While we may moan about the cold winter weather here in northern Minnesota, it did help us. Monday and Tuesday we were busy delivering boxes of frozen beef to our customers from Superior, Wisconsin to neighboring homes. Hauling the beef in our open-box pickup, we were happy that it stayed nicely frozen in 9 degree temperatures. (Three big steers turns into a whole lot of beef!) Now we have several boxes of our own quarter waiting on the front porch to be packed down to the basement where the freezer is waiting for them. I still have one frozen turkey and a few packages of burger to can up as chili, but the freezer will be able to hold all that new beef. We feel so blessed to have such full pantries and freezer!
Some of the beef went down to Bill and Kelly’s and we also brought them a rooster and three hens as they had lost a few birds over the last year or two and wanted to renew their small flock. They were down to three hens. We were glad to see the birds go as we have too many chickens due to talented and determined hens sneaking into the long grass in the orchard and hiding nests. Then they would come out with a dozen new chicks each. It doesn’t take long to have a lot of chickens.
I hope all of our readers in the wildfire areas of California and the earthquake part of Alaska around Anchorage escaped damage and destruction. Our prayers are with all folks affected!
Will is busy at work today on our rack for the new solar panels. I’m so excited because it won’t be long before we can start attaching the panels. Of course it will be awhile before we can actually use them as we still have to buy three charge controllers and a combiner box, but we watch each step as progress achieved and are happy. (The beef money went to pay off our loan for our new bull this summer along with payments on the principal for our tractor, truck, and land loans. We always pay off any loans just as fast as we can to avoid interest. And we hate any type of loan at all!) — Jackie
Here in the Copper Basin we got a good shake of the house according to the ladies of the house because I slept through it! No damage. My crew in Seward felt many of the after shocks too but no damage. My grand daughter in law freeked and was afraid she would have a heart attack but she is fine in the end. We have had unusually warm weather (mostly teens and twenties) and lots of cloud cover which is making this dark time of the year even darker. It’s not full light until 9:30 and starts getting dark about 3:30.
i’m real glad to hear you escaped damage. But really, Howard, you SLEPT through the earthquake??? Boy I’ll bet you caught heck about that! Yep, it’s pretty dark here; full light at about 8:00 and it starts getting dark at about 4:30 so I know what you mean. I feel like a chicken; ready to go to bed at 6 PM….
I remember the days of our own beef. The brine-soaked stuff in the stores is nothing by comparison.
You’ve got that right. And so much of the big-box store meat is irradiated too. I don’t want that! Ugh.
How do you create your power now
Do you charge up batteries with a generator
We would like to try that
We started out by charging our batteries with a generator but that takes a lot of gas. So we first added some small solar panels which helped some. Then we added four large solar panels plus a second-hand wind generator which helped a whole lot. Now we’re adding 9 more big solar panels which should just about do away with our gasoline use in the generator. Hooray!
A little advice from someone who lives at almost 62 north latitude with 5000 foot mountains five miles south of us. If the sun shines we get about an hour on the panels this time of year and with this weird weather year we haven seen any in two weeks. To efficiently charge the battery bank we have a n Iota 45 amp charger hard wired into the main bank. This charger has a built in charge controller built in with three stage charging. You can get larger chargers if you have a bigger bank. To save on run time we went with propane lighting and refrigeration when we started twenty years ago. We have a 12 volt sunfrost freezer on the porch with its own panel and battery bank and backup charging. Usually this time of year the ambient temp is much colder than the freezer but we have had to watch this lately as for instance we had 33 this morning. We get most of our wind in summer so a wind charger wouldn’t help our sun less winters. Just some workaround ideas.
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