Although Will’s wood-fired stock tank heater worked pretty well, he knew it could do better. Roughly patterned after the “rocket stove,” the new one does burn hotter and keeps going even longer. The modifications included adding a 6-inch smoke pipe chimney, removing the square tube air intake (and welding a patch over the hole!), and removing the 6-inch diameter filling pipe and replacing it with a longer 6-inch pipe, inserted down into the tank about 18 inches. This gets air to the fire, making it burn much hotter. Before, the air came in the square tube, but it was not large enough. The new tube lets more air in and the larger chimney lets the smoke out faster. So, all in all, the whole thing works even better!

Lucky it does, too, because a cold front moved in from Canada, giving us a high today of -3 degrees! Last night and tonight it is going to be down to -26. This morning, the cow’s tank was frozen solid. After stoking up the cold tank heater and letting it cook for several hours, there was a foot of melted, steaming water in the tank (not steaming hot, you understand — after all it WAS only -6 degrees all morning!).

Will’s going to hunt around the dump and try to find another small water heater to build another heater for the horse tank; right now, we melt one tank, then haul the heater to the other. It works but requires a lot of monkeying around. We sure love our new heater! And so do our animals! — Jackie

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Wood-fired stock tank heater

I love the wood fired stock tank heater, and I hope you write up a more detailed article about it for the magazine. How long do you leave the heater in the tank? How do you get the fire going? I am so tired of hauling water down to the critters while the big tank is just a huge ice cube.

Jane Jasper
Sapello, New Mexico

Yes, we are thinking of writing an article on building a wood-fired stock tank heater. Even if you don’t have welding skills, it would cost little to have a local welder put it together. All of the components are easily found at local dumps, old farms, yard sales, or a neighbor’s, house for little or no cost. Ours is built from an old, small water heater tank, a piece of pipe for the chimney, a square tube for the air intake (could use pipe), and a larger diameter piece of pipe for the inlet for the wood. We leave it in the tank all day for a frozen solid tank. By evening, it’s melted at least half of the ice! We pull it when the fire is nearly out, in the evening. In the morning, we put it back in and it melts nearly all the ice from a 200-gallon tank. To start the fire, we just crumple a little newspaper, light it, and toss it in, quickly followed by several pieces of birch bark or other fine kindling. Then we start adding dry, small wood until it gets fired up. After that, we add chunks of wood, as needed. It works very well but Will is already thinking of ways to make it better! We’ll keep you posted. (He’s planning on adding a longer intake pipe, running down into the firebox and a couple of feet out of the stove, to allow more air (hotter burn) and let him use 4-foot poles, which will self-feed. This will eliminate running down to the pasture several times a day to chuck wood in the heater.) — Jackie

Pickled quail eggs

We raise quail and our family loves pickled quail eggs, but they only last a few weeks in the fridge according to the recipe I use. Can you pressure can them? Do you have a recipe? Another question I have is I pressure canned some pumpkin this year, I put it in the food processor first so it was smooth. After canning the jars lost a lot of liquid, it was down a couple of inches. The water in the bottom of the canner was orange. Is it still safe to eat? What did I do wrong?

Crystal Misiak
Millboro, Virginia

You can find a recipe for canning pickled eggs on page 124 of my book, Growing and Canning Your Own Food, available with a click, right here! But here it is so you can have it right now:

18 whole hardboiled, peeled eggs (or the quail equivalent!)
1½ quarts white vinegar
2 tsp. salt
1 Tbsp whole allspice
1 Tbsp. pickling spices

Mix vinegar and spices in a large pot and bring to a boil. Pack whole, peeled, hardboiled eggs into hot sterilized wide mouth jar, leaving ½ inch of headspace. Ladle boiling pickling solution over eggs, leaving ½ inch of headspace. Remove air bubbles. Process for 25 minutes in a boiling water bath canner. If you live at an altitude above 1,000 feet, consult your canning book for directions on increasing your processing time to suit your altitude, if necessary.

Sorry Crystal, but you’re not supposed to can pureed pumpkin or squash as it is so dense. It is possible that the internal temperature of the food does not reach a high enough temperature for sufficient time for safe canning. Now we can pumpkin and squash in large dices, instead. On use, you just heat the contents to boiling for 10 minutes, then puree the chunks without liquid and use. — Jackie

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For our pigs, that is! We have two gilts that need to be bred and we have no boar. Friends of ours, Tiffany and her husband, Nate, had a boar they could spare but needed their three goats bred. So we traded breeding services and we brought all the animals home. Two of their goats are in with our Boer buck, Thor, and the other, which is part Boer, is in with our Nubian/Boer buck. The kids should provide plenty of milk and also extra buck kids (lots of tasty meat). It’s a totally win-win situation, as neither of us will be out any money and we’ll both get our animals bred.

Will’s been working on log siding for our house. Rather than pay $50 or more for a piece of log siding to finish our addition, he’s cutting slabs with our portable Hud-Son bandsaw mill and then using sanding discs on our angle grinder to clean off the pieces after he drawknifes them. So far, he’s got several done and they are looking good! My son, Bill, did this with the interior gable ends of his log home and his turned out great. Better than store-bought siding! Cheaper and better is our motto!

Our winter continues to be GREAT. Today it’s sunny and 42 degrees above zero! This is unheard of here in northern Minnesota in January. The usual temperature is 35 below, so you can see why we’re kind of nuts, here. True, it may not continue, but every mild week is a week closer to spring and a week that it’s NOT cold. — Jackie

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Yesterday, I became a grandma again. My oldest son, Bill and his wife, Kelly, had an adorable tiny baby girl. She was named Ava Marie, weighing 4 pounds 15 ounces. Coming into this world three weeks early, she was a bit of a surprise to us all. But she’s hungry, happy, and doing fine. I made a quick trip today to Duluth to see the new baby yesterday, and was glad that Ava came yesterday, with temperatures around 45 and the sun out. Will has a bad cold (getting better today) and didn’t want to be around a tiny newborn with it, so I drove down alone.

Today it’s snowing, blowing, and cold, with the temperature steadily falling. It’ll be below zero tomorrow night and on into the week. Oh well, January is still unbelievably warm! — Jackie

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Obviously, we can’t use an electric stock tank heater. Propane heaters are expensive to buy — and to run! Will remembered his dad telling him about his chore, as a kid, of having to fill his grandpa’s wood-fired stock tank heater every day and that got Will to thinking. We have two big tanks for the horses that we fill with hoses, chopping ice out in-between. But, sooner or later, the ice gets thicker and thicker until there’s only a five-gallon basin left unfrozen in the top. Will looked online at some wood-fired heaters and thought he could manufacture one. A trip to the dump brought back a couple of small hot water heaters, which he dismantled for the tank inside. Then he welded an air vent pipe on (square one in photo), cutting a hole in the lower side and putting a chimney on top to vent the smoke. Then he added a piece of 8-inch pipe, welded on top to load the wood, with a flat swinging cap to close after the fire is going.

He tried it yesterday, first in the cow’s tank, which was also frozen pretty badly. By evening, the tank was half unthawed! So this morning, he took it down to the horse pasture and set it in a chopped basin on top of the ice, and fired it up. Now, two hours later, there is a wide basin of water around the heater and all the afternoon to go. (And because it’s forty degrees today, that should help a lot!)

It’s amazing what can be done with very little money to make homesteading on a shoestring much more enjoyable! Thank you, Will! — Jackie

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And now we are waiting for the call to come pick up our pork at the processing plant. Of course, it’s going to be a little longer before the hams and bacon are smoked, but the wait will be worth it! I’m hoping that by next year we will be set up to smoke our own meat again. Both Will and I have done it before, but right now, we don’t have a smoker or facilities to set one up. (There’s always a next year project!)

We kept our two gilts and are bringing a friend’s boar over to breed them. We’re trading breeding services on our buck goat for their boar’s services, so it will work out great for both of us. We’d hoped to breed both to a red wattle boar, but their only red wattle boar weighs 800 pounds. He’d squash our gilts! So we’re using their Berkshire boar this time and have reserved a purebred red wattle boar from the same sow that we got our barrow from — unrelated to either gilt. We don’t want to raise lots of pigs. Grain prices are horrible and don’t look like they’ll ever come down again. But we’ll raise a couple of litters a year and sell the extra weaner pigs to help pay for the feed costs for the pigs we keep to raise to butcher. I really do love the red wattle pigs and our friends say there’s no better pork. I’ll let you know about tomorrow! Mmm.

Meanwhile, I’m working on an article for the magazine on off-grid living on a shoestring, getting ready for a second Christmas dinner with my son, Bill and his wife, while Will is out burning brush piles. As our land was cut-over Potlatch timber land, there were lots of slash piles up on our ridge. UGLY. They were too rotten to use as firewood, so they just sat there. As we’re having an open winter, Will decided to burn them as there’s 3-4 inches of snow on the ground for safety. Last night, he burned six piles up on the ridge and BOY does that look better! And today, he set off the three piles down in our horse pasture. Those were all that was left from clearing the horse pasture, all shoved into one huge pile and two small ones. They all burned nicely, and relatively completely. What a relief it is to have all that gone. Another job done.

On to the next! Will’s working on his bridge, down at the creek. It, too, is coming along nicely, with both ends now down and supported well, rip rap on the upstream side consisting of power poles, boulders, and rock. There’s even planking on top for temporary driving over with the four wheeler! Now he’s hauling gravel to raise the level of the lower ground beyond the bridge, with rip rap to keep it from washing away. This will be a huge improvement over our inaccessible acreage across the creek, except in the winter. Soon, we’ll be able to drive the four wheeler, dozer, or tractor over it year-round. — Jackie

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We did, here at our homestead. My sister and nephew came from the Duluth area to share Christmas dinner with us. As usual, I cooked much more than we could eat, but that only means we get to eat leftovers for days! Not a bad thing. My son Bill, his wife, and my grandson, Mason, are coming this Saturday for a second Christmas dinner so I get to do it again. Lucky I lost the six pounds I gained over Thanksgiving!

Meanwhile, Will’s been busy building his new trailer, made from the old mobile home frame. He’s been cutting lumber and bolting it down to the frame. It’s coming along nicely, with more than 2/3 done already. He’s even making another trailer from the rest of the frame to use to haul firewood logs out of the woods when there isn’t enough snow to use the dray. Not bad from “junk,” eh?

Our weather continues to be mild for the Northwoods. Yesterday, it was more than forty above, and we have only about 3 inches of snow on the ground. We’re waiting for the other shoe to fall, though, as usually it’s well below zero this time of the year, plus we usually have several feet of snow on the ground. I remember moving here in February of 2003, having to have a bulldozer clear a trail in — all 1.3 miles — through three feet or more of packed snow. This year it’s much easier on us, for sure. The unseasonable temperatures make it feel like spring so we continue to drool over seed and nursery catalogs, just waiting for spring.

Have a very Happy New Year! — Jackie

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We just had a snow storm mixed with freezing rain. Several deer came down the trail below the house, heading for the horse pasture and the round bales of hay we have out there. The horses sometimes share their hay with the deer. So far, our deer herd is fat and happy with the relatively open winter we’ve had so far. We’re several feet below normal snowfall for the year.

This fall the beaver were stockpiling tons of brush in the mud out in the beaver pond and I commented that I feared an open cold winter. And we’ve sure had an open winter so far. The cold usually comes right after Christmas. We have plenty of wood and food, so we’re not worrying.

Today I helped a friend can up a deer he’d shot with his bow and arrow. He wanted to learn to can meat, so I spent the day giving lessons. He went home with lots of meat and was real excited about the possibilities! And that’s exciting to me. — Jackie

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