Tuesday 27 January 2015

The experiment continues

Greetings.

I went out today and bought some additional seeds for herbs and a few more lettuce and also two bags of seed starting mix for a total of $23.84. 

The leeks are actually starting to show a wee bit of green now as the little tiny sprouts poke up out of the soil. I am planning to start a couple of pots of micro greens, hence the additional packets of lettuce seeds.

Stay tuned .....

Cheers.

Sunday 25 January 2015

Gardening Experiment

Greetings to you all.

I recently read an article in GRIT magazine written by Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti in which she kept track of all her annual garden expenditure and also recorded how much her garden produced and translated that into how much that would have cost in a grocery store. She saved close to $500. off her grocery bill. 

You can imagine what my reaction was when I read that. I have got to give this a try and see what sort of results we can get.

So, here we go.

January, 2015
To date I have received one order of seeds from Stokes and the total cost of that was $75.97. Everything will be in Canadian dollars, of course, since I live in Canada. Naturally, here we are in the dead of winter in Ontario so at the moment, there is nothing at all to harvest for the month of January. As was to be expected, we are in the red by $75.97.

One good piece of news today is that germination has started with the Leek seeds that I planted 5 days ago. They are sitting in a warm south facing window and seem happy to spring to life. 

That is it for me for the moment. Have a great day. Thanks for stopping by. Cheers.

Friday 23 January 2015

Cleaning Silver the safe and fast way

Hello again. Welcome to the second post of the day. 

My dear mother passed away quite a number of years ago. She left me some pieces of silver flatware that are really quite lovely but I seldom use them. Because I have to clean them. It is a chore that I do not care for. At all.

While browsing through one of my natural cleaning books looking for something completely different I found a recipe to clean silver. The amazing thing is that is uses the same two items that I use to clean practically everything in our house. Baking Soda and White Vinegar. Well, I simply had to try this. I took pictures along the way. The results are nothing short of astounding. Here goes.


I used a plain ordinary plastic washing up basin, nothing fancy. I lined it with aluminium foil wrap.


Here are a few pieces of the silver. You can see how very tarnished the fork is in particular. It has probably not been cleaned in years and years. Shame on me.


Lay all the pieces of silver to be cleaned on the bottom of the basin. Each piece MUST touch the foil wrap. It does not matter whether you are cleaning sterling silver or silver plate (which is what all of this is).


Gather your extensive list of supplies. :)  Baking soda and white vinegar. Bring a full kettle of water to boil.


Now, sprinkle the baking soda liberally over the silver pieces.


Pour on the vinegar. It will bubble up quite a lot. I probably used 1-2 cups in total.


Now, quick like a bunny, pour over the boiling water. All of the silver pieces MUST be completely submerged.


The chemical reaction, and I have absolutely no idea what it is called, nor do I care, will start to work almost immediately. It is simply amazing. Here is the same fork after a couple of minutes in the solution. It is substantially cleaner. If I was planning to use this, I would likely give it a quick buff with a silver cleaner or a silver cloth. The nice thing is that I would not need to spend 20 - 30 minutes scrubbing away with the silver polish to get the worst of the tarnish off.


Here is what the pan looks like when you are done. You can see how the foil has discoloured from all the tarnish that has been transferred to it. Now, I do not know if you can use the foil more than once but I am going to give it a try and see.


Well, thanks a lot for joining me again today. This has been a revelation for me I must say. All this work took about 10 minutes and the most of that was waiting for the kettle to boil. And the even better part, no harmful toxins were used. Yeah. 
See you next time. Cheers.

Baking Bread

Greetings all. If you are like me you probably follow a number of different blogs pertaining to all sorts of different subjects. One of the blogs that I follow is that of Cam and Michelle Mather. They live a very self-sufficient lifestyle, off the grid on 150 acres of land. Recently they posted a bread recipe of Michelle's. In recent years there has been a lot of books and recipes around for NO-KNEAD bread. Even my dear sister-in-law has tried this with great success and she sent me her recipe. I have not yet tried it but plan to do so.

After reading Michelle's recipe I decided to make the leap and try it. In the past I have only made bread the "hard" way. That means lots of kneading. Now, don't get me wrong. I actually do enjoy kneading bread dough. I find it very zen like to just clear your mind and let your hands work the dough. However, never one to let a good thing pass me by, I decided to have a go. 

So, yesterday afternoon I mixed up the dough, let it rise (which it did admirably), did a bit of kneading as Michelle suggested we could, shaped it into a loaf and let it rise again. Then, when the wood stove was cookin' good and hot, in it went.

As you can see from the photo, I got a very nice loaf. I sliced it this morning. The crust is quite firm, but I like that. The crumb (that is the inside part) is soft with a good texture. I tasted it by itself first and it has a very nice flavour. The addition of a little bit of butter did not hurt in the least. 


After this experiment I do believe that I will have to try this more often. I will try my sister-in-law's recipe next and then take it from there. 

When you consider just how painfully simple this is to do, there is absolutely no reason not to have fresh homemade bread all the time. The very best part, apart from the ease of making and the great taste is the fact that I know exactly what is in that bread. Flour, salt, yeast and water. And that is all that there should be in a loaf of plain white bread. The fact that I can make this loaf for well under a $1.00 is an added bonus. 

I strongly recommend that you all give this a go. The actual hands on time is mere minutes and who does not love the smell of freshly baked bread. Thanks Michelle and Mary.

Thanks for stopping by. Cheers.

Thursday 22 January 2015

Seed Orders

When it comes to ordering seeds, everyone seems to have a favourite company that they like to deal with. And I am no exception to that rule. Until this year.

I have been dealing with Stokes Seeds for more years than I care to count. I ordered from them again this year for all the usual suspects like an amazing hybrid Broccoli called Goliath that produces huge heads. I like Stokes. Their seed is good quality. I have never had issues with germination and they have a good variety. And I must say, their service is excellent. The lady I spoke to on the phone with my order was friendly and efficient. I had my seeds in just over a week. In fact, those at the very same Leek seeds that I planted a couple of days ago.

However, there is a new kid in town. It is an American company called Baker Creek Seeds. ALL of their seeds are open pollinated non GMO. That is very important to me. I have purchased their magazine on occasion, which is called Heirloom Gardener. This year I decided to take a chance on the seeds. Their catalog is fully illustrated with simply stunning pictures of amazing produce and flowers. This year I stuck to winter squash and tomatoes. Oh my goodness, I cannot wait to grow these tomatoes. If the blurb in the catalog is even close to being true, we will have some pretty amazing tomatoes this summer. I placed my order online a few days ago and received a delivery notification today with a tracking number. They should be here in about a week or so. Stay tuned....

Thanks so much for visiting. Have a great day. Cheers.


Wednesday 21 January 2015

Making Power and Feeding the Birds

It is a wonderfully beautiful day here. The sun is shining brightly and our solar panels are churning out power. Because we are off the grid, I need to take advantage of days like this to use any power hungry appliances, so, today it is laundry and vacuuming. Not the most fun in the world but it needs to be done.

And I am sure you have already guessed that we do not have a clothes dryer. Way too power hungry. I hang up the clothes on an old-fashioned clothes horse and put it in the front window in our bedroom. Our house is designed as passive solar. That means on a day like today when the sun is beaming, our front rooms are flooded with sunlight and warmth. In fact, on a day like today when it is so sunny, the front of our house can get to between 75 - 80 F degrees. That heat is drawn into the back of the house making it very comfortable in here with absolutely no other source of heat during the daytime. I do not usually put on the stove until around 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon.

I have a couple of photos for today. Here is a shot of the house from the road. Lots of snow here.


We do some wildlife around here. At this time of year it is mostly birds. We have put up two feeders at the front of the house to help them out during this very cold weather. This year so far we have had scores of Blue Jays, lots of Chickadees and I have also seen some Juncos and also a couple of Red-Breasted Nuthatch.


We do have a lot of deer that wander around the farm, hence the 9 foot garden fence. They have a couple of spots that they like the most. When it got to -35 a couple of weeks ago Frank took out some food for them. Mostly corn and molasses but it is helps them with much needed calories. They have to search for their food at this time of year and we want to help them if we can. We had a couple of does come close to the house last winter but I have not seen any this year.

That is it for today. Thanks for stopping by. Cheers.




Tuesday 20 January 2015

Where to Begin.....

Hello and welcome to our new blog about living a self-sufficient lifestyle.

If I think back I realize that this idea was floating around in my brain for many many years. My hubby Frank and I were living in a fairly large town about an hour north of Toronto, Ontario. We were both working in jobs we did not like but it paid the bills so we stuck it out. We had a small century home that we had renovated to make it more energy efficient and we had put in a good size garden to grow veggies. We also had a couple of fruit trees and some soft fruit. But we were still in town and I especially longed to be in the country.

We had the "lightbulb over the head" moment when Newmarket held it's first EcoFestival. We went and found an exhibit that would change our lives. A fantastic woman named Tina was building a straw-bale doghouse to show the possibilites of this sort of building. Her company was called Camel's Back Construction. We were both utterly hooked.

That day at the festival began a 10 year research plan.  We knew then and there that we wanted to build a straw-bale house. We knew that we wanted to be in the country. And finally, we knew that we would need to be near a ski hill as that was Frank's passion.

In 2008 we began to look for land. We had a completely amazing realtor to work with. Her name is Pat Forrest and she now has her own realty firm. She specializes in selling vacant land. She showed us so many pieces of property and walked a lot of land with us. It was not until May of 2010 that we found what we were looking for. It was utterly perfect. We put in an offer, written up on the hood of Pat's car. We were accepted and our adventure was beginning.

Because it is now 2015 and all this really started in 2010 I am not going to try to write about the entire process as it would be far too lengthy. I will be as concise as possible to bring things up to date.

2010 - We put in our offer in May, finally the land closed at the very end of August and we took possession. We bought a very old trailer that the seller kindly hauled to our land for us and we went to the property a few times that year, mostly walking the land to see where we would want to put the house and garden, etc.

2011 - We were working on the house design but things were taking much longer that we thought they would. Accordingly, we put up the fence for our kitchen garden. It is 110 feet by 180 feet approximately. We put in a 9 foot fence as the deer pressure here can be quite severe at times. We also planted fruit trees that year, about 15 of them.

2012 - In May of this year we began construction of the house. Frank had retired from his job and he moved full time into the trailer. I remained in Newmarket, still working, and would drive to the farm every Friday night after work, returning to Newmarket on Monday. Just to put things in perspective ... It is a 4 1/2 hour drive one way. I did this every weekend from May until November. Frank worked on the house with a lot of help from our amazingly talented friend Todd and I would work on the garden as much as I could. The farmland had lay unused for about 30 years. The area we had chosed for our kitchen garden had once been a hay field. Sadly, it had been reclaimed by weeds, perennial wildflowers mostly like milkweed, etc. These flowers are extremely reluctant to leave regardless of how hard to try to dig them out. I got in a couple of beds for Asparagus and also put in some raspberries, blackberries and some soft fruit like currants and gooseberries. We also put in some Rhubarb. Nothing thrived as well as the weeds. By the end of that year, we had the exterior of the house completed. It is a straw-bale house, just as we had wanted. I designed the house and then we had the drawings done and they were engineered as required by the building officials.

2013 - We sold our home in Newmarket and moved to the farm. We had no running water, no hydro, just an outhouse to use and there were two adults and two large dogs all living in the small trailer. We spent the summer and fall working on the inside of the house. Putting up walls, doing all the electrical, eventually having gas stoves and a woodburning stove installed so we would not freeze to death in there all winter. The day the man installed the insullation in the attic I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Finally ... warmth. And hydro. We are off the grid and had had a solar array installed by a fantastic firm called Ottawa Solar.

2014 - Work continued on the interior of the house and also most of the exterior work was completed like trimming out windows and doors, installing soffits and facia. We did a small amount of work in the garden but not too much. The large area that will be for the vegetables was covered with cardboard and then tarps in an attempt to kill all the weeds underneath. We did the same thing with a large area that will be for strawberries.

2015 - Fast forward 5 years and here we are. The house is mostly finished inside with just a bit of work left to do and is very comfortable to live in. As I write this, I am looking out our living room window at the garden, covered in a blanket of snow, waiting.....

This will be the year that we start homesteading in earnest. I decided to write this blog as a way to keep a record of what we manage to accomplish here. So I will begin today.

Tuesday, 20 January, 2015
Planted 200 Leek seeds. Placed my last seed order with a great company in the US who only sell open-pollinated non GMO seed for lots of heirloom tomatoes.

I will post lots of photos along the way to show our progress. Thanks for being a part of our journey.