Recent Entries

The longest night approaches

Well winter is upon us here. Its cold and snowy outside but we have been keeping warm, for the most part. The big news is we are now in full egg production. All three of our hens are putting out eggs! The down side is there wont be any fresh chicken for the stew pot but hey I can wait. Im currently taking a bit of a break from trying to get the water heater set up for them. We have been defrosting and using warm water to try and keep their water from turning solid but with a 5 day trip coming up we figured we needed a real heater.

We have already started getting seed catalogs which means as soon as holiday hectics are out of the way it will be time to start planing. Im already working on the designs for the new potting shed and expanded chicken run(we want to get a few for birds next year) so even the next year project list is starting to grow. oh well winter is a time for planning

I need to get out into the woods and do a bit of firewood harvesting. I havent used the chain saw since I hurt my back but I have split a few logs. as long as I stop when I can start to feel it I seam to be ok. I just have to keep myself from pushing it.

Well anyways That is the news for the north lands. Hope everyone has a happy holidays

~Fuzzy

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a weekend in review (sort of)

With my back being out we didn't do a whole lot of running around this weekend. Friday we went of with my parents on a quest for produce. It started off as simply going apple picking but the place we usually go is still closed for some reason. So we ended up stopping at a road side stand and buying a lot of apples with plans for pies, sauce and butter. We also ended up questing for pickling cucumbers. It's the end of the cucumber season and mine did very poorly this year. We found some and pickles were made.

Saturday we went to the Tall Ships festival, which for me was a mistake as I spent most of the day trying to block out the pain to a manageable level. But I think fun was had by all.

Sunday we processed the remainder of the pickles, made 4 apple pies (1 that we are eating now and 3 for the freezer), some apple sauce and we are working on apple butter. A birthday cake was also made for my mom. Now I am working on making chicken stock to make chicken soup.

Our canners have been putting in some hours and I have been enjoying watching our pantry fill up. But that's how I think fall should be.

In other news, here is a picture of our new chicks!

~Fuzzy

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: home

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souvenirs

So today, with an unexpected guest in tow, we went to the local German heritage festival for beer, sausage, and potato pancakes. It was a nice afternoon filled with the sounds of polka and the smells of German foods.

For some reason I felt that we should get some souvenirs, so I got us a pair of pint glasses and pair of Silkies.

For those of you who don't know what a Silkie is, it is a chicken, a very fluffy chicken. Our new chicks are white silkies which are very adorable, as all chicks are.

I have spent the evening being amused at the fact we bought a pair of chicks on impulse yet other than having to get some food for them, we were able to set up a living space within 10 minutes of being home.

Fuzzy

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Change of plans

Hello friends!

We need to make an unfortunate but necessary change in our garden plan next year. It has taken us three years to realize what needs to be done, and it pains me to have to say it, but the consequences have become too great.

We need to plant fewer tomato vines next season.

I know, I know... what are we thinking? All this space, and all this sunlight, and decent soil, and... and all this space!

But the load has become too heavy -- literally. We don't have enough good, strong poles to stake the tomatoes and the vines collapsed the cages we made this year. The tomato portion of the garden is an absolute mess.

We were too busy/ignorant/distracted to keep up with fungus control, so they're all half-dead. The slugs eat any nearly-ripe fruit within a foot of the ground. Which is most of them. The sprawling vines have overshadowed -- and thus killed -- several basil plants, and are inhibiting the growth of several others.

And worst of all, even after all this destruction, we are still losing embarrassing quantities of tomatoes because we can't pick and/or process them quickly enough and they are rotting away.

Tomatoes. Rotting away. In my garden.

This has to stop.

We're going to try to can this weekend since we *both will be home for more than a few waking hours at the same time* and probably can salvage enough to put a few jars in the cupboard. I've been oven-roasting what I can, and we've got more than a gallon of amazing caramelized tomatoey goodness in our freezer. But it's still outrageous how much food -- TOMATOES at that -- we are wasting.

So. Fewer than two dozen plants next year. For real.

Which means some of you need to visit us in May to take all our just-in-case seedlings off our hands.

Tiff

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mission statement

Mission statement

Hello, friends!

Fuzzy and I have decided to operate this as a joint blog, focusing on the silly things we are doing to try to transform our suburban-reared selves into a crazy survivalist homesteading family.

We are lazy and easily distracted, we make a lot of mistakes, we are busy and we are swinging a lot of this on our own, so we thought it might be good to document exactly what we are doing and why, in the hopes that one of you might be inspired. We also think it would be good to document exactly what we think goes wrong when we do something, in the hopes that one of you might learn from our errors. Also, when we find/make a home for keeps in a few years we need a means of remembering our thoughts.

So anyway, as indicated in our first post, we will be discussing gardening, homesteading, parenting, simplifying, hearth-building, and otherwise agonizingly slowly creating a somewhat self-sufficient life. Other thougts belong elsewhere.

Hope you can find something useful!

Tiff

First post

Our first post. Gardening, homesteading, food, parenting, frugality, earth, life. Joint account, crazy child who needs to go outside immediately, more later.

Hello world!