Travelin' Turkeys!

      Well the air conditioning is out here at Little Bit Farm! I kind of view it as a test. I have always been fascinated with history. One thing that truly fascinates me is just how women years ago coped with the heat. It is hard for us to imagine what a pioneer woman or for that matter, any woman of moderate means went through before the advent of modern technology! I mean these women had to do the washing, ironing(next to a stove or fire), and cooking on fire, all in whatever weather they had to face. Just how did they get along?
     In the last few days, I have done most of my truly laborious things in the morning or evening. However, I am finding that the heat is rather exhausting itself. Fortunately for me, it has been a lot cooler during our outage than it would have been a month ago.
     I have some theories about living with the heat. I think the human body learns to adapt to whatever weather it must endure. The last couple days have seemed hot to me simply because I had air conditioning before now. It is taking some time for my body to adjust. I was working this morning, and felt tremendously hot. However, I sat down here to write with an ice cold peach ice tea, and right now I am feeling pretty cool! The temperature is the same, if not warmer, which just goes to show the benefits of ICE!
    The pioneer woman's ice was hard won, if she had any at all! It had to be cut during the winter from a pond or lake, hauled to a storage barn, packed in tight with sawdust insulation or straw, and then stored all summer. Needless to say, many people did without! You can see something of the process of ice cutting here:
Amish Ice Cutting  As for me I am very grateful for my ice maker:^) However, I could live without it!
    It is my opinion, that one should never become totally dependent on anything, except God! The presence of technology is only so reliable as the people who control it! The simple truth is, that people, though many are good-hearted, are fallible! Technology today is like building a house of cards. Parts of it are dependent on other parts. When a critical part fails, the effect on the surrounding parts can be catastrophic.
    In our society, we feel so insulated from real life. We buy our food at clean shiny grocery stores. We have faith that the trucks will always run to fill those stores. We have faith that the power will always be there to power those stores. We have faith that the farmers will always be able to raise the crops to send to our grocery stores. We have faith that the food in the grocery store will always be safe to eat. People often place more faith in their ready ability to get food, than they place in God, who created all those people that make the magical place called a grocery store happen.
    The truth is, however, that grocery stores, like so many things built upon technology, are vulnerable to all kinds of things. People don't like to think of such things. It frightens them. However, we saw with Hurricane Katrina that there are things that can happen beyond our control. Sometimes circumstances change the environment around our house of cards, a door opens, and a strong wind blows through.
   I believe that there are some things coming in the future that have the potential to be that strong wind blowing on our house of cards. I homestead, partly because I want to insulate my family from that wind! I particularly think our economy is fixing to take a shift down. So the A/C going out is a test of how I'll live without it, if I have to. The following is a list of things one can do to help prepare for times when unforeseen circumstances change radically my standard of living;

1) Store some food, and essentials. I recommend at least 3 months of food and other items. Storage is not something you can live off of indefinitely, but if there is some sort of emergency in the dead of winter, such as power grid failure due to terrorists or something, you'll need 3 months before planting a garden. Cook from your food storage, don't just store, eat! Find some recipes your family likes. Don't assume that they will just eat unfamiliar food if they are hungry enough! Here are some basic storage lists: Storage List 1 
Storage List 2 (not just food)
2) Store Open Pollinated Seeds - these are not hybrids, and will reproduce true in case you must save seed to replant.
3) Build Emergency Kits for House And Cars - in case you have to leave the house quickly in a tornado or other disaster. Here is some help: Build a 72 hour Kit 1  Build a 72 Hour Kit 2
4) If you have a small space raise rabbits, and bantam chickens - Have a look at this google images site for some cool ideas for coops: Bantam coops  Bantams will produce good eggs, on very little food. They are quiet if you only have hens. House them well, and your neighbors will not complain. Bunnies are even quieter, and produce lots of meat on little food.
5) Store items for barter
6) Move to the country - This may seem radical, but it is a good idea.
7) Get a woodstove - NOT a pellet stove, a plain jane  basic two burner wood stove, will keep you warm when all else fails.
8) Go to church - We need God in an emergency, and in no emergency! Going to church helps us build our relationship with him, and it also helps us build relationships in our community with others who care about what we are going through. If you have never asked Jesus to be Lord of your life click the link below. Jesus loves you, and he died to pay the price of sin, so that you would not have to pay that price: Meet My Savior
    I love my church! I feel the Lord there, though because he is always with me every step of the way, church is not the only place. However, I know that were there ever to be a crisis, I would stand beside my brothers and sisters at Union Valley Baptist Church, and we would work together to help one another, help others in our community, and reach people with the message of Jesus Christ. That is an irreplaceable comfort! If you do nothing else in this list come to church! Union Valley Baptist Church
9) Pray and Read God's word! Petition God for your safety! Ask him to help you through it. He is there, and he will listen!
10) Get a radio and a flashlight that runs without electricity or batteries. I highly recommend one that runs on both solar and with a crank! This is a great thing to have in your cellar!

   The above is a basic list, with numbers 8&9 being the most important! Everyone have a wonderful day!!!

My Beautiful Granddaughter At Her Church. She asked Jesus into her heart this year! If she can do it, so can you!

I Live In A Weed Nightmare, But I Choose It!

Today's Eggs

      Yes, it is true. Many years my garden gets overwhelmed by weeds, and yet I don't spray anything, ever! Well I take that back, we do spray wasp nests when they are endangering people, but not in the garden. It's not a glorious triumph:^) It's more toleration!
      Years ago I studied about the effects of pest control. Yes, I did go back and read that old book, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. However, it was not what mainly shaped my opinion of pesticides, herbicides, and artificial fertilizers. I studied far more than Ms. Carson's opinion. The basis for my beliefs about organic growing mostly came from simple common sense. I thought, "If something makes a biological organism sick enough to die, won't it make me sick too?". Why would I spray poison on my food? It seems so simple to me, and doesn't require a list of statistics to support it! However, the statistics are there. I'll not list them here, because the point of my discussion is not to prove that organic growing is the right way to go. In my book it is. However, my point is that my life is a fight between me and bugs and weeds, and for the most part, I surrender, at least up to a point. I do want my share, after all:^)
      Life is full of irony:^) My eldest son became a pest control operator. What is an organic momma to do? Life has taught me that we love em, we teach em, we pray for em, and we trust God! My youngest son, seriously cannot see the point either:^)  Some days I want to throw up my hands too. However, I began doing what I do for reasons, both personal, and religious. I look back now and think sometimes that perhaps I didn't explain my reasoning well enough, but more likely is that my children must make their own decisions. I made mine.
      In 1991, I went through a postpartum depression after having my second son. It was a rough time for me. I had lost two babies( yes my reproductive life was full of troubles ) at 23 weeks of pregnancy in a row before him, and the hormonal changes combined with several years of emotional upheaval rather caught up to me. However, it caused me to spend a lot of time in prayer and Bible study. The prayer and Bible study, along with some herbs helped me make it through the challenge. There was always a bit of depression that followed pregnancy with me. With my first child, my parents became concerned, and recommended therapy, which NEVER worked well for me! What they didn't understand, and what I came to understand was that it was mostly a physical change with some emotional repercussions. Ultimately I dealt with it to some extent following the births of each of my children, including my last daughter who died.
     It is an interesting thing to me how stupid people in the last several decades were about hormonally related depression! In the fifties and sixties, this was seen as some sort of personal weakness. Women were shut up in hospitals and retreats, and their children taken away from them. Women who seriously had problems were often ignored totally, and even today we turn our heads in disgust , and throw women in jail who are often suffering from postpartum symptoms, which nobody wants to discuss, and certainly not in court! Hospitals and doctors, hardly ever counsel young women on the potential for the baby blues to turn into a year long mental illness! Years ago, it was like if a woman had emotional problems, she was tainted or stupid or immoral!
   For crying out loud, we can take care of a woman who has Strep throat, but we can't manage to find in ourselves one shred of compassion for a woman struggling with a very physical illness! Sadly, doctors are even worse often than the general public! When I went to my woman doctor, she laughed and told me, "Well at least you are not hearing voices come out of your TV  telling you to kill your children, like this one lady I saw! Here, I'll give you some medication and send you to a psychiatrist.". This was the very last thing I needed to hear! I went out the door, threw the prescription away, and went and found my pastor! Through him, a man, I found what I really needed was God's help, and through my Aunt Alice, I learned what was causing my problem. Once I knew where I stood, I was able to find some herbs to help me, and a close relationship to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ which was the real help I needed, an appointment with the Great Physician, and he never once talked about voices coming out of the TV!
    Well, I guess we must travel in our discussion about the weeds of life(which sometimes come in human form), back to the weeds in the garden. Anyway, after I started to recover from the hormonal changes that beset me following pregnancy it was always like sunrise! For me it was a time of great emotional, spiritual, and mental growth! During the particular experience after my second son, God began talking to me about what he wanted me to do. Why do I homestead? God told me to. Why do I grow organically? God told me to! Why have I tried to feed my family from what I could grow? Because God told me to. I felt and still feel a strong urging from the Lord to grow clean food. I have always had the strong impression that somehow either I, or my children needed this knowledge that I was pursuing!
    Therefore, I battle weeds, and bugs for God. I'd like to say I always do it in the way he wants me to, but the truth is I always feel less effective than I think he wants me to be. I firmly believe he is using this organic life I am leading to his purpose and his glory. I just wish I could live up to it all, be all he wants me to be. I've always felt that he has me here to help train others, particularly my family for some future eventuality. I believe that as poorly as I have managed to do this job he called me to do, he has used it to further our health, and our joy. It certainly has furthered mine.

After all that, now I can talk about what this post is really about:^) Here we get Little Bit Farm ready for the fall gardening season. The first pic( above)  is my tomato garden this year, which as anyone can see suffered from terrible neglect. Can anyone see a tomato plant:^)? I spent much of my summer cooking at camp, going on a mission trip, teaching vacation bible school, and a host of other activities. In the midst of it, our weedeater went out, and then my weedeating sons did too, lol! Next is the garden next to it, which was my spring garden this year. Today we harvested beets out of it. Here you can see the progress on revamping it:

   This method is really effective for working on over weedy ground. Just left the frame, line with cardboard, and fill with dirt, or barn cleanings by the time the seedlings are growing well the cardboard is disintegrated enough for the roots to get through. I will plant greens in that first bed tonight. Everybody have a great day!!!

So I must confess, I have an inexplicable attraction to little tiny houses! In fact, I just love the idea of a little cosy cottage, where I can curl up next to a warm fire with a good book! I have it in mind to build myself one, and I just can't get away from that notion. Currently there is a whole movement of other people who are just as enamored as I! In fact here is an interview with one lady who built the cutest cottage ever: Cutest Cottage Ever

Here is a pic of a little house my friend owns. Of course it is old and in very poor shape. However it's atmosphere is lovely!

  I guess I started having this dream when I was little, and was still building forts and playhouses! Except, I guess I just like the idea now of playing all the time! I just love tiny spaces, but more than that I love tiny prices:^) It is a lot less expensive to build a tiny house, and when you think about it why do we need all that space? For storage? We can store things in a shed. Actual living takes up very little space. A place to sleep,  eat, potty, and relax. We have become so enamored with space that we think that we need more to fill up the space, but maybe we really need less. Maybe we need less space, confusion, stuff, and most of all stress! Just pare it all down.

    Besides, it's surprising how much we can fit into a space when we simply work harder at it. A place for everything, and everything for it's place. Quite a few years ago we lived in an 18 foot trailer with a slide out for 6 weeks with four children while we looked for a house in a new location. At the end of it I was ready to move into something bigger, but more because we were living in a campground, which was not my own, than because the space was too small. Campgrounds are not great for permanent living with a family, too many strangers, and bizarre rules, having to use the campground phone(no cell phones in those days), and other peoples children. It was stressful. However, I knew even then that I could live that way on my own land easily, with some minor changes. One would have been a small separate bedroom for the children, just a tad more privacy:^) However, we got along. Things went well.

   Here is a link to an article on how to make things easier in a tiny space:  18-Brilliant-Storage-Ideas-For-Tiny-Homes

   Actually, in my future I dream of a barnyard surrounded by a collection of purposeful buildings. These buildings would include: My cottage, a hen house and yard, a barn, and a shop. Also included would be some other things lacking from our homesteads of today: A little library, a chapel, a root cellar, a spring house, a summer kitchen, a storage shed, a laundry, a milkhouse, and a piggery. And between all this, gardens of vegetables flowers and herbs. So basically, I want to go smaller, and bigger!!!

Homestead Renewed

So in the past few years, my homesteading has been fairly limited, partially due to illness, and a lot due to frustration! In 2006, I came down with Peripartum Cardiomyopathy, which is a fancy way to say I got heart failure from a pregnancy! I was very blessed in that I recovered eventually! However, I unfortunately did lose my baby due to an unrelated problem.

   During the next few years I just simply struggled to make progress here at Little Bit Farm. My Kids are getting older, which one would think would make things easier because they would be extra help, but it just made them more stubborn when it came to convincing them to help. Not to mention, they are all finding their own lives, and often did not see the point of where I was devoting mine. Now I am really not complaining. For sure my frustration was not solely from their lack of interest. My frustration went a lot further than that. For one thing we began to really struggle financially, and feed costs went sky high, and inflation in everything else went up too. It just got to the point where I felt that I was fighting a one woman battle, and steadily losing ground, and nobody cared but me! So I took a vacation, no goats, no turkeys, no ducks, no geese, no pigs. I kept the remainder of my chicken flock after the last bad dog.

   However, during that time we didn't abandon all thought of homesteading. We did manage to keep our little four acres and orchard here growing, and we purchased 30 acres for our future homestead. This last summer has reminded me of my priorities, as my garden mostly died during this drought, mostly because I was too busy to care for it.

   In spite of all that Fall is coming, and I am renewed in my commitment to feed our family from home. For one thing, I cannot afford not to! For another, I know that it is the healthiest alternative for someone who cannot afford to buy Organic food all the time.

   So I am renewing, revamping, and rebuilding my homestead and to a degree my life! My youngest, my daughter Lacey and I are starting over. In the last weeks I have added 4 standard Bronze Turkeys( Two Toms and two hens. One Tom will be Christmas dinner), 7 beautiful pure white muscovy ducks, 6 guineas, and quite a few chickens. Lacey and I have done some fence repair, and we will soon have a big barn cleaning, as soon as the burn ban is lifted.  Also I have made a deal on a small herd of Boer Goats(4 nannies and a wether), which will be delivered here soon. It's a good thing, because my pasture needs some trimming! I am also looking into adding a few sheep at some point. We will not be adding pigs, they became overwhelming, and too expensive to feed! I will also pick up a good dairy buck I think, to cross to the boers.

   I am also revamping my garden for fall, and am fixing to plant several beds this week! I will be putting in quite a few vegetables to carry me through winter. Honestly, I can't wait! I'm dreaming of Kale, Mustard, Spinach, Turnips, Beets, more summer squash, bush beans and all manner of yummies!

   Today, On my plate I have cucumber relish, and Watermelon Shrub, and preserving 100lbs of Potatoes. With that, I am ending this post so I can get to it!!!