Wednesday, March 4, 2015

That's one big egg!





Are you as tired of this long, cold winter as I am? This is the point in the year when I am eagerly looking for signs of spring, and this week I found one.

On Tuesday I was surprised and happy to find this egg in the duck house. Ducks are seasonal layers. We haven't seen a duck egg since fall, so this one was a welcome sight. She has since laid two more. 

Duck eggs taste much like chicken eggs, but they have a richer taste and a creamier texture. I use most of them for baking.




Here it is in a carton of chicken eggs. The brown ones would be large to extra large if they were graded, and the green ones would be medium to large. I can't leave the duck egg in the carton, because the lid would not close. Actually, I am planning to save some of these duck eggs and put them in the incubator. Stay tuned for duck hatching pictures sometime in April. I sense a cuteness overload coming.

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Book review: How to Make Money Homesteading by Tim Young



Do you want to be a homesteader? Or maybe you already are, but you are finding it hard to pay the bills each month. That's the position we are in, so I was very eager to read this book as soon as I heard about it.

I am familiar with Tim Young and his wife, Liz, having read his previous book, The Accidental Farmers. Tim and Liz did what a lot of us want to do. They left their big city life to start their own farm. They learned as they went, and Nature's Harmony Farm is now a successful producer of award-winning farmstead cheese. They are able to earn their living on the farm, and Tim wrote this book to teach us all how we can do the same.

I had high expectations about this book, and I was not disappointed. It is filled with great ideas for earning money from your homestead. There really is something for everyone here. I could relate to a lot of them, and some I am already working at. But there are so many other things I could be doing as well, and some I had never considered before. Some ideas are large scale, others have low start-up costs and would be suitable to augment one's current income.

My favourite feature of the book is the profiles. There are eighteen unique farms featured. Each is well described and the farmers/homesteaders talk about such things as how they earn a living, how they got to where they are, what things they would do differently, and so on. It is like being able to sit with them face to face and learn from them.

This is a book that should be on every homesteader's must read list. It inspires, encourages, and empowers the reader to turn their farm into a viable and sustainable enterprise. And it is entertaining too. What more could one ask for?

Now I am exploring the possibilities and I am confident that this book will help me find the niches that we need to make our farmstead thrive.