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I will no longer be posting to the blog. I am starting a new one that will more acurately reflect the path our lives are taking.

Michael Bunker

I will write more on this later, but I wanted to link to the trailer for the book "Surviving Off-off Grid" written by Michael Bunker. Click on the title to be taken directly to the trailer.

Squeezin The Juice

What the hell!! I've been buying gallons of organic orange juice when I've got a frigging orange tree in the back yard. For quite a long time, I've dismissed the orange tree as a nuisance, somtheing to be dealt with. The fruit would fall to the ground year after year, requireing clean up. I had never tried to eat the fruit, having been told by more than one person that the oranges from the tree were sour and not fit to eat. What a suprise then, when I finally decided to see for myself! The ripe fruit is sweet, juicy, delicious, hands down the winner over store bought for the financial savings alone!!

I picked up a trillium juicer at Sally's on half off day for $2.50. It looked brand new, in the box and all the parts were wrapped in plastic. SCORE! The master plan was to juice every last orange on the tree. Since then I found this Granny Miller video and realized I should can some of these wonderful oranges. That will be the next task.

All members of the family were enlisted for this job. No one was coerced and no husbands were injured in the making of this juice.

The girls and I picked bushel after bushel of oranges. After picking over 100 oranges, I decided to get through what we had before picking any more. We brought the oranges in from in sacks, about 20 at a time so the girls could carry them. Freya washed and rinsed the oranges while I peeled them. All the peels and pulp went into the compost after we were done.

Bella and Dad put the oranges through the juicer, its not the most efficient juicer but it ROCKS for $2.50! After letting it settle for a while, Freya scooped out the pulp. Or as she calls it, "The Gulp".

We worked all day, the girls were really into it and couldn't wait to drink their own homemade orange juice. At last, after about 4 hours we were done and the girls went out to play while Scott and I did the clean up. I don't think this juice will last us all year, but it will definitely put a dent in our grocery bill!

The big problem we are running into is space. There is not a lot of space in our freezer....and 20 bags of frozen OJ takes up a lot of room. Another reason to buy a deep freeze!!

Can You Dig It?

I am never more content with my body than after a days work outside in the garden and all that tending to it entails. Hard work, physical work, honest work makes me feel......relaxed in my body like no other work can.

Today was coop cleaning day. This job is a process and cleaning the coop itself isn't even the first step.

The first step is to remove the layers of hay off all the beds in the front yard. I have tried planting cover crops for overwintering and it was a serious backfire!

To this day, I am fighting the clover I laid down a couple of years ago. Its called cover crop for a reason! A thick blanket of it grows over a quarter of the front yard. If I want to plant there, I have to spend an hour bent over, pulling scraping and yanking the clover out.

Next, I empty all the beautiful compost out of the bins. This gets spread out over the front yard beds. It is now that my inner fire is really lit up for Spring! The glorious smell of the compost always gets me going! This is a smell I will never tire of...dark, rich, crumbly soil. Throughout my life, in its darkest moments, my greatest comfort and solace has always come from lying on the earth. Soaking up the heat that comes from the black dirt and filling my nose with the scent of it.

Now at last, it's time to clean the coop. All the cedar shavings and manure get shoveled into the wheel barrow, rolled over to the empty compost bins, and layered in with the aforementioned clover. A good soaking of the mixture gets everything going. I will continue to add to it the normal yard waste and kitchen scraps that the chickens don't eat(which dosn't amount to a whole lot!)

A new layer of cedar shavings go down on the floor of the coop and the freshly scrubbed ladders the chickens use as roosts go back up. Now the coop is done!!

Dandelion Tea

I came this close to buying Dandelion Tea the other day. Truly, I was about to pay money for it. Then I heard my Granna's voice in my head. Cussing me for wasting money on buying weeds. So, I came home and looked it up online and made it myself! I get what I want, save money, and Granna's little voice inside my head is happy. I like to make the voices happy now and then.

I felt a little guilty about keeping these prime dandelion greens to myself (the chickens usually get dibs) but then realized that with the copious amounts of of it growing in our garden, there really was more than enough to go around.

After picking and washing, I layed them out on the drying racks (wonderful and beautiful window screens I bought from a demolition sale for $1 each) and let them set for about a week. Along with the leaves, the tea recipe calls for dandelion roots. I looked at about 10 different recipes and this is what I came up with....

1 tsp. dandelion leaves and root per cup of boiling water.

See how simple!!! Dandelion is likely an excellent digestive aid and is used as a tea to cleanse the liver. But I just like the taste and the fact that its FREE!!

Holy Seed Starts!

This is it! March in California is time to start cookin!!! I am a bit reluctant, however, to over do it. Our family will be vacationing in mid-April and I have yet to find a volunteer to feed the animals every day, let alone nurse along tiny seed starts!!

Planning, however, doesn't need any help to move it along. This year, corn will have its own plot. The girls (our chickens, not our kids) will have to relinquish a bit of the backyard so we can grow a nice sized crop of corn. If only they knew they were the intended recipients, they wouldn't mind.

Then, tons of salad greens, collard greens, beets, tomatoes, carrots, peas and beans. I will be trying broccoli again this year. I've not had luck in the past due to aphids. However, I've lost my fear of using DE on the plants and I'm sure this will do the trick.

I'm cutting back on the summer squash but will still plant a couple of patty pan and crook neck.

This should be the year the blackberries take off. With a little luck we'll be making jam from our own berries this year.

The girls are already in full egg-laying mode, we're getting a dozen eggs every 2 days. We've been having a lot of egg white breakfasts!

15 Free Minutes

Time to really get going on the garden! This week has been a lot like spring even though its barely mid-January. I've been working on pruning and mulching lately. Yesterday I cleared out a large area in the back yard that had been filled with rocks and pea gravel. The plan is to surround it with a chicken wire fence to protect it from the chickens and use it to try my hand at corn again.

Last season, it became obvious that the peach tree was affected by leaf curl. After reading from many sources and asking around it seemed the consensus was to spray the entire tree with copper sulfide. I hate to use anything on the plants but compost and DE but I really can't bear to lose my peach tree. Scott bought it form me shortly after we got married and it was the first thing that we planted together. So, I pruned it well and sprayed it down. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this will keep it healthy.

One of my goals this year is to grow wheat. I have never grown wheat and I don't know anyone who has grown wheat, but it's really just a grass....right? We'll see how that goes!!