Homestead and Folly

Para, Nat and Eddie, our three lovely ducks enjoying a dip in their pool I can't remember how the idea of keeping ducks came to pass but I do remember my son asking me "so you mean these will be pets that we don't eat right?" I said "yes, well, unless we have to". We did our research and found that Indian Runner ducks don't need a lot of water and don't fly. They seemed to meet our needs. I also thought they looked ridiculous and not all that different from bowling pins. We sourced a hatchery about two hours a way and ordered 10 Buckeye chicks, and  3 Indian Runner ducklings, one male and two females. We planned on eating their eggs and hatching ducklings down the road. We excitedly awaited the e-mail from the hatchery telling us the babies had hatched. Finally the notification came and we made arrangements to pick up or new brood in the spring. Big pile of chicks and ducks The ducks we thought we were raising We arrived and the lady ...

 when my yard is covered in snow, "stopping to smell the roses" is more a figure of speech   The best part of working at home is being master of my own time. I work very hard physically and mentally but when I want to sit and stare at the ocean or watch the chickens sorting out their chicken problems I can do that, and that to me is divine. I feel like the wealthiest person in the world because I am in charge of my time and time is something precious to us all. I am forced to look around, to notice the smallest change. I have the luxury of experiencing nature everyday and in so doing am able to live in the moment and refrain from distraction I used to listen to. I am spiritual in these moments without even meaning to be. I meditate without the intention of meditating, I look and experience nature in most facets of my life and through this I have developed an attitude of protection of the earth because it is so very important to my life. When you live with animals, ...

Mother Rabbit looks on as her kits eat Last night it got so cold that we filled large jugs full of hot water to put into the bunny pens to keep them warm. Lately it is with trepidation that I open the rabbit hutches first thing on these very cold mornings almost turning away afraid I will find a frozen, dead bunny and will have failed that animal so greatly. So far, no bunny-sicles. I opened the hutch this morning to find lots of active baby bunnies hopping around, waiting for their food. I also found their water was frozen solid. I poured hot water in and on it and dumped out the frozen puck, refilling the dish with warm water dosed with a few drops of apple cider vinegar for their health. Once they were all set with food, water and hay, I moved on to the next hutch and the next. It is difficult to express the joy I get from watching the rabbits. I was never particularly drawn to rabbits in the past. My sister once had a pet rabbit and I don't think I ever even pet ...

Has anyone noticed how much a loaf of good bread costs at the super market lately? Around here, unless I can get it on sale, it costs me almost $5. With a kid in school and husband working away from home, even on a good week where we manage to cook lots, we go through a few loaves of bread. We used to only make bread in the bread machine to go along with soups when that fresh, warm, buttery goodness was too hard to resist. I had tried various quick method yeast breads from magazines and websites but they just never turned out to be worth the effort and I don't usually have time or attention span to spend all day babysitting bread dough. Even buying the expensive but worth it locally milled whole wheat flour, local honey and all of the ingredients, we figure a 2lb loaf of bread machine bread costs us the same amount as the store bought loaf, but lasts longer because it is more filling and has the added bonus of no mystery ingredients or preservatives. I used to use the machine...

Okay, so our chickens are not laying very well lately and we cannot figure out why. No sudden trauma or change, nobody is molting, they are eating the same diet they have always had, they are not too old, it is not especially cold, they are getting lots of light and they seem normal except that for the 17 chickens we are keeping (to be fair five are male or chicks and two are recent moms leaving 10 to lay eggs), we are only getting 1 to 4 eggs per day. One of the cures for this I have run across a couple of times is powdered kelp. Oh, thought I, "I live near the beach where I have seen lots of kelp, this will be easy". Husband and I discussed going down and getting some kelp and while we were at it, we may as well fetch some seaweed for the garden. Sounded like a great idea. Well, after weeks of waiting for a nice day to go down on the beach we decided to pick a day, stick to it, weather be damned! It just so happened we had company that weekend and they didn't kn...

For awhile now I have wanted to grow sprouts but for some reason couldn't get around to it. I bought a nifty little kit that contained seeds and a small canvass bag but then when I went to make it, I couldn't think of a good place to hang the bag after each rinse, imagining the endless dripping if I were to somehow manage to suspend the bag over the sink. Frankly I could see struggling with that bag just to produce a few sprouts which I couldn't see growing, having to wash that bag out and really I don't need a dingy, wet, brown sack to cheer me up in the middle of winter, so I used the bag for something else (see "Self-Inefficiency" August 2013 ). Other people poke holes in lids or buy specialty jars produced for the purpose of growing sprouts but guess what, they are just holes in a lid on a jar. This sad sack will not work for us Recently my son tried some sprouts on a sandwich and loved them! Well that was the impetus we needed. So w...

I know it is gross but this homesteading thing can't all be cute bunnies, precious chicks and charming moments. Some of it is practical solutions and yes, gross bugs. My husband has worms. Wait, that didn't sound good at all. We have decided after years of not feeling quite right about feeding our laying hens commercial grade layer ration to find alternative sources of feed for them. Why? When it comes down too it, why would we feed our chickens something which is formulated especially for factory chickens whom are neither free ranged, allowed to procreate or to socialize. In the summertime, our chickens free range and we hardly feed them anything but table scraps and a bit of grain at night of which they leave most in their tray. In the hard winter when the ground is frozen or covered in a layer of snow we must feed them some grain. We have been feeding them commercial layer pellets because it is cheap and seems more or less to agree with them. Also when we did a sear...

I recently read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I was shocked at just how relevant it is to my current lifestyle. It provides such an interesting and informative look at the beginnings of Big Agriculture in the United States which of course has lead us to our current model of food as an industry. While this is of course a work of fiction, it is also a great look at our past and provides a way to look at that history in a touching, personal way. For that reason I am putting it on my list of books about small farms and food sovereignty. There aren't always other homesteaders I can talk to about my experiences or ask questions and share stories with so I often find myself reading homesteading memoirs. I usually get my books from the library or on loan from kind friends as a part of my quest for self-sufficiency but there are a few on my Christmas list this year, those I have read and re-read and want to own. I am rarely without a homesteading or "how-to" far...

As the weather grows colder and the days shorter, it is the end of my summer garden. I pulled the last of the tomato plants and hung them in the kitchen to ripen. They look festive, like tomato garland. I continue to chop wood everyday and it will feel strange when there is no more wood to chop. The real excitement right now is all about the rabbits. Chopping Wood Tomato Garland Our rabbit had kits! I haven't actually seen them yet but I felt one. Having read many "how to" books about gardening, home improvement and  raising animals I am struck with how usual it is for my own experience to fall short of what the books say. However, with getting this Doe, mating her to the buck and having her babies it has all been exact and matches the book perfectly. When she grew restless and and started rubbing her face on everything like a cat, we put her in the Buck's cage. As per our book's description, he chased her,...

Chicken stored for the winter The meat chickens were processed this week. I was sad to cart my meat chickens off but the weather is getting colder, they were getting so heavy they were sitting down to eat and they were becoming a bit harder to look after requiring me to re-fill their water three or four times a day and hunting anyone and anything for food. Also the day before they were to be taken to be processed,  a hawk was flying right over our yard, hunting them. My mom spotted the hawk and her and I rounded up the meat chicks and put them safely in their tractor, then shooed the layers to semi-safety. It was tiring and about the last thing I wanted to be doing in that moment but a hawk will swoop down and carry off even the heaviest of chickens so we had to act. After the cost of feed, processing and gas to get there, we ended up saving about $2.50 per pound. We ended up with 69 lbs of meat in the freezer. All in all, worth it but that isn't the most valuable thing...

This week we are reminded of our inexperience. We think our Doe rabbit is pregnant and now we are scrambling around to find another tractor for her daughter as apparently you can't leave them together after her new babies come because she may either attack her eldest daughter or eat her babies. I don't know, something like that. We had read you could just put a screen between the two but now we are thinking it will be too tight in their current accommodations. Their current hutch/tractor is leaking a bit and I am wondering if we need to make serious modifications as you aren't supposed to let the rabbits get wet. We are left scrambling. She is due in a few weeks. We are also supposed to build/buy a box for the pregnant doe to kindle in. We are in the learning curve stage where we begin to wonder if this was such a good idea. I remember it with the first layer chickens but eventually we worked out all of the kinks, redesigned their coop many times and now have a great sys...

I met my son from the school bus and we went over to hang with our meat chickens when all of a sudden he says "mom, one of the chicks is bloody!" I looked down and saw some old blood on the chicken's neck but these things usually look worse than they are. I went to get a box and Riley scooped up the injured chick without even being asked. He has seen this before and seems to know just what to do. I grabbed a cardboard box, a handful of wood shavings and set the chick down inside. I put a bit of water and some food in there with him, went back to the yard and shooed the rest of the chicks away from their new favorite spot, the neighbour's tree. When I went back to check on the injured chick I noticed a lot of blood drops on the new shavings and said "uh oh". I picked him back up, grabbed an old shirt and wrapped him up so he couldn't hurt himself or me and held him pressed to me and went inside. I sat on the couch and had a look at what was bleeding...