It occurred to me, as I was writing this, that maybe I should be writing under a nom de plume and not reveal my location.  You see, I work at a library where we perform a service that is illegal in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and probably some other states. Luckily, we aren’t in those states… But you never know who’s gonna try to implement a law next.  It seems a library in Pennsylvania admitted to having a seed library and received a legal order to stop what they were doing.  No, we’re not talking about marijuana seeds or anything that controversial, just plain, old flower and vegetable seeds.

Legal Issues of Saving Seeds

While saving and sharing your seeds seems perfectly innocent, there are actually other libraries in the United States and other countries that have ended up in trouble with the law for such endeavors.

In 2014, a library in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania worked in partnership with the Cumberland County Commission for Women to start a seed library within their facility.  They obtained information from the Pennsylvania State Agricultural Extension office to start the program.  But then they received a letter from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture stating that they were in violation of the Seed Act of 2004.  Who knew!  First jaywalking and now this? 

But while this seems like a joking matter to some of us, the Department of Agriculture felt it was so serious that they sent a high-ranking official and lawyers to a meeting with the library.

When I first heard of this, my first thought was that this was some plot on behalf of the seed companies so that they wouldn’t lose money from so many people sharing seeds for free.  However, I found that the USDA’s fears are based on the idea of botanical bioterrorism!  And here I thought poison ivy and kudzu were the worst botanical terrorists there could be.  

The Seed Act of 2004 mainly focuses on the selling of seeds, but there is also a concern about seeds that might be purposely or accidentally mislabeled, the growth of invasive plant species, cross-pollination, and poisonous plants.

The Department of Agriculture told the Pennsylvania library director that the library staff would need to test each seed packet for germination and other information if they were to continue to provide the seeds.  The library ended up discontinuing its seed library and, instead, sponsoring seed swapping days in order to avoid any legal ramifications of actually being responsible for the seeds themselves.

Practically the same thing happened with a library in Minnesota, except there, the seed officials showed up in person.  Library staff there were also told they had to discontinue their seed library.

But good news folks!  If you don’t live in Pennsylvania, or Minnesota, there are lots of places in other states that seem to be getting away with having their own seed libraries.  Just check your state and local laws.  During the time of the problems in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, there were already at least 300 across the U.S., so it never occurred to them that it would be a problem.  To learn about your state’s seed laws, visit the American Seed Trade Association website.  The site features a map of all states, and when you click on a state you can read its own individual seed law and whatever restrictions there may be.

So, With All This Drama, What’s the Point of a Seed Library?    

Many gardeners are already ordering seeds and planning for spring.  And still, others are alloecwing a few of their plants from each crop go to seed instead of picking the fruits or veggies from them, then saving those seeds for next year.  Why bother when it might be easier to simply buy more seeds in the spring?  Well, other than saving money and a trip to the store, many feel there is more guarantee that seeds collected from plants that they already have and know are healthy, will also be healthier, and seeds adapted to their soil and climate, not to mention local pests, will be even more robust.

Our local library has taken this idea one step further by helping patrons share those healthy acclimated seeds.  Now the “book” library also contains a seed library made up of heirloom seeds that can be “checked out” by anybody who has a library card and signs up.   

As a way of getting started and enticing participation, our library gained donations of heirloom seeds from such companies as Baker Creek, Seed Savers Exchange (SSE), and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (SESE).  The library now has over 100 varieties of heirloom seeds for vegetables, herbs, and flowers.  There is no charge for the seeds, but it is hoped that people will gather seeds from their crops at the end of the summer and donate some back to the library in order to continue the tradition.

The focus is on heirloom seeds because seeds of crossbred plants will not “remain true”, meaning that they won’t turn out the same as the original plant, but seeds from heirloom plants can be gathered and used from year to year.

Thus, while the seeds checked out this season will be heirloom varieties, they won’t be as adapted for this area yet.  The ones donated in future years will become more and more and hardy.     
Other reasons for seed libraries are to preserve seeds that have not been genetically modified, since there is growing concern about what effect GMO foods might have on our health, in addition to fears about its effects on the environment.

NOTE: I am using words such as “concern,” “theory,” “idea,” etc. in this discussion because I don’t feel that I have explored both sides of this highly-debated science extensively enough to feel confident about taking a side.  I’m just putting these ideas out there for your consideration.

Many feel that GMO seeds will destroy the food chain because they often contain pest-control features which could result in the reduction of insects that are part of the food chain, thus diminishing that insect’s predators, and then the predator’s predators, and so on.  Then there is the fact that we rely on good insects, such as honey bees, to both fertilize our vegetables as well as produce honey; both are a part of our own food chain.

For some of us, money is the biggest factor.  Sometimes you don’t need all of those seeds they sell in those packets and the packets can be pretty expensive if you buy enough of them.  Why not share and share alike, so we all save a few pennies?

While genetically modified seeds are developed to yield the biggest and best fruits and vegetables, they are often hybrids, so the seeds of the plants they produce will often not remain true, meaning that your next crop won’t look the same as the previous one.  It will revert back to the original, lower-quality strain it was hybridized from.  There are also issues regarding the patents on the seeds.   
However, heirloom seeds saved at the end of each growing season and replanted the next year become acclimated to the same area year after year, and will become stronger and better each year.

Here is one more scary theory about GMOs.  Since most GMO crops are engineered to tolerate a certain type of herbicide, the weeds these are supposed to kill are building up a resistance to the herbicides and coming back bigger and stronger and then needing more toxic pesticides to kill them.  Wow, I guess when you think about how we develop vaccines for the flu each year and then have to create new versions because the disease mutates, it all makes sense.

Oh, the Stories We Hear at the Seed Library!   

Those who are interested in preserving heirloom seeds are often those who are interested in preserving history.  They may want to carry on their grandmother’s favorite rose or a treasured, old, apple tree from their parents’ homestead.  Maybe they feel those pumpkins grown from a specific strain of seeds are the secret ingredient to the wonderful pumpkin bread Mom made when they were young.

We’ve been hearing lots of stories from our patrons at the library who have brought seeds to share, and we’ve enjoyed their enthusiasm as they’ve told us how proud they are of the huge pumpkins they grow each year with their special, family seeds.  We’ve also been seeing a lot of young couples selecting seeds for their first home.  It is almost as if they are more than just seeds; they are hope and potential memories.

During the weeks following my father’s death, I spent a lot of time going through old framed pictures, documents, and photo albums at his house.  In one album, along with my grandmother’s passport from Hungary, which enabled her to enter the United States through Ellis Island in the early days, I also found a yellowed, letter-sized envelope labeled “Hungarian Paprika Seeds”, and within were folds of tissue paper with about a dozen dried seeds in each fold.

I imagined my grandmother coming to America to marry the man she had met when he visited his own relatives in Hungary a few months before.  Imagined her tucking envelopes of seeds into her suitcase so she could carry on her gardening tradition from the old country.  Then I wondered if those seeds would still be viable if they were really brought over in the 1920s.  Maybe they were sent over later.  Maybe she saved them from her own garden in America.  Nevertheless, as far as I could figure, they had to be at least 20 years old.

I decided to try putting a few in a wet paper towel and watching to see if they would germinate.  They did not.  But then I tossed some into several outdoor planters, and voila!  I started getting pretty, green plants that were quite healthy.  But I couldn’t stop asking myself, “Is it possible that seeds as old as 10 to 20 years would still grow?  Or did much fresher seeds somehow find themselves in an old photo album that hadn’t been looked through in years?”

My endless curiosity lead me to the internet in search of how old a seed can be and still be viable.  Apparently the oldest mature seed that has grown into a viable plant was a Judean date palm seed about 2,000 years old, recovered from excavations in Israel.  It was germinated in 2005.  Amazing!

Some seed companies that are capitalizing on the idea that we will eventually have some sort of apocalypse, either zombie or otherwise, sell “survival seeds” which they say can last up to ten years because they have been dried in a very precise way.  Drying methods do apparently make a difference.

Also, I found that germination is not an on/off state, as if all seeds in a pack go bad at once.  As seeds get older the percentage that germinate will start to drop off, and then at some point will fall to zero. 

Now that I think about it, I probably tossed a dozen of my grandmother’s paprika seeds into those pots and only got a few plants.

So, back to the companies selling seeds for the apocalypse.  These companies say that properly dried seeds still have a 50% germination rate after 15 years.  But then, how are you going to maintain a proper vegetable garden with zombies stomping through it all of the time?

The Science of Seed Saving 

According to information from a U.S. Department of Agriculture website, seed is best stored through the winter at 50 degrees and at 50 percent humidity.  A good way to store unused seed packets is to place them in a sealed jar with powdered milk or rice at the bottom to absorb moisture.  Store your seed jar in the refrigerator or a cool area such as a basement.

There is an excellent book on seed saving titled The Manual of Seed Saving: Harvesting, Storing and Sowing Techniques for Vegetables, Herbs and Fruits by Andrea Heistinger.  In it, she gives detailed collection and storage methods for seeds from different varieties of plants.

She explains how to set aside a few plants each year and let them go to seed, and then how to harvest the seeds.  How easy or hard it is to collect seeds depends on the particular plants you are collecting them from.  Some are as obvious as tearing a bean-like pod apart and skimming the seeds out, while others may require soaking until they ferment, or using a sifting device to separate them from the husks and hulls, or sometimes just a little breeze will do the job.

They separated wheat from the chaff in the early days by tossing it in the air so that the wheat seeds fell more heavily to the ground while the chaff (extra stuff), blew away in the wind.  This reminds me of a memorable scene in movie, but I can’t remember the name of the movie.  It was a beautiful scene: women wearing long skirts and white blouses with scarves on their heads, standing in front of a pretty red barn, tossing the wheat into the air, the chaff floating on the breeze, the sunset in the distance… What the heck was that movie?

But, seriously, seed libraries are awesome.  I’ve never felt like I could afford to buy very many packets of seeds, but now I can get them free and return a few at the end of the summer, though I’m not obligated to do so.  Everyone understands that it’s not always possible to save and return your seeds, especially in the first year. 

A Larger Seed Exchange 

In addition to small libraries like ours, where we might have 20-30 people borrowing and sharing seeds, there are also some very large, commercial-type seed-sharing businesses, like the ones that donated seeds for our library to get started.  Most of these offer opportunities to become involved in the saving and sharing process either through donations of money or seeds.  Others may purchase seeds from farmers, giving them an opportunity to make some extra money.

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange is able to operate on a larger scale without fear of government intervention because they store seeds in climate-controlled areas and they perform their own germination testing in order to ensure it meets both federal and Southern Exposure standards.  Test results are printed on the packet to help you determine planting density and quantity needed.

Southern Exposure is located on a 72-acre farm between Richmond and Charlottesville, Virginia, they work with over 50 small farms across the U.S. that provide the seeds, and they are always willing to take more.

“We’re always happy to talk to farmers who are interested in diversifying their income streams by growing seeds for us,” they state on their website.  “Despite working with many growers who come to us with little experience saving seed, we find that the seed we buy from them at the end of the season is more reliably true-to-type than the seed we buy wholesale.”

 Cha-ching! Sounds like opportunity knocking.

The post Check Out These Seeds! Grow Hardy Plants and Preserve the Food Chain with a Seed Library appeared first on Homestead.org.

Ok, the howling was from the neighbor’s dogs, and I was really just sitting on my porch steps, but it was dark because I had been trying to boil that stuff down for hours to no avail. My maple syrup ended up just being maple water.

But it was a pleasantly warm evening because I had been saving my maple sap for months in plastic coffee containers in my deep freeze. After all, I needed to have a lot before I could cook it down.

When I embarked on my maple syrup journey, I had heard of regular folks who strung up milk jugs in the trees to collect that lovely nectar, so I thought for sure I could do this, especially since I had found some fancy-looking metal buckets designed especially for the task with a spout (spile), lid, and all. I only got three buckets because I just wanted to give the process a try.

When I posted my initial efforts on Facebook with pictures of these containers hanging from the trees, I got comments obviously meant to discourage me.

“They say it takes nine gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup,” one person said.

“I think it takes 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of maple syrup,” another said.

And I said, “If I only make an ounce, it will be an ounce well worth it. I just need to see if I can do it!”

When I looked it up, it was indeed 40-43 gallons to a gallon, but who’s counting? I’m sure it varies, especially when some types of trees have more sugar in their sap than others.

I had done my research and learned that they didn’t necessarily have to be sugar maples; just about any kind of maple tree can be tapped. Sugar maples are said to have the highest sugar content, but red, black, and silver maples also work. Trees with less sugar would need to be boiled down longer to get a comparable sugar content.

Not only maples, but other types of trees can be tapped as well, including black walnut, which is said to have a—surprise, surprise!—nutty flavor. Birch can also be tapped, and is said to taste more like molasses; box elder can be tapped for a syrup with a milder taste. And then there is sycamore, which is supposed to taste like butterscotch. Yum! There is also hickory syrup, but it is more often made with the bark, and that makes me want to learn more. But back to tapping trees—well, I’ll stay on the bark topic long enough to mention that I once saw a movie about escaped holocaust victims who survived in the woods in the winter by cutting bark and using it as face masks to keep from getting frostbite. Such ingenuity!

Ok, so back to my maple syrup journey. Now all I needed to do was look around at the trees in the woods on my property and ask myself, what kind are they? Deciphering which trees are which isn’t very easy for some of us. I’ve tried to learn to identify trees from their leaves and bark, and I recognize the most obvious ones like oak and maple, but that is in the summer when they have leaves, and even then, some trees have leaves that are too high to see.

But maple I recognize because my yard is full of maple leaves in the fall, so maple is what I chose. I also did a Google search to identify the type of maple leaves and concluded they actually were sugar maple.

I’d also read that there is a certain time for collecting sap, so it varies from one region to another depending on when the weather warms up enough for the sap to start running in the trees. It is best to collect it in early spring from around February to March when there are freezing nights of temperatures below 32° Fahrenheit and days warm up to above freezing in the 40s. The cycle of freezing and thawing causes pressure changes that make the sap flow. This can last for four to six weeks, but you should stop collecting it when the trees begin to bud out because this can cause the sap to taste bad. I tapped my trees from Feb. 2 through April 2.

So, first, I grabbed my drill and the correct size bit for my spile. The spile is the little spout that goes into the tree. The size of the bit varies depending upon the size of your spile, usually 5/16″ or 7/16″, if you use one, or perhaps the size of a tube or something else you use to collect sap in. They even make special plastic bags designed for sap collection.

I found three trees that were large enough (at least 10-12 inches in diameter) and chose a spot about 4.5 feet from the ground (as I’d read was important) on each tree and started drilling until I made it through the outer wood and into the empty area where I presumed the sap would flow. A tiny drip came out to let me know I’d hit the right spot. Then I hammered the spout into the hole, tied my collection bucket to the tree, and put its little peaked hat on to keep bugs and rain out. In a larger tree that I tried, I didn’t get that initial drip, but it started to drip a little later. My buckets came with a hanger, but I ended up using some rope to secure them from high winds.

I went out to check the next day and found maybe a half cup of sap in each container, as well as a couple of bugs. I picked out the bugs and poured the sap into an old coffee container and put it in the freezer to be cooked down later, when I’d collected “enough.”

Of course, this was the point in time when I thought of an episode of the show Naked and Afraid where a woman found a vine in the forest that she was able to cut in half and drink from. So, it occurred to me that if I am ever lost in the woods and desperate for something to drink, and I happen to have a sharp knife with me, I might be able to cut deep enough to get some sap. Too bad I don’t normally hike with my drill.

Okay, back to the syrup. So it went like that each day, maybe a cup or cup and a half of sap in each bucket, pouring it into my coffee cans and freezing it in hopes that I would eventually have enough to boil down for a few ounces of syrup. And when I had about 10 cans full of frozen sap (still far from the 30 gallons prescribed), I decided to pick a nice day and start trying to boil it down.

I read that when you boil it down, it will let out quite a bit of sticky steam, so it’s best to do it outside over a fire rather than coating your kitchen walls and ceiling with it, unless you just like the idea of walking into your kitchen and taking a lick at your sweet walls now and then. Hence, me with my fire in the wheelbarrow in the middle of the night because it took way longer than I thought it would. I regret to say that the cup or two of sap that I ended up with after boiling it down as long as possible was just a little bit sweet and nowhere near thicker than water.

But I did learn a few things. Like, even though making the syrup is a little more than I can handle, it’s free sugar water and might be especially useful if you are stranded in the wilderness without something to drink. I guess it might even offer a few calories to sustain you, and the protein in the bugs is a bonus. And don’t forget about covering your face with bark!

But lo and behold, about a year later, some friends invited me to go visit Moonstruck Maple on Brooks Mountain Road in Brooks, WV. Nestled in the Appalachian Mountains, on a long, windy road that made me a bit car sick, these people make gourmet maple infusions (yummy little treats) and pure maple syrup. They share the mountain with Three Rivers Avian Center, which is also a great place to visit if you are into observing big wild birds such as hawks, eagles, falcons, and owls that they have saved and nurtured back to health. The folks from both establishments have a great respect for the birds and other wildlife on that mountain and try their best to conserve it.

But back to the maple syrup. Instead of gathering syrup in containers and taking it back to be cooked, the folks at Moonstruck Maple have run lines from the trees and directly to what is called an evaporator for storage and cooking. The evaporator is housed in a small building called a sugar shack, used specifically for cooking it.

Alisha and Mike Segars are the owners of Moonstruck Maple, and Alisha answered a few questions for me.

She explained that they use food-grade tubing made specifically for the maple syrup industry. They run 15 to 20 taps from the trees onto a series of 3/16-inch lines that run from the trees and join to a lateral line of the same size, which then runs into a 1-inch line that runs into their collection tank. In addition to getting it to the collection tank more easily, tubing also creates a vacuum and pulls more sap out of the trees than might naturally drip out. And they run their lines downhill, so that helps as well.

The sap then goes through a reverse osmosis system, which uses pressure to take out 50% to 75% of the water before the sap enters the evaporator for boiling down. Now that is a big difference! Next, they still must heat the sap by keeping a wood fire burning, but the way the evaporator is designed, it is able to heat up to 700°.

Alisha said they have the largest evaporator in their main building, but they also have a few smaller evaporators positioned in different areas on the property where they tap trees. The evaporator in their main building can hold 3,000 gallons, while the two smaller evaporators can hold 500 to 600 gallons. She bought hers from a company called CDL. But I did find that some companies sell evaporators online for smaller amounts of sap, all the way down to 17.5 gallons.
An evaporator is comprised of a large shallow pan that provides a lot of surface area for evaporation and is heated from the bottom. Some are simple open pans, while others have compartments that are arranged in a serpentine manner so that the sap travels through the system as it heats and moves to the end near the spout when it is finished. Some include a filter, thermometer, and a float to manage how quickly fresh sap is allowed into the heating pan. Some are attached to a heating unit, and others are mere pans that you need to find a way to heat, either by setting them on a grill or over a fire. The main one at Moonstruck Maple includes what amounts to a woodstove underneath that comes as part of the setup.

You can also buy a separate reverse osmosis system, and depending on size and quality, those can cost anywhere from $100 up to a thousand dollars or more, and you can buy systems that filter or use UV rays to sterilize. Basically, you can spend as little or as much as you want to, depending upon whether you do it as a hobby, or hope to sell it on a larger scale, or perhaps just want to get a few dollars at the farmer’s market.

If I chose to do it over again just as a hobby, I don’t think I’d want to run a lot of lines over my property, but I would probably tap a lot more trees to get more sap at once, and use either those special bags or milk jugs (if only I bought milk in jugs)… oh, wait! Can I use plastic coffee cans? Maybe.

And I’d consider buying a small evaporator pan or finding one second hand and maybe using that old charcoal grill that I forgot I had… after I clean the wasp nests out of it.

And if I wanted to get a little more serious about making maple syrup than that, I guess I would consider finding a way to buy a cheap reverse osmosis system because that makes a really big difference. Imagine, 50% to 75% of the moisture removed before you even start cooking it!

The post Lessons From My Maple Syrup Misadventure appeared first on Homestead.org.

When I first saw my house, I thought it was just a simple wooden house covered in vinyl siding. Then I ventured around back and saw a small area where a piece of siding had been removed to expose its real core material: logs. But not logs laid horizontally as with most log cabins, but logs standing up vertically.

I personally had never seen a log cabin constructed like this before. I’d always known log cabins to have their logs laid out like Lincoln Logs, horizontal and interlocking. But while I thought this style was unique, with a little research, I found that these cabins have been made by different people from various cultures around the world throughout history. I found references to Swedish cabins built with vertical logs in early settlements, as well as in Hungary, where my ancestors originate, and in France and Canada.

I found several companies that build cabins of this sort today, branding them with references to their origin. For example, Caribou Creek Log Homes can build you a Swedish vertical log cabin and refer back to its roots in Sweden, where they used a “full scribe” method of making grooved and interlocking logs that are erected vertically.

I also found a company called Canadiana (no, that’s not a typo—it actually does end with the letters I-A-N-A.) that can build you a Canadian style vertical log cabin, because they say the style of construction has deep roots in Canada (New France), where French colonists built them along fur trade routes because they were easy to build and used what trees were available on site. They refer to it as Canadian vernacular architecture, meaning an architectural style that is designed based on local needs, materials available, and using local traditions. Originally, vernacular architecture relied on the design skills and tradition of local builders rather than formally schooled architects.

I also found that many refer to this style of cabin as a stockade cabin, which brings to mind forts known as stockades built by the cavalry and seen as strong protection from enemies. One might note that the fences built around the forts to protect them from the enemy were also built with upright logs. I guess I’m saying that this type of structure has often been used where strength was most needed.

When I bought my house, most of the other people on this hill were part of one family, so I was able to ask about who built it, and I found from a relative, Sarah Shelley, that it was built by her great aunt, Lyda Aliff Carroll. Personally, I found that really inspiring for me as a woman, but also pretty amazing. Not because I don’t think women can do anything men can do, but because it was built in 1931, when most women weren’t allowed to do much themselves. (We got the right to vote in 1920, but we didn’t get the right to have our own checking accounts until the 70s, so I imagine it was her husband who had to sign for any loans that may have been needed for materials.) And she did have a husband, so he may have also helped her with the lifting and such. I don’t know.  I’ll just put this out there for any relatives who happen to have more information on the building of this house. I’m interested! Let me know. One of the great things about Homestead.org is that they are willing to let writers add to their stories over time, and I will do just that to correct any errors or add additional information you may provide.

So… back to the ease of building it.

First of all, these cabins are usually built using the trees that exist on the building site. This is possible because the method uses smaller trees in both length and width, which are possibly more abundant, or at least, from my experience, a lot easier and less dangerous to fell.  These cabins are built using logs that are about 8 feet long, just high enough for a one-story cabin when stood on end. One needs only to dig a shallow trench and line up the logs, standing each one on end, and put chinking between the logs, or sometimes slats of wood (board) are used to connect the logs. Mine had chinking that was held in partly by lots of long nails. I’m assuming she put the nails in to add something for the chinking to hang onto and then smeared it on.

I’m not sure what type of machinery she might have had available. At first, I thought that it might be a little difficult for a single person to stand an 8-foot log on end, until I noticed that smaller diameter logs are usually used as well.

Another advantage is that by adding logs this way, you can make the walls of the house as wide as you want them to be. If you want to build a small cabin, use fewer logs. If you want to add on, add some more logs. With a standard log cabin with logs laid horizontally, you pretty much need to decide on a size and stick with it. That means that if you want to build at 10 foot wide house with horizontal logs, you need to have 10-foot-long logs, a 15-foot house would need 15-foot logs, etc. Those trees would be harder to cut down, harder to lift, and maybe harder to find on site.

And lastly, I found a few advantages, or perhaps only perceived advantages, to their sturdiness once they are built. With vertical logs, there is less shrinkage around doors and windows as the house ages and settles. Apparently, when logs age, they shrink in diameter, which pulls the horizontal logs downwards around door and windows sills and can cause some problems, but by propping the logs up vertically, the shrinkage just slightly increases the gaps between the logs and you can add extra chinking to make up for it, unless you decide to get really fancy and fill in with interlocking boards. Logs don’t shrink as much lengthwise.

Some think water would be more likely to permeate the logs from the end, while others have noted that a simple two-foot overhang from the roof would solve this problem. Personally, I thought that all houses had good-sized overhangs. The overhang on mine looks to be about a foot and a half, and I haven’t had any problems with water dripping under it.

I’ve always told myself that my house is sturdier with its thick logs as opposed to frame houses, and I like to think that it might even be able to withstand certain weather events better than cabins with horizontal logs. After hurricane Helen felled numerous trees in the forest behind my house, I began thinking of what might happen if one of those trees had fallen on my house. This is just my theory, well, actually I think I found a few others who backed me up, but I believe that the vertical logs would hold up better if a tree fell on my house because, if you think about it, it is easier to break a stick by hitting it in the middle than it is by hitting it on the end. But then I cut a few holes in the house to add extra windows, so that kinda ruins my confidence in the stability of this particular house.

Unfortunately, using younger, smaller trees has one disadvantage. I have found sources that say older trees have more heartwood than sapwood, and heartwood is what builds a tree’s resistance to insects and moisture. As a result, trees with more heartwood are said to be more stable and durable. But then, many other things can affect the strength of the logs, too. For example, I’ve read that trees that are grown in high altitudes have more heartwood than trees growing in lower altitudes. I live in Bluefield, WV, where the altitude is 2,611 feet above sea level, which is higher than some since we are a mountainous region, but not terribly high. And of course, you could also consider that different species of trees, such as oaks, have harder wood. Or you can stop analyzing the situation so much and just use the trees around you. I like to think that is how Lyda Aliff Carroll felt when she built mine.

The post The Hidden History of My Log Cabin: The Straight-up Truth appeared first on Homestead.org.

My point is that I guess these people from shows in… 1994! God, I’m old! …inspired me to believe that I could do just about anything myself if I just had a chance to see them do it once on TV. And as it turns out, we now also have YouTube, so we can look up how to do something and watch it again and again. Yep, that’s how old I am. Older than YouTube!

I’m 66 years old now, and through buying this as a fixer-upper and owning it for 30 years, I have learned how to do an awful lot of things that people often pay professionals to do. Yes, I’ve made mistakes, and many things will never look as good as they would have been if done by a professional, but they never would have been afforded if they had needed to be done by a professional, and they are good enough for me. And I have to selfishly say, “me” is all that counts in this situation. People and relationships come and go, but this house is my solace, my retreat, the place I have designed specifically for me and however many cats I choose to have at any given time. Two for now, and perhaps a few too many in the past. Because of my love of the woods, I’ve cut holes in the walls and installed more windows, and because of my love for my cats, I’ve built a large wire enclosure for them out back, screened in my front porch and put cat passageways in every door in the house so they can visit me if I’m in the bathroom, bedroom, or porch, but never get out and be eaten by bears.

So, what DIY repairs have I learned over the years? Well, first there was plumbing. Oh, lord, lots of plumbing when you consider the pipes under both sinks were rusted out when I first moved in, and there were small leaks here and there, and then there were the frozen pipes each winter and just all of the little things that happened over the years like water heaters springing leaks (lesson learned with that one: no amount of  epoxy will seal a leak in a water heater. Better off cutting it in half and turning it into a planter.)

I glean what knowledge I can not only from YouTube videos and TV shows, but occasionally from those I think are knowledgeable on the topic. Unfortunately, as a woman, I’ve often had men assume that I am asking them for help when I only want advice, and I’ve also endured the assumption that I must not have any knowledge at all since I am asking, and that I “really should call a professional.”

“A plumber will do it for you in an hour and only charge $200,” said a friend that I called for a little advice. That’s when I realized I’d rather spend a few more days in my basement, grunting and twisting to try to get that one pipe loose than to pay “only” $200!

Professional-assisted DIY Repairs

But one time, ONE time! I decided to call some plumbers because my water lines froze and broke, and I was struggling to loosen a particular pipe because it was between two other pipes, and I couldn’t figure out which way to turn it. So, I ended up calling plumbers, and they did pretty much what I had thought of doing, but was warned against by another advisory friend. They cut a pipe. If only I had had the confidence to cut that pipe, I would have saved myself $200. But where I did save some money was by telling them that they could fix my plumbing up to a point (my $200 limit), and I was perfectly capable of handling the rest. That worked out well. They finished with the pipes, and I replaced the faucets that had blown out. I’m not sure if “blown out” is the correct word for it, but they do tend to get stopped up and stop working after a big freeze, or after all of the rusty water flows back through and clogs them up.

But the next thing these plumbers did was introduce me to the miracles of PEX pipe, and how easily it can be put on with a tool for cutting the pipe and crimping a sleeve around it. There is also an insert you put inside, kind of like fixing your garden hose. I was feeling intrigued and began wondering if perhaps I should invest in the gadget for doing this, which seems to vary in price from $20 to $80 or more. Hmm… I believe it depends on how much you plan on using it, and if perhaps it isn’t cheaper to go with the tools that you have. I’m still considering the idea. But how will I know if a $20 tool will work, or if I have to buy the most expensive one? I suppose that is a question with all tools, though. And I guess I probably spent as much or more on all of my pipe wrenches. Perhaps those who are just getting started should consider which will work best for their house.

Oh! Here is one of the most important DIY repairs I learned for plumbing, and I only learned it a couple of years ago. If you slide an old piece of pipe that is a couple of feet long over the end of your wrench handle, it will give you more leverage to provide torque for turning the wrench. In essence, it seems like it gives you double the strength that you had. It has helped me unstick pipes that I couldn’t budge with my wrench alone. In fact, they make lengtheners for the lug wrench you use to loosen the lug nuts on your car when changing a tire, too. That way, you can throw your whole body into turning those lug nuts when the mechanics make them too tight with their pneumatic drills.

The flow of water through pipes usually makes sense to me, so I’m much more willing to fool with plumbing than electricity. However, I have learned how to rewire a plug or two and fix a few things. What’s my secret for avoiding electrocution? I turn off the main breaker with no trust for the way things are labeled in my handwritten, scribbled-out, and revised breaker box chart. So, I do all electrical DIY repairs during daylight with a flashlight.

But once again, it has been YouTube to the rescue when I’ve needed to take something apart and try to repair it. For instance, I learned that a simple switch on my washing machine kept it from starting one day, and all I had to do was remove that switch. The purpose of the switch was to stop the machine from spinning when you lift the lid. So now all I have to do is remember not to stick my hand in the washer while it is spinning. Duh. Luckily, I don’t have any kids in the house.

I managed to fix my dryer by watching a YouTube video as well. Unfortunately, I had a few screws left when I put it back together, so now it squeaks a bit while running, but it has been 15 years since I fixed it, and it is still working. When I dry my clothes, I just shut the door to the laundry room and tell the cats to cover their ears when I turn it on.

You can learn a lot from watching YouTube videos, but at the same time, it is just like politics. There will be those who are helpful and those who dispute them, those who want you to learn from their experience, and those who want you to call a professional… such as themself.

For instance, when my muffler rusted and fell off my car, I watched some YouTube videos before buying a new generic muffler and replacing it myself. But I also found some competing videos where mechanics showed themselves under cars banging on parts of the exhaust system with sledgehammers in an effort to prove that if a muffler was rusty enough to fall off, then the rest of the system was probably too rusty as well and was probably ready to fall apart.

Personally, my car is so old that there is no telling what might go wrong with it next, so I see no need to invest $1,000 in a new exhaust system. My muffler is hanging in fine so far.

I have to say that I am constantly astounded at how much people pay to have new shingles put on their roof, and I believe that I have probably saved the most by doing that myself. And aside from having no labor expense, another thing that made it more cost-effective is that I didn’t do it all at once. I was doing my very best to avoid credit card debt at the time, so I used my $500 tax return to buy enough supplies to do one side of my roof, and I did the other half a few years later after saving up more money. The cost of the roofing materials has probably gone up quite a bit since I bought this house in 1994, but you can’t beat the cost of labor: zero!

How did I do it? I was familiar with the process of hanging asphalt shingles because I had helped a friend hang a few shingles on his house as a repair, so then I started doing the math to figure out how many shingles I would need. Then I started looking into the cost of metal roofing and the ease with which it could be put on, and I decided upon that. Instead of nailing up dozens of 12’ by 36” shingles and overlapping them, all I had to do was screw up about 10 sheets of metal on each half of the roof. They only weigh around 20 pounds each, and I’m the kind of person who would rather hoist more at once rather than climb up and down and up and down with loads of shingles on her back.

For the first few days I had a good friend helping me, but he mostly took part in helping me yank the old shingles off the roof. I finished the other half a few years later, after the internet was invented and I learned that you don’t need to remove the shingles before putting on a metal roof because the metal is less heavy than shingles.  Metal roofs weigh between 0.7 and 1.5 pounds per square foot, while asphalt shingles weigh between 2 and 5 pounds per square foot.  Gee, how about that!

As with everything, I wouldn’t say I did it perfectly, but I did it perfectly acceptably. One half of the roof may appear upon inspection to be a half inch higher than the other side, (since there are still shingles under one side) but you’d have to look pretty hard to tell, and I’m not out thousands of dollars for labor.

As I write this, I’m planning to drag an old hose into the house to snake out my washing machine drain hose. Something I sort of learned from a neighbor. He had a big, long PVC pipe that he pushed into the straight part of my drain hose in the basement in order to push out any blockages. I never would have thought of that. I would have thought I needed something more solid rather than hollow, or that I needed to buy some sort of professional auger, but it worked!  So that gave me the idea to use a stiff garden hose and just cut the metal end off so that it would fit through the curved parts of my drain hose. It works like a charm!

With each new project you learn something new and actually have a strange hope in your mind that you will somehow need to do it again because you are proud of what you have learned, even though you are totally exhausted and hope that you won’t have to. Is that what you call cognitive dissonance?

Where to find Materials for Cheap (or Free)

• There are places where you can rent a kabuki tractor and ride it down the street with just a driver’s license. Who would have thunk it? I did this when I decided to order a load of crusher run gravel to fill the lumps in the private road up to my house. I’m not sure if anyone was watching, but I waved my hand like royalty as I drove it up the street. I did manage to tip it over once, but it has these pneumatic feet that you can use to lift it back up. That doesn’t mean I didn’t fall though! More like a jump, I guess. I was young and spry at the time.
• Many auto supply stores and home improvement stores have tool loaning programs
• If you find the right people in charge of demolition with the city or county, sometimes you can get hold of stuff from old houses. That’s how I got the super-cool, old-fashioned, iron, crank-out frames for my picture windows.
• Another place to find free boards is inside the things you would normally throw away, like old mattresses and couches. They are made up of slats of wood that can be used for shelves and all kinds of things. And by breaking them apart to save the wood, you save on the cost of dump fees.
• Free pallets are another way to get cheap wood. Lots of companies advertise that you can have them so they can get rid of them.
• Searching for things on the side of the road. One man’s trash is another’s treasure! That chair might be fun to reupholster!

The post How to Save Money with DIY Repairs (and Where to Find Materials, Cheap) appeared first on Homestead.org.

Instead of naming companies and risking any hard feelings or possibility of defamation, I think I would prefer to describe my experiences and share what I know, but I’ll refer you to Indeed.com or Glassdoor.com for reviews of specific companies. I guess I am partial to these two sites as far as looking for jobs and reading reviews of past employees’ experiences, although I realize that all reviews must be taken with a grain of salt. I would also advise searching the internet for each company’s website and scouring YouTube for any training videos that current teachers with those companies may have put out. There are quite a few, in fact.

Let’s Start with the Fun Part

When I worked for my first online teaching company, we had lessons set on slides that we would go through for each student on a one-on-one basis. We would enter the class a few minutes early and leave our cameras off until class time. During this time, we could see the students, but the students couldn’t see us. I would usually draw pictures on the screen until class time, and students would often join and add to my drawings. It was a sort of silent communication through pictures, and I think it helped build rapport.

I had one little boy, I’ll call him Peter, who always added to my drawings. If I drew a cat, he drew a fish for the cat to eat, if I drew a dog, he drew a bone, and if I drew a bunny, he drew a carrot for the bunny. Once we had exchanged drawings, I would open the screen to show my face, say “hello,” ask them how they were, and guide them through the preprepared slides.

One time, there was a technical error, and the lesson wouldn’t show up, but we could still see each other, so we just practiced conversation, and I asked if he could show me anything in his room. He had this huge collection of superhero characters that he introduced me to, and I loved the fact that he spoke so enthusiastically when showing them to me.

But the first time I opened the lesson and saw a little 5-year-old girl I’ll call LingLing, she was grimacing with her hair flying all over her head as her mother tried to tame the tangles with brush and comb. For those first couple of lessons, she would have that same angry look on her face and would scribble over my drawings with what seemed to be contempt, but I kept greeting her with funny cartoon animals and a big smile, until one day I opened the class, and her hair was smooth, and she was smiling at me, and things got better and better from there. She also stopped scribbling on my drawings and started drawing along beside them. But as she got older, she became more distracted and started walking around her room during our lessons, so I would gently call her, “Come back LingLing, come baaack.” Eventually, she would come back, and we’d have a nice lesson. I learned that coaxing worked better than telling with the younger ones.

And then there was the little girl who would point at my water bottle (I needed it to combat a dry throat), and she would roll back on the couch laughing hysterically. It took me a while to realize that she didn’t think water itself was funny, just the size of the bottle. I got self-conscious about it and started using a smaller water bottle, but I must say I enjoyed her sense of humor and watching her collapse on the couch with laughter. She also had a grumpy-looking baby brother or sister who sat in a bassinet, and sometimes she would turn the camera toward the baby’s pooched-out cheeks and little scrunched-up face and say, “See the baby!”

I also had a few older students, and we had some great conversations comparing their large cities in China with my town in America. When we exchanged answers on questions like,  “How many hospitals are in your city?” there would be so many in a city like Shanghai that the students couldn’t count them, but when it came to my answer, they were flabbergasted when I told them we only have one hospital (I’m a bit flabbergasted about our lack of hospitals myself, to tell you the truth).

I got to learn about their transportation, restaurants, population, etc., not only through conversation, but sometimes firsthand when a student would take his or her iPad out on the street during a lesson, and I would get to look up at the apartment buildings and shop fronts. Sometimes parents would be driving their children around during a lesson, and I’d get a great tour of the area. I was surprised to open my computer screen one day and see a girl with her hair flying back and her head bouncing up and down because she had logged in from her iPad, which was strapped to her mother’s back, as they rode to school on a Scooter.

I remember spending time in the park and on the subway, and I even accompanied some of them while they were eating in restaurants. And I really enjoyed hearing them tell me about the different foods they would eat. In fact, I gained about 10 pounds during that first year because I kept buying packaged versions of the foods they had spoken of, from hot and sour soup to mochi balls. Mochi is Japanese, but one child told me about them, and I just had to go buy a pack at Walmart and savor those yummy balls of ice cream encased in sweet dough.

Unfortunately, at a certain point in 2022, China chose to limit what companies could teach their children from outside of the country, and thousands of teachers/tutors from across the US and in other countries lost their jobs. This left a lot of us looking for other types of online teaching jobs, so there was a lot of competition out there. I applied to several companies and often didn’t realize that they weren’t the type of job I was looking for until I went through a virtual interview and learned the terms of each job. I am fairly satisfied with the company I’m working for now, but I continue to explore others as they pop up daily on Indeed.com, so I thought I would outline some differences to look at.

Curriculum

The first company I taught for had lessons with various exercises in speaking and completing sentences, matching words to pictures, and the like. They were pretty much timed to the minute and required no preparation time at all, which made it easy to set up back-to-back classes.

With my current company, some of their lessons are a bit short, so some advance preparation of other material may be necessary, but they also provide you with a host of other lessons that you can access to fill up the time slot.

And then other companies merely provide you with the platform (an online space to hold your course) and you are expected to develop an entire course on your own and find your own materials.

Qualifications for Teaching ESL Online

As far as my own qualifications go, I have a master’s degree in English, and I have college teaching experience, but I don’t have a grade school teaching certification. I also obtained an ESL (English as a Second Language) or TOEFL (Teaching Of English as a Foreign Language) certificate through an online course that costs around $150 and only took a few weeks. The first company I was with offered to finance part of this. And don’t worry, classes for teaching English as a second language don’t have anything to do with the student’s first language. I don’t speak Chinese, but I teach Chinese children.

But the variety of qualifications needed for these jobs is as varied as the companies. Some companies prefer you to have a teaching certification, some just prefer you to have a college education, and some prefer an ESL or TOEFL certificate. There are also a few, maybe one or two, that only require you to have some command of the English language, but those are the kind that may only pay about $7 per hour and even less to people in certain countries.

Other Common Requirements

• Many require background checks.
• Some require a passport even though you won’t actually leave your country to teach. I’ve only had one company ask me for this, though.
• One company insists that you have a computer that is less than three years old.
• Many companies require that you use a particular app to give your computer a speed test to prove that it is sufficient to handle the tasks at hand.
• Most require you to have your computer connected directly to your modem rather than just using Wi-Fi.
• Most require you to have a headset that is hardwired (plugged directly into your computer) because Wi-Fi may cause a sound delay.
• Some want you to submit a short introductory video of yourself or a short 5- to 7-minute video of yourself pretending to teach a class.
• Some want you to have at least two previous years of online teaching experience.
• Oh, and some actually do want you to be able to speak the language of the students that you teach. For instance, there is a job out there that I keep almost applying for until I notice that you need to know Spanish or Portuguese.

Hours Available

Most of my experience is with teaching children in China where there is a 12-hour time difference, so you can either teach at the wee hours of the morning from about 5 to 9 a.m. which would be 5 to 9 p.m. for them, or from 5 to 9 in the evening, which would be from 5 to 9 a.m. for them. But there are also jobs teaching in the U.S. and in other countries, so those times could vary accordingly.

As far as the number of hours you work, some jobs require you to work a certain number of hours, while others say you can work as many or as few as you’d like. Please note that “as many” hours as you want may not always be possible with the competition from other teachers at most companies, depending upon how they arrange their schedules.

It was easy for me to get 20 hours per week with that original company because I would just open up my schedule for certain hours and they would automatically fill those hours with classes. In the company I work with now, it is a little harder to get classes. They offer them randomly throughout the day as they become available, but you need to be ready to respond to their emails quickly to catch those classes before another teacher does. Each company is a little different.

Tax Issues

So far, I have taught through companies centered in the U.S., even though I taught children in China. This might be something you want to consider with regard to communication issues with the company and tax issues. The companies I have worked for so far did not take out money for taxes, but did send me a record of my earnings for the year so that I could calculate my taxes. Be sure to look into your tax responsibilities as a person who is self-employed. You may need to calculate your self-employment taxes quarterly if you make more than a certain amount of money. I was surprised to find out that self-employment taxes were somewhat higher than taxes I’ve paid in other jobs, so if you do need to file, be sure to count every expense you can think of because those costs for computer, internet, pencils, paper, printing ink or whatever else you might use can add up and take quite a bit off your bill. Something that didn’t occur to me at first was deducting the cost of the antivirus software, Microsoft Word, and any other programs or apps I might be paying for in order to facilitate my work. If you have a dedicated room for nothing but business, you might also be able to claim an exemption for a home office. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can get away with it because I teach from my bedroom with one of those desks that rolls over my bed. But, hey! When you’ve got sciatica and restless leg syndrome, being able to teach while sitting on your bed with your legs alternately stretched out, or cross-legged, or kicking and squirming, is priceless.

Contracts and Obligations

In this world of clicking to sign a contract every time you visit any website, most of us never read that five- to ten-page document full of big, long, complicated words in really tiny writing, but it is probably a good idea to read your contracts for jobs very thoroughly.

There is one company that still continues to send me e-mails asking me to teach classes even after more than a year, but I haven’t attempted to. I ended up being accepted for that job and signing a contract with them, but some things in the contract bothered me a little bit, specifically a statement that any payment disputes would be dependent on Singapore law and not USA, and a warning about teaching similar classes for other companies, and something about a $3,000 fine.

The wording was dubious, and I couldn’t figure out if they were trying to keep me from plagiarizing their works, which makes sense, or to keep me from teaching the same topic for any other company, which would be ridiculous because I’ve found that many online teachers work for several different companies in order to get enough hours.

Then I read some reviews of that company on Indeed.com, and teachers were always talking about other teachers “backstabbing” other teachers by telling their students to leave poor reviews on other teachers. The reason for this was that the company gave more classes to teachers with the best reviews. It seemed like this merit system was creating competitive salespeople rather than teachers, and I don’t think I want to be involved. I don’t even know any of the other teachers in my current company or my last two, and I like it just fine that way. My only competition is that of competing against student apathy and doing my best to engage them.

Pay Scale for Teaching ESL Online

Pay scales seem to differ widely. I was paid $20 per hour by my first company, but I only make $15 per hour with my current company, which is a little bit better than the second company I worked for, which only paid about $12 per hour. I’ve come to not expect much more. Before I was doing this, I was teaching adjunct English classes at local colleges and only being paid about $1,200 per semester for each class, which, if you divide up class preparation time and paper grading time, probably equals to less than minimum wage in any state.

If you search for online teaching, you may see one company offering $25-$30 per hour, and you have to ask yourself at what point you might get $30. With many of these companies, the pay bonuses are not so much for merit, but for recruiting other teachers. Personally, I’ve had some troubles in the past with recommending friends for other jobs I’ve had in life, so I’m not all that crazy about the idea.

Some companies advertise as high as $50 or more per hour, and I found many of those are really just providing you with a platform for teaching classes that you design completely on your own and decide on the prices. As I read further on one website for such classes, I found that you only get 70 % of the fee, so if my math is right (it’s not my strongest subject) that would mean that if you charged $50 you would get $35, and if you charged $30 you would get $21, which is okay, but then I found a note that said “In general, we recommend setting a price point of $18-$21 per learner, per hour in class.” Sooo … $18 to $21 would actually be $12.60 to $14.70 per hour after you give them their 30% fee, and you will be putting in a lot more than an hour when it comes to setting up your curriculum and reading papers. But perhaps you will actually get more than one student in a class. You never know.

I will say that it is hard to get full-time hours for most of these jobs, though I’ve seen offers for a few. I was able to get 20 hours per week with my first company, but that was about all of the available time. I am struggling to keep 6 to 10 hours with my current one, but part of that is because I’m partially retired and don’t want to work evenings and weekends. So far, as long as a man with a chainsaw doesn’t take away my social security check, I’m okay with making about $400 extra per month because I get to stay home, and the kids online can be lots of fun. If the man with the chainsaw does come, I’ll be scrambling to get all of the classes I can.

The post Making Money & Making a Difference: My Experience Teaching ESL Online appeared first on Homestead.org.

All you have to do is take a cutting of a coleus plant, leave a couple of leaves on top and pull off some leaves near the lower part of the stem so that you have two or three nodes for roots to grow from.  Then dip it in rooting hormone, stick it in water, and it will start producing roots within a week.

There are several rooting hormones on the market by names like RootMax and Rootboost. I can’t speak for them all, but I assume they are much the same. For years I was using RooTone and I’m currently using TakeRoot. Apparently, some (including RooTone) do contain a fungicide as well.

Once the roots develop, you just need to keep adding water each day because these little boogers are thirsty! I have never known a plant that is such a heavy drinker. And once they’ve developed a healthy set of roots, you can put them in pots with dirt and start trying to find places to put them all. I’ve propagated so many over the winter that I’m now hanging them from my ceiling in old coffee cans.

Why? Well at first it was to save money and get a jump on the short growing season in West Virginia, but then it became more of a passion … or an addiction? It fulfills in me some need to nurture, although I already have that fulfillment with my sweet cats. Maybe it is the idea of continuing life from generation to generation within a span of months. For me, this propagating coleus is like keeping a fire alive by passing it from torch to torch. I just can’t quit carrying on the life of that first seed planted last spring.

In a way, I find it much more satisfying to be watching these roots grow in clear water right before my very eyes than looking at a container full of dirt and wondering what may be happening with the seed you put in there last week.

Okay, I’ll stop being philosophical now.

The origin of the story is that for years I’ve been working on building a perennial flower garden where I have at least a few flowers blooming at once throughout the summer, but it has been 30 years since I moved into this house and the trees have branched out considerably. In the summer their leaves are blocking out more and more sunlight from my little circular flower garden and pond positioned in what used to be the sunniest part of my yard.

So keeping blooming flowers going has been a bit of a struggle, and then there are the deer. I live in a wooded area, and I love everything that comes with it: the deer, the racoons, the groundhogs, the possums, the squirrels, the occasional snake brought to me in the mouth of a cat. I love it all, and I’ve been torn about the deer eating my plants and flowers for many years. I enjoy seeing them out there grazing on the leaves of the bushes and natural grasses I let grow along edge of my yard near the forest, but when I’m smiling and gazing out the window and I see them start moving in closer and munching on my flowers, I end up banging on my window to scare them away. Then I feel a little elated to see them bounding off with their white tails flashing but lament the fact that I don’t get to watch them graze anymore.

So, I did some research into flowers that deer don’t like and found coleus. And yes, I have found that they will totally ignore it even while chomping down a hosta right beside it.

For a few summers I planted lots of coleus in my garden, starting it from seed and waiting for quite some time before they were big enough to be showy. Then I started wondering if I could somehow propagate them over the winter so I wouldn’t have to start the whole seed growing process over again, and it has worked like a charm. And even though they are shade tolerant, they aren’t averse to sunlight. I have some growing on bright windowsills and some under grow lights in a cabinet.

I was first attracted to coleus because of their deep, rich, red leaves complimented with bright green edges. I also love the fact that the leaves are pretty all of the time as opposed to blooms on plants that may last two weeks.  Then I discovered that there are many more varieties of coleus than I was originally aware of.  I found these beautiful frilly-leaved ones last summer, and then I also found bright yellowish green coleus and coleus with more lance-like leaves.

Apparently, there are over 300 different species of coleus and over 1,500 varieties, and they come in many, many different shapes and colors. It’s just a matter of where to find them. I’ve only found four varieties in the local garden stores around here so far, but I’m in a small town, and there is always the online ordering world.

Continuous Care for Coleus

Once you are growing your coleus in a pot or in the garden, two things you might want to remember are that they are still heavy drinkers, and if you miss a day or two of watering, they will droop quickly.

Coleus flowers are just small spikes of not very bright or showy flowers that most people just cut off, and cutting them off inspires more leaf growth. I did leave a few flowers last summer just for variety and perhaps something for the bees.

Coleus looks better when it is occasionally trimmed of its aging faded top leaves, as the younger leaves are richer in color. So, if you want to save those trimmings to make even more coleus, more power to you!

Rooting other types of plants

Over the years, I’ve found that it’s hit and miss sometimes with propagating plants, which I guess is why I’ve been so enthused about coleus. I can see results within days as opposed to weeks with something like pothos, or never with certain things I’ve yanked up on the side of the road in hopes of cultivating.

I have a small wisteria bush that is in an unsunny part of my driveway, and I’ve made numerous attempts to clone slips from it so I could plant one in a sunnier spot, but to no avail.

When I decided to browse around on the internet for more research on propagating plants in water, I found opinions that woody plants don’t propagate well in water, which makes sense considering the wisteria.

Woody plants are said to be better suited for soil propagation, and that I believe because I have found the easiest way to propagate forsythia is to just to bend a few lower branches down into the ground so they can root themselves while still drawing energy from their original bush. I tried that with the wisteria, but the branches were too stiff to bend to the ground.

There is also a plastic egg-shaped thing you can buy that clamps around a branch of a bush for trying to root that branch. It is best to either trim off a leaf to get a node for root growth or nick and peel some of the bark off in that area. Rub on some RooTone, then put some growing medium such as sphagnum moss (something that retains moisture but also drains well) in the container and clamp it together over the branch. I bought a few and attached one to a beautiful peach-colored Flame Azalea that I found growing in the woods. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find that tree since because I can only recognize it when it is blooming. Oh, well. Some day I might walk into the woods at bloom time and see it.

Others have suggested that it is cheaper just to use a plastic bottle or wrap some plastic wrap around the branch to hold the growing medium, and that sounds like a good idea to me.

Succulents are also said to be better not rooted in water. Pineapple plants are succulents, and I have a pineapple plant that I rooted from the top of a store-bought pineapple. I just put that one directly into the dirt after brushing on a little RooTone and kept watering it and watching it. At first, it was hard to tell if it was actually growing or if I was just keeping the top green, but after a while,e I started seeing new leaves and it has finally visibly increased in size. I’m not sure if I really have delusions of being able to grow it to a full-size pineapple plant or expect it to start bearing pineapples, but I enjoy the spikey foliage. I’ve seen YouTube videos that indicate it grows much faster, especially if you grow it in a bucket outside in a sunny area. If I can find a sunny area, I might try to boost its growth that way this summer. I wonder if deer eat them… a quick check with the internet says, “Yes.” Darn! I guess I’ll keep it in a pot inside.

The post Coleus: A Deer-Proof, Shade-Loving Garden Solution appeared first on Homestead.org.

But do fires really just pop up whenever you rub sticks together for a few minutes?  I once witnessed a demonstration at Wolf Creek Indian Village by a guy dressed in Native American garb.  He rubbed sticks together and started a spark that lit a fluffy piece of shredded bark; he held the burning fluff in his hand for an instant and blew on it causing smoke to plummet out, then the fluff ignited into flames.  It was like magic!

However, I find this scenario completely ridiculous now that I have a woodstove and have gone through the experience of trying to start and maintain a fire.  Even with the use of a lighter, fire starter logs, lighter fluid, and crumpled papers, building a fire that lasts for more than a few minutes is a challenge and a learning process.

Now that I know this, I believe that a scenario from the show “Naked and Afraid” is more realistic.  In case you have never seen it, don’t worry—this is a survivalist reality show, not pornography (the private areas are pixelated).  But even so, perhaps their self-consciousness over their nakedness is somehow hindering them in building a fire.  After all, the guy at the Indian village was wearing some pretty swanky buckskins.  All I know is that people on Naked and Afraid usually spend an average of two to three days trying to build a fire by rubbing sticks together.  By the time they succeed, they are usually naked and dying, because they can’t sterilize the water they gathered in their palm-frond bowls.

I’ve also heard the theory that the first man may have discovered fire when a tree or some dry grass was struck by lightning.  I guess that is plausible.  I just can’t figure out what prompted him to run out and throw a piece of meat on it.  Maybe the lightning caught the tree on fire and the caveman threw a carcass on top of it to put it out, the sweet smell of burning flesh triggered his appetite and, well, the rest is history.  Maybe I should put a lightning rod on my woodstove…

There is actually quite a bit of science involved in building a good fire.  I mean, even if you have a lighter or matches, the process of getting a fire going—and keeping it going—to warm your house on a constant basis, involves many factors like the type of wood you use and how well aged it is; how it is cut; how it is stacked in the stove; the tinder you use; how your chimney is set up for drawing air currents; and whether the doors or windows of your house are opened or closed.  Then you have to make sure you hold your tongue in the right position when you light it.  Well, maybe not that last part.

I decided to install a woodstove because I looked around at all of the fallen trees on my little hilltop and started imagining my electric bills withering down to nothing.  But first I needed to find a way to cut those trees up.  I found that axes aren’t nearly as easy to use as they appear to be in the old westerns, and when it came to using an old chainsaw someone gave me, I found myself to be pull-cord challenged.  So I went out and bought an electric pole-saw and about 60 feet of extension cord.

The first winter, I trudged through the woods behind my house looking for fallen trees and stretching the cord as far as I could.  Some trees would cut like butter, while others pinched the chain on my saw, causing it to fall off.  I suspect this has to do with a combination of impatience, lack of chainsawing technique, the fact that I bought the cheapest chainsaw on the shelf, and my inability to understand certain concepts that seem so clear to others, such as “tighten the screw on the chainsaw, but do not tighten it too much.”  I have problems with those shades of gray.

At any rate, whenever my chain fell off, I would have to pull off my gloves and protective glasses, pull out my wrench and go through the process of putting the chain back on.  Needless to say, at first I was pretty excited to find that certain logs I encountered in the woods were downright soft and fell apart like a well-cooked pot-roast.  This is when I first learned the term “punky.”  No, this time it doesn’t refer to disgruntled teenagers playing loud music, but soft rotten wood that burns quickly, but way too quickly.  It is also often full of ants, termites, and grubs, who tend to scream, grab their baggage and run for the hills (or your floorboards, in the case of the termites) once the flames start licking at their sticky little feet.  I guess that sort of foretells another problem with punky wood: the bugs that have any sense will jump off and hide in your house before you stick them in the woodstove.

For a few years, I ran out of trees that were within the length of my extension cord, so I ordered my wood from some people who advertise in the trading journal.  Those people would explain to me which woods they had available and whether they were woods that burned high and fast or low and slow, so I began wondering how I could identify the trees around my house.

First, I got out the old leaf key to determine what type of trees I had. Unfortunately, fallen trees rarely have leaves, so I began to try to analyze the bark (I also wondered if I should be sniffing the wood like I once saw Al Borland do on the show Home Improvement, or perhaps licking it).   I’ve still got a long way to go in figuring out how to identify wood, but I did find some information on the Internet about what types of wood are best.

After scouring the internet for information, the best and most complete advice I found on which woods are best, was from a chimney sweep.  I found a website for Master Sweep Chimney Service in Redwood Valley, California, and it had a very comprehensive guide to log types and other burning issues, such as what causes the most creosote build-up in your chimney.  Well, I guess it makes sense that the guy who has to clean the stuff out, learns what causes the biggest mess!

All of my life I have been told that you shouldn’t burn pine because the sap causes creosote to build up in your chimney, but Chimney Sweep Guy explains in his article that it is all about the drying process.  It turns out,  that moisture, not sap, is what causes creosote, but pine that hasn’t been aged at least a year will hold that water in the sap.  He explains that if the pine is aged for at least a year, it will cause less creosote buildup than many other woods, because at that point, the dried sap acts as an accelerant and it burns really fast and hot, which in turn heats up the chimney more, causing less condensation of water, which is what actually causes creosote buildup.  On the other hand, if not dried properly, pine will hold more water in its sap, and this is why fresh pine causes creosote buildup.  He says pine and fir are usually fine after drying for one year, but hardwoods such as oak need to be dried for over a year and up to three years.

When it comes to choosing logs, you have to decide if you want a fast, hot fire or a slow, long one.  For me, it’s a matter of economy and the ability to sleep through the night without having to restoke the fire.  Steve Nix, a professional forester and natural resource consultant who maintains a forestry/forest/tree information web site for About.com, explains that you will get longer lasting fires from wood that is very dense such as hardwoods.  So if you happen to have the advantage of being able to see what leaves are on a tree before you cut it, then you should know that hardwoods come from trees that have broad leaves (deciduous) and softwoods come from trees like pine, fir, et cetera (evergreens) which have needles instead of leaves.

For those who understand physics, Nix lists the following as the best burning firewood species.  He lists their BTUs per cord and their density, both of which are a bit Greek to me, so I ran to the dictionary to find out what a BTU is.  BTU stands for British Thermal Unit and is based on the amount of energy needed to cool or heat one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit.

Best Burning Woods for Heating:

Hickory – 25 to 28 million BTUs/cord – density 37 to 58 lbs./cu.ft.

Oak – 24 to 28 million BTUs/cord – density 37 to 58 lbs./cu.ft.

Black Locust – 27 million BTUs/cord – density 43 lbs./cu.ft.

Beech – 24 to 27 million BTUs/cord – density 32 to 56 lbs./cu.ft.

White Ash – 24 million BTUs/cord – density 43 lbs./cu.ft.

Drying logs

I spent last summer cutting up all of the trees that had fallen in my woods, assuming I would be able to use them this winter.  I thought, for sure, they had been lying around for long enough to be properly dried.  However, when I began searching for answers I found that the required length of drying time mentioned previously is only part of the drying process.

Just lying in a horizontal position for a year doesn’t necessarily dry out your wood.  The logs should be halved or quartered and stacked, uncovered, in the driest place possible, up off the ground, not too close to the house to protect it from possible termites.  Even though the nice, fresh cuts look prettier, the grayer-looking wood with lots of cracks is the wood that is properly dried.

In addition to the higher creosote issue with wet wood, I found at Wood-stove.org that the more moisture is in a log, the more energy it takes to heat it.  Freshly cut logs are supposed to have about 50% moisture before they are dried and 20% after, meaning they will generate around twice the energy when they are dry because they won’t be using that energy to heat the water inside.  Wow!  I think I understand now!  I believe that may be the cause of one of the problems I have with keeping a fire going.  Unless it is wood that I have purchased by the cord, most of my wood really hasn’t been aged properly.

Ignition

When it comes to lighting your fire, I’ve heard tell you can make fires with flint; steel wool and a battery; rubbing sticks together; or with a magnifying glass.  I saw Anthony Hopkins do the magnifying glass thing in a movie once.  That was cool.  But, assuming I’m in the comfort of my own home, I prefer to do it the old-fashioned way, with a lighter and a piece of paper or maybe one of those long matches.

Kindling

When it comes to kindling, I’ve tried it all.  I’ve hacked the bark off of logs for kindling, gathered sticks, crumbled up old students’ essays, and I’ve purchased those fire-starter logs.

One winter, I collected the cardboard tubes from inside my toilet paper and paper towels and filled them with the sawdust I created when cutting the logs.  It all seems to work pretty well as far as the initial rush of flames, but the wood products are more sustainable than the toilet paper tubes.

In scientific terms, it is said that “kindling should have a large surface to volume ratio, and more bulk than timber, so it will ignite easily,” which means that a bunch of twigs works well because the twigs have a lot of surface area in between and around them, thus more places for air to get in, and fire loves oxygen.  I found that information at a WikiHow site, which I find ironic because as an adjunct English professor, I always tell my students not to use such sites for their research.  It makes sense though, and the information was edited by Michael, Jack Herrick, Lisa Radon, Ben Rubenstein and 157 others.  I don’t actually know Michael, Jack, Lisa, or Ben, but those 157 others sort of tipped the scales in their favor.

Tinder

Tinder is the fast burning stuff you usually ignite first so that it will ignite the bigger logs and get your fire going.  It’s the shredded bark the guy at the Indian village used, or anything fluffy that lights easily from shredded paper to dryer lint.

I must note that I have a preference for those small brown fire starters that you can purchase for about a dollar and divide into fourths.  But a quick search of the internet also showed me many many ideas for how to make your own fire starters.  I found something about using coffee grounds, paraffin, and molasses melted together and poured into wax paper cupcake holders.  Another suggested cotton balls rolled in petroleum jelly; and then there was sawdust and paraffin; dryer lint and candle wax; pinecones and paraffin… The big question is: is the most commonly used ingredient (paraffin) cheap enough to warrant the effort of making homemade fire-starters?  Well, I looked it up and a 10-pound slab of paraffin is about $18.85 and then you will need coffee grounds (presumably free after using for coffee) and molasses for a couple of dollars a jar, while a readymade box of fire starters is $26.66 for 9 pounds.  So, if you’ve got some time on your hands, it might save you a little bit of money.

(Call it pessimistic, but I’m always a little skeptical of everything that people say saves money.  For instance, when I see shows about extreme couponing, I wonder if these people are really saving any money considering the gas and time that they spend, and whether they ever get wholesome food like meat, fruit, and vegetables, or if they only get 15 tons of Twinkies to store in their garage until they expire.  But, at the same time, you have to consider the fun factor.  Many of those extreme couponers see this as a fun hobby they can share with their friends, trade coupons, shop together, and so forth.  I get that.  But I digress.  Back to the fire!)

Air and Smokey Air

The last thing I feel should be mentioned regarding the maintenance of a fire in your woodstove, is air.  There are a few different theories out there about air and ways to get enough air-flow to feed your fire, but then, with air, comes the problem of smoke.  Wood that hasn’t been seasoned properly may smoke more than usual, or it could have to do with the up and downdrafts from your chimney, or maybe your chimney isn’t drawing right because it is too cold.

You can help a chimney draw by crumbling up some paper, lighting it and holding it up your chimney, if you have access that way.  With woodstoves, that isn’t quite as easy as it is with fireplaces.  Also, some say leaving a window cracked in the room can help balance out the air circulation and help the chimney draw better.

I personally have found the issues of air and smoke to be my biggest fire-starting problems.  I try to leave the woodstove door open for a while in order to help the air circulate and get the fire burning well, but soon the room is full of smoke.  In fact, if I die in a house fire, when they come in to investigate, they’ll find that I had five smoke detectors and two carbon monoxide detectors in the house, all of which were long ago hidden in closets and covered with pillows because I just couldn’t handle the constant beeping whenever I had a fire in my woodstove.

Homestead Heating Safety

The post The Mysteries of Fire (Including How to Sustain One in Your Woodstove) appeared first on Homestead.org.

But, as with anything, once you create it, you have to market and sell it.  And that seems to be one of my biggest worries: once I get started, where will I sell my fur or yarn?

Well, believe it or not, there is a festival somewhere in this world for just about every passion.  In fact, here in West Virginia we even have a roadkill festival!  Of course, they don’t really serve roadkill at the festival, just animals that commonly become roadkill.  But that is neither here nor there.  The fact is, that all across the country there are fiber fairs and festivals.  These festivals are not only a great place to sell your fiber products, but also a great place to bond with fellow fiber enthusiasts of all types from those who raise the animals for their fiber, to spinners, knitters, and those who engage in other types of fiber art.

I decided to check out one these festivals myself recently, so I attended the Olde Liberty Fibre Fair of Bedford, Virginia, an annual event which took place on a Saturday in April at Goode View Alpaca Farm located in Goode, Virginia.  Owned by Jim and Lisa Beck, the farm is reputed to breed top-quality alpacas selected from the most elite lineage and farms in the country.  They also have a farm store called the Natural Alpaca Shop and Learning Center where they have many alpaca goods and other gift items.

Let me set the scene for you: rolling hills in the background and strolling alpacas in the pasture surrounding the festival grounds.  I first went behind the main building, where the Beck’s sell their own Alpaca yarn and fiber products, and found rows and rows of tents with vendors selling fiber products and more: they were selling skeins of yard, balls of yarn, hats, mittens, sweaters, tanned pelts, cat toys, as well as baskets and hand-carved wooden instruments, and someone was selling lamb cuts (which is pretty darned hard to find at the supermarket).

At first glance, I was distracted by some cute ram lambs with tiny nubs on their heads where horns would someday be, and some very fluffy, white herding-puppies, not to mention the alluring smell of deep-frying Oreos and sizzling pepper steak at the concession stand, but I tried to stay on course and go for the things that would teach me most about my planned vocation.

As I envision myself raising rabbits and either cutting or plucking their hair, I realize that there would probably be more opportunities to sell my products if I could sell both hair and yarn, so I’ve considered the idea of learning to spin.  I haven’t even touched a sewing machine since fifth-grade home-economics class, but spinning wheels look easy to me, so I asked around.

Julie Jeavons, her daughter, Olivia, and their resident foreign exchange student, Caroline Johannessen, were giving spinning demonstrations at the fair.  Julie assured me that spinning wasn’t quite as easy as it looked, noting that she initially took classes for several months and has practiced for around 10 years.  But then Olivia said she’d been spinning since she was eight years old.  “I thought it was fun,” Olivia said, noting that she picked it up as a fun activity and then just kept on.  So, I guess I won’t know until I try, and Jeavons was a bit too protective of her spinning wheel and yarn to let anybody come in and mess it up.

She did, however, tell me a lot about the process her fur goes through before she gets to spin it.

She said she harvests fiber from the Rambouillet sheep they raise on Rose Lane Farm in Rocky Mount, Virginia. She then sends it to a fiber mill in Michigan.  At the mill, it is washed, carded, and made it into rovings so the fibers are all going in one direction and ready to be spun.  She dyes her own yarn in a dye-vat at home and says she always uses natural dyes that are homemade.

“For instance, black beans make a beautiful blue dye,” she said. “I usually let it sit in the vat for a couple of hours and then hang it on the clothesline to dry.”  She sells it at a local knitting shop.

But washing, carding, spinning, and dying are not all that goes into the making of a ball of yarn.  Down at the other end of the fair, Susan Myers demonstrated how to use special devices to make skeins of yarn into balls of yarn.  She used a swift, which is a type of wheel that is used for keeping the skeins untangled while a ball-winder turns around and around, spinning the yarn into a ball.  She said that you can purchase either an electrically-powered one such as hers, or one with a hand crank at the base.  She explained that the skein must be positioned just so when it is wrapped onto the swift because slightly crossed pieces of yarn can mess up the entire ball.

“They need to be perfectly straight, to begin with, because they can get tangled and that can be a disaster,” she said. “You need to check every tie to make sure they are not crossed over.”

So, there was an aspect of yarn-making that I’d never considered, and one or two more machines to buy.  She said she spent about $400 for the two.  Hmmm… I guess I’ll just take things a little at a time and maybe pick up some of these skills once my bunny ranch is further established.  I already have visions of an Internet site for Kish Mountain Bunny Ranch with a logo similar to a Playboy Bunny silhouette (but not so similar as to give grounds for a lawsuit).  Who knows how many people who have the wrong impression and wrong intentions might be drawn to the site?  Oh well, a hit‘s a hit, right?

For my first fiber article for Homestead.org, “Rabbits, Rabbits Everywhere (And Look at All That Hair!)”, I interviewed Leslie Shelor, owner of Greenberry House Yarn, Book and Vintage Gift shop in Meadows of Dan, Virginia.  At the time of that interview, she had previously raised German Angora rabbits but had taken a short hiatus.  I happened to run into Leslie at the fair and she said she is now back in business with the bunny fur.  She said she has three rabbits, but they are retirees and she doesn’t think she’ll be breeding them.

Leslie advised me that, since Angora-rabbit yarn is quite expensive, she has found that she can lower the cost by blending it with sheep wool, which also holds its shape better.

“It brings the cost of the yarn down from 24 to 28 cents per yard to 18 cents per yard,” she said, noting that she puts it on a spindle and weaves the two into yarn.

At the next booth, I found that if I never catch on to this carding-and-spinning-and spindling stuff, felting is actually a viable option.  Janice Stegall-Seibert of Felted Song Fiber in Louisa, Virginia had a variety of whimsical fairies with felted balls for heads and soft, flowing dresses of combed fiber, as well as other items like bowls and purses that she has created by felting wool.

Put simply, felting is the process of wetting down wool, adding some soap and rubbing it together until all of the fibers get entwined and become one.  You can do this to shape small balls for cat toys or for the heads of the whimsical fairies Janice sells, or you can flatten it out into sheets.  She also demonstrated another way of felting by using a needle to punch the fibers into a piece of stretched cloth to specifically shape her felt and add different colors. With this more specific technique, she has made lapel pins of felt.

Janice said she uses sheep wool in her felting and she buys it online or at fiber fairs.  She said she first got into felting as a hobby when was trying to take it easy while healing from an illness.  She said the first thing she made was a felted Santa Claus, then she started making the fairy sprites and other whimsical figures, as well as more practical things such as this marvelous invention: felted soap!  Touted on its label as being “for good clean fun,” Janice has encased a soap bar inside of felt so the felt lathers up with soap and exfoliates as it cleans.  She said wool is also naturally antibacterial.

And, get this!  As your soap shrinks from use, the felt cover shrinks right along with it. I thought that was fascinating.  At last, something good about the fact that wool shrinks so easily!  My ex-husband didn’t think it was anything good about the time I tossed his favorite sweater in the dryer and made it small enough to fit a toy poodle.

Ginger Ausband of Bedford was one of several people giving demonstrations and classes at the fiber festival.  She was using various methods to color fabric from batik (a technique of wax-resist dyeing) to acrylic ink, henna, markers, and tie-dying.

She explained the chemistry behind various techniques of coloring fabrics, such as why one should use alginate as a thickener, and soda ash to make the fabric more receptive to the color, and how urea slows the action of the dye.  During our conversation, Ginger mentioned that she homeschooled her children and that teaching them this sort of thing in the home also helped them learn about such school subjects as chemistry.

At that point, I came to realize that there is a collective consciousness among the vendors and attendees of embracing the homesteading movement, and each person or family has its own story, from Julie Jeavon passing on her spinning to her daughter, to Ginger Auzband, who has made homesteading skills such as cooking, canning, and fabric-dying parts of her homeschooling process.

And while some fiber enthusiasts may have come from generations of farmers, others are quite new to it but share the same love of nature and desire to be self-sufficient.  For instance, Jim and Lisa Beck both grew up in the city. “We met and got married, then moved to New Jersey,” says Jim, “From there we moved to Paoli, Pennsylvania, where our son Jimmy went to Conestoga High, and a month before Jimmy was to graduate, I said to Lisa, ‘Let’s do it.’  She looked at me like I was crazy!  I said, ‘Let’s have a change of life; let’s buy a farm!’  I was looking into raising alpacas for about three years and in the search, we had also come across some of the most amazing people that also raise alpacas.  We have not found anyone in this community who is not ready to help you!  It sounds crazy but maybe it’s the whole lifestyle, so here we go.  We sold the house in a day (yeah, one day… go figure).  We bought a farm 350 miles south the next week (and no we didn’t have family or friends in the area already).  This is a whole new experience, and we haven’t looked back since.”

Incidentally, in addition to their alpacas and alpaca products, the Becks were displaying several new members to the family during the fair: three very cute, very white, and very soft Maremma Sheepdog puppies.  These are a special type of Italian herding-dog that takes its guarding of alpacas or any livestock very seriously, and bonds with them in an adorable sort of way.

Jim described how the dogs will bow their heads in submission when around alpacas or sheep in order to show them that they mean no harm, and it’s not unusual to see a Maremma Sheepdog curled up for a nap with a sheep or alpaca.  However, Maremmas spend most of their time patrolling the perimeter of the pasture so they can bark off wolves or other wild animals that might attack their precious herd.

“For 2,000 years this has been bred into them, so it is instinctive,” Jim said. “They just naturally know what to do.”

Over the course of my day at the Olde Liberty Fibre Fair, I began to get the impression that fabric festivals aren’t strictly about fabric, as there were also wood spinners, flute and dulcimer makers, and basket weavers.  So, those of you who create any sort of handmade product may do well to consult the guidelines of each festival individually to see if you might be able to be a vendor.

How does one define fabric anyway?  Are pet-food bags made of fiber?  Regardless, Dee Bray-Ware, who cleverly goes by the name “Dee Bag Lady”, came up with something pretty unusual: carryall tote-bags made out of pet-food bags!  Dee used her sewing expertise to cut the bags in just the right places, reinforce critical areas with double stitching in some areas, even triple stitching in others, and zig-zagged for extra strength.  She said she even sews crosshatch reinforcement at the base.  What does all of that mean?  I don’t know, ‘cause I don’t sew; but I’m assuming they’re really strong.  Then she adds handles to create tote bags that you can use for groceries, as beach bags, picnic bags, storage bags… you name it.

At any rate, people who buy a lot of animal feed are likely to attend fiber festivals, and people who believe in recycling are sure to be happy about this idea.

She uses feed bags of dogs, cats, donkeys, chickens, goats, and rabbits, and she makes a deal with people that if they give her 10 bags, they get one free tote, and if they give her 30 more, she’ll give them another.  She said she has made over 400 bags in the past three years and has been selling them at craft shows.

There were 33 vendors at this festival and I regret not having a chance to interview each and every one, but I’ve tried to give you a sampling so you’ll know what to expect and what to look for.  I have found several websites that include listings of fiber fairs and festivals across the country from the Ozark Fiber Fling, to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, to the Hoosier Hills Fiber Fest, and on, and on.  Find one in your area and make a day, or a weekend, of it.  You won’t be disappointed.  To get you started, here are two websites with calendars of fiber fairs and festivals: http://fiberarts.org/calendar/ and http://www.ozarkfiberfling.com/fiber-arts-event-calendar/.

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Raising Butterflies for Profit?

I spoke to Ellen Reynolds, the owner of a “butterfly house” at Beagle Ridge Herb Farm in Wytheville, Virginia, to get an idea of how she was able to both breed and attract butterflies to her gardens, and how she has managed to turn growing a butterfly garden into another profit-making part of her business.

The reason I wanted to do this article is that I was sort of a geeky little kid who collected bugs and butterflies and went around telling people I wanted to be an entomologist when I grew up. Most of my friends thought I was a bit weird, riding my bike around with a bug catcher strapped to the back of my banana seat. But I have maintained a fascination for all bugs, and especially butterflies.

Over the years I’ve researched ideas for how to have my cake and eat it too, by raising butterflies to enjoy and make money from them as well. I’ve found a few businesses online that raise them and release them at weddings, funerals, and other events to make some money. I’ve also heard of a few places where you can order fully developed butterflies, still alive, but folded in little envelopes during shipping so they don’t beat their wings up, then you can either raise them or release them at different events. Many of these same places also sell eggs and larvae.

It seems that, if you have the energy, focus, and a little backup money to hold you through the lean times, just about anything can be turned into a money-making venture.

For one thing, you can start an herb and butterfly farm like Ellen and educate the public with tours of the gardens and lectures on local wildlife and fauna, but then that requires a ton more learning than I could ever cover in this article. In fact, Ellen has taken special classes to not only become a master gardener but a master naturalist as well.

They also have tea parties and other events in the butterfly house, which I think of as more of a butterfly garden because it isn’t really enclosed with solid walls or anything. It is more like a tent made of wire, with holes just small enough to keep butterflies from leaving, and just clear enough to let the gardens’ pastoral views and sunshine come in.

With an already thriving farm where they grow all types of herbs and also make and sell herb products, they started the butterfly house more recently. In July, Ellen said they were in the middle of their third generation of butterflies in the butterfly house, so her choice of plants to accommodate them has obviously been successful.

Growing Host Plants to Attract Butterflies

I always thought I knew a lot about butterflies from my childhood proclivities, but other than the fact that Monarch larvae must have milkweed to eat, I was not really aware that other butterflies were so species-specific when it comes to what plants their larvae prefer to eat and thus, which plants they lay their eggs on.

Butterflies use two different types of plants: those that provide nectar for the adults to eat (nectar plant), and those that provide food for their offspring (host plant). Butterflies are not picky about nectar plants and will drink from just about any flower available, but they are all plant-specific when it comes to where they lay their eggs so their caterpillars can eat what they prefer.

And just like each plant is different in its purpose, each butterfly is different in color and pattern. So while you may be used to choosing your plants according to how you like their shapes and the colors of their flowers, it might be fun to try choosing plants for your butterfly garden according to what shapes and colors of butterflies they can attract through the feeding of their larvae.

So who eats what?

Growing a Butterfly Garden

Fennel—which has wispy, feathery leaves and clusters of small, yellow flowers—and parsley—which has interesting leaves and clusters of flowers that aren’t very colorful—are the favorite for the black swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes). This is a large butterfly with what look like little shirttails on the bottoms of its lower wings, hence the name swallowtail. Well, actually, I guess they named it after the type of tails swallows have, but I think they also look like shirttails. You will probably notice its vivid yellow and blue coloring on the edges of the wings before you ever realize that its predominant color is black.

The larvae of the comma butterfly (Polygonia c-album) prefer hops for dinner. Yes, the same hops used to brew beer. Maybe you can have a beer while watching your butterflies. I’ve never grown hops, and never really thought it was a garden kind of plant, but apparently, some people incorporate them into their landscaping in creative ways since they are very tall and need some type of structure to be strung up on. The flowers look like small, green pinecones. Hops are fairly tall plants and commas are fairly small butterflies. However, the commas have pretty orange coloring with black markings, and their wings are a fascinating shape with sort of fluted edges

The word “stinging” may make you think twice about putting something of the sort in your garden, and their flowers aren’t exactly show stoppers, but stinging nettle is the plant that plays host to the red admiral (Vanessa atalanta), a medium-sized butterfly with red and black and white on its wings. The red admiral captures your eye with flashes of red as it flutters around. I saw a great many more red admirals when I lived in South Dakota as a child, perhaps because there was a horse pasture across the street where I did my butterfly hunting, and probably a lot of stinging nettle growing there.

In addition to stinging nettle, false nettle is a host plant for the red admiral, as well as the common buckeye butterfly. The buckeye is a fawn-colored butterfly with amazingly vivid eyespots lining the edges of its wings. While eyespots on moth and butterfly wings are thought to be a protective mechanism to scare off potential predators, it seems this butterfly has overdone it a little with so many eyes, but they sure are beautiful.

Are purple and orange a good color combination? That’s what you can get if you raise violets with their deep purple flowers, as they play host to the eggs and larvae of the great spangled fritillary (Speyeria cybele), a fancy name for a fancy-looking butterfly that is deep orange “spangled” with black speckles.

The painted lady (Vanessa cardui), another butterfly with patterns of orange, black, and white, uses hollyhock and thistles as its host plants.

The leaves of many common trees also play host to a number of butterflies. The willow tree is a host for the mourning cloak butterfly (Nymphalis antiopa), which has dark blueish black wings with a yellow border and small bright blue spots on the inner edge of that border, and the pawpaw tree is host to the larvae of the zebra swallowtail (Protographium marcellus), a white swallowtail with black zebra-like stripes. Cherry and poplar are for tiger swallowtails (Papilio appalachiensis, P. canadensis, P. glaucus, and P. rutulus), which are similar in appearance to zebra swallowtails but with a yellow background.

And, true to its name, the spicebush swallowtail (Papilio troilus) uses spicebush as its host.

Asters, those lovely lavender-colored flowers, are hosts for the pearl crescent (Phyciodes tharos), another vivid black and orange butterfly, but quite small.

And, of course, monarchs (Danaus plexippus)raise their eggs and larvae specifically on milkweed.

Monarchs are one butterfly most everybody is familiar with, I guess because of its bright orange coloring with vivid black lines and for its reputation of making long migrations across the United States to Mexico for the winter. Consequently, it is pretty common in most parts of the country.

The monarch caterpillar is described in most articles as having bands of black, orange, and white. I was ecstatic when I noticed one of my milkweed plants was covered in tiny, fuzzy caterpillars that had bands of black, orange, and white. Little did I know, monarch caterpillars are not fuzzy, and these caterpillars were actually from another species that doesn’t become a very attractive butterfly.

Instead, these were the caterpillars of the milkweed tussock moth (Euchaetes egle). These moths use milkweed as hosts for their caterpillars as well. I thought the fuzzy milkweed tussock caterpillar was adorable because I just love anything with fur.

But in spite of all its cuteness, this caterpillar and its siblings can decimate a milkweed leaf in an hour or so. I actually picked a leaf full of the critters, sat it down on the sidewalk and glanced at it from time to time as I did some yard work. First, it was a leaf full of caterpillars.  Then it was a twig, the caterpillars having left it for new territory. But as beautiful as the tussock caterpillar is, its resulting moth is no bell of the ball. It is a small dull whitish-grey colored moth the size of the ones that probably flutter around your porch light in the evenings. So I’m not really sure how to feel about tussocks. The caterpillars are lovely, but they eat too much, and the moths are… blah.

How Do Butterflies Know Which Plants to Eat?

Here is one very interesting note that I came upon while researching for this article. When you consider how difficult it sometimes is for us humans to identify types of plants, you’ve got to wonder how butterflies are so astute at this process. According to one source I found, the female lands on a leaf and drums on it with her forelegs. Then, the specialized chemical receptors in her forelegs sense/taste/smell the leaf and its chemical exhalations to confirm or deny the host-worthiness of the plant. Fascinating!

But wait! This just in from Wikipedia, quoting from MonarchJointVenture.org: “The black swallow-wort and pale swallow-wort plants are problematic for monarchs in North America. Monarchs lay their eggs on these relatives of native vining milkweed because they produce stimuli similar to milkweed. Once the eggs hatch, the caterpillars are poisoned by the toxicity of this invasive plant from Europe.”

Wow! I guess we can all be fooled now and then. Maybe that’s why we don’t hear much about monarchs in Europe… except for the governing kind.

The post Growing a Butterfly Garden: Host Plants to Attract Butterflies appeared first on Homestead.org.

Next, at around the age of fifteen, came my Euell Gibbons Days. Gibbons in the 70’s was like Bear Grylls is today, but he didn’t scale cliffs, or bite the heads off insects. Instead of risking his life out in the extreme wild, he preferred to concentrate on those things that could be found on an innocent family hike. In fact, the book I read, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, was about as dangerous as it seemed to get with him. Lions and tigers and wild asparagus, oh my! Back then, I read that book and tried dandelions, not hard to recognize, and found that the roots might be edible, but they sure were bitter, and well, I tried the flowers and the leaves, too, and I guess you might say I was unimpressed.

I didn’t spend much more time tasting wild leaves and flowers after that, but I feel drawn back to different former interests every so many years, so here I am again, forty-some years later, and I’ve been thinking of what type of edible plants might be growing in my yard. After all, you never know when you might find yourself in abject poverty, or more realistically, hiding out from the living dead during the zombie apocalypse and being forced to live off the land.

But since my days of eating grass and imitating moo-cows, I’ve become a bit more aware of the dangers of eating the wrong plants. Maybe it’s because I saw that movie, Into the Wild, a couple of years ago. The movie is based on the diary of Christopher McCandless, a guy who decided to live off of the land in the Alaskan wilderness. He apparently did well for quite some time, but at the end of the film he died because he ate the wrong kind of plant.

Needless to say, after seeing that movie, I became extra paranoid and did further research to find that there are lot of plants that look very similar to one another; some that are edible and others poisonous. So when I realized that I had finally succeeded in transplanting and growing what I assumed to be milkweed into my garden, I was happy because I hoped it would draw some monarch butterflies to my garden, but I also remembered that parts of milkweed are supposed to be edible and even considered “good-eatin’” by some. I thought I might go ahead and try some, but felt that I should make sure it really was milkweed and not some poisonous lookalike.

I found various websites that listed the differences between common milkweed and dogbane, which is said to look similar and has a reputation for being poisonous to livestock and, presumably, to humans as well. Some lists were slightly different from others, so I compiled one of my own and went through it one at a time during my identification process. Here is my list:

How to tell Milkweed from Dogbane

1. Milkweed leaves are smaller ascending the stalk, larger lower on the stalk. Yep, mine are! Dogbane leaves are slightly larger ascending the stalk, smaller at base.

2. Milkweed has fine hairs on the stem and leaf bottom. Yep, mine do! While Dogbane stem and leaf surfaces are smooth.

3. Milkweed has few, if any, buds on its leaf axils, while Dogbane has many leaf axils with buds. Mine did have some small buds on the intersection where the leaf’s stem branches out from the main stem. Is that the axil? I looked it up and yep, that’s the axil, but at the same time, it didn’t have lots of them. And how do you define “lots”?

4. Milkweed leaves do not squeak when rubbed together. Dogbane leaves squeak when rubbed together. This part is debatable. First, I rubbed and didn’t hear a squeak; then I rubbed again and thought I did. Then I wondered if it was because the leaves were wet, or because I rubbed them too hard or too lightly. Was it a squeak or a moan? I gave up on that one.

5. Milkweed exudes lots of milky latex sap, while Dogbane exudes a little bit of milky latex sap. Um, again, the measure of the amount is all relative and I didn’t have any dogbane to compare it to, but I did see what I assumed to be “lots” of milky sap.

6. Milkweed stalks are hollow and green inside, while dogbane stalks are solid and white or cream inside. Yes, mine are hollow, although not as hollow as I expected (thick walls).

7. Milkweed stalks are slightly squared in cross-section, while Dogbane stalks are round in cross-section. Yes! Yes! Yes! While I always thought of the stalk as round, once I cut a piece off and looked at the cross-section, I noticed it really is square. If you have ever wired something electrically, you’ve learned that there is a very slight difference in shape between the positive and negative side of an electrical cord. It’s sort of like that; subtle unless you are looking for it.

8. Milkweed has green stems while dogbane has red stems. Yes! They are green and they are square. Did I really have to go through all of that other identification? Well, better safe than sorry I suppose.

So on to the taste tests…

The tender young shoots when they are about eight inches high, the leaves, the flower buds, and the pods that come after the blooms have expired, are all said to be edible. The trick, apparently, is to catch the green pods before they get to the silky stage (2” or smaller), and the youngest leaves are also said to be the most tender.

If you open a pod and the seeds and silk still look moist, it is fine, but if the seeds and silk are starting to dry out, or if any of the seeds are turning the tiniest bit brown, the pods will be tough. Another test is to give the pod a gentle squeeze along the seam. If it pops open easily, it’s probably too mature to be tender enough to enjoy eating, but a great way to spread seeds in your garden.

I was warned by one source that milkweed needed to be boiled multiple times with the water changed each time in order to leech out all bitterness. So I collected some leaves and flowers and boiled them three times, emptied the water three times, and didn’t taste the slightest bit of bitterness. The leaves got limp, like cooked spinach, and pretty much tasted like it, too. The flower buds became limp too. Then, I read elsewhere that milkweed isn’t bitter at all and is in fact sweet tasting. With that source there was no talk of bitter toxins to boil out, so I plucked another leaf from my milkweed plants and nibbled at the end of it. It tasted…. like a leaf! Gee. Then I plucked a tiny flower off of the clump of flower buds. The flower tasted pretty much like you would expect a flower to as well, except that for some reason I was hoping it would be a little crunchy, since some suggest it is good in salads. Nope, not crunchy, not flavorful, just kind of like biting into a tiny piece of tissue paper.

So I decided to follow the directions from that article and quickly dip my flowers and leaves in boiling hot water to blanch them, then dip them in a beer batter and fry them. What did I find? That you could probably fry horse manure in batter and it would taste good, because, after all, it’s really just the batter we like—whether it is the crunchies at Long John Silver’s or the extra crispy crust at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

I deep-fried milkweed flowers and leaves, along with some daylily flowers because I was definitely sure of their identity and edibility, and they happened to be blooming at the same time.

Something I found about batter-frying the daylilies was that it would probably have been best to remove the stamens. Not that anyone says they are poisonous or anything, but when you fry the flowers, the stamens come out looking like black spider legs peeking out of the center. Of course, it might be fun for Halloween.

I found that daylily flowers are pretty good for holding the batter, and they taste good because the batter forms a nice crunchy crust around them, but they don’t have any taste of their own. The milkweed flowers on the other hand, soaked up the batter in and around all of the little individual flowers and had a sort of spongy quality when fried—crispy on the outside and spongy on the inside. I liked it, and there was a faint broccoli taste. I’ve found myself craving that unique combination of crunchiness and sponginess later on and felt the temptation to pick the last flowers of my six milkweed plants for the pleasure of having them again, but decided to leave them for the monarchs. When I tried the leaf, it seemed only like a structure to hold my batter and didn’t have much taste of its own, but I left one leaf on the plate uneaten and sampled it later after it had cooled to room temperature. That is when it actually had some flavor.

So through some experimentation, I have found that, although they may be edible, many things aren’t necessarily all that good, unless you have oil or butter, flour, eggs, and salt to dress them up with. But then, that seems to be true of a lot of things, so I guess I might spend some of my zombie avoidance time, growing my own wheat, stealing eggs from wild birds, and chasing down deer for milk to make the butter with, or would it be easier to make vegetable oil. How do you do that? Squeeze a cornhusk? And actually, what I made was a beer batter, so I guess I’d have to grow some barley and hops too. But beer keeps well, so maybe I’ll just start stocking up now. I did some research on salt substitutes and found that dried and burned coltsfoot leaves can provide a salty flavor, and boiled hickory roots leave a black salty-tasting powder.

I must admit though, that later in the season, when the milkweed pods appeared, I was on a diet and thus didn’t want to use the batter and frying method. I brought in a pod, which had matured to a couple of inches long, but wasn’t old enough to have turned into fluff, and I cut it open. Inside, I found a tender core that tasted sweet and vaguely familiar. I only ate a bit, because it is best to try a small amount and wait to see if you have any adverse reactions, even after going through the entire visual identification process. But for days I kept craving more and wondering what that taste reminded me of… and then it hit me. The little baby corn that people put in salads and Chinese food… it tasted just like those. And now that I know they don’t upset my stomach, I’ll be having some really good salads next season.

To make the batter, mix up 1 cup beer, 1 cup flour, 2 eggs, salt, and whatever other spices you like. Mix it to a smooth consistency, adding more flour if it seems to need to be thicker or more beer to thin it. Flop your flowers or leaves around in it to cover and then deep fry them until golden brown.

I guess I should mention that the main reason I wanted milkweed in my yard was to attract monarch butterflies. Monarchs hang around milkweed because their larva will only eat milkweed, and milkweed, in turn, makes them taste bad to birds; so this food which nourishes them also protects them from predators. When birds see bright orange butterflies with black stripes they instinctively know that these will taste bad and thus ignore them. Another interesting fact I always mused over during my childhood butterfly-collecting days is that the Viceroy Butterfly does not eat milkweed, and does not taste bitter, but it is orange with black stripes, so the monarch’s reputation protects the Viceroy as well. Sort of like wearing leather and studs to look tough to ward off bullies.

Over the years people have used milkweed for a host of other purposes as well as attracting beautiful butterflies to their gardens. It has been used as filler for pillows for people who are allergic to chicken feathers, and during World War II it was used as filler for life jackets because of its buoyancy (it is said to be six times more buoyant than cork). Early Americans carried it as tinder for fires, twisted the stems’ tough fibers into rope, and used in various medicinal concoctions. Its sap is said to cure warts. I wish I had a wart to try it on.

In addition to the obvious choices such as blackberries, crab apples, and cherries that I have growing on my property, I have also found that certain parts of the Yucca plant (known locally as rock lilies) are edible, but with this plant, you must distinguish between which parts are edible. While we sometimes see Yuca (one “c”) roots sold in the stores, these roots come from a tropical plant that looks nothing like the North American Yucca, and the Yucca (2 “c”s) roots are not edible, but the flowers, young pods, and seeds are. From what I’ve read, it is still best to cook a little, try a little, and then wait a little to be sure you don’t have an adverse reaction.

I also have numerous wild grapevines growing on my property and on a trellis near my porch. The grapes turn purple in the fall, but are very small and have a large seed in the middle, so they are best used for jelly. Just boil them, sift through cheesecloth to remove the seeds, and then follow the recipe on the pectin box. And alas, I am currently trying to learn to weave the vines into baskets. Of course, one more use for grapevines if necessary, is to obtain water in a pinch. In the most recent episode of “Naked and Afraid“, they cut the vines and sucked from them like a fountain. Fortunately, I’m rarely naked and almost never afraid… but that is because the zombies haven’t arrived yet.

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