Spring in the Garden... Baking in the Sun

Wahoo! A few consecutive days of warm, sunny weather! After weeks of on and off snow and a definite chill in the air, despite signs of spring like blooming daffodils and fruit trees, this warm interlude is very welcome.
We have been out in the garden preparing for the growing season. Working on the strawberry bed, mulching the rhubarb, weeding the asparagus, planting lettuce and peas, tending the garlic, and generally mowing down the cover crop and preparing to till and plant when our clay soil dries up some.
The end of winter/early spring is one of the least productive times in the garden, but we still have carrots, chard, beets, and even found a cabbage sprout that did not go to seed, but made a small cabbage instead. Better yet, there is finally new growth on the rhubarb and the asparagus is coming on.

Poor asparagus, the first spears that poked up were turned to mush by freezing cold. Now that it is not going below the mid - 30's we have been able to harvest the first of it. Even better, the rhubarb seems to have come up in force almost overnight!

We love rhubarb. Tart rhubarb pie with cold vanilla ice cream is to die for. We even like it made into a sauce to pour over custard or ice cream. This first rhubarb inspired me to indulge in one of our other favorite sunny day pastimes - cooking in our solar oven.

Solar ovens are wonderful. The first one here was modified cardboard boxes with foil lined reflectors and insulation between the boxes. It worked excellently, but despite our best care the cardboard started to warp and disintegrate in a couple of years. So we finally purchased a commercial one (then another!) and have been cooking in them almost every sunny day ever since, even in mid winter.
Think of them as a solar powered crock pot that also can bake. It is absolutely the best way to cook brown rice. Beans, stews, curries, lasagna, casseroles, pot roasts... all of these cook to perfection. Breads, cakes, brownies, and cobblers do just as well. We even use it to bake granola - which is the only thing we have ever burnt in it (oops...).

On the day we picked the rhubarb we just happened to have some organic strawberries I got in town, so it was obvious we had to make a strawberry - rhubarb treat.
I had already made some Spanish rice in the Sun Oven in the morning, so it was set up, pre-heated, and ready. I put together a quick and easy crisp and we had it by late afternoon, it cooked while we worked in the garden. All we had to do was check it and turn the oven now and then.
Now, you can easily cook in a solar oven without turning it. Just aim it somewhat west of the direct sun so the sun will hit it for the longest period of time. We built a giant turntable for ours using the base for a "Lazy Susan" and a scrap piece of countertop. This way we can turn it to follow the sun all day using a wedge to hold it in place so it doesn't turn freely in the wind.

You can build a solar oven easily yourself. There are many plans available on the internet, from simple Pizza Box "warming" ovens to a good basic cardboard box model: Solar oven plans . Lots of good information and more plans are in the book, "Heaven's Flame" .

For a wonderful, durable, reasonably priced solar oven, we use and recommend the Global SunOven.
Links to more information and cookbooks can be found at: Morning Hill
By the way, you will want some glass casserole dishes with lids. Colored glass is best, but they can be hard to find and/or expensive. K mart had the least expensive new ones I could find, and they crop up all the time in second hand stores.
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Now, about the Strawberry-Rhubarb Crisp... Here is the recipe:

Solar Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp
Use all organic ingredients, if possible.
3 to 4 cups fresh rhubarb stalks, cut in 1 inch chunks
1 pint of Strawberries, sliced
1/2 cup sugar or honey
1 Tbsp minute Tapioca
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1 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup flour (whole wheat or white)
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped nuts (walnuts, pecans, or almonds)(optional)
a pinch of salt
5 Tbsp. butter, melted (you could use oil, but it is not near as tasty)
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Preheat your Solar Oven.
Mix the fruit, sweetener and tapioca in a 2 1/2qt casserole or 9"x 9"x 2" baking dish, set aside.
In a medium size bowl, mix together the remaining dry ingredients. Add the melted butter and stir until just mixed. Now sprinkle the oat mixture over the fruit and pat lightly.
Bake in the solar oven until top is crisp and browned and the fruit is bubbling up around the edges, 40 minutes to 1 hour (or more) as needed.
Best served still warm with ice cream.

I would love for others to share their favorite spring and/or solar oven recipes.

Earth Day Every Day

Happy Earth Day!
For us the idea of Earth Day is an everyday affair. It is our passion and our challenge and, likely, our duty to the future, to keep our planet healthy. Being "Green" is a way of life, not a one day a year experiment. Our recent big project was finally upgrading our electric system and completing our Solar PV (Photo Voltaic) panel array.

We have been working on our power system here since 1977. When we moved to this very rural property and began to build our home the electricity diverted away from the highway and up over the mountain, about a mile before it got to us. The price to get the power down to our location was way out of our reach. No problem, we had spent plenty of time living and working with kerosene lamplight, we were young, our eyesight good, and we already had a propane refrigerator and wood heat and cook stoves.
This served us well for a few years, until our oldest daughter, then 9, wanted to read to herself and her siblings in her bedroom. We got wall mounted kerosene lamp fixtures for her room and then realized that one pillow fight and the whole house could burn down! We became the lighting police and worried constantly. As a result we soon rigged up a car battery to a 12 volt interior lamp from an RV. This worked great but the battery did not last long, so we collected several and then, when we made the long drive to town in our pick-up truck, charged all the batteries with a jumper cable from the truck battery that came out the hood and wove through the mirror and passenger side door handle into the back of the truck where they were hooked up. You had to be careful not to forget when you went to get out of the truck!

Once the early PV panels became available we were able to get some of the used Arco PV panels that had been removed from some huge installation I believe AmTrak or some such had dismantled. If you know any off-grid "Old Timers", chances are they have had some of these Arco panels. Thus began our love affair with off-grid renewable energy.

It has been a long and adventurous road since then. The technology has changed and improved dramatically over the years and it is amazing to see what you can do setting up a new system, off-grid or inter-tie, these days. For those of us who are just upgrading it is a bit more difficult. Since we often have to match our old equipment (preferable to discarding it and starting anew) finding compatible PV panels and parts to fill out an existing system can be challenging. Luckily we found a great deal on used panels from - you got it - a large project that had been disassembled! It is like coming full circle.

What we have achieved is a system big enough to power our home and business without having to check if the washing machine is on spin cycle before we use the soap cutter or laser printer. We switched from 12 volt to 24 volt and got a bigger inverter to convert the power to 120volt. Now all we have to do is rewire the 12 volt house!

The system has 8 - 75 to 85 watt BP PV panels, 7 - 80 watt AEE PV panels, which match perfectly and are alternated on the array, and 5 new panels (on lower left), slightly larger Solec 80 watt panels, to fill it out. These, along with our Whisper H80 wind generator, charge the 8 deep cycle Rolls batteries that actually run the house. A new OutBack 3.5KW 24Volt inverter rounds it out, although there are other misc. charge controllers and gadgets as well. We also have a small pelton wheel for micro-hydro power but, until we switch it up to 24 volt as well, it is off line.
Even though we are now more power - full than ever, we still have to be mindful of our power usage. Living on batteries is sometimes quite limited. Particularly when it is cloudy, windless weather. Powering down everything when not in use, from lightbulbs to this computer, is essential. Everything with a standby load is on a powerstrip we can turn off.

But since I cannot tell an Amp from an Ohm, that is the sum of my "Tech-Talk". I just love being able to reap the benefits - like writing on this blog on my solar electric powered iMac!

Want to reap a little solar power from us? Try a bar of our "solar powered soap"! All the ingredients came from plants powered by photo synthesis, and all the machinery involved runs on our alternative energy system. Go here to see our soaps.

Into the Future...

The girls of the Future

Here they are - the girls of the future! These are our four grand- daughters. Every time we think of them it reminds us how important it is to quit dwelling on the mistakes of the past, which have gotten us in to the situations we face now, and put our energy into creating the future that will sustain these growing youth and their future families as well.

Our family tries to live consciously. That is, we try to be aware of the effect our actions will have on the world around us. There are so many levels to that, we are always discovering new ones. And while I suspect we will never quite think of everything, you can never feel bad about doing the best you can. And you always aspire to do better, always learning more about the connections between your actions and the environment.

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. - John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

We just had the 3 older girls here for just over a week, and it was a good exercise in teaching them some basic green/conscious living principles.
It was a challenge for them, but they quickly mastered our crazy recycling system: burnable (newspaper for starting fires), compostable, recyclable (5 categories!), and what we call "Total Garbage". Remembering to turn out the lights when you leave the area was harder, and hardest still was remembering that chickens do not get meat scraps or orange or banana peels. The dogs get the meat treats and the garden compost and worm pile get the other. We use cloth napkins, and everyone has their special ceramic or glass cup to drink from that gets washed once a day or when needed. They help me hang their clean wet clothes on our "solar and wind- powered clothesline"!

They love to gather the eggs from the hens and help us in the garden, not bad for a bunch of city girls. We try to teach them where their food comes from and about birds and bugs and which wild plants are poisonous and which are edible and why not to pick ALL the wildflowers in any one spot.

We cook with them, everything from bread to pizza to energy bars, all from scratch. We do not eat anything that comes pre-made in a package. We drink cider that they helped us press from apples last fall. We walk.
And we can tell from their response that this is not all normal fare for them and that they love to see the connection between things - those little "Aha!" moments where the dots connect and they see how one thing in life acts with another.

To see these connections, the effect one action has on other things, that knowledge is the first step toward living a conscious life that will sustain us into the future.

"We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past."
- Miguel de Unamuno, writer and philosopher (1864-1936)