Oh, and there’s one other cost. You have to clean out the ashes occasionally. For me, it’s less than once a month during the burning season, and I usually remove enough to fill the kindling bucket (about 2 gallons). That is, I’d guess about 5 pounds of ash for every, say, 1200 pounds of wood I burn. (This is a completely scientific ballpark guess.) This winter I found that wood ash functions beautifully as a snowmelt. It sticks readily to ice or compacted snow and won’t bounce all over the place like the snowmelt stuff you get from the hardware store. Ash is dark in color, so it attracts the sunlight and melts ice; and it’s also (what’s the buzzword?) “organic.” No artificial colors or flavors. When the ice is gone you don’t have to worry about some mysterious chemical residue like you get with the stuff from the hardware store. It goes into the ground and maybe eventually ends up in another tree. Pretty cool, huh?

Yesterday after church (and various home teaching visits) I came home and stretched out in my cushy chair. The fire was burning merrily just a few feet away. I leaned way back, put my feet up, and took a snooze while the wind blew outside. That’s the cost of wood heat.

Beats vacuuming out a furnace filter.

I know y’all live in the city and can’t do much about your heating bill. I’m guessing your landlord would frown on your building a campfire in the living room, and what would you do with the smoke? (I know; I used to be a landlord.) But you can vicariously enjoy our heat. And you can do one better: If you really want to, start planning for your own snug aerie in the woods. You don’t have to have all the answers right now; you can just grab a pencil and start planning. It’s a great time to buy land.

Our three oldest doing what they thought was Mom's job. Many hands make light work.

Jess and I are super-hyper-overachievers, and with the first half-dozen of our children we thought we could handle it all while our children sat around reading The Lightning Thief (where does he keep the lightning once he’s stolen it, by the bye?) or Harry Potter for the 17th time.

But with seven children, we can’t do that any more. And we won’t! Bwa ha ha ha haaaa!

Emma’s assignment this afternoon is to fix the legs of the stool in my studio. Becca’s assignment is to key in the names of selected art galleries whom I’ll pester with my art. Katie helped me with the Jeep’s tires this morning, so she’s off the hook except for her regular chores. Abby’s assignment is to find another piano piece to play at our family piano recital in May. Go go go!

Actually the kids are really fantastic about helping. They have their chores to complete every day, and they do about as well as I did when I was their age—and I was a pretty conscientious kid.

But there’s enough work around here that it’s time to step up a little bit. They want to; Emma asked to learn how to start a fire, and she’s been doing it every weekday morning for the last two weeks. (She does pretty well, too). Becca and Katie are fantastic helpers with the younger kids. One evening last week Jess and I were sitting at the table talking after dinner while the kids were running around breaking stuff. Jess and I like to talk, and we don’t get much chance to do it. So I said,

“Emma, Becca, Katie, come.”

They came. They’re good at coming when called, mostly.

“Please load and start the dishwasher and wash all the dishes. You may finish when the kitchen’s clean.”

And they did! And it looked like they had a pretty good time. And Jess and I enjoyed the chance to talk for a little while.

So I think I do this again. Soon. Regularly.

What do you think? How do you help your kids pitch in around the house?

Screaming blue drums with openings designed by space aliens!

Out at our place I find that we have to jury-rig things a lot. That is, figure out a way to make stuff work. (Or is it jerry-rig? Or rerry-jig? Depends who you ask, I guess.) Making do makes for a lot of ugly stuff, but maybe that’s the reason homesteaders build their hodge-podge empires way out in the country, so that nobody can look down their noses at you as they cruise by in their expensive Snooty Cars. As for us, we can’t afford most of the stuff we do, so we make do.

Case in point: These lovely electric blue 55-gallon drums. One of them used to hold jalapeno peppers; the other, olive oil. What are we doing with them? Why, whacking their tops off and filling them full of chicken feed, of course!

Chicken feed comes in mouse-friendly woven sacks that weigh as much as a Volkswagen and don’t keep anything out as well as they keep the seed in. That includes not only mice but moisture, mold, and anything else calculated to waste your chicken-feed money. You need something else to keep the feed in, even if it’s ugly.

Viola. (=Joke. It’s a literary friend’s corruption of the French. Voila.)

A local outfit uses these drums for food ingredients, then sells them to local yokels for $5 each. Hey, a bargain! But the openings are two inches wide on  top,  and I have absolutely no idea how to wrench them open. Never seen caps like these; they look like they were designed by space aliens. How to get the drums open? Hmm, how ‘bout power tools?

I sawed the top four inches or so off of both drums last Saturday and left them out in the vague hope that they’d get washed out by the rain. No dice. The vinagery smell has diminished, but rain doesn’t wash out congealed olive oil. My solution? Well, maybe I’ll dump the oil out on the slash pile in the hopes that will help the wet wood ignite. (I’ve been meaining to burn that slash pile for several weeks. I’ll report on my success in this endeavor next week, if I survive.) Then wash out with soap, if the poultry’s water line  ever thaws out. Then reattach the lids with a cheap door hinge, and fill with chicken feed. Note to self: dry barrels out before filling with feed. Oh, and get the barrels into a dry location before filling. That would be splendid: trying to wrestle a screaming blue headless drum weighing 240 lbs. into the shoop. Yippee. I think I’ll try lighting a bonfire with congealed oil first.

One pint o'homemade sour cream. Would you like fries with that?

I promised you Homemade Week last week, and I made good on that promise by staying home on Friday. So no post. Actually I wasn’t home much that day, having accepted an invitation to spend my day off first at the local high school career day, talking up my career (such as it is), and later at the elementary school, losing a battle with the 4th grade class as to how to draw their self portraits. I had lost my voice. It is useless to go to war with 4th graders when one has laryngitis.

So it’s a new week, and I have to tell you about homemade sour cream. Jess made some last week and put it on potatoes she made, and wow! I was impressed. It was not as thick as the store-bought stuff, but I figure just about everything we make, grow, or raise at home will be different somehow from the store-bought variety.

Here’s the ree-sype. Or, I should say, the dee-rexions.

Get one pint of the thickest possible cream off your gallon of raw milk. Better yet, get one pint of cream off of two gallons of milk, to ensure that you don’t have any wimpy cream (or, horrors, actual milk) in your future sour cream.

Place the pint jar o’cream in a bowl of hot water to warm it up. When the jar is warm to the touch, add 3-4 tablespoons of buttermilk (“the fresher the better,” we’re told), depending on the desired consistency. Mix buttermilk with cream, cover, and let it sit out on the kitchen counter overnight. In the morning, you’ll have sour cream.

Once it’s sour cream’s sour, you’ll have to put it in the fridge. Otherwise you’ll have a Bad Thing.

The first time we did this, we had sour cream. And behold, it was yummy. The second, third, or tenth time, we do it, you never know. I’ve learned to make better bread by defying my own recipe, and Jessica produced yogurt the other day that had the consistency of actual yogurt (instead of yogurt-flavored liquid), simply by breaking the rules that came with the yogurt-maker. That’s how these things go. Practice makes perfect. If our recipes ever kill me, I’ll let you know.

Grate up the soap with a cheese grater, then throw it in the pot of boilin' water

Well a few months back I mentioned my homemade laundry detergent and bragged about what a great job it did getting our clothes clean. There was only one problem: it was lumpy. This must be because I used half a bar of Fels Naphtha soap ( which I completely forgot to use this time). I made some more laundry soap on Saturday, and this time it’s smooth as silk. This is because I used a whole bar of Dove soap, which Jessica doesn’t like becuase it makes her feel greasy. Maybe because it’s one-quarter moisturizing cream? Hopefully it doesn’t make our clothes feel like that, but it’s SOAP for heaven’s sake. Soap is supposed to remove grease. How they ever make soap out of one quarter moisturizing cream I’ll never know. Of course I also add borax to the mix, and if Dove soap is sweet and fluffy moisturizing cream, borax is the sandblaster of the detergent world. (At least I hope it is.) Dove vs. sandblaster? Borax wins. I’ll let you know if I feel greasy.

Here’s the REE-sype (adapted from The Simple Dollar, thank you!)

1 pot boiling water

1 bar o’soap (as discussed above. Also, Jess and I save all those thin little soap slivers from when the bar of soap gets too small to use in the shower. They dry up and we keep them in a box until soap making time. Better’n wasting them.)

1 cup borax

1 cup baking soda

Grate the soap on a potato grater. (The grater gets all soapy, but you can just throw it in the dishwasher when you’re done.) Sprinkle the soap particles into the boiling water and stir them up into mush. Use a metal spoon—easier to clean. When it’s all stirred in, turn off the heat and go fill up a 4-gallon bucket with hot water in the tub. Throw in the borax and baking soda while it’s filling.

Leave enough space at the top for your pot o’soap, dump that in, and cover it up. Trent says to let it sit for 24 hours, but who has time for that? I used mine on a batch of laundry the same afternoon. Nobody’s mentioned greasiness yet.

This makes enough laundry soap for 64 loads of laundry if you use a cup per batch, but at our house we’re cheapskates who also have a front-loading washer so we don’t need much soap to begin with. Maybe 1/3 cup, maybe 1/4. The former will stretch the bucket of soap to 192 loads, the latter to 256 (1 gallon = 16 cups). Granted, with 9 people living in a house surrounded by animals and dirt, we probably do more laundry than some people, but still. Cheap covers a multitude of sins.

And thanks for your input on the frequency of posts. As you’ve noticed, I’m moving to three posts weekly for now. Thanks for your comments and support.

Ingrediments for windshield washer fluid

Actually I can’t make weeks at home, so I can’t truthfully advertise homemade weeks. If I could, I would have made about a thousand of them already and quit my job. In the absence of that, however, I’ll document all the homemamde stuff I made this weekend. I’ll also try to document how those homemade things have panned out.

Today: Homemade windshield-washer fluid. (Really.)

Every day for the past two weeks when I’ve started up the Jeep, it dings at me and flashes the cryptic sign “LOWASH.” No pending engine failure here; I faced a more catastrophic disaster: LOW WINDSHIELD WASHER FLUID!! Being penniless and besides lacking the time to slog over to my local Schuck’s (unfriendly salespeople) or Wal-Mart (twenty minutes to park, thirty minutes to find product, seventeen hours to check out), last Saturday I thought, “Huh. Wonder if I could make my own.”

So I did.

Here’s the recipe*:
2 cups white vinegar
1/2 cup rubbing alcohol
3 quarts warmish water

I used this much liquid because I was very low on LOWASH fluid. It’s springtime around here (sorry, you east-coasters who are still buried in snow), and that means our local dirt road is a swamp with potholes. It makes for filthy vehicles, dirty glass, and consequently lots of used LOWASH fluid. If you live in the Clutches of Suburbia, you might not need to make so much. Reduce ingredients proportionately, and you may want to add blue food coloring so nobody drinks it. Or to make it look store bought. I assume no responsibility if your vehicle detonates halfway down the driveway. (Or if anything else goes wrong. Just so we’re clear.)

How does it work?

Perfectly. It cuts the mud, grime and smear from the glass, and so far it does not streak. I am one happy (and smug) customer. The alcohol lowers the freezing temperature of the water, and this morning I used it to clear the frost from the windshield. Wonder why I never tried that before.

We’ll see how it works in the summertime, when the bugs are out. Since spring is sprung already, summer is right around the corner, bugs included. If it doesn’t work, I’ll probably tinker with the recipe before I try to buy more at Schuck’s.

*This word is pronounced “REE-sype” in our house, since it’s actually spelled that way. Now you know.

But enough about buckwheat already! This post was supposed to be about our butter. (Which is quite tasty, if somewhat chunkier than the storebought “bread spread”, which we have taken to calling PHVO at our house [for Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, which is what it is.]). (Can anyone suggest how I can avoid using parenthetical statements all the time? [I’m so distractable that I’m always inserting parentheses (which frequently have nothing to do with the subject [which in this case has become so lost that my (parenthetical observations have completely overpowered the post [Parentheses are neat. (You can keep stacking them inside each other [like those little Ukranian dolls (and at the end of the statement [they all unwind at once (like this)])])])])]).

Back to the butter. Since we now get raw milk from the neighbors (someone alert the FDA! Help! Help! I’m engaging in Non-Government-Approved Agricultural Activity!!!), we have plenty ‘nough cream to make bucketloads of butter every week. Last time Jess just gave a quart jar of cream to each child and had them shake it till it butterized, but I don’t see that activity holding its appeal for very long. It will quickly turn into Work. I can just hear the kids now: “Make bed, clean room, throw jammies on floor, practice piano, feed chickens, gather eggs, make butter. Mommmmm! Do I hafta?” So, being the good Dad I am, I called in the aid of the (dramatic music here) Power Mixer. Da da taaaaaa!

Rule Number 1 of making butter with the Power Mixer: Always Put a Lid On First. This is the sad voice of experience.

Rule No. 2: Get the cream out of the fridge first thing in the morning and don’t plan on making butter till sometime after lunch. This is because cream needs to be not cold if you want it to butterize. This is the impatient and frustrated voice of experience.

Rule No. 3: Send a couple of kids all the way down to the end of the driveway without a coat (and preferably toting something fragile) so that Mom will go running out of the kitchen when the cream turns to butter. This is because the butterization happens quickly, and the buttermilk will come spurting out of the holes in the Power Mixer lid, and your wife will be not happy with you when she sees buttermilk on her counter. Buttermilk is great for homemade biscuits. (Not for the Pillsbury Detonating Canister kind. If you add homemade buttermilk to those, the chemical reaction will cause your kitchen to burst into flame.) This is why you must distract your wife first.

Rule No. 4: Rinse butter. If you do not rinse butter with cold water until the water runs clear, the milk stays in the butter and goes rancid. This is icky.

Rule No. 5: Enjoy. It is especially helpful to get bread crumbs and butter globules all over your keyboard. You are not allowed to gloat at the wretched mortals who must eat PHVO on their Pillsbury Remotely-Resembles-Biscuit Food Product, since you yourself were eating PHVO not so long ago.

Wish you could see it better, but that's life in the woods, folks

Steller’s jay? Jeller’s stay? This is English; you can never tell how something is supposed to be written. I used to pride myself on my spelling capability (even though I lost the 6th grade spelling bee on “asterisk”, a word I’d never heard before, but I’m not emotionally damaged, waaa!). But now that I’m getting old and decrepit—I’m 40 as of last Saturday—I’m more cautious about spelling. Teh turht is, it is psosilbe ot raed Egnlsih qiute raedliy eevn wtih sracbemld wrdos bcasuee of hwo oru bnairs wrok. Cloo, huh?

But enough about my ineptitude (for the moment). I wanted to show you a pretty picture of Stellxr’s jays (where “x” represents the trick vowel) (or was that “trick fowl,” ha ha!) that have been swarming our bird feeder all winter. Ain’t they purdy? I remember seeing these birds for the first time at Yosemite National Park when I was 11 years old. Their intense blue plumage, black heads, and crest are distinctive; as is their call. I think it’s somewere between that monkey call you hear on old Tarzan jungle movies (“aaak-gakakakakak”) and a train wreck, which is what most jays do (a short, grating call: “aaakchghhh”). This concludes my bird-call lesson of the day, especially if I’m wrong.

I’m thinking about posting only three days a week. What do you all think?

This is about a week’s haul in the winter—2 dozen eggs, give or take. (I can’t see through Abby’s hand.) In springtime, it will be about one day’s worth. We will have so many eggs floating around that we’ll have to find a way to freeze them, or something. Can you freeze eggs?

Jess took this picture to demonstrate the size of the chicken eggs compared with those of the duckies. Duck eggs are supposed to be larger, but the chicken eggs (the brown ones) are almost the same size. Either we have really fat hens (true) or the ducks are still so scared of being caught and butchered that their eggs are small (possible).

I had occasion last summer to open a container of store-bought eggs. Their uniform whiteness startled me, as if they had been laid by machine. Their shells seemed fragile and their taste watery. Well, that’s the case if you grow and make most of your own food. (The kids are not weaned off of the occasional sugary cereal or Ritz Crackers, yet.) You grow used to richer tastes and heartier textures, and you seem to get a little snobbish as well. If only the ducks laid bigger eggs.

I have to figure out how to reduce the trauma when it’s butcherin’ time. My dad said that to catch poultry for butchering you can take a long stick with a bit of wire taped to the end and bent into a hook, and snag their legs with it. It looks like I may have a chance to give that a go. Remember the white chick, Tubaloth? We found out recently that he’s a rooster—and we can’t use two roosters.

We’ll have to make do with our patchy snow and mud. In the mean time, not to rub it in or anything, we’re grateful to have a root cellar.

I was at the tax man’s the other day and saw his copy of the Wall Street Journal. The front-page, above-the-fold picture was of a couple of folks in a barren supermarket, picking up what they could get of what was left. It was just a few forlorn lemons, as I recall. I hear that back east the weather is so bad, people are burning all their books by Al Gore to keep warm.

In the meantime, we have our own grocery store at home.

This is an old picture of our root cellar. Now it’s so crammed with supplies that we have step up on the shelves and pick our way back like spelunkers to get to the dishwashing soap, say, or the condensed milk, which are on the back shelves. My orders are to go pick up 25 5-gallon buckets next week to store more of the staples up and out of the way. Okay.

It’s a nice feeling. Once our propane tank is refilled, we should have all we need to survive for up to four months should we be cut off from the outside world. Power, hot water, food, popcorn, and everything. Provided nothing breaks that I can’t fix, and my daughters learn to take shorter showers.