Homestead Garden Harvest And Insulating Battery Shed

I tested out the ATV to see why it was overheating. I spent some time working on insulating the off grid battery and water shed. Started making cheese. Melanie gives us a tour of the organic garden and her harvest of vegetables.

I bought some cheese making supplies and am going to try my hand at making some cheddar cheese using raw goats milk. We are getting about a half gallon to a gallon of milk per day on the off grid homestead and we are running out of ways to use it. Making cheese is a great and tasty way to use up some extra milk.

I have received a book on how to make milk products already. Melanie and I are studying this book and trying out the recipes. We have already tried to make goat milk butter but that failed. We have made multiple batches of goat feta cheese which turns out good. And we have made our own yogurt.

But for making hard cheese I bought a book and some cheese making supplies. I have some bacterial cultures needed in cheese making and some organic liquid vegetable rennet.

Today I am going to make some cheddar cheese on video but that will be a separate video. It will take me four days to complete the process so stay tuned if you are interested.

I spent some time in the morning working on getting your video live. We had a very late night and so we had a later start in the morning. The sky is looking like rain, but you never know around here.

I started the four wheeler that I picked up the other day to see what may be causing it to overheat. Before I ran it though I looked it over and found that the radiator was low and the overflow tank was empty. I put fresh water in them and ran the ATV for a while to warm it up and see what happens.

The quad ran quite a while for me. It ran very nicely until it got warmed up well. Then it sputtered and stalled out. I figure due to the bad head gasket.

The previous owner had taken in the four wheeler for repairs two times for a blown head gasket but the shop never looked for or fixed the cause of the problem.

After the vehicle was off I looked for water leaks and sure enough I found a water leak up under the plastic shroud. I cannot see up there but I figure it is a blown radiator hose. I will have to take off the plastic and see what is going on in there. I hope the fix is that simple.

The engine starts and runs well enough and the radiator was warm to touch. This tells me that both the water pump and the thermostat are most likely operating. Although I cannot yet rule out the thermostat fully.

I had to make a run for animal feed. We love our animals out here at the off grid homestead. We have two goats, four turkeys and about 30 chickens plus two cats.

We take care of our animals and they feed us. The goats give us fresh daily milk. The chickens provide us with eggs and eventually meat. The cats, well, they eat anything that moves inside the house including flies, spiders and anything else they can catch. They earn their keep.

I am cleaning out the Jeep in order to build a camping package into it. I was studying the camper trailers in Australia three years ago and got the idea to turn my Jeep into a self propelled and self contained survival and camping Jeep.

But the Jeep has become a storage space for just about everything that needs to be protected from the weather during the past year. This includes insulation meant for the water and battery shed.

I need to finish insulating the off grid water and battery storage shed in order to prevent our water from freezing this winter. And cold batteries have a reduced output as compared to warm batteries.

So I spent some time putting insulation in the walls of the off grid battery shed. Until I realized that time was running out and I had about a five hour job ahead of me making cheese.

Melanie shows us her garden harvest. While I was working on insulating the water shed, I wondered where she had been the entire time.

Melanie has been feeding the three of us almost entirely on the fruit of our own labors. We eat fish that we caught ourselves along with eggs and garden vegetables. Our garden is fully organic this year.

We are aiming for a Back to Eden style no till garden combined with a modified square foot garden.

The back to eden method involves using mulch and compost to build up soil through the years. This gives you a very healthy growing medium and very few weeds.

The square food garden method uses garden plots that are 4 feet by 4 feet. This allows you to reach into the middle from all sides. After my first year trying this method I realized that I did not need the pathways in between the plots. So I made 4 foot wide rows this year with 2 foot wide pathways.

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Troy
http://www.thedoityourselfworld.com
http://www.theoffgridproject.com