Our Self Sufficient Home

After spending almost a week without power, and an old generator last winter we decided it was time to upgrade to a more sensitive device friendly unit. The only high power items in our house are our well, and our dryer. Other than tools in the shop these are the only devices that run on 220v, everything else in the house is much smaller. When the power is out we have no plans to do laundry, even a week without power we should be more than fine for not doing laundry.  Water is a different story for us, however we have the older generator that can actually output 220v if we need to refill our lines, and pressure tank. Right now we have about 40 gallons of available water in our pressure tank plus whatever gallons are in the pipes. Last winter during our near week outage we did not run out of water but were careful, and used water from our 5 gallon containers for the toilet.

Utilizing a Kill A Watt meter we were able to determine the draw on everything we would like to run in the house when the power was out, and then added them up and mismatched. Lucky for us the Honda EU2000i was more than enough to run the entire office, plasma TV, and even start up and run our fridge as long as everything wasn’t cranked up all the way.

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Thought I’d share my latest crochet project because it involved a new step for me. This is the first project I’ve made that required the shaping and blocking step.

This scarf was blocked in segments because I didn’t have a piece of cardboard large enough to accommodate it’s length. Since this piece has a lot of open space it needed the extra shaping that blocking provides to give it a finished look by removing the ripply, uneven effect.
It’s really quite simple, pin the item into the desired shape onto a piece of cardboard and thoroughly moisten the yarn with a spray water bottle. You can also wet the piece before pinning but I found it much easier to do after. Allow it to dry, remove the pins and you are left with a nicely shaped knitted garment.

Fall is here, days are shorter, cooler and the rain has started. Few things are more comforting on a cold rainy day than some hearty, home cooked food. The rain put a hold on outside projects so my Sunday was now open for an indoor activity. Homemade chicken pot pie fit the bill. Actually, I made the filling 1 day then made the crust and baked the pot pie on day 2.

I had 2 chicken breasts that I browned in a pan the evening before, the remains of a package of chicken breast since that much chicken is always far too much for one meal feeding 2 mouths. The chicken was diced and set aside. All the veggies were also prepped and set aside- potatoes, carrots, celery, mushrooms, onions, parsley, and peas.
In a large pot a couple tablespoons of butter were melted and the onions were added. Crushed garlic, thyme, and salt and pepper were added. A few tablespoons of unbleached flour were added one at a time and mixed well to create a roux which will later thicken the liquid. The mixture was cooked for a few minutes then slowly chicken broth was added to the roux mixing constantly to ensure the flour mixture incorporated smoothly into the liquid.  I used one can of broth then added all of the veggies and chicken then topped off with more liquid. This way, I was sure to have just enough liquid since I was aiming for a thick stew liquid and not a soup. The pot was covered and cooked for an hour or 2.

Buttery, flakey, brown, melt in your mouth pie crust can be so simple. 4 ingredients is all it takes.  I made enough crust for a full size pie and 2 small pies. Here are the measurements I used: 2  ½ cups flour, 1 cup COLD butter, about ½ cup COLD water and a few pinches of salt. The butter should be cubed then added to the flour and salt and cut in until it’s crumbly. I don’t get bent out of shape if some of the larger clumps won’t break down because this is what helps create the flakiness. The cold water is slowly added and mixed. I prefer a fork for most of the mixing. Form the dough into 2 balls and refrigerate for a few hours.

The dough was rolled, the pie pans were filled, the delectable pies baked until golden brown and the house smelled incredible.

With winter approaching it’s been top priority to make the garage more water proof than in the years past. When we purchased our home it didn’t have a garage door on one side and the other was an old wooden door that was warped enough to allow cats in and out! Needless to say the door was not water proof, and even with it closed the garage flooded all the way to the back wall.

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This little crocheted amigurimi owl was a project I stumbled on while searching for a  Crochet Today pattern for something else. He’s so charming I just had to make one. For those not familiar, amigurimi is the art of creating small stuffed creatures from crocheted pieces. Mr Owl stands about 4 or 5 inches tall and worked up in a few hours. Read the rest of this entry »

Made from Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life by Jenna Woginrich is an entertaining glimpse into the life of a self sufficient woman. In 180 pages she breaks down major points of self sufficiency (raising chickens, gardening, beekeeping, sewing, rabbits, etc.) into dedicated chapters then breaks it down even further into subcategories. I loved the format of this book as it allowed for skipping around to read in the order I wanted.

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Well Autumn is officially here and days before rainfall are numbered, as if we dont always feel the pressure of winter looming over our heads. We had a spare pair of hands to help us today as we moved our freshly delivered firewood, sorted, and stacked it.

The tractor was used to haul the rounds to their designated spot and the quad with trailer was used to haul the split pieces to their home. This system flowed nicely with 3 people.

We have an outbuilding that was already standing on the property when we bought it that we’ve been using for our firewood storage.
4 cords of almond were delivered and dumped as close to the wood storage as possible. There are many trees in the way to prevent an easy unloading and stacking process.

It will take a few more afternoons before we get it all stacked but we dented the piles today.

For those of you who haven’t followed our garden this year, we brought home 6 fruit trees in the spring, one of which is a lovely dwarf nectarine tree. There was a single nectarine growing when we got it and FINALLY about 2 weeks ago the tiny little guy was ripe. I had been keeping an eye on it as August was quickly passing by and while examining it, it fell off into my hand.

This was our only fruit from the six trees this year. Compared to a full size apple you can see how petite it is. I wish I had taken a picture of it cut open. This was probably the most juicy, sweet, delicious nectarine I’ve ever had. The skin was tender and at the peak of ripeness…all around perfection. Maybe I’m a bit partial because it came from my own garden but thats part of gardening, right?

I grabbed a bag of Arrowhead Mills whole grain pastry flour while at the local grocery store. It was new to me, looked intriguing and I wanted to try it. I pulled up Arrowhead Mill’s website for recipes and found this fantastic recipe for extremely moist pineapple raisin carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. These scrumptious little cupcakes are full of texture and have just the right amount of sweetness.

Whole grain pastry flour is light in texture, much lighter than whole grain or wheat flour and has a low gluten content. Its not recommended for use in breads or recipes that call for yeast but is great for cakes, cookies and pastries.

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We finished up the cucumber harvest with a batch of sweet and tangy bread and butter pickles.

First, cucumbers were cleaned thoroughly, then cut into appropriate spears for the jar sized used. I used half pint jars and cut the cucumbers accordingly. Even though the cucumbers were harvested at obviously different sizes it is important to have end pickles that are the same size to allow for even and thorough cooking/processing.

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We’ve decide on the tractor we are going to buy, it’s the Kubota M59 TLB.

We decided on this model kubota for many reasons.

• Size to power ratio
  This unit is small enough to fit between the trees, and on the trails and roads on our property.
  It also has the power to move a lot of dirt, and do some serious digging
• Strength
  We went with the M59 TLB because of how strong the entire Kubota tractor is put together.
  We have no plans for any mid-mount attachments, and utilizing the space for strength made sense for us.
• PTO availability
  We looked at older/used construction models and what we looked at did not have the rear PTO which would have severely limited the tractors use. We want something that we can use for many things, and having a rear PTO and rear hydraulics were key to this.
• PTO Power.
  With plans to add a wood chipper in the future the high power PTO will surely come in handy.
• High volume hydraulics.
  With the high volume hydraulic system we can run bobcat attachments such as a post hole digger on the FEL or a concrete hammer on the backhoe. While we don’t plan to own these attachments knowing we can rent them for the odd job will sure help!

Once the unit arrives we are hoping to finish the garden leveling before winter, and work on leveling out and clearing some space around the garage.

I have so many dreams of a green, lush, landscaped, flower garden and so many things standing in the way. The soil is hard clay, zero rain fall during the hot summer months, freezing temperatures and plenty of snow fall in the winter and most importantly our conscious effort to use as little well water on non edible plants as possible.
During our backyard clean-up, which is an on going and  seemingly never ending project,  we discovered lush patches of what turned out to be Vinca Major, commonly known as Periwinkle. This large variety of the Vinca has thrived to say the least in the natural conditions so we decided to roll with it.

We have never watered this fantastic ground cover and yet it rambles on, so much so that we occasionally have to cut it back. This paired with our ignorance of the plant led to a poisoning of the dear husband during his clean up with a weed whacker. He wore no mask and ingested  bits of the plant and its juice. As a bit of time passed he had an overwhelming feeling of nausea and dizziness.
Alarmed, I got online and read through our plant books to learn that Vinca Major is indeed poisonous and is used for medicinal purposes. We followed up with poison control and nursed him back to normalcy and all ended well. We have no small children or animals to worry about a future poisoning and the dog is uninterested so the plant stays.
A word of caution: dont hack freely at this plant without protection and do not let animals eat it.

Well we had some extremely hot days mixed with cool nights and the onions bolted. This being the first year we’ve grown them I really wasnt sure what to expect but knew this was a bad sign. I pulled the rest of the onions up and was disappointed to say the least to see that they had not even doubled in size since being planted. First onion season was a failure but at least had some pretty flowers to enjoy.

The cucumber harvest has been plentiful…and relentless. Perfect!  They were planted with the intention of making some homemade pickles before the end of summer.

These beauties are a pickling variety purchased from John Scheepers.

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Renting a tractor is no cheap cost and maxing out the usage during the rental time requires multiple rentals, and a lot of money out of pocket! So we’ve started looking at purchasing a Kubota Tractor… we are checking tractor auctions, craigslist, ebay, new, and more!

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