If you have had to change meal plans just before supper, or even
worse, mid stream as it were while cooking, you need to get control of your
pantry. The good news is organizing and maintaining an organized pantry is not as difficult as you think.

First of all, what is a pantry? At it's most basic, a pantry is simply your collection of foods and foodstuffs from which you create meals. The
better stocked, or deeper, your pantry the easier it is to quickly prepare
nutritious and tasty meals.

So, even if your pantry currently consists of salt, pepper and some
mustard, you can apply the following method and build a deep pantry to feed
yourself and your family.

The first thing you need to do is record EVERYTHING you and members
of your family eat for at least a week. Two weeks is better, a month is ideal.
Just keep a notebook on the counter or the fridge and have everyone write down whenever they take something from the fridge, or cupboards to eat. Also write down every time you purchase takeout or eat out at a restaurant. If you already use the meal planning method of grocery shopping you are already a step ahead,  but it can be worthwhile to door the notebook exercise, because if you are  anything like us you may plan to eat X, Y and Z but sometimes life happens and  you end up eating X, D and R that week.

 So, you now have a notebook full of raw data about your family's eating habits. You need to sit down and organize this data set. You can do this with pen and paper, or if you are the technical type use your favourite spreadsheet program.  Organize the data into items that you can store with no
refrigeration, items that have a short lifespan and require refrigeration, and items which are longterm storable but in a freezer.

So, nothing too difficult yet. This is where most people, my family  included, get a good look at how much processed and "junk" food they have been eating. The good news is this process will help you steer your family to healthier choices.

The first category to look at is the long term storage items which do not require freezing or refrigeration. These dry goods will generally be the backbone of your cooking. Here we find things like pasta, rice, spices, sauces or ingredients to make sauces, flour, oil and sugars etc. What is the item you used the most of during your recording period?  The second most used? Go through the list and you will quickly see what you should have the most of and what you do not need to have large quantities of.

Our dry goods list looks something like this:
               
Tomato sauce, flour, black beans, tomato paste. oatmeal, brown rice, chicken
broth, beef broth, kidney beans, brown sugar, yeast, canned tomato soup, egg noodles, baking beans, molasses, cream of mushroom soup canned, white sugar, apple cider  vinegar, baking soda, salt,  baking powder, chocolate chips,pie fillings, pudding mix, shake n bake, pickles, jam , relish, Dijon mustard, popcorn, BBQ sauce, ketchup etc. This varies depending on the season, but that  is the list that you will always find in quantity in my pantry.


Now, the amount of food you store will depend entirely on how large your family is and how much room you have. I like to have at least three months of dry goods stored. Not all of it is in my pantry. At any given time there is usually food stored elsewhere in the house. Especially right now as my 'pantry' is a collection of awkward shelves sitting in the room that will be my pantry when we get around to renovating it in September or October..
A stand alone pantry is ideal, in my vision, a pantry will house stores of food, many small kitchen appliances, and will also have  counter space for working and an small sink. I should get everything but the sink when we put in the new pantry here. In the last two houses we have lived in, Gary and the boys have built pantries in existing closet space.

These have worked just fine and were cheap and easy to install. It can be a little extra work to keep them rotated properly and hungry teenagers can completely un-organise a pantry in under a minute. So if you are short on cupboard space, have a look at a nearby closet or stair well that you can convert..

So, now we have a list of staples, a place, or an idea of a space to keep them, where to go from here? We could just go out and buy a month supply of everything on our list but odds are most of what you eat is not going to be on sale that week. So here is how to build your pantry on a budget, slowly.

Yep, that's it. The secret is you have already done the hard work by tracking your food usage and compiling your list of staples. So now you start to build your supplies without charging a massive grocery bill to your credit card. You will remember that I don't have a credit card and advise everyone in our self sufficiency workshops to ditch theirs.

If you will be using your existing cupboards as your day to day pantry have a good clean out. Throw out all the out dated food,, and anything that has not expired, but you know you won't be eating, donate to your local food bank. Now you can start building your supplies. Watch your local flyers, if you are a coupon person continue to work with your coupons. If you use four cans of tomatoes a week and a store has them on sale for 50% off, buy eight or ten or however many you afford. (If this were me I would buy 24 but I will get to that later.) Keep in mind that next week you need to buy the four you will use next week. Once you get a month supply of that item, start with another. Remember to place the newly purchased items at the back of the shelves to keep your products fresh.

After a while you will open your pantry doors and discover  that you have a lot of food stored. And you didn't need to go in debt to do it. Now you have reached what I think of as the saving point. Once you have reached a point where you have a few months of most staples on hand you can change how you buy groceries forever! This is the fun part, supermarket managers hate to see me come in. The manager of one of the supermarkets in Bridgewater saw me loading 2 cases each of chicken and beef broth into my cart and jokingly said, "you're supposed to buy stuff that isn't on sale too!"  I gave him a big smile and replied, "I only need whatever is on sale" and walked away.
For the most part this is how I shop. After tracking everything you buy and paying close attention to the pricing for however long it takes you to build up a good stockpile of staples you will know the seasonality of your staples. I only buy sugar twice a year. Once during the summer canning season,  and again during the late fall, Christmas baking season, when stores put it on as a loss leader. I NEVER pay more than half price for sugar. Occasionally we will use something more than I had planned and I will either pay more than I want to, or dip into the minimum 6 week supply if I know that item will be on sale in the next week or two.

You can also save money by experimenting  with producing some of your own staples. If you use a lot of tomato products, sauce, paste, canned tomatoes; try making some of your own. You can grow your own or try your local farmer's market. Go towards the end of the day, you may be able to pick up the last of the days supply for a lower price if the farmer doesn't want to take it home. An even better way is to build a relationship with one or two of the venders and ask them about ordering or buying a large quantity of product. Going back to our staple of tomato products, you can make homemade canned tomatoes for pennies a jar. You don't even need to make a whole lot of different tomato products. If you need tomato sauce, open a can of tomatoes, hit them with a stick blender, add some herbs, salt and pepper, a few dehydrated mushrooms and voila! You have tomato sauce. Much healthier and better tasting than anything you could have purchased.

If you refer back to my staples list everything that is in red type is something that we have made and canned ourselves.
We didn't start out that way, and I don't advise you to try and make all your own product at once either. Start with something easy that can be processed in a hot water bath. Learn how to make it, get comfortable with the process, and learn to recognise problems. Then when you are comfortable doing that you can try things which require a pressure cooker. In general low acidic products require a pressure cooker to get temperatures high enough to  kill off bacteria. A good reference book will give you good recipes to start with or the US department of agriculture website has good information on canning and recipes to try. Sadly, the Canadian site is pretty much useless.

So that is my recipe for building a deep pantry, you can also apply the same principles to frozen food. Freezing fresh vegetables in season is the cheapest and most nutritious vegetables you are ever going to get. Same with fruit. Fruit an also be canned, but do require a pressure cooker. Consider ordering a side of pork or quarter or side of beef for the freezer, it will cost you less and if you know where it comes from you can usually be assured that it was raised as you would have.

So, how does this tie back to Saturday's post? It's about control. Pure and simple. Taking back control of your life, and there is no better way to start than by taking control of your food. Imagine opening your cupboard and knowing that you have one, two ,or three moths of food for your family. It is like money in the bank, if something happens, an illness, a layoff at work the peace of mind is priceless. Food is a necessity, but it can also be a family building point. Even if it is only one day a week sit down as a family and enjoy a meal together. You will know your kids better I guarantee it! Have a great day everybody!
 

Yesterday was Achievement day for Reiley's 4H club. This is the day by which they are required to have completed all the work for the projects that they have been working on since last fall. In the case of the life skills projects this usually entails three separate pieces. For livestock projects this means they show their animal at the achievement day event.

Now as any one with children will tell you, the words child, project and deadline rarely bring out the best in families. We did get a break this year as Reiley only had three projects and two of them were livestock. Last year he took vet science, welding, first aid and small engine PLUS goat and beef. So that was four life skills projects times three projects for each totaling 12 sizable projects all due the same day. (I'm pretty sure that was one of the reasons we  chose to home school.)

For achievement day, projects are not judged against the other projects, just that they meet the requirements for the project completion. Some children choose not to compete and are happy with their awards of achievement. For children who do choose to enter their projects into competition, achievement day is a great time to get some feedback on their project and just a chance to get fresh eyes and perspective.
With livestock, it is a good run through in preparation for the exhibition. You can see how your animal reacts to being with other animals if they usually aren't, and to test your handling skills in a show environment. For us it was a run through on trailering Ivan and an opportunity to get him used to groups of people around him. All in all, everything went well. Even trailering went without  too much fan fare; a miracle in itself since it has been years since I had to back up a trailer.

All the projects were great. May I just say the kids in cake decorating are amazing! I think that's what I need, a project where you can just eat your mistakes.. (oops I already have that it is called my veggie garden)

Speaking of the garden, most things are finally growing well. The tomatoes are getting close to five feet, so I will be pinching most of them off tomorrow so they can put their energy into making fruit rather then growing plant. Some of my onions are starting to bolt, mostly the red ones for some reason, so I will introduce a little judicious pruning there tomorrow also. The zucchini suffered this year. The slugs took most of them before they could really get going. I replanted so hopefully they will bear fruit. I refuse to eat store bought relish anymore so I may need to buy, beg or barter some zucchini to have enough to make the years supply of relish.
Even though it makes for an insanely busy summer I just love all the preserving and canning. Fall is my favourite season, and I think a large part of that is the nesting feeling.

Finishing all the work of summer, and slowing down to appreciate all that hard work. The pantry and freezers full to the rafters, herbs hanging, and the root cellar bursting. Just that sense of everything just starting to wind down.

I think that is a large part of the allure of this lifestyle also. The feeling of accomplishment, the knowledge that what you do matters, even if it only to you, your family and friends. Actually let's make that especially if it matters to you, your family and friends; because let's face it your work should matter most to you and  the people who are closest to you. That is what gives you a sense of community, a sense of belonging and importance. Too many people never get the satisfaction of completing something in it's entirety, of truly providing for themselves and those they care about.

Our society is fractured, we make parts of things and send them somewhere else to be put together with other parts made by different people, sometimes on a different continent. Or, we trade our time for money doing something that we may not enjoy, sometimes doing things we find distasteful or even reprehensible.                                                                                      
I am not saying that everything we do here on the farm is an absolute joy or that we walk around like we have found Nirvana. It isn't; but we do know that everything we do here matters to us and to those that we love.
Our children have grown up knowing that the work they do matters, in some cases that it is vital to our family. I think this responsibility is necessary for kids. It teaches them values, that they are needed and valued and that their actions have consequences,  good and bad. I feel that this is something we have lost. Even in adults of a certain age, they have never had that feeling of accomplishment or knowing that they are integral to the people around them. Most companies do their utmost to let people know that they are not vital, the whole we can get along just fine without you so don't think you have any sort of guarantee here atmosphere.

No wonder we are all so stressed and our society is floundering. We need to take back our souls. We need to make our communities function on the human scale again.

If you feel this way, if you are desperate to get off that treadmill and ready to start feeling like you matter begin today. Start taking your life back TODAY!  It is possible, it is not difficult, it requires planning, educating yourself, and perseverance; but it can be done.

On Monday I'm going to start a series of blogs to show you how to start. We are going to look at how we got here and how to step off the treadmill and we are going to start with food. See you all on Monday. Have a great day everyone!

OK. So plan B did not go well. In fact plan B has led me with an eye swollen shut for a few days now. Apparently 12 stings in 24 hours triggers a moderate allergic reaction for me. Good to know 

The cloth did work to a point, but there were bees on top of the cloth when we opened the hive on Monday evening. The bees were also tired of being messed with at that point. They decided that I was the target of their wrath. Just a small aside, if you decide to work with bees and you have long hair, make sure it is pulled back TIGHTLY. If they manage to find a way under your veil they will get caught in your hair. It is difficult to make sure stingers are out when they are in your scalp surrounded by hair and it is really difficult to get the poor dead bees out of your hair in the shower  Scalp wounds also hurt, not as much as 3 tightly grouped stings on the eyebrow, but they hurt just the same.
So, after I ran cursing across the yard shedding clothing as I went, not one of my best moments I'll admit, we realised we needed plan C. I was mulling it over the next morning as I iced my face, the biggest issue is that the 'bars' from the nuc don't fit snuggly into the hive like the regular bars do. Even with the cloth on top of the bars the bees are able to get around it. Putting a solid top over the bars would make the hive really hot and stress the bees too much. However, if we could find a way to fix a solid surface over the area where the two nuc bars are, we could function until the bees work their way over and build new comb on the other regular bars.

We reached a compromise, Gary cut a board about six inches wide and the same length as the regular bars. He and Reiley placed this board over the cloth covering yesterday. Gary had a peak under the cloth and reported that the bees were filling in the space around the bars and the cloth but were not laying foundation on top of the cloth. Unfortunately I wasn't able to see the board go in. I decided that trying to fit the board with only one eye functioning, and hence no depth perception was not the best plan ever.

The good news is that Gary and Reiley were able to place the board quickly and with minimum disturbance so the bees stayed calm.  I am going to take the top of the hive on Saturday just to check, and I'll take a couple of pictures then. So, what have we learned? If I ever need to convert a Langstroth nuc to a top bar hive again, I will cut the comb completely from the frame and use a large needle and some baler twine to attach the comb to a regular top bar. It is slightly more disruptive to begin with but if I can prevent the disruption that we have caused the bees this week it is a no brainer.
So ends lessons learned on the homestead this week. Have a good day everyone, I'm off to ice my face again.

On Saturday I had a quick peek at the bees to see how they were doing.  They were doing well;unfortunately they were doing well in the wrong direction. They had managed to get around a space in between one of the 'bars' from the original nuc and one of our top bars. They were building comb between the top bars and the roof of the hive. It was a complete mess. Well, it was a complete mess from my perspective. I am sure the bees didn't think so as they had masses of lovely comb all filled with fresh honey and some brood started. At least we know there is ample pollen and nectar sources for them

So yesterday I starched a cloth and last night we tackled the mess or tried too. Things didn't go well. Proof positive that you should not work with bees when you are tired and cranky. Bees require you to be calm and present.

We did did manage to scrape the newly built comb and it's contents off the roof. We had planned to remove the comb from the top bars and hopefully get rid of the old 'bars' from the nuc altogether. I had a good idea that the plastic frames from the nuc were the ones that were causing the issue, and as I recalled they had been mostly used when we put them, with just some brood left in the comb.

Unfortunately, by the time we removed the comb from the roof the bees were really worked up, and I was distracted and even more cranky than when I had started. I also had 6 stings to remind me that it doesn't pay to work with bees when you are cranky.

So we scraped as much of the top bars as we could, and removed both of the old plastic frames bars. We also removed the follower board to give the bees the full half length of the hive.

I laid the cloth and we closed everything up for the night. So, this evening after everyone settles down, I will open up the hive and make sure all the bars are still flush and the bees have no access to the roof cavity. Hopefully I won't have to move anything around and I won't get stung again!
Have a good day everyone!

Three solid days of dark sky and heavy rain finally convinced me to make the changes to this site that I had been planning for a few months. The site just felt ... heavy.
This new design seems to fit this farm, and also represents how we are feeling as we see our homestead develop and grow. We are still just getting started, but are already reaping the rewards of our work. Thanks to everyone who has helped us along to this point. Sharing thoughts and ideas with all of you helps us to refine our plan. We hope this site has been helpful and inspiring to you, and that you will continue to follow our progress. Please let me know what you think of the new look. We hope you like it. I'll be back tomorrow with a regular post. Have a great day everyone!

Yes today is chick day. While I went with every intention of just bringing home the 30 meat kings and 8 brown layers I had ordered, they had extra unclaimed chicks... so we have 60 meat kings and 8 brown layers.

As predicted, they are comfortably ensconced in the kitchen for the next day or two.

Also,  Gypsy's fascination with chicks continues. Gypsy is our spaniel mix rescue dog. We have had her for 7 years. The only thing we know about her is that she was found and taken to the S.P.C.A. She had been shot, and she still carries several pellets in her side.
Gypsy is not known for her friendly manner. She has, understandably, trust issues. She is much better than she was after we adopted her, but she is still prone to ... cranky days. But, she has a weakness. She has always been fascinated with chicks. Actually animal babies of all kinds but particularly chicks. She will sit beside the cage for days on end if we let her. She doesn't try to eat them, she doesn't chase them. She just sits and watches over them. By the time they hit a pound or so in size she could care less, but as long as they are babies she is fascinated.

As I said, mysterious, but adorable! Have a great day everybody!

Short post today, just an update on the chicken front
So here we have it, the new and improved hopefully mink proof, or at least mink resistant meat bird hut:

The hut is a wood frame with slab wood on the back half. The front is chicken wire, with 1/2 inch hardware cloth on top. There is mink wire attached to the bottom, and goes underground to discourage tunnelling. We hope. The top is a heavy duty tarp.  With the exception of the beefed up wire sides and the anti tunnelling wire this is the same set up we have used for meat birds for the last 4 years. It works well and if it ain't broke....

The birds arrive tomorrow, just 30 this time, given the weather forecast they will probably stay in the house for a couple of days. (See,  if you say it fast it just sounds normal).
 Prepare for cuteness pictures tomorrow as our spaniel LOVES chicks ! 
I  promise you will know what I mean tomorrow.  Have a great day everyone, and if you are in Nova Scotia.. enjoy the rain!

Today was jam day. The first of a few  preserving days of the year as we cycle through strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, apples and grapes. As I mentioned yesterday, I decided that since the wood cook stove was already out... I might as well make jam on that and keep the house cool.
So last night we hulled and mashed 24 quarts of berries and let them sit in the fridge overnight. So this morning I had this

Actually, that was only half of what we had, but you get the idea. While Gary set to work heating up the stove I set to work washing jars and getting everything ready.  In short order Gary had the stove heating and it was time to start sterilizing jars.
The hardest part of doing this on the woodstove is timing. This is exacerbated by having the stove outside. It simply doesn't draw the same as it does inside and therefore has  more uneven heat. Once we had the canning pot boiling we were ready to start.

As noted, I do not double my jam recipies, I cannot get a good set when I try. On the other hand I have made several wonderful batches of syrup over the years.
We use an old strawberry jam recipe, it is simply 2 quarts of crushed berries and 6 cups of sugar. No pectin or lemon juice. This recipe requires a lot of boiling to thicken the jam but the taste is just like fresh berries. It also uses less sugar than recipes that have pectin. The method is simple as well, but time consuming and requires constant attention.
To make simply bring the berries to a good rolling boil and maintain for 2- 3 minutes.

Once it has boiled for 2 - 3 minutes add the sugar and stir until completely dissolved. Now comes the tricky part. You need to bring the mixture back to a good boil and keep it boiling until it starts to thicken. This is usually in the 35 - 40 minute span. You need to stir frequently to prevent scorching. Even a little scorching will taint your entire batch . Not too bad on an electric or gas stove but  it can be tricky on a woodstove. We always run two batches at once. I leave a 15 minute gap between to give me time to fill jars with the first batch before the second batch is ready. If this is your first time making jam just stick to one batch at a time as when the jam is ready, it is ready NOW.
 You can tell when it is done by using a cooking thermometer. When it reaches 220 F it is usually thickened up enough to pour. You can also use the sheat test. When ready, a spoonful of jam will come off a cool saucer in a sheet, like a smooth wide flow, not runny not globby.
If you have been making 30 - 40 liters of strawberry jam a year for the past 20 odd years, you can tell by stirring.
When the jam reaches this stage, remove from the heat and stir the jam continually for 2- 3 minutes. This prevents the beries from rising to the top of the jars. It is now time time to pour into the jars.

My best advice is to invest in a canning funnel. You will save yourself heartbreak, and it will become an  indespensable tool in your kitchen. Even though I purged my kitchen of plastic  more than 10 years ago, I can not use a metal canning funnel. I have one, but I have burnt myself so many times that I just don't use it for hot items any more. I did purchase a silicone funnel this year, the same stuff that spatulas are made from. Today was it's first trial and it worked fine.

I like to keep everything close when making jam. As soon as the jars are filled I pop the lids on the jars. Make sure that the rims of the jars are clean so the lids can make an airtight seal. You need to use new lids everytime. Once the lids have been sealed you cannot get a reliable seal of the orange rubber coating again. Screw the rings on right away and they are ready to go into the hot water processing bath. The jars need to be processed at a rolling boil for 5 minutes. So start timing after the water returns to a boil after you have added the jars. Be sure that the water covers the entire jar. This is usually not an issue with smaller jars but can be a headache for 1 litre jars.

A note about lids. I am not happy using these lids. They were still coated with bisphenal-A until last year. The makers of the Ball and Kerr brands are advertising a new BPA free lid this year but I am not really sure about the coatings they are using instead. I am in the process of switching over to Weck jars but this will take time and I cannot afford to replace all of my jars at once.
I have friends who are using tattler lids, but I'm still not a fan of plastic in any form. While I am using these lids I make sure that I don't turn the jars so that the food comes into contact with the inside of the lid. It's the best we can do.
My general rule of thumb regarding chemicals is to look to Europe. European countries have stronger lobbying rules than Canada and the US. Consequently there are many chemicals that we use in North America that are banned in Europe. This is readily apparent in the personal care product industry. Large commercial names almost always have North American versions and European versions of their products. It has always seemed ridiculus to me. Like the labelling that reads "carcinogenic in California".??? Really, and it stops being a carcinogen when I cross the Californian border. Bah. But I digress...

Finally, after your jars have been processed, set out to cool. I set mine on a wire cookie rack, this enables air to flow underneath and they cool quicker. Listen for the telltale "POP" sound, and make sure the centre of the lid is depressed before you put your jars away. You can remnove the rings at this point, I don't simply because they are handy to have when you open the jar to start using the product inside.  So after all this work, you will have rows of yummy, strawberry jam. You will probably be sick of strawberries by this point, but come those cold, dark February days, it is a fabulous jar of summer you can pull off your shelf and enjoy.

Have a great day everyone.

We are exhausted!  Even the dogs are wiped.  I have been coming back from a midweek migraine and Gary has been overdoing it for a long stretch. We have hit the homesteading wall.

We are at that point where we have been getting to know the land here for about a year, we know what we want to do, and what we have to do to get there.We can see it as it will be; but we are impatient creatures.

It is especially difficult as we were so much further ahead at the last place. Starting out here seemed like a huge step backwards, I know that when we get this place rolling it is going to be even better than what we could have built at the place in Bridgewater, but it just seems like we have been saying "didn't we just do this?"  way to often this week.

I think a lot of it has to do with the garden. Having been completely self sufficient , and then some, with vegetables it seems to be an admission of failure to me every time I have to buy veg this year.

We are making some progress, outside living space is coming around, Gary is having fun building rock walls. For some reason, unfathomable to me, Gary thinks building with rocks and bricks is fun. I am assured it is a "guy thing".  To be honest, I'm just pleased that he does find it enjoyable. I love a rock wall!!
 We have been building beds for the herbs, figuring out pathways, and access points. Sometimes I am my own worst enemy as I am adamant that just because something is functional does not exclude it from being beautiful. Yes, I only demand the impossible. I'm quite frankly surprised that Gary didn't throttle me years ago.

tomorrow is going to be a big day, I will be making strawberry jam on the cookstove outside. Gary and Reiley will be attempting to build the ultimate mink proof chicken pen as the first birds will be arriving on Tuesday. July 15th and we haven't had any birds yet. That is a record. I have layers coming with the meat birds. I have been buying eggs since last September when a mink killed all my beautiful barred rock hens and the roo.

I promise there will be lots of pictures tomorrow, for tonight I am off to prepare berries for jam while Gary cooks a couple of steaks and he seems to be making me a yummy spinach and goat cheese salad. I really am a lucky girl!

Have a good evening everyone.

Hi Everyone, I hope everybody has come through the storm with no substantial damage. We were lucky. With all the large trees we have around the house things could have been a lot worse. We did lose half of one of the large apples and several large branches from one of the ash trees in the front of the house, so we will have to examine that tree carefully to make sure it is sound. Any one of those trees in the front yard would take out the house were they to come down. So as I said things could have been much worse.
The good news is that our power outage plan worked. We were able to keep ourselves in comparatively comfortable state for the duration. (which in our case was only 56 hours.) We have had time now to sit down and assess everything and we are altering our homestead plan.
As I have mentioned before, the five year plan is to cut the power company umbilical cord. We plan to use solar, wind and micro-hydro to do this. The plan was to add these elements in the fourth year. We planned to add everything at once, meaning we would only have to mess with the internal electrics one time. The new plan is to start adding these elements gradually  starting with a couple of solar panels this fall. This will give us more flexibility in charging the battery bank and we can run part of the house on the solar setup.
 The summer kitchen which was planned for next year, will also be built late this summer - early fall. This kitchen will house the wood cookstove, and will be used mostly during the summer and fall to do all the canning / preserving and baking. This building is also integral to hosting workshops and I have great plans to have everyone here for a thanksgiving dinner prepared on the wood stove.

We also learned that crock pots are power hogs! I was working in the artisans guild at Upper Clements Park last Friday so I asked Gary to make a batch of chili in case the power went off during the storm. Sure enough, we lost power around 11 am on Saturday. When it came time to heat up the chili for supper I checked the watts rating on the slow cooker. Now given that my 14 inch TV complete with ipod dock and built in DVD player is rated at 58 watts, I was expecting to be able to hook up the crockpot to Matthews little 200 watt inverter. NOOO. We checked my crock pot and both of Matt's crockpots, mine had the lowest rating at 270 WATTS! Now this is not some fancy digital crock pot with all the bells and whistles. This is your basic low heat, high heat, maintain heat set up. I don't think so. We put the chili in our trusty cast iron dutch oven, the one I use to bake apple cake in, and plunked that into a heated BBQ, lid down. Twenty minutes later, yummy chili. Which brings me to our next conclusion. We need to get our backsides in gear and get a small woodstove in the house. Had this storm been in the winter, we would have been cold.

We did discover that we need a larger inverter. Between Matt and I we have a small 75 watt inverter, a 200 watt inverter and a 410 watt inverter. The 75 watt lives in my car. I have had that for 5 years now and it is amazing. It plugs into a car power port, it has a plug socket for an electric cord and a 1000 miliamp usb port that will fully charge a smart phone in twenty minutes. We use it when we go camping, to the drive-in and during long road trips.
Matt's 200 watt inverter came in very handy this week.  He and Sheena have a large aquarium and we had to run the air bubbler every 2 hours. The 200 watt inverter ran the bubbler, coffee maker and our internet modem and router all day Saturday. Well until the power at eastlink's rural broadband tower went off. It also powered my smaller TV and the satellite receiver for 3 hours on Sunday evening.
My 410 watt inverter was less versatile. We used it to power the lights in Gary's sprouting system for a while as the 200 watt would not have been enough, but the amount of energy the inverter requires makes it very inefficient. It is no where near big enough to cycle the fridge or any of the freezers. We are now  planning to purchase a bigger inverter that will handle the fridge and freezers if need be.
We have four deep freezers in the basement right now, three are ours and one belongs to Matt and Sheena. As soon as we were getting messages from NS Power that this was going to be a prolonged outage we removed anything we would need for the next few days and wrapped all the freezers in blankets. The freezers are in our dirt floor basement which stays cool so we lost only a few bags of vegetables from the freezers, maybe eight pounds.
However if the outage had lasted any longer we would have had much greater losses. So we need a bigger inverter to run off the truck battery. We will be able to run the fridge for an hour a day off the truck battery with the truck at idle, and if the outage is prolonged we can run each freezer for an hour a day also.
So, as I said all things considered we were very lucky to escape major damage, and our self sufficient planning paid off and we were able to come through the outage fairly comfortably. I was able to use my large kerosene lamp that I had been dying to use since I found it a Frenchy's a couple of years ago. I can read by it! Gary pointed out that one of regular lamps only took 12 watts to run.. but what fun is that?
I will admit, I enjoyed the power outage to a certain extent. Not having a TV blasting for 18 hours a day was magical to me. And yes, there are days when that blessed box is on for 18+ hours. We actually sat around and talked! I know! Talked, laughed told stories. If all my brood had been here it would have been perfect. We would of had to sleep in shifts.... but it would have been fun! We missed you Jason. Jason is our storey teller extraordinaire! I think it`s a genetic trait that skips a generation as my Dad is also a brilliant storey teller. We also missed Graham`s mechanical abilities. Matt managed to become a conduit while hooking up the inverter the first time. Graham would have had us outfitted with an outdoor solar shower by Sunday morning! Poor Graham, just his luck that the biggest storm in years hits 48 hours after he flies to Edmonton! Graham loves storms like I do, he would have stood out in the storm with me. And Bethany, we missed you too. You always have the great ideas!
Unfortunately you guys were not here, and almost a year after moving away from my kids I think that was the biggest lesson I will take from Arthur... we are better and stronger together.
Hoping everyone is ok. Talk tomorrow.