7460 The Best of MEN Winter 2014

M O R E T H A N A M A G A Z I N E . . . A W AY O F L I F E

3 4 THE RENEWABLE ENERGY HANDBOOK/AZTEXT PRESS; COVER: MATTHEW T. STALLBAUMER

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News From Mother Building a new sense of excitement and optimism

Instant, No-Dig Garden Beds Create or expand your food garden with these simple, timesaving techniques.

Living Off the Grid (And Without Propane) This Ontario home is powered by sun, wind and wood, and consumes almost zero fossil fuels.

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Small-Space Gardening

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Chickens in the Garden

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8 Easy Projects for Instant Energy Savings

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Live Simply: Save Money, Smile More!

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Rainwater Harvesting: A Better System

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How We Created a ‘Homestead Hamlet’

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Save Money on Groceries

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Homemade Bread: Truly Easy and Delicious

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Craft These Fresh, Easy Cheeses

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Care and Cultivation of Permanent Garden Beds

Growing food in small spaces can be fun and productive — you just need a little sunshine and some imagination.

You can “recoop” much of the expense of raising chickens by putting their manure to work in your garden, and by enlisting your birds for organic pest control.

VERTICAL VEG/SARAH CUTTLE

ELAYNE SEARS

LINCOLN JOURNAL STAR; BELOW: JIM MACKENZIE

Implement these inexpensive strategies to reduce your carbon footprint and slash your energy bills. Spending $400 once will save you $900 per year.

Are you drawn to the idea of simple living, but not sure where to start? Three families share the changes they’ve made that have allowed them to live with less income but greater security and life satisfaction.

Think beyond the rain barrel: This simpler, cheaper approach will help you harvest much more free water for your garden!

A Nebraska neighborhood exemplifies how to live more sustainably and securely by networking with neighbors to produce and share homegrown harvests.

Buying in bulk and freezing or canning fruits and vegetables are great ways to enjoy better food and cut your costs by up to 85 percent.

Say goodbye to the intimidation factor in baking homemade bread!

These tips and simple bread recipes will inspire beautiful loaves and a whole new outlook on baking.

Learn how to make fresh cheese, and get easy recipes for paneer, mascarpone, chèvre and fromage blanc.

Establish permanent garden beds and paths to provide a secure habitat for the dynamic soil food web that sustains your crops.

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M O R E T H A N A M A G A Z I N E . . . A W AY O F L I F E

DIANE GUTHRIE, STYLING BY BITTERSWEET FLORAL & DESIGN

BARBARA DAMROSCH

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20 Crops That Keep and How to Store Them

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75 Safe and Effective Herbal Remedies

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65 Self-Reliance Tips That Will Save You Money

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Grow More Food in a Movable Greenhouse

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Freezing Fruits and Vegetables From Your Garden

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How to Dry Food: Reap the Garden and Market Bounty

Stash a winter’s worth of delicious, homegrown produce in the cool corners of your homestead.

Learn which plants are best for treating a number of common ailments, including allergies, depression, indigestion and more.

Apply a DIY approach to any facet of your life, and you can start saving big today.

Boost productivity in spring, summer, fall and winter with a do-ityourself greenhouse you can transport around your plot.

Round out your food preservation regimen! Tap these straightforward freezing tips to turn your garden harvests into sensational off-season meals.

Dry the harvest to stock up on homegrown snacks and convenience foods for year-round eating.

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Organic Pest Control: What Works, What Doesn’t

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Keep a Family Cow to Enjoy Delicious Milk, Cream, Cheese and More

Our nationwide reader survey reveals the best methods for managing common garden pests.

Have a cow! Here’s what you need to know to buy and care for a dairy cow. You’ll have a blast, plus save money on dairy products (and even meat).

DREAMSTIME/BRIANHOLM

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Start a Self-Sufficient, 1-Acre Homestead

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Build an All-in-One Outdoor Oven, Stove, Grill and Smoker

Live off the land with these strategies for establishing selfsufficient food production, including advice on crop rotations and raising livestock.

For about $350, you can build Mother’s versatile and durable cooking unit.

JASON HOUSTON; BELOW: RICK WETHERBEE

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Learn to Can for Homegrown Flavor

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Backyard Chickens for the Best Eggs Ever

Save money and enjoy delicious foods all winter with this traditional food-preservation skill.

You can keep a few hens to produce homegrown eggs, even if you only have a small backyard.

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Instant, No-Dig

GARDEN BEDS

Create or expand your food garden with these simple, timesaving techniques.

By Barbara Pleasant Illustrations by Elayne Sears

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igging or tilling the soil before you plant is preferred, but it isn’t essential. Here are several ways to create usable planting space with no digging. Later on, when the season winds down and you have more time, you can turn this year’s instant beds into primo permanent planting space.

Easiest No-Dig Options The best way to start a new garden bed is by digging a new site to incorporate organic matter and remove weeds. But in a pinch you can just cover the area with cardboard or layers of wet newspaper, followed by several inches of grass clippings, shredded leaves, or weed-free hay or straw. Use a hand trowel to pull back the mulch, cut away sod, and open up planting holes for stocky transplants, including tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, herbs, flowers — whatever transplants you can buy will work.

If your soil is hopelessly hard and infertile, line your car trunk with a tarp or old shower curtain, and head to a garden center for a load of 40-pound bags of topsoil. Slash drainage holes in the bottoms of the bags, then lay them over the area you want for your growing bed. Use a sharp utility knife or scissors to cut away the tops of the bags. Moisten well, then plant the bags with seeds or transplants, and mulch to cover the bags. (If growing tomatoes in bags, allow one bag of topsoil per plant.)

(including me) have tried straw bale beds, which have their pros and cons. You can put one anywhere, and if it’s kept moist all season, the area beneath the bale will show rapid improvement in drainage and tilth thanks to the work of big night crawlers, which thrive beneath straw bale beds. However, bale beds can be costly and need a lot of supplemental water and liquid fertilizer, but they are still fun and rewarding to grow.

To get large-scale “instant” results, use bales of straw or hay to frame a big raised bed (arranged in a rectangle, a 15-bale instant bed will have an 8-by-20-foot footprint). Fill the enclosure with as much soil, compost and any other free or cheap growing mediums you can find; you’ll need a truckload or two. Allow

several days of intermittent watering to thoroughly moisten the growing medium and the bales, and then plant vegetables inside and on top of your straw bale barge. As long as you can keep this setup moist (soaker hose coverage and mulch are mandatory), it will support a huge array of summer vegetables and decompose into a beautiful bed of organic matter in about a year.

The Frame Game

Other easy ways to create instant beds involve setting up a frame of some kind and filling it with growing medium. The frame can be temporary, made from plastic fencing or untreated boards, or you can build frames from scrap lumber, slender logs or stacked blocks or stones. Or talk to a fencing company about You can make new garden beds quickly with no digging or recycling rails from discarded cetilling by using bags of topsoil, as shown here. Punch holes in dar rail fencing.

You don’t need the bottom sides of the bags for drainage before you place to build four-sided frames — just them on the ground and cut away the tops. Then you can plant directly into the soil in the bags and mulch the area to cover the bags. In fall, pull away the bags and re-form the beds with a rake.

Straw Bale Solutions In 2004, following the lead of horticulture professors N. S. Mansour from Oregon State and James Stephens in Florida, Rose Marie Nichols McGee and dozens of volunteers grew colorful salad greens in compost-enriched bales of hay and exhibited them at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show to promote the “Plant a Row for the Hungry” program.

Since then, thousands of gardeners

Seven No-Dig, New Bed Options 1.

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Lay down cardboard and mulch; set out transplants.

Plant directly into bags of topsoil.

Make frame with straw bales and fill.

Use wood frames and fill with compost or topsoil.

Build a “bird’s nest” from brush and fill.

Make “lasagna” — layers of leaves, peat moss and compost.

7. Build compost pile, add soil and plant.

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Tim Rinne and Kay Walter — the author and his wife — added a greenhouse to their home in 2010 (left). With the sun as its only heat source, the greenhouse allows the community to grow coolweather crops, such as lettuce, in winter (above).

In the meantime, Linda, Ed and another neighbor obtained permission to develop a community garden space in the empty backyard of another neglected property, adjacent to the one Kay and I had bought. And in the summer of 2011, as we’d hoped would

happen, Linda and Ed were able to acquire the property, adding a fourth lot to our burgeoning project. They embarked on the same grueling house- and yard-renovation process that Kay and I had gone through. The soil in the backyard was awful — mostly composed of clay and rubble. But it has since been amended and the property has already been successfully integrated into the neighborhood garden.

And, like magic, the transformation we performed on our properties spread to the rest of the block. After gardening with us for a year, two of our neighbors were inspired to establish plots in their own small yards. Two more homeowners who live across the alley, and whose health conditions prohibit them from getting out to garden, offered us access to their backyards as well. And an investor-owner was so impressed with what we were doing to the neighborhood that he offered us his entire yard for more growing space. In return for the use of their properties, the rest of us share our surplus vegetables and fruits with them. In five years, we’ve carved out more than a half-acre of garden and orchard space in our single city block, with 50 fruit and nut trees, nine grape arbors, and 15 berry patches.

The Hawley Hamlet, One Square Block

Have a Homestead Hamlet?

Berry patch

City street tree/shade tree

Fruit tree/nut tree/grape arbor

House or other structure

Hoop house/greenhouse

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Top left: Jean Lewis

LINCOLN JOURNAL STAR

Vegetable/native flowers garden

TIM RINNE/NATE SKOW; TOP: JEAN LEWIS (2)

So, What’s a Hamlet?

For the first couple of years, we described what we were creating as a “village.” But that term always sounded a bit presumptuous to me; what we were doing seemed a notch down from that.

The word “hamlet,” I discovered, originally referred to a community too small to have a church or shops. Hamlet residents were dependent on a nearby

on our home and began generating energy, rather than just using it. We’ve also insulated our walls, installed energy-efficient lighting and low-flush toilets, and have rain barrels beneath every downspout.

What we’ve enjoyed most out of all of the green improvements we’ve made to our property, however, is the attached conservatory we added to our home (we call it the “greenhouse”). We live in a historic district, so we wanted to ensure that we built something compatible with the original architecture of the neighborhood. In my gardening reading, I’d come across the works of Eliot Coleman — an organic farmer in Maine who grows food yearround in unheated greenhouses — and wondered Members of the Hawley Hamlet in Lincoln, Neb., have upturned their once-grassy whether we could do something similar. We thus lawns to free up space for vegetables, fruit and nut trees, berry patches, and more. designed our greenhouse to have a dirt floor with no heat source other than the sun.

We’ve also erected a simple, 15-by-30-foot hoop house in one village to supply the necessary services the hamlet lacked. That of the neighborhood gardens that cost us less than $1,000 in definition sounded right on target — we’re too small to be totally materials. With just transparent plastic sheeting for a cover, we’re self-sufficient and will always be embedded in Lincoln’s urban able to grow salad greens for the block long after the first frost core. Living as we do in the Hawley Historic District, we now has ended the gardening season outside. refer to our community homestead as the Hawley Hamlet.

All told, 20 families now participate in our hamlet. Everyone has Building Neighborly Bonds his or her individual vegetable plot. We share the fruit harvest from the community orchard, and in the three “donated” backyards, Everything I’ve described here we’ve done without government we’ve established potato, bean and gourd patches that we rotate assistance. Our hamlet is a self-initiated, self-supported urban annually, sharing the harvests equally among the neighbors. homestead that we’d love to see replicated all over the country.

The feature that makes this hamlet concept so attractive is that it Chickens, Bees, Solar Panels and More can be imitated in any urban setting by neighbors building bonds Our corner lot’s location offered us no secluded place for a with one another, collaboratively growing food in neighborhood chicken coop if we were to even remotely abide by city ordinance. gardens, making optimal use of their local resources, and lightenThe only suitable location near our home was the driveway of our ing their footprint on our overstrained ecosystem. next-door neighbor Barrie. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I asked And gardening, I can tell you, is a veritable magnet for neighBarrie whether he’d be interested in keeping chickens. He jumped bors. In my 30 years of political organizing, I’ve never seen anyat the idea, and since May 2011, Barrie, his boarder, Pat, and I thing break down barriers and foster dialogue like growing food have been the proud papas of four adorable Rhode Island Reds. does. In the first 22 years that Kay and I lived on our block, we Like clockwork, each reliably provides an egg every 30 hours, knew one or two of our neighbors by name. Today, after five years which keeps our households amply supplied. of working to build the hamlet, there are no strangers. We know When we first launched the community homestead, I was pretty everybody. We all work together to produce delicious, high-quality hard-core about everyone growing only food. But thanks to Linda’s food, and we enjoy constantly learning new things. We also feel sensible counsel, I lightened up, more secure and content. particularly after she pointed out Anyone can do what we have how critical flowers are to the done. And the place where it can bees we rely on for pollination.

We love this term “homestead hamlet” — it has such a all begin, fittingly enough, is in At Linda’s suggestion, we jointly friendly, cozy sound to it. And we bet quite a few of you are the garden. took a class on beekeeping and set doing similar things all across the country. Send us reports up our first hive in April 2012. on your local hamlets, and we’ll share them in the magaTim Rinne lives in Lincoln, Kay and I have also been zine or online. Email us at Letters@MotherEarthNews.com.

Neb., and is the state concentrating on turning our We invite all hamlets to schedule open houses and coordinator of Nebraskans 108-year-old house into a workshops to celebrate homesteading education (go to for Peace. He can’t credit “green” residence. In 2009, we www.MotherEarthNews.com/Homesteading-Education for enough all the neighbors who installed a geothermal heating details). If you want to develop a hamlet in your neighborhave come together to create and cooling system and saw our hood, why not let this article be a conversation starter with the Hawley Hamlet. utility bills plummet. In 2011, your neighbors? we installed rooftop solar panels WWW.MOTHEREARTHNEWS.COM

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HOMEMADE Truly Easy BREAD and Delicious

Say goodbye to the intimidation factor in baking homemade bread! These tips and simple bread recipes will inspire beautiful loaves and a whole new outlook on baking.

By William Rubel Photos by Jim MacKenzie

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have always found baking homemade bread to be truly simple. I just put flour, water, leaven and salt together and stir. I often put the water in the bowl directly from the tap and just turn off the tap when I think I have enough. I never measure precisely, and people always love my bread. I honestly think you can’t fail at bread-making as long as you pay attention to the dough and don’t try to bake it when it isn’t ready.

Making bread you’re happy with is a matter of both the bread and your expectations. A loaf of bread doesn’t have to look the same every time or match a picture in a book. There is no one pathway to delicious bread.

Here, I’ll share how to make a crusty white loaf, a deeply flavorful multigrain bread and a lovely sandwich bread. I encourage a largely free-form, no-knead system in which your role as bread baker is like that of an improvising jazz musician or nurturing gardener. It is a holistic system that recognizes fermenting bread dough as alive and ever-changing. It is a system that sees each batch of dough as having the potential to produce an infinite range of successful conclusions, such that each recipe is a window into a world of possibilities rather than an end in itself.

The Yeast You Can Do Yeast is active in dough at any temperature above freezing up to the oven temperature that finally kills it (about 140 degrees Fahrenheit). Like plants, yeasts grow more quickly at warmer temperatures. Just as hothouse vegetables may look beautiful but have little flavor, when dough rises at hothouse temperatures (80 degrees and higher), you get good gas production but not good flavor. Yeast needs time to create good flavors. I suggest using an instantread thermometer so you can check dough temperature conveniently.

Experiment with long, slow fermentations (12 to 20 hours). This means experimenting with a small amount of yeast in the dough — no more than one-half to 1 teaspoon per pound (about 4 cups, sifted) of flour — and dough rising temperatures

Contrary to traditional bread-making wisdom, you can skip kneading your dough.

Instead, try the simple stretch-andfold technique shown here to strengthen your dough’s gluten structure.

from the low 70s down to those of your refrigerator. In a hot summer kitchen, mix the dough with cool water. In a cold winter kitchen, mix it with warm water. Be patient with your dough and it will always yield fabulous bread. That said, sometimes you may need to make bread in a hurry. If you have to, use a packet of yeast (21⁄2 teaspoons), mix the dough with warm water and let it rise in a warm place — and be happy! It’s always better to enjoy a homemade loaf than plastic-packaged bread.

Yeast Types and Tips Saccharomyces cerevisiae is the singlecelled fungus responsible for fermentation in beer, wine and bread. Bread yeasts are simply strains of S. cerevisiae selected for maximum carbon dioxide production in doughy environments.

Yeast strains optimized for bread come in three forms: as blocks of refrigerated, active compressed yeast (19th-century technology), as granulated dried yeast to be rehydrated in warm water (1940s technology) and as finely milled dried yeast to be rehydrated with the flour (1970s technology). This last form of yeast is often

called “instant yeast.” Beer and wine yeasts, which you can easily purchase online, produce exceedingly flavorful loaves.

In my talks with yeast companies, I’ve been consistently told that most of their customers are more interested in speed than taste. Instructions on yeast packets reflect this priority.

Here’s my advice: If the yeast should be hydrated in water, then use warm water, as the packet directs. But if the yeast should be stirred directly into the flour, then, as a rule, don’t use water that is WWW.MOTHEREARTHNEWS.COM

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A spare dresser in a cool room can furnish convenient storage space.

slowing physiology by controlling respiration (usually by lowering temperature) and/or providing moisture so crisp root vegetables sense they are still in the ground (although some staple storage crops, such as garlic, onions and shallots, must have dry conditions to support prolonged dormancy).

Most storage crops need to be cured to enhance their storage potential. During the curing process, potatoes and sweet potatoes heal over small wounds to the skin, garlic and onions form a dry seal over the openings at their necks, and dry beans and grain corn let go of excess moisture that could otherwise cause them to rot. Harvesting, curing and storage requirements vary with each crop — see the charts on Pages 58 and 59 for specifics. In my experience, harvesting and curing vegetables properly allows for much more flexibility when it comes to options for possible long-term storage conditions.

Storing Spuds

Some crops need high humidity; others keep best in dry conditions.

Seeking out good food storage spots in your home or on your property can lead to interesting discoveries. Take storing potatoes, for example. When we asked the M E N Facebook community (www.

Facebook.com/MotherEarthNewsMag) to share favorite ways for stowing potatoes in winter, we received dozens of great ideas: Place cured potatoes in a burlap bag, tuck the bag into a plastic storage bin left open a wee bit, and keep the bin in an unheated basement.

Corn, beans Line plastic laundry basand garlic are kets with newspaper, with a snap to store. potatoes arranged in layers between more newspaper.

Place the packed, covered baskets in an unheated garage.

In the basement, make short towers of potatoes by stacking them between layers of open egg cartons. Cover the towers with cloth to protect the potatoes from light.

Place sorted potatoes in cloth grocery bags that have been lined with black plastic bags, and then store the cloth bags in a cold space 56 THE BEST OF MOTHER EARTH NEWS

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under the stairs. A similar method: Sort different potatoes into paper bags, then place the bags in milk crates to prevent bruising.

Use an old dresser in a cool room or basement to store potatoes. Leave the drawers partially open for ventilation.

In a shady spot outdoors, place a tarp over the ground and cover it with an inch of loose straw. Pile on potatoes, and then cover with more straw, a second tarp, and a 10inch blanket of leaves or straw.

Bury a garbage can horizontally so that its bottom half is at least 12 inches deep in the soil. Place potatoes in the can with shredded paper or clean straw.

Secure the lid with a bungee cord, and cover the can with an old blanket if needed to shade out sun.

Here in Virginia, we have vole issues that require us to harvest our early spuds promptly, so my buried garbage can gets plenty of mileage storing potatoes. Buried coolers or even buried freezer bodies (with machinery removed) can work the same way.

Stowing Crisp Root Veggies

Theoretically, root vegetables that grow well below ground can be mulched over in fall and dug as needed in winter. This often works well with parsnips, but most gardeners would risk losing much of an overwintered beet or carrot crop to wireworms, voles or other critters. Repeated freezing and thawing of the surface soil will damage shallow-rooted beets and turnips. Harvesting root crops, cleaning them up, and then securing them in cold storage is always safer (and more convenient). In Zones 7 and warmer, you’ll probably need a second refrigerator, as you won’t have naturally cooled spaces that stay below 40 degrees Fahrenheit in winter. In colder winter climates, you have several options: Try bins, buckets or trugs packed with damp sand or sawdust stashed in cold spots around your homestead, such as under your basement

Uproot leeks, cabbage and Brussels sprouts, and place in damp sand.

stairs or in an unheated garage or storage shed. This method works amazingly well if you can find a place with temperatures in the 32- to 40-degree range.

Every few weeks, dump out containers and repack them, eating any roots that are showing signs of softening.

The previously described method of storing potatoes in a buried garbage container works well for root vegetables, but you’ll need a second one (or a buried cooler) for roots that need moist conditions. Pack these in damp sand or sawdust to maintain high humidity.

Working outside the fridge, the biggest challenge in storing crisp roots is maintaining high humidity without promoting molds and soft rots. That’s where packing materials, including damp sawdust or damp sand, come in handy. Sawdust is clean and lightweight, and the residue can be shaken out into the garden. Sand weighs more but is reusable — simply dry it in the sun and return it to a bucket or bin until you need it in fall.

A seasonal second refrigerator is worth considering if you have a lot of beets or carrots to store, live in a climate that’s too warm for underground storage, or want to store root vegetables to sell or trade later.

When preparing to store beets, carrots or other root vegetables in plastic bags in the refrigerator, sprinkle in a few drops of water as you pack each bag. Ideally, a few drops of condensation should form inside the bags after they have been well-chilled in the fridge.

Sorting Through Winter Squash

Now for something really easy: storing winter squash.

The hard rinds of winter squash protect them from drying out, so all they need is a cool spot where you can check on them from time to time. Look for signs of mold, and promptly consume squash that have developed minor blemishes, such as discoloration or soft spots.

Some types of winter squash will store for a longer period of time than others will, so eating your squash in proper order is important in order to prevent spoilage.

Squash and pumpkins classified as Cucurbita pepo tend to keep for only two to three months. These include acorn squash, delicata or sweet potato squash, spaghetti squash, and most small pumpkins. Eat these first.

Buttercup and kabocha squash (C. maxima) will keep for four months under good conditions, but begin watching the fruits closely for signs of softening or mold after two months. Many squash pie devotees bake up all questionable buttercups in early winter and stash the mashed squash in the freezer. This is a wise move, because it’s far easier to make a pie or a batch of muffins if you have frozen squash purée waiting in your freezer than if you have to face down a squash the size of your head.

The smooth, hard rinds of butternut squash (C. moschata) help give them the longest storage life (often six months or more), so butternuts should be eaten last. We grow more butternuts than any other winter squash because they are such a cinch to store.

Butternut squash are a cinch to store for up to six months.

Apples and pears store best in a second refrigerator.

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Reap the Garden & Market Bounty

HOW TO DRY FOOD

Dry the harvest to stock up on homegrown snacks and convenience foods for year-round eating.

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By Barbara Pleasant

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any gardeners freeze, can or give away surplus zucchini and tomatoes, but what about drying them? Not only is drying a delicious way to preserve and concentrate the flavors of your fruits, veggies and herbs, but if dried, produce requires little

space — and no electricity — to store, so you can enjoy it in fall and winter, too.

Last year I dried peppers, squash, garlic and quite a few cherry tomatoes, which brought much comfort when a power outage pushed my frozen treasures to the brink of thaw. The biggest revelation came in early spring, when I began using dried foods as other stockpiled veggies ran low.

I discovered that cooking with delicious home-dried foods is as easy as cooking with packaged convenience foods, at a fraction of the cost. Sweet dried fruits and crunchy veggies are great in meals, but they’re good enough to enjoy as snacks, too.

What can you dry? From tomatoes and beets to sweet corn and green beans, almost any vegetable that can be blanched and frozen is a likely candidate for drying, along with apples, strawberries, peaches and most other fruits. In times past, people waited for a spell of dry, breezy weather to dry bunches of herbs or peppers threaded on a piece of string. And the first dehydrator I ever used was a parked car (just lay the goods on the dash or under the rear window). You will need only a warm oven

DAVID CAVAGNARO (2); TOP RIGHT: EBEN FODOR

If you don’t have a garden, stock up on in-season produce from a farmers market to dry at home. You can dry almost any fruit or vegetable you like to eat.

to dry a basket of shiitake mushrooms, but unless you live in an arid climate where sun-drying is practical, you’ll eventually want a dehydrator. David Cavagnaro compares plug-in options in “Choosing a Food Dehydrator” (http://goo.gl/xqMyp), and Eben Fodor shares his expertise on how to build simple, nonelectric food dryers in the article “Build a Solar Food Dehydrator” (http://goo.gl/yGLhC ). (For lots more on solar options, see www.MotherEarthNews. com/Solar-Food. — MOTHER) But back to the food. Do you want the simplicity of scalloped potatoes from a box — but homegrown? Or how about the makings for dozens of pasta salads in which everything but the noodles came from your garden or a local farm? With a stash of dried foods, you really can drag through the door after work, set some dried veggies to soak, and then flop down for a few minutes, talk to the kids or change your clothes. By the time you’re back in the kitchen, you’ll be greeted by plump, pre-cut, organically grown veggies ready to be stir-fried, sautéed, simmered or tossed with dressing for a fast salad. You’ll

see that drying foods to stockpile is one of the easiest ways to achieve a local diet.

Back to the money. Organic convenience foods have their place in busy lives, but you pay for the time and energy involved in their creation. You subsidize the growing, drying, packaging, shipping and marketing, and it all adds up to some hefty retail prices. A dried organic vegetable soup kit costs $2 to $3, and a frozen entrée can push $5. The organic “skillet dinner” category runs somewhere in between, and it’s a great example of a situation where you could make your own for about 50 cents using home-dried foods.

Drying peppers and herbs can save you big bucks at the spice rack, too. And if you make your own smoky sweet paprika or hot pepper blend, your cooking improves as you discover new ways to use the blends to punch up your favorite dishes.

Drying With Attitude In Lanesboro, Minn., organic gardener and food-drying expert Mary Bell thinks people should look at food drying with a creative eye. Bell has invented what can only be called new foods, such as succulent “half-dried tomatoes” seasoned with basil and thyme or “Can’t-A-Loupe Candy” — chunks of cantaloupe seasoned with ginger and powdered sugar before drying. To deal with bountiful crops of hard-to-preserve eggplant, she figured

out how to cut eggplant into strips, soak them in a salt/lemon juice solution and dry them into pasta-like strands. For overripe zucchini, she marinates thin slices before drying them into chips.

According to Bell, the principle behind her book Food Drying With an Attitude (available at www.MotherEarthNews. com/Shopping), is sustainability. “I want everybody to have food they can supply for themselves year-round,” Bell says.

“Drying can provide a way to use things you already have instead of buying from some other place.” Bell removes ribs from big kale leaves, dries them raw, and crushes them into a jar to use as all-purpose potherbs, and to sell at her farmers market booth alongside her locally famous fruit leathers and dried tomatoes — a springtime treat that satWWW.MOTHEREARTHNEWS.COM

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