My New and Improved Black Soldier Fly Set Up

I have had a Black Soldier Fly contain for about 3 years now. I found the Black Soldier Fly Larvae by accident, and raise them for fun and to sell to a few friends who feed them to their chickens. Well something about my set up, about everybody's set up, has always bothered me - it's the ramps the BSF use to self harvest. These ramps are such a pain to set up and hard for the BSF to find and use.

You can look at my old set up here. It's a 55 gallon water drum with a door cut in the side. I used PVC pipes for ramps that ended in collection buckets. Although the system worked, I always felt the chances of the BFS larvae finding the ramp and using it were not as good as they could be. A broad ramp leading to a broad exit hole would be better, but you can't just insert a plywood ramp into your set up. First of all it will rot, and second of all, BSF can get through any crack and they will all end up lost on the other side of the ramp. Then I thought one day, why bother with a separate ramp? Why not tilt the whole container the 20 degrees I wanted and cut a long slit for an exit hole in the side?

Here is the design my husband and I came up with. The design was mine and the execution was his (of course.) The barrel is tilted at a 20 degree angle. The collection bucket is the beige container with the green top on the right. The drain goes to the jar with the red top on the left.

There is a slit cut inside at the high end of the barrel. The larvae will instinctively crawl up and fall out of the slit, into the collection bucket, when they are ready to pupate. The barrel was pretty full since I hadn't cleaned it out in a few years and it was very mucky since my old drain did not work too well. I have a lot of composting material to spread around now.

 

There is a wooden stop at the low end to keep the barrel from sliding off the support. My husband thought of this and this stop was really needed. You see I wanted to simply prop the barrel at an angle with cinder blocks and, no, that did not work, so don't try it. The barrel gets pretty heavy and just slides right off of cinder blocks. My husband stepped in at that point and built me the wooden frame. He's so handy!

There is a drain here as well. I pour the liquid in my compost tea maker.

 

At the other end we have a support for the collection bucket. We ended up making the slanted support for the bucket, because we could not figure out how to cut the bucket properly so that it would fit up against the barrel right. The geometry of a cube partially intersecting a cylinder at an angle was beyond us! So the collection bucket is tilted at the same angle as the cylinder, which makes it much easier to cut the sides so the bucket snugs up against the barrel. The wooden slice of a circle you see in the picture was what we used to draw the cutting line for the supports and the side of the collection bucket.

 

The lid of the collection bucket had to be cut too. We just measured from the exit slit to the end of the barrel, then fit it by trail, and no error thankfully.

Some of the larvae after a few days.

 The system works great! I am getting a lot more larvae each day with this simple integrated ramp (doesn't that sound fancy.) I can't believe I didn't think of this before! Send me your comments and questions!

Laundry to Lanscape Greywater Project Update

Last spring my wonderful husband installed a laundry to landscape Grey Water system in our backyard. It feeds three fruit trees (a peach, some raspberries, and a fig) at the front end, and waters the vegetable garden at the back end. So far I have been thrilled with its performance!

Here is part one, and here is part two.

Some changes we have made: Shortened the lines and added a plug.

We shortened the lines by lopping off the last two pots on each line. The directions said it could support up to 30 pots, but of course I tried to make it longer. The last bit never got enough water. That part of the bed also got too much shade, so I am converting it to a wild flower patch.

 

Garry modified the end so that it now has a clean-out plug. This was necessary for the second up date for the system. Note! Brand new bath towels produce a ton of lint! Our system did clog up due to a batch of new bath towels that produced copious lint. We were washing them over and over to try to get all the lint out, and we managed to clog up the system - the middle of the garden was getting soupy. Garry hooked in the garden hose to the hose service connection and blasted the clog right out. (I am so glad he included that!)

 

Here is a picture I took March 1st. The arugula had been blooming for a while, the cabbages I planted in the fall. Basically everything I planted in the fall was still living at this time. I even harvested some broccoli in February! I attribute this to a pretty mild winter combined with the extra water the garden got all during the cold season. We wont say anything about the aphids who survived the winter...

The Most Beautiful Color of Spring

 

The beautiful color of tender new growth in the spring! For much of the year the predominant color in Texas is the beige you see in my grass in this picture. When we get rain, or if we water, we can have a green lawn, but if the countryside does not get rain, the grass goes dormant in the summer, AND it goes dormant in the winter when it gets cold. Then how I long for this lovely refreshing green to appear!

These are my day lilies coming back after a hard drought, then a mild winter. Their fresh new green is a contrast to the older evergreen liriope edging the bed, and the dormant beige grass. Can't wait for them to bloom!

The color green is supposed to be relaxing, good for your heart, calming, soothing and comforting. I praise the Lord every year for His Spring, the color Green, for New Life and for my Life in Him! Have a wonderful spring!

Josef Holzer Permiculture Video

This is a fantastic video by Josef Holzer who has perhaps one of the most famous farms in the world (the world of permaculture and agroforestry.) Makes me dream big dreams (with lots of "if only" sighs in them). I hope you enjoy it.

Pumpkin Soup Again

We bought some pie pumpkins recently and processed them for the freezer. In honor of pumpkins, and all their goodness, I thought I would post my Pumpkin Soup recipe again.

Place all the ingredients in a sauce pan and blend after it is all heated through, or if you are using fresh pumpkin and sweet potatoes, you have to cook them through before you do any blending, obviously. See below for the best way to cook fresh pumpkin.

5 cups chicken broth
3 cups cubed and peeled cooked fresh pumpkin, or one 15 oz can pumpkin
2 sweet potatoes cubed, peeled and cooked, or one 15 oz can sweet potatoes, drained
1/2 of a 15 oz can coconut cream, or 1/4 cup coconut cream concentrate plus one tablespoon brown sugar, or one can coconut milk plus one tablespoon brown sugar.
2 Tablespoons coconut oil
2 Tablespoons minced fresh ginger - use fresh!
1/2 tsp dried onion powder
Dash of dried garlic powder or one clove fresh.
1 Tablespoon lemon juice
2 Tablespoons lime juice
1/8 tsp chili powder
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 cup of fresh basil (don't leave this out, it is awesome!)

Simmer until heated through, then blend and serve. Makes about 8 cups of soup.

You can cook this in a Vitamix. Dump everything in and blend on high until it is hot.

If you use canned coconut cream and canned sweet potatoes it will be sweeter than with fresh sweet potatoes or coconut milk, so taste it and add more brown sugar if that is what you desire.

It is so delicious! This does not taste like pumpkin pie! The sweetness combined with the ginger, basil, lime, and spices - just great!

Everybody loved this soup, even the doubters : ) Hope you enjoy!

Here's how to cook fresh pumpkin easily. Using a sharp, heavy knife, chopped the pumpkin into large chunks very carefully. Use a spoon to scrap out all the seeds and membrane. Steam the pumpkin chunks, with the rind still on, for about 30-40 minutes until it is very soft. Wait until the chunks are cool enough to handle, then use a spoon to scrape the cooked flesh away from the rinds. It's messy, but easier then trying to peel a fresh (hard) pumpkin. We cook all large squash varieties this way too.

Happy Butterflies

We have a little butterfly that really likes to hang around our house. We see it flitting everywhere, hanging out by the hundreds on the west wall of the house, or in the oak trees. It's very busy and flies very fast in crazy circles. We frequently see them chasing each other in butterfly battles. I had a laugh one day watching a Mocking Bird try to catch one (unsuccessfully.)

This morning I was attracted by the sight of a trail of ants going up my oak tree (I'll get back to the butterflies.) I needed to check this out and make sure the ants weren't chewing on my tree, or tending any aphids. I was busy trying to follow the trail of ants around the tree when my husband came out to say good-by in the morning.

 I said good-by distractedly, "Sorry, I'm following these ants."

The ants didn't appear to be up to no good and there were no aphids. The ants only wandered around to the ends of each twig and back again. While I was focusing on the tiny ants I was totally missing this sight below being enacted all over the tree:

 

I almost jumped when my eyes focused on the comparatively enormous butterflies after staring at the ants for so long! 

Well the mystery was solved. If you click on the picture to get it bigger, you can actually see the butterflies' tongues sipping sap from the ends of the twigs! I assume that is what the ants were doing too. I'll keep an eye on them though, because I don't trust them. 

These butterflies are Hackberry Emperors (don't butterflies have pretentious names? There sure are a lot of Admirals and Emperors in the butterfly world) and they prefer sap to nectar. Who knew?

Peach Butter

Its peach time! Our lovely peach tree blessed us with abundant peaches again this year, so I am on the look-out for ways to use and preserve all that wonderful bounty. My efforts to make peach jelly last year did not turn out too well, so instead this year I decided to make peach butter. I figure if they love apple butter, they will love peach butter too.

After picking some ripe peaches, we sorted them out into two piles. The perfect ones got put in a pretty bowl on the counter. The not so perfect ones - the ones the birds took one bite out of - filled up a colander. These were the ones destined for the peach butter.

Usually recipes for peach butter have you boil and peel the peaches, cut them up and sieve them. That is VERY messy and time consuming. We simply pitted the peaches cutting out any bad spots or bird pecks, and blended them skin and all (in a Vita Mix.)

 

We ended up with 8 cups of pureed peaches. The pureed peaches went into a crock pot with 4 cups of sugar, 2 tablespoons of cinnamon, and 1/2 tsp of cloves (this was too much cloves according to John, but Anna loved it.) I let it cook on low for 6 hours with the lid propped up on two long wooden spoons so the peaches could reduce.

When they were nice and thick we jarred them up and boiled them in a water bath for 15 minutes. We ended up with four full pints and one almost full pint. The almost full one did not get processed because it will soon be eaten all up!

The peach butter was a success. Next batch I will make without any spice as I read that you get a better peachy flavor that way, but I love these spiced ones too.

What do you do with excess peaches?