Oooooh. It's been six weeks.

Which means my cayenne oil is ready to be used.

Next on my list: Cayenne Salve!

#cayenne #cayennesalve #naturalskincare #naturalremedies #holistic #homestead #homesteader #homesteading #selfreliant #selfreliancy #selfreliance #selfsuffient #selfsufficiency #homemadesalve #homemadeskincare #salve #salves #shopsmall #shopsmallbusiness #shopsmallbusinesses #smallbusiness #smallbusinesses #etsy #etsystore #etsycreator #fediverse #federated

I just posted homemade small batch rose salve in my Etsy shop.

Rose petal (from my garden) infused olive oil, rose hip seed oil, beeswax, and mica powder.

No fragrance or essential oils added-- its all natural baby.

Can be used for dry skin, dry lips, and even has some anti-aging properties!

You should check it out and get yourself some. :D

https://www.etsy.com/shop/thespookyfarmer

#salves #rosesalve #roses #rose #homemade #handmade #smallbatch #smallbusiness #supportsmallbusiness #supportsmallbusinesses #shopsmall #shopsmallbusiness #shopsmallbusinesses #natural #naturalskincare #skincare #selfsufficient #selfsufficiency #selfreliance #selfreliant #selfreliancy #homestead #homesteading #fediverse #federated

It seems that a post of mine about getting rid of lawns has gained traction, so for that I say #thankyou.

Since #mastodon isn't algorithm based, I'm going to guess that this is a subject that a fair amount of people care about, which is so damn important. We only have #oneplanet and we have to do what we can to preserve it-- especially when on the whole the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

That said, I feel the need to specify this for due diligence:

I am not a scientist, I have no formal secondary education on the environment of which to speak. I just happen to give a shit, and want the best for us all.

#earthday #earthweekend #loveyourenvironment #selfreliance #selfreliancy #selfsufficient #selfsufficiency #homestead #homesteading #fediverse #federated

This is where the storms come in.

As i’ve said, we had some nasty storms in the midwest last week. I’m not sure about elsewhere, but I can say for fact that they were needed here because we’ve been dealing with a drought all damn season.

How we have a drought when we live less than 20 miles from lake Michigan?

Fuck if I know.

But we are.

So the rain was definitely welcome, but the wind that came with it absolutely sucked. It has gotten to the point that my hometown got so much rain last week and the week before that in combination with the wind, TONS of mature trees were completely uprooted… some pulling up slabs of sidewalk concrete with them. I’ve never seen anything like that in the (albeit segmented) time I’ve lived in Wisconsin.

Where there’s wind and downed trees.. there’s generally power outages as well, and that was certainly the case here. The power company said that 180,000 of their customers were left without power, and it was the largest power restoration effort in the company’s history.

All over facebook i’ve seen people around my age flailing and unsure of what to do in these power outages. Worrying about their food spoiling, so on and so forth… and it just brings me back to the conversation Adam and I had.

“We may not live in a society where we have to rely on ourselves to survive, but what if we did?”

Learn how to grow at least some of your own food.

Learn how to preserve food.

Stock up when things are on sale and stick them in your freezer.

Have water on hand.

Have candles on hand.

And this is only the beginning. Please… learn these skills if you don’t know them. these skills being commonplace knowledge was only a generation or two ago.
And even if you don’t want to go full send and try to rely on yourself as much as possible, who doesn’t want to save some money?

(2/2)
#selfsufficiency #selfsufficient #selfreliancy #selfreliance #homestead #homesteading #hobbyfarm #hobbyfarming #beprepared #monday #mondaymotivation #stayvigilant

I made this blog post in the summer of 2021, and posted it on my site (which I’m currently working to get my domain back for.) anyway! Here it is. Definitely not the best, but I try to do ‘one shot’ writing, so it’s minimal editing and more flow of consciousness.

It’ll take a few toots, but lemme know what you think!

my mother and I had a conversation weeks ago about if pies were still the ‘all-American dessert.’ I don’t recall what we actually ended up landing on, but the most important takeaway that I had was (and bear with me… it may seem like a hot take) that women more actively joining the workforce had a large part to play in this.

Really, up until the 1970s, women worked in the home more often than they worked outside of it. whether that was tending to children, running family businesses, or taking care of things around the house in general. There were widening opportunities for women who were educated, but even a high school education wasn’t necessarily within reach for a lot of women in the united states’ not-so-distant history.

Of course, after the war, more women joined the workforce, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that young women really expected to spend at least part of their lives working. so they prepared to do so by getting degrees that would jumpstart careers instead of degrees that would solely help with jobs.

Don’t get me wrong… I am absolutely all for the things that have been afforded to me as a woman alive in today’s day and age. I have spent the vast majority of my not-so-long adulthood traveling and experiencing the world while working odd jobs just to fund my travels. To bastardize that Blanche Dubois quote from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, I have always relied on the kindness of strangers in my travels and adventures as well. Whether that has been a warm place to sleep for a few months, offering me a job, or informing me of opportunities I could pursue.

I digress.

When women joined the workforce and the idea of a two-income family became a larger reality, suddenly there wasn’t a parent home when the children got back from school. There wasn’t a parent (read: usually a mother) home all day being a homemaker. And with children being in school as opposed to times of yore as well… even if the homemaker was home, there weren’t children home to pass most of these skills onto.

For a long time, schools had shop classes and home ec classes. I’m 28, and my middle school got rid of home ec classes the year before I started. We still had shop classes, but I can say with full conviction that I do not actively remember a single thing I learned in that class aside from ‘watch your fingers.’ My high school had a cooking class… but only one… and no shop class.

I am a firm believer that these classes started falling to the wayside when schools started pushing everyone toward college educations and decided to start ignoring the fact that we need people in the trades as well.

They told you to do your homework so you could get into college and not be a janitor.

but they forgot to tell you that the janitor makes a hell of a lot of money.

I had two beacons of inspiration for writing this post:

1. A conversation with my boyfriend
2. the storms in the midwest last week

My boyfriend, Adam, and I had a conversation two weeks ago about self reliance and self sufficiency. Being that we are millennials that give a shit about global warming and want to do our part in reducing our carbon footprint, we have been trying to figure out what all we can do going forward for the rest of this season as well as next season to cut down costs as much as possible by trying to produce for ourselves as much as we can.

My mom has passed down and continues to pass down old school homemaking traditions, but all of this got me to thinking that i’m not sure that a lot of other people my age had that same luxury. Maybe this is just something that I think because I grew up in a well-to-do suburb of Wisconsin’s largest city… that isn’t something that i’ve ruled out.

(1/2)

#selfsufficiency #selfsufficient #selfreliancy #selfreliance #homestead #homesteading #hobbyfarm #hobbyfarming #beprepared #monday #mondaymotivation #stayvigilant