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“There is nothing like staying home for real comfort. Nobody can be more devoted to home than I am.” - Jane Austen
I was more than ready for our fall break from school when the Friday before rolled around. Every year it seems teaching gets harder and harder. I won’t get into it all here, but there’s not a lot of support for our educators across the nation. So, when that bell rang at 2:56 pm signalling break had finally begun I wasted no time wrapping up my teacher responsibilities and headed out the door. I had the opportunity to go on a vacation with a great friend this year, but between farm expenses and my student loans increasing it was hard to justify spending money on a fun trip. So, instead, I took this opportunity to nourish myself and my home. It was a busy week for sure and I feel so good about what I accomplished. I allowed time for a lot of rest, creativity, and doom scrolling as well which created a sense of balance throughout the weekend. “Adventure is just one step away” October 13th - Dailey Yoga Open House - Chakra Art Snapshot Friday the 13th was the kick-off to my break. Some may view this day as unlucky, but I would have to disagree. I think humans find many silly things to be afraid of because we are told to be afraid of something. Viewing this day as lucky over the last few years has facilitated such a large shift. Now, Friday the 13th is one of my luckiest days. On this particular day, I traded my time to help friends celebrate opening their new yoga studio! If you’re not familiar with Daily Wellness, Daily Yoga, and Adam Paul Salon you need to be. These guys are amazing and do such great work. Jason and his team facilitate massage, acupressure, and cupping sessions while Adam and his team provide top-notch cosmetic services. I’ve personally had my hair styled by Adam and my booty rubbed by Jason. They are the most creative professionals in the wellness/feel-good industry! I love doing Chakra Snapshots. Mostly because I get to facilitate creativity with those who sit in my chair and because chakra readings are deeply personal to each individual. Essentially, a Chakra Snapshot is an interactive tool you can utilize to “check in” with your energy centers. Infusing your brand of magic into each ink drop and through the transforming power of fire, you will have a physical representation of your energy flow. Best part? You get to take your snapshot home with you as a reflective piece of art for your home or self-care space. “Clean your space, clear your mind.” October 14th - Home Blessings I love starting any new adventure with a nice clean of our home. To me, it makes projects feel less overwhelming. Instead of focusing on all the tasks I need to complete throughout the week, I prefer taking a day to clean, clear, and create a firm foundation for all my creative and mundane workings. At the end of the day our home became a fertile playland where I felt comfortable enough to make a huge mess in the kitchen to can vegetables, process herbs, and anything else I could think of doing. October 15th - Harvesting Rosehips and Yarrow; Canning Homegrown Marinara Klaus and Gisela were a great help while I was harvesting rosehips early Sunday morning. I let the puppies enjoy the nice, cool weather while I made my way to the pasture area to my rosehip patch. The rosehip patch I typically harvest from is an invasive plant in North America so I don’t feel that bad about harvesting a lot of fruit from this patch. I go into more detail about the multiflora rose in an upcoming podcast/blog post so stay tuned for that! In short, however, rosehips are full of beneficial vitamins to support your immune system and make amazing skin care products. I try to harvest rosehips throughout the winter months. Rosehips are seeds to make the next generation of plants. Harvesting the fruit will keep the spread of this plant down while also leaving important food for wildlife. I haven’t done anything with my harvested rosehips yet. I also harvested yarrow and sweet gum seed pods for a recipe and spell later this month. Making the marinara sauce was much easier than I anticipated albeit messing. Thankfully, I cleaned the house thoroughly the day before! Throughout the summer I froze our fresh tomatoes picked from the garden. We had an awfully slow year with the air quality being poor due to the fires in Canada and I honestly didn’t think we’d have enough to process and can. That’s why I froze them as I harvested them. I would fill up a plastic bag and throw them in the freezer. At the end of the season, I had enough tomatoes to make 30 6oz jars of marinara, 3-quart jars, and plenty left over to make ketchup in a couple of weeks. I purchased all my jars from Amazon when I saw them on sale. My water bath canner came from Menards and was also on sale. We have a glass top stove and this canner was rated safe for glass. I highly recommend it as it worked very well! I’ll link everything I purchased for my adventures this week at the end of this post. The marinara was AMAZING! Seriously, there isn’t anything better than garden fresh marinara. Not only was I able to use all our tomatoes, but I was also able to season the marinara with herbs I grew from my garden this year too. The only ingredients I wasn’t able to grow were the onions and garlic. The basil, thyme, rosemary, and sage were all lovingly tended to, harvested, and processed for this purpose. They understood the assignment! October 16th - Free Plants; Arthur Releases Betty the Turkey Monday was a scheduled day of rest for me. Outside of taking advantage of the rain and planting transplants I was given, I had nothing on my agenda. My wonderful uncle dropped off Adam’s Needle, Hibiscus, and more Irises earlier that week who desperately needed to get into the ground. Thankfully, it was pretty wet all week and I didn’t need to do any extra watering! While planting, I heard a crash and some squawking coming from the coop. Our baby goat, Arthur, has been exploring his new digs with more curiosity. This day, he decided the turkeys also needed to free-range with everyone else too. The grain in their coop didn’t impact his decision to enact chaos upon our homestead. Thankfully, Don was back to good health and Betty was no longer broody. After a few headbutts from Arthur and Bryn, Betty soon calmed down and now everyone is getting along. This is incredible because she was attacking everyone and everything during her broody season. Plants in the ground, and animals were fine, so I spent the rest of the day doing minor tasks like laundry, cooking dinner, and updating my Grimoire with all the new recipes I’ve added this season. October 17th - Ducks Being Ducks, Olive Oil Hates Me, Product Making, & Pantry Organization It has been a dream of mine to have a nice pantry big enough to store all my herbs, herbal products, and months of food. I feel very lucky our basement is open enough to sequester a portion of the basement for this very purpose. However, after 6 months of me just throwing stuff down there, it needed to be organized and cleaned desperately. The pantry was the top priority for this day, but I had other chores that needed to be done first. Mainly checking on my yard birds. This includes the chickens, turkeys, and ducks. We lost two of our drakes a week ago from an owl attack and we have been skittish about being in the barn area. They can fly and I don’t worry about them a whole lot, but I enjoy getting my eyes on them daily. This day I found both muscovy and our mallard, Margaret, paddling around our pond living their best life. I don’t know if we’ll do more ducks in the future, but I sure do love seeing them be ducks on our pond. When it looked like everyone had been fed and was ready to start their day, I moved into the house to start working on the pantry. That’s when I saw her. Olive Oil…. Olive Oil is one of our Buff Orpington and a master of escape. It was her squawking I heard first and then the greenhouse bouncing along the fence of our garden. The rescue was thankfully swift and painless. Olive Oil was not grateful. Organizing the pantry took a few hours and when it was over I felt so good about myself and what I accomplished. I’ve been collecting old furniture, metal shelves, jars, lids, and food processing supplies for over a year to have a pantry able to store canning supplies and our food. Now, I have a whole space dedicated to storing all the things we enjoy throughout the winter. When that was finished, I bottled up my poison ivy skin spray and charcoal salt scrub. These will be available at the craft shows coming soon! October 18th - Butternut Squash Soup; Goat Fecal Sample Tuesday was another lightly scheduled day. While cleaning the pantry I found 4 butternut squashes I had stored the previous fall. They were a little dried out, but for a year in storage, I was pleased with how well they stayed preserved in the basement. I wanted to use them before I lost them. They made delicious butternut squash soup I froze and stored for later in the year. My father has been dabbling with using a microscope to do his fecal samples on his herd of goats. I wanted to test how my holistic/herbal routine with my animals was doing and he was so kind to show me how he does his. I know my critters are healthy, but routine assessment is crucial for understanding what is going on inside their bodies and giving hints on when the routine needs to be changed based on what is happening in real-time. I’ve been feeding my animals approved kitchen scraps for a year. They get a weekly ration of fresh fruits and veggies from the garden, leftover tomato sauce, and grains, and the yard birds get some sort of protein in the form of meat. On top of all that fresh goodness, all the critters forage. We had a walnut tree that fell in a windstorm over the summer. The goats have enjoyed eating the bark and leaves while the birds peck at the walnut hulls growing soft as they ripen. Walnuts are a natural dewormer and when paired with weekly natural deworming foods and snacks, we’ve managed to successfully keep all our animals healthy and our goats worm-free! I’ll have more on this topic in next week’s blog topic. October 19th - Tarot Reading; Floor Cleansing Earlier in the week I was privately messaged by a person asking for more clarity concerning their life path and direction. I enjoy these sorts of readings for others as it usually turns into brainstorming with each other different perspectives or ideas to add some transitional spice to their journey. I don’t do these readings often as it’s not something I feel like I need to offer consistently. However, when I do get the chance to do a reading for someone it just makes my day! I love using tarot, runes, and other tools to actively engage my intuition to help others understand their question or concerns on a deeper level. It’s a very fulfilling gift I have! After helping this woman and earning resources to pay for my chicken’s scratch for the week, I spent the rest of the day cleaning and cleansing my floors. I don’t always mop the floors, but I try to sweep daily if not every other day. Between the dog hair and the debris from homestead life, our floors get really dirty! It’s not worth it to stress about keeping the floors clean at all times, but they were getting pretty sticky and needed a nice wash. I do love how the house feels after washing the floors! October 20th - Bless the Rains As most of you locals know, we’ve been in a pretty long drought. We do okay on the homestead with our pond, the creek, and the underground stream. We conserve our water to the best of our abilities, however, it is so nice to have real rain. I had a nature walk scheduled for this Friday evening. We were going to walk around the homestead practicing identifying different plants that can be found locally. The goal was to be able to identify 2-3 new plants successfully although we were going over more than that. The rain we got wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to cause our trail to get muddy and slick fairly quickly. The decision was made to reschedule our nature walk for October 28th at noon. October 21st - Goodwill Crafts, Welcoming a New Flock My week ended with a fabulous shopping trip to our local Goodwill. I picked up some sweaters, a new pair of pants, and two framed pictures I got creative with. I took Jake lunch and later met with an ole high school friend. She needed to downsize her flock and graciously delivered 12 new hens. They haven’t figured out their sleeping arrangements yet, but it seems like everyone is settling in okay. October 22nd - Art, Sheets, Tidy for the Work Week The last day of fall break was a day dedicated to tidying up loose ends and preparing for a new work week. This meant sheets got washed, all my crafty decor projects had to be put on the walls, and my work bag prepped. I watched an entire season of Ancient Aliens, made dinner for Jake and me, snuggled some cats, and relaxed the rest of the day. I can honestly say I don’t feel like I missed out on anything on this break. I truly enjoy being home and I managed to get a lot of projects I wanted to get done completed. I had a blast doing the work and the feeling of a clean and well-managed house is worth it.
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AuthorCaitlin is a full-time special education teacher with a penchant for the wyrd. When she isn't hanging out with the coolest kids, she's out in her garden tending to her herbs or frolicking with her 2 goats, 40 chickens, 6 ducks, 2 turkeys, 2 dogs, and 6 cats. She understands it's a hoarding situation at this point, but life is too short to worry about boring things like that. Archives
May 2024
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