Homestead and Folly

Our Chickens haven't been laying eggs well at all. Others are quick to ask "Are they molting?" We thought this a possibility...back in September but  unlikely they are still molting. "Is it the cold?" Unlikely as this has been a problem since September and we have experienced very warm weather until January, and last year was much colder.  They seem healthy and are of  varying ages. Other farmers have reported similar problems. Could be the feed changed or maybe the up and down temperatures. We trimmed the rooster's spurs having read that can make him go lame and upset the chickens. Still we are getting one egg a day from 12 hens. One is older and retired, but we are without explanation about our lame flock. So it came when my husband mentioned someone was selling  twelve, two month old,  Buff Orpington chicks, we decided to jump at the chance and raise an additional batch of laying chickens. Any that happen to be roosters we will raise for meat. We sc...

Did you ever have a friend that you somehow lost touch with even though you enjoy that friend's company immensely? You didn't mean for it to happen but the more time that passed the harder it was to reach out and have that casual conversation? Before you knew it a ridiculous amount of time had gone by? That is what happened with my blog. I had been waiting for my house to sell and so had let my blog writing fall away, thinking my new homestead would be the perfect place to start my next entry. Well my house didn't sell and having now taken it off the market and decided to stay here, fall and now winter have come. Add to that, I got a part time job off of the homestead and the business of being thrust into fall preparations such as the arduous task of stocking up firewood. Had we known we were staying, we would have had at least started to process the wood in the spring and summer. A firewood shortage in our area as my wood guy, Danny says is due to "those bloody ...

I love Tomatoes. They were the first thing I ever grew as an adult in my garden and they come in so many different flavours and colours. They are the star of my garden. This year I had only a small garden while trying to sell our family homestead. I grew 4 varieties of cherry tomatoes, beef steaks,Roma's and some weird black heirloom tomato that stays crunchy when ripe. Not a huge fan. I did an experiment (something I find myself saying often!). I started, indoors,7 year old  Roma tomato seeds straight out of the package. In the second batch I planted saved Roma seeds which were two years old and were the offspring from the store bought plum tomatoes, saved, but not according to the experts. I know, I am living on the edge but having just gone through a hideous winter and coming out of February, perhaps a little shack happy, I was itching to do something garden-y. The experts have this method whereby you put the saved seeds from a fresh tomato in a bit of water in a s...

We have been raising rabbits for meat for almost a year and having gone through a long, cold winter now, I have tallied the costs and they don't look good. When it comes down to it, the way we raise rabbits in wood shavings in a hutch, with a tractor for access to fresh weeds and grass is too expensive. Either they have to go or we have to find a better way. Sometimes when we ran out of bedding last winter, we would use some of the rabbit's food hay as bedding for them,and it worked fine. We ran out of hay but I got to thinking about the insulating properties. You drop a glob of hay in and the rabbits break it up, chew some and stand on some. They make a nest out of it and sleep in it. Rabbits are very clean animals and I have read if you keep them clean they will not have problems or parasites. We need to cut out the wood shavings and switch to hay. Hay is $4.00 a bale and wood shavings are $8.00 a bag. The hay is half the cost and lasts twice as long. My next probl...

After a few false starts where I thought my zucchini looked like it was producing only to discover the small zukes had rotted from being unfertilized, I took matters into my own hands...literally. I began taking pollen from the male flower and gently placing it in the female flower with the tip of my finger and tho this made me feel slightly dirty, it produced some very nice zucchinis. Stalled, sick pole beans My pole beans were off to a promising start and then they stalled out, turned yellow and then got red edges. They have not grown in weeks and I am fairly certain they have a virus or bacteria. I have always planted pole beans and they have always done well. Well, they are dead. Fail.  Luckily I also planted bush beans in the hoop house so I will still have a few green beans to eat but not the haul I usually get around my bean tee-pee. The Mini-hoop house experiment has shown me just how much further along heat-loving plants get while sheltered fro...

When I was four, my mom nicknamed me "Sarah Strawberry". It may have been my strawberry blond hair but more likely it was my love of strawberries that won me this name. We ate the last jar of homemade jam at the end of May and I have been counting the days, jealous of my pals in America and their mouth watering photos of strawberries that come to them much earlier than we have them! We were going to go picking last weekend but figured that they probably wouldn't let us on account of Hurricane Arthur knocking on their door. I held off buying a single grocery store berry, holding out. Finally picking day arrived. We woke up at 7 and hit the road before it got too hot. We drove for a little over an hour, my son getting more and more excited. We have been taking him to U-picks since he could walk and have trained him as a rather skilled picker. We took most of our own baskets and wooden holders having learnt in the past that they can cost quite a bit. We walked to our...

The apples stayed on the tree, even if the tree tipped over After we gathered emergency supplies such as water, food for our family, BBQ fuel, batteries and flashlights, a trip to the library and cleaned up the yard, I set my attention to  protecting the animals and the gardens. After figuring out the prevailing winds would be from the South and the South West, we turned the rabbit tractors into the wind so they wouldn't flip, locked the animals all inside securely and set our sites to the plants. I opened up the hoop house figuring nothing was going to keep that plastic shut anyway. I added a few more tomato cages and tied them together and then to the hoop house frame. My cukes had just sprouted their first tiny cucumbers the day before the hurricane so I tied the vines down low to the ground to a post. I like to use pipe cleaners because we always have them laying around after children have finished craft projects and because their soft padding doesn't dig into...