Building Your Homestead Community
Early this week I noticed one of our lambs wasn’t putting on weight and was listless. I checked out Mama Sheep and realized that Mama has a damaged udder on one side. The little lamb wasn’t getting enough milk because her bigger twin brother was hogging it all.
I contacted a close friend who has a LaMancha dairy herd and asked if she has milk to spare. “Of course! Come on over.” When I got to her farm, she told me that because she has a bunch of goat kids to feed she asked her mom, who also has a dairy herd, to bring over a gallon. I spent an hour visiting with both of them, looking at goat kids, talking about our homesteads and how many animals were still due to deliver. They also told me about a better nipple to use to feed the lamb. I wasn’t familiar with the design, so she went to house and came out with one for me to use. I paid for the milk and nipple and left feeling much better about the lamb’s chance of living.
Miss Susie Q filling up on a bottle of milk. She wanted to hold the bottle herself.
Later that evening, while giving Miss Susie Q her bottle of warm goat milk, I thought about the 3 farms working together to save one lamb. This is my homestead community of support. It includes friends, fellow farmers/homesteaders, neighbors, relatives, and some old guy who lives down the road. I need these fellow homesteaders in my life. They need me and what our farm provides. We often have a stranger stop by to talk with Bob about something farm-related. His reputation as an agriculture teacher is well known and sought after.
For thousands of years, agrarian communities have been strong and economically diverse. Local dairy farms provided milk, butter, and cheese. The orchard grower sold cider and apple jack. An elderly couple supported themselves raising and selling chickens and eggs. A single mother took in laundry, made and sold soap, or served hot meals. Another family baked bread early every morning to sell to neighbors.
Enter the industrial revolution and globalization and suddenly we are all consumers, not producers. We don’t need the local dairy farm because we buy our milk and butter from a grocery store. Food is frozen, then popped into the microwave. We don’t make anything that our neighbors want to buy. Our neighbors are in the same boat.
But, we are facing a new and frightening world, where travel and contact with other people are discouraged. Stores have shortages; besides, we don’t really want to take our families to a big, crowded store. People are told to stay home from work, often without pay.
It’s time to rebuild our communities.
I challenge each of you to consider “what do you have in your hand”?
Here are a few ideas:
· Eggs to sell
· Bread baking
· Cake and cookie baking (birthdays still happen)
· Mending and sewing
· Chain saw/small engine repair
· Sharpening services
· Vegetable/fruit plants to sell
· Car repair
· Painting
· Cider press
· Soup by the quart
· Fishing worms and minnows
· Essential oil salves and balms, homemade soap
· Sawmilling
· Butchering on the homestead
· Raising chicks to sell
· Carpentry
· Firewood
· Building wagons to pull behind bicycles or small vehicles (ATV’s, etc.)
· Jams and Jellies
· Honey or maple syrup
Some other ideas:
· Organize a swap meet or clothing exchange before summer comes. I know that a couple of my grandkids are growing like weeds and need new clothes. That also means they have outgrown a bunch of clothes. Also, who has a zillion canning jars in the basement that they aren’t using? Swap them! Extra tools, bags of nails, hand knitted hats.
· Put together a video library for the kids. Most videos now come with a BluRay and DVD format in each case. (How many copies of Frozen 2 do you need?) Collect videos, sort them by type or age appropriateness. Put some 12 year-olds in charge of checking the videos in and out. The library could be open a few hours each week in someone’s garage or basement. The kids can design check out cards using 3x5 index cards and all that scrapbooking stuff you bought but never used.
· Canning classes. Find someone who actually knows how to safely can (and when to use a pressure cooker) to provide these classes before gardens are ready to harvest.
· Use the same idea for sewing or mending classes.
· Have a monthly meal – it can be a carry out.
· Put on a bicycle-repair clinic.
· Identify who is most vulnerable in your area and check on them regularly.
· Help your neighbor prune their fruit trees so they are more productive this year. This can be a service you sell, too.
· Build raised beds for vegetable gardens. They are much easier to maintain.
· 2 or 3 families together can care for a large garden area and divide the harvest.
This is our moment.
We can pull in, contract on ourselves and isolate emotionally and spiritually, OR, we can determine that, despite the uncertainties facing us (whether illness, our jobs, our safety), we will reach out in our neighborhoods and communities to help one another and become stronger.
A simple recipe to try:
Sometimes there isn’t much in the pantry or (worse!!) you are out of ideas for lunch. Here is a great recipe that only uses the most basic supplies to make a great foundation of a meal.
This recipe takes basics from the pantry.
Flour Tortillas (Chapathis)
4 c. wheat flour
1 tsp. salt
¼ tsp. baking powder (optional - it helps make them puffy)
¼ - ½ c. butter or oil (I used olive oil, but you can use any oil)
1 c. warm water
Mix the dry ingredients together.
Rub in the butter or oil.
Add water to make a soft, pliable dough.
Knead briefly, divide the dough into 12 – 16 balls.
Cover and let rest 15-20 minutes.
Add the oil to the dry ingredients and mix until you form a smooth ball of dough.
Divide the large ball into 12-16 dough balls and allow to rest for 15 minutes.
After rolling into thin circles, bake on an ungreased griddle or skillet.
Flour a surface and roll each ball into a thin circle. (Use sheets of waxed paper to make this easier).
Bake on an ungreased, heavy skillet or griddle until brown specks appear on the cooking side. Flip over and cook other side.
These store well in refrigerator or freezer.
Fill with sandwich fixings for a wrap.
Spread lightly with oil and sprinkle cinnamon sugar. Cut into wedges. Bake at 350° until crisp.
Spread lightly with oil and sprinkle coarse salt. Cut into wedges, bake at 350° – you made tortilla chips!
Enchiladas.
Thin crust pizza.
Fajitas.
You can make a simple sandwich wrap, cinnamon crisps, or tortilla chips.
From LLL cookbook Whole Foods for the Whole Family
Herb of the Week
Coltsfoot
Those little yellow flowers you see popping up along the roadway might be mistaken for miniature dandelions, but if you look closely you will see that the leaves are shaped differently.
Coltsfoot is an old-time treatment for respiratory tract complaints. The flowers and leaves yield a sweetish-aniseedish tea, taken separately or together, fresh or dried. Some herbalists advise straining the tea to remove the leaf hairs, which can be an irritant.
The leaves have also been used as a smoking tobacco since classical Greek and Roman times. There is even a rock candy you can make with the plant.
It is especially good for a dry cough and works well with mullien and/or fennel.
Coltsfoot and fennel tea
Put 4 or 5 coltsfoot flowers or a couple of leave in a tea pot with a heaped teaspoonful of fennel seed. Pour boiling water over them and brew for 10 minutes. Strain and drink hot.
Drink a cupful 3 times a day.
From Backyard Medicine, Harvest and make your own herbal remedies Julie Bruton-Seal and Matthew Seal. Skyhorse Publishing 2009
Grab a good plant identification book specific for your area before you pick and use any plant. There ARE look-alikes that can make you ill. This information is for educational purposes only and not designed to diagnosis, treat, or prevent any disease process. See your HCP when you are ill.
Be well. Meet your neighbor.
Polly
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