jason | KW Homestead

Author: jason (page 5 of 13)

5 Unusual Things You Can/Should Recycle

November 20, 2014 / jason / Comments Off

In our modern world of upgrades, planned obsolescence, and the constant ebb and flow of new and newer products, appliances, and gadgets, we end up having to deal with a lot of waste. I’m not talking about garbage, trash, or food scraps, nor items that we all know are recyclable like glass, plastic and paper, but those large, and/or unusual items like appliances, electronics, and many other household items that we throw away every day.

This list is just 5 of the many lesser known things that are indeed recyclable and do not need to be thrown away into landfills. Some of these items can be taken into retail stores to be recycled while others can often be picked up by junk removal companies.

Tires

Tires can be reused as well as recycled.

Old, worn out, and junk tires should not be thrown away. In fact, most municipal garbage collectors won’t even take tires so that leaves homeowners and citizens wondering what to do with their old junk tires. Many companies exist that will take tires and recycle them into useful rubber products like playground padding, mulch, or road materials. Tires can also be used in earth-ship construction, or as planters in the garden for starting sweet potato slips.

Washers, Dryers, Refrigerators, and Other Appliances

These large household appliances are made of metal, usually steel with electric motors made of aluminum and copper. Metal recyclers can recycle these products and reuse them in the manufacturing process. Some large appliances like refrigerators and AC units contain refrigerants that are potentially dangerous and harmful to the environment. You should always be careful with these and never send one to the dump where it can become a pollutant. Rather, find someone to recycle it, and they can make sure that anything useful gets reused instead of wasted or turned into pollution. Some other appliances that can be recycled include stoves, microwaves, dishwashers, and freezers.

Batteries

There are many different types of batteries, but the ones that are most often recycled are car and marine batteries. These large batteries contain lead, and are recycled in the production of new batteries. Some batteries can be refurbished, and others still are rechargeable. Batteries can contain some pretty nasty chemicals in them, so always be careful if you are storing or transporting batteries. Many places that sell batteries will take them after they are dead, and others allow you to return the battery as a “core deposit” and can even save you a few bucks on your next purchase.

Ink Cartridges

Ink cartridges are similar to batteries in that they often can be exchanged at retail locations for some sort of credit. Office Depot and Staples will often credit $2-3 depending on make/model with the return of an ink cartridge. These cartridges can be refilled and many companies will provide this service and are always looking for more ink cartridges. These companies handle them in a safe way and ensure that no ink residues leach out into the groundwater, an unavoidable fact if you send them to the dump.

Computers and Other Electronics

Computers, cell phones, speakers, keyboards, and phones are all recyclable. The components inside them, including the memory boards, wiring, and heat sinks are all able to be re-purposed, reused, or recycled. This type of material is known as e-waste and there are many companies that specialize in recycling and removing unwanted electronic devices. This keeps the costs of production down and reduces pollution too. Many of these electronics can leach out some pretty harmful chemicals if not properly disposed of, and by recycling them, you can make sure that does not happen.

If we want to be sustainable, then we must take care of our waste streams. These resources need to utilized, whether it’s as compost, biomass, or recycled materials and components.

If you are in the Greensboro/Triad area and have a large or unusual item that you want to recycle, send an email to Jason (at) ourochreway.com and we can come and make sure it stays out of the landfill!

Some Cold Weather Posts… Brrrrrr…..

November 18, 2014 / jason / Comments Off

In anticipation/celebration of the unusually cold weather that is rolling in tonight, 19 degree cold weather, I thought I’d take a look back at some of our cold weather posts from the past. For new readers who maybe weren’t around last winter, check out some of these posts on cold weather and winter homestead chores.

Hopefully these posts don’t make you feel too cold! Stay warm tonight!!

With Christmas right around the corner, why not get your Christmas tree delivered right to your home instead of messing with all the hassle and mess of picking one up and transporting it back home! If you are in the triad area, check out our Greensboro Christmas Tree Delivery service!

Acorns/Oak Nuts: Food from the Woods

November 17, 2014 / jason / Comments Off

This year has been a good year for acorns in North Carolina, with almost every oak I’ve seen having a decent crop of nutritious nuts. The oaks on our property are no exception, and in particular the chestnut oaks have had a bumper crop of huge acorns this fall. I gathered this pile of acorns from beneath a chestnut oak in about 5-10 minutes, and it ended up weighing about 5 pounds. Not too bad, and if you do some math, that would be 30-60 lbs. an hour.

5 pounds of chestnut oak acorns from our woods

Chestnut oaks make great acorns, some of the largest in our bioregion and also some of the least bitter. In general, the tastiest and sweetest acorns come from white oaks, while the most bitter tend to come from red oaks.

I’ll start processing these in the next few days and eventually get down to a nutritious and delicious product! Talk about nutrient dense food!

But before that can happen, the tannin will need to be leached out. This isn’t too complicated or difficult, but it does take some effort. I don’t know if we’ll be eating acorn bread on our tomato sandwiches next summer, but it should be a fun and edible experiment!

Managing Woodlands, Woodlots, and Forests for Fun and Profit

November 13, 2014 / jason / Comments Off

The millions of acres of American Woodlands have, for the last 2 centuries, been mined not managed. They have been stripped, clearcut, set on fire, and replanted with short rotation mono-crops to the point that many of our mature woodlands and forests bear little resemblance to healthy and natural woodland communities.This has been done in the name of short term profits, and while the logging companies and sawmills made-out great, more often than not landowners received a stumpage price way too low, and were left with a degraded and less valuable piece of forest in the aftermath.

clear-cutting forests is rarely the best form of timber management

It doesn’t have to be this way though. Forests can be sustainably managed and designed to produce income for generations. With proper thinning, forest planning, tree selection, and management techniques, forest owners can ensure that their woodlot is not just a commodity to be firesold to save the farm, but a profitable ecosystem that increases in value over time, and can be passed on to future generations.

To do this e will have to go into these abused forests and asses the damage that countless “highgrading” cuts (a logging practice where all trees above a certain diameter are harvested, leaving the worst adapted and least valuable species standing) have left only stunted, poorly composed timber stands. Sometimes we may need to replant, or perform shelterewood and seed tree cuts to ensure proper forest regeneration, but often some thinning of poor quality trees, which can release trees of higher quality to achieve their full potential, combined with timber best practices like crop tree management, silvopasture, and coppice regeneration can bring degraded and abused forests back into sustainable productivity and profitability.

These thinnings wont always be of high enough value for commercial loggers, but this material does not need to be wasted. In fact,it can be extremely profitable. These crooked, small diameter and low value logs can be used for mushroom production on logs, firewood,craft wood, or even be sawed to length on portable bandsaw mills. Other uses can include fence posts,biochar prodcution, hugelkulture, and round timber construction.

small diameter oak logs inoculated with shiitake mushrooms!

This is where the small woodlot managers have an advantage. It’s one thing to find uses for 2-10 acres of low value wood, but quite another when you are dealing with 1000’s of acres. Smaller forest owners, particularly those who live on the wooded acreage that they are managing, also have the advantage of constant contact and correction. They walk their property every week, sometimes every day and can notice things like diseased, dying and dead trees, and can quickly implement a strategy to deal with them. They can also easily diversify into many avenues of production. It’s very feasible for someone to combine a small shiitake mushroom operation on logs , a coppice grove for crafts, cut a few cords of firewood for home heating, put in a small food forest with edible tree and cane fruits, go hunting a few times a year for turkey, squirrel and deer, all while increasing the value of their timber, property and life.

forest owners and managers should observe and interact with their woods in order to come up with goals, and management strategies

This is the key to timber management, the interaction between owner and forest. There cannot be a prescription for management until an owner knows what he/she want’s to achieve with their woodlot. After that, a timber inventory, and then a timber management plan can be created and implemented. From there, it transitions to the long and enjoyable phase of observations and interactions, all tailored to the goals laid out in the beginning. This can lead to many years of productivity, profitability, and sustainability, all from a woodlot that was worth only a fraction of it’s value, but with proper timber management, can be passed down for generations as it wealth accumulates.

Blackberry and Raspberry Propagation by Layering

November 11, 2014 / jason / Comments Off

We have plenty of wild blackberries growing on our homestead, so when we ordered cane fruit plants last year for our food forest, we focused on raspberries. We did get 1 type of blackberry though, a thorn-less variety named Chester, known for its sweet, early ripening berries. Because we only have 1 lone plant at the base of a dwarf apple tree, we figured we should try our hand at layering, an easy method of cane-fruit propagation.

a chester blackberry ready to be layered

Layering involves digging a small hole by the base of the berry bush and then bending one of the canes down into it. That’s pretty much it. Over the winter, the buried portion of the young cane will start to send out roots, and will develop into a new plant! By bending the cane, instead of snipping off a cutting, the new plant still has access to the old plants more established root network and all of it’s nutrients and water it can absorb from the soil.

dig a small hole by the base of the plant, about 6 inches deep

then bury the new shoot, tamp down the soil, and wait until spring!

Come spring, simply cut the cane 6-8 inches from the base of the new plant, and feel free to either dig up and transplant your new black/raspberry or extend the older plant outwards like you would if you were creating an edible hedge, or fedge. This new plant will be exactly like your old plant, except that for the first year it’s leaves will be upside down!! Pretty cool, and a great way to produce more plants for free!

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Plantain (Plantago): Herbal First Aid in Action!

November 10, 2014 / jason / 2 Comments

Here’s a short video on how I treated an insect sting on my knuckle at work with some plantain today. Plantain is a great medicinal herb that is both very conspicuous and very safe. It’s a well known herb, sometimes considered a weed, that is often found in lawns, nature strips, and parks.

The compounds in the leaves are extremely useful at pulling out toxins and poisons, and old timers have used this wonder plant to treat all sorts of cuts, bites, and envenomations. My sting today was on my knuckle! Ouch! But the plantain (genus plantago) worked it’s magic and after just a few hours I couldn’t even tell which finger had gotten stung! Check out the video for more!

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Rhus copallina: Shining, Dwarf, Winged or Flameleaf Sumac

November 6, 2014 / jason / Comments Off

Rhus copallina, or shining sumac, was one of the wild plants on our property that puzzled me for the longest time. I could recognize its distinctive sumac-y look that meant it belonged in the Rhus genus that contains the more common staghorn and smooth sumacs, but it didn’t match any of the pictures I could find of those two species. I was worried for a bit that it might be poison sumac (Toxicodendron vernix) but a quick Google search told me that the best way to tell poison sumac from okay sumac is the color of the berries. Red berries = don’t worry, and white berries = don’t touch/eat/make sumac tea. So, I went on not knowing exactly what the plant was, and being intrigued by its interestingly winged leaflets.

You can easily tell this type of sumac by the winged margins between the leaves.

But then, out of the blue one day while researching different types of permaculture plants, I stumbled across an image that finally made it clear that this sumac was winged sumac. It’s a great plant, with many uses and a strikingly beautiful presence on the homestead, especially in fall. It’s leaves are the darkest, most robust red I’ve ever seen.

But it’s not just a pretty plant! It also, like all of the safe sumacs, has a very high amount of vitamin c in it’s berries. You can soak them in water to pull out the vitamin c, and then freeze the tangy juice and use it like you would lemon juice. It’s also common for people, especially in the south, to make “sumac-ade” or pink lemonade out of the berries as well. I’ve heard of fisherman using a sprig of sumac berries in place of lemon when baking fish as well. In some countries, the berries are dried and ground up to make a spice that adds a red coloring to many dishes, and the pithy stems were often used in pipemaking.

We love the beautiful fall color of Rhus copallina!

Shining sumac can grow in a wide range of climates, from zones 4-10, and can tolerate full sun or partial shade. It really is a pioneer species that thrives on the forest edge, where it leads the advancement of meadow to woods. It spreads by suckers, can quickly fill up an area that has been cleared, and it is often planted as both a wildlife cover species and as a shrub to stabilize soil and prevent erosion. All sorts of birds enjoy the berries, and they help to spread the seeds as well. One more interesting thing about flameleaf sumac is that it often colonizes after fire events, which makes me wonder if the small stand we have used to be somewhere a burn or brush pile was kept by the previous owners.

In any event, I’m glad to have identified this plant, and even gladder to know that it’s so useful. I have been encouraging it wherever I see it growing, and hope to transplant a few into our backyard food forest this upcoming year and make a bunch of sumac-pink lemonade!

Sweet Potato Harvest 2014

November 4, 2014 / jason / Comments Off

Today was a great day to harvest sweet potatoes. The slips we planted months ago have done okay in the garden and it was time to dig them up and see how they made.

The goose troop making sure I didn’t miss any sweet potatoes

In preparation for our first frost the other night we cut off the tops off of the sweet potato plants because frost damage enters the tubers from the vine part, and by cutting off the top and leaving the potatoes in the warm ground, we can delay the harvest a few days until it’s more convenient.To add a little bit of extra protection, I covered the sweet potato beds with old bed sheets to keep in a little extra warmth. It definitely worked, and there are no signs of any frost damage.

cutting the vines off and then covering with a bed sheet can give you a few extra days to harvest your sweet potatoes

We planted 3 different varieties; 1 red porto rican sweet potato (I know, it should be Puerto Rican, but that’s what they call it), 1 yellow porto rican, and 1 korean purple. The porto ricans we grew last year with great success, and the purples were started from tubers from Super G, and international grocery store in Greensboro. They were planted in 4 different locations in the garden. About 1/4 went into one of our new hugelkulture beds, where they were inter-planted with sorghum and cowpeas as a southern style 3 sisters garden. These did the best.

red porto rican, yellow porto rican, and korean purple sweet potatoes

Overall, the yields were not as great as last year, but still okay. We planted them much later than last year, and the fertility in many of the plots were on the low side. Still, we should have plenty of sweet potatoes to last us through the winter and into next year. This means plenty of sweet potato ginger soup! Yes!!

Small Scale Catfish Pond Stocking

November 3, 2014 / jason / Comments Off

How do you stock catfish in small pond? Particularly one that’s not easily accessed from the road or driveway?

Most pond stocking companies offer delivery services for their fish, and have big hoses and tanks to get the fish into your pond. But because our recent batch of twenty five, 8-10″channel catfish was such a small order (they only cost $20), delivery wasn’t really an option. Luckily, the fish company is able to fill up some heavy duty plastic bags with water, and some extra O2. This gives you plenty of time for a short drive, and doesn’t stress the fish out too much in the process.

Carrying catfish in a plastic bag down to the pond

Once we got home, it was a simple matter of dumping out some of the excess water and then lugging a big ole pile catfish over my shoulder and down to the pond. The fish people had left their tanks open all night, and the water was nice and cold, so we didn’t bother acclimating the fish to our pond water. We just dumped them out.

almost there…

Free to grow and eventually turn into catfish sandwiches

All in all, a very simple chore, very doable for 1 person. each bag had about 12 catfish in it, so it took 2 trips (about 10 minutes). So,if your thinking about stocking your small pond with fish, be they catfish, bluegill, or bass, don’t worry about bagging them up and bringing them if you cant find someone to deliver them. This would work even better with smaller sized fish, and you could probably stock a decent sized pond entirely with bagged fish if you planned it carefully.

We only added the 25 larger catfish because our pond is in pretty good balance, with a somewhat high population of small bluegills and some larger bass.They seem to doing well, its hard to tell, but we haven’t seen any floaters since the pond was stocked 3 days ago.

The Catfish Have Arrived!

November 2, 2014 / jason / Comments Off

A big warm welcome to the 25 newest members of Kuska Wiñasun Homestead!

channel catfish are great fish to stock in small ponds for both meat and fun

Yesterday we picked up twenty five, 7-10″ channel catfish from Carolina Fish Hatchery and brought them back to their new home, our 3/4 acre pond.They were double bagged, given a shot of oxygen in their water, then placed in 2 of our big plastic totes while we drove home to release them. They held up well during the hour drive, and so far there are no floaters at the pond.

With some luck, and a diet of small bluegills, they’ll be “eatin’ size” in no time! Stay tuned for more updates on how and why we stocked our small pond with channel catfish!

KW Homestead

Pasture Raised Poultry & Edible Landscaping Plants Since 2013