Innholdsfortegnelse for September - October 2015 i Grit

GARLIC FOR THE HEALTH OF IT For ages, garlic has been revered as food and medicine and, occasionally, for magical properties. The Chinese knew of its healing and disease-preventing benefits 5,000 years ago. It was fed to the builders of the Great Pyramids and was hung on houses throughout Europe to protect those within from witches and vampires. Today, garlic is known to help lower cholesterol, reduce high blood pressure, and destroy bacteria and fungi. A sulfur-based compound known as allicin gives garlic its health benefits and its pungent smell. Cooking tames garlic’s pervasive odor and sweetens its taste, but high heat or overcooking may remove some of its beneficial properties. There are two types of true garlic: hard-neck varieties, favored by cooks for their rich flavor, and soft-necks, known…

Rolling Greenhouse Extends Season Phil Norris’ rolling greenhouse helps extend his growing season without the pest problems of a stationary greenhouse. Norris and Deborah Wiggs operate a 13-acre organic farm on the coast of Maine. “The first week of March 2014, we were planting inside when the ground outside was still frozen and snow covered,” Norris says. “This year we had a really harsh winter and couldn’t plant until the second week of March.” Neighbor and experienced rolling tunnel builder Eliot Coleman was a handy resource. He suggested a 48-foot-long-by-22-foot-wide high tunnel that could be easily vented through the end walls. Norris designed the rolling high tunnel to traverse four 48-foot plots over the course of the year. He bought high tunnel bows and cross members from Rimol Greenhouse Systems.…

AUTUMN IS A TIME FOR clear skies, crisp air, brisk temperatures and seasonal delicacies. School’s underway, football games and sports activities abound, the family is busy all the time, and the holiday season is getting closer. Seasonal fruits, like pumpkins and apples, are piled high at farmers’ markets, roadside stands and grocery stores. Apples, while found year-round, are known as an autumn fruit. This time of year is when you find the tastiest, juiciest and crispest varieties of apples. For a true antique apple, try farmers’ markets or organic food stores for Spitzenburg, Grimes Golden, Baldwin, Pippin, Pound Sweet, Gravenstein, or Golden Russet. Better yet, explore the old homestead and see what trees your great-grandparents planted when they homesteaded. You won’t regret it. EDITOR’S NOTE: Regarding the July/August Recipe Box,…

Mulling over this year’s nominations for the 2015 Grit Homesteaders of the Year recognition was torture of the best kind. In the end, we selected three winners and one runner-up who embody, to us, the real spirit of a gritty homesteading tradition, which takes patience, determination and dedication. Here we offer you a glimpse into the lives of our four Homesteaders of the Year. GRIT.COM Check out the 2014 Homesteaders of the Year (http://bit.ly/1I0OE5O). SARAH STEVES OF SUNSHINE & RAINBOWS FAMILY FARM (WINNERS) NEWALLA, OKLAHOMA Age 37, single mom; 2 daughters, Lili (10) and Olivia (7) 5 acres “Several years ago, my daughters and I lived in a small apartment in Norman, Oklahoma. As a single mother, I had a very difficult time paying all of my bills and putting…

EACH FALL, we host a cider-pressing event. Crates overflow with crimson-striped, emeraldspeckled, golden-laced apples. But the center of attention is not the 2,000 pounds of apples. Stealing the show is a wooden, handcrafted cider press that looks as if it has been transported through history, custom built in 1998 by local woodcrafter Andrew Campbell. Friends and neighbors eagerly gather to help squeeze out the rich, juicy apple cider that will be frozen or fermented for the winter to come. The tradition simply would not be possible without our cider press, around which we create memories and cultivate deeper relationships as one season turns to the next. A pressing matter Before explaining the materials, tools, or step-by-step instructions, it is necessary to understand the basic process of the cider press. Apples…

Calling all jammers, bakers and canners. You could be part of a growing movement of people starting small food businesses in their homes. No capital needed, just good recipes, enthusiasm and commitment, plus enough know-how to turn ingredients into sought-after treats for your local community. Everything you require is probably already in your home kitchen – and you can start tomorrow. GRIT.COM Food entrepreneurs, with all types of products, take advantage of a community kitchen (http://bit.ly/1IxHO6x). Thanks to new laws on the books in 42 states, specific food businesses can now be launched from home kitchens. These state laws, often referred to as “cottage food laws,” allow you to sell certain food products to your neighbors and in your community. By certain foods, the laws mean various “non-hazardous” food items,…

Even though I have raised chickens for years, I never expected to raise them to eat. After they provide delicious eggs, I retire my layers to the barnyard, where they help manage manure, turn compost, and fill my woodlot with industrious melody. But Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle convinced me that I could raise my own meat birds. So, in 2008, I raised and processed two small flocks of the Cornish and White Rock cross, or Cornish Crosses. They are fast-growing birds typically raised in big operations to supply restaurants and supermarkets with everything from nuggets to whole birds. Strangely, it’s only because I have a lifelong affection for chickens that I can kill them at all. If I didn’t care about them, I’d just eat store-bought chicken. I…

Jack McGee couldn’t justify a commercial chicken plucker for his family’s small flock, so he made his own with wood and other scraps he found around his Michigan farm. His model is a copy of a commercial model. “I had treated plywood and 2-by-4 scraps, and the white top is a 12-inch food-grade PVC pipe, heated and flattened out,” McGee says, explaining that the chickens are placed on the PVC and never touch the treated wood. The drum is also a piece of 12-inch PVC pipe with the ends of disassembled squirrel cage blowers. The drum spins on a ½-inch steel shaft secured on the outside of the wooden unit with bushings and metal pieces from the blowers. Mc-Gee purchased plucking fingers ($1.30 each) from Cutler’s Pheasant, Poultry and Beekeeping…

Share your visual perspective with the Grit community. Post your photos at Facebook.com/GritMagazine, Facebook.com/CappersFarmer, or tag us on Instagram (GritMag). We chose several images you see here from those platforms, and you can find more within the blogging community on our websites. Share your best shots, and we just might select one of your photos for a future issue of the magazine. To admire even more readers’ photos, visit Grit.com and CappersFarmer.com.…

LOFTY GOALS ARE SOMETIMES ACHIEVED by those who live with their heads in the clouds. At an elevation of approximately 2,250 feet above sea level, at the end of the aptly named Red Cloud Road near Bonners Ferry, Idaho, you could say that Georgia Earley is doing just that – with her feet firmly planted on the ground. That is, when she’s not on a ladder or on tiptoe to reach the tree’s branches upon which she places her unusual specialty: a seasonal round of larger-than-life “fruit traps” designed to entice fruit flies away from her prized crop of organically grown cherries. GRIT.COM Hank tells the tale of his Kansas Sweet Cherry tree, and the harvest (http://bit.ly/1LYohjz). Supporting the local nursery in Idaho, before the age of 30, she bought…

THE WOOD BURNERS of the past have been much-improved and refined with better efficiencies for producing heat. There are modern versions of the old potbellied stove that are both stylish and capable of heating a large area. Add-on wood furnaces can be adapted to existing fuel oil and propane furnaces providing an optional or dual form of heating. In more recent years, the popularity of outdoor wood-fired boilers (OWBs) has increased substantially for people who have access to wood and are looking to replace traditional heating methods. How do OWBs work? Wood-burning hydronic heaters – also called outdoor wood-fired boilers or furnaces – are residential or small commercial wood-fired water heaters that are located outdoors away from the space being heated. Typically, a water jacket surrounds the furnace’s firebox heat…

A year before I bought my first two Black Angus calves, I purchased a 50-pound sack of tall fescue seed to sow in my 4-acre pasture. As I tossed the seed onto the thin spots of the field, I enjoyed that sense of satisfaction you get knowing you are taking care of your land. As I later discovered, I couldn’t have been more wrong. A year after grazing the calves on the pasture, they didn’t look quite right to me. They had good appetites and seemed content, but their coats looked ragged and rust colored. Being inexperienced at the time, I thought it possible they might not be pure Black Angus, which would account for the inconsistencies. I wasn’t quite sure what to think until I did a little research…

Even now, some 25 years later, it was an October afternoon to remember. The trees on the Pennsylvania mountainside blazed with color, and the cool breezes softened the warm sun. No stranger to hunting pheasant and rabbits, I had joined friends on a grouse hunt, and we picked our way to the creek bottom below, ears straining for that heart-stopping explosion of wings in full flight. GRIT.COM Learn essential outdoor survival skills from a previous GRIT article (http://bit.ly/1JOhZAM). We soon discovered that while the grouse were apparently somewhere else, we were not alone on that Pennsylvania mountain. As we stepped into a clearing, a very non-birdlike whistle drifted down from above. There, some 15 feet in the air, perched an archer in a tree stand, camouflaged, waving quietly to catch…

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I had a fear of thunderstorms – astraphobia as it’s called. I got this from my mother. No, not genetically, but she was scared of them, so I was, too. In time, though, my love for all things weather took over. As a budding meteorologist, I started to enjoy these raw displays of nature. Over the years, I’ve done some strange things during thunderstorms – I’ve played golf through them, and I also played tennis through one. But, so much for my eccentricities. For “normal” folks, I would recommend a healthy respect for thunderstorms, something between hiding in a closet and sitting on your roof holding a metal golf club. The good news is that lightning kills very few people. In 2013, lightning killed 23 people…