Lovely photos , We had a few Hares in our district when I was very young we never bothered them as they were only a few , they were wiped out eventually , was nice seeing them again .
On Friday we had a calf butchered. A twin that had not been accepted by its mother and hence was grown up by the bottle. Today it came back from cooling and hanging. I wanted to take some pictures. But when I came in from the office, there was only one hind quarter left to be broken down and parts of the calf already in the freezer. It is easy to be a self-supporting homesteader, when your dad does most of the work. 8) These will give us some fine steaks To be roast and schnitzel Goulash The clippings go into the meat chopper And these will make fine broth as well as them dogs damn happy
good food, good meat, good god, let's eat. not that i eat a lot of meat, but when i do that's the kind of meat i'd like to see. good job all around.
My cabin in the woods Two years ago I bought this old house some kilometers from my home. I wanted it to be my little haven of silence and am thinking about building my retirement home there. It used to be a small sawmill until about 1930. Later the lot was used as a nursery, selling vegetable seedlings, vegetables and flowers. It even had a heated greenhouse for growing orchids. After the gardener died, the greenhouse was knocked down und parts of the lot were sold to neighbors. Unfortunately they sold most of the mill race, too. (Else I might have been able to restore it and install a turbine.) Then an older, introvert man bought the house and the remaining acre of land and lived a modest life there, for the last 3 decades. He seems not to have cared much about maintenance. So the house was in rather wretched condition when he sold it to me and moved away. It is of the grid, except a telephone line (no cell reception there). Water comes from a spring and electricity is provided by some solar panels with accumulators and a generator as backup. As I am always short of time, things failed to move forward as I had hoped. I had to find a better solution, a new permaculture element. As a friend of mine looked for an inexpensive place to live, we decided she should move in and help with the renovation. (Building law does not allow me to build a new home there until I have lived in the place for a couple of years, as it belongs to the exterior zone. So we have to renovate the place to at least make it habitable for some years. ) The desired improvements accelerated and in the meantime she was able to move in with her horde of animals. Ready for calcimining: The composting toilet before and after renovation: We removed the wall between sleeping room and bathroom, to make the room bigger and brighter. An old wood stove for cooking. Window before (left) and after grinding and first layer of paint (right). (You get an impression, what the whole place looked like.) Part of the old shed turned into a hen house:
It looks amazing, & you have made such a difference with your renovations! Fantastic effort Manfred : ) And how wonderful your friend now has a beautiful place to live with her animals. Win/Win situation there : )
I love the way it sort of nestles into the trees and that woodstove!!!... bet it warms the whole place and cooks up a storm.Wish I had one.
The cabin has seen some progress in the meantime. Along the driveway was a row of rotten spruce stumps and behind them a row of overaged elder shrubs. We cut these down to allow more light into the garden. We are hoping most of the elder stumps will shoot again, to give us a new, but smaller hedge as a screen and some blossom and fruit harvest. The rotten spruce and the twigs went on a pile in the back of the garden, to create a little biotope. Looks like a wren already made up its new home there. The elder trunks went on the firewood heap. Nature is starting very early this year. The butterburs are breaking out of the ground. Behind the cabin we have cleared out a lot of trees too, as we want to plant fruit trees there. Firewood for the next couple of winters. (The pile is bigger than picture´s the perspective suggests). The first chickenweed pancakes of the year. Harvested from the greenhouse and the hens. Chickenweed is often reckoned as an annoying weed. But it actually tastes better than most conventional salad or spinach greens. Grandpa´s old Kramer and plow have been helpful again. And Tanja is removing wheelbarrows full of weed roots to clear the now reanimated vegetable garden for her seeds and plants.