Anniversary Day!

Well today is the anniversary of the day we have moved to our home This starts our 3^rd year living here and there has been so many changes. In more ways than one. One big change is with the life I am living and the people I am with I finally have a stable home for my kids. This is the biggest deal for us.

We are growing at least part of our food in our own garden. We are on a first name basis with the local MFA employees. We have been to Baker Creek Heirloom seeds a couple of times. We have our own producing flock of chickens.

The soil in our garden is getting better than it was when we moved here. I couldn't believe it when the soil was easy to dig down into. Silver has been in the best health in years, as he's getting plenty of exercise.

We have gone from having no water and living out of a tent, to having a small building and a claw-foot bathtub in a real bathroom. We now have a “real” kitchen … and a acquisition over the last weekend was new (to us) side-by-side refrigerator that we bought for $75; that is maybe a year old.

These are just a few of the things that have been changing in our lives since coming here, and living the life we have wanted to live. My only regret? That we had not done it sooner. Live the life you truly want to live, not the one you think you need. Remember we are living off a very small income, and we take care of all important things. All of our bills get paid, we have a home to live in, we have food on the table. ...and We live where we want to be living, could life be any better?

Be Well, Be Safe, and Blessed Be...

Update!

Hi everyone out there, I know it's been a while and; sorry but we do not have internet again as yet. I am having a cheap lunch at a local restaurant that has WIFI. There has been a lot going on though so I will let you know all of that now while I still have a chance before we head on out of here.

First, our “boxed” tomatoes did so well! They however, did all wind up cross pollinating so we wound up with some interesting plum type tomatoes. I froze a few and am now adding them to stews as we have them. They finally wilted when we had the real hard freeze in the middle of November. We will be growing the cucumbers in that box next year and I am really hoping for a bumper crop! I now have two little Purple Smudge tomato plants growing inside for winter tomatoes. Hopefully they will do well.

We put in our wood heater, it wasn't the mass heater we wanted. It is a barrel stove, we put a concrete/vermiculite mixture; with a piece of goat panel into the bottom. It holds heat there very well, so even after hours past burning we have warm still radiating out. Also, the concrete has not degraded any I wonder if it's because it was portland cement we used? We purchased the bag or portland from Lowes in their damaged $2 spot and the bag was almost completely full!

We finally have a flush toilet, we installed the free toilet we found over the summer; at the beginning of November. The septic we dug is doing a very good job, I hope it keeps doing well during the winter time; we will see. We will be installing a old claw foot tub that is being given to us from a member of the church my girls attend. We also have a lead on a electric water heater that just needs it's elements replaced.

...and speaking of water heaters. The gas one we picked up at the local free store could not be repaired, however we have tried out an experiment we saw from You Tube. A few different people have tried turning old gas water heaters into wood fired ones. Well, Silver tried it out the other day while it was a good enough of a day to have a bath in our outdoor bathing area. It worked wonderfully! We heated a whole heater full in the time it took us to heat 20 gallons of water on the stove. Also with only the equivalent of two good sized logs worth of wood.

We had our “home grown Tom” turkey for our Thanksgiving dinner and he only just barely fit into my small oven. As it was he barely fit into our roasting pan, he legs hung over the side and I had to creatively foil him to cook him properly. So I know the “Jenny” will fit in our oven.

Now, we are short our car as one lovely fall day; we went out to head to the store just it seems at the wrong time. The highway department was working on the main road just off of ours and it seems it was just after they added the stone/dirt, but before they smoothed it out. A large stone tore out the whole bottom of the engine and our car is no longer driveable. We are looking for -something- we can buy and get inspected that won't cost much, but there doesn't seem to be any around us. We are getting rides to the store when we need it from some wonderful friends of ours. THANKS GUYS!

We fully butchered a doe a couple weeks ago from field dressed. Again, a nice person from the girls' church had gone hunting on the first day of deer season and when she got one that day she offered it to us. I have tot ell you chili made with venison is wonderful! We also still have some nice bones hidden away in the freezer for making some nice stocks.

I want to tank anyone who has been keeping an eye out for updates and I'm sorry that it probably will be a while before I will be putting up another one. We are hoping this winter to get the internet bill caught up so we can get it back on... maybe. We actually are not sure if we want it back on, it's something we are thinking about.

I did have a surprise for one of my fellow bloggers (and I do hope one day to catch up on my reading), I did finally find the book that talked about making your own stock feed.

The Manual of Practical Homesteading

written by: John Vivian

ISBN# 0-87857-092-6 (hardbound)

0-87857-154-X (paperback)

Here is the passage about making your own feed: (pg 244)

“We don't shell the corn or strip off the sun flower seeds. It's a waste of time, and I figure that there are some nutrients and a while lot of good roughage in the cobs, husks, and flower heads. So, once we get a truckload of corn back to the barn, we crank up the shredder/grinder and run a few ears of corn through. If it is dry enough the ears will literally explode into chicken-nibblums. Then we take a break and go through the dried-out sweet corn for culls and to pick up the drying gourds, pumpkins, and squash, which usually amount to five or more bushels. Then the grinding begins. The big shredder has powered wheels and I just run it up onto the truck bed, hang a feed sack over the discharge chute, and the kids begin feeding in grain, steady sprinklings of dolomitic limestone, plus heads of whatever small grain we may have grown that year. Also added are the gourds, pumpkins, and squash if they are dry enough.”

Now they do talk through out the book about other things that are saved at odd times to be fed over the winter or fresh out of the garden when picked for family eating. Also they also tell you how to do silage, as he had to when his grain crop would not ripen fully. He lived in eastern US so had a short growing season, so if you check out the book keep that in mind.

This is our newest aquisition:

Clawfoot tub given to us by a member of Little Creek Baptist church! Thank you very much!

Now I need to say good bye for a bit again I hope everyone has a Happy Yule, Merry Christmas and a good holiday no matter which one(s) you have in the coming months. So...

BE Well, Be safe, and Blessed Be...

Pictures!

This is the "doorway for the bathing room we made, on the right is the canvas tarp. It looks a bit rough I know... but after 6 months of bathing in the "great" outdoors it's like *coughs* heaven.

This is a picture of the interior, just wide enough for the tub to fit in, we have some logs holding it semi level and still.

Wow I must be on a role having 3 blog entries in one day LOL.

Be Well and Blessed Be...

Rambling....

Well... looks like the batteries in my camera are dead, right after I took pictures of our new "bathing" room; so once we get some money I'll post the pictures(if it rains it pours right?). We decided to try to make an enclosed bathing room with what we had on hand so we could have a semi warm bathroom. We have a canvas tarp that we have wrapped around two sides of our former outdoor kitchen roof. We have it up against the back end of our shed with a piece of the tent and a blanket to block the wind there and a normal tarp on the "door" side. We put the lamp we used to brood our chicks from New York, to help warm the room. We still have to dump the tub out so the "floor" is a piece of OSB with a rug on it and we dump away from the floor. With heating water it takes about 3 hours to prep a bath, but at least now we don't have to worry about cross winds or people seeing us now that our leaves are falling off the trees. We have decided to buy our "potty chair" from habitat as when we checked out their store in Springfield they were $3 a piece... muuuuch cheaper that buying one new at $70 for the cheapest. Then we are going to buy a 5 gallon bucket to use instead of the "cup" it has on it so I can change it less often. Having the sawdust toilet means the 2 and 1/2 ft (approximately) cesspool Silver dug will work for our kitchen sink for the winter. We just need to set up a curtain for the toilet for privacy(what's that?)

We are going to walk the whole of our property once all the leaves are off the trees completely so we can see if there would be a good spot aside from the foundation to put our house as now we are thinking we don't want to be so close to the road anymore. One day when we came home from spending an hour looking for an open laundromat (ever one was closed) our "Ruby Ridge" neighbor (the first one on the street) was walking up from the back of our shed. Seems he was searching for his chainsaw and thought we had it... actually started yelling at Silver about it until Silver told him that his neighbor behind him had it. Silver even drove him down and showed it to him, the man did apologize, but that wasn't the end of it. The one who had it was the woman who moved out here with her family and they left her on the property so they could live in the city. Well a couple days after "Ruby Ridge" came by complaining about the chain saw, the second neighbor's husband (back for his weekly visit) came to ask us how we knew the chain saw was on his property. Made it sound like we were "scoping out" his property and not-so-politely told us to not go near his property or wife again, because she thinks people are wanding her property and implied it was us... well.. to say the least Silver was not happy about that and surprisingly didn't toss the man off of our property just told him to leave and not come back. Then a few days later we made sure that we no longer had any of the first man's tools so we can avoid both sets of people. I mean why would these people think we want to scope out a piece of property that has piles of trash on it.. yes we need building materials... but we aren't that desperate!

Oh well...

Be Well all and Blessed Be...