As a result, somehow microgreens got mixed up with swiss chard, and I ended up thinking beets were swiss chard.  It wasn’t my intention to plant beets.  I don’t like them.  Freakishly red, weird textured, bland tasting.

So I was surprised to see large bulbs on the bottom of my “swiss chard”.  We harvested them, looked up a couple recipes, and decided to roast them in the oven with a light coating of olive oil.

Just pulled from the garden and rinsed.

Close-up!

Separated into bulbs and greens.

We ate the bulbs with malt vinegar.

Roasted bulbs with malt vinegar.

WOW.  Fresh beets do not equal canned beets.  Delectable, sweet, with a texture like a juicy potato.  And not only that, but we ate the greens as well, pan fried with a bit of olive oil and soy sauce.  Delicious!  Tasted very much like swiss chard except sweeter.

Sauteed greens.

I’d highly recommend planting them.  They do well in well-drained soil and are a cool-weather crop.

Oh, and they turn your pee pink.  Double-plus win!

-A

We started Project Tree when we first bought the home a few years ago. Our thinking was something like “How hard can it be?” And while it turns out this is a pretty low maintenance operation, I learned that like everything else I ever try to do, I generally don’t know what the hell I’m doing. We’ve killed a few trees, stunted the growth of others, and prevented others from producing for a season.

I’m probably going to have to come back to this tree thing in several posts, to cover troubleshooting, initial planting, watering, fertilization, pollination, and pruning, but I’ll start us out with what we’ve got going, and what we have to look forward to.

The tour
Here’s the breakdown. We have a pluot, orange, lemon, avocado, loquat, and two apple trees, all on our average/small sized back yard. Fruit trees are typically smaller than shade trees, and come in dwarf varieties if necessary.

Loquat tree in a…trash bin. I encourage you to buy something more attractive if it’s in your budget.

Lemon tree sapling in a strawberry patch.

Think carefully about what you’ll use your lemons for if you’re thinking about getting one. I run into so many people who give lemons away at harvest because they can’t manage them all. We plan on using them for cleaning solutions in addition to food.

Apple Trees (left) and avocado tree (right). All thriving with monthly fertilization and minimal watering.

Notice the raised brick beds? The clay soil is absolutely disagreeable, and in the most uncharming way. Above ground you get better drainage, better soil (Which you bought and filled yourself), better control of what goes into your trees roots, and an attractive landscape. The only downside to the half circles next to the fence is that you will eventually will have to share with our neighbors, so I hope you like them.

Pluot tree. The one tree we have that can thrive in the clay. This guy is directly in the ground. Notice the brick bordering? That is its 3ft growing space. It keeps the area clear for watering and fertilization.

Pluots growing

…we’ve killed a loquat, plum, peach, almond, and avocado tree, mostly because of the clay soil we tried planting them in. Clay is very compact, obdurate can-barely-be-called-soil matter with poor drainage and for roots is like trying to go through concrete.

Orange tree in a raised bed

This orange tree (Washington Navel) is doing…ok. Do you notice how the leaves are moderately yellow and smallish? We are hoping for dark green, broader leaves. The yellow is expected in the early spring, but it looked like this all of last year, and it dropped all of its oranges. We tried several things to no avail, and almost resolved that the real problem was that we bought it at Walmart. We’re posting to you about this so you hopefully can learn from our mistakes. There are a few things that could be the problem.

Overwatering – citrus trees don’t like wet feet. They prefer a good soaking, and then to be left alone several days to dry out.
Underwatering – This is the part I got frustrated with. I know I have both over-watered and under-watered this tree in its life to date. The correct balance is about 1-3 times a week, depending on how hot it is.
Not enough iron-Yellow leaves but an otherwise healthy looking tree may indicate an iron deficiency. You can buy iron supplements to sprinkle in, and that’s what we’ve been doing, receiving moderate improvement. Baby steps.
Soil acidity-Looking online, some websites say the acidity of the soil is one of the most important factors to plant and tree growth. Furthermore, different species prefer different levels of acidity. Orange trees – a little more acidic (5.5-6.5). We add coffee grounds to the soil for this, but I’ve heard that Epsom salt is a good idea (1/2 tbsp diluted every 2-3 months). Work towards changing pH level carefully and slowly, over the course of several seasons.
Fertilization-Citrus trees and avocado trees need a special fertilizer that is designed for them. This is something we’ve acknowledge that we pretty much have to buy.
Disease- admittedly we have less experience with this, because we haven’t dealt with it yet. I wish you the same luck.

Happy to say that our orange tree is doing great now, with several orange buds growing. We’ll have to prune some off so that it can focus on growing fewer bigger oranges.

-J

Finished Hutch

It really helps to have the right tools for this thing.  Let’s see, to get started:

An electric drill (AC!! We used a battery powered one last time and had to quit several evenings only because we ran out of charge)
jigsaw
rotary saw
level
measuring tape
a ton of screws of different sizes

Devin thinks building the rabbit hutch is boring

We got a new rabbit.  A Californian doe.  Our buck is a Californian too so we’ll have pure breeds in case someone wants to pick up a pet from us.

She loves it. So roomy in here!

Anyway, we resorted to making our own, not only because it’s cheaper, but because you can’t really find a good double-decker design on the market.  With limited square space, going vertical is a very good idea.

The upgrades from the last one:  the color.  Andrea pick the last one and it almost caused a divorce.  Terracotta my left hemisphere.  Also, bigger shelter, a 10 degree roof slope instead of 30 degrees, which is more than plenty in a climate that gets no snow.  And as you can see below, we’ve installed bins at the base that we intend to use for vermicomposting.

our last hutch of 2 years is holding up just fine

TIME INVESTMENT: Approximately 16 hours.  I wish I had tracked the number of hours spent building this for you, but I didn’t think that far ahead.  I would say a solid two days (8 hour shifts) sounds about right, counting extra trips back to the hardware store in case you also  just don’t know how to buy everything at once.

For detailed instruction on how to construct this hutch, click on the “quail hutch” tag to the left.

Next time I think I’ll post on fruit trees.  See you then!

-J

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Behind the Curtain

Sustainability.  Whether because of rising temperatures or rising prices, more and more people are looking for ways to cut costs and reduce their carbon footprints.  No longer is it considered embarrassingly agrarian to cultivate a vegetable garden, now magazines and news articles tout the benefits.  My husband and I have hopped onto the bandwagon wholeheartedly, our backyard a mess of garden beds, fruit trees, and the occasional chicken.  And then there’s the hutch off to the side of the house, filled with adorable little brown birds.

“What do you use the quails for?” I’m often asked.

“Well, we eat their eggs…” I reply.  Sometimes, depending on who has asked, and gauging their potential reaction, I stop there.  We nod, smile, and continue on to other topics.  Other times, if I sense a sympathetic soul, I forge on ahead.  “…and we eat them.”

I’ve judged wrongly before.  My conversation partner cringes, and before I know it, I’m digging my own social faux pas grave.  “We knock them out before we kill them, it’s very humane.”  “They live happy lives before they die.” “They’re really tasty!”  I can literally feel myself sinking, their estimation of my civility placing me somewhere above a murderer but not by much.

These people are not vegetarians.  They eat animals, just as I do, but they purchase their meat in packages at the store, the bodies separated into all the tastiest bits, cocooned in Styrofoam and plastic wrap.  The visceral matter of slaughter, and the viscera, are once or even twice removed, out of sight and mind.  It’s easy to imagine that these were never animals at all, just bits of food churned out from some clean and clinical factory.

Admittedly, slaughter is not an appetizing process.  The quails don’t go calmly, at peace with their function in the world.  They squirm in my hand, their actions frantic.  They are only still when we knock them unconscious by banging their heads against the countertop.  We cut the heads off, bleed them out, then remove the inedible bits – the wings, feet, feathers, and organs.  When we’re finished, they are indistinguishable from grocery store meat.

But while my husband and I keep our quails watered, fed, and happy, the livestock that eventually make their way to the store don’t always have those assurances.  They’re often kept in crowded conditions, standing or sitting in their own feces, unable to even turn around.  Some never see the light of day.  Slaughtering is done on a factory line, with little regard for the animals’ comfort or suffering.  And yet this is considered by many to be more civilized than raising an animal in your home and doing the deed yourself.  My husband’s coworker even explained to him that while she would eat grocery-store meat, she would not eat our quails even if we brought them in cleanly butchered and ready to cook.  As she stated, it was too weird because we “knew them.”

We hatched our quails from eggs, intervened if their feet weren’t growing properly, and moved the heat lamp away from their brooder in increments, so they would never be too hot or too cold.  Yes, we knew them.  And by knowing them, we accepted the risk we might feel empathy for our future meals.

Empathy doesn’t come into play at the grocery store.  It’s hard to feel any sort of kinship with a package of ten drumsticks, or a cross-section of beef.  The animals are long dead.  We never had to look them in the eye.  Although we can be certain that the cow, chicken, or pig suffered in some way, it’s easy not to think about.  We didn’t know the animal, or saw how it died.  Why, then, should we care how it lived?

It’s a sad fact that we, as humans, are more willing to inflict unnecessary pain when we have no connection to our victim – be it through a relationship with them or even just line of sight.  In the Milgram experiment, subjects were prompted to give electric shocks of increasing intensity to someone they couldn’t see by pressing a button.  85% of subjects administered the highest level of electric shock, even though they knew the other person suffered.  When subjects had to actually press the person’s hand to a plate to administer the electric shock, the number fell from 85% to 30%.

With this curtain drawn between us and the lives our food lead, this separation, it is simple to keep pushing that button, keep swiping our card at the checkout – indicating, by our actions, that we consent to how our food is treated.  Killing our own food is hard to do.  I don’t enjoy it – in fact, I often put it off.  I cringe every time one of our quails die.  However, as a person who loves to eat meat, but also loves animals, raising and slaughtering my own seemed a happy medium.

Should we all keep quails in our backyards?  What about chickens, cattle, and pigs?  Perhaps not.  Slaughtering my own meat was, and is, a bit of an experiment.  I won’t suggest that all apartment-dwellers resign themselves to vegetarianism.  But by looking upon slaughter as a necessary ill in order to get meat, and not something that should be kept out of sight, mind, and conversation, we can force ourselves to confront the process by which livestock goes from animals to meat.  By acknowledging that our steak was once a living, breathing cow, capable of feeling pain, we may be more inclined to purchase meat that comes from cows kept in better conditions.

Civility need not be measured solely by how much blood we’ve had on our hands, but also by how we treat those we are not required to treat well.

In an effort to provide more frequent updates to you on sustainability activities, I’ll be adding myself as a poster to this blog.  For the past two years I’ve worked in the background of our backyard operation.  You might have seen pictures of me before – the guy with his hands and knees in the mud while his wife talks to the chickens and puts dresses on the dog.  But I’ve decided: No More.  I won’t play second fiddle to this orchestra anymore.

There are a lot of ideas I hope to experiment with, and a lot of things I could talk about on this introductory post, but the past few trials I’ve endured in the past few weeks brings one topic especially to mind: FAILURE.

For every success we share, I have to say there is a failure.  I’ve been pampering and coddling a selection of seedlings through the late winter, each struggling for survival in the extended cold spell we’ve had.  Finally the sun rises and I place them in the shelving cabinet outside.  What happens?  Overnight an army (ok, it was more like a gang) of slugs sacked the plants, cutting almost all of them off at the head, and left nothing but a trail of snot-which begged the question: is slug slime compostable?

Anyway, I had nothing to plant mid-April, and against my current for SELF-sufficiency, had to scoot over to Lowe’s and buy a grip of seedlings, so that we would at least have some roasted peppers this summer.  At least I had the option-some fanatics believe that the day will come when we only can rely on ourselves.  But don’t worry, I’m not one of them and I’m not one to preach.

It’s a way of life, whether it’s for your health or to save money or for the environment or simply to have better tasting food, the world would be a better place if everyone did at least one thing that was sustainable.  Even a single tomato plant would be an excellent start.

This weekend we started building a second rabbit hutch, which proves my point to you that some weeks are going to be harder than others.  But if you pride your home and your work, and you strive for a greener, cheaper lifestyle, I think you will find there is a lot of fun to be had.

Building another rabbit hutch

Look forward to talking to you soon

So…this is not brewing beer from scratch.

Yes, it comes in cans

You get this cute plastic beer keg to brew beer in, plus the ingredients for your first batch (which is just ok, admittedly – the ones we tried later were better).  After further research, we joined the Mr. Beer club on their website, which allows you to get $5.00 shipping as long as you buy $30 worth every few months.  It works out to about $0.70 – $1.00 per beer, which is pretty darn cheap if you like a good beer.  Each batch is supposed to make 20 bottles, but we find we squeeze out 22 on average.

Brewing beer with this kit consists of only a few steps.  You follow the directions for each recipe, but they mostly consist of mixing what’s in the can with water, heating it up, mixing it with more water, and dropping the yeast in.  This tends to take about half an hour.  Two-three weeks later, you bring it out and bottle it.  We use old beer bottles for our brew, washed out and sanitized (reduce, reuse, recycle!).  The capping equipment we already have from our sake.  Bottling takes us about forty-five minutes and also involves adding sugar to the bottles for carbonation.  Depending on the recipe, you let it sit for another four weeks to six months, and then you are ready to enjoy!

This one is actually an apple cider, which is why theres no head on it

Time-wise this has worked out pretty well for us.  We always check the flavor profile and reviews before buying recipes on the site, and are now considering a little experimentation with our beers.  It’s not brewing beer from scratch though, so depending on how much of a purist you are, this may not be for you.  Cost-wise, this has also worked for us.  It’s cheaper than buying the beers we really like at the store, and it’s fun to have a little something we brewed ourselves (sort of).  In addition, we always manage to hit a sale on the Mr. Beer site before we buy.

We’re considering trying to brew from scratch at some point so we can do a comparison.

TIME INVESTMENT: Approximately 1.5 hours per 22 bottles

COST: $30 for the kit, $15+ per recipe, $15 for capper (if you don’t have one already), and $3.75 for a bag of errr…a lot of caps…
$48.75 to get going and brew your first batch

In the end, it’s a money-wise venture for premium beer lovers.  It feels a little chintzy when you’re pouring things out of cans and adding water, but this is counter-balanced by the fact that the beer is actually tasty, and you can still say you home-brewed it without quite lying.

As with everything, there are pros and cons to the chickens, and some of these go hand-in-hand.

Pro: They’re fun to watch!

Ahhhh...the open range!

Con: Watching them usually entails letting them out from their enclosure into the yard which leads us into…

Sub-con: They poop on the deck if we’re not watching.

Sub-con: They eat our nommable tomatoes if we’re not watching.

I have my eye on you...!

But…Sub-pro: Free-ranging them means low feed costs.  They eat very little feed if I let them free-range.

Sub-pro: They also eat slugs, fertilize the garden area, and turn over the dirt.

Pro: Their eggs are bigger than quail eggs! 2 vs 10 for an omelette!

Con: Their eggs are bigger than cute widdle quail eggs :\

Three short of a dozen!

Pro: Hens are very quiet most of the time.

Con: Their bok bok ba-GAWK hey-I-just-laid-an-egg-song can be noisy and nerve-wracking if you are not technically allowed to have chickens.  It’s at a dog bark decibel level and goes on anywhere from 0-5 minutes a day.

We converted the side yard into the chicken yard. Area on the right is for growing nommables for the chickens. Right now it holds clover, chickweed, vetch, bok choy, and a grapevine.

Pro: If you give them plenty of greens, their egg yolks are orange and the eggs amazingly delicious.

Summer vegetable fritatta

Con: They need more space than quails and are more conspicuous.

TIME INVESTMENT: 5-10 minutes a day.  I put them somewhere between fish and cats on the upkeep scale.

COST: $2-3 for a baby chick at your local feed store + $25 for a bag of organic feed (less smelly poop with organic feed) + $90 to build the coop = $124 start-up costs for three hens.  If you add on pine shavings, a heat lamp, straw, store-bought feeder/waterer, the cost would be something closer to $150.

Raising baby chicks is adorable, but keep in mind, they will not lay for six months.  A hen at laying age costs somewhere around $10.

I'm really selling the older hen thing, aren't I?

So…keeping chickens is not the most money-wise venture in the world.  If you value fresh organic eggs, then keeping hens may be a good idea for you.  If you could take them or leave them, you could probably leave the chickens out of the equation as well.

The paint's faded, but the string and poles have held up well

First go out and buy some string (butcher’s string works well) and some of those 4-ft long bamboo poles. You can get them from the hardware store.

25 in a package

For this project, you’ll need eleven of them. So you can make two a-frames per pack! Not bad… Take two of your bamboo stakes and a piece of string 12″-18″ long.

Make three of these.  Place them next to each other in your garden, about 1.5′ apart.  You should have used six stakes. Take the seventh stake and place it on top – use this to line up your stakes properly. Tie it on.

The top bar, going across

Now take your eighth and ninth stakes, and tie them going across, about 1.5′-2′ up from the ground.  The stake getting tied to the vertical supports goes on the inside of the frame, the stake getting tied to the diagonal supports goes on the outside of the frame.

Tie them to all three vertical supports, and all three diagonal supports.

a-like so!

Now take your final two stakes and break them in half.  You’ll only use three of the halves for this frame, but save the other one in case you want to make another frame later.  Tie them going across your horizontal supports, at each intersection.

You don't have to get as crazy with the string here, these stay in place pretty well

Once you’ve tied all three, your frame should be finished!

Finished A-Frame

Simple, effective, easy, and cheap.

COST: $4 for the package of 25 4′ bamboo poles, +$5 for a package of string (if you don’t have it already)

= $9 total, makes TWO A-Frames. $4.50/frame

TIME INVESTMENT: 30 minutes

We grow a variety of vegetables on ours – cucumbers, beans, green beans, peas…they hold up remarkably well.  One of ours began to lean a bit under the weight of all of our cucumbers, but it never fell apart and it never fell over.  We plant one seedling at each base of the stake – so it should hold six plants.

Cucumber Seedling

Happy planting! =)

We found a wonderfully detailed guide here: http://www.taylor-madeak.org/index.php, and went out to buy the supplies and ingredients.

Brewing Bucket – $15
Sake Yeast – $7
Sushi Rice – $14
Koji – $14
Miscellaneous Brewing Equipment – $15
Bottle Capper – $15
Refrigerator off Craigslist – FREE

That’s $80 to start, for approximately three gallons of sake. That’s a lot of sake, but that’s also a lot of money. And what about time investment?

Rinsing the Rice

Fermenting...

Separating the Rice from the Liquid...

Moving the Sake into Secondary Fermenters...

Moving the Sake From Secondary Fermenters into Bottles...

As you may be able to tell, it was a lot more work than we expected. Steaming the rice was time consuming, especially towards the end, when it had to be done in batches. Stirring the sake a couple times a day was no big deal. Moving it into the secondary fermenters, and later into the bottles was difficult and took 1-2 hours each time. Keeping the sake at fifty degrees was extremely difficult. We eventually ended up purchasing a brewing thermostat ($60) in order to keep our sake at a regular temperature. This cuts down on time investment, but ups the cost.

COST: $80-$140

TIME INVESTMENT: 8-10 hours

And for an impatient person like me, the vast amount of time it takes to go from rice, water, and yeast to drinkable sake was tedious. 10.5 weeks.

I’m going to go ahead and say that this is not worth the time and money if you’re aiming for something quick, easy, and low cost. It’s fine as a hobby (which my husband has decided to take upon himself…after all, we have all the supplies now), but not as a sustainable activity.

My experience brewing beer was much more pleasant, and I’ll post on that in the next few days!

I found out that you can get the old tires for free, because otherwise they have to pay to have them hauled away.  We happened to pick a truck dismantler place.

If you live in the Sacramento area, Subway Truck Parts is a great place to go

So we got some pretty big tires.  Lots of growing space!

Dutiful hubby, loading up ginormous tires

The awesome thing about growing potatoes in tires is that it’s easy to do, it saves space, and you (allegedly) get a high yield.  You’ll want three tires for each stack.  First tire goes on the ground, in a place of your choosing.  Fill the tire with dirt.

Shovel your dirt into the tires

Next step – take out your seed potatoes.  Cut the potatoes into pieces, two eyes to a piece.  We skipped this step since our seed potatoes were, ahem, very obviously clearance potatoes.  They may live, they may not.  But this way you’ll get more potato plants.  Plant them into your tire.

Clearance seed potatoes! At $0.50/bag we weren't really going to say 'no'

Next step – once your potato plants come up, a few inches high, put another tire on top and add more soil, leaving the very tops of the plants bare.  As they grow higher, repeat, up until the top of the third tire.

When the plants brown and wilt, it’s time to harvest your potatoes!  I’ll let you know how this works out for us.

COST: $3-5 for seed potatoes, check your local hardware store.  Tires are free, and I’ll be posting about how to cut down your costs for gardening soil.

TIME INVESTMENT: 30 minutes to pick up the tires, 30 minutes to plant.

In other news, we’ve transitioned from winter into spring.  Our tomato plants are going strong.

Flowering! Can't wait for fresh tomatoes

We also purchased a dwarf peach tree.  For those with little space, dwarf fruit trees can be a great investment.  $23 for this one.

Growing a lot of peaches for such a little tree

I’ll be back soon to post about what happened with our sake brewing – start to finish, and whether or not it’s a sustainability win or fail.