GM Grass.. now we are getting ridiculous...

Sorry folks but this will be a multi post across the board as this is important.

The Health Ranger over at naturalnews.com is calling for a boycott of Scotts lawn products due to their soon to be newest product. What could this product be? GM grass seed... yes, -GRASS SEED- if it was not bad enough to have GMO's that were food stuffs people are going to be pushed to buy a GM grass seed that is “roundup ready”.

http://www.naturalnews.com/033022_Scotts_Miracle-Gro_GMO_seeds.html

Yippie... so now everyone who wants the “perfect lawn” will be pouring gallons of roundup on their lawns. What will eventually happen to the water tables in these areas? Poison is still poison no matter how you “bottle” it. It will still affect the rest of the environment that you put it in.

How are you going to feel when the lawns at schools are sown with this seed and they start pouring roundup all over the grass that -YOUR- child will be walking/running/playing over?

What happens when it cross pollinates with natural grasses? We'll have GM grass everywhere eventually. Also remember what I said about corn? Corn is a “grass”, it is a distant cousin to what is on the lawns in the cities. However, anyone who is trying to strengthen a “old” variety of corn with crossing it with the wild ancestor. What will happen to that ancestor plant?

With the idea of this going to happen what I see will be happening is that we will have a “new” urban desert a green one. It will be grass and nothing else, of course you could plant the GM trees so that maybe you'll have a tree in your yard too. Trees are hurt by round up just as any other plant is.

Home vegetable gardeners and “urban” homesteaders will have major issues when their neighbors grow this grass, due to the spraying of the chemicals on the GM grass. As the spray -WILL- carry over to your yard.

So protect yourself now.. protest THIS ONE if nothing else in the GM area. Check out the Health Ranger's post on naturalnews.com to see how you can voice your opinion on this subject!

Cob stove and oven

Now first I'd like to mention I have found a site that lets me do a free web page through google (yeah) here is the link to what I set up yesterday check it out:

http://wolfwoodsinmo.weebly.com/

I do not plan to stop posting here any more than I stopped when I got the wordpress blog. Eventually I am hoping to buy the real address and have it a separate entity, but for now this is our web page.

I also want to make a wave to Phelan and her current post as a MUST READ!!!!!!

http://a-homesteading-neophyte.blogspot.com/2011/07/worst-drought-conditions-since-dust.html?spref=fb

Please go check it out and see what she has seen.

Now to the "real post"

I'm sure a few of you may remember this cook stove we made last year. Well we are going to re-build it and surround it in cob. We did learn a few things about our construction of this one.

#1 when using cinder blocks, you need to make sure you DON'T need to move them after they get hot and then rained on. Cinder blocks break after repeated heatings and rains.

#2 when filling them with gravel let them "settle" so you don't have to go back and refill them after they have been heated or you get #1

#3 if you get breaks/cracks wasps WILL build nest(s) inside your cinder blocks and it will cause a problem if you need to take it apart for any reason.

So with that knowledge we are re-building it, and going to be putting in a cob-ish oven next to it. It will have elements of both cob ovens and rocket stoves, and we will be using a barrel for the "cooking" chamber. We are going to one similar to this one:

It's a cool design and I like how wide the cooking area is with the barrel. Thanksgiving is getting so big (the Tom turkey btw) that our not standard size oven prob won't fit him when it's time to cook him.

So here is what we have done so far:

This is if you can't tell the pile of clay from our ongoing root cellar dig. This is going to be the base for both the wood stove and the oven. We are hoping to have a space between the two for us to store wood in. Which my son's new daily chore till school starts is to chop up the cut wood into pieces small enough to use in a rocket stove... maybe it will put some muscle on his scrawny frame.

Anywho... the "front" half of the clay pile was hoed flat and then smoothed with both the hoe and a mini garden rake. Silver took at least 20 minutes making sure it was as smooth as he could get it. Course... that did not last long after the cats came out (hahahahahaha), we'll have to clean up a bit in a few days once everything here dries out from the rains we just got.

This is of course is the next step, Silver put out the metal squares from the old stove, to which we did have a good sized wasp nest inside of. Thankfully no one got stung.

Silver set them both out as you can see, played around with which direction to put them in. Then made it level... perfectly level. What can I say he's a perfectionist. He checked the "level" across in this spot then on an angle in each corner then across the other side.

Oh, this level? It's a 6ft level that we bought at Harbor Freight Tools for $14 before we left New York state. I do have to say I like their stores! I will also say that I personally think that every homesteader whether you are "urban" or not should have a 6ft level. It is very useful when working on a big project. Course you should have a few different sized levels... but that's going off on a bit of a tangent.

Ok, now a few more steps along as you can see. First Silver used 4 pieces of the broken flat cinders from the first stove and placed them in the corners of the squares to hold it in place. Then he added rocks then covered it in gravel from the driveway.

Then he asked the kids to put a rock (remember all those rocks we dug up?) along the front to make it look nicer and to help prevent the clay from washing out. Which he then went back over their work and filled in or found better fitting rocks.

After that he went and added a layer of gravel to the "base" surface. Now the plan once it all "settles" and dries out... to put concrete dust over all the gravel and rock and wet it down to harden. This will give a nice firm base for the oven and make the stove base solid and hopefully the front with be secure. We are also hoping for the added benefit due to the gravel for there to be "rivulets" for water flow to go out when it does rain. the plan is to make the stove and oven water proof.

The plan for the start of the oven is to possibly use earth bags if we can find enough of those heavy duty feed bags that people don't want. In the past we have reused our's as garbage bags, but after watching many youtube video's on cob ovens we noticed the person who has done the most. Uses in almost all of his, for the base; earth bags. From what we have seen, based on youtube videos (which as I don't have books on cob I have to us youtube) this particular one is a semi-expert as his job is building a myriad of things with cob.

So that is what we have done so far and the "plan" for our first step on the oven. Will update as we do.

Be Well, Be Safe and Blessed Be...

Take Back Urban Homesteading Day of Action

"Mother Earth News" email writing campaign:

Seems that the good people at MEN have decided to fall to the whims of the D-family, and switch out from the term "Urban homestead" to "Modern Homestead". I for one have an issue with this as do the members of Take Back Urban Homesteading on facebook. This weekend is a "day" of action in an email writing campaign against this to MEN. Here is my contribution:

Dear Mother Earth News,

I have read your magazine for years learning as much as I can about the Homesteading way of life and anything having to do with “off grid” living. I now live on a 5+ acres homestead in Missouri. While I am not an “Urban Homesteader” I do believe in what they do and offer my own help through what I learn in my process of making my home a “viable” home for my family.

It has come to my attention that you are succumbing to the “machine” by changing your use of the term “urban homesteading” to “Modern Homesteading” because of the Dervases institute. I have to say I am greatly disappointed in this move on your part.

That family did not create the movement, nor had I even heard of them till you did one article on their family and at that time I though “wow that's cool”. I have not heard a thing about them anywhere since then. At least not until they pull the lawsuit against the people who use the term “Urban Homestead”. A term that has been used in the movement well before Jules and company claim to have started it.

Almost 8,000 people on facebook alone are protesting this and are outraged by this happening. I am no different, this term cannot be “owned” as it is general use. Your magazine has in the past been a beacon to many people trying to live with limited intervention from the “machine” that is modern society. You have also helped those who cannot leave their city lives and chose to live within the “machine” to do what they can.

It saddens me to see that your magazine no longer truly supports this. Also due to the fact that you are putting this one family who happened to just be “lucky” enough to make it better than most in their endeavors above others who have been doing it for years I cannot in good conscious buy/read your magazine.

I hope that eventually you change your stance and I'm sure if you do I will hear of it, through the web of the true “Urban Homesteaders”.

Rivenfae Wolf

Please support us in this attempt to make MEN see that we don't care for this bow to the D-family.

I am a (non) Urban Homesteader!

Well I can't quite say I am an Urban Homesteader living in the country as I do, so for today I will have the (non) put in front of the term while I use it. Today is "Urban homesteader Day of Action" and us here at Wolf Woods wish to participate.

So for those of you who have not been following us fully welcome to our (Non) Urban homestead!

We started this off technically years ago for both me and Silver with just an idea (even before we met each other), we both felt the need to grow our own and live in the quiet of the country and take care of ourselves. As much as we possibly can. Over the years I have read countless information on Urban Homesteading, trying to get ideas to apply to my hopeful future "on the farm".

Oddly enough most ways of farming that Urban Homesteaders use can be applied to a small scale farm in the country, and this we are going to try on our 5.29 acres. The big thing here is our ground is a very thin layer of dirt and lots of clay under it, so we need to do raised bed gardening. The best place to find the most info on raised bed gardening is through Urban Homesteaders.

Now as you might be able to see here you can grown in the soil here, even with little added to it. These are my hot peppers from last year, and boy did the plants grow; granted the sweet peppers grew taller. They only had my lovely goat manure/bedding mulched over them, and they did not produce as much as I would have liked, but dang they grew!

I have my own ideas for setting up a raised bed but it takes a year to prepare it, and here I shall give it to all Urban Homesteader and (non) urban homesteader alike:

First you need to build your raised bed it has to be wide enough to fit a bale of straw in it while that bale is still bound. After you have made this raised bed if you used wood you probably want to line the sides (btw have the bottom open). Next place a whole straw bale in it, then cut the bindings -DO NOT LOOSEN IT!-(as in leave it intact after removing the binding). Now over that add a layer of peat moss, then a layer of manure (make sure there is no chemicals in it), and then on top of that a layer of soil. Continue layering till almost to the top of the raised bed, then take another straw bale and unbind it and spread a thick layer of straw over it. During the course of the year make sure you pull anything growing in it out, and in the late fall rototill the bed (yes rototill); then again add more straw. When the next spring rolls around rototill again add a little peat,soil, manure if you need more substance in the bed and plant away!

Now the reason for leaving the bottom open is that this way you are amending the soil underneath, just doing it a space at a time, and somewhere down the line the ground will have wonderful soil. However you can just keep using the raised bed, infact when I get to build mine they will be permanent.

Back to my little history of us:

When me and Silver first met we both discovered we both liked the idea of growing our own food, and both of us wanted to own some land so that we could do this. After about 2 years of looking at one website that offered us land with no down-payment and no credit check (the drawback is the cost, but hey my credit sucks!), we spent that 2 years looking at the same property as well. An opportunity (as we see it anyway) popped up for us to take and buy and leave where we lived so we did.

We moved here to Wolf Woods, with no house, and no working well.

We spent most of our first year here in this tent, that "blue pile" was our "stuff" we brought with us. Camping out is tons of fun... however camping out for 6 months with 3 kids is not fun! Also cats seem to like to climb on tents and we we had to "spot fix" the tent a lot or we'd get wet when it rained.

We also started off with a dug well that had a pump in it, but as we were not sure if the pump worked we waited 4-5? months before we even tried hooking up the well to the electric.

We were so happy when the water started flowing that we even called our friend 10 miles away to let them know the wire they picked up for us worked! The best part was, we didn't have to ask our neighbor's for water anymore, and that for us was a big relief. Also made taking baths much easier as we could do it every day now not just ever couple of days when we'd get water.

Our next "big moment" here was when we got our "Winter home" as I'm calling it now though our "offical name" for this building is "The bunk house".

Our pretty blue/green shed 12x24 in space and 5 people live in it, we put in a sawdust toilet, which I wonder if there is a way for an Urban Homesteader to try to use one as that would lower your water usage greatly. I have also come to love the sawdust toilet a lot more than a flush one, and when our house is done being built we are going to just keep using sawdust toilets in it.

During our winter months we finally finalized our ideas for our house building which for us is what we really need to accomplish next. We are going to use the ideas on this website as the base of our ferrous concrete geodesic domed house:

http://www.birdcagedome.com/

We are even considering using this idea for our chicken coop (I'd free range, but... last time I did our garden got eaten; and my lab just loved chasing them!), we are also going to build our animal barn this way. Now on the subject of animals while Urban Homesteaders have done amazing things in their cities with raising livestock (where they can), as we are planning on a cow (2 prob) we need ideas from somewhere else. I found the methods from PolyFace Farms the best:

http://www.polyfacefarms.com/

The man who owns this farm uses techniques that mimic the animals "wild" ancestry, for instance giving the cattle pasturing that mimics what buffalo would have done. The animals are kept close in small pastures and are moved daily to another one. The plan here is to take 1-2 of our acres and divide it into 1/4 acre plots all connected half saved for "field hay" for winter food of course and the others for the few animals we will have. so with that plan every 4 days they are back on the first one, we will see how it works, we might have to increase the amount of plots or shrink the pasture size.

Right now we are trying to set up what growing we will do this year, and cleaning up the space where the house will go; also seeing if our chainsaw will start. It died last fall guess we just over worked the poor thing...

Anywho like I said, I love Urban Homesteading, but as I am rual I'n a (non) Urban Homesteader!

Be Well and Blessed Be...

DISCLAMER:

(I am a blogger and not a reporter therefore please note that some of my materials may not be all there is out there in the world or internet on the subject and I might get something wrong. I'm sorry but it's human nature to make mistakes) <--- This is going to be the newest joke on the web.