Secondhand Home Project

06/01/2019

Happy Sunday from Professor Eggs-avier and Malcolm Eggs here at The Humble Hive 💚. Also, their combs have mud on them from pecking about... no frostbite here.

04/11/2018

🐷 Having been plant-based eaters for 5 years, it's been quite the departure from our norm in raising our own meat! Here's my latest blog post sharing the story of our meat pig, Kevin Bacon, as a case study for sustainable meat production. There's a mess of "facts" out there regarding whether or not meat can be sustainable, and in this blog post, I break down everything that went into raising him. You decide. Is it possible to eat meat and enrich our environment to boot?
https://thehumblehiveblog.blogspot.com/2018/11/raising-meat-sustainably-case-study-for.html

21/10/2018

It's been a year since I've posted any photos of our home and earlier this week, the lighting was beautiful so I snapped this 💚. Earthship and farm tours have been delayed until 2019, but be sure to sign up on our website to receive updates as we hope to have tours and workshops up and running in Summer 2019! We can't wait to share our space and homestead with you! https://www.thehumblehive.com/tire-house-tours.html

11/10/2018

Autumn Olives: They grow abundantly here in Ohio and are a non-native invasive species. With them popping up all over the place, get outside and find some plants while you can harvest the berries! The fruit is incredibly high in the antioxidant lycopene (40-50 mg/ 100 g versus 3mg/ 100g for a tomato!) as well as vitamins A, E and C. Mark my words: They WILL be the Goji berry of the future! They are easy to identify and delicious to eat! We love eating them raw, but try to freeze several pounds a week to put in baked goods and smoothies during the winter. We literally have hundreds of the trees on our property in various stages of growth. Oh, and goats also LOVE the whole tree 😂. They're a win-win!

06/10/2018

Every living creature on our land has multiple purposes. A year and a half ago, we moved our pigs into an area that was destined to be an intensive food production space. We layered food scraps (their primary source of food) from a local grocery store with carbon (mulch, leaves, straw, etc.) and our pigs, chickens and duck turned it and deposited manure for us; raising the soil level several inches over the course of 9 months!

This happens to be a wet area with poor drainage, so we plan on installing raised beds (with salvaged landscaping timbers) here next year to finally take a serious stab at growing a significant amount of our own produce. The pigs have spent the past 9 months in the exact same sized space which will be the second of our two intensive food production spaces. That area too, will be outfitted with raised beds filled with quality compost for the 2019 growing season. I look forward to taking the winter to obsessively plan the area and the crops that we'll plant!

Not only do our pigs and chickens provide meat and eggs for our family, but they're allowed to express their "pigness" and "chickenness" and do our food production prep work for us! This is the stuff I live for 💚

26/09/2018

👨‍🌾👩‍🌾 Our lifestyle has changed drastically since we began building our earthship-inspired home. We've gone from city-dwellers to country-folk, vegetarian to raising our own meat, and from active consumers to producers. Here's a glimpse into the bittersweet weekend we just had harvesting the remaining chickens we raised for our family and community of friends. In all, we have raised 400 lbs of chicken this year! It has been one hell of a 4 1/2 years and it all came to an emotional head this past weekend. This will be the first of several blog posts I plan on sharing about our experience transitioning from plant-based eating to raising our own meat 💚
http://thehumblehiveblog.blogspot.com/2018/09/culling-old-hens-and-sustainable.html

Our beloved, hilarious crew of land-mates When out and about, it’s easier to tell people that we’re vegetarian. We’re not these days, b...

15/07/2018

👋 We have some news to share... 2 years ago, we participated in a docu-series that was released last week for the FYI network! The series followed 3 families who desired a more sustainable future and is called "My So-Called Simple Life." It can be found playing right now on FYI or you can view the full series online through Amazon, Hulu or Sling TV. If you'd like to tour our home or participate in workshops, both will become available in Spring 2019 (contrary to what our website currently states). Just fill out the online form and we'll contact you as dates become available! 💚
www.TheHumblehive.com

04/07/2018

🐷💚🐷Our pigs' garden! We feed all of our pigs off of 75 gallons of food scraps from a local grocery store almost daily and thanks to our group effort, this garden has emerged! Our 6 pigs spent about 6 months of their life in this area; building soil for future food production space. We added fresh mulch regularly to refresh the space and thanks to the pigs and chickens, it has been turned and turned and is beginning to break down into soil. We moved them to a new space this past winter and were left with a nutrient dense future garden. I decided not to intensively plant this area this year as much of the carbon hadn't broken down yet, but nature had other plans. I chose not to thin it out and just let the plants take over the space this year and we have nearly 100 volunteer tomato plants and 50 assorted squash, pumpkin, cantaloupe and watermelon plants growing alongside the potatoes we've plopped into the space. Next year, we'll put in the landscaping timbers we've salvaged for free locally and fill them with fresh compost and plant right into it. This year though, we cheers the pigs for their green hooves 🥂!!

02/06/2018

🐐🐐 We're pleased to introduce the two newest additions to Humble hive Family Farm: Zelda and Odin! They're Nigerian Dwarf goats and we'll be using Zelda's future milk to produce our own dairy products sometime in 2019 after she's had her first kids. Odin is her castrated brother who came along as her roomie. They're truly incredible!

We built their home ourselves with materials we've salvaged over the years; only spending $20 or so on hardware! They have a covered porch/ eating area with a loft, sleeping quarters with three tiers for sleeping, a ladder leading up to a deck and a separate space below their "bedroom" where we'll keep the breeding stock of our meat bird flock (Freedom Rangers) whose eggs we'll hatch out next year for meat.

They have electric net fence that we'll move once they eat through their current area. We planned for their deck to also serve as a means for them to reach the crazy amount of honeysuckle we have in our treeline. 💚

29/05/2018

🐐🐐 The goat house is finally complete! While we were disappointed that their coming home was delayed by two weeks, it ended up being for the best as we are totally prepared for their homecoming on Thursday (fingers crossed)!

Zac constructed the whole thing for less than $20 as it was all built with salvaged materials we've been given or have picked up over the years!!! It is built on a "sled" so that it can be dragged about our land by our truck or tractor when the goats work their way through the brush in their yard. The yard is enclosed with electric fencing that is easily set up and torn down which lends itself well to rotational grazing which we've found to be great for the rest of our animals and for our land.

The house has stairs leading to a lookout deck on top of their home that we'll be butting up against our honeysuckle-ridden treeline so that they can start putting a dent in our invasive species takeover back there. The railing is to try to discourage them from launching themselves off of the top of the house though they may still decide to do so anyhow...

They have a covered front porch area where their food, minerals and water will be with stairs to a sleeping loft where they can lounge when it's too hot to sleep in their "bedroom". Their main sleep quarters is equipped with three levels and has a wall that lifts up from the outside to allow for increased ventilation during the steamy summer months.

Underneath their sleeping quarters is the chicken "house" where our meat bird flock (Freedom Rangers) will sleep at night and lay eggs. Their food will be kept separately to prevent our goats from gorging on it and becoming sick. We plan on hatching out the meat bird eggs next year with an incubator so we'll be keeping a flock of our top meat birds this year to breed next year's flock.

This life is a good one 💚.

28/05/2018

🐔🐓 Our "chicken tractor" is complete! It will house our 75 meat birds until they're slaughtered and will be moved daily around our land to provide them with fresh greens and bugs which will encourage the healthiest birds! Moving the pen daily also means that many common chicken illnesses are kept in check as they don't have a chance to develop. 3/4 of the chicken tractor has a roof over it so they have adequate shade in the summer sun. As if there needed to be another bonus on top of pasture-raised, organic chicken, we are gifted their manure which is deposited exactly where we want/ need it each day.

This time around, we followed Joel Salatin's plans to a "T"... Well, almost. Instead of fashioning our own chicken tractor dolly to move it daily as Joel has, we added some wheels that, once engaged, allow the tractor to be pulled from the opposite side with a rope handle. Using salvaged materials, we were able to build this for $100!

Unlike the one we made last year in a pinch, this one is lower to the ground which makes it wind-resistant. Our last one was taken and destroyed by a tornado that came through here a couple of months back and we decided to listen to our farming idol, Joel, and do it his way 😂.

We're so excited about this meat-bird-raising season!!! 💚

18/05/2018

After escaping her area twice yesterday, Coraline got her wish and is now in with the boys while in heat. Dirk Piggler (the tiny guy on the left) is the only intact boar we have and is still trying to figure out how "it" works. When I came out to feed them this morning, I found him mounting Cora's head 😂. Though he should technically be able to create piglets with her given his age, I think he's got some work to do on the mechanics of s*x and so it will likely be early winter before piglets arrive 💚💚💚.

I can't tell you how much excitement this change of lifestyle has gifted me over the past four years. No matter how much we try to plan or control what goes on here, we're constantly reminded that we don't always know best and as a "Type A", I've learned how to "go with the flow" far more than I ever would have had we not altered the course of our future.

I'm full of wonder and excitement about the days to come and am relishing in the unknown; that which would have terrified me in the past. I'm very thankful, indeed.

26/03/2018

I am privileged to be able to start every day with these guys. Everyone is fed primarily food scraps collected from a local grocery store. Their happiness and stress-free existence brings me abounding happiness. Being connected to our food feels immensely rewarding 💚

25/03/2018

💚 Lots of food forest understory plants sprouting! Basil, Milkweed, Chinese Chives, Bee Balm, Lavender, Thyme, Oregano, Mint, and "Self Heal." I just got some Wormwood, Chamomile and Marigold started indoors as well! These green sprouts are just what I needed to get through this lingering winter weather.

23/03/2018

For the past 3 years, I've used a composition notebook for land planning and garden notes. I decided to purchase a leather-bound Tree of Life journal to take more mindful notes from here on out and hope to one day pass it on to our boys as they take over our land. Nowadays, practical, real skills are almost absent from our culture. Very little "wisdom" is passed down from generation to generation. We hire out for everything and buy new when something breaks. We rely on YouTube videos for all how-to's. I'm not sure our boys will appreciate this, but it feels a lot better; that's for certain. I'm looking forward to recording all of our successes and failures here 💚

16/02/2018

🐖Check out our (mini) Carbonaceous Diaper! You read that right. The term "carbonaceous diaper" was coined by Joel Salatin and refers to the carbon rich material (leaves, straw, wood chips, etc.) that is layered in animal housing over-winter to absorb the animals' droppings. Our 6 pigs share a home with 8 chickens and a duck, but have free reign to go out to their 2,000 SF yard whenever they'd like. While the pigs leave their home to go to the restroom, the chickens leave their droppings in the house when they're roosting and it all gets turned in with the animal bedding when I refresh it with new straw or wood chips. I decided to check the pile yesterday and was shocked to find beautiful compost! It's been about 4 months worth of accumulation, I'd say. I can't wait to clean out the house in a month or so and use it on our garden 💚

11/02/2018

🌱It may still be winter outside, but inside, our home is bursting with the sights and sounds of Spring! We haven't set dates for our upcoming workshops and home/land tours as we have been heavily working on setting in motion our food production plans. We'd like to have the first dates set in the next month or so. Thank you for your patience! Here's a sneak peek at what we've been up to... Our goat "kids" will be arriving in May, our pigs have been prepping our Spring food production space and will be moved to new space in March or April, we've ordered our dwarf fruit trees, fruiting/ nut bearing shrubs, and edible/ medicinal understory plants for our food forest to be planted in April and May, we're rearing 8 chicks indoors that will be moved outside to live with our boar and barrows when Dirk "comes of age" and we just separated and transplanted 400 leeks into larger cells, got cabbage planted indoors and will be planting peppers and kale soon. We also bought a package of succulent seeds and were excited to see them sprouting! If it weren't for these late winter activities, I don't think I could bear winter 💚. We'll be sure to keep you posted on workshop and tour dates and times once life calms down a bit. In the meantime, feel free to "sign up" to receive updates as our workshops and tours come available at https://www.thehumblehive.com/

22/01/2018

🌱Baking brownies, you ask? Nope, just getting some seed starting mix ready to be sanitized in the oven for step 2 of our 2018 Food Production space. I needed to prep some of my homemade mix for leeks that I'll be sowing this week. Here's a great link about sanitizing homemade seed starting mixes: https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/garden-how-to/soil-fertilizers/sterilizing-soil.htm

21/01/2018

🌱It feels so good to dig my hands in some soil again! Step 1 of our 2018 food production space is now underway as I'm making some seed starting mix from an equal mix of coir, vermiculite and compost. It's incredibly cheap to make. The coir we purchased in a block for $17 (11 lb. block) and the vermiculite from a local pool installation store for $16 (20 lb. bag). We only needed 1/10th of the bag of vermiculite and 1/2 the block of coir and still will end up with a ridiculous surplus of seed starting mix (35 gallons of mix in all!). The extra coir and vermiculite will be stored until it is needed next year. The rest of the prepared mix will go to our house plants which are in desperate need of nutrients. Now that it's mixed up, the next step will be sterilization which I'll do in small batches in our oven. I'm planning on sowing our leeks inside under lights this upcoming week. I'm frothing at the mouth with excitement right now.💚

17/01/2018

❄️It might be the dead of winter right now and we might not be growing any produce outdoors but our pigs sure are hard at work preparing our food production space by turning these grocery store food scraps into precious soil as well as sustainable pork. Here's Posy-pig chowing down on some spent watermelon like it's a hot summer day. Get it Posy!❄️

05/01/2018

We're excited to share that we'll be both vending and speaking at Mother Earth News Fair in Asheville, NC on April 28th and 29th! https://www.motherearthnewsfair.com/north-carolina/workshops/?cat=Keynote

Our goal is to deliver practical, hands-on training and experience taught by leading experts in the areas we concentrate on in the magazine: renewable energy, organic gardening, sustainable agriculture, green home building and more! So expect to get down and dirty at the MOTHER EARTH NEWS FAIR!

27/12/2017

25/12/2017

We're all set for winter reading here at The Humble hive! Oh, and I (Lauren), got all the cold weather gear I need to stay warm while tending to farm chores this winter. Have a great day, everyone 💗🎄💗

22/12/2017

The past 4 years we've been focused on building our self-sufficient earthship-inspired home and are now focusing on food production. This upcoming year, we'll be producing our own chicken, pork, eggs and will be getting our dairy goats in the spring. Here's a rundown of how we very passively build our soil in anticipation of fruit, vegetable and nut production. We've chosen to spread the food and wood chips all over to ensure the animals don't feel competition for food. If we didn't have the multi-species habitat going on, we'd perhaps consider building a compost pile that would break down faster that the animals could access for food as they choose. As it currently stands, it's important for us to ensure the pigs, chickens and duck all get the food they need to thrive and so we scatter it all about to ensure that goal is met. Doing this alone allowed us to raise our soil level a full inch in a matter of months. For comparison's sake, it takes at least 100 years to naturally build 1 inch of soil!!! We're pumped at the mere thought of the 2018 growing season! More info in the "how-to" section of our website: www.TheHumblehive.com

20/12/2017

Geeking out planning next year's food production space and stumbled upon this 💚

19/12/2017

Last year, we had 7 Solatubes installed in our Earthship home and we couldn't be more pleased with our decision today. They provide natural lighting all day long and are equipped with a solar-powered LED that kicks on at night to provide gentle "moonlighting." The only time we flip on conventional lights is at night when we're cooking, reading, etc. The rest of the time, no additional lights are needed. Solatubes are a fantastic, sustainable lighting solution. Be sure to check them out to reduce household electricity usage!

10/12/2017

Enjoy supporting local businesses? Check out our home-based business, Humble hive Homemade and go Zero-Waste this holiday season with these Toxin-Free, natural deodorants for 🎅 stocking stuffers 🎅! They REALLY WORK and we offer refunds for those who try it and are unsatisfied. Thus far, no refunds have been given and only glowing reviews abound! When all out, simply toss it into your home compost pile. Here at Humble hive Homemade, we choose only Zero-Waste packaging. It costs us a great deal more, but it's the only way to operate with our ethics intact. Make the switch to Zero-Waste, Toxin-Free deodorant today!

🎄Go Zero-Waste this holiday season and purchase these Toxin-Free, natural deodorants for 🎅 stocking stuffers 🎅! They REALLY WORK and Humble hive Homemade offers refunds for those who try it and are unsatisfied. Thus far, no refunds have been given and only glowing reviews abound! When all out, simply toss it into your home compost pile. Here at Humble hive Homemade, we choose only Zero-Waste packaging. It costs us a great deal more, but it's the only way to operate with our ethics intact. Make the switch to Zero-Waste, Toxin-Free deodorant today!

01/12/2017

Good afternoon everyone! I'd like to introduce our sweet pigs, chickens and duck. All of the pigs (other than Kevin Bacon) are a Kunekune American Guinea Hog cross. Kevin is a 4-way cross of Mangalitsa, Red Wattle, American Guinea and Kunekune. This is how I get to start every morning 💚. Not pictured is our other flock of chickens who live in our treeline and our flock of ducks who reside on our pond.

We'll begin offering workshops on raising pigs, goats, chickens and ducks in 2018! Be sure to sign up for updates on our website:
http://www.thehumblehive.com/workshops.html

28/11/2017

Even though we have many adult egg-layers on our farm, it has taken us two weeks to amass this many eggs. Did you know that as winter approaches, egg-laying by chickens decreases due to the increasingly cold temperatures and the reduced amount of daylight hours? Why not heat the coop and add lights to encourage egg-laying, you ask? Because late fall/ winter is a time of rest. Now that we live life according to the seasons, we have a much deeper appreciation for the rest that is needed by all life this time of year. We keep our chickens for eggs primarily, but the reality is that they provide us with so much more; manure, compost turning, pest control, entertainment. We have designed our sustainable farm so as to be able to allow a respite for everyone when it is needed. Additionally, because their bodies are allowed to take the time to conserve energy and resources generally allotted to egg production, we believe their overall health throughout the cold months is much greater than it would be if we were continuing to encourage egg-laying by artificial means. They adapt much quicker to the cold temperatures and are heartier overall.

These few eggs created each week are cherished by our family. We save them up for special meals like our breakfast of fried eggs this morning. When baking, we've adapted and use a mixture of water and ground flaxseed or chia seeds in recipes that call for eggs. It's a great replacement and allows us to make the most of the eggs we are gifted each week.

As I was doing my morning farm chores today, I was reflecting upon just how much all these animals give us in return for us caring for them and ensuring they live out a quality life. The trust, respect and excitement they all gift us each time we approach them is enough to fill me full of good on bad days. I don't dread spending time each day to take care of them; I cherish it. Truly. Even on the coldest of mornings, I relish getting to care for them and ensure they have all they need to thrive here.

Before living on a farm, I never fully grasped the term "animal husbandry." Now that we have a farm and care for animals on a daily basis, I get it. It is a symbiotic relationship much like a marriage, where each party takes care of the other and mutually benefits from the enriching environment created as a result. This term couldn't be more spot on; albeit patriarchal (I'll let that slide for now and shall digress...).

I'm so thankful for our life and for all the "work" we've chosen to take on each day. I put the word "work" in quotes because it isn't work at all. It is living we've chosen to do. Each day, we choose to live our best life; a life filled of passion and wonder.

*If Animal Husbandry is something that you're interested in, we'll be hosting a series of workshops in 2018 on keeping chickens, ducks, goats, and pigs. Sign up to receive updates on upcoming workshops on our website:
http://www.thehumblehive.com/workshops.html

19/11/2017

Now that our home is nearing completion and we've taken concrete steps at securing more long-term food production (tree-planting, adding pigs to our land, etc.), we plan on focusing some significant time and energy on annual food production and building up our land in front of our home for a mini "Food Forest" in 2018. Here's a "How-To" post about how we've started very passively working to build up our soil 1 FULL INCH in only 4 months time (FYI: It takes approximately 100 years to produce 1 inch of soil naturally). Now's not too late to get your 2018 garden prepped for many fertile growing seasons! Oh yeah, and the "method" we discuss can be totally FREE to boot. Free's always good.

While you're on our site, be sure to "sign up" to receive updates about our Earthship Home Tours & Homesteading Workshops that will become available in 2018.
http://www.thehumblehive.com/passive-food-production--our-take-on-back-to-eden-gardening.html

We first heard about Back to Eden Gardening a couple years back after watching the documentary on YouTube. We felt like newborns opening our eyes to see our mother for the first time. No joke. Anyhow, we felt silly for not having considered this common sense "method" and needing to watch a documenta...