You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Devin’ tag.
What do you do when you’ve just had a wedding, and your garage is filled with cardboard and packing materials?
YIKES!
Why, build a solar oven, of course! I used the instructions/plans from The “Easy Lid” Cooker and “Minimum” Solar Box Cooker with one or two modifications.
Find two boxes, one slightly smaller than the other. My smaller one didn’t have flaps, hence the modifications, but ideally yours would. You’ll want at least a 1/2″ margin on all sides. Check to see if you can fit the pots you plan to use for cooking in the smaller box!
My two boxes for solar oven use!
MATERIALS:
-2 boxes, 1 slightly larger than the other, plus some extra pieces of cardboard – FREE
-a pair of scissors or a serrated knife (for cutting the cardboard) – FREE
-Elmer’s white glue, non-toxic and safe for use in a solar oven! – ?? I had it lying around, let’s assume $3
-lots of aluminum foil – $2
-turkey-sized oven bags – $2
-a wire coat hanger – FREE
-newspaper or newsprint – FREE
-black spray paint, non-toxic when dry – $3
TOTAL COST = $10
Your basic supplies
First step – cut the larger box in half. Glue the hanging flaps down. Take the side you intend as your bottom, and line it with a big piece of cardboard. This is what is going to allow the top part of your box to act as a lid.
The lining should be tall, taller than the other half of your box
Take your lid, and hold it up to the liner. Cut the liner down to the height of your lid, leaving the four corners up to form tabs.
Like so! You can see the corner I left up as a tab
Using your Elmer’s Glue, line the inside of the outer box with foil – all four walls and the floor.
Shiny! Better view of the tabs too
Now plunk your inner box in the outer box, and line the space in between with crumpled pieces of newsprint or newspaper. This is the insulation for your oven.
We overstuffed ours a little, but we were able to squish it all together later
My outer box was a little too tall for my outer box, so I cut my outer box down to match the inner box. And since my inner box didn’t have flaps to fold over, I took spare pieces of cardboard, glued them to the inside of the inner box, folded the over the insulation, and tucked the remainder in the space between the outer box and the liner. Didja get that? If not, here’s a picture =)
I scored the cardboard with sharp scissors so it would fold in a precise manner
As for the tabs, I found it easiest to tuck them under the flaps. Cutting them in half down the middle (from the top) helped me maintain the corners. I wanted the top to fit snugly. I think I missed one tab and ended up gluing it on the top. Oh well! I weighed everything down with a couple of books while I was gluing things, to get it to better stay in place.
Devin shows me exactly what she thinks of my methods...
Done!
Line the inside of the inner box with aluminum foil.
Starting to look (sort of) like an oven...
Make sure your lid still fits, in case you were over-zealous with the paper-packing. A snug fit is good – less heat will escape. Since I cut down my liner to fit my inner box, I had to cut down my lid as well. You don’t want any space between your lid and the top of your oven.
Measure the thickness of your walls. Draw a rectangle on the lid that matches the dimensions of the open part of your oven. Cut it on three sides and score the last side with your scissors/knife. This will be your reflector.
Glue one of the turkey oven bags shut (prevents moisture from accumulating inside). Glue this to the underside of your lid, over the opening. Line the reflector part of your lid with aluminum foil (just on the side facing the oven).
It should look like this
You’re almost done. Now to make your drip pan. Take a piece of cardboard that will fit inside your oven, flat on the bottom. Cover it in aluminum foil. Spray paint it black.
Fancy fancy drip pan!
Cut a piece off of your wire hanger, and use this to prop up the reflector. The ends of the wire can go into the corrugations in the cardboard.
I ended up propping mine up higher than this to get more reflection
Put the drip pan in the bottom, put the lid on, face the reflector towards the sun, and you’re ready to cook! Of course…don’t forget the pot with the food in it.
Mmmm...beef stew...
I cooked some beef stew. The oven DOES work, a fact I am very excited about! It will get to a temperature of about 300 degrees. Food inside does not require stirring and will not burn. It works something like a slow cooker, so you can pop food in it in the morning, and come home from work to a meal. Prime cooking hours are between 12 and 2 (or so I’ve read).
Best of all? Cooking in a solar oven takes no power and will not heat up the house! Make those hot summer months work FOR you.
TIME INVESTMENT: 3 hours
Just so you know, we’re expecting more quail babies later this week!
In a quick aside, I’ve installed a hummingbird feeder in our yard. Not only will they help pollinate our flowers, but they are awfully fun to watch!
The side yard is a fine and dandy place to grow vegetables. It’s already given us more tomatoes than we can eat. However, we’re aiming to cut our grocery store trips waaay down (and don’t homegrown veggies just taste better?). Since we have plenty of lawn, and live right across from a massive expanse of grass, we decided to put a couple of garden beds on our lawn.
We built ours 4′ wide and 8′ long. 22″ tall to keep the puppy from jumping up and rooting through our veggies. It’s entirely unnecessary to have yours quite so tall, unless you have a small dog that loves to dig!
PARTS (per garden bed):
6 – 8′ long 2×8′s
1 – 8′ long 4×4′s
24 – 3″ long wood screws
TOOLS:
circular saw (or get the wood cut to size at the hardware store)
power drill/screwdriver
We had the hardware store cut some of our wood to size, and we cut some of it at home with a circular saw. Three of the 2×8′s need to be cut in half. The 4×4 needs to be cut into 4 22″ long sections.
Cutting the 4x4s into 22" long sections
Put 2 of the 4×4 sections on the ground, and line up 3 of the 4′ long 2×8′s. Pre-drill two holes on each piece into the post. Make sure the drill bit is slightly thinner than the screws you are using.
If you're doing this alone, it might be best to do on a flat surface
Screw the 4′ long 2×8 pieces into the post. Line up the 22″ long 4×4 post on the other side and do the same. You should end up with a piece that looks like this. Three 4′ long 2×8′s and two 22″ long 4×4′s.
Devin in a most un-ladylike pose!
Repeat for the opposite side. Then stand those up, and start putting on the 8′ long 2×8′s. Two screws for each end of the board.
Put your back into it, kid!
A very short time later…
We had the long ends overlapping the short ends for a neater look
Now we have a raised garden bed! We’ll have to dump dirt in it, and raise up some seedlings, but you get the idea. Since we have it in our lawn, I’ll probably be sealing the outside to protect the wood from our sprinklers (though we turned off the one that was inside the bed. We have a hose from our sprinkler system coming up this side of the yard, so we’re going to put our garden beds on automatic sprinklers as well.
DON’T MAKE MY MISTAKE:
Build it where you plan to have it lay, or close by. It is heavy!
COST:
$43 for the wood + $6 for more screws than we needed = $49
TIME INVESTMENT:
If you include the hardware store trip and the cutting, about 3 hours.
On the Friday after we got back from our honeymoon, someone *cough cough* hubby *cough cough* left the door unlocked on the quail pen. The quails got out, and Devin the puppy played with them until they were dead. Four quails gone. Disaster!
The next day, I saw Devin pawing at the deck and whining. I had the feeling there was something under there. I took a look, and sure enough, there was a quail stuck under the deck boards. She must have popped over our sprinkler hideaway, gotten down into the hole, and slipped under one of the support boards to get completely and utterly stuck. You may not have understood that, but I barely do either!
How did she GET under here??
After some mental anguish, we decided we HAD to get her out. A quail slowly dying under our deck? No thank you!
Hubby got the drill, and we started taking out one of the boards.
Out comes the board...
She was a thirsty thing, so we were able to tempt her out with some dripping water. Dripping water is very attractive to quails. If you’re trying to get them used to using a rabbit/guinea pig waterer, just squeeze it until it drips. It gets their attention right away! And shiny things. They will peck at shiny things.
Closer...closer...wait for it...!
Success!
For a trapped quail, she didn't seem too happy to be rescued.
So…this is one of the reasons we’re hatching some more (due date of 8/20). We’re a little short on quails these days, thanks to the puppy. BAD PUPPY.
We started building our raised garden beds this evening, until the drill ran out of juice. I wanted to work on the A-frame to show you, but it looks like the raised garden beds will come first! I bought a ton of seeds at Home Depot for our winter garden, so I’ll show you what we’ll be planting there.
DON’T MAKE MY MISTAKE: For goodness’ sake, make sure to shut your doors after you collect quail eggs! Yes, quail can fly, but they are not very good at it. Once they haplessly wander out of their cage, they’ll be only a hop skip and a jump away from completely helpless. Add a cat or dog into the mix, and you’re short some quails and up some fairly useless carcasses (unless you feed your pets a raw diet. Then they’ll still be handy).
We moved into our house in July. Most of the yard was already landscaped, and one of the side yards had been turned into a dog run.
The side yard gets a good amount of sun, and we have a little dog – thus no use for a dog run…so we decided that this area would be our garden. We thought, “Oh, we’ll just move this bark here.” In reality, it turned out to be a lot tougher than that.
Note the gate - perfect for keeping puppies out of gardens!
We moved the bark, and there was a black tarp underneath. So we moved the tarp, and there was sand underneath. FINALLY we moved the sand, but there was hard-as-rock clay beneath that.
Over two weekends we bagged up all the bark and put the sand into bins. We didn’t throw it away – we posted it for free on craigslist and a few different people picked it up.
We wet down the clay and used a shovel to loosen it up. We bought a lot of garden soil (we bought most on clearance from Target – this was at the end of summer – for $2/bag). We mixed this with the clay and made raised beds.
Bins, bags, and a hose, oh my!
Those were our winter crop. Of everything we grew, the chinese cabbage and the broccoli proved the most prolific. The taste difference between the store-bought chinese cabbage was pretty large. Home-grown was much more flavorful and very, very tender. Small differential between home-grown and store-bought broccoli.
Here’s what it looks like now.
Two neat little rows...we kept some of the sand.
The black hose going around we just installed yesterday. We’re planning on adding an automatic watering system back here to reduce the daily time investment. We’ve pulled up most of the winter veggies and planted some seedlings out here. The sugar snap peas seem to have come into their own just now.
Pretty flowers and edible = a winner
The strawberry patch is starting to grow some little strawberries now that the weather is warmer.
Can't wait to eat these!
LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE:
If you’ve got clay for soil, do yourself a favor and borrow a rototiller from someone. Breaking up the clay was back-breaking work. That’s what took us the most time. Do raised beds so you can have better control over the content of the soil. Keep in mind how deep the roots will go. Cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower all have shallow roots. Plants such as tomatoes and carrots have roots that go deeper.
INITIAL TIME INVESTMENT: 2 weekends’ worth of labor, less if you don’t have to move bark and tarp and sand.
DAILY TIME INVESTMENT: 5-10 minutes
Tomorrow – an entry on making your own soymilk.
Hello, my name is Andrea Stewart, I’m 26 years old, am engaged to be married on July 11, and have an 11-year-old stepson-to-be. We moved into our suburban home last July. Both of us are interested in preserving the environment (and our bank accounts!). We have a puppy named Devin, a cat named Zorro, and four fancy goldfish named Mojo-a-Jo-Jo, Cujo, Godzilla, and Fry.
Since my fiance and I work full-time, and our location is prohibitive, we’ll be looking at simplistic ways to increase our self-sufficiency.
Our Location
Ah, home sweet home. We live approximately 5.5 miles from downtown Sacramento. When the weather is nice, we like to bicycle in to work. We are by no means in the middle of the country.
Home, Sweet Home
The view from our front yard - there's the Port of Sacramento
Our Backyard Deck
Our Backyard, we'll get to that terracotta-colored thing later...
As you can see, another constraint we’re working with is our neighbors. Met ‘em on both sides, HOWEVER, they can see straight into our yard. So anything we do has to be neat, contained, legal, and quiet. Preferably, it will be visually attractive. No goats, chickens, miniature cattle…anything like that. We plan to live here for a very long time, and would prefer not to be chased out of the neighborhood with torches and pitchforks.
I’ll be documenting both our successes (so you can duplicate them!) and our failures (so you can avoid them =( ).
So here’s to saving our planet and our wallets one household at a time!
…and in case none of that sounded good to you, here’s a gratuitous puppy picture begging you to stick around.
I'm a puppy
