The First Time We Saw the Land in Four Months

There had been so much rain for...months.  The road was not passable.  We kept checking back.  And then, last week, unexpectedly we were able to get down the road again!  The last time we saw it, the whole shoulder of the road all the way to the ditch had been scraped clean down to sand.  We had sown a couple of POUNDS of various seeds I'd kept over the years.  We had no idea what we'd find because the floodwaters washed a lot of them away.  But as we neared the property...I became like a little girl again.  The pics can't pick up these without "orton-ing" them color-wise, but it was the only way to somewhat capture it on camera...

JOY!!!!  Flowers waiting like a celebration as we lay eyes on the farm for the first time in soooooooo long!!!

Thanking Jehovah!!!

I Need Your Suggestions About This Website

It's that time again.  I'm feeling the need to purge and organize and overhaul this website.

I'd LOVE your input.  Should I take down the blogroll? It's been up there, obviously, since 2007 and is longgggg. 

You guys are so good at websites yourself, are familiar with homesteading blogs and so on, and know what you like.

I still do not want to include ads on the page, even though I'm not averse to a wish list sidebar if it ever comes to that.

ANY ideas you have, just shoot them out here.  They will not hurt my feelings!  I might or might not use the suggestions, but I will definitely consider any and all of them.

Thank you in advance...now hit me with  your best shot  :-D

Fascinated by Alternative Beehives

Photo source unknown

(This picture was sent to me by my kindred spirit Teri, who is always in tune with the things that make my heart sing!)

We've ordered a good beginning beekeeper book and we are learning what we can through blogs (Hey, Warren!) and books and online information before approaching someone here locally to mentor us when we start our first hives. 

Bees can be so exciting!  Watching honeybees busily glutting on goldenrod and purple loosestrife out at the farm is something I think I could really do for hours...it makes me so happy to see them with plentiful nectar forage, zooming here and there and feasting.

We met a nearby landowner who has hives and who I know will give us the benefit of his expertise in the event we get some of our own hives...hooray!!

I'm writing this short post in order to have a link to alternative hives I haven't heard that much about, and so I can find the links faster. 

The two I find very interesting right now are the Tim Rowe Rose hives and the Oscar Perone hives.  I have a book about the Rose hives and I am really interested in his system and finding anyone who has tried them.
Here are a few videos introducing this method:
First Rose Hive video
Second Rose Hive video
Third Rose Hive video

I am also interested in knowing more about the Perone hive, which mimics a hollow log concept, some parts of which are not designed to be removable.  They say it is designed to have a really large population of bees and takes 2 or 3 years before being fully established enough to have excess honey for human harvest.  Nicole at The Pantry Book built an observation Perone hive and I'm following her experiment with great interest:  PERONE HIVE LINK

There's also a youtube video that goes into some detail about its design and operation.

OK, that's it...just wanted to have these links pinned here for convenience.  If you keep bees, I'd love to learn from any advice you would like to share! 

Dan's GREAT 40x4x4 Raised Beds, Ft Myers Area

This post is SO late!

And I owe HUGE apologies to Dan, the builder of these awesome raised beds!  How do I begin to apologize for a nearly 4-month delay??

These pictures were all taken in July.  July, I say.

Over the past few months we've had multiple internet access difficulties and technical problems.  While the moment is ripe, I'm GOING to post these pics that should have been posted in JULY.

In July, we cobbled together the finances to get a piece of equipment that, we hope, will allow us to clear some of the land without the need for renting the big machines.  We'll eventually have to do that, but it's very costly.  Every now and then we'll do a craigslist search of certain items on our Needs list to see if there's a real bargain to be had.  Riding mowers, bush hogs, tractors and the like are still out of our range even on craigslist.  But under Brushcutters, we found a listing for an old walk-behind with an older German engine and never-used replacement blade.  The price was right so we made the drive to Ft. Myers to see a man named Dan.  He really didn't want to sell, but needed to, and after Jack checked it out the deal was done and we loaded it up.

It had begun to rain.

Little did we know it would not stop raining pretty much for the next three months.

Here's a pic of the brush cutter.  We put $100 or so of repair into it, just what Dan had told us it would need to keep on keeping on.  It was an incredible deal for something that cut like a mini-bush hog that new would have been priced in the four digits and well out of our range.

In chatting we found out Dan was a farmer most of his life and now where he lives he's still growing enough food to put up a prodigious amount for fresh and freezer.  We had brought him cuttings of moringa and chaya, and even though it was raining, we really wanted to see the raised beds he had mentioned building.  In the drizzle and the soppy field, this glorious sight awaited:

These are his 40 foot long and 4 foot wide, 4 feet high raised beds.  I mean there are raised beds and then there are THESE...this one is obviously about to be spread with another layer of fertilizer.

They were simply beautiful!  But that's not all.  In these pics, they are between harvests.  Dan raises starts of whatever will go here first and then plants them.  But they are designed like big 40 foot long grow pots.  You know those all-in-one containers that have food, water, soil, all in a kit?  He did just that, but on a bigger scale.

Down inside these beds, they are angled with a water reservoir (if I understand correctly) and moisture barriers where water and wood don't need to touch.  It's designed to drain efficiently without water waste, and has a built in drip system, all put on a timer.  You plant, set the timer, and do other things.  Lest the photos look out of proportion, these beds came up to my waist!  The posts alongside are there for support, and the beds are designed to alleviate a lot of bending when planting and harvesting.  I just really loved the innovation and detail in these!  It's a whole garden, even though there was an in-ground garden just beyond them.

Here Dan is kind enough to pose in the rain with his handiwork.  His full freezer of every kind of vegetable attests to the success he's had with this system.  It's especially worthwhile because in Florida summers the weather can be anything from drought to deluge.  These beds really make for more accessibility and are so useful.

When asked if he builds for others, he stated he certainly would, from ground up to finished product, for a very fair price.  In a state with a large elderly population and variable weather, and huge suburban areas, I can imagine just one of these huge raised beds, designed to be mostly hands-off as far as maintenance and watering, would go far to feed a family.  I have Dan's permission to list his phone number here in case anyone within driving distance of Ft Myers, Florida, would be interested in contacting him for more information about having one, or more, built.

Dan:  239-785-9329

Please call him...these are so worth seeing and having more built!

Surinam Cherries

Unexpected harvest of Surinam cherries from the small bush we planted years ago , which has never fruited until now!  We have so few plants growing from the past that this was quite a surprise.

Also, one papaya tree fruited and one recently ripened on the tree...it was sweet and delicious!  Last year's harvest was prolific but we could never get to ripen well and had to eat them green (cooked).

So nice to have actual edible fruit from this little Surinam cherry bush, even if it's just a handful

Quick Update from the Ark, Rant Likely

Maybe...maybe I'll be able to type something here before being knocked offline by the ghost in our home DSL/phone lines.

It has rained nearly non-stop since mid-June of this year.

I must be the most boring homesteading blogger out here, because we planted nothing this year, have no real progress to report on developing the farm, and I was working exhausting shifts some of the time while simply recuperating during much of the other time.  I enjoyed making the money, was frustrated about seldom if ever seeing my husband due to the opposite schedules, and my housework didn't just get behind, it just became overwhelming.

My knee has not healed beyond being able to support general movement, which is a HUGE improvement over this spring, when I was in bed with it elevated a good bit of the time, and struggling with chronic pain throughout.  The pain now is not acute most of the time, unless I overtax the knee's abilities..meaning I have to refrain from the normal things such as bending, kneeling, squatting, or walking on uneven ground.  UGH.

I've had a few pity parties in the last months, but they don't help :)  I feel like I'm not just leg-handicapped sometimes but with the slowdown on every front because of this SLOWNESS of being able to physically do much, I feel it mentally does me in sometimes.  What CAN I do, what CAN I do??  Well, God's been so good to have allowed me a job assignment that I was able to do well during these months.  I worked 12 hour days, and yes the leg hurt badly at the end of them, but most of the time not to the point I couldn't get it elevated overnight and repeat the next day.  Days off work were spent mostly in bed with it elevated.

Welcome to the world of no health insurance, and not being able to afford it.  It's my reality.  I have no doubt it's other people's as well.

I joined a program called Epiphany through my GP's office that allows me to pay in $83/month for a very inclusive full basic health "coverage" through my doctor's practice.  It works in cooperation with local labs and such for the basics.  It's not insurance, but it insures that I have the availability of 25 office visits a year, all the standard lab tests, and basic care with things such as mammograms and so on during that time.  And $83/month is not easy for us to afford.  Anyone who wants to argue that a much higher percentage of income should be spent on health insurance simply has not done the maths for a lot of families such as ours who just don't have it, work hard anyway, and don't rely on government programs...and probably wouldn't qualify anyway.

Back to home, enough healthcare discussion...

I'm going to pursue the avenue of being a home companion since my prior job description included more lifting and ability to bear weight when helping clients.  I think the pay will come down somewhat, but at this point I'm going to have to do what I can do.

I'm giving myself permission to get this house in not just good working order, but back on its feet again.  When my longer term client moved out of state recently, it left me in a lurch job-wise.  It's not an easy assignment to duplicate...God had just worked it out very well for those 19 months with this particular client.  I'm very very grateful for that.

I hate the physical incapacity for the reason it slows everything down, and it puts more work on my husband's shoulders in areas that used to be no problem for me to do myself.  He's been especially patient...he's pretty laid back most times and he knows how to pace himself.  I'm the one who loved to get a To Do list and knock the sucker out, fast;  he always paces himself and goes much more slowly, but sometimes more steadily than I do.  Sometimes it was incomprehensible to me not to just "get 'er done," because I don't like to have too many loose strings hanging, too many halfway-finished chores or projects.  These days, EVERYthing is characterized by mindnumbing SLOWNESS.  I am now the tortoise, not the hare.  I'm not digging Aesop all that much.  But it is what it is.  That's my mantra these days.  There has to be a lesson in here somewhere, surely.

That said, I think I'm in the wrong "outside" job field.  Closer than I was, though, before.  I should be in a counseling or social work field, be paid to listen and perhaps problem-solve, find constructive ways to face the world and engage creativity or to comfort.  I'll stop there.  It's just I shake my head at the incompetence or just sometimes the ignorance of people in caregiving, healthcare, and helping fields.  Up close, it's alarming.

I'm distressed, but mostly angry (can you tell?) at the refusal of the younger generation of caregivers to actually Give A Bleep.  About anything.  I just deleted an entire paragraph detailing some examples, for the sake of fearing professional repercussions.  See?  I'm not the PC type person.  I much more a self-motivated self-employment person.  I've seen lying at every level, at the expense of the actual patient.  I will elaborate no further, and even this mention may come back on me. Hmmm.  People, there is so much incompetence in elder care, please watch out!

I'd so love to shout, "Done!"   I haven't found another outlet yet to bring in money.  I throw myself into work wholeheartedly.  I hate being undone by poor management, young (or even older) workers who have no more sense than most little children, and by the erosion of any moral standard in their minds by which they operate.

Whooo, this turned into a rant, right ?  I'm now officially a confirmed old fart! ha

I need to catch up here on the blog, need to find enough computer access to fulfill state paperwork that's due for my certification (job), finish some mind-numbingly slowwww (thank you, knee) tasks around here that still have yet to be finished, and catch up on correspondence.  And rest this leg in between.

I absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVE being here at home, doing "Home" work.  I haven't touched my herbal studies in so long I'm homesick for it.  Prioritizing means I have to chop off some of the more pressing To Dos in order to make a space for that.  It waits.  I long for it, so it motivates me to get some of this other knocked out.  As the mess is cleared, things are cleaned, and the pace is slower and more deliberate, I find stretching our weekly food a fun challenge, love actually seeing and being around my husband, love the fact I'm not at the whims and dramas of other workers half my age.  I get to study my scriptures daily, get to turn on good music, and can make time to read a good book, or three :-)

Outdoors, all is still neglected, or at least whatever "neglected" is while we huddle in the Ark of our house during these long rains.  The bindweed threatens to overtake one of our islands of loquat trees in the backyard, yet in the mornings I simply love the exuberance of tiny blue morning glory-ish blooms that embrace it in its death hug.  We'll tear it off and dig it up at the roots when there's enough sunshine.  Our confederate jasmine bush became so vigorous with all this rain that it pulled down the two trellises and there's no re-propping them at the moment, due to fire ant infestation all around the ground.  The rains seem to have spread the fire ant population to any clump of vegetation possible, so we can hardly just walk around in the grass outside without being their free food.  They are all over the roots and vegetation of the jasmine, so it's all currently flopped over waiting to be set free.  And I haven't SEEN the farm in MONTHS.  SOOO anticipating finally being there again, even if just for a short while!

Well, there's my nonsensical rant for now.  More actual subjects afoot soon, maybe, if the computer will stay on that long.  I miss writing here!  Please drop me a line and let me know how you are...as I said, our computer/internet access has been severely limited and inaccessible for weeks and weeks.  Mostly all I miss is knowing how all you are, and reading some emails.

I hope your approaching Fall is wonderful!

Hope to be back soon.  Next update will be the woefully delinquent post with pictures, about Dan, the man who builds awesome raised gardens.

Be well!

Shalom from the Ark,

Robbyn and Jack

Crowdfunding for Baby Finn

I love this homesteading community and am very pleased to provide this link to one of our own, Michele from Mystic Mud blog. 
 


Her newborn son was born at 28 weeks and has health issues that put a lot of pressure on the family finances. To know this family, as we have come to through her blog, is to love them.

Thank you for stopping by this website to provide an encouraging comment and perhaps even a financial gift to help ease their way.

This is today's way of coming together from long distances for our neighbors. Thank you, from Jack and myself

Click On This Link