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Long over due update! We added livestock (and poultry)!

Non-gas operated lawn mowers! It is hard to believe I am so far behind on my blog posts.   Spring is a busy time on the homestead, especially a first spring!   Two and a half inches of rain last night in about a two hour period has given me some time this morning to write as it is too wet to get much done!   So much has happened in the last two months, I will probably on touch on most of it in an attempt keep this post readable!   First, we lost our bee hive from last year, the bees ate the stores in the middle of the hive, all the way to the top, but did not eat the outermost combs.   From the looks of it they ended up starving themselves out because they moved too far from the edges for them to reach them with the cold weather.   We were able to salvage about 15 lbs of honey and a pound or so of wax out of the dead hive. We also managed to harvest a couple containers of virgin honey comb. This years honey harvest In this picture you can re...

Applying for a Grant, Kinders, a Web Page and Bee Poop

It is hard to believe that I am now less than 3 weeks away from signing out of a military installation for the last time and going to the farm live full time. Things have been pretty busy since the last post, I did make it home for a weekend, but the weather was still to bad to do much outside with too much snow on the ground.   On a good note I did got a lot of my woodworking and pen supplies organized and set up while I was home and we got the Saltwater Aquarium stocked with some fish and invertebrates, still 6 months to a year out from coral however but after it being in storage for over 6 years it was nice to have it running again. Most of the work on the farm lately has been behind the screens, working on a business plan and financials in order to apply for a grant from the Farmers Veteran Coalition (https://www.farmvetco.org/).   We are applying for the grant to help pay for running electricity to the farm property, the cost of which will be about $4200.   We ...

Anyone Can Make Sour Dough Bread without Yeast

Making my first sourdough bread So, I have always been interested in trying to bake bread, but I have never had much luck with commercial yeast and getting my dough to rise.  Not sure if I would use water that was too hot or what, just never had much luck and it discouraged me from continuing on.  Then when surfing homesteading sites/blogs I kept on running into blogs about making a sourdough starter, it piqued my curiosity, so I started reading more on it.   Turns out there was a way to make bread without a commercial yeast!  As I am very much about self sufficiency and eventually want to culture my own yogurt and cottage cheese, this looked like an ideal place to start, learning to bake bread and gain some experience with cultured foods.  Making a sourdough starter is surprisingly easy but time consuming in that it takes about a week from start to finish.  While that sounds intimidating, the truth is it only takes a couple minutes a day....