Feeding Animals and Keeping Costs Down

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No matter how much you plan, or how frugal you try to be, most of the time it takes experience and trying things before you can actually learn what will or won’t work when it comes to keeping animal feeding costs as low as possible. Lowering costs is one area that’s become really important for us, especially since at this time, we mostly produce food for ourselves and don’t make an income on it. We do sell eggs and a little milk on occasion, but if we’re lucky we just break even, so that mostly just helps offset costs for feeding the chickens.
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Family and Bananas… A Great Start to the New Year

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Family and bananas… I’m sure you’re probably wondering what those two things, or at least the bananas part of it, have to do with starting out the New Year. Well, the month of December was a pretty crazy one. Fun, but crazy… from going to a Christmas party… to having late night chats with my sister… to playing board games with the family… I went bananas staying up late and even took it to an extreme and pulled an all-nighter or two. It was really bananas because I almost got my days and nights mixed up, and at my age, it’s going to take me a while to recuperate from that. But it was fun, lots of good memories made, and it was totally worth it.
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Fermented Pickles

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Pickles… oh how I love to eat them, especially around the holidays. A plate full of a little cheese ball with crackers, veggies with dip, and summer sausage with pepper jack cheese just isn’t complete without a crunchy, sour pickle on the side. Unfortunately, since we try to avoid eating a lot of foods with added dyes because of allergies, we aren’t able to buy pickles from the store anymore. Most all brands have yellow dye added. It’s really kind of irritating that it’s added because the yellow dye doesn’t actually add any taste or nutrition value to the pickles. I don’t even know why they have to put it in… but that’s a whole other rant for another day. Not only do they have dyes, but they also usually have other ingredients that we try to avoid, like high fructose corn syrup.

So whenever I buy pickles, they’re one food I always buy organic. Not only do they not contain dyes or high fructose corn syrup, but most of the time they are made with more nutritious ingredients, like apple cider vinegar and sea salt. Plus they taste a lot better. The only down side to buying organic pickles is they’re expensive, so I don’t buy them that often. Because of that, I’ve been trying really hard to master the art of making them myself. During the summer, I’ve made several different attempts to can them but I’ve always ended up with mushy pickles. I do plan to keep trying because it would be so handy to have some canned pickles in the pantry to pop open when the mood for a good pickle strikes.
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First Snow of the Season

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Whenever I hear there is snow in the forecast, I always cringe. It’s not that I particularly dislike snow; it’s more the inconvenience of it that I dislike. Chores always take longer and it’s more difficult to take care of the animals. Michael drives a truck, so I worry about him having to drive if the roads are bad. Plus, if we have a measurable amount, it almost always slows work down for him. Then, once the snow melts, there are the muddy roads to deal with. Snow just isn’t that much fun. The kids on the other hand, especially Miley, love snow. In fact, Miley’s been wishing for snow for a while now.
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Eating Real Food…Where to Begin?

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With all the different diets and opinions on what makes the perfect diet, it’s really hard to figure out what a person really should eat. Are eggs good for you or not? What about fat, is it good or bad? How about grains, should we eat them or not? It can all be so confusing and really frustrating to figure out. So how do you figure it all out?
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Why we Choose to Homestead

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The desire to homestead… raise our own animals, grow our own food, become more self-sufficient… why?

Well… for us it was the need to have a healthier lifestyle. I feel having good health is the most important thing you can do for yourself. When you don’t have any health issues, it’s so easy to take good health for granted. Sadly, it’s not until you start having your own health issues or watch someone close to you fight health issues that you realize exactly how important it is to take care of yourself.
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Figuring Out Just How Much…

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Pork, it’s what’s for dinner… and breakfast… and supper… and snacks… yeah, we’re going to be eating pork for a while. Today I picked up our pig from the butcher and spent a few hours rearranging and organizing the freezer. We still have a lot of pork left from the other pigs, so now the freezer is stuffed full of pork. That’s definitely not a bad thing; in fact, it’s a really good thing. It’s just kind of hard to gauge how much food you will actually get when you grow your own, especially when first starting out homesteading. We’ve made plenty of mistakes in that area, so I thought I’d tell about the mistakes we’ve made and what we plan to do differently.
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Guest Post… My Cat Dusty

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A couple months ago, Miley came to me and said, “Hey Mom, I have an idea that you can make a blog post about.”

“What’s that,” I asked.

“I think you need to write about Dusty. He’s a really nice cat and I think everyone would think he’s so cute.”

I said, “Yes, that’s a really good idea, I’ll keep that in mind.”

Several weeks passed and Miley brought up her idea again. I told her I wrote it down on my list but just hadn’t gotten to it yet. The other day, she again asked, “Mom, when are you going to make a post about Dusty?”

Then I had an idea. I asked her, “Instead of me writing a post about Dusty, how about you write about him? Since you’re his favorite person and he’s your favorite cat, you would know more things to write about him than I would.”

She thought that was a great idea and got started right away…
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