Community Leader HeidiRainCountry
Community LeaderForum Replies Created
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If you have plenty and you have chickens, feed the SCOBYs to them, since I never use a SCOBY to start vinegar, I just toss any of the ones that form to my chickens and they eat them right down. Very healthy for them
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Dehydrating in slices is a goo option but funny thing about dried citrus is it is one of those that loses quality quickly in storage so you would want to use up within a year. Since lime peels can be pretty bitter, you would want to peel first but I think powdering the dried fruit would be great for adding flavor. I have a bunch of grapefruit I am considering doing that very think with (they were gifted to me). You can also freeze or juice.
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I can see a lot of great replies but not enough time to read through them all so I apologize for that.
We have a solar oven and have used it for a good number of years. The tricky part for us is, well, Rain Country means very little sun and even on a nice day in late fall through early spring, it can still not be strong enough to thoroughly cook a chicken but is fine for cooking steelhead or salmon. So it is all about planning and it really only gets used during the three months of summer. Our wood stove is our main cook in the 8-9 months we have to keep fires burning and in the summer it is often just easier to bake in the toaster oven connected to our solar power. We also have a Winnerwell stove top oven for baking breads, pies, and biscuits and a gas run Camp Chef oven, We have a Winnerwell camp stove we plan to buy the stove pipe oven for as well. I think we have a total of three camp stoves we picked up at garage sales, I know we paid only $1 for one and it works great. Though we do not do this much, there is also outdoor open fire cooking and then of course the BBQ.. I am sure I am forgetting something!
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If there is any root left on the elderberries, they will be back with a vengeance, haha
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No kidding. We are very protective of our chickens and have built them a very sturdy coop with a concrete foundation and floor. All the areas they roam in are totally fenced in but that still does not keep all dogs and especially not cats, out. It has been 6 years and we still have yet to lose a single chicken to racoons or anything else but we have had them get terrorized by neighborhood pets.
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Patrick is 58 and I will be 57 next month. The only prescription drugs we were on was thyroid medication but we quit them over 10 eyars ago now and are doing great. Using nettle to nourish our thyroids and replacing Over the Counter meds like pain killers and allergy medicines with herbs, we are doing great! Getting older is a fact of life and we cannot life for ever and we will age but we want to be as healthy as we can be until the LORD takes us home 🙂
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Yep, we have. Wind is not a good option for where we are right now and even water but water would be doable on either of our other two pieces of property.
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We use both public power and solar but our solar set up we put in place ourselves and is totally independent from public power. We are not grid tied at all. Patrick installed separate solar outlets in our house close to the public power outlets so we can switch over anytime we need to but simply unplugging from one and plugging into the other. This has worked great for us especially here in rain country where we have near constant cloud cover through the winter months so we can run very little off solar during that time of year. This is also why we have so many back up options. Power outages are common here but for now we still like the luxury of having the public power when need be.
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That is beautiful! I love green! I would love to have a wood COOK stove some day but that will likely be something we use in our off grid location, for now I use our regular wood stove in the living room to cook and bake most things during the 8-9 months of the year we keep fires burning.
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Yes, we all have to work in some form. For me, ever since before I was married I made my own jobs. I taught dance (mostly Ballet, first starting in a gym I worked at part time (I had been trained in Ballet since I was 5) . When we got married we bought a house with a big enough rec room to convert into a dance studio so I was able to teach from home. A few years later we were able to double the size of that room as my business grew and I was able to also learn martial arts by exchanging lessons for space rent. Once I had my black belt I was able to start teaching my own classes. Eventually I retired from all that (after 28 years) and decided to take a step of faith and start a youtube channel which expanded my reach for the hand crafted items I had been making and selling locally for years. Youtube then opened up other avenues for passive income as well. So, I get to call the shots on what job I choose to do and what suits me in my current stage of life. To me that is a form a freedom
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