It's Dead

I got into this urban homesteading stuff because of "survivalism," but I eventually decided that the best way to survive--or perhaps even thrive, if that's not too much to ask of the universe--would be to get a decent job. So I am putting my energy into school and letting everything else go. So, yeah, this blog--and the project it documents-- it dead. Maybe I should delete it... but I like to think that some of the beekeeping stuff is pretty cool and could help some new bee people out there, so I'll leave it up for a little while at least. But there will be no new posts. So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye....

Update

Obviously I haven't been doing much homesteady stuff lately! What I have been doing is:

• working and saving money to go back to school and finish the science degree I started years ago;
• trying to get said school to actually let me register for classes (this is MUCH harder than you'd think it would be), and 
• learning refreshing my memory of math and chemistry.

Since none of this really pertains to the subject of this blog, future scholarly and science-y things will be posted at my newish other blog. (Oh, and I'll have a real update for this one soon, too. Really.)

Well, That Sucked

If anyone is still paying attention, y'all might be wondering about the unplanned, announced hiatus. Well:

1. I haven't been doing much any "homesteady" stuff this winter, and I try to keep this blog topical. (Read: I don't blog about "personal" stuff.)

2. After eight months of hateful, hateful involuntary unemployment, I finally got a job. Downside: the job  is bad, low-paying and has really horrible hours. Combine that with...

3. Insomnia! Fucking insomnia!

...and I haven't had a lot of energy. Oh, also, there's been this:

They say that the Bitterroot Valley has mild winters. They lie. They LIE. Also, I am from Arizona and too much time without sun sends me to a Very Bad Place, mentally. The evil white stuff is finally starting to melt and I actually saw a patch of blue sky a minute ago, and I finally feel alive again. So this blog may live again. Or it may not. But if it does, then there's going to be some changes around here....

Extraction in Action

We've started extracting the honey from the frames harvested last weekend. Here's how you do it:

First you "uncap" the frames, using a hot knife to cut off the wax seal. This is tedious, and sticky.

Then you load the frames into the extractor*...

...and start it spinning.

The honey flies out and splatters on the inside...

...and then oozes down to the bottom...

...where there is a spigot to drain it off.

(The cheesecloth-lined colander is there to filter out bits of wax and dead bee parts.)

So now, if you go through the beekeeping posts on this blog, you have the whole story; from getting a package of bees and installing them in a hive to extracting the honey. Not bad, huh?

*If you don't have access to an extractor, I think you just set the uncapped frames in a container and wait for gravity to extract the honey for you.

Harvest

We had the first killing frost of the season last night; that's almost exactly one month later than the first frost last year in Pburg. That is one of the reasons I love Missoula. (Other reasons include libraries, bookstores, Mexican restaurants, colleges, movie theaters and coffee shops.) But seeing as how the garden is now all sad and wilted, it's time to finish harvesting and appraising what we've got.

Robbing the Bees

Yes, for the first time in my beekeeping experience, I got to see the harvest.

 Hive Two (which we did first) was pretty mellow, considering; Hive One less so.

If I remember correctly Andy took out a total of 27 frames, which he will bring back home tomorrow for processing. The fullest ones (mostly in the second supers; the top supers weren't "done") were simply oozing honey.

There's Treasure Everywhere!

It's mushroom season here, and as much as I enjoy fungus-hunting in the deep woods, all I really have to do is look out the window. There's fungi everywhere here, and without even trying I keep stumbling across things I'd only seen before in books. Like Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes fame) said, there's treasure everywhere!

Identifying these things is sometimes easy but usually--not; and so far I don't trust my skills enough to risk eating any of my finds. There's a lot to learn. Now most things, I find that the more I learn, the less mysterious (and potentially the more mundane) they become; but with fungi, the more I learn the weirder they get....

Tremella mesenterica on a dead spruce tree

Phallus impudicus, the Stinkhorn. It lives up to both its names.

Beautiful varnished polypores (Ganoderma tsugae?) on a pine stump

Boletes!

Gomphidius

Russula xerampelina

?

It's Big, It's Heavy, It's Wood

It's better than bad, it's good!

If you happen to be a long-time reader, you may recall that one of the biggest challenges in my shiitake-growing experiment (besides the @#$&ing blue-green mold) was getting the right kind of wood.  Specifically, it wants hardwood, and we're in conifer country. Well, when we were first looking at this house, we noticed a big pile of what appeared to be cottonwood logs in the corner lot. "Don't worry, we'll get rid of those," the landlord said. I crossed my fingers and waited, and lo and behold the logs were never gotten rid of after all, so I decided to go ahead and claim them.

Rather than try chopping and chipping and shredding the logs to make the usual bags of substrate, I decided to save a lot of time and effort and try the traditional method of log cultivation, as practiced in Japan for nearly a millenium.

Did I say save time and effort? Log cultivation, it turns out, is one of the most tedious and annoying tasks imaginable. First I had to dig the logs out from their pile of dirt and weeds, where, it turned out, some of them were already being colonized-- by Trametes versicolor, the "turkey tail" polypore:

Free fungi!

 Trametes isn't edible (it would be like trying to chew wood) but can be made into a medicinal tea, so I harvested it. Perhaps this log will produce another flush next year as well....

Anyway, then all the logs had to be moved from the sunniest, driest part of the yard where they  had been piled to the coolest, dampest part--the opposite corner. And these suckers are heavy.

Now to prepare the logs for spawn: take a 5/16" drill bit and drill a 2" deep hole. Then another. And another. And so on for the entire log. And the next log. And the next...

Then plug spawn (grooved wooden dowls innoculated with mycelium) are tapped into each hole. 

 I am doing half the logs with shiitake and half with Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus); the wood is dry and poor quality, and may not be good enough for the finicky shiitakes, but Pleurotus will colonize just about anything.

P. ostreatus plug spawn

And then each hole is plugged with cheese wax.

The result looks a bit like an ill-conceived attempt at modern art. If the landlords ever do decide to haul these off, they're going to wonder what the heck we're up to.

And of the course the final step... waiting. Hopefully in six months to a year I'll have some mushrooms to show for all of this!

Money Talks: "The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class"

There's a lot of good economics videos out there, so I've decided to start a regular feature, um, featuring them. We're going to get the ball rolling with a bit of prognostication from Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, who seems to be one of the good guys... despite the fact that Obama likes her.

(On a personal note, this is also my response to those people who give me a dirty look when I say I'm not having kids. Watch and you'll understand.)

Possum Living Gets Revived (and Reviewed)

A funny thing about the self-sufficientish lifestyle is that, while we're all doing pretty much the same things, we're all doing them for completely different reasons. Some are survivalists, some think they're characters in an Ayn Rand novel, some are waiting for Armageddon, some want to save the world....and some of us are just weird.

Years ago somebody recommended an odd, out-of-print book called Possum Living: How to Live Well Without a Job and (Almost) No Money by a teenager named Dolly Freed. I reviewed it on the (now defunct) blog I had back then, and while I don't have that review any more, it boiled down to "it stinks."  Well, Freed must need money after all, because someone put Possum Living back in print. And it's being enthusisatically marketed as "relevant" and "inspirational." 

OK, anything about poverty is, unfortunately, relevant. But inspirational?!?

I went back and re-read parts of my (1978) copy and was surprised to that I do not hate this book as much as I remember. It might even be useful to some people  who are just getting started on the self-sufficiency kick, or struggling to make ends meet. But I still have two objections:

1. If you're interested in the subject matter (frugality, gardening, small livestock raising, etc) just be aware that there are many, many other books on the same subjects... much better books. (Not to mention websites!) I'd suggest that, at the least, you save up a few more dollars and buy Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living instead. You get a hundred times more information, without any of the attitude.

2. ...That attitude. Apparently Freed was a teenager when she wrote this. It shows. Oh, she was a very intelligent and literate teenager, but still. Do you want to read a book by some know-it-all kid?

What it comes down to is that I simply don't like this book, because I don't like the author's motives. Freed is part of the "voluntary simplicty" (a.k.a. "poverty is fun!") crowd, and I think those people are full of it. If you have to be unemployed,  do your best to survive with health and dignity... but don't pretend poverty is something to aspire to, or that laziness is a virtue. As somebody on Seinfeld said (in a different context), "That's like using a wheelchair for the fun of it!"

But if you really want to read Possum Living... I bet you can still find the 1978 edition online, for free. Which is, I think, much more in keeping with the spirit of the thing.