Our neighbor and friend Jamie gave me a great book, about Urban Homesteading. I think this was based off of me talking for several weeks straight about wanting to have chickens to harvest their eggs. It took me awhile to get to reading this book, I read a few I had in front of it, once I got into it though I think I read the whole thing in a few days. I had no idea how much I would love this book. I think I have always liked the idea of making things, building things, knowing how things work, and being creative in a structured, engineering kind of way. I don’t think I have quite found my outlet to do this though until now. I figured out quickly that I am not really crafty in the sense of clothes, or photo albums or that type of stuff. However I think where I do like to make and create things is on the Homesteading front. I have been composting now for a few months and I really enjoy converting our unused food into fertilizer for good. Now, with the book I have all new projects to add to my list of creative skills. Project #1 is Pickling. I had been thinking about pickling for awhile although I didn’t know that it was so easy. All you need is a jar, vegetables to pickle, salt, water and patience, at least that is what the directions say. Elliott was also really excited about this project. We decided to pickle both cabbage (red) and cucumbers as Elliott really wanted pickles in the traditional sense and we had an abundance of cabbage so we wanted to include sauerkraut. We have been saving some old glass jars to use for left over storage instead of plastic since glass doesn’t leach although we wanted some clean new, no half the label still on the bottle jars for our pickles so we bought mason jars for our project. Our pickle projects aren’t ready until Thursday, as they are to sit for at least one week. Then we will put them in the fridge so they last longer while eating them. I am really hoping that it works. I think the only thing that could go wrong is food is not supposed to be exposed above the salt water and we filled our jars pretty full. If it doesn’t work we will try again although I am keeping my fingers crossed.
The next Urban Homesteading projects on the books includes a type of fermented food similar to yogurt - filmjölk, and container gardening!
