When planning the sustainable garden, you should choose varieties of plants that will allow you to save seeds for planting the next year. This means they should be open pollinated, not hybrids, and not genetically modified. Hybrids will not reproduce true replicas of themselves, and it is illegal to save seeds from genetically modified plants. Many people think they have to buy … [Read more...]
Get Ready to Garden
For some people, the idea of starting their first garden and growing their own food can seem overwhelming. For others, it might seem ridiculously easy. You just plant seeds, and they grow—right? “But there is so much more to it,” say the overwhelmed future gardeners. The soil temperature has to be just right, and you need to choose the right plants for your climate, plant them … [Read more...]
Planning the Sustainable Garden: How Much Will You Grow?
After choosing what to grow, the question is, how much do you want to grow? Do you simply want to grow enough to eat fresh throughout the growing season? Do you plan to can or freeze any for winter meals? Most tomato plants can easily produce twenty pounds of fruit. If you want to make a pasta sauce once a week throughout the year and your recipe calls for a pound of … [Read more...]
Brooding Chicks
When you pick up your first chicks, they will need to stay in a brooder for several weeks. If a mother hen had hatched them, they would spend most of their time under her wings, being kept warm by her body heat. Because they were hatched in an incubator, you need to duplicate that warm environment by creating a brooder. “Brooder” is a fancy word for what could simply be a … [Read more...]
Hog Fencing
Although many people say that goats are the most challenging animals to keep fenced in, I find pigs much more challenging. It only took us a couple of years to figure out how to keep goats in their pastures. However, we’ve had pigs now for thirteen years, and we still have problems with them escaping. They are ridiculously smart and seem to continuously come up with new ways to … [Read more...]
Maple Syrup: Can you produce your own?
If you've ever wanted to produce your own homegrown sweetener, maple syrup is a great choice. Although sap runs in late February and March, now is the time to start planning because it's easier to recognize the trees when they have leaves on them. It is also easier to purchase supplies, as many suppliers run out of everything in the midst of sugaring season. Here's an excerpt … [Read more...]
What’s so bad about lard?
For most of the twentieth century, people believed that lard was indigestible and unhealthy. They mistakenly believed that eating foods that contained cholesterol would raise your cholesterol, which would lead to heart disease. We now know that all the above is incorrect. Lard is actually good for you because it is a monounsaturated fat like olive oil. It contains about 50 … [Read more...]
Milking donkeys
For those with food sensitivities who are unable to drink cow, goat, or sheep milk, there are other alternatives. In addition to milking her East Friesian sheep, Angelia Silvera of Gods Blessing Farm in Niota, Tennessee, started milking donkeys more than a year ago because of her health problems. “Donkey milk has healed my stomach and digestive issues, and cured food … [Read more...]
Sneak peek: Making kombucha
When I wrote the second edition of Homegrown and Handmade, I just could not let the book get reprinted again without adding all of the things that I wished I had put in the first one -- like making maple syrup and raising pigs and starting a homegrown business. But I'm glad I didn't put those things in the first book because I've got six more years of experience on all of those … [Read more...]
What happens when you have too many roosters?
We were naively ecstatic when our first chicks were hatched in 2003. Not only were the chicks adorable, but it also meant that we were self-sufficient when it came to providing eggs for ourselves. Our hens were providing us with eggs, and they were providing us with their replacements so that when they slowed down and eventually stopped laying, there would be younger hens to … [Read more...]