To work for a living or to live for working?

This is a topic that I have struggled with over the years, my work ethic has been programmed to do a job right and work until it is done. This often has me working long hours, I end up exhausted sometimes needing a day or two to physically recover. This can't possibly be good for me, but I had a deadline, one that I often set myself. I am not alone in this, many Americans work 60 + hour workweeks. So many of them are salaried employees and it is expected of them even though they are only paid for 40 hrs. It is so frustrating, everybody says "Oh the poor people in China can't earn a living wage" have you looked at yourself lately. Working one or more jobs to make ends meet, in an economy that even before the bubble burst in '08 was geared to sap you of your financial gain. By the time you pay for cable, internet, cellphone, car insurance, Starbucks and rent you are in the hole. With one broke down car or high utility bill away from ruin, your job gets shipped off to China because paying you $10/hr is cost prohibitive. What do you think will happen when our country no longer is able to produce anything because we shipped it all away to other countries. Will we be a land of self righteous paupers who are too good to get our hands dirty, yet have no appreciable skills to market. The answer I think is to become a producer yourself, make your own food, even if it's just a little. Make goods you can sell out of a cheap relatively available material. There is always a niche for goods out there, find one and exploit it for your families benefit. Repair broken possessions rather than buy new all the time, or spend the extra money to buy a quality version that will stand the test of time. In short work for yourself first and your boss second. 

Spring brewing

You can see one of my little home brew helpers cleaning a carboy for me. My family loves to help me brew one thing or another, especially my kids. Probably because most of it is splashing in a bucket. I currently have a double batch of beer going, a Black Dog Ale and a Smooth Nut Brown Ale. Both are kits from  http://www.midwestsupplies.com. I find they have good prices and an excellent selection! I also branch out on my own, last year we made 1 gallon of Dandelion wine, delicious! This year we will be making 5 gallons of Dandelion wine, and my experimental wine will be Oak leaf wine. Supposedly young oak leaves are full of sugar and make a refreshing country wine. Of course it could taste horrid, but that's part of the fun finding out. I used this recipe for Dandelion wine from this site:  http://www.donosborn.com/homebrew/dandelion.htm

I used Cote de Blanc yeast and the wine came out heady and sweet, with a mead like mouth feel. I also added ginger to my recipe and boiled all of the ingredients in a mesh bag (available at midwest) and for the sugar I used brown C & H cane sugar. 2lbs / gal. After an appropriate amount of time 3 months I think, I killed off the yeast and used a clarifier then bottle aged thew wine.
My next beer is a high gravity kit from midwest called a Power Pack Porter. It's a deliciously thick porter with a high alcohol content, it has about 9 lbs of fermentables in it. The down side is I have to wait 6 months for that one, the upside, it'll be really tasty! 

Generations

I have heard a statement, though I can't recall the source. That given a large enough disaster learning and technology would be lost in a single generation. Leaving our descendants in a quasi stone age of technological discards and crude amenities. Sounds terrible right? Your kids would know some things to help them, but their kids wouldn't have a full enough education to repair or utilize our current technology properly. Common everyday knowledge would be lost and they would have to reinvent it or discover something new.

I am sorry to say that this has already happened! The current craze is to "Go Green" or "Eat Local", "Seasonal menus". Your grandparents and theirs before them for generations all knew that stuff. They knew how to cook healthy meals that would feed their families, sometimes for days. The skills and everyday knowledge about the natural world that our grandparents had, died with our parents.

My little family wants to homestead, live closer to the land, grow some food and raise some livestock for meat. We probably won't have pigs or cows, but we just ordered chickens for eggs and meat. I discovered that my mother used to help pluck and butcher chickens, she told me that she hated the plucking. She never told me anything about chickens growing up, we got it from KFC or had it on the grill. In the "modern world" there was no room for those skills, fast food, pre-made dinners all trumped raising food. We had a small garden when I was a kid, but it never grew much and we certainly never canned anything.

I intend to relearn those lost skills, thankfully there has been a great deal put down in books, sadly that takes a long time to find, read, try, and perfect those skills unaided. My wife and children will be there learning along side me. Hopefully my children will teach their children and so on so that the skills I am so patiently relearning don't get lost again.

I Urge those who read this to go out and find a lost skill and preserve it in yourself and your family. Thus armed they will have a chance in a world where gas is too expensive for all but the wealthy and fresh preservative and chemical free food is out of reach.

What's the matter...Chicken?

We have decided good or ill to pursue raising chickens. We had a brief experience with chickens when we rented from a farmer and his coop was close to our dwelling. We picked eggs, fed and watered them on occasion and helped butcher. So armored with that brief experience and a liberal application of research we want to get some chicks for meat and eggs. We have settled on "Black Austrolorps" for our egg layers as they are a gentle friendly breed and are good for eating also. The "Meat" birds are a hybrid from http://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/index.html that grow quite fast without suffering (Hopefully) the disabilities of commercially grown chickens. They are called "Cornish Roasters" and reach 4 to 6 pounds on 8 to 10 weeks.

We debated for awhile how to keep them, penned or free range. Each has it's drawbacks, messy birds and risk of disease for penned birds and predator losses for free range. So far we are leaning heavily towards free range as I believe I can build a predator resistant coop for night time. Having free ranging birds would also hopefully reduce the bug population around here. Our landlords have horses and it doesn't seem to matter how far away they are, the flies are ever present. Last year there were so many grass hoppers eating our garden, we could stand to have a little grasshopper feast as well. As for the penn/coop itself, I am thinking of building a geodesic dome and covering 3/4 with chicken wire and the rest with plywood. That way if we are going to be gone or there is bad weather, the chickens can be penned for a short time. The plans for the dome come from this site: http://www.geo-dome.co.uk/ If you end up using his calculator tools remember he's British and the tools are in Millimeters. I will be posting pictures of the coop once built and chicks once we get them.

Spring into action

So this weirdling weather while beautiful has some sinister foreshadowing. We failed to get much snow which provides valuable water when melting to the land as a whole. If the weather stays so nice and sunny with no appreciable rain fall there won't be a lot of crop growing going on either. To get on my soapbox for a moment western mono-crop farming when combined with a drought equals dust bowl! All of the chemical fertilizers, pesticides and GMO crops leach the land of valuable nutrients, depleting the soil. Once it gets dry it's gonna blow away. That means that people are going to have to fend for themselves and become producers, even if you grow food in buckets on your deck. So stop watering your lawn and start growing food so you have it when you need it.

Quick update

Quick and dirty update, so we stayed 6 months at that first apartment, (North town) we hated it. Parking was terrible the neighbors had domestics all night long or smoked up all the time. The place was to drafty the smoke would come across the hall and waft under our door, sucked! Then we moved back to the west end of the cities to another apartment (coachman) and stayed for a year. My Son Jameson was born November 12th 2010 adding a delightful little boy to our family. Coachman raised the rent at the end of our lease so we made a deal with the cottage crew, I remodeled a small mother - in - law apt they had in their downstairs and we moved in. It's cozy, sometimes too much so but we get along. We tried getting financing for a new house of our own but things fell apart at the last min so we are waiting a couple months for a second try through a different program. In the mean time we are beginning our journey down the road of self sufficiency. I have begun home brewing, we have sworn off fastfood and make good food from scratch and are learning what we can to become producers rather than consumers. We just got our seeds started for an ambitious garden this summer, and are hoping to try chickens. I have a bunch of projects planned for this summer so I will keep posting about them here. First project is to build a geodesic dome greenhouse for our plants, I hope to be building parts by the weekend.

Oops...I missed a few months

I will begin posting here again shortly, I have all new adventures to relate. Many hopefully happier than those in the past. Stay tuned and tell your friends to check out Tales of the Rom Baro as I discuss homesteading, crafting, home brewing and more.

~The Rom Baro