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Well I finally decide to join facebook. Ill be sharing pictures and interesting articles and recipes. If you would like to learn more or follow or friend me on facebook you can find me at www.facebook.com/dirtyfeet.maggoo look forward to chatting and sharing with you all.

Whats that smell??

We have recently adopted a new dog. She resembles a miniature lassie and, my daughter had decide to name her ginger. She was a stray that showed up on someones porch on the other side of town. So seeing the collie resemblance in her, we decided to adopt her in hopes of having a good herd dog that would help keep our yard free of cats (I'm allergic :( ) and other critters that might disturb our livestock.

So very quickly she became accustom to us and is running the fence outside, when me and the husband decide to take some eggs that our black bantam Cochin hen has been trying to hatch unsuccessfully and throw them in the wood. We know they are gonna be bad, possibly rotten. So my husband starts tossing eggs and one hits the grass and breaks and standing over twenty feet away we can smell the stink. If you have never smelled a rotten egg, be VERY thankful it is as my husband would say a smell that would "gag a maggot." My dog for some unknown reason decides to run over, roll over and roll back and forth on top of said rotten egg.....seriously... rolling back and forth as if she was getting some sort of thrill out of this nasty, stinky, rotten egg.

Right about this point I am thinking how am I gonna wash the dog without getting that smell on me. I don't even want that smell near me let alone on me. So I think back to the time that we caught a skunk in our live trap. There was no way of getting around shooting the skunk so our yard smelled so bad you couldn't even walk out the door without gagging. After the skunk sprayed about three times in the backyard there was a sheen on the grass and we sprayed it with vinegar and almost immediately the smell dissipated. Its like a magic trick. Vinegar of all things gets rid of skunk stench. So I sprayed my dog with some vinegar in hopes that I wouldn't actually have to get the smell on me and it worked. I still went ahead and bathed her after the vinegar had dried. But point being if you ever get a stinky egg or dog like me you don't have to let them "wear it off" as I have seen a lot of people do when their dogs get sprayed by skunks. You can use vinegar to bathe them. I just use the cheap white vinegar and it is only a few dollars for a gallon so it is not an expensive thing to keep on hand. We keep some on hand anyways for canning and cooking and baking.

I have heard of some people making apple cider vinegar from apple scraps at home but I have yet to venture into that endeavor. Maybe one day but for now I think my apple scraps are better spent as pig feed. She loves apple scraps, just remember to remove the seeds before feeding to livestock since they contain arsenic. You can also use the apple cider vinegar to help lower parasites in your livestock. There are many reasons to keep vinegar on hand even if its just one of those things you store under the sink. Which is where we keep ours all three gallons of it. Hopefully you never have to use your for a rotten egg but you never know. One thing is for sure we are all a little happier that the smell is gone on our little HOMEstead!

On the bookshelf

I have been thinking a lot about the things that have helped me along the way to figure things out and learn new trades when it comes to homesteading. I learn a lot by doing, but I also learn a lot from books. So I thought I would take a few minutes to share some of the books that I own and have read and found helpful as it pertains to the homestead.  The first book I think is a must have might gross a few out because of the pictures inside the book. But, I think that this book is a necessary one for people who have never hunted or cleaned their own meat. I found it very helpful in building my confidence into helping me butcher our chickens for the first time. It is called A Hunter's Cookbook: A Practical Step-By-Step Guide To Dressing, Preparing And Cooking Game, In The Field And At Home, With Over 75 Delicious Recipes And Over 1000 Photographs


The next is a book that I have never fully finished reading because it is so big and so much information in it that I get distracted and tend to flip through and read random pages in it. It has everything that you would need for being self sufficient on your homestead. It has information on building chicken coops, making cheese, soap making, bread making, tons of information on herbs and tonics. Really there is far too much to list of what this book has, if you can only afford to get one book I would say this one is definitely the one that I would pick. Country Wisdom & Know-How: A Practical Guide to Living off the Land


Another book that I find myself looking at all through the growing season is one that most homesteaders already have on their bookshelf. It is the book I refer to any time that I pull out my canner and can anything. I find that I can take almost any of my recipes and can them using this book just by canning the longest time for whichever ingredients are in it. If you are canning potatoes and meat for example, the meat is supposed to be pressure canned longer than potatoes so you would go by the time it takes to can the meat in the recipe.  It is a great idea for canning leftover soups so that you don't have to make a huge pot to bring the sick neighbor some chicken soup. ® Blue Book Guide to Preserving (by Jarden Home Brands)


There is also another blue canning book that I purchased while at the 2012 NRA conference in Houston, that takes the recipes to a whole new level. There are tons of recipes in this book that are not in the blue book. A lot of them are things I never would have even thought of it I hadn't seen them in this book. Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving I can promise you will not be able to make ever recipe in this book because there are a lot of them in there.

These are just a few of the books on my bookshelf I have tons more and I will try to cover more of them as the year progresses. If I have one good word of advice for purchasing books, it would be not to get them from the big box store, amazon is a great website and will save you tons on books. Take the Ball complete book for example, it is usually around 15$ on amazon I paid 20$ at the NRA conference for it. Every one of these books are worth every penny, but it helps to save that homestead cash for that roll of fence or new milking pail that you need. You can check out these books on amazon at http://astore.amazon.com/alitbitofhom-20