Heading Home Farms: 2016

Monday, June 27, 2016

Adapting a Soaker Hose to a Water Catchment System - Our Experiment

We have well water and we also have gardens that are not within 100 ft of our outdoor faucet or hose. One of my permaculture goals for this year, as inspired by my sea monkeys (yes sea monkeys) was to make a water catchment system that would water these gardens.
There aren't any buildings by these gardens, so a rain barrel would have to work independently. So can you use a rain barrel without it being hooked up to a gutter?
So far yes.
I chose this rain barrel because it has a large empty space on top that I could use to catch more water.

We drilled holes into the place where you would typically have a plant. We also plopped a mosquito dunk here. Side tangent, I was pleasantly surprised and happy to find out only last year that mosquito dunks are not poisonous! I handled these things with gloves and trying not to breath when I held them for years. Last year I happened upon an article that referred to them as organic. I did further research and read confirmation that these can be used in ponds that animals drink from! What??? So I use them in my rain barrel. Many people recommended gold fish to prevent mosquitoes in the barrel.
I thought it was mean to put them in a dark and probably super-warm-from-the-sun tank. I also think that the fish poo and stuff would clog up my faucet or drip hose. So we went with the dunks.

Back to the barrel without a gutter, so far so good. I did fill it up orignally with a hose because my plants were in danger of really drying out and I didn't have time to wait for rain.
Rain, though, has been keeping this pretty well topped off.
Back to the soaker hose, which is what this is supposed to be about, I chose this soaker hose because I could turn it on and wander off to do work and not have flooded my garden within an hour.
This post is just for those of you that want a drip/soaker hose but have found what I did. There isn't enough water pressure from the gravity in a rain barrel to make the drip hose work.
Darn it!
So after much pontificating, I chose to amend my soaker hose to see if I could make it work anyway.
Here's what I did. This is the link to the drip hose that I have.
A soaker hose is basically a plastic tube with many tiny whole that let water out into a cloth sleeve that covers the plastic tube for the length of the hose. The holes must be tiny because I didn't really see them and the lack of pressure from the barrel faucet made them not work.

So I removed the little green "hose repair" cap on one end of my 25ft soaker hose and slid the cloth material down. Please note, sliding the cloth down and then getting it back on will be the longest part of this project. Sometimes it feels like you won't get it back. You will if you keep working it.

After I had it halfway down, I used scissors to clip a tiny slot in the hose, starting about 18" from the end of the hose and made a slit every 15-18 inches right to about half of the hose. Remember, you're cutting the plastic hose inside, not the cloth cover. This is as long as I cut it. That was the whole snip, not the beginning.

I then slid the cloth back, replaced the green repair thing with its 2 screws. I removed the green thing on the other end, slid the cloth half way down and made a few more slits on this end. BUT I probably only made about 4-5 on this side.
The reason for this is, once I cut the first half and re-assembled... I was super happy to see that it was working the way I wanted it to, but there still isn't enough pressure to get to the other end of the hose. So you need to have an end with very few slits so that some water is forced to the second half of the hose.
I know, I know, 25 feet is not very long. I don't have all of the answers to this yet.
Yet we did get water dripping from the hose where it was just dry before!

I DO want to share this experience so that you guys can take this info and run with it and hopefully share your own ideas. What do you use on your rain barrels to take advantage of the water?

Thursday, May 12, 2016

Making Almond Milk at Home

This recipe doesn't fall under the cheaper category. It does fall under healthier because you know what's in it category.
Let's make home made almond milk!
It's pretty easy and doesn't involve a lot of work. Most of it is time... time to soak the almonds, time to stain the almonds, etc.

Here's what you need:

2 cups raw and organic almonds

A bowl of water

4 cups water (not included in the soaking water)

Agave Syrup

Place the almonds in a bowl and cover with about an inch of water. They will plump as they absorb water. The almond milk is creamier when you let them soak longer so shoot for about 18 hours if you can. We did it over night and through the next morning.
Drain the almonds and rinse them off. They will be all puffy. Perfect! Discard the soaking water because it contains phytic acid, which affects the body's ability to absorb nutrients.
Place the almonds in the blender and cover with 4 cups of water. You can do two bacthes in the blender here if your belnder isn't big enough or strong enough.
Blend at the high speed for 2 minutes. The water will turn white and the almonds will be reduced to tiny tiny tiny pieces.

Strain the almonds through cheese cloth or any other very fine strainer that you would use for jelly.

After it has drained for about 15 mins, then gather up the material around the remaining paste and press or squeeze as hard as you can. I choose to put a small plate on top and then put a heavy weight on top of that. I let it sit for another 15 minutes.

Add your agave to taste. I added 5 drops at a time and taste tested it as we went along. In our house, 20 drops was the go to amount for this much almond milk.
Seal up what ever you aren't drinking right now and store it in the fridge for 2-3 days.
I also put some in the freezer, but we haven't tried that yet to let you know how it worked. I will update when we do.

Now here's the part where you can be super frugal. You can make the remaining almond paste into almond flour which is great for baking. Spread the left over almond paste into very thin layers onto your dehydrator tray (as though you were making fruit roll ups) and dehydrate at 120 for about 8 hours.

Dehydrating time will totally vary based on how wet and or thin yours is. So check it at 8 hours and run it for more if you need to. You should have super dry chips when you're done. Run these through a coffee or herb grinder until it's floury dust and store in air tight container.

Let us know how yours turns out. We love it and are very happy to know the origin of our food and exactly what's in it!

Also feel free to follow us on Facebook to join our HHF Tribe!

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

How to Defrost Frozen Meat Quicker - Without a Microwave or Warm Water

This will be a quick and easy post just as it's a quick and easy answer to a problem most of us have had at one time or another. You need to cook something and the meat is frozen. Ugh!

In the past I have done the slow and tortuous microwave method. I have even tried the soaking in warm water method.

But high school chemistry came come to the aid of us all.

Plop your frozen meat upside down into a room temperature cast iron pan.

That's it! Don't preheat the pan. Don't try to pry the packaging off the meat.

For my experiment, I took 2 separate packages of frozen ground beef out of my freezer. I put one upside down directly in my pan and I put one on my cupboard.

The one in the pan defrosted in about an hour and the one on the cupboard took over 3 hours.

What's happening here is basic physics.

Metal is a wonderful heat conductor. The cold from the meat meets the warm from the pan. It creates a cold spot on your pan and the cast iron wicks the cold away in an effort to return to room temperature.

They actually sell products for meat defrosting which is one more thing you don't need in a cluttered kitchen. Even though you don't need it, you can read more about it here.

I prefer to have items that serve multi purposes and now my cast iron pans serve even more purposes. Yay!

I have only tried it so far with meat. Have you tried it with other foods? The physics should stay the same.

I will also take a moment here to tell you about one of my favorite kitchen gadgets. When I first heard about it, I thought it would be silly and add to my clutter but this tool really helps when you are frying up ground beef. It makes the meat mix and cop so easily and uniformly. I mix onions in with this and it makes it super easy. I used this tool when I made ground beef rocks and it was super fast.

It's a Ground Beef Meat Chopper and Mixer. Love it!

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Cherry Dump Cake

I do love dump cake.
It's easy and delicious. You can use many different types of pans and many different types of fruit.
For this recipe, I used a casserole dish because I wanted the cake part to be cakier.
If you use a flatter pan, it will be less cakey and more like cobbler.

12 oz canned cherry pie filling.
One box vanilla cake mix
1 stick of butter
1 can of soda or (in this case Logenberry)
Walnuts

Use cooking spray to cover the bottom of your pan.
Dump the fruit in.
Dump the cake mix on top of that.
Dump the Logenberry or soda on top of that.
Dump the stick of butter on top of that.
Dump the walnuts on top of that.

Put it in your preheated (350 degree) oven and check it after 45 minutes.
Depending on your pan, it will either be done or need another 15 minutes.

Enjoy!
It's perfect after a dinner of Popalack. It's great with vanilla ice cream, too!

Popalak AKA Potato Pizza

I don't know where the name Popalak came from except that I know it from my mother in law. This is what my husband's family calls it. This post is dedicated to her with great amounts of love.
My MIL was able to feed a very large family for very little money with her creative recipes. Sometimes I have learned that what she calls something isn't what other people think that thing is.
For Popalak, I don't even see it being something that other people think is even a thing : )
I tried to Google it.
It's really good, pretty easy to make, inexpensive for a large family.
It also probably has almost zero nutritional value. When we make this, it's because it's a comfort food on a cold winter day. Not for healthy eating reasons.

Here's what you need:

1 pizza crust in a tube (like a crescent roll container, only it's pizza crust)
5 lbs potatoes. You can use which ever type you like best.
10 slices of American cheese.
Onion salt
Pepper
20 oz shredded mozzarella cheese.
Paprika
Baking spray

Baking spray, aluminum foil or a cover for your pan, and a 13x9 glass pan.

Cut your potatoes in half and then quarter them again. Plop them into a pan of water (make sure the water covers them) and get them boiling on the stove. Your going to boil them until they are just tender when stuck with a fork.

In the mean time, spray the bottom of your 13x9 baking pan and lay the pizza crust over the bottom only of the pan.
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
Lay your slices of American cheese over the pizza crust. Now you wait until your potatoes are ready.

Again, you want to boil them just until a fork can easily be stuck in them, but don't go too far or they'll be mushy.
Drain your potatoes, rinse with cold water to stop the cooking and drain all water.
Use your shredder and grate the potatoes over the pizza crust and cheese in the pan. You will be making an even layer here, Maybe an inch tall.

Most of the parts of this recipe can be adjusted for your taste. Less potato, more potato. Less cheese, different cheese. Add diced onions, what ever you want.
Season with onion salt and pepper.
Once you have your potato layer, you will add your mozzeralla cheese layer.
Add paprika, cover with aluminum foil and bake for about a half hour.
You will know it's done when the pizza crust is a beautiful golden brown on the bottom.