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!

Honey and cheese

Our sprinkler drip hoses seem to have much more pressure than they need to. Every so often one or more of the heads will blow off and then water will spray out all over the place. It is sort of annoying, but our house does have more pressure than is good for it, so it is not all that surprising.

This Saturday we harvested honey for the first time. We got a little more than 3 lbs of honey (from one bar alone). It went pretty well, and we also got a decent amount of beeswax too. A lot of the cells in the bar that we harvested were not capped, and tasting the honey, it seemed to be less flavorful than we would have expected. Thus, we think that some of the honey might have not been fully concentrated, so we are going to consume it quickly.

If honey is finished by the bees and capped off, then it has really good storage qualities. If it is too watery, however it can still go bad.

Since I ran out of space in the hive, next week I will be harvesting three or four bars. I am going to have to find a good place to store it, since I don't yet have any plans for what to do with so much honey.

The process that I used to extract the honey was as follows:

1. Remove the honey comb from the hive. First get the comb out of the hive itself, and then get the bees off of it. That took some doing. I kept having to shoo them off, and they kept flying back to the comb. After a while I was completely surrounded by a swarm of bees. After removing all of the bees I cut it off the top-bar with a knife. With a different type of hive you might have to do something different.
2. Mash up the honeycomb to release the honey. Put it in a big popcorn bowl, and use a potato masher, that seems like the easiest way.
3. Pour it all into a straining device. I used some real cheese cloth (not the stuff that they sell at the store as cheesecloth, the stuff that people press cheese in when making home made cheese) draped over a 2 gallon bucket.
4. Wait (it takes forever for honey to drip through your strainer, but it will do so eventually).

Speaking of cheesecloth, I have not made a real cheese in a long time. I have made paneer and ricotta a decent amount, but not much else. We have mostly been eating all of the cheese we made from last time that Lala and Clarabel were producing a lot of milk.

Lala and Clarabel (for those that don't know) are our goats. They are both half nigerian dwarf. Lala is half nubian, and Clarabel is half alpine. When they have just had kids, they produce about 3 quarts of milk a day, so we have to make a lot of cheese, kefir, and yogurt to get through all of the milk, however when they have not just had kids they produce only about 1 quart a day, which is hardly enough milk for our family.

When my wife is pregnant we pasteurize the milk, but other times we just drink it raw. Goat milk is a necessity for our family, since our oldest daughter is not able to drink cow milk.

Lala when we first got her.

We milk our goats twice a day, and feed them and refill their water at that time as well. Goats are about as difficult as taking care of a dog, however with goats you get less companionship, and way more milk (not that I have milked a dog).

My wife wants to add that you can supposedly clicker train a goat, however that never seemed worth it to her.

If you are considering getting some goats to live in your back yard, make sure to look into the zoning for your house. Many areas do not allow goats. Additionally I would not recommend getting a nubian unless you happen to live in a deaf colony. Nubians are quite vocal, and many neighbors might get annoyed with them.

One thing that was really helpful for us when we were considering getting goats was finding Your Goats: A Kid's Guide to Raising and Showing at a local thrift store. It is a book aimed at children, and teaches them how to take care of goats. It was way less scary to read about it in a kids book because they didn't talk about all of the things that could go wrong as much as they offered encouraging advice. My wife adds that we have never had anything go wrong that was not covered in this book (mastitis is the only thing that I can recall the goats ever getting, and that wasn't horrible).

Once you have goats you might want to try out this useful recipe for goat milk paneer/ricotta:

• Heat up any amount of milk to 198 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Add enough acid to curdle the milk. We use white vinegar, but some people use citric acid or lemon juice. It doesn't take much.
• You will know that you are done when the milk starts to turn a little bit yellow, and white curds form in the milk.
• Strain out the curds and salt them to taste. If you are making ricotta, you are done. If you are making paneer, wrap them in a cheese cloth and press with 5 lbs of pressure for a few hours until they are firm enough for you.

My wife adds that paneer is an amazing cheese that can be used to replace shredded chicken breast in practically every dish. It is really what tofu wishes that it could be when it grows up. Another interesting thing about paneer is that it does not melt. It is a grilling cheese. You can literally put it on a grill and grill it like a burger. It will not melt.

This recipe also works with cows milk, however we adapted it from the original version found in Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking, so if you want a cow's milk version then reading  that book would be great. We use Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking for our home made brie, romano, parmesan, and we adapted their cheddar recipe as well. It has a lot of useful information about many common problems with cheese makes, and is definitely worth picking up if you are interested in making your own cheese.

Reading the book also helped us to want to make moldy cheeses for the first time, and we are highly appreciative of the fact that we did (although we have never made a successful blue cheese yet).

Bees, Bikes, and Broccoli

Saturday I tended to our bees. We have a top bar hive and they had all 18 of the bars that I had in there full of comb. I added two more bars just last week, and since they already filled them I added four more bars yesterday. I am no bee expert (I recently inherited the hive from my father in-law), but with such a big hive I am starting to feel excited about the production capacity that we'll have.

For those that do not have a bee hive, it is way easier than having any other animal that we have had (including cats, dogs, birds and fish), or any other livestock that we have had (chickens and goats). All I have had to do so far is keep opening up more room for them to build comb in, about once a week. Once the hive is full, all that I'll have to do is harvest the correct amount of honey each week until winter rolls around.

Once winter is here, apparently I need to do some more work to prepare them for winter, but not really that much relative to the amount of work that other animals take.

Either way, I would recommend bees to anyone that is on the fence. They are great.

Our peas are finally producing (we got them out a bit later than the old folk that I talk farm stuff with, so it isn't too surprising that they took a little bit longer than some other people's).

Today we also discovered a rapini broccoli that volunteered. This is a bit of a mystery, since we have never grown broccoli in the front yard before, and none of the mulch that we used was from our back yard. We love all broccoli, so we are going to tend it and hope that it goes native. Having broccoli all over our yard would be a great thing.

Mrs. True has been looking for a while at alternate means of getting around with three kids. One thing that has been useful to her is our bike trailer. She really likes being able to take the kids around on the bike and not only conserve gas money, save the world, and get to where she is going easily, but also she likes not having to buckle five point harnesses on all the kids while bent half over in a minivan.

She recently found a used Madsen Bucket bike for sale, and we decided to get it. It fits all of the kids in it easily, and it drives pretty well. The bike is made using solid construction techniques and handles pretty well considering the fact that you are carrying around 60+ extra pounds in the back. We are considering making it into an electrically powered bike. We will post about that if we decide to do it.

We found a few new mushrooms growing in the yard today. We must have imported them with the compost that all the new gardens are composed of. They are deliquescent (which means that they dissolve into a black inky mess pretty quickly after sprouting up), so I have not tried to identify them, however they are not really growing in that big a quantity either. Next time that one sprouts up I will make sure to take some pictures of it and try to identify it.

I have eaten field mushrooms, and scotch bonnet mushrooms that grew in my yard, and have some other varieties that grow in my yard that I have identified as poisonous. Make sure that you identify any mushroom that you are considering eating before you try it out. Eating random mushrooms will probably kill you.

My go-to identification book is North American Mushrooms: A Field Guide To Edible And Inedible Fungi, which has excellent pictures of all of the mushrooms that it tells about, and is very thorough at explaining the characteristics and pointing out other mushrooms that are similar. My biggest beef with the book is that it uses really long words when shorter ones would do. You will have to memorize the glossary, or you will have to leave a book mark in it.

I would not, however encourage someone to eat mushrooms that they have identified using just one source. A Field Guide to Mushrooms: North America is my second source that I use. I also like the MycoKey, and Roger's Mushrooms websites (both of them provide excellent keys that can help identify mushrooms). Finally, for those who haven't heard the old mushroom hunter's adage "When in doubt, throw it out". Don't eat anything that you are not entirely sure of. Lots of people die every year over bad identifications.

Back to Eden and Mallow

Hello, I am Mr. True. My family and I live on a quarter acre lot in a suburb of Salt Lake City Utah. We are interested in growing, harvesting, and making our own food, providing for our own basic needs through our own efforts, and living in a more healthy, and sustainable way.

This blog will chronicle our efforts, and serve as a repository of the things that we have learned. We hope that it will be enjoyable and helpful to you.

This year we planted a garden in our front yard following the advice of a movie called Back to Eden. We first placed down a layer of cardboard that we got from a local store (decomposed shipping boxes), and then we got a load of horse manure compost from a local horse owner. We put the compost on top of the cardboard and planted seeds deep enough that it was moist. So far we have a lot of green growing, but we haven't seen much fruit yet (it is after all not yet late enough that anything should be producing fruit).

We have, however gotten a few salads out of the leaf crops. My personal favorite is a volunteer crop that grows wild almost everywhere in the world: mallow weed. It started growing near our tomatoes (the stuff sprouted through the compost, and grew so large that we had to eat it to help the tomatoes get more sun.)

We learned that mallow was edible by reading the book The Wild Wisdom of Weeds: 13 Essential Plants for Human Survival, which is a highly recommended book about edible plants that grow virtually everywhere that humans live. We might write a post just about this book some day because we liked it that much.

Mallow is a mild wild green with circularish leaves. It tastes excellent as a salad, cooked, or on sandwiches. Between that and the other "weeds" that we have in our yard I wouldn't expect that we are going to buy much (if any) lettuce this year.

Another favorite volunteer crop that we have is Swiss chard, which we planted a few years ago, and which went native (so we keep getting it back every year).

There is more to say about our garden this year, so next post will probably be in a similar vein.