Will the contents of this picture feed our family of nine for the next year? Probably not. For one thing, I don’t like the taste of tires. I meant, once everything’s growing, will it produce enough food to last us through until the next harvest? Probably not. But it’s a good start.

On the far left are the fruit trees: various varieties of apple, pear and plum. Between them grow sunflowers and chamomile. On the left you can also just make out one of the two raised beds Jess built (yes, I know she’s amazing) to contain five kinds of squash (spaghetti, zephyr, “little dumplings,” zucchini, and crookneck); pumpkins; and edible gourd. Then come the regular raised beds, that are already 80% planted and will grow green beans (under the white fabric), arugula, beets, kale, cabbage (red and purple), onions (purple and yellow), endive, carrots (2 varieties), lettuce (3 varieites), swiss chard (2 varieities), green onions, radishes, spinach, and snap peas. Then comes the greenhouse, containing leeks, tomatoes (3 varieties), broccoli, celery, cucumbers (3 varieties), collard greens, chinese cabbage, bok choi, watermelon, cantaloupe, and various types of peppers (cayenne, jalapeno, banana, Hungarian wax, and green [2 varieties]). The tires contain potatoes; the idea is to drop tires successively around each plant to contain the dirt we add as they grow.

Missing from this shot, as far as home food production goes, are all the poultry; the horseradish and asparagus in the far left corner of the garden; the berry patches—blue, straw, and rasp; the herb garden and rhubarb cages*; the vegetable contents of the greenhouse; apples, elderberry, huckleberry, and grapes from neighboring lands (we pay for the grapes); our overflowing root cellar; and the deer I’ll shoot this fall. The herb bed contains marjoram, basil (2 varieties), sage, dill, parsley, garlic, thyme, chives, cilantro, and oregano.

And Jess has done virtually all of this.

*Once it gets going, rhubarb needs cages. Not to climb one, like tomatoes or beans, but to protect innocent passers by from getting swallowed up in the rhubarb jungle. We have five (count ‘em) rhubarb plants. You’ve been warned.

Saturday mornings usually mean a big day ahead: lots of cleanup, lots of laundry, some special projects inside, and a couple of big projects outside. I may have to tinker with the cars or swing the ladder up against the house; I will have to make bread and refill the woodpile on the back porch (36 cubic feet of wood for a week’s heat—not bad, I’d say). Saturdays are always busy. Later on maybe I’ll take the kids exploring or settle down for a little reading. But at our house, it’s work in the morning, play in the afternoon. The morning sunshine feeds ambition—I’ve got things to do.

But just now, on my way past the dining room, I see these cold jars basking in the fresh sunshine, and I have to grab for the camera. It’s like music in the light. It’s analgous to our lives, maybe. It’s a homemade life, but it’s as fresh and delicate and real as a piece by Satie.

It’s a lodgepole pine, 70 feet tall and 95% dead. I thought, It might as well come down now. Another year and it would be completely dead, and then a high wind might bring it down. We might wake up one morning with a dead tree in the poultry yard, in the berry patch, or even right down in the middle of the shoop. There was no wind that afternoon as I stood there, chain saw in hand; my saw was sharp, I had the time, and I wouldn’t have to contend with wind pushing the tree this way and that while I was trying to control its fall. So I started cutting.

I hacked out a wedge-shaped cut halfway through the trunk in the direction I wanted the tree to fall. Then I cut from the back toward my first cut. But like many lodgepoles, the trunk was oblong, and its long axis faced the direction I wanted the tree to fall. It would much rather fall on the shoop. But I quickly retrieved some wedges and pounded them into the slice on the back of the tree, the way our neighbor John had done last summer.

It worked. Pretty soon, the tree leaned away from me and fell according to directions, crashing heavily down as trees do, right across the old skid trail and well away from anything breakable.

The wood from this tree could provide several weeks’ worth of heat to our home next winter. Jess wanted to take my picture with it. I wouldn’t have chosen that, since I’m the least likely person on our road to drop a tree successfully. But she insisted.

It’s surprising to think of the effectiveness of that little steel wedge. It probably doesn’t generate more than an inch of lift. But when it’s is pounded into a deep cut on the back of the tree, that one inch is enough to bring the two-ton, 70-foot behemoth crashing to the earth.*

It’s analogous, isn’t it? Great trees grow from little seeds, and little wedges can bring down great trees.

*It occurs to me that some of you may be upset about my cutting down a tree. Here is a little secret: every tree falls. It may fall in a high wind or by lightning strike; it may die by insects or by fire, but like every human, every tree dies; and when it does, there is only one place for it to go and that is down. I would far rather control the time and direction of its fall, and use its wood thankfully, than otherwise. It is part of a wise stewardship.

I was going to try recounting how many varieties of plants Jess has planted here, but I can’t count that high. There are lettuce and sunflowers and tomatoes and peppers, watermelon and snapdragons and squash and good grief, I can’t remember. Since this picture was taken last week, the window-seat garden has burst forth and multiplied. The lids of most of these strawberry-box gardens have been hinged open to allow their vigorous occupants some headroom.

Jess has been storing these strawberry boxes since last summer, when we bought all the strawberries to freeze and can for jam. (The sad truth is that our own strawberry plants didn’t produce enough fruit for much more than surreptitious mouth-popping, or  adding the occasional tang to a bowl of corn flakes.) The plastic clamshell boxes serve as mini-greenhouses, and many of the warm-weather plants will be hardened off and transferred to the real greenhouse when they’re big enough.

And where’s Jess meanwhile? Oh, she’s down in the real garden, planting cool-weather crops like spinach and radishes. Yeah, I know; it’s only March. She loves to get her hands into the dirt.

It’s a modification of my old bread recipe. After lots of practice and many mistakes, I’ve found some things that work. No doubt I’ll come up with other shortcuts in future, and probably ruin it in the process, but for now it works pretty well. And for somebody who isn’t much smarter than bread himself, well, I like it.

Put 6 cups hot (116°) water in a measuring bowl and add 1/4 cup (4 T) yeast. Then combine the following in the bread mixer:
12 cups whole wheat flour
3 cups white flour
1 1/2 T salt
1 cup brown sugar (I like mild honey instead, but we ran out)
1/3 cup oil
3 T dough enhancer (this is the ticket, friends, to good soft bread)

Pour the yeast mixture in and mix the whole schmere for 10 minutes. While it’s mixin’, grease 6 bread pans. When it’s done mixin’, grease your (immaculately clean) hands and divide the dough evenly among the pans. I twist the lumps of dough a little to smooth them out. Set the pans in the oven to rise (don’t turn it on; but flip on the oven light so you can see when it’s riz). It takes less than an hour for the bread to rise up big and puffy (at least I think it does; I’m always off doing something else while the bread rises). At that point, turn the oven on to 375° for 30 minutes or so, and remove when the loaves sound kind of hollow when flipped with a fingernail. Slather with homemade butter and enjoy.

See, it’s not an exact science. You may want to divide this recipe in half or even thirds (I tripled the batch from the cookbook, along with other modifications). But hey, our forebears didn’t have timers and thermostats to make their bread. Just kind of wing it, learn from your mistakes, and enjoy. I sure do!

This is how we make it work. I can get quite a few samples of women’s clothing at my job, and with a wife six daughters that’s a handy thing. Jess is able to create some concoctions that we otherwise could not afford, because she’s handy with a sewing machine (just visible in the background) and is not afraid to make do.

Some of the samples have been intentionally mutilated to prevent their resale. The “mutilation” consists of a slit in the lower backside that’s a couple of inches wide, one that’s easily stitchable and virtually impossible to see. (It’s there if you look for it, but who’s looking for little stitched-up slits in the backside of an erstwhile $90 jacket? Not you, I hope.) Under a jacket or cardigan, Jess will wear tanks and layers that have bigger holes than that in back, and nobody’s the wiser. She looks like we actually spend money on clothing. At church on Sundays she looks like a million bucks, but the cost was actually a million dollars less than that. Time wise, it’s maybe five minutes with a needle and thread. I’d say that’s a decent trade for a smashing wardrobe.

All I can say is that if you’re married and you want a lifestyle like this, both of you have to be willing to do what it takes. We’re cheapskates, but we live well because we make do. It helps that Jess is a wizard at stuff like this (it’s a learnable skill). See that picture of Christ in the corner? That’s a cross-stitch that she did. It contains over 11,000 stitches, according to my rough calculation. And she did three of them.

You don’t have to be that kind of superhero. It’s helpful just to make do where you can.

Of course sometimes we will go through that many jars of canned food in a single week. (Remarkable, isn’t it? Almost as if we had seven children.) At that rate the pantry can fill up pretty fast with washed and empty jars. We tranfer the empty jars back down to the root cellar, but with hundreds of jars to store, that fills up too. So Jess likes to keep the jars circulating. And canned chicken and canned beans are a great first step for a hot supper, too.

Since beans start out hard and chicken starts out raw, you have to pressure can them for a certain amount of time to make sure they’re safe. Jess has the Ball canning book that imparts all those secrets. I know that if you don’t can meat correctly you can get salmonella or other nasties; but as far as I can tell none of us has died yet from eating home-canned meat.

You’ll note the jars of chicken appear about half full. They start out full; when she’s canning, she slices the chicken breasts into strips the long way and packs ‘em in. But they cook down to the quantity shown here. And since we don’t eat a ton of meat, one jar half-full of cooked chicken is plenty for a big supper for all of us, plus the portion I’ll tote to work next day for lunch.

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.

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.