The Humble Hive

01/06/2019

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.

11/04/2018

Having been plant-based eaters for 5 years, it's been quite the departure from our norm in raising our own meat this past year! 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

10/21/2018

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

10/11/2018

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. Oh, and goats also LOVE the whole tree 😂. They're a win-win!

10/06/2018

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 💚

09/26/2018

👨‍🌾👩‍🌾 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 💚

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...

07/15/2018

👋 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

07/04/2018

🐷💚🐷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 🥂!!

06/02/2018

🐐🐐 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. 💚