Category: Homesteading

Butterfly Garden

We have a small pond in the back yard and a bricked in courtyard in front of the house. I am building butterfly gardens with native plants in both areas. Hopefully we’ll be able to sit in the dining room and watch butterflies hatch.

Here are the plant that I’ve ordered

Common Name Botanical Name Type
Partridge Pea Chamaecrista fasciculata Host and Nectar Plant
Showy Milkweed Asclepias Speciosa Host and Nectar Plant
Western Sand Milkweed Asclepias arenaria Host and Nectar Plant
Wild Petunia Ruellia humilis Host and Nectar Plant
Butterfly Weed Asclepias tuberosa Host Plant
Common Milkweed Asclepias syriaca Host Plant
Whorled Milkweed Asclepias verticillata Host Plant
Blue Sage Salvia Salvia azurea Nectar Plant
Cardinal Flower Lobelia cardinalis Nectar Plant
Iron Weed Vernonia altissima Nectar Plant
Orange Coneflower, Orange Black-eyed Susan Rudbeckia fulgida Nectar Plant
Purple Prairie Clover Dalea purpurea Nectar Plant
Royal Catchfly Silene regia Nectar Plant
Sweet Joe Pye Weed Eupatorium purpureum Nectar Plant
Wild Bergamot, Wild Bee Balm Monarda fistulosa Nectar Plant
Golden Alexanders Zizia aurea Host Plant
Michigan Lily Lilium michiganense Nectar Plant
Rose Milkweed Asclepias incarnata Host and Nectar Plant
Purple Coneflower Echinacea purpurea Nectar Plant
Wild Lupine Lupinus perennis Host Plant
Wild Senna Senna hebecarpa Nectar Plant

Making Soap Molds

I want to design and print my own soap molds – special holiday bars or pre-stamped bars. We’re still working on setting up the 3d printer, so haven’t tried anything yet. I have a few downloadable soap mold forms bookmarked (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1806226/apps happens to be up in another tab now, but search thingverse for ‘soap mold’ and you will find quite a few).

The trick will be finding an appropriate filament — one that won’t melt at soaping temps (something I need to better understand) but can still be extruded at my printer temp (190-250C). Preferably a not-too-rigid filament with a little bit of flex. That’s trial and error – expensive, too, when buying whole rolls of filament. I found http://globalfsd.com/ (there’s both a US and European site) that sells small quantities of many filiments, and I’ve purchased a bunch that *seem* like they might work.

What I planned to do until I can identify a perfect filament for non-melting and easy to remove soaps is create positive forms on the 3d printer (essentially print what you want a bar of soap to look like) and then google up a procedure for making a silicon mold (uneducated guess is glop some silicon ‘stuff’ onto the positive form to create the negative silicon mold).

For anyone wanting to play with a 3d printer without dropping a couple hundred bucks on it: check your local library. Ones around here are building “maker spaces” with 3d printers, embroidery machines, engraving machines, large format printers, etc. You pay for consumables (i.e. filament in this cae) but gain familiarity with the machines before deciding to invest in one.

Soap Swirls!

I have tried many times to get swirls in soap. What I’ve actually gotten is halfway seized blobs of colour. Still works, still smells nice … but it doesn’t look like the pretty soaps I see online.

Everything I’ve read says to mix the components to a light trace so it won’t seize before you get it poured and swirled. Many attempts later, I have swirls! Two tricks — I mixed the essential oil into the oil before adding lye. Adding the EO after the oil:lye is mixed was just too much mixing. I also used more water than the normal 2:1 water to lye ratio.

Added the lye water to the oil/EO mixture and used the stick blender until it was just combined. There were no longer oil spots floating on top, the entire mixture was a homogeneous colour. I split the soap into two pots and stirred in the clay with a tiny whisk. At this point, I still had REALLY runny soap.

I used a modified column pour technique — a rounded cup in the middle of a large mold. This made concentric rings of colour. I then used a very thin wooden dowel / gigantic toothpick that was used in a sandwich at a local restaurant and dragged lines from the perimeter of the mold into the center. The shape held! Popped the whole thing in the oven with the light on and let it sit for 24 hours. Removed it from the mold and it was really soft compared to my normal recipe. That’s the extra water – it needs to cure longer. Bonus, though – it was soft enough to cut easily with a knife.

 

 

When cut into bars, there are actual swirls!

New Soaps

We’ve made a bunch of new soaps this past week — mostly using the same 20% super-fat all coconut oil recipe, although I made a 0% super-fat coconut oil soap to use as laundry detergent. We just have to visit some store that actually stocks washing soda (WalMart – not somewhere I frequent, but according to their web site … it’s stocked at every local store here).

We made a rainbow swirl soap with orange essential oil — important thing about making rainbow swirl soap? Don’t try to smooth out the top! The whole top is a consistent lavender colour … cool, though, because the rainbow bits appear as you use the soap. Totally not what I was going for, though.

Another swirled soap using activated charcoal and green zeolite clay with tea tree essential oil. Again the swirl didn’t turn out the way I wanted … I think you’ve got to have really fluid soap batter to get these swirl techniques to succeed. This batch was less thick than the rainbow above … but it still got gloppy as I poured it. Also – there’s a reason the ‘column pour’ technique has a square in the middle. If you use a round object (say, a glass that you happen to have and know won’t be harmed by soap) , you get concentric circles. Not a design with scallops to it.

And I’ve found a few new recipes that I’d like to try — one is using pureed cucumber in place of water in the soap. And one that’s got to wait for next year — using daffodils as the colourant!

Chicken Food

I’ve found a few good ideas for things chickens will feed themselves — include the compost area in the chicken pen, the chickens will turn the compost for you, eat fresh veggie scraps, and eat bugs they find.

Put a board or rubber mat down on the ground – let it sit there for a day or two, and a bunch of bugs will move in under it. Flip the board/mat into a new location & the chickens will go after the bugs that have been uncovered.

I also plan to grow a “chicken garden” in their coop — buckwheat, millet, flax, red clover, and forage peas. Hopefully they won’t confuse their garden with our garden. I want to try allowing them to roam in our raised bed garden to eat bugs … but I may end up fencing that off so they don’t eat our veggies!

Homemade Dog Food

In case we do get a dog, I wanted to have a few recipes for homemade dog food because I really don’t want to feed a dog fat coated grain nuggets.

Liver Brown Rice

  • 2 lbs raw chicken livers (3 containers) – remember, you can also use beef liver
  • 2 cup of cooked brown rice, set aside
  • 1 cup of chopped carrots
  • 1 chopped broccoli,
  • 2 cup of water
  • 1 teaspoon olive oil for pan

Chop veggies and liver into bite sized pieces. Saute liver. Add water and simmer until liver is cooked. Add veggies and cook for a few more minutes. Cool and refrigerate/freeze.

Beef Sweet Potato

  • 1 pound of beef
  • 1 small sweet potato
  • 1/2 cup of carrots, diced
  • 1/2 cup of green beans, diced
  • 1/2 cup of flour
  • 1/2 cup of water
  • 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil for frying

Microwave the sweet potato until mostly cooked and chop into bite sized pieces. Dice beef and saute in olive. Remove meat from pan. Add flour and water to make a gravy. Add in veggies, sweet potato, and meat. Cook over medium-low heat until carrots are cooked (5-10 minutes). Cool and refrigerate/freeze.

Lots of Veggies (my own)

  • 3 lbs beef offal
  • 1 cups brown rice
  • 3 cups spinach, shredded
  • 1 zucchini, chopped
  • 1 cup peas
  • 1 tablespoon oil
  • 1/4 cup flour
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 cup meat stock
  • 1 1/2 teaspoon ground egg shells

Dice everything into bite sized pieces. Saute meat for a few minutes until mostly cooked. Add in flour, egg, and stock to make a gravy. Stir in veggies and cook for another 3-4 minutes. Cool and refrigerate/freeze.

Apples!

  • 3 lbs turkey/chicken
  • 1 cups brown rice
  • 2 apple
  • 2 cup carrots
  • 1 tablespoon oil
  • 2 tablespoons tapioca powder
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 cup meat stock
  • 1 1/2 teaspoon ground egg shells

Dice everything into bite sized pieces. Saute meat for a few minutes until mostly cooked. Add in flour, tapioca powder, and stock and heat make a gravy. Stir in fruit/veggies and cook for another 3-4 minutes. Cool and refrigerate/freeze.

 

Bulbs For Next Year

The fall planted bulbs are in bloom, and we know what grew well here (and what didn’t — wild tulips survive well here, but the big, beautiful Dutch tulips become a rodent buffet. I’ve tried mixing them with other bulbs to no avail. As much as I love the Dutch tulips, I’m not buying more this year.). It’s time to put in an order for this Autumn. I order bulbs from both ColorBlends and Old House Gardens. This year we’ll be planting daffodils:

  

And some more crocus bulbs to scatter throughout the lawn:

DIY Hop Arbor

Our hops are finally strung! I ordered coir rope that is used by most hop growers – hopefully this doesn’t snap like the twine we used last year. Last year, all of the ropes slid together at the top. Which stretched the ropes (and probably didn’t do anything to keep the twine in one piece). This year, used 3/4″ PVC piping (yet another Home Depot purchase not being used as intended) and drilled holes through which the ropes are strung.

 

It was a lot easier to get the strings up this year – we ran each individual rope through its hole and tied the stakes to each end. Then pulled the wire that runs between the two trees up and secured it onto the tree branches.

Some of our vines were long enough to wrap onto the coir rope — so we’ve got hops climbing their ropes:

Permaculture

I’m intrigued by the idea of permaculture gardening — creating landscape installations that are planted once and are then self-sufficient. For growing food, it is a slow process — the tomatoes we plant this year will produce this year. The fruit, nut, asparagus, etc that we plant this year … we’ll get some in two or three years at the earliest (some nut trees take a decade to produce!). But they’ll keep producing year after year. In some cases, they’ll even spread.

We planted some apple and peach trees from Trees of Antiquity last year – and then found out it was a cicada year (i.e. a really bad year to have new trees). Well, most of our new trees made it. This year, I want to start some asparagus and nut trees.

I selected hazelnuts to start — first, we all love hazelnuts. And it really doesn’t make much sense to put effort into growing something you won’t enjoy. But they also produce nuts in 2-5 years. I ordered them from Willis Orchard — I’ve read good and bad reviews of the place, but the shipped prices were great and I read a lot of bad reviews about pretty much any nursery or orchard. Hazard of shipping live products.

The trees were small, but I knew that when I purchased them. I love how these bare root trees where shipped. There’s some gooey gel stuff around the bare roots that keeps the trees hydrated (esp good when you are SUPER slow about planting your bare root trees!).

We’re starting asparagus from seed — it takes longer, but I was able to get unique strains unavailable as crowns. I picked up some berry seeds too – no idea if they’ll actually grow (this is more of an experiment than an attempt to cover the yard with cane fruits and cranberries). And strawberries — Home Depot had a whole bunch of strawberry plants well before it was reasonable to plant them … but they were beautiful plants on clearance. They’re still potted and located close to the house to keep warm.

I also want to replace our ornamental grasses with something useful (and hopefully something that doesn’t spread into the lawn and create an unmowable fibrous mass). Maybe a patch of oats that can reseed themselves.

Maple Sap Season Coming To A Close

We’re getting to the end of maple sap season – collecting a last batch of sap and boiling this week. We should get another gallon or so of syrup, but the red maples are well into leafing out. I’ve heard a lot of descriptions of the sap flavour after bud-break … to me, it is tannin heavy. That would put us around four gallons of syrup for the year — and re-enforce my belief that the algorithm determined tapping date is when we should tap – even if that’s the second week of January!