What makes me me.

How often do we as a culture wonder "who am I".... I passed my bookshelf, looking for something to read. I slowly went over the bindings of the books with my eyes and realized the next time I wonder that question, I will come here. What is on those shelves are like looking into my soul and seeing who I really am. What I cultivate within my mind.
My shelves are loaded with books in categories. I have herbal reference books on my top shelf,for easy access. Followed by homesteading, farm, and various animal care books. My next shelf holds many titles on nature; field guides, study of plants animals, botany, gardening, plant spirits and herbal majik. This is than followed by books on spirituality; in Christianity, Judaism,Native Americans and various other schools of thought including metaphysical studies. My next shelf is on  homeschooling, and child rearing. The next has manuals of all kinds-mostly belonging to my husband as well as relativity theory, physics, biology and string theory. Next comes the stories....The giver, The Shack, the Celestine Prophecy, civil war novels, Native American novels, historical fiction, Madeline L'Engle, J.R. Tolkin, C.S Lewis, Jean Auel, the classics, ...The list goes on. Then there are magazines on herbalism, homesteading, and home school. Montessori manuals and other curriculum items. Then Last, but not least, my favorites.(usually kept on the floor near my bed);My tattered bible, The Course on Miracles, the Vines Bible Dictionary, and the Metaphysical Bible Dictionary. Oh, and the three latest books I am currently reading: Natural birth control, Nurturing the child's spirit; a guide to non-secionarian classrooms, and Bygones( novel on Amish life). So that in a nutshell is who I am. I literally am what I eat. And I love to gobble up books.

Master bread rercipe

A few people have asked for this recipe so here it  is:

5 1/2 CUP whole wheat flour
2 cups unbleached whitte or fresh ground kamut (my new favorite)
1 tblsp salt
2 tblsp yeast
1/4 cup vital wheat gluten
4 cups luke warm water

mix it all up and let sit on counter over night or for 8 hours. It will rise and then fall. then use or put in fridge for up to 5 days.

I use this recipe for bread, doughnuts, pitas, pizza douigh, cinnimon bread, or sticky buns. It is great to have in the fridge iwhen you are in a pinch, as I am sometimes too busy for fresh bread. If you roll it out really thin, you can also use it for crackers. I will post the use of it for doughnuts soon. Enjoy!

gardens, gardens, and more gardens....

I love gardens! Flowers and herbs and veggies.... I just love them all. And because you just can't have too many gardens I put in another one! I made what is called a knot garden, though my husband says 'not' garden, because right now it is just a design, not a garden. But I beg to differ. It also doubles up as a meditational walking paths. The Chickens sure love it!

Here are some pictures of the other gardens in the beginning of their full bloom.This is my flower garden out front.This is a side view of the Home Vegetable gardenThis is my newest herb garden.
This is the children's gardenHere is Willow hiding in the peas.This is my first herb garden. When we first planted it the fig tree was only 2 feet tall. Looks like I will be needing to relocate these herbs to the new garden next year!This is Faith's little Vegetable patch. She worked hard on it, and now is finally seeing the fruits of her labour.

Picken' Taters

This weekend brought 100 degree weather, and time to pick potatoes. I think it worked that way so God could show us what it would really be like to be farmers, no fooling here! But even with the scorching temps we had a great time and harvested quite a crop. We guestimate somewhere around 300+ pounds of potatoes. The ants were not too bad this year and despite the shorter grow season due to the hot sun and no rain, we did quite fine. I tell you it just goes to show how little we really have to do with anything....All we did is take the inititive to put those potatoes in the ground. With only the help of God himself(we only got 4 inches of rain in the entire 2 1/2 month grow period)We got a magnificent harvest, and even got to share the work with family! We put on a little contest for the kids to see who could get the biggest potatoe from each type-Yukon Gold, purple Magesty, and Reds. It kept them motavated! Nathen won the prize for Yukon Gold and Purples, Calob won for The Reds, and Faith won best seed potatoe and hers will be the best of the next generation. There was a $1.00 prize for each catagory. The kids really rocked today. We were out of there in 2 hours.

here is a picture of a cluster of taters still on the plant.These are jsut some pictures of the rest of the feilds, the corn and beans. We have quite a harvest still ahead of us! Praise God for his boutiful goodness to us!

Chickens, I only cried once.

Well we butchered our chickens. I will spare you the pictures I will only write about the gory details. I hated looking at them. I did not like feeding them, and watching as I let them out of their pen and instead of eating free-range like normal chickens they would just leave their pen to go to the other feeding trough, or worse just sit and rest until their next meal came to them. It was very different then our other birds, but when all was said and done and our first meal was served it was all worth it. It was 12 pounds of organic-I-know-where-you-came-from-I-know-what-you-did meat. When the butchering started, having done this all before, I thought it would go off without a hitch. It did for the most part, though my oldest son and husband were both busy when one of the birds decided not to die. So my son asked me to hold it while he went to get a hatchet, because the beast refused to die. So here I am holding its feet while it flapped out of the cone and into the yard. I knew better then to let it go, so I proceeded to yell "I shouldn't be doing this!" while my husband tried not to laugh. I did start to cry though and then they sprang into action, and got the bird from me and killed it thoroughly. It took me a moment to compose myself and my daughter asked later "Why did you cry, mommy?" and I simply said"Because no matter how old I get I will always still be a girl." She understood that and went about her way. I must add she was the first to rush to my aid and hold me until I felt better. She is quite the "girl" herself.
We made it through though. Butchered nine birds by noon. And I must say, they were between 8-12 pounds and had a lot of fat, which is great when you roast one because they are so tender and delicious. All-in-all I am glad we did this, I might even do it again now that I am looking at the meat in my freezer. One thing I would change: Do it in the fall. Other than that, if you can overlook the way the birds look, which is not like any other chicken(quite disturbing in the way they eat), but they do produce good meat. The cost: about .50 cents per pound. We fed them only organic,non-medicated feed and payed about .99 cents per bird. The cost of feed being about $14.00 a bag because of it being organic/non-medicated. It was worth the extra cost.  I am happy with the results. We will try butchering some of our excess laying birds in the fall and compare the quality of meat before we embark on the cornish/barred rock meat birds again. But there is always Rabbits.....