Ants in the Plants

A few weeks ago, I brought some of the plants in my office home.  I soon  noticed a few very small ants walking around on top of the tool box where one umbrella plant was sitting.  I don't know what kind they are.  As I have noted previously, I have had the most success with ants when I've used bait.  I still have some Advion packed away in a box somewhere, but I had a tube of Optigard readily available.

I've had mixed results with Optigard.  Sometimes ants just walk by it; othertimes they go after it immediately, like the picture in the previous post showed.  This time they were initially pretty indifferent. 

They walked right by and around the spots of bait.  After a few minutes, an ant tried it, and was soon joined by some others.  They didn't take much, but I don't know how many were in the plant.  I didn't get a large number coming out of the soil when I watered it, like I have seen before with other colonized pots.

However, the baiting was at least partly successful: about three days later, the top of the filing cabinet had a number of dead ants on it.

The Optigard worked, although I had the same issue mentioned previously: it seems to be prone to separation, with the first thing coming out of the tube being close to syrup in consistency.  That's okay for a flat surface like the filing cabinet, but not so good for a vertical one like a wall.

Canning Chicken

I have a pressure canner--I actually have two; one bought last summer and one bought a few years ago.  The picture is of my largest, an All American 921 that can hold stacked pint jars.

I have always planned to take up pressure canning, but until now haven't.  I'm not concerned about the pressure canner blowing up.  The All American has six screw-down locks, additional lugs to prevent the lid from blowing off if the main locks somehow fail, and a overpressure plug that will blow out at some point if pressure increases.  And I'm now under 1000 feet in elevation, so am able to can at 10 psi instead of 15, thus reducing the potential problems with pressure, anyway.  My main concern has been food safety.

I've gotten very comfortable with canning acidic foods, but botulism poisoning would be a show-stopper.  But it is also very rare (only 17 cases of foodborne botulism reported in 2018).  So whatever people are doing to can low-acid foods seems to work reasonably well--and I assume that the directions at the NCHFP site are designed to be safe at the > 99% level. However, the site also has horror stories.

All this being said, procedurally, pressure canning of most things is pretty easy--much more so than peach preserves, for example, which require a number of steps to get to the point that something is ready to go into jars.

For chicken, it's very easy.  In this first attempt, I canned some boneless, skinless chicken breasts.  I just cut the raw breast meat up into small pieces and packed the pieces into the jars.  I got about 13 ounces in each jar, leaving about 1 1/4" headspace (to the 'freeze' line).  The processing time is 75 minutes for pints. I processed them for 80 minutes, just to be sure the jars got to 240 degrees throughout.

If you look around online, you'll find some sites that suggest adding liquid to raw-packed meat jars before processing.  In my case, that would not have worked.

As the picture below shows, the jars are pretty full of liquid.  This may be because of the chicken I used--Great Value from Walmart.  The package said something about how the chicken may contain brine, much like the turkeys for sale around Thanksgiving.  The NCHFP site notes that there usually isn't enough liquid in raw-packed meats to cover the contents of the jar, but it worked fine with my low-grade chicken. As a side note, I'd intended to add 1/2 teaspoon of salt to each jar, but forgot--nonetheless, when I opened a jar the next day to sample it, it seemed as though it was seasoned just fine--because of the brine, I assume.

Last summer I didn't do any canning, partly because the house was hot and the thought of running boiling pots on the stove for a long period of time wasn't attractive.  That will definitely be a factor this summer, as well, which is fast-approaching.  I do have an outdoor camp stove with two propane burners that I plan to try using (though the NCHFP discourages this; it seems that it should be doable without causing damage to the canner since the body is so thick--and burners can always be turned down).  All this being said, the big canner seems to absorb and internalize most of the heat, not radiating much out into the room.  Some steam escapes, but it's less than with a boiling water bath or atmospheric steam canner.

Going forward, I expect most of my canning to continue to be non-pressurized.  However, it's nice to have the option to can low-acid foods, as well.

Sauerkraut 2020

I haven't made sauerkraut for a couple of years.  Last year I was too busy with moving, and this fall I never got around to making any.  During the winter, my indoor temperatures are actually a little low for kraut-making (65-72 is cited as the optimum temperature).  So the shoulder seasons, fall and spring, are the best time.  Temps in those months can be tricky, however; I have already had temps as warm as 76 indoors, but then cold spells plunge it back to the low 60s.

As always, I like red cabbage for sauerkraut.  I have noted before that each dressed head is about two pounds; this time my heads were a little small.  I got four, and ended up with seven pounds of chopped cabbage total.  The first step was to quarter the heads and cut out the core sections.

Chopping up each head only took about 10 minutes or so; I spent about an hour on the process overall.  This time, I tried cutting up the core and including some (not all) of it in the crock, as well.  We'll see how that goes.

As previously, I don't use anything other than a now fairly dull serrated knife to cut the cabbage; there are certainly ways to make a much finer consistency than I use, but this has worked okay for me so far.

I then added one tablespoon of salt per two pounds, squeezed the shredded cabbage a bit, then put it in the crock and used the stomper.

Finally, I added some brine to get the fluid level up to the top of the cabbage, even though I knew it would continue to excrete juice for a while and add to the mix.  This time I used coarse kosher salt, which is not recommended on makesauerkraut.com, but I thought it was the only plain salt I had. I later noticed a bag of canning salt on the shelf.  Oh, well. The brine that I added helped dissolve it.

Now I just let it sit for a while.  By the time I open it, it will be nearly May, and getting much warmer (most likely).  The first few days have been in the upper 60s to low 70s, which is almost perfect. Hopefully the ferment will turn out well.

A Beautiful Pest

Wisteria.  It's very invasive, spreading everywhere, and it climbs trees, covering them up (though maybe not as thoroughly as kudzu) and eventually choking them.  I have some wisteria encroaching from one property line, and I've been dealing with it for a few years--not very effectively.

This year I have at least made some progress on it.  This is the time of year when the leaves on trees are just coming out, but the wisteria is in bloom, making it easy to see.  More importantly, the vines snaking up trees are easy to see, too, because there isn't much undergrowth yet.

I noticed a tightly-wrapped pine with a couple of wisteria vines going up.  When I cut them--it was easy, even though they were thick; the wood isn't very substantial--I saw these marks in the bark.  This is one reason it's so noxious.  It wraps itself tightly around trees, then as the vines grow in diameter, it chokes off the cambium layer, like a slow-motion python. Cutting the vine relieves the pressure.

I know it'll just send out sprouts from the vine stump at ground level, but I have at least knocked it back a few years.  One of the vines I cut (not on the tree shown) was as big around as my wrist.  Even that thick, I was able to sever it with some loppers (though not in one bite).

All that being said, the flowers are nice.  For a brief time, a couple of weeks at most, they're attractive and fragrant.  Some people to this day buy the stuff as an ornamental, and if tightly controlled (which is challenging), it can be a good small tree for that.  The downsides are too great, however.  I went ahead and severed every large stem I could find.  The flowers will wilt a little faster than normal this year, but that's fine.

The Miracle of Bark

My wood stove setup is not the greatest.  The stove itself is nice: it's a Hearthstone Shelburne and can keep my 1400 square foot house reasonably warm in Georgia.  As the picture in this post shows, the chimney is not very tall.  It's about 12 feet at best.  It's apparent that it doesn't draw strongly.  Once the fire is roaring, it draws in enough air and burns well.

Sometimes when it doesn't seem to getting off to a very fast start, I throw in some bark.  Much of my firewood is oak, and the bark usually detaches as it dries.  A lot of hardwoods are that way.  It burns extremely well.  It very reliably improves the burn.

 In the picture above, the intensely burning area is a few small slabs of bark, with a sweetgum log on top.

This is a closer view.  Oak bark does not burn for long, but it's not a flash in the pan.  It burns long enough to get split wood (or an unsplit small piece) burning aggressively.  Throwing several sheets of bark into the stove at once heats the stove up to about 400 fairly readily (stove top temperature).  Although 400 might seem low, the max is about 600 and soapstone stoves seldom get above about 350-400).

Bark also functions well as kindling.

All of this may sound counter-intuitive, and some people dismiss it as being useful, because bark resists flame.  This is definitely true for small pieces that I throw into the stove with bark intact: the fire has to be going somewhat well for that to work.  It takes a few minutes to burn through the bark and get to the wood underneath.  However, when off the original wood (split or otherwise), the bark by itself does burn well.  Contrary to what a lot of people have indicated, I haven't noticed that it leaves more ash. It may...but I never use enough for that to be apparent.  I have never fed a fire nothing but bark, although I have enough of it that it could be done.

Oaks have good bark and some other hardwoods do.  Wood like cherry and peach has very little usable bark, but it burns okay, too; it's just paper-thin.  Southern pines don't have too much bark to them, and it often doesn't seem to separate, but western pines sometimes do: ponderosa pines can have very thick bark, and very old douglas firs can have bark up to 14 inches thick (though trees of that size aren't likely to be often used for firewood).

Bark works.  It's a reliable go-to.

Filtering Water

So my well has some issues.  It's an old bored well, i.e., wide and shallow.  As I've noted previously, there's often sediment in the water (actually, there's always sediment, but sometimes it's a noticeable problem despite nominal one-micron filtration).  The refurbishing done on the well last year was intended to mitigate the periodic sedimentation problem, but it has become apparent that when there's heavy rain in a short period of time, that can cause water to enter the well bore from the bottom fast enough that it stirs up sediment.  My location got about 24 inches of rain in the first 2 months of 2020, including 6 inches on one day.  So I've gotten a couple of bouts of stirred sediment.  The picture of the dog bowl shows what it was like when I wiped it out during a particularly cloudy time.

Another issue is bacterial contamination, also as previously commented upon.  Although guidelines say that filtering water through a certain depth of soil (this source suggests 10 feet), in actual practice it seems that they are still susceptible to contamination even if deeper.  I had an inspection of the casing done, and it looked pretty good all the way down to the 40+ foot bottom.  Nonetheless, I have had recurring bacterial contamination issues, and chlorine shocking is a major pain.

Ultimately, I'll probably drill a well, that is less likely to have issues.  In the meantime, I have set up my Berkey.  I got a Royal Berkey a few years ago, but had never used it.  I was not sure it would really work.  One can find all kinds of claims and counterclaims about the black Berkey filter elements.  Berkey itself says they have silver in them, which is helpful, and various lab tests are available (others question those).  So I set it up, primed the filters (a challenging task when the source water is known to be contaminated), and then ran a test. 

The filters worked: no bacteria.  However, when dumping turbid water into the top, it does clog up the filters fairly quickly--very quickly, actually, depending on the degree of turbidity.  If you have visions of using pond water in a Berkey and drinking what comes out, that might work out okay in terms of purity, but get used to dismantling and scrubbing the system frequently.

The filter element at the top has been cleaned, and the bottom hasn't (yet).  I didn't use the paper towel to clean; I used a scrubber sponge.  A lot of silt is still visible at the very bottom of the filter; I'm not cleaning there because I don't want to detach the element from its base.  That would basically ruin the filter.  This degree of fouling happened within just a few gallons when the water was bad.


Otherwise, the filters work okay, although don't take the throughput claims of Berkey too seriously.  Even when primed, they won't filter anywhere near as fast as suggested, unless the top reservoir is kept topped off.

This picture shows what the top tank looks like almost 24 hours after filling: it has processed most of the water, but not all.  I don't fill the top reservoir to the absolute top, and am getting about 1.5 gallons per day through the system with one refill per day.  It's faster when the elements are first cleaned, then eventually slows to where not much gets through the elements at all (maybe a half gallon per day or less), at which time they need to be cleaned again.  There's room for two additional filters, which would speed things up, but the same cleaning issues would remain.

So it does work, but it's not exactly the most convenient way to get water when compared to just turning the tap.  My well does have contamination issues, but most coliforms aren't really harmful, and I'm not having any GI issues when showering in what my well offers up.  Nonetheless, a more permanent solution is forthcoming.

A Winter Whole Wheat Loaf of Bread

As I noted last winter, in my new/old house, it's challenging to get bread to rise when it's below 70 indoors.  Here's what a recent batch of 100% white whole wheat dough looked like after "rising" on the counter for about eight hours:

As you can see, there's essentially no rise to it.  I put it in the oven on the proof setting for about 3.5-4 hours, yielding this:

That was enough to start baking.  The end result was a very respectable (if slightly underbaked) 100% whole wheat loaf.

Within a month, this should all be moot until fall.