What we hope to always have and have growing...Self Sufficient

[897tgigvib]

Getting older really is one of the challenges.

It was my uncle Farnum, a great grandson of General Robert E. Lee, who first coined the phrase, "Getting old aint for sissies". He was right. One of the ways around it is to simply get tougher and more efficient. Course another way around it is to have a younger assistant and do a mutual beneficient thing.

 

[Mickey328]

Dang...if only I'd had more kids way back when...I could put 'em to work for us! LOL

 

[digitS']

"340 days of sun each year" . . !!

You said something about 17 inches of precipitation each year, Mickey. We've got about 19" but it sure, sssuuuurre takes a long time to squeeze a drop or flake outta the clouds. Summers have long days with plenty of sun but, not only are the days short, but the winter is cloudy something terrible. No reason to think much about solar power up here but -- you've got potential !

I used to grow much of what I ate and, I suppose, I still do. Still, I am not a canner and even have some problems with using things up that I've stashed in the freezer. Mostly, I am interested in a garden ~ these days ~ for fresh veggies!

Those grass burners do real well building meat. I don't know much about rabbit nutrition but suspect they have just about the same requirements as the ruminants. My family always had beef, beef, beef in the freezer. I used to search thru trying to find chicken or fish, anything but beef. Anyway, frozen pasta sauce with ground beef must be fairly nutritious and I've long made quite a bit of it with homegrown tomatoes and such.

I remember that cabbage rolls were a real staple during the winter. LOL. My cellar even these days gets fairly well stocked with winter squash, onions and potatoes. I don't try putting cabbage down there anymore. Carrots, parsnips and celeriac can go in a leaf-covered pit in the backyard garden. They do better in there than the fridge. Most things have been used up, like the leeks and what has been downstairs. Less than ideal conditions meant that when I tried to store 200# of potatoes down there a few years ago, it was real difficult for DW & me to use them before sprouting just got too bad. I suspect they would be better in a outdoor pit, also.

Breakfast this morning was soy & rice cakes. No, I didn't grow the rice but I did grow the soybeans. I fully intend to freeze the edamame this summer rather than allow so many to fully mature! Making tofu & these soy/rice cakes is a lot of work! The beans are probably as nutritious as edamame since they are nearly mature, anyway.

The soy and rice are boiled, milled in the food processor, formed and steamed, and finally fried:

Here is the tofu just before it is hung up to drain above the sink:

Later, and with a little onion, mushroom and soysauce (no, I don't make soysauce ), that tofu will be just fine for dinner .

I have grown flour corn several times in the garden. Here is something that I made from it. (It really wasn't all that difficult after Seedcorn told me that the kernels could be soaked and then run thru a food processor and that I didn't need a mill.):

Something I should probably learn to make is kimchi because I grow a lot of this:

Bok choy may not work quite as well as Chinese cabbage for kimchi but they are closely related. I like kimchi and it is just possible that I could do better with it than sauerkraut.

Steve

 

[897tgigvib]

Oh Digit, those bok choy stems look a LOT like what some families made their Kimchi out of when I lived in Korea!

Hlyreung Rlyee No made it the best was my opinion. (I was the only American who could say her full name right. You have to flip your tongue upside down to start both her first and middle names). Her Kimchee was almost all based on "Cabbage" stems that look just like those Bok Choy leaf stems. Also, the hotness of hers was a smooth heat instead of the biting and burning heat others were so proud of. I came home early one day to see her bringing in the buried pot. Hers was a nice concrete lined hole with a nice cover over it. Other families had it right in the dirt. She was frowned on sometimes for her methods. Also I am reminded of freshly winnowed white Rice.

I sure hope those "National Geographic moments" still go on over there.

Their "Winter Kimchi" is entirely different, and is based on Beets and hot red peppers that are dried, flaked, somehow mixed with the Beets, mashed, and then fermented cold underground in a clay pot. That will most definitely clear your sinuses!!! I only ever used it as more of a dip for the to die for way they cook steak that is more teriyaki than I have since ever tasted.

 

[vfem]

You have big plans, and its all very possible!

I find my significant other is usually the down fall to most of my big plans. He's not much help with the animals unless I dictate what has to be done, when, how, ect...and then stand over him to make sure not only did her hear me... but that he did it correctly. You know, one of those I'm better off doing it myself moments. I do all the harvesting, cleaning, processing and cooking. He'll till in the winter/spring, lay straw and mulch for me, and remove birdy heads because I just can't bring myself to do that part.

My daughter & husband are the same way with left overs, so I try to make small batch dinners and meals so I'm not stuck eating all the leftovers for 3 days straight alone. I do find cooking whole large chickens and meats works out nice because I won't flavor the meats. Then I have like 1 roasted chicken dinner, then chicken salad sandwiches for lunch, chicken shredded up for tacos another night and off course I freeze the bones until I have a few bags of bones for stock. I can a LOT of stock, always handy and makes the house smell amazing during the winter when I do that the most.

In the fall I freeze left over green peppers, chopped tomatoes and few other veggies. I find those are nice to grab to make omlets on the weekends so we each stuff our omlet with something different. Peppers and onions in mine, cheese and bacon for the kiddo and hubby likes the left over meats & cheeses in his.

Planning lots of meals while you're processing everything will make things easier. Assigning chores to the significant other, taking the time to teach them should help some... unless he's like mine and rather screw things up on purpose so you don't ask for their help again. Sure makes a woman nutty!

 

[Jared77]

I think the biggest part is knowing what you need and what are your limitations. Keeping tabs on what your using and what your not. For example if you grew a "ton" of squash that's great and producing a crazy about of anything always makes a gardener feel great but if its rotting before you using it all, could you have planted less and used that space for something else?

Are you keeping tabs on what grows good where you live? Some varieties don't do well in certain areas, so are you trying new things in addition to keeping the staple varieties going to see if you can expand? How fast are you getting your meat rabbits up to processing age vs amount of food put into them? How many lambs does your family eat? How many can you store? Are you feeding extra ewes that are not carrying their weight?

You only have so much time and resources so being efficient is a big part of being SS.

Simple things can be done to like passive water heating troughs (check out Mother Earth News for a great article on that) and other simple ideas like that can really make a difference in costs and power demands if your dependent on solar or a generator because good weather and power outages don't seem to know each other very well. I guess I'd always be assessing things and looking at what your doing to see what you can better, easier, less demanding, more cost efficient etc.

I think you can do it, just takes a certain frame of mind.

 

[secuono]

I just brought out some frozen rabbit into the fridge for tomorrow. Still have my home grown potatoes, will use those tomorrow as well!
Going to grind the bones for the dogs, too.

 

[Mickey328]

Okay, maybe 340 sunny days was a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much! It's the moisture, or lack thereof, that's the killer here. We've been exceptionally dry, even for us, this winter and there's already talk of water rationing this summer. We're busy squirreling it away now because I will NOT let my garden succumb! What little lawn we have left...pfft...let it go, but I want my veggies! I think we may have gotten almost a quarter inch of fluffy, dry snow today...whoopee!

Steve...tell me about this garden pit for roots? I assume since it works in your area it might work for us. Although they're edible, my canned potatoes aren't my first choice. I canned them this year because we simply didn't have any place to store them. By next year, Dave will have cut thru our foundation into our wee crawl space, so we'll have some room, but I'd really like to be able to store lots of things "fresh" We're going to try our hand at parsnips and turnips this year as well as some spuds, carrots and beets. And those are all better cooked just before consumption. Dave did something when he lived back in OH...he built a sort of locker out of hay bales, leaving the center empty, put his potatoes in there then packed it with loose straw, closed it up with more bales and tarped the whole thing good. He said it worked pretty well, but was a PITA to get into for the potatoes.

Gotta say, your food pix look good, even though I don't eat soy in any form. For most of my life, the main thing in our fridge was beef as well. It still would be if 1) we could afford it and 2) it wasn't full of antibiotics and hormones and "stuff". Raising our own rabbits and chicken is an effort to provide "clean" meat for us at a lower cost than if you got the "organic" kind.

Our plan for the "offal" is to give most of it to the chickens. However, I discovered an interesting thing that most of you probably already know...when you pressure cook fine bones, like chicken and rabbit, they become quite soft and don't splinter. I'm going to save all the bones, make my stock and then grind them into bone meal for the garden. It'll take a lot of 'em, but heck...we don't need 'em for anything else.

 

[897tgigvib]

We sure have some amazing people here! Secuono, hear vfem, jared, and the others. There's some great stuff here!

 

[digitS']

We may be risking Secuono's tolerance to hi-jacking . . . :/ especially, if we are just talking about carrots.

But, I know that a "potato clamp" is a traditional storage technique. For some of you, mounding above ground may be necessary, I really don't know how this pit storage would work where the soil doesn't drain so easily. Others use this pit idea for things like beets, also.

Here are the carrots from a few years ago:

This is in a garden bed not far from my backdoor. Just about 8" of soil goes on the carrots, all lined up like that. That line-up really helps when I'm out there getting some out. On top goes another 8 to 10 inches of pine needles. I have used leaves and some tree leaves that don't mat down work okay. I have also put all my leaves/pine needles in one of those big, 2-handled buckets. Then, turned that upside-down on top the mound of soil. That kept water off the mound but that isn't real important here.

One thing that seems necessary, wait until your local mouse family has found their winter home before filling the pit with veggies. And, it is best, I think, to keep the pit out in the open for that reason also.

Steve