Bees on the Catnip

When we moved into our current house it helped that there were already many perennial plants in, including catnip and hollyhock all along the front yard. The bees and other pollinators have enjoyed these all summer.

I have noticed so many different pollinators, in fact, that I interlibrary loaned The Bees of the World by Charles D. Michener to try and identify the many different bees. The book, however, is 600+ pages and covers a lot of the technical aspects without necessarily helping with identification. A good book in its own right, but not what I needed for identification (however, if you are interested in classification aspects and historical development of bees I would recommend it).

Does anyone know of a good bee identification website? Here are a few of my bees on the white-flowered catnip. Click on the image for greater detail.

Sharing good book lists on WorldCat

I was looking up a book on worldcat.org today (Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered) and I realized how much I love living in a digital age.

For those of you who don't know WorldCat, it is an online library resource that provides the "official" library record with all of the publication info and library holdings worldwide, but it also provides Web 2.0 tools for everyone--like tagging, reviews, and the ability to make reading lists. If you want to create a reading list, you can create a free account and keep track of all the books you like, want, need, or hope to use later. However, if you don't want your own, you can still see other people's lists that they have made public.

So, at the bottom of the (Small is Beautiful) record I could see all of the public lists that include the book. In particular, I was impressed by this list: "Ecominimalism" by meg2584 [WorldCat.org]. The list's owner describes it as "A messy reading-list-in-progress, for a back-burner project of mine, synthesizing works on the natural and built environments, health, (anti)consumerism, development economics, and both upper- and lower-case-m minimalism." Awesome list, currently 69 books. I have read a few of them, and heard of a lot of them. But there are many I will be seeking out (probably using WorldCat, since the list is already right there).

Speaking of Mushrooms

We are in week two of a new mushroom kit and the mushrooms have sort of tapered off--then I realized, it said 6-8 hours of indirect sunlight a day & apparently someone closed the blinds. I have been in a mushroom mood of late, leading me to explore this great, relatively new mushroom book: Mushrooming without Fear: The Beginner's Guide to Collecting Safe and Delicious Mushrooms (See all Outdoors & Nature Reference Books). I have seen some great mushroom books, but this one is the best I have had the chance to come upon. It is very colorful, very clear, and tells you when you need to be concerned that something you've found looks similar to a poisonous variety. Good read, if only to take my mind away from the indoor mushrooms we are trying so hard to grow. Perhaps in the spring we will get brave enough to go OUT and look for mushrooms.

Librarians Share Bad Teacher Traits #learntrends

This post has been moved to a new location at melodycondron.com.

The Beekeeping Librarian will continue to have posts, photos, and resources pertaining to gardening, urban homesteading, beekeeping, and cooking. Library-specific posts and things for librarians can be found at the new site.

Good Teacher Traits, According to Librarians ... #learntrends

This post has been moved to a new location at melodycondron.com.

The Beekeeping Librarian will continue to have posts, photos, and resources pertaining to gardening, urban homesteading, beekeeping, and cooking. Library-specific posts and things for librarians can be found at the new site.

Finally Trying a Mushroom Kit

We've debated about getting a mushroom kit before--mainly the debate has been that we would rather buy the plugs that you can insert into tree stumps or the spores you can mix in to straw to create a mushroom "bed" in your garden. In fact, we did just that in the fall. Perhaps mushrooms are coming up right now in the straw bed we prepared last summer. Sadly, we are 300 miles away now and have to settle for a mushroom kit in the house, since we don't have the extra bed space to devote to mushrooms. Plus, we may not even be in this house next year (we are renting). So, a kit is what we got. If we were going to cultivate non-kit, I would recommend The Mushroom Cultivator: A Practical Guide to Growing Mushrooms at Home by Paul Stamets.

We bought our kit from a local hardware, but it is from Garden City Fungi in Missoula, Montana. They are a certified organic mushroom farm and I also like that they are close to home. We just got our first Shiitakes from it last night & ate them with brown rice and broccoli raab from the Helena Farmer's Market. My only complaint is that the kit will "finish" after two or possibly three cycles, so it is not a long-term mushroom solution. I assume we will chop up the block after that and compost it. But for those of us in apartments who want to experiment and/or don't want to pay a ton for organic mushrooms (shiitakes are so expensive, organic or not!!), I would recommend it. One tip: we have the kit on a plastic tote lid (and on the tray it comes with) since it does get pretty moist under the provided humidity tent.

A Year Without Posts & a Spring Without Bees

It has been a year since I last posted to this blog, in part because I had started another one during our house-building and move to a small plot of land in NW Montana. However, life took a few odd turns and, despite just finishing our little house and loving the land we were on, I was offered a really good job that I really wanted. As a result, we moved 300 miles to the middle of Montana. I am still in the library world, but some of our homesteading efforts are temporarily on hold while we work out what it means to be living in a small city instead of a tiny town. Our bees and chickens were adopted by friends since we did not have suitable living arrangements for them. However, we have made the best of it and are still brewing, growing mushrooms, making things from scratch, and growing as large a garden as we can on our small space. I am hoping to get back to having some small livestock next year. In the meantime??? I must read, read, read. I will come back to this blog and share resources as well as our slightly more urban homesteading methods.

This book is a good indicator of where we are at at the moment:

The Edible Front Yard by Ivette Soler

Antique Cheese Press: FAIL!

Today's post is brought to you by the book A Guide to Preserving Food for a 12 Months Harvest: Canning, Freezing, Smoking, and Drying; Making Cheese, Cider, Soap and Grinding Grain; Getting the Most from Your Garden by Mariel Dewey -- a great book (despite the fact that this book brought to my attention that the press we had bought as a fruit press was, in fact, a cheese press, leading me to use it for said purpose with poor and frustrating results).

In my last post I said that I would explain how things went with the antique cheese press. Well, here it is: it sucked. I have put it into the category of, "this neat old farm tool is awfully neat looking but should probably just be for decoration." As such, it will probably be someone else's decoration since it is too bulky to keep around if it simply cannot be functional, too.

It all started out with the dilemma of how to sanitize it all. The moment I started wiping it down ("pre-cleaning" if you will), an orange color (read "rust") came off on the cloth. The main section of the press and the follower are cast iron. The internal hoop seemed to be aluminum and the external one cast iron, too. This should have been my first warning; all of the cheese making books clearly say stainless steel or plastic implements only. My response to that had been, "then why did someone make this wonderful old cheese press out of cast iron?" Well, from what I can figure, it must have been all they had available. The press is sturdy and nice looking and would be functional if it were made out of nice stainless steel or wood.

To be honest, the cheese was not THAT bad. I constantly struggle to know whether my cheese is doing what it is supposed to since I am paranoid and (relatively) inexperienced. However, even after washing and sanitizing in Star-San, the press turned my cheese and the butter muslin spotty-orange. Mind you, this is not a colored cheese--I do not add coloring. So this just did not seem right, you know?

After looking online, I found one or two other people who have used old presses and they seemed to be content with the orange RUSTY cheese. They said things like, "just cut off the orange rind and it's just great" and "despite the metallic taste..."

Um, no.

My goal after spending hours in the kitchen tinkering with curds and whey is not to have rusty, metallic-tasting cheese. However, endeavoring to make the best of it, I tried to salvage the cheese. I cut off the orange sections (basically all of the outside, top and bottom) and then cut off a piece of the white section inside. This usually tastes like a bland mozzarella. Before spending any more time on it, I figured I should check to see if it would even turn out edible. The white section tasted a bit metallic, too. So I cut off MORE. Suddenly, I had two hunks of cheese that had been pressed but were now all fresh-surfaced and, though they did not taste metallic, were obviously not going to dry as normal.

I coated them with salt on all sides and turned them. Applying more salt, turning, wiping off wet salt, turning, applying salt. For weeks. Finally, today, they seem to have enough of a rind that I can store them in some way. They also seem harder than a rock. Perhaps they are nice and perfect inside. I am an optimist.

Since they are already super screwed up and experimental, I decided to bandage them instead of waxing. This way, if they are bad, I will have no idea what part of this whole process is bad. And if they are good, the same. It is a wonderful process, messing yourself up ahead of time through completely non-scientific trial and error.

So, the two chunks of cheese are now double-bandaged in butter muslin and crisco, drying in the cool back storage area. I imagine that, if they actually manage to be edible cheese in the end, they will not taste like Farmhouse Cheddar. Mystery cheese--my favorite.

A Great Day is Made of Pasta from Scratch, Sawdust, and Making Cheese

Today's blog is brought to you with the inpiration of two great books, both of which are available from the Montana Partner Libraries: The Backyard Homestead edited by Carleen Madigan and 200 Easy Homemade Cheese Recipes by Debra Amrein-Boyes.

It is a rare occasion (lately) for me to have 4 days straight off from the library and I have tried to make the most of them. I am currently on day 3 and, after two days of getting up to speed, I feel like I got a ton done today!!

Originally, we planned to go to Kalispell and pick up some brewing equipment and bulk foods but we decided to stay in the Libby area and track down as much as we could locally. The aim was to make some pasta from scratch, use my giant old-fashioned cheese press (see picture) for the first time, and get a load of sawdust for the garden since the weather was reasonable. We managed to do all three.

We hit up Homesteaders' Ranch and Feed Store first and I, again in attempts to shop locally, put in an order for thermophilic cheese starter, calcium chloride, and Star-San sanitizer (the sanitizer we use for both beer and cheese). We can't get any of these things locally and so I'm interested to see if Homesteaders' can get them and, if so, how much it will run us. Homesteaders has been carrying brewing equipment for about a year and it has really been nice. At Naturally Good Things we picked up some local eggs for $2.25 a dozen to use in the pasta and I picked up some yogurt culture, which they do carry. I have been trying to track down a local source of cow's milk to no avail so we had to buy it at the regular grocery.

Errands done, we let the 4 gallons sit out to warm up while I learned how to drive a truck. Really, I have never driven a truck. And since we bought an old one last week, I really need to be comfortable driving one. Since our other car is a Toyota Prius, the 1988 Chevy Silverado feels really, really big. But you know what's nice? Taking your own truck to the post yard to pick up a truck load of sawdust without conniving friends with trucks into helping you. So we did that.

On getting home, Nate started the pasta with a recipe from The Backyard Homestead while I washed the past maker. We bought this book even though the libraries have it because it has a ton of information on a lot of things we do regularly. What caught our eye in particular was the sections on backyard grain-growing, overviews of livestock, and basic directions for things from scratch (for example, pasta). We made a pound of fetuccini in under an hour and had some for dinner while the milk was warming up in a hot water bath in the sink. We are hoping to do what we did with bread: slowly work our way toward making all of it from scratch. We eat a lot of pasta and bread, so having both of these items made at home would be just awesome. We don't buy any bread anymore, so I think we can make it work with pasta, too. We figured out that a pound of pasta costs about 65 cents made at home and it will be even cheaper when we get chickens in the spring since most of that cost is eggs. We also figure that we can slowly mix in wheat flour to the white recipe to make a good whole grain mix past somewhere in the middle.

The cheese is still in progress as I write this; the curds are cooking. We are making Derby cheese from the 200 Easy Homemade Cheese Recipes. It is another book I will probably have to buy--great information, although she wants to put calcium chloride in everything. It is supposed to increase yields but if you don't have any and you did not read closely you might think that you could not make cheese without it. Other than that, the recipes are great and there are many new and interesting recipes and recipes for non-cow kinds of milk, like buffalo mozzarella and many sheep and goat cheese recipes. We are making a three gallon batch and I will be using the whey for ricotta and the 4th gallon of milk for a soft cheese, probably an herbed cream cheese. We will get it into the press tonight, probably around 11pm. Then we'll see the old cheese press in action! I will blog about that separately once I have seen it working.

Farmhouse Cheddar is Not Illegal (unless you do it right)

I am making cheese tonight: farmhouse cheddar. I have had some success with this cheese before and Nate suggested I try it again instead of attempting parmesan (which I have not tried before) since I did not have the right starter.

As I do every time I attempt cheese making, I went through all of the different books I have and reviewed the basics of hard cheese and cheddar processes, etc. There is a very big difference between the books and it is obvious that: #1, some cheese makers take themselves a lot more seriously than others; #2, I am a lazy cheese maker; and #3, the best ways to make cheese are illegal.

I will first go over point #3: illegal cheese. I am talking, of course, about the fact that it is illegal in most of America (if not all?) to buy or sell raw milk. You can own your own animals and use their milk but you cannot sell it to others. I am not even sure you can give it to others as a gift. Can others drink it when they visit you? I just don't know. What I do know is that I don't own any dairy animals and I am not allowed to buy raw milk. One of the very few things that my cheese books agree on is that raw milk makes the best cheese. So, alas, until I buy goats, the best way to make cheese is illegal. It reminds me of an article in the current issue of Mother Earth News called Everything He Wants to Do is Illegal. The article was written by Joel Salatin, who authored a book called Everything I Want to Do is Illegal. The book and the article talk about the many ways that government has made it more difficult for people who want to make and raise their own food. I plan to pick up the book or maybe buy it for the library.

Backtracking to point #1: some cheese makers take themselves much more seriously than others. I love Ricki Carroll's book Home Cheese Making. That being said, everything but her most basic recipes scare the hell out of me and at once point nearly made me cry. Directions for some of the cheeses call for cutting the curd into very specific cubes, including 1/4" inch, 1/2" inch, or even 3/8". 3/8"??? I mean, come on. I can't even keep my sewing at 3/8" with the little guide next to the needle. My favortie directions, though, all involve bringing temperature up. Try this one from the emmental recipe: [by putting the pot in a large sink full of hot water] heat the curds one degree every two minutes until the temperature reaches 114 degrees." Right. On the other side of the fence are books like Max Alth's Making Your Own Cheese & Yogurt and the Sunburst Farm Family Cookbook. These books are very, um, laid-back about cheese making. One of Max's recipes actually says "raise the temperature as high as your hands can take it." The funny thing about that is not the inaccuracy, but the fact that I'm fairly sure Ricki Carroll would wince on hearing that Max is using his hands to stir the milk and cheese. The Sunburst Farm book goes even farther away from sanitary and measured cheese making with its "Sun Cheese" recipe, wherein you--yes--leave a jar of milk out in the sun. Needless to say, I have learned to come in somewhere in the middle. As with Nate's brewing methods, I have learned not to be so terrified that I did not sanitize up to my shoulders or that I was 2 degrees off when I pitched the starter. Most of the time it works out.

#2 should be self-explanatory. Lazy cheese maker. A clear example is that I am blogging instead of sanitizing equipment of hovering over my warm milk. I will go do that in a minute. A final note: to everyone who has wanted to make cheese, or yogurt, or beer, or anything, but didn't because they thought that it was terrifying after reading the directions, just remember that the Sunburst Farm Family has been eating cheese made from milk they leave out in the sun and they lived long enough to write a cookbook. It (probably) won't kill you to try your hand at a new kitchen skill one of these days.