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By Ted Dunlap, on January 29th, 2023 
Among the dumb jokes that stuck with me from early adolescence was: Mexican weather report: Chili today, Hot tamale Unfortunately my neck of the woods is not expected to rise above FREEZING until February. On the estate, our little valley grabs the cold and hangs on to it with unappreciated tenacity. You can see my morning low to the left. Yep … minus 24 … or so. Thanks to a nice collection of firewood I have built up, I can keep the palace around a plus 75… roughly a one hundred degree difference … that I really appreciate after plowing or blowing snow in the yard for an hour or two. The photo to the right is from yesterday’s two-hour […]
By Ted Dunlap, on December 22nd, 2022 
Now THAT’s COLD. At Sunrise (8:17), I threw on a wool coat, insulated gloves and boots for a one-minute outdoor job of opening the chicken door so my flock could get out to their heated water reservoir and food supply. Whoops. My young back-saving helper yesterday did not close the double gate into / out of the chicken yard after blowing a foot of snow off their scratching yard. So I did that while I was out there – to keep them in and predators out. By the time I was back inside, my legs were cold through their double layers, my back was cold through its triple layers and my cheeks were genuinely frosty in the non-bearded areas. (Interesting […]
By Ted Dunlap, on December 20th, 2022 
Connect with the natural world for a day. This year our calendar day of December 21st will be the shortest. From this day forward the days will grow longer and longer until the turnaround at the summer solstice. Montana sunrise will be 8:11 am; sunset 4:44 pm; length of day 8 hours 33 minutes; night 15 hours 27 minutes The sun’s steady disappearance from our world will make a turnaround. This is worth celebrating, marking in some way big or small. I plan to work in my greenhouse, perhaps put some seeds into pots and onto a germinating heat mat (that we have yet to dig out of whatever clever storage site we found for it). Maybe you can […]
By Ted Dunlap, on November 12th, 2022 
One of the real treats in my life is a heated shop. I have a lovely collection of tools and workspaces enabling me to putter with woodwork, metalwork and a bit of mechanical maintenance. I am not great at any of it, but pretty darn good at solving the little challenges and opportunities life sends my way. I have spent some time turning my Jack-of-all-Trades persona into a way to make an honest living, but only at the wrong place at the wrong time. The Fixer business did not blossom, but my website The Fixer.biz is still kicking around as a place where I document some of my creations and share ideas I have come up with. I wish I […]
By Ted Dunlap, on August 14th, 2022 
A main driver of my life is gaining control of my homestead, estate, working spaces and equipment. After each move from one to another, the list of urgent/critical projects is immediately followed by the crucial, then important and so on until I reach the settled in phase. In each case there is some marker that gives me the feeling I have arrived. Seven years into our Bunkhouse occupancy, I finally hit what I think is that marker. I am comfortable that I know what spaces I want to irrigate, have them relatively easy to wet and no longer have to disconnect hoses, move pipes and reconnect to run my mower around the yard. This evolved irrigation system will be reasonably […]
By Ted Dunlap, on June 30th, 2022 
All the lamestream media outlets, including those dominating the Internet search engines agree that “abortion rights” and “gun control” are all you need to think about. As they pound on those drums, what is it we are not supposed to be noticing? What is it they are doing that we are not supposed to see? From FrontPageMagazine: Glazov Gang: 10k Dead Cattle in Kansas – Why? Connected to the controlled demolition of food and energy supply? From EnVolve.com: Rancher Warns Mass Cattle Deaths Are An ‘Inside Job’ Designed To Cause Food Shortages Experts are now warning that the sudden deaths of thousands of cattle may very well be linked to a diabolical attempt to cause mass food shortages in America, […]
By Ted Dunlap, on May 22nd, 2022 
In this little How-To, I share my experience laundering a 16 gigabyte SanDisk secure digital (SD) card. The little buggers are 1″ by 1 1/4″, quite flat and capable of storing one hundred and twenty-eight billion bits of information. That number, along with that amount of data are both quite incomprehensible. How about 16 pickup trucks FULL of books? That is literally the amount of information can be stored onto this little card. That is to say, there is almost no space between the bits of data on them. A spec of dust could short out any of the circuits therein. I mention this to provide perspective on the following little tale. The Easter Egg Chicken Ranch attracted another […]
By compatriot, on February 3rd, 2022 
by Tyler Durden Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com, The information that I am about to share with you is extremely alarming, but I have always endeavored to never sugarcoat things for my readers. Right now, there are shortages of certain items in grocery stores across the United States, and food supplies have gotten very tight all over the globe. I have repeatedly warned that this is just the beginning, but I didn’t realize how dire things have already gotten until I received an email from a farming insider that I have corresponded with over the years. I asked him if I could publicly share some of the information that he was sharing with me, and he said that […]
By Ted Dunlap, on March 10th, 2021 
Today the third batch of chicks arrived at our local farm & ranch store. It will also be the third batch to sell out within hours of arrival. In normal years each batch lasts a week or more. The chicks are telling us something is very different this year. The guy in front of my was a first-time budding chicken rancher with lots of questions and needing to completely gear up. Others are tuning up existing flocks. The chicks say there are lean times on the near horizon.
By Ted Dunlap, on October 10th, 2020 
With four days of rain predicted and reasonable certainty that both the summer and the Indian Summer are history, I saw this morning as my last chance to seed the areas my construction projects this year laid bare. I have been trying to buy or borrow a real harrow to work the seeds under cover, but nothing worked out. So I made my own along the lines of cheap, scrappy farm yard stuff. Old boards. Fence scrap. Screws. Chain. Ingenuity. It worked just fine. It has been almost a decade since I sold off my 20-year business, The Gentleman Farmer with tractors, implements, good-will and customer list. Our Bunkhouse homestead demanded a snow plow so I have a Polaris […]
By Ted Dunlap, on July 24th, 2020 
TEOTWAWKI, The End Of The World As We Know It is upon us. We are in the early stages, but the normal we had a year ago will not return in our lifetimes. We had a warning in Spring and have been granted a short reprieve, but it would be foolhardy to squander the next month. Every analysis I read and see indicates The Change will get worse, soon… much, much worse, and frightfully soon. I share much of that at this website and will continue to do so. Meanwhile, most of us agree that we have at least one good month to build our pantries. Few expect supplies to be as plentiful and easily accessed past October. Hardly any […]
By Ted Dunlap, on May 5th, 2020 
The moon over the Idaho Territory will be full on Thursday, March 7th. Bob Cannard, my organic gardening mentor encouraged us to plant on every full moon. He did not touch on whether or not he believed it cosmically favored the plants themselves. His expressed reasoning was that it organized us to do regular plantings whether that was seeds, starts, bare-root, or transplants. Get something started every full moon and you will always have a good garden. From long before there were computers, televisions and electric lights, people on nature-driven cycles have called the first full moon of May, “The Planting Moon”. Whereas in some environments planting and growing year-round is possible, here our growing season is short, but […]
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