Potpourri for Free!

Made a beautiful fruit salad for church potluck yesterday! As I was peeling & coring fruits I threw all those bits into a sauce pan to simmer with a cinnamon stick. Humidifies a dry winter house and makes it smell heavenly! Try it next time you have some apple cores and orange peels!

Bountiful Baskets

My friends, do yourself a favor and check out BountifulBaskets.com! This was our basket for this week with an added fruit package. All this was $25...no kidding!! Our local delivery comes every other week, and I plan our meals and snacks around the contents of our baskets to be sure I use every teeny bit of yumminess.

A little something...

The girls planted carrots in these pop bottles so we can watch them growing beneath the soil. I think I'm just as giddy to check our experiment each morning as they are!

Irrigation

As we problem solve our way through this past summer's challenges, one thing we know for sure is that our garden is too large to hand water in excessive heat & drought conditions. We've decided to design an irrigation system to make the task of watering more efficient.

As Homestead Man works through a plan involving PVC pipe and sprinkler heads, built in an above ground grid, the 9-year-old is coming up with her own underground system. The drawing below shows recycled bottles with holes punctured to allow water to slowly leak out. The bottles are connected with pipe so they can be filled in one above ground inlet. Pretty clever, huh?

Fall is for Baking!

Anyone else have an irresistible urge to bake this time of year? I always pop overripe bananas in the freezer in their skin then thaw them and squeeze out the banana (toothpaste style) when I am ready to bake this banana bread. I added 1/4 cup of wheat germ in the batter and sprinkled a bit on top to boost the nutritional value. Add in pecans grown on a family tree, and you've got a treat you don't have to feel quite so badly about!

News from the Coop!

We have exciting news! After a long run of bad chicken luck and a short break from birds, we went to a local farm and picked out two brand new healthy, happy hens for the hen house! I can honestly say that we have learned how valuable these ladies are to the homestead over the past few months of eggless existence. We bought local eggs, but it wasn't the same.

There's something quite wonderful about walking out to gather eggs, greeting the hens and stroking their lovely feathers, and cracking open a fresh egg with a rich orange yolk, laid just hours before. We know our hens are happy, that they can munch on grasshoppers and green grass all day long, they spend their mornings scratching through a pile of hay nibbling the grains. Hearing them coo to each other while they peck along the dirt is so calming. We've just missed having them around so much!

Meet Beetle, our lovely Black Australorp, named for her iridescent feathers and Feathered Friend, our Columbian Wyandotte, named by the 7-year-old. Beetle seemed happy with her new diggs...she laid a gigantic brown egg just one hour after arriving here at the OAH.

Lessons Learned

My dear friend over at Watsourced has been making some amazing lists on her blog this past week. She inspired me to give it a try, so here goes.

Through this summer of drought and unbelievable heat, we learned many things here at the OAH:

We do not have a realistic plan for watering an acre of garden, orchard, and ornamental plants when rain is non-existent.

The rain barrel is only good if it rains at least once a month. With the slope of our roof, even a small rain will fill the barrel. Considering the addition of at least one more rain barrel.

Bunnies and chickens do not handle the heat well. We need a backup plan to keep them cool. I've heard some people suggest freezing excess squash and zucchini and putting these in as a sort of herbivore popsicle...faced with another extreme summer, we'll certainly give this a try.

Cats are a necessity around a homestead. Tex has kept our yard free of mice and rats (yes, you read that right) and he's made sure we are aware of all his hard work by leaving their remains RIGHT beside the front door. In fact, he's such a great mouser, he sometimes goes across the street to neighbors' homes to hunt there as well. Gotta love him!

Ornamental grasses are TOUGH! We planted some purple fountain grass and it is beautiful despite all that this summer has thrown at it.

While an in-ground pool is not in keeping with our steps to a more sustainable lifestyle, it is a great moralle boost during an almost unbearable summer.

With all my country girl-ness, I still cannot handle snakes. I cannot choose to respect a "good" snake...they ALL give me an instinctual reaction of fear that is overwhelming.

We need to dig out the ponds out at Willow Run. They need to be deeper to maintain water levels and keep fish alive through a drought, but this costs thousands of dollars, so that will have to wait a bit.

I am a quitter. I feel like I gave up on the garden too early and that I might have been able to save some of it if I'd just given more effort. This disappointments me more than words can say.