Finding Contentment

The Organic Meat Quest Continues

For the past couple of days I have been searching the Internet looking for small family farms that sell grass-fed beef and chicken. I would also like to get my dairy from a small farm. I just cannot see continuing to make my family ingest antibiotics and an artificial growth hormone that has already been banned in Canada and Europe.

Unfortunately, our area is not very health conscious. Health food or "whole food" stores are extremely hard to come by and require driving to another city, so I knew healthy, organic farms would be hard to find. I have found one for beef and one for chicken, but am still searching for an organic dairy farm that will sell to the public. It would be great if I could find one that did all three!

If you are looking for such a farm in your area, I have found some good resources in the Eat Well Guide and Local Harvest,

We shouldn't need to buy many vegetables as we usually have a large garden every year, and our own chickens produce our eggs. Speaking of which, my husband caught the girls eating their own eggs today. Gross - canabalism! I'm going to have to research this and see what the issue is.

I found some really good animated videos that helped explain to the children why we are concerned about our food supply. Check out The Meatrix.

Inhumane practices lead our family to ban beef in household

The U.S. just instituted the biggest beef recall in our nation's history. When I heard that, I started researching. The whole recall is actually the end result of an investigation by the Humane Society of the United States regarding inhumane practices at a California slaughter plant.

This video is very graphic and very disturbing, unless you just don't care about treating animals in a humane fashion. It shows cows being poked in the eye with a stick, shocked with electricity and ran over with forklifts. Please be forewarned that this video may be inappropriate for young children, and even some adults.

I am a meat eater. I love a good steak or hamburger. And, like many of you, I really didn't want to watch the video all the way through. It was too disturbing, and it would be too hard to continue to eat beef after watching it. But I did. Ignorance is NOT bliss.

Because of other recent concerns about our nation's beef supply and this video - you can read the full story of the recent recall here - my husband and I have decided to suspend our family's beef eating habits. We are searching for a local, family-run farm in North Carolina that we can buy our beef from. And until then we will buying meatless crumbles from the grocery store for use in things like casseroles and spaghetti. Dinners like meatloaf and roast will have to be suspended.

We cannot raise our beef, but this whole incident is just another reason to become as self-sufficient as possible. If anyone has any other ideas for replacing our beef, please share.

New year; new goals

It’s January 1, the time of New Year’s resolutions. If there is one thing I like about a new year, it’s that it seems like it’s a time for new beginnings, fresh decisions and a return to realizing what is really important.

There are so many resolutions I would like to make. But what is a resolution? Usually, I think it is more about something that we would like to become a new habit – or the breaking of an old habit. And to me, resolutions usually mean learning something new, and then putting it into practice.

Because I have so many new things I want to learn in the new year, I am not going to attempt them all at once. Instead, I am going to list them on my sidebar and then mark them off throughout the year as they are finished or become a habit. I may even add more as the year goes on. Most of my goals are centered around homesteading, as we have only been at this for less than a year.

Here are the new things I would like to learn and put into practice this year:

·         Sew

·         Feed my family healthier foods

·         Knit

·         Make soap

·         Start an outdoor herb garden

·         Grow and use herbs

·         Make yogurt

·         Perfect  my bread making

·         Start a container herb garden

·         Start a family recycling program

·         Write a book

Other things that I already know how to do, but need to put into practice:

·         Use a household management binder

·         Add high school classes to our homeschool

·         Paint every room in the house

·         Start clipping and using coupons again

·         Prepare weekly homeschool reports for hubby

·         Plan more field trips

·         Redo budget to reflect new house payment

Homemade powdered laundry soap

I recently promised Melissa D SC that I would post my recipe for powdered laundry detergent. With everything going on I completely forgot. Actually, I'm starting to notice a pattern of forgetting things I was supposed to do lately...

Anyway, I have been making powdered laundry detergent for months, and I would never go back to using store-bought laundry detergent again. With five people in the family we have a lot of laundry, and we go through a LOT of laundry detergent. I can't begin to imagine how much money I have spent on laundry detergent over the past years.

When I went searching for a homemade laundry detergent recipe, I found several people that made the liquid (which is actually more of a gel) variety. But I found that it was time consuming to make and required a large bucket that took up a lot of space.

Somewhere I came up with this powdered recipe. I don't remember where, or I would post it. In all actuality, it probably happened more like my food recipes happen. I find a recipe that looks interesting and then keep tweaking it until I have what I really want. Regardless, here you go.

Homemade Powdered Laundry Detergent

5 bars soap (Fels Naptha, Castille or, in a pinch, Ivory)

1 box of Borax

1 box of Arm & Hammer washing soda (not to be confused with baking soda)

Grate soap. Mix outside in small bucket with other ingredients.

That's it. That's the entire, complicated recipe. I use about one tablespoon for normal loads, and I'll often add a scoop of a generic OxyClean. Nothing else is required.

The soaps I listed are some of the more natural ones on the market, without the perfumes and dyes. Homemade bar soap would also work great. Although the Fels Naptha and Castille are probably best, they are hard to find in stores, so I have taken to using Ivory. Ivory is a moist soap, however, so you may have to let it dry out before grating so it doesn't clump. I have actually been using the lavender scented Ivory. They may have added perfumes for that one, but it sure does smell good in my laundry!

Washing soda can also be hard to find. Although the ingredients are easy to find online, I hate to pay shipping charges. Many of have said they found washing soda near the Borax in the laundry section of Wal-Mart. But although my Wal-Mart carried the Borax, it didn't carry washing soda. After calling everywhere around, I finally found it at a Harris Teeter grocery store. Not the one in my town, but one in a neighboring town. Since they are only about $2.50 each, I bought several boxes to last.

I discovered quite by accident that I should mix the ingredients outside. Pouring large amounts of the powders causes a kind of cloud that probably isn't healthy to breathe in.

This batch has lasted me about six months, and I still have plenty left. This natural laundry detergent, that I know exactly what went into, will save me hundreds of dollars over a lifetime. I shudder to think I once paid for this!

My canning room

In our home, we have a cellar. That's all I can really call it. Half of it is just a crawl space, the other half is full size. It had a dirt floor until my husband laid down a crude brick one. He keeps his "workshop" stuff down there, as well as the gardening and fishing stuff. In the cellar was a tiny 6' by 6' corner room made of cement blocks. I have no idea what it was originally intended for. At first I thought to use it for a craft room, but soon realized that like many cellars, it stayed quite damp all the time. And when it rains the floor gets wet.

We have lived here for years, but soon after we decided to try to "homestead" and live a simpler life, Hubby got the wonderful idea to turn it into a canning room. He's worked on it for weeks - you have no idea how crude this cellar is - and finally announced it ready. Now I am working on filling it up! Because I am new at this, I am not canning enough to fill it up yet. Therefore, I am also buying canned goods from our local Aldi's to fill it up, along with gallons of water. Every time I have a few extra dollars I buy some more canned goods to put down there. I cannot put anything in boxes, or even plastic bottles that might not have as tight of a seal, because of the dampness (and the bugs). But sealed canned and jars that I have made sure are properly sealed seem to be doing fine. My goal is to get a year's worth of food down there, and to constantly replenish it so that it never runs out. I predict that if there is ever a nationwide disaster that shuts down the big stores, I will be one of the most popular people on the block.

I wanted to share some pictures of my canning room. I took the first picture from the inside of the canning room, looking out into the cellar. Each picture after that is just moving the camera in a counter-clockwise direction.

Here is the door. Doesn't look like much, does it?

Going counter-clockwise from the door, here is some of my canned items. Mark built the tables and shelves to put the items on. The room was empty before that. Yes, that's just cement beneath the table. I don't know why it was put there, but I guess it had something to do with whatever the room was used for.

Hopefully, I'll get all those empty jars filled!

Evaporated milk, since the dampness keeps me from putting boxes of powdered down here. The brick wall with the vent is the outside wall of the house (actually, I guess it's probably the foundation). The cement walls were built in the inside.

I need to make sure I start focusing on getting more water!

This is an old baker's rack that was in the cellar when we moved in years ago. It will provide some extra shelving if needed.

And there you have it. On the other side of that rack, we are back to the door. A little tiny room that someone once built for something - now my little canning room!