Here's what has been going on at the homestead, week of 24Jul17

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Ambitious goals

Long ago, when we were living in Maryland we had the goal to reduce our grocery store consumption.  We set ourselves a limit of only shopping local and minimal shopping at the grocery store. Here's the link to that challenge.   Tough Decisions Now due to worldwide events, we are revisiting that idea however instead we're challenging ourselves to grow as much as we can ourselves.  This means fruits, vegetables, proteins and herbs. Thanks to my husband who gave me a go-pro for Christmas I will now be filming quite a bit of what happens on our property so now you can follow us as we face challenges, celebrate successes, and work to produce over 80% of our food. Friday we received our honeybees and we hived them Saturday, 18April. This weekend we will also be tapping birch trees which will be used for birch syrup and birch wine.  I'll be putting up videos shortly as we accomplish all of this and more. Now that being said, Blogger has been relatively hard to work with wh
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Negative 36 with chickens in our garage

The past couple of weeks have been interesting to say the least.  Our temperatures here in Interior Alaska have gone from positive temperatures in the teens to lows of -40.  While the house is hanging in there, of course, no surprise there. This place was built to last, we have lost a couple of animals and now as of today, the 5th of January, we are housing three chickens in our garage.  Unfortunately two of these girls had the bad luck to start molting late Autumn.  Little Ms. Toriel started molting first in late November.  Chloe came right behind her in mid December.  By the morning of Christmas Eve it became apparent, we had to house poor little Toriel in the garage as first and foremost she had very little feathers on her poor body.  She's also lower in the pecking order which means others are picking on her and she is not allowed to share their heat.  As my husband brought her in to show me it was apparent, she was on deaths doorstep. Her eyes were frozen shut, her foot looked
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Compost Tea = MASSIVE GROWTH

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I've been looking at photos from the past few weeks, especially since I found some recently on my Facebook page from last year at almost exactly this time, and well....I really have to pat my husband and I on the back. This is what really made the impact. The left side was from last year.  No compost, no raised beds, No compost tea, no extra soil. Nothing. This year we've added raised beds, extra soil, extra compost, compost tea, vermicompost and bonemeal along with loads and loads of backbreaking work. So I guess I cannot attribute all of our success to the compost tea.  However, the tomato plants in our planters are doing awesome ! We have diligently been following a schedule of compost tea one week, miracle grow fertilizer the next. The end result? Can you believe this!?  What amazing growth! Next is our tomato and eggplant/pepper beds.  Again just really awesome growth here.  We've been out here almost nightly now so it's easy to miss how the plan
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