Book Review: More Other Homes and Garbage Designs for Self-Sufficient Living

If I could have only one book on my zombie apocalypse bookshelf it would be this one. Though it has to be one of the worst book titles ever, More Other Homes and Garbage: Designs for Self-Sufficient Living, by Standford University professors, Jim Leckie, Gil Masters, Harry Whitehouse and Lily Young has everything you need to set up your off-grid compound. This book, first published in 1975 and revised in 1981, grew out of a heady period in appropriate technology research and DIY hippie experimentation that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s. In some ways it's the rural version of the original urban homesteading book, The Integral Urban House: Self Reliant Living in the City.Both books, not coincidentally, share the same publisher.

Feeding the digestor on the homestead. An illustration from More Other Homes and Garbage.

More Other Homes and Garbage covers alternative architectural materials, passive cooling and heating, home power generation, solar water heating, methane digesters, sewage reuse and disposal, water supply, small scale agriculture and aquaculture. All topics are covered in great detail with, as is expected for a group of engineer/authors, lots of formulas and tables. While some material is out of date (Art Ludwig has taken greywater well beyond what's in this book), most of the 374 pages of More Other Homes and Garbage are still very useful.

I especially like the can-do DIY tone of the introduction which describes a middle ground between "terminal pessimism" and "technophilic optimism." What's depressing, in fact, is that a lot of the topics in this book have not received much attention until very recently. The frivolous 80s and 90s were simply not the time for More Other Homes and Garbage. Thanks to the great recession, however, this book is relevant again. Get your copy before vengeful Mayan time travelers zap the interwebs in December.

Update July 31, 2012
A Root Simple reader, Lisa, pointed out that you can download this book for free here. Thanks Lisa! 

A Rocket Stove Made From a Five Gallon Metal Bucket

The principle behind a rocket stove is simple--rather than cooking on an open fire, you burn wood in an insulated chimney. Rocket stoves are highly efficient and easy to make. They run on twigs, so you can avoid cutting down a whole tree just to cook dinner.

We've had a rocket stove made out of brick in our backyard for several years. The post we wrote on it in 2007 is--oddly--the most frequently searched post on this site. I figured that since there was so much interest in the topic it would be good to offer one that didn't require masonry work. Better yet, I figured that it should be portable, so I made it out of a five gallon steel paint bucket. (eta: for your googling pleasure, it seems retailers call these cans "steel pails" rather than buckets). The project took less than an hour to complete and I'm very pleased with the final result. We created a pdf with full instructions that you can download at the Internet Archive. What follows are some photos showing the building process:

Using a piece of 4" vent pipe and a 90º elbow, I made the chimney. See the pdf for the exact dimensions.

I traced the outline of the vent pipe on to the lid of the bucket and cut this hole out with a jig saw. Tin snips would also have worked.

Using the vent pipe as a guide again, I cut out a 4" hole near the bottom of the bucket.

I used one part clay (harvested from the yard) to six parts vermiculite as my insulation material. Mixed with water, the clay holds the vermiculite together. I could also have used dry wood ash, but I had the vermiculite and clay on hand so that's what I went with.

With the vent pipe in place, I packed the insulation into the bucket and let it dry for a few days before putting the lid on.

I found a barbecue grill at Home Depot that rests on the top of the bucket to support a pot.

Next you want to get yourself a tin can, take off both ends and open it up with tin snips. Cut a piece to serve as a shelf in the mouth of the pipe. It should be about 4" long--so it sits forward in the mouth of the vent. The rear part of the vent, where the fire burns, is open. The twigs rest on top of the shelf, the lower half is for drawing air.

The last step was to add the new Root Simple stencil to the back.

Some fire tips from the little lady, our resident pyro:

A rocket stove isn't like a campfire--you don't throw on a big log and kick back. Cooking on it is intense and concentrated, best suited for boiling or frying. The best fuel source is twigs, small ones--I prefer pencil-sized twigs, and I never try to burn anything thicker than a finger.

To start a fire just shove some paper or other tinder under the shelf toward the back of vent. Lay some very thin twigs, pine needles or other combustibles on the shelf. Light the paper and watch it go. Start adding larger twigs to establish the fire. Of course, twigs burn fast and hot, so you have to keep adding more fuel. Also, the twig are burning from the back (the fire is concentrated in the bend) so as the fire consumes the sticks, you just keep shoving the unburned parts to the rear.

There's a balance between choking the vent with too much wood and having too sparse a fire. After a few minutes of playing with it you'll get the hang of things. If you're doing it right, there should be no smoke, or almost none. These things burn clean.


Let us know if you like the pdf and if you would like to see more similar instruction sheets (maybe in an ebook format) of these types of projects. There's also a good book on using rocket stoves as heaters:  Rocket Mass Heaters: Superefficient Woodstoves YOU Can Build by Ianto Evans and Leslie Jackson.

The Chinese Wheelbarrow

From the very cool Low-tech Magazine, the Chinese wheelbarrow:

The Chinese wheelbarrow - which was driven by human labour, beasts of burden and wind power - was of a different design than its European counterpart. By placing a large wheel in the middle of the vehicle instead of a smaller wheel in front, one could easily carry three to six times as much weight than if using a European wheelbarrow.

 Read the rest here. So who will be the first to make one of these with an old bicycle wheel?

Hay Boxes or Fireless Cookers

Illustration from The Fireless Cook Book

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Jessica from Holland sent us a letter recently praising our work, but very, very gently scolding us not including the hay box, a groovy old energy saving technology, in our book. We do stand corrected! And her enthusiasm for hay boxes has reignited our interest, too.

We actually considered hay boxes for Making It, but didn't end up building one for a variety of reasons, including just plain running out of time. But I have to admit one of the primary reasons was that natural gas here is really inexpensive, so the cost savings of starting and finishing a pot of soup on the stove, vs. starting a pot of soup on the stove and finishing it in a box, just wasn't compelling enough for me to make a lifestyle change. This is a silly excuse--water is also inexpensive here, but I'm obsessed about saving that resource. I guess a lot of what we choose to do just comes down to our various quirks and passions.

I'm thankful to Jessica for reminding me of the hay box. I believe that my New Year's resolution will be to meditate on the sources and real costs (in terms of the environment, human health, etc.) of gas and electricity, and work on new ways to conserve energy. The hay box, or fireless cooker, may be one of these strategies.

What the heck is a hay box?

Sorry if I'm leaving some of you out of the loop. A hay box aka fireless cooker is a very old fuel saving technology, which perhaps has its origins in Scandinavia.  It is simply an insulated box that you put a hot pot of food into, and leave it all day (or all night) to finish cooking. It's the forerunner of the crockpot.

This cooking technique isn't limited to hay boxes. The same concept is used by people who put oats and boiling water into a Thermos at bedtime and enjoy the finished oatmeal in the morning, or by campers who wrap their sleeping bags around a cooking pot so they'll have hot food when they get back to camp.

As far as I can tell, no one is selling fireless cookers made in the old style, but they are quite easily fabricated at home--or improvised in emergencies. However, if you are in a buying mood, a very similar technology exists in something called thermal cookware. These are essentially giant Thermoses--I'm including a link to a random example of one on Amazon here.

Why would you want to build a fireless cooker?

• To save time at the stove
• To have food ready when you get up, or come home from work
• To save energy, because you're a do-gooder.
• To save energy, because energy is expensive/unreliable where you live.
• To learn this technology well so you'll know how to use it in case of emergencies. (A fireless cooker combined with something that can boil water, like a camp stove or a rocket stove, would be a great combo for any emergency, long or short.)

Okay, so how do you build one?

It's really simple. You're just insulating a pot. There are many ways to do it, including simply bundling the pot up in a bunch of quilts. But if you're going to do this regularly, you probably want a more stable system than that. You'll want to build a box.

First, though, you should probably start with your pot and build from there. This technique works best when the pot is full, so you'll want to choose a soup pot/dutch oven sort of pot that is the right size for you and your family. It should have a lid, obviously, and should be made of something can come and go off the stove top--i.e. no ceramic.

 Once you've chosen your pot, you'll need a box to keep it in. This box should allow enough space for at least 4" of insulation all around your pot. (We'll talk about the insulation next.) So the pot height/pot width plus at least 8"= the minimum dimensions of your box.

The cooker could be anything sturdy with a lid, but the tighter built, the better. A big cooler would work great. I've just had a crazy inspiration that one of those newfangled ottomans that are hollow inside for stashing away your junk when company comes would also work nicely!

You can make a "two holer" if you want to have the ability to cook more than one dish at a time. In that case you might be able to build one in a hall bench or a big toy chest or trunk. If you can't scavenge anything, you could build a wooden box with a hinged lid. A well-insulated, box-style solar oven can do double duty as a fireless cooker, too. Whatever you choose, the box should have a lid that either latches or can be weighed down so it closes securely.

If your box is not built pretty much airtight--say it's pieced together out of wood--you should seal it up before you insulate it. In old manuals they recommend gluing a layer of  paper all over the interior. You might choose to use tin foil or a Mylar space blanket. A space blanket would help reflect heat no matter what your box is made of.

Then you need to choose an insulating material.

Early 20th century options, as per old books:

• Hay or straw, cut fine
• Sawdust
• Wool (they mention this is the best material)
• Southern moss
• Ground cork (it seems fruit used to be shipped in this!)
• Softwood shavings ("excelsior")

Contemporary recycled options:

• Styrofoam or foam. Carving a pot-shaped hole into a block that fit your chest would be the best, but scraps could work, too.
• Shredded paper. At last, something to do with all those bills!
• Cotton or polyester batting taken from old pillows or quilts. 
• Wool in the form of cast off sweaters and blankets, perhaps shredded?
• This might sound nuts, but if you cut down a bunch of weeds, let them dry and chop them up, they would work as well as hay. Straw has that nice hollow stem construction which probably holds heat better than hay, but some weeds have the same sort of stems.

• Note: I'd discourage using fiberglass insulation for safety reasons. It's nasty to work with and you don't want to risk any of it getting in your food.

Fill the box up all the way with insulation. The box should be filled to the top, but the material shouldn't be packed so tightly that there's no airspace. Tiny air pockets are where the magic happens.

Next, make a permanent nest for your pot in the box by hollowing out a pot-shaped hole in the insulation material. Line that hole, as well as the top surface of the insulation, with a one big piece of fabric. Secure that fabric to around the edges of the box with staples or something. That will allow you to lift the pot in and out easily and will also keep bits of insulation out of your food.

The final insulation step is to make or find a cushion sized to fill all the empty space in the box from the top of your pot to the closed lid. It should be fat enough that you have to use a little pressure to close the lid. There should be no open space at the top of the box. And again, the lid must latch or otherwise secure tightly. In the image at the top you can see the two cushions that come with that set up.

It's often easier to understand something just by looking at pictures. If you do an image search for hay box, you'll see lots of them, many improvised quickly. Whereas searching fireless cooker brings up more antique images.

A fireless cooker from a 19th century German catalog, image courtesy Wikimedia.

Cooking with the Hay Box

Okay, this is all very theoretical for me because I haven't done it yet, but this is what I know, and I hope those with experience will comment to help us newbies out.

The cooker is perfect for anything you'd associate with a crockpot, like pot roasts and other stewed meats, soups and stews and chile, bean dishes and also hot cereals, polenta, whole grains and rice.

First, it's pretty much impossible to offer up exact cooking times. It's going to vary by both quantity of food and the construction of your box. In short, you're going to have to play with it.

But the gist of it is that you start your cooking on the stove. If, for instance, you're doing an initial saute, you'd do that first, then you'd add all your ingredients and liquids and bring it up to a simmer (for how long may vary by recipe--the old cook book I'm consulting most often recommends 10 minutes boiling on the stove for meaty dishes, but if I suspect for non-meat things you could just bring it to a boil and then take it off immediately) then move it to the box to finish cooking. A good box should hold heat for 8 hours. The actual cook time will be less--how much less will vary by dish. But it will not burn or overcook and it will keep warm until you're ready to eat.

I've heard that in general you would use less water than with stove top cooking because there's no evaporation.
 
Here's some of Jessica's tips:

Suggestion: put the beans/lentils/wheat/rice/peas in a thermos flask together with the absorbable amount of boiling water/stock. Do this in the morning. In the evening you have a thermos with still warm and well-cooked food. With just a few seconds of boiling water. Think of the hours per month that you can turn off the stove and still have warm, cooked food!
 ...

It works fine with other things as well:
Eggs: put pan with eggs and boiling water in, take out of hay chest after 10 minutes (or more, or less, depending on your experience.
Vegetables: take out of hay chest after 110 to 125% of ordinary cooking time. Experiment! Don't use a lot of water.
Stock... why not?

It even works with things like meat balls and chicken wings. Have the meat on high fire until the outside develops the right crust or color, then keep in hay chest for xx time until inside is 'done',

Mr. Google can lead you to various resources on this technology, but my favorite resource so far is this old book: The Fireless Cook Book by Margaret Mitchell (1909), which is actually both a construction manual and a cookbook--a wonderful crusty old cookbook with recipes for things like Mock Turtle Soup. You can read it online at Archive.org, or download a pdf or even as an e-reader file--for free!

Do you have any recipes, tips or techniques to share? Please do!

An obligatory nanny-state warning: If food drops below 140F (60C) for an hour or more, bad bacteria can move in. You might want to take the temperature of your food when you pull it out of the box and see where it is. If it has dropped below that temperature, put it on the stove and rewarm it to at least 165F(74C).

CoEvolution Quarterly Online

While hunting down old appropriate technology resources on the Internet, I was delighted to find the winter 1978 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly, put out by the folks behind the Whole Earth Catalog. This issue of CoEvolution profiled Robert Kourik (which CoEvolution spells "Kourick") who practiced permaculture before Bill Mollison gave it a name:

[Kourick] is developing methods of growing edible and ornamental plants together for maximum beauty, minimum upkeep, and a self-sustaining yield of food.

He does it by concentrating on growing perennials that do not need to be replanted each year and annuals that reseed themselves spontaneously. He uses ground cover plants that fertilize other plants, such as the beautiful pastel-flowering lupin which puts nitrogen in the soil. . . Kourick's goal is to develop what he calls a "self-reliant" garden that produces all of the nutritional needs of each plant. "The gardener," he says, "can then supply his own nutritional needs by adapting his diet to the garden's produce."

Amen is all I can say to that. A garden that requires fewer inputs is exactly what I'm working on right now.

In the same article Kourik mentions incorporating fruit trees, kept pruned small, into his gardens,

Robert Kourick believes that tree crops can be a mainstay of any garden, and he has discovered a plant breeder in Modesto, whom he calls the "new" Luther Burbank. This man is Floyd Zaeger [I think that should be "Zaiger"] who has developed genetic dwarf fruit trees that are strong on adaptive qualities and perfect for Kourick's garden.

Floyd Zaiger, incidentally, is the person who developed several of the fruit varieties I mentioned in yesterday's blog post including the pluot, the aprium and the necta-plum. He developed these varieties through a herculean breeding program involving hand pollinating something like 150,000 trees.

Robert Kourik went on to write an excellent series of books, Drip Irrigation for Every Landscape, Roots Demystified, and Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally

You can read CoEvolution Quarterly and the Whole Earth Catalog for free on the Interwebs at wholeearth.com or download individual pdfs for $2. One of these days I'll put up a separate page of links to more free appropriate tech and prepping resources when I get the time.

End of Summer Photos

I've got a backlog of random photos that, somehow, never made it into full blown blog posts. Here's some of those pics starting with our modest passion fruit harvest. Beautiful flowers and tasty fruit.

Kelly accidentally planted some potatoes amongst her sweet potato patch. We got a few potatoes and some pretty potato flowers.

My friends Gloria and Steve, who own a small herd of goats, did a goat milk tasting at the Institute of Domestic Technology comparing their backyard milk against a couple of store bought goat milks and some cow milk. Guess what? Fresh goat milk from the backyard is delicious and does not taste "goaty". Store bought goat milk just doesn't compare, though the Summer Hill brand at Trader Joes is passable.

Lastly, two of my favorite things: cats and corded telephones. 

Best wishes for a happy fall for all Root Simple readers.

Paper Fire Brick Maker

Another highlight from John Zapf's compound, an African-made paper fire brick mold. You soak the newspaper, press it into the mold, let the brick dry out and you've got fuel for a fireplace. More info on the process here.

Skid Row Community Garden Gets SIPs

Novice gardeners + hot rooftop accessible only by many flights of stairs = perfect opportunity to use self irrigating pots.

Two master gardeners, Anne Hars and Maggie Lobl asked me to show them how to put together some SIPs (read more about what a SIP is here) for the Los Angeles Community Action Network, which works with homeless and low-income residents on skid row.  Hars, Lobl, myself and a bunch of folks from LACAN put together a few SIPs and planted vegetables on the LACAN rooftop. The plants are thriving in a space where previous attempts at container gardening met with mixed success.

Gardening, like all the ways we humans interact with our surroundings is all about context. If you've got soil, as I'm lucky to have, work with that first. But if you have only a sunny rooftop or balcony and/or limited gardening experience SIPs are a great tool. They almost guarantee success, which is encouraging for people who have never gardened before. 

Read Jeff Spurrier's article about the LACAN SIP garden in the LA Times, "Skid Row Community Garden: bounty by the bucket."

Scarlet Runner Bean Stew

Homegrown Neighbor here:

Apparently a block away, Mrs. Homegrown has also been having bean cravings. Maybe there is something in the air. Maybe its just that beans are hearty, filling, inexpensive and all around awesome. I happened to get my hands on a bag of dried scarlet runner beans from Rancho Gordo specialty beans.

Scarlet runners are a favorite garden bean as they are great climbers and produce beautiful red flowers. If you want to grow a bean teepee or need to cover a chain link fence, they would be a good plant choice. In fact, my neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Homegrown, grow them every summer.
 

I've never had scarlet runners as a dried bean before. But having lived in co-ops in Berkeley for many years, I am pretty experienced at cooking dried beans, other legumes and whole grains.

When it comes to dried beans I almost always do the overnight soak method. To soak beans overnight, simply place your beans in a large pot. Rinse them and pick out any stones or broken beans. Fill the pot up 3/4 of the way with water and let soak overnight or for at least five hours. After their soak you may need to add more water. The beans can soak up a lot. Then cook on medium to high heat for about an hour. Test a bean. How done you want your beans is rather subjective. If you want to use them in a salad, you may want them a little more firm. But if you want to make refried beans, they need to be extra soft. Just taste and see what you think. I like my beans nice and soft but not falling apart.

So to cook the scarlet runner beans I placed them in the 3 quart enameled pot that goes with my solar cooker, filled it the rest of the way with water and let the beans soak overnight. The next day I admired the fat, swollen beans. I threw in a few bay leaves and put the pot in the solar cooker around 9 a.m.. I arrived home around 4 p.m. and my beans were done.

They are big and meaty, but still rather bland. I'm going to eat them for dinner tonight and this is what I'm going to do to flavor them: I'll keep the pot liquor (the water the beans cooked in). In a separate skillet I'll heat some oil and saute onions, garlic, maybe a few pieces of celery then add some mushrooms. I really recommend cooking the onions and mushrooms in butter for extra flavor. But since I'm making tonight's dish vegan, I'm going to cook them in coconut oil. Then I'll add the cooked onions and mushrooms to the beans on low heat. Then add 1 -2 teaspoons of ground cumin and a dash of cayenne.Yum.

StoveTec's Hot Rocket Stoves

StoveTec's wood burning rocket stove on the left, charcoal and wood on the right.

A reader comment alerted me to a very cool product, the StoveTec Rocket Stove, offered by the "not-just-for-profit" wing of the Aprovecho Research Center. Profits from sales of the stoves benefit the Center's research. StoveTec sells two rocket stoves, one for wood and the other for both wood and charcoal. While I haven't tested one, the $37 to $40 price is a bargain.

Rocket stoves are a simple "appropriate" technology that burns small pieces of wood and charcoal efficiently. We've blogged about them before and even constructed our own out of a vent pipe and bricks. Instead of burning a log to cook you can use trimmings from trees, bushes and even agricultural waste. According to StoveTec,

"StoveTec Stoves, rocket stoves invented by Dr. Larry Winiarski, use 40-50% less fuel and reduce emissions by 40-75% while reducing green house gas (GHG) emissions an estimated 60% or 1-2 tons per year. These stoves are preferred over other improved cook stove and three stone fires by 95% of users in Uganda. High adoption and preference reported in India, South Africa, Ethiopia and Chile proves the stoves great versatility among many different users."

Looks like they could find a nice home in North American as well. Do some pruning and then cook dinner. How about a rocket stove tailgate party?

A Bike Powered Washing Machine

Via Bike Blog NYC, the Mayapedal Washing Machine:



We dig the inclusion of a derailleur to make the washing experience shiftable (apologies to the fixed gear hipsters out there). Based in Guatemala, Mayapedal has welded up a bunch of clever "Bicimáquinas" or bike machines that you check out here.

Build a Solar Dehydrator

Like many of you, I suspect, we've got a few too many tomatoes at this time of the year. One of our favorite ways to preserve our modest harvest is with our solar dehydrator. There's nothing like the taste of sun dried tomatoes, but unless you live in a very dry desert climate like Phoenix, Arizona you can't just set fruit out in the sun and expect it to do anything but go moldy. In most places in the world, including here in Los Angeles, the relative humidity is too high to dry things out in the sun. Solar dehydrators work by increasing air flow to dry out the food. The one we built uses a clever strategy to get air moving without the use of electric fans such as you'd find in your typical store bought electric dehydrator.

Our solar dehydrator is constructed out of plywood and consists of a heat collector containing a black metal screen housed in a box with a clear plastic top. This screen heats up on a sunny day and feeds hot air into a wooden box above it. Vents at the bottom and the top of the contraption create an upward airflow through natural convection (hot air rises). You put the food on screen covered trays in the upper box. With sliced tomatoes it takes about two full days of drying and you have to take the food indoors at night to prevent mold from growing (a minor inconvenience). We built our dehydrator several years ago and have used it each season for tomatoes, figs and for making dried zucchini chips.

You can find plans for this "Appalachian Dehydrator", designed by Appalachian State University's Appropriate Technology Program, in the February/March 1997 issue of Home Power Magazine. The February/March 1999 issue of Home Power features a refinement of this plan, but we just built the original design and it works fine. The original plans and improvements to those plans are split between two articles: Issue #57 and Issue #69. You need to download and read through both before building this dehydrator. . Alternatively, the always excellent Build it Solar website has a whole bunch of solar dehydrator designs, including a nice cardboard version. And while you're in the library there's also a book by Eben Fodor, The Solar Food Dryer.

As an added bonus to the tinkerers out there, take almost any of these designs, remove the top box, stick it in a window and you've got a passive solar room heater.

Appropriate Technology

Our rocket stove, pictured above, was mentioned on BoingBoing last week and we thought we'd use the occasion for a brief roundup of similar "appropriate" technology concepts. The term appropriate technology evolved out of political economist E. F. Schumacher's book Small is Beautiful and is easier to show rather than describe. While not always low-tech, appropriate tech concepts feature elegantly simple (but not simplistic) design, efficient use of energy and are usually aimed at poor countries. What Homegrown Evolution would like to prove is that these technologies have a place in developed western countries as well. Here's three of our favorite appropriate tech ideas and websites:

1. Rocket Stoves: our brick rocket stove and a link to a video on how to make a simple metal version.

2. The glorious Solar Cooking Archive which has links to dozens of simple solar cooker plans that you can build yourself. We built our cardboard and aluminum foil Pavarti cooker with plans from the solar cooking archive.

3. AfriGadget. The subtitle of this blog says it all, "solving everyday problems with African ingenuity."