Spring is in the air. Birds are singing and the fish are healthy. I haven’t had to touch the bubbling system for the fish in over a month. The timer turns on the air pump twice a day for an hour and the hole in the ice stays open, see the photo: http://screencast.com/t/OWI5OWFjNTc

The Great Backyard Bird Count was the best ever with over 94,000 checklists sent in counting 11 million birds including 597 species.

Every day I take another load of firewood from the shed and the wood pile is getting lower. Three photos, including one with a view of the cart I use to bring the wood into the house shows the results – December 25, 2009, January 24, 2010, and February 28, 2010, the last day of the average third quarter of the heating season. What the photos don’t show is the part of the pile to the right which will keep us warm next year: http://screencast.com/t/ZTEwZDQ4O http://screencast.com/t/N2NhNTUzN2Ut http://screencast.com/t/M2ZlNGM3

Our maple syrup season is off to a good start with over three gallons of sap producing almost a pint of syrup from the first tap. I’ll put in the second tap in later today.

Anyone else having a good start to the year?

Top 10 Workshop Tools

My dad was both a machinist and a mechanic. It seemed that he spent most of his time at home with tools: either under the car or in the cellar. In the fifties, if you didn’t fiddle with cars they stopped running. I inherited some of his tools and have acquired many more. To me, not only is the right tool useful in getting a job done, but tools are symbols of who we are. A large diesel-powered digger can make a 50 foot trench in a few minutes that would take a day to dig by hand but the associated cost and collateral damage of the first is enormous. So I dig minimalist holes while thinking how much fun it would be to excavate large chasms and fill them back in with powered monsters, but the consequences….

Although I have lathes, drill presses, milling machines, welders and similar items that I use to develop renewable energy equipment, the following top ten list of workshop items I find essential for living. They are useful not only for fixing things that break, but also for developing new articles that make life easier or better. Many in the list are not a single tool but a category. You may get by with only one hammer but you need as many screwdrivers as you have types and sizes of screws or as many wrenches as the dimensions across bolts and nuts. Of course, there are not ten most important tools because situations change. Tools required for maintaining a working home are different than those it takes to build it. Tools a writer needs in a city are different than one who is homesteading. The following list is more a celebration of hand tools that I appreciate and want my daughters to have where they live in three vastly different cities:

10.  Wrenches, Pliers: good for loosening and tightening fasteners that have threads.  Also indispensible for plumbing jobs.

9. Screwdrivers: There are many types and sizes, from tiny ones useful for repairing glasses to drivers with large handles that make it possible to remove and replace rusty screws. One approach to optimize space: a holder with a huge variety of bits, including my favorites: a variety of Torx sizes, that do not slip as easily as all the other types. I no longer use nails for construction: they don’t hold well and are difficult to remove, making reusing lumber difficult. Torx screws come out as easily as they go in, making disassembly and reuse easy.

8. Cutters – Knives, Files and Rasps: A Swiss Army Knife, that has a few blades in addition to scissors, is always in with me and is indispensible. It will get much higher rating under garden tools. Various knives and box cutters are useful for a variety of tasks as are files and rasps. Coarse and fine files can perform a wide variety of metalworking tasks with more control than using electric power tools.

7. Battery Powered Drill with Bits: the only electric tool on the list. Charging batteries for these was the first task for our photovoltaic array. We use lithium ion and nickel metal hydride batteries because, unlike the more common option, they have higher capacity and can be recharged anytime. Nickel cadmium batteries have a “memory” problem and should be completely discharged before recharging which often wastes power and time. Cadmium, along with lead, are also poisonous and must be kept out of landfills while the elements in other portable battery chemistries are not as harmful. Other hand powered tools like hammers and sanders compete pretty well with electric power tools but not drills. Fastening thousands of screws to secure corrugated roofing and sheetrock, drilling holes for bolting together structures and scrubbing the hulls off black walnuts are much, much faster and easier with a power drill than one that is hand powered.

6. Hammer: Though no longer needed for driving nails, they are indispensible when working with punches, chisels and when forming metal. There are many types but any one, in a pinch, can do the job of another, though not as well. Rivet and ball peen hammers really do nicer jobs setting rivets or forming metal than does a claw hammer, but the latter can pull nails that the others simply can’t do.

5. Hacksaw: The most versatile kind of saw. It cuts all the different metals, except for hardened carbon steel, as well as plastics and small pieces of wood. You’ll need at least two different blades: 24 and 32 teeth per inch – the first to cut thicker softer material, the finer teeth to cut thin and harder material. Cutting lumber and plywood requires other types of saws– but then these are usually used at the job site, unless you’re making furniture – in which case you’ll need many other more specialized woodworking tools.

4. Markers – Punches, scribes: You’ll need these to lay out work, make patterns, or simply produce another copy of something.  It hard to make things well without drawing lines to follow while cutting or “prick” punch indentations to precisely locate where a pilot drill bit starts holes.

3. Measurers – Dial Caliper, Rulers, Tape measures, Squares: These go hand-in-hand with markers, though the inside and outside points of the dial caliper can readily make marks on their own. For laying out small items, I find a dial caliper indispensible. It is fragile, though, and I’ve ruined a few by dropping them. Once the pointer is loosened by hitting the floor, it’s only good for rough work. I’ve had much worse luck with digital calipers – they don’t like to get wet, they’re even more fragile than their dial-type cousins, and they can give arbitrary readings if you don’t “zero” them.

2. Multimeter:  Indispensible if you want to fix electric things. In the past few days I’ve used one to sentence weak rechargeable cells to the recycling bin and to determine which wires can enable the computer two rooms away to read me lectures from a DVD while I cook in the kitchen. We use a lot of rechargeable batteries: for a variety of lights and electronic gizmos. How do you tell when their lives are over? One way is to fully charge a batch, check their voltage (they should all be nearly the same) and then set them aside. A few days later, measure them again. If the voltage of any cell has dropped significantly, it isn’t holding a charge and won’t provide service when you need it. Inexpensive digital multimeters (DVM) are under $10 – and can tell you better than your tongue (by “tasting” the power between terminals) if a non-rechargeable  battery  still has some life left, or that a line has voltage on it, or that a switch works.

1. Vise: Every workshop needs one. A vise is great for holding things: while you measure them, work on them, or even paint them. It’s another hand that doesn’t complain if something gets too hot (when using a torch to loosen rusty fasteners or soldering), if you slip and score it with a chisel or knife, or if you put a hole in it when you drill too far through the work piece. Before using them routinely, I cut myself much more often because an item slipped, a bit in a drill press grabbed a piece out of my hand and other silly maneuvers. You can do work much more carefully when items don’t move.

Three centuries ago we made everything ourselves or obtained it from an artisan in the village. Today, we throw away things that don’t “work” because of fashion or repairing them is “uneconomical”. Consumers don’t need tools for moving new stuff from stores to trash bins. But the environmental costs between locally making and repairing what we need and what is typical today are quite different. I’ve given up trying to be able to make everything in my life (the chip that makes a DVM work? Get real!). But in terms of our carbon footprint: for the really big items we do have to take local responsibility.

Making Maple Syrup

A few days ago it warmed up to 40 F degrees (4 C). This was sure welcome after weeks where the temperature never went above freezing. Rather than look at long term forecasts, I placed the first tap in our maple tree so that it can announce when the sap starts flowing. Every year is different. Sometimes in February, if you don’t get your taps in, you miss a significant part of the harvest. This first day the tree yielded only a cup of sap, and not another drop since.

What makes the sap flow? Warm days with nights below freezing. Some years have many weeks, but others have too few nights where this occurs. Once nights stay warm, buds begin to open and it’s all over. Sugar and black maple trees have the best sap for making syrup. It takes about 40 gallons of sap from these to make a gallon of syrup. Red and silver maple trees also work but have less sugar in the sap so it takes more to make a gallon. These maples also have a shorter season because their buds open earlier causing the sap to get cloudy and stop flowing.

From a larger process that used tubing, holding tanks and an evaporator outdoors, our maple syrup process has evolved into a very small kitchen operation. I now tap only a single tree using a very simple technique.  I drill a 7/16 inch hole about 1.5 inches deep at a slight uphill angle into the side of the tree, about 4 feet from the ground. Into this I pound an aluminum or stainless steel tube, 6 inches long and half an inch in diameter, about a half inch into the hole. On this I hang a gallon plastic jug, into which I’ve drilled a half inch hole into the handle, see the photo:  http://screencast.com/t/NWMzMjNhYTYt It’s important to place a tap in a sector of the trunk that has not been used in the past few years. Viewing from above, I place two taps opposite each other and moving clockwise around 30 degrees from where they were the previous year.

The polyethylene jugs I use are the smooth heavy duty variety because freezing sap in waffled lightweight plastic milk bottles makes them leak. Vinegar and similar jugs last for a few seasons. One neat aspect of translucent bottles is that you can see how full they are from far away. On days where the sap flows well, the bottles may fill by early afternoon and you can gain another half gallon by the end of the day if you empty them. It’s good to empty the bottles before they freeze solid. The tight fitting hole in the handle of the bottle where the tube enters and a tight cap keep midges and other flies from getting into the sap. They like sugar too! You then don’t have to filter out the ones that drown.

Carrying the large pot that we use to boil away the water out to the maple tree saves a trip. Exchanging empty bottles for full ones would work but requires extra bottles and storage space. It takes quite a few hours to boil away the water in a few gallons of sap and it is important not to let the thickening syrup burn. When foam starts climbing up inside the pot, it’s time to move to a cooler part of the stove. To save time, we often pour thin syrup into a quart jar and finish many batches together when its convenient. This avoids inadvertently making maple sugar charcoal and having to clean the pot. The two taps in our two foot diameter tree gives us three to four quarts of syrup in a good year.

Making maple sugar candy is very popular with kids and requires boiling away a little more water and a few more minutes. When very hot syrup solidifies on a spoon as it cools – it’s ready to pour in silicone molds or on snow. Making the year’s supply of syrup is a great ritual and adds a welcome smell to the kitchen. If you can access a maple tree or two, a few minutes a day can make a sweet elixir that lasts the year.

When you heat with wood in a parlor or cook stove, there is an available surface where the heat can do many chores on its way to the rest of the building. Heating water is easy because it doesn’t burn and stick to the bottom like everything else. It just boils away and, depending on where you place it (how hot), most empty pots tolerate heat pretty well.

The hottest region of the stovetop of a cook stove is over the firebox. It gets proportionally cooler farther away. What are good meals to cook on a wood stove? Soups, stews, and chili. Combining dried beans, corn and two quarts of broth in a pot at the far edge, where it slowly simmers overnight, makes hearty meals easy. Our favorite soups? Minestrone made from our own onions, garlic, beans, corn, cabbage and hot salsa stock, and adding squash seeds or chestnuts contribute nutty flavors; and potato leek, or fish chowder. For variety we add game like rabbits, squirrel or venison to soups and stews. When these are not available we add hot sausage.

When we process poultry, we also turn chicken and turkey parts into stock. We typically use two pots: one for people food, the other for cooking down “naughty parts” into food for our dog and cat. The latter includes organs, bones, damaged tissue and body parts that the more squeamish members of our family pick around or reject wholesale. Fat that rises to the top we make into food for birds. We found a neat way to make vegetable  soup stock: when making salsa, tomato sauce and paste, once the ingredients boil for 10 minutes, less than half the volume are solids. If you sink a large sieve into the pot, in less than a minute it fills with clear liquid. This we ladle into quart jars and preserve. This broth comes from the onions, garlic, tomatoes, tomatillos, bell and hot peppers, corn-off-the cob, basil and spices, so no additional flavors need be added to the soup. One sad aspect is of this process: all the flavors in the soup are no longer in the salsa or sauce so you have to include enough spices and garlic so that both the broth and thick salsas knock socks off. Boiling down this amount of liquid would require a lot of fuel and time and risks burning the food toward the end of the process.

A quick meal? Pesto. In the summer we freeze three parts basil, and one part each of garlic and parsley. For variations we add hot peppers or tomatoes. These are well chopped in a food processor and spooned into quart bags. This mash freezes well and keeps for more than a year bathed in the frozen liquids. While a pot for pasta come to a boil, I place a thawed bag of pesto mash in the food processor and add about half a cup each of pine nuts, olive oil and parmesan cheese. I blend it together and in two minutes it’s good for a dozen portions of pasta. It’s also a great spread for bread. With a hot fire, the water will boil and the pasta is ready in less than fifteen minutes. Different cheeses and nuts create variety. Though not as exciting as pesto made with pine nuts, substituting roasted meats of naked-seeded pumpkins, that have no outer shell, or some of the bushels of chestnuts, black walnuts or hickory nuts that we harvest from our own and neighbors trees, introduce local flavors.

The first fires in the morning and those needed to heat the kitchen after it cools while we’re away also bring the oven to temperatures suitable for baking. We keep a container of dough in the refrigerator so that it takes only a minute to form a loaf. We let it rise on the shelf above the stove, and bake it for up to an hour. So with less than two minutes of “touch time” we make a wide variety of artisan breads. After trying most of the many dozens of kinds from all over the world described in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois, we’ve developed our own varieties that feature the vegetables and herbs we grow. There is no kneading in the process they developed and the breads are all great! Whatever dough we have at the time also make great pizzas – which are especially good for guests because they can make their own with the ingredients they prefer. The best part of this dough approach? You never have to clean a bowl– when you take the last batch of dough from the container in the refrigerator that holds six to eight loaves, any bits left on the bottom and sides become part of the next batch. You make loaves and pizzas on a peel that is liberally dusted with cornmeal (we grind blue flour corn for this) and slide them onto a preheated pizza stone or granite slab in the oven.

Since the wood stove is always warm to hot, we don’t use our electric stove or microwave much from October to May. We cook pancakes, soups, stews, pasta, and other recipes on the stovetop and bake poultry, bread, cakes and cookies in the oven. In the spring, the stove transforms sap from two taps in our maple tree into a few quarts to a gallon of syrup, depending on the year. Making a gallon over six weeks adds the right amount of moisture to indoor air and making more would require taking the operation outdoors. Our garden produces ample fare for the winter: dried beans, popcorn, potatoes, squash, onions, garlic, cabbage, and vegetables we freeze or can. Late summer evening projects include making pesto for the freezer and canning pickles, salsa and tomato sauces.

As we progress through the seasons I’ll write more details covering the above and similar processes. Please add any anecdotes, favorite recipes, tricks and ways to make it neat to live without burning fossil fuels you want to share.

Wood: Stored Solar Energy

Life is good. There’s plenty of food in markets and restaurants. We drive or fly anywhere we want. No matter the weather, our homes, offices and stores are comfortable and well lit. We have money for toys, movies, and parties. And our kids play on travel teams, take dance lessons, or go off to college. Life in the US and Canada is easier than it has ever been and billions of people on other continents see this and would like similar lives.

But there are problems: almost half the oil, gas and coal that makes life easy is now carbon dioxide and warming the earth. Sea level is on its way to rising ten feet because greenhouse gases we keep adding to the air is melting glaciers and warming oceans, making them expand. Each of us has to find our own ways to live well that cause fewer problems. One appliance made a big difference in my life and it greatly reduces my family’s carbon footprint.

We’ve burned wood in parlor stoves for more than thirty years and even fed wood into a furnace located in a separate building to keep warm. Although the latter kept the firewood dirt, smoke and ashes out of the house, it took way more wood and trudging through snow quite a few times on cold days. Six years ago we purchased a new wood-burning cook stove from a Canadian manufacturer: http://www.heartlandapp.com/en/Products/WoodburningCookstoves.htm.

Stoves built for heating usually have a large firebox and the fire burns a long time before needing more fuel. A cook stove has room for only a small amount of wood and has to be fed more often. On colder days I have to get up early and make a fire with kindling and add wood two or three times before leaving for work. Nine hours later the stove is cold but repeating the morning routine quickly brings the kitchen above 75 F. The other rooms warm up more slowly and don’t get quite as warm. This isn’t a problem because we live primarily in the kitchen where we cook, eat at the large island counter, and enjoy reading while sitting on the couch near the stove. We’ve insulated our home and closed leaks that let in cold air so our 2000 square foot home is comfortable even when it’s below zero outside. On cold days we close off bedrooms that our kids use, at most, a few days a year.

Feeding a wood stove requires a bit of effort. In early spring, weekends are dedicated to gathering wood. We have an orchard and an acre of woodland that always needs pruning, culling or picking up branches. Neighbors have trees broken by ice or killed by disease. We store small and large pieces of wood under cover so it dries as we process it into stove pieces when time permits. It takes about five cords to get us through the heating season. Our large woodshed stores enough for more than one season so wood is always very dry and easy to light. After cutting all into 16 inch pieces, only large trunks require splitting. We utilize every branch so there’s always plenty of kindling for starting fires. To minimize handling, pieces up to 2 inches in diameter we store in large bags. We bring a full one inside every week or so.

We keep one day’s supply of wood close to the stove in a metal bin that holds about 120 pounds, has four casters underneath and a handle in front. Every few weeks, debris that comes off the wood and collects on the bottom of the bin I dump on garden paths, along with floor sweepings that accumulate while processing wood. Twice a week the tray under the firebox fills with ashes. We distribute these on the snow thus adding minerals to lawn and garden soil.

Having a hot stove is good for drying seeds, flowers and clothes. We built a rack just below the ceiling off to one side of the stove to hang produce and flowers. In turn, garlic, ears of corn, gourds, and flowers become decorations as they dry, hanging below the rack. It also supports trays above that dry heirloom seeds: peas, peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, basil, beans, parsnips, carrots, herbs and salad crops. Snow covered mittens, socks and outerwear draped over the cart of firewood dry quickly.

Cooking on a wood stove requires a little more work than using gas or electric appliances but when the power goes out, the heat and meals it provides are welcome. It’s also satisfying to use natural energy for living. Before heating with wood, it took over 500 gallons of fuel oil to heat our water and space over a year. We now use less than 80 gallons, primarily for heating water for showers, dishes, and clothes. When we go away, we use oil-fired hot water to keep pipes in the house from freezing. Cooking with wood and other reductions make our electric bills, and our carbon footprint involved in making electricity, typically half of what they were.

Like oil, burning wood turns the carbon into carbon dioxide that goes up the stove pipe but over a few years growing trees convert the same amount of airborne carbon into wood. Existing and new trees fill in the hole in the woodlot. Wood that dies, has fallen, or is cut to prevent damage to power lines, typically decays in a process that returns carbon to the atmosphere anyway. Collecting and burning this wood simply utilizes a resource that would otherwise be processed by fungi and insect larvae.

As fossil energy becomes more expensive and its role in changing the climate becomes more apparent, it’s important to find ways to live that are also fun and rewarding. My dream is to use sunlight directly for heating, cooling and cooking and storing it for use at night and cloudy periods. It will take a few more years, and others to make this happen. It has taken a billion people in technologically advanced countries a little more than 100 years to extract and burn almost half the available oil, coal and natural gas. Now that almost seven billion people want lives as rich as those we live, we’ll all have to find ways to harness locally available energy that grows, shines or blows almost every day.

Next Piece: Retro Cooking

Also: Don’t forget to let the world know what birds live in your neighborhood. This weekend is the Great Backyard Bird Count: http://www.birdsource.org/gbbc/

Including Exercise Routines

Although my wife meets her friend there every week, I’ve never been to a gym. To me it doesn’t make sense: drive twelve miles, pay membership fees, and postpone chores for at least two hours. I prefer to incorporate exercise into the routines of living. Apart from shoveling snow, winters don’t include much aerobic work. A diesel tractor and chainsaw don’t want to start when temperatures have single digits. It’s also hard to work in heavy gloves, through which fingers still get numb. It’s usually windy here and induced chill creates misery. When the air is still, we do enjoy cross country skiing  if the sun or the moon is bright – but the white blanket melted a few weeks ago and another’s not scheduled.

Above freezing daytime temperatures become common in late February and March here in the Northeast. Outdoor activities then proliferate: gathering sap from maple trees, collecting wood, repairing garden and orchard fencing, and staging plant propagation supplies. It’s also time to prepare greenhouse beds for planting the spring crop of salads, greens and herbs. It freezes inside this greenhouse only during December, January and a few days in February because it is integrated with another building, sheds snow well, and has lots of thermal storage – but that story will have to wait.

Living without burning fossil fuels in our culture involves finding ways of doing things by hand or with tools that utilize energy derived from sunlight. Some of our electric power is already generated by hydropower and wind turbines with very little coming from solar panels. Farm and other draft animals used to provide power for growing food and transportation but they required lots of food themselves. Today we need available land for growing food for people. It makes more sense to harness the sun directly for powering tools and vehicles. But that will take a few years and in some cases, may be inappropriate.

Although there are many others, David Butcher has developed many pedal powered devices that either powered a variety of tools directly or by generating and storing electricity for power: http://www.los-gatos.ca.us/davidbu/pedgen.html. From a propeller driven canoe and “pickup”, a drill and a water pump connected to pedals he progressed to a laptop, electric powered kitchen appliances, and even a washing machine, though that didn’t work out so well. What’s really neat is that he spends time on his pedal-powered generator every day and communicates over the internet while he pedals. Over the years, he’s lost a few dozen pounds and has never been healthier. He publishes how many watt-hours he produces every day and encourages others to join him. I hope to soon – because it makes sense. I spend hours a day on the computer, why not exercise during some of that time?

It will soon be time to gather wood. Since we burn wood for cooking and heating our home we have to collect quite a bit: five to eight cords, or 600 to 1,000 cubic feet. It’s a two part process: fetch wood, and then store it undercover in ready to burn pieces so it can dry over the summer. I’ll describe our process, soon. Gathering and reducing trees to firewood are very aerobic and I lose many pounds over two months.

Mowing grass, clearing meadows, harvesting pond plants, and gardening are very aerobic and these activities occupy much of my spring, summer and fall. After a few years it becomes natural to break tasks into manageable blocks that can be spaced so you never get too sore. Feeding our acre of garden with cuttings from four acres of grass gives me lots of time for thinking while keeping fit. We each have to develop routines that make sense: walking or biking to work or shopping, soccer with (or without)  kids, 5K runs, the possibilities are many. Find activities that fits your lifestyle and make them part of what you do every day, or most days.