FALL PRESERVING TECHNIQUES

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Mice will only reproduce at a higher rate if they have an abundant supply of food. If you are truly overrun with mice, find and eliminate their food source: sacks of grain or seeds, accumulated trash or garbage.

Next year, keep grass and weeds mowed in a 100'-wide band all around the house before the plants have a chance to go to seed and provide the little rodents' primary winter food supply.

Lastly, you can build an owl's nest - a giant birdhouse or small pet house - about 2 1/2' square with a peaked roof to shed rain and with a 6"-wide entrance. Fill it with loose wood shavings and fasten it high in a tree, with the front facing your driveway or garage. A family of barn owls will keep the mouse population in check.

Dear MOTHER,

We want to grind our own grain to make bread. Which do you consider the best method, for a grinder.. stone or steel? And do you have a recommendation for a home grinder?

Raleigh Hardin

Your timing is great. With the Y2K scare, home food-grinders were hard to get toward the end of 1999. Now, they are a glut on the market.

After more years of a self-sufficient country existence than we like to admit, there are a few chores that have proven to be so time-consuming for such a small return that we are glad to pass them off to machinery and tradespeople. One such chore is milling flour. (The miller was a popular tradesman in any pioneer or frontier town. He would grind a crop for a portion of the grain a farmer brought him so that no money exchanged hands until the miller sold his share.)

When grinding your own wheat for flour, you have to set the grinder's burrs so close together that single-pass handgrinding is very strenuous and time-consuming. We restrict our milling to nuts, coarse whole-grain flours and corn by using steel burrs.

Fine-textured stone burrs are practically essential to grind fine-textured bread flours, but they have their drawbacks. Stone burrs of natural stone or man-made ceramic composites have grain channels cut into their faces like old-time, water-powered millstones. In these horizontal grinders, grains are picked up at the mouth of channels around the wheel's rim as the wheel turns and are rolled down the ever-shallower channels toward the hub, where they're ground down as they pass. But grain can jam in the channels and the burrs are fine-grained enough that meal can clog up the grit, so the burrs will slip and quit grinding if the grain is at all moist or oily. Stone-burred grinders are no good for nuts, coffee or peanuts (for peanut butter), and cleaning wears them down quickly. Replacement burrs are expensive and cost around $50 per set.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print