Homesteading Diary 11
2008
12/29/08: Well, we're almost at a New Year again. Our Christmas was fairly quiet, as he had the flu. I did go down the hill to eat dinner with the kids & grandkids. It was a good meal, but it would have been a lot more fun if he hadn't been sick. It's hard to believe we've been online for over 10 years now. We only have one puppy left out of the litter of Pom puppies, as we sold the next to the last one today. Hope you all had a good Christmas, and we wish you many blessings throughout the New Year!
12/8/08: It's been a busy time with the Thanksgiving holiday. We had a litter of Pom puppies born on 10/29/08, so they're almost 6 weeks old. We've been getting ready for Christmas now too. We have a tiny little Christmas tree decorated and up on top of our entertainment center. No room here for the Christmas town, but eventually that will change. He has been cutting mountains of firewood, and out of the house a lot more than usual with the holiday season. It's about time to start Christmas baking. We're hoping to sell all the puppies in this litter for extra Christmas money and car insurance.
11/12/08: We lost our entire bulletin board for about 3 weeks, towards the end of September. We finally recovered the database, but only after we built a new version 3 phpBB board. So now we're in the process of transferring information posts from the old database to the new board. We've been canning white potatoes and dehydrating onions, still adding to our pantry for the winter. I have a pot of beans & bacon on cooking for supper tonight & will make corn muffins to go with that. We've had our first frost already, and the gardens are obviously done. Our tobacco plant did well this year, growing to over 9 feet tall. We harvested a lot of seed pods from it, so we're hoping to plant more of it next year. I hope we have as good of luck next year as we did with this one plant this year.
In the meantime, we have houseplants once again. We had bought a small menthol plant at Bakers Creek in the spring. I left it outside on the porch stand all summer, and it thrived. We did bring it in for winter, and it's still doing good - so far, anyway. I have taken some starts off of it, and they seem to be doing good too. Our neighbor, Dianna, gave me a start off of her "ice plant". I had never heard of it and never seen one before. They are really pretty. Anyway, I had 2 longish pieces of this vine. I broke each piece into 2 pieces, so then I had 4 pieces. She said the man she bought it from told her to put the starts in dirt, throw water at it, and leave it alone. I did exactly that & left it on the porch stand over summer also. It has done great too. I have taken several starts off it to pot in other pots, and all the starts have done well too. We brought the "big one" in for winter too. I had intended to hang it in the living room, but ended up putting it in the kitchen instead, as the furnace dries the air out in the living room too much. He says I have a brown thumb when it comes to houseplants, I kill them all. LOL I hope this ice plant is "kill-proof". The rest of our houseplants are in the south windows of the guest room. The fall colors here have been absolutely gorgeous. With the woods all around us, it's pretty just to stand on the porch and LOOK.
We took the hummingbird feeders down & took them in to wash up & store for next year. I always miss the hummingbirds when they go to migrate - and then welcome them back in the spring. Our neighbors down the hill have let some loggers in to log their place, so we've been hearing them on a regular basis. Seems strange to hear "traffic noise" up here in the middle of nowhere.
Speaking of the middle of nowhere, I got something in a newsletter from OHG yesterday that I thought was pretty appropriate for us:
"Have fun talking to your neighbors be they across the back gate,
over
yonder (Jon points) or on the backside of nowhere. Just remember
that nowhere is somewhere to many folks: and depending on how you
spell it, home is NOW HERE."
I thought it was a great quote -- and fits us to a TEE.
9/7/08: By now, we've put up over 100 jars of green beans, 4 batches of salsa, lots of jelly and jam, and more. Yesterday, we did carrots -- tons and tons of carrots. He brought in 2 5-gallon buckets of them -- after the tops had been taken off and the carrots hosed off outside. We ran 6 pressure-canner loads of carrots yesterday, plus a water-bath canner load of pickled eggs. It was a very busy day.
8/17/08: We have had a very busy summer with the gardens, canning, dehydrating, etc. Cabbage has done well. The potatoes did not yield as much as we thought they would. Onions have done well. Spinach did well, but we did find out that 4 rows of it only turns into 7 pints when canned. The lettuce did extremely well. Turnips have also done well. We ate turnips instead of potatoes for a few months, because we just refused to pay $5 for 10 lb of potatoes at the grocery store. The carrots are doing very well this year - best year so far on those. The green beans have also done very well. In fact, I have gotten thoroughly sick of canning green beans this summer. Hehehe.. Okra has done well. We've made lots of okra pickles and froze breaded okra for deep-frying. The sugar snap peas... well, we only got a few handfuls. The celery seed did not come up at all. Sweet corn did ok, but we did not get near what we thought we would. Peppers have all done well. Tomatoes are in a kind of shady spot. They've done alright, and we've canned & dehydrated tomatoes, plus put up 2 batches of salsa. Cucumbers and zucchini have done well. We've made LOTS of pickles this year, and have frozen a lot of shredded zucchini, plus ate fried zucchini all summer long. The watermelons are doing okay, but the Minnesota Midget cantaloupe was a little disappointing. We have one cantaloupe on those vines. We didn't go to Jacob's Cave in the spring, but we have sold all but one of our Pom pups, and she might be sold tomorrow. That will leave Chevy and the 2 new Cavalier pups. He did end up ordering a cultivator, and he's waiting for them to call him to come and pick it up - so that should be a big help next spring.
5/21/08: Our home-building plans have been put on hold. The "settlement" hearing that we attended turned out to be unmentionable, really. The "settlement" they offered was a joke. We turned it down and left the decision in the judge's (and the Lord's) hands. We attended our annual April campout last month, and we have Jacobs Cave coming up next month. We'll have 6 Pomeranian puppies to take with us to Jacobs Cave. Our garden is all in already, which means he has been highly busy over the last few months. We bought a plow and disk for the tractor, and he's been looking at a cultivator also. We sold the big GQF incubator this spring, and he has decided to do some truck patch gardening and sell produce this year. To that end, he plowed up our 2 patches that we usually plant (the front garden and the back garden) and then plowed up several more spots around the homestead, ending up with a total of 7 garden plots to plant. This is what we have planted this year:
4/17/08: Cabbage plants: Planted in front garden 4/17 (1 40-ft
row)
Broccoli plants: Planted in front garden 4/17 (1 40-ft row)
4/21/08: Potatoes: Planted in potato patch (new ground
broken this year). 3 50-ft rows planted.
4/23/08: Onion sets: Planted in back garden. 2 42-ft
rows with 1 lb of red onions, 1 lb of white onions planted..
4/23/08: Spinach: Planted in front garden, 4 40-ft rows
planted.
4/23/08: Lettuce: Planted in front garden, 2 40-ft rows
planted.
4/23/08: Turnips: Planted in back garden, 2 42-ft rows
planted.
4/28/2008: We finished planting the back garden today, one of our previously
established garden spots, although he did make it larger this year.
Carrots: 2 rows of Danvers half-long
carrots, 42 feet rows.
Green beans: 4 rows of Blue lake bush
beans, 42 feet rows.
Okra: 1 row of Clemson spineless, 42
foot row planted.
4/30/08: Sugar snap peas planted in the big tractor tire bed.
5/1/08: Celery seed planted in the tire flower bed.
5/5/08: Sweet corn. We planted 12 rows of sweet corn today.
That is, TWELVE 110-foot rows or 1320 feet of sweet corn.
5/11/08: Planted 3 rows of tomato plants. (3 dozen).
5/12/08: Drone planted 6 more rows of 25 feet each of green beans, and one 25-foot row of various hot peppers today. That gives us a bit over 300 feet of green beans now.
5/18/08: Cucumbers: 7 hills
Zuchini: 6 hills
Bell peppers: 12 plants.
5/19/08: 8 watermelons and 4 hills of cantaloupe planted and mulched with straw! Our main gardening spots are all planted now.
It looks like we will be HIGHLY busy this summer working in the gardens. Some friends gave us "half" of a greenhouse, but it's not assembled or up yet. He is planning to build a barn/potting shed area to set the greenhouse up against.
2/25/08: We have 2 new week-old Nubian bottle boys that he went & picked up yesterday. They will be company for our buck once they get big enough. Right now, they are in a small pen with a heat lamp out in the shop. We will hopefully have 3 new litters of Pomeranian pups come spring. He has been bringing in duck eggs on a regular basis, and just starting to get chicken eggs again on a fairly regular basis. He even brought in a goose egg the other day. It looks HUGE compared to the rest. It's been so long since we had any goose eggs, it seems, that I had forgotten how big they are. LOL Spring signs are definitely popping up all over. We've had lots of ice and cold here, and I am definitely ready for spring.
2/18/08: Well, at least it's been less than 3 months
since I updated the diary.
We've been in the "new" homestead for 2 &
1/2 years now. Our temporary mobile home has been a semi-permanent solution for
living since we've been here. We've intended to build a home from the time we
bought this place, but now we're finally getting to a place where we should be
able to start building this year. By this point in time, We've looked at
dozens of different home plans, floor plans, and types of building methods.
We've talked about earth-sheltered, underground, and above-ground. We settled on
ONE of each of the 3 different types. The cost difference of building
earth-sheltered versus a regular stick-frame house is phenomenal. If we
end up having to build an above-ground home, we settled on a 1200-sq-ft log
cabin style -- here:
http://www.eplans.com/log_houses_house-plans/HWEPL58886.hwx
Then we looked at earth-sheltered homes & picked out a design that we liked
better than most, here:
http://www.earthshelteredtech.com/plan-ev.htm
and then we came across the formworks designs:
http://www.formworksbuilding.com/galleryExt.html
We sent away for the information on these formworks homes. They are tornado
proof, hurricane proof, earthquake proof. I can't wait for the information all
to get here. IF the building costs of this are comparable to the other two we
looked at, this might just be the ticket.
If we did the formworks home, we might go with a floor plan similar to the log
cabin style and add a loft over the 2 bedrooms. So we're waiting anxiously
for the information to get here. Some of this will all depend on cost
comparisons. The above-ground home will be the cheapest to build. The
earth-sheltered home is quite a bit more expensive - but then you also are
living in a home that is tornado sheltered. So, now we'll see how the formworks
compares in costs. When he first started talking about completely underground -
I thought - Oh, NO... dark, dank, livin in a cave. But these don't look like
that at all. So, we are learning lots of new things - and hoping to be
able to start construction this year sometime on our new home.
Back to Homesteading Diary 10, 2007
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2/18/08