Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth (22 page)

Besides dairy and pasture, root crops, especially Jerusalem artichokes, are great feed for pigs. Let into the root patch, they can do the harvesting themselves. Winter squash and other garden vegetables make good pig food. A person growing for the markets will find the pigs willing to chow down on all the leftover and cull produce available. A three ounce serving of pork contains about 40 percent of your B
₁₂
requirement for a day.

Rabbits

We had rabbits for about six years — another 4-H project. We found directions for making a wire rabbit cage in
Integral Urban House
. Out of print for many years, I am glad it is available again. I like that rabbit cage design because it has a hay manger between two cages. We followed the suggestion in the book to have the rabbit cages overhanging the chicken yard. The chickens scratched through their droppings, making finished compost on the spot. Alternatively, you could locate worm bins under the rabbits to catch the droppings, and feed the worms to the chickens. Having the rabbit/chicken set-up is a good one, but I would prefer to have the rabbits on the ground, which presents a quite a different set of management decisions. The Salatins at Polyface Farm
⁹
in Swoope, Virginia, have been doing that for many years. If you are breeding rabbits, you would need a buck and one or more does, with separate cages for each, plus one or more cages for the weaned young ones to grow to butchering age, which is two months. A doe will give birth a month after breeding. The average size litter is eight bunnies.

Rabbit food you buy consists of pellets made predominately from alfalfa. If you were to raise all the food for your rabbits, it would take 9 pounds of alfalfa hay and 60 pounds of fresh greens (garden debris, weeds, produce scraps) to produce one four-pound (live weight) fryer.
¹⁰
Your rabbits would have to be accustomed to eating that much, since
about 15.4 pounds of pellets will get the same results. Even if you don’t grow everything, you can supplement pellets with alfalfa and greens from your garden. Alfalfa is a suggested food for all the animals. It could take the place of red clover in your garden rotation (see
Chapter 8
— Garden of Ideas), possibly staying in for an extra year, before the next crop replaces it. The average yield of alfalfa hay in the US for 100 ft
²
is 14.9 pounds.
¹¹
Feeding the alfalfa to your livestock means that you wouldn’t have it to put in the compost pile, but now the animals are part of the cycle and their manure would go to the compost, which would go back to feed the alfalfa, as well as the rest of the garden. A three ounce serving of rabbit meat contains three times the daily requirement of vitamin B
₁₂
.

One advantage of raising rabbits and chickens is that taking the meat for the table can be done one animal at a time, as needed, without canning or freezing. Even if you butchered a litter of rabbits at a time, you could fit them all in the freezer space of your refrigerator — a big consideration when living with minimal fossil fuel. Manage your rabbit herd so the next litter is not ready for the freezer until there is room for it. A sustainable diet is plant-based, but not plant-only. Using animal products to round out your nutritional requirements also means using the animals to harvest plants in as sustainable a manner as possible. Land can be kept in permanent pasture as long as it is not overgrazed by stocking too many animals there.

I mentioned that goats can clear land of brush for you. If you don’t need land cleared, recognize their brush-eating preference and harvest it for them. When we had bamboo that needed to be cleared, everything I cut from the bamboo poles went to the goats. They considered it a treat. I tried to do that in winter or early spring before the pasture was growing again. The bamboo poles were kept for garden projects. Pigs also can be used to clear land. Let out on enough pasture, they won’t do too much damage; but penned in a smaller space, with maybe some stumps, they will root them up. Properly fenced, they could rotate through garden space after Jerusalem artichokes, carrots, beets, or mangels grown for them, leaving the area cleared and fertilized.
Properly fenced
is the key for that.

There are certainly more nutritional requirements to consider than just calories, protein, calcium, and vitamin B
₁₂
.
Nourishing Traditions
by Sally Fallon is a good reference for learning more. I’ve shown you some ways to include animals in your food production circle. Often things can be added to a system that will enhance the whole system, and rather than overloading it will make the best use of all the available resources. Enhancement is the goal.

11

Food Storage and Preservation

H
UMANS HAVE BEEN STORING FOOD
to eat later since long before electricity became a part of our lives. Unfortunately, today many don’t know how to manage that without electricity. A sustainable diet uses the least fossil fuel to get food from the garden to the table. Folks are trying to be more self-sufficient, as evidenced by the explosion of new gardens; which makes food preservation, especially canning, a popular topic. It reminds me of the back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s. The Bicentennial in 1976 spurred even more interest in the home arts. Those were the years I was starting to garden and learning to can. Both Kerr and Ball, along with a few other companies, were producing canning jars and I still use some commemorative Bicentennial canning jars I bought at that time. (Bicentennial canning jars are kind of silly when you think about it, since canning was not a preservation method in 1776.) The magazines on the newsstands had articles about canning and I could buy everything I needed to get started, so that’s what I did. I had both the Ball and Kerr books for home canning and freezing. There were also books that told about other methods, such as root cellars, making cheese, and fermenting.
Stocking Up
came out in 1973 and was on its tenth printing by the time I bought my copy in 1975 and
Root Cellaring
was published in 1979. My biggest inspiration to go beyond
canning was reading
Home Food Systems
, which came out in 1981. After checking it out of the library many times, I decided I needed to buy a copy. The sticking point for me to go beyond canning was that I didn’t know anyone who was doing it. It is always better to have a flesh-and-blood mentor. Lacking that, even attending a talk or workshop would have helped. Today there is once again a self-sufficiency movement, but it is not necessarily back-to-the-land like before, when living in the country on a farm was the goal. Perhaps now it should be called bloom-where-you-are-planted, what with the current interest in urban farming.

Times certainly have changed.
Mother Earth News
, a homesteading magazine that had its beginnings in 1970, has an online presence with bloggers, such as me. They sponsor the Mother Earth News Fairs in Washington, Pennsylvania, and Kansas, where you can go to hear the people you have been reading about — once again, such as me. Communities are sponsoring workshops and programs that help people lead more sustainable lives. When you first start out learning new things, it can seem hard and, at first, not very productive. I’m here to tell you that it gets easier. In fact, with a little knowledge, it doesn’t have to be that hard to begin with. Any change brings chaos to some degree, but once it becomes your way of life, things stabilize. I will share what I’ve found to be helpful.

Make Use of the Space You Already Have

With staple crops grown for a sustainable diet — potatoes, sweet potatoes, garlic, onions, winter squash, grains, peanuts, and tree nuts — you don’t have to dig a root cellar or buy special equipment to store them. Growing up in northeastern Ohio I thought every house had a basement, but I learned that wasn’t so when we moved to Virginia. Since the frost line is not as deep here, the house foundations aren’t as deep; so mostly there are just crawl spaces, unless your house is on a concrete slab, and then there is no chance for storage at all. I didn’t know anyone storing food in a cellar in Ohio, other than canning jars, but the potential was there if you had one. Before you think about under-the-house storage, however, take a look at what is available in the house.

A spare room or closet can become a food storage area. Turn off the heat to that room and maybe open a window a little. It doesn’t have to be too cold, just cold enough (about 50°F). A closet on an outside wall might be cool enough already. We never had any spare rooms or extra closets, so I never made use of that idea. Space was pretty tight with a growing family. One winter, while retrieving a bread pan, I discovered that the cabinet beneath the kitchen counter in the northeast corner of the room was exceptionally cool. A check with a thermometer showed the temperature to be about 50°F. My first thought was that I had better keep that cupboard door closed. My second thought was — why am I storing baking pans here instead of potatoes, winter squash, onions, and garlic? It was easy enough to clean out that cabinet and add produce stored in baskets, cardboard boxes, and plastic tubs. It would also be a good place for grains, beans, and nuts.

We had been in the house for enough years that it was time to rethink what was stored in all my kitchen cabinets. Even if you don’t have children being born or leaving home, your lifestyle gradually changes and it is good to do a major clean-out now and again. There were things stuck back on the shelves in the bottom cabinets that I never used — because they were stuck in the back of the bottom shelves. When our time opened up for a kitchen project, my husband took out those shelves and replaced them with pull-out shelves he built. Forget major appliances and other improvements, for me that was about the best thing he could have done. During that time we took the opportunity to paint, inside and out, the plywood cabinets that were standard in about 1960 when they were put in.

Having pull-out shelves means that everything is readily accessible. No more unused things hiding in the back. The space that was to become my potato/squash/onion/garlic storage area was behind two cabinet doors to the left of the sink. We made a plywood wall to block that space off from the under-sink area. The option exists, if we get ambitious, to put a vent in the bottom and one near the top to let air flow through from the outside. In that case, I might insulate the doors. For now, ventilation occurs when the doors are opened and closed as we get things from the cabinet. In the winter, the temperature in that cabinet is
colder than the room, usually around 60°F or a little lower. I’m not sure it ever consistently stayed at 50°F — maybe it was 50°F that day to get my attention. Venting to the outside would increase air flow and lower the temperature. While I was in my take-a-new-look-at-everything mood, I cleaned out the packed junk drawer just above this new produce cabinet and now we keep bread there. Hoosier cabinets from days long past had tin-lined bread drawers and that’s where I got the idea. The bread box moved from the kitchen counter to the pantry where it now holds extra light bulbs. As for all the junk I cleaned out of that drawer — it was sorted and put to good use elsewhere. No one has missed it.

The new pull-out shelves all have solid bottoms, except for in the produce area. For that we used a heavy metal grid, capable of holding the weight and allowing air to flow through. In the produce cabinet, I can fit a bushel of Irish potatoes and a bushel of sweet potatoes, plus winter squash, onions, and garlic. If I have more than that, it can go in plastic boxes in the crawl space or a cool closet elsewhere. Sweet potatoes and winter squash can even be stored under a bed, although the space under our beds has always been full of other things.

We do not have an electric dishwasher, preferring to wash our dishes by hand. If we had a dishwasher, we might not have room for storing produce in an under-the-counter cabinet. If you are looking for more storage space under the counter and think that the dishwasher is just in the way, but that it’s too much trouble to take it out, use it as storage, freeing up other cabinet space.

Crawl Space Root Cellar

Sweet potatoes and winter squash are happy being stored at 50–60°F at 60–70% humidity. Irish potatoes are happier being stored a little cooler and at 80–90% humidity. If they are too warm and dry, they will sprout earlier. I fill the box in the cabinet in the kitchen with potatoes we are going to eat and keep the extras in the crawl space under the house in ten gallon plastic boxes with air holes drilled in the boxes and the lids. They don’t go in there until October. Until then the potatoes are stored in wooden bushel baskets with newspaper on top to keep out the light,
or stored in paper grocery bags and kept either in the house or in a shed. The baskets and bags allow the potatoes to breathe. Before storing them in the crawl space, I sort the potatoes carefully, discarding any that have gone bad, and counting out how many I need to plant for the next spring, keeping them separate. The furnace is in the cellar — keeping the cellar a little warmer and often drying it out — both bad for the potatoes. Conditions in the crawl space are better suited. Even when the temperature dipped into the teens, the temperature in the crawl space never dropped below 48°F. You can monitor the temperature with one of those remote sensors that operate with or without wires. If it has a wire, you can take off the baseboard trim in the house and drill a hole in the floor next to the wall, put the wire through, then replace the trim, making a groove for the wire, allowing you to check the temperature of the crawlspace from inside the house. You might want to do this in a utility area or a closet. I know someone who ran a wire that way to put a light in his crawl space. The cord came up through the floor into a bedroom right beneath an outlet, where it plugged in. If you do drill through the floor, make sure you know where it will come out below. You don’t want to drill through an electric line or water pipe.