agorism, gardening, homesteading – Page 27

Back in the Saddle

As the world continues to move in lockstep with the oligarchs of control toward their Global Gulag, we here on the wee homestead move from damage control after the spring manufactured weather terror toward our next steps in resistance.

Handy Hubby has been working hard clearing the uprooted and split trees from around the house, continuing on that momentum to clear a few more as well, optimizing our lovely views. Some cool weather and rain, at last, allows for a giant bonfire, and we contentedly watch the damage go up in smoke.

Since this setback made it impossible for him to finish fencing a second pasture this year, some hastily employed electric fencing saved the day, and the critters can now save me the task of pruning, mowing and weeding.

Maybe Mama Chop knew we, and she, weren’t up for a big litter this year. Now her remaining four piglets get pampered with her undivided attention and we will all have fewer mouths to feed.

The new guard gets to expand their territory. Tori gets to expand her dominance and spread the love.

A1B400E4-43A2-4CF1-A6E2-2FD22D68DE24 — But maybe a bit less love is in order?

We will continue circling the wagons, with a storm shelter moving to the top of the long list, because the writing is clearly on the wall, in neon, though the vast majority continue skipping their merry way to the guillotine.

Climate Control, Geophysical Warfare, Climate Change.

Survival Instinct?

Do you love yourself enough to save yourself?

“He who takes a stand is often wrong, but he who fails to take a stand is always wrong.”

Frederick T. Gates, in 1913, director of charity for John D. Rockefeller’s Southern Education Board (SEB) wrote the following:

“Is there aught of remedy for this neglect of rural life? Let us, at least, yield ourselves to the gratifications of a beautiful dream that there is. In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.” https://unmasker4maine.wordpress.com/2015/01/24/abcs-of-dumbdown-from-gates-to-gates-frederick-gates-1913-to-bill-gates-2015/

Do you love your life enough to fight for it?

Do you care about your family enough to try to warn them?

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” TS Eliot

“. . . if the American people had ever known the truth about what we Bushes have done to this nation, we would be chased down in the streets and lynched.” – George Bush Senior (interview with Sarah McClendon, December 1992)

Do you revere nature enough to serve it?

“There is no anti-depressant that will cure a depression that’s spirtually-based, for the malaise doesn’t originate from brain dysfunction, but from an accurate response to the desecration of life.” David R. Hawkins (Power vs. Force)

Do you respect your ancestors enough to sift their wisdom from their folly?

“Some authorities take the view that we are all virtually at the mercy of the mass media and baleful methods of group stimulation, whilst others have suggested that brainwashing and similar techniques available to the modern mind-manipulator are not only well-nigh irresistible but lead to real and permanent changes in political or religious outlook. If such beliefs are well-founded, the outlook for civilization as we know it is not pleasant to contemplate.” – J. A. C. Brown (Techniques of Persuasion)

“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.” – Edward Bernays (Propaganda)

“What a great advantage for leaders that the people do not think.” – Adolf Hitler

Do you honor the future of humanity enough to get serious?

“The man who does not know what it means to be under psychic hypnosis, is already under it. – Vernon Howard

In my 20s, I accepted the Globalist agenda without knowing it, without questioning it, because I didn’t understand it was an agenda. I was propagandized into believing it was in the obvious best interest of humankind without ever applying any outside research or critical thinking.

On my very first website, about two decades ago, I wrote, in all earnestness, “Educational technology will level the playing field around the globe and then we will truly share One World.”

I WAS WRONG! If I have to repeat that publicly every day for the rest of my life to atone for my idiocy, that’s fine with me!

Not only did I not understand I’d been propagandized into supporting an agenda, I could never have conceived the agenda’s ultimate goal is Oligarchical Collectivism. (Yuk!)

Please forgive me for being a naïve tool of the State for half of my life! I repent! I’ll forever bear better gifts, I promise!

“We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march toward world government.” – David Rockefeller (Address to the Trilateral Commission, June 1991)

“Kennedy’s unswerving loyalty to the British monarchy was rewarded; his daughter, Kathleen Kennedy…married William Cavendish, the Marquis of Hartington. Hartington was the son and heir to the tenth Duke of Devonshire…who have run British politics since the days of Elizabeth I…While serving as ambassador in Britain, Joseph Kennedy was made an initiate of His Majesty’s Most Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem…Joseph Kennedy Jr. and John F. Kennedy were trained at the London School of Economics, and institution founded by the Fabian Society dedicated to training and recruiting foreign cadre as future British agents within government, business, media, and educational posts in their own countries. The Kennedy brothers were trained by Fabian Society Executive member Harold Laski.” – Dope, Inc

Do you know your country well enough to recognize its enemies?

“The elementary principle of all deception is to attract the enemy’s attention to what you wish him to see and to distract his attention from what you do not wish him to see.” – General Sir Archibald Wavell

“Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing tactics, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.” – Mark Twain

http://www.michaeltsarion.com/an-address-to-the-dead.html

“Well, the psychologists and sociologists of merit have been telling you for years. You are dissociated. You have infantile amnesia, and you inhabit an abstraction that is an pseudo-life. You are dead to the real and alive to the simulacra. You are outer-directed and always on the go, racing headlong toward your graves as if eager to get to them. You’ve replaced experience with reaction and intimacy with performance. Your thinking is autistic, narcissistic, and masochistic, and you’re in denial of your denial. You use your pain to gain attention, and perform good deeds mistaking those silly acts for true virtue. Your ambition and preoccupation is an avoidance of inwardness. You compete to prove you’re better and that you matter. You adore the clutter, the noise, over-stimulation and endless domestic minutiae, because it distracts you from attending to your Dharma. You crave relationships because you have none with yourselves. You want children because by your twenties you are sick of yourselves. You crave more so you can feel rich. Deconstruction, divestiture and psychosomatic catharsis mean nothing to you. All that matters is acquisition, competition, attainment and reward. The Earth can suffer, but that is alright. As long as you succeed and get hold of the power you secretly desire, nothing else matters.

Are you still confused?

Do ya want to know what these words mean? They mean you are unaware that you are unaware. They mean that you have given up the right rulership of yourself. They mean that you have become totally dependent upon priests, politicians, medics and corporations, telling you what to think, believe and do. Actually its not freedom that you want. Oh no, you’re scared to death of that. What you really want is freedom from freedom, and Big Brother is itching to let you have exactly what you secretly desire. Micael Tsarion

“Freedom is the last thing he wants. He functions, as we shall see, according to the principle of pleasure in non-freedom. To be sentenced to life long freedom is a worse fate then life-long slavery. To put it another way: a man is always searching for someone or something to enslave him, for only as a slave does he feel secure.”
Esther Vilar (The Manipulated Man)

https://unslaved.com/episode-148-entrainment-social-hysteria-mob-rule/

Do you know yourself well enough, do you understand their game well enough, to become a formidable opponent?

It’s a Life Skills Problem

I couldn’t agree more with Max Igan when he repeats that losing our life skills is assuredly one of the most serious vulnerabilities of modern civilization.

Of course, I can’t agree with his ‘no private property’ stance, but that’s another post.

Igan’s outlook reminds me when I was first introduced to the theory of Spiral Dynamics, when my fellow students (mostly middle-aged women of a relatively superior income class) immediately ‘recognized’ themselves in the ‘highly evolved’ stage of ‘Turquoise’. Big surprise.

I was far too polite when I refrained from pointing out what was obvious to me even as a novice, having already been ploughing away on the wee homestead by then for several years.

“Your Turquoise is built on a house of cards, Madame,” is what was obvious to me immediately, and which I longed to express. If it were built on a house of sand you’d be far safer, I’d then add.

Even my favorite synopsis of this social theory fails to highlight the significance of ‘Beige’ — the foundations of civilization. This stage is considered to be subsistence living, hand-to-mouth, barely advanced to basic tribal existence.

The theorist here, Don Beck, demonstrates respect, even some reverence to their ancient wisdom, but with the assumption, it seems obvious to me, that an evolved civilization has technological immunity to such bio-psycho-social devolution that would accompany this exceptional vulnerability of modern life.

You think butchering and gardening, farming and foraging are skills beneath you, Family Silicon Valley?

Or, in the tolerant, nostalgic age they are, at best, quaint lost skills to pine about and imitate in your Petri dishes? Ya’ll can’t possible recognize your feeble attempts bound to fail as you attempt to fit all of creation into your teensy-BIG Smart World?

Think again, former friends. Here are the real skills armies and resilient cultures are built on.

Me, a cheese-maker? Didn’t see that comin’!

Here’s your reality, Family Turquoise, if the grid goes down, you can’t survive, not even for a fortnight. Psychic breakdown would occur almost immediately, due to lack of any authentic earthly connections or spiritual foundations in your personal or family or community unit.

Then the true reality of your vulnerability would hit home for real. You have NO LIFE SKILLS, at all! Not spiritually, not physically, not emotionally.

Most Americans these days can’t even cook from scratch. This skill was lost in barely two generations. And what’s worse, they can’t even fathom what happens to the individual mind, let alone the family and in turn the collective consciousness, when faced head-on with annihilation.

The more ‘superior’ one calls themselves in the modern world is directly related to how vulnerable they really are. Perhaps that’s what the well-quoted Bible translation meant in claiming, “The meek shall inherit the earth.”

As a wise woman in an era of uncertainty, who are you going to put your confidence in—the wealthy CEO of Fiction, USA with a San Francisco loft worth a few million on paper—or the ‘poor’ man who can trap, shoot, butcher and even cook the meat for your table?

That the ‘A Class’ woman chooses poorly in this situation doesn’t surprise me at all considering our current state of affairs and the fact that of the many supporters as well as volumes discussing this social theory of Spiral Dynamics, I’ve yet to find one who gets the full nuance of Beige.

Modern folk just don’t want to go there. It’s like the old lyrics, “How ya gonna keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen gay Paris?” It’s hard work after all.

It’s not just whistling Dixie in your Tu-Tu, thanks anyway, Grandma.

1938 Mom - 4th-ice follies — Yeah, that’s Granny, the gorgeous one, 4th from the left.

So we get Soy-Boys who are good at sales, rather than competent men who can bring home the real bacon. The ‘elite-class’ calls this ‘evolution’. This is ‘spiritual’ advancement.

Why might they promote this among the plebs and their entertainers? Heaven knows!

If one isn’t capable of hurting a fly, then we’ve evolved to societal sainthood, according to these shysters. This is their Utopia.

As for the adult-children bolstering these Pied Pipers? How long shall the competent among a functional colony support them, I wonder?

http://www.alt-market.com/index.php/articles/3969-why-is-the-elitist-establishment-so-obsessed-with-meat

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall . . .
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall . . .

And I said, “Serves ya right, fat ass in fantasy land.”

More Hard Losses

The hardest losses to deal with are those that have no lesson attached. A lesson helps keep the focus on aspects of a tragic situation that might be overcome in future. It gives us a sense of control over what seems otherwise out of our control.

We’ve not had such fortune on the homestead this year, and to make matters worse, I know we have a lot of company around the world.

The tornado and hail and drought and continued weather whiplash were/are out of our control. Now, to pile on more setbacks and losses out of our control our young ram has to be put down just two days after being introduced to his harem, due to a fatal injury we’ve no idea how occurred.

Not only have we lost this perfectly healthy and handsome fellow, but now we’ll have no spring lambs either.

AE2DDC78-3B5B-4920-A982-02AFF459CDFE — Bye, bye Blackface, sorry for your not -so-nice short life.

And the hits continue. We woke to find Mama Chop squashed seven of her just born piglets during the night. She’s had two previous litters without issue and we’ve no real inkling why this time would be any different. Could she have been confused by the sharp temperature drop? Could it be she finds it as irritating and uncomfortable as I do?

We have neighbors whose cows couldn’t get pregnant this year after two tries and then lost a perfectly healthy milking goat in her prime from a sudden tumor.

But, as sad as all this is, there are farmers and families, rural and urban, all over this country, all over this world, losing their livelihoods, their properties, their homes, even their lives to what equates to weather terrorism and mass land and power grabs. Blizzards, floods, fires and finger pointing in every other direction but where it belongs.

These are the casualties of the escalating undeclared war that’s being ignored or minimized by the masses hypnotized by the bread and circus and chorus of lies coming from the mainstream media.

Instead of standing up and speaking out against the fascist takeover by this corporatocracy posing as our government and media, folks are lining up to handover all their health records to them!

I can’t even fathom the level of insanity of the masses of folks who consider this to be a good idea.

Supposedly one of the stages of grief is acceptance. Apparently in this asylum we must accept what we cannot change. And what we cannot change is everything.

It’s the crazy ones, like me, who refuse to accept.

Sorry, but I have no good news for y’all this time. No silver lining, inspirational quote, spoonful of sugar, meaningful song.

No lesson.

For the LOVE of BEES

If you plan to join the growing number of hobby beekeepers the very first step should be to define your goals. I learned that the hard way.

It’s a wonderful thing to see the popularity of beekeeping keeps increasing. I love beekeeping for many reasons, but when I was first starting out the learning curve was very intimidating. And that’s coming from someone who usually adores learning.

Not only was there loads to learn about the bees themselves, but also about how to manage their colonies, which changes depending on your hive type, which is dependent on what your goals are as a beekeeper.

The first question to answer for yourself as a newbie is if you are interested in beekeeping as livestock or as habitat provider, or maybe both.

I had several mishaps in my first years because I hadn’t asked myself this most fundamental question. I hadn’t asked myself this because in all the books, forums, courses and club meetings I’d attended, no one asked this question. The general assumption is always that the beekeeper is interested in bees as livestock, because that’s what most want.

In this case, follow the commercial standards, using their Langstroth hives and peripheral equipment, their treatment schedules for pests and diseases, and their feeding programs and supplies, and you should be good to go. You can buy nucs (nucleus colonies) in the spring, and if all goes well you’ll have some honey before winter. This is by far the most popular route to take in beekeeping.

3D20AE9C-B664-4014-B63E-60DCE37A2BC9 — Our only Langstroth hive on the homestead, bedazzled with old jewelry.

But it’s not for everyone, including me, which took me a few years to figure out. Honey, pollen, wax, propolis, royal jelly, queen rearing, and other processes and products from beekeeping are the main goals of this style of beekeeping and there’s lots to learn from the commercial operators who have mastered many of these skills for maximum efficiency and profit.

However, if you are interested more in providing habitat and learning from the bees, and creating truly sustainable, long-term, self-sufficient colonies in your space, following commercial practices is really not the way to go, and can lead to a lot of expense, confusion and frustration.

In the hopes of encouraging more beekeepers to become honeybee habitat providers rather than livestock managers only, here are a few tips and resources.

0F66DEAA-3033-44FD-AECE-B91386C6AE8A — The bee yard of Dennis Kenney of Jackson-area Beekeepers Club, with his preferred horizontal hive style. Horizontal hives differ from Top-bar hives in that they have full frames with foundation. Benefits of full frames is ease of management and stability of comb. Drawbacks would be the added expense and the artificial, manufactured foundation and its potential contaminants.

The conventional practice is to keep all your hives in a ‘bee yard’ for reasons of convenience and space. This is antithetical to bee colonies’ natural proclivity to nest far from one another. It creates problems of diseases and pests that spread rapidly in conditions of overpopulation, which is why so many treatments are needed, and then feeding when nectar/pollen flow is scarce, as well as being hyper-vigilant in your regular hive inspections to find issues immediately before they spread. Now that I have spaced my 6 hives out around a very large area I’m having far more success. But, only time will tell!

What else I’ve learned:

The typical Langstroth hive is made for easy transport and standardization purposes for the industry mainly, but they are not ideal for the honeybee habitat provider, because they are made with thin walls in order to be lightweight. This means they are poorly insulated and so not suitable for the long-term stability of the hive—getting too hot in summer in southern climates and too cold in winter in northern climates. Our top-bar hives and nucs have thick walls and insulated roofs.
If you want your bees adapted to your area and climate you don’t want to do the conventional practice of buying new queens every couple of years. Ideally, you’ll want your colonies to produce their own queens. Queen-rearing will remain an essential skill for a more advanced beekeeper, because occassionally you may still want to make splits to increase your numbers or to replace weak colonies, or to re-queen another hive displaying poor genetic traits.
When the colonies are weak, depending on the issue, they may need to be culled. This is rarely suggested by professional beekeepers who promote regular treatments on which the weak colonies then become dependent, while still spreading their weak genes on to subsequent generations and their diseases and pests to other colonies.

Just like the faulty logic of ‘herd immunity’ in the vaccine debate among human populations, many commercial beekeepers use the same complaint about those of us who want go au naturel, that is, treatment-free, with our bees.

Many scientists and researchers are trying to raise public awareness that this is not how herd-immunity works, not in livestock or in humans, and I applaud their efforts. I personally find referring to populations of people as a herd to be insulting. I think it actually trains individuals through neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) to think of themselves and each other not as unique and separate individuals, but rather as cattle to be managed.

You’ll also want to mostly forgo the conventional practice of swarm prevention. The goal is for the bees to become self-sufficient, as in the wild, where colonies can live for decades with no hand from man to aid or to disturb. Some of these colonies are enormous, like one we found in an old oil barrel, there for over 15 years and thriving with multiple queens in the same colony, which most likely swarmed annually.

Swarming is a natural, bio-dynamic process performing many different functions for the colony, hygiene being an essential one. Everything the beekeeper takes away from their natural processes is a stress on them which must then be alleviated by other, most likely artificial, means.

Plant perennial and annual crops the bees like for your area and climate. Here in the south there are plenty of plants that bloom at different times most of the year, giving free bee buffets from early spring to late fall, like: bluebonnet, white clover, hairy vetch, wild mustard, vitek, morning glory, trumpet vine, yaupon, and lots of garden herbs and crops, too. It is my greatest pleasure to harvest cucumbers, peas, beans and arugula surrounded by forging bees—they love them as much as we do!

Experimenting and observing is the most fabulous feature of the honeybee habitat provider!

I know a homeschooling homesteader with an observation hive in their house that the children treasure. Not only do they learn from these fascinating creatures about how they operate in the hive, but how they are connected to the seasons and to their environment. They’re learning constantly from the colonies’ successes as much as from their failures.

I practice slightly different techniques with each hive to discover which methods work best here on the wee homestead: one hive has a screened bottom board, one I keep with a reduced entrance all year, one’s in full-sun and another partial shade, and so on. Not that this will necessarily solve the mystery of colony failure, but every bit of data helps!

Some unconventional resources:

Books

The Shamanic Way of the Bee: Ancient Wisdom and Healing Practices of the Bee Masters by Simon Buxton (2004)

The Dancing Bees: An Account of the Life and Senses of the Honey Bee by Karl von Frisch (1953)

Top-Bar Beekeeping: Organic Practices for Honeybee Health by Les Crowder & Heather Harrell (2012)

Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture by Ross Conrad (2013)

Sites

Treatment-free Beekeeping YouTube Channel

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC_Yb2d_9M09hcaWlghVZDg

The Bee-Master of Warrilow by Tigkner Edwardes (1921)

https://archive.org/stream/cu31924003203175/cu31924003203175_djvu.txt

Biobees

http://biobees.com/library/general_beekeeping/beekeeping_books_articles/BroAdam_Search_for_Best_strains2.htm

Dr. Leo Sharashkin

horizontalhive.com

The Value of Venom

Honeybees know the value of their venom, they give their lives for it. We know how precious is the value of the honeybees’ venom, understanding it as both cure and poison.

In natural healing bee venom is used for all sorts of cures, a number of them painful. Honeybees can be merciless, even to each other, for the ‘greater good’.

What did I find today outside one of our hives but droves of drones, those are the males, kicked out by those bossy female workers who clearly decided they could no longer be supported. They will also kill and replace an unproductive queen without hesitation.

And me, being the opportunistic and cunning human that I am, collected these evicted dead bodies in order to make Podmore, considered an exceptional traditional medicine used to cure all sorts of ailments.

Quite unknown to American beekeepers, I wonder why, considering its value? Could it be they don’t like the thought or action of collecting dead bees?
Podmore

This reminds me of another big related beef I have with our current cultural climate: Weakness is not a virtue. And neither is positivity.

I like the way Micheal Tsarion just put it in his last podcast, because I think it’s spot on. Our Prozac smile culture is in a “regressed state of animated autism.”

The Reign of the Terrible Mother

Optimistic bias undermines preparedness and invites disaster, according to sociologist Karen Cerulo.

In Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2009 book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, she underscores how hard Americans have been working to adapt to the popular and largely unchallenged principles of the positivity movement, our reflexive capacity for dismissing disturbing news, whitewashing tragedy as a ‘failure of imagination’ and relentlessly spinning suffering as little more than a growth opportunity.

While in fact I am writing now out of a spirit of sourness and personal disappointment, unlike Ehrenreich according to her intro, I nonetheless find much value in her final paragraph: “Once our basic material needs are met—in my utopia, anyway—life becomes a perpetual celebration in which everyone has a talent to contribute. But we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition by wishing it. We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.”

The bees know.

One of the very many things that fascinate me about the bees is that the Freemasons so covet it as a symbol. I can imagine there are many reasons for this, most of which will probably remain a lifelong mystery to me.

At some point the bees simply refuse to adjust any more and they swarm, this is a natural, healthy, cyclical process, which most American beekeepers try to avoid at all costs.

We seem as a culture to abhor natural processes.

As cruel as this is sure to sound, could it be that maybe swarms and cullings are natural processes for humans as well as bees?

6CA978BD-9288-40E7-9397-8B4D2A444958 — Moving colony from nuc to permanent hive. How you like my fancy paint job? 🙂

7D32A3B8-7388-4DC9-BF42-148ACC828FB5 — Setting up a swarm trap. Open invitation to immigrants, move-in ready!

My new honeybee hero and virtual mentor: Dr. Leo Sharashkin!

Bleeding $$!!

Apparently the economy is brilliant, according to the Trump-Train.

Well, I believe that, believe it or not. It’s elementary to me by looking at our own expenditures of the Crazy-Train Spring 2019.

Because health care costs are ridiculous:

$3,700 for emergency room visit, 5 stitches to Handy Hubby’s hand. His first on-the-homestead accident/injury. Ridiculous health care costs thanks to insane policies of multiple administrations. Thanks, Corporatocracy! Great job at outrageous cost.

$4,000 new roof, thanks to increased weather modification/manipulation in our area, Geoengineering being ramped up thanks to widespread approval by the Trump-train.

$200 and counting for acupuncture treatments thanks to electricity surge on new electric meter that fried my shoulder something awful over 6 months ago. The garden is neglected, the household, too, my bad. The Trump-train loves 5G tech, bring it on! Yay!

4 days lost paid work for Handy Hubby, who had to take vacation time to normalize the homestead after manufactured ‘tornado’ dropped at least 2 dozen mature trees on our property, a half-dozen right around our house. Oh, but we are so blessed, none hit me or the house or the critters. Silver lining, brilliant!

Two weeks before that was baseball-sized hail, that meant $300 on a new windshield, that had just been replaced.

And all kinds of folks and communities around our area of East Texas are spending loads of $$ on damages of their own. Markets are thriving! Thank you, sir, may we have another?! Houston is promising to be a well-spring of endless catastrophe revenues, brilliant. I bet Trump did that! Or, fairies?

That’s including exciting and constant weather whiplash all year, like a weather rollercoaster at Disney Land, resulting in no pear crop this year and a complete lost effort with many other crops in the garden that go straight to seed from the constant fluctuating temperatures. Hurray!

Common sense alert: no crops thrive in weather whiplash! (Don’t rain on my parade, bitch!)

We can no longer afford the delusions of this economy. We are downsizing. Most of our meager holdings will meet freezer camp, unfortunately, as we come to grips with survival mode.

Let’s all enjoy our eternal non-inflation in the fantasmagorical Trump economy!

When the Going Gets Tough

We have all kinds of sayings to ward off all kinds of issues, mostly with the intention of bypassing, minimizing, and moving on. Shit happens, right? Don’t let the bastards get ya down, eh? There’s always a silver lining. Don’t sweat the small stuff. The sun will come out tomorrow. Look at the bright side. Don’t cry over spilled milk. Buck up, buttercup!

DCD476B5-07FF-48ED-9665-286C0B2D571D — The falling trees missed the roses, and the deck and house, and all the critters, and me, PRAISE BE!

I know, I know, I’ve heard it all and I’ve probably said half of it myself. Really though, when someone’s truly feeling down, no one wants to hear another ‘pick yourself up by your bootstraps’ slogan. A friend to cry in your tea or beer with would be loads more helpful, but sometimes that doesn’t help either.

14D48C7C-5393-4B88-A63B-C5768A2606D6 — Thanks to more experienced friends at Melody Acres Ranch the overturned nuc has been righted and it’s doing just swell.

I count my blessings, really, I do. I’m very good at that.

It’s just that, sometimes, nothing helps, at least not right away. Sometimes there’s a ‘something’s gotta give’ feeling that lodges itself for a while after a big, bad event, even if everything mostly turning out fine in the end.

The triumphs still feel too short-lived and the setbacks too many.

I remember to remember my favorite things, but the joy in them seems less renewing. This in itself is solemnifying.

Visitors are welcome, yet distracting.

I know nature is resilient and life goes on. The very morning after the ‘tornado,’ as I was assessing the damages, the birds were chirping, the critters begging for their meals, and Handy Hubby headed back home from work out-of-state to get us back into gear.

Still, despite my usual mood-shifting tricks, my gears still feel a bit stuck.

The snake getting fat on our eggs in the coop, a rabbit devouring the garden.

Oh, just let them be, I think, which is not really like me.

Sometimes that’s just the way it is.
And, this too shall pass.

Earning My Mid-Wife Badge

The Girl Scouts was as close as this suburban girl ever got to learning any kind of traditional skills growing up. I quit it early on, considering ‘badge earning’ to be well beneath my expanding “cool kid” facade.

But if there’s a badge worth earning, midwifery would be up there with the loftiest of them. I’m humbled and proud to say I got to experience it last night for the first time.

I bit of critical background: I’m squeamish. Considering we didn’t have children of our own and I didn’t have my own dog to take care of, let alone any pet previously to our dear Papi, at about age 42, it seems to me squeamishness pretty much comes with that territory.

It’s because I was well aware of this personal limitation that I NEVER imagined we’d have so many animals.

Chickens, for us and many other clueless homesteaders, are the Gateway Livestock. Then came ducks, turkeys, sheep, pigs, and more dogs. But we both swear we’ll never get cows or horses. (Ahem)

Considering my penchant for ‘Too Much Information’ I’ve now been acclimated to loads of poop, vomit, blood and morbid sounds of all sorts. It also got me scared, very scared, about all that can go wrong with pets and livestock. And how painful that is, and knowing this truth in advance is useless. It does not help the pain by expecting it. It does help though to be prepared. So far I give us a C+ on that when it comes to the critters.

My TMI penchant leads also to so much online and in books about serious diseases and awful complications and the myriad very dirty deeds endemic in the farm life. Talking to others more experienced will also always bring sad stories and sometimes tragic ones.

Maybe I don’t quite deserve my badge just yet, but I’m fairly certain I saved our ewe and her young lamb last night by being at the right place at the right time and doing my usual C-level work. 🙂

When our ewes have lambed in the past I was not there to witness the actual event, only woke up to find the lambs delivered, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. On one occasion I found one mutilated by our young puppy and I had to kill it. I cannot speak about this moment still today a year later without tears. It was the most confusing, stressful, tragic, sorrowful day of my life. Like most in the so-called advanced economies, we grew up very sheltered from death and from the act of killing. Hubby would’ve handled it far better had he been home. I was alone and a basket case.

I was alone again this time when Buttercup gave an unusual and very loud bark audible from inside the house that clued me in that something was going down. I went to the stalls and saw mama was in labor. I was determined to watch it all and learn.

I was hoping and intending to remain a bystander to nature’s miracle.

C5C334A0-55C8-4A2F-AEE0-0BBD8F18151C — Take a bow, Buttercup!

As it happened I could tell something was wrong right away. Then I doubted myself. Then I went back and forth a dozen times, yes, no, yes, no.

Then I concluded, no, something’s really wrong here, get help. Help? Like from who? I called two friends with more experience and they didn’t answer. I looked through our book on sheep, panicky by that time. I call Hubby. He calls his folks and searches online while I pace waiting for the bread in the oven to finish so I can go back to the stalls.

I muse, even in this stressed state: “Oh, we’re both waiting on buns in the oven.” Yes, that’s how I cope with stress, and most things really, goofy humor.

It doesn’t occur to me again that the fetus that the ewe cannot seem to push out is in fact dead until hours later. Yet, I felt it, even considered it immediately, instinctually at the very first moment I saw it. I just tried to over-ride that feeling with too much doubt and reasoning and wishful thinking.

On the phone with Hubby we decide there’s really nothing I can do alone in the dark with no experience and no equipment and no nearby vet. Then he calls back and has changed his mind. He urges me to go back out, put on some rubber gloves, and see if I can help her.

And he was right! As soon as I touched the fetus it was obviously dead and my foolishness at waiting hours to “realize” this washed over me. I strained, along with mama to get it out, knowing if not she would surely die as well.

At last it came free, followed by another smaller, but wonderfully alive little treasure!

5F82EC40-D345-4378-A7BA-1EF6BE4105DB — We did it!

I’m happy to report as of this writing about 16 hours later, mama and babe are doing well, eating and drinking and getting to know each other.

Yes, I was alone, but really, it was very much a team effort. Thanks y’all!

Wins & Losses 2018

A short break from the heavy subject of addiction to share some homestead updates lately as well as highlights and misfortunes from the last year.

bubba.buttercup — ***Naughty, naughty!***

Starting with the good news, we have two new happy thriving lambs!

They are the first of the year with two more mamas looking full and ready to follow with some of their own any day now. Or more likely, since today it is beautiful and sunny, it will be the next time it’s pouring rain and freezing cold.

4500a222-3226-4bf9-87ad-7cca99cfb015 — ***Their first day roaming the land with the herd.***

3fd37d20-e532-4788-924d-d24b8a71d2e3 — Last winter’s model looking great

vacaproject — *Almost there, so close, but not close enough*

That was the weather once again for this rough start. Unfortunately, our permanent corral space is not yet finished.

I had to cancel a holiday trip at the very last minute and I spent a lot of time stressed and worrying. I couldn’t handle a repeat of last year, which is such a tragic story for me I haven’t yet been able to tell it publicly.

It was nearly a repeat. Hubby was at work again, and to keep it short and simple, I found one of our not-so-well-trained LGD (Livestock Guard Dog) had jumped the fence, grabbed one just after birth, jumped the fence back and was ‘guarding’ it until I found it barely breathing and injured.

Luckily there was a completely unplanned, last minute visit that cheered me up after my canceled trip.

photo(29) — It’s hard to think of anything sweeter than kids and animals!

And it’s hard to think of anything worse in the garden than poison ivy and wasps!

photo(27) — Poison ivy in the same spot 3 times, many weeks of torture.

photo(28) — And wasp stings 3 different times, miserable.

And my bee colonies didn’t even last the summer. This is an enormous disappointment. But I don’t give up easily and have next spring’s bees on order, locally sourced this time.

Last spring’s packages brought home from Arkansas

Additional misfortunes include the duck that was mysteriously fried by our electric pole in the front yard. And another incident that shot an electric impulse through my hand, up my arm, and landed in now nearly 2 months of stabbing shoulder pain. Then there’s the ram that’s butted me 3 times and therefore will meet his demise prematurely ASAP.

I don’t think Hubby shares this sentiment, but in my case, I’ve definitely had better years.

Here’s to better fortune in the coming year, for me, and for all y’all!

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