Bags-O-Flour and food storage

I posted a while back about Food Storage. It's something that is very important to us. We are not yet to a point where we could go without commercial stores, but we are moving that direction. I'm not talking about being free of them for everyday needs, although we are certainly reducing our dependence on them, I'm talking instead about getting to a point where if there were a catastrophe, or food shortage, or monumental rise in food costs for a prolonged period we would be less impacted than we would if we were like every "normal" family out there. I don't want to scare anyone, and honestly I'm not scared myself, but I am cautiously pessimistic. That is to say I don't have enough faith in the current economy and global stability to not hedge my bets.

One of the primary things that goes hand in hand with having food storage is eating it. If you store a basement full of whole wheat, beans, rice, oats, etc. but you live daily on wonder bread, take-out and Big Gulps, your setting yourself up for failure in my opinion. We eat a lot of the foods that we store on or in our regular diet. Beans and rice are regular dishes around our house and many of the other foods like oats, flour, sugar and the like are of course regular additions to almost everything. We spent a little time with a borrowed wheat grinder this weekend grinding about 40 lbs of whole wheat flour that A~ will be starting to incorporate more into our diet as well. We placed it into 10 one-gallon zip lock bags and are going to store it in the chest freezer for later use. This is not the optimal way to use your flour just for the record. It will have some minor nutritive loss from sitting ground rather that grinding fresh, but it will be minor, and since we don't yet have our own grinder, we are at the mercy of the kindness of our neighbor.

Another component to this food storage formula will be a our 100ft diet. That's right, the garden! What better activity can we all incorporate in our homes than some sort of freedom garden. Grow things that you know your family will eat through the year, and preserve what you can for later. Try a couple of new plants too, but in limited quantities. Biodiversity is a necessity in a healthy garden, but you don't want to take up a lot of your growing space with something that you may not like. Particularly if your on a small suburban lot such as ours. Next year you can expand if you like it enough.

I began this post with a little bit of doom and gloom; a necessity, I thought, to make my point. I hope you get the point that yeah there may be some instability in the world, and yeah there's a good chance it'll get worse before it gets better. But this blog isn't about the bad things that might happen, it's about the possibilities that we CAN make happen. It's about making the possibilities...Realities. They won't happen overnight, but they will come if we decide that they will, and truly believe in them. One thing is certain though. Do nothing, and you will get exactly that in return.

Be well all. Tomorrow should be a very good post for you chicken lovers out there. Ooooo... the suspense...Till then.

P~

Food Storage guide. - A fairly comprehensive guide to starting a family food storage program.

The boys are back in town...Spring is wonderful

This weekend, is the first one that I've seen the bees in the yard. Not Yellow Jackets, I saw a couple of those a few weeks ago, these were Bees. Ah yes. Spring has sprung and the Boys are back in the garden. I thought you might enjoy a little eye candy courtesy of the Macro lens...

It's amazing isn't it? How do they hang on like that?

They seems to really like the grape hyacinths on the side yard. Give them another couple of weeks, or less, and they'll be all over the first time we'll get our Lilac to bloom (We're so excited... we love lilacs!!)

I've found over the last couple of seasons that we've been moving to a more organic and natural way of tending our gardens, that I have had a marked increase in the number of bees from the first year we were here. Of course I should qualify that statement, I don't mean the first year, I mean the first real season as there was nothing in our yard the first year.

Here are a couple of the things sprouting up around my 100 foot grocery outlet.

One of the first of the 150 onion sets that were planted last weekend to poke it's head up.

The peas are popping up too. If you look at the background, you can see some mesclun mix that I plated under the trellising start to poke up as well. My hope is that by the time our temps here get too hot for the greens, maybe the peas will shade them... it could work?

Here we have a couple of sprouts from the same bed. Radishes that are growing along the front of the bed, and some spinach sprouts that are in rows inside the bed



I also managed to get a couple of the "leggy" sprouts from the peat pellets into some larger planters. Those are mostly tomatoes; Brandywine, Hamson and San Marzano, and a couple of butternut squash that my uncle sent to me.

I love spring... such promise for the future, life springing up all over... I hope you all had a great weekend and that your gardens are waking up as well.

P~

Oh...OK then?

Well you know that Summers just around the corner, or at least that Spring is in full effect when you start getting the knocks on the door from the lawn "Care" specialists. A~ informed me this afternoon when I got home that we had had three different companies stop by to talk to her this week. Two of them knocked on the door and gave her the pitch. She informed them that we are an organic house and didn't like to put chemicals on the lawn. They countered, as a good salesman would, with "You do know that we do have fully organic fertilizers that we can use?" Never the one to be outmaneuvered by a slick salesman, A~ parried with "We like to know where everything that we use comes from, so we only buy from local farmers and suppliers." Well, this was enough to convince both of the first companies that we were some kind of strange suburban freaks and deter them. While generally speaking what she said was true, we do like to buy from local farmers and suppliers quite a bit, we have never bought any fertilizers from anyone like that. But nonetheless, if they can't take no for an answer, they need to expect some embellishment right?

The last company to stop by had a couple of people walking around the sidewalk in front of our house looking and pointing at our yard when A~ saw them. She went outside and asked if she could help them with anything. After they gave her generally the same pitch, she and they exchanged much the same conversation as the previous ones. This company, to their credit, was not ready to give up just yet and made a final attempt to win our business by adding "Well you know if you don't like to use fertilizers, we do have some organic products that will kill those dandelions for you." What do you think she said? She tells me she looked them dead in the face and matter-of-factly said "We eat the dandelions, so we don't want any chemicals on them either." Oh man, I wish I could have been there to see the look they gave her when they finally said, "Oh... OK then... well, have a nice day...?!" Priceless! I love that woman!

You know I understand why their in business, it is nice to have a lush green lawn. It's nice to have large sweet tomatoes in the winter too, but are they really worth the price? God made the earth to run in cycles. The ground needs to have some down time too. People burn out and get sick when they run too long, getting up early and working till late, gleaning ever more and more production from themselves. I shouldn't think that the ground is any different. Is feeding it fertilizers to increase production and pesticides and weed killers to keep the diseases and pests as bay really much different than a person working too many hours and taking stimulants to "Stay alert", and vitamins and medicines to stay "healthy"? No. What happens to the people that do that? They get sick, tired, unhealthy and miserable, and over all their time and effort may increase, but their true production and quality level decreases. It's just not a sustainable way to live. Just the same, I may be able to grow things faster and longer with the help of some of today's finest NPK wonder drugs for the garden. But over time the ground will suffer, quality will suffer and the health of myself, my family and my friends will suffer. It's not sustainable. At some point, something has to give.

As A~ and I began to change a lot of the things in our daily lives last year, there came a natural point where one thing led to another. Does it make sense to try to have a healthier home environment if your not going to eat healthier? Why bother to eat healthier if everything you buy is just full of tons of chemicals and growth hormones? Why grow your own food if your just going to mimic all the unsustainable practices that you're trying to get away from to begin with? And on it goes. This is why I refer very often to these changes as "the journey" that we're on. It really is a journey from one place, of relative ignorance of our actions and their effects, to another of greater participation in the process and connection to the world around us. Thanks for peeking in once and a while and traveling with us on it.

P~

Thought for Today

It’s been a while since I’ve shared a thought for today. I heard this song the other day and thought it would be a nice one to share.

 

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery,

None but ourselves can free our mind.

~Robert Nesta Marley (Bob Marley) – Redemption Song

 

Remember, we are only ones in control of our state of mind. “They” cannot make us angry unless “We” give them permission.

Own your happiness and Be The Change.

P~

Sprouting progress

I am so tired, and just got out of a hot bath, so the post will be very short tonight.

A couple of the sprouting beds that we have going on in house this year.

We've never really been able to get a handle on the sprouting indoors thing. We do sprout a lot of things indoors, but have generally only had decent luck with beans, cukes, and Zucchinis. For whatever reason, we just don't seem to nail down the right date to plant them in advance so that we will have them for the season.

I do have a plan however. A~ and I were talking the other day and I said how much I wish I could have a green house; both to grow food through the bulk of the winter, as well as being able to sprout lots of sprouts in the spring. We are NOT the type to run out and buy a greenhouse, regardless of how well we can justify it. But we are the type to multi-purpose and re-use existing items to accomplish the same end. Some of the longer readers here may remember when we completed our re-purposed concrete project . In that post was this picture of our pergola that I built in the back yard a couple of years ago. What we decided to look into, is to add a temporary siding of sorts by wrapping a heavy gauge clear tarp around the outside of the frame of that pergola, and doing the same to the inside of the frame. This would give it a 4" airspace for insulation, and should allow me to grow through winter, as well as to start sprouts and harden them off in the spring.
Never too early to start thinking ahead... now, if I can only remember to rotate my sprouts tomorrow to keep them from getting any more slanted.
P~

Goings on.

You might have noticed the postings being a little thin around here. That's not because I haven't been doing anything, but quite the contrary. As I said earlier in the week the weekend was a busy one, and it hasn't slowed. I've been able to get a little work done each night on the chicken coop. It'll be a Cadillac of a coop when I'm done I think, a "Coop de ville" so to speak. So far I have finished the basic framing and completed the Nesting box addition to the end of the enclosure.
You can see that I made the coop to have the main hen house well off the ground. I plan to use the same basic method that I outlined in "Small-Scale Coop Care" to build a deep mulch in the bottom of the coop by slowly adding carbonaceous material (straw or sawdust) on top of each layer of manure and will slowly build up the depth of the base of the coop with a rich compost base. Having the hen house well off the ground will allow me to "uppen" the level of the floor and still give the birds enough room to mill about comfortably.
Here's what the nesting box looks like so far. I'm only making it a two birder, because I don't want to encourage bedding in them, only nesting for egg laying. The missing top to the box when finished will be able to be opened from outside to retrieve the eggs. I will be putting a roosting pole across the front of the box, and another in the center of the house and higher up. You may be able to see the metal brackets on the horizontal posts. These are there to allow me to use a removable tray for manure collection. The object of this is to work with the 1/2 inch wire mesh floor that I will be using (at least on half of the floor.) to allow me to close off the bottom in the winter to keep the warmth in while still having ease of cleaning. In the summer here it can get over 100 F regularly so this will allow me to remove the closed floor entirely in order to allow ventilation and breezes and will let the droppings fall to the deep mulch below.
Here is another view with the nesting box on the back wall where you can see fairly well the layout of the whole coop. The little square in the near wall will be the entrance, and the wall just to the left of it will be a large door that I'll be able to open for maintenance/cleaning. I should be able to get this done by the end of the weekend,if not sooner, then it'll be decorating time. I mean, if it's gonna be in A~'s yard it's gotta be relatively pretty right?

Hope you're all having a great week. Till tomorrow.
P~

Chickens 101 - pasting up

If you caught my post from yesterday, I mentioned that I wanted to talk about something potentially lethal to young chicks. Allow me a little digression first. Even before I received my first order of chicks, A~ bought me a very good book, "Living with Chickens". I enjoy it very much for it's simple easy reading. It's not a dry reference manual by any means, so if you prefer that, this is not the book for you. But if you like a good dose of solid information mixed with some personal stories and lots of great photos this may be a great book for you. I get no benefit from referring this book to you, but as I said before, good products deserve good word of mouth advertising. And enough on that...

The issue that I did want to take a minute to cover is called "pasting up"; you can see a picture of it below. It's a rather poorly named condition I think, as it really gives you no idea what it's all about. The reason I mentioned the Living with Chickens book was because it was in it's pages that I first heard about this problem. Chickens will have a tendency, I have found, to hunker down and not do anything when they are stressed. This is particularly true with your chicks, especially after transporting them, but really whenever their schedule is changed. One result of this is that they will often not drink enough water. (This reasoning is purely observational, and not based on any specific expertise, for the record.) This seems to be the cause of "Pasting Up", as I have only had it happen after some sort of shock to the birds.
What pasting up is, in essence, is an unusually thick and "pasty" manure that gets stuck to the chicks feathers around the vent area. In and of itself, this isn't a problem. However, if left unchecked, it can build on itself throughout a matter of hours and eventually close off the chicks vent entirely. The bird, in this case, will not be able to expel waste properly, and will get basically backed up. When this happens, the chicks will stop eating or drinking, because they are filled up. Chicks that don't drink water at least, don't last long. So what do we as responsible chick keepers do? Well, basically the same thing we would do for a baby that messed all over itself, clean it. The picture above is what a chickens vent should look like. I've found that a paper towel soaked with warm water will do the trick very nicely. The chick will complain very loudly, but it is for the best. you may even have to pull a couple of the down feathers that it's stuck to, but again, it's for the best. The bird I lost from the first order that I received was due to this. I didn't know what to look for for the first couple days, and when I found the pasting up advice I immediately knew what it was. By that point it was too late and the chick never recovered.

I know a couple of readers, and a some of the other blogs that I frequent, had had some problems with their chicks this spring. I don't know if this could have had anything to do with it, but since I know there are a couple of you that are looking into getting birds, I wanted to share the information and maybe save a chick sometime down the line. I would have liked to have heard about it sooner. Now that I do know about it, I was able to find it immediately in a couple of our new chicks, and so far no difficulties.

Till tomorrow all...

P~