Quick hit: Fast growing.

Yesterday was incredibly busy so I don't really have much of a post for today, and didn't get much done homesteading wise. We did go out with the Critter, and he got to look over a corn field that hasn't been plowed yet this year, and was fascinated. 

On the homestead Boris is doing a lot better. We're guessing he must have pulled  muscles or something of the like. He's limping, and struggling to stay upright as you can see from his posture. We're glad to see him recovering relatively rapidly given the degree of fight and injury he dealt with. We just keep making sure that he's in at night, and out during the day when it isn't raining.
Last but not least, the seedlings are doing very well. Perhaps a bit too well honestly on the tomato front. As you can see Below the tomato seedlings are shooting up fast, and some are almost in contact with the roof of the mini greenhouse they're in. When that happens the top will have to come off. The pepper seedlings are still very small, so we'll see. We may have to set up a second working area and transplant to larger pots soon. That's all for today, we'll be back Tuesday!

Quick Hit: Fed Up Documentary

Last night the Lady of the House and I got to see the documentary "Fed Up" and really enjoyed it. The movie is really good from the food science perspective, focused on the day to day "normal" food chain. It has a lot of information the Lady of the House and I already knew, but is well worth knowing. Even if you know everything it is very well presented, and is a documentary I think everyone in the USA and other developed countries at the very least should watch.


http://fedupmovie.com/#/page/home

Quick Hit: More chicken pictures

The Lady of the House had gotten some  great photos of the chicks being sheltered, and out and about yesterday and had promised to share them today. I had to leave this morning without the image files, and with the Critter being up all night I didn't have them 'till just now. So here's more cuteness with chicks than the photo earlier, which I'm including just because

As you can see despite the chicks being adventurous, they're still learning a lot from mom, and not being full sized they still can't handle the weather that we're getting right now without help. I personally love seeing them stick their heads out to look at the world while staying warm with her help. One of the things that's been a constant lately is them going back into the coop without a problem at dusk so I'm not chasing them around. Now that they're relaxing more I want to spend time sitting with them to get the chicks used to me so they don't run from me when I go to pick them up if I have to. It's not something I got to do with the hens we have, but they're still fairly relaxed at this point. Before our next batch of chicks though I do think I need to do something about the ability of chicks to freely enter and exit the run they're in. It'll probably come down to putting more chicken wire around the base, and then piling old wood so it actually blocks them in. It may be a more urgent thing that I'm thinking of right now because as I mentioned earlier today, there appears to be a hen that may be broody, we shall see this evening.

Quick Hit: Twilight is angry with me, and chicken on walkabout

Apologies for the late post today, it's been sort of hectic between some dental work and everything else. This is going to be something of a short post because of that. I tried to get our first breeding of the season in, but Twilight decided she wasn't having any of that.

She actually ended up screaming when I picked her up, and unsurprisingly with that reaction wouldn't lift for a buck. We'll try getting her bred again next week so we aren't having kits born when we're gone for the weekend. I actually if I'd checked my calendar properly instead of half asleep would have seen this wasn't the day I'd intended to start breeding again by a week. Ahh well, apologies to Twilight as well! We'll regain her trust with some treats, and more regular handling than she got this winter. It's just been so cold, and I've been so tired I haven't been reaching in to say hi every day, I've just been trying to get chores done and off to work. By evening I just need to rest, and spend time with the Lady of the House, and that's led to some non trusting rabbits.

This morning had another adventure, when feeding the chickens I noted we were down one Rhode Island Red, and went looking for a body. Instead I found her roosted in a slightly precarious place, that's right by the basement door. Looks like she got herself stuck there, and wasn't too happy about it. Interestingly enough she just stepped up on my arm and let me carry her back to the run, where she hopped back up on the fence and back in with the rest of the chickens. Usually with birds I expect to have to train step up to get them to do it calmly, so it was a nice if unexpected thing.

So, Thursday I'll post our planned breeding schedule for what that's worth, and some of what's been going on with our rabbits behind the scenes.

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!

Chicken wanderings, and night alerts

Did you know that smoke detectors fail to false positives? I was reminded of that last night around 2 in the morning. Just another adventure in day to day life. On the topic of adventures the chickens have progressed from living in their coop, to going out into the run, and last night we gave them their first 30 minutes out of the run free wandering. Good lord can they tear up ground fast. They're also far more interested in putting things in their mouth than figuring out whether they're good to eat.  This is particularly relevant to making sure there's no random plastic around on the ground, they will eat it.

Quick hit: Rabbit apple experiment

There is more going on than just a recipe, but I haven't been able to get photos, or much free time either, so for now, a quick hit with a recipe I tried out last night. As usual, this isn't so much a recipe as an experiment where I slammed ideas together and saw what came out.

Idea 1: Applesauce
Idea 2: Sweet and spicy rabbit
Idea 3: We've got some Salami in the fridge, not sure how long it's been there but it's still good. Let's use that!

Materials:
1 rabbit butchered into sections. Ideally it would probably be boned, but I cut the heck out of myself while sectioning it, so I didn't go all the way.
1 lb carrots chopped medium
1 hard salami cubed small
2 lb (ish) cubed apples. I used random seconds from the farmers market for this.
5 limon peppers
2 sticks cinnamon
small handful cloves
cilantro to taste
small handful basil leaves
small handful rosemary
dash chili powder
other spices to taste

Method:
Brown the rabbit on medium heat. Remove from the pot.

Put 2/3rds of the apples in and put the rabbit back on top. Put all of the spices in. Simmer over low medium heat stirring from time to time for about 45 minutes. Put the rest of the apples in, and continue simmering for another 30 minutes.

Put the salami and the carrots in, and simmer for another 20 minutes.

Let cool a little before eating. Honestly, it's best the day after as with most recipes that involve a lot of spice mixing.

Results:
The rabbit is so tender it's falling off the bone, the spice level is good for us but definitely has a good solid kick with enough sweetness to still stand out. The smokiness of the salami was a fortunate and really good addition to it because the day after the smoky flavor has blended the rest of the flavors very well. Over all it isn't so much like apple sauce as it really is a meal when served with some sort of starch.

Quick chickens on the prowl.

 A short post today as things haven't really settled down. I didn't touch on our mini dinosaurs at all yesterday in the late post, so today, CHICKENS!.

The importance of correct and working equipment.

So, today's post is a little scattered and last minute because this morning we were thinking about getting the car to the right place at the right time to get repaired within our budget. So I got to the internet this morning and said, "Shit, no blog post!" and the Lady of the House suggested the topic, so I'm running with it.

She actually suggested the importance of a car, which is a big deal. I just decided to expand it because of how often the correct tool or a working piece of equipment would make our lives much easier. The importance of a car is obvious to all of us living outside of a city like Boston, New York, or Prague. You have to have a car, or you can't go anywhere, can't get to work, can't see people. Effectively you can't live without a car in day to day life. That sort of vital necessity of a car that we are all familiar with is especially important in homesteading. It's come up all the time in our lives since we started on this mad adventure. A splitting maul makes life much more bearable

The reason the tractor photo is up top is simple, our first piece of equipment we really needed to work, and didn't have working was a tractor. With a tractor digging beds would be done by now, I could have started work on a cold storage facility, and we wouldn't have needed to buy the snow blower. But, lacking the snow blower, our first winter we lacked the proper equipment, and shoveled the driveway until our bodies gave out, and we had a sheet ice slide instead for months. There's plenty of other examples going on around the house, even right now. Having the correct shovel, and yes there is a difference. Those of you who keep up with us recognize the broken shovel. We Had to get a new shovel to keep digging garden beds because a flat nosed transfer shovel is not a round nosed digging shovel, not even a little bit. So I guess the point of this post is, make sure you spend the money to get the right tools to do what you are aiming to do, without them your life will be much more difficult! Right now, we're looking at what sorts of tools would make our lives more tenable.
1: A vehicle with more transportation space, probably a pickup truck.
2: A tractor.
3: A wheel barrow because carting around 5 gallon buckets of dirt and rocks isn't the most efficient thing ever.
4: A mattock for digging because, while shovels are great for digging, if you want to break up hard ground you use a mattock if you don't have a back hoe.

Those are really the big tools that we should have to do what we're trying to do. There's also things like rain barrels, fencing and so on that we'll need to do a lot of what we want long term, but those aren't so much tools as supplies. We'll work on the tools we need, but lack of them is definitely in the forefront of our minds right now as we try to get the plants we have in the ground before we run out of time.

Mother Nature Strikes

As you may or may not know, the Western Massachusetts area I live in got hit hard by an unseasonable snow storm. We unlike the rest of the area never lost power, but we did have other things to take care of. Like hand shoveling the 200 yard long driveway so we could get out for work, and so our friends could get to us for warm space to sleep, hot food, and a shower. Unfortunately this means my hands are not doing so well for typing at the moment. Posts will resume on Thursday with a discussion of the storm and what it did.

Quick Hit: The Value Of Friends

There is more to say about the value of friends than just one short post, but it's worth making a quick start on it. One of the things I've been working on is a finished room in one of our outbuildings to use as an art studio/sitting area. This particular space was one of the big draws of our place, and was something we were enthusiastic about when moving in. Unfortunately there has been a bit of a debacle with the local building inspector, and things have gotten slowed down by 3 months. Unsurprisingly then when things started moving again, I wanted to get things done as fast as possible. To that end, when I had to insulate 800 square feet of ceiling, I called in friends.

Two friends showed up on 3 day notice, and helped out with the rather unpleasant job of doing ceiling fiberglass insulation. It was a learning experience for both of them which may be valuable to one of them who has been doing work on her own house. That said, both of them were covered in fiberglass and itching thoroughly by the time it was done. The value is obvious, I have friends, they showed up and helped cutting down the time this took significantly. It meant that I got that 800 square feet done within 5 hours rather than 15, or more. Not only that, neither of them asked to be paid (which I can't afford right now). They just know that if they need a hand, I'll come give it if I can do so at all.

Chances are over time, you will make acquaintances and friends with a variety of skills and abilities. As you homestead draw on those skills and abilities. Chances are you don't know how to be a plumber, an electrician, framer, finisher, floor installer, foundation layer, insulator, painter, excavator, lumberjack, farmer, animal expert, butcher . . . etc. Use the people you meet to learn what you can, and get done what needs to get done. Chances are you can do something that they can't and need done, or you can simply offer your time and labor helping out. Don't be afraid to help folks out "for free." In the end it will end up coming back and helping you when you need to reach out for help.