Bitterroot Bugle archives |
By Ted Dunlap, on October 10th, 2020 
With four days of rain predicted and reasonable certainty that both the summer and the Indian Summer are history, I saw this morning as my last chance to seed the areas my construction projects this year laid bare. I have been trying to buy or borrow a real harrow to work the seeds under cover, but nothing worked out. So I made my own along the lines of cheap, scrappy farm yard stuff. Old boards. Fence scrap. Screws. Chain. Ingenuity. It worked just fine. It has been almost a decade since I sold off my 20-year business, The Gentleman Farmer with tractors, implements, good-will and customer list. Our Bunkhouse homestead demanded a snow plow so I have a Polaris […]
By Ted Dunlap, on July 24th, 2020 
TEOTWAWKI, The End Of The World As We Know It is upon us. We are in the early stages, but the normal we had a year ago will not return in our lifetimes. We had a warning in Spring and have been granted a short reprieve, but it would be foolhardy to squander the next month. Every analysis I read and see indicates The Change will get worse, soon… much, much worse, and frightfully soon. I share much of that at this website and will continue to do so. Meanwhile, most of us agree that we have at least one good month to build our pantries. Few expect supplies to be as plentiful and easily accessed past October. Hardly any […]
By Ted Dunlap, on May 5th, 2020 
The moon over Montana will be full on Thursday, March 7th. Bob Cannard, my organic gardening mentor encouraged us to plant on every full moon. He did not touch on whether or not he believed it cosmically favored the plants themselves. His expressed reasoning was that it organized us to do regular plantings whether that was seeds, starts, bare-root, or transplants. Get something started every full moon and you will always have a good garden. From long before there were computers, televisions and electric lights, people on nature-driven cycles have called the first full moon of May, “The Planting Moon”. Whereas in some environments planting and growing year-round is possible, here our growing season is short, but its days […]
By Ted Dunlap, on April 3rd, 2020 
My wife cannot imagine breakfast without eggs. Even with her awesome wheat, nut, blueberry pancakes, maple syrup, bacon and sausage, there still has to be an egg on top. I cannot imagine a homestead without chickens. Even in a downtown tract home I had one. Now my flock is around 20. I feed them organic, non-GMO because we expect to eat the eggs and want a healthy product. I also supplement with a bit of oyster shell calcium and ample grazing space. The girls love it. Our springtime egg production is up to over a dozen a day. I will let a broody hen reproduce sometime this year to refresh the flock. After two years, production falls off rapidly, […]
By Ted Dunlap, on March 13th, 2020 
Sean called his Darby Adult Ed class “Mud Made Mankind”. He gave us a wonderful introduction to working with clay, glazes, potter’s wheel and much more. We found ways to mold clay that didn’t work. We found ways that did. He was a wonderful teacher, cheerleader and assistant. I entered the class with a specific project in mind. I didn’t care if was the only creation I made, but I was focused on getting this one done. As you can see here, we pulled it off… and I do mean WE … Sean was a big help in many ways. I have a carnivorous pitcher plant that seems to like its home, rewarding me with a fly-free laundry room […]
By Ted Dunlap, on March 9th, 2020 
My organic gardening mentor encouraged us to plant on every full moon. Not so much that it favored the plants themselves, but because it organized us to do regular plantings whether that was seeds, bare-root, or transplants. Get something started every full moon and you will always have a good garden. In Montana that assumes you have a greenhouse. We simply have too much winter cold to allow year-round outdoor plantings. What a blessed place I grew up in where we could. Lovely Nature was unfortunately taken over by lazy minds. Today, March 9th is a full moon. That is my trigger to consider planting something. Other signals from nature: The little budgies have returned to our neighborhood. The glaciers […]
By Ted Dunlap, on February 28th, 2020 
An occasional problem on The Easter Egg Chicken Ranch is the egg eating hen. When one breaks open an egg in the nest and discovers interesting goo inside, she may never lose that interest. It is a high-order problem as there is no way I know of to figure out who the culprit is and remove the problem child from the flock. This ugliness cropped up recently with a new batch of hens coming on line. My flock now stands at 2 great, peaceful, compatible roosters and 18 hens who know which rooster is the leader of her personal flock with no jostling or squabbling over position in the grand scheme of things. Ah, but how did I outsmart the […]
By Ted Dunlap, on February 20th, 2020 
My wife is an egg junkie. She MUST HAVE eggs in every breakfast – lots of them. She picked up a dozen store-bought factory farmed eggs because my girls weren’t keeping up during a cold snap. The visual differences are screamingly obvious. Factory yolks are runny, watery while ours are stiff and full-bodied. I confess to a lack of interest in taste testing, though from incidental/accidental experience the flavor goes from zero to sixty; just kind-of there to EGG flavored. No thanks. Dog food. Poor dogs. Not counting investment in facility, labor, bedding and other details that go into The Easter Egg Chicken Ranch, the NON-GMO, truly natural feed costs run my eggs over $4 per dozen. Chickens don’t […]
By Ted Dunlap, on February 6th, 2020 
I enjoy raising chickens simply to have them around. I also dislike buying factory eggs from grocery stores where Free Range means something quite different from how my chickens live and natural is anything but. I could cut my costs significantly with standard commercial feed, but pay 80% more for organic. It all comes back into our diet. Standard GMO is not food. I do my best to avoid it. A rounding-off guestimate I made the other day has us paying $4/dozen for our fresh, non-GMO, organic, free range, colorful, numbered eggs. Infrastructure and labor must stay out of the calculus or it gets wonky in a hurry. Lamentably my life experiences did not include the mentality or skill […]
By Ted Dunlap, on October 29th, 2019 
Since I strongly dislike uninformative teaser headlines, I put the topic right up there. I am impressed that this hearty “weed” grows well in our somewhat harsh Montana environment, particularly in abused driveway ‘soil’ and similar tough ecosystems. I’m promising myself to begin learning more about the healthy harvesting that lies unused right before my eyes … and under my feet. I can begin making such promises now that I am ALMOST caught up with the rush I have been in developing our current homestead to a basic operational level. This common driveway weed is also one of the most powerful natural medicines 07/13/2016 / By usafeaturesmedia (Homesteading.news) It’s known to pop up as a persistent weed in gardens, on […]
By Ted Dunlap, on September 20th, 2019 
I was a fill-in presenter today at the local garden club meeting, doing a show and tell about the green carnivores I share my space with. One of the gardening ladies suggested there was a certain justice were they to take a chunk out of us after all the plant eating we have done. The one on the right is a Nepenthes ampullaria x hamata that somehow thrives in the imperfect conditions I provide. Mostly north east glass in a laundry room that had always attracted most flies who made it into our house. We really didn’t have many this year. Perhaps that is why this plant is thriving in sub-optimal conditions. The flies disappeared into the pitchers rather […]
By Ted Dunlap, on August 28th, 2019
My chickens produce this art. They do this work for chicken feed. We unceremoniously eat their art work. This is the third iteration of my Easter Egg Chicken Ranch. Pictured below is a two-day collection.
By Ted Dunlap, on January 1st, 2019 It is January first in Montana (yeah, kind-of everywhere today 😉 ) with temperatures ranging from the morning low of -1 to a high of 20 degrees Fahrenheit. When I raised the thermal drapes this morning there was ice six inches up the south windows. The one tomato plant and one of my sweet bell peppers on my studio bench are starting to bud into flowers! I think I planted the seeds in pots on the October full moon; the 24th. I definitely planted lettuce, spinach, basil and oregano in the greenhouse on that day, but can find no mention in my notes of pepper planting anywhere. I think I remember doing them then. The greenhouse lettuce and spinach […]
By Ted Dunlap, on November 15th, 2018 I won’t buy it. Ever. Anywhere. For me, fasting beats eating poison. “But shopping for non-GMO and organic is more expensive. “ Nice trick, globalists. Promote someone-else-pays health care, then rig the market to make everybody sick. Great takedown of civilized society. Of course “they” don’t eat this junk themselves. That’s just for the peasant class … which is everybody else. Today’s news from ActivistPost.com is about what is in your “less expensive” potatoes. One Potato, Two Potato, Three Potato, Four How About GMO Potatoes No More TOPICS:Catherine FrompovichGMOGMO Free DietGMO Toxins NOVEMBER 13, 2018 By Catherine J. Frompovich What’s the main selling point of the GMO potato? Its flesh stays white and doesn’t oxidize when cut. It doesn’t turn green, brown or […]
|
Bitterroot Bugle permanent pages
|
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/silver/t24_ag_en_usoz_2.gif)
