 To split a log for home firewood, our gardening segment will talk about how to grow cucumbers. We'll offer some tips on making pickles from your garden cucumbers, and for our young viewers we'll show how to make a nutritious pocket sandwich next on A Better Way. Welcome to A Better Way, I'm Don Elder. The cucumbers are fine vegetable for salad, sandwiches and pickles. On today's gardening feature, Larry Quinn looks at what it takes to grow healthy cucumbers. If you like homemade pickles and enjoy fresh cucumbers in your salad, then this is one crop that you may want to include next year in the garden if you weren't able to grow it this year. Dick Biggs is a horticulturist with the Maryland Cooperative Extension Service, and we're in his garden today looking at cucumbers. Tell us about this particular crop, Dick. Okay, cucumbers are fairly easy to grow. We have basically the same problems that we talked about last time with cantaloupes. We have the striped and spotted cucumber beetles, so if we can control them, then we should not have the bacterial wilt. Cucumbers do take up quite a bit of space because they are a running fine crop. However, there's one benefit with them. If you're limited on space, you can grow them on a fence, chicken wire or any type of fence where you can get them to go up in the air instead of on the ground, and that can cut your space by about half or so. How much time does it take to produce full-size mature cucumbers? The cucumbers really don't take that much time. Generally, they will run around 75 to 80 days from the time you plant the seed. That's amazing how fast they go once they start flowering. You get your flowers, and I can pinch one off here so we can see it. We've got our flowering that occurred just a couple of days ago in already our small cucumber. I would say roughly in five or six days with the moisture levels we have, this cucumber would be approximately this size. So you have to be on the lookout. Once they start to be in this condition, you've got to start checking every couple of days because it won't be long before they're ready. And when do you harvest them? Looks like we have several here that are getting close to harvest. Okay, it all depends on what you want to do with them. If you want them for slicing for salads and that sort of thing, then this is really about your right size. If you let them get much larger than this or they get fatter and start turning white, then you'll find that they're getting a little bit tough and maybe even bitter. If one looks like if you were going to pickle, make your homegrown pickles, that'd be just about the right size. Fine. If you like to pickle, you can do them this size. You can use this size for like dill chips or dill spears. It really doesn't matter. A lot of people even take young ones like this and just cram a jar full of them for sweet pickles. Is this a particularly hard crop to grow or is it pretty easy? It's hard to say. You really need a good growing season. You need plenty of hot weather and plenty of water when they start making rapid growth. If you get those two conditions and you can control the insects, it's an extremely easy crop and you'd better have a lot of neighbors that like cucumbers because you'll have to find a home for them. Big, big thanks for being with us to talk about this crop of cucumbers and next week we'll be turning to zucchini. If you're getting tired of spending an awful lot of money for toys, it seemed to fall apart after a few months or else they need batteries or they need a complex set of instructions to put together. Well, we have a partial alternative. My guest is Marcie Myers and she's a home economist for the Maryland Cooperative Extension Service. We're going to talk about homemade toys. In fact, we've got the ingredients for some homemade toys right here. We can play poultry farmer with this one. We can. We can play dairy farmer. Well, we really couldn't. These aren't exactly ingredients, Don. These are the toys. Oh, this is it. This is the final part. Right. This is what my children played with. They're good enough for my kids. They're good enough for yours. The thing is, the whole philosophy of toys. What are toys for anyway? Why do kids play? They don't do it just for fun. I guess it's a diversion. Well, it's been said that play is children's work and toys are their tools. That sounds, you know, kind of corny. But it's true. They're playing for purpose. They're learning a lot. Even tiny babies who are touching things. For instance, plastic hair curlers. As long as the plastic is soft and not brittle, a tiny baby could learn a lot from this. They're learning how things feel, how they taste mostly, to a year, year and a half. And common household things as long as they're safe can be wonderful toys for children. In fact, you have to check on purchase toys too for safety to be sure there aren't sharp edges, aren't little pieces that are going to come off. So if you're going to have to check anyway, why not go with the free stuff? None of these things need to be assembled. They don't run off of batteries. That's great. Really, our box here, which is a shoe box, very brightly colored and appealing to children. Different age kids can play with this and have a wonderful time. It's not a shoe box someone a child plays with. It's any number of things. It can be a monster box. I'm afraid to look in. It can be building blocks. Kids will stack up boxes like this or put things in them cans too. Button collection in there or it can be anything collection. If you're really a creative parent, you can decorate these things. Are you talking about really young children like preschoolers? Mostly, yes. Once kids hit school, they get a little sophisticated. They've also been watching television. Five-year-olds are sophisticated today. That's it. They watch television and say, you know, I want some of that. They see sophisticated, expensive toys advertised and a lot of times the toys that are really pushed are not fun for kids at all and not educational. If it has a battery and does things by itself on the floor, you can watch it a day or two and after that... Well, the problem is they're designed by adults. That's right. And most adults are much too grown up. Okay, now let's start looking at some of these things tonight a minute time because these... all these came out of your house. You didn't really have to do a lot of planning to bring these things with you. This is a potato chip cylinder that's been covered with some kind of wrapping paper. Just to make it attractive, although the color of the cylinder itself is bright and cheerful, you can cover it with plastic coated paper and this makes it washable too and this is a safe thing. Little tiny children may have a wonderful time peeling this off. I'm sure you've seen children who unwrap Christmas presents and then play with the wrappings in the box while the expensive toy, battery operated from grandmother sits on the floor. This is good for caring things too. Oh, and it rolls and babies that are crawling can roll it and they'll follow it. Alright, now this is a pie tin. Yeah. In fact, this reminds me of something when I was a kid. We used to take aluminum trash can tops and they had a handle on them. They had made a great shield. And it's sled and icy weather. Sure. Little kid's favorite place to play, I think, is right between and under his mother's feet in the kitchen floor. Doesn't seem to mind water dripping on his head. Love to pull out pots and pans from the lower cabinets and bang them, feel them, chew on them, push them around. Generally make a terrible mess. But they're learning something while they're doing that. And on the other hand, they're right there where you know what they're doing too. So it's a little bit of forethought. You can put safe things in those lower cabinets that they can open. Now you put something together here. Most people throw these things away. Margarine comes in them in any number of things in the kitchen. But I've seen toys like this where you had one item nestled inside another. Yeah, five, eight, ten dollars for four or five of these. They come in more colors too. Things that fit together. You can see where that's an educational thing. You can't put them together this way because that one won't go in. So it teaches the child relationships and sizes. Right, size, shapes, and so forth. Again, I can't stress too much the safety factor here. These are that soft plastic that aren't going to break. I can't figure this one out. Well, that's a little more fancy. It looks like a clear plastic gig, okay. You're just not at that stage yet. That's okay. This is a common-part puzzle-type toy. Just an example of a good toy that is a commercial product. This one's a little sophisticated. That means that I can't do it. My children can. But there are simpler puzzles of this kind that will absorb school-age children. And again, like this with a tiny child is teaching them space and shapes. This is doing the same thing for older kids. This looks like something that wrapping paper comes wrapped around. Yeah. And kids can build again with boxes, empty boxes. Build all kinds of wondrous things with tubes. Cut them up, glue them together, stick cut holes in boxes and stick them through there. And only in their imaginations do the real things exist. The whole point then is that not so much of these things are inexpensive, but the fact that here's something that can really stimulate your child's imagination and creativity and the things around the house. You have to use yours a little, too, to see toys or play things in ordinary objects like this. A sand scoop out of a plastic milk bottle. Now, when I was in elementary school, not too long ago, we used to take these things and paint them, all different colors, and use them to make... Make Christmas tree ornaments. Right. Cut out the cylinders. Joy boxes for little girls, spray paint them, you know, and line the little sections with cotton, and they put all their little junky jewelry in there, and they think that's wonderful. And they've made it themselves, and that's the important thing. They've done something. Now, something like this. Is there a chance that a child could hurt themself on a kitchen utensil? I mean, this doesn't have any sharp edges particularly, but it's hard. You know, a young infant might... I wouldn't give this to a tiny baby. I was thinking of this kind of down in that bottom cabinet with the pie pans and the sauce pans and so forth of something that'll bang, make a good noise. You could hurt yourself if you fell on that, but it's not going to come apart. There are no small pieces. Thanks, Marcy Meyer, with the Brown Cooper Extension Service being with us. So, you know, if you just look around your house, you'll probably find all sorts of things far more imaginative than what we've brought out here today. For maximum efficiency in your home fireplace, it's important that you learn how to split a log properly. Larry Quinn was in the wood lot recently, and he learned to do just that. Today, we're going to talk about splitting wood, how to do it, and the tools to use. Zeke Hornick is a wood energy specialist with the Forest Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Zeke, just how do we go about this splitting wood? Well, first, I guess you have to get the wood, Larry, but then you need to have a good firm base to work from, and that's why we worked off of a chopping block. And then the other thing is to get your feet on good solid ground, then get the right tools. By and large, unless you're a more perfect chopper than I, you really ought to go for hard-toed shoes as well. Zeke, what are some of the other tools that we use? We've seen the axe use, but what are some of the other tools? Well, for the really tough pieces, you need a wedge and a sledge. These are heavier than the axe, aren't they? Yeah, it's quite a bit heavier. This one happened to be an eight-pounder, but you can get a very variety of sizes, depending on the work you have to do, up 10 pounds down to this nice little fella for the backyard slitter. Yeah, that's about a three and a half pound. Then we have the splitting maw, which is sort of a larger version of the axe, but it still has the design of the wedge so that you get more of a splitting action plus the weight. And here is a case of just getting it up, lining it up, and letting the splitting maw do the work. All right, let's take a piece of wood here and try the wedge and the sledge, OK? Oh, you sure picked the piece that needed a splitting wedge. Let's put on some safety glasses so in case we have any flying metal here. Take one of these wedges. Now, what do we do first? It looks like you've marked this one already for me a little bit. You did that? Well, yeah, one of the things you'll find, Larry, is that all these knots look pretty vicious, and they can make life miserable for you, but they never go past the center of the piece. So if you always aim for the middle... Let's see. Right in here. Right there, what we call the pith, you will miss the knots. And if you cut at a right angle to the knot, you never have to encounter a knot with the cut. So that's why I've started the cut there. So if you put your wedge in there, this thing should split quite easily. Notice how that's falling apart. That's a nice job, Larry. And you guess you know that with the axe you'd have been hitting a few more times. That's right. Let's talk about kindling for a moment. Small pieces of wood to help get the fire started. Well, that's where your cedar and your pines come in. Some small pieces. They're nice and light. And what you need to do is split them into pieces about this big. So set them up there and that one, I guess we can split it in half and then we'd have a piece of kindling. All right. What you want to do is bury your the sizes from very small to pieces this size before you move into your regular firewood sizes. And you just need a few pieces like this to get started. Right. Right. What about storing the firewood when we get through? Well, once you've got your hardwood cut, you still won't have a good piece of firewood until it's been dried. Because this is over 50% water right now. So the thing to do is put it in a pile out in the open where the air can get at it and that will dry the wood, take the water away. And if you really want to have it nice and clean and dry when you use it this winter, then cover it either in the shadow or with the even a tarp or piece of plastic. See, Corning, thanks for being with us to talk about firewood and splitting it how to do it with the right tools. If you'd like more information on firewood, you can write us for this free booklet. Our address is Agriculture TV, Washington, D.C. 202-50. You know what the price you pay for a quart of firewood these days, too, if you can find a supply that you can cut, it's well worth the effort. Did you do that all in one take? Well, as a matter of fact, the magic of television probably did make me look like a little better woodsman. Splitting wood down is really a difficult job. And if you don't master that skill early, don't feel too bad about it because it takes quite a long time to learn how to swing the axe safely, even to use the wedge and the sledge. And one of the things that probably any wood splitter would tell you is that if you're using a wedge and a sledge, be sure you get two wedges. Why is that? You only need one at a time. Well, just like my luck, that one wedge gets stuck in the log. Oh, yes. And so you need another wedge to split the wood so you can get the first wedge out. Sometimes I've used two wedges and a small axe. It depends on the kind of wood. It may be twisted and turned and doesn't really split that easy. Now, again, what is a good size for a log for the home fireplace? I mean, is this about it? About 20, 24 inches? If you have one that is a quarter of a pretty good-sized log, and that would be a little bit too big to put in the fireplace. That's why you do need to split it. Now, something like this, Don, you don't really need to split that because it'll catch on pretty easily. But when you have larger logs, you definitely do need to split them. And that's where you use a little energy of your own and splitting them, believe me, a lot of energy. You know, one of the things I think that is becoming interesting these days is the fact that people are no longer just thinking of firewood as something aesthetic, you know, sitting around the nice warm fireplace on a cold evening and they're starting to look at it from a functional standpoint. That's right. You're gonna be talking about heating the home with firewood next week. And talking about how to get more efficiency out of using wood in the home to heat the home. Because a lot of times it's not as efficient as it could be. And so we're going to give some tips next week to give a little bit of help along that line. And also coming up in the next few weeks, we're going to take a look at some rather innovative uses of wood now. Not just heating homes, but heating factories, textile mills, a brick plant. Many states in the South have discovered that with a large natural resource and fast-growing timber that they can put some of this to good use and reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. So wood is coming back, folks. And we're going to be also later on Don talking about if you do want to cut your own trees down and cut it up into logs, we'll give some tips along that line too. Thank you Larry. And coming up in just a moment, a better way just for kids. I finished planting my pot full of herbs. Did you know that you could eat every single part of the plant? Well you can. Today in our tough kitchen we'll be showing you how. Plus we'll be showing you a pocket full of good food ideas from the Human Nutrition Center. Come on, let's take a look. Hi, I'm Tommy. Hi, I'm Darcy. Hi, I'm Mike. So what are you about to have a plan for today? I'm stuffing my salad into a sandwich. Why? I'm stuffing my sandwich into a pocket. You know what they're talking about? We're making pocket sandwiches. Oh, well how do you do that? This is pizza bread. It comes from the Middle East and it's made out of whole wheat flour and it has a pocket in it like this. Now we'll show you how you carry all of the plants. To eat the leaves, you can eat the lettuce, the parsley, or the cabbage. To eat the roots, you can eat carrots or radishes. To eat the seeds, you can eat alfalfa sprouts or cucumbers. To eat the flour, you can eat broccoli and to eat the fur, you can eat tomatoes. To eat the stem, you can eat the celery or the mushrooms. I want to stuff my salad into my sandwich. Yeah. Yeah. Let's fill them. You can even sprinkle a little cheese on top if you want. Yeah. Hmm, it looks like it's going to be good. We've got pickles next. A mushroom. You can even pour a little salad dressing on it. If you want the recipe for pocket sandwiches, write to us. Say again. If you've been growing cucumbers in your garden this summer, you might want to use them to make pickles. Pickles and relishes can add zipping zest to your meals, snacks, and party refreshments. In this booklet, Making Pickles and Relishes at Home, you'll find all sorts of suggestions and tips on making your own pickled products. There are basic recipes for old-time favorites. For instance, pickled pears, pickle lily and sauerkraut. You'll also find tips on preparing sweet gherkins, cross-cut pickle slices, and dill green beans. And you'll learn some common causes of poor quality pickles and spoilage and sauerkraut. I'm sure there are lots of homemakers who would enjoy making their own pickles, especially when garden vegetables and fresh fruits are an abundant supply. If you would like this booklet, Making Pickles and Relishes at Home, just write to Agriculture TV, Washington, D.C. 202-50. Now, let's join Don and Bill Holman from the Forest Service for some tips on backpacking. Hey Don, we better find a place to camp pretty soon. It looks like rain. Yeah, it'll be at least an hour or so. This looks like a pretty good place. It's out in the open and away from snags, and it's a pretty hard sight. What's the problem with snags, Bill? Well, in the high windstorm, they could fall on the tent. We want to be away from any danger of falling snags. We also want a place to the camp where if it rains, we're not going to be in a flooded area. It looks like a pretty hard sight, and we can minimize our impact. So we don't want to be too close to the tree line, then? No, I don't think we do. We want to be out away from the trees so the snags don't fall, but in a hard sight so it doesn't cause a whole lot of resource damage. I like to eat, but I guess the first thing we're going to do is get our shelter out. Yeah, we better do that right now. Okay. That's a nice tent. Hey Don, this is a fairly common kind of a backpacking or mountain style tent. It is made up of an inner tent in a fly situation. You'll note that the fly that we put on is held away from the inner tent, and the fly is used when there's a great deal of a lot of rain. Why the idea of even having to fly at all, because it seems to me that this will keep us dry when? Well, it wouldn't, Don, because it's a breathable kind of a nylon, and it doesn't sweat. That's for ventilation, right? It's for ventilation, and it keeps the water from dripping on your head. The tent has a lot of other little features that we might be needing tonight, such as mosquito netting, and we have a little best of you on this particular tent where we can store our gear underneath. This is a pretty common design, isn't it? Yeah, it's a very common mountain kind of tent, and it only weighs about five pounds, and doesn't take up a lot of space in your pack, and it's, as you could see, very easily to set up. It only took us about three or four minutes. I remember back when I was in Scouts, we used to have to trench around around a tent, where those are tents without floors, I guess. You don't need to do that anymore, right? That's right. This tent has a coated nylon bottom, so you can set it right on the ground. In fact, I know the people managing the forest would just soon not have a trench around the tent, because then that impacts the site for the next person. Yeah, I noticed a helicopter flying overhead. Is that a farm service helicopter? Yeah, they must have some fires in the area or something. Well, I guess the next thing we need to do is get our sleeping bags. Yeah, that would be a good stroke of business to get that done before it gets too dark. What kind of pads that? This is a closed cell foam pad, non. It looks like it's really thick enough to give you much comfort. Well, that's really not the purpose. The purpose of it is so that the moisture from the ground doesn't come up into your sleeping bag, and it causes a little bit more insulation and you stay warmer. In fact, with this kind of pad, you can throw it on the snow and put your sleeping bag right on top of it, and sleep very comfortably. Yes, it is lightweight. There are other kinds that give you more comfort, but I found that this is the best. Now, we'll get the sleeping bag out here. Notice it's put in a stuff sack, so it takes up a lot less room. Because you can compress it inside the bag? Yes, you can compress the sleeping bag and put it into a relatively small space. Is this bag down? No, there are several kinds of sleeping bags. There are synthetic fibers, there are down bags, and there's a combination of bags. This one happens to be a synthetic fiber. Each of them have a little different characteristic. Yep, if I was going to go buy a sleeping bag now, what factor should I consider? I mean, a down versus a synthetic, I guess? Well, that would be your first choice, and it depends on the kind of area or the kind of camping you're going to go into. If you're going into an area with a lot of humidity, a lot of rain, I think we would recommend a synthetic sleeping bag, because it tends not to absorb as much moisture as down, and it dries out rather quickly. But if you're going to go into a cold area where it's relatively dry, I think the down is better. It compresses a little bit more and weight for insulating quality is a little better ratio. Well, actually, this doesn't weight that much, does it? No, this weighs about three pounds, and this bag is good. Well, I slept in this bag down to about zero. Well, I hope you'll have that kind of temperature. No, I don't think we'll have that kind of temperature tonight. But in fact, it's going to be relatively warm, and one of another thing a person ought to look for in a bag is the fact that the zipper zips all the way down to the toe, so you can open it up to get a lot of ventilation. This zipper works in both directions? That's true. It's a zipper that you can zip all the way up, and then if you want to let your feet get some ventilation, you can just open up the bottom section. One should look for that in a sleeping bag. Most of the good sleeping bags have that nature. I guess the plastic and in ordinary nylon-type zipper is less prone to jamming up to. That's true or freezing up, and this is a large YKK-type zipper that works in most, under most conditions. I think we can put this in the tent now. Well, Don, we got the tent up in the sleeping bags in. Let's go eat. That was good to me. Next week on A Better Way, we'll get a chance to watch Don enjoy that outdoor meal with Bill Holman and some more information on camp stoves and cooking for those who are backpackers or campers. Also, next week our gardening segment will talk about zucchini, we'll have some household cleaning tips, and we'll be continuing talking about use of firewood to heat the home. So join us again, won't you, for Better Way next week.