It takes anywhere from 40 to 80 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup, and that can vary from year to year, and from tree to tree. One mature sugar maple tree, 16” in diameter, can produce a quart of syrup from 40 quarts of sap yearly. So, if you like syrup, you’ll need a lot of trees.
Most of the equipment needed for tapping trees can be made at home or purchased, if you’re of a mind to. Taps, buckets, and boiling pans, plus a good sized fire and griddle over it, are the essential tools. Trees are tapped by drilling an upward slanting hole for the tap on the sunny side of the tree. The sap runs when it warms up into the 40s and 50oF range during the day with freezing temperatures at night. It’s a lot of work, during a particularly cold and soggy time of year. But syrup is an outstandingly useful food, plus an excellent trade item in a down economy.
There are other natural sources of sugars. Sugar cane is one, and sorghum is another, but these are warmth-loving plants with long growing seasons. Odds are good that the production of these will move to equatorial regions or be available at prices that make them the province of the rich.
Extending the Season With Greenhouses
During the Dalton Minimum in the 1800s, growers in Europe extended their growing season and plant survival during unseasonable cold, by placing glass domes over individual plants – effectively, a mini-greenhouse. These “cloches”, which means bells, were made from heavy clear glass. Plants that were started early could be covered by a cloche until the weather was warm enough for it to do without the cover. A modern version might be a plastic gallon milk jug, bottom cut off, and placed over a tender plant. Unlike a glass cloche, it would have to be attached or weighted to the ground so it won’t blow away. If the weather will be very cool, each cloche could be covered with hay or a blanket, or banked with soil.
Similarly, some gardeners utilize a “cold frame”, another mini greenhouse that is big enough to grow lettuce, greens, carrots or a few other cool weather items. Effectively, a cold frame is a simple rectangular box with about a 45o angle front to back, with the front edge lower and the back edge higher. The lower side faces south to catch winter sun. Over this, a simple glass window is placed and hinged along the higher back edge. Use wood screws to put this box together at the edges so that it is solid and holds tightly.
The box should be set into the ground up to the bottom of the front piece so that soil acts as an insulator. You can also put a 1” layer of Styrofoam insulation along the interior walls, too. Fill the box with compost, and cover that with 4 to 6 inches of top soil up to the bottom of the front wall. The compost will keep the cold frame somewhat warm, even on very cold days. The glass lid is your greenhouse, providing light to the growing plants. On days when the sun is out and temperatures rise, the glass is raised an inch or two to allow good air flow. On cold days, the entire frame can be covered with a blanket or hay.
When the weather has warmed up, the cold frame can be removed and stored until it’s needed again in the fall. This type of structure is especially nice, because it can be made from wood leftover from other projects and an old otherwise useless window. If you can, paint the interior white to reflect light onto the plants.
Like a cold frame, a large greenhouse can keep plants going through cold and even into the winter itself. The key to growing in a greenhouse during the dead of winter is warmth. Today, warmth can be maintained with propane or kerosene heat, or even with a well-placed wood heating stove. When we are in the Cold Times, we may not have access to extra heating sources -- except the wood stove, of course. But we can still site a greenhouse partially underground. That in-ground greenhouse tends to maintain its temperature better than any above-ground version. If compost is used thickly in the planting beds, it may generate enough heat to keep the entire area warm enough to grow whatever cool-weather crops and greens that you’d like.
Construction of an in-ground greenhouse is more complicated than building above-ground – the soil’s composition affects what kind of walls you use (concrete or concrete blocks are ideal), whether you will require French drains around the structure, and how much insulation you will need. The interior walls need to be high enough to allow you to stand upright, and it must be able to collect as much sunlight as possible during the winter.
One way to store heat is by making the back sun-facing wall of the greenhouse a kind of Trombe wall. Perhaps even having heat-storing masonry or even water stored in black-colored barrels so that all incoming sunlight is converted to heat and released back to the plants during the night.
The author of the book mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Backyard Winter Gardening, discusses briefly how he built an underground earth-sheltered greenhouse at his Utah home. Includes some good ideas and practical tips, from someone who has actually done it.
University of Minnesota has been exploring what they call the Deep Winter Greenhouse (DWG), an above-ground passive solar construction that makes use of a primary heat-sink and small amounts of heating and lighting.
They grow cold-weather crops such as mizuna, lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, other Asian greens, and so forth with minimal inputs. They’ve completed a free online .pdf:
Cold Climate Greenhouse Resource: A Guidebook for Designing and Building a Cold Climate Greenhouse available at:
http://www.extension.umn.edu/rsdp/community-and-local-food/production-resources/docs/cold-climate-greenhouse-resource.pdf
The full plans are here:
https://umn.qualtrics.com/CP/File.php?F=F_78JCrtZBH8ALDgh
The book is less than 70 pages, the plans about 30 pages, and are worth printing out right now, so you have a copy on hand whenever you decide to build.
If you build planters for your greenhouse, make them double decker. On the bottom level, build boxes you can cover, fill with aged horse manure, and plant mushroom spawn from edible types. These will grow well in the moist, warm greenhouse conditions and handle the dark conditions beneath the planters, produce lots of excellent food for the table, plus high levels of carbon dioxide to help your other plants grow, too.
Calculate How Much To Plant
Having evaluated your daily use of specific foods a couple chapters ago, the next question is: how much should we plant? This is a surprisingly complex question, because we need to factor in risk, as well as the basics for fresh eating AND for storage. There was an old saying from the middle ages, advice on how to plant peas:
One for the field
One for the mouse
One for me
In other words, the people understood that there was a good chance that a portion of their harvest would be lost to natural conditions (“the field”), to hungry competitors (“the mouse”), and whatever survived that was for the people. Basically, they planted three times as much as they thought they needed.
In modern gardening, we have the widely shared tendency to believe that each item planted will provide the expected yield. This has worked quite nicely, as long as the weather has been agreeable and we have control over pests – and there is a perpetual backup supply available in the supermarket in case of garden misfortune.
We can’t think like that anymore. We must assume that what comes out of our garden plot is what we will have to eat – and plan accordingly. Extras always get stored either as preserved food, or by being fed to livestock that store it “on the hoof”.
Before we go on….
I want to advise you that the following numbers will stagger you. There’s likely to be a moment when you grasp that the sheer amount of seed, and ground, and effort that is required to feed your group will be impossible. You will experience a sense of failure and defeat, even before you start. This is temporary and a healthy stage in your understanding and growth. You’re just coming to terms with the reality that has been in front of you all your life. Just follow the plan, and learn from each problem you face. If all your ancestors could do this with only hand tools (and they did, or you wouldn’t be here), then you can too.
Let’s look at a couple examples that will give you the means to calculate your own needs. Garden peas, also known as English peas, are versatile when eaten as shelled peas and they can be dried to make split pea soup, too. The opened pods can be fed to livestock, put into compost, or used as the base for a delightful white sweet wine. In my garden, planting against a garden fence about an inch apart, in rough but moderately fertile soil, I grew Saber peas. I was able to harvest 10 pounds of shelled peas, plus perhaps another pound for fresh use, from 50 feet of row. That’s one pound for each five feet of planted row.
Read that again: one pound per each five feet of row. If we eat, between 2 or 3 people in a household, a pound of peas each week at 6 to 8 ounces each once a week, we would need 52 pounds for a year’s worth of side dishes or ingredients. At 10 pounds per 50 feet of row, we would have to increase garden space a little over five times to achieve 52 pounds. That is, we would need a row of peas 250 feet long or multiple shorter rows that add up to 250 feet. Add another 50 feet for growing next year’s seed peas, too.
Green beans are a little more productive, since the pod is consumed as well as the seeds. Planting Blue Lake Bush, I can grow a pound of green beans each two feet of row. Fifty feet of row equals 25 pounds of fresh beans – which will can up to about 20 pints (a little more than one pound of cut beans per pint). Once again, if we use a pint a week, we’d need to grow about 60 pounds. So, we’d need 120 feet of row. Add on 25% more row, about 30 feet, for seed.
Now suppose we have green beans 3 times a week; we’d need three times as much row, or 360 feet. So, between peas and beans alone, we’d have to have at least a 300 foot long garden, or multiple rows adding up to that much. Alternatively, in a shorter garden, we could grow half the crop early in the season and then replant to get a fall crop, weather permitting.
So, here is the calculation:
______ amount in pounds consumed each week
X 52 =
______ supply in pounds needed for one year
______ amount in pounds that can be produced per foot of row
X (supply in pounds for one year) =
______ feet of row required
+ 25% X (feet of row) for replacement seed
Now, include every other type of garden plant you’d like – tomatoes, potatoes, melons, lettuce, squash, cucumbers, celery, parsley, herbs, beets, carrots, corn, and whatever other items. It’s obvious that a half-acre per person is a fairly reasonable amount to plant if your garden is your primary food source. Assuming no crop losses to bad weather. It wouldn’t hurt to plant extra, even double the amount. Store for just-in-case you lose next year’s garden. You’ll still have plenty. Keep as much variety in your diet as possible. That’ll make planting more challenging and require more seeds and record-keeping, but better nutrition and more interesting meals.
The highest producing garden crops, per space utilized, are tomatoes and potatoes, by the way.
Lee Wheelbarger, on Grand Solar Minimum
YouTube channel encouraged storing
5 years’ worth of seeds.
He said that this will give you enough seed to
replant through several years of failed harvests, even
three successive bad years.
Many sellers offer seeds in “bulk” (several pounds) at lower
cost than buying in small packets.
A Word About Hydroponics and Aquaponics
Hydroponics is the process of raising edible plants in a controlled environment, typically a greenhouse or even a specially outfitted shipping container, under lights. The plants are started in a neutral substrate, usually “coir” made from coconut husks, and submerged in a flowing nutrient liquid. The nutrient liquid is typically formulated for specific plant varieties. Tomato nutrient is different from lettuce nutrient, for example. The nutrient solution is circulated past the plants at a rate that promotes fast, steady growth. You’ve probably already purchased hydroponic tomatoes and lettuce at larger supermarkets.
Aquaponics is similar to hydroponics, except that instead of using a chemical nutrient solution, the plants are fed by water from fish tanks. Fish may eat a pellet feed, leftover greens, and whatever bugs can be lured to their tank. The water in the fish tank is circulated past the roots of the growing plants, which utilize nutrients from the fish waste, and clean the water enough that it can be reintroduced to the fish tanks. In this way, two crops, plants and fish, can be gained from similar amounts of space.
These are marvelous systems that work very efficiently right now. There are some significant issues, however, that limit both hydro- and aquaponics going into the Zen-slap and Hang-on eras. First of these issues is that the plants, either in a greenhouse or shipping container arrangement, must have light and warmth. That means having electricity. If the power goes down for any length of time, plants and fish will be lost for lack of light and warmth.
Also, the nutrient solutions are produced in factories today. There’s no guarantee they’ll still be available later at reasonable prices, and if they are, larger commercial operations will have first dibs.
Even though aquaponics has little need for nutrient solution, you’d still have to acquire “fry” – baby fish – from some source to restock your tanks. Most home operations are not set up with the right environment for raising hatchlings.
Finally, pumps to circulate fluids are both electrically operated and they wear out and break down. That means having backup power as well as replacement pump parts or replacement pumps.
The ability to grow food in a temperature and light controlled environment may become an important way of producing food on a commercial scale, as we enter into Cold Times. Setting up a system that overcomes loss of grid power, importation of nutrient chemicals, and access to small fry – as well as replacement seeds, since you’ll harvest everything before it seeds out – makes this system very challenging and costly on a small scale.
Better than focusing on a single source, consider growing food in as many different venues as you can – an indoor sunroom, a greenhouse, outdoors in fields, in gardens, and in a small hydro- or aquaponics set up. That way, if you lose one or two venues, you’ll still be able to have a harvest.
Keeping the Harvest
Once you have gathered your harvest, you have an important decision to make about how you will store it through the cold winter months. At this time, the most common and familiar method is freezing (keeping in a deep freezer in vacuum packs or other packaging). Almost all foods with which we are familiar can be frozen for long-term use. The costs include packaging and packing equipment (such as a Food Saver vacuum-packer), a large deep freezer, and electricity to run it.
Second to that is “canning”, which is actually done in glass jars with single-use or repeated-use type lids – this is the canning that I discuss through the food chapters. It can be done with a “water bath” large canning pot, or with a big heavy multi-quart pressure canner. Most common fruits, vegetables and meats can be successfully canned, although some are better frozen (broccoli and cauliflower, for example).
In addition to canning jars and lids (about $12 per dozen), you’ll need the canning pots (boiler runs about $60; the All American Pressure Canner is the top of the line at about $250), jar lifters, funnels, and additions (sugar or honey for the fruit, salt for the veggies and meats), fresh water, steady heat source that is either propane or electric but NOT glass-topped stoves (they will crack).
Ball and Kerr lids are sold as “single use,” although some people do reuse them with the risk of a sealing failure. Tattler lids are fully reusable, but cost quite a bit more than the other types of lids – the initial investment is recouped as you continue to use them through the years. Ball and Kerr are available at supermarkets and department stores. The only place I’ve seen Tattler is online.
A third increasingly common method is dehydrating or drying foods. This is a method that can be done with an electric dehydrator or in an oven set on pilot or the lowe
st temperature. Fruits, veggies, spices, and meats (cooked and as jerky) can be dehydrated. The best home dehydrator I’ve found is the Excalibur at $250 or so. It is much easier to use and gives a better result than the round ones sold at department stores. Before use, you may need to “rehydrate” the food, placing it in warm water for a period of time to let it fluff and puff a bit. Dehydrated foods can be stored for long-term in mason-type jars, out of direct sunlight. If you have a Food Saver or other similar device, you may be able to vacuum-pack in your mason jars for really good quality long term storage.
Fermenting is another method we are familiar with. Cheese, sauerkraut, and wine are examples of food preservation by fermentation. Preparing foods by fermenting is a fine art and requires time and practice. You’ll need jars, vats, additives like yeast or starter cultures, and a clean, cool, environment to store in such as a basement or fruit cellar.
Cold Times — How to Prepare for the Mini Ice Age Page 17