Fall berry picking

Since we put out garden and bees to bed we have only been able to produce a few things to eat, and so we have been relying more on buying things from stores. We still have our own milk, which means that we also have cheese, yogurt, and kefir. We are still eating our own eggs, and we also still have a reasonable amount of swiss chard. Swiss chard keeps growing even in the snow at our house.

Last week we made some brie, since Mrs. True was due to give birth to our next child this week. She is not supposed to eat brie when pregnant, so we haven't been making it (even though I love it so much). In a few weeks we will be ready to eat a home made brie again, and I am super excited.

We went out today to pick some wild fruit and berries and supplement the things that we could grow at home. We got a reasonable haul: 2 gallon bags of rowan berries, about half a gallon of miscellaneous berries, about 40 windfall pears from a pear tree that went native in a forest nearby (the thing is so huge that there is no way that the birds can get them all, and they just fall off all fall.) We also got some apples, but they all got eaten as we picked the other things.

The truelets go to this forest to pick pears and apples about three times a week, but when I go with them we end up picking more than just apples and pears.

The rowan berries are not yet ready to eat. They need to be frozen for a few months before they will be ready for that, but the miscellaneous berries are ready right now.

We got four other types of berries. First we got fireberries (or, more correctly firethorn berries), which have poisonous seeds but taste decent when made into a jelly and also provide their own pectin, so they are great to add to other jellies. Last year we made a large batch of hawthorn/firethorn jelly which was very popular with the truelets so we will probably do that again this year.

We also got rose hips because the truelets wanted to pick them. They are high in vitamin c, but they don't taste good. Since I was leading them to pick wild berries, I decided it would be counterproductive to snub an edible berry if the truelets were putting them into the basket.

Third we got oregon grapes (I love them. They taste unique, and very strong). They are hard to pick because the leaves are spiny, and they are pretty sour, but we like them. People plant them all over the place, so they are really easy to find (even in the forest).

We also got common barberries which I have never picked before, but have a good flavor. the oldest truelet said they taste like rose petals, but I don't really think that they do. They are way more sour. They have saw toothed leaves and sharp thorns all over their woody stems. The berries fortunately grow in large clusters, and are easy to remove from the plant. We got quite a few from the large bush that we found.

We will probably pick some hawthorn berries from the park at the top of the hill to round them out, and then make a jelly out of some of the berries, and eat the rest.

In which we eat a lot of squash

This week we found some green grapes while we were visiting the local park. We have standing permission from the elderly couple who owns the grapes to eat anything that grows on the outside of the fence, so we gathered about 5 lbs of grapes in about 1 minute of picking.

We usually wait till the first frost to pick their concord grapes, but with green grapes, it seems that the flavor is good before then. It looks like this year will be a good year for grape juice :)

We also canned more peaches. This time we preprocessed them by boiling them down in a little water mixed with citric acid and sugar (they produce a lot of juice when you cook them down, so a lot of starting liquid is not necessary). So many more fit in a jar if you preprocess them, so we will do that form now on. It really isn't that much more work.

We have also been enjoying squash (zucchini, yellow, etc) from a couple of different sources this week. We personally planted a ton of plants, but we are not harvesting nearly enough ourselves, so we have been supplementing our own production with squash from other sources (co-workers and church members).

How anyone cannot grow enough squash is a subject of discussion in many circles that we frequent, however I have decided that the family of Mrs. True must have angered an irascible gypsy, or something like that in some ancient time, and that the curse still follows them till this day.

To be honest, though, the True family (including Mr. True) does has a bit of a problem with growing squash, which is a pity because we love to eat it. Just this week we made pasta with squash, stir fry with squash, pancakes with squash (sort of like a mixture of Okonomiyaki and pumpkin bread), and we have also had squash as a side dish multiple times. Our goats and chickens would probably also love the stuff, but we don't have any to spare.

Speaking of goats and chickens, they are doing well. We expect to have a new kid soon, as Clarabel visited the stud almost 150 days ago now. Perhaps our next post will be about that.

Also, I finally fixed the bucket bike. I will make a post soon detailing what it took to get it all working well as this post is being posted much too late already.

Three cheers for a pick!

This past week Mrs. True and I mucked out our goat shed. We use a "Deep Litter" method for taking care of the shed, so we only do this about once a year. It took a few hours, but it was not really that bad (and for us it is way easier than cleaning out the shed every week).

For those that have never heard of deep litter, the method is basically this:

Every day you strew straw over the parts of the floor that have visible manure or are wet. The floor slowly gets higher and higher over the course of the year. Once a year you clean it all out.

This works great in a desert habitat, as the upper layers tend to dry out, so you can't really smell anything. We have been using it for a few years now, and it is really easy.

We have always used an ensilage fork (which are made for this job) and a wheelbarrow (which are made for every job) to clean the shed out, but this time we tried a new tool for part of the job and were highly impressed. The new tool is a rail road pick. They don't look like they would do much, but they are perfect for getting the stuff broken up so that the ensilage fork can easily lift it away.

Instead of taking all day like we thought it would, it took only about 4 hours. I am blaming it on the pick.

We also went on a walk to the woods behind the local park, and found tons of old fruit trees (apples, peaches, pears, and plums). It must have been an orchard before it became a forest.

While we were there we found some Oregon grapes. We have made Oregon grape jelly before and loved the flavor, so we will be back later in the year to pick these ones. if they are still around.

Finally, while we were there I saw some berries that my dad told me as a child were poisonous ("Twinberries" he called them). Since I recently learned that a lot of the "poisonous" berries that I grew up avoiding only were poisonous if you ate the seeds, I decided to look these ones up. They were honeysuckle berries, and were in fact poisonous. Oh well :).

Still not dead

Since our trip, Mrs. True has been recently planning the curriculum that the Truelets will be learning this year in our homeschool, so we are not all that active in our homesteading endeavors.

We did can a bunch of peaches (we got some at a local farmers market for $0.83 a lb, so it seemed like a good idea to can some of them), and we have not had to buy any veggies (with all of the stuff our garden is producing). The kids are getting a little sick of squash, but I have been enjoying all of the weird hybrids that we have made.

We have also been working a lot more on Mrs. True's motorized bike. The problem with the chain falling off at high speeds has not yet been fixed (it seems to be a really tough one), but I did get a new tool on Friday in the mail, so hopefully I can get the chain properly tensioned and that should help it. When we have a working solution I will post it with more pictures so that everyone can benefit.

Chokecherries

On Friday the entire True family picked a bunch of choke-cherries. They are a plentiful source of sour fruit to those interested in them. We plan on making them into jelly.

Choke cherries (at least the ones that we found) grow on small trees which can be easily bent over to the ground, so the first step in picking them was to grab the trunk and bend it over so that the Truelets could pluck all of the berries off of the stems.

The berries grow in bunches sort of like grapes, and they are hardy enough that you can just pinch the stem at the top of the bunch and slide your fingers down the bunch to pop them off (with your other hand under the bunch to catch the falling cherries).

They are super sour, and also sort of make your mouth taste hairy if you eat them when they are not all the way ripe (though I have read that cooking them removes a lot of the sour hairiness). They seem to become black when they are fully ripe (though your local choke cherries may vary from this).

At the same time as we were picking the choke-cherries, we also found some baneberries (which are poisonous), so we didn't pick those ones

We are following a recipe the we found here to make our jelly. We haven't done more than extract the juice since we were busy yesterday, but since we ended up with a little over 2 quarts of juice we are probably going to end up making a 2.5x batch.

We might end up changing the recipe a bit since a lot of people seem to like adding lemon juice or almond extract to the juice prior to making jelly out of it. If we do, we will post the new recipe, but since we don't tend to carry almond extract we might leave it out.

We know of some other chokecherry bushes, so our next foray into picking and eating chokecherries might be making flour out of them. This is, of course assuming that I can convince myself that the cooking process destroys the cyanide in the cherry's pit.

The Apes of Wrath

This week we were tipped off by my sister that there were apricots that were going to waste near her house. We asked the elderly couple about them, and were told that we should take as many as we could (they hated cleaning the things up off the ground, and had had all that they could use).

It was a short drive away, so we went early Saturday morning and picked a lot of apricots (I am estimating 75 lbs). It took 3 hrs and was pretty easy work. Apricots just want to be picked. They were small but beautiful. The kids ate and ate all of the apricots that they wanted, and we still didn't even clear off a quarter of the tree.

The apricots were very sweet, and had thin skins. We decided to blend them, flash freeze them, and to make smoothies out of them for the rest of the year. The first time that we tried to process so many apricots we ended up blending it up and using it for smoothies, and it worked well, so this time we decided to do the same. We also ate a lot, dehydrated a decent amount, and have a lot left over for more consumption.

Whenever we put a bag of apricot puree in the freezer, I like to label it 'Ape', and ask the Truelets "What puts the 'Ape' in Ape-ricot?"

We have tried apricot jam a few times, however it never turns out right for us, so we decided against it this year. Mrs True adds that she hates canning stuff in the dog days of summer and hearing up the kitchen to sweltering.

We also have two sad stories this week: the first is the Sunflower Fiasco. One of our sunflowers (the biggest one) finally lost all of the yellow off of its face, and I decided that it was time to harvest it. Apparently you don't just do that, because the seeds were all empty. It looked like it was going to be an amazing harvest, but it ended up being only a learning experience. In the future, we will harvest sunflowers only as directed to by the internet (which is to say when the back of the flower is brown).

We have one sunflower that is taller than the roof of our house right now. I really am beginning to wonder where these seeds came from.

The second sad story is a tale with a moral. We were sitting at home when out Bishop knocked on the door. He was holding something to his chest, and when I came out to talk to him he turned his back so that the kids couldn't see what he was holding as he asked me (showing me a glance of it as he turned) if I wanted to take care of a baby duck.

He said that he saw it on the side of the road, and it was lost, so he took it home, but didn't know what to do about it. He thought of us since we have goats and chickens. Now, Mrs. True loves all intelligent mammals, but I only love animals that are useful in a utilitarian way. If this duck were intelligent or useful (read edible) we would happily welcome it into our home, however a baby duck does nothing for either of us.

We took the duck more because it was polite than because we wanted it, but we have already posted an ad on a local bulletin board offering it to anyone that wants it. Worst case scenario it will be gone on Tuesday because someone already offered to take it on Tuesday if we still had it then.

The moral of this story is that when you are obviously taking care of a farm in a suburban setting, people can't help but notice and will assume that you know everything about all animals.

Finally, Mrs. True has been reading Anticancer: A New Way of Life recently. She isn't reading it because we have any cancer, just that she is very interested in eating healthy. If you read this book you will learn that my last statement is not actually true, apparently everyone has cancer in them all of the time, and most of our bodies fight it off all the time as well.

The book is written by a MD (in psychiatry) that got a brain tumor and decided to learn more about cancer so that he could prevent himself from getting it again. He recommends eating less sugar, more fruits and vegetables, less processed foods, and more turmeric, ginger, green tea, and garlic.

Aside from the green tea we do pretty good at following his diet already (His listed spices are some of my favorite spices anyway, and we love veggies and fruits and avoid most processed foods). The big change that we would have to make if we were to follow his eating recommendations would be to eat more small fish instead of large fish. Apparently anchovies are great for you. Who would have known?

Motorizing a Madsen Bucket Bike

We have just finished attaching an electric motor to Mrs. True's bucket bike.

Here are a few pictures of the bike as it currently stands:

The process that we went through to get it all put together was as follows:

Mrs. True researched what type of motor she wanted. We found really good reviews for a few types of electric motor kits, so we went with the cheapest one that looked like it would do the job.

It is a mid drive kit from gng electric. Mid drive motors attach near the pedals and drive the chain, as opposed to hub drive motors, the other main affordable option, which replace a wheel with a battery-driven wheel. Mid drive motors allow different gears to have an effect while the motor is running and tend to be the more powerful option. For moving a heavily loaded cargo bike up hills, this seemed like a good idea. Also, with a front disc brakes and a bucket over the rear wheel, a hub motor would have been hard (and more expensive) to install.

The cheapest hub motor that Mrs. True found was $500 including the battery, so her goal was to get a mid drive and battery for that price. The name brand mid drives are at least $600 without the battery, but we found a cheap kit from China for $288 including shipping but not the battery.

Many people on the internet advise against the cheap Chinese kits. We will see in a year if we end up agreeing. There were certain penalties associated with it from the start, but they did not outweigh the price savings to us.

The main problem with the kit was the bottom bracket they sent. Despite the seller asking for the measurement of the bike's bottom bracket, the one they provided did not fit at all. We had to order a separate bottom bracket, and it had to be a very unusual shape to allow the motor to attach. We ended up finding one that would work at SickBikeParts.com. They have a variety of bottom brackets in odd sizes and fast shipping. This cost us another $23.

The plug the kit provided to attach the motor to your battery was very strange, so I bought new plugs from the Home Depot and wired them on. A more expensive kit may have used a more regular plug, and of course buying the battery and motor together would ensure that wiring was not a problem. It was worth the money to us to do it ourselves. We also had to buy longer bolts to hold the motor to the bike frame, but we can't really blame that on the cheap kit. The Madsen has a very large frame; the supplies they sent would have worked on any normal bike. Both of those together added another $5.

The last problem we ran into was the idler wheel in the motor. It's not in line with the path of the chain, so sometimes it derails. We have not yet resolved that issue, but we don't expect it to be an expensive fix; it will just take time.

We had to take the bike to the bike shop to get the bottom bracket removed and the new one put on, since we don't have the right wrench. Our local bike shop guys were very nice and did it for free. That was awesome. If you're near Salt Lake, check out Revolution Bicycles; we like them and will continue giving them our business.

The other major part was the battery. Mrs. True tried to argue that since we'd only paid $200 for the motor, we could afford $300 for the nice batteries. I argued that it would be easy to chain together three batteries made for power tools to get the correct specs (36V and 20 amp hours) and it would only cost $114. We went with the cheaper option, which will probably not surprised readers. Here are the batteries that we bought, as well as the charger.

Mrs. True had second thoughts on seeing the batteries, which were 3 times as big and 5 times as heavy as the expensive ones, but I was confident. And once they were attached to the bike, she agreed that the weight didn't make that much difference.

However, attaching them was an interesting problem. We engineered three different solutions before finding one that we think will work. The first try was too bulky to fit in the available space. The second looked like it worked, but pedaling became an art form to keep your shoes from hitting the box. This is our current solution:

We bought 4 L-shaped brackets and two mending plates and eight bolts and eight nuts and a slew of bungee cords, all at the Home Depot for about $20. First we formed shelves for two batteries with the mending plates and L brackets. It looks like this:

We then bolted the shelves together, straddling the bike frame behind the seat, as you can see above.

We drilled holes in the bucket and attached U-bolts as anchor points for the bungee cords and bungee corded the batteries in place. The third battery was laid on top of the other two and bungee corded to the mending plates below. The final arrangement looks like this:

The controller, a very small box, was zip tied to the frame in front of the batteries and all the wires were attached. We also had to cut off one handlebar grip to replace it with the twist controller for the motor. We still need to come up with a way to make it all waterproof, but in Utah that is less pressing.

All this took a couple of days of work, three trips to the Home Depot, and two trips to the bike shop. Most of the time was spent on the battery holder; the kit was simple to install with the exception of the bottom bracket. I enjoy this kind of project, so this was a good choice for us. We saved at least $200 over the cheapest simple install kit and got a more powerful motor.

It has worked on an unloaded test drive around the neighborhood and once we adjust the alignment of everything on the chain, we expect good results. Mrs.True plans to bike the kids to the library this week (3 miles with several hills). That will be the test. We'll report the results.