Musings from the hearth

 Its official! Davey Tree Expert Co. has bought Wise Oak Tree Service out of South Londonderry Vermont and they want Hubby to be a part of the new office. Although he'll be working in Vermont, we truly hope to find a homestead in NH, within driving distance to South Londonderry. I was raised in NH have always loved it there, and hubby has developed a real love of the state as well.  Who that has lived there doesn't love it?  But first, we have to sell this house.  Its on the market where we've had one single showing in the two weeks its been listed. Not a lot of people are clamoring to move to rural Mower county in southern MN to a 5 acre homestead.  Lots of medical workers come to work at the Mayo facilies in both  Rochester and Austin, however, they seem to prefer a suburban house in the those cities. Then there are the Hormel plant workers, most of whom either rent, or likewise want to own something in the suburbs of Austin. It takes a mindful desire to homestead, or at least embrace the rural lifestyle of southern MN to be interested.  But we have no fear that we'll sell eventually. The right person who is looking for a homestead that's all set up and  has a completely renovated farmhouse will come along eventually. In the meantime, our realtor is hosting an open house this weekend while Hubby and I are visiting with our daughter and her family in southern Iowa. 

But this whole sale adventure has had me musing on the comment I hear so often from people, about how simple our life is, how intentional we live.  Although we are mindful and intentional in our lifestyle, it is by no means simple.  I think, if it were, that a lot more people would be living this lifestyle if that really were the case.  No, its much simpler to put in an internet order for your groceries and stop and have them delivered right to your car in the parking lot. You barely have to lift a finger until you get home. Simplicity is not having to go out and seed, cultivate, fertilize, weed and harvest your own vegetables and then process them to last the winter.  Simplicity isn't raising baby animals through to maturity, getting up early to feed, water and nurture them, tend to them when they are sick or injured, and then slaughter them, butcher them and process them yourself. No, that's not simple at all. But then, we don't do it for the simplicity of it.  I just don't understand where people get the idea that we live a simple life.  Hubby goes to work 5 days a week, every week of the year to make enough movey for us to live the way we do. We live this way for the security and sheer pleasure in the accomplishment it brings us. I also believe we eat healthier than many Americans do. We get exercise and we appreciate the lives we take to put meat on the table more so than we might if it were a faceless, nameless chunk of flesh on a styrofoam tray.  We're also not as bothered by the increasing recalls on nearly everything anymore. I think the very fact that it ISN'T a simple life is why so few people want to homestead, although the lifestyle is gaining in popularity. It sounds scary to just jump in.  I can understand.  I'd probably be terrified to live in an urban or suburban setting. I imagine being out where you can't hear traffic or human voices at all but that the sounds of the wind rustling in the corn fields, and the serenade of crickets and frogs being all that you have to keep you company at night would be frightful to some folks. 

No, our life is complex.  We ritually give thanks when we slaughter. We raised our kids to understand that these animals are only here because they are to be food for us and we need to treat them with the respect and honor they deserve. We fill our freezers every year and that's a lot of work! We have a generator in case we ever lose power so we don't lose all the fruit of our labors, our year's supply of meat! We have to always think ahead and have a plan A, B, and C. 

We tap our own maples and boil the sap for syrup, we raise honey bees and harvest their honey (leaving them with enough for their own winter stores), extract it and bottle it for sale as well as gifts and our own use throughout the year. We pick berries and fruits and make jams and preserves. We can corn, green and wax beans, tomatoes in various forms, pickles and other vegetables. We harvest and cure potatoes, onions, winter squash and pumpkins for the coming winter months. We dehydrate zucchini, apples and peaches and soon, we'll have a freeze dryer to add even more goodies to our winter storage. 

But none of that is easy or simple. It is rewarding though.  

As I look around at this homestead, the chickens and turkeys long sold, the lambs and pigs in the freezer, the garden harvested and put to bed for the year, I realize how quiet it is.  I'm reminded in a very real way that we're leaving this homestead to once again start anew someplace else.  This time, hopefully and God willing, it will be in a place that has claimed both of our hearts, New Hampshire.  We want to continue our complex lifestyle until we literally cannot anymore. Then, at that day, we'll lay down our hoe and our feed bucket and maybe get to try the simpler life that most people lead.  I sort of dread that day.  

23963 610th Ave, Brownsdale, MN 55918 | MLS #6611558 | Zillow

Bittersweet days

 So our ultimate destination has been determined in the broad sense. We're going to Vermont. We don't know exactly where in Vermont because Davey Tree holds all new acquisitions closely until they are legally completed, which is expected to happen sometime in the next few weeks. All we know is that the acquisition is somewhere in Vermont. So, we are one step closer to knowing our future. We're so thankful that Karl has a great job with the same company he's been with for nearly 25 years now. Davey is an amazing company to work for. 

We're doing what we can to get the house and homestead ready to sell. We're done with most of the big stuff and are now trying to get a LOT of smaller stuff done. We have painting to do, trim to put up, a door to replace, some flooring to install, and things like that still. We also have an ash tree by the driveway to take down and firewood to cut up and stack to let go with the house, and the exterior of the house and barns to paint. Thank goodness for log splitters and paint sprayers! 

We sold the haying equipment.  It went quickly and for a fair price. We also sold hubby's saw mill. A bittersweet transaction. The sheep are going this coming weekend, well, except for the ram lambs who we'll keep and raise up until just before we leave. They'll be marched to freezer camp then. The pedigreed silver fox rabbits will be sold as soon as their babies are old enough to be separated. We have 2 does and a buck.  The babies we'll also keep to grow out for the freezer. The plan is to have a huge yard sale to sell a lot of smaller farm equipment, furniture, power tools, hand tools and other miscellaneous stuff, likely over Labor Day weekend.  We're also going to sell our single axle trailer and buy either a stronger single axle or a dual axle so we can haul our Mahindra tractor across the country. 

In the midst of all the chaos, our registered sweet Maine Coon female, Oakley, delivered 7 darling babies. Our Maine Coon cattery, Red Tartan Maine coon kennel will be coming with us to Vermont. We already have 4 kittens reserved and will likely have the last 3 spoken for soon. They never linger without homes for long.  We do ESN (early spay and neuter) so the kittens go home at 14 to 16 weeks of age already spayed or neutered.  Early spay and neuter hasn't been found to affect a cats growth the way it does to some large breed dogs. The kittens should all be in their new homes by the time we leave for New England and of course, all that are going to New England will be delivered by us. :)  

The vegetable gardens are flourishing! The rain and sun have been good for it all. We're eating fresh zucchini already. Our favorite ways to eat zucchini is stuffed buffalo chicken zucchini boats and orange zucchini muffins. The broccoli is starting to come in as well, and the tomatoes are approaching 5 feet tall. We have them trellised up on a hog panel and T posts.   Our onions and potatoes are huge and plentiful and our winter squash are all formed up and growing.  We need to take as much with us to Vermont as possible since it may be a while before we are able to have a garden.  We're hoping to be in a new place by spring, but we want to take our time and get a place that fits our needs and future goals, so we're not going to rush into anything. 

We've had storm after storm after storm, leaving Karl and the rest of his crew crazy busy, working about 12 hours a day. Needless to say, with coming and going, eating and sleeping, he doesn't have much time to get things done on the homestead. So weekends it is. He did take Friday, the 5th of July off (my birthday) so we have a 4 day weekend.  We're going to have a marathon house rehabbing event so we'll see how much we can get done! 

I'll leave you with a photo of our new baby Maine Coon kittens.  

The end of an adventure and the start of a new one.

 We tried.  We really tried. But ultimately, Minnesota just isn't going to work for us. The people here are, for the most part, some of the nicest people I've met anywhere we've lived. They are very welcoming folks. We also love our little homestead.  It has, just about, everything we desire in a homestead.  Except for the fact that it's in Minnesota, it would be perfect. 

The house is charming, a small Victorian farmhouse (2050 square feet), with 3 bedrooms, one of which is downstairs, and 2 baths, one upstairs and one downstairs. The farmhouse kitchen we installed is perfect with it's walk in pantry and 3/4 bath along with a laundry room right off the kitchen. The formal dining room is small enough to be cozy, but big enough to fit my family sized table, china hutch and small buffet. The living room is enormous and the bedrooms are all cozy, but not small.  There's even a basement that does triple duty as a mechanical room, food storage room and storm shelter. There's a full size garage attached, 2 pole barns and wooden barn on the 5 acres, a hay field and a pasture a well.  Yes, it's nearly perfect.  But, it's in Minnesota.  

No, it's not the winters, although the winters ARE colder and windier (the wind here is nearly relentless), than we're used to, the snowfall is a fraction of what we're used to. We love winter, we love it far more than we love summer, although we do enjoy the delights of summer like grilling outdoors, canoeing and fishing and gardening. There's just something about winter that we love.  Ice fishing, fruit tree grafting and maple sugaring are just some of the outdoor activities we enjoy in winter. We also love the fact that it just gets dark earlier in the winter, making it likely that you'll find us snuggled indoors in front of the fire together, just enjoying the fruits of our labors.  During the summer, we're usually working outside until the last possible moment before bed. 

For us, a couple of mountain-raised people, we simply can't get used to the flat of southern Minnesota. There are no mountains in Minnesota, although there are bluffs along the Mississippi river. We really miss our mountains. We also miss having a good 4 seasons climate.  Our part of Minnesota simply doesn't have a good 4 season climate.  It has a long, cold, windy winter, a very short spring, a long, hot, humid summer and an autumn that if you blink, you'll miss it.  We're used to a long, cold and snowy winter, a long slowly unfolding spring full of flowers, a hot and humid, but not overly long summer, and a beautiful and never long enough, yet surprisingly long (if that makes any sense at all) Fall.  We miss the colors of fall, the scent of fall and springtime.  I think those "change" seasons, fall and spring, are our favorite seasons, followed by winter and then summer. We simply don't have that in Minnesota, at least not this part of Minnesota.  

So many folks here, when we say we want to move back to New England, can't understand why, and it's something nearly impossible to explain to someone who has never been there.  The place pulls at you once you've lived there with it's charm, beauty and culture. We simply miss it. We miss it a lot.  We tried to ignore the feelings when they'd pop up in either one of us, but we feel like we're dying a little bit inside all the time.  We're pretending to be happy, when we aren't.  

Hubby has a great job here and he loves the people he works with and for. The Rochester office has been one of the best shops he's been associated with in his nearly 3 decades with Davey Tree. But he's ready to go home. We're ready to go home. He's talked with his manager about it, and although he's sorry to see him go, he says he understands.  So we're trying to get hubby a sales position within Davey somewhere in northern New England.  He was approached about a transfer to a sales position in Massachusetts, but ultimately turned it down as our desire is to be in the north of New England, i.e.., New Hampshire, Maine or Vermont.  Hubby has been working with the regional manager up there and they have something in the works for him.  So, it looks like we'll be moving again, hopefully this time, for good.  

I'm tired of starting homesteads and then selling them to other people.  I want a homestead where I can live and die at.  I want to plant apple trees and actually get to pick apples from my trees. I want to feel some permanence and be home.  Hubby wants that too. So we'll sell this place, and likely stay in an Airbnb for a few months until we find THE place we want to call home. We want to take our time and find a place that fits in with our lifestyle and our plans and dreams and goals.  Goodness knows we aren't afraid of hard work so we're willing to do the work needed to make it ours but it has to be the right place. We need at least 5 acres with at least 3 acres fairly flat. We don't want a total rehab this time around, but we don't mind replacing a kitchen, a couple of bathrooms and flooring, and paint, but we don't want to gut and rebuild the whole thing. A barn is nice, but we're willing to build one. A basement or cellar is a must-have and a garage is high on the list too.  We'll hold out until we find our place. 

We just don't know where we're going at this point.  Its a mysterious adventure at this point.  We have decided to sell everything that isn't vital.  Hubby has all but sold his sawmill and he's only had it a year.  We've sold the baler and will sell the rest of the hay equipment soon. We're selling most of our outdoor power equipment. We're selling our canoe even.  We'll take our meat processing equipment with us along with most of hubby's woodworking tools. We'll sell all of our furnishings except our dining room set, our box spring and mattress, and our freezers.  Although I love our kitchen wood range, it will likely go with the house as its just too heavy to move.  We are keeping our new Mahindra tractor and will upgrade our utility trailer to a dual axle one so we can haul it across the country when we move.  We'll likely let our daughter in Iowa use it for however many months we're in the Airbnb and then come back out and pick it up when we have found a place. This is truly going to be starting over! 

We'll take you all along with us on this adventure to find the right homestead wherever it is that we land. 

In the meantime, we still have a lot of work to do on this homestead.  We have the upstairs bath to finish, the upper hall to finish, trim to put up in all the downstairs rooms and I'll need to pain nearly every room still.  We then have to put up new siding and paint the exterior and do a few repairs on the deck and paint that.  We also need to take down a couple of dead ash trees that had the emerald ash borer in them when we moved in. 

We have our piglets we're raising for the freezer and a couple of lambs along with about 20 turkeys and a few meat rabbits. We're hoping to be able to get these grown out and put away before the move. We have 2 piglets and we're hoping to sell one and put the other in the freezer. Our daughter is taking our sheep to their farm in Iowa and potentially our silver fox rabbits as well. Our plan is to move well stocked with food because most likely we won't be raising anything in 2025, so this is going to have to get us through. We planted an extra large garden this year, like we used to grow when the kids were home, and it will be processed to last a couple of years. Our apple trees are loaded so we'll hopefully get a good crop.

They are talking about wanting hubby there (wherever there is. They are keeping it all close to their vests right now.) in early Fall, so we're trying to get everything done that we possibly can get done before they want him.  Can we do it? Can we finish this place and sell it? We shall see! 

     Spring is teasing us here in Southern Minnesota, with warmer temps, flowing maple sap, and a promise of things to come.  Old man winter is off napping, but I don't kid myself, he'll awaken again soon and will likely push the young spring away until her proper time. but we're loving it for now and have so much to do! Ready to read a taste of spring life on our small holding farmstead? Read on!

    I love the rhythmic cycles of farm life.  Most of what we do all year is in preparation for winter. We tap maples for syrup and maple sugar and put it away to enjoy all year long.  Our stores of maple syrup and sugar have to last from March to the following February when it's time to set the taps for a new year. We raise sheep and really enjoy lambing season when the new lambs are born, usually in January and February. They jug lamb in the barn.  A lambing jug is a small pen that is just large enough for a mom and her lamb. The ewe gives birth in this jug and the mom and baby bond and live together in this jug for a week. Then, the divider is taken out and the pen joined with the pen of the neighboring ewe and her lamb to give them more room and keep the flock bonded together.  We usually raise two ram lambs for our own use for the freezer, and either sell the rest, or keep a ewe lamb or two to add to our flock or to replace an aging ewe. Spring is a time when the chickens and turkeys and guineas and geese start laying again due to the increase in daylight and new warmth. We can eat the eggs or incubate what we need to produce more poultry for the freezer for the coming winter months.  We make a few diferent sausages from poultry, particularly buffalo chicken sausages and Thanksgiving dinner sausages. Both are superb! We get piglets in April or May and raise then all summer and fall and butcher them in late October or early November for the freezer.  We brine and smoke our own bacon and ham and make several different sausage varieties from the meat, particularly, Italian sausage, Mexican sausage, a savory sage sausage and a sweet maple sausage that we stuff into natural casings for breakfast links. Then, we sow a large garden and baby it along all summer and we put up the fruits of that labor for winter use as well. We can it, dehydrate it, and freeze it. We have blueberry bushes, red currant bushes, peach trees, cherry trees, plum and pear trees, strawberries and rhubarb as well that we harvest fruit from in it's season. Spring, Summer and Fall are very busy on the farm, and Winter is the down time, the time to relax and refresh and spend time just enjoying the fruits of our labors. 

    When we bought this homestead it had been neglected for some time, at least a decade. Dead trees that hung over the house needed to be removed, the house needed to be completely gutted and rebuilt, the gardens, barns and orchard all needed to be reclaimed. We were definitely overly ambitious the first year and have since learned to have a plan, a schedule, and be happy when that gets accomplished rather than trying to do everything in one month or even two! 

    While spring is flirting with us, we decided that we'd go out and tackle the dead/dying hedgerow that is so ugly and harbors so many predators and undesirable creatures.  (Not that any of God's creatures are undesirable in their own right, however, rabbits decimated the gardens and girdled the little fruit trees, foxes filched all but 2 of our guineas and skunked had lunch at the expense of our honeybees).  Putting up a trail camera definitely showed us where these animals were exiting and entering and it's always through the hedgerow. Starlings and red winged blackbirds nest in the hedges and nipped all the tops off our newly planted garden vegetables last year. We choose not to kill all these creatures who are only doing what comes natural to them.  As good stewards, we need to be sure we're not giving the foxes, skunks and rabbits a hiding place on our doorstep. Besides, the hedgerow is mostly dead shrubs, predominantly honeysuckle and red twig dogwoods, both of which grow fast and thick when not controlled. We can use the wide swath of land the hedges cover for pasture or some other use.

    So we took the tractor out, got a length of rope and activated our burn permit, then headed out to cut down these hedges and burn them on the garden spot.  Burning them will help the soil as well.  

  We also pruned the 3 mature apple trees on the property.  We believe we have 2 Honeycrisp trees and we aren't sure what the third tree is yet.  Last year the trees were so overgrown and the drought so bad as well as the fact that we hadn't had time to spray the trees, so that the few apples that survived on the tree were small, dimpled and dropped off the tree too soon, likely due to the drought and as far as variety goes were fairly unrecognizable. So this year, we have them pruned and we'll spray them this weekend. We use something called dormant oil spray, a mineral oil spray that is excellent for dormant fruit trees. It is approved as an organic pesticide as it doesn't poison anything, rather it suffocates the little bugs that overwinter in the buds. We spray when the tree is dormant so that the little creatures are killed before they can enter the fruit through the bud when it swells to fruit. Honeybees and other pollinators also are not out yet and won't come in contact with the oil. We spay a second time after the flower buds have fallen and the tiny fruits are just visible. Finally, we spray a third time when the fruits are about marble size. We also grafted a few other varieties onto one of the trees, namely, Arkansas black, McCoun, and Wolf River.  We'll see how the new grafts do.  We also grafted Dolgo crab apple onto a volunteer apple root stock, so we're hoping that takes!

We have tapped our maple trees already for the year and boiled about 3 gallons of syrup, which is plenty for the two of us for the year and a few pints to give away to his coworkers for Christmas presents at the end of the year. We boiled the last of the sap into maple sugar which we particularly love in oatmeal and rolled onto sugar cookies. We've now pulled our taps, washed the collection barrels out and put them all away until next year. 

Hubby is tuning up the farm equipment, getting the tiller ready to till up the garden soil.  We'll lay the landscape fabric down and cover it all with wood chips and then plant when the time is right.  He's also putting new teeth on his hay rake and getting the baler tuned up and ready to go.  We have a zero turn John Deere mower that is having starting issues and we'll likely take that into the small engine repair shop in Austin to have it gone over. 

We still have pasture fencing to put up so the sheep can graze naturally once the grass is growing, and as early as this spring has seemingly arrived, that may be sooner than later! 

Of course there's the regular work of mucking out stalls and pens and coops for the compost pile, cutting and splitting firewood for the coming winter, keeping the house clean while continuing our remodel, cooking meals, baking our breads weekly, and the more mundane chores of laundry, record keeping, and budgeting.  

I wouldn't have it any other way!

  

     Our frigid cold temps are seemingly behind us and the forecast for the next 10 days looks spring-like! With temps below freezing at night and up to around 40 degrees during the day, it will be the perfect conditions for maple sugaring. We still have a little snow on the ground too.  Hubby and invited some friends who are interested in learning the ins and outs of maple syrup production on the homestead scale to come join us in setting the taps and sap line for our sugaring. So hubby went out and put in taps with them on the maples at the front of the property, teaching them the dimensions of a tappable tree and important things like how deep to drill the tap hole and how many taps can be put on what size tree. (I stayed either behind the camera, or in the kitchen preparing lunch.) They got the trees on the front of the property done and then came in to lunch.  We had chili with homemade Mexican sausage, and sourdough discard dinner rolls with honey butter. 

This afternoon we went out and tapped the remaining trees on the side of the property. These should start running within the next 24 hours as conditions sound like they'll be perfect.  Its early still as we don't usually start collecting sap until the end of February or beginning of March on some years.  But we don't call the shots here weatherwise.  We adapt and change our game plan to accommodate Mother Nature, and when she says its time, well, then its time!

We put in taps, run food grade plastic tubing to the taps and the other end goes into a 15 gallon food grade barrel.  When the barrel is nearly full we'll start boiling sap on an outdoor wood burning evaporator. It takes about 4 hours of good rolling boil to boil down 40 or so gallons of sap into about a gallon of syrup, depending on the type of maples used.  Sugar maples have more sugar content in the sap so they take fewer gallons of sap to produce a gallon of syrup. Red maples take slightly more sap to produce the same gallon of syrup, but the syrup tends to be a darker more burgundy syrup than that produced from sugar maples. Silver maples tend to have a lot higher water content and lower sugar content so they take longer and more sap to boil down to that gallon of syrup. The sap flows from the trees, through the tubing and into a barrel. We collect the sap and start boiling it down on our evaporator as soon as the barrels start to get 2/3 full.  We'll boil it down to where its nearly finished outside and bring it into our farmhouse kitchen to finish off.  When we've made all the syrup we want for the year, we'll turn a gallon or so of syrup into maple sugar.  What a treat that is! We use maple sugar in oatmeal and other delicious meals. 

Here is a photo run of our process in tapping the trees.  We'll do a post on actual boiling and sugar making later.  Maple sugaring season is always a harbinger of spring, so yay!!

Why we live the lifestyle we do.

 I'm often asked, "Why do you live like you do?"   My answer is usually something like, "Because we love this lifestyle!"  While that's true, I answer that way because in reality, the answer is more complex than you can boil down into a simple reply.  In truth, the reasons we live this way are many.  I was raised this way, as was hubby, although we were raised differently.  Hubby was raised in the gorgeous state of Utah in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (formerly known as "the Mormons") and was raised with a strong conviction on preparedness and food storage. He was taught to can and freeze food, and how to garden at a young age. He worked for a bee keeper and learned from the age of 8 how to keep bees successfully.  I on the other hand, was raised in beautiful, rural New Hampshire on an organic homestead by "old hippies".  My parents were in their mid 30's when I came along, yet they embraced the 70's back to nature lifestyle long before it went mainstream.  I was taught to make bread, cheese and soap as a child.  I was taught to cook, bake and preserve food early on in my life.  We raised livestock for our freezer, had an orchard, bramble fruits and grape arbors and a big garden and an herb garden that provided all the veggies and herbs we ate all winter long. There were 5 of us at home at the time and when we got to be teenagers, even though all girls, we ate our share and then some! We cut and burned wood for heat, having 2 wood stoves and wood burning furnace in our 150 year old cape house. We had chickens for eggs and 2 milk cows we milked. 

    So you can say this lifestyle is really all I know, or hubby knows.  But that wouldn't really be true.  You see, after high school, I joined the Air Force and went off to see the world. Hubby left home and headed to California to make his own way in the world as a young man. He also served a mission for his church.  He had some very lean times in his young adult life. He could have turned back to his family for help, but he was determined to make it on his own.  And for the first time in MY life, I was dependent on the grocery store. I hated it.  I endured and also had lots of lean times.  After my stint in the Air Force, I went to school for nursing.  I married and had two children.  We lived a very suburban life, one I hated.  I felt disconnected from in a very real and strange sense. Fast forward several years and a divorce later, and I'm a single mom with 2 children. At church one day, I met the man who, unknown to me at the time, would be my husband and eternal companion eventually. We talked a lot early on and what did we talk about? We talked about the lifestyle we both dreamed of having.  We schemed and planned on how we would get there. He was a returned missionary and I was a single mother. We married soon after meeting.  We were poor as church mice, both of us as broke as anyone can be.  We had no vehicle and were living in an apartment in town. Both of us hated it.  He walked to work at a factory, and on his way home one day when we were newly married, he spent a few dollars buying a bushel of Grimes Golden apples and carried them on his shoulder home to our apartment.  We spent that evening in the kitchen, drying some, making apple butter and just enjoying ourselves.  I knew I really had found my kindred spirit! We both recognized that we needed to get somewhere else, out of town and into the life we both longed for.  We started doing without while we saved every dollar we could.  I made our bread and made our jams and jellies and canned everything I could get in bulk.  I had a garden on the balcony of our apartment. I had veggies in pots instead of houseplants. It seemed to take forever, but we passed the time dreaming about our future homestead.  

    Eventually, it happened.  We bought a small place and raised chickens and turkeys and rabbits for meat and eggs.  We'd buy Christmas birthday presents with a homestead flavor for each other, like a grain mill, or a gift card to a seed company or a hatchery. We started small and always knew we would build up to our dream homestead.  Hubby eventually got a better job and we sold our little place and moved up to a bigger, nicer homestead where we raised pigs, sheep, a steer and had a milk cow, chickens, rabbits, turkeys and geese. Hubby learned to graft and we put in a greenhouse where he could graft heritage fruit trees for sale. We bought a saw mill so he can mill our lumber. We learned as we went. We celebrated our successes and discussed our failures, encouraging each other to try again! 

    We now can't imagine living any other way.  We teach others to live this lifestyle by hosting grafting classes, teaching beekeeping, orchard management, bread making, butchering, canning classes, etc. We're currently living in Minnesota where hubby has taken a position with the same company he's worked for, for 24 years, as an arborist sales rep. We have 5 acres and have a full and active homestead. Our children have homesteads themselves, both still developing and learning. Its fulfilling to see!

    We believe in self reliance as much as we are able. We're not interested in living off grid.  We like being part of the comforts of the 21st century, but we are prepared to live off grid if we HAD to.   We like to know what's in our food and minimize our ingestion of preservatives and other things we can control.  And there's a certain joy and satisfaction in the doing too!

    This is our homestead the day we bought it. The back part is now pasture and we have gardens and fruit trees as well. 

   

    So you can see, the answer to "Why do you live the life you do?" isn't at all easy.  It's just in our blood I guess!

Bread Baking day!

Its bread baking day on the homestead.  I always have sourdough starter in the fridge when I want some tangy and filling sourdough bread.  I also go through a lot of potatoes making potato starter for sandwich bread. Hubby loves cracked wheat, so I am making cracked wheat bread today for him.  I'm also making English Muffins for myself, as that's my favorite breakfast  in the morning, a toasted English muffin slathered with peanut butter, hot and dripping over the edge, and a small spoonful of homemade jam topping it all off. That, and a cup of Teeccino, since we don't drink coffee, and you can't ask for a better breakfast! And English muffins are so very easy to make.  Every now and then I'll change it up by making cranberry almond yeast bread or cinnamon raisin yeast bread. In midwinter, when the kitchen wood range is keeping the room toasty, I love to set a batch of salt rising bread.  Its a finicky bread to make, but so very worth the effort for something different every now and then. Toasted salt rising bread with butter and homemade apple butter slathered generously on top is a real treat!

I generally bake once a week. I make the bread for the week, usually a sandwich bread, an artisan bread or an Italian bread, and English muffins.  I then take the leftover breads from the previous week, as long as they are stale but not moldy at all, and if I am in need of breadcrumbs (and use a lot of bread crumbs not only for casserole toppings and meat loaf binder, but for old fashioned bread crumb griddle cakes too), I dry slices of bread in the oven and grind them up into crumbs in my food processor or blender. If I don't need bread crumbs, I'll turn whatever bread is left over, even English muffins, into various bread puddings depending on my mood for that week.  Bread pudding is so versatile and forgiving and it can actually be a healthy dessert if you're using wholesome whole grain breads, which is our favorite.  We rarely make white bread, preferring oatmeal, cracked wheat, or 5 grain bread instead.  I usually add flax seed meal, wheat or oat bran and/or wheat germ as well depending on the type of bread I'm making, so our bread puddings are always full of whole grain goodness. Because we raise honey bees, I have the luxury of baking our breads with real honey too. I think our favorite bread pudding is Pecan pie bread pudding.  Decadently delicious!  

As a rule, for health and weight control, we only eat other baked goods on holidays.  So I make hubby a cake for his birthday, I bake an easter cake, we have cookies on Father's Day, cherry pie on the 4th of July, whatever I'm in the mood for on my July birthday, and an all-American apple pie on Labor Day. We'll do fall themed cupcakes for Halloween, snowstorm squash pie to commemorate the first snowstorm of the year, Pumpkin everything (cookies, muffins, pancakes and waffles and of course pumpkin pie) for Thanksgiving week. Christmas is usually traditional New England goodies, like Whoopie pies and Needhams (potato and coconut candies. Delicious!) We generally don't eat desserts other than these, unless the grandkids are having a birthday and we make the drive to celebrate with them (they are 4 hours away, so it depends on what day of the week birthdays land on.)

Bread pudding, usually made with fruit (Apple caramel, Peach praline, and blueberry pie bread puddings) are what we usually eat for weekday dessert if there was any stale bread left after making crumbs for the week.  Some weeks we have no desserts when we eat all the bread or I need a lot of bread crumbs for the coming week's meal plan. I do admit to making extra bread in the hopes of having some left over. If I send hubby to work with leftovers instead of sandwiches, we will most assuredly have bread leftover, so that's often my strategy too. 

Do you bake bread? What's your favorite? Do you have a baking routine, like a set baking day or anything? I'd love to hear it!

This old homestead

     We've been in this old Victorian farmhouse for a year now.  Yes, we moved across the country from the White Mountains of New Hampshire to settle into a new life and a promotion for Karl. We purchased 5 acres with several barns, a large, rather neglected pasture, a very weed filled garden spot, 3 mature apple trees that are in desperate need of attention, and an old Victorian style farmhouse that needed to be gutted and restored. Why did it need to be gutted you ask? Because cats and dogs had lived freely in the house and had used it as their toilet.  It had sat empty for some time before we bought it and cats had been left behind. 

 

    The cats being taken away was one of the requirements of the purchase.  Then, the hard work started once we took possession.  We stayed in the city of Rochester in an Airbnb for a month while we made the daily 1/2 hour drive each evening after Karl got off work, to then work on the house.  We started in the room that was the living room and we took up carpets, underlayment, base molding, and dry wall down to the studs in an effort to get rid of the urine stains that were so evident throughout the room.  We removed the gas fireplace that no longer worked. It was actually lovely, but we didn't want gas with Karl getting so much hardwood for free all the time. So out it came. We washed down everything with Urine destroyer and then used an odor blocking primer on the doors and remaining trim. We then installed new underlayment and hardwood flooring. We scraped the old textured ceiling (after testing for asbestos and getting the all clear!) and sanded it smooth and painted it. We installed new drywall and pained that, installed new lighting, and a wood stove on a tiled hearth in the corner. We then moved into this one room, hung a tarp across the wide double doorway to the rest of the house and called this one room home.  

    Along with the asbestos testing, we tested for radon, as we always do when we move to a new home.  This time, unlike any previous home we've tested, the levels came back high.  4.0 PCi/L is considered the line where you need to consider remediation as prolonged exposure to radon above that level is linked with the development of various lung cancers. Our level in the room we were sleeping on was 14.7 pCi/L. We contacted a few remediation companies and had them all out to bid our job.  We then took the bids into consideration along with the reviews/reputations of each company and finally settled on Athelon out of Rochester MN.  They came out and had the job done in 2 days with zero mess left behind.  Our levels now average around 1.9 PCi/L .  Much better! We did the prep work for them as they are pretty much just installers of the system.  Our old home has a small basement/storm cellar and 3 separate crawl spaces.  Each crawl space needed to be encapsulated separately and have it's own suction point installed as well as one for the concrete basement room. The problem was that the crawlspaces were not only very shallow, but filled with all manner of debris along with a large quantity of cat feces.  

    So, we drafted our Son in law, Will, daughter Sara, and our grandson, Logan, to come up from their place in Iowa and help us clean out the crawlspaces one weekend.  Bless them! It was nasty and dirty work.  Even masks and gloves didn't make it any more pleasant.  We took up the floors inside in one room and we lowered the level of each crawlspace by filling 5 gallon buckets of dirt and debris and dumping it into our utility trailer where it was then disposed of. It was dirty, sweaty work, but with their help, we did it! The Athelon crew was able to come out and put in our remediation system so we could breath easier, literally! 

Over the past year, we have demoed the tiny old kitchen, the dining room, the downstairs bedroom and the 3/4 bath downstairs.  We've put in a new kitchen, remodeled the 3/4 bathroom, installed a laundry room off the kitchen and bath, reclaimed the old walk in pantry, put in a lovely formal dining room, and redid the main bedroom upstairs.  We still have the downstairs bedroom/office to go, another bedroom upstairs and the main full bath and hallway upstairs, but we've come so far! The house no longer reeks like cat and dog urine and it is ever so much more functional.  We've added things to make it perfect for our homestead use, like a kitchen wood range in the kitchen.  None of the rooms are actually finished as they all need some small things still, like some trim work, face plates, paint, etc. But it's feeling good to look at all we've accomplished so far.  

This is the dining room after we completely gutted and restored it. The beautiful old mahogany stained fir trim was so urine soaked and scratched and chewed up from the animals, that there was no saving it without lots of wood filler and then using paint. We kept the old trim and cleaned it with Urine Buster, used odor blocking primer on it and then filled the damage and painted it. We did faux paneling and historic color paint to finish. There's hardwood on the floor. We salvaged what plaster we could, patched with drywall and skim coated the entire wall area with a thin plaster coat before doing the faux paneling.  The ceiling isn't finished yet as it is going to be coffered. 

Then this lower photo is the before picture with the urine soaked carpet, the scratched and chewed doors and trim and the damaged old plaster. Stay tuned for more of our old house restorations!