Homesteading Binder Additions

This past week I added the following to my Homesteading Binder:

• This milk-record sheet from The Prairie Homestead. It's for one animal for one month.
  
• This excellent guide: 10 Things to Consider When Living off the Land. It's stuffed full of great advice and practical thinking for when you are looking for your land.
  
• A vegetables-in-season and a fruits-in-season chart.

I'm traveling home to New York today. It is well over 600 miles and takes right around twelve hours with stops for bathroom breaks and lunch. I am also traveling with my cat and she is not happy about it! Prayers of safety are appreciated.

Homesteading Binder Additions

I thought that Mondays could serve as the round-up of whatever I have added to my Homesteading Binder this past week.
So, without further ado:

This list of 22 lessons in running a successful farmers market stand. It sounds promising, though I haven't full read through it as I only added it to my binder this morning.

I also printed information on cultivating and transplanting wild blackberries, because my uncle has tons of blackberries every summer, but I have none. I thought to transplant a few. However, the link seems broken. Here's the link anyway, just in case it's back up soon.

A list of cold-temperate perennial plants that grow in my zone. I got the list from here. Just click your area and it will take you to the correct list.

That's it! Three new additions this week.

Homesteading Binder Additions

These are the pages I added today to my homesteading binder; linked so you can add them to yours too.

This image from this website about herbs and their uses in food. I thought it would come in handy when I have an over-abundance or can't think of what to use an herb in. I had to cut this image into four pages in my Adobe Photoshop program because they wouldn't all fit onto one print where I could still read it.

I re-typed the graphic from this article onto a Word document, but I left off the advice about pesticides and citronella oil and just stuck with the vegetable and herb ones.

This chart from this article which lists which vegetables and herbs can be grown in the shade and how they'll do. The charts from this article about which vegetables grow well together as well as what to not grow with them. I copied them to a Word document and printed them.

I'm afraid I'm going to run out of room awfully soon in my tiny binder if I keep up this pace!

Also, I wanted to assure anyone reading this that I promise there will be an abundance of pictures soon. I lost my camera cable and am almost ready to purchase a new camera too, so for now, I'm very limited.

Home to Woefield: A Novel

I did finish the cover for my Homesteading Binder yesterday and added the pages about making lye and also a small chart I found here that shows the average first frost and last frost for garden planning purposes.

I also finished reading a wonderful, if quirky, book yesterday that I thought I'd share.

I ordered it from Amazon about a week ago on a whim. Well, I guess it could be considered a want. I don't know. What I do know is that I needed to round out my order of $8.64 for a 1/16th inch hole punch. Why would I need a 1/16th inch hole punch? To punch small, perfect holes in cardstock tags for the products I am aiming to sell at the farmer's market and craft fair next year.

Anyway, Amazon recommended a book entitled: Home to Woefield by Susan Juby. I read about it and was intrigued. See I had just finished another excellent book: The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball and was aching for another book on farming.

I added Woefield to my wishlist and moved on, trying to find something already in my cart or wishlist that had been there longer. In the end it nagged at the back of my mind until I bought it.

It's about a young woman named Prudence from New York City who is very much a part of the Back-to-the-Earth movement (she even has an earthworm composting farm in her apartment) when she learns that her Uncle died and left her a farm in Canada. She decides it's the perfect opportunity to practice what she preaches and moves in.

The farm comes with a small town packed full of interesting people, a crotchety old man who has lived on the farm forever, a neighbor across the road who blogs about heavy metal, and a very serious young girl. Prudence is at once admirable and pitiable. She seems fairly clueless but is so optimistic and hardworking that you can't help but hope she succeeds.

The book focuses mostly on the story and less on the farming aspect unlike Kimball's book, but then again this book is fiction. The characters and really the whole story are fantastic and fun. A word of caution though: it really is chockfull of swear words and taking the Lord's name in vain. It bothered me on more than one occasion and I would not let children read it, but as far as reading it just to myself - I skimmed over them or read a different word in place of the offensive ones.

For a nice, easy, entertaining read I would recommend this book, but don't go expecting a lot out of the ending. It feels rushed. I felt like we had spent all this time getting to know everyone and then we get cut off from them very suddenly where the story ends. Everything seems resolved toward the end, but still it is very abrupt.

Overall I really enjoyed this one.

*As a side note, I was not compensated in any way for this review
by either the author or Amazon and I purchased the book with my own money.

Homesteading Binder & Lye

I thought that the very best way to begin tracking what I know, what I want to learn and general information is to start a Homesteading Binder. I have an admittedly small binder to use, but it will be remedied if (when) the information outgrows the binder.

So far this binder has one thing in it: a guide on How to Make Lye. It's a direct print from this page here. It sounds promising with ways to gauge the strength of the lye with regards to soap making, and without having to constantly buy ph strips from a store or online.

I spent quite a bit of time wondering where in the world I would get lye if I didn't buy it, and after all that wondering I decided to actually research it. I should have lead with that! It took all of three seconds to read that lye is made from soaking wood ashes in water. Specifically a hardwood because other types will not mix well with the fats necessary to make soap. The website above makes a few wood suggestions, but the forests around me are just packed with sugar maples and so that's the kind I will use.

I'm not set up to try it now, but as a resource it's a good thing to nail down and add to the binder. Does anyone else keep a binder like this? I know that Quinn at Reformation Acres has mentioned hers a time or two, with some good downloads to use.

Animal, garden, land, fencing, and home management can be all contained in one Homesteading Binder, or multiple ones where each is dedicated to one topic. I'm not sure how this will work out, but I have confidence that I will learn and adapt as I move along. As I change it, I will share it here!