Wandering animals, and ethics vs feelings.

It's another rainy day with no great photos to share, and fortunately I've been thinking about ethics again. Before I get there though, we have a couple things going on around the homestead. First the turkey is missing this morning, and there's no exploded poof of feathers. I suspect she's going looking for a tom that will give her what she wants since I'm clearly not doing it for her. I hope she comes home soon, and we'll keep you updated. The second thing is, somehow in the weather changes the hutch with Dawn and her daughter ended up open. On the big up side, when I walked up and picked dawn's daughter up, she didn't run anywhere but back to the hutch and let me put her back in. The benefits of having well socialized rabbits. I guess being outside in the rain wasn't as much fun as she thought. Below the cut, let's get on to some thinking.

Turkey thoughts.changing coops.

Today the turkey has a lot of our attention. Not because she's doing poorly, quite the contrary, she's doing very well. We're very happy to have her around as well, as I think she has a lot to do with our poultry being unmolested. Just after dawn, and before full dark she hangs out on top of the chicken coop to insure the chickens are safe. As folks have mentioned, a lot of predators go off the height rule. Turkeys in addition to being powerful birds, show up as "big" to foxes and probably are very discouraging to them. It's a very nice thing to have.

Ice and balance.

Well, we successfully got down the driveway this morning, but it was something of an adventure. We've officially discovered the limitation of YakTrax, and have recommendations on more robust replacements for them. On a slope of this grade, with hard black ice at low temperatures, the YakTrax aren't even gripping. You're just relying on your balance, and limiting contact with the ice. The areas I shoveled all the way down are actually the most dangerous now, but they will be the first to melt, so I did make the right choice at least, but there will be a lot of salt. This brings up one of the things I've thought about many times since starting to homestead.

Many good photos around the house.

The Lady of the House has graced us with photos from her higher quality camera, and it makes a hug difference. I love seeing the really good photos, especially since she's been getting better day by day at framing shots which really reduces the preparation work of photos. You can tell because I have a huge mishmash of photos today. As you can see Above Dorado still is our floppy bunny of please pet me. Every day when I bring food he of all of the rabbits wants me to open the hutch and pet him. I've been trying to make an effort to do so since I know it makes him happy. It's tougher than it used to be, I'm getting up at the same time and doing the same chores, but I'm so much more fatigued than I was pre Critter small things seem harder.

Sometimes you have to eat the pork chop.

Today we're going to talk about a topic that we aren't necessarily fond of, and that's the reality of food when you leave your home. The quote in the title comes from The Compassionate Carnivore by Catherine Friend. To paraphrase a chapter in her book, sometimes you can't eat perfectly, and you just have to eat the (deep fried) pork chop. If you want a good read, that's a book well worth it. It was one of the books that have informed the basis of our philosophy. I want to discuss that a bit today since it became a focus for the Lady of the House and I as we traveled to a convention to sell her art.

At home it's relatively easy for us to talk about eating well. We have a yard full of greens to eat, not all of which we planted or even have to work for. We've built our lives at home around trying to eat well, and while we aren't perfect we do well. When you leave the house though things HAVE to change. Restaurants aren't geared around ethical eating, or even healthy eating most of the time. Some areas are worse than others of course, but even in good areas most food in our price range isn't ethical food, and if we're out with friends at a restaurant, or at their house we aren't going to examine every aspect of our meal, demand ethically raised and cared for food, or not eat.Whether it's because we need to eat, or we want to not be anti-social, or not offend our friends when they want to feed us. Sometimes we just have to eat what's in front of us. That's exacerbated when traveling outside of our "home range" as we did last weekend.

When traveling one can only bring so much food with you on a practical level, and what you bring has to be non perishable. That means preserved most of the time. We brought a fair amount of good food with us, and tried as much as possible to eat it, we even did fairly well. That said we also ended up eating fast food 4 times over the course of 4 days. In all 4 of the cases it came down to we'd either been working, or traveling all day long, and just needed some hot food. I'm going to be honest, I didn't even think about food ethics for 3 of them, I just needed food, and I needed it now so I didn't fall asleep while driving. So where does that leave us, given that we try to live better than that? The big thing in my mind is, making small changes in our every day lives matter more than occasional lapses. It's part of our philosophy of, small changes are better than no change. Obviously, the better we can do, the happier we'll be with ourselves, but if we're going to maintain this dual life, sometimes, we'll just have to eat the pork chop.

Thinking about chickens and what we're doing.

Of course on a post mostly about chickens I'm going to start with a bunny photo because they were being adorable when I came out this morning, and wanted attention. Of course, that meant I gave it to them because when they want pettins, I want to give them pettins. They're looking good, growing fast, and eating everything in the world that is provided to them. No wonder they've grown so well with eating how they have. But now over to chicken discussion.

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!

More rainy day thoughts: Why we started, how we will continue.

Another day of rain, this time it's a significant down pour. As we call it in this area a Noreaster, in Texas we'd call it a gullywasher. It's not the best sort of weather for a 45 - 50 degree day, but it'll help the water level for the area which is low for a number of the reservoirs. The chickens aren't getting time out wandering and free ranging because I don't want the high winds that have come with it blowing them around the yard and getting them injured or lost, unable to find their way back to get dry and warm. They objected strongly as I left this morning for work, I could even hear their objections in the car.

Since without photos there isn't much to talk about homestead side other than that the Lady of the House still hasn't given birth to the Critter, and we're going to be doing another work day Saturday, I'm going to have another day of thoughts on Homesteading.

Rainy day thoughts on homesteading and hobby farming, and which we are.

On this rainy Thursday there is a lot going on, but not a lot to talk about it looks like. It is a good reminder of just how much the weather affects our day to day life, and controls what we can and can't do. Today though, it isn't changing what we were going to be doing. Almost all of what we are doing is preparing for the arrival of the Critter with house cleaning, and baby stuff preparation. Other than doing daily animal chores we haven't been doing anything really "homestead" related. At least, not homestead related beyond the fact that we live there. No photos worth getting from today or yesterday, so it's another old photo post.

Actually, on that note I wanted to think about homesteading and hobby farming. Before going on with the discussion let's set out some definitions.

An intentional community concept brainstorm

Things have been a bit hairy since last Thursday to say the least. I don't have photos today of any sort for which I apologize. All I have is a landscape by the Lady of the House.

What I'm going to talk about today is a concept I've been kicking around that the Lady of the House tentatively supports based on finding solutions to some of the glaring problems, and resolution of some details. The idea is of building an intentional community based around ethical living and eating, art, and feminism, without rejecting technology.

That's a mouth full. How can we pare that down?

An intentional community based around food, ethics, and art.

Thoughts on the influence of my SciFi love on homesteading.

Well, today is a day of forgetting things, but fortunately only non vital things. For purposes of the blog the
most important thing I've forgotten is to take photos. Not by far the Only thing of course as I left the chickens water outside over night which is only non vital because we have running hot water, and that deals with frozen water right quick. I'm not sure if it's the time of year and the changed light that's made me a bit less attentive than I should be, or simply the stress level from non homesteading things. For yesterday I can actually blame creaming the back of my head on a pallet shelf at work so hard I saw double for part of the day Tuesday, this morning was just me screwing up. But, since I don't have new photos to talk about, I'm just going to talk about my thoughts and some consideration I've been giving lately. Oh, and include some of the better photos from the past of the blog. Sorry about the slightly rambling nature of the post below, but if you have the time to read I'd love to hear responses.