This is part one of a four-part series on busting through the excuses for not homesteading so you can live more sustainably. Let’s dig in. “Oh, I’d love to homestead, but I DON’T KNOW HOW.” Oh, honey. This is a terrible excuse for missing out on some real personal satisfaction. Remember when you learned to tie your shoes? At one point in your life, you did not even know how to tie your shoes. So you watched someone else do it every morning. Then you decided you WANTED TO LEARN HOW to tie…
Category: Homestead
Do Just One Easy Thing To Save $60 This Year
Do you want to save $60.00 this year? Make your own liquid laundry detergent. It’s easy, cheap and fast! You don’t need any special equipment. I’ll tell you how I wash clothes for 2.3 cents per load. There are 3 Ingredients: Borax, Washing Soda (Not Baking Soda!), and Dawn or Palmolive Dishwashing Liquid (the handwashing kind, not for dishwashers, & get the good stuff.) You can buy these on Amazon, but it’s going to be way cheaper at the Wal-Mart. Here’s the Nuts ‘N’ Bolts of how we calculated the savings. Check…
Baby Chicks on Burton Farm – August 2016
It’s Your Birthday, Little Chickens! Twelve babies were born this week (so far!) We did lose one early on, but the other baby chicks appear to be doing great. Some are pure Dominickers, but others are a mix of Dominicker and Copper Maran (Amigo). What color eggs will those chickens lay? There was a cricket in the coop, so Rocky threw it toward the mama, but it wasn’t long before one of the babies was running off with a cricket leg in its mouth. They’re a fast learning bunch, this…
How to Delight Your Chickens by Re-Purposing Junk
Entertain your chickens for free! You likely have a lot of this stuff already (or can find it on the side of the street any given weekend) to be re-purposed into your very own chicken carnival. Yeah! Take the girls to a carnival! So, naturally, when you arrive, you, as the responsible adult, will be analyzing all the activities at the carnival to make sure you and your girls hit all the important attractions with minimal inconvenience. Everyone’s so excited, aren’t they? So while you’re passing by the ticket booth,…
One Rocking Marigold: Garden Update 7/17/16
I am marigold growing genius superstar! Just kidding. Kind of. All right, so recently, I told you how I had been completely unsuccessful with my marigold-from-seed attempt (uhhh-gain!), but this week one finally flowered. I let my fingers do some walking over the interwebs and found I’d been doing marigolds wrong. Today, I’m admitting my faults and promising a new day for marigolds on Burton Farm! How I’m remedying what I’ve been doing wrong with my marigolds: Because marigold seeds are so feathery and paper thin, I have always scattered…
It Never Seems to Rain on the Mountain
It was supposed to rain yesterday. The weatherman had been promising “rain on Saturday” all week. After a hot, dry day with the boys, I figured it wasn’t coming. I screwed the hoses back together, pulled the heavy out to the garden and noticed for the first time the heavy, dark rain clouds overhead. “Nope,” I thought. I’m already out here now, so it’s getting watered. I started watering the garden. It needed the water yesterday. I bet my neighbors (if either of them see me) will think I’m nuts.…
Garden Update: June 19, 2016
I know. I know. It’s important to get in your garden every day. At least, every other day. Not just on weekends. Ashamedly, I’ve only been a weekend gardener and it shows. I hand-weeded around our small plants this weekend in the blistering hot sun, but still only covered about 30% of the garden. And there are still weeds in the walkways. Ugh. Every day, Erica. Get out there every day. How do you motivate yourself to just do it? Something Different and Exciting Happened Though… But yesterday, instead of…
Garden Update: June 12, 2016 – Two Steps Forward…
It appears that the Irish Spring Soap Helped. In hand-weeding this weekend, I only saw one little pile of golden nuggets, instead of many. So, that’s great. What does this mean? It’s going to take a bar of soap each week to cover half of the fence line to keep rabbits out of our garden? Maybe I’m cheap, but that seems like too much for me. It’s supposed to rain all week, but when it stops, I’m going to sprinkle some hair clippings from my hairdresser’s floor. We will see…
Our First Turnips & How to Get Rid of Rabbits
So. Here are the first three turnips that were planted willy nilly in the garden. They’re the first crop to come up. Since it’s my first time growing turnips, I wasn’t sure what to look for, but two of these were busting out of the ground a half inch, so I thought we were good to go. We didn’t eat the leaves since they’re pretty holey and really, who wants to stink up the house for eleven scrawny, holey leaves? The pigs were really excited about them, though. I tossed the tiny…
5 Goals We’ve Set for Our 2016 Summer Garden
Five Goals We’ve Set for Our 2016 Summer Garden 1. Grow and eat the best tomatoes and cucumbers that we have ever eaten in our lives. Everyone knows that a farm grown tomato is the best tomato and those supermarket tomatoes can’t even tomato. Tomato. Oh my stars, do I want a real tomato! And the white cucumbers we grew a few years back from Baker Creek Seed Company tasted out of this world delicious, especially when we didn’t let them get too big. I definitely intend to gobble them…