Where Food Comes From

On Saturday we caught and started slaughtering a chicken, but were unable to finish. I did not tie the chickens feet or hold it tight enough while cutting it’s neck. I searched for two hours looking for the hen that was half cut and did not find her until two days later. She is fine and healthy barely more than a scratch on her thanks to a dull knife.
Thursday we decided to try again and were lucky enough to catch our 2nd rooster which we do not need. I’ll give you a basic outline of what we did in our slaughtering and processing of the chicken.

1. Cut both sides of the neck and held the chicken upside down until it had completed draining
2. Scalded the chicken (to make removing the feathers easier) and plucked the feathers, which was the lengthy part of all of this.
3. Removed the head, feet, “guts,” heart, and lungs
4. Cut into parts and grilled
5. Ate as a meal with store bought potatoes and our own homegrown cucumbers
If you want detailed instructions this is where we got our information at
How to Butcher a Chicken

The chicken did not taste like “store bought chicken” because it was not a meat chicken. It was a game rooster. We did not love the taste of it, but enjoyed the whole process and felt good learning and experiencing something new that will be a wonderful life skill.

Having Sol watch the whole process with fascination may have been the best part of all. Sol seeing where food comes from is so awesome and knowing that this will be his life and he will have an appreciation for food, life, and animals excites Sandi and I both. He was in fact eating a pear off of our own pear tree in the backyard as I slaughtered the chicken. What a wonderful picture of what we hope our life will always be like in the future.

'Garden Success and Failure

Here are some pictures of the wonderful bounty we are getting from our slapped together gardens. We have cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, sunflowers, and pears that are ready to be picked and watermelons, catalopes, oakra, banana peppers (courtesy of Hidden Haven), and potatoes all growing that will be good within a week or two. Our pumpkins completely died. I have included a pictures of that as well. We are still very excited and feel ready to continue on with our journey of making our life better.

This last week we decided to make food instead of buying fast food on the road. We made a list for every meal with what we needed to buy and stuck to it! We ate every meal according to the plan. This is a huge step towards a better life for us. Being on the road 12 hrs a day some days it is hard to make yourself not eat fast food, but we not only were able to bring the food from home we enjoyed it and are excited to continue.
As a side note last month we decided no more sodas to start making us healthier and we have not had a soda in over a month. We will be posting a list of items we plan to eliminate from our diet monthly to slowly improve our eating without trying to attack everything at once.

We got our first full months electric bill since we turned off all of the lights and air conditioning and were very excited to see what difference, if any, it made.

Previous months bill $184.00
This months bill $ 40.00
Savings of $144.00

This was not our reasoning for not using a/c or lights, but it sure is incentive to keep it up!
We are planning to slaughter at least one chicken today. We will be posting on this in a few days.
Chris, Sandi, and Sol

Vacation

Our family has taken a few long weekends in a row to relax and have a vacation. So we will be picking our posts back up and have plans to start slaughtering our chickens this week. We will document all of this as we go and will let you know how they taste. Our vacation was great and thanks for waiting around for us.
Chris Sandi and Sol.
P.S. We are so excited to get moving full speed ahead look forward to great things.

Learning from Failures

We have had a rough week with different things not working out or running into obstacles hindering us from making progress with our transition. We have had our gardens be overun with bugs, oil lamps we've purchased not work, our shampoo eat Sandi's skin (a few weeks ago), as well as a feeling of discouragement.
When we stepped back as we were feeling discouraged we realized we had learned a lot from our mistakes and failures and were also succeeding in other areas.
Our gardens are doing awesome (thus all the bugs), we're learning about pests and how to control them, we obtained a rain barrel for $15.00, we shot our guns (that we've owned for over a year) for the first time, we learned olive oil does not work very good as oil in an oil lamp and we have been staying faithful to not using lights in our house, no air conditioning, no sodas, and we have also bought a juicer and have been using that faithfully once a day.
Learning from our failures is as important as learning from our success. I've attached a lot of pictures for you to look through.
1.We've got lots of pests as you can see
2.Our lovely rain barrel
3. Sol with our solar night at night time
Failing is not a failure unless you fail to learn from it.
Chris, Sandi, and Sol

No More Lights

We have officially quit using normal lighting in our house as of 3 days ago. We bought several candles and candle holders and have been enjoying using them. We bought one little $4.00 solar light from tractor suppy to use as a night light. We place it outside during the day and bring it in at night and it lasts all night long.
Coming home after dark we just pick up the solar light and use it as a soft torch coming into the house. We really have enjoyed it and are excited and feel really use to it.

Also as a reminder please check out our website at TheBantamLife.com
or on the right side of the blog we always have a link to the website. We are slowly getting more and more content there that will not be on the blog. With the blog we are limited in the ability to seperate information into categories and with space.

If you have any information on how you are being self sustainable, recipes, items that you would want to post for others to be able to use feel free to email me at bantamfarms@gmail.com or post comments on the blog with the information.
Chris, Sandi and Sol

P.s. We are loving the Dental Experiment! Great results already.

Dental Experiment

I have in the past few years needed to get some dental work on my teeth in the price range of $500. This was the cheapest quote we had received. Basically it would be for a more detailed cleaning of the teeth. I had not taken care of my teeth as well as I should have and so they needed to spend extra time getting it right.
Well we started researching how to make our own toothpaste/tooth powder and we ran across an amazing website full of information. I highly recommend anyone to check it out and at least read the information there even if you don't apply it to your life. Click here for the OraMedia website.
In a quick summary a dentist named Dr. Robert Nara had the belief that we could take care of our teeth without ever having to go to the dentist. He believed that what you used to brush your teeth was less important than how you brushed your teeth. He believed that you should brush 3 times a day with baking soda and 1 or those times with salt in the mix. He also says to rinse your mouth with salt water so the bacteria in your mouth cannot thrive in the high salt environment.
Because of this we are doing an experiment mainly with my teeth.
1. I am going to brush 3 times a day with baking soda (we are checking other sources to make sure this will not wear the enamel off) and once a day with salt and baking soda(do not brush with salt yourself if you have any metal fillings it will cause corrosion)
2. I am rinsing with salt water once a day and using salt water in my water pick to help the healing of my gums.

3. Sandi is going to be my dentist and will remove the heavy plaque buildup with a $4.50 dental cleaning kit from Wal-Mart.

Dr. Nara stated that he believed your diet had a big deal to do with the health of our teeth so we are steadily trying to improve our diet. We have already begun that prior to this by cutting out all sodas (we do still drink sweet tea) and we have recently gotten a juicer to help us eat healthier foods. We will also be canning and dehydrating fruits and vegetables in the near future. I have posted some pictures of my mouth after the first brushing and will be posting updated pictures as we go along. I believe we will track this for one month when we will show final pictures (or if need be 3 months) and let you know how it went.

Getting Radical

Getting Radical
by Chris Stanley on 06/28/10

Our family has been lightly tossing around the idea of not using our lights anymore and making candles to use instead. We also were thinking we could turn off our air conditioner. The following day the air conditioner stopped working and we are pushed into our plan a bit faster.

The reason we are doing this is to prepare us for using less electricity when we build our log cabin that will be powered by alternative energy only. Maybe it is radical or maybe it's genuis!

Not only does this help with energy costs, but it also takes away the incentive to be inside and forces us outside more to do the things we need to do any ways.
Chris, Sandi and Sol

Use what you have.... when you have it

Two days ago we cut down some mimosa trees in our back yard (I was testing my on sale $2.99 machette I bought from Tractor Supply) in an attempt to clear some space and give sun to the trees we really want to thrive. After cutting them down we noticed that the bark peeled very easily and my brilliant wife decided to make a basket with the bark. With no prior basket making experience she worked until dark to get as much bark as she could and create a basket. She was able to finish about half of the basket and it turned out beautiful, but the next day it did not want to cooperate because as it dried it curled and was not very pliable. The other trees we had cut down were also not peeling in whole sheets anymore as it dried. So if you start a project finish it as soon as possible you never know what might prevent it's completion later.
We also used some of the branches of the trees to make teepee tomato plant stakes to help guide them as they grew.
Following that we pulled all the leaves off of all branches and used it as mulch along with 30lbs of old dog food (to fertilize) and our trimmings from our bushes to smother some grass and help to create some rich soil in the future.
The more you think about becoming self sufficient or just how to be more sustainable you will start to see things that you can use that would have otherwise been dismissed as trash.
There is a great line in the Self Sufficient Life and How to live it where the author stated that the garbage man should be the last one called to a self sufficient homestead. Nothing is garbage when trying to be self sustainable.
Thinking this way we were able to take something that would have been trash and find 3 uses for it, or actually 4. We used some branches to give the chickens "roosting sticks." They really enjoy the sticks.
We listen to the Self Sufficient Homestead podcast and they have a great saying they put on their tee shirts now that I think is applicable here
"Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."
Think outside the box and you just might find uses for things you never would have previously.
In a few days we will post our newest homemade item which will be shampoo. The soap is working beautifully already with only 1 week of aging. The aging is suppose to complete the hardening of the soap, but it is already hard enough to use and we are enjoying it a lot.
Chris, Sandi, and Sol

Homemade Chicken Feeder

What you need
1 5 gallon bucket lid
1 smaller bucket w/lid (we used a 14LB bucket)
Drill
2 screws

We drilled 4 quarter size holes in the sides of the bucket. Make sure you drill directly above the bottom of the bucket on the sides.

Next place the 5 gallon bucket lid with the top on the bottom of the bucket so the feed will collect on it. I only drilled 2 screws near the center of the lid which seemed to hold fine.

Fill feeder with feed and place the smaller lid on top of the bucket and you are good to go!

I'll give you this advice for FREE
We asked a Food Lion (which is a grocery store) manager if they would sell any of their 5 gallon buckets that the cake icing came in and they said, "no, but we give them away."

So stop by your grocery store or local Wal-Mart and ask. It never hurts to ask. I know from a friend that Wal-Mart will sell their buckets for $1.00 a bucket or for a $1.00 for as many as you can carry.

This is a 14LB chicken feeder and I checked tractor supply's price for a 10LB feeder
Cost to make $0.00 Time to make 5min
Tractor Suppy $15.49
Total Savings of $15.49

Soap

What you need
13 ounces of lye
5 cups of cold water
5lbs of fat
7oz coconut oil
7oz olive oil
4oz beeswax

(substitutions- weight for weight of oils and lard, and twice as much beeswax for lard)(simplified you would start out with 6lbs of lard)

I grated orange peel and lime peel and let dry overnight(1 orange and 1 lime)

I only had 1 tsp of citrus essential oil and I added in a few drops of lavender (next time I will use 2 tsp of EO)

mix lye and cold water, let cool
melt fat until clear and let cool until you feel resistence but not to the point of hard fat floating in there
pour lye (lye should be bathwater warm just feel outside of container) into fat (fat is still on stove, burner off)while stiring slowly. If fat seperates turn burner on until it warms back up and turn off.

Stir 25-ish minutes

It is time to add scent when you can make a line for a second in the top of soap

pour into greased container (I used a large tupperware and two bread loaf pans and filled them up so be prepared with enough container space)

(Here is where I sprinkled grated peelings onto top of soap for looks. I had to push the peelings into the soap, I used the head of a screw)

Put in oven (keep oven off) with the light on for some heat and pan of waterto keep it moist. I let my soap sit for a day and a half and pulled it out and set it on the counter. It was still too soft to take out of the pan so I left it on the counter for another day and it came out fine.

I have read that letting the soap age is a good thing. I don't really know why but I imagine it is so the bar is dry and won't fall apart so easy in water. I cut the soap blocks into bars with a knife and stacked the soap bars on an old recieving blanket, covered them up and set them out of the way. They say let them age for three weeks or so, but we'll see how long it takes for them to get dry enough.

One thing I did notice was my soap didn't lather but I looked it up and it is just a result of using alot of lard in the mixture. But it cleans great!

TADA! Thats it. Sure you can make this into an art of chemistry but this was the first time we ever made soap and ours turned out just fine and I made half this stuff up. So don't be afraid to just do it and experiment! And don't be discourage if yours doesn't turn out, research if you can use your failed soap over again in a different soap recipe.

Cost of one batch of soap $20-$25.00 for 40 bars. Once we are in the position to be able to "create" our own ingredients by using our our animal fat and create our own lye it will be cheaper, but for now we don't have those resources.

Homemade bar of soap $ .50 a bar Time to make 1 1/2hrs for 6 months of soap
Walmart Irish Spring $ .50 a bar
Being Self Sustainable PRICELESS

The Bantam Life

This is the start of our blog and our first test post. Visit us at TheBantamLife.com as well as here on the blog.
Chris Sandi and Sol