Making things!

I think I've become addicted to making things.  In the past few weeks, I've made several batches of soap.  I'm using hot process in my crockpot (instructions and photos to come), and I've made a darn good imitation of Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap.  I toyed with a few other recipes and scents, too.  The lavender came out a bit iffy, but the lemongrass/clary sage oatmeal soap is nice, as is the oat and honey.  I haven't quite gotten the hang of adding enough essential oil to properly scent the soap, but it lathers really well in my hard water - which is far more important to me.  So many handmade soaps I've tried just don't have long-lasting bubbles, and I need to re-soap my pouf or washcloth halfway through my shower.  But my soap bubbles, so I'm ecstatic.  :)

Tonight, on a whim, I whipped up a mini-batch of chapstick.  I'm utterly addicted to Burt's Bees peppermint (hmmm, I'm noticing a minty trend here...), but I'm on my last tube.  I'm also not addicted to the $3.50 per tube price tag.  After a bit of Googling and a peek at the ingredients on the real thing, I got busy. Here's my recipe:

.2 oz beeswax
.3 oz coconut oil
.1 oz shea butter
.05 oz avocado oil
peppermint essential oil, "to taste"

I melted all the ingredients, except the peppermint EO, using a 2 oz mason jar in my cast iron skillet with some water (sort of a mini double boiler).  After the beeswax melted, I dipped a knife into the mixture, removed it, and allowed the chapstick to cool so I could check its texture.  It was perfect; not too oily and not too hard.  I removed the mason jar from the heat, added about .2 mL of peppermint EO, stirred, and poured the chapstick into 2 little tins I'd ordered from Mountain Rose Herbs ages ago.

Broke and Healthy, one of the sites I used while coming up with my recipe, breaks down the cost of making this chapstick from scratch.  By their calculations, each .15 oz tube of chapstick costs $.08 to make.  My recipe weighed about .6 oz, making each tin cost approximately $.16.  My tins cost about $.70.  Even including them, which is kind of silly since I'll use them over and over, the cost to make this at home was about 25% of retail.  And it took less than 10 minutes.  You can bet I'll be doing that again!

I love the feeling I get when I replicate something I usually buy.  Yes, I'm still a consumer, because I have to buy my oils, beeswax, and other ingredients.  But the "value added" part of the equation?  That's me!  I have total control over the ingredients; no petroleum products, preservatives, or artificial anythings.  And, I'm not giving any of my money to corporations with questionable ethics or business policies.  Good stuff!

EDIT - I sat down a few nights ago and figured out my actual costs, based on the real ingredients I had purchased, including tubes, which I didn't originally have.  As made, it cost me $.20 per tube (of that, the tube cost $.14, so my chapstick was only $.06 per tube!!).  If I were to make it using all organic ingredients, which I plan on doing when I sell these and/or run out of my current stock of oils, it would cost $.24 per tube.

The fall pantry

Last year at this time I posted about how important it is to prepare for winter, both literally (when there is little to no fresh, local food available), and figuratively (when a crisis, personal or environmental, may prevent you from buying or acquiring food).  This year, at almost the same time, I find myself thinking the same thoughts.  Deja vu?  Maybe a little.  We've been living without my paycheck for just about 4 months now.  We are solvent, but it's tight.  Really tight.  In spite of our simple lifestyle, it has still been an adjustment, and we have to watch every. single. penny that we spend.

In spite of our financial constraints (we spend less per week on groceries than a family of four could receive on food stamp benefits [$167, in case you're curious]), we've been able to really stock our pantry.  Please excuse the cruddy pic; our camera broke and I can only take pics with my phone now.

In contrast, here are the same shelves in January of 2011, when Shayne had just built them:

At first glance, the thing I notice most is that the shelves are much, MUCH more full in the first picture.  All canned/jarred goods are at least 5 jars deep (for quarts) or as many as 7 deep (for half pints).  That's really a lot of food we have stashed on those shelves.

The second thing I noticed is how much less processed food we now have.  Yes, there's storebought cereal - I'll get around to making my own granola one of these days - and crackers, noodles, and some soups.  But there are a lot more "staples" like dried beans, canned veggies and fruits, oats (in mylar bags in the kitty litter tub), wheat (in buckets, not shown), and flour (also not shown). 

I did a bit of an inventory the other day, and found that I have nearly 3 months of food stored up.  Here's what that looks like (items with an asterisk are things I preserved myself):

• 50 lbs of wheat
• 20 lbs various flours
• 2 jars of yeast
• 20 lbs oats
• 4 lbs of mixed beans for soup
• 3 lbs pinto beans
• 3 lbs navy beans
• 8 lbs kidney beans
• 8 lbs lentils
• 4 lbs split peas
• 3 lbs black beans
• 15 lbs brown and white rice
• 2 lbs wild rice
• 8 pints canned tomatoes*
• 5 quarts tomato juice*
• 12 quarts pasta sauce*
• 20 lbs pasta
• 8 pints applesauce*
• 6 pints pear sauce*
• 17 pints sliced pears*
• 7 20 oz cans of pineapple
• 10 pints peaches*
• 4 pints pickles*
• 9 pints corn*
• 2 pints maple syrup*
• 5 pints chicken*
•  Plus various canned soups, cereals, spices, flavorings, and cooking essentials (baking soda, baking powder, cornstarch, olive oil, etc).  And coffee, which is certainly an essential.

And then there's the freezer...

• 25 lbs ground beef
• 7 lbs roasts
• 10 lb ham
• 5 lbs salmon
• 5 lbs green beans*
• 7 lbs corn*
• 5 lbs mixed veggies
• 10 Freedom Ranger chickens*
• strawberries*
• blueberries*
•  raspberries*
• orange, yellow, and red peppers*
• butter

And the "root cellar" in the garage...

• 50 lbs potatoes
• 50 lbs onions

 Hungry?  :)

So...  How did we amass all this food on such a limited budget?  The wheat, oats, potatoes, and onions were bought in bulk.  The wheat and oats came from Country Life Natural Foods, a co-op nearby with great prices.  A 50 lb bag of wheat was $25 (compare to King Arthur flour, which is $3.29/5 lb bag at Meijer - $.65/lb.  Which is actually still a great deal on premium flour, but wheat berries are cheaper and more versatile).  The potatoes and onions came from Shelton's Farm Market, which offers pretty amazing deals on in-season produce, especially when you buy in large quantities.

The frozen and canned produce were bought in-season from either the farmer's market or Shelton's.  Every time I've calculated the cost of my home preserved versus store bought, the home canned/frozen comes out cheaper.  It's obviously more work, but I love knowing where my food has come from and what is in it.  Plus, I enjoy it!  For me, it is worth my time.

The rest was bought through watching sales.  Meijer really has some good sales on staples, so when I see them, I stock up.  Recently all olive oil was 25% off, so I bought a gallon jug.  Their brand of pasta goes on sale for $.89 per 1 lb box.  And strawberries (though I much prefer local, we didn't freeze enough in June) can be gotten for $1/lb. 

Our fall preparations have also included storing more water and fuel.  Especially with little ones, if our power should go out for an extended period of time, I don't want to be too uncomfortable.  We still need some oil lamps and lamp oil, but I feel we could be reasonably comfortable in an emergency.  And considering that the average American doesn't have any sort of preparations or much of a pantry, I feel like we're a bit ahead of the game!

How to pasture poultry without a chicken tractor

When we first got chickens, we were surprised at how far from home they would wander.  They mostly stayed in our yard, but we found that they'd occasionally go over to the bar near our house, which is further than I expected them to go, and across a somewhat-busy street.  The current flock travels as well, but in a different direction.  I spoke with all the neighbors when we got chickens, but either I missed one, or they changed their mind.  Someone got upset about birds in their yard, and they called the humane society on us.  We weren't home when the officer came out, but we were given a warning about our birds "running at-large".  Oops.  I really wish the neighbor had just come to talk to us; I don't understand why they wouldn't want chickens in their yard eating their bugs, but I would have responded the same way I did to the humane society visit.  In other words, the chickens would have been kept in their run instead of ranging. 

Poor chickens.  In 3 weeks of confinement, their eggs went from having orange yolks to yellow yolks.  I don't think they were as pale as storebought eggs, but there was definitely a difference.  I'd let them out half an hour before sundown to range a bit, since they'd stay very close to their coop, but it just wasn't the same.  Shayne and I talked about fencing the yard; we talked about fencing an area around the coop.  But if we fenced the yard, it would ruin our views and access to the little woods behind the house.  Ethan plays back there, and the neighbors let us dump any yard waste that we don't burn.  And if we just fenced an area around the coop, we knew in short order it would be down to bare dirt.  They could exercise, but there wouldn't be any forage for the birds.  I didn't want to build a tractor, since we already had a nice coop and run.  Plus, most tractors small enough for me to move myself seem like they're too small to really let the birds exercise.  What to do?

After some serious googling, I came across Premier 1 Supplies and PountryNet.  It's portable netting made for pasturing poultry.  It's designed to be electrified, but we're just using it as a standard fence.  There are PVC posts every 10 feet with a U-shaped stake that you step on to push into the ground, and the fence itself is flexible, twisted wire 48" high.  The entire 100' roll weighs about 20 lbs, and it takes me about 10 minutes to set it up on the days I move it.  I'm sure it will be less once I'm not pregnant and can move a bit faster...  The birds get the benefit of fresh forage, my lawn gets fertilized, and the chickens don't stay in one place long enough to destroy the grass.  If there's a downside, I haven't yet found it.

We got the green netting, since we didn't want to draw attention to the fence.  I wasn't sure how it would look, and although we are in a somewhat rural area, we do try to keep things aesthetically pleasing.  I'm no Martha Stewart, but I didn't want our yard to look ghetto (for lack of a better term...).   I had to wait on the green fencing, as it was back-ordered, but I'm really pleased with it.  It's nearly invisible from the road, and it allows the birds enough area that I really only need to move it twice each week.

The chickens are happy, we should be back to getting healthy eggs, and hopefully we won't have any more problems with our neighbors.

I feel like, overall, we've settled into a pretty good rhythm with what we eat.  I still buy some things pre-made from the store, like crackers, cereal, some bread, and cheese.  But I've also learned to make many things myself, like pasta sauces, yogurt, many kinds of soup, pie crusts, and lots more.  I'm almost tempted to make a list of the things I make that "normal" people buy.  The past few times I've gone to the store, I hardly even ventured into the aisles, and I feel like people must look in my cart and wonder, "What do they EAT?" because there are rarely any ready-to-eat items there besides fruits and veggies. 

Because of our comfort with making rather than buying most foods, when I DO want something that's pre-made, I have an awful time selecting something.  Today I (or rather, Ethan) wanted to buy pickles.  I forgot them while I was at the market, and that turned out to be more problematic than I could have imagined.  I found myself in the condiment aisle at Meijer, staring at hundreds of jars of pickles that I just couldn't buy.  Every single jar had objectionable ingredients.  Vlasic, Mt. Olive, Claussen, and several "boutique" brands.  Dill pickles, Kosher spears, bread and butter, sweet gherkins.  Many varieties had corn syrup, and every last jar had artificial colors (yellow and blue) added.  I found a few lonely jars of organic pickles hidden in the middle, and finally selected Meijer Organics bread and butter chips.  I think there were all of three options for organic: relish, bread and butter chips, and dill spears. 

I know it's silly, because they're just pickles, but the whole experience depressed me.  Why should it be so hard to go into a store and find a product that you can be relatively certain is safe?  Why do pickles, a food that is already preserved by nature of being pickled/fermented, need preservatives?  Things like this are the very reason I started learning to make so many of my own foods, and overall I take great pride in making my own.  But there are days, like today, where it just makes me sad that I can't go into the store and find real food.

Although I'm still angry, I didn't come home and wallow.  I got busy and turned my $6 half-bushel of mixed seconds apples into 8.5 quarts of applesauce.  Then, for shits and giggles, I looked online at Walmart and found that a 48 oz jar of Great Value applesauce costs all of $1.97.  I haven't bought applesauce in so long, I didn't realize it was so cheap.  Of course, it also contains high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, water, cinnamon, and ascorbic acid (to protect color).  Approximate cost per ounce is $.04.  Santa Cruz organic applesauce, the only applesauce I could find that contained only apples, cost $.16/ounce.  Mine, while not organic, contained only apples and cinnamon and cost $.02/ounce + 2 hrs of my time (including processing).  The peace of mind from knowing where my food came from and exactly what's in it?  Priceless.

Pickles are definitely on my list of new things to learn to make this year...

Jarhead

Today really brought home how much I love canning jars.  They're so convenient for so many things, that I can't figure out how some people live without them.  Just today I used them for:

• "canning" maple syrup that I bought in bulk from the farmer's market.  I bought a half-gallon and repackaged it into pints so that it wouldn't crystallize before I could use it.
• mixing up a bit of BBQ sauce in a half-pint jar to take out to the grill
• packing up leftovers from dinner (pint)
• repackaging honey from the store that was in a plastic jug.  I can't remember why I bought this instead of local honey, but it was starting to crystallize.  The narrow mouth of the plastic made it really hard to get to the honey, and I was hesitant to put the plastic in the microwave.
• making sun tea (half gallon)
• a makeshift coffee mug

 This is in addition to the jars in my fridge that hold my milk, the jars of food that I've canned, the jars of dry beans in the pantry, and the jars of soup and chili I froze in the freezer.  Seriously, I use them for everything.

This year's homesteading plans

Yes, yes, I'm well aware that the year started about 3 months ago...  But the gardening season is just starting here, so it seems an appropriate time to talk about my goals.

First of all, our garden will be considerably smaller than the past two years.  Really small.  Baby #2 is set to make an appearance in mid-July, and I just don't want to be inundated with tomatoes while trying to adjust to having two littles.  I am still planning on making my own sauce and juice and canning fresh tomatoes, but I'd like to do it on my schedule.  So I will buy my tomatoes at the market in order to have some leeway with timing.  I'd hate to let tomatoes rot because I'm exhausted from a colicky baby or something.  I think I'm just going to grow dry beans, squash, carrots, onions, potatoes, and watermelon this year.  Everything should store well, so even if I'm a little slow to harvest, there shouldn't be any issues. 

My hens are going absolutely crazy laying eggs.  I've read in numerous places that a hen needs many hours of daylight to continue to lay, but my girls laid all through winter.  Production did slow down, but I never got less than 3 eggs per day once everyone started laying.  Now with the slightly longer days and warmer temps, I'm getting 5-6 eggs per day.  I love being able to feed them our kitchen scraps and leftovers that are going bad (though we've been really good about having less of those!).  No changes are planned for the girls, barring any catastrophes.

But we are going to get more chickens.  I have a friend with a barn and fenced horse pasture (out of use) who has offered to raise chicks with me!  We're going to get Freedom Rangers, as I have some ethical objections to the cornish cross hybrid (namely, I believe it is cruel to breed a bird to grow and gain weight so quickly that its legs and heart cannot support it.  I realize that sometimes this can be mitigated by withholding feed for some of the day, but I just don't feel it is responsible to breed a bird that is predisposed to so many health issues).  Our 25 chicks will arrive in late May or early June, and we will plan on butchering at about 12 weeks.  I would like to do the butchering ourselves, and another friend may have a chicken plucker built by then that we could borrow to speed things along.

I'm slowly but surely adding to my cooking repertoire.  Recently, I've made homemade Lara bars from dried dates, dried cherries, and walnuts (recipe).  Mine turned out a bit less sticky than they needed to be, but I about blew the motor on my mini food chopper, so I just left it instead of adding more dates and cherries.  I've also made broccoli cheddar soup (yum!) from this recipe.  I halved it and used all cheddar instead of "processed cheese".  I also added onion when I was melting my butter.  I had to cook it WAY longer than 30 minutes to make the broccoli less crunchy, but it was very good.  And...  I got brave and made my own pie crust to use for my chicken pot pie after learning that Pillsbury refrigerated crusts have awful ingredients and artificial colors.  Yuck.  I've always been scared of pie crusts, but decided to give it a go.  I found a recipe using 5 ingredients: flour, butter, salt, sugar, and water.  The first one was a dud (though edible), but version 2.0 was quite good.  I only used 2 1/4 cups of flour, so it wasn't so dry.  I'm impressed with myself.  If you decide to try your hand at crusts, I strongly suggest rolling it out onto a piece of parchment paper or waxed paper.  It makes transferring the crust to the dish so much easier and allows you to use much less flour.  I'm planning on making up a couple and freezing them so that they're on-hand in a pinch.

Foods I want to learn to make are yogurt, a good wheat sandwich bread, more soups, and homemade pasta.

But really, things here will just be business as usual this year.  As always, we're taking baby-steps to increase our self-sufficiency, eat healthier, support our local economy, and live more mindfully.  Some days I feel like I'm not accomplishing anything, but every time I take my lunch to work in a mason jar, I'm reminded of how far I've come.

Thoughts on becoming a homesteader

I'm sure there are folks out there who are anxiously awaiting more bathroom pictures, but right now I'm taking a bit of a detour to talk about other areas of my life.  More pics and an update are coming, though!  I should have more to say about it by tonight.

I just had one of those moments when I looked at myself, as if from the outside, and wondered who I was and how I got to where I am.  I was in the kitchen, mixing up flour, yeast, water and salt for bread.  A big pot of vegetable beef soup was cooking on the stove.  The beef is from a cow named Dolly, I grew the onions myself, I grew and canned the tomatoes that went into the tomato juice, and most of the other ingredients are from local farmers.  My sink is full of canning jars from food we've eaten and ingredients we've used in the past 24 hours.  Next to the stove was a wooden crate of herbs and several little jars of homemade "Neosporin".  I could hear my rooster, Pretty Boy, crowing out in the backyard.  And I was thinking of the apples on the back porch that are starting to get wrinkled, wondering if I had time to make applesauce tonight.

It really struck me how far from "normal" I've strayed. 

Sometimes I look at the blogs I read and people on message boards and feel like they are "real" homesteaders and I'm just dabbling.  I don't grow even close to all of my produce, I still buy bread at the store more than I bake it, and I eat out WAY more than I should.  But taken as a whole, the way we choose to live is not even close to mainstream. 

How did I get here?  How did my rather normal and unremarkable childhood (no offense, Mom, I just mean that I wasn't brought up on a farm or by hippies!) turn into this not-at-all normal lifestyle?  I keep wondering if there was a turning point, I place where I suddenly realized that I had to have chickens in my backyard, or grow and can my own tomato sauce, or know the cow that turned into my hamburger.  But I can't find that place...  I don't know when my mentality shifted and I became aware of how unsustainable and unhealthy so many modern practices are; I don't know what made me decide to opt-out.

But here I am.  Here I am with chickens in my backyard, a cow named Dolly in my freezer, and bread rising on the counter.  And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Pretty Boy meets The Girls

Last night we took a trip to a friend's farm to go get Pretty Boy, the rooster.  Ethan was ecstatic to go see cows, and was even more excited when he found not just one, but three tractors in the barn.  This child is obsessed with machinery.  Sue got Pretty Boy into the kitty carrier with a minimum of fuss, and he rode quietly all the way home.  I set the carrier in the coop, still closed, and planned to wait til dark to let him out.

At around 7 pm, Shayne heard Pretty Boy squawking quite a bit, so I went out to check.  As then hens were trying to come home, Pretty Boy was bk-AWWWWK-ing at them loudly and scaring them away.  I moved the carrier out of the coop, and peace was restored. 

And then it was dark.  I was worried, as last time I introduced new chickens to an existing flock, there was a lot of picking and pecking before they sorted it all out.  But this time, nothing happened.  Pretty Boy went to roost on the ladder to the chicken house, and the girls cooed sleepily at him before going back to sleep.

But I was still worried.  I woke up at about 3 am and was unable to get back to sleep.  All I could think about was whether or not there would be bloodshed in the coop when I went out in the morning.  Was it too small of a space to introduce a lone bird to my flock?  If they fought, would the picked-on bird be able to find somewhere to hide?  Maybe I should go out at 6 am and open the door, so they could all go straight outside when they woke up?  Yeesh.  It was a long night.

I actually slept later than I expected, probably as a result of being up half the night worrying...  So at 8:30, I ran out to the coop, expecting much chicken misery.  Pffft.  As if.  Pretty Boy was in the house, and the girls were on the floor.  As I opened the door, Pretty Boy emerged and started bRRRRkk-ing at me.  The girls all hopped out the door, and Pretty Boy followed.  He followed them around, making chiding-sounding noises at them, then did his little wing-dragging mating dance.  Oh my.  My little adolescent hens went crazy.

First the girls would all cluster together, making little chicken noises that reminded me of nothing so much as a bunch of teenage girls giggling.  Then one would get brave and run up to Pretty Boy.  She'd circle around him, acting shy.  He'd dance some more, and she'd get even closer.

 

He'd decide the moment was ripe, and he'd jump on her back.  "Sqaaaawwwk!" went the surprised hen, as she ran back to the other girls.  They'd giggle and gossip some more, then another one would go to tease Pretty Boy.

The light was horrible (which is obvious from the picture I took), otherwise I'd have taken a video.  They were hilarious.  I think Pretty Boy was flattered by all the attention; he came from a flock of 70, with several other roosters.  I'm really looking forward to seeing the results, now that he has his own, very appreciative, harem.

We're getting a rooster!

I said when we first got chickens that I'd never get a rooster, because I was afraid of all the noise he may make.  And now I'm eating my words.  With the continued unease in our economy, plus the fact that I've been unable to source a reasonably-priced provider for pastured chicken meat, I decided to look a little closer to home for a solution.  And when a friend posted on her blog how she needed to offload a rooster or two... the answer seemed obvious.

Pretty Boy, a Buckeye/buff Orpington cross, will be coming home to roost on Monday night.  None of the girls have started laying yet, but two of them are really close.  Their combs are bright red, and their wattles get bigger every day.  I expect eggs within a month. 

We currently have three breeds of chickens.  Buff Orpingtons and Australorps are considered a dual-purpose breed.  The grow fairly quickly, are heavy-bodied, and are excellent layers of brown eggs.  The Easter Eggers lay green eggs, and are fairly slim.  They are geared more for egg production than meat, but since their eggs are green, I will be able to easily remove them from underneath a broody hen.  Or if we hatch in an incubator, I'll select only brown eggs unless we need to replace a layer.  I'm hoping to raise a few birds next year for our own consumption.  I'm not sure yet if I'll do the processing myself; I don't have a good spot outdoors for butchering and cleaning production-line fashion.  But if not, we have a processor nearby who charges $7 per bird.  Even adding in feed costs, I estimate each bird would cost about $12 and dress out at 4 - 5 lbs.  And for organic (getting new, organic feed soon!), truly free-range, pastured chicken, a price of less than $4 per pound is unheard of. 

I'm still not certain about the noise issue...  But he can't possibly be noisier than our neighbor's 6 beagles. 

Winter is coming

Being poor sucks.  Obviously, we're not destitute.  We have a roof over our heads, food to eat, and plenty to be thankful for.  But our saving account has been just about exhausted, and I have $300 in our checking to last us til next payday.  That doesn't include paying the NIPSCO bill, our IRA contribution, groceries, or gas.  Or the toilet repair that is happening tomorrow.  Basically, we have no disposable income and barely enough to cover the necessities.

I haven't been this broke since college.  My last paycheck was $285.  I didn't have enough sick time to cover the time I took off after the miscarriage, so I got docked for 8 or 9 days.

Times like this make me so glad that I store food.  I have lots of flour, sugar, and yeast for bread.  TONS of pasta and sauce.  Canned fruits and soups.  Broth.  A freezer full of meat and veggies.

People used to put up food for winter, because no fresh food was available outside of the growing season.  With modern transportation, that's no longer strictly necessary.  Even when it's winter in Indiana, it's summer in Chile, and we have the luxury of (fairly) fresh produce year-round.  It's also no longer necessary to butcher meat in the fall so that we don't have to feed it through the winter.

But what about a figurative winter?  A time when you don't have the means to buy food?  Or you may have to choose between buying food and keeping the electricity on?  Our situation is nowhere near that dire; I'll have a normal-sized paycheck next week, and we'll start to rebuild our savings.  But if we hadn't had that savings, it very well could have come to that.

I look at my food storage as an insurance policy against the lean times in our life.  Winter is always coming, literal and figurative, and we should do everything in our power to ensure that we are prepared.

New basement storage shelves

Shayne built me these wonderful shelves this afternoon.  They're obviously not fancy, just plywood on wall-mounted shelf brackets.  But I can store all the food on these that I previously had stored on 2 5-shelf units.  So we've freed up a bit of space in the basement, and we can rearrange so that things we use often are closer to the door to the storage area.

I eventually want to expand our food storage, so we'll need more space some day.  For now this is plenty, though, and it will help me stay organized.

Backyard chickens: Another hen homicide

I came home for dinner tonight and went to shut the coop door.  I checked inside to make sure all the girls were tucked in and to gather any eggs before they froze overnight.  Then on my way back to the house, I noticed my favorite Australorp laying in the snow.  The mystery neighborhood dog strikes again...

I'm not sad so much as I'm pissed off.  I like my chickens, but I never named them, and I don't really consider them pets.  But...  I don't really like them being killed by a roving dog, either.  I want my hens to be able to free range, but that doesn't seem to be an option right now.  Maybe some kind of fence is in order.

I was able to get the breast meat off of the hen.  I wasn't sure how I would feel about doing it myself, since with the last hen I had just watched my friend do it.  But it wasn't a big deal, or difficult to do.  I don't know that I could kill my own birds, but at least once they're dead, I can take care of business.  I guess I can add that to my list of ever-growing homesteading skills.  It's an unfortunate thing to have to do, but I am grateful that I can have a bit of meat out of the deal.  At least her death wasn't completely in vain...

Backyard Chickens: New Additions

Today my friend J from work called me with a surprise: he was on his way home from his sister's farm with 2 Ameraucana hens. I lost my buff Orpington on Christmas Eve to a dog attack, and I was planning on ordering chicks again in the spring. I'm so glad thta now I don't have to! Not that I minded the chicks, but I don't want the hassle of a curious toddler and a boxful of chicks with a heat lamp over it. I don't think he could resist the temptation!

I met J at his house earlier and brought home these 2 odd-looking girls:

The red and blue one has a muff - feathers that stick out around her beak - and they're both supposed to lay blue or green eggs. They're more elongated and trimmer than my Australorps and Wyandotte, and neither has wattles to speak of. Looking at these birds, I can see why scientists theorize that chickens came from dinosaurs.

So far the silver hen is having a bit of trouble getting along with my Wyandotte, but hopefully they'll sort out their pecking order without any major damage. They were both roosting on the same branch tonight, which I think is a good sign. We'll see.

Merry Christmas from the backyard chickens!

Chickens in the snow

I had read that chickens hate snow and won't walk around in it.  Mine must not have gotten the memo.

My buff Orpington has started laying, and we now get 3 eggs on most days.  Hers are a very light, almost pinkish tan.  The Australorp's are a light brown, and the Wyandotte is a darker, but still light, brown.  The other Australorp's comb and wattles are finally turning red, so hopefully she'll jump on the egg-laying wagon soon.  I keep expecting egg production to drop, since our days are getting shorter.  Everything I've read about chickens says that they need over 12 hours of daylight to continue laying (some even say at least 16 hrs).  Right now we get about 10 hrs, 45 minutes, and it's still decreasing.  I guess it's just another thing my chickens missed the memo about.

Year in Review: Homestead Harvest

This was a bit of a rough year; between working full-time and keeping up with the kidlet, I didn't really have much spare time at all.  Next year should be more productive, since Ethan will be able to "help" with gardening and cooking a bit more.  I'm really looking forward to teaching him about growing food and raising animals.  But even though this wasn't the most productive homesteading year, it was still a blast, and I'm really enjoying being a mommy.

As far as homegrown foods...  All that really survived our hot summer was the tomatoes and green beans.  The broccoli fried in the heat, and the carrots never even sprouted.  I wanted to plant potatoes and onions, but it never happened.  Neither did the spinach or lettuce.  Oh well.

I did make lots of jam.  I canned 6 half-pints of cherry butter, 9 half-pints of raspberry jam, and 15 half-pints of strawberry jam.  There were also 6 half-pints of strawberry ice cream topping (also great to add to yogurt).  And I still have a bunch of raspberries frozen in the freezer waiting for me to make them into jam.

The tomatoes were a big success.  I only planted Romas, and I canned 12 quarts of sauce using only my tomatoes.  I'm definitely planting more next year.

Frozen veggies...  Didn't happen.  I wanted to at least freeze some corn, but the harvest came and went before I even had a chance.  Oh well.

I've started on applesauce, and canned 6 quarts so far.  I plan on buying another bushel of apples at the market soon.  A yellow delicious and Empire blend seems to yield the tastiest sauce, in my opinion, but I might pick up some "mixed seconds" as well.  My goal is 18 - 20 quarts.

The best part of this year, and what makes up for the lack of productivity elsewhere, is the fact that we got chickens.  Even better is that they now lay eggs!  I got our cute little balls of fluff on May 4, and on October 11 my Wyandotte laid her first egg.  One of the Australorps started on October 22, and the buff Orpington looks like she'll be laying any day now.  The other Australorp seems to be a bit of a later bloomer.  But her wattles have gotten a little bigger, and her comb a bit pinker, so I'm hoping she'll get started soon as well.  Still, even 2 eggs per day is nice, and it's enough for me to share with others.  I'm not keeping track, even though I probably should, but I've gotten at least 4 dozen eggs so far. 

Chickens are so, SO easy.  All I have to do is shut the coop door at night, open it in the morning, and check to make sure they have food and water.  They pretty much feed themselves by free-ranging around the neighborhood, and eveny night they come home and put themselves to bed.  They require about as much upkeep as a gerbil, but with the bonus of producing food.  Can't beat that!

I'm thinking of adding 2 Easter Egger chickens if I can find some.  The only thing more fun than yard fresh eggs is blue or green yard fresh eggs!

I'm already getting excited for next year!  I want to order from seed catalogues instead of buying hybrid seeds from the garden centers around here.  I'll probably get seed potatoes locally, but that's it.  Time to start browsing the web to decide on varieties!

The Monster Egg

I'm not sure which of the girls laid this one, but I can't imagine it was fun!

Looks like a double-yolker to me!

Backyard chickens: More eggs coming soon!

This is one of my Australorps, happily parked in the nest box.  I'm so proud of her.  I knew she'd be statring to lay sometime soon, since she was exhibiting signs of sexual maturity (large, bright red wattles and comb, squatting, and no longer shedding her neck feathers).  But I wasn't sure when she would lay, or if maybe she had already started.  Some hens don't lay in the nest box (my Wyandotte) or even the coop.  So since they free-range most of the day, I thought she may be laying in the woods, or the neighbors bushes, or Lord-knows-where-else.  I felt bad shutting all of the girls in just to see if one hen was laying, especially since there aren't many nice days left, so I was determined to wait for a rainy day to keep them all in the coop.

But apparently that won't be necessary.  This afternoon I came home from dropping Ethan off at his "grandparent's" house, and was greeted by only three happy chickens.  I checked the bushes, the neighbor's yard, and the woods before thinking that she might be in the coop.

And there she was, right where she was supposed to be, and hopefully working on laying an egg.

The first ones seem to take a while -- the Wyandotte sat on the nest for about 90-120 minutes for the first few days -- so I had to leave for work while she was still sitting in the nest box.

Let's hope she has something to show for all that sitting!

Backyard chickens: Scrambled eggs!

Since I collected my fifth egg today, I decided it was time to make some breakfast!  My mom came over after going to the farmer's market, so she got to share the feast.

I was going to do a side-by-side comparison of my "yard fresh" eggs with the all-natural eggs from the farmer's market.  But my mom didn't get any this week, and the ones I had in the fridge, while still good, are a few weeks old.  I didn't really think that would be fair.

But my eggs would have won anyways.

The first thing I noticed was that the shell was extremely hard.  I don't feed any supplemental calcium, just standard Nutrena layer crumbles, some table scraps, and whatever they find while free ranging.  I did get some oyster shell bits for winter, though, since they won't be able to range as much.

The second surprise was how orange the yolks were.  I had thought that the orange yolks from the market eggs were bright, and they certainly are when compared to a store-bought, factory-farmed egg.  But the yolk from my hens were BRIGHT orange.  The egg white was also a yellowish color, not clear.  How orange everything was became even more obvious once the eggs were cooked...



No Photoshopping.  The eggs are really this color!

  

It looks like I made scrambled yolks!

Surprise #3?  They tasted like eggs.  I had thought that maybe a truly fresh, free-range egg might taste... I dunno.  Eggier?  Kind of like milk from a grass-fed cow tastes different.  Nope.  Although a free-range egg does have more nutrients, the taste is the same.

So breakfast today was yard-fresh eggs (scrambled with local milk from grass-fed cows and cooked in homemade butter) and toast with homemade raspberry jam.  If I'd made my own bread, the entire meal would have been entirely homemade.  But it's close. 

I also noticed that one of my Australorps kept squatting while she was out ranging today.  That's supposed to be a behavior that comes right before egg-laying, so maybe soon we'll be getting 2 eggs per day!

Backyard chickens: Yard fresh eggs!

We haven't eaten any yet, but I've now collected 4 mini-eggs from the Wyandotte.  She seems to lay them between 10:30 and 11 am; if I go out there any earlier, she's sitting on the little nest she scooped out of the pine shavings in the coop. 

I have to say...  There's nothing cooler than collecting an egg that's still warm from the hen who laid it.