Here is a video of him inspecting the bee hives today!  I was quiet actually so there is no chatter on the video but here in coastal North Carolina it was a beautiful day today!

This is the time of year bee keepers need to inspect their hives and make sure their brood is not in the top of the hives, check the stores, check the brood pattern, and check for the queen. You can see he is concentrating in the video.  This spring I will be getting suited up and working the hives with him.

Have a great Sunday everyone!

Fondly,

I told my husband tonight we were going to need to order more seeds and he laughed at me saying that he didn’t know where we were going to put any more seeds.

Well I told him one can never have too many seeds.  I know I need more onion sets and I know I need more of my favorite hybrid peppers.  Yes I don’t exclusively plant with heirlooms while they are wonderful our sandy soil does very well with hybrids too.

So we lined up our seeds we are going to start for our garden, we also lined up the seeds for our seed swapping train we are on, then we lined up the seeds for our plant sales we participate in and then I remembered my garden will be starting soon.

I want to plant potatoes again they are easy, the peanuts were so much fun to watch grow and even the Jerusalem artichokes while they did not do well in our sandy soil were fun too.   I can never have too many tomatoes or peppers I can them and freeze them.   It’s never ever a dull moment around here.  I get to find beautiful eggs in the coop everyday, the bees are coming and going and everywhere I turn around a new plant will be springing up out of the earth or containers.

We are just right around the corner from Spring…..in just a few more days it will be February.  Where did January go?  Have a great Sunday everyone!  Also I want to take a moment to welcome all my new followers……..I always look forward to hearing from all of you!

Fondly,

I love all homesteading topics and I love seeing what you are doing at your Homestead!  So please link up this week so I can see all the cool things you all are doing that I only wish I had time enough to do all the projects I want to get done myself.   I love seeing how others are living sustainably, providing healthy wholesome nutritious meals for themselves and their families.  I also love seeing all the clever, creative ideas out there.   I love seeing posts of your cows, goats and other farm animals too.  I only have one criteria please do not link up items you are selling.  Please do share what you are doing on your homestead………this week I made yogurt, hopefully before the weekend is out I may even get some other items on my to do list accomplished.

Please link up for the Ole’ Saturday Homesteading Trading Post Ed. No. 9 here:

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My homemade yogurt turned out perfect I could not have been happier remember the consistency is not quite as creamy but I was quite pleased!  This morning I even had a bowl and I swirled in some honey on top it tasted so delicious!

Take a look for yourself!

Thanks for stopping by our Lil’ Suburban Homestead and thanks for linking up at our blog hop this week!  Don’t forget to come back next Saturday!

Fondly,

This post was linked to the following blog hops:

I don’t always make homemade yogurt the reason is my gang doesn’t particularly care for it although I love it.  I make a smoothie almost every morning with fruit, yogurt, and milk and its quite filling, delicious and relatively unprocessed. I don’t like it plain though I mix in a little jelly or honey to kind of take out the slightly sour taste.  Making homemade yogurt is another way that you can practice your sustainable living skills because you are not purchasing pre-packaged foods or at least less of them and you are leaving a gentler foot print on this earth.  You see homemade yogurt doesn’t have ingredients like carrageenan for instance….don’t know what carrageenan is???? Watch this video…..it explains it a little bit:

Also here is a blog post about carrageenan that is very interesting reading.  I am not even going to get into natural flavorings and other chemicals and junk that are loaded in the food we eat everyday.  What I will tell you is it wasn’t that long ago that most foods weren’t made like this.    Believe it or not yogurt has only been popular in America for the last 30 to 40 years.  Here is a really good site that explains how it is processed:  How Yogurt is Made - you will see all the stages the milk goes through just to get prepared for becoming yogurt.

When I don’t make yogurt I purchase Dannon All Natural Vanilla because in my area with out going to one of the Co-ops it’s the best that I can find…with cultured Grade A Reduced Fat Milk, Sugar, Natural Vanilla Flavor (which of course leaves me a little skeptical) and pectin.

Today I am going to show you how I make my homemade yogurt. I don’t buy the cultures off of the internet which would probably result in a product that is 100% free of processed food
but this product will get there this way too you just always have to save a little bit of yogurt for the next batch.

It is so easy that I wonder why I don’t make it more often.

All you need is:

2 quart jars

enough whole milk to fill 2 quart jars (It does not have to be raw or organic.  In our state we are not allowed to purchase raw milk anyway…that’s a whole other topic)

a pot

a candy thermometer

4 TBSP. of yogurt total – (2 TBSP. each) get stirred into each quart jar.

a small cooler

some towels

hot water

1.  First I pour 2 quarts of milk into the pot and heat it up to 180 degrees.

2.  Then you let the milk come back down to 120 degrees.  (This takes a while…patience is a must)

3.  While the temperature is coming down you can heat up water to slosh around in the awaiting jars because you want them to be warmed up.

4.  Then you pour the hot water from one of the quart jars into the bottom of the cooler and pour the other one out in the sink.

5.  Lay some towels down in the bottom of the cooler.

6.  Once the yogurt is 120 degrees you can pour it into the 2 quart jars, stir in the leftover yogurt and seal them.

7.  Roll the jars up in the towels and place them in the cooler.  Actually the cooler now becomes a warmer similar to some crock pot recipes you may have seen.

8.  Place the yogurt in the cooler and wait 8 to 12 hours.  Put it in a place where it won’t get moved or disturbed usually until the next morning.

9.  Now you have to wait for your fresh, delicious, natural homemade yogurt!  Sometimes this yogurt comes out a little thinner than the store bought counter part but since I am using this mostly in smoothies this is perfect for me.  Some people recommend putting gelatin as a thickener in it I have not tried this yet.

Making homemade yogurt is easy and really not all that time-consuming especially if you have other tasks you are working on in the kitchen.   Yogurt is also a fermented food and fermented foods have great nutritional benefits.  Look at this blog  article “8 Reasons To Eat Fermented Foods”  by Cheeseslave…one of them is that fermented foods aid in digestion and another reason is that they are rich in beneficial enzymes.

It’s common sense the less processed food you eat the better off you are….so I am really working hard in 2012 to eat less of the grocery store junk while I will admit because of prices I have not gone completely organic and I definitely don’t own my cow here are at our Lil ‘ Suburban Homestead

So lets break this down I think I paid $2.89 for this gallon at milk at a local warehouse so since my son Noah who loves math told me that there are 4 quarts in a gallon I forget these things…that means the total cost of this yogurt is $1.45 approximately for 2 quarts.    So per cup this yogurt costs about 18 cents maybe a penny or two more if you want to count the 4 tablespoons of leftover yogurt.  Normally I pay for the Dannon Vanilla about 2.99 when it’s on sale for 32 oz…. which equals about 74 cents a cup approximately so almost triple in expense and less healthy because even though it doesn’t have carrageenan in it; it has still been processed in a factory environment and stored in plastic.  Whereas I keep my homemade yogurt in glass mason jars.

Thanks for stopping by!  Part 2 of Making Your Own Yogurt is coming soon!

Fondly,

This blog post is linked up to the following blog hops!

So many people have posted and emailed me that they would love to have a greenhouse but simply cannot afford one at this point in their life etc….  The Viking in my life along with a little help from me built our greenhouse mostly out of recycled materials.   We should call it the “Recycled Greenhouse”.   I will warn you when you build a greenhouse this way you have to be extremely patient.  I know my good friend Katherine at Nerd In Flip Flops will agree that the making of a greenhouse is definitely a time-consuming occupation which involves lots of decision-making and planning.  I have other friends who have recently put in a greenhouse or they are in planning stages of putting in a greenhouse right now.  It is labor intensive but not impossible.

Our story was almost comical at first my husband toted around from house to house where we moved  a bunch of plate glass and plexi-glass it was quite a pile and we kept carrying it wherever we moved and storing it for he knew the greenhouse was coming even before I did.

We did have to purchase some lumber to frame out the greenhouse and of course the usual hardware to accomplish such a job that is where most of our expenses went.  My husband also recycled refrigerant containers and used them in a unique way;  he filled them with water to help the greenhouse to act as a heat synch.  They do indeed help to keep the greenhouse warm long after the sun goes down.

The first year we did not have a roof on the back we used some old insulation, tar paper, and a tarp to cover up the back of the roof.  Eventually we did finally spend some money on some metal roofing we found at the scrap yard for just a few dollars.  Most everything, the shelving were logs from the side of the road and or stuff my husband has found in his travels.  As you can see we just started out with a dirt floor but slowly collected flooring materials…..we found “Freecycled” piles of bricks to lay down for the center walkway and then a friend of mine from work was getting rid of all of the red rock from her garden so she said we could come and take as much as we wanted.  So we did and yes my husband sifted out all of the dirt from that red rock and laid it down as the rest of the flooring.  We had to make quite a few trips to her house actually  Oh did I mention labor intensive…..

One thing that was funny was my family can never believe how my  husband finds things on the side of the road so we had priced up a metal roof fan for about $89.00 and we decided to wait on it.  So my Mom and Step Dad were in town and we were driving in our car and sure enough the exact same metal roof fan on the side of the road in a trash pile that we had been hunting down.  Seeing is believing!

Our greenhouse was built for somewhere around $300 to $400!  Yes it does involve planning, time, energy, and even some scrounging if you are on a tight budget.  Yet the rewards of having your own plants cozy and warm in the cold winter weather is worth it!

If you enjoyed this post check out my other blog posts about our greenhouse:

A Virtual Tour of Our Greenhouse in January ,  Talk About A Hot Bed, and The Hobby Greenhouse Tour Was Successful!

If you finally found a way to build a greenhouse or a cold frame please share in your comments.  I have always wanted to have some hoop houses but have not made that happen yet maybe this will be the year!  I will post again soon with pictures of our flooring and some close-ups of some of the other details!  So come on back and thanks for stopping in at our Lil’ Suburban Homestead!

Fondly,

Let’s face it stressful schedules, long days at work can make up the formula that leads to expensive take out meals or eating out more often.  For me this is not something I want to do to my budget or to my financial goals.  Planning is key and while eating out of the pantry and freezer are a great help in January and February and we have plenty of food tucked away it is easy to forget what you have put aside so a review of your pantry, freezer, and pre-made meals is in order at least weekly.  My title is kind of a play on words because pre-making pantry meals and soup mixes  is something homemakers have been doing for years but got away from common sense which is less junk is better.

Earlier this year I made a bunch of pre-made mixes but I didn’t blog about it as around the same time my good friend Lisa at The Way Grandmama Does It put together an excellent blog post about pre-made soup mixes here.

I think this is a good time of year for a reminder to use what you have on hand and not to forget to use those Pre-Made meals and put them to good use!   Some of these recipes call for some processed ingredients likebouillon cube and potato flakes but there are many recipes online for unprocessed bouillon cube like this one here or these Chicken Buillon Cubes, or this one.  I could go on and on as there are tons of recipes on the internet!

These pre-made unprocessed meals for the most part have come in so handy on hectic nights when I have been tired or I have just thrown them in a crock pot.  Either way coming home to a cooked meal or knowing your meal will just be a simple affair can make a big difference in your mood.

I made Potato Soup (this is so easy and delicious), Holiday Split Pea Soup, Italian tomato and Pasta Soup Mix just to name a few.  Click on the links below for more recipes.

Homemade Onion Soup Mix (with no MSG) from Heavenly HomeMakers

Homemade Cream Style Soup from Taste Of Home

Chicken Noodle and Friendship Soup Mix from Thrifty Thursday

A little time and planning will get you a great reward.  I spent an afternoon with all of my beans, pasta, and spices and my Food Saver out on the counter and ended up with enough Pre-Made meals to help make this fall and winter a lot easier with meal preparation.

Have a great Monday everyone!

Fondly,

Pioneer woman puts together some delicious and easy recipes.  I am an avid follower of hers. My eldest brother and his wife gave us some Korean pears over the holidays on New Years weekend. They are absolutely delicious, crispy, and not overpoweringly sweet and perfect for this recipe. So I used a few of them that we still had on hand.

I am not going to re- post the recipe since it’s at the Pioneer Woman Tasty Kitchen site. Go to this link to get the recipe.  Pear Crisp With Vanilla Ice Cream…we opted not to add the Vanilla Ice cream tonight as that would involve another trip to the grocery store and we are using what we have at the moment and trying to make fewer trips to the store!

First I washed, peeled and cored the pears.   I use my old fashioned apple peeler to get the job done.  This is a very inexpensive apple peeler I got at a hardware store up in them mountains for about $14.95 and it’s still getting the job done even with these huge pears.

I used some individual soup crocks we picked up at a flea market or yard sale somewhere….what was really nice was I took them out of the oven and they sat on the table for an hour but because I cooked them up in these little crocks they were still warm and it gave it time for the topping to set up and get a little bit crunchy.

Oh by the way I always use dark brown sugar if I can help it I just think its richer…….Of course all of the peels and cores were saved for my chickens which they thoroughly enjoyed.

Oh I forgot to mention the rest of the gang doesn’t like nuts so I just chopped up nuts for my crisp.  I am convinced mine tasted the best as it is the closer version to Pioneer Woman’s dish although I believe she used walnuts and well with me living in North Carolina I of course used pecans.  I love both though.

I don’t know how they could not love pecans. Here is a picture of my pear crisps ready to go in the oven.

Yum!
Now here they are fresh out of the oven!

These turned out even better than I had hoped for.  Hope you decide to try it sometime it’s delectable!

Oh and if you love desserts make sure to look at this blog post one of my faves….“The Art of Making A Birthday  Cake”…it’s yummy!

I love all homesteading topics and I love seeing what you are doing at your Homestead!  So please link up this week so you can help us add to our to do list around here…..One of my favorite things to do around here is to just be the Lil’ Suburban Homestead photographer so if you just have some pictures you would like to share link them up here.  Not a blogger?  Not a problem!  I would still love to hear what you are thinking please comment on mine or the other blog hops so we can hear your ideas too!

Okay on to my book review.  My daughter gave me this book for Christmas “When All Hell Breaks Loose – Stuff You Need To Survive When Disaster Strikes” by Condy Lundin author of the Best Selling 98.6 Degrees:  The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive!  I have not read this one yet but it’s on my list to read this year!

His titles may be colorful but this man knows what he is talking about.  I consider myself fairly savvy as I have been on survivalist and prepper boards for years and I have learned so much new information by reading his book.  Cody discusses very practical facts for hygiene and nutrition when you are in survival mode.  He does not hold back as a matter of fact if you have a weak stomach this book might not be for you.  But if you have a desire to live and survive a disaster situation I would highly recommend this book!

Without obviously spoiling the book here are some topics that were very interesting to me:

• Living off the land with wild edible plants and game
• Dish Washing Strategies
• Staying Warm
• Staying hydrated
• Food storage
• Nutrition
• Basic hygiene
• Fuel
• Strategies for helping your body to be ready for Survival situations

I was amazed at the in-depth nutrition information he is not just briefly covering a topic he goes very in-depth with very alternative non traditional methods!  You gotta’ read this book……if you can’t run out and buy it see if you can get it from your library.  I am so glad my daughter gave me this book and it will have a permanent place on our book shelf.  Also if you like Cody Lundin here is another blog post I wrote about his show Dual Survival.

Please link up for the Ole’ Saturday Homesteading Trading Post Ed. No. 8 here:

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Thanks for stopping by our Lil’ Suburban Homestead and thanks for linking up at our blog hop this week!  Don’t forget to come back next Saturday!

Fondly,

Here is an example of what is available online they are typically called a seedling heat mat…this one is sold by Burpee.

My husband pretty much found everything for free, although he did have to buy a plug.  You know if you look around as you are driving down the road people throw away all sorts of things you can use for projects around your homestead.

Materials for this project:

stainless steel tray

pipe heating cable (12-15ft)

thermostat

gravel

potting soil/soil amendment mix

electrical outlet plug

First my husband secured the cable to the bottom of the metal tray with some heavy foil tape.  He then set the gravel on top and then filled it with soil mixture.    Next he wired the heating cable to the thermostat and mounted it to the side of the tray.  He then installed the electrical plug and made sure everything was properly grounded.

And then we have our own DIY Seedling Heat Tray!

We planted some tomato, ghost pepper, and some Texas Blue Bonnet seedlings that all came up within 2 to 3 days!

This might be a project you may want to do if you have the electrical skills on your homestead.  I know I would not have done this project myself but it was really neat to see him put it together and its going to be a lot of fun to experiment with seeds with it this winter!

Happy Planting to all those who are seed starting now!

Fondly,

Don’t know what SOPA is?  http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71567.html

I love this post it is titled….Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge

I work in Education as it is it is we tap into this free knowledge on the internet on a daily basis….so I cannot imagine a world without free knowledge….this would be a sad thing.

Here is an example of the legislation from the article listed above:

Several of the provisions in SOPA force American Internet service providers or ISPs hosting websites to remove a site from the Internet if there’s a claim it’s infringing against copyright, even if it has not been fully proved in court. The argument is that this would make it easy for someone to make false or weak claims to take a website offline while the case makes its way through the courts. (National Post)

I didn’t know what it was…a co-worker had to enlighten me but I was thankful he did so when I saw this black out I didn’t panic…;)…I am kind of addicted to the internet but I don’t always pay attention to what is going on around me.

This article is great that is listed above because no one disputes that we need to crack down on thieves…..I was scammed with a gift card I bought over the holidays.   The issue is that it will give the government way too much control over the internet.

I don’t know about you but I have seen with government control that one thing just leads to another……and I am not going to delve very deep into this topic but I don’t want it I would just rather learn to be a better educated consumer and purchases from company’s that I know are legitimate.  I want to be free to talk about on my blog whatever I want.  While I do not want people taking images or articles  from Lil’ Suburban Homestead because that is my hard work I don’t know if I want everything we do scrutinized under the magnifying glass of the government.    So I don’t know what the answer is I am just not sure government management of this is what we need.

So I support this black out.  I think we need to Stop SOPA!

Have a great Wednesday everyone…although it feels like Tuesday!