Wow, Friday of labour day weekend already!! It has been such a busy summer here at the homestead. Our first full summer, trying to get everything done at once. So I thought this would be a perfect time for an update on the summer's main projects.

Gary's big goal for this summer was to get the first section of road  that will give us access to the back of the property. The first section being from the driveway to the pig yard. So at the end of May the area looked like this

The first week in July the pigs were working their magic

Today the 'road' looks like this.

The change is even more dramatic down by the house where the diveway is being extended to meet up with the 'road'. The changes in the landscape all around the house even suprised us when we started looking at what had been accomplished this summer. Back in May the place looked like a nuclear test area, remember how cold May was?

It is much nicer now. The goats fence has been moved back towards their shelter. The large rocks where the pigs are playing are the start of the rock we will be using to make terraces for the vegetable garden. The guys are currently rebuilding the pig yard at the top of the hill. They are getting a new yard and Patches and KW are getting new shelters. (More pics on that next week.) The pig yard has been highest priority for this weekend as patches is due to farrow a week from today. The wood stacked on the pallet is from the large branch we lost from the apple tree during Arthur. Gary has been saving to use in the smoker when we graduate Wart in a couple of weeks.

My priorities were getting the bee hive up and running, putting in medicinal more herbs and just getting the immediate space around the  house cleaned up. I have put in 2 elderberries, a witch hazel, lavender, and lots of  comfrey and calendula. The back yard has gone from this

To this...

The pit to the basement entry is only half filled in. The new door we ordered to go in the other side of the house will be here in a week or so. Once we have that in we can fill in the current door with cement block, lay the tile drain and back fill the hole. Finally the new freanch door will go in the back wall of the house. I am hoping the doors will be in by my birthday the first week of October. (hint hint)
We also managed to have one rotation of meat birds. They will be starting to graduate soon, and I have 8 laying birds growing in the chicken area. The chickens have actually ended up doing really well in their little sun-dappled area at the bend in the "road". I am thinking of just beefing up the defenses of this hut and adding a few nest boxes to keep the layers in this winter.

We have also thinned out the small coppices of trees in the back of the house, and added a swale to deal with water issues above and in front of the bee hive. We have had a couple of so-so rains and it has worked well. We shall see with the rains fall ususally delivers. Gary has the three soild sides up on his wood storage shed and he and Reiley have been working to fill it. As mentioned the new pig yard and huts should be finished tomorrow. There is still about 1/3rd of the truck full of 2X4's to get started on the new permanent  goat shed.

Moving the basement door is going to be the real game changer. Once that wall is blocked up Gary can expand the sprouts operation and we will notice a real difference in the power usage this yaer as the old door funneled cold wind directly onto the hot water tank.

There is also going to be time for one larger infrastructure project this fall. We are going to be talking workshops this weekend and I will let you know what we decide on. The infrastructure project will be directly related to which workshops we decide to have next year...so stay tuned.

It has been a busy summer, and will continue to be so until freeze up. But when winter finally hits this year we will be much more secure and settled and ready to take great leaps forward in our plan to teach others the skills we have and in doing so learn from them.

It is not always easy, but is is possible. You have the dream, start taking action that will bring the dream closer. Piece by piece it comes together, but you need to start. Small steps everyday and suddenly you are miles fromwhere you started. IT IS POSSIBLE! Start living your dream today.

I'll be back Monday, have a great weekend everyone!

I realise this post will not apply to everyone who reads this blog. It doesn't even apply to the majority, but it will apply to some and as it is a subject I am passionate about, I felt a need to write about it. This actually started a week ago, I reached out to a mom who had posted a comment about trying to keep it all together while homesteading and homeschooling five kids. As I feel somewhat qualified to answer this question I shared with her some of the thoughts I have. This includes the things I did wrong and how I would change things if I could do it all over again.

This entire exercise has me thinking about the good the bad and the ugly of homeschooling, while it is gaining in acceptance and the doors to post secondary schooling are now wide open for homeschoolers; there are still a lot of misconceptions about what homeschooling is and more importantly what it isn't.

While I haven't been really active in larger homeschooling circles for a few years now, some of the concerns and questions I have heard are actually close to the same ones I was asking myself all those years ago when we first started our homeschooling life. So, I have put together a sort of open letter to anyone who feels they would like to homeschool, it is lessons learned from many years experience. It is mix of my proudest moments for my children and some of those times when you just wish you could have the moment over again to do right. 

The best piece of advice I ever had with regard to homeschooling was to breathe deeply and relax. As a very type A personality, this was difficult for me to learn. Over the years I have realised the more relaxed I am, the more relaxed the kids are.

When children are young, <9 years old, do not be too concerned with formal curriculum. Children are hard wired to learn, in fact the only way to keep them from learning is to lock them away. The only thing I would do is to introduce a math curriculum, I prefer Singapore math especially for the primary grades. If you are naturally inclined to math, if you see the patterns easily and know you can pass this on to your kids, then you don't even have to do that. Numbers  do not come easily to me, so I wanted to give my children a solid base in math. Essentially, this is the key to successful homeschooling, especially homeschooling younger children. Kids at this age are just so curious that they naturally turn almost everything into learning.

Know what you strengths and weaknesses are and utilize curriculum to fill in the gap.    

This stage takes a lot of time on your part,  but you can also help yourself by turning regular chores into learning time. Science behind canning, why weeds grow so quickly, filtering and vacuum pressure while cleaning the house. There are ways you can foster the learning without having the steady stream of questions 12 hours a day. If one of the kids was interested in say frog eggs they found in the pond. I would talk with them about it a little, explain what the mass was etc. If I had a book about the topic we could look at that for a few minutes or more depending on how much time I had. If they were still interested we would find age appropriate books during weekly library trip. Having these books around encouraged the kids to start reading. Magazines for kids are also great. If you speak to your librarian you may be able to get some of the back issues of the magazines as they have to cull back issues on a regular basis. Video resources are now much easier to utilize  with things like Netflix and live streaming.

Another thing we continue to do is to spread our school year over the entire year. So as the kids get older and started more formal curriculum, we just gave ourselves the entire year to finish the 'grade'. This gives you more time on a daily basis. Instead of trying to fit everything  into  several weeks you have several months.

The curriculum I chose for ages 9- 12 was usually unit study type curriculum. Roughly grades 4-7. I had a list of things they should have covered by that time, I would sit down with each child and together we would choose what they were interested in and wanted to learn about for the coming block of school time. Thankfully most unit studies offer different age ranges within the study guides.

From age 13+ we switch to more formal curriculum, science, history  etc.  By formal I mean curriculum with written reports, tests etc. But we still kept to the year long schedule.

These are things that worked for us, it is important to remember there is there is no one size fits all curriculum. Each child will learn differently. Many many children go through life with no curriculum at all. (gasp)! Fuelling their imagination, in my opinion, is key to lifelong learning. One of the most important things we can do as homeschooling parents is to foster a love of learning in our children. Learning is not something that starts and stops with a bell. If a love of learning, the tools to think critically and the skill to find and evaluate information were the only things my kids took away from their homeschooling I would be a very happy Mama indeed!

There is also no one size fits all method of homeschooling. Find what works for your family, relax and enjoy the chaos! It goes by much to fast. My 'children' are now 25, 23, 21, 20 and 13; and I honestly don't know how it went by so fast.

Homeschooling can be a remarkable way to raise your children. It is not for everyone. If you think it would work for your family, explore it. It is a huge commitment, and I don't know of any homeschooling parent who hasn't had the occasional sleepless night worrying. (Those nights become less frequent as you go along.) The rewards are amazing too, you will be mentoring your children as you go through your daily life. They will see how you conduct yourself, they will learn your values and model them. It allows your children to learn at their own pace, and in the learning style that works best for them. While it is a huge time commitment on the surface, it can actually be easier to schedule in family time and extracurricular activities. It gives you freedom to set your own schedule, and when it comes right down to it isn't that one of the reasons we all chose the homesteading lifestyle?

As always, if you have any questions the comments are open. Have a great day everyone! See you tomorrow for another How To Tuesday.

I thought it was time for a little update on this summer's projects. Remember these guys?

Well, they have grown a little...

Aren't they just too cute?  They are quite settled in on their little piece of the farm.

As I posted about 6 weeks ago, one of the major projects here this summer is building a road to allow us access to the back half of the property where our wood lot is. The guys have been hard at work moving fences and shifting things around so the pigs can start the "plowing" of the road. They finally finished and they moved the pigs onto the new road four days ago.
So back on June 24th, the area looked like this:

After four days of very happy rooting by the porcine division, our soon to be road looks like this:

Speaking of the pigs, Patches is due in less than a month, September 5th to be exact. She is in really good shape and having a grand old time rooting around in her new space...

As long as those three strands of barbed wire hold up we'll be in great shape.

The goats are also enjoying their digs this summer. Between playing on the stump and the rock and peering in to watch the chickens, days are very full indeed.

The knotweed battle has taken a decided turn in our favour. Gary has a new toy!

He has hit the big patch of knotweed a couple of times now and it seems to be working; apart from an awful smell and a patch of landscape that looks like a scene from Apocalypse Now. Anything has to be better than knotweed.

Everything else on the farm is incredibly green. Even though we thinned out a huge amount of weak, smaller trees There is still a great amount of shade cover and as predicted the undergrowth has grown up with the increase in sun.

The blue is the roof of the chicken hut, it is approximately 100 feet from the back of the house. The new road runs up just to the left of the hut.
We are about half way through the working season, aka summer. We are slightly behind where we thought we would be at this point, but all in all we are happy with how things are progressing. This comming week will be all hands to the wheel as Reiley and I will be away from the farm all the following week, August19th through the 23rd for the Digby County Exhibition.

Reiley is showing Ivan and Pepper on Tuesday afternoon / evening. Also, hopefully, on Wednesday for the championship classes. I will be judging the crafts and sewing categories for 4H on Wednesday, and Digby county 4H has hired me to be the barn manager for Thursday, Friday and Saturday. So if you are in the area please come down to the exhibition and see us and everything else. It is the 135th anniversary of this exhibition and we are looking forward to showing there. 

Have a great day everyone! Enjoy the super moon tonight, hopefully cloud won't hide it from us.

Last week I had a little rant about some of the things I love about homesteading and certain aspects of our 'global economy' which annoy me. We meet a lot of people who want to live the type of life we do. Invariably the questions turn to how can you afford to do this? I have alluded to Gary's health throughout this blog, but I have never actually explained the story behind it, as the details are vital to how we manage to homestead he has given me permission to tell the story.

In the spring of 2002 we were living in Ontario, managing a small hog farm. Reiley was just about to celebrate his first birthday and I had just completed the  second year of training for my RN diploma. We were happy, the kids were doing well the only point of discontent was that we missed 'home'. (I have rarely met a Maritimer outside of the maritime who did not continue to refer the maritime as home.) As Gary was one of the best in Canada at what he did, we knew that there were very few farms east of Ontario that could afford to pay him what he was making at our current job, and more importantly for Gary, keep his interest long term.

Gary had become known as a fixer; someone who came into a farm that, for various reasons was in trouble. He had a skill set of knowledge, drive and work ethic that allowed him to problem solve, examine the operation and discover why it was no longer profitable. He would formulate the plan to bring the farm back to profitability and also had the work ethic to then set the plan in motion. Sometimes this took a few months sometimes a year or two. Once the farm was running along where Gary thought it should he would get bored. The challenge was gone, it would be time to move on. While this led to a bit of a nomadic lifestyle, it was interesting. While I knew much less about the business when I first met Gary, he taught me the basics and I became his sounding board. We discussed his 'projects' and by the time our daughter Bethany started school I understood the industry as well as Gary. The farm we were running in spring of 2002 had been a startup We had been hired  by a businessman from Toronto in 1995 to start a hog farm just outside of Pickering Ontario. We had the farm up and running in that location. Due to urban sprawl, in 1998 we moved the farm to Little Britain, a small community between Port Perry and Lindsay.

By this time, the oldest four kids were all in school, and we had decided to stay where we were. The nature of the farm we were running was such that it kept Gary on his toes and held his interest. I had started training as an RN, something I had always wanted to do. Our favourite surprise ever, Reiley, was about to turn 1. We had a great co. unity of friends, things were looking settled. Then on Easter Sunday 2002 Gary had a call from a farm in New  Brunswick; could he come for a job interview? It was our chance to come home.

We went for the interview, Gary then flew back to New Brunswick a couple of weeks later for a one week trial, he was offered the job. When he flew back home we talked it over, there were many disadvantages to the move. He would be taking a pay cut for the first little while, his salary was dependent upon performance bonuses, it would mean uprooting the kids and I would have to switch from an RN diploma program to a bachelors degree. None of this was insurmountable, We knew meeting the performance targets was possible, kids are resilient, and with a GPA of 3.95 I knew I could complete the degree program easily. All or this was no obstacle in the face of that magic word....'home'.

So, on Mother's day weekend 2002 we moved to New Brunswick. Everything progressed as planned for the first year. We settled in, Gary met the targets and in early spring of 2003 negotiated a new contract that with combined salary and benefits put his annual income just in the 6 figures bracket. I had taken the first year off from university to help the kids adjust, but had already been in contact with UNB and transferring my credits would be no problem. We were living the typical upper middle class lifestyle; car loans, gold card, soccer teams, music lessons, gymnastics and pizza night. We had some token nods to our roots, we kept a small vegetable garden, I made some preserves and knit some mittens and sweaters for the kids, but essentially we were fully integrated into the North American consumer lifestyle. Then suddenly, everything changed.

On June 19th 2003, just two days before his 36th birthday, while attempting to rescue several weaner pigs which had fallen through a hatch in the floor, Gary suffered a hydrogen sulfide knock down event. I entered the barn several minutes after he lost consciousness, his herdsman, the only other person in the barn, had attempted to remove him but she could not lift him from where he was. I placed the 911 call and kept them informed until the emergency responders arrived. Gary was removed from the manure storage area and was unresponsive but combative. He was rushed to the ER at the local hospital where he was assessed placed in a medically induced coma, intubated, catheterised, given detox kits for hydrogen sulfide, methane, and ammonia. He was stabilized with regard to cardiac function and transported with attending physician and RN accompanying, to the nearest trauma centre 30 miles away.

It has been just over 11 years since this occurred, and I still go into nurse brain when I have to recount that day. The ambulance arrived at the trauma centre shortly after I did as I was sent ahead to complete the paperwork. Gary was immediately admitted to the ICU. While his heart was strong, he remained in a medically induced coma, and would not be taken off the drugs until at least the next day. He was given another set of detox kits. I made the decision to go home to the kids and come back early in the morning. I spent the night trying to sleep but I just remember sitting beside the phone waiting for it to ring and planning Gary's funeral.

Well, I didn't need to worry about the funeral. Gary was released from the ICU
to my care three days later. He spent the next two and a half months recovering  before he returned to work. By the end of September he was back to working full time. While he was good at hiding his symptoms from his employer I knew he  wasn't right. He could hide the amount of pain he was in, but he couldn't hide  his memory problems, his inability to concentrate and the reaction he was having to being in the barn environment every day.

We went to see specialists, psychologist, neurologist. He had CT scans and  EEG's. For a man who detests hospitals, and has always treated illness as something to be overcome by shear stubbornness, he endured this with little complaint. The verdict was always the same, something was going on but they didn't know what. There was nothing wrong anatomically, but his wiring had been disrupted. They could give him pain killers, which he didn't want, but other than that they offered little hope.

As I said he became adept at hiding symptoms. He increasingly began to rely on the boys to help him. When the boys had finished their schoolwork for the day they were allowed to go to the barn. Jason in particular loved being in the barn. He had celebrated his 9th birthday a month before the accident and he knew how to operate every system in that barn, and where each 'room' of pigs was in the growth cycle.

We  continued this way for almost two years. Then early in 2005 Gary was given a promotion. Until; then he had been in charge of the 10,000 head feeder barn. Now he was being put in charge of the day to day operation of the entire farm. The  commercial and purebred breeding program, the finishing operation
....everything. The irony was this is what he had been working for since he
graduated from N.S.A.C. in 1998. We talked it over, he wanted to try. At this
point he was still not telling me all the trouble he was having, I think that
with his short term memory issues even he didn't know how bad everything was. 

The promotion involved a move to the "home farm" an hour away. We moved over in  the summer. What we hadn't counted on was the change in environment. 

While in his barn, Gary had come to rely on environment triggers to help him. Just his familiarity with the layout had given him cues on what had to be done and an order to his day. Now he had to learn 4 new barns, feeding systems tons of new paperwork and supervise five staff. he started to flail almost immediately. Still he maintained the facade. He had enough knowledge locked up in is head to keep it going. Again, the boys helped, I think  I had the only 11 and 12 year old boys around that could breed pigs via A.I..

By Christmas 2005 I had face the fact that Gary was not going to be able to
continue, he was starting to face it too. For the first time in his life Gary
took vacation time. I began paying down debt like crazy and trying to put
together a plan for "after".

By March of 2006 it was over, the career Gary had worked so hard to build, the life we had imagined for our kids had just evaporated. Gary had gone through several phases of testing and was put on short term wage replacement through Workers comp. He underwent a grueling two day vocational assessment. Within weeks he was placed on long term disability by NB Workers Comp.

We had to move as our house had been included in Gary's salary package. We decided to come back to NS, specifically to the Valley to be close to my dad and we thought it would be an easier adjustment for the kids to remain in a predominately agricultural community.

Between May of 2006 and early 2010 things were not great. We managed to avoid bankruptcy, just By the time the dust had settled, and Workers Comp. had finished clawing back the CPP disability benefits our annual income was just over 33% of what it had been before the accident..

For a while I tried to protect Gary.by keeping him away from barns of any kind. Another  result of the the injury is a sensitivity to many pollutants. Exhaust gasses, off gassing plastics, paints, varnishes synthetic fragrances of any kind will set him back. He can not go shopping. Fluorescent lights and off gassing fumes make him incredibly ill. Cleaning supplies, laundry detergents; you name it, he  is incredibly sensitive to it. So, I reasoned that exposure to manure gas, the very thing had had first triggered this should be avoided at all costs.

This was not going to work. In my haste to protect him, I was trying to suppress who he, we were at heart. We are a farm family. We worked in agriculture because we love it, we love animals and taking care of them, we love the independence of growing our food and providing for ourselves.

This realization finally came to me in the spring of  2010, I went out and bought Gary a piglet. So began the homesteading journey that has brought us here. To these 20 acres, this blog and to sharing our knowledge and our journey with you. 
 
I have shared this with you for one very simple reason; We could not be living this  life homesteading unless we had learned to live without debt. Unfortunately the way we have learned to do that was a rather harsh life lesson. We often meet people who want to live this life style, but what we hear most often is, "we can't afford it". I am hear to tell you that you can live on a lot less than you think you can and be a lot happier than you are now. The only debt we carry is our mortgage, and our mortgage is less than many people spend on their monthly car payment. Everything we do here is done on a pay as you go basis.

I know this goes against everything advertisers, society and even
our government has told you, but debt, especially consumer debt, is
neither necessary nor acceptable. We have been sold a myth that taking on debt is normal, why wait  for what you want? You can have it now! We can give you low interest, spread  the payments out over five years, you can upgrade to leather, it's only an extra $30 a month! One of the most disturbing memories I have surrounding the 9-11 bombings is the image of George Bush telling a still 
shocked and grieving continent to "go out and shop" ???  Seriously?

We have become a society whose economic stability is based on a premise of cheap disposable goods.

If you want to homestead and you don't think you can afford to join me tomorrow. I am going to share with you how we got out of debt, and a couple of different  strategies that could help you get to this life quicker than you may have ever imagined. Have a great day everyone!

Gary showing Jason and Reiley how to trim cattle hooves

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!
 

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!

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.

We have been going through some old photos, looking at greenhouses we built in the past and trying to decide which way we want to proceed. There is the tried and true hoop house version:

Yes, that is a very young Mr.Reiley there. Either 6 or 7 years old. Or we could go with the beautiful post and beam that the boys built out of wood salvaged from an old barn:

While I am a fan of the latter, I am not sure how viable this is as the incarnation above took Gary, Jason and Graham almost two months to build. We are limited on manpower these days. We will continue to mull the ideas.

On the finished project side, the first raised bed is done and planted.

Yay! This bed is on the NE side of the house. That is the area we have been putting in swales and drainage to try and dry up the area and slow down the water flow. The potential site for the micro hydro project is also on that side.

The bees are in!!  I brought them home in that downpour on Thursday, and we added them  to the top bar hive today. We did get some pics so I will write up a post on Wednesday.
The work has also started on moving the Basement door to the side of the house and filling in "the Pit".

Attractive no? Anyway, the plan is to install weeping tile accross the back of the house, fill in "the pit" and install a new direct entry basement door on the side of the house.  The window just above the current basement door is going to be removed and we have a lovely set of french patio doors to go into that wall. The newly level ground will be our main outdoor eating, BBQ and hangout space.
Today the guys installed level markers and began knocking down the pile of earth on the right hand side of the picture:

So now you know what we have been up to this week. In addition to all the regular chores, feeding animals, weeding the garden etc.  There is just never enough time!
I hope to have the final pasture pig post on Monday. This one will cover feeding of both meat pigs and breeding stock. It May not appear until Tuesday. We will see how Gary is feeling, while I know some about pigs, he is the expert in that field around here. Actually I would say he is the expert in that field anywhere. See you soon. Have a great day every one!

I was at a meeting Monday evening and I met a woman who, along with her son, daughter-in-law and two small grandchildren, recently moved to the area.  They have purchased a property and her son wants to homestead.
Like about half of the people we meet through our homestead and consulting business he has no background in farming. This lady commented that he was working probably harder than he ever had in his life trying to get everything done.
It is something we see a lot of. I wanted to address that age old question of "where do I start?"
Unless you have recently won the lottery, or you are going to gamble your entire life savings on your property, you most likely will not be purchasing the picture perfect homestead featured on the cover of the last country magazine you bought.
Lets face it, homesteads or hobby farms, are about living a lifestyle. People tend to want  a connection to the land, to know where their food comes from, and generally a slower pace of life. Although some may argue with me on the slower pace of life after 12 hours of chores and garden weeding when, just at dusk, the neighbour calls to politely inform me that my pigs are digging up her tulip bulbs and could I please come and catch them.
The biggest mistake we see people who are new to this life style making is the idea  that everything has to be done NOW.  That within a year of purchasing your property everything has to be in place. The gardens have to be immaculate, all the livestock penning and shelter has to be built and looking like something off the cover of chicken home and garden
These are the people who will burn out after year, they're just setting the goals way too high and in the process setting themselves up to fail.
The  truth is most of the good homestead are ones that are built slowly. You need to take the time to get to know your land, to see how the sun moves across your land throughout the entire year. Where the prevailing winds originate in summer and winter. Does that bottom land flood every spring or just in very heavy snow years?
You also  have to consider how you are going to use your property, are you going to build a 2 acre market garden, or only produce food for yourself? Do you plan to use tractors, draft animals or hand tillers?
When you buy an existing farm or homestead you're probably going to
inherit the concept that the person who had the land before you had. Sometimes
it's a great and sometimes tit's all wrong. Hopefully hopefully whoever built
the farm knew what they were doing. However more and more we are seeing people buying raw land, or a small acreage with just a house and possibly a garage or shed. There are drawbacks and advantages to both but you need to realize that it will take time to build. 
You need to have a plan. Not a drawn in stone plan, but before you start throwing time and money at building infrastructure you need a priorities list. You should also have a land use plan in mind, especially if you are planning on making income from your homestead.
Now I realize that if you are bringing animals with you, you need immediate shelter, (been there done that). But that does not mean that you lay out $5000 for lumber and build a barn the first month. You need to see where you are going.

First: What do you want to do? Write it down. Be specific. Be realistic. We have 2 sayings here; they are based on over 25 years of experience.
# 1 is  first you get good, then you get big. (# 2 is garbage in - garbage out but we will deal with that another day.)
Start small, figure out the bugs in your systems. For example: you want to raise chickens for your own food, instead of ordering 65 chickens for your first run, order 10 or 15 hopefully on the first order date of the season. You will know within a couple of weeks if there are glaring problems with your set up. You may build a fabulous chicken co-op, but then come home the first day the chickens have been outside to discover a hawk has taken some of your birds. Better to find out you have a weasel or feral mink with 10 birds vs. 60.
The same applies to gardens, test your soil. Even if it is only a basic ph and soil structure test. It is a lot easier to augment your soil before a crop is in the ground than after.
Second: plan it out. Get out the graph paper or software. Note the location of buildings, large trees, the driveway. Mark the compass points. Does the plan work. Make use of the zoning principles in permaculture. Zone one areas are places you utilize everyday, usually more than once a day. Take seasonal differences into consideration. The first big snowfall is not the time to discover that the most logical place to pile snow is now covered by your young fruit orchard. Think about leaf fall, access to buildings and water movement. If you are going to be hauling several hundred kilos of feed a month you probably want fairly convenient access to your feed storage, same with hay. That leisurely stroll up the path to the barn in summer becomes a treacherous ice field trek in January. Talk to your neighbours. They can tell you that the wonderful spot you have for your garden was where the former owner parked the school bus for 20 years.
I'm going to wrap this up  for today as I have already blathered on way longer than I had intended. That's what happens when you are passionate about something; and I am very passionate about helping people establish their homesteads. I want every person who dreams of having this lifestyle to be enabled to succeed. I firmly believe that small farms, homesteads, self sufficient suburbanites, what ever you want to call them are imperative to feeding the country. I also know that planning and patience are the best way to make sure that each one is a success. Hopefully I have given you lots to think about, for those of you just starting out don't be discouraged that you are not where you thought you would be.  First you get good. Then you get big.