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I want to welcome and thank Romona from Mona Sez today as our guest author.  Today she talks about some not-so-traditional, yet totally awesome uses for pumpkin seeds.  Thanks, Romona! Read more

 

Tuesday of this week, October 1st, was our one-year anniversary of the day we left our large, newer suburbia home for an old, old farmhouse in the country, in hopes of starting a more self-sufficient life.  It’s really been an amazing year.  Rick, myself and our 4 kids have all had to cope with all kinds of different feelings, from missing our former home, to dealing with all of the work that comes with owning a hobby farm, to simply enjoying the peace and quiet that comes with living away from it all.  We’ve had to deal with intense summer storms, learning how to cut down on energy usage, and preserving our own food.  It’s been a boatload of hard work, but a great ride nonetheless this first year.  Here is some of what we’ve learned this first year “on the farm”. Read more

 

Greetings, friends!  This post comes courtesy of a reader question I got from our friend and loyal reader,  Jim.  Jim wrote:

My wife lovingly plants a veggie garden every year. 3 years ago we lost our last dog and for the past 3 years rabbits have eaten our entire veggie (raised) garden – ugh! We’ve tried everything except a chicken wire fence (she claims that will be too much of a hassle to weed/garden around). Have you got any suggestions? We can’t get another dog because our granddaughter is allergic to them.

Being that this is quite the common problem, I thought I’d address it in a post.  First, let’s talk a little bit about rabbits and their eating habits (hey, that rhymes!)

Rabbits like to feed at twilight, but are pretty non-picky as long as they get their meal.  Their main preferences as far as vegetables are: lettuce, cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower.  They also like very young fruit trees..  Being that rabbits reproduce at quite a rapid pace, they can quickly overtake your garden similar to a scene like Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds”.

Rabbits and other pests are quite common to most people’s gardens, but there are humane ways to rid, or at least ward off the fluffy intruders; ways that don’t include the hassles of a trap or the finality of a .22.  🙂

Here are some tips for keeping your veggies safe from our fluffy friends:

 

1.  Put a fence up, and put it up early.  I know: they are a hassle, those chicken wire fences, but it is one of the best ways to keep rabbits and other intruders at bay.  My elderly friend and mentor, Pete, makes a 6 foot high chicken wire fence with wood supports and a door, that looks like a giant see-through room. People go in and out via the door to weed and gather the goodies, and the large “room” he creates every year keeps out the many would-be visitors, including a small, long-time resident black bear.

2.  Scare them away with smell.  “Rabbits sniff everything”, my gardening book says, “and after a sneezing fit, they’ll move on”.  Sprinkling black pepper on your plants in the evening  will send those wascally wabbits running from your garden plants in a fit of sneezing, so the experts say.  Another option is, if you can find their path from their home to your garden, you can sprinkle the path with moth crystals. (no affiliate links within this post) Don’t use plain mothballs, however, as they can be dangerous and appealing to kids due to their resemblance to candy.  Another tip suggested sprinkling blood meal around the edges of your garden and/or on your plants will scare rabbits away as well, fearing for their very lives.

3.  Utilize companion planting.  Companion planting has been used for centuries as a way to  help plants grow better.  Planting certain plants next to other plants not only encourages better growth, but can ward off intruders as well.  For instance, planting marigolds in your garden can help ward off certain flying insects with their bright color and intense (to the bugs) scent.  Rabbits in particular dislike onions, so surrounding your lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli with onions, chives and garlic can really do wonders for warding off those pesky “wabbits”.

Jim, and my other gardening friends, I hope this helps a bit.

How about you, readers?  What are your tried and true tips for keeping rabbits from eating your home-grown goodies?

Yeah, yeah, I know it’s only January, but now’s the time to start planning your garden, whether you’re urban homesteading or you’ve got tons of acreage.  What can I do, you might ask, when the ground is frozen and my garden is covered with several inches of snow? Read more

So, we’re 27 days out from beginning the countdown to our Depression-era lifestyle in order to learn how to: be more self-sufficient, live on less, and reduce our debtload during 2013.  As I prayed about this yesterday, I felt again strongly in my spirit that this is indeed the Lord’s plan for us.

And I have to say, I’ve gone through the gamut of emotions.  2 weeks ago, I was angry.  Angry at myself that we weren’t debt free years ago, angry that we haven’t had more income, angry at the way our choices have affected our children.  And angry because now we’re in a situation where it’s going to take extreme actions to get out of the hole.  Beyond gazelle intensity.

Last week, it was different.  I’d moved on to acceptance, and a bit of depression.  As I sat one day, making our dinner of rice and broccoli hotdish, I came to the realization that, come January 1st, this dinner is going to be considered a feast – one that we may not have for quite some time.

Today, I’m simply driven.  As I look at the world around us, I see it going more and more down the tubes, into a direction that most of us don’t want it to go.  And I, for one, don’t want our family to be in shock if and when the day comes that the crap really does hit the fan big time in America.

I know you don’t want to be in a situation either where you can’t take care of your family should big time troubles hit.  So, I hope you’ll join us on our frugal journey.

This post is kind of like the second half of Homesteading: Where to Start?, and tells more of the story leading up to our big move, which I talked about in Rethinking Things: How We Got Here.  We hope you enjoy it!

Ok, so now that we’ve been researching homesteading as the Lord leads, we came up, in April, with a whole new reason why homesteading is indeed what the Lord wants us to do. Read more

This post is a “prequel” to our first post: Re-thinking Things: How We Got Here.   It tells about the time between when we first felt led to get out of the suburbs, and when we actually moved into our old farmhouse.

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Welcome to the story of how we went from suburbia family to farm family in only 16 short years :-).  We hope you enjoy this story of “The Beginning”. Read more