Homestead Update 12/30/2017

The weatherman is predicting night time temperatures in the single digits for the next few days so I have been preparing. I know you Northerners are accustomed to these temps and you stay prepared but it is rare for us to be in the single digits. I pulled my two generators out and cranked them up and let them run making sure they were ready. I bought 15 gallons of Kerosene for my heaters and lamps. It is a big pain getting kerosene out of a 5 gallon can into these items so I bought this fuel pump. I had one that is a manual model but it doesn’t work too well, but this battery model is the cat’s meow! Just flip the switch and it pumps away. I wish I had bought one sooner. I wrapped my outside water faucets with insulation to keep them from freezing. The faucets are the only thing I have exposed, I hope I covered them enough!

I worry about Jethro and Wilma in these bitter temps, but I have made them as comfortable as possible. Brandi goes out with me in the mornings when I feed them and she wears her insulated vest for two reasons. One is to keep warm, but the other is to have a bright fluorescent color to dissuade the Coopers Hawks from swooping down and snatching her up. Without her vest, she looks just like a rabbit running across the yard! I take her out and check all around before I put her down, but I still keep her close to me. Keep prepping everyone!

Homestead Update 5/7/2017

I have been working around the yard this week planting new shrubs and perennials. I received another order from Hostas Direct and they came in perfect condition. It is hard to believe I can open the shipping box and find 8 perfect specimens like this. I also bought some hostas and other plants from the FFA chapter of a local high school and they were really nice. I planted some tomatoes and peppers in the new raised bed I made last month and they seem to be doing well despite the 6 inches of rain we received last week.

Sweet Thing has been working on some crafts so she made this picture frame. I cut the wood and sanded it down then she white washed it, added the twine to hold the picture, and added some decorative accents. She is going to donate several of these to our local Bee Keepers club to auction off at our yearly fund raiser.

She made some vinyl letters and designs to stick onto these drink glasses. One of those machines I showed you in her sewing room printed these on vinyl and cut them out. Don’t ask me how. I may think of some ideas she can do for me with that machine!

I was in my shop last week making 3 more swarm traps to put out and Oreo and Kensey came in to help me. I have 22 traps out now and 4 of them have bees in them but I haven’t brought them in yet. I might get one or two tonight and bring them in and transfer them in the morning. The past two days have been sunny but the wind was blowing 30 MPH gusting to 40 MPH. Not good conditions for working bees, that wind puts them in a really BAD mood! I don’t like the wind either. I’ll keep you updated on events around here. Until then, keep prepping everyone!

Homestead Update 12/24/16

Tonight is Christmas Eve and Santa stopped by the homestead to have dinner with all of his little friends.

Sweet Thing has the table set with her festive holiday décor so Santa can dine with reindeer and bears.

His other friends are Elves, Snowmen, and a Christmas mouse!

Sweet Thing has also been busy making her world famous Chex Mix. She worked three afternoons and made 30 gallons of mix.

Here is some of it all bagged and all ready to go. A lot of people really look forward to her Chex Mix!

Brandi helped her make the Chex Mix so now she is asleep beside me in my recliner because she is all tuckered out! Keep prepping everyone!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Homestead Update 5-28-16

I am back to working my usual 70 hour work week for this time of year so I didn’t have much time for chores around the homestead, but I did want to write a quick update. Not only am I working long hours, when I do have a little time off when it rains, I have still been going to Arkansas to get my parents house ready to move into and check on my sister after her snake bite. She is doing much better now, but she was in the hospital 7 days receiving intravenous antibiotics. I asked her if the bite hurt and she said yes, it burned like fire anytime the pain meds wore off the first few days!

We needed to make a quick, one night, trip so we decided to take Brandy with us on a “shake down” cruise to see how she traveled. Low and behold, she was a perfect traveler! It is a five hour trip and she slept most of the way down, and when we came home she did the same thing so apparently riding makes her calm and sleepy. When we arrived at the new house, she ran and played and was not bothered in the least that she was in a strange, new place.

Those are volunteer tomatoes that came up in a large pot right out of our back door. The upper picture was taken only a week prior to the picture below, the third picture was another week later, they are really growing. We always have these volunteer tomatoes come up. I have read instructions on saving tomato seeds where you wash the pulp and dry the seeds on top of a refrigerator. I’m sure that works fine, but we don’t go to that trouble. During the growing season, when we see a tomato we don’t intend to harvest for any reason, we leave it on the vine until it gets very overripe. We then pick the tomato and drop it into the soil in the pots. We had literally dozens of small plants emerge this Spring. We gave some away and I replanted the rest after I put new potting soil in the pots. That is good, Miracle Grow potting soil by the way, it is much better than cheap, Dollar Store potting soil. You could do the same thing in a garden, and if you wanted to rotate locations in the garden to help reduce disease pressure, you could simply drop the overripe tomatoes in the location you want them to grow the following year. Simple and easy, just the way I like it. More to come tomorrow. Keep Prepping everyone!

Homestead Update 5/1/2016

Well, it looks like we are going to be keeping Brandy after all. You look at this picture and say “Ah, Isn’t she a sweety.” No, she is not! She is so bad! I know why she was dumped. She bites and chews on everything, including our fingers. I understand that is partly from being a puppy, and partly from being a Terrier. We are trying to break her of the habit, I hope we make progress soon, I can’t stand to loose much more blood. We are also working on house breaking her and we are probably 80% there. Hopefully we will be 100% very soon.

I had to work on getting my parent’s house ready for them to move in, and we are almost there. This is the dining room after I added the beadboard and trim. I think it looks pretty good.

I was looking at my deer browse area in the back of the property and saw a lot of bees working the blooms. As I was watching that clover I noticed lots of Bumble Bees feeding there.

As I was out working, I saw this field, probably 80 acres, just covered in some sort of Winter crop which was blooming heavily. I sure wished this field was closer to my hives, they could do a lot of foraging there!

I saw a recipe in a newspaper that looked interesting, so Sweet Thing fixed it for me. This is a mix of Jalapenos, red and orange bell peppers, with a clove of garlic all steeped in a mixture of vinegar and sugar. Man that stuff is good! I could eat this every day! Keep prepping everyone!

Homestead Update 4/24/2016

I was heading to town Wednesday and I saw that some low-life, scum sucking, sub-human piece of pig crap dumped this puppy on the side of the road. I picked her up and knew we couldn’t keep her so I headed to the Humane Shelter to drop her off. I arrived there at 8:30 and they didn’t open until 10:00. I needed to get to work so I dropped her off at my Vets office for the day. We intended to find a good home for her. We kept her a few days and decided to keep her, so we named her Brandi. An indoor dog was one of the last things we needed right now, but we couldn’t bear to take her to the pound.

On the home front, I went to my bee yard and discovered one of my hives had swarmed. Darn! I split this hive twice this Spring and they swarmed anyway. I can’t believe how many bees came out of that hive. The swarm was 20 feet in the tree so there was no way to get them back. I have more to talk about but I just got in and I need to shower and get to bed, I have an early day tomorrow. Keep Prepping everyone!

Homestead Update 4/2/2016

I managed to put out some more swarm traps this week for a total of 16. As you can see this one is about 15 feet in the air. I think I have them all positioned from 9-15 feet high. It’s not easy to haul them up that high pulling on a 1/4 inch rope thrown over a limb, let me tell you!

I went on YouTube and copied this idea for a table saw sled to cut hand holds in bee hives.

It makes hand holds almost as good as factory made. I couldn’t cut them on my saw nearly as fast as the videos showed. I don’t know if my saw was underpowered or maybe I was using the wrong blade. In the videos, it takes 5-10 seconds to cut this out. On my table it takes 60 seconds because I have to “hop” the sled on the blade instead of just using a steady cut. Never the less, it got the job done.

Spring seems to be in full force now and my hostas are coming up. Take a look at the bright yellow leaves on this specimen. I forgot the name of it, but it sure is pretty in the early Spring.

I noticed a row of these trees blooming at a park. I walked under them to look and sure enough, the bees were working like crazy.

I’m not sure what it is. Probably a sort of Japanese Cherry if I had to guess. Anybody out there have any ideas?

I also came into possession of this aluminum up-right scaffold/ladder. It doesn’t look too safe does it? It has a platform that extends from 9 feet to 14 1/2 feet. I had one of my employees climb up at 9 feet like you see here. He said “this is not too bad.” We raised it up to 14 1/2 feet and he said “Uh-Uh, I don’t like this!”

It is called a Tallescope and they are used extensively in the UK, particularly in the Theater business. I couldn’t find any information about this item in the US which leads me to believe OSHA probably has banned their use. There are supposed to be 2-4 outrigger legs on the sides which this one is missing. I think I can buy some that will fit so that will make it much more stable.

This is one in use in a theater and those outrigger legs do indeed make it look much more stable.

We were visiting another couple last week and we got to meet Albert. The owner whipped out a bottle of Visine and put drops in his eyes and I said “what in the world is that about?’ She said he had some surgery for a condition called “Cherry Eye” and it messed up his tear glands, therefore the eye drops. She said they spend more on his Doctor bills than they do on themselves. I know the feeling! Until next week, keep prepping everyone!

Homestead Update 12/19/2015

I haven’t done much actual Homestead activity this week, but I have been Christmas shopping! I always buy myself some nice gifts for Santa to bring me.

This is a Porter-Cable 18 gauge 20 Volt cordless nailer. I haven’t seen a cordless one before and I just happen to have 2 other Porter-Cable batteries that will fit this tool so I just had to buy it. I’ll let you know how it works out after I try it on a project.

We shopped at a local flea market/junk store and he sells hand-made metal objects-DE-art. This is a metal catfish sculpture that is about 4 feet long. I sure would have liked to have it but it was out of my price range.

Two weeks ago, I had a bag of apples going soft. I intended to throw them in the woods behind the dog pen and just for kicks I threw some of them in the dog pen. Jethro loves apples! I kept feeding him one apple per day until the bag was gone. The first day that I didn’t give him an apple, after I filled his feed bowl, he just ignored it and stood up on the fence looking at me as if to say “hey, where’s my apple?” I had Sweet Thing buy a cheap bag of apples and I give him one each morning. You can see from the picture, he really munches them down.

We went to a Christmas dinner party at the home of one of my clients. He had this big tray of 2 inch thick fillets which he cooked on a Big Green Egg and they were delicious. That Big Green Egg is on my wish list. They sell a generic version at Lowe’s for $300 so I may end up with one of those someday.

Sweet Thing used some big cans of mixed nuts in her World Famous Chex Mix. After removing the labels, she then took those empty cans and covered them with Christmas paper and added bells, bows, and ribbons. I think they look really nice for gift giving!

I went next door and visited with Little Bubba today. My neighbor said I can’t have him back! His Granddaughter loves him and they are best friends now. I think he just might wander over to my shop for a visit every now and then. Keep prepping everyone! Oh, I almost forgot our Christmas tune, enjoy!

Homestead Update 12/13/2015

There hasn’t been much activity around the homestead the past two weeks. I did manage to put up this Rubbermaid Accu-track rack system for hanging up weed eaters and garden tools. I got tired of having all of my garden tools leaning in a big pile in the corner of my workshop. Invariably, anytime I wanted a particular tool, it would be all the way in the back of the stack and I would have to move every other tool to reach what I wanted to use. These tracks have sliding holders for quick adjustment and they feel nice and sturdy.

These are some runaway goats I encountered back in October. I was driving down a turnrow of a field I check each week and I saw some animals way towards the other side of the field. At first I thought they were small deer and as I got closer I realized they were goats. I had seen some farm animals at a house I pass that is about 1/2 of a mile from this field so as I was leaving I stopped at that house. I told them if they were missing some goats, I knew where they were. He said those goats came from a house about a mile further down the road. They had been missing for 2 months but no one had been able to catch them. He told me the owner said if anyone could catch them they could keep the goats. HUMMM! I wonder if I could take some t-posts and cattle panels and make some sort of trap? I bet I could come up with something if I could get motivated enough.

The man I was talking to had these cattle behind his house. I think that black one is just about ready to go to the freezer isn’t it?

I have an update on Little Bubba. The day after my first post of him, I was telling my neighbor about him. He replied “I have been seeing some mice around my house and my granddaughter has been asking for a cat. How about I take him to my house?” He took him home the next day and now he spends most of the day inside the house and sleeps out under the carport at night. He just settled right in over there so he has a good home after all. Keep prepping everyone!

How Many Syrian Refugees Should We Allow Into The USA and The Newest Resident of The Homestead

There has been a lot of discussion in the news this week about allowing 10,000 Syrian refugees to invade come to the USA. We have been told Oh, most of them are widows and orphans so there is no need to be afraid. Only one in a thousand might be a terrorist willing to strap on a suicide vest and kill you and your family while you are out at a ball game or shopping or eating dinner. Well, I think that meme above puts it in perspective doesn’t it? I’m not going to eat any of those M&Ms! Even if there are NO terrorists mixed in with them, we have enough people in this country already living on government assistance without bringing in more. Let them stay in the neighboring countries around Syria. They are all Islamic states and would be a better fit than here in our country!

This is the newest resident of the homestead, Little Bubba. He is a probationary resident that I have granted temporary asylum. If President Obama can bring in thousands of Middle Easterners and allow untold millions of third worlders to stream across our Southern border and then grant them citizenship, then I guess I have the authority to grant citizenship to Little Bubba! He was dumped out at a friend’s house, and my friend said he couldn’t stay there. He was going to take Bubba to the animal pound and I just couldn’t stand to see him treated like that. Bubba is such a sweety, I hope everything works out so he can stay. He seems to be content to stay out in the open air area of my barn so I think he will be OK there. My other barn cats are still taking their time getting used to him. The first couple of days, they really hissed and growled at him.

Today I noticed them touching noses so maybe they are not too upset about Bubba invading their territory. We will just have to give it a little more time to see how it works out. If I decide to let him stay, I will take him to the vet to be neutered and checked out to be sure he is healthy. You can tell from that picture, Kensey is much bigger than Bubba. I think Bubba will grow a little more, but he will always be a small cat. I’ll let you know how it goes. Keep prepping everyone!