Archive for the ‘rain’ Category

April Showers Bring ….. Lots of Rain!

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

We’re getting our fair share of April showers this year. We need it, but it’s been slowing down the chicken coop progress the past week or so. Even so, we’ve managed to get a fair amount of work done on it. By “we”, I really do mean Bernie, but I have helped as much as time will allow. You can take a look at how far along we are on the Back to Basic Living website.

Between rainy days, Bernie has to find one dry enough to go to town and mow the lawn at our house there. He’s got his plate full between trying to keep up around here, and do maintenance there. But he fits it all in and never complains.

I made some gift baskets to sell for Mother’s Day. One has a Goats Milk Body Lotion and a Goats Milk Soap bar made with goats milk, honey, and oatmeal. I put them in a reproduction antique enamel soap bowl:

Photobucket

I also have some gift baskets with three large bars of soap. Check them out if you’re looking for a nice Mother’s Day gift. Since I’m selling the soaps and lotions at a lower price with these baskets, I can’t offer any discounts, but I may be able to save you a couple of dollars in shipping if you request it in the notes section when you order. If you want me to check for better shipping, add a note and don’t pay right away – wait for me to get the shipping cost and I’ll bill you via PayPal.

All of the rain is really helping my spring garden grow. It won’t be long until we’ll be eating fresh salads here on the homestead. Next month we’ll be putting in the summer vegetable garden. With the arrival of the chicks scheduled for the middle of May, we should have plenty of fertilizer for it!

Bee Free,
Penny


Posted in basic living, bath products, chicken coop, dentist, handmade soap, homestead, homesteading, rain, spring | No Comments »

Random Stuff We’ve Been Up To

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

This blog and our website have been such great experiences for us. I started the website because when we first considered homesteading, I found lots of site about people who were homesteading, but very few that explained how they got started with it. I figured we were bumbling our way through it, and maybe someone could learn from the mistakes we make as we go and the stuff we do right. I never dreamed we would make so many new friends, and hook up with so many old friends we had lost touch with. It’s been great! Now if we could only get our families to look at it…… they’d rather call and ask “So what have you been up to? Anything new on your website?”

I think I told y’all that Senator Obenshain asked us to get a bunch of bikers together and ride in a parade for him the second weekend in October. Senator Obenshain has been a great friend to us, and we love riding, so we got a crew together and made him proud. Here’s a group shot at the end of it. If you’ve ever been around bikers you know that trying to get them in one place in one time is as easy as nailing jello to a tree, so this picture is missing a few. But it’s a nice picture anyway, so I’ll post it here:

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
I also posted some additional pictures on the VFR website. Check them out!

We were having a lot of trouble with yellow jackets robbing honey in one of our hives. We ended up screening in the bottom entrance, so the girls would all use the top entrance and hopefully be able to ward off the predators a little better. Well, they were still struggling. So I put out some wasp traps that I hope will give the girls a little break. I talk about how to make the traps on The Bee Buzz if you are interested in reading it.

Tonight I made some coffee soap that is supposed to be great at getting rid of cooking smells (like onion, garlic, fish) off your hands. I have always wanted to make those pretty swirl soaps, but I never had much confidence that I could actually do it, so I didn’t try. Well, tonight I decided to give it a shot. I made the swirl color out of cocoa powder. The coffee soap is a dark tan, so I thought the deep cocoa color would be pretty in it. And it probably would. But I learned what I suspected all along. I am swirl challenged. So instead of swirled soap, I have blobbed soap. But it really smells nice. I’m hoping when I take it out of the mold tomorrow and cut it, it won’t look as bad as it does in the mold. But did I mention it smells really nice?

Bee Free,
Penny


Posted in basic living, bees, biker, freedom fighter, home made soap, homestead, homesteading, honey bees, rain, Virginia, wasp, yellow jacket | 2 Comments »

The Calm After the Storm

Saturday, April 21st, 2007

Last weekend we left the homestead in the middle of what felt like a monsoon. We got several inches of rain from Saturday through Sunday. Then on Monday the wind started. It howled for 2 days. The entire North East got hit with this storm and it was brutal.

We worried about the homestead all week. We have big, tall trees and we knew the ground was completely saturated before the winds started. That makes the ideal situation for trees to be uprooted. And uprooted big, tall trees can really cause a lot of damage.

Sure enough when we arrived Friday night, we found two trees down in the driveway and two trees hanging over the driveway, held up because they were entagled in other trees. All of them were uprooted. I put some pictures up on the website. We walked up to the house, got the chainsaw, and cleared the driveway of the two that had fallen. When we got up to the house we noticed 3 more trees that were down in the front yard, and several in the back. This morning we saw there were actually 4 trees down in the front yard. The good news is there was no damage to the house or garage. Well, I guess there was a little damage – the storm door got blown open and beat itself to death. We had to remove that. But we are so very thankful no trees fell on the house.

Needless to say, we spent today sawing up trees and removing the logs and branches. Bernie used his backhoe on the two that were looming over the driveway. He knocked them down pretty easily with the bucket and the boom. We spent about 6 hours clearing out all the trees and then decided to move all the shredder, splitter, boat, lawn tractor, motorcycles, motorcycle trailer, and ATVs into the new garage.

After a full day of working outside, we came inside and I cooked a nice meal of fried deer steak, rice, gravy, aspargus, and biscuits. Bernie helped me clean up the kitchen afterwards and we are both officially plum tuckered.

I am very proud to report the bees made it through the nasty weather just fine. Today it was near 80 degrees, and the girls were just a blur of activity. Tomorrow morning we’ll go down and remove the hive reducers. I think (read hope) we are finished with the really cold weather now, and the girls are just fighting to get in and out of the entrances. I am really very proud of them. They are tough little cookies.

Bee Free,
Penny


Posted in basic living, biker, homestead, homesteading, motorcycling, rain | No Comments »

All Washed Up

Sunday, April 15th, 2007

It was a rainy weekend at the homestead. It was cloudy and misty when we got up Saturday, and it started raining before noon. It rained all day and all night – and was still raining when we left. The two creeks that our driveway passes over were full, and I’m fairly certain they will likely cover the road before this is all said and done. We haven’t had this much rain in quite a while. Hopefully not all of the grass seed we’ve spread around will wash into the woods. It would be nice if at least a little stayed in the yard and sprouted.

Because of the weather, we didn’t get out on the property much and spent the time relaxing a little and keeping a nice fire stoked. I did want to mention that after I checked the bees last weekend and started walking back up the driveway toward the house, a red fox pranced right across the road in front of me. He never even gave me a glance. He sure was pretty, and I couldn’t help but hope he doesn’t end up in our chicken coop once we get settled out there.

The bees are fine. Friday evening when we arrived they were buzzing around the outside of the hives. They’re safely snuggled up in the hives trying to stay warm and dry today.

Bee Free,
Penny


Posted in basic living, bees, fox, homesteading, rain, red fox | No Comments »