Our First Egg!

Yes I would first like to point out that our internet is momentarily on, but as the phone company said 8th at end of business day; we are guessing it will go at any time.



Now on to today's BIG news:

This is our very first egg! I found it this morning when I decided on a whim to go check out the yard, thinking that the girls aren't looking very closely and found it in the yard not the coop. Under the outdoor roost. It is a medium sized egg so we are figuring it came from the Polish Crested hen or maybe the Barred rock hens we have. So I am setting up a schedule with the kiddo's on a "chicken check" a couple times a day just to ensure that we will get all the eggs that the hens produce. ...also because I don't want them eating them, they didn't seem to notice this one when I went in to get it.



As for the root cellar... it looks like we will be waiting a bit to dig in it as it is 1/4 full of water from the rain we got and we are due more rain today... Yep, we need it... but this morning on the way to the hen house I commented to Silver that with the fog and light it looked like early spring outside. Being that it is still the "dog days" of summer that's an odd occurrance to me.

That's it for now as I want to get this in before our net does go down.

Be Well, Be Safe and Blessed Be...

Final Word?

For now anyway right? AS it sands according to our phone company the internet will be off by end of business day today. So the plan is to get our building supplies with the money we save from turning off the internet. the hope is to get it put back on later on when we get the building projects done.

Now I would like to talk a moment about the weather, and I know weather is the -MOST- complained about thing out there, and right now I have a complaint. It has rained so much in the last couple of days it's like spring rains here...we're still in summer... Now do we need rain? Yep, we do; but not this much. We are suppose to get it all week too... yippie... Well considering all you can do about the weather is complain ... lets just say.... I AIN'T HAPPY...

Ok, got that out.. one mention before I go (for months?) yes I have a donate button I also on my profile have a amazon wishlist.. if anyone wants to lend a hand to us please go to the wish list till we get back online. If we can't catch a donation we won't get it. While we are effectively offline unless we can afford the gas to hit the library it's just not possible to check paypal.

So thanks to everyone who reads and I will be back at some point in time with probably a major update!

Be Well, Be Safe and Blessed Be...

Rocket Stove Cooker!

Ok so for functionality our Rocket Stove cook stove is finished I do have a video of it here:



There is an occasional moments where the video halted before I uploaded it, and I'm not sure if it transferred that "hiccup" into the online copy. Now a few comments on this... We only spent about (give or take) 4 hours of work putting it together, and have about an hour or two more just to "finish" it. Though it's in working order. WE used 6 standard cinder blocks, 6 flat cinder blocks.. they cost a piece about $1.50. We used about $25 of concrete and chicken wire. The chicken wire was left over from our chicken yard, the concrete was some we bought for something and never used it. Oh.. odd thing about chicken wire... when you think you've used it all you have some left; almost as if it grows.

We bought one 10 pound bag of mortar mix to "glue" the blocks together. We used one bag of vermiculite at about $6. WE used one 6in elbow and one piece of the 6in 3ft long single wall stove pipe. The elbow we got for free and the 3ft section was a little over $5. We also "Scavenged" a few metal bits here and there for different parts we needed like that "face plate" we had above the opening for the burn chamber.

So just to point out again, this did not take hardly any time to make and I can say aside from "on the job experience" (with the cement application) anybody can make this. I hope to post more pictures when we have them and it gets finished. Also of our cook oven and the mass heater when they are both built!

The weather... not a complaint.. kinda...

WOW... rain for 2 DAYS!!!!! It's great... aside from the fact that it starts early in the morning with a intense thunderstorm. Being that it starts when it's still "dark" out my astraphobia kicks in... -yeah-?

Now being that said, it has cooled us off these last couple of days, we got our rocket stove cooker pretty much finished off and I'll have pics and a vid on it once it drys out enough for us to "fire" it up once. We still have some patch work to do on the cement, we used up 3 bags of ready mixed concrete and did it over chicken wire. Now this is the planned method for our full house construction down the line and it is showing us what we will need for that big project and how easy/hard it will be. I will say it takes more concrete than you think it will, so if you are going to chicken wire concrete something it will use more than you plan concrete wise. Also you need to make sure the chicken wire is -VERY- tight or you will be "stuffing" with concrete instead of just covering it in concrete.

Other than that it was fairly simple to do, more so for Silver as he's had experience working with concrete verses myself. This was my first time working with concrete, and it was interesting and took one bag of concrete for me to "learn" how to do it.

Well that's about it for now, yes the planned no internet for a while is still on for after the 8th so we'll see what goes on.

BE Well, Be Safe and Blessed Be...

Few Words...

OK folks first thing, due to money issues here we are going to have our internet off for a month or 3 while we get the money for our building projects done. So after the 8^th of this month I won't be online (according to the phone company).

I will be keeping track of what goes on here so I can update when we get it back on. WE are going to be working on our outdoor stove in the next couple of days and provided we don't get rain before tomorrow afternoon we will get more digging done in the root cellar tomorrow. We are down about 2ft now and we need about another 5 ft.

I have made a couple of decisions on some of our “standard” crops at this point. We liked the lemon cucumbers more than standard cucumbers in flavor and how they grow so unless the dragon's egg variety does well and tastes better we will be sticking with only lemon cucumbers. By the way... we had one ripen fully so far and it was so GOOD!

As it stands we will be growing red noodle long beans as the green black seeded one was having a major bug issue. While we picks the same amount of both, all but one of the black seeded were “buggy”.

I seem to be having some major issues with my squashes this year. I still have no female flowers on them. Now I see them starting then they wilt and die. However, the male flowers are flourishing. Anyone know why? I'm wondering if it's been the heat wave causing it troubles.

I have some good news on the GMO front:

http://www.naturalnews.com/033216_GMO_contamination_lawsuits.html

At least in two states a farmer can sue another for contamination by pesticides/herbicides and GMO infection. Read the article please and learn more!

I will be making my first jam/jelly attempt sometime this week as I know have everything I need to make some. Wish me luck and if I get it done before our net goes down I'll post my results.