Last August our faithful companion Spotter died. It was so hard to lose such a good boy. He was the best Rendezvous dog too. He was silent, disciplined, and protective. And very territorial, which meant that we never had to worry about him running off and getting lost. Sure, he would take off, but he didn’t go far and he always came back. He took his own daily walks when I was too pregnant to walk him. He could stretch out on the front lawn and watch bicycles whiz by and squirrels frolicking without being tempted to chase. We didn’t need a fence for him. That’s how good of a dog he was. After his death, I didn’t want to get another dog. I had enough going on with 5 children. But when a few of our chickens were murdered and the amount of predators increased, I changed my mind, but again, it was going to be tough to find a dog like Spotter. So we did some casual looking through the rescue pages and farm pages for a dog. We made a list of what we wanted in a dog: a low prey drive, trainable, independent, and protective. Basically a Great Pyrenees Anatolian mix. Now I thought it would take another year to get the money and set up for a dog. But that is not what happened. The day before my birthday my husband called me from work. His coworker told him that there were some Great Pyrenees puppies for sale at the sheep pens of the local college, and there was one left. He was going to go look at it. “You mean that you are coming home with a puppy.” Turns out the puppy was the runt. A rather large runt. His mother was awful at mothering. She neglected her pups, causing one to die. The one my husband was looking at was left out in a ditch and barely ate, which caused him to be on the smaller side. He wasn’t a Great Pyrenees Anatolian mix like it was thought. He was mostly a Maremma, an Italian Sheepdog, with a pinch of Great Pyrenees and Komondor. So this “runty” pup was brought home. I named him Charley Pretzel. And at only 7 months he is whopping 65 pounder. I can see why people, like city dwellers, give them up. They are massive, very smart, and stubborn, which makes it a struggle to handle. They need lots of room and activity. Very energetic. It is not much different than raising a toddler. And my toddler loves that dog! He and Charley are always together in mischief. All of my kids like to nestle with him just before bedtime. Charley is a wonderful addition to the family. He is a handful now, but he is learning quickly and becoming a great guardian for us. He was supposed to be an outdoor dog and guard the chickens, but he thinks he is a lapdog and one of the kids!
I will share more Charley stories as we go on! Enjoy your day.
1 Comment
I have been away from blogging again. My focus has to shift from candle making to home making. Which is far more important! So not much time is to be had for making candles, but I really need to get them going so I can help pay off medical bills and I really need to clear out these boxes of wax! I am surrounded! And you need that warm cozy scent so dearly enjoyed in Autumn.
Another goal is set for this coming Fall. We again missed the Spring Rendezvous, but the Fall Rendezvous is by far the best time to go. It makes me a little sad that we missed the Spring one though because Victoria could have worn the buckskin dress that fits a 6-month-old. My husband made it for our eldest and every time we went, there was a 6 month-old ready to wear it. But things out of our control happened. My husband had a tonsillectomy around that time. In case this blog is new to you, my husband was diagnosed with stage 3 follicular lymphoma in November 2020. His 2 PET scans lit up his tonsils. His oncologist was concerned that it could be cancerous, but wouldn’t know until it was biopsied. So the tonsils were removed. It took a long time to recover from that procedure, but the good news is that it is not cancerous! He is completely finished with treatments for stage 3 follicular Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. All that is left to do is the annual PET scans to make sure that the cancer is still gone. And slowly he is regaining his strength and energy from the chemo. He really wants go to the Rendezvous this time! Which means that on top of making candles, I need to dust off my great grandmother’s Singer Sewing Machine and learn how to make period clothing for my 5 children! Will I be able to do it in time? I have been on hiatus for a little too long now. Life became very busy and still manages to be hectic. I had a baby girl in October and since then have been very busy with two little boys along with baby throughout the day plus the upkeep of the urban homestead. It really gets rambunctious when my two eldest children come home. But a couple of months ago I started back into my beeswax candle making. In the Catholic world that I belong in we have a holy day called Candlemas on February 2nd. This is when the beeswax candles are blessed for devotions and other special occasions. Naturally I love this day. So I thought it was the best time to get it all going again. Since then I’ve been learning how to make votives and dye wax. I am also exploring into scenting my beeswax with chrism and other scents for religious use. All of this experimenting comes from the suggestions of friends and good people. Besides candles I really have become a crazy chicken lady and egg colors have become my thing. Of course I appreciate every egg laid and happily have given eggs away to friends and family, but soon I plan to sell eggs to help with the cost of feed. 🙈 Right... anyway. Someone had mentioned hollowing out the eggs and selling those, so I’ve been working on that, and it is quite a skill to practice. My first batch had rough looking holes, but I’ve since found a better pin to use to make a nice clean hole. Now I just need to align them so the contents can come out easily. This has been my work thus far. On top of that I’ve been selling other artisans’ goods through Trades of Hope. I love the mission. It’s what inspired me to take candle making into a business. I plan to hold onto that side job for a little bit longer so you can check it out at tradesofhope.com/KathleenAuschwitz I will have an Etsy shop stocked soon, but if you are interested in votives, jars, pillars, and tapers, please email me at [email protected].
Until next time, keep your candles trimmed and burning. This morning my husband encouraged me to keep up the blogging. He must have realized that I hadn’t. So I will give the brief story since the last I posted.
It’s been a long summer of drawbacks and loss. Also we decided that we cannot attend Rendezvous, so I did not pull out the sewing machine, but I should have anyway. Our garden didn’t fare well, because of the free ranging chickens who discovered that we use peat moss, their favorite thing to bathe in, and the weather was too hot for a long period of time. We lost a Rhode Island Red and a Lavender Orpington within a month. They disappeared. None of the chickens seemed disturbed by their disappearance. Just me and the family. So we lost the Orpington on last Tuesday and my husband was sad. But the next day, Wednesday, our beloved dog Spotter died while at the vet. It was all so sudden. I can scarcely believe that he is gone. He had a broken tooth and died under sedation. He was 14 years old and I knew him for 12. He was such a good boy. I will end this post with happy news. Our Goldie has been laying eggs for about a week. A couple had been pecked, but overall we have had great eggs. My kids are so proud to be chicken farmers. And that will be a story for another time. One of the things we wanted to add to our little neighborhood homestead was an orchard. We have started out rather late, but it has proven to be fortuitous that we did. We wanted an apple orchard. Our kids love apples and considering how many bags of them we buy, we might as well get a few trees. They would also provide some shade where our beautiful Chinese Pistache once stood. Our first stop was at box store nursery. We are limited on nurseries in our small town, so we went to where we know. The species were unfamiliar to us, and I thought about the man who saved 1,200 heritage apples. What did we want? Engineered or heritage apple trees? So we skipped the apple trees. Another fruit-producing plant we wanted to grow were blueberries and blackberries. At this nursery we found blueberries and blackberries, but like the apples, were these the species we wanted? Not sure, so we forewent those too and would do more reading on them. I did snag some Arkansas Traveler and Cherokee Purple Tomatoes, because I was familiar with those. My husband found some flowers for the front garden bed: cockscomb, marigold, vinca, and another flower, which the name escapes me. This little start on gardening felt great. Our search for good apple trees continued. We went to a family-owned nursery. It was a whimsy and wild kept nursery. Their apple trees were almost $200 for a 6ft tree, but they looked a little pathetic. Maybe they would have been fine, but with a 6 month guarantee, it seemed like a gamble. We decided to wait and think about it. They had a wide assortment of flowers, which I did want a few more flowers for the front bed. The geraniums were 99 cents a piece so we bought 3 geraniums and my husband wanted to grow purple fountain grass again. We never did go back for the apples. A couple of weeks later I subscribed to Backwoods Home magazine after seeing the ad for a 99 cent trial. I had enjoyed their articles and wanted to learn more. They sent an electronic copy of the previous quarter, and there was an article about apple trees. It was loaded with great facts that I didn’t know about like the trees that Johnny Appleseed planted were not as sweet as they are now, but now the apples are sweeter because apple enthusiasts grafted them. We didn’t want a grafted apple tree, but I learned that even heirloom trees are grafted. The whole apple tree history seems muddled to me, so if you have a better grasp on its history, send the info my way! The author of the article had a few nurseries to choose from that he deemed as great nurseries. Stark Brothers Nursery jumped out at me because the location is in Missouri, making them neighbors to us and probably had a better selection for our zone 7A. It just so happened that they were also offering free shipping and their berry bushes were on sale. And their apple trees were far less expensive than the family-owned nursery we had looked at. Granted the trees will be smaller. There is also a one year guarantee too! So I bought 4 Ouachita Thornless blackberry bushes, 4 Blueray blueberry bushes, bought 2 Gala apple trees, and 2 Freedom apple ... oh and two Meyer lemon trees that will have to be brought in during the winter. So I didn’t go exactly heritage apples, but I thought we ought to get a familiar variety, and maybe over time we can get a couple of the heritage ones. Now the apple trees won’t be coming in until October, but everything else did arrive safely. I could already taste the fruit when I unpacked them in the entryway. Oh, I wish I had read the instructions on the website, because I put my plants outside that day. But they don’t put those in the box. It’s all on-line. Apparently they were to be eased into the outdoors since they had been in a greenhouse and had not yet been acclimated to the natural sunlight and air. That’s how I understood it when I finally found the care instructions on the website. Fortunately I did not plant them right away, and they are on my front patio. They are looking better with new growth starting, so we maybe looking good. We just need the weather to cool down so we can plant them. Very long story here, but I hope you at least have learned a thing or two. We should all try being self-sufficient as much as possible. It doesn’t have to be much. Grow herbs in a pot. Grow potatoes in a 5 gallon food grade bucket. Explore Backwoods website and other homesteading websites. Always ask yourself, how did my family pull through the Great Depression? Then start researching. You will have failures and successes, but just keep learning and trying new ways to be self-sufficient! https://www.wideopeneats.com/heritage-apples/ This is about the man who saved the heritage apples.
https://www.backwoodshome.com/ very useful magazine! I must admit that I have a chicken problem. That problem is called Chicken Math. I know in my last post, published a while ago now, I was talking about pantries, and I do plan to revisit that, but I’m a little sidetracked. It still ties into being self-reliant. But it’s about chickens. So you know I started out with 3 chicks, and then three weeks after that we added 3 more. Well.... so.... A week ago I took my eldest daughter out to go grocery shopping and she had birthday money to spend so we got her a Barbie doll. Then I was thinking about getting my husband some black jelly beans, because it settles his stomach after having his maintenance treatment. But I couldn’t find any at this store. So I decided that we’ll just go to Atwood’s. Now the candy shelf is up at front. I could have stopped right there like my mission driven mind told me to do, but that fun impulsive part of me said to my daughter, “Hey, let’s just check out the chicks. They may not have any, but we’ll just take a look.” Oh they had them alright. Tubs of them. I was ok until I saw the Rhode Island Reds. My great granny had RIR. In the same tub were Lavender Orpingtons. I noticed how pretty they were, but for $8.99, no. (Later I find out that pure breed chickens are around $20, but still, when money is really tight, everything is too expensive.) But I thought about egg production, my great granny, and my daughter plainly said that we should get the RIR. I texted my husband for his approval, which he gave because part of being self-reliant is to have chickens, and better get them while you can. So I got 3 of them, and I was a wreck while the employee boxed them up. Was this more responsibility than I could handle? Can I feed all of them? I’ll have 12! What if one was a rooster? 🥴 Should I have spent my money on what needs to be paid off?? Oh heck. Too late now. She’s boxed them all up and my daughter is thrilled. We needed chick supplies so I grabbed a heat lamp and bulbs. I saw bedding. Needed bedding, but didn’t know what to get. The kind employee seemed to have read my mind, because the next thing she said was that bedding was outside so to tell the cashier that I need some and someone will help me get a bag. We bought our things, and an employee helped load the bedding into the van, which is pine shavings and better than what I had been using. Straw is not great. Pine shavings is fine. It smells great. I digress. We get home with our 3 Rhode Island Reds, which aren’t purebred RIR. Those cost more. Mine are Old Faithfuls, whatever that means. As the family and I looked upon our 3 chicks, I thought about those purple hue Lavender Orpingtons. They were so pretty. I had seen posts on BackYardChicken and people gushing over them. Good mama hens if another hen isn’t. Docile birds. That night I read up on them. Nonaggressive. Cuddly. Good egg layers. So I bought 3 of them the next day. I was going to buy 2, but my husband said to get 3. And that’s how I ended up with 12 chickens altogether. It’s called Chicken Math. It’s amazing how “we’ll just see how we do with 3 this year” tripled within 3 months.
And I have to make a feed run at Tractor Supply soon. 🤭🐓 Today is a good day to go through your pantries. And I’ve got the “homestead bug.” I made that up. I started thinking about homesteading many many winters ago, but thought that one needed lots of property and I certainly didn’t have that. I didn’t think I would ever get the know-how. It wasn’t until I started the beeswax candles hobby that I thought to myself, “Self, you DO have what it takes.” Then my imagination went flying on what we could do to have that self-reliant homestead. My husband is so happy that I have had this breakthrough. That’s another story too. One of our main concerns is food. We have a large family and oh, yes, it’s about to get bigger in October! Yes another sweet baby! Another mouth to feed, which I’m ecstatic about. Seriously. So I need to do better at buying enough for my hungry brood, but with a tight budget, it’s challenging. I end up buying too much of one thing and not of another necessity. My problem is not paying attention and staying organized with my food. I did an inventory once, and got lazy. Lost track and then I allowed chaos to rule my roost. Then 2020 came and we went wild with stocking up on things. I don’t want to think about that again, because I learned a valuable lesson and here I am today taking stock on what we have that is still good. There will be interesting dishes coming up this week. Usually when I start this project, I try to do everything all at once: write down the item, when it expires, the quantity, and then try to categorize it. If it expired, I simply tossed it. With 4 kids 6 and under, I can’t do that all at once. I have to break it down into small parts. So today it’s just weeding out the bad, and the recently and almost expired food will huddle in an accessible area of my cupboard. That’s it. Ok, I might be sorta categorizing my food, but I’m not writing anything down or typing anything up until I get rid of the old stuff first. If you are struggling with pantry items, I would suggest this step first. As my favorite organizer FlyLady says, “you can’t organize clutter.” Here’s to having a healthy pantry. Until next time, friends, get started on what you want to do!
My posts are far and few in between, but the events of my life have not been. My husband is undergoing his biannual maintenance for lymphoma and I’m trying to keep 4 kids, a dog and, six chickens alive and well. My plans on going to farmer’s markets or opening my own little stand to sell beeswax candles and Trades of Hope items has yet to come to fruition, because of the weather, last minute change of plans, and, my own health. We are also spending more time researching on gardening, livestock, and other self-reliant ideas to add to our lists of things to do. I would love to put a couple of apple trees in the yard, although for my monkeys, a banana tree would be better! But this is Oklahoma and I’m not scooting a banana tree in and out of the house for cold weather. Watch. I’ll be scooting tropical plants in October.
We want our family to learn a new set of skills in order to overcome the obstacles that are and will be before us. We want a simpler life, which doesn’t mean less work, but rewarding work. It is freeing to know that we do not have to worry as much about food and shelter when we are capable of making it with the things around us. Are you doing anything to become more self-reliant? I did it. I experimented with turmeric to give my candles a deep orange, but since my candles are already a natural deep yellow my idea failed. I am not great at seasoning food and now I may have brought that over to dyeing wax. A bit of me was afraid to use too much turmeric, because it is expensive and my husband loves it in his cooking so I didn’t want to use too much. I just used about a tablespoon of it and mixed it into a small bowl of beeswax. I don’t think it made a noticeable difference.
My next experiment will be using sunflower seeds. It makes purple and that’s the color I really want for my Advent candles. I just did the turmeric because that’s what I had on hand. Now there maybe another way to get a purple color besides sunflower seeds, and I have been looking into other natural materials to dye candles purple. It will just take time since I am busy with children and domestics. As Miss Frizzle of the Magic School Bus show always said: “Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!” I take that to heart. So take a step forward in your hobby and have fun! The warm scent of beeswax is wafting through my house. It’s so much better than the brussel sprouts I had on the air fryer the other day. Nobody liked that odor.
I plan on dyeing my wax today. In the meantime, I am going to take orders for candles in the usual natural color as pictured. If you would like to place an order, please drop a comment and I will be in touch. |