Fruit Thieves!

Even if you’re good at growing your own food, bad weather or thieves could steal your harvest: everything you planned for winter provisions. Fruit thieves struck the homestead this summer. This year, our most productive apple tree had set a…

Tale of a Broody Hen

Baby chicks the natural way! Incubators work fine but chicks hatched by a mamma hen is ideal for off-grid sustainability. This post is a compilation of four separate posts chronicling the adventure of the homestead’s first Boody Hen. Some chicken…

Chicks at 1 Week

I promise I won’t write about chickens every week. But, it is fascinating how much chicks develop in just their first week of life. They progress from helpless fluffy lumps to miniature chickens with much of their adult behavior. By…

The Chicks Hatched. Now what?

Excitement here at the homestead: the eggs hatched in the incubator. A renewable food source is a valuable prep. Raising new chicks each year is part of the renewability. Okay, the eggs have hatched into wet, little chicks. Now what?…

Incubating Chicken Eggs

If you’ve ever thought about some incubating chicken eggs and starting a flock of your own, here’s a quick primer on incubating chicken eggs. As of this writing, this year’s batch just passed the two-week mark. How are they so…

DIY Sweetness: Maple Syrup

Producing your own food is an important goal. Gardens grow veggies and grains. Hunting (or husbandry) provide meat. Sweetener is another matter. Making your own maple syrup is useful and rewarding. Winter: everything is frozen and buried under snow. It’s…

Modern slavery on MLK Day

While cutting up a downed maple tree today, ( the pond was frozen), I was musing about the subtlety of modern slavery. An editorial in the Sunday paper cited some very brief quotes from Alexis de Tocqueville regarding freedom and the…