I lied..

Yesterday when I wrote I said you may not hear from me for a little while, and I have to admit I thoroughly enjoy writing and sharing here so... Hello I'm back already!!

I had a five page paper to write today about Agrarianism and Deep Ecology. While I was researching these topics I found a lot of great information. I wanted to share this quote by Rebecca Gould, she says:

"At the moment, in much of the United States, homemaking is looked down upon as a profession. In reality, it is the most important profession and can be the most exciting of all.... The home is our most important social institution and unless we give it the respect that is its due and stop the incessant erosion that is taking place, we will suffer irreparable loss.... The home is the focal seat of education and emotional security. More and more the functions of the home have been taken over by the school, but the school is no substitute, no matter how fine the instructors or expensive the equipment....What mental insolvency has overtaken us that we can allow the core of our culture to be denigrated, weakened and reduced? Far better to burn your house to the ground and live in a cave than to lose the sense of wonder and privilege of making a home" (1).

I love this!  My husband and I get so many sideways looks when we tell people that no, we do not have a full time regular job, and that yes in fact we are okay with that! We work at home, there is not a single moment while we are home where we are not busy doing something. A homesteader's job is never done. Even while we sleep if our chickens wake us up making weird noises we rush around finding warm clothes and a flash light to run outside and check on them. Usually it's only the neighbors dog, but just in case we want to make sure our girls are safe.

If we ever have a child we will definitely home-school.

Next spring we plan to add several chickens to our flock and sell/ barter eggs, we want to do the same with our fresh produce, and we hope to learn how to can fresh produce for ourselves and to sell/ barter. We already sell/ barter our home made health and beauty products so I guess we are off to a good start!

For all of you out there who are currently striving to create your homestead and those of you who are already thriving from your homestead.. keep up the good work!  You inspire me, and I hope to inspire you, together we can re-establish what a home is all about.

1- Gould, Rebecca Kneale. At Home in Nature : Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press, 2005. p 15. Copyright © 2005. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Resource based economy..

A frequent conversations between our friends and ourselves has become centered around a free world. Every topic genre somehow comes back to the idea of a resource based economy.

I fell in love with the concept (I don't make a habit of falling in love with concepts by the way) a few years ago. At our home the name Jacque Fresco is well known, we speak about him and The Venus Project often. I'm posting this twenty minute video because in a nutshell it explains everything you need to know about a RBE (resource based economy); it also answers many common questions that I thought at first and now find myself answering when this topic comes up.

This is a subject that I am very passionate about. I feel that all humans are born with the right to live a life they are passionate about, without having to worry about how much it costs to do so. We live in a world, where from day one, people are concerned about thier babies, mothers, grandmothers and all three of those life stages deserve to be taken care of, without worrying about how much it costs to do so properly.

Why can't mothers get care from doctors who heal people because it makes them happy, not because it makes them rich? What about the mother after giving birth, all children deserve an excellent education that actually enriches their life instead of molding them to fit into society and crushing their passion? The mother of the child should be able to stay at home, with the father to raise their child. If people choose to work they would be working a job that they spring up out of bed to go to because they are excited about it; or they should be able to continue their education learning as long as they want to, about whatever they want to. In a system where every human is given what they need to live happily and healthily people would live longer. I could talk about this topic all day!

So I'll stop now, let you watch the video, and tell you there is so much information and new technologies already in existence that could make this type of life possible... today! I'll post more later, I'm sure, about the technologies I love, and other various aspects that could all fit into this type of world.

No dream is to big, as long as you believe it can come true!

You live you learn, as the seasons change

The frost, a few nights ago, killed the remainder of the plants that were still growing from the summer. We still had Basil, that I would harvest every couple of days; Tomatoes, a few varieties that were growing slow but still growing; and Loofah Gourd, this one really got me I've waited so long to harvest the gourds and cut them into smaller sizes to use in the shower.. there is always next year I suppose.

This is all just a reminder about the cycle of life and how all things come in their own time, not in mine! The lettuce, onions, and carrots seem to be alright so there is hope yet!

Every day in the homestead life we come across a new adventure so the wonderful process of learning never ends. So far we have met all types of obstacles along the way... Like the horn worm..

Image Credit

My husband thought that the horn-worm was a type of caterpillar and we left it eating happily on our tomato plants because it wasn't killing the plant... yet... and we really enjoy the butterflies and Luna moths that hang around the garden

We thought we were sharing in the process of life by allowing this caterpillar to prune our tomato plant and we figured it would form a cocoon somewhere, but instead... it produced a trillion (not literally) egg sacks on it's back and then there were hundreds of these annoying bugs eating our tomato plants until they were completely bare...

You live... you learn... and the chickens had several horn-worm treats once the hubby picked them off our plants, so at least someone was happy about it! =]

Regaurding our first post...

As I said before, homestead life can be very busy. Along with our day to day chores I also write for my holistic healing blog ApotheKayla  and we are full time students! 

So a quick recap of our summer activities is in order since it is officially, almost, Halloween (which is one of my favorite holidays by the way)!! 

First let's talk about the ladies... 

It is so amazing to have been able to watch these creatures grow from 2 day old chicks to full grown layers! Sadly, because we knew nothing about chickens when we began this process, we ended up with two roosters. One of them had to go to ensure safety for the rest of our small flock; however the good news is that the one we chose to keep is doing his job fertilizing the eggs and we will be able to hatch our own chickens. 

My amazing husband used only re-purposed materials to build our cute little chicken coop, which sits at the top of our cinder block, stair stepped garden beds. The birds seem very content with it....

We on the other hand have big, and I mean BIG plans for our new chicken palace that we will construct this winter. Why winter? Well we want it to sit halfway in the yard and halfway in the woods behind the house. We are going to build an earth-ship type chicken house (aka coop) that we can walk around in, and have plenty of fenced in areas (grassy and wooded) for the chickens to roam about in. This being the case we need to wait until the small undergrowth has gone dormant for the winter so we can tell what's-what! 

After making sure our feathery friends were happy for almost twenty weeks we received a startling show of song and dance (from the girls) and a present of two lovely eggs! To be honest it was weird to eat the first few eggs, but now we recognize them as a gift from the animals we love. We feed our birds a mixture of store bought feed, with wild bird seeds, flax seeds, and garlic powder once a day; and they wouldn't be able to claim they are spoiled if we didn't give them treats (veggies, clover, they absolutely love watermelon) every evening before they tuck themselves in to bed at night!

We are very fortunate that we ended up with roosters, although in the beginning we said "absolutely no boys allowed"! The universe begged to differ, and now we can expand our flock!

On to more cuddly creatures...

We brought home our teeny tiny 6 week old kitten Judzia (yes she is named after the one and only Judzia Dax from Deep Space Nine) a few weeks early and I ended up having to bottle feed her. At one point we really didn't think she was going to make it, but we pulled through together!

It wasn't long before we added an additional cat to the homestead! Judzia, we figured, would enjoy a playmate and Tig fits in perfectly. He is also great for keeping pests out of the garden and he loves to lay next to the chicken coop on sunny days!

Needless to say, these cats (like our chickens) are pretty spoiled...

The garden...

So... we live in North Carolina, and this summer we had slight drought in the beginning of the summer followed by a month long streak of continuous rain which broke records for our area. Our garden stayed drenched, many farmers in our area had entire crops go to waste...

We did enjoy a few good looking heirloom non-gmo cucumbers though!

We also enjoyed our very first bowl of non-gmo green beans!

The bits and pieces of the garden that didn't quite make it were a well received treat for the chickens and I swear they smiled when we almost filled their entire coop with Lima bean stalks. They scratched and played in the vines for days!

Some plants survived the wet summer, the basil and fennel are still growing and like I mentioned earlier it's almost halloween! We also have tomatoes that are still growing, there are several varieties including: Purple Cherokee, Roma, Cherry, Grape, and regular red's. They are all heirloom and non-gmo as are all of the seeds we plant!

We tore all of the sad plants out of the garden and re-seeded the beds with a fall crop of carrots, cabbage, lettuce, onions, and we were hoping we may be able to grow some broccoli... but I think the broccoli prefers the warm temperatures of the late spring/ early summer.

We plan on building some indoor greenhouses for our basement, so we can grow certain crops year round and of course get our seedlings to a head start at the beginning of next year..

..oh so many plans..

The husband and I have also been "making over" the basement as an apartment. This has taken a lot of patience but we really enjoy our space down here! We have a lot of work left to do but so far we have a bedroom, living room, laundry area, I have an office (which includes a custom built desk under the stairs), greenhouse space, and the husband has his own work room! We decided to give up apartment living and go into the purchase of a home with my mother and nine year old brother so they live upstairs and we get the basement. Don't worry... when the renovations are complete I will post pictures... plenty of pictures.

So all in all our first summer as homesteaders was successful, we lived, learned, laughed, and loved all while building new dreams and plans for seasons to come! I hope to be able to blog more here, and keep you all up to date with projects inside and outside of the home! Thanks for reading!!

-The Winters =]

Gadget hacks every blogger should know

If you are here then you must have just read part 1 of the gadget posts! Click here if you missed that post and want to catch up.

There are many ways to use the HTML/ Javascript Gadget in Blogger. It is one of my all time favorite Gadgets because it allows me to customize my blog in a way that other gadgets do not.

The first gadget hack, isn't really a hack but some people may not know how to add social media plugins to their blogs.

Add an HTML gadget and find the social media gadget you would like to install, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Instagram. Then copy the HTML code and paste it into the HTML gadget.

If you know the widths of your sidebar customizing this feature should be really easy. For example: if your side bar width is 250 you would set the width of your social media plug in to 230 or even 225.

Okay, now we forward march onto a real hack!

Do you want an image on your blog with cute social media icons that has different areas that click through to different links?

I will now introduce you to Image Mapping!

The very first thing you have to do is set up a private image page (just make the page and keep it to yourself). Then add the image that you want to be clickable. Now, open that page and right click on the image. You should see the image on a page all by its lonesome with a black, or dark gray background. The URL of that page is the image URL. This is very important.

Before you can even think about image mapping you must have your image hosted somewhere on the world wide web. Some people use flickr or other photo hosting websites but since I already use Blogger I just use the image page concept and that helps me keep my blog images organized and all contained within my blog.

So, now click here to use the image mapper on isdntek.com. Its free, and compared to others out there fairly simple.

Why would you want to map an image?The image below is a prime example of why image mapping is so cool! This is the welcome image I use on ApotheKayla.



With the image mapping tool from isdntek.com you paste the image URL into the Image URL field and click load image. Then you will click new link, this is the fun part!

Drag the transparent gray box over the spot on the image that you want people to be able to click on, the Facebook logo for instance, then type in the link to your facebook page!

You can add in as many links as you like. In the image above (the ApotheKayla welcome image) I have seven links mapped in one photo. On the WinterStead welcome image I have two.

This tool is also great if you want to link an entire image, such as the "Got EO" image to the left, to a page, or external link. Just make the gray transparant "hotspot" box cover the entire image.

Also if the image is larger than your side bar once you click make code you can edit the width by deleting the width in quotations and adding your own.

If you want an image without a link in your side bar then you can either click HTML next to Compose at the top of your image page or blog post and select the HTML code for the image you want; or you can get the image URL, load it into the image mapper, and click make code without adding any links!

To instal the code into your layout you add an HTML/Javascript gadget and past the code into that box. If you get frustrated by the extra space created by the code just delete the <br/> (this code means break) from the code anywhere you see it and the extra spaces should be removed.

So technically this blog post has a few gadget hacks in it! If you are curious about more gadget hacks or blog tips feel free to join me, and my other Blogger blogger friends in my Facebook group Blogger bloggers: Learn and Share!

Thanks for reading and until next time, Keep Calm and Blog About it!

A day in the life...

Getting up early with the chickens has new meaning for us now that we actually have chickens! Tending to the garden, chickens, and making natural products for our family can be time consuming for sure. There is a sense of accomplishment however that you cannot replace with anything else. Knowing that you created a place to sow your seeds and watching them sprout, raising chickens from 2 day old baby chicks and building a chicken coop that they seem happy to live in it all becomes worth it at the end of the day! We are the Winters and this blog is where we show you how we transformed our lives from living week to week to living the homestead life. We are working on becoming as self sufficient as possible and would like to share our journey with you! We hope you enjoy following us and that you are able to gain inspiration to start your own garden and possibly raise farm animals. While it all seems overwhelming at first it begins to feel very natural everyday that you do it! within weeks we will have fresh eggs and veggies/ herbs from our garden and we are excited to share with you all!

                                           -The Winters