Composting human waste

We have begun to get the homestead ready for by winter collecting wood, removing a/c units and general cleaning. One of the items on that list is to empty out one of the compost bins. I wrote about this before but it's been a couple years now, we compost our toilet waste. We have a bucket composting system based off the Humanure website Joe Jenkins promotes. http://humanurehandbook.com. What this means is that our toilet is a bucket that after each use we cover the waste with saw dust that we get from the local lumbar yard. A trailer full of saw dust lasts us about 9 months. When the bucket is full it is my husband's chore to empty it unto the compost pile. Speaking of chores, he went out of town for a week so his chores became my chores. I do not care for this chore and I am fine washing dishes and doing laundry so I do not have to do this chore.

The compost bin is made from old pallets. Everytime a bucket is dumped on it, it is covered with straw. We compost our kitchen scraps here too. During the summer the pile runs about 140 degrees. This is pretty hot compared to standard yard compost piles. The pile stays about 90 degrees until February or when the pile gets above the height of the pallet walls, then there is too much wind and it freezes.

This was our first pile so it has been composting for two years now. This is longer than your standard yard compost pile but it needs the longer time to break down and harmful bacteria. The only thing that has not broken down are these stupid baby wipes my son uses and egg shells.  It looks just like regular soil. My husband forced me to smell it even though I got grossed out. What do you know, it smells like soil and has zero bad odor at all. This pile is being spread out around our fruit trees. Human waste compost is not suitable for a vegetable garden. It is great for shrubs, trees and landscaping compost. 

Behind the compost bins my husband put together a bucket washing station, he used an old wire crib mattress as the bucket drying station and built a rickety straw bale storage area. We also store the wood chips back here. We fill a small garbage can with the saw dust and keep it in the bathroom near the toilet.  In the spring and fall the compost bins are covered in snakes because it is so warm. I went to dump our kitchen compost bin on the pile and saw all these old snakes skins and a snake slithering by. I screamed and threw the bucket and have not gone back all summer.

The main level is almost complete. I painted the kitchen wall where my husband's kombucha operation exploded and stained the walls. Then my husband finally got around to putting up the trim around the bathroom door, front door and window. He did not use traditional trim but some super cheap trim. At first I thought it was going to be dumb but now that its up I really it, sort of gives it a rustic look that not every house has.

It's bow hunting season right now. My buddy Charlie and my girlfriend Julie got deer with their bows. They saved me bag of fat off the deer. I spent three days rendering it down. Towards the end it really started to smell so I made my husband dump it int he woods. The dumb pug of mine found it and has been out there eating it. I have four jars of deer fat now that  I will be turning into some deer soap for the holidays. I will also be giving them some deer fat soap so they can not only eat the deer they kill but bath in the fat. Hahahahaha!

So simple I never thought of it

Woodstove season is in full effect this time of year. It has snowed 2-4 inches several times this year only for it to warm up to a rain and melt it all away. We even have had a morning with the wake up temp at 0 degrees. I purchased new snow boots for myself and my son. My feet grew since being pregnant and the older my son gets the more winter playing and activities we will be doing so I need to make sure I have good warm gear. I packed away all the fall and rain gear for our snow pants and mittens. The maul and ax have been sharpened and a new wheel was put on the wheelbarrow this past summer.

Our wood shed has two stalls and is very tall. This year we hung plastic sheeting around three sides of it to stop blowing snow. I'm not sure why we did not think of doing sooner. I guess we liked dealing with snowy wood. I have been keeping track of the sun movement patterns and the wind patters on our property. We live in this little wind tunnel, wind blows right up our drive way and hits the wood shed, causing snow drifts. I told my husband that a second wood shed of the same size needs to be built right next to it. This would give us 4 stalls and we  would really be able to get our wood on a burning rotation. One stall provides enough wood for a winter burning season with some extra for maple syrup boiling in the early spring. I have it worked out that stall one would be "burn this year" wood, stall two would be "second year cured" wood, stall three would be "first year cured" wood and stall four would be empty/ this winters harvest wood. I prefer to harvest wood in the sinter when I am not sweating to death and there are no bugs. Then the following year we would just rotate over. This way it would practically eliminate our need to buy dry cured wood. It's about $200/season to heat our place. That is still a bargain compared to natural gas prices we were paying in the city. In Minneapolis we were paying about $200+ a month and in Connecticut we were paying $400/ month. These were small rambler style houses.

This is some of the wood we got from friends who had a tree come down during a spring storm. We do not have room for it in the wood shed so its drying out in the yard.

My husband surprised me and built me a wood stand for inside the house. In the past we were just stacking wood in a rubber made bin. Again, I don't know why we did not think of this before. This new thing holds TWO wheel barrows worth of wood and lasts us almost an entire week before we have to cut more. There is also more air circulation around the wood, so if any of it gets damp from splitting it out in the snow it drys a lot faster.Yesterday was my turn to split wood, I did the two wheelbarrows full. It was a lot of work. I brought in one load and saved the second load for my husband to bring in. He also rigged up a ramp onto the deck to wheel the wheelbarrow up so you don't have to make a million trips up and down the stairs. Pushing a packed wheel barrow up the ramp is hard work too.

This is an example of a knotted up log that is impossible for me to split. I lift up the 8 pound maul over my head bring it down in a squatting motion and it just sort of bounces off. By splitting wood in a squatting motion instead of an over the shoulder motion I am giving myself more of a full body work out.  I end up stringing together epic combinations of swear words that echo through our woods. I'm sure the neighbors think I am casting some sort of evil spell. I will attempt to split these kinds of knotted up logs about five times, if I can't do it then it goes in my husband's pile to split. Last year we had a big'un that was so knotted up that he couldn't even split it so it turned into fire pit wood.

Leather Face the Pug likes his bed on the floor  right next tot he wood stove. Sometimes he gets too hot and has to exit the bed and stretch out across the rug to cool off.

My son and I got our machete and sword out to clear brush from along the drive way and mail box. He wanted to pretend we were "viking pirates". It was a pretty fun afternoon.

Foraging and canning.

This summer has been very busy volunteering at the food pantry farm. It's a two acre farmed owned by a retired farmer that donates all the produce to the local for pantry. The farm is planted, weeded and harvested by a team of about 6 volunteers including myself. Last year we grew 6,000 pounds of produce. I'm not sure what amount we will have this year, we have had a few set back. Its' been a very wet and cool summer up here in northern Wisconsin. Sadly, the potatoes and tomatoes got blight. We were only able to get a very tiny harvest of potatoes. The tomatoes have sort of just gave up. The whole farm just seems weak.

So, between the farm and the local farmers market I have been busy canning. My salsa turned out so good last year that I used the same recipe agian this year.

salsa

I love the Hmong farmers at the local farmer's market. They have the best produce around. It's better looking and more fresh than the grocery store's produce. One of the farmers gave me some fantastic Thai chilis and sweet peppers to make sriracha sauce. I changed the recipe a bit this year and added more tomato paste so its more like a Thai ketchup. I like to use this sauce in my cooking classes through community education.

Finished Sriracha

One of my farmer market friends grew beautiful plums this year. I bought an ice cream bucket full and made plum jelly for the first time. I was cooking down the plums and straining them, I was amazed at the brilliant magenta juice I ended up with. The jelly is a little runnier than I would like but man does it taste good. I'm going to test it out served over pork loin, meat balls and other savory dishes.

I picked a bag of cucumbers from the farm and made a batch of dill pickles. I have never been super impressed with the way my pickles turn out. I tried a new recipe this year. I probably would have skipped them all together but my son adores pickles. He would eat a whole jar if I would let him.

finished pickles.

fished plum jam

I bought some fantastic sweet corn out of the back of a pick up truck. I grilled it and made some of my famous corn relish. It is wonderful on beef tacos and breakfast tacos. It also pairs really nice with black beans.


























My son and I had an exciting summer picking fruit too. There is a pick your own strawberry patch near us. We picked a bucket of strawberries. I think between what I picked and what I bought from the stand I ate about 5 quarts just to myself. Nothing is better than biting into aa fresh strawberry and having the juice pour down your chin. The rest of the year the store strawberries just do not come close to that flavor.

We have massive amounts of blackberry plants along our driveway and this year I even found a few raspberry plants. The raspberries were not a huge producer. We ended up going to the pick your own place again when their raspberries were ripe.

Wild blackberries and raspberries

I took all the fruit and made a fruit booze again this year. Last year I had big plans to give away my fruit booze as Christmas gifts but ended up drinking all of it at Thanksgiving. Each fruit that becomes ripe I put in a glass jar and pour vodka over it and repeat for each fruit until the jar is full. Then it soaks until the holidays. I enjoy it with a touch of simple syrup and sparkling water. It's also good straight in a low ball glass with ice.

blackberry picking

fruit booze

I had a great year mushroom hunting. I even found some varieties that I have not found before. My son loves learning about mushrooms and helps me identify them. He even found Black Trumpets all by himself. He was running through the park and says, "MOM! I found black trumpets." What do you know he was right. We found a nice haul of chanterelle mushrooms that I gave to my friend.

I went to northern Minnesota and found a nice chunk of chaga mushrooms for my tea.

After a rain I found a chanterelle, oyster and puffer mushrooms on my property. My husband stir fried them up and ate them with his dinner. I also found a little patch of lobster mushrooms in the same place as last year and a new patch of shrimp of the  woods mushrooms.

spring oyster mushroom

lobster mushroom

destroying angel mushroom

On our hike I was able to find a destroying angel mushroom. My son loved that it had such a cool name. He asked if it was a bad guy I told him yes. It will kill you.

The three wild hazelnut trees had nuts this year and we were able to get to them before the squirrels got them. I attempted to roast them but I messed it up some how and they did not turn out.

Now its time to prepare for winter.

My season working with a bee mentor

I completed a season working with a bee mentor! It all started last year in October when I went to Minneapolis and completed bee keeping 101 at the University of Minnesota with my friend Samantha. The class was fantastic and it was attended by 200+people. Having bees up here was one of my goals when we moved to our property. It was more of a romantic day dream....that and having sheep and spinning yarn. The sheep part is for sure NOT going to happen anytime soon.

I came back home all ready to buy bee gear and a box of bees. I stopped myself once I saw how expensive it was all going to be. I thought, maybe I should listen to the advice from the instructors and work with a bee mentor to see for sure this is what I want to do. I started asking around up here for names of local bee keepers to see if they had any interest in being a mentor but no one wanted to give me names or the names I did find, they said no flat out. That's fine, at least they are direct with me. There are plenty of bee keepers but they are sort of a private group. There is no local bee keeping group. I ended up taking a Master Gardeners Class and I was finally put in touch with a gentleman named John that works at the extension office. He agreed to work with me! yay!

So in May I met him at his bee yard to open up the hives from winter.

First time in a bee suit.

 I got to see how he closed up the hives for our long Wisconsin winters. The amount of honey he left in the hives, the pollen patties and the sugar water feed he used. I was able to see what a strong hive looks like, what a weak hive looks like, I am able to identify a queen, larva, brood, pollen, capped cells, wax and honey. He even had some bee nucs to add to a hive.  The term “nuc” is short for nucleus colony. A nucleus colony is just a very small colony of a few thousand bees and a queen. I got to feel the pain of getting stung in the head a couple of times too, no allergies either.  He showed me his log book where he keeps track of how each hive is doing. Each hive is labeled and logged every time he checks on the hive. He logs how many frames and boxes are being used by the bees, if he sees larva or brood (the term brood is used to refer to the embryo or egg), If the queen dies, if the hive swarms or if the hives gets a mites or a disease. 

Pretty much anything that happens to the hive gets logged. 

Nuns and over wintered hives.

We do have bears up here and he went over the electric fence with me and how important it is to have 9,000 volts. 

old honey to feed the bees

 Later in the season I got assist him and his wife with removing the honey super frames from the hives. Its sort of a long process of getting the bees to leave the honey supers. You have to fit new hive caps with this felt and this be spray that has a smell the bees do not like that makes them leave the honey super for the frames and boxes below. You wait about 15-30 mins then remove the cap and check to see that most of the bees are gone. It also helps to have your smoke can going too.  Some of the bees get really pissed off in the process. The honey frames smell so good, fresh honey warmed by the sun. Depending on how much honey are on the frames, each honey super can weight 30-50 pounds. Bee keeping is not for the weak. John had to make sure my bee suit was zipped up tight and he even went as far to duct tape my ankle and wrists of my suit just in case.

The next day I went to his honey house (workshop in his garage). He had the wood stove going to keep the room nice and hot to make the honey flowed easier. He removed the frames from the boxes and used an electric heated knife to remove the capping wax. He handed them to me and I loaded the honey extractor. It looked like it held about 25 frames but I did not count. The frames fit into little slots vertically.

electric knife

capping wax

frames spinning.

A honey extractor is a mechanical device used in the extraction of honey from honeycombs. A honey extractor extracts the honey from the honey comb without destroying the comb. Extractors work by centrifugal force. A drum or container holds a frame basket which spins, flinging the honey out. With this method the wax comb stays intact within the frame and can be reused by the bees.

honey extractor

Honey is poured through this strainer then at the end of the line was his wife bottling all the honey into 1 pound jars to be sold.

At the end of it John gave me a bottle of honey and a chunk of bees wax. The wax smells like summer and sunshine. I am so grateful to be able to be apart of this. I almost don't want to eat the honey because it means so much to me. But this winter I will be enjoying in my tea.

TWO Years in the Woods

WOW!!! Our family has survived TWO YEARS in the woods! I actually love living up here and all my friends I have made. Since August is the anniversary month of giving up city life, parting with half of our crap and living 100% debt free, I thought I would go over the pros and cons of living in a tiny home.

As many of you know from reading my blog, we live in a 400sq ft house, with maybe an additional 150 sq ft sleeping loft. Our house is not on a trailer like you see on the tv shows but attached to blocks on the ground. Here is my list:

Pros:

• No mortgage! This is fantastic because it allows us to be a single income family which lets me raise my son and not a stranger at day care. This can also be annoying on days filled with melt downs but overall it's very positive.
• Less house to clean. Less junk to collect. Living in a small space makes you become a master organizer that takes advantage of your wasted vertical space and get rid of excess toys and junk way faster due to lack of space.
• Forces us outside more. When you live in a small space you become  very close as a family because you are never apart. I always know who is watching tv and who is on the computer. To have our own space we must go outside and enjoy nature in all seasons. I have even started to love winter. 
• Save money on energy. We can illuminate our house with one light because its so small. We heat with wood and its small enough to cool with a small a/c unit. I have fallen in love with going outside and splitting wood in the winter. The rhythmic motion and sound of the maul cracking the log is very relaxing. I have become stronger stacking and hauling wood into the house. There is still the first fire of the season where I pack in too much wood and get the house up to 87 degrees and have to open all the windows. The loft stays an even 60 degrees all winter which makes for perfect sleeping temps.

Cons:

• No basement. This is annoying because I have no room for a big deep freezer. We have a tiny second freezer but we could really be saving some money by buying meat in bulk or hunting more game. 
• No washer and dryer. Every Sunday I haul all the laundry to town and wash it. Its very depressing sitting at a laundromat listening to radio church service so I go to the coffee shop and I do sit and enjoy a cup of coffee. As a parent of a two year old when we moved here, I can tell you that potty training is less than enjoyable if you have to haul poop and pee soaked clothing and sheets to town.  
• Lack of storage. I do not have enough room for my pantry items. I enjoy canning veggies, jam, meat and soups. I have a terrific electric pressure canner so I put up a couple of jars of soup or meat every time I make a big batch. I store all sorts of back up food so I do not need to drive to town if I run out of salt or fish sauce. Or if we get snowed in we will be eating good for weeks. I had my husband build shelves in our loft but I keep filling them. Now I am short on space to store all my hand made soaps.
• Tiny house =tiny bathroom. The saddest part.....I had to sell my beloved claw foot tub to make room for the well tank. If we had basement it would go down there. I think my favorite hobby is sitting in the tub with LUSH bath bombs, drinking prosecco and reading horror novels.

All and all I am happy with this place and the land. (not the snakes). I enjoy living within our means even though it can be frustrating not being able to get brand new cool stuff all the time. I will say in the future I would love to add an additional room for my husband I to sleep in and a bath house or a sauna. I was thinking a traditional Finnish sauna with a woods stove. I would also like to install outdoor plumbing and really get my mushroom log set up going.

Porch

We learned some new skills! My husband built a deck. 20' x8'. My dad was pestering us to build a deck for a year and a half. We both thought it was going to be too much work and that we really didn't need a deck. You know what? It is actually very nice to have it now that it is completed. It took a few weeks of working on it in-between rain storms. The deck posts had to have holes dug 4 feet so the freezing and thawing would not buckle the deck. My son had a wonderful time being lowered into the holes and digging with a hand spade. He also built quit the construction road system for his trucks to haul the dirt away. Our soil is in layers of sand, rock and clay, which makes it pretty annoying when you are digging and you hit a rock.

This deck is more like a porch off of the front of the house. Its very nice to sit on in the morning and look at the trees and drink tea. Come evening the mosquitoes get so thick that the porch is no longer enjoyable without a thick spray down of bug spray. My husband was so desperate NOT to take my son to a birthday party, that he agreed to screw the deck boards on in a rain storm to get out of it. We came home from the party and the boards were on and our power was out.

Our power stayed out for 3 days. We were able to keep the house going with our battery inverter on our Jeep battery. It was not strong enough to run the fridge so when the power came on I ordered the larger size. We did keep everything charged up, had a fan running and the tv running for Netflix.I bought some blocks of ice and put them in the fridge and freezer to keep things cold. The only thing we lost was my son's beloved popsicles. My friend had me over to shower and I was able to give my son a bath. Other than that it was no big deal. I cooked all meals on the grill and we used our stored water supply to drink since the well pump was not working. We have a composting saw dust toilet so we did not need water for that. I did switch to paper plates while the power was out to save on water for doing dishes. I have been increasing my stored water supply since this last outage. I think I am up to about 15 gallons of water on hand.

Along the front of the porch I would like to plant herbs and some flowers for tea. We also found out there is a birds nest right above the chairs that the babies are pooping down on to our seating area. It's really cool watching the humming birds come to the feeder and fight each other over the food source. 

I'm enjoying stepping outside to use my grill, before I would have to walk down stairs and across the yard to cook anything. This came in very handy when our power was out for three days and the grill was our main source of cooking meals.

Here is the jerk bear that is getting in my trash and tore down and dragged my bird feeder away. Now we will have to wait to feed our bird friends until fall. If you look back at our finished deck photo you can see that the feeders are reachable now because of the deck and I do not want to promote the bear being that close to my house.

The 4th of July holiday we spent digging up rocks and hacking away at tree roots. One thing about moving to the woods that I was not expecting was that each year the frost pushes up rocks. Sometimes its whole rocks and sometimes its just the tops of humungous boulders. Then you hit these things with the mower and it breaks. We must keep our small plot around our house mowed to keep the ticks away. Nothing pisses my husband off more than spending money over and over again on lawn mower parts. Mower deck parts are very expensive too. I found out $300.00 was his limit. He spent 3 days digging and digging, hooking up straps to the jeep and dragging these huge boulders around and off to the side of the yard.

The smaller rocks he either carried by hand or used the wheel barrow. I chopped on some roots and some small stumps. I HATE that job and to me I would rather pay someone to do it than to sit out there in the heat and have a stroke hacking away. I also attempted to burn a stump out and I failed. The fire went out after 5 minutes. 

I even managed to set the gas can on fire which had to be put out with the fire extinguisher and dirty looks form my husband. Oh well live and learn.