This Sustainable House

A couple of months back I wrote a post about the setting up of a new incubator, built out of an old fridge. The basis of the incubator is an old fridge, which had stopped working sometime ago, donated by a member of the Canberra Freecycle group. To this I have added an automatic egg turner, a fan & heat source, and thermostat. At the time of the last post I was still waiting on the thermostat but it has subsequently arrived. The video below has more details of the construction.

So early last week I finished wiring the device and today it lurches into life! This morning I set 34 eggs, from my wonderful hens, and over the few weeks I will follow their development via this post. Watch this space…

UPDATE -- Well approx 5 days ago the chicks in the incubator began to hatch. We had 11 chicks hatch successfully but many more pipped but ultimately died in the shell. I think the reason for the poor hatch were two design problems both of which I’m working to correct before the next run.

The first problem is that I think the humidity was a little high during the incubation period. This is the most likely cause for the results we received, as the eggs don’t lose enough water during incubation and the chicks actually drown inside the shells after pipping but prior to hatching. I did have a humidity meter in the incubator, which suggested all was good, but I’m wondering if it’s accuracy was somewhat lacking? This can be easily fixed by regulating the open water containers as well as replacing the meter.

The second problem was the fact that the hatching tray may have been a little too close to the heat source leading to the eggs receiving both convection and radiant heat when in the hatching tray. This has been corrected by better ‘gapping’ the hatching tray from the heat source. (see photo to right)

So it’s now time to rejig the unit, and set another batch of eggs to see if we have worked out all the wrinkles.

For those of you who keep up with the TSH website, which isn’t hard given the small number of posts I put up each month, you will recall that about 3 weeks ago I decided to bring to life a sourdough starter… The Mulloonian! The starter took about a week to get going, and over the past few weeks the community has started to develop and settle in. Who needs SIMS when one has a sourdough. In fact, the Mulloonian was going so well that I encouraged it produce a ‘sprog’ so there is currently two colonies in the fridge, excluding last weeks curry, one on organic wheat flour and the other on organic spelt flour.

However the one thing I haven’t yet been able to master is turning either Mulloonian into a nice loaf of bread. Each time I have tried, and admitadley I was trying with the bread machine, it produced an edible loaf with an excellent taste, but a very heavy texture. It could be that the Mulloonian still isn’t quite ‘ripe’ but more likely is the fact that I’m not quite used to it yet.

So this weekend the goal is to practice making sourdough. I have started with a semi-leavened light wholemeal loaf (pictured below) so as to start the weekend with a win. A semi-leavened bread is a bread in which you use both your sourdough culture AND commercial high yield yeast. The advantage is that the commercial yeast gives the dough a really big boost whilst the sourdough culture still imparts a wonderfully subtle taste. It’s the ideal bread for someone who isn’t all that keen on the strong sourdoughs. The recipe that I have used was loosely based on “The Sourdough Bakers” Light Wholemeal Bread. This is a very good site, and well worth a look if you are into sourdoughs.

The next step will be to get a full sourdough bread going in which commercial yeast doesn’t add that boost. This is a little trickier, and will take longer, as there is no certainty around how the culture will behave. Think of the difference between the Mulloonian and commercial yeast as the difference between a flower pollinated in the field by the wind, and one pollinated in isolation by a scientist in rubber gloves. The latter will behave fairly predictably but goodness knows what you’ll get with the former! And that’s the key point… I need to bake with the Mulloonian so as to get to know the community, understand it, and learn how to coax it to work for me. It’s about me understanding it’s needs and treating it accordingly, rather than just applying a mindless tool to the dough.

I’ll pop up some pictures of the resulting sourdoughs… assuming that they are worth photographing!

Semi-Leaven Bread

Like a lot of people, I love sourdough bread. The complex flavours, the aromas, it’s enough to get the mouth watering just by thinking about it. Wonderful!!

However the key to a good sourdough is the starter… a colony of living breathing organisms (fungi and bacteria).There are a number of ways to create a starter such as seeding it with a commercial/existing starter, using commercial yeast to kick it off, or relying on natural yeasts/bacteria in your local environment. It is this latter approach that I have taken to create… “The Mulloonian!”

The starter is being created by mixing equal quantities of water and flour together, and then leaving the mix to ‘collect’ some local yeasts & bacteria. The mix will then need to be ‘fed’ every day for about a week. Feeding is pretty simple, basically we dump half the current mix and replace it with fresh water/flour mix.

After about a week, give or take, the mix should be good and bubbly, with a pleasant slightly sour smell. Bingo! We have starter…

Keep your starter in the fridge and feed it once a week or so. It’s pretty hard to ‘kill’ a starter unless you let it get too hot. Even starving it to death is difficult! If oc

casionally fed, then a starter can live for centuries… think of it as a family heirloom.

The TSH “Mulloonian” was kicked off earlier this evening and I’ll keep you posted on it’s developments… I feel like a father.

1/2/11 – Update – The Mulloonian burst into life this morning with some lovely bubbles appearing throughout the mix. It is also begginning to develop a little hooch, and a distinctly sour aroma… Live, Damn You! Live!!!!

7/2/11 – Update – The Mulloonian is definitely alive and breathing. It took about a week for the cultures to really get going, and now they are bubbling and boiling with that gorgeous distinctly sour smell. In addition, if you take a little taste it is so sour it’ll make your face screw up! Next step is to try our mix to make some bread…

The Mulloonian - Day 1

The Mulloonian - Day 7

As some of you are aware, my last incubation attempt was a total failure! Unfortunately my incubator’s thermostat, a still-air foam model (which will remain brand-less), failed causing an unacceptable temperature spike. This spike killed the majority of the developing embryos resulting in a hatch of only 6 chicks (from 28 fertile eggs). This is an appalling hatch rate.

So I have decided to build my own cabinet style incubator, complete with digital thermostat. This ‘model’ will be capable of setting up to 132 eggs at a time (in the auto-turners) or 44 eggs at weekly intervals. It will also have a dedicated hatching tray, to facilitate cleaning, and the ability to use it during winter to whip up the odd brew…

I’m achieving all of this by using an old fridge, no longer in working order, as my cabinet. This has the benefit of being incredibly well insulated and easy to clean.

I’m adding to this a fan, a heat source, and my egg turners.

At this stage the prototype is undergoing initial trials with different heat sources and this clearly demonstrates the potential efficiency of the unit. Below is a picture of the measurement apparatus. You can see that the temperature inside the unit is a cosy 35.7 degrees celcius and is exceedingly even (hatching tray is located on the bottom of the unit, egg trays half way up). Of course, the current temperature isn’t quite high enough to incubate eggs but that temperature has been reached with only 48 watts of power (considering both the fan AND the heat). I’m guessing that a total of 60 watts of power will be necessary to run the unit, equating to a cost of ~$0.36 per day to run… Not bad when you consider it could have 132 eggs in it at the time.

Anyhow, this is just an initial post and I’ll return to this project in a week or two when it is fully operational to show you the ‘finished’ product.

Well it has now been a couple of months since the pigs first arrived at TSH (see Making a Pig of Oneself) but today the day finally came when it was time for them to move on.

They have done a stirling job digging and cleaning that garden area as the video below attests. The next step, after processing the pigs, will be to erect some temporary irrigation and then sow the area to green manure. This will grow for another couple of months, before another 5 piglets are brought in the to do the job for us again. The garden area should then be ready for planting in early spring.

The video below shows the wonderful work the pigs have done for us, and the end result of the last few months. I would like to warn those who find animal carcasses disturbing that there are images of the carcasses in this video. However there is a warning page allowing to you exit the video prior to the scene of the carcasses. There is no footage of the slaughter… that’s a private, and definitely unpleasant, moment.

The pigs were all slaughtered and dressed on-site, the advantage of which is that there was no transport stress whatsoever. It was just a normal day for the pigs until that rapid killing blow (by bullet). The downside of dressing them at home was that we had a few technical issues with the hot water production, leading to the animals having to be skinned… no crackling from our pigs. Not the end of the world, and will probably do our health a world of good anyhoo…

I’d like to wish everyone a very, very merry Xmas and a wonderful new year!

It has been a big year for This Sustainable House and I’ve throughly enjoyed the interactions I have had with so many of you. Thank you!

2011 is already shaping up to be an even bigger year but more about that as the year rolls on…

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

One of the principles of permaculture is to use animals and systems to do as much of the work as possible. This comes from the premise that an under-utilized output of any system creates pollution, and this applies equally to material ‘things’ as well as non-material stuff.

In this case I was planning on spreading some mulch around inside the pig pen and, rather than do the work myself, I chose to enlist the help of the pigs. It wasn’t too hard… you’d be surprised what they’ll do for a little cracked corn!

The video below demonstrates the principle with both a before and after viewpoint.