Tag Archive | personal: homesteading

Self-Sustained Living: How Big a Backyard do you need to feed a family of Four?

Aug15

T. linked me to an interesting infographic here: How big a backyard do you need to live off the land?

Be forewarned – the original source is a solar panel company (I think), so the infographic is slightly tilted towards “cover your roof in solar panels,” but it’s otherwise a pretty reasonable source.

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Bamboo Flooring, a series of links and thoughts

Jan23

We’re going to replace the floor in most of the downstairs the entire house, eventually, but first is likely to be the dining room-living room-card room area.

We’ve been considering bamboo floor, for strength/aethetics.

Is it really green? from Treehugger
This site is really cranky.

A buyer’s guide from Popular Mechanics

and a color option from Lumber Liquidators.

We know we’re going to go with wood (or grass, wood-like, at least) in these areas, with throw rugs. We’re thinking of doing radiant heating under the floors, since we have to replace all the floors eventually anyway. it’ll be in the reddish end of things, because we both prefer it, and it will not be oak or pine, because neither of us like those for floors (I grew up with pine floors. Just… no).

(some of the links I’ve found in making this post have made me second-guess doing bamboo, but I still have at least a year to make up my mind).

Do you have wood/bamboo/etc floors? Radiant floor heating? Anything you love or hate about it?

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Homesteading: Next Project Up

Jan21

The next project is a small one.

(After I: tidy the sewing job on the door curtain; sand the raw edge on the bedroom hooks)

Okay, two small ones, one much smaller than the other. First: Hang the mirror in the bedroom.

Second: The walls in the bathroom are ugly, and will be until we raise the ceiling. Also, I have a wire shelving unit for over the toilet just waiting to be installed.

I have bought the materials, and now I want to stretch a panel of fabric over a wooden frame (the fabric is a brown swirl on a buff-colored polyester suede) and hang it over the worst wall (the one I pulled the paneling off so we could see how bad it was), then install the wire shelving in front of it.

THEN I’m going to make a little 8″ cube fabric basket with the scraps.
Whee!

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Homesteading: Woodworking skills

Jan21

Ever think you “had” a skill, only to realize what you had was the bare rudiments?

That’s sort of what’s been happening to me with woodworking.

I know how to use power tools. I know how to screw two piece of wood together – or nail, even – without making a mess of things. I can put moulding around a window with reasonable mitered joints. I can make a raised bed with no trouble at all. I can use most power tools pretty well.

Gutting and redoing a house (or making furniture, which is the next step) requires so much more than that.

Skills I need to get a handle on to finish the foyer:
* I need to learn how to use a Kreg Jig (link) to make pocket holes. This is for the overhead bin’s frame, for invisible joins.

(The overhead bin is a storage unit I’m building over the coat-hanging rod)

* I need to learn how to work with a slab of maple (1″-plus thick, 4′ long), how to square it, and how to fill the crack with resin (video link)

* I need to learn how to build a face frame for the bin, and how to hinge the door (the slab of maple, probably in two parts) so that it hangs evenly and looks nice.

When that’s all done, the next skill up is learning to use a router. Because routers are cool.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/641004.html. You can comment here or there.

Apples!

Oct31

It’s October (still); that means there have been things I’ve been doing other that writing.

I’ve been raking leaves and cutting deadwood out of trees.

I’ve been sneaking in that last bit of painting when the rain stops.

I’ve been picking things out of my garden, peeling, cutting, cooking.

I’ve been picking apples.

I’ve been picking apples.

I’ve been picking apples.

We had, when we moved in, one super-productive apple tree that had been overgrown, so made a lot of tiny tart apples.

Over the last two years (last year was a horrid apple season in this corner of the world; we got a warm bunch of days in March, followed by a cold snap and a day of 6″ of snow), T has been trimming the tree, getting into proper apple shape. At the end of this year, it really looks properly like an orchard tree.

But then, when he was cleaning out the hedgerow (he’s been cutting grapevines out of everything for two years now; they choke out anything they touch), he looked up.

And realized that those green round leaves… were apples.

We’d known we had one apple tree in the hedgerow.

(note: this is what Wikipedia thinks a hedgerow is. Around here, it’s a lot more haphazard. Think of ten feet wide, length of your property long of planted trees allowed to go wild, underbrush, thorns, and trouble. But it slows the wind right down!)

And that apple tree turned out to be two, hung with so many small apples that it looks like an interior designer’s idea of “apple fronds” or something.

But it turns out we have FOUR.

We gave a 55-gallon barrel of apples to a friend for cider. We’ve been giving away copy-paper boxes of apples to anyone we can get to take them.

And we’ve been cutting, coring, cooking down, saucing, and canning apples.

And canning apples.

and canning apples.

Send help?

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Seeeeeeeeds!

Feb14

It’s the time of the year when we start planning our garden. This time of year, the snow and the slush demand some thinking about the warmth and the nice weather to come.

Also, seed catalogues have the best sales in February.

So, the T. and I were all set to put together an order last night – just needed to look through the box of freecycled seeds I’d picked up Tuesday – and then.

We opened the box.

O_O

Squash, at least three types
Four types of melons.
cumin, basil, more basil, parsley.
Peas, beans, GARBANZO beans, peas. Beans.
Posies. Loads and loads of posies.
Spinach. Lettuce. Two types of Kale.
five types of tomatoes
tomatillos
habeneros
bell peppers
Turnips, carrots, parsnips, rutabega, BEETS
Onions.

We’re gonna need a bigger garden.

They’re not new seeds; they’ll probably have a much lower germination rate than fresh seeds. But that’s okay. There’s enough overkill in there to allow for a rate as low as 10% on everything but the root veggies.

Guys, this is awesome.

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Tracking Food Waste

Jan21

I blogged a year or two ago about a blogger who posted Food Waste Fridays. I can’t find the link right now, but I’ve just found this article from heifer.org.

(Ah, here: Food Waste Friday)

We don’t waste a lot of food, and what we do, we usually compost. But it still bothers me.

Do you have any tricks for minimizing food waste in your house?

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