Welcome Back Winter!

That's the first winter picture of the season. Looking out over the garden, the morning after the small snowstorm of Nov. 29. Everything was coated in heavy, wet snow that froze to a thick crust overnight.  Still a thick crust today, with afternoon temperatures barely warm enough to start melting the top layer. Hard to believe it's time for this already, but it is.


This storm was an odd combination of a lot of rain followed by a lot of snow. The Eel River is flooding into fields filled with snow, which looks interesting. Our pasture is a muddy mess. Hamburger tried to put his front feet up in the feed trough this morning while he was eating; I suppose to get them out of the cold mud. I hope it warms up and dries out for a little bit, or its going to be a messy winter.

Bits of Beauty

Flowers and shrubs here on the farm are putting forth the last bits of their beauty before winter kicks in. I thought my 55 cent mums had quit blooming, until I noticed the gorgeousness pictured above. I think it is almost prettier than the original blooms.

In the weed patch landscaping beside the front porch, self-seeding snapdragons have managed to keep coming back year after year, even though I haven't actually planted snapdragons in at least 2 maybe 3 years. Depending on the year, they will get some blooms in during the summer, most definitely before frost. This summer I saw several snapdragon starts, no blooms. Until this week . . . quite a ways past the first frost:

I have half a mind to mulch that area with leaves and see if I can't overwinter a few snapdragons. I've done that before (by accident), and ended up with the best looking flowers off of them the next summer. We'll see.


The rest of the color you'll find around here besides the dull green yard and our poultry is fruits and leaves.

Though I know burning bush is not native, and can spread quite well given the chance. I still admire it's fiery display in the fall. I wanted to show you ours in it's full, bright pink glory, but the wind got to it before my camera did. So here's a picture of what's left . . . burning bush fruit:

When Ryan first moved to this property, he was big on planting any kind of bush, shrub, or perennial he could get his hands on. This included a pair of bittersweet plants, of which there are male and female plants, and you have to have a male and a female plant to get the beautiful bitterweet fruit of autumn wreath fame. 
After 4 years of being in the ground, and no fruit to speak of we were beginning to think we got jipped, and that we had 2 female or 2 male plants, instead of the promised male/female pair.

That is until this year, during which the bittersweet vine took over it's arbor, and tried to take off into the yard. And this fall, as it's leaves fell off, we found this:

Evidentally, like many things, bittersweet seems to have to reach a certain age before it will produce fruit (i.e. reproduce). What you're seeing in the picture is pretty much it's total produce this year, which is hardly enought to cut and make a wreath with. I don't know if I'll even cut it. I kinda enjoy being able to see it in my walks in the yard.

Having this growing in my yard seems odd, considering the time I can remember spending with family cruising country roads looking for this stuff growing in the fence rows. All for some color to hang on the door, going into a season of drabness.

Speaking of . . . it snow flurried here yesterday. Best be getting my windows cleaned in preparation for out the window, winter blog photos. Which is a really sad motivation for washing the windows, but hey at least they're getting cleaned.

Hurry Up and Slow Down

Back in college, me and one of my friends made up a term for the kind of lovely fall weather we've been having the last few days. We called them "be a cat days", because it they make you want to curl up in a lovely spot in the dry, crunchy leaves like a cat, and absorb the loveliness . . . just like it seems that Henry and Shadow were doing yesterday afternoon.

If you're a young turkey jake, for some reason the fall weather has seemed to induce a lot of strutting behavior. I was beginning to think that one of our young-uns was trying to either court me or viewed me as competition (for what I don't know, no females in his line of sight). He started out here:

And came closer:

And closer:

After the following picture, I pulled my hand with camera back from the pen, as I wasn't sure what was next on his agenda, and didn't want to find out if it involved beak or claws:

I came back to the pen a little later, and there was not strutting to be found. Though he started up again when I went in to the pen to feed them; makes me a little nervous when I have to turn my back on male poultry . . . I've had too many negative experiences with our rooster I guess.

The calves have really started to seem to flourish this fall, we've upped their rations to start finishing them for their end purpose . . . beef in the freezer. The flies have started to diminish, so there's less tail swishing and kicking going on (they freaked out when we tried to spray or pour anything on them to get rid of bugs, etc, so we just gave up, and told them they'd have to deal with the flies, and we would find other ways to get wormer in them).  Though their favorite part of fall, the fact there is an apple tree that hangs over the pasture fence, and when there aren't any apples on their side of the fence, there are nice humans around that will pick some up and feed them to them for a treat.

Probably not traditional beef calf rations, but neither are stale tortillas, and they are big suckers for those too. Though they get those as treats only occasionally, usually about 2 weeks after we've had tacos and I can't find anything to do with the last 2 or 3 tortillas in the pack. Really we've found that most of our livestock are pretty good at cleaning up leftovers, and would probably throw more into the pasture if it didn't cause such a ruckus between the calves and the poultry. I miss the pigs in that respect, because with them around I never had waste food, unless it was really gross and moldy; in which case, it doesn't get fed to anything except the compost pile.

It's getting to be that time of year where we hurry up, so we can slow down. We know that the weather is only going to hold out for a little while longer, so we best hurry up our outside chores so that we can slow down when winter hits.



Grandma's Grape Juice

So . . . over Labor Day weekend (which was forever ago) we made the 12 pounds of grapes I picked on that Friday morning into 21 quart jars of Grandma's Grape Juice drink.

Note: the following recipe is for story only, I am not advocating that you go out and do this with your 40 pounds of grapes and you will have perfect juice. This is my first time using it, and I have not got to drink the stuff yet as it hasn't set long enough, so I can't even tell you if I got it right yet.

It started out like this:

After a couple of hours of picking them off the stems, and getting rid of any bugs and ugly grapes, we ended up with this (the 12 pounds of grapes in a big bag for weighing with our hanging scale):

Then we washed them, and picked over them again; you don't want any of the ugly, shriveled up, smooshed ones for making this stuff.

Then you dump a cup of grapes in each jar, which has been washed and sterilized, and is still hot from being sterilized (i.e. just out of a dishwasher where you set all the wash and dry cycles to hot!), and then add 3/4 cup of sugar, and fill the rest of the jar up with boiling water. The rest of Grandma's recipe is kinda vague to those of us used to modern canning techniques. It went something like this: seal the jars, and let cool; then invert for several hours, and then store upright. Will be ready to use in 6 weeks. No mention of what canning method to use to process these babies, and no way was I going to do the old invert to seal thing. We did that with some maple syrup the first year we made it, and ended up with mold. Ugh!

So I go searching the grand old Internet, and come across a magazine article for the same recipe, but with lo and behold, water bath canning directions. Yea!!! So we water bath canned these guys for the time suggested, and ended up with these:

















I have more picture of the actual process somewhere. I think I must have took them with Ryan's phone instead of mine, and I didn't send them to my e-mail yet. When I find them, I'll try to update this post.

In about a month we'll have to crack one of these puppies open and see what it's like.

Where September 1 Finds Us . . .

I find that August ramblings have taken us far from the blog posting world (has it really been since Aug. 3?).  So I'll do a quick run through of August in pictures:

One of the 4 batches of pickles we made. These are my Grandma's bread and butter pickle recipe. We made three recipes of dill pickles (from a mix) for the dill pickle eating machine who lives at my house (i.e. Ryan). Needless to say that's like 20 - 30 jars of pickles ( I've processed so many other vegetables since then I've forgotten the actual number).

Quite frequently during the last few weeks our kitchen table and counters have been covered with boxes that look like this:

As the days have went on, there have been less and less squash and cucumbers, and more tomatoes. Today all my boxes are filled with red, except for the occasional green of a pepper. I don't know how in the world we've ended up with all the tomatoes we have (and they just keep coming), but I'm not going to complain. Can anyone say salsa, spaghetti sauce, tomatoes for soup, ketchup, and did I say salsa? Yum!


Besides storing them away, we've been eating tomatoes too. My favorite? A good ol' BLT with a big chunk of fresh Black Krim. I really don't think there is a better tasting slicing tomato. Though I know that it may be hard to get past the purplish, reddish, blackish color for some. (This picture doesn't do justice to the rich color of these tomatoes!)

Sunflowers have come into season, blooming and ripening seed. Our birds are too big of fans of them to let us dry them before serving, so as soon as the seeds are ripe, you will find a mob scene like this:

Other stories . . . the last cantaloupe out of our garden . . .

This picture isn't much for scale, but it was quite possibly the largest one I had ever seen. Eight pounds, my friends!  I only eat cantaloupe out of the garden. The ones from the grocery store don't taste the same. Needless to say we ate our fill off this one, and still had more for the next couple of days.


Pullet eggs:

We have some new hens, they are pretty, and they have started to lay these lovely little eggs. I will share their story another day.

Yet other stories . . . the pigs went to the butcher last week. We were ready for them to go, they were not. Which made loading them out quite the experience. I'll just say we know what not to do next year, and leave it at that. Sounds like we will have quite a bit of pork in our freezer. One had a hanging weight of 190 and the other was 210. We pick up everything next week after the hams and bacon have been smoked.

We hope to get a fall planting into the garden. There are broccoli and cabbage plants growing in the upstairs bedroom, and bags of garlic dispersed among the boxes on my kitchen table. Now if we could just get a nice soaking rain to soften up the ground so we could till it under and ready for planting.

We finished digging potatoes last week . . . I have never seen our ground so hard; Ryan could barely get the potato fork stuck in the soil deep enough to turn it over. At least we were rewarded for our efforts with some nice potatoes. Though it appears that there is a critter around that likes Yukon Golds as much as I do, at least half of our crop had little (or big) gnawed spots on them.

That's enough rambling for now. Soon I will introduce you to our new flock of laying hens, update you on the meat turkeys, show you my experiment making grape juice using my Grandma's 1930's recipe, and other fun stuff.

Wishing Away the Summer

The other day my mom said something pretty profound to me, when we were sitting around having a normal everyday conversation. "We have to be careful that we don't wish the summer away." So, so true. When it seems we have day, after day of heat wave, and everything is dying for a drink, it is so easy to wish for cooler days and another season. But summer only comes once a year, and no two are ever just a like. Another way to think about it, we have heat for maybe 4 months of the year. The other 8 months are either just plain cold, or a variation of cool, wet, and blah. If you're lucky May and October turn out to beautiful, but some years they're not.


In no other season can we grow food to fill the pantry, have daylight until 9:00 p.m., and be guaranteed that most local bodies of water will be warm enough to swim in. I can't get a garden ripe tomato in January, and look out the window see my flowers blooming in November. The conclusion . . . even though it's hot and humid, and kind of miserable, and spending more than an hour working outside in daylight hours leaves us sweat-drenched; it's time to savor summer. It will be gone before we know it, and next thing you know it will be 14 degrees at noon, and I'll be wishing for August.


In celebration of summer savoring here's a few peeks of summer life around the farm this week:

Black Krim tomato with the blush of ripeness. Can anyone say BLT or tomato and mozerella salad?

Yet another male animal around here declaring that he's the king of the world. We some how managed to get all toms for our meat turkeys this year, which is good because they grow bigger than hens, so more meat, but unlikely odds yet the same. Plus that means there's a whole lot of gobbling going on around here.


The other guys, they haven't got the whole crowing thing down yet. They still sound like they're making their morning calls through a kazoo.

And will constantly tell you that no matter what yummy treats you throw in their corral; the grass is always better on the other side of the fence:

Otherwise, it's just hot. Occassional storm blow things down, or knock branches lose to hang down out of the tree tops, like this walnut branch, heavy with unripe nuts.

Right Now . . .

Flowers that say "August" to me, like this Black-Eyed Susan, are starting to bloom around the yard.


We have hit the tipping point where harvesting has begun to far outweight time allotted for garden maintenance. And the weeds . . . they appear to be winning. But that's only when you're looking at the garden from a distance, if you peek between the weeds, you will find great big onions seemingly pushing themselves out of the ground, tomatoes that are at the point of super pale green, getting ready to blush to red any day now. And the sweet corn; the sweet corn makes up for the pitful showing of the green beans.

I haven't done a good job of counting how many dozen ears we have picked, but we know that we have frozen about 25 pint bags of it, eaten a dozen or so fresh, and given a few ears away. And there is still a lot more to pick. So I may be finding new recipes to use corn in this winter, and go more sparingly on the green beans.

The ears may not win any prizes at the county fair, but they're good-sized and sweet, and to us that's all that really matters.

All this preserving seems time consuming, and some days I would like to pretend that there aren't dozens of ears of sweet corn to freeze or pounds of green beans to snap and can, or cucumbers to pickle. To feel footloose and fancy free in July and August, in this household . . . not going to happen. But it all pays off later, when instead of going to the grocery store I just hit up the freezer or shelves in the basement, and have all the ingredients I need to make a nourishing, satisfying meal.

Kitchen Invasion

We've entered the season here on the farm where horizontal space to set something down on in the kitchen is at a premium. This is because pretty much all available space is invaded occupied by produce waiting to be or in some step of being processed or preserved. At the moment we have: a sink full of snapped green beans waiting for the dishwasher to finish sterilizing jars for canning, 6 cabbages waiting to be made into freezer slaw, cole slaw, or whatever other recipes we can find to use it. Yellow squash and zucchini waiting to be  frozen, eaten or sold. You get the picture. And we haven't even hit tomato season yet :)

(This big one was a 6 pounder! We got two meals out of it. Yum!!!)



Outside . . . the sweet corn is getting tall, trying to compete with the neighbors field corn.

The calves search for shade, and good stuff to eat. Here they're enjoying the shade of the apple tree, on a pile of loose hay/grass cuttings we picked up from Ryan's sister's field.

As always, the cherry tomatoes are getting ready to over produce . . . I learned my lesson, and we only planted one of these super stars this year:

While this abundance can be overwhelming when it comes to cooking and preserving . . . in the long run it's worth it. Healthy, homegrown food, just waiting for its turn at our table. So very, very blessed.



In the Growing Business

Here in our corner of the world, we've got some serious growing going on. As in vegetables, weeds, berries, and poultry.


After a slow start, our Cole crops and peas have taken off, and as they are wont to do, are all producing copious amounts at the same time. So there is a constant flow of some kind of vegetable in our fridge waiting to either be made into supper or cut up, blanched, and frozen for suppers later this year.

Our first couple years of gardening together, our broccoli wasn't much to get excited about. Even this year, we set almost 20 plants in the ground, and lost almost half of them. But the half that survived are going gangbusters, thank goodness! We eat a lot of broccoli around here:

Last week, I dug a few potatoes to have new potatoes for supper. Mostly just to see what was hiding out under all those hills in the garden:

The short row of early planted potatoes that these came from is already dying back this week. Which was kinda our intent, to have a red potato crop to dig and eat when green beans started coming on.


Speaking of . . . never mention in front of a vegetable plant how very dependable that plant is, and how you always have so much produce from that plant, etc. , etc.  It will turn and laugh at you! Not literally, but a couple of weeks ago I was saying that about our green beans. Now three-quarters of our green beans are infected with some fungus or bacteria and are losing leaves. And while still showing that they will make a comeback, and even putting on flowers and pods. They will be behind, and less this year.  Not matching the new potato harvesting plan I had thought, or my predictions about how you can always count on green beans to produce if nothing else.


I mourned the end of strawberry season, which seemed short, and not nearly bountiful enough. Though really can there ever be enough strawberries? Luckily black raspberry season was right on its tail, and the weather that didn't really work for strawberries seems to have done well by raspberries. We have picked several quarts over the last couple of weeks, and for the first time in a few years I made some black raspberry freezer jam:

Believe it or not I did sieve some of the seeds out of the pulp before I made it into jam; though you wouldn't guess by looking at those jars. There are still a lot of berries out there to be picked, but they are drying up fast with this hot weather and no rain.

3rd Official Day of Summer

This post was really supposed to happen yesterday, but due to various camera/photo issues, I decided to quit and try again the next day. Hopefully my photography vibes are more in tune today.

We are to the last of our June roses; the pink climbing roses that wreath the kitchen porch trellis:

They are a bit past their prime in this photo. Most of them faded and a little bug eaten. When the blooms first open they are almost hot pink, fading to baby pink after a couple of days. And the bug eaten issue is just part of the general beetle plague that has descended upon our landscape. Not Japanese beetles, though they are just as voracious, these are little brown and black beetles that are about the same size as the Japanese, but not the right colors. And they won't be here for long. We had the same thing last year, and luckily it's only a couple of weeks and then they are gone. Until this time is over, Sevin dust is much more of a friend than we like it to be, and contact with beetle poop is an every time you go outside occurrence.


Pictures of the garden this time a year are always so pretty:

Everything is pretty well weeded. At least for the next day or so. Once the rain and cloudy skies let up, we're in trouble. It's easier to stay on top of weeding because right now harvesting and preserving time is at a minimum. That time will end soon. And then its a question of weed between the rows or do something now before these tomatoes turn to mush on the kitchen counter. You can guess what happens. Though we really, really want to work on reducing the weed seed load of our garden soil this year. Which means catching weeds before they go to seed. We've mulched in several areas, and are trying to work at running the hand plow between rows as often as possible, or hoeing and hand weeding where required. If it would dry out for 2 minutes, that would be helpful.


On the animal front, baby chicks and turkeys are growing well. Starting to become curious and aggressive. Ready to be in outside pens.  We kicked the hen turkeys off the next because we found out they had broken all their eggs, and thus weren't incubating anything! They moped for about a day, and then got over it.


Calves and pigs are growing well. Getting ready to build up our hay supply to keep the calves on hay for a couple of weeks while we block off the pasture and let the grass grow back up tall. Which they hate, but it keeps our grass from getting ate down to the quick.


Other than that, we're just ready for a little bit more moderate weather pattern. With sunshine and warmth, and the occasional rain shower, appropriately timed, of course. The constant stream of rain and storms, thumbs down.

Or at least that's what this brocolli plant said. Broken off at the base by Tuesday night's gusty storm, just as it was getting ready to form a flower head . . . of course.  


Time to go pick some berries, and get my daily dose of beetle poop.

A Little Lost

Yesterday morning I was letting Checkers out on her tie out before I closed the house up and went to the grocery store. It is not unusual for her to go a little nuts if she catches the scent of one of our outdoors cats on the porch, steps, or landscaping. But she was going pretty crazy, as if the cat itself was hiding under the buttercup bush. The cats don't usually stick around and hide though, if a dog is in the picture. I glanced under the bush seeing what looked like an extra rock in the landscaping border, and thinking it was about the right size to be a baby bunny.


So I put Checkers in the house, bend down, and push the branches of the buttercup back to get a better look. Not a bunny, not a rock, not a cat,  but a . . .

TURTLE! Friends, we live a half to three-quarters of a mile from the nearest creek, wetland or river. How and why did we end up with not a forest-loving box turtle, but a water-loving painted turtle hanging out by our front step? I have heard of female turtles walking quite a ways away from their home to lay their eggs, but really??? We don't have any water for babies when they would hatch. I think this turtle got a little lost.


So I put her in a bucket, and carried her down the road to the creek, and set her a little ways from the water's edge. Pointed away from the road, obviously. Hoping that if she felt the need to climb away from the water she would just go up the hill into the woods, and not turn around towards the road.


Checkers and I took a walk this morning. No smashed turtle on the road. So far, so good.

Strawberries and Roses

Right now, the highlights of these early June days . . .


Strawberries:

and Roses . . .

They make the weed, mulch, mow cycle a little bit more enjoyable :)


What little joys are you finding in your early June days?

Around the Farm

Around the farm, we've had a little bit of everything . . .

Ryan saved this gorgeous cecropia moth from the barnyard, where we were pretty sure one of the chickens would find it and think that it was quite a treasure to parade around with.  As slow as it was moving it was either at the very beginning or end of its short life, pumping its wings in a slow motion version of flight.

Most people don't think about there being moths in Indiana the size of one's hand. I can count on my fingers the number of times I've seen one of these. They seem almost otherworldly compared to the small, simple critters we are used to seeing congregate around our porch lights.


Otherwise, it's just hanging out with the barnyard critters . . .

As you can see, the pigs are growing quite well. And enjoying every chance they get to roam the pasture, and get a good back scratch. And take a good wet, muddy bath when the weather gets hot . . . even if the water pan is not quite big enough:

A few weeks ago we kicked the turkey hens out of their separate building because even though they were laying eggs, they showed no signs of going broody. Now they're both broody, at the same time, sharing custody of about 15 eggs . . . in the dog house in the middle of the pasture where all the other birds can go in and out at liberty. But they are not to be detered from their goal of motherhood evidentally . . .

They're everywhere . . .

Lately, the skies around here have looked a lot like this a great deal of the time (I have quit counting how many days in a row of rain):

On a hot summer day, I would almost welcome clouds like that; they mean a big shift in temperature is coming . . . hopefully for the better. But we may have just seen a few too many of these lately.


At least the rain makes somethings grow and bloom. Just in time for Memorial Day as usual the irises are in full swing. Somebody who lived in our house a long time ago like irises, and as required with them, they get dug up and spread around a little more every couple of years. So now they're pretty much everywhere, and we are blessed by their colors during a dark, rainy week.



Light purple:

Dark purple like a royal robe:

Mauve and burgundy . . . like a fancy coat and dress:

Bright yellow, like lemon meringue and sunshine:

And every year I get excited knowing that soon I will get to take this picture, all red, yellow, and purple . . .

This year the purple is a little lacking . . . the dame's rockets are not hardly there for some reason. A couple of years ago it looked like this:

Which makes me a little sad, that it is has changed. Really though, that's part of loving our own little spot here on earth, and really anything I suppose . . . is knowing that it will change, but loving and finding the wonder and beauty of it still . . .



Here's hoping you have a blessed weekend, and that you take a few minutes to find the beauty and wonder that is your own little corner of the world. Happy Friday!