Managing Eastern Red Cedar on the Homestead

Eastern Red Cedars

Today was an absolutely gorgeous day. This morning was drizzly and thunder filled, but that all cleared up by noon. We spent a good part of the afternoon outside doing some forest management. We focused on irradiating small Eastern Red Cedars that have sprung up all over. We walked around looking for any baby trees (those under 5' tall) and cut them down. We ran out of steam at around 30 and will do some more next weekend, and every weekend after that until all 4 acres are free of the preditorial beasts. If you do not control Cedars they will grow tall and broad, blocking out sapplings and other new growth by preventing sunlight from reaching the ground. My forest is mostly Oak, and I want to make sure to manage my forest so it not only looks nice, but all the trees remain healthy as well. 

Unmanaged Forest

Eastern Red Cedar has always been present in Oklahoma, but were kept in check by natural wildfires. Back in the day before European settlement, wildfires would take care of the issue, however changes in use of the lands has led to these trees reproducing at a rapid pace.

Baby Eastern Red Cedar around 2 feet tall

Red Cedars are prolific seeders. Birds eat the seeds and spread them via their waste. Anywhere birds roost, Red Cedars are common. The birds digestive systems prime the seed and the seeds germinate with ease once they hit the ground. If not removed when small, the trees continue to grow and become more difficult to remove

Cut down at the root

For those with large tracts of lands, prescribed burns can be an effective way to manage the growth of these trees. However, on my land that is not an option. So I choose the next best option. I go around with a pair of loppers and cut the baby trees off at the dirt. That's right, I commit tree massacre.

Juvenile Eastern Red Cedar

There is still much work to be done to bring this forest to where it needs to be, but we are making progress. After we get rid of the baby trees we will be taking a chainsaw to the larger, fully grown trees. We will however be leaving the Cedars along the front of the property. They look nice, don't interfere with any other plants, and provide us with privacy. Not all Eastern Red Cedars are bad, but careful control must be taken to prevent them from taking over. 

For more information on controlling Eastern Red Cedars on your property, the Oklahoma Forestry Service produced this helpful pamphlet.

Thanks for stopping by the homestead!

3 Packet Slow Cooker Pot Roast

Creating a wholesome dinner has never been easier than when using slow cooker. I love my slow cooker because I come home after a long day to a house that smells wonderful. I can sit down to relax and enjoy a meal without any muss or fuss. 

My good friend and neighbor, Chrissa, shared this simple recipe for a wonderful roast that tastes amazing. This roast is fall-off-the-bone tender. You can add carrots, onions, potatoes, whatever you want. Make a large roast or a small one, either way you can't loose. Make a large roast and freeze some for a later meal. This recipe is great for cheaper cuts of meat and will help stretch your grocery budget. Enjoy!

Ingredients: 

1 Ranch Dressing Packet

1 Brown Gravy Packet

1 Taco Seasoning Packet

2 tbs Oil 

1 Roast

Vegetables such as carrots, potatoes, onion, etc.

Add a Liner to Your Slow Cooker

1. Line your slow cooker with a slow cooker liner. This makes clean up a breeze!

Sear the Meat

2. Sear the beef using in two tablespoons of oil. 

3. Add any fresh carrots, potatoes, and onions  you want to the bottom of the slow cooker. Use fresh, uncooked vegetables. 

Sprinkle Packets on Meet. No Water Needed.

4. Place the roast on top of the veggies. 

5. Sprinkle the 3 packets on top of the seared roast. No water is needed. 

6. Cover with lid.

7. Cook until the meet falls apart.

This method makes an amazingly seasoned roast. Plus it is just so simple! I buy seasoning packets when they are on sale and keep them in my pantry. I also try to buy meat when there is a good sale. This meal is budget friendly and delicious. 

I love an easy meal that is filling and wholesome. Thanks Chrissa!

Homemade Egg Noodles

The overall goal I have with my life on the homestead is to become more self sufficient. Basic skills for the simplest of foods have been lost for many of us as we increase our dependence on grocery markets and packaged foods. A most basic item, pasta, is surprisingly easy to make. Making egg noodles is surprisingly easy. Why buy your noodles at the store when you can use your own fresh harvested eggs to make high quality noodles? 

Mrs. Volfie of Our Half-Acre Homestead is one of my favorite YouTube homesteaders. Mrs. Volfie is a wealth of information and today I found this short video where she demonstrates the process of making homemade egg noodles. 

The pasta machine, like Mrs. Volfie stated, is under $30. I poked around on Amazon to pick one out. I narrowed my selection down to two (based on price and reviews). Below are my two choices. I have settled on ordering the read one. 

Stainless Steel Pasta Machine w/Clamp

Stainless Steel Pasta Machine in Red: Get ready for the exciting complements for your fresh homemade pasta with this durable stainless steel pasta maker. It's very easy to use; just clamp your pasta machine, choose your settings and you are ready to start. Also included an instructional booklet to help guide you on your pasta preparation. You can make all kinds of pasta such as fettuccine, spaghetti, linguine, and tagliolini with this machine.

Metro Italian Style Pasta Maker in Chrome

Metro Italian Style Pasta Maker in Chrome: Make delicious homemade pasta anytime with this stainless steel pasta maker from Metro. Just clamp this pasta machine to your counter or table edge, choose a setting, and you're ready to turn out fresh homemade pasta. You crank the Metro pasta maker by hand as you feed in your dough.

Made of stainless steel, the machine's adjustable rollers press your dough into long, four-inch wide sheets in a choice of seven thicknesses. You can then cut the sheets into squares for making ravioli, or longer sections for lasagna. By sliding on the stainless-steel cutting attachment, you can extrude thin spaghetti or medium-width fettuccine noodle.

After use, wipe the machine clean or run a damp paper towel or piece of felt through it. Remove the handle and clamp for compact storage. You'll never want to resort to buying dried, store-bought pasta again. A recipe booklet is included to get you started.

I will also need a drying rack. I picked this one: 

Norpro Pasta Drying Rack

Norpro Pasta Drying Rack: Even the longest fresh fettuccine or linguine won't touch the counter when draped on the arms of this sturdy pasta drying rack. The rack stands 16-1/2 inches high, including a heavy, stable, 7/8-inch-thick base. Assembly (and disassembly for storage) is simple. The 3/4-inch center post screws into the base. Four 18-inch dowels then slide through holes in the post, providing eight arms--cunningly angled so they don't interfere with one another--on which to hang fresh pasta to dry before going into the pot, refrigerator, or freezer. As is traditional, the rack is made of unfinished wood so pasta strands don't slide off. --Fred Brack

The best part of being a homesteader is there is always something to learn. I can't wait to make a fresh pot of chicken noodle soup with my own fresh egg noodles. Yum!

Bored with Facebook and it is Affecting My Blogging

Did you ever get to a point where something you are super into and love reading about becomes the same thing over and over? Let me use Facebook as an example. I am a member of several Tiny House groups on Facebook. I have researched and read so much that the posts are now becoming painfully repetitive. The same photos, ideas, and questions are posted over and over again. Facebook in general has become that way. It is such a time thief as you scroll through post after post trying to find new and unseen information. I wonder if Facebook will eventually go the way of MySpace?

I think one of the problems is you don't see all the posts from your entire friends list. This means you see the same unhappy people posting the same unhappy, snarky memes over and over. The vibe from
Facebook seems so negative now. I used to enjoy my morning coffee while I caught up on friends and family's posts and activities. Now I just see political mudslinging, memes with spelling and grammar errors, and complaining. Facebook has become, for me at least, useless information overload and time-suckage. Am I the only one that feels this way?

This has me considering only using Facebook to update my Tiny House Homestead page on posts here and moving away from using Facebook for any other purpose. Don't get me wrong, I still think Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with distant family and friends, but maybe my interaction should be through direct posts to them, not generalized posts or memes. Does Facebook actually serve the same purpose it did 5 years ago? 7 years ago?

I think I might feel differently if there was some sort of Facebook search engine. Some way to look though posts quicker for information I find interesting. Right now I just see a mile of posts and maybe find three or four that are actually useful or interesting to me. Life is simply too short to spend hours trying to glean a gem out of this mine of useless information. My time is too valuable.

I find this repetitive information overload to be draining and it actually affects my blogging in a negative way. I hesitate with many of my posts (many never get published) because I don't want to contribute more of the same over and over. I try to update on things I actually do or try here on the homestead. I try to post things that are relevant and useful. Most of all I try to post and be real. This is after all my real life, my real experiences, my real adventure. At least when I post here you make a choice to stop by and read. I don't post five times a day, flooding your email and Facebook with the same posts over and over. I appreciate you, my readers, and I respect your time. I value your feedback.

Anyway, as I was sitting here this morning mulling over the days since my last post and trying to decide on what to write about, I found I haven't done anything super exciting or thrilling or maybe even post-worthy. I worked, collected eggs, lost a few chickens to a critter, slept, ate... well you get the picture. So, if you get irritated because I don't post a ton or I go in spurts, please understand I am trying to spare you bullsh*t fluff because I respect your time.

Are you experiencing the same overload I am? What do you think?

Look Up for Great Storage

We love board games. We have lots of board games. Storing board games in a traditional house is easy because closets are common. Here in the Shouse, closets are non-existent. I contemplated storing them up in one of the lofts, but as the old saying goes, "Out of sight is out of mind." I know that had we stashed all the games up in the loft, they would remain there and we would rarely get them down to enjoy.

For a time now I had stored some of the games in the living room on shelves. I hated this. I would sit down to relax after a long day and look at the cluttered (and sadly often dusty) shelves with the chaos driving me to distraction. Then when we cleaned out the storage barn we found two more boxes of games. There was no way all those games would fit on my existing shelves. I had to come up with a better way to store the games where they were both easily accessible, but still tidy.

I kicked around lots of ideas like adding cabinets with doors (too expensive), building a wall of bookshelves to look "built in" (same problem I already had, just more expensive), and adding skirts or curtains to the existing bookshelves to hide the contents of the shelves. None of those ideas felt right.

Poking about on the web, as I can frequently be found to do, I came across this bit of inspiration by doing a Google image search:

I hadn't yet finished the ceiling area in the living room. I wanted to embrace the exposed joists that supported the upper loft and formed the ceiling for the living room. I had several ideas for finishing the ceiling, but other projects too priority, to the ceiling was fair game.

Looking over lumber at my local DIY big box store, I settled on 8' lengths of 2.5" wide by 3/4" thick lengths of wood. Each one cost just under $1.50.  These are sold in bundles of 6 by my local store, so I bought 5 bundles, making 30 boards total. I also purchased a box of 2.5" Torx screws to secure the boards to the joists.

I contemplated staining the boards before putting them up, but ultimately settled on the natural wood. I really like to embrace the colors nature has created. These are pine boards, they are light in color and have a very fine grain with occasional knots. Some boards have nicks, chips, or slight splitting. I embrace those unique qualities. Because of the way I chose to put the boards up, the combined strength of the shelves is surprisingly high.

Measuring the distance the shelves would need to span, I found the room to be just over 10' wide with 6 joists. I settled on cutting the wood in 6' and 4' lengths. By first attaching a 6' board then butting up the 4' board, I was able to span the room. The next row I flipped starting with the 4' length and then adding the 6' length. I did this 7 times. This made my shelves 22.5" deep; plenty deep for board games, books, shallow long baskets, etc. The final available shelf space varied slightly as I had one double joist in the ceiling, but the average space between the joists was 22". I repeated these shelves on the opposite side of the room. As an added bonus the shelves concealed the insulation exposed from the loft.

I moved all the board games into their new spaces and was able to declutter the book shelves. I couldn't be more pleased with the overall look. Living in a Tiny House has many challenges, but one-by-one each challenge can be met. I love finding creative ways to add storage and character to my Shouse.

Part of the fun of building your own house is experimenting with options. Get creative with storage and don't forget to look up.

Now, how to finish the underside of the loft so the oriented strand board doesn't look so bad... hmm. On to the next project!

Organizing the Barn

Last weekend the weather was beautiful and the temperature mild here in Oklahoma. The winds have been fierce on and off for the last week and a half, so the greenhouse structure I was using as a mock tool shed was seeing some bad wear and tear. Sucking it up, I got up early last Saturday and tackled cleaning out the storage barn, organizing and culling the "stuff," and moving all the tools in out of potential weather exposure. The project took all day and boy my knees hurt like heck for the effort. 

Doesn't Look Like Much, But It Is A Huge Improvement

First we hauled out all of the boxes that needed sorted. Into the loft on one side went all the holiday decorating supplies. We moved all the unused furniture and various household goods I am not parting with (someday they will go in a guest cottage) into the far recesses of the loft, before lining up the boxes for the holidays close to the edge for ease of access. A large pile for donating began to form.

I moved all the canning jars to the back corner of the barn for now. Eventually I want to add more shelving to the barn and neatly store the jars by size and wide-mouth vs narrow. However, for now they are stacked neatly all in one area. I decided to leave all my craft project totes stored on that side in front of the jars for now because I want to be able to access them easily as the mood hits to complete the multiple quilts I have started. 

Toward the front of the barn on the right side I kept a portable closet to store out-of-season clothing. An antique dresser fills the space between the boxes and the portable closet. 

I will build a workbench like I built in my garage in my "big house."

On the left side, we moved in the frame to the greenhouse with its great shelves, sans the plastic cover. This created a great tool storage area. This took up roughly one quarter of the barn, but greatly increased the storage area and efficiency of accessing tools. I added a folding table in front along the left side as a tool bench until I find an old door to build a more formal and solid tool bench. Finally I brought in larger tools such as the saw table and shop vac. 

Storage Bins Idea

I still have some barn goals which will be met when the budget allows. These include:

• Uniform storage totes
• Shelving
• Lighting (solar)
• Running electric to workbench area

All in all, it is a pleasure now to be able to access things I don't want to store inside the Shouse or Shedroom. I am able to locate and use the things I choose to store. All my things are protected from weather and the locking barn door helps keep everything secure. 

It was a Saturday well spent!

Tiny House Squawktet

I promised I would record the chickens when singing early in the morning (4:30am ugh). I edited this track to remove the quiet time in between crows, but you get the idea. Enjoy!

Check out this episode!