A compost pile has been a ubiquitous part of the food system since we first domesticated plants, but we’re missing out if we just use the finished material for fertilizer. Composting is a complex biological process that creates almost everything a plant needs to thrive: heat, moisture, nutrients, and carbon dioxide—the only thing missing is … More Full-Circle Composting: Get More than Just Fertilizer
The goal for this year is over 120 lb of honey and going into the winter with between six and eight hives. If successful, that means we’ll have quadrupled our colonies and gotten honey in the process. … More Bee Report — 2017 Management Plan for Honey and Splits
Continued from Part 1. So far, we have skinned, fleshed, salted, and rinsed our hide. Refleshing (optional) This is just a repetition of the scraping done in the first step. After salting and rinsing, more membrane (and a bit of fat and flesh missed before) can be scraped off on top of the hide-scraping bench … More Research Update — Deer Hide Tanning Instructions, Part 2
I am continuing my first foray into deer hide tanning. In this post, I’ll outline the methods that I’m following. Tanning has three main steps with a few additions (given in parentheses): skinning and fleshing, (salting and rinsing, refleshing, hair removal,) pickling and neutralizing, and softening. We’ll go through these step by step. Before we … More Research Update — Deer Hide Tanning Instructions, Part 1
As gardening season comes to an end, many of us are coming to terms with an unwelcome competition for our fruits and vegetables. As much as we love a good tomato or cabbage, there are plenty of creatures who love them even more than we do. The fight against insect and other animal pests is … More Polyculture: Letting Nature Do the Work — Contribution from Andrew Flachs
As we contemplate our move to Wisconsin and our acquisition of the property that will become the permanent home of the Low Technology Institute, one thing is for certain: we are going to add to sheep to the chickens and bees that we already keep. While we weighed the options of goats, llamas, cows, and … More Future Plans — Fences
Right now, the Low Technology Institute exists largely online and in my tenth-of-an-acre lot in urban Saint Louis, but this is about to change. Over the next few months, we’ll be packing up tools, chickens, bees, and projects and moving them to our new home city, Madison, Wisconsin. Why Madison? My partner, Lauren, and I … More A Look Forward — The Institute’s Move to Madison, Wisconsin
Things are moving along this fall. We have a few projects running at the moment, and I have updates on two of them: growing mushrooms and tanning deer hides. Note, I do not have pictures of the deer posted below, but I do show skins being cleaned. If you have an aversion to that sort … More Research Update — Mushrooms and Deer Hide
We strive for cycles of growth and nutrient use here at the institute. Modern farms are a one-way street for resources: fertilizers, seeds, and equipment come in, while the grown products, excess fertilizer, and money go out (for a discussion of this, have a listen to Low Tech Podcast no. 3). One cycle we’ve built … More Introduction to Aquaponics
Two of our current projects moved along today. Here are the data and impressions. Acorn Processing Acorns are a decent-value nut found widely across the temperate world. The common thought is that a person could collect many times more calories than he or she expended while gathering acorns. I am gathering data on the caloric … More Research Update — Acorns and Mushrooms