These would be the solar food dryer and the electric one, respectively.

Our electric dryer, which can be identified only by its manufacturer, "B & J Industries", and vague "Model # 7010", remains somewhat of an enigma to me. What has more miscellaneous information about everything than the internet? And yet the only two leads I could find on this dryer are an ad in a 1980 issue of Backpacker Magazine and a thread on an online forum called "Rapture Ready" in which the writer talks about hers suddenly ceasing to work. That's just what happened to ours, and in the absence of any information on the omnipotent and omniscient internet I was forced to take matters into my own hands.At this point I'd like to harp on the benefits of a well-rounded childhood. Last week our intern Tracy said her son asked "how does Dan know how to do so much stuff?" (keep in mind, this is through the eyes of a 5-year old). My answer: I took lots of stuff apart when I was a child. My family can attest to this. Apparently it is only much later that one learns how to put stuff back together again.
But back to the point. I'm not very electrically savvy, but I could figure the dehydrator out after taking the back off. It runs more or less in series from the power supply through motor, heating element, thermostat, and thermal cutoff, which is the safety fuse in case the whole thing overheats. Bypassing the thermal cutoff (which breaks at 98° C) I found the whole thing worked. To make a long story short, I found 98° C thermal cutoffs online and got one for a little under a dollar. Which is really a ripoff, because if I ordered 1,000 of them they would only cost 34 cents each...
I haven't installed it yet, because I have been too busy dancing with excitement around our new solar food dehydrator! For my birthday I received a book, The Solar Food Dryer, which discusses the concept of using solar energy and contains recipes for dehydrating. Which I skipped right over to get to the plans it gives for building your own "high-performance, low-cost solar food dryer". It took me much longer than it had to to build, because I'm not great at assembling all the materials before beginning. As far as I can tell at this point, it is certainly capable of high performance and was relatively low-cost, depending on what one has lying around.
For materials the plywood, pine and redwood were free, and the big pane of glass was donated from friends' renovation project. (I actually got two of those panes, so I am building one for us down here and one for the folks up at Ecology Action). For the first unit I also scrounged much of the hardware (or fabricated it) from found items. For the second I am using "nice" things that I bought. It is sort of hard to nail down a final cost for the hardware (screws, handles, hinges, screen kits, thermometer, misc. other) because I wasn't keeping great track, but my estimate is about $75 per unit. Maybe less.
Those with more discerning tastes for the final look might spend more, and those who have a keener eye for scrounging parts would spend much less. Probably the only somewhat mandatory costs are the thermometer (~$7), screen kits (~$30), weatherstrip ($5), and the high-temperature stove paint (~$12). The gathered ingredients look something like this.
I put it all together, and ended up with a very nice, very effective piece of equipment. How effective? I was hoping to get it finished when we would have full summer sun to use it, but only just got it all finished this past week. We put it out Wednesday afternoon when the temperature was about 70° F and the interior temperature hit around 140° F. One afternoon wasn't enough to finish the large screen of apples, so we put it out again Thursday morning and they were dry before noon, again hitting about 135° F on a day with a few drifting clouds. So with mid-October sun angle and cool temperatures it still did the trick wonderfully. I'm sold. Well, I was sold before, but now I would recommend it to others.What we have now is a contraption that, with no further cost, will dry two 42" x 30" screens at a time full of yummy fruits and veggies whenever the sun is out. Yay!

Let's go to the County Fair!

This year we were hoping to attend the Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show and the California Wool and Fiber Festival, three big events bundled together. It is a great time because, besides the usual rides and fried foods, it has lots of free samples of apples, wonderful art and craft displays, tons of cute animals, a whole building of fiber stuff, and best of all, the Sheepdog Trials. If you want an impression of how cool these dogs are, check out this youtube video of the 2008 Champion at the Mendocino County Fair. Picture 1,500 or so people behind the camera hanging on every motion of the dog. Previously that has been the highlight for us.

So what would have ordinarily been a fun time turned in to much more this year, as one of the Willits Spinning Guild members was organizing the Fiber Festival part. She came to the August meeting and announced that she wanted it to be a good show, so everyone should submit at least something for judging. It was a reach for me, but I decided to submit four samples of yarn I am spinning for Margo to crochet into an afghan. Just to fill the ranks out, you know.
We went to pick up the booklet that tells you guidelines, divisions, categories, and classes, and it was thick. Margo couldn't resist looking through it, and as she did she got ideas, marking pages that she thought were fun possibilities. She became more and more ambitious, and in the end decided to submit two pies, a plate of cookies, and solar-canned peaches and pears.
In this way we brought extra excitement about the fair. Sunday held the Sheepdog Trials and the spinning contest, so that was our day. We got there in time to see the last two dogs, then wandered straight over to the fiber building to greet friends and check out my submissions. I ended up with a first, second, and third place ribbon among four samples, which felt great. There were some fantastic projects in the mix, all woven, knitted, crocheted, tatted, felted, etc. We got to see our friends Steven and Tamara, who go about in fashionable buckskins and are the most hardcore primitive-skills people we know. At their booth they had home-made examples of everything from arrowheads to nets, plus some further down the alphabet. They have a company called Paleotechnics through which they sell some kits, have a number of books, and do an incredible amount of education.
Then came the spinning contest. I spun in it, and Margo helped the judges get everything organized and processed. As you see in the photos, there are a few styles of spinning represented: drop-spindle (my choice), Navajo spindle, and spinning wheel. The contest has three parts. The first is the warm-up spin. In this one they give you some fiber and a blindfold. The pictures tell the rest. These ladies are using the Navajo spindle and, as they have probably been spinning twice as long as I have been alive, are not much hindered by the blindfold. I was another matter...The second part involved spinning for quality. This was broken down into many classes, dividing by age, experience, and method. I am experienced enough to not be a beginner, but not so much that I can compete in quality with the average "experienced" spinner. The only other experienced drop-spindlist had 20 or 30 years' practice on me. But we had fun. And I got to show off my andean-plying skills. For a great description of the technique check out this blog post by an intrepid spinner. I've created my own way to avoid the necessity on my drop spindle, but the contest involved extenuating circumstances. And, as I said, I got to show off.
The third part was as hopeless as the second in terms of winning, but was a real hoot to try. It was the speed contest, and was only divided into beginner and experienced, all else considered equal. There is no match for a spinning wheel in all-out speed. There was a great clacking and clattering, and I was reminded why I prefer simplicity to mechanization. If anything had gone wrong with one of those wheels it wouldn't have been pretty. The one next to me sounded ready to throw a rod. So no prizes for Dan there. Below, Margo helps to make sense out of a tangle of niddy-noddys.After winding our way through buildings and displays, sheep, hogs, cows, bunnies and fowl we finally made it to the Arts and Crafts building to see what kind of success Margo had found in the canning and baked goods. They were spread all over the place, whether to make better decoration or because of some strange sort of logic, we weren't sure, but it took a while to find all her submissions. First we stumbled across the Shoofly pie, which had a second-place ribbon on it. It's always nice to see that someone else thinks your family recipe is [almost] as tasty as you do. Wandering, we found the solar-oven-canned peaches and pears, which won first and second places in their classes. After more searching we found the mint-chocolate-chip cookies in a glass case, with a second place ribbon on them. Great victory for the Royer-Miller kitchen!
It took us a long while to find the final submission, her "All- Pumpkin Pie", but when we did we were quite pleasantly surprised. It won first place in the Pumpkin Pie class and Best of Division for pies and pastries! A little blue ribbon and a big purple one. How about that?
The downside of submitting baked stuff to this fair is that they do the judging the Wednesday before the fair opens. Then it sits there all Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday before you can pick it up. At the least it means stale cookies. At the worst, in the case of moist stuff (like pumpkin pie), it means a healthy layer of mold. Nothing says "Yum!" like a big purple ribbon on a moldy pie. Below is the pre-penicillin version.So if you want the secret to amazing cookies and pies, you know who to ask. And remember: if it molds, it is natural.
Out of nine submissions, then, eight won awards. What's more, the cash involved paid for the submission fee and gas to the fair! But not the garlic fries and the funnel cake...

Get Them Before They Get You!

I've hit a landmark of west-coast living that I put on the same level as learning how to surf. Last week I ate my first rattlesnake! It happened like this:

Garden Manager Ellen's son Cody, who roams the ranch fixing fences, irrigation pipes, and cows, occasionally runs across a rattlesnake. Often he kills it, and on one notable occasion he skinned one for a hat-band (turning down my suggestion of making gloves - you know, with little rattles at the fingertips?). The natural progression was to grill one up for dinner, which happened last week.
The photo shows clearly what happened: Cody relished it and Ellen, on the right, was disturbed, disgusted, and naseaus. Everyone at the table, in fact, fit into one of those two categories. Happily (for those of us in the former) Cody was willing to share!
Inevitably someone must ask "Does it taste like chicken?" To which I must answer "Probably it tastes like gutted chicken neck grilled with seafood spices." Specifically, a chicken whose neck was genetically modified to contain lots of very strong salmon bones. Tough, but novel.
I am told it is a lot better in stew, though somehow I had always pictured them cut in sushi-style rolls and frittered. Shows what I know. (That's me in the photo on left, sampling my piece).
Ok, now to a subject I have wanted to broach for a while. Hear me out before you mock. There are many among us who say "I am a vegetarian, though I eat fish" or even "I am a vegetarian" when it turns out that white meat in general doesn't count as meat to them. And saying "I am mostly vegetarian" is not objectionable. But I am betting that I could not get away with saying "I am mostly vegan." Never mind that I hardly ever eat meat, or that I consume merely a little butter or honey regularly. I'll let Nikki respond however she likes to that one.
I don't specifically want or need to be vegan (especially given the opportunistic tendencies demonstrated above), it is simply a hypothesis of mine that vegetarians are a little more inclusive with their designation. 'Cause I can still be a mostly vegetarian and eat a little rattlesnake if it crosses my path. Free-range, grass-fed, and everything.
Having enjoyed the novelty of rattlesnake, what other dangerous delights might be next? Here's a hint from our front door (picture it deep-fried, if it helps):

Lemon Tree, Very Pretty

Walnut Grove in Lake County

A disclaimer: some of the following images may be offensive to arborists or horticulturists. Children may be able to identify them as somewhat Seuss-esque.

This year's pruning time has come and gone. I almost missed out on most of the action because of my high ideals: I believe that pruning fruit trees requires long-term vision, and the owner of the tree should either 1) be the sole pruner or 2) always have it pruned by the same person. The rationale is that fruit trees can live productive decades if taken care of, but can take years to train in a certain direction. A surrogate pruner might cut off a two-year-old branch for which the owner had high hopes.
But I enjoy the art of pruning, so until I have trees of my own I'll prune any trees for which the owner hasn't created a plan. Step one was our visit to a friends' place in Portland, OR. They have a recently acquired property with a few fruit trees, two of them over 50 years old, maybe over 60. That leaves plenty of time for mismanagement. The pear was probably at least 30 feet tall, water-sprouts and all. A little high for easy harvest. At 10' the main trunk split into two 8" trunks which were racing each other to the heavens. At 20' both of these trunks had been cut to stubs, each of which had a dozen or more branches reaching out. To make a long story short I was aggressive, perhaps overly. I wish I had pictures. With the advice of an arborist who lived across the street I cut one of the two competing trunks halfway down. (The idea is to end up with a tree half the height of the current one, but such a change has to happen over a long period of time with such an old tree.)
The other old tree was an apple, which was less out of shape. It is a shorter story. Essentially, it is said, your fruit tree can be a fruit tree or a shade tree, but not both. So it got thinned mercilessly. Again, the pictures would be great. You'll have to use your imagination after seeing the lemons.
So that was step one. Step two was that, upon our return, Garden Manager Ellen started talking about the lemon trees in the greenhouse needing pruned soon. She always lets interns prune those, because she says they come back beautifully from anything. So last week I went for them.
Not ignorantly, of course. I looked up articles on the internet.
I read an amusing quote recently by the Rev. Dr. Francis H. Wade which goes "The Bible is like a person, and if you torture it long enough, you can get it to say almost anything you'd like it to say."
The internet is like an amiable genius on LSD. If you listen long enough it will run the gamut from the insightful to the utterly incomprehensible. But, like the Bible, it is most easily misinterpreted when you step into the middle of the monologue, not knowing what came directly before or after (and not taking the time to find out).
So I found two main thoughts on pruning lemons, and citrus trees in general. The first is that everything thinner than a pencil should be taken off every year, and you can prune it all off back to main branches. In "the industry" they sometimes cut them back to trunks. The second is that citrus trees don't need to be pruned. They'll take care of themselves.
I disregarded the second because 1) the trees are in a greenhouse and are already touching the ceiling without encouragement and 2) it isn't any fun. So I started pruning, then went back to the internet to check because the tree started to seem a little gaunt. Emboldened by what I re-read, I forged ahead. I took pictures this time.
With the first tree I followed the advice thoroughly. As you can see, the number of leaves left on the tree could be counted on two hands. We had a family of friends visiting about this time, and they were glad to come out to the greenhouse to help tame the wild lemons with me. I'm leaving their names out to protect them. If I get hauled away for tree mutilation I want them to be safe. I'll take responsibility for this one, guys.
They were in charge of two of the other trees, setting a more moderate example for me when it came down to the final two.
Now time for a little educational piece. You might or might not wonder what I did with all the prunings. In Grow Biointensive we try to keep everything in the system, so tree prunings generally either get used as mature material in a compost pile or as the rough material upon which we build the pile. These tree are different, though. I don't know if this is true for lemons as a whole, but Meyer Lemons (the variety we have) produce a bonus crop on their branches: 1-2" thorns that are sharp enough to slice as well as pierce. We handle our compost often enough to not want surprises like this inside.
Last year's prunings got tossed out the back of the greenhouse and ignored.
This year I was going to do the same, but further away. I wanted to provide wildlife habitat, but preferably not right up next to the greenhouse. We have enough rodent problems. I started by moving the earlier pile, which had been increased by weeds tossed on top. Underneath the pile was some very nice compost. Now my plan is to make the new pile further away from the greenhouse, yes, but not to ignore it. Every bit of organic matter is a big help.
Here are some of the tools I used. The Felco pruners at top left and the pruning saw are both indispensable, but the next tool to the right is also very nice. It has pruning shears at the business end, which is on a long, adjustable aluminum pole with a hand-trigger at the other end. Very, very nice. The last tool is powerful but wicked. It has a lopper on the business end of its pole and a long rope. Pulling the rope levers the lopper closed on the branch of choice, but you have to pull hard. This is where it gets wicked. Where do you put the butt-end of the pole to brace it against the pressure? I tried my rib cage last year, but only once. The shock of the successful lopping bruised one of my ribs, so now I steer clear of the thing completely.

I don't know if you can identify with me, but I often find that shortly after I do something new, which I thought I had read enough on, I stumble upon something else enlightening on the subject. So one of the books I later looked at on a whim mentioned that lemons store most of their fruiting energy in their leaves. Hm.

I'm not a Coward

In my reply to Jay's comment on the last post you'll notice he asked how people dehulled back in the day and, more notably, I gave suggestions that I had never tried and asked him to let me know if he learned anything. This was cowardly, which I realized shortly after posting it. I'll seek to redeem myself with this post, after a day of experimentation.

In her invaluable book on homesteading skills, The Encyclopedia of Country Living (which I would recommend to anyone who wasn't alive during the depression), Carla Emery talks about hulling wild rice. She quotes a description by the USDA in 1885 on the "parching" process Native Americans used to loosen hulls: "It [the grain] is laid on scaffolds about four feet high, eight wide, and twenty to fifty long, covered with reeds and grass, and a slow fire is maintained beneath for thirty-six hours, so as to parch slightly the hull, that it may be removed easily." Wow. Then they would put it in a skin-lined hole in the ground and stomp on it. Commercially wild rice is parched in bushel quantities in big metal cylinders over a fire.

Under hulling in other grain sections she refers to this parching procedure and recommends following this with a once-through in a grinder set at 1/16 of an inch. Garden Manager Ellen says she has often put it through our electric grinder, set wide-open.

This is all I knew this morning.
I started with a very small quantity (~4 ounces) of Perfectly Awnless (but obviously not hull-less) Wheat, and divided it in half. One half I ran through the grinder, set wide open. The other half I parched in a cast-iron skillet over a gas stove, stopping as some of the hulls started to seem scorched and some of the grains started popping. This I followed by putting it in a box with hardware cloth on the bottom and grinding it with my foot. I can say, from trying both, that the grinder worked fine, though it broke many of the grains and ground some flour even though it was set to its widest. The parching went well, and clearly loosened up the hulls, which allowed the grains to leave very easily. I secretly decided right then that I preferred the parching method because, though it required flipping grains smallish amounts at a time, things come out tidier and whole. The fact that the grinder produced flour, cracked grains and whole grains all at the same time seemed a bit sloppy.
This was educational, but it was on too tiny a scale to mimic even the small amounts of grain that we grow, let alone the amount someone would grow for sustenance. So I went a step further. I had a bag of Farro wheat, which has tenacious hulls paired with nasty awns, those pin-like things sticking out of picturesque wheat heads. It was about 24 ounces of material, so I divided it in half and went at it.
Notes:
First of all, each half had a number of grains that had come out during threshing, so I tried to remove as many of those as I could before proceeding. I set them aside (after weighing) as the seed stock to plant next year.
Grinding was frustrating for a couple of reasons. The awns did a good job of blocking the hole, so I had to keep poking at it. Once through the grinder I took the results outside, sifted the flour, then winnowed the chaff. I was left with plenty of broken grain of different sizes, some whole grains, some still in hulls, and a bunch of awns that were too aerodynamic to blow away. After spending a lot of time separating the remaining hulled grain out, I ran it through the grinder again. And then separated it out again. A point about growing your own food: you will never get all the dirt off, and you will consume a few more bugs and a little more fiber than store-bought stuff. I'm ok with that. I'm not sure about 1.5" awns in my flour, but maybe that's good for me too. The thing that would have made this a better possibility is using a hand-powered grinder, since then you can feel the resistance and work with the grain better. Being able to open the stones wider than our grinder permits would have been nice, too.
Parching was not as smooth as with the Awnless, probably because there was more of it. After trying to toast the whole thing at once I divided the batch into two, and it was still a lot. I am not sure I toasted it enough, as it was. When it came to the crushing with my foot many grains came out easily, but some were persistent. I parched these once more and they became easier. The nice thing about the parching vs. grinding was that after parching the awns all broke off completely and became a non-issue. Hooray! The resulting grain looked a lot nicer, because it was mostly clean and completely whole. The parching process took a lot longer than the grinding, but that was because This American Life came on in the middle, and I had to listen intermittently. It would have taken a little less time than grinding, I think, because I didn't need to spend as much time sorting it.
Starting out with 12 ounces of each I ended up with 7 ounces of "grinder-hulled" and 7.5 ounces of "parching-hulled." Not sure what that means.
Conclusion
It seems like it takes a long time to process a little grain this way. I'd imagine that practice and a perfected process would help some, but it is not a speedy thing. Something else to note is that hulled grains store much better in their hulls, so you might do this kind of procedure on demand. Maybe set all those farm kids on it. Also keep in mind that both processes affect the viability of the grains (they won't germinate after being cracked or heated up in a skillet) and the grain will germinate straight out of the hull when planted, so there is no need to hull the seed you want to grow out.
Why bother with hulled varieties, then, if they are such a pain? Because they are pretty and we love them. Also because you'll lose much fewer mature grains to birds, wind, and whatever else, since they are locked in. The last reason was mentioned in the last post, too, which is that some of the hulled varieties have nutritional benefits not available in hull-less varieties.
Whew. I think I'll take a break on grains for a while. They wore me out today! So let it not be said that I shied away from a challenge. I may be silly, but I'm not a fraidy-cat.