Building intentional liberty into your life . . .

We have FUNGI!

Quick Update

Yes, yes, I know I harvested this one early.  What can I say, I got excited.  This is the first shitake that has fruited on the logs I inoculated last December.  I’ve had plenty of fruitings on pre-inoculated logs, but not on logs I inoculated myself. First, that’s a really quick fruiting, so things seem to be going well.  I was a bit concerned, as there have been some false turkey tail ( or some kind of shelf mushroom anyway) growing on my new logs, and I was worried they would take over the whole logs before the shitake had established.  But it looks like I was worried for nothing, because the shitakes are kicking butt and taking names.  Excellent!

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Today’s Harvest (God is Good)

Quick Update

Today was a good day.  The harvest is starting to come in.  We’ve been able to harvest a couple of cucumbers and peppers here and there, and some rhubarb throughout the Spring and Summer.  But the pace is picking up.  Tonight we harvested our white and yellow onions, and a good number of cucumbers and zucchini.  In the next few days we’ll have to harvest rhubarb, green beans, green peppers, cherry tomatoes, more cucumbers and zucchini, more blueberries, and some of our late-bearing blackberries.  Yesterday we harvested about 25 lbs of food in all, and we have probably another 35-40 lbs to bring in over the course of the next week.  So, we’ll need to get busy canning, blanching, freezing,

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God Please Bless These Children

Quick Update

So I was working in my shop yesterday evening when the girls came and asked me if I had any “small bottles”.  My dad-senses immediately kicked in, and I asked them what they were up to.  Apparently they had harvested some blue bells and, soaking them in water, had concocted a perfume.  They now wanted to bottle the product to give to their mother (and to sell the rest).  While the whole project was wonderfully cute, what really got me was the name they came up with for the labels; “The Sisters Perfume”.  With me working from home, and their mother home schooling the girls, our family is incredibly close.  And these girls have a bond that will last for

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Cider from Store-Bought Juice

Blog Posts

I’ve done some things on this channel about wine-making.  But what I’m really most interested in are meads and ciders.  My first attempt at mead was a complete flop, not because I made it wrong, but because the recipe was, um questionable (note to self, basil probably doesn’t belong in mead).  But that’s another story. So I wanted to move into ciders in 2016, but there really aren’t a lot of fresh, locally-sourced apples available in January.  So, based on some posts by Jack Spirko at #TheSurvivalPodcast, I started looking at juices available at the grocery store.  Based on the results I can tell you this can be done quickly, easily, and inexpensively, and it can produce fantastic results.  You’re

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Deer B Gone

SSP YouTube Channel

The deer and rabbits are playing havoc with my perennials and fruit trees.  They’ve chewed the branch tips off of my apple tree, decimated my azaleas, and are generally ticking me off.  And since I’m limited by both geography and the calendar on the, um, methods I can employ to combat these fuzzy marauders, I have to resort to less-than-lethal deterrents. So off to the big-box hardware store I go, only to discover that commercial repellents cost about $27 per gallon!  Wow, there must be some potent ingredients to justify that price.  I must learn more.  What are the active ingredients; let’s see. Hmmm, the first one is putrescent egg solids.  Wait, I’m paying $27/gallon for rotten eggs?!?  Maybe there’s

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