A Log Cabin Christmas

During this 2007 holiday season, it seems the children are all nestled asleep in their beds, with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads… oh, wait. You say the “children” are all teenagers now, terminally bored with Christmas and expecting a 10-gig iPod loaded with every album too objectionable to be played in public, plus keys to your a car and $400 worth of “Prison Chic” pants that hang somewhere around the thighs and show off their underwear?

Did the fudge never set, so you had to run to the store to buy enough ice cream to disguise the un-set fudge as super chocolate syrup? Were those tollhouse cookies hard as a rock, breaking grandpa’s dentures with the first bite? Did cousin Jim finish off the entire bottle of rum you’d brought for eggnog before passing out under the tree? Did the dog eat that perfect glazed ham before you could get it into the oven to heat? Did it snow during the night and hide all the firewood you’d stacked somewhere in the yard for the Christmas Eve fire? Are the in-laws insisting on watching Enemy of the State as a “Christmas Movie” instead of It’s a Wonderful Life for the 16th time?

Be of good cheer, enjoy yourself anyway, and…

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Filed under Family, Holidays, Homestead, Log Construction | Comment (0)

Energy Independence: Part I

The Basics

We have all heard the litany… global warming, unsustainable consumption habits, the real human costs of petroleum dependency and the ever-rising cost of all forms of energy. When it’s difficult for regular middle class city and suburban dwellers to maintain their few hours of home down-time due to rising costs, the burden on rural homesteaders can easily be impossible to bear.

The smartest thing that anyone committed to sustainable and self-sufficient living should have already begun planning their off-grid strategies. Even though it may take years to accomplish the dream, the sooner you start moving in that direction the sooner you can hope to get there.

There are many things to consider before taking your homestead off-grid, and this series will take a look at some of those things as well as offer some resources so the homesteader can begin his or her own research. In this post we’ll examine the current and projected future costs of different on-site energy sources, energy storage vs. backwards metering, and best alternatives for your particular homestead.

Continue reading »

Filed under Alternatives, Energy, Future Planning, Home-Products, Homestead, Independence | Comments (2)

Your Perfect Homestead Christmas Tree

It’s now just one week until Christmas Eve. Have you found and installed your Christmas tree yet? The holidays around this homestead require a tree that must go up the week before Christmas and come down a week after Christmas, so let me lend a few homestead hints on that particular subject…

Our family stopped buying commercially produced Christmas trees as soon as we moved to our homestead in serious Christmas tree country. They’re a regular Big Cash Crop here, but take years to grow and a lot of work trimming so they’ll have just the right thickness and shape. Heck, there are Christmas tree farms in our immediate region that’ll let you come in with a hand saw and cut your own!

But that’s not what we do. We do have a cathedral ceiling in our little living room from when the loft was built, so we like our trees to be 15 feet tall. But even though Scotch pines and hemlocks and Frasier Firs grow wild on our property and in the forest around us, they’re rangy and thin from growing in a forest. You’ll have this if you don’t carefully trim your growing trees in view of future Christmases.

Continue reading »

Filed under Activities, Family, Holidays, Homestead, Timber | Comment (0)

Making Your Own Natural Designer Soaps

…The Old-Fashioned Newfangled Way!

Once upon a time things like laundry soap, dishwashing soap, handwashing soap and ever-so gentle complexion soap was all nearly as cheap as potatoes, cornmeal and all-purpose flour. Nothing anybody thought about ever making for themselves, because what would be the point?

With some home-grown and home-preserved foods, a gardener/homesteader will of course do it anyway despite the fact that these things can be purchased from the grocery store from mass production companies for a lot less than it takes to grow, harvest and process at home. That’s done for taste, nutritional content and pride in self-sufficiency. But soap, a very much basic part of our general upkeep of cleanliness all around the homestead, has until recently been practically a lost art form.

Now it’s coming back, in favor of specialty soaps that go for a pretty penny at natural food and product stores, but sell fast. Part of it is the ever-rising cost of mass produced soaps, some of it is the trend toward avoidance of animal products, and some of it is an increasing number of serious allergic reactions to chemical ingredients in mass produced soaps.

Continue reading »

Filed under Activities, Home-Products, Homestead, Soap Making | Comment (1)

Edible Wild Things: “Cossack Asparagus”

The Common Cattail (Typha latifolia), a.k.a. the broadleaf cattail, and its cousins the narrowleaf cattail, southern cattail and blue cattail, grow throughout North America and much of the rest of the world. They like to grow in shallow water-catchments off the side of roads, at the low end of agricultural fields, near ponds, lakes and swamps. Most people are very familiar with stands of cattails in their area, but may not have thought much about how useful this plant is as food and medicine.

Almost all parts of the plant are edible at the right time of year. As a member of the grass family (as are wheat, rice, corn, oats, barley and rye) that has thus far escaped concentrated cultivation, the homesteader might develop as much a liking for cattail foods as for other wild foods such as acorns, sun chokes, ground nuts and kudzu. Particularly if s/he has a nice natural stand of cattail in the bottomland marsh, where it’s easy to harvest edible parts at all times of year. In fact, management by harvesting can contribute to the general robustness of a fine stand of cattails and increase yields.

Continue reading »

Filed under Harvest, Homestead, Wild Foods | Comments (2)