This has been shared before, I know. Still, it’s delicious and easy, so do it!
Just cut some thick slices of onion or pepper. Thick and even is key as otherwise there will be leaks.
I love to eat them on a piece of toast.
Tag: Homestead
A cheap way to acquire garden seeds
There are lots of ways to get things growing cheaply. You can save seeds. You can grow produce from scraps. You can join a seed or plant exchange, etc. I wanted to grow pinto beans this year. Perhaps a few other shelled bean varieties as well. The seeds seemed rather expensive though. $6 for an oz of seeds, yikes. So, like other growth endeavors I looked to the supermarket. I’ve previously grown quinoa and lentils from supermarket bulk bins. I’ve grown sunflowers from bird seed. Could beans be grown easily as well?
I bought pinto and black beans and the kids helped start the germination test. Simple paper towel and ziploc bag taped to the window. We started our watermelon seeds like this as well.
Germination has been a success. 100% germination for the pinto beans and 80% for the black. I’ll be buying a bag of pinto beans (10lbs for $14.99) and spreading it about in various places to find the easiest way to grow it. We eat a lot of Mexican food here so I’ll be excited not to have to buy canned pinto beans again!
Dealing with rabbit problems in the orchard
We have a lot of obstacles to growing here in Wyoming. We’re high. We’re dry. We have insane winds. We have extreme fluctuating temperatures. We’ve got a short growing season.
Hmm. Why do we live here again? I’ll get back to you on that.
A lot of these things we just have to deal with. Rabbits, however, can be….dealt with. Ok, mostly I just complain about them, loud and often. I’m not a particularly good shot. Mostly I just don’t care to learn. Husband is a great shot though. Encouraging him to get out there and do some mafioso style hits is the problem. The rabbits don’t bother him like they do me. Probably because the growing stuff thing is all me.
We had a dog who was great at hunting rabbits once. Now he’s dead and our other dogs couldn’t catch a rabbit if we held it in front of their faces.
I know how a lot of permies deal with the rabbit scourge. I tried Sepp Holzer’s bone sauce last year. The rabbits appear to like it quite a bit. Utter failure. I do put tree guards on all of my trees that are large enough to support them, and some that probably aren’t. The rabbits appear to like their food wrapped. Leaving low hanging branches for them to nibble is a great idea. My trees aren’t exactly large enough to do that. Every branch is a low hanging branch at the moment. I encourage predators. Unfortunately the dogs don’t. In fact they do a great job of repelling predators. It’s like a bunny sanctuary at our house.
I suppose beyond wholesale slaughter of Satan’s furred minions I have no idea what to do about this rabbit problem. I guess I’ll try to look at the bright side and think fertilizer. Bunny poop fertilizer. That’s something I’m not lacking.
The above pictures are all of the same tree. Please explain to me how the rabbits did that.
Just a fun pic. It’s SOOOO hard to get good pics of things when the instant I focus in on something my “help” jumps in the way.
Sainfoin- An experiment still in progress
If you had asked me last year what I thought of our sainfoin experiment I would have told you it was a failure. A walk along the property today has proven otherwise. The sainfoin, It’s ALIVE! Right now it is the same size as last years seedlings. It has a million more leaves though.
I could be wrong, maybe it’s the size of them making me think this, but I swear there are more plants as well.
well it’s hard to see each plant but there are 6 plants in this frame. Last year I would have expected to see 2.
Our ground is awful, as you can see. I’m excited to see what difference the sainfoin makes of this mess. It’s coming up in all the cracks from what I see. Sainfoin does love dry. Dry is what we have.
I was assisted in todays sainfoin adventure by my plant scout and all around bossy photographer.
I was hindered by the girl who refuses to walk this much. So much. Wagon AND stroller much. Sigh
Weird cooking experiments I’ve been up to.
I’ve been wanting to make and can my own broth. Unfortunately I have too many projects and too little time. However, I do cook dinner every day. Some of the dinner prep parts are wasted. Some main parts of dinner are wasted on certain household members as well.
I love making soup with our old hens, or mean roosters. They make some delicious soup. My husband has never been much a fan of soup broth and usually a lot of it is wasted. It’s broth though. Healthy broth as I make my soup with mushrooms and vegetables. So I canned it. Well I put it in jars and froze it, but I’m still considering it canning.
Oh, I filtered it before putting it in the jars.
I also made chicken enchiladas. You boil the chicken and then shred it, throwing out the broth. Well usually I do but not this time. The freezer is loaded with frozen broth that would normally get trashed.
Tastes great in meals so far. Better than store bought for sure!
Not a lot gets wasted at our house. We have the big dogs and the birds and now the pigs. Chocolate is officially our only food waste product. Yay!
Mini-Kraters and Swales handling winter melt
The temperatures are rising and our snow drifts are slowly melting. Snow harvesting was a wild success this year. If you’ve followed any previous posts than you know that the snow is a problem for our driveway but the melt is the real nightmare. Our driveway and road turn into a mud pit. So last summer we trenched with our new excavator and the results have been amazing!
That is one fabulously dry road!
The trenches are full and the area immediately around them is saturated, but the driveway has been maintained fabulously. So far. We’ll let you know if I’m still confident about our earth works after a heavy rain.
All of the water kept off the driveway is then trenched to various places. Our swales receive most of it but we also have some retention ponds that get rather full.
The swales harvested a tremendous amount of snow and that’s melting off right now.
The harvested snow was wonderful for both insulating our fruit trees and now for watering them. The ground around the swales is amazingly saturated.
The kraters (some more than others) are still really full of snow. About 1-2′.
They are holding strong and I couldn’t be more pleased with our decision to dig them!
A downside of such heavy snow harvest is that the trees can be covered quite far up the trunk. We’ve suffered quite a bit of rabbit loss. My best, hardiest fruit tree was attacked. I tried to Dr. it but who knows if it will pull through the damage.
Doctor’d apple tree
Osage orange poking out of snow.
Blackberry. I covered them heavily this year as last year they were all entirely eaten away.
As always children running about with moisture inevitably ends with really wet children. I was taking a picture of the gorgeous ice designs in our trench when Son decided to go ice skating and…… well he learned to check the ice thickness before clambering on.
