Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Some days...

...when it hasn't been above freezing in a week and you just want to stay inside and watch the Law and Order: SVU marathon, but spend an hour outside working with the dogs...

Photo Credit: mmarcotte51

...when the wind takes your breath away and you tell yourself that the chickens will be okay even though the coop door isn't shut and it's supposed to snow tonight so you go out anyway, refill the feeder and waterer, and shut the door...

...when you can't feel your toes and you have to go reset the circuit breaker for the back of the house, again, because you're trying to warm it up for your shower, finally...

...when the snow starts to fly again and you still haven't gotten to take a shower and the dogs need outside again and you need to take your cold meds and....


you wonder why you do it.


Then you watch the deer moving through your yard, as they do almost every afternoon, checking to see if you've dropped any goodies on the way to the chicken coop.

Then the barn cat sneaks inside because he's cold and you sit down after your shower and he curls up in your lap.

Then you have your lunch-toast, and eggs that didn't exist twelve hours before.

Then your kids come home and there's laughs and giggles in a room heated by fire.

And you remember...

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

It's been cold, so I've been cleaning.

Everyone was sick with a nasty cold. My seven year old had croup. So I decided it was time for some old fashioned Spring Cleaning.

Taking apart every single room. Cleaning top to bottom. Exhausting. I went through almost a gallon and a half of vinegar last week, although, to be honest, some of it went to pickle cucumbers and onions. That's one of Mr. S.'s favorite treats, and I always pickle some right away when the cucumbers first go on sale in late winter.

I'm still not done with the cleaning. The boys' room is proving problematic. The carpet in there is nasty, but with cold and snow it's hard to shampoo. I got part of it done, but it needs to be redone, and it's simply been too cold to get it done. Then I tried to move the bed so I could at least clean and vacuum under it, and the leg bent, so I ordered a new bed. We've needed to replace it anyway, but still. Because I can't move it until the new one gets here, I'm kind of stuck. Today I'll be treating the one part with baking soda, and then vinegar. We will be replacing it this spring, but it stinks and I want that fixed, even temporarily.

Photo Credit: emilydicksonridesabmx

We have gotten a LOT of trash out of the house. It's amazing how much trash builds up over the cold winter! You get lazy in front of a warm fire, I think! Of course, cleaning out all the nooks and crannies and under the beds and behind the couches is also a contributing factor!

Two of our chickens are laying now. There are six eggs in the fridge, waiting for us to get enough to have a celebratory breakfast for dinner with our fresh eggs.

We bought fence posts this weekend to build a small yard for the dogs. There's a dog run at the back of the property but the gate is broken and I don't see the point of having the dog run way back there. We were planning to enclose a portion around the front and north side of the house, that is already partially enclosed. Then, yesterday, my 14 year old had the dogs in the dog run so they could play off the leash, while he held the gate closed, and they jumped the fence to chase dogs that had gotten on to our property. So there goes the yard idea.

Today I'm tired and crabby and sick. But the cleaning needs to be finished. The kids are on the mend, but with the schizophrenic weather we've been having, the cleaner the house is, the less sinus and allergy issues we'll have in the coming days.

I also have some onion bottoms to plant. Hopefully I will get that done today too.

Last night, we had tacos for dinner. I made refried beans to go with them using this recipe, and they turned out great. My neighbor, who is from Mexico, swears by adding lard to her beans to make them creamy, so I did add some lard, but it didn't make them creamier. So I'll be skipping that step next time. I doubled the recipe thinking that I would have some left over to freeze, but I ended up just having enough for some leftovers. Maybe we'll have burritos for lunch later this week.

Monday, February 4, 2013

No time to write yesterday. Grocery shopping, and looking for Diatomaceous Earth and root hormone at the farm store. I'm going to have to order both, I think. We made it home in time to get the chickens fed, and pop dinner in the oven, and mix up some guacamole for the Superbowl.

I think everyone benefitted from a slower day. The kids are home, but their coughs all sound so much better. When it warms up a bit more I'll be opening the windows to get some fresh air in here.

Saturday I cleaned out the chicken coop, later this week I will be wheeling it around in my garden cart, spreading the straw and poop mixture over the gardens. I still have leaves to get moved over, too, so I'm grateful for this lovely weather.

No neat pictures today, mine or anyone else's. I'm cleaning. I'm determined to unsick my house!

Saturday, February 2, 2013

The groundhog did not see his shadow today.

Which means absolutely nothing. The long term weather forecasts available online from various places, however, tell me that we are finally heading into Spring. Average temps this month will be in the 50s. I won't be planting anything this month, but I will definitely be outside.

Some days, you just don't get much done. Yesterday was one of those days. A bit of this, a bit of that, mostly helping my neighbor take care of some stuff that needed to be done. That's the way it goes some days.

Friday, February 1, 2013

Yesterday was warmer still. We've gone from lots of snow in the yard to lots of mud. Still have sick kids home with a cough. I'm hoping it will be warm enough and not windy enough that we can go outside and let them get some warmth and sunlight to help.

Some days seem like I move in a circle from kitchen to laundry room to living room to outisde for something, and yesterday was one of those days. I do enjoy it, though. Some days, I'm in the kitchen for six hours or more a day. But it's all in the name of providing the healthiest food I can for my family.

Photo Credit: La.Catholique

This is radical homemaking. Perhaps we could even call it retro homemaking. Maybe our grandmothers did it. For sure, in most cases, our great grandmothers did it. For centuries, farmwives have been tending the garden, preserving the food, tending the livestock, at least those for home use. They have known animal husbandry, seasonal eating, planting by the signs of the moon, how to make lard, soap, and the best feed for their animals.

As technology advanced, women began to move out of the kitchen and off the homestead. Workplaces became open to them, either by choice or by necessity. And a few generations or so ago, women began actively fighting for their rights to do things like vote and own property of their own and work. Whatever you think of feminism, the be all end all of it is that women have a choice. A plethora of choices, if you will. You choices are based on your wants and needs, as are mine.

So I am proudly a radical homemaker.

We have better technology now, and can do more, faster. It's not that I want to undo any of that. It's that I want to know that I can do it. It's that I need that connection, that touchstone, to the past. It's that our food supply is full of artificial that and GMO'd this and frankly, I want to move away from that. But mostly, it's that I want to give my children a legacy, and past full of memories and skills they can hold on to as they grow. Sure, dance lessons or soccer would give them the same thing, but those things aren't available here, and if we lived in the city, we probably wouldn't be able to afford them. This love for the earth, respect for the food, knowledge of where their food comes from-that I can give them.

And some days, being a radical homemaker means I spend six hours in the kitchen. Yesterday's circuit went something like this

Dishes
Laundry
Check the fire
Clean in some room
Check the fire
Sprouts
Dishes
Check the fire
Sit for ten minutes
Lather, rinse, repeat

That's all in a normal day here.

We did go by our little local market. We don't shop there often because their prices are generally higher, but I found myself in dire need of something or other (yes, it was probably chocolate) so we went. I stumbled onto a bounty of fresh vegetables on sale. I bought some cucumbers, which I will pickle with onions in vinegar in the fridge for Mr. S., and some carrots that will go into the dehydrator. I found a package of marked down tomatoes that won't last long, but Mr. S. will enjoy them sliced with dinner for the next few days. He's the only one that will eat tomatoes like that.

Since we had carrots and cucumbers I decided to buy a head of lettuce, and made some ranch dressing mix when we got home. I used this recipe and while I'll have to agree that it made phenomenal ranch, the mix itself did not fit into a quart sized canning jar. I have it sitting in a baggie until I can use more and then I will move it into a jar.

Dinner last night was the aforementioned salad, and spaghetti and garlic bread. It was fantastic!

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Not much in the way of outdoor chores got done yesterday. While it was, in fact, warmer, the wind was like razor blades. Frozen razor blades. The kind of wind that takes your breath away and you have to turn around so you're facing away from it just to get a quick breath.

So that was fun. I got the chickens fed and watered. I opened their door so they could go outside and they weren't interested at all. I took the dogs outside and dumped our reclaimed water in the gardens. And that was it. The rest of the day was spent inside.

I did get a lot of work done inside, though. I finally got my sprout station set up in the laundry room. It's the best place for indirect sunlight for them. It's not overly warm in there, but I think it will do the job.  I took some pictures of my sprouting so you can see how I do it in case you're interested in starting to sprout for some of your animals or even your family.

This is a temporary set up. I wanted to start sprouting without spending any money, to make sure it was going to work for us. Over time I will buy shoe boxes or some other types of containers to do this on a larger basis next winter. Right now we have 13 chickens. I'm hoping we'll have some new additions by next winter, meaning we'll need more sprouts. And I honestly think that we could grow more sprouts now and they would not go to waste.

What I'm sprouting right now is my scratch mix. Corn, oats, and some assorted bird seed. Again, over the summer, I will be changing that mix to oats, wheat, and black oil sunflower seed. I'll also be changing the scratch mix I'm using, but I will talk about that more in depth at a later time.

This is the tub where I keep the jars. I think it's a sweater box. I have a ton of these boxes lying around. Of course, most of the lids are long since lost, but for this, I don't need the lids. The metal thing in there is something Mr. S. found in the shed. The previous owners left a lot of stuff here and we don't even know what this is for, but we found a way to use it.

The box needs to be tilted to facilitate the draining of the jars. Right now, I'm using an old paper towel tube. I will find something more permanent, as I'm not sure the tube can take the weight of the fully loaded jars.

This is three days worth of sprouts in jars. I use 2/3 cup in each jar. These are lined up to be rinsed. They need to be rinsed two or three times a day. Ignore the basket full of laundry in the background there.

I measure the seeds into a big cup, and fill it with water, so that I can pick out the chaff. This can be difficult as not only does the chaff float, but the black oil sunflower seeds also float. When I set up the system for next winter, the BOSS will be added separately, after I pull out the chaff.

This is the seeds in the jar, about to be rinsed a few more times and then soaked in about that much water, under the sink, for four hours. Some people soak for longer, but I'm finding my sprout production is just fine even with shorter soaking. I'm sure that depends on what you're soaking, and I may need to change that when I change my sprout mix next winter.

Once the water is in the jar, I cover them with a circle of plastic canvas and a canning jar ring. This allows me to rinse and drain them easily.

I did not take a picture of my whole set up. I'll try to include one later. If you're interested in sprouting for your livestock, there is a long discussion of it with tons of information, pictures and even a few videos here. It's primarily about cows, so those folks let their sprouts actually grow into "grass" that looks like sod mats (called biscuits) but without the dirt. I feed the sprouts to my chickens on day four, because that works well for them. We don't need the longer wait for chickens.