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!

Sunshiny Goodness

Willits weather is funny, because it is completely unpredictable. It can rain in the middle of the summer, though it almost never does. It can frost in June, though it almost never does. It can be in the upper 70's for a week in January, though it almost never is. But there are annual trends, strange ones, by which you can judge how relatively odd the weather is, and people will say things like "Huh, this freakishly cool weather usually comes in June, not May," or "Huh, usually this week or so of beautiful weather hits in February, not right now." Which is what our Garden Manager, Ellen, said today. People who have lived here for more than 20 years can talk that way with some amount of confidence. For the rest of us it just seems like someone up there is rolling the dice to see what the day will look like.

As a bit of trivia, we here are apparently on the border of the Alaskan and Hawaiian jet streams, so when one of them has the hankering to go north or south a titch, well, we get unseasonable weather. I have come to think of all of the weather here as unseasonable.

The unseasonably nice weather in the past 5 days and the coming 6 or 7 days has us doing whatever we can in the garden. Weeding takes a high priority at all times, as does harvesting whatever is ready to be harvested. And this time of year, not being able to count on the cold coming back to stay, we prune when it looks like it could stay warm. Which was today.

Here we have Ellen hitting the Asian Pear tree hard, because it went wild last year. In the foreground are two Persimmon trees, one of which is getting the ax this year.

Another bit of garden trivia: two years ago the whole region had an overwhelming fruit year, and some of our trees, not pruned for bounty and not quite watched closely enough, split down to the ground. We lost a couple of plum trees and a peach tree. Or two peaches and a plum. Something like that. At any rate, the remaining trees got a good pruning last year, and then some unseasonably cold weather came along late Spring and took all the blossoms. No one anywhere near us had any fruit besides berries and such. No apples, pears, peaches, plums, persimmons... We were sad. The trees weren't, though, and put all their energy into new growth.
So today in the garden Ellen pruned, Margo weeded, and I harvested willow from our basket-willow stands. And we all watered for the first time this winter.

The beautiful weather came at a difficult time for Margo and me. In the apprenticeship program with Ecology Action we each plan and teach six classes a year to EA Director (and Golden Rule Advisor) John Jeavons and EA Garden Manager Carol. Our next classes will be presented this Thursday, mine on Grains and Margo's on Seed Saving. Naturally we would have preferred cold, rainy, prohibitive weather that would keep us out of the garden definitively. But there we were, in shorts and short sleeves, getting our vitamin D.

To follow up on my last posting about putting all our precious grain seed away in plastic, I got out our store of silica gel and baked it. Silica gel is useful because it absorbs water, but it is fun because it's treated with cobalt chloride, which is blue when the beads are dry and pink when wet. Now I think it would be less confusing if blue was wet and pink dry, but we don't live in a Harry Potter world and cobalt chloride doesn't work that way. All the same, it's a good time, the agricultural version of a hypercolor shirt.

So for posterity I put some crystals in a bowl of water to take a picture. Then I baked the whole bunch of them in the oven for a while at 200°F (that's how you're supposed to dry them) and put them in the bowl for another photo. I made some handy 1 cup envelopes out of paper, which breathes just fine, and am in the process of transferring seeds from plastic to paper. I will sprinkle some silica gel in the bottom of each jar, and watch it for a few weeks. If it turns pink, I'll put more in. That's how we learn, I guess...
Coming up next, by popular demand, threshing :)

Pathetic Offspring

We love our grains dearly, and so when one (or all) of them goes astray it pains us all the more. Especially when the fault can so clearly be traced back to us.

This is what a bad grain year looks like for the Golden Rule (speaking specifically in terms of fall and spring grains, like wheat and rye). Here is the entire grain harvest for the 2008 season. In the photo you have two points of reference, a CD in front and a gallon jar in back. A third point of reference that may be helpful is the area we grew in grains last year (1,318 square feet) together with the total weight of the grains (54.56 lb) and the fact that, subjectively speaking, we usually do much better than that...

Objectively speaking we have three categories of goals for yields in anything we grow: beginning, intermediate, and high. "Beginning" is for if the grower is facing impediments, like lack of experience, poor soils, uncooperative weather, things of that nature. "Intermediate" is what we aim for. We aim for "High" yields, too, but more in the way a child of a past generation might hope for a Red Ryder BB gun. Beginning, intermediate and high yields for these fall and spring planted grains are, respectively, 4, 10, and 20+ lb. per 100 square feet. So in a bed of 5X20' we might expect to get 10 pounds of grain and hope for more.

When you do the math, you see that we got an average of 4.13 lb/100 square feet. Now you would notice if you could see my spreadsheet that our 160 sq ft of cereal rye this year did produce 11.09 lb/100sq ft (of which we are all proud), but it was the clear exception. On the whole, for our fertile soil and doting love, we got abysmal yields.

At which point were our babies led astray? Well, one could point to the wildfires that plagued Mendocino County, despite the firefighters' best efforts, clouding the air with smoke and drastically cutting down photosynthesis for at least a month and a half. We're sure this was to blame for many of the other low yields we saw this year. But the sad truth is that the grains were at their last stages of maturity then, their chlorophyll having departed for greener pastures (ha ha ha).

No, we had no one but ourselves to blame, and let this be a lesson to all of you out there. Reap the wisdom from our thickly sown sloth: weed your grains virtuously! Also your garlic, onions, flax and things. But if you would not be thrown into strings of foolish excuses when your visitors say "Huh, I never realized wheat was so short," weed them when they need it! Grains just can't compete.

I guess I'll follow that up with a nice photo, cause even though they were really sad looking, they were our grains and we love them. Here you see some of them at the end of their lives. That green tint in the closer bed of yellowed wheat is volunteer chamomile, happily prospering. A little information: we plant nearly everything on offset spacing rather that rows. Fall and spring grains are planted on 5" centers. We put stakes and string up around the beds to give them support. The closer you plant grains the better they produce (to a point), but as they cram together they are also prone to "lodging," which is when they meet rain or wind and lose (fall over). Hence the stakes and string.

The winter season calls us to organize ourselves, and I attacked our seed shelves recently, trying to figure out how many species, varieties, and years of grains we had stored for use. There were many jars, bags, or packets from previous years, but since most of the grains were grown last year we can choose to store the freshest seeds. Then I consolidated them, made a list, and stored as much as we might want for seed in the coming years. (I plan to cycle those out when we have harvested and threshed this year). The picture shows the grains all packed in plastic bags inside jars. I just learned this morning from EA's Garden Manager that this is a big no-no. Any moisture in there will wreak havoc on the seeds, rendering them non-viable. So we'll go get some silica gel, which absorbs moisture, and put it in each of the baggies. The rest of the seed goes on the table by the flour grinder, ready to be turned into something tasty and healthy.

Grains are a joy to all of us here, but, lest you think we are more impressive agriculturalists that we really are, I must say we don't come anywhere close to growing all the grain that even Margo and I consume in a year, let alone the community. Grain, even intensively grown as we do it, demands a lot of space. We do it here a little for fun but mainly for experience, biomass for compost (more about these practices soon) and to acclimatize varieties to this region.

I will end this post by parading past you the names and varieties of grains we have in stock, like the abused but victorious personalities they are, proudly marching to the grinder...

• Wheat: Pacific Blue Stem, Red Fife, Kamut, Huron, Lavras, Hard Red Spring, Hard Red Winter, Emmer, Black Emmer, Maris Wigeon, SS791, Square Head Masters, Chidham Red Chaff, Colona Lunga, Turkish Red Winter, Perfectly Awnless, Alaska Spelt, Early Stone Age, and Farro
• Rye: Cereal and Akusti
• Triticale: Pika, Musky and Juan
• Oats: Paul and Shelly
• Barley: Karan 16, Schrene, Tibetan, Sangatsuga, Naked, Ethiopian, Faust, and Jet