Wild Hope Homestead

This week has been full of all sorts of activities, despite battling through more winter sickness on the weekend. Oh, the things we get up to. City folk and more consumer-driven folk must wonder what on earth I’m thinking sometimes, but I have so much fun making our lives more healthy, saving money and learning all manner of homesteading skills. The only upside of sickness is that we can’t go out much so we are getting some little things done around the place. When we don’t have a small-child attachment.

Tasty Food Stuff

The week started with an experiment in making a gluten-free, dairy-free happy-study-finishing chocolate cake to share with my Crafty Women on Crafty Night. After cutting a handful of foods out of my diet I am down to my last two suspects: gluten and wheat, which are similar, but I intend to get to the bottom of it. This week I was supposed to be adding gluten back in, without wheat, by using foods like barley. But, things got a bit too busy, too busy to think about what to do with barley and too busy to want to risk getting sick. I will prattle on about food intolerance issues another time. Back to the cake. It wasn’t bad for gluten-free, but it needs some improvements, the main one being less vinegar. I suppose I’ll need to do another cake experiment…

We ate our first homegrown oyster mushrooms this week. They are tasty! They’re a bit more mild than field mushrooms but I still love ’em. I ate some for lunch today, fried in pork lard. Then some for dinner, fried in beef dripping. Happiness! This week I instigated the lard experiments, which I will post about later.

Oyster mushrooms: From growing bag in the garage…

To the frying pan…

To the plate. I just love this homegrown mushroom thing. This was today’s lunch.

The Husband also got busy in the kitchen, using a big stash of our frozen tomatoes to make 10L of tomato soup. The smaller garage freezer has become our preserving freezer and it is now half full of soup. And there are still more frozen tomatoes that need to be used!

Of the five baskets in the ‘preserving freezer’, four now contain tomato soup, spring onion soup or frozen tomatoes.

So much soup! And this is why I grow so many tomatoes.

Vegetables and Light

We’ve had to buy a few more veges over winter and have been unpleasantly astounded at the price of some veges, in particular broccoli and cauliflower. The last growing season was a poor one, followed by a rainy, gloomy Autumn and this is further impacting on the increasing price of store-bought veges. Although I don’t have the time to grow everything I want from seed at the moment, buying seedlings to grow is still a lot more cost-effective than buying veges from the shops. At Bunnings you can get a little punnet of 6 vege seedlings for $1.96 or thereabouts, compared to $3.50-$5 for one head of broccoli or cauliflower from the supermarket. And the supermarket broccoli is puny as. I bought one punnet each of red cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower from Bunnings to add to my brassicas in the garden. I will let them get a bit bigger before planting. It has been a pretty mild winter so far, with only a few frosts, so I might as well make use of the milder temperatures to keep adding cold-hardy crops to the garden.

I also found myself in Mitre 10 Mega one day, where I bought a light for the back porch. This is the final light I needed to add to the house lot of light fittings that I have been gathering and storing for some time. The next step is getting a quote for an electrician to install all the lights in the house, a few of which will be in new positions, and to do a few other little electrical jobs.

As I was exiting the garden centre section, because, obviously, I ended up there, I found seed potatoes! I had been carefully thinking about which potato varieties to grow next season, with input from The Husband, since he was not impressed with Ilam Hardy last season and loves Agria. It’s always good to have more than one variety and to try out new things, so I am planning to grow Agria and Summer Delight as my major main crops and either Liseta or Allura in the planters for a quicker-maturing, early crop. Summer Delight was one of the varieties of seed potatoes available at Mitre 10 Mega, so I bought one 1.5kg bag. It is way early, but I thought I had better get them while I could, as I didn’t see that variety last season. I can always plant them a bit earlier with some protection. They are now chitting in the garage.

I found the seed potatoes! Eager beaver.

Some of the seed potatoes were already showing signs of growth. Time to get chitting.

Tackling the Windows

A less fun activity this week was the commencement of window cleaning. Our windows have gotten so, sooo bad. Today, I finished cleaning all the windows in The Little Fulla’s room. I did such a good job, and, yes, there was a toothbrush involved, that it took ages. Well, the frames were bad! His room is at the shady end of the house. If I can get two or three window cleaning sessions in each week it won’t take too long to get the whole house done, right? I hate window cleaning. I don’t mind the actual glass cleaning, but the window frames? I’d rather clean the chicken coop. One good thing to note, though, is that I used homemade cleaners instead of nasty chemicals. For the frames I used a little vinegar in about 1/4 bucket of warm water and for the glass I am experimenting with 1/4 cup vinegar in 2 cups of warm water with 10 drops of essential oil (I used lemon). The oil is supposed to help prevent streak or water drop marks and I’m pretty happy with it so far. Who needs chemicals, man?

The windows in The Little Fulla’s room are now almost clean enough to eat off.

The wooden frames attached to the inside window frame are what the insect screens sit in. The screens need to be cleaned somehow and I’m not going to have them up in the cooler months anymore as we don’t need them and they just contribute to mouldiness.

Let’s just say this lounge window isn’t the worst window in the house. Yikes!

The Chickens

The chickens have been trucking along well through the wet winter weather, enjoying the goodness of The Orchard Pen. But on Staurday morning as I fed the chickens, I discovered that Kitty had a problem. She was barely eating, but pretending to eat, and it was glaringly obvious because she is one of the three who love to eat from my hand and get first dibs. Then I noticed that her crop looked huge. Into Chicken Hospital she went with suspected sour crop. It seems she had been drinking a lot as her crop was so full but there was only a little bad smell and spew was not forthcoming. During the day she got rid of some crop contents from both ends on her own while being kept off food and water, other than epsom salt flushes. As her crop started to go down I realised it was probably more of a case of impacted crop merging into sour crop. This means no induced spewing but massaging a few times a day. And we all know what a sour crop chicken means around here… A spewing human! And sure enough, The Little Fulla was that human yesterday. What is it with these chickens? It’s like they know things. Needless to say, we missed our planned family trip to Auckland yesterday. I hope Kitty recovers well as she is very dear to me. She is the easiest to treat of my oldies and such a lovely girl.

The chickens have been enjoying scratching in the hay I laid down to help protect their feet from the concrete in front of the woodshed and to keep the run area where the coop is a bit more sanitary.

Mr Bingley looks so pleased with himself. “Look at all my feathers!”

Still no clarity on whether Lorelai (front) is a miss or a mister, however, she doesn’t have saddle feathers and her wattles are smaller than Sookie’s (back). It’s not much use comparing Lorelai to girly Sookie, because although they are both Wyandottes, the colours are bred on entirely separate lines otherwise they don’t come true. That means their genetics and the way they develop are different.

A Stone Mission

One evening we found ourselves on a stone mission. I bought a pile of used small river stones on Trade Me for $40, with the intention of using them in The Driveway Expansion Plan. That’s a new plan. Actually it’s not new, it just has a name now. We will need some more firm gravel as well, but this was a good start. The Husband went to get the stones with the borrowed trailer one day after work. But the pile of stones was a bit bigger than I thought it was. He came home in a fluster because they wouldn’t all fit in one trailer load, it was a lot of work shoveling them and he had to take the trailer back in the morning. We both shoveled and raked the stones off the trailer onto a tarp as fast as we could, which was not very fast at all, then bundled up The Little Fulla, took our shovels and headed off on a family stone mission. We shoveled the next load of stones onto the trailer, which came up to about 3/4 full. Shoveling stones is a lot harder than shoveling dirt. They look small, but they are heavy! Especially when they’re dirty and wet. It was hard work, but we gained a big pile of stones for a good price and got it done before the darkness of night descended. The arrival of more rain has helped to clean some of the stones.

At the moment, we have a short driveway with the only proper parking being the carport at the end of it. The Husband parks his work van on the drive behind the car or on the grass on the west side of the drive when it’s not too soggy. But sogginess has become a very real thing around here with all the rain we’ve had. When the road flooded and we had to do some awkward maneuvering for me to get the car out one night, wading through water with The Little Fulla in tow, it became clear that we needed to do something about parking space sooner rather than later. I have always intended to turn the bit of garden on the west side of the carport into a parking space. The main reason nothing has been done about it yet is camellia stumps. Always the camellia stumps! There are a bunch of small stumps in there that need to be dug out. Now there’s a tarp with a pile of stones sitting on top of some of them… Aren’t we good at making piles? We could be pile-making specialists. Need a pile? We’ll make one for you.

Much of the lawn on the left of the drive is destined to be turned into parking space. This contains the dippy bit where The Husband parks his van, in the absence of sogginess.

The area to the left or west of the carport was always going to be turned into parking space. Can you see my weeding line? At least the tarp will kill some of the weeds.

I’ve only planted things along the edge of the fence. The green leafy bits are some of the many camellia stumps that are going to be a pig to dig out.

That Patio Woodpile Area Thing

We have been continuing to chop or saw up wood from the long/large bits of wood woodpile beside the ‘covered’ patio woodpile.

The patio woodpile area that The Husband has been fiddling with is not going very well. High winds keep blowing his wood and plastic covering off, leaving the wood wet again. The good news is, the wood is going to have to be moved into the woodshed now, for I have done things. Good things.

The Husband has been doing a lot of chainsawing to get wood chopped up into fireplace-sized bits.

That patio woodpile area thing.

I can’t say I’m surprised that The Husband’s makeshift ‘cover’ isn’t holding up, but I’m not thrilled either. This is not my vision for the back porch! Never mind, I have pavers coming soon! Then to tackle the roofing part. Properly.

I have been watching auctions for loads of pavers on TradeMe since The Husband started doing his weird patio woodpile thing. There is a paving company that has a bunch of $1 reserve auctions every week for pallet loads of various styles and amounts of pavers. Some go for well over $100 and the cheapest I saw was $40-something. I found a small load of end-of-line pavers that I really liked the look of, worth $252, and got them for $2. Two dollars! That was totally meant to be. Now we just need to pick them up…