Blizzard

The first real winter weather of the winter season hits in late March, go figure. Anyway, outdoor projects are on hold and I'm officially behind on preparing for my parents' visit.

Yogurt, Improved

I figured out why I was getting so much whey in my yogurt. I assumed that all I needed to do was scald the milk to kill competing bacteria, but in fact the milk must be heated to 180 degrees in order to change the structure of the milk protein. I did that this weekend and got a much creamier, whey-free yogurt. Success!

I'm draining another batch of yogurt in an attempt to make labneh, a kind of middle-eastern cream cheese. It's the second item in Fankahuser's series of cheese-making tasks for beginners. We'll see how it turns out tonight.

I'm so far behind on my yard and vegetable garden. I need to stop planning and start doing!

My indoor citrus trees are really taking off! Both have sprouted lots of new leaves and look very healthy. The lemon tree has a rouge branch that I am contemplating pruning, but I don't know anything about pruning so I just keep staring at it and wondering what I should do.

Composting Supplies

In the interest of finally starting a real compost bin (and getting rid of the piles of stuff all over my yard) I bought three cheapo garbage cans with lids and some bungee cords yesterday. The bungee cords are to hold the lids on from critters and for when I roll the barrells to mix the compost. I will punch holes in the can with a nail. For now, I have a lot of "brown" material, which I will put in the bins temporarily and shovel in bits into the bin where I will add green material as needed. I hope that with three bins I will be able to let one bin sit and do it's thing while I'm mucking about with the other two.

BTW, raw, whole, milk tastes so good!

Homestead weekend

Now that I have my Larga Vista Ranch milk, I made yogurt again this weekend. This time I did not skim the cream off first, hoping for a creamier yogurt, but the yogurt had a lot of whey around it. I'm not sure why it turned out so differently from the last time I made it. I made a second batch on Sunday to use in making Labneh, a middle eastern cream cheese. Fankhauser's cheesemaking site (link on right) recommends a progression of cheesemaking task for newbies, and Labneh is second on the list after yogurt. It seems to have a lot of whey too.

I also finished off a batch of 5-minute bread dough making pita and a boule. I was surprised both worked because the dough had gotten really wet and seemed flat, but the boule turned out perfect. However, one of the pitas stuck, which resulted in some serious scraping of the baking stone.

All the herbs and the citrus trees I potted are taking off. I have to rotate them every day because they're really stretching for the sunshine from that southern window. It finally occurred to me that I ought to pull the sheers back. I may like my sunshine filtered through them, but the plants are liking the more direct light.

My sweetie also took me shopping for the non-lumber portions of the gear I need to make my self-watering raised beds. I now own my first circular saw. Now to find a lumber yard...

Green Cleaning for Cheapos and the Lazy

I've been ripped off most of my life by the companies that make cleaning products. One thing I have been discovering this last year - I need almost nothing they sell in the cleaning aisles. It's all marketing and germ-phobia. For the record, I don't believe in killing every germ in the house. I think it makes us sicker in the long run.

I've been cleaning almost all the surfaces in my home with a spray bottle filled with a 50/50 mix of vinegar and water for a year now, including my sealed hardwood floors. It is not any harder than cleaning with Windex/409/Lysol/etc, and my house is just as clean. The vinegar smell lasts only for a moment, and then all you smell is clean because vinegar is a natural deodorizer. No perfumes, no mystery chemical, no need to put child locks on the cabinet under my sink. To clean my floors, I spray them and then wipe them down with a rag attached to a Swifter after sweeping. My floor shine.

For the kitchen I sometimes need a little more oomph, so I have another spray bottle with a 50/50 mix of vinegar and water and a tablespoon of unscented liquid castille soap. Castille soap is made of vegetable oil, so it cuts grease very nicely. It will not, however, dissove in vinegar and water, so I shake the bottle a couple times before every use. Seeing globs of the soap in the bottle is normal. The other difference between this and the plain vinegar bottle is that, because of the soap, you need to rinse.

I scrub sinks and my tub with baking powder when the vinegar doesn't cut it.

For my wood furniture, I dust with a microfiber clothe. I polish occassionally with my one BELOVED commericial cleaning product: Howard's Naturals wood cleaner. Read the label and you will recognize all the ingredients - no mystery chemicals here. Wood positively loves this stuff. I had a hope chest that was badly water damaged, and after using this on it for a couple of months, the damage is now invisible. This stuff is pricey and totally worth it.

My other commercial cleaning product is 7th Generation dishwashing powder. I use it for environmental reasons. It works fine, and as far as I can tell there are no homemade or natural alteratives for the dishwasher. Bummer. I get 7th Gen cheaper through Subscribe-and-Save on Amazon.

I recently started making homemade laundry soap. It is much cheaper and so far it seems to work better than commericial detergeant. I read that this is because the companies that make detergeants are too cheap to put actual soap in them. They use detergeant made from petrolium, which is cheaper and doesn't clean as well. But I can't verify that.

I make a very easy powdered version, but I'm thinking of making a liquid one for the darks/cold cycle. To deal with any potential residue in my pipes and to soften my clothes, I use a Downy ball full of vinegar. BTW, it also helps deodorize clothes too.

CAUTION: Vinegar does not react well with bleach. Combining the two will release a toxic gas. Don't use the two in the same cycle. Also, I tend not to use bleach. I stick with oxygen bleach.

Making powder homemade laundry soap takes three cheap ingredients, a grater, and a food processor. It took less than 20 minutes. I found all the ingredients at King Soopers. To learn about the details, see the Homemade Laundry Detergent link under Tips, Instructions, Resources on the left side of this page.

I still have unsolved green cleaning dilemmas. I've heard my homemade laundry soap will also clean a toilet, but I haven't tried it yet. Also, what about liquid dishwashing soap for handwashing dishes?

From what I can tell, vinegar in the rinse cycle will soften clothes but will not prevent static cling. There are recipes for homemade fabric softener, but I don't see a green benefit to them. I think the best option is finding ways to make my own reusable dryer strips and reduce the amount of softener used. This will be one of my next green cleaning projects.

All in all, I enjoy not breathing in or touching scary chemicals, paying a lot less for my cleaning products, and having a house that smells clean rather than perfumed. Sorry, I totally don't understand air fresheners. They make me feel sick, and I wonder what stink they're covering up when I encounter them in other people's homes.

Raw Milk and Homemade Dairy

finally got off the waiting list and into the regular rotation for Larga Vista's raw milk!

FYI, buying and/or selling raw milk is illegal in Colorado. It is, however, legal to drink raw milk from your own cow. So I bought a share of Larga Vista for $40 and now I own a piece of all those cows! In order to get milk, I pay for the feed and boarding of my cows. I pick up the milk at a park near my home after work on Tuesdays.

Raw milk is both unhomogenized and unpasturized. All homogenization does is break up the fat molecules in milk so that the cream won't separate to the top and people don't have to shake their milk before they pour it. No one knows what this does to people who drink milk. It does nothing to make milk safer. And I find it really annoying since I WANT to be able to skim the cream off the top. Especially since Larga Vista milk has LOTS of cream in it.

Unpasturized milk from most modern dairies is extremely dangerous and will make you sick, because the cows are raised under horrendous conditions. Larga Vista insists you visit the ranch before they will sell you a share, and their dairy practices are impeccable. Their website www.largavistaranch.com goes into their farming practices. No one does milk better than them in Colorado.

I also pick up a dozen pastured eggs from the same people as part of an "egg share" program where I bought 3 months worth of eggs at once. In this case, the egg share program let Doug and Kim (the Larga Vista farmers) buy enough chickens to replenish their flock (which had been decimated by a fox) and guarantees them sales. On the customer end, I get local, free-range, pastured eggs from chickens raised the way everyone imagines chickens are raised (but almost never are). And the price is comparable to organic eggs in the grocery store.

I brought the eggs home and cracked two of them along with my last grocery store (organic!) egg into a bowl to make myself an omlett. The difference in the yolks was amazing! Even the Whole Foods organic yellow, while the Larga Vista egg was deep orange. Yummy!

As for the milk, when I was on the waiting list, I was able to get a few jars here and there and successfully made yogurt and butter, as well as enjoying the milk plain.

I use a yogurt maker to make yogurt, though there are many techniques for maintaining the temperature that do not require one. It's just simpler for me. I use a freeze-dried yogurt culture. Making yogurt basically involves:
1) Heating the milk to a specific temperature
2) Cooling it back down to a lower specific temperature and stirring in the culture
3) Maintaining the temperature (that's all a yogurt maker does) and waiting for the culture to do it's job. This takes between 4-8 hours depending how tart and firm you like your yogurt.
4) Refrigerating the yogurt
I do not add any dried milk or other thickeners to my yogurt as I want it as pure as I can get it. When I want fruit flavor, I put a small spoon of preservers or jam into the serving I am eating. I don't flavor the whole batch because I enjoy plain yogurt and I also use it as a replacement for sour cream. Honey is also excellent for sweetening yogurt. If any liquid forms on the top of your yogurt, don't stir it in; just drain it off.

There are many good resources out there for making yogurt. It's easy and much better than what you buy in the store. I used the technique described in the book "Urban Homesteading," but most of the methods out there basically describe the same process. Making your own also saves money and reduces waste (all those little plastic cups). I highly recommend it. Now that I have a regular source of good milk again, I'm going to be making all my own yogurt. BTW, this can be done with grocery store milk, if you like.

Making butter is even easier than making yogurt. You CANNOT make it with homogenized whole milk because there is no cream to skim, so if you are getting your milk from the grocery story, you need to buy cream. This pretty much eliminates the cost savings, though you will get a higher quality butter by making your own.

Basically all you need to do is agitate the cream for about 8 minutes until you see the butter separate out. This can be done with a jar, a marble, and a hyperactive child. As I lack a hyperactive child, I use a blender. Once you see the yellow globs form, you drain out the liquid. This liquid is REAL buttermilk and can be used in baking or you can drink it. Then you wash the butter. I put the globs in a small bowl and repeatedly add water, press the butter with the back of a spoon, then drain off the cloudy water. I do this until the water is clear. You're basically washing remnants of the milk out, which will make the butter keep longer. Then refrigerate.

Because homemade butter does not have water or other ingredients whipped in like storebought butter, it will be much harder in the refrigerator than your regular stick of butter. I've heard a butter bell is a great solution to this, and it's on my list of things to buy.

I have READ that all it takes to make cream cheese is to drain yogurt for several hours. This is next on my list of homemade dairy projects to try. Last year my sister and I read how easy it was to make mozarella, but we screwed it up and ended up with farmer's cheese. Hopefully the cream cheese experiment will go better than the mozarella experiment! Now that I understand controlling the temperature of milk better, I am ready to try mozarella, and making Ricotta, again.

Once I am done with these dairy experiments (and I'm confident that I'll eventually get mozarella right) I will be able to produce ALMOST all of my dairy needs in my kitchen with organic milk from local, healthy cows. To me, this is a locavore and urban homesteading ideal. Hard cheeses are the exception, but one day I will tackle them too! So I've made good progress on dairy, and I have a plan to attack my meat, fruit, and vegetable needs. And a vague idea about flour and baked goods. If I can get all but my oils and a few luxeries, I'll be "importing" only the kinds of things people used to before refrigerated trucks ruined food in America: coffee, tea, sugar, some spices. For me, this kind of independence from an untrustworthy and unstable system that feeds us poisoned, low-quality food is worth the work.

And, like the authors of Urban Homesteading stated, there's always more power in being a producer than a consumer.

Indoor Herb Garden and Citrus

This weekend I went grocery shopping and they had a random cart of organic herb plants for sale, so I got a peppermint, sage, and thyme and potted them up in the few pots I already owned. I still have a flourishing rosemary I bought from the local nursery down the street.

I started a basil plant from a cutting by removing the bottom leaves and letting the cutting sit in a glass of water. It took over 2 weeks, but roots did miraculously appear! I potted this one up too and it's doing great.

So the herb garden is officially started. All my pots are sitting in front of my largest south-facing window.

I've grown herbs successfully before. For beginners, the easiet way to kill herbs is to over-water them. Let the soil get completely dry between waterings, use soil that drains well, and ONLY use a pot with a drainage hole in the bottom. Many of mine did not have one, since I improvise with all kinds of cheap containers I buy at Goodwill. I found it was easy to add a hole with a drill.

Of all my urban homesteading projects, this is the only one I have significant past experience on which to rely. My other recent indoor gardening project: indoor citrus. About which I know only what I read. But there's no such thing as local citrus in Colorado, so I'm going to give it a shot.

I purchased a 2-3 yr. Bearss seedless lime (aka Tahiti/Persian) and an improved Meyer lemon from Four Winds Growers http://www.fourwindsgrowers.com/). They arrived in excellent condition and were both thriving despite the fact that they shipped early, arrived when I was away on businesss, and sat in a dark shipping box for 4 days before I could get to them!

Both are grafted dwarfts and popular choices for growing citrus indoors. "Sour" citrus (as opposed to sweet citrus like oranges) is supposed to be relatively easy to grow indoors in a Northern climate. I'm a little worried about the low humidity and plan to mist the plants when I water them. I hope it won't require an acutal humidifier or grow light. Since I'm operating without any experience, only time will tell!