It's Easy Being Green

A lot of people have funny thoughts about home brewed beer. One of the many visions people get is the quintessential picture of someone brewing beer in their home bathtub. It is a funny thought but not one that represents home brewing at all!

I’ve had the hobby of brewing for about 7 years now. A good friend of mine down in the Valley of the Sun decided to try it out one day and were quite impressed with our results. We both enjoyed fine liquors, beers, wines and cigars. Beer happened to be one of those products we could make ourselves! We used to brew pretty regularly, putting together a batch about every other month. It’s definitely motivation to have a “brew buddy”. When I moved away, I kind of lost the spirit and enjoyment of the process without my “brew buddy” and really only brewed once or twice a year. It didn’t help that I ran across some batches of brew I didn’t particularly enjoy. What do you do with two cases of beer you don’t like? Give it away…and hope the bottles find their way back to you!

Lately, I’ve been trying to get back into my homebrew hobby. So, over the weekend I got together with a buddy of mine from work who also brews and we put together two separate batches. Last fall, I brewed a Pumpkin Ale. It was like drinking a slice of pumpkin pie only in a beer! A couple of bottles were fun to try but not anything you would drink on a regular basis. This year, I opted for something a little more mainstream…a Honey Brown Ale. Most people should be able to enjoy more than a couple of bottles of that! Fermentation began within about 8 hours of pitching the yeast. That’s always a good sign when your fermentation kicks off that quickly. This morning, when I woke up, fermentation was literally on a roll. The wort (liquid that is fermented into beer) towards the bottom of the jug looks like it’s boiling. Streams of tiny bubbles rush toward the surface of the carboy (jug) and then burble through the airlock to be expelled. No matter how many times I see it, I’m always fascinated.

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Two weeks from now I’ll rack the brew into another carboy for secondary fermentation. On December 16th, my homebrewed Honey Brown Ale will be ready for bottling. Homebrewing is a fun and rewarding hobby. While it’s really no cheaper than buying good store bought beer it is a good lesson in self-sufficiency. With just a few simple ingredients available at your local homebrew shop, you can whip up some suds you really enjoy and know that it didn’t take a truck, traveling thousands of miles and using hundreds of gallons of fuel to get to you.

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If you’re looking to become more self-sustaining, growing and preserving your own food is an excellent way to achieve that goal.  Not only is it probably one of the easiest ways to achieve your sustainability, it is also one of the cheapest.  For some reason, I had always imagined home canning to be a bygone era but reaching back I could vividly remember one of my Mom’s old high school friends canning her own jams and jellies frequently when I visited.  Maybe I thought, it’s not that far out of vogue.

As Homestead Hottie and I looked for more and more ways to make our life more green and self-sustaining, food preservation seemed to be a logical next step following our entry into growing some of our own food.  Home food preservation does take time but the end results are so worth it and will save you a ton of money in the long run.  You won’t have to rely on a run to the grocery store for a canned good but simply walk into your kitchen pantry.  Check out this video as I show you how we turned a bumper crop of green tomatoes into a half-dozen quart jars of our own, homemade pasta sauce.

If you didn’t catch my post on how to ripen or use all those end of season green tomatoes,  click here.

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A lineup showing just a couple jars of what we've been able to put up over the last two weeks here at the half-acre homestead. Our shelves in the garage are now over-flowing with food to last into the winter season.

As I enter the fifth week of unemployment, I’ve started purging my magazine racks scattered throughout the house.  It’s been a welcome sight for my Homestead Hottie, seeing a few magazines trickle out the garage door and into the recycling bin destined for bigger and better things than collecting dust and taking up valuable space.

I got a bit ticked though thumbing through the November 2009 issue of Organic Gardening though.  A brief article flipped my lid, informing me for the first time that canning jar lids produced by Jarden (brand names include Ball, Kerr, Golden Harvest and Bernandin) contain BPA.  Bisphenol-A is the very industrial chemical that we have diligently tried to purge from our home and food supply, tossing storage containers, water bottles and even commercially canned food.  Now I come to find out my freshly preserved organic goods from the garden might be tainted with a chemical linked to reproductive and developmental problems, diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

The news disgusts me since Homestead Hottie, Darling Daughter and I just wrapped up two very busy weeks preserving this Summer’s harvest.  So far we’ve proudly home canned and shelved:

4 jars of cinnamon apple slices
4 jars of pickles
12 jars of strawberry jam
4 jars of halved tomatoes
8 jars of apple sauce
3 jars of apple butter
8 jars of tomato sauce
3 jars of whole tomatoes
5 jars of chicken stock

Some websites claim the only lids containing  BPA are those with a white coating on the inside.  One or two mention that Jarden quit using BPA in their products.  Still others yet warn of chemicals used in the competitors lids (Tattler) called POM which apparently contains formaldehyde.  Now I’m so confused I don’t know what to think.  I’m trying to put a call into Jarden to see what info they can give me about the situation.  Stay tuned for updates!

In the meantime, I’ll keep looking at the alternative to avoid BPA in our home canning.  What have you done to keep the chemical out of your food supply?

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Have you ever had a rogue plant grow out of your compost pile?  I have several rogue plants that have sprouted through the air vents in our composter including squashes and tomato plants.  Take a look at the rogue composter pumpkin that’s currently taking over the fence and now setting fruit.  I guess that’s some good compost in there!

This is a pumpkin, several other squash plants and some rogue tomato plants that grew out the side of our composter.

This is the first pumpkin to set on the rogue plant that grew out of the side of our composter. I never expected the plant to get this far along but I guess it's happy.

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The so-called “Dog Days of Summer” are paying off in the veggie garden this week. My wife and I have spent quite a bit of time outside pulling weeds, smashing squash beetles, plucking Tomato Hornworms and giving our little 10×4 foot plot of wholesome paradise some good ‘ol TLC. Mother nature has been a big help too, squeezing some much needed rain out of a passing cloud or two at least once a week. That’s apparently a rarity out here in southwestern Indiana during August but who’s complaining? We’ll gladly take the free water!

Our collander is brimming with Friday's tomato harvest, sporting a fresh batch of roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and slicing tomatoes.

On Friday I had to make a mad dash through my tomato patch to harvest what was ripe before the plants sucked up all the rain water. I’ve been having a big problem with tomatoes expanding way too quickly with all the rain and then splitting just as they ripen. Since I’ve been picking preemptively, they’ve been faring much better though. Our roma tomatoes are producing a bumper crop of pear-shaped goodness that will be perfect with pasta. The cherry tomatoes haven’t let up either, gifting us with a fresh flush of fruit every couple of days.

On Saturday our baby was fast asleep for an afternoon nap so we decided to hit the garden again and do some cleanup. Squash beetles totally annihilated both of our zucchini plants. They bore into the stems of the plants and kill their ability to suck up water. They eventually get the wilt disease and die. I would normally be sad about it but those two plants each produced about ten pounds or more a piece of fresh summer squash.

A weekend bounty of fresh vegetables for the picking. Clockwise from top left: Handfuls of cherry and roma tomatoes, lemon cucumber, bell peppers and an Orange Oxheart heirloom tomato.

While we were out there dealing with the squash beetles we harvested another basket full of produce. Saturday’s take included more roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, lemon cucumbers, bell peppers and an Orange Oxheart heirloom tomato. All have really taken off and produced wonderfully in southwestern Indiana. We can’t wait to enjoy the fresh tastes of each of them.

My failures were definitely sweet corn, yellow squash, pickling cucumbers and pumpkins. I’ve been struggling with powdery mildew spreading from one cucumber vine to the next and then it spread onto my pumpkins. Both are still putting on fresh leaves and trying to set fruit but the mildew just marches on. My sweet corn growth was very stunted and produced some very tiny ears of corn, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. I didn’t follow proper planting recommendations by planting at least four rows so that was probably the cause there. Yellow squash were attacked by squash beetles early on and never really had a chance.

We still have another three months to go before the first average fall frost so I think our harvest days are far from over. I’m also going to try my hands at growing some fall vegetables this year and am getting ready to tackle that project this week.

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It’s already coming up on mid-August but there is still plenty to do out in the yard. This week my Mammoth Sunflowers started blooming, so there is now an array of happy faces greeting us all around the back of the house. Many of them have reached 8 feet or taller and continue to grow even taller with each passing day.

One of our many Mammoth Sunflowers that started blooming this week has a special resident. If you look closely at the bottom of the bloom, you'll see a Praying Mantis waiting in the shadows.

Now that they’re blooming, I can start my bee survey. It’s all part of the Great Sunflower Project run by Gretchen LeBuhn at San Francisco State University. The project was started to help understand the challenges that one of our most important pollinators, bees, are now facing. After all, scientists say every third bite of food you take is the result of bees doing their good work.

A Bumblebee makes his way around the blooming sunflower, collecting pollen.

I set myself up in my lawn chair this morning, grabbed a cup of coffee and sat and observed one of my sunflowers for a few minutes to see how long it took for 5 bees to visit one bloom. The maximum wait time allowed by the study is 30 minutes but I didn’t even get close to that amount. As it turns out, just six minutes into my sunflower observation I had reached 5 bees visiting and happily pollinating.

That’s good news! Not only do the bees pollinate the flowers but also the bountiful harvest growing in our own backyard vegetable garden. I’m hoping just a few minutes spent helping their research will help develop some solutions to dwindling bee populations. While small, they’re so important to our life.

I’ve even considered doing some home beekeeping at some point in time. My yard is way to small to even think about it now but in the future when I have a few acres under my belt, I’m hoping I can get some hives going.

If you’re interested in learning more about The Great Sunflower Project or want to know how to conduct your own bee survey, just click that link and head to their website.

Happy pollinators hard at work on a Mammoth Sunflower

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Surround Yourself With Fall

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