Hydrating Iced Tea, How to Prevent Swimmer’s Ear, Plus pruning Black Raspberries!

welcome back to homesteading with the zimmermans where we work hard and play hard on our little corner of land in Iowa my husband and I were born and raised old order Mennonite or horse and begging Mennonite as some refer to them as and although we are no longer part of that culture or community we are intentional about passing on the old-fashioned skills of our childhood to the Next Generation hello this is Ruth Ann Zimmerman here for homesteading with the zimmermans in today's video I will be showing you a little bit of a mix and match of our favorite hot summer home remedies recipes and also how we trim our black raspberries and we are in the dead center of Summer the corn all around us the acres and Acres of cornfields are in tassels and anytime every year when we get to this point of the summer our humidity levels just Skyrocket and temperatures start to creep toward the 90s and I know that's not very hot for those of you in the southern hemisphere but we think that's pretty hot but it's like living in a giant Greenhouse when that happens we slow down RAC our central air is not hooked up this summer because of a remodel project so we have found it very interesting watching our family acclimate to these temperatures everybody has slowed down and well maybe the younger crowd they're in and out of the pool a lot so they haven't slowed down a lot but we are trying to get our outside work done in the morning and then again in the evening and in today's video I am going to show you how we make our favorite hydrating tea to keep everybody hydrated because when you sweat and when you sweat a lot you lose more than just fluids you're losing minerals in potassium and to prevent headaches we try to make sure that we are drinking fluids that have minerals and potassium in so this will takes place of any Gatorade or Powerade that we would ever need to buy anything with electrolytes we don't need to buy anything with electrolytes because we understand what whole food ingredients go into something like this to help you recover when you've been outside and working lots in sweating Lots so the first thing I do to make my dehydrating tea bring about two cups of water to an almost boiling point then I got some loose leaf tea this is ginger peach and we find the ginger to be very very refreshing um and I don't have because it's loose leaf and I don't have a strainer fine enough to pour the hot water over I'm just going to make my own little tea bag here and I'm going to put about four tea bags worth of loose leaf tea in this coffee filter [Music] I'm gonna tie it up with some cotton string does that not white right and then we're gonna put it in the hot water that's correct won't it like like all the paperwork no it won't fall apart because coffee filters I mean it would if you would squeeze it real hard so now we're just gonna put that in there in that hot hot water they don't turn into tea yep it's gonna turn into tea I'll make a whole gallon of tea today a whole gallon that is four quarts oh I just need one of these but then I'm gonna add some green tea too four bags of green tea [Music] [Music] all right this is garbage it's hydrating tea right Yep this is gonna be hydrating tea [Music] yep okay now we're just gonna let that sit for about 15 minutes you have to turn the timer all the way past the 15 to 20 and then and then turn it back to 15 yeah otherwise it won't ring right here yep turn it back to 15 to 15. there you go when the timer goes we can take the tea bags out and then we can feed them not yet whoa you got it so we did open up our bag of peach tea because we didn't think it was Brewing well enough in that little pouch so we opened it up and now we've decided we're going to pour it through there we're gonna pour it through this coffee filter you ready oh yeah [Applause] why do we have to put it through the bag because we don't want pieces in our tea yeah but we can just use the strainer I think still some pieces would go through looks like pieces go through because the bubbles mm-hmm oh just a bunch [Music] extra honey I'm gonna go and get a shirt on okay so when you sweat your body loses minerals like potassium and salt remember how your sweat tastes salty so honey has potassium in and lots of other health helpful minerals and add sugar yeah and it makes it sweet and then we're gonna put a whole teaspoon of salt in and then we're going to put lemon juice in too but first let me stir the honey around to get it mixed in looks like you never want to put your honey in when your tea is still very hot because it can kill the minerals and thing the the nutrients in the honey you don't want to put your honey in when the tea is boiling that's right and it won't be hydrating so the honey adds potassium and minerals and then we add the salt for more minerals we add the mineral salt and that helps your body stay hydrated better than just plain water okay now you may squeeze the lemons in Harrison use your two hands now look hold the jar with one hand so it doesn't go there you go this is what makes it sour that it's not okay now let me okay why isn't this still down oh it will hang on [Music] no candidate can I wait okay stop now look I'm gonna pour some water through there to help the lemon juice go down [Music] salty salty [Music] okay is it all mixed yep [Applause] no you can put all of this icing mix it around [Music] okay now we're going to put water we're gonna fill up the rest of the way with water [Music] we made a big mess now go get some cups with and put some ice in [Music] that's good is that good yeah I was like I'm still taller and then I looked down oh did you find a cool spot Cupid the next thing I'm going to show you in today's video is how to prevent swimmer's ear now I grew up swimming in the river I grew up on the banks of the Conestoga Conestoga Creek and swimming in the river was just a daily thing getting swimmer's ear was no fun and what happens is when as kids when we go under the water and we're doing all kinds of acrobatic movements under the water goes into your ear and then when it doesn't drain out bacteria grows and you're going to get an ear infection it's very painful not fun at all and I'm sure some of you have experienced it and on the rare occasion I remember one time my mom taking it was either me or one of my siblings to the doctor because she was not one to run to the doctor at all but on this one occasion she took one of us to the doctor for swimmer's ear and he gave her this very very simple home remedy that we used ever after that and none of us ever got swimmer's ear after that so that's what I'm going to show you next two very simple ingredients okay for the swimmer's ear remedy that our old family doctor taught us when I was the same age that my children are now you need two very simple household ingredients you need rubbing alcohol because what will happen is the rubbing alcohol will mix with the water that's in the ear and then it will evaporate because that's what rubbing alcohol does and then the other thing that you need is white vinegar the distilled white vinegar will change it will make the water that's left in the ear acidic and bacteria cannot grow in a high acid environment so there it is real real simple so I've got a bottle of each and you need one part of each so this was what we did at home growing up so um let me see this is 16 ounces so I'm gonna pour eight ounces into half of this would be eight ounces so I'm going to pour eight ounces into my measuring cup so now this is half empty and this rubbing alcohol is also 16 ounces so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to pour the rubbing alcohol into the white vinegar so now I've got swimmer's ear solution in here and then I'm going to take this white vinegar and pour it into the bottle of rubbing alcohol hey Kendrick are you done swimming okay rubbing alcohol and white vinegar so now we're going to label them of course so that we don't use them for anything else [Music] all right so then what we're going to do the vinegar helps um bring it bring the asset level up inside your ear so bacteria can't grow so we just pour a little bit into the cap okay you ready and then we pour some into the ear it's only a couple drops it feels like I put a lot in doesn't it can you just count about to ten and you get to 10 you can dump it out in yep just turn your head the other way and it'll come out now we're gonna do this one what do you have to do both yeah okay count to ten and then you can dump it out so on a day where they are in and out of the pool all day I will just do this once at night before they go to bed um but say if we go to the river or to the lake I will do it immediately after we come home so the other thing I'm going to show you is Smoothie bowls um which are the perfect summer lunchtime meal and I've been showing these on Instagram and people have been asking how do you make your smoothie bowls so here real quickly is how we make smoothie bowls we are making smoothie bowls for lunch and we start with frozen strawberries and frozen bananas and add some frozen raspberries today too and then we're gonna add just a little bit of milk to get it started and a little bit of vanilla and we're going to blend it all together [Music] because these smoothies are for the boys I need to make sure I add a bunch of protein so I'm using whey protein today but sometimes I use some homemade Greek yogurt as a base and then that adds enough protein [Music] I don't know [Music] so we haven't added any sweetener to these smoothie bowls but we do top with a generous helping of maple syrup or raw honey [Music] and now I'm going to give you a quick rundown of how and why we trim our black raspberries so it is high time to prune my black raspberries as you can see they are about to take over the entire Garden you see all the way down here we're not going to be able to mow this week until we get this trimmed um and here here's what we're after this was last year's prune you can see I pruned there last year and then it branched out all these ways and produced berries so that we're gonna do the same thing this year so if you look in through here you can see all the old branches dying back these are all the ones that bore fruit this year they were pruned last year they bore fruit this year now they're dying back and all these new canes are next year's producing canes so what we want to do is we want to trim these new canes off just like this and then because this is next year's producing canes what's going to happen is because I prime this it's going to send out like four or five new shoots so instead of having one producing cane I'll not I'll have five producing canes next spring and I take them down to I could take this one down a little further and we do this as soon as they're done producing berries as soon as they're done producing berries we'll trim them because all these new branches that are going to grow they need time to get hard and Woody before winter sets in any branches that are not hard and Woody before winter sets in are going to die back in the winter and you'll have you'll lose branches that could bear fruit so here like this one has not been pruned but here you can see where it's already starting to turn Woody all these little spots on here little purple spots that's where the branch is turning Woody and but we need to trim this one and then it'll send out four more shoots and then that's the ones that we need to get Woody and then I trim them and tuck them under the wire just to keep it more organized [Music] foreign news the sweet corn is ready and we have all been enjoying it immensely and if the sweet corn is ready that means very likely we have some very very warm days and with our AC not hooked up this summer we are finding many other ways to beat the heat and we've slowly acclimated to the temperatures and nobody's really complaining anymore after a day or two of 90 degrees [Music] the heat definitely has not put a damper of any kind on the boys's imagination [Music] [Applause] and even in all this heat the Animals still need to be taken care of and the milk still needs to be taken care of [Music] Tom and Jerry have started having some time in the pasture without their halters on and without being you know Fooled Around by the boys they have enjoyed getting to know our fattening cows and just having some free time to explore on their own [Music] [Applause] [Music] well that brings us to the end of this week's video thank you everybody who has subscribed to our Channel thank you for commenting and sharing uh our Channel and remember you will find the links to the things I used and the recipes in the description [Music] foreign

Channel: Homesteading with the Zimmermans

Views: 24,520

Keywords: Remedies, Swimmers Ear, hydration drinks, recipes, hydrating drinks, iced tea, homesteading, family

Id: kup-iXtuP1Q

Length: 23min 48sec (1428 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 05 2023