Penny demonstrates that all girls like to feel pretty, even butchy farm dogs.
But like many girls, she hates having her picture taken, no matter how pretty she feels.
Things are so heavy and gloomy lately that I thought I would share this today. Have a great weekend, y’all.
Posted in weather
Completely hemispheric (no flat spots) antique copper bowl, from France, with brass holding ring. Get out the whisk and go to town. I usually avoid single-use tools in my kitchen but I make an exception for this beautiful bowl.
On many things in my life, I find I am a half-geek. That is, I am really interested in knowing HOW something happens (and will often spend hours studying how) but I often stop myself before completely knowing WHY it does. It’s like I still wish to be caught by surprise, or at least want to still have a bit of faith that something magical can happen. Also, it’s no fun being a geek 100% of the time (trust me).
In an effort to remove all things electronic from my life, I have increasingly gone for hand-powered tools in the kitchen. I like stirring/kneading/whisking things by hand, and fortunately my dependency on kitchen electronics was pretty thin to begin with…so not much has been recycled/rehomed. New things have come in, though, and most of those things were found by my husband (the household shopper) at either the antique mall in town or at various thrift stores. Here are two items I use all the time, especially now that eggs are in seriously great supply again: this hand-blender and this copper bowl.
When I use my (much faster) c. 1925 hand blender, I need both hands, so I make a nest with a dishtowel, tip the bowl, and start whipping. Loose whites to stiff peaks in less than 4 minutes.
Whipping egg whites is what I call lots of fun. The whole process: separating white from yolk, setting the whites in the bowl, reaching for the blender and the tea towel…it’s enjoyable to me. The result is fun too (meringue, souffle, roulade, even a simple cake). That I know how to whisk, or in this case blend, and even why it’s best done in a copper bowl are interesting facts to me…but that it happens at all is where I find the surprise.
And life in the kitchen would be quite boring without a bit of magic.
Herb and cheddar souffle
There’s a pretty hard and fast rule about farm animal ownership: there shall be no sleeping in on the weekends.
Somehow, in my deepest dreamy slumber at 7:30 in the morning on Sunday, I could have sworn I heard a turkey. Our hen turkey, to be precise. She wasn’t alarmed, she was simply making her typical cooing noise. Hmm. I woke up and still heard it. Considering our bedroom is on the second floor and the turkeys were supposed to be locked up for the night, I, uh, thought I was still dreaming.
Nope: not dreaming. She’d flown out and onto the porch roof outside the bedroom, and was asking for her breakfast. That’s pretty good for a bird brain, don’t you think?
And here’s the birthday girl’s interpretation of our turkey.
Posted in chickens, etc.
One of my manias is seeds and seed-saving. Perhaps it’s my Catholic upbringing*, but it bothers me that so many good seeds sit in cupboards and drawers and old shoe boxes and never get planted…much less harvested. This year I decided to winnow down my own considerable stash by doing a seed trade with a few gardening friends. I stumbled, however, on packaging the seeds. If I bought envelopes it kind of defeats one of the purposes (thrift) of seed trading. Fortunately, I am married to an artist, so I put him on the home-made envelope task.
I asked for small envelopes (seed trades don’t mean “four years’ worth of cucumbers”) and I wanted them to be easily made and resealable. He came up with envelopes made of 4″ square pieces of regular paper. Here’s the photo tutorial below. You end up with little 2″ envelopes…perfect for, say, 300 lettuce or 6 pumpkin seeds.
*you know, the profligacy of seed wasting evidenced by Monty Python’s “Every Sperm is Sacred” from The Meaning of Life. If I truly believed it, I obviously would have more than one child.
4×4 square piece of paper
halvsies then quarters
tuck one bottom edge into the other
seeds go into the center here and then the top gets folded over. Label on the other side and voila…
Eggs from Maggie (Black Australorps, pictured) and a little one from our pullet Chicken Patty (slow-growing CornishX). First eggs tend to be smaller, but Maggie always lays our biggest ones so perhaps the comparison is unfair. It’s easy to tell who lays what egg if you only have 7 layers.
Eggs. One small package, one thing so ubiquitous, humble and yet so miraculous. They’re cheapened, of course, by the crass way we treat battery hens; I would lay insipid eggs too if I had to live their lives of horror. But a farm-fresh egg from a well-treated hen, laying even in the depths of a greenless winter…now that is a little bit of wonder.
My family is quite happy eggs are back on the menu now that the girls are laying again. I had hoarded them during the girls’ peak moult from Thanksgiving-Christmas. But now it’s breakfast for dinner again! There is nothing quicker or more delicious than a simple fried egg steaming and hot on a plate, or even a more gymnastic poached egg sitting atop a salad. Add toast, or maybe some potatoes. Cheap wealth in eating.
I think back to the day when Bonnie laid our first egg. So perfect, so precious! Not our effort, but still we gloated. And we fought over it too if I remember correctly. One egg, split three ways.
Posted in chickens, etc., food
Does it insulate a person to have diminished expectations of things? To proceed thus, one can easily become pleasantly surprised, no? I find I operate this way with many things in my life*, especially green growing things. Sure, I have a certain hope they’ll grow for me but it’s not a 100% expectation. I find it best to work in the 50% category.
Above, however, is a sweet little patch of cilantro that I transferred from garden to greenhouse with no hopes at all for a harvest. If you’ve ever planted the stuff you will be struck by two things: one, how rapidly it shoots into flower and two, how freely it reseeds itself. Both these traits mean your harvest window is a tiny one. Well! IN my usual what-the-hell fashion, I planted about ten tiny seedlings into the old greenhouse and threw a piece of leftover greenhouse plastic over the top of them. I have been rewarded by lots of lovely cilantro all winter long…and yes, it surprises me. Those fleshy little stems and leaves, I thought, they’re bound to give up the ghost and turn into mush.
Sometimes (only sometimes) I like being wrong.
*including politics.
Posted in seeds
Nearly 7′ of the white stuff climbing up the sides of the greenhouse: this crap does pile up
It makes sense to clear the sides of some of it, at least down to the 3′ level, if just to let more light in.
Hope: while it’s +15*F. outside, here’s what it is inside. The worst it’s gotten inside is +20* despite the deep freeze of the last week or more.
I’m one of those foolishly idealistic people who actually thinks politics is a higher calling. Despite the fact that it’s mostly practiced by people with an inflated sense of self worth (and sycophants aplenty to encourage this view), the actual job is to be a servant to the people’s business. I had no foreknowledge that 11/07/2000 was the start of one of the darkest eras in my life, and it is just as well that I did not. I do feel, though, that we’ll soon wake from the nightmare that has been the last eight years. Today is a great day to start a new dream, and it’s time to start digging.
Deep snow, friends. Deeper than usual. Not as cold as elsewhere but…somehow the geese don’t mind. When I am doing critter chores I free the geese and turkeys to follow me around. Such flapping and squawking! Such freedom, flying out of their pen. And then they land in the snow, erp. Er, a little help here? Please?
Posted in chickens, etc., weather
To keep up accreditation in our field, we architects must attend seminars that address certain areas of our profession. The majority of the credits we need are in the area of “Health, Safety, and Welfare,” a general category meant to keep our knowledge current so our buildings don’t collapse and kill people. (Granted, these seminars are usually bone-dry boring affairs run by building products manufacturers to sell their products, so attending these seminars is not, for me, an irony-free affair.) Anyway! I think of this phrase often now that I sideline in animal husbandry. If you’re going to take on the responsibility of having animals, anything you do must benefit their health, their safety, and their welfare.
Coop construction, July 2006
I am so glad we built the Taj Mahal of chicken coops, really I am. Never intended to house more than a dozen or so birds, our coop could easily accommodate another dozen, but I am glad it does not. Why? This cold weather is why. Those girls are going nowhere. Even if I do leave the door open and shovel them paths to tread in their yard, it’s just too cold for them outside. They are (and will remain for the foreseeable future) cooped up.
Cooped up, and bored. Sorry, girls. I do try to bring them treats a couple of times a day, and I do need to freshen their water, which freezes. (In their boredom they flipped and pecked the heated dogbowl I set in there; fearing barbecued chicken, I removed the bowl, and now schlep water often.) During the day I turn a 40 watt light on for them too; it’s on for about 10 hours. They’d started laying again (whew!) around Christmas before the light went on so I don’t think I am overstimulating them to produce, and the light is too faint to really warm the place up.
Secretary of the Department of Chicken Homeland Security: yours truly, July 2006
Our pellet gun has gone a long way to defend the Chicken Homeland. A good strong fence over and above the chicken run would help too with aerial threats but it’s not in the cards if I have my Daisy handy. Last year I strung deer netting over the run and awoke one morning to find a hawk INSIDE the run. What the…? The girls were in the coop as is the usual overnight situation but I had the hawk to deal with. Tom and daughter were out of town. What to do? As usual when defending the Chicken Homeland my adrenaline kicks into high gear and I ran outside in fuzzy slippers and bathrobe with the nearest weapon I could find: a cast-iron skillet. It was not the hawk’s best day.
The geese and turkeys have their own pen and shed, and I have to chase them all into the shed every night. Sometimes the geese adamantly refuse to go into it and I let them stay out. Considering they don’t really sleep at night (they doze most of the day, in turns) being in the shed is no fun for them. We’ve had no threats to the Greater Poultry Homeland, though.
Now that we’re getting a goat or two, plans are changing. Dogs are the greatest threat to goats, dogs and their wild coyote cousins. Again, the goat(s) will be cooped up at night in their own shed inside a sturdily-built fence. Considering that goats are great as poison ivy and brush eradicators, we’ll use electrified fencing to give them access to day browse.
So, yeah, you’ve got to do a bit to keep your critters safe, secure, happy and healthy. Owning them, though, is so rewarding that the daily details of addressing their needs are really much more of a pleasure than a burden. Skillet days excepted, of course!
Posted in chickens, etc., death
Boo! At least the sprouts of onions like these Red Wethersfields are edible, unlike the just-as-spooky potato sprouts.
One of the things that the lazy person inside me really appreciates about freezing and canning is that, after the item is frozen or canned, it requires no monitoring from me. Root cellar crops require lots more care. And here it is, nearly mid-January, so it’s time for me to make an assessment of the State of the Stored.
The greenhouses and gardens in winter are great places for me to keep root crops like beets, carrots, parsnips, turnips and rutabagas, and it’s there that I go to find them. In the past I have stored them in the root cellar, but frankly they do better (and require less of my care) in the gardens themselves. Leeks, likewise, will be just fine in both the greenhouse and the gardens, and I am able to grow a fair number of salad onions through the winter in the greenhouses (both bunching onions (scallions) and regular onions that haven’t fully bulbed out).
Sprouty onions and potatoes in a cold dark basement are unpleasant, to say the least, especially when I am in a rush to make dinner and have to sort through them. I store these two crops on the floor below my canning jars; the average temperature all winter there is 50*. I try to eat the onions in the order of their sprouting (cipollini first, reds second, yellows third, whites last) and that usually works fine. Potatoes, however, have an internal sprouting clock that goes off with a bang, usually toward the end of January, and frankly there’s not much I can do about that. It would help if my basement were colder, maybe by 10*, but that’s not going to happen either.
In the true root cellar I have cabbage and apples. The daily average back there is about 35*, though it gets much colder on days like today (10*). This “cellar” is simply the back stairs to the basement. It’s far too cold for potatoes and onions out there but these other things are just fine in the cold. In fact, I tend to ignore them. It helps to go through them about once a month and pull out the bad apples, but cabbage lasts all winter.
Winter squash. They’re stored with the canned goods, but tender pumpkins get the kitchen-floor treatment under the butcher block table as it’s warm-ish there (60*). These things all require some vigilance from me. Fortunately we do eat quite a bit of the stuff so I usually have the stash fairly sorted through and eaten in terms of ripeness, but…we usually also hit a “no more squash, please” request right at the time when some of the more tender ones are beginning to go bad. Luckily the geese and turkeys love squash! Uncooked, I just split the things in half and it’s beta-carotene treat time for the poultry. The sometimes even eat the peel.
Anyway, the short answer to the lazy person in me is that all storage requires a bit of vigilance. Every jar’s seal needs to be checked before and after opening; the damned freezers do need to be grumble grumble defrosted annually, and yes, all root cellar crops do have an Eat By date built into them. Frankly I am glad to be able to have the time to do this produce monitoring: I’m certainly much more busy in the growing season!
Posted in food
The turkeys’ and geese’s view
I am watching snow fly upward. We are staying home today under a blizzard watch, and I’m watching my own little blizzard right now while everyone else sleeps.
Thank you all for your thoughtful comments yesterday. I cannot tell you how gratifying it is to me to learn there are so many other people out there with an itch to dig! Dig, and maybe blog about it! When I started this blog endeavor, indeed, when I started this grow-most-of-what-we-eat thing, it was a rather solitary pursuit. It still is a solitary pursuit, come to think of it; it’s my muscle, my rather like-it-or-lump-it decisions as far as what is grown and what is cooked and what gets preserved for later. But to know that I am part of a community, at least a virtual one, is good for me on a cold day like today.
So thank you, kind readers.
Little Edie is not happy
Posted in Uncategorized
Gratuitous cuteness photo
Anyone else finding it hard to pull the trigger and order your seeds/critters/thoughts for the upcoming season? I think I am just as guilty of grinding this economy to a halt as anyone is. I am finding it really hard, harder than usual (and that is saying something) to open the wallet! Sigh; I know this is now a worldwide phenomenon.
Anyway, I hope this indecision soon gets, uh, decided, at least for this household. Too many plans riding on it!
Posted in sweat
On Thursday the child and I had to be somewhere around sunset. We do not normally see this daily event for two reasons. One, I (and by extension she) am normally never anywhere at sunset but at home: me usually logging miles around the floorspace in the kitchen, she usually joining me or doing her own thing. And two, there’s a forest across the street that prohibits our seeing this daily occurrence. Anyway, this Thursday sun as it set was HUGE. Like, light-up-the-sky-and-think-it’s-on-fire enormous. Has anyone else noticed this?
“It must be perihelion,” I told her. “We’re as close to the sun as we’re going to get this year.”
“But why is it so cold if it’s so close?” she asked. (Seeing the sun set in the lake in the heat of Summer, that sun is tiny.)
“I don’t know,” I said. “But you should find out,” I told her.
On the way home that evening she saw the moon. “I see the wolf moon!” she said. I’ve taught her the names of all 13 full moons. (The full moon is actually tonight but I certainly wasn’t going to rain on her parade.) Because we live in the country and the sky is unobstructed and light-pollution free, I figured we all need to be a bit more aware of the heavens above. This was something we all used to know, to be aware of, just like canning and cheesemaking and gardening…
Posted in nature
This is the side of the new greenhouse. Every day I knock at least this much snow off the thing. Why? It gets dark in there otherwise!
We had a bit of a break in the constant snow around here, so much so that I’m getting a little used to a daily salad. (No snow = more light = happy plants.)
Note the muted light in the greenhouse, yet stuff keeps growing.
I also got a new salad spinner. My last one had had one too many encounters with the hard floor. This new one is bigger so I have to stop myself from filling it full: that’d be too much for the three of us.
But you know what? To my snow-blind eyes, these salad ingredients, even dirt-covered, are SEXY. Do you not agree?
Brune d’Hiver, oakleaf, Freckles romaine, Amish deer tongue, black-seeded Simpson lettuces with red onion, radicchio, red onion and carrot, with some par-cel cutting celery.
Posted in greenhouses
Sugarloaf chickory
Many of us are poring over gardening catalogs at this time of year. It, admittedly, is a fun exercise, this paper gardening: such potential! Such success, if it’s all on paper! And not to knock all those catalogs that come in the mail, most unbidden, but…have you considered the alternative? You know, seed houses that are either so small they haven’t a catalog, and/or seed houses that are actually trying to do the world a bit of good by preserving diversity?
The longer I have lived on this farm the more I do try to walk the walk: I am a seedsaver, but I am not yet entirely self-sufficient in seeds. This year I am doing a bit of seed-trading with some local gardeners, so I anticipate new additions in the form of both seeds and rootstock from these trades. But there are a few other outfits that I think should get more traffic because of what it is they are trying to do.
Into growing the grains for your daily bread? The Heritage Wheat Conservatory both sells grain and is a great advocate for the preservation of heirloom grains. Recipes included!
The child and I experimented with leather breeches beans last year with a usual green bean variety that I grow. Trouble is, this variety is not grown to be preserved this way! Beans are a vastly varied species of edibles, and the average seed catalog barely budges beyond green beans and the occasional heirloom dried bean. I will purchase some creasy (greasy) beans from Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center this year. The objective of this organization is to recover and encourage Appalachian heirloom tomatoes and beans.
Nobody beats the Sage of La Honda for preserving seed and plant biodiversity. His catalog is a botanical education.
Sand Hill in Iowa is a family-run organization that preserves rare seeds and poultry. I will be getting our Chantecler chickens from them this year, but their seeds are also quite notable. Don’t be put off by their byzantine ordering process.
NativeSeeds Search aims to preserve the seeds and foodways of the American southwest.
Amishland Heirloom Seeds is a one-woman seed store based in Pennsylvania Dutch country. She’s stingy with her quantities but her heart is true: you are to preserve the entirety of your first crop for next’s year’s seed. Word of warning: she hasn’t updated her catalog for 2009 so I have no idea if she’s even still doing what she’s doing. UPDATE, 1/8: seems she’s just a little slow getting her website running!
This year, I think I will give my beloved Fedco a pass and order all of my seed needs from Turtle Tree. This company, based in upstate New York, suits both my latitude and growing expectations and is ALL open-pollinated, a necessary step in my own adventures of seed saving. They also have forage crops for the expected four-legged additions for the farm this year.
And finally, there is one fruit tree company you should all know about. They’re local to me so I do have a bias, but their catalog is much deeper than either Fedco Trees or Trees of Antiquity. The problems he has had with an embezzling employee are over, so he’s back to providing the best fruit tree diversity in the country. Shop Southmeadow Fruit Gardens!
Newly-kneaded mozzarella
One of my biggest problems, and one which I will probably never rectify, is a certain…chutzpah borne of the oft-repeated statement/question below:
“Well, how hard can THAT be?”
I utter it so often (aloud and otherwise) that it’s become something of a life statement. I’ll tell you something, though: certain cheesemaking is hard to do. And then I recall my first rock-hard loaves of bread baked some 25 years ago and think, well, getting good at breadmaking was hard to do too. Practice, practice, practice. That, and ignore your inner naysayer.
Lemon juice ricotta
Cheesemaking from fresh milk yields surprisingly little cheese. Whey is the bigger byproduct, but whey is some mighty good stuff. I use the whey, generally, in three ways: in breadmaking, in animal feed, and in lacto-fermented things like pickles, kimchee and krauts. It’d be kind of a pity to throw this gold liquid down the drain, or even into the compost. The farmyard poultry get their grains soaked in it overnight before eating it.
No way: wheeey
But yeah, I’ve been making lots of dairy goodies here lately. I’ve been practicing to become a milkmaid. Having a home-based dairy: well, how hard can that be?
Posted in dairy goats, food
Inchelium red (below) and German hardy garlic
I suppose it cannot be called a tradition if it’s only the second time I am doing it, but on New Year’s day I planted some more garlic in the greenhouse. Last year I found some nearly-sprouty cloves and said “the hell with it” and threw them in an unused greenhouse bed without really thinking much about the consequences. They ended up being gigantic. Seriously huge, apple-sized bulbs. All garlic is now getting the greenhouse treatment.
My one honest garden tradition that I have is that I like working in the greenhouses (or garden, weather permitting) on each and every holiday. Solstice came cold and blowy and I turned the compost piles. Christmas, though frozen, was a greenhouse weeding day! Thanksgiving was a seed-planting day. And New Year’s found me with a trowel in my hand. Considering how much these gardens do for us, this tiny bit of cultivating is my way of saying thanks, of reconnecting a tiny bit with this good earth.
Then I grab what I can for a feast!!
Posted in greenhouses, sweat
Molasses glazed dry cured ham
When we got our half of a pig, I had the butcher chop her up into sizes manageable for a family of three. The ham, for example, which is normally a 12-15 pound thing, was divided into five pieces for us. Perfect for experimenting!
Tom got a combination smoker/barbecue thingy from yours truly for the holidays. He’s not exactly a reluctant cook, but as with most men there’s something about an open flame that brings out his inner Escoffier. We experimented with the two hams I had started curing last weekend. One ham was wet cured (basically salt, sugar, spices and water) and one was dry cured (everything listed minus the water). The wet-cured one was to be the traditional glazed ham, the other leaning more toward Country Ham. They got different smoking times and temperatures, but we took the glazed one with us for a New Year’s Eve party at 5 and left the other one to smoke for the remaining 8 hours of its 18 hour smoking session.
That party ham was gone in no time flat. Wonderfully juicy, it had a garlic/mustard/honey glaze. The image above is of the molasses-glazed dry-cured ham. It became part of New Year’s day breakfast with eggs, then part of a split pea soup lunch (first year harvesting my field peas*, a great dual-purpose green manure), then somehow it factored into dinner with a gravy and potatoes. It barely made it though: I couldn’t get the child to stop eating it!
*see, this is a gardening post after all.
Posted in food
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