Thursday, July 30, 2009 by Hodding.

The other afternoon, Lisa drove home to find Helen, Angus, and me making a large, circular house out of cordwood.

“Why aren’t you weeding?” she asked, understandably. I had 50 percent of the kids working, and we were neglecting our most important summer project. What was I thinking?

“I’m getting ready for winter. We’re building a Holz Hausen!”* What sets a Holz Hausen—literally, a wood house—apart from any other way of stacking wood is that it actually accelerates the drying process without any added expense. The ten-foot-tall house is built in a ten-foot-diameter circle. The outer logs are laid side-by-side like the spokes of a wheel to make the circle, with the inside filled by pieces that stand vertically end-to-end. You pile log on log, slightly tilting toward the middle with the outer pieces—until it stands seven feet tall. Then you ever so slightly start tilting the outer pieces outward so that by the time you reach ten feet, you have a natural roof of split logs, bark side up, to shed rain and snow. The inner pieces, standing end-to-end, create a chimney, circulating air and heat throughout the entire structure. Stored in a Holz Hausen, green firewood can dry in 3 months instead of the typical 18.

Dedicated readers know that we switched from heating our home with oil to using a woodstove last winter. We scraped by—not because we just happened to have five cords of dry firewood sitting outside our home, but because Lisa bartered some legal work for enough wood to last until spring. If we hadn’t needed wood and, more importantly, have been willing to barter, her client wouldn’t have been able to pay her. We would have harassed him and eventually dismissed him as a cheating scoundrel. He would have marked us off as just another couple of priggish white-collar assholes while knowing that he hadn’t made good on his debt. By bartering, everybody won. We got what was near impossible—truly dry wood in the middle of winter—and he paid his bill and won a couple of fans along the way.

The wood the kids and I were turning into a Holz Hausen, however, had an equally satisfying provenance. We’d bartered three dozen eggs and a loaf of our bread, per week, for a year for three-and-a-half cords of wood.

“That’s fine,” the ant queen allowed, as she lugged her legal books and purse into the house, “but how about helping me weed in the lower garden after I get changed? What good will a warm home do this winter if we don’t have anything to fill our stomachs?”

While she might have been stretching things a bit since we haven’t given up on shopping, I knew my place within the colony.

“Yes, my lady.”

The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah ….

*Here’s a good illustration and explanation of a German Holz Hausen, although the plans are for one that is seven feet tall instead of the traditional ten.

Photograph by Margaux Scott

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Thursday, July 23, 2009 by Hodding.

I generally tear through life like a kid in a roomful of Christmas presents, without ever pausing long enough to study my most recent actions. But these days, my family and I take stock of our actions quite frequently, mainly to judge whether or not some new method of living frugally is working. How did cheesemaking go? Did it save money? Yes. Were the kids and I amazed when our balls of mushy curds transformed into stretchy, moist mozzarella? Yes. Did it bring us together? Well, yes and no. We worked together contentedly most of the time, but we do have three hormone-fired girls: Anabel pushed Helen, Helen mocked Eliza, and I snapped at all of them independently.

Yet I have to say I’m proud of my family. The kids were fairly typical American children when this began. They didn’t really help around the house and, when not on the computer, they were flipping through catalogs, getting giddy over what they might someday buy or be given. While that’s an oversimplification, there was an underlying expectation—actually, more of a need—for new things, so that they could feel happy, secure, and equal to their friends. They still want things, of course, but they’ve changed in substantive ways. Helen, 11, unbidden, sweeps the kitchen most days, wipes down the counters, and generally prepares the room for the next onslaught. Anabel, 13, puts on her rubber boots and heads outdoors to clean the hen house and collect the manure almost every week, without being nagged to do so. Angus, 6, reaches into the nesting boxes and collects eggs five or six times a day. And Eliza, Anabel’s twin, who has so given over to our changes that she recently asked if we were still living frugally, invariably puts down whatever she’s doing to tend to the immediate need of the moment. They’re no angels, of course, but, more importantly, they’re no longer average American kids. Instead, they’re returning, along with millions like them across the country (from what I’m hearing from friends and seeing on the Web), to the values we’ve always claimed to cherish: responsibility, respect, and, of course, frugality.

And what about me, you might ask? When I first suggested cutting back to Lisa, I said I’d like to try it for a year. All being frugal meant to me was defeat, boredom, and eating dinner at a cafeteria-style restaurant at 4:15 P.M., just to take advantage of the all-you-can-eat special.

Well, now it means something entirely different. It means finally growing up. It means living like a good father, instead of just looking like one to outsiders. It means realizing I’ve finally learned to live on what a writer makes, not on what he dreams of making, and knowing that this is a lifelong change, not just material for another book. It means finally understanding how much pain I caused my wife, and vowing never to return to the past. And why would I? Changing my ways and helping Lisa lead our family toward a debt-free, project-rich life has made us the family we always dreamed of.

My grandfather once wrote about the bequests we leave for our children, and Lisa and I would like to add two more: One of them is being frugal; the other is having fun working together.

Frugal Tip of the Week
Make a list of the most expensive things you buy every day, every week, and every month. Then either scratch each thing off your to-buy list or, if crossing it out forever is impractical, decide whether it can be replaced by a cheaper or secondhand item or something made by you. When you’re completely honest about your spending, it’s astonishing when you realize how you’ve been wasting your money and what you can do without.

Photograph by W. Hodding Carter

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Thursday, July 16, 2009 by Hodding.

Ahhh, the life of the frugal subsistence gardener. Wake at the break of day—not by alarm clock but from an internal synchronicity with nature or perhaps the crow of a rooster. The early, ethereal rays of sunshine don’t just light a path to the lower vegetable plot but dance beside you, leaping and bouncing from dew drop to dew drop. You are one with the soil, and fear not the bank statement. That’s the way it is for some of our fellow frugalistas. I know it is. But it’s definitely not the Way of the Carters.

“Mom! Dad!” Anabel screamed from her upstairs bedroom Tuesday morning. “There’s something gross all over my room! Help!” And then a few seconds later: “Something’s definitely wrong with the kitten!”

Punctuating her screams was a repeated, “Tap! Tap! Tap!” originating from somewhere between her and me.*

I would’ve gone to help Anabel clean up the mess but at that same moment, Lisa came bursting into the house, a basket of eggs swinging from her wrist. “Hodding. We’ve got to do something about the tomatoes. They’re dying. The blight is back!”

“You’re on your own, big girl,” I called up to Anabel. Blight trumps scat any day. “Don’t forget to wash your hands.”

This summer has been the wettest summer on record since 1914. I’m not sure what happens to most vegetable gardens in Seattle, but here in New England, our peppers, corn, tomatoes, and basil don’t take kindly to non-stop Wet Willies. The 67 tomato plants (plus another dozen of varying strains that Lisa got on sale) that I nurtured from seeds and carried in and out of the house all spring long to soak up sun in the day and stay warm at night are under attack. Their leaves get brown spots, turn yellow, and finally wither away, taking entire branches with them. According to the news, a certain Alabama nursery sent out seedlings infected with “late blight” to big-box stores all over the northeast. Evidently, one or more of the 12 plants Lisa purchased delivered what’s taking us down—along with my fellow Gourmet writer, Nanette Maxim. Even if Lisa hadn’t bought one of these infected plants, we probably would’ve gotten the blight anyway, since the fungus can travel two to three miles by air.

Forgetting the sick cat in Anabel’s room for the moment, I dashed outside, scissors and plastic bag as my weapons, and began snipping midstride. The blight…must…die! I will not lose my precious babies to a mere fungus. Those aphids earlier on were one thing, but a fungus? No way! (This was before I learned I’m supposed to pull up the entire plant and dispose of them in sealed plastic bags. Ahhggg! Guess we won’t be canning tomatoes after all, and we’ve started spraying the potatoes since “late blight” is what caused the infamous Irish potato famine.)

“Mom! Mom! Mom! Dad!” Angus suddenly started screaming. I figured he needed a boost on his hand-me-down bike that’s just a little too tall for him so I kept my head down to let Lisa handle this one; it wasn’t an emergency. “The chickens are loose!”

I dropped the scissors and quickly herded the escapees back into the pen, immediately cursing that I was wearing a bright red shirt. Snowflake doesn’t like red. He flew at my chest, pecking and scratching even before landing.

Stumbling backwards out the door, I squashed an egg mid-retreat. When will Stella learn to lay her eggs in the nesting boxes like all 18 of her sisters?

Almost back to the besieged tomatoes, I wondered when things had gotten so crazy and if it was okay to drink mead so early in the morning? My rationalization being that the mead had only been fermenting for a month (I tossed out the first batch that would’ve been a couple months old by now, because it tasted like burnt vinegar) and was therefore fairly weak. Lisa called from the lower garden: “There’re slugs everywhere! All over the potatoes! What should I do? Get some beer?”

Slugs, like thirsty frat boys, will crawl into Bud-filled containers and die what I assume is a very happy death.

“Smash them!” I scream back. “Kill them, now! We have not yet begun to fight!”

*The tapping from upstairs and the mess in Anabel’s room had a single source: an escaped 6-week-old chick that had evidently sneaked inside. Since we’d been away visiting family the previous night, it’d actually been home alone for 24 hours. Although I’m still not sure how it got from the closed garage to the inside of our house, I was finally prompted to move the chicks outside. They’re now living under an overturned (ruined) dinghy inside our trash trailer. They can’t be directly integrated with our existing flock or the older hens will literally tear them apart. We know this because our friends tried such a thing and now have a few less chicks. We’re supposed to move them into the elder hens’ house one at a time, at night when the old ladies are roosting. Supposedly, when the old hens wake up in the morning, they don’t realize the new, young hen doesn’t belong. I want to write “I wonder if the same thing would work with wives?” but know I can’t because not everyone would know I’m not doing it to offend but simply because I had to. It’s like dropping spit from a bridge or from up in a tree. You just got to do it. Right?

Frugal Tip of the Week
Don’t waste your money on shaving cream. Simply lather your hands or washcloth with a favorite soap and then add a dollop of body lotion. Not only does it save money, but your skin will be less irritated—and you’ll know exactly what’s in your shaving potion. I even think I get a closer shave this way, too.

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Thursday, July 9, 2009 by Hodding.

I attempted to conquer a thousand-or-so-year-old art form this past weekend and, for some inexplicable reason, wasn’t able to pull it off. An article on easy cheese recipes in Mother Earth News promised success in under a half hour, but 7,326 minutes later, I still couldn’t quite call myself an artisan.

Related links

• Use this fresh mozzarella in Fried Mozzarella Balls, mozzarella in carrozza, chard salad and other mozzarella recipes
• Meet the Carters in this video
• Follow the family from the beginning of the series
• Last week: If It Only Had A Brain
• See all Extreme Frugality articles
• Read more by W. Hodding Carter on gourmet.com

The idea was just too frugal to pass up: Why buy shredded mozzarella week after week for $4 a pound (on sale), as well as the occasional $8-a-pound (on sale) fresh stuff, when I could make my own from a $3.25 (on sale) gallon of whole milk? If a gallon of water weighs seven pounds, I figured, milk would be slightly heavier, and I could end up with five or so pounds of cheese, thus saving 20-something dollars. What idiotic penny-pincher could ever pass up a savings like that, especially when the magazine blurbed, “Once you start making fresh mozzarella, you’ll never go back to store bought.” A smart penny-pincher, that’s who—but not because there are hidden costs. Besides the milk, the only other expenses are citric acid, rennet, and salt. Fifteen bucks can land you enough of those ingredients (see the Frugal Tip of the Week for a mail-order source) to make a bathtubful of homemade cheese.

What went wrong? Nothing, really. The kids and I warmed a gallon of whole milk to 55 degrees Fahrenheit, added 1 1/2 teaspoons of citric acid, warmed it to 88 degrees, added 1/4 teaspoon of rennet, and then let it warm to 105 degrees. About eight minutes later, I let out an ear-splitting “Yee-haw,” not knowing a specific celebratory cheese holler. The magic had happened, and we had a pot of almost-mozzarella. And the best part was that it looked like most of the milk had solidified into curds, with only a little bit of whey surrounding them. But as we began to move the cottage-cheese-like curds into a separate bowl with a slotted spoon, my giddy mood deflated with every scoop. Less than half the mass was solid curds. Clearly, I had not been following my own advice to become more pessimistic/realistic.

Then it got worse.

As we pressed and squeezed ever more whey out of the curds, shaping it into eight pebbly blobs, I realized my frugal-euphoria had, as usual, switched off my brain and that, of course, milk is mostly liquid (85 percent, actually). It didn’t matter how much thickening and culturing and curdling we did, we weren’t going to transform seven or so pounds of liquid into five pounds of solids. There is a legitimate reason why cheese is so expensive: it takes lots of milk. Persevering, we then heated the whey to 175 degrees, dipped the rough blobs, one at a time, into the almost simmering whey, kneaded more whey, dipped again and then watched each blob transform itself into mozzarella, stretching into long rubbery strands before our startled eyes. “It’s working, Dad!” Helen said. “It’s really working.”

By the time the last bit of whey had been squeezed out, we had six shiny balls (the kids, not me, ate the other two) of homemade mozzarella, weighing a grand total of 1 1/2 pounds and I had come up with an obvious solution to the milk-to-finished-cheese-ratio conundrum.

I called Lisa, laying the groundwork by describing every heartbreaking moment of our first cheese-making experience. But before I could broach what was clearly a crazy notion, she interrupted me by suggesting, “I guess we need to get a cow.”

And that’s why we’ve been together for 17 years.

Frugal Tip of the Week
Make your own yogurt as well as mozzarella and other simple cheeses. Despite my own predictable letdown, it will save you lots of money and is definitely a lot of fun for the entire family. Just be sure to order your cultures and rennet from a reputable wholesale company like the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, in Ashfield, Massachusetts.

Editor’s Note
We’ve tried our hand at making mozzarella, too. For our take on the process, see “Behind The Recipe: Fresh Mozzarella.”

Photograph by W. Hodding Carter

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Thursday, July 2, 2009 by Hodding.

If only I were a Seneca Indian living in upstate New York a hundred or so years ago. Those guys knew how to scare birds. Instead of employing a lifeless scarecrow that eventually loses its effectiveness when the birdbrain birds* realize the dude hasn’t moved an inch for months, the Senecas marinated corn kernels in an herbal potion that, when ingested, sent them flying in dizzying circles, chasing away all other avian predators.

Yes, the birds have joined their six-legged comrades in the pitched Battle at Carter Bottoms (our recently coined name for the lower vegetable plot), compelling Lisa to finally enter the fray. After discovering crows munching on nearly all her watermelon seedlings and sunflower plants last Friday afternoon, she stood guard for the remaining three hours of daylight to protect her remaining babies. Not until the sun finally dropped behind the trees and the last cawing crow fled for the night did she drop her guard—but she also didn’t waste any time in planning our counterattack.

“Kids!” she yelled above the din of squabbling teens, stomping into the house covered with mosquito bites and slinging mud everywhere. “It’s scarecrow-making time!”

And thus was born Samantha Lee of the six-foot frame, rainbow-colored dreads, and Barbie-slim waist. To us, she is a goddess; to the birds, we hope, a fright.

Do scarecrows work? These days, many people swear by more modern methods, like hanging glittering used CDs and tin plates around the field. My brother-in-law scares birds away with computer-controlled noise-making cannons. In fact, his family’s company sells and installs these bird-deterrents for farmers and airports all over the world.

“The main drawback to scarecrows,” my friend Bill Rupert says, “is they’re not very mobile—something you might not have realized, Hodding. But, they do work really, really well—until they don’t. The birds eventually catch on, and then the scarecrows just make a great roost.”

Maybe the problem is they’re just not enough like the original scarecrows, which were modeled after Priapus, son of Dionysus and Aphrodite. In Greek mythology, he frightened away birds simply by baring his legendarily horrific face (or perhaps his erection; it, too, was hideous—hideously large, that is), and grape growers began carving anatomically correct wooden likenesses of him and setting them in their fields. The Romans copied this practice (along with everything else), spreading scarecrows throughout their world—until followers of Christianity gave the boot to the idolatrous, immodest figures. And so the Europeans returned to scaring crows and other birds the old-fashioned way—making young boys stand in fields all day all day, throwing rocks at every winged intruder. After the Black Plague wiped out much of the labor force, farmers stuffed boys’ clothes with straw and planted their likenesses in the fields. We’ve been stuffing old clothes ever since.**

Was I just filling space with this nugget of scarecrow trivia? By Priapus, no! Thanks to studying the scarecrow’s past, I now know what to do when Samantha Lee’s effectiveness wanes. I’ll station Angus, who at six has already been noticed by more than one Major League scout, behind Samantha Lee and pay him (probably in discounted candy bars but maybe something more wholesome) to chuck rocks at the birds. A couple of days of both direct hits and near misses and soon enough, those birdbrains will surely associate previously docile Samantha Lee with the relentless attacks. It’s got to work, right?

*I know, I know. Many birds, especially crows and ravens, have keener memories and sharper minds than I. I’ve not only read Bernd Heinrich’s Ravens in Winter, I’ve also spent hours tromping through woods and sitting still to watch various ravens. But when you’re being abused, you tend to overlook such facts and go for the jugular. Thus to me, all birds at this point in time are birdbrains and many, many other unprintable things.

**Other parts of the world have similarly rich scarecrow histories. About.com’s Pagan/Wiccan section has a decent (but short) online rundown of all things scarecrow.

Photograph by W. Hodding Carter

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