Here on the homestead I am starting to get frustrated with the amount of laundry we do in one week. Where a family of four might have two to three loads a week, our large family of ten seems to be coming up with 10 to 12 loads in one week. Sure there are a lot of us, but it still seems like so much laundry for one week and being that we are currently renting and are unable to make a drying room for our laundry, we are forced to use a electric dryer which frustrates me even more as I have been trying to limit the amount of hydro we use in a day.
So after a great deal of discussion we have come up with a plan. We have been trying to get back to just the basics and when it comes to the children and their clothing well I am pretty sure we could cloth about 10 to 15 extra children, so our plan is to go through all the clothing in the next two weeks and cut back to a weeks worth of clothing, pack away a few extras and then donate the rest of the clothing to children who could really use it in the area. After this is completed I am hoping our weekly laundry will be cut down by at least 50%.
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Well it is the first day of February and things have been getting busy. In front of our patio doors we have our plant stands up and have planted an assortment of bell peppers, hot peppers, celery and some starter tomatoes. We are lucky enough to have the wood stove almost directly beside the patio doors so at night our little seedlings are getting enough heat to grow! At the same time we have been outside trying to get things done for spring, but with these cold wind chill temperatures not too much is being accomplished. We had a warmer day this past Thursday so my hubby decided to head out to the bush and bring a few dead fallen trees back in order to make it thru till spring, so later today we will be cutting and splitting it all.
Our ewe Cinnamon is doing very well and her baby Caramel is up and running just like one of the children. I have to admit I was a bit worried with the cold snaps this winter that our little Caramel might not make it but everything is going well! Our piglets are growing and we have now noticed that we have two male piglets, not one. So now we only have five gilts but that is okay, we will only be keeping the one male for breading so come March or April we will be making our way to the abattoir with our second male pig to get some rather yummy bacon! This morning at about 7:30 as chores were in progress, our dogs where going crazy once again, barking, howling and at what? As I looked out the balcony doors to our back yard there it was, about 1/2 an acre away taunting the dogs as it moved back and forth. Now I have to say I can't be 100% sure whether it was a coyote or a wolf but it was quite tall and in my opinion a little to close for comfort. It was an extremely cold night last night and the dogs where barking steady for a few hours, but with complete darkness surrounding you its hard to locate what they are barking at, so I have to believe that this animal is hungry and looking for food so coming close to our homestead as it knows our chickens are around. Guess its time to lock the chickens in the barn at night!
So now you have the overprotected paranoid mother for a little bit, as I get used to nature coming close. I now find I am repeating to my children to stay close where I can see you. I sure bet they will get sick of hearing that very soon, but when you take children out of the city and place them in the country were they want to explore...well I am just keeping them safe until I know our surroundings as well! Today was a busy day on the homestead! Between baking over 100 english muffins, a few loaves of bread and hamburger buns, I was running back and forth from kitchen to barn while our ewe cinnamon was lambing, after a few hours we knew something was happening as our dogs where all going crazy. By the time the girls and I got down to the barn cinnamon had already delivered a beautiful baby lamb. Now this is our first birth on the homestead and so you can imagine the excitement, especially being that we had not expected a lamb for another month...guess my calculations where a little off. So all afternoon we spent laying more bedding and checking up on mom and baby. After a discussion with the children we have decided to name our lamb caramel as he or she looks just like cinnamon!
It has been a while since my last post, but don't worry I haven't stopped writing! It has been a very busy few weeks and these cold snaps make it very hard to get outdoor work done. Currently I am putting together a cookbook that I hope to have completed around July if all goes well. It is very time consuming to transfer all my handwritten recipes to the computer and I really don't have the patients to sit all day and type. My next chore will be to find a program to print it from, but technology is not my favorite thing!
We have been very lucky so far this winter as we only had five cords of wood cut and split for this season and as long as we don't have another really cold snap we should make it through till April. I have to tell you when we first moved here I was so afraid of the wood stove, having a few house fires when I was younger had made me very unsure of them but I put my big girl boots on and sucked up my fears and I have to say even though I am still not 100% with the wood stove I know how to use it and it keeps us warm, so I am no longer a panicked mother watching the temp every five minutes! Now as February quickly approaches we have our garden stands in our windows waiting to have seeds planted in the soil, we have created a chart to help us keep track of each seed we plant and how many. Last year we did not totally succeed with our garden due to all the rain but we planted 7, 239 plants by hand, we are hoping to do just as many if not more this year. I also plan on trying to sell some seedlings in front of our home in May, so I have to make sure we have extra plants growing. This year I am going to learn my herbs, so I am trying to decide where I would like to make a herb garden that will get adequate light and yet at the same time keep it away from the vegetable garden. Planning the rest of the garden will be done after we work the field, from experience we know this should have been done last season but unfortunately we did not move in on time and did not have the equipment. I am ready though, if it takes us making raised beds in the garden than that is what we will do! In order to succeed in our dreams the first few year will be hectic and a lot of work but I know we can do it! With February only three weeks away life on the homestead is getting busy. There is so much prep in planting and with our winter having brought us an extreme cold snap we have decided to start our early seedlings inside to ensure they do not freeze and we loose out on plants. At the same time we are designing our greenhouses and watching the sun daily in order to find the exact location in which to build. Remember if building a greenhouse you need an area that receives the longest period of sunlight in order to keep it well heated, but an easy way to ventilate if it gets too hot. We just leave our door open at times like this. Now some may ask why would you start your planting in February? I did myself a few years back and was told that some plants are slow starters so to get a good harvest they must start early. So on February 1st we start planting our onions, celery, and pepper plants, sometimes we add a few tomato plants so we have early tomatoes to eat. Now don't be like many people we know and rush out to spend a tone of money on all the planting trays there is no need, you will find that you can find everything you need right out of the recycling bin now a days...so lets re-use! To start seedlings you can use anything from small plastic baby food jars, yogurt containers even pop bottles. Last year we started all our seedlings in 2L pop bottles and yogurt containers. We cut holes in the bottom of each yogurt container, then cut 3/4 of the way around the middle of the pop bottles in order to make our own little greenhouses! We placed the yogurt container with soil into the bottle with our seeds and closed the lids and placed in our windows. These worked wonders, just remember to rotate your seedlings and water but do not over water, if there is too much condensation lift the lids. I found these as dual purpose because after we transferred the seedlings into the ground I cut the tops of the bottles off and placed them in the soil as a funnel every so many feet down my garden so if there was a drought I could simply place water into the funnel and it would go into the ground for the plant to absorb. Also you could use the tops as little greenhouses in your garden to help those seedlings that are in need of a little extra warmth, by placing them over top of the plant and into the ground a bit in order not to have them up and blow away ~ Today we began the first day into what will be our first full year homesteading and preparing ourselves to meet our goal of buying our own property and homesteading off grid within the next two years. So to start we want to wish all our readers a Happy New Year and hope we can continue to write interesting posts to keep bringing you back to our page. In today's post I decided why not start the year off writing about those lovely birds who bring us yummy eggs and later on meat for dinner and soups...you guessed it I am talking about chickens! Here on the homestead we have about 10 Road Island Red chickens that free range, coming and going as they please and 15 Jersey Giants that are currently residing in a large pen in our barn. We have been raising chickens for a few years now and dealt with many problems when we first started out. First things first as we learned quiet quickly, always make sure you use a hardware cloth at the bottom of your cages and chicken wire half way up in order to make it harder for rats and weasels to get into your cages as well it makes raccoons have a harder time biting through the wire. Personally we use hardware cloth for almost all poultry/bird coops and cages to protect our birds. Secondly if you free range your chickens know your predators, we thought our chickens would be fine running the barn, little did we know that we had a fox that would tunnel through and steal a chicken every other day. For the first few weeks I could not figure it out, none of the other animals were disappearing how could this be! So my husband and I decided to build an outdoor coop for them and as we where collecting all the chickens from the barn, I fell and there it was I could not believe it. In between the barn and silo was a dirt wall and wouldn't you know it a hole big enough for a small creature to crawl through. I immediately went to the house and grabbed a field camera and set it up and two days later while checking the pictures to my surprise was a small fox entering and exiting our barn...what a sly fox he was. Needless to say after finding out all his easy kill had moved he didn't stick around too much. Now back to our chickens! When picking a chicken be choosy, look at dual purpose breeds with good egg production. When we first began we did not know much about chickens so started with leghorns, although great egg producers they are not a meat bird. We tried them but it was a very tight meat and very little, although a perfect soup bird. Then we tried the RIR and found they also where a great egg producer but for meat they just were not as meaty as we wanted so we searched and searched and then I found Jersey Giant chicks, well I jumped on the opportunity and bought all the chicks they had and was pleased with my purchase. Not only did their name describe them perfectly but they also where able to produce us with a quantity of eggs. The roosters grow to be a beautiful chicken dinner and the hens if not being kept for breeding are also well worth the buy and still cheaper then buying from the grocer and if you can kill your own chicken and don't mind that kind of thing as we do here on the homestead it just got cheaper for you. Winter is finally officially here and yet there is no snow to be found. As we come to the end of the year, we sit here around the table at our homestead and we discuss what plants we are going to be planting this year, which month to begin our seedlings and where we should build our green house so it has enough light until we transfer our seeds. In the next month we will be making a list of all the seeds we have and what seeds we need in order to plant a large garden to supply our family with enough food to last until the next season , with the cost of food continuing to rise we try to teach our children the benefits to all our hard work, and by growing our own produce we do not have to question whats in it, nor do we wonder where it came from! No GMO's on this homestead, just natural organic seeds grown in the earth that we are provided with and animal compost. Everyone's needs are different so the amount we plant may be very different from your homestead but cucumbers are a must for us, the children love homemade pickles and relish and they are always the first item we run out of on the homestead. Tomatoes and squash are tied for second as the garlic is already in the ground, even though we only got 86 bulbs planted this year it will have to do as we did not have enough time to rip a large area before frost came. On top of that we are trying to begin some Apricot trees and Cherry trees from seed so we have them outside in pots in hopes that they will sprout in spring, sure they will take 3-5 years before producing us with any fruit but it will be well worth it to have our own trees. Moving here was a quick and overly rushed decision and therefore we were unable to bring our greenhouse structure with us but it was made quite simply and kept the heat in enough that during spring and summer you would literally sweat buckets, so we will try to make a larger replica of our old design. Here on the homestead cheap and simple is the best way to go, so we tend to re-use a lot of items in order to suffice. Up until we moved here our main source of heat was oil or propane, so splitting fire wood for the occasional wood stove fire was done by axe and a manual foot pumped log splitter. Yesterday we broke down and decided it was time to purchase a log splitter to help us split the logs we find lying in our forests, as now our only source of heat is our wood stove. We know its not the off grid way, nor is it helping reduce our carbon footprint but when you have eight young children to care for and enough chores around the homestead to fill your day the last thing you want to be doing is swinging an axe in the cold temperatures of the evening or in horrible weather.
So after a long day of assembling the heavy 22 ton log splitter and splitting two cords of wood, its now time to make dinner and prepare for another day of Christmas baking on the homestead. Well December has almost come to an end and like all the children I was hoping for a white Christmas, which in the last few years meant a lovely white blanket of snow. This year however meteorologists are talking about a weather bomb, sure it would be the year that I move miles away from home that we would get a winter storm and not be able to have family attend, just my luck. So now our work around the homestead gets a bit busier as we roll the last couple bales of hay into the barn, make our animals bedding just a bit thicker to insure their warmth and unpack all the wool blankets, candles, flashlights and do a quick shop for bottled water just encase we do get hit by the storm. With eight children on the homestead we are pretty prepared for anything. This past fall I canned as many preserves as I could before we up and moved, I always buy in bulk when it comes to such things as flour, sugar, coffee, tea, pasta....well you get the idea, and our freezers are full of our chicken and beef that we butchered as well. So all and all no matter what winter brings us, with our cupboards full, the wood stove burning to keep us warm and act as a back up stove top, water and lots of blankets for warmth I believe we will be set. |
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