You SAY you want to save money - or - HIPFT, part 1

Prices of everything are going up; many say out of control.  Produce, fuel oils (gas went up 19 cents in one day here), corn, wheat, rice, cotton, coffee, chocolate…..it isn’t going to get any better people.

Then we complain when the monthly bills come in the mail.  Electric and natural gas rates went up.  The phone company’s list of added charges are long enough to require two additional pages.  Your cable bill is actually three digits long (not including the numbers to the right of the decimal point).  Your land line phone, which you hardly use anyhow, steadily goes up. And that’s just the stuff you get in the mail.

The majority of the people will do absolutely nothing about the price increases (except complain).  Not that you can just go to the store & say, “I’m only paying $1.20 for that bag of apples”, but you can do other things to reduce your spending.  I strongly believe that one of the reasons our country is in such a mess is that nobody is willing to work for what they want or need.  They will bitch & moan about this or that, but won’t personally lift a finger or change the teeniest habit in order to make a change.  I bet you know of at least one person that’s sucking on the fed/state tit in the form of welfare, but are more than capable of providing for themselves.

Sorry for the rant.  Now, back to what I was getting at:

So what are you going to do about it?

No.  Really.  What are you going to do about it?  Besides griping?

I know it stinks.  You haven’t seen a raise in several years.  Your paycheck doesn’t automatically adjust itself for cost of living increases (unlike some of our politician’s paychecks….nice, hugh?)  So how do you compensate for the disparity between what your paycheck brings in and what you lay out for living expenses?

You get cheap.  You start thinking to yourself, “How can I spend less on _______”, and then you make a list of ways to do that, and implement those ideas.

Start with one thing.  Like your electric or gas bills.  Heating anything, be it your stove, your hot water or your clothes dryer, costs money.  Your electric bill has gone up 20%, so make a conscience effort to cut down your usage by that much.

But how can I do that?  By planning & always thinking, “Hey, I’m paying for that!” 

If we had a device on every electric appliance that had a real-time read out of what it was costing us to run it, I bet there would be a lot more frugal minded people out there.  But since we only get that utility bill once a month, we tend to forget that running our dryer on high for an hour for a half load of towels cost us x dollars or that baking a single loaf of bread in the oven costs x dollars.

Here are some of the things we do here to save on our electric bill.  Hopefully it will inspire you to take some cost-cutting measures yourself.

Heat.  We are fortunate enough to not only have a wood stove, but timberland enough to keep us in firewood, even just using downed trees or standing snags.  If you don’t have a wood stove or furnace, can you try lowering your thermostat down a degree or two?  Don’t think you can live with a 65 degree household?  Then keep turning down the heat just one degree at a time.  Close doors to rooms that aren’t used and close the vents to those rooms.  Close your blinds or curtains during the night to reduce the heat loss through the windows.  Better yet, buy or make yourself some insulated curtains.  Thrift stores around here usually have a boatload of insulated curtains.  They are usually butt-ugly, but you can either sew a different material on the front or just use them behind the “nice” curtains & just pull them down during the evening.  Oh, and wear sweaters or socks…I know you have them. 

Turning off the water heater.  The main reason we have hot water is to bathe.  And since this usually occurs in the early morning, why are you paying for heating the water for the other 20 hours of the day?  Remember…..”Hey, I’m Paying for That!”  (I think I’m going to have to make that into a common acronym around here; H.I.P.F.T!  Catchy, don’t you think?) 

You can manually turn the water heater on & off, but if you’re like me, you’ll end up forgetting and have to wait a half hour for hot water (which really isn’t that horrible) or take a very invigorating – and quick – shower.  Your local hardware store should have a timer for the water heaters.  Invest in one.  I plan to very soon.

Clothes washer & dryers.  You don’t have to wash your clothes in hot, or even warm water all the time.  With the exception of really, really dirty clothes or a load that needs some major bleaching, I wash everything using cold water.  I also line dry our clothes as much as possible.  And if you just can’t bear the thought of crunchy clothing, try line drying until your clothes are almost dry, then put them in the dryer for the last few minutes to fluff them up.

Lighting.  I think everyone knows that fluorescent lights use less electricity.  And even if you have the new bulbs, turn the stinking light off if you’re not in the room!  I sound like your Mom, don’t I?

Electric phantom loads.  Things like your tv & computer are using electricity even when they are turned “off”.  We use a power strip for our tv / dvd player & stereo system.  Everything gets plugged into the strip & the strip is turned off after the stereo or tv is turned off.  If you’re a big computer user, use the sleep mode so it powers down if you’re not using it; better yet, just turn it off.

Cooking.  Try to bake several items at once.  With the exception of some cakes, cookies or other “picky” baked goods, most recipe temperatures can be fiddled with either up or down a bit.   Better yet, save some time and make several nights worth of dinners in one day.  It takes a little planning, but imagine how much better you’ll feel when you can just take a pre-cooked meal out of the fridge, pop it in the microwave & say, “Dinner’s ready!”

I’m sure there are plenty of other ways you can reduce your electricity usage but the heak if I can think of any more right now.  Do an online search or go to your library & check out some books.

Remember my new favorite saying….HIPFT!  

Hmmm……it’s not the easiest thing to pronounce.  Kind’a sounds like I have a lisp.  So much for making that the new household word.

Searching for an Eggs-planation

For the past two weeks, I’ve been finding a broken egg on the milk stand platform.  Not like an egg with a crack in it, or an egg that had been pecked by another chicken (as there wouldn’t be much of anything left as they will readily eat a broken egg).  It looks like it was dropped from a decent height, as it had a very large “splat” profile.  Egg shell, egg white & yolk were all still there.

I’ve also noticed that we haven’t been getting as many eggs as normal.  It’s still winter so I understand that they won’t be laying as much, but about a month ago we were consistently getting at least a half-dozen eggs and it seems that suddenly we were only getting two or three a day. 

Snakes?  Possibly, as I’ve wrangled my share of them out of the nest boxes and relocated them far away.  I don’t kill them as they also keep the rodent population down; and I’m a bit partial to the scaled fellas.  We’ve had a few days of 60 or even 70 degree weather around here this month, but I didn’t think it was anything hot enough or long enough to bring the snakes out of hibernation.

We’ve also had a sudden small, but noticeable increase of the squirrel population here lately and I’ve heard people say that squirrels could carry an egg away.  So I figured those little furry buggers were taking our eggs & in the process, occasionally dropping one on the milking stand while making its way out of the barn via the shelving & rafters. 

But dropping one in the exact same place?  Every time? 

So after finding the fifth, maybe sixth egg yesterday afternoon in its typical “Splat” pattern, I started to earnestly look around for any clues.  Not that I claim to know the inner workings or thoughts of the fluffy tailed rodent called a squirrel, but it seems to me that if it were to take an egg out of the barn it could have taken a much easier way out.  Then I looked directly above & around the scene of the egg-splat. 

Could a chicken be nesting somewhere on the shelves or in the rafters, lay an egg & have it roll off & fall to the milk stand?  I suppose that was as good of an answer than any, but I still couldn’t  figure out where the chicken would sit that could cause the egg to roll & fall into the egg-splat area.  So now I’m on a mission.  I’ve gone out to the scene of the crime four times already this morning in hopes to find a chicken nesting there, but nothing so far.

Ah! So that’s why they make small bales.

We used to buy our hay in small square bales, but at $4 a pop (and that was relatively cheap), it wasn’t very cost effective.  So a few months ago, we bought our first round bale.  At $39 it was cheaper, but obviously it was much, much larger than what we were used to dealing with.  We put the bale in Ms. Melman’s barn on its side and I would peel away layers.  Definitely not easy to work with as now I had to grab a bunch of loose hay instead of picking up the flakes on the square bales.  We ended up buying a total of three round bales.  Ms. Melman and Nugget went through one bale in just under a month and they are about ¾ through their second bale.  The goats have only eaten about a third of their bale.

I had to stop at the feed store to get more goat chow so I checked to see if they had any more round bales left.  I was a bit nervous as it’s getting late in the season and still several months away from haying here.  They had one round bale left, but it had seen some water damage & was moldy on one side.  Mold is not good for anybody, even mules who can eat some of the poorest roughage.  The feed store did have four big square bales left.  They were $50 instead of $39 (for the rounds), but they were also supposed to be another 150 lbs. heavier.  So I paid for a large square and had Paul pick it up later that afternoon.  A large square measures 4’ x 4’ x 8’ long; a convenient size for those that have a pickup truck.  What wasn’t so convenient is that you just can’t roll this bale out the back of the truck like we did the rounds.  The feed store picked it up with their forklift & kind’a shoved it into the truck bed.  We had to figure out how to get it out of the truck bed when we brought it home. 

If it weren’t for the fact we had a tractor, I’m not sure how we would have done it.

The bale is at the house now.  But it needs to be in the Mule Barn up the road.  There won’t be enough room in the barn until they finish the round bale, so Paul set the new square bale on a pallet & tossed a tarp over it and he’ll tractor it up to the barn when they’ve finished the round bale.  We’re going to have to somehow shove it sideways into the barn as we can’t get the tractor into there.  That should be interesting.

Finally started my seeds!

It’s been on my mind since January when I started getting those farm porn magazines in the mail (i.e. seed catalogs).  And I’ve been going through my old seed packets like a farmish King Midas, heaping them in small piles, picking them up & letting them cascade off my hands, all the while wondering which ones I want to start this year (all of them, of course!).

Today was the day.  I couldn’t procrastinate any longer.  Technically I’m already a week or two behind in starting my peppers and tomatoes, but at least the garden is officially underway.

Last year I started like 200, yes two hundred, seeds in those little plastic containers.  I think there were 48 individual cells in each flat, so it really didn’t take up that much room.  But they either died shortly after getting their first set of true leaves or never grew more than a few inches tall.  I think it had something to do with not having the light close enough to them, but I’m still not sure.  They were all spindly & the ones that did survive being transplanted into the garden didn’t grow an inch more through the entire summer.  Talk about a bummer.  I babysat those little sprouts for week upon week and didn’t get a single tomato out of it.  So I ended up buying some heirloom veggie plants at the local farmer’s market.

This time, I decided to splurge and buy some of those nifty peat pellets.  No mixing up seed-starting soil, no dirt all over the kitchen countertop, just wet ‘em, shove the seed in there & done!  Yes, they cost me 8 cents per pellet and I could have used the seed-starting mixture from last year & those little plastic cells, but I’ll save the eight bucks somewhere else this month.

Like my "designer" round greenhouse?

It used to be the container for an ice cream cake!

I started 18 cabbage, 6 eggplant, 25 peppers, 10 tomatoes, 5 yellow pear tomatoes and 5 red cherry tomatoes.  I also saved some seeds from a really good batch of apples a friend gave us last year & planted six just for kicks.

Now that I have the seeds started, that means I only have a few days to find exactly where I’m going to keep them and how we’re going to hang the lighting.

I’m hoping to have a good sized garden this year, so I’ll also sow some more cabbage seeds directly in the soil later on.  My main focus this year is to have a big winter squash garden, although I still haven’t decided if I’m going to start them indoors or just sow them direct next month.

We currently have two raised beds right in front of the house and I want to start an onion and herb garden in those.  Paul said we’ll try to get two or three more raised beds made next to the other two this spring.  If we do, I plan on having my lettuce, spinach and other “kitchen” fixings in those beds.

Have you started your garden yet?

I'm an Urban Homesteader (well, kind'a)

If you are a visitor to any type of homesteading, gardening or small-scale farming type of blog, I’m sure you’ve heard of the family that is trying to obtain a Copyright on the word “Urban Homesteading”.  I won’t go into much detail here as you can just do an online search and look up the word “Urban Homesteading” or go to Facebook and look up the same and you will be bombarded by articles, blogs, tweets, etc. on the subject.

I haven’t read that much on the newly controversial word, and I’ve never personally been on the family website that “started” this all, but what information & opinions I have gleaned from the web is that a family is trying to make people stop using the word “Urban Homesteading”  as they claimed to have given birth to the word and movement.  Kind of like a certain Vice-President claiming to have invented the internet if you asked me. 

Now, I understand that there are reasons to have Copyright laws.  But for a family to claim ownership of such a common word, something that was probably used by many, many others before and to send threatening lawyer-speak letters to bloggers is just plain, well, rude.   Not to mention arrogant. 

I think one of their reasons was that they didn’t want “Big Business” to get a copyright on it first.  There may be some logic to that;  Look what the FDA did to the word “Organic”…….that federally sanctioned label means absolutely nothing to me now. 

I guess that my idea of a Homesteader, Urban or Rural, is someone who wouldn’t use lawyers or threats to stop others from using such a common word.  A word that should be uniting people in their quest for a better quality of life shouldn’t be at the center of a Copyright controversy. 

Any goats missing a leg?

That’s what Paul asked me yesterday afternoon.  Seems like an odd question, doesn’t it?  So let me tell you what prompted the seemingly bizarre question.

Paul had just finished some (more) dozer work so Rhiannon & I brought him a beverage and we all sat down on a bench in the front yard.  Moonshine had disappeared into the woods for a few minutes, then came trotting back with the biggest grin on her face.  Well, as much of a grin that she could manage with the front leg of some animal hanging out of her mouth.

She seemed so happy that we didn’t bother taking it from her.  When Paul said that it was probably from the goats we butchered, something didn’t click.  First of all, we butchered the goats a month ago so any remains would have been long gone.  Second, the leg Moonshine brought back had black hooves…..and ours had white hooves.  So curiosity got the best of me and I went to inspect Moonshine’s newly found treasure. 

This was definitely a goat leg, but not one of ours as it not only had black hooves, but a black stripe down the front.  I took the leg from Moonshine & noticed that not only was it a goat, but it was a smaller breed of goat as the tibia / fibula (is that what they call it in goats???) was rather short.  The hoof was not a young looking hoof, and had not been trimmed for quite some time.  It was also very “fresh” – the joint actually bent quite easily and the bone still had bright red, somewhat moist meat on it.  Very “CSI” of me, hugh?

It’s not like Moonshine or the neighbor’s dogs haven’t come up with various parts of deer, squirrel or rabbit, so seeing wild animal parts is nothing really new.  But the fact that this piece of goat was found by our dog in say, five minutes, means that the carcass, or what was left of it, was pretty close by.  And I’m pretty sure we’re the only people around the immediate area with goats.   I’ve also heard the coyotes yipping the past four nights. 

I suppose some inconsiderate hillbilly could have butchered a goat & dumped it’s carcass down the road & the coyotes found it.  During hunting season (or even off season) we get our share of deer carcasses thrown out onto our road and eventually Moonshine ends up with a leg or hoof.

So now I’m worried about the goats.  And thinking about talking to Paul about getting another livestock dog.  Yes, we have Moonshine, and I suppose I could keep her outside, but I think she’d end up being a coyote snack instead of a coyote deterrent.

Oh, my answer to Paul’s question of “Any goats missing a leg?” was:

“Um.  No?”.

To which he replied, “Have you checked?” 

(I thought it was a pretty silly question as they were all within sight of our bench)

“Well, no.  No I haven’t.” 

………………

Don’t worry, all goat legs were accounted for. 

Well.  At least the last time I checked.

Kidding Kit

With kidding season just a few weeks away (and Nettie making me wonder if it will be earlier than anticipated) I’ve started getting things ready.  I cleaned out the kidding stall, let it air out for a day then put in fresh pine shavings.  Washed out the kidding pen water & feed buckets.  Dug out my Kidding Kit from the depths of the barn and went through it.  Of course, after a year of sitting idly in the corner of the barn, the cooler I keep all the kidding supplies in was just covered in dust, feathers and other icky unidentified barnstuffs. 

Here’s what I keep in my Kidding Kit: Wee-wee pads, bulb syringe, weak kid syringe, dental floss (for tying off umbilical cords), Iodine, cotton balls, scissors, latex gloves, lubricant, thermometer, ProBios.  Not shown is the Iodine, paper towels (lots & lots of them), empty paper feed sacks and garbage bags.

Not sure what happened to the Iodine, so I’ll have to steal some from our medicine cabinet.  I use the paper feed sacks to spread on the kidding pen floor to catch the majority of the goo from birthing.  After the kid is out, I’ll wipe it down with paper towels, then place it on the wee-wee pads for the doe to finish cleaning it off.

Then all of the stuff goes into zippy bags, into another lidded plastic container, then into an old cooler. 

The cooler also acts as a handy-dandy seat while waiting in the stall.

This will be our fifth year being midwives to the goats and I’m still a little bit nervous.  It’s Nettie’s fifth pregnancy, Ishtar’s second, Annette’s second and Cloud’s first.  If Paul is around for any of the kiddings, I’m hoping to take pictures so I can post them on here.