First Sign of Spring

Spring has to be around the corner if the number of seed catalogs in the mail box is any sort of indicator. We love getting them just as all gardeners probably do and we spend lots of hours comparing the offering of each company. We try to stick with organic seed as much as possible but with a growing season that is usually about 90 days it is hard to find every thing we want. We like the open pollinated varieties too but same problem there. We are going to use more low hoop house tunnels this year to try to extend our season as much as possible. Johnny's Select Seeds has a bending jig for sale so that you can make your own hoops from electrical conduit. They  have a excellent video on their web page that shows how to do it. With the cool summers we typically have it is hard to get those heat loving vegetables like tomatoes and peppers mature early in the season. We also want to try starting some sweet corn in the green house to see if we can get sweet corn earlier than the middle  of August which is when it was ready last year. Well ,I better get busy and start sending out my seed orders, spring is just around the corner!

Old Tools

This is a burr mill we use to grind corn for our cow and chickens. It is probably over 100 years old. It belonged to my grandfather and he used it to grind grain for his sheep.I'm not sure if he used a tractor or some other engine to drive it but it is designed to be belt driven. We only grind a small amount of grain at a time so I took off the belt drive pulley and put on the big hand fly wheel you see in the pic. Now we not only get the corn ground but we get our cardio workout at the same time. It is missing the shaker mechanism it once had to help feed the grain into the auger. I have to wonder if anything I buy now and use every day will last me my lifetime let alone be usable for my grand kids. We tend to buy hand tools at auctions and flea markets or sometimes even at antique shops. Many of the tools our grand parents used are perfect for us off grid homesteaders. They have already been tested for durability and function! The strangest part is that I have bought "antique" tools that were much less expensive than a brand new version of the same thing.

Bug Patrol

 We like these little bantam chickens for bug patrol. They forage for bugs all summer long and seem to make a significant dent in the tick population. This area is over run with Limes' Disease so any reduction in the ticks in our area is welcome. This rooster is a Belgian Bearded D'Anver. The hens are tiny and very friendly. We have various egg layers but we keep those in a run because they dig such big holes to dust in and so we can find their eggs easily. These little guys don't do so much damage to the yard and we let them hatch out a few chicks each year. They are great mothers and it is fun watching them herd their brood around. We have tried several different breeds of egg layers but have not been that impressed with any of them yet. We need chickens that have a small comb so it doesn't freeze in our cold winters.They also need to be fairly heavy  and well feathered for the same reason. We are going to put some solar powered lights in the hen house to see if it gets the hens laying again. We are at the 45th parallel so winters are dark, under 9 hours of light a day near the solstice, more than Alaska and Canada but not enough to keep hens laying!  This year we are going to try either Jersey Giants or Light Brahmas which we are hoping will be a true dual purpose bird. Maybe they will work out.

Target Practice

   One disadvantage of living in the woods is that your livestock is a lot closer to any predators in the area.  Wolves, coyotes, foxes, bobcats, and  black bears all call this area home and, with the exception of bobcats, are fairly common.We haven't kept bees for the last few years because of bears raiding and destroying the hives but that is the only real problem we have had with the large predators so far. We do have a guard llama with the goats.  Small predators such as raccoon, mink,skunk, and weasel are a bigger problem. They are not as afraid of people and much more likely to get into the hen house or the rabbit house. Last year we had a weasel kill seven half grown rabbits in the middle of the day. All of this is part of  the reason for target practice. The other part is just something fun and interesting to do outside in the winter! The top pic is Ann plinking cans with my old model 67 Winchester.22. The lower pick is Ann with a new slingshot we picked up recently. Compared to the forked stick and pieces of
inner tube I used as a kid this thing is high tech. It  uses tubing for the rubbers and even has sights. We bought marbles for ammo which fly very straight. Now we just have to keep practicing so we can hit something with it! It is quite powerful. At twenty feet or so it will punch through heavy cardboard so I guess it would send any  smaller marauding critters on their way. Practicing with firearms can get expensive if you use any of the larger calibers so we do our practicing with the .22 caliber rifle. It is all that is needed to eliminate smaller predators if needed. I try to make sure our critters are housed securely so I don't have to kill predators that are just trying to make their living. Sometimes you only have poor choices and I like to be prepared so we will keep on practicing!

Mud Oven

I love projects that let me try something new and different  without spending any money! This mud oven was one of those.I did spend a few dollars for some bagged wood shavings because I didn't have enough saw dust. The saw dust is mixed with some of the clay as a insulating layer all around the inner fire chamber. I also used some fire brick that I had for the floor of the oven. We have used the oven a few times but I think I got carried away and made it a little large for it's intended purpose. I got the instructions from a book, Build Your Own Earth  Oven, by Kiko Denzer with  Hannah Field. The book is very well written and very easy to use as you build your oven. The book also has lots of recipes and info about sour dough bread which was what we made in ours.  Because I made it too large it takes a fair amount of wood to get it hot enough to hold heat long enough. Then once I do have it hot enough I don't have anything to use up the residual heat except for drying the next load of wood. Part of this is just poor planning on my part. We will try to use it more this coming year but I think I may have to tear it down and build one a more appropriate size. This one is restaurant/ community  size rather than house hold. Fortunately there is lots more dirt where I got this from.

Homemade Wine

 Every body should have hobbies and I've got bunches of them. One that I have had for years is making wine. It satisfies that basic urge to create as well as resulting in a tasty beverage. Well, sometimes it is a tasty beverage, sometimes not so much. One of my sister-in-laws is a very accomplished wine maker and it would be hard to tell her wine from some professional vintages. She uses methods that are similar, on a small scale, to those a vineyard would use. My wine making is a little more, shall we say,experimental. I actually only have one wine recipe, just change the name of the fruit and I'm good to go. This method does have some draw backs of course. Some of my vintages seem to require more aging than others. I have a bunch of elderberry mead that has been in the bottle for  3 or 4 years and does not seem to be in a hurry to finish aging. Oh well, I had a grape mead that I started to throw away after hauling it with us on several moves that turned out very nice. I called it my 500 Mile Mead cause that's how far I had hauled it around. This year I made 2 batches of wine, a wild raspberry and a elder flower. Both are drinkable, the raspberry a bit too dry, and the elder flower a bit to sweet. I have the elder flower cut half and half with spring water and it is very tasty like that. The raspberry has a awesome raspberry flavor but unless you like very dry wine it can use a little wash with it. Making wine can be a enjoyable hobby and if you can pick wild fruit it doesn't cost that much to get started. I'll put my basic recipe on the recipe page when I get a chance.

If at first you don't succeed

 We grew mangle/ sugar beets this year and as you can see they did good. Admittedly the ones in the pic are trophy size compared to the majority but they were all good sized. We planted them with the intention of using them for livestock feed and that is what we did with most of them. Cattle really like them and our steer and milk cow got most of them but the pigs and chickens ate their share too. We ran them through a old meat grinder and added them to our normal grain ration to extend it. This worked well and we will try some again this year.
  Some time during the growing season we read a article about making sugar from sugar beets at home so we thought we would give that a try since we had beets to try it with. I'm not sure if mangles are the same thing as sugar beets or not . These were quite sweet if you took a bite of them. At any rate our sugar experiment was a flop to say the least. I thought we followed the directions closely so maybe mangles and sugar beets are different. It would be nice to be able to add another sugar to our maple sugar production.  This year I will make sure that whatever seed we get is called sugar beet.

Mushroom Experiment

This log had a nice flush of oyster mushroom on it last fall. We had read  that you can sometimes get them to produce a flush of mushrooms indoors. We have it in a bucket of water and it is sitting in the shower so every time we go in there we dump a little water over it to keep it damp. It is suppose to take 4 to 6 weeks to start growing mushrooms again. We have only had it in the house for about two weeks so we will have to wait a while yet. If this works I have several more pieces of it to try. Oyster mushrooms are delicious and it would be great to have fresh ones in January!

Good for what ails ya.

 Ann next to big yellow birch.

 A nice walk in the woods is good for man and beast. Ann and I took a short hike near Mondeaux Flowage last week. The snow cover is still light so we didn't need snowshoes. We had gone out to get our weekly supple of spring water from the artesian well there. Since it was a mild day and we had time, we made a circuit up the hill and through the woods looking for chaga conks. We spotted some very nice ones but they were all up to high for us to get them. There are some very big hardwoods in that area and since it is part of the park rather than the federal forest, nothing has been cut in a long time. We definitely have added it to our list of places to go mushroom hunting come spring.  We found a maple with a nice bunch of oyster mushroom frozen on it and another that had lion's mane growing before freeze up. We found two varieties of  hedgehog mushroom near this area last year.It is hard to beat old growth hardwood forest for mushroom hunting.We both came home feeling much better. Cabin fever is not an imaginary ailment!

Here's a pic of one of those chaga conks.This one was not as nice as several others we found but they were all up high like this. We did pick one small conk that Ann spotted along side the road on our way home.

Here is another conk, just as high as the other. We found four nice ones in this area but all at this height.

Canning Butter

 If you have read some of my previous post you know we have lots of butter to store. We have been putting it in a freezer we have at Ann's son's house. Having a freezer is a great convenience when you raise most of your own food but is a hard item to run  when you are off grid. Our solution has been to have the freezer at my stepson's house but I always feel like we are cheating at being off grid. After finding a link about canning butter we had to try it. Here is the  link,   www.familycow.proboards.com , search canning butter for the details. We really like the way it taste and since canning it pasteurizes it, it can stay out of the fridge without spoiling. Handy when you don't have a fridge! One more item we don't need to have in the freezer.