Night Droppings Come to the Rescue

One morning my American Chinchilla doe hid in a corner of her cage and refused her favorite food. She produced no droppings and no urine that day.
It was a sorry sight.
The clickable title will take you to how she was “cured”….

From Nell to “Chick Mirror”

Most of the time, it is much easier to see the “outer clothing” of the matter than perceiving the “deep truth”. The latter requires clear-sightedness, which may not be possible with our sophistry and neuroses in the way.
As a result, a lone chick may die of emotional deprivation….
The clickable title will take you to the subject matter.

Soap Making

Any serious homesteader should try soap making. It’s fun, meditative and creative.
I don’t mean using one of those “fake” melt and pour soap base. Those have lots of “junk” added to them so there isn’t much of a difference between your own “fake soap” and store-bought “junk soap’.
I mean using a few organic raw ingredients and nothing more.
There are “cold process” and “hot process” – each with pros and cons. You should try both before deciding what suits you better.
The clickable title will give you my experience, my preferences and more.

Chicken Feed – Homemade Organic

Having had a close and intimate relationship with food and food making, it was not far fetched for me to want to make organic chicken feed for my hens. After all, I’ll be eating their eggs. Not to mention that they would most likely prefer the tasty variety than the extreme-heat-treated, artificially-vitamin-fortified factory-made everyday-is-the-same commercial feed.
The clickable post title will take you to not only the practical how-to on this matter.

A Cockerel in Our Midst

Whoever said that only roosters crow had never met my wolf.
There wasn’t supposed to be any rooster in my supposed all-hen-flock….
The clickable title will take you to the fun post of surprising facts.

My Lesson on Life & Death

Incubating chickens taught me many lessons.
The most important one was that impatience, my “signature trait”, may have grave consequences, including, but not limited to, life and death.
The clickable post title will take you to the revealing text of how I became an unwitting killer….

Getting to Know My Hens-To-Be

Ten days after I obtained my 7-week-old hens-to-be, I was in for a few surprises.
Fun, puzzling and most of all, surprises that I had never, for the life of me, imagined birds may have delivered.
The clickable title will reveal what I have learned….

Homemade Incubator – Anyone Can Do It

Nobody should have to spend hundreds of dollars for incubators if you simply want to bring about chicks for your own homestead.
Gather a few items you most likely already have in the house and a few minutes of your time would let you build an incubator that works.
The clickable title will take you to all the how to in a few easy steps.

Focaccia

Focaccia is undoubtedly my little helper, as the process of making it delivers me into a meditative state. In this case, a focaccia is never just a focaccia even though the concrete result of a beautiful focaccia would not last more than a few minutes after the steamy hot bread is out of the oven.
Life coaches or psychotherapists who don’t like the process of focaccia making would be hard pressed to find other ways to clear their minds….
The clickable post title would certainly boost your confidence in turning out a loaf of focaccia – anyone can do it, the simplest bread ever existed – and much more.

Opening a Coconut

Not having grown up in the land of fresh coconuts, it took me a while to figure out how to choose a young and mature coconut and how to open them without a hammer or using brute force.
The clickable title will take you to the post.

Sauerkraut

Cooking is not about what shiny equipment you have, it is about a creative process that allows you to turn any scrap of leftovers or whatever random items you have in your fridge or on your counter into a tasty meal. Good cooks are creative thinkers. Cooking and food making are meditative processes that allow one not simply learning a new dish, but using a specific knowledge gaining in a particular field as a tool for honing our creative thinking skill in general.
Sauerkraut making acted as such a tool for me here.
The clickable title will take to you the fun details of my learning to cook, not just sauerkraut making.

Natural Wound Healing: from Hydrotherapy to Manuka Honey

When a wound is infected, the traditional treatment is surgical debridement, for humans and domestic animals alike.
However, plenty of other less invasive and readily available remedies may be just as effective, if not more. In this post, I explore some of these treatments, including manuka honey and hydrotherapy.
The images in the post may be upsetting to some.
The clickable title will take you to the full text.

Kefir – Love it or Hate it

Kefir is one of these things which, despite its undeniable health benefits, elicits strong “opinions”. Some love it. Others hate it. I have yet to find someone who claims indifference towards it. One of my patients would pinch her nose, tilt her head backwards, and then quickly pour the thick semi-liquid substance down her throat. “Exactly how cod liver oil was taken when I was a kid”….
The clickable post title will take you to my own kefir-making journey.