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.

Cooling Your Home Using Box Fans

The average daily high temperature so far this summer has been 93 degrees where we live, and it has gotten as hot as 103 degrees one time, and broken 100 five times. That being said, we have an excellent central air conditioner which we have not yet turned on this summer. It's not that we're crazy or anything, it is just that we see the benefits of not using all of that electricity. Not only can we save the world, but we can also save our bank account.

Mrs. True wants me to make note of the fact that in the desert where we live, the night temperature is much lower than the daytime temperature. This is true, the night average temperature in our are has been 67 degrees - much cooler than the daytime temperature. This is also the linchpin of the entire scheme that I am going to present in this post, so it bears mentioning. If your night temperature doesn't seem significantly cooler than your daytime temperature (we're not sure how humidity affects this process), your results may vary.

If you visit Weather Underground, click "more," "historic weather," and type in your zip code you will see that it probably gets colder during the night than it does during the day. When cooling your house using box fans, you take advantage of this by opening up your windows at night and venting the warm air out of your house while pulling the colder outside air in.

Every evening we open up two or more windows on opposite sides of out house and vent the house by placing box fans in the windows. One window (the kitchen for us) has the box fan placed so that it blows air into the house, and the other window (the master bedroom) has the box fan placed so that it blows air out of the house. The rest of the house can have the windows open, and more air will exchange based on where they are in relation to the two master windows.

In the morning we just reverse the process by taking the fans out and closing the windows. It takes less than 1 minute a day to do this, so we spend less than 3 hours a year doing this. We have collected box fans from our local thrift store, for an initial investment of about $15, plus electricity costs, which we have not broken down but are certain total less than running an air conditioner.

Mrs. True notes that our house gets up to 80 during the hottest parts of the day, and it gets down to 70 during the night, so our house is still fluctuating in temperature, just not as much as the outside air. We did add extra insulation to our attic when we moved in, which probably helps and maybe makes up for the ancient windows in the bedrooms and not-well-fitting exterior doors that leak our our cool air. We also have a small one-story house; we believe the method would work in other layouts, but it might take some experimentation to find the correct windows.

And, of course, it is very important that we are comfortable at a higher temperature than many people keep their houses at. We think most people probably could be comfortable at 78 degrees, though, barring medical issues. Isn't that why Southern California is so popular? (Mrs. True adds that in past years, she has consistently turned on the air conditioning only during the time she is cleaning the house; other physical activities done in the home might also affect your perception of an acceptable temperature.)

Organized Simplicity: Step 2

This is a continuation of our series on Organized Simplicity.

After having cleaned the master bedroom, we set our eyes on the kids' bedroom, which also serves as their play room. This room is one of the rooms that is hardest to keep picked up in the house because the kids have so many toys and things that they like to get out every single day. Sometimes, when an attempt to keep the floor clean by reducing the number of toys available has failed yet again, we wonder if kids just have some psychological need to cover the floor with something, whether it be toys, clean laundry out of the drawers, torn-up bits of paper, dishes from the kitchen... whatever they can find. It's a frustrating room. We're hoping this process will do some good.

We took everything out of the room first and placed it in the carport. We did this while Mr. True was at work, so we didn't move the two pieces of furniture: the monkey bars and the bookshelf.

Mr. True and I made the monkey bars when the oldest Truelet was a toddler. I have never been confident in my upper arm strength, and I would like our kids to be better than I am. I enjoyed the ideas about the potential of babies in the book Fit Baby, Smart Baby, Your Baby and, although we don't follow the procedure exactly, I like having the monkey bars and other resources available to us. The monkey bars also provide the structure for hanging the kids' sleeping hammocks (see our hammock post here).

The kids' room consists of a 10' x 10.5' area with a 10' x 2.5' closet. The majority of this closet opens on the room and has a hung sliding door that can only cover one half of the closet at a time. Half of the closet is floor to ceiling shelves (usually open) and the other half is storage space (usually closed). A small portion of the closet space actually opens onto the hallway instead of the kids' room and is intended to be used as a coat closet. We hang a few coats there, but we have put a locking knob on it and most of it is the kids' toy library. They can ask for a toy (or a group of toys - stuffed animals and toy food, for instance) anytime that they have returned the last toy they had out. This is one of those attempts to keep their floor clean that I mentioned above. As I also mentioned, it's not terribly effective. But it does reduce the amount of stuff on the floor, so we stick with it.

The pile of stuff that we removed from the kids' bedroom made a pile about 11.5' long by 8' wide by 2' high, for a total of 184 cubic feet. This was surprisingly less than in the master bedroom, but then, I do go through this room and throw things out on a fairly regular basis. Despite these efforts, we added a decent amount of toys and clothing to the throw away pile.

Once the room was empty, we scrubbed all the crayon off of the walls (which was a bit of a Herculean effort by itself, because it is so difficult to scrub crayon off as it happens). The older two Truelets helped a lot. Though we usually use homemade cleaning products, it was worth it to break out the Magic Erasers to get the kids' walls clean. 

Next we moved all of the useful or beautiful stuff back into the room and placed it back where it belonged. There was a significant amount of stuff in the storage part of the closet that we hadn't thought about in years, but it mostly went back in (baby supplies and canning jars). We pared down our VHS collection, but we didn't get rid of all of it. (I inherited most of the Disney movies on VHS from my grandma and have no intention of paying money to get them on DVD.) In front of that, there is room for a large bookcase full of the kids' books. I like kids' books, but they always end up covering the floor (see above). So the books are in small boxes by first letter of the title (A-C, D-E, etc) and I take out one basket each week and put it where the kids can read the books, then put them back on the shelf and get out a different basket. The alphabetizing means that I can find a particular book when I'm looking for it, while alphabetizing by title means I don't have one box of Dr Seuss and one of Beatrix Potter; the books are spread out so you can find something in each box to match your mood.

The toy library was pared down to Duplos, stuffed animals, dress up clothes, toy food (the toy kitchen belongs in their room but is currently in the kitchen to redirect the youngest Truelet, who loves to "help" cook), dollhouse furniture and dolls (the dollhouse itself also belongs in their room, but they hauled it outside and it hasn't made it back in yet), and my Breyer horses (Mr. True's Legos are stored in another room until the Truelets are a little older). The shelves in the open half of their closet hold clothes in baskets (8 outfits each, plus pajamas, underwear, and church clothes), crayons and a roll of pink builder's paper (a thrift store find that has been wonderful for allowing them to do art without feeling annoyed by how much paper they go through - $5 and it's lasted a year),  and a treasure chest where they can keep a few always-available small toys (matchbox cars and My Little Pony toys at the moment). Some out-of-season clothes are stored on the top shelves. (The clothes were apparently all being washed in the pictures below).

Out in the room, they have the monkey bars with hammocks, a rocking horse, a bucket of books (rotated with the ones in storage), and someday the dollhouse and toy kitchen.

This was an impressive purge and we're happy to have less stuff. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem quite finished. In the master bedroom, walking in makes me happy and relaxed and filled with a desire to keep it so nice, which makes cleaning up easier. The kids' room just looks bare. Boring. Uninspiring. But I don't want to add stuff, because I like them having as much space as possible to play in. Besides, stuff means that we have to clean under it, and apple cores get stuck and rot, and they pee on it, and... yuck. So what do I do?

I'm still working on this question. I'm not a decorator and this is extremely difficult for me. So far I've bought some vinyl wall stickers to decorate the walls, hoping that will cheer up the room without requiring floor space. I'm also considering rearranging, possibly allowing the hammocks to hang from the monkey bars to the wall instead of along the monkey bars so that one can be left up during the day to use as a seat (our monkey bars are too short and low to allow the hammocks to fully extend, so an adult sitting in one ends up on the ground). I'm still toying with other ideas to make the room more appealing.

Writing these posts is apparently harder than cleaning the house, since it has been a few days since this all happened. Maybe we'll be quicker to report on the next room we finished: the front room.

The Top 10 Reasons to Sleep in a Hammock

Mrs. True just mentioned in a post about the fact that we sleep in a hammock. I came up with the Top 10 reasons why you should have a hammock instead of a bed awhile ago. I thought it would be good to revisit the idea here.

As a bit of a back story, we started sleeping in a hammock a little over a year ago when Mrs. True was researching the out-gassing of mattresses (in conjunction with having baby mattresses and being told to let them out-gas for a while so that the baby doesn't breathe toxic fume). Hammocks were only tangentially mentioned - they are, oddly enough, not much blogged about - but the few resources she could find always mentioned that they were excellent for your back.

Since I have had recurring neck pain for years (after I got in a bike accident), this interested her. It was also significantly cheaper (by at least an order of magnitude) and/or easier than non-outgassing mattress options, so we decided to try it out. We ordered a family-sized Brazilian cotton hammock and built a hammock stand out of 1" galvanized steel pipe from Home Depot, for a grand total of about $200. 

It took us less than a week to get used to sleeping in it, and we have never looked back. In fact, when we spend the night in a bed (on vacation or such), we are sore and unhappy. We have since bought smaller hammocks for each of the Truelets, freeing up tons of space in their shared bedroom/playroom (three kids' beds, even bunk beds, would make the room claustrophobic; three hammocks barely register), so everyone in our house sleeps in a hammock.

So, without further ado, here are the top ten reasons to choose a hammock instead of a bed:

1. When was the last time that you laundered your bed? That's gross! I heard from a reliable source (a stand up comedian) that there a 10 million dust mites in the average bed. Your bed might be super-average. The Truelets would invariably (when they were sick) come over to my bed and throw up on it. How do you clean that off? With a hammock you just put it in the washing machine.
2. Your back will thank you. I once got attacked by a car while biking to work. My neck was never the same since then... until we got a hammock. I now only have neck problems when I want them (which is to say when I sleep in a bed.)
3. You love your spouse and want to cuddle with them. A hammock enables (and even enforces) that cuddling. If you don't love your spouse (or cuddling (like that is even possible)) you can get two hammocks - one for yourself and one for your spouse. Just make sure that one of them is big enough so that if you want to cuddle sometimes then you can still cuddle.
4. Your bed is trying to kill you. What I mean to say is that hammocks do not have to be fire retardant like the government has mandated that all bed mattresses are. The out-gassing of fire retardant materials into your room from a mattress is guaranteed to kill you (unless something else does it first). Every person who has ever slept on a bed is either dead right now or is in the process of dying.
5. You can take your hammock and you can hang it up against one wall and reclaim your entire room whenever you are not sleeping in it. This allows you to have a smaller bedroom and still get a larger amount of use out of it than a normal size bedroom. Japanese people have been doing this for years by sleeping on small mats and putting them away during the day. The only problem with the Japanese method is that it is impossible that those little mats are comfortable (Unless you are Japanese, I guess). I played a game once called Sushi Go! which almost makes me Japanese but not quite Japanese enough to enjoy sleeping on a mat on the ground.
6. Hammocks allow you to sleep in a much cooler condition in the summer. They allow heat to radiate in all of the directions instead of just up so you can get cool from the bottom as well as from the top. This allows you to save money on cooling bills.
7. You can have multiple hammocks in trendy colors so that you can show off your fashion sense and style (the extra hammocks will easily fit in a closet or something. They don't take up that much room)
8. Hammocks are portable, so if you want to take your hammock with you to sleep on the road or something like that (not literally on the road, that's dangerous. Sleep in the gutter.) you can totally carry your hammock around with you. If you want to carry around your mattress you probably have to have a really big truck. Good luck with using a mattress on a camp out (or in the gutter for that matter). We have actually taken our hammock on camping trips. It is great. My sister's tent blew over and our hammock was wonderful.
9. Hammocks are far less expensive than mattresses and they're more comfortable anyway. You could buy 4 or 5 hammocks for the price of one bed and then you can change out your hammocks every season or however often you want to.
10. Unless you like sweeping out the underside of your bed regularly, underneath your bed is a really gross place (a breeding ground of filth to quote Mrs. True). Every so often if you move your bed you'll find that there is a desiccated apple core, or a dried up piece of pizza. You will never find such nonsense underneath your hammock because you move your hammock every single day when you get out of it.
11. If your kids decide to climb in your bed and have a cracker party it is difficult to clean it out. With a hammock, you just dump it over and all the crumbs are ready to be swept/vacuumed off of the floor.

There are a couple of downsides to a hammock, though these are easily outweighed by all the advantages. One is that it is very difficult to get out of a shared hammock without disturbing the other sleeper(s). If you cuddle kids down for a nap in your hammock and then want to get up, it takes a lot of skill and a dollop of luck to get away without them crying. And if you're not used to sleeping cuddled up to your spouse, do get two hammocks.

Finally, in the winter you will need to attach an underquilt to your hammock or else you will get an amazing amount of cooling (at a time when it is not desired). You could buy an underquilt like this (make sure to get the right size), but we just tied blankets to the bottom of our hammock, and it works great.

Organized Simplicity: Step One

This post is continuing our series about Organized Simplicity.

Cleaning the master bedroom was a monumental task. Though we did the whole house three years ago, Mrs. True has gone through every other room and removed the excess at least once in the intervening time. Not the master bedroom. It became where stuff went to die, crammed in closets and corners and out of the way. Dealing with that took a solid 12 hours of work for two adults, with the "help" of the Truelets.

We took everything out of the room and placed it in the driveway. We then wiped the walls and floor of the entire room and began to sort through the pile that we made. When we started to sort it, we had extracted a pile of stuff from the room that measured 17'x5'x3' on average. Considering the room is 13'x10', and that it has a 2'x10' closet, we could spread the stuff out over the entire floor to a depth of 1.7 feet. Looking at the room beforehand I would not have guessed that. Mrs. True kept moaning, "So much stuff! How do we even have so much stuff?" as we carried out load after load.

Here is the stuff pile:

Here is the empty room (except for a cheese fridge in the closet):

We were asking ourselves continuously: "Is this beautiful/awesome or useful?" If we couldn't honestly answer yes we did not bring it back inside. Things that made the cut: about half the books, most of the clothes (we did pretty well on having a minimal wardrobe, if nothing else), suitcases and bags, a trunk of mementos each for Mrs. True and I, a small set of drawers with craft supplies, a bag of fabric and a sewing machine, basic furniture. Things that didn't: the other half of the books, a ton of craft supplies (Mrs. True explains that somehow some part of her brain keeps believing she's crafty when she's at the store, but never when she's at home), and random junk that had been pushed into this room for lack of anywhere else to keep it.

Here is the room after the clean up (yes, the hammock is our bed; there should be a post about that someday):

And here is the pile of stuff that we removed.

A rough estimate says we put back about 150 cubic feet of stuff. It would pack much smaller than that in a U-Haul, with proper boxes and all, but that works as the first number. Given that we estimated pulling about 255 cubic feet of stuff out, we did very well; we got rid of almost half! Well done us!

The room looks amazingly better (Mrs. True accidentally-on-purpose forgot to take "before" pictures because it was so bad) and we are very pleased. It also is much more motivating to keep such a lovely-looking space picked up. We hope to find the same results with the rest of the house.

Organized Simplicity: Step Zero

As Mr. True and I have been listening to Walden and Thoreau's emphasis on minimalism and simplicity, we both remembered one of my favorite books, Organized Simplicity by Tsh Oxenreider. When I found this gem at our local library three years ago, I devoured it, recommended it to everyone I knew, and followed its ten-day, step-by-step plan to organize and simplify your home. We had intended to do it every year, keeping our home simple, but with one thing and another it's been about three years since the last time we did the entire house. After listening to Thoreau's inspiring experiences, we were both seized by the desire to do it again.

The book is about going through your life and removing everything that doesn't contribute to your purpose and enjoyment. It's in the same genre as the current bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but I like Organized Simplicity much better. For one thing, the author doesn't make absurd claims that if you do it once you'll never have to do it again or if you use her method of folding laundry you will come to enjoy it. (My hatred of that concept is personal, since I detest laundry with such a passion that my husband sorts it and I stuff mine into dresser drawers without folding at all; I cannot imagine any method of folding that would make me happy to add such a chore into my life.) More pertinently, Organized Simplicity was written by the mom of three young children living in American apartments and suburbs (as well as occasionally overseas - I'm jealous), making her advice much more applicable than that of a single woman in Japan.

The first half of Organized Simplicity is theoretical, talking about finding your life's purpose and making sure your finances and calendar and life in general reflect it. It's not nearly as abstract as some "life purpose" books, but it wasn't something I had great need of at this point in my life, beyond inspiration for the second half.

The second half is a ten-day exercise in which you take every single item out of a room, clean the bare room, and look at each item while asking yourself, "Is this item useful? Is it beautiful?" before returning to to the room if it gets at least one yes. The first time I read this book and shared the idea with my husband, he said, "Beautiful? I don't have anything because it's beautiful," so in our house the question is, "Is this useful or awesome?" (In this one case, I will admit that the KonMari "Does this prompt joy?" might be more helpful if you also have a family member who balks at "beautiful.")

Another factor prompting my desire to do this exercise was seeing my parents, over the last month, downsize from their 3000 square foot house here in Utah to a 500 square foot tiny home in California due to a job change. It is amazing how much stuff piles up in houses. It also made me curious about how big a U-Haul we would have to rent to move ourselves, if for some reason we desired to move. So we decided to not only do an Organized Simplicity on our house but also to measure everything as we took it out and put it back.

This series will document the ten days or so of work we'll be putting into this process. Organized Simplicity divides up the rooms in a general way, but we'll be adapting it to our house's layout and our own schedule.

We have a 1070 square foot house with a storage shed and carport (no garage, basement, or attic) to work with. We do have a large amount of closet space, which I am very grateful for. In this area, we have two adults and three small children, ages 5, 4, and 2, with a new baby due in the fall. The first time we did this process, three years ago, we only had two kids and I had been starting to feel that we needed a bigger house with our third. When I finished the process, I though our house was huge and had plenty of extra space. We're hoping to find the same results this time, because we now expect to raise our family in a home no bigger than this. (Who wants to clean extra square footage anyway?) Minimalism and simplicity is our way to go.

Here is our room breakdown and anticipated order:
1. Master bedroom
2. Kids' bedroom/playroom (one room)
3. Front room (living/family room)
4. Bathroom (yes, we only have one; if we do stay in this house, there will be another half bath added)
5. Kitchen (I anticipate this taking two days)
6. Home office (which someday will be a second kids' bedroom, but they don't need it yet, so it's a catchall space)
7. Storage shed and yards

We are excited to see exactly how much stuff we have and how much we can get rid of. We're happy to invite you to join us on this adventure!

Strawberries: A mini-story

When we were picking cherries, I talked a little with the friends who told us about the cherries, and they told us about a patch of wild strawberries that is near their house as well. We decided on Sunday to go up to see the patch.

Since Mrs. True and the middle Truelet were taking a nap, I went with the oldest and the youngest Truelet. We were excited as we went out, and decided to bike there in the new bike. Mrs. True is very strong to take them all in that bike. It was hard on the small hills even.

We didn't exactly know where the strawberries were, just approximately, so we went out into a large vacant area behind a church to look for them. The first thing that we found was a gooseberry bush. It had some edible fruit on it, so we ate some and picked some, and we continued to search.

Next, we looked under some small sumac trees that were growing in the area, and found the patch. We noted its location, ate a few berries, and decided to come back the next day with boxes to pick a bunch of berries.

The trip was a success, despite the Truelets' tromping over the patch and destroying a lot of berries. We plan on taking their shoes off next time that we go strawberry picking (so that they notice when they step on a berry.)

We ended up getting over a gallon of berries that we froze for smoothies. We also made a pie, and the Truelets ate as many berries as they could.

The moral of this story is: remember to talk to people about your fruit gathering habits. Everyone has a chance of knowing about fruit that you do not know about!

Foraging from local fruit trees and step by step honey extraction

This week we have been picking cherries from a cherry tree in the neighborhood. This is one of the things that is the best about being in a neighborhood. Everyone seems to want to have fruit trees in their yard, however they never pick the fruit. We regularly pick fruit from other people's trees (with their permission of course), and from trees owned by the government. We also pick grapes from an old couple's fence and make grape juice in the fall.

Finding this free fruit can be frustrating when you first move into an area. I have seen several websites that attempt to help people locate fruit, but we don't have one that we've found useful so far. The most fruitful (ha ha - we're so punny) source we've cultivated is word of mouth. Every time we talk about spending all our evenings for a week picking fruit, our listeners become more likely to remember us the next time they see a laden, unattended fruit tree. Every year, we get at least one notice from a friend: "Hey, I noticed that this old/renting/never home neighbor of mine has a fruit tree - they'd probably let you pick the fruit so they don't have to clean it off the ground." We ask and almost always get a yes. We clear up rotten fruit from the ground while we're working and usually offer the owners a percentage of what we pick (although no one has ever taken it), and people seem happy about it. Our second most effective method of getting fruit is to watch when we're walking and biking and note the positions of fruit trees. We ask their owners if they will pick the fruit themselves. This succeeds less often (a decent number of these people want their own fruit), but some of the people do let us pick and we get a new, nearby source.

We have processed about half the cherries we picked so far. We have three gallons of cherries frozen for smoothies next year. Mrs. True tries to get herself and the kids to drink a fruit-and-kefir smoothie every day for the probiotics, so it's useful to have lots of frozen fruit on hand.

To process cherries is super easy if you have a cherry pitter. Just wash them off and pit them. You can can them if you want to, but that is way more than we are willing to do, so we just freeze them. This is the cherry pitter than we use, and it is excellent (terms of functionality, storage space required, as well as in terms of price.)

We harvested honey again today. I took some pictures this time, so here they are:

These are the tools that we use to collect the honey: A big bowl, a knife to cut the comb off of the top bar, and a hive tool (a small crowbar for breaking into a bee's home)

Here is the hive unopened, but with the roof up. I don't know why there are rocks on it. I intend to ask my bee mentor some day.

Here are both sides of the comb that I selected to harvest. It is more capped off than the one from last week.

Here is the comb after I shooed all the bees off of it, and cut it off the top bar.

I mashed it with a potato masher.

Placing the comb in a 2 gallon bucket lined with a colander and plastic mesh cheesecloth.

A few hours later most of the honey has drained, and the comb is left over.

We don't pasturize our honey, so pretty much the next step is bottling it in glass jars.

Finally, I just decided to read Walden for the first time. It is quite a fun book. As I was talking about it with my brother in law, he said it sounded like I was just Thoreau reincarnated

So far my favorite part has been the following quote:

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.

This is so true! Whenever I want to go to Easter Island, or Italy and can't because I have to work my daily job I wonder weather all the stuff that I have it worth it, or if a simpler life with  would be better and allow me to be happier.

Mrs. True liked his idea of voluntary simplicity:

I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one.

Speaking of houses, our current house is great. We have, however had this idea of a dream house that we have talked about for years. It will be a small house on a few acres in the country. It will be banked into the earth like a hobbit hole, it will be by a stream and in a forest. There we will be able to grow food for ourselves and spend time together all the time.
Of course this dream house will probably have to wait till I'm retired, since it would involve being out in the country, but we are hoping that through thrift and economy we can retire before too long. Mrs. True will probably write a post our retirement plans before too long.

For anyone else who dreams of retiring in a hobbit hole, we discovered a company that sells hobbit holes. Here is the website. We thought that this was a really cool idea!