Labor Day work

That's right, while everyone around me was having a party or a BBQ, I was working a 10 hour day in the hay field. My back, butt and knee are killing me. But, I got a bunch done so it's all good. I hope everything goes smooth for tomorrow and I will get a couple days break. I am so ready to get to baking some bread!

Look what I've got! Are they cute or what? My cat Mozart has 3 calico and one smoke grey kitten. They were under the porch getting the eye ick so I had to scoop them up and bring them in. They are already looking better. Kittens haven't fared too well around here this year. Out of 5 batches, only 2 kittens previous to this batch have survived. All have been sickly this year.

I was having a discussion this evening with a friend, Hey Scifi, about real life old timey pioneer living. The concept is pretty popular lately along with what I'm doing with the self sufficient, self sustaining life. There's plenty of things I do here that would qualify as pioneer living. I grow all my own food and don't buy any prepackaged food from the grocery, I garden for the most part without power equipment and harvest all but my wheat by hand. It's all done the old fashioned way, in the ground in rows and plots. I also use containers and the new tire sets for the potatoes but with no special gadgets or specialty growing helpers. I grind my own grains for animal feed and flour, live without air conditioning, cook quite a bit with a wood fire and make all our meals from scratch. I even butcher for myself. These are all qualities I would consider as skills contributing to a pioneer way of living. So, would I be considered at least partly living a pioneer lifestyle? What about those people out there that just claim to be living like that, buying their food from the grocery while growing food in the garden to sell to others? Coating their wares with pesticides while claiming it's all grown the old fashioned way. Or, people out there trying to sell something, using the "pioneer living" as a sales hook?

What counts as self sustained then? Anything you can produce for yourself, more than once. Growing a crop and seed saving to produce a future crop. That is making that item self sustained. Planting fruit trees or berry bushes is another way to self sustain. Those items produce for you without having to make a monetary input each crop. Growing corn to feed to a chicken is self sustaining. You get eggs and meat and new chickens by feeding the corn you grew from the seed you saved and planted. Cool, huh?