Pellet Stove Dehydration Unit #2

Each year a small amount of our food stuff is dehydrated in order to be preserved for the ensuing cold months. Trays of raspberries, strawberries, and other berries can often be found setting atop the barn roof during the hot summer days slowly turning into fruit leather. As the suns rays beam down upon the roof it creates waves of heat that help to wick away the moisture within the mushed fruits, quickly drying them to a storable consistency. Unfortunately, other than berries, most of what we would like to dry is not ready to be harvested until early fall (September and October) at which time the sun no longer shines with the intensity needed to get away with simply plopping a tray down on the barn roof and walking away until it is fully dehydrated.

In previous years we have relied upon an electric dehydrator to dry late season tomatoes, apples, pears, plums, tomatillos, elderberries and other fall crops. When our electric dehydrator broke in 2010 we re-purposed the trays and using a cardboard box as a makeshift air tunnel proceeded to use the hot air blowing out of our pellet stove to finish the task. It worked so good that I built a more permanent device to be used this past fall.

Our pellet stove dehydration unit #2 works on the same principle as the cardboard model. Hot air flows into the wooden box and is routed up through re-purposed dehydrator trays slowly but very effectively drying the foods within. During the months of October, November, and again in the early spring we often prefer to use our pellet stove to heat the house leaving the wood stove for the colder winter months, so it was only logical for us to make better use of the stoves heat by rigging up a way to dry our foods as well.

It's hard to take a decent photo inside our house so bear with me as these pictures are a bit hard to look at. This picture shows the dehydrator butted up against our pellet stove while inside tomatoes are drying. The whole unit sits atop an old barbecue stand that helps bring it to the correct height an makes it easier to roll around.

Here you can see the hole was cut just smaller than the round trays and a line was drawn so I could easily center them properly.

Inside I attached a piece of sheet metal to help direct the airflow up into the trays rather than the corners of the box.

I put bumpers on the outside so the unit would not come into direct contact with the hot pellet stove and also added a drip tray to catch any liquids that might leak out as is prone to happen when drying tomatoes.

Most of our dried goods are stored in glass jars. While tomatoes tend to lose their flavor after six months or so most fruits, corn, hot peppers, and beans will keep for years this way. Have you ever dried a tomatillo? It brings out a surprisingly sweet/tart flavor that we find most appealing, especially as an addition to our salads.


OK then, back to dreaming about spring...

Garden In Transition

The last of the root veggies have been put away and are snug as a bug in a rug.

Carrots are layered in coolers,

parsnips in totes

and endive in pots.

The summer garden has been put to rest, all covered in frosted leaves, weeds, and debris...but the winter gardening season has just begun.

Some Little Sweet Potatoes

A few days ago we harvested a modest amount of long, skinny, red and white sweet potatoes, they were absolutely beautiful...beauty being in the eye of the beholder of course.:) I can see that my endeavor to produce sizable sweets is going to be an ongoing multi-year challenge.

The potatoes were cultivated under a covered hoop for much of the summer but I believe this season's cold nighttime temperatures greatly limited tuber growth. Not a total failure though as a small 3' x 5' experimental plot still yielded a good 15 pounds of these tantalizing treasures that taste pretty darn amazing when roasted with a little olive oil, rosemary, salt and pepper.

Potting Up Celery & Little Willie

Still frost free and our celery is potted up. In a another week or so it will be transferred to the root cellar for the winter, providing us with tasty stalks and leaves throughout the snowy months. Each pot contains 3-4 plants, 1/3 of whose foliage, preferably the less than desirable ones, are removed to compensate for root disturbance during the potting procedure. Only healthy plants that show no sign of bolting (sending up a round central stalk) to seed are chosen for winter storage. Most plants will not only survive the winter in our root cellar where they will continue producing, albeit somewhat more pale in comparison to the ones produced under sunlight, but can be planted back out into the garden in early spring for more fresh greens and eventually seed from chosen plants.

A new variety that we grew this year called Crisp & Tender, thanks to the seedy generosity of the kind soul at Kabun-Malay Kadazan girls blog, was a big hit with us. Unfortunately, we did not place it in the most ideal location as it was the last batch of celery planted this past spring and wound up in a slightly drier and shady location at the end of the row under a fir tree. Even so, the plants provided us with a plethora of slender and surprisingly dark green flavorful stalks...for sure we will be growing this variety again next season. We also grew Ventura, Giant Red, Utah, and a leaf celery called Parcel.

Sweet & Tender celery, all the way from Australia, thrived in our cool shady garden.

Also, meet Willie! This newest member of our family was found in the bushes almost two months ago. Hungry and emaciated the poor little guy took to us without complaint...he was so small. Little Willie has grown a lot, he likes to take dust baths with the chickens, greatly annoy the other cats, play in the garden, eat, eat some more, and sit on my lap while I am on the computer.

Harvesting Beets & Greens

Beets were harvested this week and we were quite pleased with the results, about 70% of them filled out nicely, the rest were either damaged by mice or too small to bother with. Pictured in the cooler are some of the better looking greens that were set aside to be blanched and frozen. Interestingly, your average beet is supposed to take 55-80 days from the time it germinates to maturity, mine normally take between 90 and 120 days. The above beets were planted in mid-May and just recently reached a harvestable size.

The mice damage was my own fault, I should have been paying better attention and either hilled dirt around the roots in early September or set out mouse traps as this is often an issue we face in the fall. Near as I can tell the mice will not dig for roots and only snack on the parts remaining above the soil which makes beets, and sometimes carrots, an irresistible target for them. Gonna have to have a little chat with those cats about earning their keep...one of them even lives in our greenhouse during the summer and has apparently not been doing as good a job at rodent control as I had thought.

After harvesting, the tops are trimmed leaving about an inch of stem remaining, keeping some of the stem intact helps to keep them from spoiling. They are then placed into totes and coolers, layered in ever so slightly damp sandy soil, and stored in our root cellar. Beets are one of our longest storing root crops, some remaining in excellent eating condition for well over a year. This year's crop included Detroit Dark Red, Crosby's Egyptian, Lutz, Cylindria, Crapaudine, Boltardy, a few golden beets whose name slips me, and a new to us variety called Red Cloud (hybrid) that performed extremely well this year...wish I would have grown a few more of those.

The Harvest Season Is Upon Us

All in all the garden has been good to us this year, recent harvests have yielded fairly decent amounts of food for winter storage. My little helper and I were blessed with over 400 lbs of potatoes from five rows totalling 160' in length, this is about a hundred pounds less than I had hoped for but more than enough to see us through the cold months...I just won't be sharing any with the chickens as had originally been planned. Next year we will plant more potatoes.

We track the weight of our tomatoes, potatoes, and onions to help us evaluate production, that coupled with the fact that since these crops are gathered in five gallon buckets it is just too easy not to.

Numerous different potato varieties were planted this season and all but one, Butterfinger , did well. Most of our spuds were small to medium in size...not a lot of big ones this time around. Pictured below are Russian Banana and Red Thumb. Russian Banana normally produces more potatoes per plant than any other variety we grow.

This year's potatoes were planted fairly intensively and yielded around 6-8 tubers per plant. They were planted 12" deep and I did not "hill them up" at all this summer. Because we have chosen to keep our aisle ways so very narrow, practically disappearing by mid-summer, it is difficult for me to hill up potatoes so I have found that deep planting makes up for this in our garden.

In 2012 I hope to experiment with more of a dryland farming technique with some of our potato crop that involves depending upon using only natural occurring rain water, wide spacing, and dirt/dust mulch to help with water retention. This will be done in an area separate from our main garden, we have a 3 acre field that is not cost effective to irrigate and need to start putting it to good use with something besides knapweed. For quite some time now one of my concerns has been that we are far too dependent upon irrigation and I would like to learn more about growing crops with less water and potatoes would seem to be a great dryland crop to experiment with. A fellow blogger , in a somewhat similar climate, has had great success with this type of farming and it would seem to be a much more sustainable manner in which to grow crops allowing us to shed some of our dependence on water pumped to us via electric power.

Our spring planted garlic experiment turned out all right, the cloves are a little on the small side but so is/was most everything else this year. We planted our garlic in the early spring because in previous winters too much snow cover has allowed voles unhindered access to a smorgasbord of fall planted bulbs and too little snow, coupled with lots of rain, has sometimes led to rotten garlic. I think I'll give the spring planting a try again next season and then decide which period of planting works best for us.

2011 was our best harvest ever with a couple hundred pounds of nice sized onions. We grew Stuttgarter, Yellow of Parma, Varsity, Jaune Paille Des Vertus, Utah, and a few Candy onions. I tried growing Walla Walla Sweets from starts again but they all shriveled up and died... probably due to our cold rainy spring weather. This will be the last time I will bother with that particular variety as they have rarely turned out for me.

The tomatoes did better than I had originally expected and should allow for a good amount of canned sauce which we will continue working on as they slowly finish ripening on our porch. Our 2011 tomato crop weighed in at close to 300 lbs, which is almost half of what we produced last year.

Our goal is to get an average yield of 5-10 lbs per plant, some will provide many more fruits some less. We grow a variety called De Tiganesti that provided nearly 20 lbs per plant whereas our Black Krim and Coastal Pride varieties only shared 4-5 tomatoes per plant with us...but their flavor more than made up for the lack of productivity.

We were very pleased with our peppers, especially considering the long cold spring we experienced, and have been freezing and eating them fresh since mid July. I picked the last few of them yesterday and will store them in the below bins until we use them up, if the weather remains cool they should keep just fine for a month or so.

The Grandson was more than happy to help pick apples, some of our trees are finally starting to produce decent amounts of fruit. The tree the boy is picking from is a Cortland. We are using these for storage and picked many pounds of mixed wild apples that were canned up as sauce.

These Spitzenberg apples have become one of my favorites for fresh eating. We were delighted to get around 40 lbs off this 6-7 year old tree.

Next up we will be harvesting beets, carrots, parsnips, cabbage, endive, celery, and so on.

Sweet & Spicy

Sweet:

Our second crop of strawberries is coming on, not too many yet but they are of nice size and flavor. The ones above ended up in a smoothie...it was good.

Spicy:

I have been busy making our version of kimchi, the latest batch consisted of cucumbers, green beans, carrots, various cabbage, Tuscan kale, kohlrabi, Italian chicory, red amaranth leaves, onions, garlic, chives, green onions, green & black peppers (would have liked to have had some red peppers for color), and was flavored with spicy red pepper powder, paprika powder, plus a few tablespoons of grated ginger.

For every five pounds of processed veggies I added a very light 3 tablespoons of sea salt. The cabbage is mixed with the salt and pounded to release juices. I then included the rest of the veggies and spices, mixed well and packed into a crock, keeping the ingredients weighted down for approximately a week. One cup of water was also used in order to have enough brine to cover everything. Seven days later I transferred the fermented deliciousness into glass jars...15 lbs of veggies made 1 gallon plus a quart.

This can either be kept in a cool root cellar or one's refrigerator. Since I had to make it early this year in order to incorporate fresh green beans and cucumbers into the mix it is being stored in the refrigerator as the root cellar is not quite cold enough yet...last year our kimchi and sauerkraut stored well in the root cellar from October through May at which time I put the remaining jars in our refrigerator. It will easily keep over a year this way, we are still working to finish off last year's kimchi and it tastes just fine.

In looking at these jars I am reminded that a piece of wax paper should be added in order to keep the lids from corroding or rusting...oops.:) Also, after the first week or so in storage we always have to add a little more brine to keep everything covered.

Does anyone else enjoy the bold flavors of kimchi?

Everbearing Strawberries - The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Please excuse me while I brag a bit...

We are in strawberry heaven, the tomatoes might be found wanting this year but the strawberries are making up the difference...not that one can really compare the two. We grow an extremely hardy everbearing strawberry plant that provides us with multiple crops of sweet berries and are thrilled with it's ability to set fruit in colder temperatures while at the same time producing numerous runners. Last year we grew one all by itself just to see how many new plants could be produced and by the end of the season counted over 60 babies. Babies begat babies that had begat baby plants...talk about vigorous reproduction. I took a picture of the whole sordid affair but of course I can't find it.

The first berries, while extremely numerous, are not very large but subsequent crops can be quite big, maybe 2-3 times the size of the originals. I will try to post pictures of them later this summer, but only if they really do look 3 times bigger....my wife says I tend to exaggerate a bit - perhaps I'll let you be the judge.:)

Unfortunately, the berries my wife is holding in the above picture were picked after a good rain last Tuesday night, we try to pick them before it rains if at all possible as wet weather tends to bloat the berries and take away some of that sweetness we so desire. Regardless, they still taste plenty fine going into smoothies and other tasty treats...it's raining again this Tuesday but we picked last night and the berries were much better.

These strawberry plants have been growing on our property for many, many years, originally given to us by my Mom who grew them before that...and as such have had adequate time to adapt quite well to our conditions, making them very special to my wife and I. We do love our Fort Laramie everbearing strawberry plants.

On Feeding Oneself...

I watched these videos linked from the Homestead Revival blog this morning and thought I would share them here as well. While I do not consider myself to be a hard core doomsdayer (well, maybe just a little:) I surely can see some dark clouds gathering on the horizon and found all of the information put forth by Marjory Wildcraft in this presentation on food storage, water supply, and gardening to be very thought provoking to say the least.





For more information on the subject of food preparedness, my friend Lynn has written numerous excellent posts on her blog about food storage of late that include many useful links.

"Let us be in a position so we are able to not only feed ourselves through home production and storage, but others as well" - Ezra Taft Benson, former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture

A Disposition To Preserve

"Alexandra often said that if her mother were cast upon a desert island, she would thank God for her deliverance, make a garden, and find something to preserve. Preserving was almost a mania with Mrs. Bergson. Stout as she was, she roamed the scrubby banks of Norway Creek looking for fox grapes and goose plums, like a wild creature in search of prey. She made a yellow jam of the insipid ground cherries that grew on the prairie, flavoring it with lemon peel; and she made a sticky dark conserve of garden tomatoes. She had experimented even with the rank buffalo-pea, and she could not see a fine bronze cluster of them without shaking her head and murmuring, 'What a pity!' When there was nothing to preserve, she began to pickle."

You can read this fine story by Willa Cather in it's entirety online - 'O Pioneers!'

Much like Mrs. Bergson we once again foraged, grew, and preserved with a devoted enthusiasm. I would suppose that the success of our garden could, in part, be based upon how much food was put by in the root cellar, canned, or saved through other means of preservation. If we were to judge our gardening endeavours in this manner it would once again be deemed another prosperous season. The cellar contains an embarrassing amount of beets, carrots, potatoes, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, celery, Belgian endive, root parsley, onions, kohlrabi, cabbage, peppers, and apples. Our warm dry living room is home to members of the cucurbit (squash) clan and yet another cool dry back room contains saved seeds for next year's garden, baskets of garlic, and even a few shallots.

This room is full of carrots, beets, and potatoes (not shown).

We like to keep our onions in baskets as it helps with airflow.

Atop our kitchen refrigerator one can find an assortment of glass gallon jars filled with various dry beans, corn, and fruit leather. The two freezers on our porch are both stuffed beyond capacity with foraged service berries, elderberries, Oregon grapes, huckleberries, cranberries, dried morel mushrooms, and cubes of hawthorn berry syrup. And from our garden - frozen strawberries, grapes, raspberries, black raspberries, blackberries, currants, gooseberries, josta berries, zucchini, broccoli, rhubarb sauce, dried apples, dried pears, dried apricots, more peppers, beet greens, kale greens, peas, stewed and dried plums, dried tomatoes, and herbs like cilantro and basil.

The back pantry contains↓


1 large box full of grown and foraged tea herbs

Tomato sauce - 104 quarts (13 left from last year)

Thick spaghetti/pizza sauce - 52 pints

Various salsa derived from tomatoes, tomatillos, and combinations of both - 82 pints (6 left from last year)

Ketchup - 7 half pints & 10 pints (4 from last year)

Sauerkraut - 5 water bath canned, 9 unprocessed quarts in basement & 6 in the refrigerator

Nasturtium Capers (also called poor man's capers) - 2 half pints

Various whole and sliced pickles - 23 pints & 15 quarts

Green beans (pickled) -6 pints

Apple sauce - 11 quarts & 22 pints

Pear sauce - 6 quarts

Huckleberry Jam - 6 half pints left from last year

Mincemeat - 11 pints & 1 quart

Ginger pear sauce - (we love this on baked squash) 22 half pints & 5 pints

In preparation for next year's gardening adventures we ordered re-usable Tattler canning lids and rings and in doing so will, with any luck, not have to concern ourselves with the availability of store bought lids and rings going forward. Our worries being that the lost art of food preservation might quickly gain relevance due to future economic or other woes that may transpire.

"...steam was generated beyond the power of the canister to endure. As a natural consequence, the canister burst, the dead turkey sprang from his coffin of tinplate and killed the cook forthwith." - News report of an early canning industry accident (1852)

Fortunately, no such bad luck has befallen us and of all the canned food processed this year only two empty jars were lost when the bottoms busted out because I failed to properly heat them before dunking into hot water to be scalded. All in all we are quite content with this year's harvest and are especially glad to be finished with the task of canning all our "green" tomatoes. Out of the estimated 500-600 lbs we harvested this year a remarkable majority of them ripened up nicely indoors. We just finished our last batch the day before Thanksgiving...Ay yi yi !

There will be no more warm jars for Rodger, the fat black cheshire cat, to cuddle up next to.

Our Ever Evolving Sunroots (Jerusalem Artichokes)

We have been growing Jerusalem artichokes, I prefer to call them sunroots, for more than a few years now and I am always amazed at how they change in size and appearance from year to year depending upon where they have been planted. This year's sunroots grew into a wide variety of shapes and sizes, some were very smooth and oblong while others much more spherical, and then there are the funky monstrosities pictured above. I grew a few of my extras in a brand new location that had Joe Pye Weed growing in it the previous couple years and ended up with huge multi-knobbed tubers. There were about 8-12 tubers per plant compared to the anywhere from 15-50 smaller ones we are normally blessed with. Here is how the majority of them looked the previous fall. Personally I prefer the smaller ones but they do seem to have a mind of their own.

Anyway, I thought perhaps the Joe Pye Weed might have some nitrogen or other soil building qualities that I was unaware of but have been unable to find any evidence to support that theory other than my big rugged tubers. A fellow gardener just did a post on these tubers as well, you can read her thoughts and see how her variety looks at Emma's coopette.com blog.

Yes, this is only one sun root...how on earth am I supposed to eat that? :)
This is a new variety that we are growing this year, the size of these is more to my liking.

A Lazy Fall Harvest

Nothing too exciting to report from our Northern Idaho garden as the lackadaisical tranquility of autumn slowly takes hold. Surprisingly warm, above freezing, rainy weather has allowed us an extended grace period in which to finish harvesting the few remaining root vegetables. Purple Top turnips planted in late August have turned into nice little egg-shaped orbs that we have stored away for winter fare. My flock of red headed step children seen in the background were beside themselves waiting in eager anticipation for the nutritious tops to be shared.

The rutabagas have also been packed into totes. We only grew a few this year as they always end up wormy but this season we planted them a bit later, sometime in early July I think, and ended up with a smaller sized but mostly blemish free crop. We planted both the turnips and the rutabagas late in order to avoid issues with root maggots that so often haunt our brassicas during the early spring months.

We also potted up about 15 containers of celery, 3-4 plants per pot, to be used for soups, salads, and stir fry during the cold months. They keep surprisingly well in the root cellar as long as they are not allowed to dry out...you would be amazed at what good use we make of celery around here.


We saw this wonderful video, posted as a reminder to myself, on how to make kimchi this morning. I liked the way she prepared it and am looking forward to trying out this method...I love how she dices her carrots. Unfortunately, with a couple gallons already made it will be sometime before we get around to this. I would like to use turnips in place of radishes and I will probably pass on the squid as we don't have any in our lake...as far as I know.:)

Some Cabbage

“Having a good wife and rich cabbage soup, seek not other things” - Russian Proverb

June 22 cabbage

Same cabbage on October 23

We grew a nice variety of cabbage this season. Red cabbage like Ruby Ball, Red Acre, Tete Noire, Mammoth Red Rock (new to us) for storage, Derby Day and Danish Ballhead for sauerkraut, and savoy type cabbage for kimchi. I never have had any luck growing traditional napa cabbage, if they don't bolt to seed the slugs make a mess of them so we always use savoy for our fermented kimchi instead. This year we grew a cold hardy savoy variety called Melissa and a smaller headed one called Frigga and have been extremely happy with the results.

After much trial and lots of error over the years we have finally found a long term storage method that keeps us in fresh (red) cabbage long into the winter months. Storing cabbage has been one of the weak spots in our root cellar storage system. Every method I have tried has eventually resulted in rotten cabbage. Last year we did something different. I thought that if I could keep the cabbage alive perhaps it would stay fresh longer, so after removing the loose outer leaves we gently pulled the plants up by their roots being careful not to shake too much of the soil off and simply replanted the rooted end into a plastic bag that had a little damp dirt in the bottom and tied it tightly around the cabbage stem. Our cabbage remained in good condition throughout the winter. As you can see in the below picture I will be storing them the same way once again.