Recent content by Calliopia

I start journals and I MEAN to keep them up but... life keeps throwing me off of my good intentions. Oh well. I guess I'll just update as I can. Current projects. This weekend I am either butchering chickens, starting the greenhouse or building cold frames.

Oh I would love to even have our heat down to 62. Right now it's at 68 because the woman that lives with us w/ her husband and kid has Reynauds and gets total body pain if the temp drops below 66 for very long and she can't tolerate extended temps below about 67.

When we had a woodstove... sigh... we used to haunt the local auctions and bring home BOXES of trash books and broken furniture as fire fodder.

I usually process no more than 5 or 6 in a day as we don't have a chicken plucker built yet. We have grand plans to build one of the ones attached to a hand drill. Some day.

I have found that people get tired of request for free stuff on craigslist. Even if I have said item myself and don't want it I will frequently ignore blatant begging, especially if it is a writing style or phone number I recognize. The fact that your child wants an xbox or whatever is not a...

I pick them up and either raise them to processing age or process them when I get them depending on how old they are. I post to Craigslist looking for free or cheap roosters and spent hens and the emails roll in.

As part of my fill the freezer with tasty tidbits endeavor I picked up 17 packing roosters this morning. I think they are all just red or black sexlinks so there's not much chance of a hen in there but they'll make perfectly good crockpot chickens in a couple months.

I just said I was looking for older spent hens or roosters and would pay up to 1.50 for them. So far most of the offers have been for free roosters and a couple old hens. The hens will be given a chance to recuperate and lay but they may be just old stewing biddies. We'll see.

http://www.vancouverobserver.com/blogs/dreamhome/2010/09/07/books-building-material Use them to build a wall.

On Friday I posted to Craigslist asking for old chickens and unwanted roosters. With in the next week I have 17 packing peeps, 6 adult Arruacauna (sp) roos, a mixed batch of about 6-10 adult and young random yard roosters, and an unknown qty of spent hens arriving all for an outlay of about...

We tried the sauerkraut last night. It's still pretty crunchy and I put way too many caraway seeds in it but it has an interesting flavor. It's more like just brined cabbage rather than actual sauerkraut.

Oh that reminds me. Something else people can do to cut expenses is go insurance shopping. I dropped close to 300 off of our yearly house premium by switching.

We are planting the following. Yep, I swear we are. Absolutely NOT going to be lazy this year. (guess I better continue my search for canning jars) Lettuce Spinach Kale Cabbage (oriental and European) Carrots Fennel bush and pole beans peas of various sorts corn - Dent and sweet peppers...

Yeah... Murphy isn't a family name for no reason. Generally that which can go awry will. Nothing HORRIBLE, just annoying or ruefully smirksome. In other news, I've been using my "at home time" to start additional pots of random plants. In raiding my seed basket for what every I think might...

Thank you... Things go in spurts. My husband says I have a little ball of chaos that follow me around and occasionally it catches up with me. This month is hectic and has things like scheduling the mortgage payment on the wrong week and carsplosions. Next month will have something fun...