7786 The Best of MEN Winter, 2015

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

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Grow More Food in Less Space (With the Least Work!)

Blend the best principles of biointensive and square-foot gardening to yield a customized, highly productive growing system.

Learn to Live Off the Land

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Home Food Preservation: 33 Top Tips and Tricks

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Easy, No-Knead Crusty Bread

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5-Minute Homemade Mayonnaise

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Building a New Sense of Excitement and Optimism

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JENNA WOGINRICH

VEER/578FOOT

News from Mother

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You — yes, you! — can learn the skills you need to be more selfsufficient. Here’s how one modern homesteader discovered the joys of a self-reliant life.

Stock your pantry like a pro by following these experts’ tried-andtrue canning techniques.

Bake crispy, gorgeous loaves from scratch using this simple technique. All you need are a few ingredients and a blazing-hot Dutch oven for miraculous results.

Craft this creamy condiment with five natural ingredients.

Cob Construction: Build with Earth and Straw Hand-sculpt your custom, mortgage-free home from local, dirt-cheap materials.

Eat from Your Garden All Year: A Regional Guide With these expert-recommended techniques and crop varieties, you, too, can break through seasonal barriers in your climate.

Best Chicken Breeds for Backyard Flocks Our reader survey results can help you choose the best chickens for eggs, meat, temperament and more.

Lifestyles of the Self-Sufficient These three inspiring stories from our 2014 Homesteaders of the Year prove that you can reject the “rat race” and build a more sustainable, satisfying life.

Grow More Food in a Movable Greenhouse Boost productivity in spring, summer, fall and winter with a do-ityourself mobile greenhouse you can transport around your plot.

Cut Cost, Not Quality: How to Afford Better Food Industrial food just ain’t what it oughta be. Lucky for us, the path to super-nutritious food at affordable prices has many entry points. Let us pilot you through the diverse options in this guide to shopping smart and eating well.

Salads All Winter? You Bet, with This Crop Austrian winter peas will give you tender, delicious greens, even in single-digit weather. They’ll also help build your soil and provide nectar for bees in spring.

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BARBARA DAMROSCH

Expert Tips for Growing Early Tomatoes Want to fulfill your cravings and make your neighbors jealous? Add an entire month to your fresh-tomato season with these techniques.

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Beekeeping Basics: What’s All the Buzz About?

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Easy Cheesy: 4 Super-Simple Recipes

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Homemade Herbal Medicines

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19 Ways to Prevent and Treat Colds & Flu

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Backyard Beef

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Growing Salad in Winter

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Build This Cozy Cabin

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Build a Simple Solar Heater

LOUISE MOSER

JASON HOUSTON

Make Your Own Fresh Sausage Mix and form homemade sausage, which you can cook as patties or stuff into casings, and then eat right away or freeze for later.

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If you’re interested in raising honey bees but need more information before you can commit, consider this rundown of the equipment you’ll need to get started and the schedule you can expect to follow.

Making cheese isn’t as hard as you might believe. Just think: In 30 minutes you could be enjoying fresh, warm, homemade mozzarella.

These powerhouse plant remedies can help you heal on a shoestring.

Spinach and Kale: The Cool-Weather Favorites Grow these stalwart stars of the fall garden, and then try this trio of easy recipes to make them shine at your table, too.

Stay well this winter with these proven strategies for fending off and bouncing back from colds and flu.

You don’t need a ranch to raise your own healthy, pastured beef.

A little patch of grass and some fencing will do the trick just fine.

With a little preparation and careful selection of varieties, you can grow winter greens even through a snowy winter atop the Rockies.

Anyone with basic carpentry skills can construct this classic oneroom cabin for just about $6,000.

This low-cost plan will show you how to turn any south wall into a source of free solar heat.

Renewable Energy Options for Your Homestead Downsize your dependence on fossil fuels with these innovative tools.

Outdoor Root Cellars Try these five ways to store fresh food for winter right in your garden — it’s as easy as tossing a bagful of leaves or clean straw over a patch of carrots!

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Is Recycling Worth It?

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Ask Our Experts

You know to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” — but is the extra effort effective? Explore whether your recycling habits pay off.

Trusted advice about organic labels, unsafe chemicals in plastic, emergency solar power systems, house mouse control, best grow lights for starting seeds indoors, and hybrid seeds vs. GMOs.

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LEARN TO LIVE OFF THE LAND

You — yes, you! — can learn the skills you need to be more self-sufficient. Here’s how one modern homesteader discovered the joys of a self-reliant life.

Story and photos

by Jenna Woginrich

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ate one night I was grinding coffee and listening to a radio show.

There was nothing particularly interesting about this. Most nights I get the percolator ready for the next morning, and the radio is almost always on in the kitchen. But that night I realized something mildly profound: A hundred tiny efforts and decisions had converged right there on the countertop.

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The radio was crank-powered, and the coffee grinder was an old hand-turner I had picked up at an antique store. I was standing in the glow of my solar-powered lamp with the aid of some beeswax candles. Suddenly, I realized that nothing I was doing required any outside electricity.

I was seeing in the dark, grinding locally roasted beans and listening to renewableenergy-driven entertainment. As mundane as the situation was, it felt perfect.

Outside the kitchen, my trio of hens was cooing in their hutch, and snap pea

pods, hanging heavy on the vine, were climbing up my windowsill. The dogs sighed and stretched on the kitchen floor and the smell of just-crushed coffee beans wafted through the air, giving me a sense of profound comfort. I felt that if the world shut down, we’d just go on grinding and stretching and sighing until we retired to a warm bed. Maybe it was the candlelight, or maybe it was the promise of fresh-brewed coffee in the morning, but in that moment I felt I’d accomplished more than anything I had ever achieved in my professional career.

Seeking Sustainability My first step down the path to selfsufficiency happened when I started learning more about how products get to us consumers. I was considering a

vegetarian diet to get in better shape and feel healthier. By reading a few basic books on vegetarianism, I started to learn about the mass production of meat in factory farms and all its related problems. The more I educated myself about how the meals I was eating got to my plate, the more disgusted and disappointed I became. I also became much more appreciative of small farms. The more I read about all the small organic farmers who treated their meat animals humanely and didn’t flood their planting fields with chemicals and pesticides, the less I could stomach buying those foam trays of meat and plastic bags of vegetables from the grocery store.

When you start to comprehend something as basic as how food gets to your plate, you start thinking about how other items find their way to you, too — things such as clothing, electronics and especially energy. The bloodshed and national security threats caused by depending on foreign oil were loud and clear on the daily news. The scary thing was that I was completely dependent on fossil fuels, and so was everyone I knew.

My gas-heated apartment, my groceries from the supermarket, my station wagon parked outside — everything was part of the system. And if the system broke, I was going to be hungry, cold and immobile. So I threw my hands in the air.

I was done with Walmart and Wonder bread. I wanted something real. I wanted a lifestyle that was no longer a part of the problem, or, at the very least, was constantly striving to be less involved in it. I wanted a more sustainable life.

Learning about homesteading — or the skills associated with it, anyhow — seemed like the solution I desperately craved. I decided to take the reins and start learning how to produce some of the food and resources I used every day. There were obvious problems: I had no idea what I was doing.

I had just spent four years in design school learning where to put things on computer screens, and that doesn’t exactly help you bed down a chicken coop. Also, I didn’t have a home to stead. At that time, I lived in a rented farmhouse in Idaho. The only skills I

So I threw my hands in the air. I was done with Walmart and Wonder bread. I wanted something real.

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HOME FOOD PRESERVATION 33 Top Tips and Tricks

Stock your pantry like a pro by following these experts’ triedand-true canning techniques.

By Jennifer Kongs

CHRISTOPHER HIRSHEIMER AND MELISSA HAMILTON; PAGE 16: VEER/578FOOT

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early a decade ago, I arrived in my grandparents’ kitchen with a pound of beets, some apple cider vinegar and a craving to learn how to can. My interest in sustainable food had grown while studying the environmental and health problems of our industrial food system, and had led me to a simple solution: Harvest beets from my organic garden and pickle them in my own kitchen. After a couple of hours with my grandparents, I had safely preserved my ruby gems. The pings of the lids sealing fed my desire to produce healthy food for year-round meals, and to continue the multigenerational tradition of canning and preserving.

Newbies often approach home preserving with trepidation and no grandparents to teach them. As long as you follow a recipe and safe canning methods, you’ll be able to preserve all sorts of foods. A few hours of energy use will reward you with months of energy-free food storage, and an unsurpassed feeling of security and wealth.

Save energy by heating jars in your water bath canner while it’s preheating.

I turned to our readers, book authors, our editorial team, and, of course, my grandparents, to compile these pro canpantry, and make substitutions to recipes to include what you’ve ning tips. For step-by-step processing instructions, refer to any preserved. — Sharon Astyk of the books in “Resources” on Page 19. Find more how-to and 2 Calculate your annual needs for whatever you’re planning myriad tested recipes at www.MotherEarthNews.com/Canning. to preserve. I felt like a genius when I realized I use approximately four 14-ounce cans of diced tomatoes a month, and that if I just Planning Makes Perfect canned 3 or 4 pints a week during tomato season, I’d end up with Experienced home canners know to plan, and then can accordall I needed for an entire year. — Robin Mather ingly. If you don’t spread jam on biscuits every morning, then Set Up the Basics don’t preserve enough jam to feed the whole neighborhood. The time investment isn’t worth it (although homemade jam with a Any reputable canning book will deliver detailed how-to inhand-lettered label and a ribbon tie makes a great all-occasion gift). structions, but you can also learn the ropes by offering to assist an 1 Think about what you’ll realistically eat. Take into account experienced preserver. As a home canner who’s taught a few folks the food your family enjoys. Plan for meals based on what’s in your in her own kitchen, I welcome both the company and the helping WWW.MOTHEREARTHNEWS.COM

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Easy, No-Knead

No-Knead, Dutch Oven Bread 1⁄4

tsp active dry yeast 11⁄2 cups warm water 3 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting. You may use white, wholewheat or a combination of the two.

11⁄2 tsp salt Cornmeal or wheat bran for dusting

CRUSTY BREAD

1. In a large bowl, dissolve yeast in water. Add the flour and salt, stirring until blended. The dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let the dough rest at least 8 hours, preferably 12 to 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bake crispy, gorgeous loaves from scratch using this simple technique.

All you need are a few ingredients and a blazing-hot Dutch oven for miraculous results.

Story and photos by Roger Doiron

P

icture a bowl of soup or a salad without a slice of crusty bread to go with it. Worse still, imagine a deliciously tangy piece of Camembert cheese, served with a glass of red wine, but no accompanying hunk of baguette.

Quelle horreur! as the French would say.

Much has been written over the centuries about bread’s importance in global cuisine. Legendary American chef and food writer James Beard called it the “most fundamentally satisfying of all foods” and referred to bread served with fresh butter as the “greatest of feasts.”

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2. The dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it.

Sprinkle it with a little more flour, and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let it rest for about 15 minutes.

3. Using just enough flour to keep the dough from sticking to the work surface or to your fingers, gently shape the dough into a ball. Generously coat a clean dish towel with flour, cornmeal or wheat bran. Put the seam side of the dough down on the towel, and dust with

True to form, the Italians are even more dramatic in describing bread’s essential role. “Senza il pane tutto diventa orfano,” they say, which means “Without bread, everyone’s an orphan.”

Several years ago, I felt orphaned myself. I had just returned from 10 years of living in Europe, where artisanal bread is so common you almost trip over the stuff in the streets. The same cannot be said of my native state of Maine, where Wonder Bread still leads wonderful bread by a comfortable margin. If you trip over anything in the winter-worn streets of Maine, it’s most likely to be a frost heave.

Bread had become so fundamental to my dining happiness that I realized upon returning to the United States that I needed to knead some of my own. After five years playing around with different recipes and techniques, I reluctantly came to terms with my limits as a home baker. I could produce excellent zucchini and banana breads, a decent sandwich loaf in both white and whole-wheat varieties, and a perfectly respectable focaccia. What I couldn’t produce, unfortunately, was the type of bread I craved the most — a hearty, round, rustic loaf with a moist, chewy crumb and a thick, crispy crust.

Fortunately, my return proved to be well-timed in that it coincided with an artisanal bread-making revival in Maine.

I became a regular customer of Standard Baking Co., a Portland-based bakery that turns out breads and pastries that rival Europe’s finest. What I couldn’t bake myself was available just a few minutes and a few dollars away.

But for people like me who grow some of our own food and cook from scratch, close foods can never be quite close enough. I remained committed to being able to produce the loaf of my dreams in my own kitchen. On a Saturday morning bread run to Standard, I asked one of

the bakers her secret to a crusty loaf. She replied “quality ingredients, time and a $10,000 professional baking oven.” Ugh. That was not what I wanted to hear.

She went on to explain that the secret to a loaf that is soft and moist on the inside and crusty on the outside lies in the careful balance of heat and humidity. Professional baking ovens achieve this balance via high temperatures and blasts of steam during the cooking process.

Over the years, ingenious home bakers have tried to replicate the humid conditions of a commercial oven by placing a pan filled with water at the bottom of the oven, or by spritzing their loaves with

more flour, cornmeal or bran. Cover with another towel and let rise for about 1 to 2 hours. When it’s ready, the dough will have doubled in size and will not readily spring back if poked with a finger.

4. At least 20 minutes before the dough is ready, heat oven to 475 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in the oven as it heats.

When the dough is ready, carefully remove the pot from the oven and lift off the lid. Slide your hand under the towel, and turn the dough over into the pot, seam side up. The dough will lose its shape a bit in the process, but that’s OK. Give the pan a firm shake or two to help distribute the dough evenly, but don’t worry if it’s not perfect; it will straighten out as it bakes.

5. Cover and bake for 30 minutes.

Remove the lid and bake another 15 to 20 minutes, until the loaf is beautifully browned. Remove the bread from the Dutch oven and let it cool on a rack for at least 1 hour before slicing.

Yield: One 11⁄2-pound loaf.

Adapted from The New York Times.

water from time to time. My own experiments in moisture management, however, left me frustrated. The quality of my loaves just didn’t do justice to the time and work that went into making them.

Just when I was ready to give up on crusty peasant loaves altogether, I came across an article in The New York Times that described baker Jim Lahey’s breadmaking technique, the results of which sounded too easy and too good to be true.

Dubbed “no-knead bread,” the method involves using wet dough, letting it rise over a long time in lieu of kneading it, and cooking it in a hot Dutch oven (heavy covered pot). While the recipe calls for a slow WWW.MOTHEREARTHNEWS.COM

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Cob Construction

Building with earth has a long and successful history. Cob construction is particularly easy to learn, requires no fancy equipment, uses local materials, and can be done in small batches as time allows — making it extremely accessible to a wide range of people. (See “DIY CobBuilding Technique” on Page 30.) After her initial success with cob, Ott traveled to Oregon to apprentice with the Cob Cottage Company. When her family relocated to the mountains east of Nashville, Tennessee, Ott used her new skills to build a small cob house for less than $8,000. By age 23, she was mortgage-free and teaching cob-building workshops all over the United States as the “Barefoot Builder.”

Cob lends itself to incorporating salvaged and eclectic construction materials. This “hobbit In the U.K., tens of thousands of cob house” in Wales was built in four months and cost about $4,600 in materials. buildings are still lived in, some of them more than 500 years old. When the British immigrated to the United States, Australia and New building constructed in the U.K. for more than 60 years, or in Zealand in the 1700s and 1800s, they brought the technique the United States for at least 120 years. with them. In Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, parts of Asia and Modern Cob what is now the southwestern United States, cob was developed independently by indigenous people. In Yemen, cob buildings Today, building your own house is the exception to the stand that are nine stories tall and more than 700 years old. norm, and it is almost unheard of to build with local materials.

However, with the industrial age came factories and cheap Instead, houses are built by specialists using expensive tools transportation in the West, making brick, milled wood, ceand expensive, highly refined materials extracted and transment and steel readily available. Mass production led to mass ported long distances, often at great ecological cost. Industrial marketing and the promotion of these new materials as signs materials have many benefits — performance, predictability, of progress. The perception of cob as “poor people’s housing” speed and ease of installation — but they have in common that they must create a profit for the companies that manufacture led to its near demise. By 1985, there hadn’t been a new cob

BUILD WITH EARTH & STRAW

Hand-sculpt your custom, mortgage-free home from dirt-cheap local materials.

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n early 1999, a young woman from Florida happened across an article online about the recent revival of an ancient British method for sculpting dirt houses. Intrigued, she used her savings to travel to Vermont for a five-day workshop, where she learned how to mix clay, sand and straw by foot, and then knead lumps of the stuff into solid walls nearly as durable as concrete.

After returning to Florida, she and some friends used the techniques she had learned to build a small pottery shed in her parents’ backyard. Some people predicted Florida’s humid air and torrential rains would melt her “mud hut” back into the ground. Following Hurricane Lili in 2002, however, the

This California utility building features an attached cob oven and natural paints.

sturdy little building, which had cost just a few hundred dollars and a summer’s labor to build, proved to be one of the few buildings left standing in her neighborhood. Christina Ott had discovered cob building.

Cob’s Origins Cob building gets its name from the Old English term for “lump,” which refers to the lumps of clay-rich soil that were mixed with straw and then stomped into place to create monolithic earthen walls. Before coal and oil made transportation cheap, houses were built from whatever materials were close at hand. In places where timber was scarce, the building material most available was often the soil underfoot.

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By Chris McClellan

Cob Pros and Cons

Pros • Uses local, generally inexpensive or free materials • Can include creative, beautiful detail • Nontoxic • High thermal mass helps temperatures stay consistent and comfortable • Negligible environmental impact • Compatible with other natural materials (wood, stone, lime) • Fun to build with friends • Earthquake-resistant Cons • Labor-intensive • Needs additional insulation in cold climates • Will be unfamiliar to building code officials and insurers

Gain building experience by enrolling in a workshop. Find one near you at www.CobCottage. com/workshops and the Natural Building Network Events page: http://goo.gl/G9yiNe.

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home interior: Spectrum Photofile/Brian McConnell

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Lifestyles of the

SELF-SUFFICIENT

These three inspiring stories from our 2014 Homesteaders of the Year prove that you can reject the “rat race” and build a more sustainable, satisfying life.

By Jennifer Kongs

B

reaking away from the confines of a full-time office job in order to build a self-sufficient homestead is something many of us dream about — but actually diving in can be a daunting decision. In 2014, our selected Homesteaders of the Year shared how they have applied thrifty-living sense and DIY skills to work more from home doing jobs they love — jobs that connect directly to their health, creativity and life

satisfaction. As the charts included in this article show, all three families have saved big by constructing and renovating their homestead structures, often making use of salvaged wood and other repurposed materials. Two of the families even built their own homes.

If you, too, want to go “back to the land,” don’t be deterred by a lack of homesteading skills. At the outset, you may only have passion, determination, physical strength or an addiction to sunripened tomatoes. Whatever pulls you

toward self-sufficient living will form the foundation upon which you can build a framework of practical skills to carry you forward. Each how-to book you pore over and each conversation you have with practiced DIYers will expand your expertise. And each time you master a new skill, complete a challenging project or sit down to a delicious, 100 percent homegrown meal, you’ll feel more confident that you made the right choice.

If you know selfreliant all-stars

who deserve to be honored as Homesteaders of the Year, send a nomination and photos to Letters@MotherEarthNews. com with the subject line “Homesteader of the Year.” For more stories of families practicing a DIY lifestyle, head to www.MotherEarthNews.com/ Star-Modern-Homesteaders.

Without further ado, we’re proud to share the following stories of three hands-on and how-to families.

Human-Powered Farm Who: Kelly McCormick and Glenn Maresca, along with Kelly’s parents, John and Linda.

Where: Duette, Florida, since 2007.

What: 5-acre farm with a 60-by-30-foot garden, tropical fruit trees, poultry, cows, a potbellied pig, bees and dogs.

ens to breed what they call “swampers”; adopting livestock from local organizations.

Employment: Kelly: freelance Web and graphic designer; Glenn: homestead maintenance man, car repairman and on-site vet.

Homestead highlights: Committing almost entirely to human and animal power; saving seed to create heat- and pest-tolerant crop varieties; producing 80 percent of their food; crossing South Asian game hens with Turken chick-

What does being a “modern homesteader” mean to you?

To us, it means being self-sustaining without fearing new technology — enhancing time-honored activities with new concepts and ways of thinking. For example, we hope to eventually use solar power for all of our electricity.

If you were starting over, what would you do differently? The same?

We would have started younger. We wasted so much time trying to conform to

Kelly and Glenn’s Hand-Built Structures PAGES 40 AND 41: LISA NEFF AND CONNIE WOLGAST (4)

Norman grazes along the edge of Homesteaders of the Year Kelly and Glenn’s pond. The Florida couple’s hand-built house overlooks their native duck haven.

Clockwise from top left: Kelly surveys the garden’s tomatoes; Glenn hangs with Willie, the potbellied pig; the couple’s cowshed made from recycled wood pallets.

Money and Time Spent

Notes/Materials

1,500 square feet

$45,000; 4 years

Built a wood frame with fiber cement siding; R-16 and R-30 insulation; shingle roof

Chicken coop

8 by 12 feet; 4-by-8-foot attached brooder/hospital space; 24-by-8-foot back run

$2,000; 3 months

Brooder/hospital connected to main coop via wall of hardware cloth for easier flock introductions; floor made from shower wall covering for easy cleaning; shingle roof

Turkey coop

4 by 8 feet; 24-by-12-foot run

$300; 1 month

Made of repurposed materials from chicken coop

Duck and goose pens

15 by 10 feet (for ducks); 12 by 6 feet (for geese)

$0; 1 day

Used chain-link dog kennels courtesy of local animal organizations; shelters within made of wood pallets

Cowshed

16 by 12 feet

$200; 1 week

Made of wood pallets and 2-by-4s; roof made of plywood and designed to be expanded as needed

Structure

Specs

Home

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