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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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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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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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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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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