There is one ingredient that goes into everything that we produce from garlic to eggs, garden vegetables, filtered beeswax, soaps and balms. This most important ingredient is called TLP. Now a Google search to find out what TLP is might lead you to believe that it is some type of advance power management system, a company on the New York Stock Exchange, or even “troop leading procedures” used by the Army. No, the TLP I’m talking about is none of these, nor is it some new mulit-purpose, miracle chemical that has been developed to save the world, and, in fact, it does not even raise the price of our products.
However, if I were to market TLP I would advertise it as something that could improve relationships, build job performance, increase productivity, has the potential to improve health and oh, so much more. Unfortunately (for anyone wanting to sell it) TLP is not a product that can be bottled, and I don’t even think it is possible to develop an app for it. Fortunately, for anyone interested in using TLP, it is readily available and at no charge.
Now that I have sparked your curiosity I’ll explain, the TLP we use is Tender Love and Prayer. It is derived from loving what we are doing, giving it the proper attention to do the job right, and asking Gods blessing on our efforts. I ask a blessing for those who use our products as well.
I would encourage you to add TLP to what ever it is you have to do to day (and everyday) and see what kind of results you might get.
With record breaking high temperatures this week it’s been hard to think about the cold and snow that may be just around the corner. We have however we have been taking advantage of these days by getting things ready for the inevitable cold.
Last week my husband cleaned and winterized the equipment we use, lawn mowers, the tractor, the four wheeler and such. He put plastic on the windows in the house, cleaned the chimney and tarred around any openings on the roof. This week his focus has been on remodeling the chicken coop and he finished that up on Wednesday.
He also took time on Sunday to work with me on splitting and stacking the fire would that has been seasoning in our court yard. He used the maul for splitting, while I used our log splitter.
I love our little manual, hydraulic log splitter because it is easy to use, but I can still get a good work out. While my husband is really good at splitting wood with a maul, I don’t have the strength, the eye-hand coordination, or the scientific knowledge required to do this efficiently. On the other hand, using this log splitter requires less strength, basically no eye-hand coordination and while the scientific knowledge of how to split wood is helpful, it is not a requirement. I love the fact that I can get a good arm workout while being productive, and that it is not gas powered, and therefore it does not cost anything to run it.
I finished splitting and stacking the wood on Wednesday.
Thursday, as the summerlike weather continued, so did we. Getting done little jobs that in past years might have gone undone. Basically storing things that should be protected from snow and cold and pruning dead foliage from some perennial plants.
In the above photo, taken last week, the green and yellow feathery looking plants are asparagus. Yesterday I cut them all down since most of the top growth has died off, turning yellow or brown. As I did this I also pulled any weeds that were starting to grow up around the plant. It was a great day for playin’ in the dirt.
I am certain there are many things that we will want to do before the snow flies and the ground freezes, and Lord willing we will have some decent weather for it, but this warm spell gave us great incentive to get a lot done.
With the beautiful weather we had today and I am so thankful that I got out and enjoyed some of it. I started the day inside, making a batch of soap.
Coconut Soap Ready to Pour in the Mold
No that is not vanilla pudding – “don’t eat it” . Then I filtered the beeswax from our last honey harvest. By 2:00 I was ready to get out of the house, so I loaded Scout and Trooper into the van and we headed to the farm. My husband was working on the chicken coop remodel, and I really didn’t know what I was going to do except be outside. After all you don’t often get 75 degrees and sunny on November 3rd in Michigan. In fact the temperature tied the record high which was set back in 1987.
After I went for a walk in the field with Trooper I decided that I would rake the out the leaves that had settled in the beach end of the pond. If I had planed this before I left home I would have been wearing my rubber boots, but since the weather was so nice I decided to just go bare foot.
November 3, 2015
The sand was warm as was the air temperature, but I didn’t wade into the water because, while it obviously wasn’t freezing, (no ice) it was cold.
I wasn’t the only one who enjoyed our above average temperature.
Trooper on The BeachScout Relaxing In The Van
The Scout and Trooper were both happy to be at the farm.
Super Chick
The chickens were happy to be out and about and scratching for bugs.
After I raked the beach area,
November 3,2015
and picked up the piles of leaves so they would not end up back in the pond, I cut up some branches that we will use for kindling and then took a few more photos of this beautiful November day.
Probably the most common thing people do with pumpkins is make jack-o-lanterns, and we are no exception. Our Halloween celebrations have changed over the years, from going to the orchard to pick pumpkins out of the field, and dressing the kids in the costumes of their choice for trick-or-treat, and passing out candy to a hundred+ kids in our community, sometimes even in costume ourselves, and one time even making a haunted deck; to the kids now being grown and moved away. There are very few trick-or-treaters in our community now, so we don’t buy several big bags of candy to pass out, and we didn’t make the expensive journey to the pumpkin field at the orchard. We did however carve jack-o-lanterns.
Our pumpkin field produced a few nice jack-o-lantern pumpkins this year so we selected a couple that we wanted to save the seeds from. Last night my husband and I carved our pumpkins.
My husband set things up in the living room. Set up also included a fire burning in the fireplace, a Carpenters CD playing, and he with a whisky and water and me with a limon’ and coke. I do believe this is the first time we ever carved pumpkins in the living room – my how things change when the kids are grown.
Scout got curious and decided to join us. Trooper decided to stay elsewhere, as he does not like the cracking sounds the fire makes.
My husband decided Scout should have some treats.
The trick was how fast Scout could eat them.
I thought our jack-o-lanterns turned out cute. Mine of course was the female looking one, while his was the masculine one. We didn’t plan it, but I though it was cool the way they appear to be looking at each other.
We decided that they should have a toast.
Then we turned off the lights and let them do their thing.
A fun night it was. They are lighting the living room again this evening and will probably remain there until Halloween.
You may have noticed that my recent blog posts have been missing pictures, especially the series on garlic planting. The truth is that my camera was missing. For several weeks I could not find it. I looked over and over, in all of the obvious places and then in the not so obvious places. I looked everywhere, but I could not find it. Finally my husband decided that we would buy me a new one. Our plan for last Wednesday was a date night, shopping for a few items that we needed, including a camera, then dinner at our favorite restaurant, Carrabba’s.
Wednesday morning, as I was dreading shopping for a new camera, (I hate shopping, especially for technology type things) I realized that I was missing something else, my crochet bag. It is a burlap bag that I keep my crochet project in. I remembered the last time I took it somewhere, and it was around the same time that I remembered seeing my camera last. Well hmmm, where-oh-where could it be. I was no longer searching for the camera, but now I was searching all the obvious places and then the not so obvious places for my crochet bag. Ah Ha! there it was, tucked away, in a not so obvious place – a corner of a shelf behind soap making stuff, and yes my elusive camera was in the bag.
As grateful as I was for the finding it, and for the timing of the find, I could not help but analyze how these things became missing. My first thought was, “who put that bag there, I would not have put it there.” After thinking about it for a while, here is what I believe happened. I took my crocheting with me one day while I was tending our farm wagon, so I would have something to work in between serving customers. Upon returning home, I grabbed the bag to carry it in the house, without thinking about it, I put my camera, that also needed to be carried in the house, in the crochet bag to make things easier. When I got in the house I dropped the bag in a corner in the living room, to be dealt with later, and I went on to do other things.
A few days later, I believe my husband was vacuuming the living room, I remember him picking up the bag and saying, “Oh, that’s your crocheting,” I think he put it back where it was. At this point, I think, I decided to get the bag out of his way, so I picked it up and instead of putting it in it’s normal place, which is next to my recliner in the living room, because it would still be in his way as he vacuumed, I mindlessly tucked it in an out of the way spot.
Fortunately this was just a little incident, and it worked out well without me even spending more money on a camera, but it has made me think about how often we get busy and just do things without thinking about our actions, we forget where we put things, we lock our keys in the house or the car, we leave our head lights on and run our batteries down, and while these examples may be frustrating and time consuming, they have little other consequence. However it is this same mindless action that could cause someone to leave something on the stove and cause the house to burn down, or leave a child closed inside a hot car with potentially deadly consequences. The act of rushing through things, of not paying attention to what I am doing could have serious consequence. So, I have decided it is time to slow down, to act intentionally, and to pay attention to what I am doing. To quote my husband, “take care of the small things and the big things will take care of themselves.”
Although I don’t have any photo’s of the actual planting these photos might give you an idea of what we did.
The 2015-2016 garlic field planted and mulched.
This is the area where we planted around 5000 garlic cloves. It may not look very big for that much garlic, but I have read that one acre can grow 30,000 to 40,000.
The lattice grid that we use for panting garlic 4 rows at a time.
This piece of lattice is what we put down on the ground, as our grid, we plant only in the rows that have 4 spaces across. With my husband on one side and me on the other we each do the two rows closest to us. Then we move this piece of lattice to the next part of the row and do it all over again. Each time we complete one lattice (grid) we have put in 64 cloves.
Our garlic plating tools.
The sticks in the above photo are what we use to poke holes in the ground, through the lattice, to put the cloves in. My husband cut these for us last year when the soil was wet and clumpy. They make a hole that is just the right size and depth for planting the garlic clove. When they are not being used for planting garlic, they are at home, on display, in our living room, so we know where to find them next year.
The back field is mowed.
This is the back field that I spent about a total of 4 hours, over a two day period, cutting with the tractor and brush hog.
Don't Eat It! Soap and Skin Care 