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

That damned house (xposted from FB)

Sometimes I really miss our house. I'm trying to figure out my feelings about it all - do I miss the house? Do I miss the town? Do I miss my friends there?

Well, the answer is: yes. I miss it all, in varying degrees depending on the day. It's hard to start on the path of a Dream (no matter how much I might now philosophically believe that the Dream is a load of BS they sell us to keep the economy going) and to start making a house into a home and then have it all just go away.

That home is where Chris began his first business. That is where some of the amazing wood working he did was completed. There were nights when he would stay up working until midnight, sleep two hours, then go back out to the shop to get it all done in time. Sometimes I'd go out to the shop when there was putzy work I could help him with - sanding, or holding the other end of something to make it easier for him to glue things up.

And that home is where I was when I had my miscarriage. I sat on the old couch we had for a few days just crying and crying. And I can still remember where everything was in the room, where the videos were kept that I watched to help distract my mind from all of those lost dreams.

That town is where we lived when I found out I was pregnant with Morgan. We walked down to the Dairy Queen (we tried really hard to make that a rule - no driving! We had to walk there and back!) and shared a Peanut Buster Parfait and I told Chris we were expecting again.

And the bathroom - I remodeled the bathroom after my miscarriage as a project I could do to feel like I had created something. Granted, I did it on a $50 budget using left over paint that subsequently stained the linoleum and bath tub, but I still was proud of the fact that I did it myself.

And I can still remember how the bathroom smelled in the heat of the summer when I was sooo incredibly wracked with morning sickness, and how the mineral smells in the water made it even worse. Nothing like pregnancy nose, right?

The hardwood floors in the living room that we were so excited to find beneath the carpeting. After living there a year we finally pulled up the carpet and refinished the main level floor. It wasn't perfect, but it was still beautiful and added a richness to the room.

Oh, and the fireplace! We'd light a fire, put on a record (yes, we have a large record collection, and we love to play them as often as we can), and sit back in our armchairs, dreaming about the future. The dogs would curl up by our feet and life was blissful in those moments.

On the topic of records: Cat Stevens' Tea for the Tillerman and Queen's Night at the Opera. Those were the two most played records at that house. Listening to them I can almost hear the fire crackle, feel the cool hardwood beneath my feet, and smell sweet cherry wood burning (benefit of being married to a wood worker - exotic kindling!).

The garden we had the summer after Morgan came. I would go out back and place her on a blanket and spend an hour or so weeding the garden. Once she figured out crawling it took considerably longer to get through a row of plants, with having to go after her ever few minutes! I made a lot of zucchini bread that fall.

My neighbors - I miss them! Cecil and Terri left before Morgan was born, and they were so excited to have a "granddaughter" (they have only sons and grandsons). They used to decorate their yard with a flood of lights every Halloween and Christmas, and I would sometimes just sit on the radiator by the window and watch the lights sparkle. They are kinds souls and immediately took us in as if we were family.

Our other neighbors, Patti and Dean and the kids - I spent a lot of time at Patti's with her daycare, and sometimes just so I could speak to another adult during the day! She was and has been a kind, supportive and welcome shoulder to lean on. Very few people know as much about the harder parts of our lives the past few years than she does.

And, for a while, I FINALLY had the chance to live in the same zip code as Ashlee. That was the first time ever! We had our Thursday get-togethers where I'd go to her house and we'd "work" - before we had kids, we'd sometimes get some office work done between chatting and gossiping, and once the children arrived we'd just run interference for each other while we chatted and gossiped. Well, mostly I'd run interference while she made food that I'd later get to eat. I'm pretty cheap - a pan of pumpkin bread and I'm yours!

In the midst of all the darkness we went through this year, I didn't give myself the chance to celebrate the wonderful times we had in that home we'd made. And we had plans... boy did we ever have plans! Our kitchen was in a state of planning the whole time we lived there :P It would have been amazing if we'd been able to finish it all. But we did what we could with the resources we had, and while we lived there, we had a pretty good time.

We're moving on. We're doing well. We're in a new place, but it's not yet home. It may be, but then again, it may always remain another resting place on the road to a new home. We'll see. I know in my heart that we have the biggest home anyone could ask for - friends and family from coast to coast who have showed us love and generosity when we were down. That much I am grateful for, and I cherish it more than I can say. But I do long for finding that sense of home again. I have my family, but I sometimes still feel lost in the world. I confided in a friend recently that it's difficult to be looking for an object and only be able to recall that it used to reside on the top of a dresser that we no longer own in a home that is no longer ours. It's hard to rest your head when you don't know where home is.