Tips and Advice on all things Homestead related

I grew up in the Amazon in Brazil and obviously, when you grow up in such an exciting adventurous place you have lots of exciting adventures to show for it! This story is one of the many! My family was very close. We kind of had to be close to each other because we were all we had, no other extended family or anything for thousands of miles, just us and the other missionaries who lived nearby. My dad was a very adventure loving person, which I'm sure was part of why we ended up in the Amazon jungle as missionaries. He decided that we needed to go on a family adventure trip once a year. We had a family meeting and decided that the first year's adventure was to be a camping trip on the Rio Verde, which was one of the most beautiful rivers in the Amazon basin that we had ever been to and it was about a 3 hour boat trip downriver from where we lived. We got everything ready: hammocks, food, fishing rods, swimming gear and the family dog (who I must admit, was a Great Dane) We piled...

I was looking around on the internet for chicken coop designs seeing that I'm always looking for cool ways to build my hens a better house or new ideas for them and I came across this ebook on how to build a chicken coop. I thought it had some good ideas that might be helpful to some of my blog readers! They have some good ideas. Check it out by clicking here:  Click Here!

I have always liked ducks. Maybe it's their funny way they waddle around, maybe their cute little quacks, or maybe their little personalities and funny things they do but I've had ducks off and on for most of my life. At one point when I lived in Brazil I had up to 100 ducks, all Muscovies. They made a mess but I loved to watch them raise their babies and the dedication of the momma ducks with their ducklings. Of course I sold them too so I didn't keep that many but they were a tiny bit lucrative and enjoyable. They would sometimes frequently escape their pen and fly up on the roof of our house and if you weren't careful they would bomb you from the air with unpleasantness! I had to run out with the broom and scare them off the roof running like a crazy lady, broom waving in the air. I'm sure if the neighbors saw me they would have laughed. When you have lots of ducks like that you have lots of duck eggs and most of the time I let the mothers sit on their eggs to h...

My latest adventure in the great story of my life involves driving for two days and 1000 miles to take my purebred show quality Dachshund girl to breed to a champion male of the same breed. So to start this story off, I will go back to the very beginning of me having a Dachshund. It all started before I got married. The fiance really wanted to have a hound dog of some sort. He was leaning toward the Basset hound. I already had show dogs, but I always preferred the big dogs. Maybe that was due tot he fact that my first dogs were very large, German Shepherds and Great Danes! But he was a rather small man (in stature at least) and wanted something smaller than my current Labradors and Australian Shepherds. So we went to our dog trainer friend (well, my friend anyway) and he happened to have an adorable black and tan Dachshund puppy in the kennel. She was very cute and tried her best to win us over. I of course was immediately taken with her but he really wanted a Basset hound. The dog t...

My journey in life has not been the easiest. But whose is, really? I have found that if I am wallowing in self-pity and thinking that no-one could have it as bad as me, then I look around or hear of someone who is much worse off that me and somehow it makes the difficulties seem like nothing. All these things I’ve lived through has made me a stronger woman, more independent, more confident in who I am and my capabilities to cope and surpass the challenges in life. I have decided to put some of my goals for my life down in written format, as it seems that once again my life is at a crossroads and things are changing and happening, not necessarily by my own choice. One of my goals, and actually was a dream of mine as a child, was to be a writer. Growing up, I was an avid reader, devouring any book that came my way. One of my teachers, at the little missionary school that I attended, gave the class and assignment. We were to pick an author and somehow she figured out if that author was...

Looks like I'm long overdue for a post here on my tips blog! I would like to share with you a neat trick that I learned for getting some certain animals, mainly chickens, to go where you want them to go. It works wonders for me especially if I want them to go into the coop before they think it is bedtime. Okay, drum roll please..... my extra special, super cool, incredible herding tool is.... the hose! That's right. I just turn on the water and the chickens go running. They don't like to get wet because they are birds so I spray the water towards them and they run for the chicken coop. It is wonderful! The duck of course likes the water so it doesn't work too well with her, but all the others go right in. It saves me time and frustration. Hopefully this little tip might help you too if you need to get some chickens going somewhere.