Eat Local

This meal brought to you by our garden and local farmer's market.

As summer winds down one of the things I don’t look forward to is the end of farmers markets.  The Web-Mistress and I love getting out on Saturdays and picking up great locally produced food to try.  Not all of the meats and such taste like high fructose corn syrup infused overly processed store bought packaged “food” that you might be used to (I’m looking at you, Hormel), but it is great to meet the people who raised it, try some different flavors, and know it is fresh. 

We have found out about blue egg laying chickens (I know, right?!?!) that will be added when the flock grows as well as well as some awesome locally produced sauerkraut.  I love all the great finds.  So get out there before the summer is gone and all the farmers have packed up for the year.

Andy

Searching for the Perfect Pickle

Two years ago, we were blessed with an abundance of cucumbers from our well-shaded 2-box garden-behind-the-kitchen.  So I set about making pickles.  I used a recipe from the Internet that declared that they would taste “exactly like Claussen” dill pickles.  So, after many late nights spent spearing and canning and an appropriate amount of curing time had elapsed, we sampled the “exactly like Claussen” dill pickles.  That is, if by “dill” you mean incredibly sweet and a bit soft.  Pickle fail!

Last year’s pickle season was lost to the whole process of moving everything we owned a few miles west and then the lingering process of trying to figure out where to put and where I have put stuff.

But this year, we are back on the pickle hunt!

We planted three varieties of pickles, which have varied in growth performance.

Exhibit A: the organic “Marketmore” variety that were part of a Costco multi-pack of seeds.  These were directly sown into the ground, and thanks to God’s perfect timing, needed a trellis at exactly the same time that the peas were done.  Trellised cucumbers are a beautiful thing.

Marketmore enjoying the trellis

Exhibit B: the “Muncher” variety.  They are beautiful, evenly green and perfectly sized for, well, munching.  I’m sure they would also be great for pickling, but they are so perfect that the bugs get them before I do, so most have been eaten by the chickens.  Oh, for the lack of a trellis!

Exhibit C: the “National Pickling” variety.  They’re short.  They’re wide.  They’re warty and they’re immensely variegated in color.  That must be why they are bound for pickles.   Again, they would have really benefitted from trellising, but they must be too ugly even for the bugs.

National Pickling in need of a pickling

And so, we have pickles.  I’ve made two batches:  I used a ready-mix for 4 pints of refrigerator pickles (seriously, if you have to store your canning jars in the fridge, what’s the point of canning?) and I used the “starter” pickle recipe from the Ball canning book for the second batch, 8 pints curing in the pantry.  I’ve got a third “sun-cured” pickle recipe to try, and then I suppose we are ready for a pickle taste testing.  Hopefully, we will find our family’s blue-ribbon recipe this year!

Web-Mistress
(and primary pickle maker)

Oh, the Irony

The chickens are doing well.  We are up to eight eggs a day on good days, with most days bringing in 7 eggs.  Our eggs are so abundant we have been able to sell some to friends and neighbors.   What a blessing. 

This also clears some things up.  Allegedly, the sexing of chicks is about 90% accurate.  This means there was a chance that the pullets we bought might have contained a rooster.  Hence the name of the blog as well as the Web-Mistress’ rooster fetish.  If any one of the chicks would stand by itself or look at her funny she would declare it to be a rooster.  She was just waiting for the day one would crow and she could cook it up.  But the math has saved them from the skillet.  Eight birds and eight eggs means we will just have to go out and get a rooster.

Andy

Hurry Up!!!

I hate waiting.  Most would not describe me as a patient person.  So, this is kind of the worst part of gardening.  You know, the time between planting and harvesting.  We are currently pulling in a ton of cucumbers but I want the tomatoes to ripen up and the squash to turn yellow.  HURRY UP!!!

Andy

While I Was Sleeping

While I was busy this week, it turns out the garden didn’t stand still.  The monsoon season here has apparently passed and the normal summer sun and temperatures have resulted in plants doing crazy things like growing and producing crops.

We got some huge cucumbers which tasted great as well as bunches of carrots.  But what was most pleasing was wandering through the garden and realizing some of the plants which got planted late turned out ok.  Check out the zucchini!  I was pretty sure were weren’t going to see any of these as our seedlings failed and we sowed very late in the season.  But it turns out we are being rewarded in spite of our best efforts.

Andy

What the ?!?!?!

Question, where do rubber chickens come from?  Answer, from rubber eggs, of course.  Ah, of course.  Wait. What?  A rubber egg?  What the heck is that?  Well it turns out that is what you call it when a chicken lays an egg without a shell. 

Right about now, if you are like me, the questions just keep coming.  How does a chicken lay an egg without a shell?  Is this even normal?  Do I have a defective chicken?  What do I do with a shell-less egg?

It turns out, this is not uncommon for birds that are just beginning to lay eggs.  Today we are up to five hens laying, so production is growing and we are probably lucky this is the first of these we have seen.  As to how it’s done, I am not sure.  As to what to do with the egg, some say you can hard boil it and eat it.  While I am sure it has been done before, it is gross enough that I plan on tossing it and hoping for 5 with shells tomorrow.

My last question regards the relative ease of passing a rubber egg compared to a regular egg.  Tragically, I may never know the answer.

Andy

Wild Weather

Wow, sorry for stepping away from the blog for a few days, but it has been crazy busy around here this week.  To begin with, it was Vacation Bible School week so mornings were tied up and everyone got worn out as the week went on.  Additionally, the weather was intense.  All of this while the Web-Mistress decided the deck needed to go so we can put in a patio.  Did I mention half the ladies are laying now?

Wind damaged crops.

Some serious storms blew through on Monday and this is what I rolled up on around noon.  My corn was flattened and our trellised winter squash had been toppled.  Fortunately, I was able to right the squash and after a couple of days in the sun the corn had stood back up. 

Starting to stand back up.

It is actually pretty cool how the plants self recover, but let’s just say I was initially panicking about the potential of lost crops.

Once the corn came back up I noticed it was beginning to tassel and we started to see silks.  So if the weather doesn’t keep knocking it around, I am hopeful that we should see some ears soon.

Hopefully the weather has treated you better this week.  And if you are lucky your task list hasn’t been growing by the hour.

Andy

Peter Rabbit, RIP

I am admittedly not the morning person I used to be.  Or the morning person my husband has become.  My response to dawn is generally an unintelligible grunt.  So early this morning, when Andy popped into the house, said something about a rabbit and ran back out again, it all registered in my fogged brain as a mumble and rustle.  Nothing jolts you out of sleep quite like the sound of a gunshot, especially when the gun is fired just outside your open bedroom window.

Peter Rabbit has been raiding our garden for some time now, enjoying the radishes and kale and pepper plants with abandon.  Generally, when we spot him, he quickly dives for cover under the large pine tree in our neighbor’s yard.  This morning, he must have been really enjoying his breakfast, because he had not moved when Andy came back out with the .22.  And until that thing went off, neither had I.

Matter-of-factly, Andy glided back into the house and put the .22 away.  So, I ask the next two obvious questions:  “Did you get him” (Of course I did!  Right between the eyes!)  and “Are you going to field dress him before work” (Um, OK).  So I quickly put on my glasses, got my hair out of my eyes and, still bleary eyed, searched the Internet for “How to field dress a rabbit” while fetching a cutting board.

Out onto the back deck we go with the most basic of tools:  a gutting knife, a cutting board and a smart phone.  I begin talking him through the skinning process approaching this whole thing as stoically as possible.  “This is food”, “Everybody used to prep their own meat like this” “Shaye Elliott does it.  I can too.”, etc.  But as Andy is nearing the end of the skinning process, which has taken all of about 3 minutes, my chest tightens, my skin begins to prickle, and the deck begins to spin beneath my feet.  Right about this moment, Andy asks “what’s next”, and based on my response from reading my smart phone, asks for a cleaver.  So I lurch into the house and fumble a cleaver out of the bottom of the knife box, somehow avoiding a nasty cut from the unsheathed knives on top of the cleaver.  I hand him a cleaver through the back door, then fall back inside in the nearest chair as the room spins around me.  Field dressing fail #1:  the nauseated wife.

About 30 seconds later, Andy comes in to announce field dressing fail #2.  I had initially handed him a tempered glass cutting board, which is now in a thousand pieces on the back porch.  Fail #2:  glass cutting boards and cleavers.  Fortunately, that was the only glass cutting board we owned, so that’s not likely to happen again.

What had been a light sprinkle has by now turned into a steady rain as I sweep as much glass as I can off the back deck.  So there will be no roasted rabbit tonight, or rabbit stew.  But the garden is a little safer today, in spite of our failure to fully realize the blessing of wild rabbit.

Web-Mistress

From Cradle to Egg

As I write this, there are cookies in the oven that include the first of our eggs. 

In they go.

I can’t wait to try them.  It is hard to believe the little yellow fuzz balls I brought home back when there was still snow on the ground are now putting food on the table.  The kids are really into this part as well.  They head out hourly, if not more often, to check to see if there are freshly laid eggs.  In some ways this is both necessary and overkill because we only have two hens laying eggs at this point.  However, yesterday we lost one of the eggs to ANOTHER CHICKEN!!!

That’s right, they caught at least one chicken yellow-beaked as it stood over its victim egg.  Now, my research has led me to believe that if we have a “Jack the Beaker” slaughtering eggs in the hen house she should be caught and swiftly administered frontier justice.  Chicken dinner, BONUS!  You may recall I bought extra birds to build some attrition into my flock.  Who knew they would be self-selecting to take a turn on the grill.  So everyday there is a race to see who gets to the eggs first.  If I catch the culprit you will get to come along on my journey as I explore cleaning chickens.

Time to go enjoy some cookies!

Andy

Pulling Their Weight

A belated happy Independence Day to all my patriotic readers out there.  Sorry for the delay between posts, but those of you who follow me on Twitter and Facebook probably are aware that we packed up and headed out to D.C.  for the 4th.  If you don’t follow me, why not?  Anyways, we had a spectacular time out in our nation’s capital with a day trip included up to Fort McHenry.  But all good things must come to an end and it was finally time to return to the homestead.

No sooner had we pulled in, but I went to check on the ladies.  Now, all along I have been planning on an end-of-July first egg, so it was without any particular anticipation that I opened the nesting boxes.  But what should I see when I went ahead and unlatched the boxes to check them?  A couple of beautiful brown eggs!!! 

Farm-fresh eggs!!!

I excitedly called the Web-Mistress to come check out our haul and brought the first harvest into the house.  Now there was a third egg found in the coop, but it didn’t look very well.  I haven’t done this before but I can only surmise that it may have been the first egg laid and the birds weren’t too sure what to do as it appeared a bit scratched up.  I am sure at this point I only have one bird laying, but hey, at least someone has figured out what her God given mission in life is.  And this proves that I don’t have eight roosters out there.

Between this and the way the garden took off while we were gone, I have truly been blessed.  How has God blessed you this summer?

Andy

Belated Father’s Day Greetings

I hope all the dads out there had a happy Father’s Day.  It was a busy day here on the homestead, what with the kids having hockey camps and such, but I got to spend a lot of time with my kids and that’s what it’s all about. 

Spending time with them and seeing how they have changed did get me to looking around at what has been happening around here.  So much has gone on since this spring.  Our winter squash is HUGE!  We did 4 foot high box trellises on 5 of the 6 plants and the 2 feet hanging over the top on most tells me we didn’t go high enough.  I also just cleaned out the snap peas.  It seems like it wasn’t that long ago that I was writing about cold crops and yet we have harvested a ton of peas and have replaced those plants with cauliflower.  The timing of the snap peas finishing up was providential as I was able to move their trellising to the first group of cucumbers needing it.

I also want to take this time to rat out the Web Mistress.  After having to issue a correction as to her willingness and ability to defend the homestead from marauding rabbits I take it all back.  Yesterday, as we were preparing for church, in the middle of a garden I spied Peter the Great.  I called for the Web Mistress to keep an eye on him as I went for my gun and was met with a host of reason why we should let him live.   Argh….We will meet again Peter, and I might just be alone!

Anyways, I hope your summer is off to a good start.  Don’t forget to like us on Facebook and Twitter.  Until next time.

Andy

About All Those Cherries

Cherries are the pits.  And the stems.   And the skins.   And , oh yeah, the fruit in between.

Just before pulling in the first pound of cherries, I happened to be talking to my neighbor who mentioned that she had been blessed with some of those cherries a year or so ago, and that it took her three hours to pit enough cherries to make a cobbler in an 8x8 pan.  Wow.  That’s intimidating.

A quick Internet search revealed that there is a product out there that will pit multiple cherries at once, for a fairly small investment.  Great, another kitchen gadget.  On reading down through some of the comments on one of those Internet search results, several other methods were mentioned.  I quickly landed on what is my personal preference for removing pits from cherries.

I have this utensil in my kitchen known in some culinary circles as a “chopstick”.  Using this exotic tool, I can pit a pound of cherries in fifteen minutes. Holding a cherry with the stem already removed (which generally happens during the harvest anyway), I locate the dot on the opposite side of the cherry where the bloom had been.  Positioning the chopstick over this dot, I push the chopstick into the cherry until I locate the pit. 

I then push the pit out the hole left by the removal of the stem.   Soon I have a bowl of pitted cherries, a bowl of pits, and a bowl of subpar cherries reserved for the chickens.

A note about skins:  while making cherry jam, Andy noted that he was expecting “cherry preserves” and that I had “skimmed off all the good stuff”.  Being the ornery Web Mistress that I am, I obligingly canned a jar of nothing but cherry skins for him from the bowl of stuff I had skimmed off the jam.  Be careful what you ask for.  Especially when I am handling scalding hot jam!

Web Mistress

Cherry Surprise!

When we decided to start our homesteading adventure the Web Mistress and I started hashing out what we wanted to grow, where we would plant it, and even what should come first.  We now have a blooming vegetable garden and a couple of fruit plots  with future projects planned.  But the one thing we didn’t get to discuss or even decide on has amazed us with the harvest it dumped on us.

The previous owner of our house planted a cherry tree 20 feet off the back door.  We moved into the house in the middle of the summer last year and had not gotten to enjoy it in the spring.  The color of the blooms was amazing.  A month later those blooms had turned into cherries! 

Wonder no more!

This hadn’t been part of the original plan, but who am I to complain.  Over the last week or so, we have been busy harvesting and preserving cherries.  I will update the final numbers but we have pulled in at least 15 pounds so far.  And yes by “we”, I mostly mean the Web Mistress.  But since this is my blog we will go with “we”.   Everyone on the homestead gets to enjoy them as ground cherries wind up in the chicken run and the girls race to see who gets the snack.

Part of an unexpected harvest.

There is a second cherry tree on the property and our neighbors tell us they fruit every other year.  I am hopeful they are off cycle and we will get a harvest off the other tree next year.  Either way, once I try the jams, vodka cherries, and pie fillings we made I will let you know how it all turned out.  Perhaps the best is when the Web Mistress pawns some of the preserved cherries off on unsuspecting friends as gifts before we have even tried them.  We might not be getting as many Christmas cards this year.

Have you done any canning yet this summer?

Andy

Chicken Poop

I spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about what comes out of the business end of a chicken, as I am sure you do.  What’s that?  It’s just me?  Anyways, chicken poop is garden gold.  Keep in mind, though, that you can’t put it directly onto your crops and gardens when it is fresh.   It will burn your plants because of its high nitrogen content.  You either need to let it “cure” for thirty days or add it to your compost bin.  I add the manure and pine shavings used to line my coop right into my composter.  This satisfies the necessary brown requirement needed to make my compost bin work.

All of the above is great, but if just starting out or building your own coop, you really need to think about how you are going to “mine” all of the garden gold about to come your way.   Let me share some tips as this was a part of the coop design I spent the most time on. 

The one thing to bear in mind is that a coop which is easy to clean will get cleaned more often.  So whatever route you go, you need to make things easy on yourself.  I ended up putting a side door into my coop just for cleanup.  Whether you go with only a main door or decide on a second access point, don’t forget to measure your broom.  Your door should be large enough to accommodate your chosen poop tool. 

Poop access point, aka the "mine" shaft

One other key feature was my decision to make my roosting bars removable.  I mounted 2x4s to the walls of my coop using raised brackets.  This allows me to pull them out and I end up with a large 4x6 foot platform I am able to sweep right out into a bucket which is then dumped into the composter.

Behind the curtain.  Note how the boards are set into the brackets for easy removal.

Just a few things I have found useful as I mine for garden gold.

Andy

Getting Back to Work

Wow!  Beyond the black widow and vehicle fire, I stepped away for ten days and much has changed.  Kudos to the Web Mistress for her hard work while I was away.  She finished our first drainage project, kept the gardens growing, and pulled in the first of the cherry harvest!  All while managing the kids and animals.  Great job!

That being said, coming home I was shocked by the growth in some of the garden beds.  The raspberries are getting huge, but that is nothing compared to how big the winter squash is.  With the temperatures rising this week, I expect further explosion.  And the cherries are about to keep us busy this weekend as they are just about ready to harvest.  More updates soon on all of that. 

On the maintenance side, though, the drive needs sprayed, gutters need cleaned, there are lawn and garden projects, and the deer stand needs to get set for the upcoming season.  Don’t tell the Web Mistress but it’s time to start looking at rabbits or meat chickens!

Andy

The Chicken Whisperer

Those of you who have spent time “out West” may have encountered prairie dogs.   You may be aware that when one “dog” detects danger, it will start to make a barking noise, which soon spreads to all the nearby prairie dogs, just before they all duck underground.  Shortly after moving the chickens outside to their permanent coop and run, they began to be stalked by pesky cats.  Our pesky cats, to be specific.  You know what?  A chicken being stalked by a cat sounds just like a prairie dog barking out its danger warning. 

Now barking chickens are something, but our chickens, not to be content with mimicking prairie dogs, also know Morse Code.  Their run is built alongside and behind our garage, and therefore, encompasses a gutter downspout.  The downspout ends at the perfect height for chickens to peck at it.  If you are inside our garage while they are pecking at it, the sound is magnified by the big, uninsulated shell of the building.

Of course, all good animal whisperers talk to their animals by name.  At least three of the birds have names.  I just don’t know which three.  They all look alike to me. 

If you’ll excuse me, I have a chicken telegram to go decode.

Web Mistress

While the Rooster's Away....

Andy is off training to be a better soldier, and he has left me in charge of the homestead.

He left me with two tasks:

Rake the grass, and keep all the plants and animals alive.

Just before he left, he knocked down the two-foot high grass in the back that had been too wet to mow or was hard to get to because of the trench-in-progress.  Ok, make that three projects.  I need to finish that trench!  After he made the first pass in the tall, tall grass, he stopped the mower and said to me (because I was just standing out there watching him.  I love to watch him work while I do nothing), “hey, you’re going to have to rake all this!”  I watched him make a few more passes and I realized, I really need to rent a hay baler.  Maybe I can sell the bales as cattle feed and make a little scratch!

Speaking of scratch, the other task he left me with was to keep the animals and plants alive.  The plants I can manage.  I just have to water.  The stuff that’s doing well will continue to do well.  The stuff that’s iffy?  That’s in God’s hands.  I just have to keep watering.  As far as the animals, I have a plan.  As long as I don’t run out of chicken feed, cat food, dog food, chicken nuggets or cereal, I should be able to keep the chickens, cats, dog and children alive.  Fortunately, everybody’s food comes in pelletized form.

Web Mistress

Guilty Pleasures

As I believe I mentioned before, watching the chickens fight over food never gets old.  So I am always looking for things to feed them.  This really does two things.  It lowers the cost of feeding these non-egg laying free loaders and it reduces the amount of trash headed to the landfill.  So, when breakfast was done and there was still a bit of cheesy eggs left on the plate, I began to wonder if the chickens could eat them.  Guess what?!  It turns out they can.  Man, does it feel wrong.  But not wrong enough to stop me from giving them a plate of eggs. 

Normally, the first chicken to see me coming with a plate food will try it and call the others over.  Not this time.  This greedy bird went to town on the eggs, barely pausing to breath.  Now, I saw another bird or two wandering over but never saw another bird eating.  What I do know is that unlike watermelon rinds which lasted the better part of a day, scrambled eggs last less than five minutes.  These birds have no shame!

Andy

Giving Thanks

Ok, so things have been going well here at the homestead.  Someone was able to make a salad for herself out of lettuce and radishes from the garden and even made kale chips for the kids.  Now I won’t name her, but she also didn’t document the amount of the harvest.  By the way, the name rhymes with Meb-Wistress.  But, we are off to a good start.

However, one area of less than stellar success has been my seedlings.  While they took off and have been under a grow light, a lack of a greenhouse to control the temperature left them looking very sorry.  We have placed cucumbers and various squashes in the ground with some direct sown seeds in the hope we can recover a harvest.  But the saddest of the bunch by far is our tomato plants.  These things are pathetic.  Let’s just say I am looking for a reason to replace these this year with store plants. 

After last night I have one.  We were visited by a special needs prowler.  He left all of the viable plants alone but dug up the tomatoes.   So I have no choice but to replace them.  Thanks!  However, it looks like a small fence is in my future, so a sarcastic hearty thanks for that one.  Oh well, have a happy and safe Memorial Day.

Andy

Entrenched....

The homestead has a completely functional detached 2-car garage at the end of the driveway.  We will probably never park in it.  In the future, it will be because we are using it for too many other useful things (like storage, since we no longer have a basement).  In the present, it is because every time it rains, the garage floods.  See, the garage was built in the 80s or 90s when the family who built the house decided to convert the attached 2-car garage into living space.  I am deeply grateful for that extra living space, as it serves as my school room.  Or at least, I intended it to.  But that’s a post for another day.  So, this garage floods because it is downhill from the driveway and the house.  And two-thirds of the roof drains into that driveway.  

 One rainy morning in early April, we went out to the garage to do something chicken-related and had to step through the 3-inch puddle in front of the garage service door.  That explains the entire bottom of the door being rusted out.  Sometimes, a motivational switch just gets flipped and the next thing you know, you are at the local True Value buying 150 feet of black drain pipe. 

Whatever I had planned for the day was replaced by some serious tag team digging.  Andy breaks up the sod with a pick-axe or whatever tool he deems necessary for the task, and I follow behind, digging to the proper depth and clearing out all the loose dirt.  This is how most of our projects go.  Wordlessly, we find a rhythm and division of labor that just gets the job done.  He usually gets the hardest part and I get the part that involves cleanup.

No trenching project would really be complete unless you had to hand-dig around the conduit that protects the power lines to your garage and several tree roots so that you don’t kill that fabulous cherry tree next to the chicken run.  In hindsight, since we were constructing the run fence at the same time, we should have trenched right along the fence line so we could have buried the fencing a foot or so to discourage digging animals.  But Andy’s digging animal solution is simple, elegant, and oh-so-much-easier. 

We are now nearing the end of May, and I only have about 15 feet left to dig, because I insisted that we clear the chicken run, the future fire pit area and the site of the future greenhouse.    The exit for the 150 foot-long drain pipe will be within a few feet of the high water mark for the annual spring raging river.  My goal for completion is tomorrow.  We still need to verify that water will, indeed, run downhill the length of the pipe, throw all that dirt back on top of the pipe, spread grass seed over the length and finally, mow down the 2 foot grass on the other side of the trench.

The end is in sight!  I just have to get to that post with the yellow cup on it....

The worst part?  All that digging still doesn’t fix our garage flooding problem.  This trench provides an egress for the water, but we still have to dig in front of the garage apron and install a drain and grate system.  It does, however, eliminate the 3-inch puddles in front of the garage service door.

Wish me luck!  And strength.  And send me band-aids for the blisters.

Web-Mistress