Thursday brings pain

Oh! My aching back! There "she" is, Hermine, bearing down on southern Illinois. That witch woke me up in the middle of the night in horrible pain. I'll be glad when she rolls right on by and goes away!

Yesterday, early evening, I had a wonderful visitor. We spent a couple of hours reviewing the finer art of butchering rabbits. I did 4, my visitor did 2. It's been so long since I had any company, I was actually kind of nervous for a while. The lady was absolutely delightful and easy to talk to. Thank you for a wonderful evening Stephanie!

I even showed off my grain grinder, which I never do, LOL, and showed off a little of the home baked bread and ground flour. I think I need to go buy a sack of commercial flour to show the difference between mine and store bought. Maybe I will.

Not too much is going on around here. I got all the hay that was on the ground done so now I'm just in a nice holding pattern. Nothing wrong with a little break every now and then. Tomorrow I'll be writing about growing tomatoes and perhaps in a day or so, I'll do another post on making soap...

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?

Well the weather has cooled down just a little, wish it was this nice 2 days ago when I hit that metal pipe sticking out of the ground and tore up my hay cutter! 7 sickle teeth, the reel guide got bent up pretty bad and 4 pick up tines got broke off. I was NOT a happy camper! The sky picture was supposed to be a red tailed hawk that was circling for the field mice i was chasing out for him but apparently I missed him in the sunlight. Kind of hard to look at the phone while bouncing up and down on the tractor, plus the glare from the sun. maybe I'll catch him next time, LOL. I spent 4 hours raking today just to watch the round baler break down. Glad that darn thing isn't mine! Even more glad I wasn't pulling it when it broke!

I spoke with a couple of neighbors on the backroad
who filled me in on all the latest gossip in my township plus some interesting tidbits on grocery prices, utility costs, etc. Looks like prices keep going up on everything. I also read this evening over at blacklisted news about food riots in Africa (even found a mildly written article on Foxnews about it) over the cost of their bread. Could that type of behavior happen here in the USA? I think it could. Just a few years ago, I'm pretty sure my family had a solid middle class life. Now, we feel more like the working poor. The same money that covered our mortgage, insurance and taxes is not doing such a good job. It's not a low wage paycheck I'm talking about either. How are people living on minimum wage surviving? How are people making less than $20 an hour surviving? Plus, those people are spending money on groceries. Thank God I don't have to do that or we'd really be in a mess.

There has never been a better time than now to work on becoming even just a little bit self sustained. Even a small reduction in your utility use is going to help. Not making a bunch of small trips to the store for just one item helps too. Learning more about cooking and baking, preparing food for yourself instead of eating out saves big bucks each month. I think we are all going to need to think more about these expenses and cut out everything not absolutely necessary in the immediate future to survive this economy.

Mondays vege growing installment

The weekend at the State fair was really enjoyable. All the standardbreds were very pleasant to be around. I have officially been reinfected with the horse racing bug. Poor Yogi, he's in for it, LOL.

While I was enjoying the horses, my mind was moving in multiple directions (as usual) and I thought about this post and what I'd like to share. As you can probably already tell, I want to share some thoughts on growing corn. Corn is actually much easier than some folks make it out to be and you don't need a 100 acre field to enjoy any type of corn. The plant consists of 2 parts for pollination, the tassle on the top and the silks on the stalk. The silks are where the ear of corn comes from. The particles from the tassle fall down onto the silks and make the ear. So, it is much better to plant your corn in clumps or blocks as opposed to just a couple long rows. Corn is a heavy feeder and loves rich soil. Corn prefers well drained, slightly acidic soil with plenty of moisture. Consistent watering through ear development is the key to a good crop. Planting is pretty simple, the soil needs to be at least 55F, deep and well worked. Set your seeds around 1” deep, around 4” apart, rows should be around 30” apart to allow for crop maintenance with in ground crops, raised beds and container plantings can be spaced much closer. Corn has plenty of roots close to the surface so close cultivation is difficult. Mulching around the stalks helps reduce weeds. There are a couple simple signs to let you know if your corn is growing properly. Purple tinged leaves signals phosphorus deficiency and pale green leaves signals nitrogen deficiency. Side dress as needed. If you planted sweet corn, the ears are ready when the silks are brown but still moist. A quick check of the kernels by pricking one- clear liquid means the ear is not ready. Milky liquid means it's ready and no liquid means it is past it's prime. Within 24 hours of being picked, sweet corn has turned more than half it's sugar to starch so it's best to eat or process your corn quickly after picking for the freshest, sweetest taste. If you planted popcorn, feed corn or cornmeal corn, it is best to allow the ears to dry on the stalk for as long as you can before picking.