"You have to clean out your ashes every morning too, right?" Mom asked me a few weeks ago when we were talking about daily chores.

"Well, actually, no," I answered. Due to our ultra-efficient wood stove, we really only get a couple of small scoops of ash even after burning a fire most of the day and night. Our five-gallon ash bucket fills perhaps once a month during an easy winter, or every two weeks during really cold spells.

Five minutes sifting out biochar and we're ready for another month of homegrown heat. Gotta love modern technology!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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