On the internet or in various guides you’ll find plans on how to make a PVC pipe hoop house, a type of greenhouse you can supposedly build on the cheap using the kind of plastic pipe you can buy in bulk at any home store.
Having built this plan, I can state unequivocally: You get what you pay for.
In my next homesteading article, I’ll show you how to build “Hoop House 3.0” – my version of a PVC hoop house that will actually last past the first windstorm, with a uv-treated cover rated for 3-5 seasons.
After we all took the dogs up the road to the top of the hill and back the other morning it was time to warm up with some hot coffee for the parents, and hot cocoa and oatmeal for the kid. As we slowly thawed out from freezing temperatures and light snow flurries my thoughts turned to one of my favorite breakfasts when I used to visit my mom and stepdad in their house in the Pennsylvania Poconos: breakfast spaghetti.
As usual when talking to the kid, my retelling turned into part reminiscence and part teaching.
Everyone in the family loves this dish, which is wonderful on a cold morning, easy to prepare and easy on your budget. The ingredients for breakfast spaghetti are simple:
Leftover pasta
Minced garlic cloves, one or two depending on your garlic-philia
Plenty of olive oil
1-2 beaten eggs
Salt and pepper to taste, and other herbs as desired, for example, oregano or basil.
In a well-oiled skillet heated to low-medium, sauté the garlic until soft but not brown. This will only take a minute or so. Turn up the heat to medium and stir in the leftover pasta to coat with olive oil. Continue stirring frequently as the pasta heats up. Pour in the beaten eggs and mix in gently until the eggs are just firm. Finally, season to taste and serve immediately.
To me this dish and the dinner variation below are a culinary equivalent to lyric poetry: brief, simple, unadorned, made out of common ingredients, and beautiful.
For the dinner variation, a classic pasta entrée that only uses olive oil as a sauce, substitute a can of well-drained and washed chickpeas for the eggs. You can also use dried chickpeas that you have prepared first, which taste much better. I have my trustworthy Fagor pressure cooker for this. But using canned chickpeas keeps the virtue of a rapidly prepared and delicious simple meal.
It never hurts to enhance the dish by also sautéing some fresh, coarsely chopped tomatoes and spinach or the greens of your choice.
Sprinkle with freshly grated Parmesan cheese and serve with a simple mixed-greens salad dressed with homemade balsamic vinaigrette, another elegant and simple culinary treat. Enjoy with a nice wine. This would be a white-wine dish if you were a wine snob. Since there’s nothing snobby in the origins of this meal, go ahead and drink confidently from any red wine you want. Red wine from a box will make the perfect anti-snobbery statement. Make sure to prominently display the box as the centerpiece.
My stepfather Joe used to whip this up on a cold morning. A first generation American of Italian descent, Joe and his brothers and sisters lived through the depression by eating pasta their mother prepared. Cheap and plentiful, easy to make from scratch, and able to be prepared with endless variations, pasta was the survival food for an entire generation of poor Italian immigrants and anyone else lucky enough to share their tables before pasta became a thing for the rest of America.
If you’ve never tasted fresh pasta, and by that I mean home-made with semolina flour and not the upscale fresh pasta imprisoned in plastic in a supermarket refrigerator, you’ve never really tasted food that is the equivalent of a bel canto aria, of a poem. Linguine is easy to make – I urge you to look up a recipe and give it a try. Maybe I’ll make a future post on it.
Last Sunday in New Albany the mercury stayed in the low 20s, so the faucets were set to drip all day and will be dripping all through the night to keep the water pipes in the crawlspace from freezing. We don’t want to have to get down there and unfreeze them again. As Sarah remarked, civilization is just one frozen water pipe away from failing.
Despite the cold, I managed to finish loading wood into the new woodshed I made from recycled pallets. For the woodshed project, just finished the other day in the middle of a soaking rainstorm, I learned how to take pallets apart using a prybar, mallet, and a hacksaw to cut through the nails. I actually had tried recycling and preserving the nails, which are threaded like screws, but I split too many boards, and also learned that the twice-used nails don’t hold as tight as they did the first time. Experiment and learn, that’s the motto of homesteading!
Other than some roofing nails, tin roofing left over from one of Sarah’s chicken coop projects, a few finishing nails, and the paving stones I bought from Home Depot to rest the shed on, I didn’t need to use any materials but the pallets. Best of all, all I had to buy were the paving stones at about $1.65 each. Okay, I also took the opportunity to buy a replacement prybar for one that had cracked, and a mallet. You could use a hammer, but a 4.5 pound mallet really helps. It’s hard to resist buying new tools for the growing collection. But that’s the cost of tool-fever, not the actual cost of the project.
Sarah got me thinking about the idea of using pallets. Practically as soon as we moved to our cottage on 2 acres my partner started pinning into her Pinterest account dozens of DIY ideas from around the Internet. Since I was planning on making a woodshed anyway, had even found plans that I liked, but the materials cost about $200, I thought maybe I’d give this recycled pallet project a try.
The results are not bad considering I had no plans to work from (didn’t use the Internet plans) except the evolving plans in my head which I had to change constantly because some things were just coming out wrong. The hardest part for me was figuring out how to attach the pallets together without investing in more lumber or in carriage bolts. Once I figured out how to remove the bottoms, leaving the tops together, it was easy to construct an approximately 42″x42″x42″ three-sided cube by simply nailing the bottoms together. Then I used the remaining square blocks of wood to reinforce the corners and the middles.
Constructing the slant for the roof was proof of the idea that reality destroys any theory. The angles I so carefully calculated of a standard roof pitch with a 4″ rise per 12″ of run and hand cut into the boards to rest the roof on did not work when fastened. But with the little fudging and re-cutting, it eventually worked well enough for an outside project. Not pretty, not made to fine woodworking tolerances, but serviceable for an amateur.
The clerk in the paint department at Home Depot was nice enough to tint about three quarters of a gallon of white barn paint I had left over from another project into a good outdoor brown. I got some of the shed painted on the outside before the winter weather made finishing that last bit of the project impossible, since I don’t have a workshop and I have to do all my crafting outdoors. So the project isn’t quite done until I can get all the paint on to protect the outside of the shed. Perhaps there will be a reprieve and I can make the project look consistent and nice, hiding most of the flaws. I understand that much of the art of woodworking is hiding flaws, so I’ll feel quite accomplished.
But I have to admit, I’m pretty proud of my recycled pallet DIY wood shed, and as you can see it’s practical. This one lives up the hill behind the house by the fire pit I built out of firebricks and refractory cement, the kind specially made to withstand the outdoor elements. The area where Sarah and I and the kid sit on some evenings with a nice fire, watch the sunset and make s’mores is much prettier and more organized than before, without a giant, decaying pile of wood in the open. And, with plenty of air circulation in the shed thanks to the spacing of the boards, the wood should not only dry out, but also season nicely.
You can find pallets for sale cheap or for free just about anywhere. One way is to check Craigslist. Make sure the pallets you use are marked HT or KD, for heat-treated or kiln dried, and not any other type, as those others are treated with harmful chemicals.
A bonus is that any wood that splits, or any leftover scrap, becomes part of the woodpile for burning, further saving the environment.
My next pallet project will be a similar design to cover the trash receptacle and recycle bins.
