Leaving the Past in the Past
With the nasty weather continuing, I decided to do a little housekeeping. Not in the house: that would be too ambitious. No, I tidied the blog.
This blog originated in 2011, right before I moved to North Carolina. Over the years, I learned and blogged a lot about preparedness, self-reliance, and provident living; however, that was then, this is now. That stuff is all history now, so I cleaned out those old posts. After all, a lot of the links to other sources were no longer valid and no ones cares how many peaches I canned in 2013. If I want refresh or expand my understanding about a particular topic, I’ll just write a new post.
Happily, the rain stopped this weekend and it warmed up. Consequently, we got a little bit done outside.
With the rain and cold, I’ve been unable to plant my spring seeds. To help things along, we put a couple of cattle panels over the brick raised bed and covered it with a tarp. The intent is to start warming and drying out the soil for planting. It’s not fancy but I think it will do the job. Maybe next weekend I’ll be able to plant.
Attach a couple of horses and we’d have a covered wagon!
One of the apple trees has a few nubs that look like they might turn into buds when the time is right. It inspires hope. The other one still looks like a stick.
My boysenberry plants were supposed to arrive yesterday but UPS appears to have lost them. That seems to be happening a lot with stuff that gets shipped to me via UPS. Somehow, things get to Greensboro and then disappear. I’ll give it a few more days before calling the nursery.
In chicken news, something is going on with Eager (the Blue Belle). When I let them out to get to the fresh grass yesterday, Road Runner, the rooster, was treating her poorly. He kept chasing her away anytime she approached the others and sometimes even when she was hanging back. Today she was acting afraid of him so we let just him out to run free and let the hens have a little alone time. Even then though, Eager just hung out in the coop. Every time I go check on her, she is sitting in her nesting spot and she growls at me. I don’t know, maybe she’s broody (though she has no eggs to sit on). Her head appeared to be tender so I dabbed some ointment on it but other than that she seems to be okay. We’ll see what happens over the next few days.
More, I Want More
I ordered my next batch of chickens!
I enjoy having chickens a lot. They are fun to watch and they make breakfast. The fact that I cannot eat the eggs is a small detail I’m willing to put up with. However, as with most chicken people, I do not have enough chickens.
I don’t want to have any more roosters though. When you hatch eggs, you get roosters. So, I am ordering a batch of females from Cackle Hatchery in Missouri.
I ordered five blue egg layers (which breeds they include will be a surprise) and three Easter Eggers, so named because they could lay blue or green or brown or pinkish eggs (each hen doesn’t lay all those colors but you don’t know what hen will lay what color). The chicks are scheduled to arrive June 10th in the mail. I took the week off to meet them at the post office.
I’m so egg-cited!
And then there were four …
Today was the day for culling the three roosters.
Rest in Peace fellas.
Old Yeller Comes to Visit
A big issue I have getting some of my projects done is getting the supplies to the house. Lugging home 2x4s and sheets of plywood has been a trial, and, progress has been very slow building up some of the infrastructure I want on my property.
We have a temporary solution for that challenge. For the next several weeks, my son-in-law let us borrow his old, yellow, pickup truck (a 1986 GMC C2500) that the family dubbed “Old Yeller.” Oscar used to drive it to work and school his senior year of high school. He loves that truck.
This week we used Old Yeller to transport some cattle panels which will be used for building fencing and hoop houses. These have been on “the list” since last summer and now we are finally making progress.
In other news this week, it’s been rainy, cold, and gloomy all week. It was a bright spot then when the seeds I ordered for my spring garden arrived. Some of these things get planted in just a couple of weeks. I ordered two boysenberry plants Tuesday and they should arrive toward the end of the month.
I Love Boysenberries!! We are right in the middle of the growing zone range for boysenberries but I’ve never heard of anyone growing them here in North Carolina. Is it because boysenberries originated in the West and, since they aren’t good keepers, they’ve not caught on in the East? Or, is there something about our weather that prevents them from being successfully grown here? I have no idea, and have found no one that can provide further insight, so, this has been designated as an experiment. I see three possible outcomes: I will be totally disappointed because they won’t grow, I will be able to grow just enough to satisfy my needs, or, I will become the only place to get boysenberries in North Carolina.
Chicken News: Egg production is great. We are getting brown and blue/green eggs regularly. The hens aren’t laying in the nice nesting box I provided them though; they choose to lay in the bedding on the floor, to one side of the coop. We have not developed the grit to do it ourselves so we are still looking for someone to kill the three roosters for us.
Apple trees: no news; they are still sticks.
It looks like the gloom and cold weather are sticking around for the next week. I am grateful for my warm home.
I’m not a Homesteader
Recently, I saw a comment on a Facebook post, or maybe a You Tube video, that started out saying, “I’m not a homesteader but today I … ” and then proceeded to indicate she had done a bunch of canning. In my mind, I thought, “Well that’s what a homesteader does.”
Modern homesteading ranges from growing a garden and/or raising animals to reduce dependence upon the commercial food supply chain all the way to living off the public utility grid and producing everything you consume. It occurs in the city on a balcony or community garden plot, in the suburbs on 1/4 acre or less of land, and in the country on multiple acres of land.
A homesteader, in the 21st century, is someone who seeks a more self-sufficient lifestyle. Modern homesteading is all about doing more for yourself and your family and developing the basic skills modern living has stripped from our lives.
The Church has always advocated for self-sufficiency and self-reliance but I’ve noticed fewer Church members taking it as seriously as in the past. Now, however, more people from the general population are starting to take notice of the value of learning and utilizing these basic life skills.
So whether you want to use the term “homesteader” to define what you are doing to live a more self-reliant lifestyle, or not, the important thing to remind yourself (and others) is that, just like everything in life, the self-sufficient lifestyle is a journey. Just because you don’t do everything that someone else is doing does not make your accomplishments any less valuable. You are just at a different stage in your journey. Embrace it and keep learning new things!
My Next Project
My gardening results in North Carolina have been dismal. I was excited to finally live somewhere that wasn’t such a challenge to grow things as in the high altitude of Flagstaff, the super dry conditions in Cheyenne, or the extremely short season in Alaska. Yet, for the most part, here, I was just feeding the bugs.
After a few years, I just gave up. I was wasting a lot of money each year for little or no harvest so I decided spend my money to support the many Farmer’s Markets in the area. I followed that plan for a few years but it sure does nothing to satisfy my urge to plant a garden.
I decided to go back to container gardening for this season. I’ve had good results in the past with it and while buying soil is expensive, it’s not as expensive as amending the nasty clay soil I have. I brought a few large planters from Cheyenne and that would give me a good start. For the past couple weeks, I have been drooling over seed catalogs and dreaming about this year’s garden.
This week I got an email indicating I had won $100 prize for what I thought was a Greenstalk vertical planter. I was ecstatic! I first learned of the Greenstalk planter while watching a You Tube channel, Cog Hill Farm. They cost a bit over $160 each though so it was just a wish for the future. $100 off would make it doable now!
I went on the Greenstalk site and discovered they were having a sale and were only $109! Well, at that price, with a $100 off, I could get two!
When I pulled up the email for the coupon code, though, I realized it was for a different vertical planter. It is an impressive growing system to be sure, but it costs $359! Even with $100 off, that was still $259 and I just couldn’t do it. The planter was worth it but I was not prepared to plunk down that much money.
I could take advantage of the Greenstalk sale though and I ordered one Thursday and it arrived this morning!
Let the garden planning continue in earnest!
🥕🥒🥔
When What to Our Wondering Eyes Did Appear
Oscar went out to the coop today to put in a new roost and nest box (since they don’t like the nest boxes we previously got them). While working, he dropped a screw into the bedding below. If he hadn’t he would never have noticed this:
Eager has started laying! What a surprise! I figured the hens wouldn’t start laying until later because of Winter. It looks like she’s laying an egg a day. I cleaned out the bedding last Saturday and put in fresh so she must have started laying on Sunday. She lays brown eggs.
Eager was the first to hatch and is the prettiest and friendliest of the chickens. This is Eager:
What a clever chicken!
Beyond 2020
While December 31, 2020 is the highly anticipated end of the worst year most everyone has ever had, I know that the pandemic and all the collateral damage that has come with it will not magically be over. The sun will not burst out in glory on January 1st. Yet, since we have a tendency to look at January 1st as a new beginning in our lives, perhaps everyone will make a renewed effort to overcome the discouragement, loneliness, fear, and anxiety that has settled over much of the world.
Many have lamented not being able to visit family, take a vacation, hug each other, and generally run our lives within the realm of whatever each of us called normal. While some allowed the fears and differences of this year to overcome them, others have managed to try new things to accomplish what needed to be done.
I have seen such wonderful things this year: people found new ways to visit one another; teachers tried new ways to engage their students; churches continued to worship; businesses developed new ways to continue serving their customers; workers undertook new ways to earn their living. When traditions could not be followed, many made new ones.
In truth, this year has been one of overcoming our ruts. It is uncomfortable to do things differently but if we let it, “different” will stretch our possibilities. If we paid attention, we learned the positive and negative ways we have been interacting with the world around us; we found some of the holes in our logic; and we discovered what jobs were most resilient and which were not. All in all, we should have discovered new directions for our lives.
Those who did not let their circumstances dictate their faith, hope, and happiness actually gained more knowledge, resilience, determination, and peace. It is inspiring to see adversity bringing out the best in people.
My hope for the new year is that these attitudes of growing and improving will continue to be found and that we all will create our own happiness.
In this New Year I hope we all find New Happiness.
Two Chickens Homestead 
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