Cabin Crafted

Category: Homesteading

  • Resupply

    As I have previously posted, we try to be locavores, living on the produce, eggs and chickens that we raise, the occasional deer taken by our son, or limiting our purchases to the local farmers.  That said, there are items that we will not or can not do without.  Items that if we were true rustic homesteaders, we would do without or find an alternate solution.

    I don’t buy paper products, except for toilet paper and during cold season, an occasional box of tissues.  I do make our soap and shampoo bars, but they require oils.  We have barn cats, dogs, and chickens and they require at least some supplemental feeding and treats.  Hubby likes sodas to drink and I like coffee, so the grocery store does get some of our business.

    Prior to the Christmas holiday’s our local grocery chain ran a promotion that if a certain amount was spent during about a month long period, you would get a 10% discount on a single purchase of $25 or more during the first eleven days of the new year.  The amount needed to be spent was moderate, just a couple hundred dollars and with son and his family here for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, we managed to barely meet their requirement.  Today, we made a careful list of pet supplies, trash bags, dish soap, toilet paper, coffee, soda, a few cartons of broth and soup for emergencies and set out to make the most of the discount.  The pantry shelves are stocked and we likely won’t need a grocery store run for quite a while.  Don’t you love it when you find a bargain or benefit from a promotion?  With the discount, plus using their reward card, we saved about a third of the total pre-discount bill.

  • On Strike

    This past spring, we entered the phase of starting to add animals to our homestead.  Animals besides the dogs and the plethora of wild critters that share our acreage.  Though I am not much of a meat eater, and though as a child I hated eggs, I have developed a liking for a well cooked egg and after seeing too much about how commercial chickens for eggs and meat were kept, decided that this was a good place to start.  Enter the chicks.  Inexperienced and totally enamored with the cute little fuzzy balls of fluff, my chicken addiction took off.  Buying chicks from Tractor Supply proved to not be the best way to go about it.  My original purchase ended up very heavy on the testosterone side.  Realizing that I had too many cockrells (young roosters) and that was not going to work out, we stumbled on an animal swap day at Tractor Supply while going to buy chick feed.  The folks had Buff Orpinton and Olive Egger pullets (young hens) and I left with one of each.   Next up, I contacted a local gal who had 6 Silver Laced Wyandotte pullets she wanted to get rid of that were about the same age as the other chicks and I purchased them from her.  I was scammed, they were all cockrells.  Realizing that most of my flock was going to be culled for meat, I found 2 more Buff Orpington pullets only a couple of weeks younger than the rest of the flock and began to separate the potential eggers from the cockrells who were beginning to strut their stuff and trying to crow.  My flock now looked like a meeting of the U.N., one pullet of this breed, 2 of that,  3 of another.  Then the first Buff Orpington got huge and started crowing, about the same time that I decided that I only want to raise a heritage breed that winters well, so Cogburn got to stay with the girls.

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    The rest of the guys, well, my son helped put them in freezer camp and I even grew a second flock of 15 more meat birds for him to put in freezer camp with my help.

    As the story goes, one by one, the ladies started providing me with beautiful oval orbs of cream, tan and brown, depending on the breed, then one day, there was a green egg.  Yay, the Olive Egger had started to lay.  Only two others gals were still figuring it out.  By mid October, we were getting 6 to 9 eggs each day.  The Olive Egger had some difficulty figuring it out.  She would give us an egg one morning, then one the next evening, then skip one to three days before beginning again, but it was fun to find the Easter Egg in the nest.  She seems to be able to fly better than the others and soon, we would find her on the outside of their run, hovering near the fence, but separated from her flock.  I would lure her back in and sometimes find her out again the same day, sometimes she would stay put for days.  About this same time, her egg production seemed to fall off and I assumed that she was escaping to lay her eggs elsewhere.  I searched the grass around the run, rummaged through the weeds growing in the compost bins, looked through the mint bed, checked for indentations in the straw mulch on the garden, no eggs.  We were preparing to go away for a couple of weeks and a neighbor was going to watch the flock in exchange for eggs, so I secured the pen so that she could not escape.  She only produced a couple of eggs while we were gone and has now gone on strike and hasn’t layed an egg in over two weeks.

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    They are too young to molt, which throws off egg laying, the days are shorter and cooler, but the other pullets are still laying, there is no illness in the flock and she doesn’t seem to be egg bound and is otherwise healthy.  She is just on strike.  I had hoped to keep this flock through next fall, adding more Buff Orpington pullets in the spring and keeping a couple of Easter Eggers for fun, letting the Buff Orpingtons raise chicks to keep the flock self sustaining and culling the other hens from the flock next fall, but this one girl is free loading and I’m not sure she is going to be allowed to get away with it.

  • Soap Making Solo

    Last week was soap making 101, taught to a class of one by a friend who has been making her own soap for years. My interest began a little more than a year ago and not wanting to get too involved in equipment until I was sure it was a homecraft to be enjoyed and appreciated by the family, only a simple mold, a few pounds of melt and pour soap base and a small assortment of essential oils not already in my supply were purchased. Several batches of that soap were made, once with daughter here to assist and learn. That was fun, but it just wasn’t quite there. The ingredients of the melt and pour were still a bit sketchy, not fully revealing what it contained and certainly not satisfying the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder part of my personality. Making soap from 100% pure oils and fats, lye, water and essential oils for scent was exactly where my goals were taking me. It was enchanting fun to carefully measure the ingredients, mixing them at just the right temperature, stirring until it resembled pudding, then pouring into the molds, covering with lids and towels to cocoon them in for 24 hours while the chemistry magic of turning oils, fats and lye, saponifying into soap. Fancy craft fair soap. After a full day, it is removed from the molds, cut into bars, and placed on a mat that allows air to circulate around the bars until they are fully cured, in about a month. No, it isn’t instant gratification, but the process and the anticipation have me hooked.
    From my lesson, last week, I did get a couple pounds of soap. We did two different 6 pound batches, mostly dedicated for her daughter to sell at a fall craft fair. I understand now why it is so expensive at the fairs and at the Farmer’s Market, but the satisfaction just isn’t there when it is purchased. The morning lesson was fun, educational, and having someone with me both made it social and alleviated my anxiety about trying it myself. No one is perfect and my personality has it’s flaws, usually well hidden, but there. The OCD has abated or I’ve learned to control it more as I have aged, but the anxiety at trying new ventures has gotten worse. It is perhaps that I struggle with these issues that I do tackle new things, often on my own, having taught myself to knit, spin, make baskets, pressure can, make jam and now soap, and taking horseback riding lessons.
    Today was the solo attempt, making a special soap for eldest son and hubby.
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    Tomorrow the two molds will be uncovered, unmolded and we’ll see how the solo venture turned out.

  • Faint of heart

    Building a house is not for the faint of heart.  Buying a neglected farm and building a house when you are retired is a short step from being declared mentally unstable, however, we took on this challenge almost 7 years ago.  For decades, each time my dear hubby asked what I wanted for a holiday, I always gave the same answer, “a cabin in the woods.”
    Seven years ago, several things came together to allow it to happen. Well, it is a cabin and we do have a few acres  of woods around the edges, but the house sits in an open field.  We found the property on a whim  midway through our youngest son’s senior year of high school.  I had retired as  school counselor and was working part time for a non profit organization to cover the family health insurance.  Hubby was reaching retirement age and trying to figure a way to retire from his law practice.  We decided to research log homes and begin the planning stages of putting a house on the land.
    In order to facilitate this, we decided to sell the home we had raised our children in, and again, on a whim, put out a FSBO sign on a day some neighbors were having a yard sale.   We were painting inside as we really weren’t quite ready to sell yet, and much to our surprise, we got calls.  Quickly, we designed a brochure, decided on a price and signed a contract with a FSBO organization that gets the listing on the web and in a weekly booklet and by the next weekend, had sold the house, just before the real estate market went south.  This meant we had to move with no where to go and a 90 lb old dog to move with us.  Apartments weren’t large enough for a 4 bedroom house of furniture and the dog.  We lucked into a 3 bedroom rental house with a small yard, stored some stuff and moved in for a year.  Once settled, we purchased a log home “kit,” hired a contractor, who turned out to be a loser, to do the log erection and rough carpentry, convinced our eldest son to move with his partner and their newborn son to the area where we were building to oversee the contractor, help make decisions and ultimately take on all of the finish carpentry and stone mason work.  With monthly visits to select the house site, have the perk test done, hire a well driller and see the progress, we plodded through that year.  As the year was ending, my part time job was going to have to become full time and I applied for a job in the county near our property, returning to a school counseling position to pay into the retirement system instead of drawing from it.  This meant that I would be living near the house and could help with carpentry work or more often, babysitting so the kids could work.  It also meant that hubby and I would be living 6 hours apart in separate apartments, me alone in the mountains, he with youngest son and dog on the coast. The new job was an all year position, not just during the school year, so moves were made, goodbyes said and we started what turned into a nearly 3 year long distance relationship until hubby put all the steps in place to leave his practice for retirement in the mountains with me.  At this point, we had been moved into the new house for almost two years on a temporary certificate of occupancy.
    After I moved in, along with son and his family, they continued to work on the house, building the interior doors, the upper kitchen cabinets, doing hand grading and stone mason work when the weather permitted.  When hubby moved up, son and his family moved to an adjacent town for him to earn his Master’s degree at the local university, working on the house during holidays and summer time to finish the foundation stone work and last summer, getting the cistern system that the contractor put in improperly to actually work,  continuing the fieldstone fireplace down into the basement in preparation for the contruction of the 4th bedroom and rec room that was in the planning stages.  He and I also, finally finished the breezeway/utility room that joins the house to the garage.
    While this work had been done with some labor on my part, the restoration of the fields to a condition that will allow for hay production and grazing of animals, has fallen to my hubby and me.  The fields had become very overgrown with weeds, brambles, invasive shrubs and cedar trees.  We purchased a tractor and a brush hog and commenced  regular mowing of every inch the of 30 acres that we could take the tractor.  Last summer, after our poorly constructed gravel driveway had reached a nearly impassable state, we hired a neighbor excavator contractor to take on regrading the property so that it would drain properly and reconstructing the driveway, this making several more acres mowable.  While he was working in front of the house, son, partner, hubby and I were digging a trench hundreds of feet down the south slope, laying a water line from the cistern, installing a yard hydrant and recovering the trench without damaging the water line.  This involved much hand shoveling, picking up and moving many tractor buckets of rock that we had uncovered.
    Early in the mountain project, son and partner, put in a huge garden, but in later years of the project, the garden was not as totally utilized and 3 summers ago, I undertook to restore as much of it as I felt I could manage on my own.  Son and family have since moved on several hours away to further continue education.  Hubby loves the produce from the garden, but gardening  is not one of his interests.  I have boxed beds, dug weeds, tried to foil the deer with a temporary monofilament fence  as of yesterday, with the aid of a neighbor friend, finally put an electric fence around the vegetable garden portion of the gardens.  We also smoothed areas for safe working and mowability.  Over the years, we have planted fruit trees, berry bushes, and grapevines.  Last fall we finally landscaped the front.  This winter, the basement project was completed.  We are nearly to a maintenance phase, but with 30 acres and plans for raising some animals other than dogs, it will continue to be muscle taxing, bone weary work,…but there is a good night’s rest at the end of those days.