Innholdsfortegnelse for November - December 2016 i Grit

FEATURED COMMENT “We have one and two heat exchangers hooked to ductwork in the house with separate thermostats, and it is just like a regular furnace. Load it up once or twice in super-cold weather, and it keeps our 5,000-square-foot home very toasty. We have a supply of wood on our property, plus we turned off the electricity to the water tank and it heats all the hot water that we need for cheap. We love it!” — Sylvia Haavisto on “Outdoor Wood-Burning Furnace,” via Facebook GRIT Bloggers We invite homesteaders, cooks, and ruraldwelling folks to join the Grit online community and become a Grit blogger. From time to time, we’ll have contests for our existing bloggers, like in September when two winners each won a Ball© FreshTech canner valued…

AUTUMN IS A SPECIAL TIME of year in our family. The cool temperatures are a welcome relief from the dog days of summer, a walk in the brisk air is rejuvenating, and the smell of the woods is one of my favorites. The trees paint a gorgeous picture with vibrant leaves of crimson, orange, and gold. There is another season that runs along with the autumn season that is always anticipated in my family, and that’s whitetail deer season. In our home, some vacation time is always reserved specifically for hunting season. Deer hunting has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. As a child, venison was always one of the primary foods on our table, and it became a staple for my family after…

I can still clearly recall my first whitetail. It was an unseasonably hot October afternoon. The leaves on the oak trees were vibrant oranges, reds, and yellows, and squirrels frantically gathered nuts for winter. I climbed up into my perch 20 feet above the forest floor, anticipating the afternoon. Mentally playing out every imaginable scenario, I felt prepared. As the sun began to drop, I noticed movement a mere 20 yards away — it was a buck. I froze, fearing that he had seen me, and surprised he’d snuck to that range without me at least hearing him. As I gathered my thoughts, I knew it was now or never. I slowly drew my bow, settled my pin right behind his shoulder, and let my arrow fly. It hit the…

A HUMBLE COLD FRAME offers a great way to produce nutritious, homegrown food outside of the prime growing season, without investing in a full-size greenhouse. Although many gardeners already use these mini-greenhouses to shelter seedlings before planting in spring, they may not realize that crops will stay alive inside a cold frame during winter, providing fresh food from the garden in December, January, and even February. Commercial cold frames can make beautiful additions to your garden, but an inexpensive DIY setup is a great way to get started. You can quickly assemble one or more DIY cold frames with upcycled materials, and then move them around your property to find the best microclimate before you install a more elegant cold frame. GRIT.COM See how one blogger kept her spinach crop…

I just read your editor’s note in the September/October issue of Grit (“New Life & Old Habits”). Congratulations on your new baby chicks as well as your Boykin Spaniel! I giggled to myself when you said “the next challenge is to get these birds home and teach Lou to leave them alone,” because I know from experience that the struggle is real! We also raise chickens (and other birds) and have a Llewellin Setter named Lexie. It has definitely been an experience trying to teach a bird dog that she has to discern the difference between birds that she is allowed to hunt and those she has to leave alone. We have 27 chickens, five ducks, 10 racing pigeons, and one goose, and as a pup, she has definitely gone…

FOR MANY OF THE COOL autumn weekends of my childhood, my family made the trip to southern Georgia to help my grandmothers harvest pecans on their rural farms. Grandmother Maggie Lanier lived beside an orchard of seedlings just outside the scenic town of Metter, a Mayberry-like place northwest of Savannah. Grandmother Ona Jarriel lived on the other side of the interstate, down a dirt road nestled between the tiny towns of Collins and Cobbtown. She had about 20 Schley pecan trees that produced hundreds of pounds of pecans each fall. My siblings, cousins, and I were not the most willing of participants for the back-breaking chore of picking up thousands of the smooth brown nuts, but someone had to do it. Both of my elderly grandmothers relied on the extra…

Canada geese are educated these days. I just surpassed 50 years of waterfowl hunting, and I’ve witnessed the changes. We once hunted geese with black flags on stakes, tires cut in half with wooden heads, and silhouette cutouts painted in Canada goose colors. Old decoys are now replaced with flocked head magnum versions and battery-powered swimming decoys. A few lucky hunters in the old days had big sets of full-bodied decoys made of plastic or a composite material that to this day I can’t identify. Mediocre calling fooled geese in the 1960s and ’70s, when most calls were made of wood or plastic and very inexpensive. Olt, Lohman, Herters and Faulks controlled the market with their surprisingly effective calls. Calls today are acrylic and cost more than $100. The old…

I should have known I had the “farming bug” when I was more excited to hear back about apprenticing with a local sheep farmer than I was for a first date. I didn’t have a car, so I biked the seven miles of hilly western Massachusetts roads to the farm with my heart in my mouth. I desperately wanted to learn more about sheep. I was willing to do anything, and I was pleasantly surprised when the shepherd offered to pay me for my time. The thought of payment hadn’t even occurred to me. Since that day, I have apprenticed on three organic farms and worked on several more. Each experience has taught me something new about farming, from pest control to dealing with on-farm injuries. I met other apprentices…

ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS about cabbage, carrots, and similar crops is that you can store them for months if you have a cold, well-ventilated space. A spare refrigerator works pretty well, but even better and more spacious is a real root cellar. Traditionally, this cold room was an underground space built under or near the home, insulated by the ground, and vented so cold air could flow in and warm air out in the fall. Then, when winter temperatures arrived, the vents were closed, and the cellar stayed cold but not freezing. Most modern basements are too warm for long-term winter storage, but you can create an indoor version of the cellars that have long served homesteaders well by walling off a basement corner and adding the vents, as…

Storing Firewood 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.…

THESE DAYS, when it comes to food production, there seems to be as much a divide between organic and conventional producers as there is among the consumers. Coincidentally — and this will be hard for many food producers to hear — both organic and conventional farmers can cause environmental damage that is almost impossible to reverse, including nutrient depletion and desertification. That’s right, organic food production can be damaging to the environment just like conventional farming, if producers don’t keep their farm’s ecology in mind. All farmers, regardless of which side of the great divide they sit on, need to remember to focus on maintaining their land’s ecosystem. A healthy farm ecosystem minimizes input costs and maximizes production throughout the years, while maintaining sustainability. Healthy farm ecology is critical to…

NO DENYING IT, Americans love the bread-based side dish integral to the Thanksgiving feast. Whether baked in a casserole dish or stuffed inside the bird, we want it just the way we remember it from our childhood. Holidays conjure vivid memories of happy times, and food always plays a role. Each year as I plan my Thanksgiving menu, I ask everyone what favorite foods they would like to see on the table. My Southern-style cornbread dressing — the kind Granny and Aunt Mary taught me to make — always outranks the turkey. To vary the recipe, even slightly, would surely be risking a riot. Historically speaking, as the United States expanded, settlers got their first taste of regional staples, and European immigrants all brought their favorite flavors to this uniquely…

Developing a process by which to turn the bitter nut of the oak tree into a viable and nutritious food staple was one of the greater innovations of mankind. Early Homo sapiens recognized the potential of a tree that produced nuts in massive quantities, were easy to crack and shell, and easily stored for long periods of time. Rendering acorns edible allowed humans to subsist over barren winters and conquer new lands where food sources would have otherwise been uncertain. GRIT.COM Seven nut recipes for every country kitchen (http://bit.ly/2c0rz9e). Long before the primitive grain that would one day be called maize made its way from South American tribes to the farms of indigenous North America, it was the simple yet ubiquitous fruit of the oak tree that provided the natives…

Long before the dawn of agriculture, our ancestors spent 2.5 million years fine-tuning their metabolism and collective physiology to an opportunist’s diet that included everything from found or hunted meats and seafood to plants, insects, and perhaps an occasional spot of honey. No doubt early humans feasted on plenty of leafy greens, nuts and other seeds as well as high-quality animal proteins and fats, all of which were loaded with vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids. Our scavenger predecessors would’ve likely raised their eyebrows at shortening, margarine and other processed vegetable and animal fats, and likely even at breads, cakes, and cookies. A lot has happened to the human diet since then. GRIT.COM Find a local butcher and buy fresh pork belly for making your own bacon (http://bit.ly/2a2Sgqw). About 10,000…