We're Back

I know we have been missing from the blog for quite some time now. So much has happened in the last year? I can't believe it has almost been year.

Quick rundown of the events
We changed jobs and moved onto a sail boat for a little over a month which was in the winter of 2010. Sailed down to Florida then got fired from our job as we got there.

We then had to turn around and rent a car and come back to NC and get our old job back.

After that we were kind of lost in our way trying to figure out what was next and what to do.

Within the last month really two weeks we have obtained seven acres of property, we have purchased a pull behind air streat (tin can love it!) for $1500.00 and have nearly cleared the entire driveway so we can drive back to our property. (it is wooded.)

We will be posting many many many posts in the coming weeks and months as we move onto this property and into the trailer. We plan to be totally "off grid" with Solar power and a well for water when we move onto the property.

Our house will be going up for sale shortly and once it sells should be completely 100% debt free with 7 acres of land a trailer and hardly any bills. We are very excited.

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.