More Homestead Summer

Once the garden began producing, there was something to harvest daily, hard but satisfying work. Here come Steph and Kent with a load - and a little help.

 

 

And also satisfying is sitting down to a meal and realizing that you grew most of what you are eating. Here's a dinner of chicken pot pie with our own chickens and veggies, refrigerator cucumbers and coleslaw.

 

 
We grew dry beans for the first time. These were called "French Horticultural". I thought they looked like Jacob's Cattle. And so easy to grow. Plant them, make sure they get weeded and watered, wait for them to dry out, snap off the pods and shell them at your leisure. We'll be planting at least three times as many this year.
 

 
Here's a homestead breakfast - pancakes with fresh milled grain, eggs, from our chickens, maple syrup from our trees and our own strawberries. Makes my mouth water. And maybe this year we'll add a cold glass of our own goat milk!

 
And maybe sometimes when we sit around the dinner table we talk of unusual and somewhat obscure questions, like:

"If you pull a vacuum on a marshmallow, what happens?" This was probably preceded by conversation about vacuum sealing food, the qualities of food being sealed and the science of what happens in a vacuum.

Which meant we had to immediately grab the Foodsaver and find out! It expanded impressively.

 

A lot can happen

in eight months. 8 months! Wow!

Well, since the last post showed those adorable little fluff balls, let's see what's going on with them now...

Late last summer Stephanie, Kent and I carried chickens from their brooder to their chicken tractor in the yard.

Steph is a pro-wrangler - she's got a trio of cacklers there

13 went to live with Kathy at her house - that left 32 chickens and while the weather is nice the tractor does a fine job as a home base. But when the weather becomes inclement, we knew we needed a more substantial shelter for them.

Enter my amazing husband and his ability to plan and execute most anything he can dream up. This is a 10' x 12' building with two windows, clear panels in the roof to let in natural light, electric light inside and a switch to run a heat lamp when necessary. It's like the Ritz-Carlton of chicken accommodations.
 

Let's open the door and see what those fluffballs look like these days. Hey, there's Foghorn!

There are six nest boxes on one side of the building. Nice and cozy, with plenty of privacy.
 

But I can lift the roof to retrieve eggs or when it's time to clean them out. I actually designed and helped build the nest boxes. They are probably more substantial than necessary but I really got into the project.
 

 
And we can see that they use them to lay eggs. And ping pong balls. Actually, I put the balls in there when the boxes were new to the chickens to give them the idea of what they were for. It seems to have worked. We rarely get eggs laid anywhere else these days.

 

Hey ladies, what do you think of all this luxury?

 
They are the happiest chickens I have ever witnessed. You can tell how content they are by spending even a short time with them. They are healthy, curious, non-agressive

 

And productive.

 

Because what do happy chickens do? They lay eggs.

 

Lots of eggs.

 

Just. so. many. eggs.

So now I am on the quest to find the best ways to preserve eggs for when the ladies stop laying. Although we are getting 19-22 a day right now, eventually they will molt and we will remember these days with fondness. I'm pursuing two preservation techniques - 1. drying raw eggs and powdering them for baking and scrambling and 2. using waterglass (sodium silicate) to store whole eggs for frying and when whites are needed.

Oh, and I'm selling them. $2.50 a dozen. Let me know how many you want.

To Everything there is a Season

And this is one of our favorites... Garden time! We've been laboring for some weeks now with tilling, and expansions. Planting and mulching. And we're starting to see things come in very nicely.

Then

Now

Or north side expansion filled mainly with squash family. It is not fenced but our Amish friends tell us that wildlife is not very keen on squash because of it's prickly vines and leaves. We're giving it a try to see if we can let them romp without needing all the protection that we provide to tomatoes and such.

Then

And they are all up now and getting ready to vine... butternut, acorn, hubbard, spaghetti, sweet pie, black beauty, yellow straightneck and watermelon.

Now

And the east expansion from the main garden is our experimental grains and our sweet corn.

Then

The buckwheat is up and lively. The purple barley is not taking off like I had hoped. The sweet corn is doing just fine but we only planted half the space to start, and then planted about two weeks later so that we can have fresh sweet corn over a longer span of time.

Now

I'm sad to say that the two hens pictured just a couple of posts ago... brownie and blackie, along with a lovely white hen, were all snatched from their coop last night. It was a very sad morning to find only three hens remaining along with Bob Jr., a very distraught rooster. We have moved the coop to our side yard, right under our bedroom window and where an exterior motion-sensitive light will come on. I'll have my 22 loaded and I will use deadly force. Kent is also going to procure some traps. I have 36 baby chicks ariving in less than a week and this carnage has got to stop. So if you hear a charp crack and the sound of a tin can tumbling, that'll be me out sharpening my skills.

Gotta run now and get dressed to attend and serve at a home-style wedding. It's a beautiful day for it!

Something to Crow About

Not everything happens in the kitchen... here's an update on those seeds I planted with such high hopes. All but four pots are showing up green and I haven't given up on the last four, either. It's all very cheerful looking and I need to rearrange and raise one of the lights to accommodate the overachievers.



I'm hoping that they don't grow too fast or we won't be ready to transplant them when they are bulging out of the pots. Already the beans and squash have lots of roots grown through the peat.



Next, I'd like to talk sprouted grain. YUMMY! I baked bread yesterday with the wheat I had sprouted and dried. I knew it was going to be different as soon as I milled it and the rich, nutty aroma was so distinctly different than the usual, albeit wonderful, smell of freshly milled grain. I modified my usual recipe slightly, after reading some sprouted grain bread recipes. I knew mine worked at extreme altitude, but I changed up my water for whole milk, my oil for a couple tablespoons of butter, I sponged the yeast in the warm milk/butter/honey solution, and I did two kneadings (with the Bosch) with a ten minute rest in between. The dough was silky and wonderful and the resulting bread is so light and the taste is homemade on steroids. I'm hooked.



So I set about sprouting more grain. This time I'm doing wheat, spelt and kamut. I'm interested to see how long the various grains take to sprout. I've got money on the kamut and spelt being about 12 hours ahead of the wheat.

I also tried my first fermented veggie recipe. Cabbage, carrot, onion, sea salt, oregano and crushed red pepper. Shred the veggies fine, mix everything in a bowl and then take a wooden mallet to it and beat it for about 10 minutes to release the juices. Pack it all in a quart jar and press down until juice rises to the top. Cap tightly and leave it at room temperature for 3 days. I'm really looking forward to trying it. Here it is in the cupboard with the kombucha. You can also see that my scoby seems to be developing just like it's supposed to.



And about that "something to crow about" - that was my lame attempt to make a hint about what went on in the sewing room today. I cut out an apron on Sunday and started it and decided that our rainy day today was a good time to finish it. If you know me you know I have a thing for chickens. Love em. Can't wait to have the real thing again. In the meantime, I have to content myself with reminders of their pretty, feathered selves. So you know I'm not going to pass up fabric like this:



And if you know me you further know that I wear aprons all the time. Sometimes all day if I'm working in the kitchen, playing in the dirt, or other potentially messy tasks. So I had this pattern for an apron called "50's Diner". I liked the technique that encases all the seams in double-fold bias tape. But like my recipes, I had to make my own modifications. So rather than a single print, I threw in a couple of coordinating fabrics from my stash. And then I realized that the bib was clucking for an applique. So on that went. The end result..



And Kent felt the applique deserved a close-up:



So, I played in the dirt, cooked and sewed. What a great day!