Canning juice, building clay ovens, and finding it's all part of the "lifestyle"

27 August 2012
Week Four

Wow, has it already been four weeks since I started this blog. Time flies when you keep busy, I guess. And busy we have been. It seems like everyday all day we are working on something and by the time we put the birds to bed between 8:00 and 9:00pm, our feet ache and bodies hurt. We flop onto the sofa, peruse the internet a little, and suck down a gallon of fluids that we've sweated out during the day to alleviate the headache of dehydration.

This week had us starting homeschool, rebuilding garden beds, moving dirt, cleaning yards, cleaning the garage, processing bushels of free apples, making juice, reworking the fire pit, and starting the base for the clay bread oven. That's what ... only nine things ... but nine very time consuming, energy zapping things they are.

Here's the start to the base of the clay bread oven. It ended up being three concrete bricks high with a 16 gage steel plate for the oven base. It's surprisingly level for just having put it on the ground with little surfacing done. Now we have to buy the clay and work the oven. I'm so excited I can hardly wait for that first loaf of crusty bread and that crispy crust pizza. My mouth is watering just writing about it.

The juice we canned is a mix of cranberry apple. It is amazingly yummy. I love cranberry juice and making my own makes me very happy. Even my daughter who doesn't like cranberry juice much, likes this. After we canned the quarts of it, we figured out how to condense it so we will use less shelf space for storage without losing any of the flavor.

These two little guys are two of our bantam roosters. They are such a hoot to have around, more like toddlers than chickens.

Moonshine is the black and white one. He is a Cochin and a big fluffy bully who likes to cuddle. Instead of attacking someone or another chicken or even ... yes I'm serious ... a turkey who is what, a hundred times bigger than him or something, from a frontal mode, he runs sideways at them like a little crab. It's amusing as long as it's not me that he's gunning for.

This white fluffy guy is Sa Kin, which I'm told in Japanese means "golden child". As a chick he was golden colored, thus the name. He is my buddy. Why the Japanese name? Well, he's a Silkie and Silkies originated in Japan. They have black skin, black meat, and even black bones with feathers that, well, aren't really very much like feathers at all. He's more like a little hairy chicken but he's sweet as can be. He has these funky feet too with five toes, most chickens only have four toes. I've always wanted one of these bantams so when I found one this spring I jumped at the chance to get him. He finally started crowing this week ... lol ... but like everything else about him, his crow is kind of soft and sweet, almost like a baby laughing.





And of course, after all this bone tiring work we've been doing, we find out this week through various blogs, that apparently, everything we're doing is somehow part of a trendy "new" lifestyle. WHAT? ARE YOU BLINKING SERIOUS?? The homesteading, self-sufficiency life is by no means a "lifestyle" choice that anyone with any knowledge of what they are getting into makes lightly or quickly and is certainly not a "trend". It's what our grandparents and great-grandparents and their parents before them did to actually SURVIVE. It's not a save the planet, feel good, warm and fuzzy, million dollar business to support or ideal to subscribe to or even a weekend project. We work hard to do what we do, and some days just aren't long enough to get it all done. So, why are we doing it? It's our life. It's how we've lived for the past 18 + years. It's not new. So why? Why? because we're poor. We don't have money to buy all the food we want, so we grow it and raise it and hope we have enough income to fill in the gaps. We don't have money to hire a landscaper to come and build the garden beds and put in thousands of dollars of plants, so we do it ourselves and grow the plants from seeds or rescue a forlorn looking plant on the 75% off rack at the end of summer. We don't have money to buy bug spray for the garden, therefore it's organic. We don't have money to haul off all the chicken waste and rabbit droppings, therefore we recycle and they become fertilizer.

Everything about our lives is about making do with what we have here and now. So very little is left at the end of the day, that's there's no time to think about what we're doing next year or the year after that. Sure we have hopes and dreams and plans, just like everyone does, but the reality is that we have no way to "make" those dreams happen. If they fit into today, then great, let's go ... but if not then they remain an idea on a sheet of paper. It certainly isn't a "lifestyle" that I ever would have chosen.

And yet, there is some magic to it. As hard as it is, as mind numbingly tiring as we get at going through it day after day, there are some benefits too. In a funny way, we eat healthier than most other people because our food is fresh, from our yard, grown without chemicals or pesticides or hauled from half the world away. It isn't processed beyond recognition. Our children know how to work and follow through to complete a job and they know how to entertain themselves and think for themselves. They've had to. And in some small way, we're giving back to the world by recycling what we can, by not polluting the world with more chemicals and poisons, by using what we have here and now and not relying on massive amounts of fuel to move our food from Guatemala or wherever to us ... in some small way we are doing something positive.

But most of all, we do some of these things because we enjoy it. Even if we won the lottery, we would still own a farm with chickens and turkeys ... it would just be a LOT bigger and we'd have peace of mind that if we woke up one morning and couldn't do it anymore, we'd still be taken care of. That isn't a certainty for us now. Some "trendy" lifestyle this is ... LOL.