Wait, it's Friday?

I seem to have gotten confused on days, and ended up not making a post yesterday! I apologize for my oversight. The new chickens that our friend was kind enough to de-acquisition to us have settled in for a couple weeks, and we're starting to get them used to being outside. I need to do a little more mowing and weeding before putting the electronetting up is going to be useful and successful, so right now they're only out when we are outside with them. The Critter really enjoys being outside with the flock, though they break way before him like he's a large ship with a really unfortunate bow wave! He hasn't yet trained these girls that he's safe enough to be around to be able to pet them.

Quick Hit: It just keeps snowing, and thoughts on "real" homesteading.

I really liked this photo from last post, so I decided to re use it for today. I'm running late on everything today because it's snowing more every day, which means I have to be clearing snow constantly. It's just part of life, but when you're at work during the day and are helping with baby care, and animal care isn't able to be compromised, you lose time somewhere. For me, it's lately been either the blog or sleep. In this case, it's the blog And sleep! The topic for today though is prompted by Cold Antler Farm's blog. Read more below the cut.

Yesterday there was a post on the Cold Antler Farm blog about someone who was upset with her for not being a "real" homesteader because she accepted help. Take it a read through, and if you enjoy this blog you'll probably enjoy hers.

My thoughts:
Homesteading is not, and can not be a solitary endeavor. By the very nature it is a community activity. I'm sure there are people who do nothing else, have no debts, and can manage to consistently survive without outside assistance, but that's their whole life. For most of us though, we can't produce the tools, all of the feed, every thing we need. We're going to rely on the people and community around us to shore up where we're short. She covers this well in her blog post, so I'll leave her words to do so.

Failure does not negate:
One of the particular things that stuck out to me was that the person who is stopping reading her blog said that she's no longer a real "homesteader" because of her lack of preparation for winter and reliance on that assistance from others. I think that's particularly silly. Not everyone succeeds all the time, and a failure or inability doesn't negate being something. If we suddenly needed to eat without outside assistance for over about 3 weeks we'd be in trouble. Before that our animals would be in trouble because we'd be out of feed within a week between chickens and rabbits. I've discussed what Homesteading is to me before so I don't think I need to discuss that again.

I guess this comes down to, I feel that what you aim for is more important than whether you always succeed at it. We may not always manage to do what we aim to do, but that's ok. I think that much like ethical eating, small steps are better than none at all. And is it really failure to be prepared if you manage to cope through help from others?

Tuesday I'll be back with more significant content and a more coherent brain!

Quiet snowy day, and Sourdough Mk. I and Mk. II

As most of you probably know, snow was the call for today in New England, and we were prepared for a serious storm. So far, we only have about 12" of snow which is very pleasant compared to 2'+ of snow. The wind has been fairly significant, but I'm not going to complain at the difference between an exhausting sort of storm, and simply one where staying home and being safe is a wise choice rather than an absolute necessity. Before I discuss the snow further though, I have some bread to discuss! Sourdough to be precise.

Cold dawn, and winter concerns.

I'm not a huge fan of waking and getting chores done during pre-dawn twilight, but there are some advantages to it. Really spectacular morning skies like this are certainly part of it, even if I can't quite capture the real colors with my cell phone camera. Came out better than expected once I gave it some editing. Anyhow, winter is here officially for me, though technically I guess it isn't. At the point where we've had snow, and a nice solid sheet of ice I say we have winter. That doesn't mean we haven't been getting the last things done we can. I'd intended to talk about the local farming forum in town today, but yesterday the Lady of the House needed an extra pair of hands with the Critter so I didn't end up being able to go. Hopefully there will be more of those.

More wood, green beans, and community

Still no critter, and another late(ish) post. This time it's because it was just a very busy weekend, and I am unused to having my patterns changed. Having Monday off which you'd think would put me in a better place for getting things done did nothing of the kind. Instead I found other ways to fill my time, and didn't have the pre planned preparation time in place, so blog prep didn't get done. Ahh well. A re used picture from last year shows what we're starting to look like, even if the weather tries to fake us out with 70 degree days, the 30 and below degree nights remind us winter is not just coming, it's close.

Learning from Crabapple Farm, wasps, squash, and new beds!

It's the time of year to harvest our meager squash harvest and enjoy it. The nice bowl of squash is the entire product of our 10 squash plants. I'm not quite sure how to feel about it, though I think I'm going to count it a success given that even professional farmers had squash problems this year. Yesterday when we went and saw Crabapple Farm in person we chatted a bit about squash, and despite the traditionally low yield on squash and the space they take the Lady of the House and I will probably be doing them again next year.

So we learned a LOT going to visit Crabapple Farm. We always learn a lot speaking with Rachel and Tevis, but going and seeing their facilities and their gorgeous hutch they made for the rabbits was excellent. I think cataloging what all we learned from going is more a list for me than interesting for everyone. However, we're going to note some of the things. 1: Straw=/= hay in that it's less prone to absorbing moisture due to the waxy coating on cereal stalks and may be good for rabbit nests due to that and the hollow stalks which are quite different from hay. 2: Given our concerns about rabbits jumping down from shelves and potentially hurting themselves of the babies they're carrying they put in a large flat stone near one of their shelves. Behaviorally it seems the rabbits actively prefer to land on that flat stone you can see Above Left which is of their nice hutch. 3: They've come up with a cool new feeder for greens and hay. Also in the same photo. 

The feeder idea is one we're going to be stealing to avoid the kind of piled mess you see Right and because they figured something interesting out. Namely that some of the best parts of greens and hay fall through and out onto the ground in a traditional wire feeder. Given that they created their new feeder which is a 2"x4" wire fencing hoop driven into a 2x4 or 2x6 piece of lumber. Then pile the greens in, and the rabbits can get at it easily, and it doesn't just automatically lose all of the small leaves and pieces of hay known as fines that are the rabbits favorite.  4: Most people just buy squash because it takes a lot of space per unit of production. Namely a 6'ish squash plant producing 3 winter squash is about right. 5: The idea I've kept having for a green house on the front of the house isn't terrible entirely, however there are better ways to do it. I'll probably do a whole post about that! Lots more, but effectively just remember to always look at other people's ideas and keep your mind open to other options. One of the things Tevis did that I really like on their hutch is a double walled outside on the sides to compensate for using boards that leave a bit of a gap. So, we gained a lot from going to see their set up.

Whew, I haven't even gotten to our rabbits yet! I'll get to them on Thursday I think. In other news on our property we figured out why we didn't have tomato horn worm problems this year! So, in the photo Left despite the way the phone camera focused my hand is basically just by that piece of wasp nest. In the big tree above the front yard, just over the tomato plants there are 3 basketball sized wasp nests that totally explain the lack of horn worms. I don't love being stung by wasps, but I no longer have the near pathological aversion to wasps that many city folk have. They do too many good things for our garden for me to really hate them!
Beyond all of that we were a little busy this weekend. To conserve heating costs we moved the Lady of the House's art studio into our unoccupied room since we haven't been able to find a boarder to fill it yet. That was part of Saturday. The other part of Saturday was getting started on making a lasagna bed/hugelkulture concept mashup raised bed. We only have so much time, so I'm not sure if we'll get all of them done that we have in mind this year. But if we don't get started none of them will get done. The basic idea is a 5ish layer raised bed put in before winter hits. Layer 1 as you see Right is a layer of paper. The traditional version of this uses news paper, but we've not been throwing away our feed bags so I went ahead and used those. This provides a layer to limit the amount of things that even have the potential to grow up through into the nutrients of the good part of the bed and be weeds in the garden in the spring. It also helps kill off the grass. Since it's paper in the long run it will decompose, and let the roots go deep into the soil below in the future.

That's long term though. The longest term layer is the second layer, and that's wood. We've sort of short cut how long term that is because instead of using fresh cut wood as is recommended in hugelkultur practice we're using what we already have lying around. Half rotten punky fire wood that's left over from our first year here when we had to buy pre split wood because of not having time to buck and split our own. Due to having not been able to stack all of it before the snows, there was a lot wasted. Instead of letting it be waste, we're having it be good useful plant nutrients that should help for years to come! Getting all of that down was a good bit of work, and by the fourth trip I wouldn't have been able to get the garden cart up the hill without the Lady of the House pushing from below. In the end we have a good 8"+ deep layer of punky wood, bark, and the dirt that's already formed in that pile. The next layer is leaves and yard clippings, mostly leaves. So anyone that has bags of raked leaves in the area let me know! I'll come take them. After that is bunny poop, compost, good solid dirt. In our case that's going to be a mix of poop and soiled hay. Over that is a thick layer of soiled hay as mulch. We're probably going to have to get our hands on more hay to do this properly even for just this bed. Even if I can just get this bed done it'll cut work, and give us more growing room next year. I'm going to be trying to double or triple this.

As a note, do the furthest bed first so you don't have to constantly go around when doing further beds in the future. Hind sight is 20/15, if it was 20/20 you'd have learned everything you could from it, and I'm not willing to make that judgment yet.

Finally for signing off today I want to put in a photo and thanks to a wonderful neighbor. Kathy Harrison, author of the Just In Case Book (and blog you can see right) had some extra walking onions she very kindly gave us. We planted them in front of the house and are very much looking forward to an invasion of them next spring! As with much of our homesteading a lot of our success and progress has come due to kindness, generosity, and the teaching of others.

Thursday we will re focus on our rabbits since we have a lot going on with them right now, and will hopefully have some good photos!

Quick, look at the cute! Ignore the man behind the keyboard!

Today's post isn't going to have as much substance in it as I'd like since I've been sleeping very poorly lately. What I really wanted to talk about was a really awesome talk by Marion Nestle the Lady of the House located, and the information in it. Instead I'm going to coast by on cute rabbits, and getting into winter prep.

Growth and preparation as spring fully arrives.

Back to focusing at home today after Tuesday's post on the rest of the picture with community and reminders that it isn't Just individual action that makes a difference. Growth is the word of the day around the homestead, which is exactly what we want at this time of year!

Twilight's fast growing brood, and financial reality.

Twilight's babies continue to be a positive thing in our life which is really nice since we had such a rough week last week. Their eyes have opened fully, they are fairly friendly, and Twilight no longer trying to take people's arms off means that we can let friends play with them for a few minutes before she gets upset. We still put the babies in a box and bring them inside to weigh them, but that won't work much longer as you can tell.

Rabbit ginger recipe, and preparing for the snow storm

For those of you not in the New England area, you may not know that a major storm is approaching. Right now our primary concern is preparation for the impending storm. How much snow we will get is up for grabs, but we are going to assume it will be on the upper end of two to three feet.

What does that mean for us? Well, mostly it means get ready to shovel and snow blow. The snow blower has a full tank, and we are getting a full extra gallon of gas just to be certain. We are considering buying another extra gas tank to fill up just to be safe. We are going to fill up our sand buckets this evening so we have that available, and load up the inside wood rack with the wood outside that is most exposed to weather so the less exposed wood isn't going to be in danger of getting soaked. I'm hoping to be able to go in to work tomorrow, but that looks unlikely to be honest depending on the snow amounts.

Above is a photo I'd wanted to share from the gifting of the box to the babies. This is one of the babies rubbing its chin on the box, claiming it. Rabbits, like cats have scent glands in their cheeks and like marking things. That was moments before the box destruction began.

One of the things we have been doing a lot lately is experimenting with various things. Some of them are really good, but not terribly exciting and covered all over the internet, like wheat berries. Great breakfast food if you can get them, and very nutritious. More interesting is recipe experimentation, and as usual we are awful about remembering to take photos of the food before we eat it, so instead,here is a picture of a rabbit staring at the camera in confusion.

Recipe: Rabbit ginger
Ingredients:
1 Fryer weight rabbit butchered out

Marinade:
3 Tablespoons soy sauce
3 Tablespoons honey
3 Tablespoons clear alcohol. We used hard cider, you could also use sake or other similar alcohol.
1 Tablespoon grated fresh ginger.
Other spices to taste.
I used:
2 generous pinches tarragon
1 generous pinch chipotle

Mix all of the marinade ingredients in a medium mixing bowl thoroughly. A whisk works best, but a fork would also do the trick. Once they are thoroughly mixed, place the pieces of rabbit in the bowl and coat them fully with the mixture. Ideally the mixture will nearly completely cover the rabbit as it sits in the bowl. Place the bowl with the marinade and the covered rabbit in the fridge for 30 minutes. During this time I'd recommend starting rice if you will be using it as the starch.

After 30 or more minutes heat a medium sauce pan so it is hot, but not oil smoking hot and coat the pan with the oil of your choice. You probably won't need more than a tablespoon. Once the pan is hot and coated take out the rabbit, and brown each piece on both sides in the pan. When you do this just take the rabbit piece by piece, and put it down. As you brown it you should also be caramelizing the marinade on it. Don't cook it, just brown each piece and remove it, placing it on a plate to the side. Don't crowd the pieces in the pan, or they won't probably brown.

Once all of the pieces are browned and set aside put 3 tablespoons of water in the remaining marinade, and place all of the rabbit and the marinade in the medium sauce pan over low medium heat to finish cooking the rabbit. This should take 15 - 20 minutes if you cook it slowly, basically simmering it. Check the thickest piece of rabbit to make sure it is cooked fully before serving.

I recommend serving with rice, broccoli, and maybe some sweet potato. This is the best rabbit recipe I've come up with yet. Obviously it takes heavily from terriyaki and ginger chicken recipes, so if you have anything similar you've tried that you know works well, pass it on!

Lots going on right now, including rat rescue.

Obviously, first and foremost the babies are doing well. The one small weak one did not make it, dying the night after I posted concerns about his health. The rest of them however are as you can see doing well. They didn't get weighed today due to the rain and cold weather, but their eyes are opening.

A little snow, and babies furring out

 But they aren't growing quickly at all. Indeed, the babies are hardly gaining weight at all. I still haven't had time to fully do out the chart, but overall they are putting all of their energy into growing fur and staying warm from what I can tell. I will try to get the chart up this weekend to do some solid comparisons and have real numbers for everyone that cares. There's lots more photos below the cut.

Surviving Sandy

 As I suspect most of the USA and Canada is aware, Hurricane Sandy has been sweeping through the East Coast, and yesterday was the expected contact with us. We got lucky, and only got brushed by the hurricane. Due to being up on and off all night I didn't get photos to show. So this morning I got a couple photos of the river down near our house.

Day to day preparation for winter, and a seasonal retrospective.

Day by day there are fewer and fewer leaves on the trees in the back yard, and soon we are going to have to shift to heated water bottles, or crocks for water as it gets too cold every night. But we have been adjusting and getting ready for winter.

Borrowed Buck, and A Snow Blower

Meet the scab. With Umbra's sperm on strike demanding more treats, and more girls, we, much like the NFL have had to turn to replacements. Hopefully with less disastrous results.

First Butchering Done

Yesterday we did our first butchering, and over all it went very well. We have one of the first two litters we are holding aside for potential breeding to bring Sunny's strengths into our American Blue lines if we can. As you can see Above he is still in the growing out hutch, and seems to be enjoying being able to eat without fighting off everyone else.

There are no photos of the process below the cut but there will be detail about the killing and butchering process.

General Update

Well, looks like I forgot today was Thursday. I have no new photos for you today, and nothing at all even vaguely planned too write. So instead I'll do a quick run down of where we are and our plans for the near future.

Bears are a Problem!

Bears. This seems to be the time for them from what we can tell. Last year we didn't see a single bear on our property, but this year we have seen them many a time. I'm now starting to see potential correlation between bear visits and lack of weight gain for the day. 

(Picture from http://www.weforanimals.com/free-pictures/wild-animals/black-bears/1/black-bear-5.htm)

Dawn's First Litter: Details

As I posted yesterday Dawn's first litter was born! I didn't go into much detail about what was going on with them, and didn't have much in the way of good pictures. Today I hope to remedy those two lacks. Yesterday at about 9:55 AM I got home from bringing the Lady of the House to work and found that there were noises coming from the private section of Dawn's hutch, which she nearly never uses. I went to check, and found her hovering over the nest. By petting her and putting out hay for her I got her to let me see the babies. I took out and counted all 8 of the babies at that point, and got pictures of her cleaning herself off. There was a fair amount of blood on her, which I'm assuming is normal for giving birth. She efficiently cleaned it off which I'm guessing means I arrived JUST as she finished giving birth. The babies at that point were completely naked, and very warm. When I weighed one a little later that one ended up being 66 grams, which is quite large for just born baby rabbits, even meat breed rabbits apparently tend to start off in the 45 gram range. Dawn has been very accommodating to let us look at and handle the babies without issue. She also appears to have been feeding them.

When Nature Calls

No, this isn't about bathrooms, this really is about when nature happens. Something that one often hears about farming is that you are at the mercy of the weather. The same is true of homesteading, and it really is true. It's not just that you're at the mercy of the weather in terms of if it rains you can't work. It means that when the time comes in the season that you need to do something, you have to do it Now. I've been told this a number of times, but it really hit home with the snow. Read about the progression below the cut.

Warning, this post is quite picture heavy.