A warm home takes hard work

A true lumberjack, this forester loves it.

We seem to be going through a lot more wood than we originally thought we would... it takes a lot of cutting.

Lucky for us, we like a lot of snow on our roof. Snow keeps our home insulated, making it warm and cozy!

The cold continues

Snowshoeing across Spearhead Lake

It hasn’t gotten above 0 degrees outside in the past two weeks…until today. Today was a warm  – it was 9 degrees outside the earth home. It was a very different world, however, by lake. It was about -20 with the wind chill on the lake, and my husband still thought it was a good day to go ice fishing. That didn’t last long, as did my snowshoeing. The snow was very powdey and the wind was brutal, so I didn’t walk very far. Despite our short attempts at outside activity, the day was still very beautiful.

Spearhead Lake on a bitter cold day

Still no luck ice fishing... and too cold to fish longer than an hour

Suet Disaster

     Since the temperature outside has not been above zero lately, my husband and I decided it was the perfect time to make suet for those poor starving birds outside. Okay, it was really I who thought making homemade suet was a good idea and needed to happen immediately. Afterall, we could use a few feathered friends around here - the woods have been so lifeless lately with this constant bitter windchill.

     I’ve never made suet before, nor have I ever seen it made before. I rarely cook, but I do enjoy baking. In fact, I will proudly tell you I’m a master at making chocolate-chip cookies, banana bread and “puppy chow.”  With that in mind, it couldn’t  be that hard making suet, right? How wrong I was. The earth home cat still cowers under our bed from the bad smell!

     I started out with about 3 pounds of deer fat, trimmed from my husband’s deer he harvested this season. “Melt it,” my Googled directions said. Easy enough, I thought as I turned the heat onto medium-high. But what exactly does the word “melt” mean? Do I melt it so it’s softened or so it’s liquified? I decided to liquify it.

     10 minutes later, as I was getting the other ingredients ready, I began to smell the melting fat for the first time. 30 minutes later it was finally done – it finally melted. Puffs of smoke bellowed out of the pot at full force leaving my husband and I speachless, squinty-eyed and repulsed.

     “Ok! Let’s throw in the rest of it! Hurry!” I shouted to my husband. A cup of peanut butter cannon-balled into the grease and persisted to churn itself into a ball of bubbles. Next came two cups of cornmeal, which after rocketing towards the top of the pot, we realized we added way too soon! Whoops.

    Last but not least, we added the sunflower seeds, sure to be a winner for those woodpeckers. But, unfortunately, since the grease was so hot, it popped all of our sunflower seeds open the minute they entered the pot! It was quite the show!

     We poured the brew into bread pans lined with wax paper. No surprise, the suet mix was so hot, it melted the wax paper. After it cooled, we cut a piece out and this is what the pan looked like:

     It doesn’t look like the suet packs you find in the store – it’s crumbily, smells purely of peanut butter and has bits of wax paper permanently attached to it, but we think it just might work!

    We haven’t seen any birds picking at it yet, but when we do, we’ll keep you informed! We sure learned a lot about making suet. We realize we don’t need to melt the fat to a liquid state and we are going to make sure we don’t add other ingredients into the grease until it’s cooled a little. We would appreciate a good recipe for homemade suet, so please let us know if you have one!

Minnesota Cold

You know it’s cold when…

Your atomic clock’s outside thermometer reads “OF-L.” I would agree it’s awfully cold outside.

Composting in Winter

When we moved into this earth home we knew we were going to start a new lifestyle. We were going green with full force! We heat our home with wood, we reduce, reuse and recycle on a continuous basis, and since our roof is made of sod, we already have a green roof!

     But, as we’ve found, there are only so many green things you can do on a limited budget and strong gusty winter weather at your door. I guess our ideas of a solar panel and tapping into geothermal energy will have to wait! In the meantime, we intend to start a small organic garden in the spring. What better to start an organic garden than to use organic compost.

     There is a primitive compost “bin” (chicken wire shaped into a square) near the earth home, but we’re not really sure what’s under the foot and a half of snow. So, our question is…

How do you compost in the winter?

    I suppose I could look it up on Google, but I’d like to try and figure it out myself. Here is what we’ve come up with.

Our very technologically-advanced bin of compost.

     We keep this bin of compost waste in the fridge until it fills, and when it does we dump it onto the frozen compost pile outside. We’re not really sure if leaving frozen food sit on top of snow-covered compost pile is smart, but we don’t know what else to do with it at the moment.

     If you compost at home, please let us know how you handle composting in the winter! We would greatly appreciate the advice!