Howdy there

I can't believe how much I had ignored my blog last week.  And I don't even know exactly what I've been doing outside of the blogosphere.  Not like I've been watching Jerry Springer and eating bon-bons, but really, I have no idea what has been taking up so much of my time.

I mean, besides watering the new strawberry, grape and blueberry plants.  And screaming at the chickens to get out of the gardens.  And untangling goat feet from tie-out cords.  And screaming at the goat kids to get off the tractor (did you know I was a screamer??).  But really, not much on the "Want to Do" list has been accomplished.  

Well, other than this:

And in three weeks, Peeping!  Well, hopefully.

And this:

What a HAM!!

Forty-seven eggs in the incubator and a hillbilly-homemade summer play dress for Rhiannon.  And that's enough, I suppose.  My sister and her husband are here for the week, so I suspect that my blog will be neglected yet again.  Unless I can get some really embarrassing pictures of her, then I'll be sure to post them :)

See ya all soon!

Don't forget, if you want a chance to bid on "The Encyclopedia of Country Living" by Carla Emery, click HERE!  And a great big "Thank You" to those that have bid or donated! :)

Auction for a Blog Buddy

Bad things happen to good people all the time.  It's just part of life.  It sucks, but it's life.  But there are ways we can help and here's my little attempt at combating the "bad" with some "good".

I would like to host a blogging auction to raise a bit o' the green stuff for SciFi Chick over at Bacon and Eggs.  She and her truck found themselves in quite a mess last week and although she thankfully came out of it mostly unscathed, the truck did not, and her and her husband are now without transportation.  Which isn't too bad if you live in the city or the 'burbs, but they live out in the boonies.  Kind'a makes it difficult for her to get her daily morning cup of Starbucks double-frappe-cacao-supremo and she's getting REALLY cranky now.  (If you don't know me by now, or SciFi....I'm joking).  Anyways...... 

If you haven't found your way over to her blog, might I suggest you do so?  She's a fellow homesteading, freedom-loving, not afraid of getting down & dirty chick and needs a little helping out and cheering up.  Since she doesn't seem one to be doing any asking for herself, I'm going to do it so she doesn't have to.  And even if you aren't in the position of helping out financially, give her blog look-see and say "Hello"! 

Oh yeah, the "good" part.  I have up for auction one gently-used copy of:

Carla Emery's "The Encyclopedia of Country Living" (9th Edition).

So not only are you helping out a fellow homesteading chick, but you'll be getting an 858 page book chock-full of "Practical advice, invaluable information, and collected wisdom for folks and farmers in the country, city, and anywhere in between."

Rules for the Auction:

Open to US residents only
Bidding starts at $10 (a great deal for this book, BTW).  
Bids must be made on the comment form on this post.  
Bidding ends in one week (Friday, May 4th at Noon CST).  
Highest bid will be the winner and must then send the winning amount to SciFi Chick via her "Donate" button on her blog (it's small and somewhere on the right side of the screen, but it's there!).  
I will then send the winner the book.
Winner will receive book, and say, "Yippee!"

Good luck, and happy bidding! 

Wild Kingdom

Rhiannon was playing with her toy animals the other day.  She has quite the assortment of barnyard animals, reptiles and dinosaurs.

Usually her little animals are buddies, sharing in adventures that traverse the mountains (living room couch), hiding in the labyrinth of caves (underneath the kitchen table) or swimming in the ocean (bathtub).  But lately there's been quite a few altercations between the animals.  Namely between the dinosaurs and the horses.  As in the horse will be laying prostrate and the dinosaur will be hovering above it.  Then the dinosaur bends down to the horse and Rhiannon makes munching noises.

Munch, munch, munch.....burp!  Excuse me!

Ok, so I'm guilty of letting her watch a few too many Planet Discovery, Wild America and Blue Planet DVD's.  But maybe it's time to put Sponge Bob in the player for a while?

So now I've been thinking about the meat-eating thing and how I'm going to approach the whole life-death-eating cycle here on the farm.  Rhiannon loves chicken.  And Rhiannon loves chickens.  She knows the word chicken can mean either her feathery friends outside or the delicious meal on the supper plate.  But when will she realize that they are one in the same?  And when will she realize that the animal had to die to fill her tummy?  And when that realization is finally made, will she shun that food?

Then there's the whole can o' worms regarding the meaning of "death".  She's seen a dead rooster and knows that it no longer moves or clucks, but just sits there (with it's head missing).  She even said the word "dead" when she saw another deceased animal shortly afterwards.  

I know that most "civilized" parent's don't have this discussion with their children.  They are so conditioned to seeing their dinner come from a drive-through window or the ingredients neatly laid out on a styrofoam tray and wrapped in plastic that the idea that their supper once lived and breathed never occurred to them. Exactly when does an inner-city or urban child find out that the burger in their HappyMeal was once a cow?  Acutally, I don't even remember at what age I realized meat meant the death of an animal.  Did I figure it out on my own?  Was I taught it in grade school?  Did my parents tell me?  Or since I was suburban-raised, did I even care about the fate of a chicken, cow or pig?

I'm not going to hide from Rhiannon where our meals come from; I want my daughter to truly appreciate her food.  But I'm not sure when, or how, I'm going to teach her about those not-so-nice facts of life and death.  Do we make her watch when we're butchering an animal?  Technically I think she was at the last chicken processing, but was more interested in the jug of bubbles a friend brought her.  Is she too young to see these things?  Or if we keep involving her by letting her hang around will she just figure "Oh, that's just how it's done" and be over it?  Or will she scream and cry the next time Mommy makes chicken and dumplings and become a vegetarian?  Ah, the challenges of parenthood!

Maybe I could get David Attenborough to come here and do a voice-over during our next chicken butchering session.

Goodbye Pan, Hello Strawberries!!

Paul's friend came to pick up Pan yesterday afternoon.  I would have taken a goodbye picture of him, but I wasn't here for the parting.  I'd say that I miss him, but I'd be lying, and this morning was actually a tiny bit more enjoyable as it required less time / work from me as I didn't have to hay or water him.  

So although we are now without a buck, we've been promised access to him come breeding season.  Deal of the century if you asked me!
My Mom and Stepfather cleaned out their strawberry bed to make room for other berries (raspberries or gooseberries I think) and look what I ended up getting:

Two buckets of strawberry plants!!  

Some of them already had berries on them so I'm not sure if the plants will continue growing berries after all the stress of being uprooted and transplanted.  But even if they don't produce again until next season I'm still thrilled!  I had bought some cheap'o strawberry crowns from Walmart a few weeks ago (why, why, WHY??) so I planted them near the back of the bed hoping that some of them will come up.  They looked pretty pathetic, but I put in a handful of homegrown compost in with them hoping that would help.

So our berry garden is actually starting to look like a berry garden.  The past two years were dreadfully hot here so I lost ALL of my raspberry and blackberry bushes (ten total) and about half (another six or so) of the blueberry bushes.  We've replaced the dead blueberry bushes with new ones this spring and the bed that used to contain the raspberries now have grapes planted there.  There is still one area that can be made into one large or two small beds.  I'm not sure what other berry type of plant I want yet, so that area may just be used for the tomatoes and peppers this summer.

Homemade Candied Orange Peels

Or my, "Why am I so darned stubborn that I have to try to make everything from scratch?" post.

Not being content with simply walking into a store to buy something, I've been known to occasionally go into a stubborn / cheap / creative fit regarding a number of various food or household products.  I think it started years ago when I first realized that one could make actually make bread.  Like, at home. With little more than some yeast, flour, salt and water.  It was just the beginning.

Then there was soap.  And lotions and salves.  Not to mention the ever increasing number of previously-purchased-in-the-frozen-food-isle side dishes and meals that I could now make.  Every year I was increasing my portfolio of homemade, homegrown or handcrafted items.  And it felt good!  When I made soap, I felt like a chemical engineer.  When I made creamed spinach, I felt like a gourmet chef!  When I harvest wild edibles or homegrown fruit, I feel like a botanist!  Handmade greeting cards, and I'm an artist!  Yearly vaccinations for the goats and I'm a veterinarian!  You get the idea.

The act of doing, making or creating something that "normal" people would only trust a paid professional to do or only buy if it came packaged in plastic at a store is a very empowering feeling.

But creativity can be exhausting.  And an exhausted homesteader is not a very productive homesteader.  So in order to keep myself from wasting away to nothing (insert really, really big eye-roll here), I needed some sustenance.  But bread and butter or fried eggs and pork sausage wasn't going to hack it.  I wanted something sweet and exotic.  And I had the makings of it on my counter top, awaiting deposit into the chicken bucket.  But instead of becoming poultry feed, I was going to use it:

Orange peels, pith removed and sliced into strips.

I washed the orange peels, sliced the white pith from it and cut them into thin strips.  Put them into a pot with water & brought it to a boil.  Drained the hot water, put more water in and brought that to a boil.  After the second boiling, I emptied the hot water again and put the peels in another bowl.  One cup of water and three cups of sugar went into the pot and when that started to boil I put the peels back in.  Lowered the temperature on the stove so the sugar syrup and peels just simmered and stirred them for about an hour.  When the peels start to look translucent, they are done.  I lifted each peel out of the hot syrup using tongs and placed them on a drying rack for over 24 hours until they were dried.

Candied orange peels, almost dried!

The next day, I dumped a bag of chocolate chips into my little double boiler and melted them to coat my orange peels.  

The other two candies were "bonus" treats.  There was still chocolate left in the pot so I took some of the leftover shredded coconut from my Peeps Cake and threw it in to make coconut haystacks.  The other peanut-brittle looking thing was made from the sugar syrup; now delightfully orange-flavored after having simmered the peels in it.  I brought the orange syrup up to soft-crack stage, added a teaspoon or so of baking soda and poured it onto a greased baking sheet.  Kind of turned out like a brittle or deflated sponge candy.

Luckily I had the good idea to put most of it in a container in the freezer or I would have eaten the entire lot of it.  Although frozen candies are just as good.

Pine tar and poultry plumage

One of my few (but ever increasing) Political Rants will follow, and it's a doozy.  If you do not wish to read my ranting and occasional foul language, please come by tomorrow when I will talk about making homemade chocolate covered orange peels (amazing variety of topics, hugh?)

If you're still here even after the little warning, thank you.  Really.  Although I occasionally get depressed about the sloth and indifference of the majority of the US citizenry, I am happy to know that there are still people out there that give a damn about freedom and about the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.  

So.  What's my rant about today?  As many of you may know, no thanks to CNN or Fox or MSNBC, there is another fight for food freedom going on right now in Michigan.  I won't get into the nitty-gritty details not only because I'll have a stroke while typing it, but because there is so much first hand information out there from the little guys caught in the middle of it.  But in a nutshell, the asinine State of Michigan and the DNR has now made felons out of anyone harboring "feral" pigs.  (Go to Bakers Green Acres for a good, if not maddening, read.)

I'm not talking about farmers letting a bunch of wild boars out into their neighbor's farmland, or secretly breeding pigs with the ability to spread a biological weapon amongst the human population (That would be our own government doing that.  Just kidding.  But it wouldn't surprise me at all.), but family farmers growing pigs that are not the status quo.  Pigs that are able to live and thrive and grow outdoors in a pasture and not in an overcrowded cesspool like in the gigantic factory hog farms.  Pigs that look like, well, pigs.  Curly tails, stripes on piglets, hair.....you know, what a pig should look like.  Pigs that, heavens forbid, may be in greater demand than those cranked out by the mega-pig factories.  More and more people are wanting their meat to be raised in a humane manner, want their families to sit down to a natural pork chop, want to support their local farmers.  But big business doesn't like that.  And neither does the State.  Big business wants to stamp out any and all competition.  And the State is right there to help out by making (cover your ears) fucking ignorant and completely unconstitutional laws in order to force everyone into compliance.

Every single day, our rulers are adding things to their list of what you can or cannot eat.  Yes, they are.  I'm sick of being called a fanatic, or a tin-foil-hat wearing wacko, or a conspiracy nutjob.  If you cannot see the writing on the wall, you are the delusional one, not me.  

Our government is making felons out of people selling raw milk, raising heritage breeds of animals, or otherwise taking responsibility over their own lives.  Things that humans have been doing for a millennium.  Yet those same departments that would love to take your daughter from you for child-endangerment (you know, letting her drink raw milk), will happily let GMO's flow through our food system without even giving us the right to know.  They make selling totally natural products like a Stevia plant as a "sweetner" unlawful (which has been in use for hundreds of years), but will grant a patent to a huge corporation to make and sell a synthetic version of it with little or no testing.

Don't get me started on the "But the USDA, DNR, FDA, etc., are responsible for reducing the amount of bacteria/pathogens in our foods, keeping our water clean, conserving resources (for whom??)" crap.  Yes, there are many things that these departments have done to honestly help reduce disease, improve food safety, etc.  There is no doubt that good things have come from these departments.  But they have gone unchecked, been held unaccountable and have overstepped their boundaries by unimaginable distances.  

These government agencies are out of control and they have gone far beyond what they were originally created to do.  They destroy family dairy operations that have not a single incident of food-born illness in 30 years of operation.  They raid direct farm-to-consumer buying clubs.  They criminalize the sale and purchase of raw milk sales.  Is it because there are people becoming sick from the products or because consumers were being sold something other than what they though they were buying?  No.  

Just like any government agency, it keeps growing and growing, feeding on the endless supply of taxpayer money.  And in order to keep the agencies fat, happy and ever expanding, they have to rationalize (i.e., make up, skew facts or out & out lie) reasons for the billions of dollars a year they suck from our wallets.  They claim that they are saving us from horrible, horrible things.  And the majority of the people still believe that it is all for our own good.  That it is justifiable.  That it is just how things are in today's society and we should all just deal with it.  It's the price we pay for living in a civilized first-world country.

Bullshit.

The price we pay for these "services" and "safety" is bloated, inefficient and downright criminal.  But as time has gone by we have been brainwashed into thinking that it's OK.  That there are just some freedoms that we will have to give up in order to live in this civilized society.  That humans are infallible so we should just assume that those institutions constructed by them are inherently flawed.  While there is truth in the fact that our governing bodies are imperfect, there is absolutely no reason that we should accept or encourage those imperfections.  Wrong is wrong.  Evil is evil.  Regardless of who institutes it or if they got away with it before.

Let's play a word game.  If I say the word "Politician", what's the first word(s) that comes to your mind?

Honest?  Civil Servant?  Law-abiding?

I'd be willing to bet it was somewhere along the lines of "Crook" or "Liar".  And the fact that we take this negative connotation in comic stride is a perfect example of how bad it has become.  We expect to hear scandalous things about our elected or appointed officials.  Nobody utters a loud and horrified gasp when we see the local mayor, judge or senator on the television being accused of breaking the law; we just shrug our shoulders and say "It's just politics" and wait for Dancing with the Stars to come on.

I see I have regressed (or progressed, depending on how you look at it) in my original ranting.  But it is really all connected.  

It is time for us to hold our ground.  It is well past time, actually.  If you watched the latest video from Baker's Green Acres (see link above), he says something to the extent that the guys lower on the DNR totem pole are "just doing their jobs".  Ok.  So maybe the poor sap who just works there to mow the grass at the forest preserve should't be held accountable (although I could argue this point also).  But anybody who would employ state-sanctioned force at the point of a gun on those raw milk sellers, heritage breed pig farmers, etc. should be held liable and accountable for their actions as well as should their superiors.  It's so much easier to say "It's my job" or "But my boss told me to do it" than to take responsibility for oneself. 

So don't pull that "just doing their job" crap on me either.  Those guys at Auschwitz where just doing their jobs.  Is the jack-booted thug with an itchy trigger finger pointing a gun at a dairy farmer going to shoot him if he dares sell that gallon of milk to a willing and knowledgeable consumer?  Just because it's his job?   Just because he has a shiny badge with ABC Dept. stamped on it?  Just because some politician said it was "OK" for him to do it? 

It's time to tar and feather.  It's going to be difficult.  There are going to be friends, acquaintances, maybe even family that you will have to come to terms with.  But we must tell them that their line of work is unethical, immoral, even evil.  That we will no longer tolerate injustice just because it's their "job".  These people need to be ostracized by their community until people realize that those jobs are not honest employment, that those jobs are nothing more than state-sanctioned evil.  We must make those jobs some of the most insidious, most disgusting, most hated occupations known to man.  When somebody tells you that she's a citation officer for the XYZ Agency, we must look at her in distain and ask why she can't get an honest job.  If a friend is applying for a job with the XYZ Agnecy, we must tell him that we no longer value his friendship.  When a guy at a bar is bragging about how he gets to carry a gun because he's going to raid a family farm for selling chickens processed on-site, we need to tell him what a POS he is.   It's not going to be easy to do, but it has to be done.

PS - I wish I didn't have to write this, but here goes:  I am not in any way, shape or form suggesting nor implying that you should use violence against any government employee (or anyone) at any time.  Violence is not the answer (although I wish the State would take the same stance).  And please don't take your anger out at your local mail carrier, city park lawn maintenance crew or the guy collecting money on the toll road.  There are government services that are worthy and justified (and you all thought I was an anarchist).   I'm not directing my anger towards them, but towards the tyrannical gun-wielding and Constitution-trampling thugs and agencies that think they are above the law just because some self-serving egomaniac in a political position told him it was ok.

The First Amendment is still (mostly) upheld in the USA.  Use it to voice your outrage.  

Grazing the Goats

The enclosure where we keep the goats is not large enough to supply them with adequate grazing so we have to feed them hay every day.  During the green months, I usually pick a lush area of grass and weeds and stake them out on a long braided rope with clippy-doo-dads on each end.  

One clip gets attached to the goat's collar, the other to the tree or t-post (or wheel of the truck, boat trailer or heavy tractor implement).

Although this may seem like the answer for those of you who desperately want goats, but have yet to install goat-proof fencing for your dreamed-about caprine buddies, let me tell you that it is NOT.

Goats are escape artists.  They will lean on, push, shove, nose under, climb over and generally make your fencing look as if a tornado ripped through your area and just dropped a mess of wire around your homestead.  We sold a doeling to a couple who claimed that she would scale their 4' high chain link fence to go visiting with the neighbor's goats.  The best "fencing" in not only a physically tough barrier, but one that contains the BEST greenery, as we all know that the grass (and briers) are always greener on the other side.  This is, of course, almost impossible, but it does help if your goats do not harbor pasture-lust for things outside of their enclosure.  If they are happy munching on what's inside their pen, they'll be less likely to want to go outside the fence.  But this post is not about goat fencing; I'll do one in the near future though.

Even though the clippy-doo-dad method of staking out goats sounds perfect, it also has it's drawbacks.  First of all, you must be within eye or at least ear-shot of them.  Because even though you may have picked a relatively snag-free area of grazing for them, they will find the smallest twig to snag the rope on.  And in three minutes flat, they will have wound themselves around said twig no less than three-hundred and fifty-two times until they are laying on the ground because there is no more slack in the rope.  I had staked Pan outside several weeks ago and he tangled the rope into a knotted mess around a long dead sapling that was, I kid you not, sticking up only three inches from the ground.

It pays to make sure the grazing area is clear of such obstructions even those as unassuming as large rocks as those will also be used to create a sort of knotted-up goat-macrame project that you will not be able to un-knot.  Even when the grazing area is cleared of any obstructions, it is only a matter of time (say, four minutes after you've left the goats and just started a conversation with your insurance agent on the phone) before they get themselves tangled up in the rope.

So why do I still clip the goats out on a lead?  Because it's the best I can do right now to get them fresh, green grass.  And as long as I can easily see and hear them, it's just a matter of going back outside and untangling them.  Now that I think about it, it's usually Pan and Annette that get the rope all messed up; Nettie and Chop Suey must be more rope-savvy.  But at least I won't have to worry about Pan much longer.