themartianchick

Thanks, Deerslayer! I might just try them! This morning I was going to try a new recipe, but decided to try some of the ones that I'd frozen yesterday. They were pretty good. They weren't limp since I heated them up in the toaster oven. I will definitely use this recipe again, but I'd like to find the perfect" recipe for me and my family.

There is nothing wrong with sticking with the old stuff! It does stand the test of time...

I save carrot seeds every year... I just leave a few in the ground to over-winter. When they finally bolt in the second year, I wait for them to dry out a bit and then snip the entire head into a paper bag so that it still has ventilation to dry out completely. I am a lazy seed saver so I don't bother trying to separate the seeds from the flower head. Once it is completely dried, I just crumble the entire head and plant it all. I essentially follow these same rules for any plants that have to over-winter before going to seed like collards, radishes, etc... I noticed yesterday that one of my lettuce plants is already starting to bolt. They had spent two days on the potting table in the sun. Now they are back in the greenhouse.

Do you have a waffle recipe that you like a lot? I had never made waffles before this morning. Even as a kid, mom would make french toast or pancakes...waffles were always made by Eggo! The recipe that I used this morning was a bit heavy for our tastes, though it did work better once I watered the batter down a little. Tomorrow, I was planning to try a yeast-based recipe that was in the instruction booklet.

My waffle iron arrived yesterday. It makes heart shaped waffles to ensure that my family knows that I love them! Anyway, I tried it out this morning with a recipe that I found on Paula Deen's website. It worked great! I kept tweaking the recipe until I got them the way that we like them. This should save us a lot of money since I'm just going to make about 100 at a time and freeze them. This morning, I only put 25 in the freezer. Tomorrow, I will try a different recipe to see if we like that better. This sure beats spending $2 to purchase generic frozen waffles that are on sale. I found the waffle iron on Amazon.com for $18. I had tried to get one at a thrift store but the only one that they had looked pretty beaten up. Oh well... This one will still pay for itself rather quickly since we won't be buying anymore waffles and we regularly went through a box per week!

I was watching Swamp Men the other night and some of the people on the show was doing that... I am so glad that I have fishing supplies stocked....(shiver)

If you pick nettles and then let them wilt, they no longer have any stinging power. Then they can be prepared any way that you'd like.

Have you ever tried the mushroom grow boxes? I did a couple of years ago. Here are a few pics: http://mission-2-mars.blogspot.com/search/label/mushrooms Whenever I harvested shrooms, I made a point of rinsing each on in a small bowl to get the mycelium (seed). Then I used that water to re-seed the soil in the grow box. They kept producing for far longer than they were supposed to.

I usually dehydrate something on Friday's, but today I am freezing onions and mushrooms, instead. While I like adding dehydrated mushrooms to recipes in the winter, I adore having fresh or frozen ones to use in the summer.

Very Nice!!! Sounds like your hubby is a keeper! Does he do the laundry, too?

I just learned a lot from your post, Amber!

I haven't tried that particular seed package before but I am kinda skeptical. If there really was an emergency where you needed to use your emergency seed bank, chances are you wouldn't be able to track the company down in the event that the seeds didn't germinate. So in that sense, the warranty on the seeds doesn't really mean much. I already had a lot of seeds, but I didn't let that keep me from buying more this year. I ordered from this company: http://www.america-t...seeds/index.php I spent about $30 and got hundreds of packets of seeds from various companies. While you cannot specify the exact types that you get, you can specify what percentage you want in flower seeds or herbs or veggies. I got 300 seed packs for that price. Lots of different varieties of tomatoes, beans, peas, eggplant, peppers, etc...Since setting up my greenhouse a couple of weeks ago, I can vouch for the fact that the seeds seem to be viable and almost every variety that I've planted has sprouted. For veggies that we don't eat, I just donate those to our summer youth gardening program. I also donate some of the flower seeds to our neighborhood association. Last weekend, I took my big tote bin of seeds to my parents' house and let them choose a few varieties for their garden. I will definitely do this again next year.

What kind of green worms were you dealing with? Sometimes there are natural ways of dealing with them. In my case, we get a lot of BIG, GIANT, slugs. They are so nasty and about 3 inches long...some are even longer. For them, I have found that leaving dishes of beer out in the garden keep them under control. The drink the beer, become drunk and drown in the beer because they can't find their way out. There may be a natural solution to your problem, too.

Whoo-hoo!! Thank you, Mother, for the directions!! I will definitely try your method, but I really should use the bread machine to save my hands. It can handle enough dough to make three loaves, though you can only bake two sizes of bread loaves in the pan... It takes about an hour and a half to make the dough, so it allows me to do other things. I have a couple of issues with my hands...chillblains and a touch of carpal tunnel. I spend a lot of time typing and (from time to time) I play the piano, so my hands have been taking abuse since the age of 5. My job requires a lot of typing for grantwriting, business plan writing, research, etc... and I tend to baby my hands to ensure that I am able to earn a living. Of course, we won't mention the amount of time that I spend typing comments on internet forums, right? If the world were to go completely awry and there was no power, I'd probably be making no-knead bread recipes or would train one of the kids to knead bread.

That was pretty much my thought process, Christy! I figure that I could have several loaves, rolls, biscuits, etc...in the freezer and then be able to pop them into the oven for the evening meal. I rarely have the time to bake bread on a regular basis. I usually only bake one loaf at a time, because it doesn't stay as fresh without all of those nasty preservatives. This way, I could use the breadmaker one day per month and make all of the dough that I need. I'd just keep loading the bread machine with more ingredients to make each batch. I'd still make all of the angel biscuits by hand. I could make hamburger buns, dinner rolls, etc... with the machine made bread dough and just freeze them. I think that I will try this tomorrow. I have the day off and we might get a snow storm so I won't be able to do much outside, anyway.

After making a loaf of white bread from the Mormon cookbook (that I received for Spring Fling- thanks Pauline!) and the cinnamon rolls (from the Angel Biscuit recipe) , I started thinking about convenience foods. I would love to be able to freeze bread dough, biscuit dough, etc and have them ready to just thaw and pop in the oven. Without using all of the chemical preservatives that companies like Pillsbury use, is it possible to do this? Can any recipe be adapted to do this or would it have to be for only "certain" recipes. I think I remember freezing pizza dough as a kid... If I can do this, then I would use my bread machine to make a lot of dough on my day off and then fresh bread on a busy day would be do-able. ( I could just use the timer on my bread machine tomake fresh bread, but it comes out in such funny shapes! The loaf is EXTRA tall and is weird for making sandwiches.

Do you have anything started in your greenhouse, Michael? I have some time off coming up in a week and I am planning to put up my greenhouse then. I do have a couple of peas planted in pots on the front porch. They haven't sprouted yet. Probably a good thing since we have had snow for the past couple of days.

Bitter Melon, a Chinese vegetable can also regulate blood sugar. I grew some last year. It does taste bad, as the name implies. It was pretty easy to grow, though.

I consider myself to be quite picky... There are certain foods that I just won't eat. However, I have never been truly hungry either. My favorite item that people turn their noses up at are eggs. We have farm-fresh, organic eggs and some people think that there is something wrong with us for eating them when you can get eggs at the store. Where do they think those store bought eggs come from??!! They all fall out of a chickens butt!!! Ours just happen to be healthier because we know what kind of food our hens eat.

We used to have a bread outlet years ago, but it shut down. I didn't utilize it as much as I should have back then.

That is a good one. I have heard that UPS takes that to another level by mapping out the routes that the drivers take to eliminate (or severely reduce) left turns. The reason is that you have to wait so long to make a left turn that they've determined that it requires less gas to make a couple of rights and end up at the destination anyway.

Right now, I am getting one egg per day from an Ameracauna. At least a fish flavored egg would be an enhancement! LOL!

Selling male tilapia is sort of the industry standard. The thought process is that the females don't gain weight as quickly as the males. However, there are ways to offset that issue. At the time when I was first looking at this, most sellers wouldn't sell only a few fish to someone. Thay all wanted you to buy hundreds at a time. I just accepted the fact that we wouldn't be breeding them...just raising and eating. Since that time,several sellers have popped up on Ebay and other places who will sell and ship small quantities. One seller in particular carries the blue tilapia which are particularly cold hardy. I would want to have females under those circumstances and would have a self-sustaining school of fish. It makes sense from a self-sufficiency standpoint but also from a shipping point of view. The shipping fish is expensive! Back then, I just didn't know enough about it to understand the various options.

For the past couple of years, our family has wanted to raise tilapia in barrels in the backyard. We haven't done it yet because we would need to extend the season and provide additional warmth for the fish. Heating the tank might just be cost-prohibitive...or maybe not. I wanted to use some food grade barrels that we get for free from a local food company and add a pump and some fish. While I have no intention of adding a geodesic dome, I do think that we might be able to pull this off by putting the barrels in the greenhouse. The greenhouse that we ordered has a removable plastic cover which we'd only use in the Spring and Fall. That might help the barrels to retain heat. The other option might be to paint the barrels black, but that might make the water too hot during the summer. We'd also have to make sure that the barrels are secure enough to keep raccoons from "fishing" in them. Each year we've tried to set a monetary goal as to how much we spend on self-sufficiency infrastructure. We try to spend only $1000 per year but that doesn't include the pantry. Aquaculture kind of straddles the line between pantry and infrastructure, so I think that this is something that we will do this summer...or at least try to do. As the article states, we might end up having a bunch of fish that are only large enough to feed to the chickens, but I doubt if the chickens would mind. This is the company that I contacted a couple of years ago to see about getting some tilapia fingerlings. There website is much improved and I would guess that it is because more and more people are getting into this. http://rdaquafarms.com/index.html