A little linky love for the businesses supporting our protesters in Madison

These businesses and organizations have donated food and supplies to the sleep-in at the capitol:

•Art Gecko (608) 280-0853
•Barriques
•Burrito Drive
•Catholic Social Services
•Capital Brewery Tap House
•Capital Centre Market (608) 255-2616
•Cargo Coffee (608) 268-0597
•Chautara (608) 251-3626
•Community Pharmacy (608) 251-3242
•The Cooper’s Tavern (608) 256-1600
•El Pastor (608) 280-8898
•EVP Coffee (608) 294-6868
•Falbo Bros Pizzeria (608) 255-9090
•Fromagination (608) 255-2430
•Gotham Bagels (608) 284-7145 / (608) 467-7833
•Himal Chuli (608) 251-9225
•Ian’s Pizza (608) 257-9248
•Indie Coffee (608) 259-9621
•Johnson Brothers Coffee
•James J. Chocolates (877) 526-3752
•Just Coffee (608) 204-9011
•Kabul Restaurant 608-256-6322
•L311
•Ma Cha (608) 442-0500
•Madison Teachers Inc
•Marigold Kitchen (608) 661-5559
•Mermaid Cafe (608) 249-9719
•Mediterranean Cafe (608) 251-8510
•Mother Fool’s Coffeehouse (608) 259-1301
•Nature’s Bakery (608) 257-3649
•Pizza di Roma (608) 268-0900
•Regent Street Market Co-op (608) 233-4329
•Roman Candle (608) 258-2000
•Second Harvest Food Bank (608) 223-9121
•Steep n’ Brew (608) 256-2902
•Stella’s Bakery (608) 663-2690
•Shakti (608) 255-5007
•Silver Mine Subs (608) 286-1000
•Sophia’s Bakery & Cafe
•Taqueria Guadalajara (608) 250-1824 or (608) 335-5914
•UFAS-AFT 223 (608) 213-5119
•Underground Kitchen (608) 514-1516
•Union Cab (608) 242-2000
•Weary Traveler (608) 442-6207
•Willy Street Co-op (608) 251-6776
•Zu Zu Cafe (608) 260-9898
•the members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Veteran’s of Foreign Wars
•PSC


Also, if you live out-of-state and want to support the protesters, feel free to contact one of these businesses and donate food/supplies.

And lastly, this site has more information about the items needed by the protesters and how you can help.

Testing old seed

We tend to order much of the seed for our gardening in bulk from the Seed Savers Exchange. We do this because the price is lower when you order in larger quantities and also to have seed on hand for emergency preparedness purposes.

But before using older seed, it's a good idea to check the germination rate. When you buy new seed the seed company typically guarantees around a 90% germination rate. That means about 10% of your seed won't germinate and plants won't grow from that seed.

The seed that we recently tested was purchased from the Seed Savers Exchange in 2007 and had a package rated germination of 87%. It's a climbing french bean. I see that now it's only sold in package of 50 seeds, but we bought a 1 lb package back in 2007 for $9.50.

I tested 20 seeds in the lowest tray of our seed sprouter. Out of the 20 seeds 18 of them germinated. That's a germination rate of 90% and I'm pretty darn pleased with that!

The Velveteen Bible NKJV - a review for Thomas Nelson Publishers

photo credit

When I selected The Velveteen Bible as my latest selection for review from Thomas Nelson Publishers I was expecting a bible that my oldest daughter might be able to use as her personal copy.

When it arrived it was evident that this edition of the New King James Version bible was not suitable for my six year old girl!

It's a gorgeous bible with a flocked cover and beautiful storage box.



There are some of the most beautiful illustrations that I've ever seen in a children's book.







But it's a very traditional printing with extremely thin and fragile pages. The binding seems quite sturdy but the pages just would not hold up well to daily use by an inexperienced reader.

However, we have chosen this edition to be our daily scripture study bible! The girls are excited to have me reading it to them every morning and are ecstatic when I bring it out of its box for morning scripture study.

We've already read through much of the book of Genesis and I was surprised by how intently my six year old daughter was listening. She's a very energetic girl and was nearly mesmerized by my reading. I'm certain our family will enjoy our readings from this bible.



In addition to the beautiful illustrations it also has a very helpful guide in the back of the bible to assist you in scheduling your daily readings.



This edition is a very small version measuring about 6.75" x 4.5" and therefore the print is small. This small size would make it a good version for an older child as it would be easy to hold and not as heavy as some bibles. Unfortunately for this middle-aged mama, that means it comes with small print as well.

All in all, though, it's a very nice edition of a New King James Version bible and would be a great heirloom purchase for an older child patient enough to carefully turn the pages and care for this beautifully illustrated children's bible.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze®.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising ."

What do you grow in the winter months?

In my neck of the woods winter typically lasts from November through April. Most of that time we have a good snow cover on the ground as well. It's not uncommon for us to have temperatures that read below zero degrees F on the thermometer. We don't even want to discuss wind chill temperatures. Really, we don't.

So what can we grow in the winter?

We can grow some potted plants set up on sunny windowsills. I've learned through trial and error, though, that they need to be hardy plants that can withstand cool temperatures. Even where we've replaced our 1880s house's original windows with energy efficient new replacement windows the temperatures in the dead of winter get pretty cool.

What grows best in our household in the winter is sprouts. Many people don't think of sprouts as plants, but they truly are.

For Christmas this year the boy bought me this Victorio seed sprouter:



I've used different methods to sprout seeds before. I've tried a glass jar with cheese cloth over the top. I've used other commercial sprouters with strainers inside, etc. But hands down I prefer the Victorio sprouter. I love that it has three separate trays. I can sprout different seeds in the different trays. Different seeds sprout at different rates and it's nice be able to have a variety of fresh sprouts on hand.

Here you see a spicy sprout seed mix:



and here you see a standard alfalfa sprout seed:



What do you grow in the winter months? Do you have a favorite method for sprouting seeds?

Wordless Wednesday - In their own imaginative world

Baking on a snowy day

The latest snowstorm to hit our area began on Sunday and our back yard looked something like this:



On Monday we received the news that it was officially a snow day. Now since the girls learn at home and I'm a homemaker that didn't really change our day too much. Snow is snow and where we live it's a huge part of our lives. What did happen, however, was that the college the Hubster works and teaches at was closed for the day. We LOVE snow days in our household because that means we all get to be together!

And what better thing to do on a snow day than bake? It warms up the house and gives us a chance to work together in the kitchen.



I tried a new recipe yesterday - Dill Pickle Bread. I found this over at Once Upon a Family and knew immediately that it would be a fun bread to try.



I made a few changes to the recipe, but that's par for the course for me.

I didn't have any dill weed in my pantry so I substituted dill seed. I cut the amount in half and ground the dill seed before adding it to the bread dough. I doubled the recipe so I'd have an extra loaf to bring over to our neighbor's, the S's. I also let the bread rise a lot longer than was recommended in the blog post. The end result was a light fluffy bread.

Also the blog post didn't indicate how long to bake the bread and I ended up baking it for 40 minutes at 350F.


the key ingredients - chopped dill pickles, diced onion, and ground dill seed

I thought for sure the girls would love this bread since it had pickles - one of their favorite foods - in it. But last night they wanted nothing to do with it. Just as was stated in the original blog post, though, this bread is fabulous eaten toasted with cream cheese on it. The Hubster and I both remarked that while it's not the sort of bread you'd want to have on hand every day it will definitely make a repeat appearance in our kitchen.

A Little Linky Love - Some more blog posts from the Urban Homesteaders Day of Action

1. Itty Bitty Farm in the City

2. Undermoderated

3. Fresh Dirt

4. Sustainable Slow Stylish

5. Grow & Resist

6. Gaea's Box of Rocks

7. Deaf Dogs and Benevolent Gnomes

8. Some Call it Natural

9. Viggies Veggies

10. In the Garden Online

11. Domaphile

12. Have We Met?

13. Fleecenik Farm

14. Simple Living in Singapore

15. Keepin' It Real

16. John Ludi and The Wonderful World of Systemic Attrition

17. Birds and Gardens

18. Life in Small Town, Wyoming

19. Charlotte Guerrilla Gardening

20. EatWhereULive

21. Dragonflyhill Urban Farm/The We Project

22. Cafe Intifada

23. Veggie Gardener

24. The Stone Cottage Farm

25. Drowning Creek Urbane Homestead

26. Crunchy Chicken

27. Chile Chews

28. Urban Homestead Diaries

29. The Farm Desk

30. Mama Botanica

31. Girl on Bike

32. Brown Thumb Mama

33. Dog Island Farm

34. Eating More Local Chard

35. Simply Living

36. EatWhereULive

37. Farmer's Daughter

38. The American Society of Permaculture

39. A Little Bit of Spain in Iowa

40. My Path to Freedom

41. Buffalomary's Corner

42. Adapting in Place

43. Bishop's Homegrown Produce/Faith of the Earth Seed

44. Liberty5-3000-Gaea

45. Heather's Homemaking

46. Humble Garden

47. CoMo Homestead

48. Wolf Woods

49. Ten Apple Farm Living with Goats

50. The Garden

51. The Green Phone Booth

52. able-bodied girl

53. Desert Lean-to

54. White Pines Whisper

55. Casaubon's Book

56. Leda's Urban Homestead

57. The Garden Life and Times of Justin Husher

58. Retro Housewife Goes Green

59. One Mom's Balancing Act

60. Yips and Howls

61. Stacy Six

62. Living the Frugal Life

63. simple.green.organic.happy

64. Under the Willow Tree

65. Countdown to a Simpler Life

66. Pollinators on the Brain

67. Annie's Kitchen Garden

68. crowhill chronicles

69. Northwest Edible Life

70. Rob's World

71. Vansteaders

72. Bees in our Bonnets

73. who me? The Adventures of Hippy Goodwife

74. Greening the Rose

75. Making it work

76. Permaculture Pathways

77. Canadian Doomer

78. Backyard Farms

79. Roast Garlic and Other Yummy Things

80. Flotsam and Jetsam

81. Home[in]Stead


I'll keep on adding more links as I learn of bloggers posting. If I missed you, please feel free to link to your Urban Homesteaders Day of Action blog post in the comments!

I'm an urban homesteader

Like most things in my life the creation of our urban homestead has been the accumulation of a lifetime of experiences. I won't take time now to go into the background, but will instead try and keep focused on the WHY of it. Why do we do this? Why do we call ourselves urban homesteaders? What does it mean to be an urban homesteader anyway?

So...let's start with why we do this...

1. I like feeding my family wholesome nutritious foods. When I grow the fruits and vegetables myself I am assured of the quality of the foods because I'm the person selecting the seed, nurturing the crops, and enriching the soil. I know everything that goes into those foods. Nutrition and Food Safety

2. Growing my own food is the least expensive way for me to obtain organically grown fresh fruits and vegetables. Do you have access to organic strawberries for your family in June or organic raspberries in August, September, and October? Have you priced out organic blueberries yet (or any organic berry for that matter)? Frugality


One of the blueberry bushes - these are planted along the south side of the house

3. Our family enjoys working together. Some families enjoy playing together but our play is work. We don't think of it as work, but that's what other folks seem to call it. ;) We believe it's important for our children to be active participants in the work of our family. There isn't an allowance or a sticker chart - just the satisfaction of producing those things our family needs to grow and thrive. Family Unity

4. Our family is striving to be self-reliant. Food is one of the critical cornerstones of self-reliance. If we have the skills and knowledge to provide our own food that is greater independence for our family. Self-Reliance

5. We're trying to lessen our family's footprint. When we grow food ourselves and when we fill in the gaps with locally produced foods we're walking lighter on this earth. Less fossil fuels are used and fewer contaminants enter the waterways and soils of this globe when we grow our own foods. Environmental Awareness

Next we'll address why we call ourselves urban homesteaders and what we think urban homesteading is.

First, let me dispel any misconceptions you might have. Urban homesteading has absolutely nothing at all to do with the Homestead Act of 1862. That Act was abolished by the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976. There are some individual municipalities that are still offering land/lots in exchange for "homesteading" but mine is not one of them.

The Hubster and I, together with the assistance of a mortgage, are working toward owning our property and it was a private transaction like most home purchases in the United States. We're just average homeowners in that regard.

We call ourselves urban homesteaders because we're working toward a point in time when we'll be providing most of our needed goods through the production of our homestead. We also currently live in an urban area.

Our city is a small city; according to the 2000 US Census only 50,792 residents reside here. We're within an hours drive of two larger cities, though. Our particular lot and house are within a block's walk of our downtown area. We're a few blocks away from our library, a grocery store, a hardware store, etc. It's not a small town. It's not a village. It's not a suburb. It's not rural. It's urban.

I don't quite know how to describe our lot as I don't know the exact measurements but it's tiny. It's smaller than most lots in our city because we're one house away from a court and that means our backyard is smaller because we have another neighbor behind our house as well as the neighbors to the north and south of our house.


In this photo you can see a view of our backyard neighbor (behind the chain-link fence) and a few of our raised beds. Our neighbor to the north is beyond that wooden fence.

We're surrounded on three sides by neighbors and the fourth side by our street. Our street is one of the busier streets in our city and is an emergency route. It's still a two-lane street and not a highway, but it's busy enough that the girls can't play in the front without supervision yet.

We really don't have a front yard. When we bought the house there were two little rectangles of grass turf and some overgrown cedar shrubs in the front. Over time we've replaced that with herbs and medicinal plants. I have some tiny bits of turf that I hope to eradicate this growing season and make the entire front yard productive plantings.


Some of the herbs and medicinal plants in our front yard

The side yard is essentially a driveway with a tiny strip between the driveway and a sidewalk near the house. We've put two large raised beds up on that strip and have a bit of turf remaining there.


One of the raised beds we constructed between the sidewalk and the driveway

The backyard has no turf. It's a series of raised beds, compost area, and perennial plantings - apple trees, raspberry canes, rhubarb, and strawberry plants. We put down wood chips that the city provides for free at it's compost center to cover the walkways. We retained a small area for some outdoor toys for the girls.

As to what urban homesteading is that is about as varied as the homesteaders themselves. In our climate we're limited to a two crop growing season. We have limited options regarding animals due to municipal ordinances and could keep rabbits, but would need neighbors' approval to keep chickens. Given our small space we opted to maximize fruit and vegetable production and purchase eggs and meat from local producers instead of trying to produce them ourselves. So for us urban homesteading begins with our growing as many fruits and vegetables as we can given our available space and climate restrictions.

You can see more of our urban homestead in some of these older posts:

A Tour of our Gardens

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Garden Update 08/17/2010

In addition to the annual gardens and our perennial plantings we also do other things to try and increase our ability to be self-reliant.

The Hubster hunts. He uses the land owned by friends or accesses public lands that permit hunting.

We also try to produce as many of the goods we use as possible. Longtime readers will know that I sew many of clothes and make a fair number of the girls' toys.

We're avid DIYers and are constantly learning new skills to improve and maintain our urban homestead.

Our dream is to eventually own acreage and create a rural homestead - but until that is a financial reality we'll continue to learn and advance our skills here on our little urban homestead.

What does your urban homestead look like?




This post is part of the Urban Homesteaders Day of Action.

Sharing the urban homesteading love

I want to share a few new community-building resources that the urban homesteading community has created in the last few days.

The first is a Facebook Page - Take Back Urban Home-steading(s). It began as a place of protest and is quickly growing into a method to not only regain our free use of language but also a place to network with other urban homesteaders and learn from one another in a community that freely shares its knowledge and experience.

Another site recently formed is Urban Homestead Information. It's still in its infancy but already has a listing of other urban homesteading blogs and sites in the US and Canada.

As for updates on this urban homestead - well, we're still in deep winter here in Wisconsin and plan to continue in that frigid status for a few more months. I'm still drooling over seed catalogs and planning our final design for the 2011 gardens. We'll be starting our seeds for transplants some time in early March this year.

I'm continuing with food preservation and have plans to try some citrus next week and hope to have a tutorial up for you then.

How are things on your homestead?

What does this look like to you?

I came back from running errands with the boy last week and the big girl very excitedly showed me her latest creation.

It's a rendition of our solar system in playdough!

I see a space unit in our future soon.

Wordless Wednesday - fairy cleaning

Experimenting with the dehydrated powdered eggs

After dehydrating some organic eggs last week to make shelf-stable powdered eggs to add to our food storage I decided I wanted to do a bit of experimenting to see if our family would enjoy using them.

After all, we eat what we store and store what we eat so before I whipped up another batch of powdered eggs I wanted to ensure that the quality was up to our standards.

I suspect we'll use powdered eggs most often in baking and other prepared dishes rather than reconstituting them to use as scrambled eggs, so I decided to try them in cookies.

I did a simple compare and contrast experiment. I first baked a batch of double chocolate chip cookies using regular raw chicken eggs.



And then I baked a batch of double chocolate chip cookies using the homemade powdered eggs.



I honestly expected the quality of the batch baked using the homemade powdered eggs to be lower than that of the batch baked using the conventional raw eggs. I just hoped that the quality would be sufficient enough for us to have the powdered eggs in our food storage on a regular basis.

I was very surprised, however, to find that the powdered eggs seemed to improve the quality of the cookies! The cookies baked with the homemade powdered eggs held together better than the cookies baked with conventional raw eggs. They also had a smoother texture and a more chocolaty flavor than the batch made with conventional raw eggs. I can't come up with a reason for the improvement, but I'll gladly accept it!

Oh, and as a side note I did have to use more water than the typically recommended amount of 2 Tbsp per 1 Tbsp of powdered egg. I did not measure the amount exactly. I started with the recommended amount and then after I realized the consistency of the cookie dough was off slowly added more water until it reached the appropriate consistency.

Repurposing old crayons - Valentine style

I'm sure many of you dear readers have done a similar project but this year the big girl decided she wanted some to give away as Valentines to her friends. I thought it was a spectacular idea!

We searched out a heart shaped muffin pan and then sorted through the old crayon box. We actually still had some crayons left over from the days when the boy used crayons (he's 19 now for those of you less familiar with the boy).

It's so very simple to do this.

Just break your crayons into small pieces and place them in your muffin pan. Then place the pan into a preheated 275F oven. Let them "bake" for about 10 minutes.



Take out the pan and let them cool. Turn the pan over and let the crayons fall out.

We used a non-stick muffin pan and had no problem at all with them popping out easily.

Jalapeno Bites

While most households in this country were watching a football game on Sunday night the Hubster and I were watching episodes of Edwardian Farm and planning our dream farm.

In between we pulled together a batch of jalapeno bites. Now, if you're a sporting fan feel free to serve these little gems at your parties. We're just not fans!

They're simple to make and so very much better than the frozen jalapeno popper type snacks - at least in my opinion.

Ingredients include fresh jalapeno peppers, cream cheese, and bacon.

I wish I could give you exact amounts, but we just always eyeball it. I'd say start with about 10 peppers, one package of cream cheese, and about a 1/2 pound of bacon.

I start with a jellyroll pan and make as many as fit on the pan. In our case it ranges from 16-20 depending upon the size of the peppers.

Slice the peppers in half and remove the seeds. I find it easier to do this step while wearing gloves. Then smear the inside of peppers with cream cheese. Wrap a slice of bacon around the pepper stuffed with cream cheese.

Bake in a preheated 400F oven for about 15 minutes or until the bacon is cooked to your crispness preference.

Here's what they look like before baking:



And here is the after pic:

How to dehydrate eggs

With all the canning tutorials on this blog I'm sure that most of my readers think all I do is can. NOT true! I also dehydrate some foods for long term storage and today we'll discuss dehydrating eggs to make a shelf stable powdered egg.

But first, I want to let you know about a book that I consider my go-to reference for all things dehydrated. The title is Mary Bell's Complete Dehydrator Cookbook.



We bought it at the same time we bought our commercial dehydrator and it's gotten a lot of use! We dehydrate fruits like strawberries, apples, and pears and we've also dehydrated potato slices, green peppers, chili peppers, and made fruit leather using the dehydrator. On my to-do list yet for the dehydrator is celery and carrots.

I don't usually do dehydrating tutorials, though, because it's so very simple. Usually you just slice the food thin and pop it in the dehydrator. Hardly tutorial-worthy, eh?

But eggs are just a teeny bit more complex. With eggs you have some safety concerns that you wouldn't have with fruits and veggies.

For instance, it's not recommended that you dehydrate raw eggs. The first step ought to be cooking them until they're dry.

I also consider the source of eggs. My first choice would be local eggs produced by free range hens. In my neck of the woods in February it's not so easy to come by fresh free range eggs in larger quantities and I hate to run the dehydrator for just a tray or two.

This time I used organic eggs purchased at Costco. Not my first choice, but an okay runner-up.



For this project I used a food processor, a non-stick pan, my gas range, and the commercial dehydrator. Feel free to substitute other equipment if you need to.

I found that working with about eight eggs at a time was the most manageable load for my equipment. I also realized in retrospect that a blender could have been a better choice for whipping up the eggs and resulted in a bit less mess!

So...I cracked open about 8 eggs and dropped them into my food processor and let it whirl a bit to whip them up.



Then I transferred the whipped eggs into a non-stick pan. I found that cooking them low and slow resulted in the best scrambled egg and the least waste. On my gas range that meant a setting of 2.



After scrambling the first batch I transferred the eggs into a bowl and cleaned the pan. It is important to clean the pan between each batch of eggs because you're not using any additional grease and the pan does get gunked up fairly quickly.

After all the eggs were scrambled I then began to spread them out on the dehydrator trays. I used the fine mesh fruit screens to minimize having small pieces drop through the trays.



Then I placed the trays into the commercial dehydrator. Four dozen eggs yielded 4.5 trays of loosely spaced scrambled eggs.



I set the dehydrator at 145 degrees F and set it for 18 hours.





After the eggs were completely dried then I removed the trays and put the dried eggs into the food processor. I let them spin a while to pulverize them into a fine powder.







Then I transferred the powdered eggs into a mason jar and used our FoodSaver to seal to remove excess air and seal the jar for storage in our pantry.



To use the eggs I'll measure out 1 Tbsp of dried egg and add in 2 Tbsp of water to make the equivalent of one large egg.

Make do and mend

We all know that making do and doing without are the cornerstones of living a frugal lifestyle. I think I've conquered doing without pretty well. It took a few years but I'm at the point now where I don't desire most consumer goods and find very few "things" that I don't have that I really want to have.

Sometimes, though (true confession time) the making do takes a bit longer.

Point in case is that pile of mending and clothing alterations sitting next to my serger in this photo.



It's not that I don't want to mend the clothes and give them a longer life. The alterations aren't complex and are easily within my range of abilities. But taking the time to do simple mending and alterations aren't very challenging and the tasks aren't as appealing as creating something new. I know they need to be done - especially the kids' clothing - but I need a bit of a push sometimes.

So I've decided to withhold all new sewing projects until I finish the mending and alterations that need to get done. That means no new dress for me until the pile is gone and no new jumpers or dresses for the girls until the pile is gone. That shirt I wanted to try for the Hubster is off limits until I've mended all the shirts of his that have tears or sewn on missing buttons.

In celebration of this upcoming mend-a-thon I created a simple poster to inspire me.



The poster is hosted over at Scribd. Feel free to print your own copy to help inspire you to make do and mend!

Wordless Wednesday - what can you do with a quilt?

Valentine garland

The girls and I had fun making this year's Valentine garland!

We used the free printable downloads from *The Graphics Fairy* and printed them out on cardstock with our color laser printer.

Then we cut them out:





Threaded two ribbons through them to create the garland:



And then hung it on three nails tapped into the woodwork above the entry into the playroom: