Larisa Walk

There are 2 things for winter greenhouses that need to be taken into account:
1. heat
2. light
Although solar gain will do well enough on its own on a sunny day, it will take much more energy to make heat at night and cloudy days than it takes to provide lights.  Another factor for northern greenhouses in winter is snow load and the structure needed to support that weight. While the snow does insulate, it blocks any available light from reaching the plants and so will need to be removed. After more than 45 years of living and gardening in Wisconsin and Minnesota, I've come too the conclusion that a greenhouse in midwinter isn't worth the effort. Instead we've taken advantage of the large south-facing windows in our house, a space that is already being heated, and rigged up shelves and lights to get through from November to early March, and use a very small non-heated greenhouse to cover the "shoulder" seasons. Greenhouses with vertical glazing (glass) don't have to worry about snow load, plastics degrading, and are easier to keep warm with insulated roofs and walls and a simple, 2 layer curtain over the glass at night (ours is a cotton painter's tarp). Supplemental lighting helps here as well. The crops for the indoor window garden and greenhouse spring and fall are primarily leafy greens (lettuce, non-heading napa, spinach, bok choy, celery, etc.). In the fall, as the light starts to fade, crops need to be started early enough that they are "mature" by Halloween and will hold until harvest over the next few weeks, with greenhouse crops picked out first before serious cold sets in. After the Solstice, the indoor plantings will have been picked out and it's time to switch to trays of microgreens until new plantings in about mid January start to produce harvests. As weather begins to warm in March, plantings can be established once again in the greenhouse.

Most importantly, there are no fruiting crops to harvest in winter greenhouses in the upper midwest. Eating seasonally is the biggests hurdle in one's thinking of how to approach a year-round, nutritious menu. Fresh greens go a long way in adding to a root-cellar and preserved foods based diet.

Get a few people to help you drive it out. Each person should have 5-6' "arm extenders" in the form of sticks or plastic pipe that can be waved around. Open your gate and drive the rabbit out. It helps if the gate is near a corner. Last year we used the waving arms method to drive out a small bunny with just my husband and me, both vintage gardeners. The same bunny came back at least 8 times and got quite used to the routine. Eventually it grew big enough that it couldn't squeeze through the 2"x4" mesh to return. When I was much younger I chased a trespassing bunny until it was tired, got it cornered, and grabbed it, giving it a toss over the fence. Not doing that again at age 70+.

Our homestead is entirely reliant on rainwater collection, both for domestic use and irrigation. We have an underground cistern for the house but use 3 above ground 1500 gallon ag tanks for irrigation (along with assorted rain barrels and a dairy bulk tank). The ag tanks, pump, and irrigation lines get drained in the fall after watering out some onto fruit trees and filling water barrels. The dumping of so much water seems so wasteful, especially since we've been having more spring droughts in recent years.  We've been fantasizing about having an underground cistern for irrigation needs to keep water over the winter. But costs and access to a suitable site make that a no go. So I had the idea of putting 12 of the 330 gallon IBC totes above ground, filling them to about 275 gallons, and letting them freeze solid. We found a seller with the tanks we wanted that was able to deliver to us. The original plan was to take off the valves and cap the tanks but that doesn't really sound easy to accomplish. So the latest thought is to use closed cell spray foam to permanently plug the piping stub and drain valve so water can't get in there and crack the fitting.  The totes will be filled with water that would have been dumped in the fall using a transfer pump on top of the tanks and moved back into the irrigation system if needed the next spring. Other than putting a tarp (silage bag scraps that are white on one side) over the "cube farm" to avoid freeze and thaw cycles, is there anything else we're missing? Has anyone else used IBC totes for frozen water storage? If so, specifically how did you deal with the valves?

When I taught energy efficient food preservation methods for many years at the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair I used to bring this method up first and foremost, telling folks that most of them probably already owned a food dryer without even knowing it. My more advanced method ;>) has the car parked with the largest window facing south, usually front but sometimes back window, rolling windows down about 1", and covering foods with a dark colored cotton cloth to keep UV light off foods to preserve color and vitamins. The windows should be closed at night if stuff isn't dry enough after the first day. I had a couple of neighbors who used this method almost exclusively.  One had an old 1970's clunker with lots of space and really big windows and he even dried blanched sweet corn on cookie sheets. Another used to work at Seed Savers in Decorah, Iowa and she "rescued" produce after harvesting seeds, especially sweet peppers, and had her car parked at work and would tend to stuff on lunch break.

For many years we had sheep and they enjoyed being fed apple tree prunings to browse upon. But the last several years we have been sheepless and wondered what to do with the prunings, and I thought why not give the native, fenced-out rabbits a treat in late winter. So we threw the prunings onto the rhubarb patch that was outside of the fenced gardens and orchards, where the bunnies ate off most all of the bark and buds, all the while pooping onto the rhubarb plants. So for many years now we have had the biggest rhubarb ever with the biggest stalks approaching baseball bat size, leaves like umbrellas (they made good mulch around the plants when cut off during harvest). The only thing we have to do is remove the branches when the patch starts to come up in the spring.  Since we don't eat that much rhubarb because of the oxalic acid, this spring we dug out half of the plants and gave them to a neighbor for her CSA.  BTW rhubarb roots also make a fantastic dye for wool and other animal fibers.

When it's cold out why not use a humanure 2 bucket system? The solids bucket can be emptied into the outhouse at your convenience (sunny, not a cold, windy day). The liquids can be used on outdoor compost heaps year round. The outhouse will be available for outdoor use when the weather is most likely warmer and you have a bunch of guests. In not too cold weather a foam toilet seat can be kept indoors and taken out with each use. BTW, the nicest outhouse I ever used was finished to a high degree and had beautiful stained glass windows and an antique etched glass window in a wood door. Memorable but I don't tend to linger in any toilet facility so not personally motivated to construct anything beyond the practical.

We have a rainwater cistern for house water and so our water is soft and easy on clothes and there is less need for laundry soap. For many decades we've been washing laundry with about a tablespoon per load of Dr. Bronner's Sal Suds. This is enough to get the dirt out and leaves a clean odor to the fabrics, which are hung outdoors year-round to dry.

Dry, soup type peas are easy to shell. Their pods are flat and don't shrink around the peas like some of the sweeter pea varieties do.  We put the dried in the pod soup peas in a large tub and use an electric hand mixer to break open the pods (you'll need a cloth draped over the tub to keep the peas from flying all over the place).  Then you can pick out the pods and winnow what's left to get down to clean, edible dry peas. When seed saving the wrinkled pod types, hand shelling works best.

For fresh peas, there are roller devices to speed up the chore, kind of like a wringer on an old washing machine. We used to have a hand cranked one and I seem to remember that these were available as an electric gadjet as well. I think these devices would work better if the pods were very lightly steamed or blanched first, but not too much so that the peas would get smashed in the process (save the water to make broth with the pods after shelling).  Maybe just a brief dunk in a colander into a pot of boiling water would be sufficient? Probably would need a towel or cloth to keep the peas from shooting out and escaping.

We too prefer snow peas to eat pods and all. Lately we've been focusing on varieties with brown seeds as they also make good soup peas if the pods get ahead of us at harvest time. We gave up on snap peas as the birds preferred them but even snow peas need Remay protection most years.

You can nixtamalize sorghum just like corn with either wood ash or use pickling lime from the grocery store. I use 1 Tbsp lime for 2 cups of grain. Easier to do and you don't need the mess or worry of using wood ashes, not that you shouldn't try it that way but to get comfortable with the process the pickling lime is a gateway ingredient ;>).

We grow Siberian peaches from seed. The trees are rather short-lived and so whenever we have a crop we plant the pits so we'll have eventual replacement stock. The first year we did this I fussed around by putting the pits in trays in the root cellar, tried various methods of keeping them moist (plastic cover, misting, etc.) Ran out of trays and containers with lots of pits leftover so threw the rest into the compost heap. Only one of the cellared pits germinated but the compost heap had many peaches germinate when the soil warmed up. Talking to a friend with more experience than we had said he always plants Siberian peach pits outdoors right after harvest. So now we make a nursery bed with rows about 6" apart and furrow the pits about 2" deep and packed into the rows so the pits are touching. Enough germinate so that we end up with a tree every 6" or so. We've also successfully done this with Siberian apricots and butternuts. Here in Minnesota we don't get a peach crop every year but the trees usually survive, for the most part, and will fruit in subsequent years when the conditions are more favorable. It's not always the severe winter cold temps that are the problem. Usually it's spring frosts after blossoming. The apricots are worse in that regard as they flower waaay too early. Last year was the first real crop in 14 years and I would have to say that they really weren't worth waiting for. Nothing beats a tree ripened peach, but when it looks like there won't be a crop (no blossoms or too early flowering) we make sure we have a good patch of melons planted (Petit Gris de Rennes is our favorite). Dehydrated melon is a superior replacement for dehydrated peaches.