EPIC Cucumber Time!

Heres a short video of my monster cucumber plant. It will be interesting to see how much more it grows before winter sets in. I"m hoping to keep the greenhouse warm enough to keep it going!

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Easy Composting Method The Best Time To Start Is Now!

Every year I see people burning and bagging leaves, are you one of those people? If so check out this easy and basic process for composting that we have found to work very well.

We stopped giving away our free fertilizer a few years ago and we will never turn back. We now do not throw away any organic material from our yard or kitchen unless it is somehow toxic or gone really, really bad. All of our leaves, sticks, sawdust, chicken manure, food scraps, cardboard, compostable paper products, and much more all end up being processed right back into our garden beds. Is there any other way? I cant imagine going out to the store and buying fertilizers and compost that some company is selling back to the same people that left their yard waste at the curb, doesnt that seem silly?



There are many resources out there on what you should compost and how much of each type of item to put in the pile or bin or whatever you have setup. I go with a simple and very general rule of thumb. We add about 75% carbon material (leaves, saw dust, cardboard, paper, wood chips, etc.). This is the base to any good compost and handily this also makes up the majority of most peoples yard waste (remember that giant pile of leaves you had to rack up last year?). The next ingredient is nitrogen materials (chicken manure, vegetables, plant materials, last years jack-o-lanterns, and all of our kitchen waste). Just to be clear you cannot add any leftovers or meat products to your compost, only things that at one time grew from the ground in some way.

Now that you have all those goodies mixed together the only thing left to do is to wait and turn it over as much as you can remember. I mix mine up about once per week. This allows air to get into the pile and for the bacteria to get to work doing their thing. Many people suggest watering the pile as well but up here in Michigan I would not do that unless it was a drought. I might pour a bucket of nitrogen rich aquaponics water on it if that was needed.

We have found the best way to get started and make sure that our lazy genes dont take over is to keep a small container on the counter in your kitchen for scraps and one just outside your door to move them into every day or two. We use an old mixing bowl inside and an old trash can outside. Once per week or so I take the trash can back to the "pile" and dump it and stir it up with a pitchfork.

If things go well and the pile gets cooking you should be cooked down to useable soil in about 60 days or so depending on your weather. This soil has everything that your plants, flowers, vegetables, or anything else needs to grow. If you do this right you should not need to buy soil, compost, manure, or fertilizers for your garden.

I hope this encourages someone to get started and save some food scraps from ending up in a landfill for goodness sakes!


~The SSL Family Dad

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Buying Essential Oils for Our Very First Time

A week and a half ago, I received the first bottles of essential oils I have ever owned in my entire life.  Never used them, never tried them, ever.  A very good friend of mine from high school uses doTERRA oils and had been contacting me to attend one of her classes where she teaches people how to use them.  I had been meaning to pick some up ever since the summer when I started making homemade laundry soap.  If you recall, I picked up a pickle bucket from a local pizzeria.  I thought it might be nice to scent the soap with some lavender or citrus to help combat the dill that still lingers in my bucket. 

Well, I never made it to one of my friends classes.  I seem to have a really hard time with stuff like Mary Kay, jewelry parties, candle parties, you know places where you feel obligated to buy something even if you dont want to?  I always end up buying something and then regretting it because it was either too expensive or something I never really needed or ended up using.  I honestly thought essential oils would turn out the same way.  I wanted to try them, but didnt really NEED them, and was doing just fine without them. 

So, to be a good friend to my friend, I decided to buy some oils from her.  But I didnt know what to buy because I really didnt know anything about them.  And I dont like to waste money so I did my homework on what oils to spend my money on.  A couple days, LOTS of articles, and several YouTube videos later, I made my decision on what to purchase.  Before I tell you what I ended up buying, let me tell you a little about what I learned.

First of all, I learned that I really didnt know ANYTHING about essential oils!  I thought they were something to make things like soaps and lotions smell good.  And thats about all I knew.  But what I learned was they are actually capable of doing so much more. 

Essential oils are the aromatic compounds found in roots, plants, trees, flowers and fruits.  Yes, they do smell good but these aromatic compounds actually protect and are vital to the plant, and they each have their own unique qualities that can benefit our own health as well.  The best part is, theyre pure and 100% natural.  Getting our home and the foods we eat as chemical-free as possible is something we have been passionate about, so this seemed right up our alley.  The more I learned about essential oils, the more excited I got!  When I read a clinical trial study on essential oils, I was SOLD.  Essential oils actually have the ability no antibiotic or medicine has.  They have the ability to pass through a cells membrane and fight off viruses! 

So before I ever even put an oil on my body or smelled one with my nose, I knew this was something my family needed.  Do you ever JUST KNOW something is right for you, that deep down inside you know youre making the right decision?  Essential oils just fit our family, they embody everything were about......and God made them, not a chemist.  That alone was more than enough for me.

With confidence, I texted my friend and told her we wanted the Home Essentials Kit.  It came with ten bottles of oils, a free bottle of Frankincense, a wholesale membership, and a diffuser. 

We know there isnt a magic pill or oil that can heal years and years of a poor diet, lack of exercise and loads of chemicals our bodies were never designed to handle.  I promise to be completely honest about our experiences with these oils, and hopefully our stories will help you on your own wellness journey as well. 

Here are a few of the resources I reviewed before making my first purchase.  I have others, so please just ask if you want more.  I found its not easy finding good, credible information on them.

 

 

And here is a website that serves as a great resource on how best to use your oils.  I found it very helpful and informative: 

http://www.everythingessential.me/

 

 

Please let me know what you think.  Do you use oils?  Which are your favorites?  Id love to hear your stories. 



This post has been shared at:  Homestead Barn Hop, Homestead Blog Hop, The Backyard Farming Connection Hop, Simple Lives Thursday, The HomeAcre Christmas Hop, Front Porch Friday


 

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DIY Food Storage Pantry Save Time Save Money Buy Bulk and Be Prepared

We are using some extra space under the stairs to store our bulk food and pantry items. Since we have been growing more and more of our own food we needed a good place to store it all! The SSL Family Mom has also been cooking and baking almost everything from scratch which means that we have a lot more baking supplies on hand. This space will give us a climate controlled area in our home using some extra space that was just piled with junk. After a few trips to Goodwill the space was cleared out and ready for some shelves.

This will be the first in a series of videos and articles about how we are storing food here in our suburban home. The first step I am tackling today is to get the shelves put in a lay out the space to handle the size items that we will most likely be storing. In the future I will continue to work on this area and enclose it with drywall, run electric for lights and outlets, paint the shelves, seal the concrete floor, and add a small dehumidifier to keep the moisture down.

The ideal conditions for dry food storage is a humidity level below 15% and temps from 40-70 degrees Fahrenheit (4-21c). The basement here in Michigan is always at about 65 degrees so we are in good shape there but the humidity is much higher in the summertime. This will be the biggest challenge and that is why I want to seal this area off from the rest of the basement and use a dehumidifier to keep the moisture levels down. That will come as a later addition as I said but for now back to getting these shelves setup!

I am using all 2X4 construction for the shelf framing for a couple of reasons. This is the cheapest and most readily available type of lumber for us here and also because a 2X4 can hold quite a bit of weight if installed correctly. I probably could have used smaller lumber but in the end these shelves will be able to hold anything I can imagine putting on them. The shelves themselves are made from cheap OSB (oriented Stranded Board) for similar reasons. It is cheap and easily available here and will serve as a good solid shelf for many years. OSB does not do well in high moisture environments but since we are going for climate control here we should be ok.

I am using a 16 inch deep shelf which will hold about 4 quart size mason jars as well as most of the other items that we will be storing here. The bottom shelf is the tallest to hold emergency storage buckets (either 5 or 6 gallon). The next shelf can hold any large size canning jars for juices or pickles. The next two shelves are sized for quart size jars and the top for smaller jam jars and canned goods. With this design I should be able to fit 30-60 days worth of food for our family of five.

 

Tools used in the construction of the shelves

Chalk line -  http://amzn.to/1BmGB0V
Speed Square - http://amzn.to/1ATc9KJ
Craftsman Jigsaw - http://amzn.to/1AlUo4X
A better hammer!! - http://amzn.to/1BmHgPY
Porter Cable Nailer - http://amzn.to/1AlV2PV

All of these and more items used by the SSL Family are available in the

Simple Suburban General Store

 

 

 

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Burning Pellets in a Rocket Mass Heater

After a few prototypes, a few burns, and singeing the hair off of my hands, heres my solution to burning pellets in a rocket mass heater.  Burns hot and super clean.

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4 Installing Bulkheads

Exploded view of Bulkhead Components
You have to do something to let water drain from the grow beds.

If I wanted to just have a simple flood and drain system, I could pump water in the grow bed for a while, then let the water gush or dribble out a hole in the bottom.

But as soon as I want to control that water in any way, I need to install a bulkhead.

The bulkhead I use for the 365 Aquaponics System is constructed from inexpensive PVC pieces you can buy at any hardware store. I use ¾” PVC pipe and fittings. If using metric plumbing bits, the equivalent size is 19 mm.
For some inexplicable reason, plumbing bits in the US are designed with a rounded edge. So for the actual part that penetrates the tank, I use PVC bits designed for electrical conduit.

The male PVC coupling bit is screwed down through the thickness of the tank. Once the coupling is tight, PVC will seat itself against the plastic tank wall in a nearly water-tight fashion. Slip a #18 O-ring around the male threads, then thread the female fitting as tight as you can by hand. The O-ring will make this bulkhead water tight, given that none of these bulkheads needs to withstand more than a foot or 300mm of water pressure.

Credit for this bulkhead concept goes to Richard Kinch, who details this bulkhead design at "An Improvised PVC Bulkhead Fitting for Liquid Storage Tanks."

Here’s a short video clip showing installation of a bulkhead.

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Building Aquaponic Grow Beds Time Lapsed

This is a time-lapsed video showing me building a deep water culture (DWC) bed and a media bed. For details about the entire build, please see this video series:   Youtube playlist

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