Member MulberryGardens-Christina
MemberForum Replies Created
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I probably don’t do it right! I have a large clothing tote that is full of seeds in baggies…. smaller seeds get slots in 1 of 5 photo albums to keep them organized. Fruit seeds I put in the fridge.
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I was just thinking on this this week. I’ve always tended to keep a stocked pantry, bc we tend to have lean times most years, and I could stretch our budget by not having to buy many groceries for months at a time. And also with 5 little ones, I always buy in bulk for a cost savings. Putting things up has been a slow and steady process for me. I have to be very intentional bc we have an income of about $500 a week. We’ve also lived years in a 3rd world country, and I have the habit of buying something when you can actually find it and being prepared to not see that item again for a LONG time, if ever.
I calculated that at our current rate of consumption I have 54 weeks of beans and 60 weeks of rice. I’m not sure how long it would last if we leaned more heavily onto those items, like we did overseas. I started learning to can this summer, and have 120ish jars canned so far… I know, it’s baby progress, but I have a hard time learning something new without having someone to do it with! Slowly I’m trying to learn to can new things. I have 3 gallons of lard put up from our first pig we butchered a few weeks ago. If we can keep freezers going, we have that pig, 5 turkeys, and we will process about 60 meatbirds in the next few weeks. I need to learn to can meat. I’m realizing how fast I’m starting to go through my jars and trying to figure out where you put them when they are full, lol! I just finished up my 5th summer garden, so I’m still a gardening newbie, but I have learned a LOT in those 5 years and hope to keep increasing my harvests. I currently have about 5000sf of garden space, and I will try to expand it more over the winter.
How do you figure out how much salt and sugar you need? I’ve just been buying 10lbs of salt anytime I make it to a Costco, and we have a few big bags of sugar, but I really don’t ever use sugar unless I’m fermenting something. So, I don’t know how much I might depend on it in an LCE. To note how often I use it, I just finished off a bag of sugar that I opened over 2 years ago. 😉
I have three 5 gallon buckets of flour, but not much in the way of whole grains. The only mill I have is on my vitamix, so if there’s no power I would be using a mortar and pestal.
I find that since I am not in the habit yet of trying to put up enough food for the year, that I’m still struggling to figure out how much I use of different things. How did you figure out how much you needed of what? 🙂
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This is a great question. With 5 kids ages 10 and under, I haven’t ever stopped to think about having fun on the Homestead, just what needs to get done. I’m an “accomplishment” type personality, and I struggle to stop when there are things that need to be finished… I’m trying to work on that. 😉 I think it is so important to take time to enjoy what you are doing! I used to go horseback riding in our woods when I was a teenager and had a horse here. My husband and I only moved our young family back to this family land a few years ago.
I enjoy family time, reading, fires, working on projects with other people, and depending on the time of year I really enjoy my garden. 😉
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Do you have the Red River clay? I’m on the Texas side a bit west of you, and we have the red clay from the river. That stuff is solid!!!! Water will sit on top of it for a week after the rain in areas we haven’t worked on.
Really for us, we’ve done a few things… we put our chickens on the area we wanted to add garden space and let them eat it down and till a bit. Then I either broadforked and added organic material on top, or I added woodchips while the chickens were still there for them to poop on and spread it around. Generally I have seen 1-2 inches of top soil added on top of my clay this way. Some of the root vegetables and other plants have gotten down to break the clay up in places in my garden as well. I drop mulch from my garden in place around other plants to add organic material as well. No more slipping and sliding or sinking into the clay in my main garden areas! 🙂
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Sent the email! I’m in North Texas, walking in obedience to the Lord and raising 5 awesome kids. We would love to extend our growing season!
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Hi and welcome to the group! We had a 25 foot plastic tent cover from a wedding a few years ago and we hung it over some cattle panels and attached to our southern pea trellis so for the most part it wasn’t touching the bushes and we attached the sides and sheets all around the sides… we put hot water, bricks, and buckets of coals in there throughout the night…. so far it looks like they survived! The rest of the garden looks like carnage….
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I had to intentionally add purslane and lambs quarter…. haven’t found any plantain to add yet. One of these days!!!
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We’re in Texas, but just miles from Bryan County OK, if you are in the south. 🙂
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You know, of all the root veggies, and over a dozen varieties of radishes I grow, I haven’t found Daikon radish seeds anywhere the past few years….
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Do you know if there is anyway to still purchase an AlexaPure? I tried following your link from YouTube last night and it only goes to the emergency food supplies. 🙂
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Where is IceAgeFarmer posting info now? I haven’t seen anything from him since he disappeared off of YouTube back in the spring.
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I think I lean more towards your thoughts on this. I have lived in third world countries where the govt would just decide to turn the internet off for extended periods of time. Electricity and internet were not always assured. It was hit or miss if you could get funds out of a bank or ATM…. sometimes for months. Putting all of my bartering ability completely outside of my access gives me pause. I realize we have many automated online payment systems set up, but I don’t want all of my eggs in one basket. Especially because I currently live in a place where quite frequently our internet is no good. Is it cloudy or windy? No internet….. I’m just not ready to depend so entirely on anything digital. I admit I haven’t looked closely into any kind of crypto currency, mainly because I have not seen a need for it or how it would work functionally in our rural area.
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When we build our house, I’m bring the garden right up next to it, and probably will attach a greenhouse to the Southside. The gardens I tend now are only 50-150 feet from the house, but going out to it a dozen or more times a day that adds up in wasted time. Currently our animals are 100-200 yards from the house, but we’ve been rotating them. If we want to get to the pond, it’s 1/4 mile walk… one goal is to build at least 1 more pond closer to the houses.
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5 of the 6 bushes survived!! 🙂 It got down to 30 here. Brrr!!!
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Thanks! I need to figure our zones out better. I’m hoping to understand this a lot better when we build our own house and can set all the zones up around it.
The only benefit for security to our location is that one corner of the house points toward a river that has no bridges withing 10 miles of us… but our property has roads on 3 sides of it and a 400 meter stretch of it is an open pasture. Not sure the best way to add security to that section. We are adding a barb wire fence on that section this fall, but maybe it would be better to make one strand be electric….