Spring Fever!

Got our seed onions started indoors this week. Also put our order in for 25 meat bird chicks due to be here the first of May. And then last night called and have 4 Bourben Red poults ordered for the end of April. Plan on tapping supar maple trees at the end of this week. So our spring has started even though its still pretty cold and snowy outside. Enjoying 2010 so far, my work is going strong and Sarah is starting to get enrollment forms in.

Hello 2010

We cannot believe it is already the new year. January is here in full force, with a small snowstorm expected to start overnight. But that's ok . . . if it's going to be this cold, it had better snow!

We leave the year 2009 behind full of fond memories. It being a year of many good things. In July we welcomed a new niece to the family, Miss Isabel, the first grandchild on Sarah's side. At the O'Hara farm we completed several projects that helped to further our homestead goals. Late last winter we completed our living room (as we described earlier on this blog), and have been enjoying the new furniture, flooring, and paint all year. Outside, Ryan enclosed a significant portion of our property with a woven wire fence to make a pasture for livestock. Inside this pasture, we built a new and improved poultry house. Up off the ground, to discourage rodents, and with large south facing windows, this nice little building suits our purposes very well. We have been very pleased that with the extreme cold, the building seems to manage to be at least a few degrees warmer than outside, and on sunny days up to 10 degrees warmer. We decided to keep all of our birds in one house this winter, not separating the chickens and turkeys, and they seem to be thriving, with the rooster gracefully handing over the top dog position of the flock to the tom turkey (but hey if you only weight 7 pounds, wouldn't you turn it over to someone who weighs 20?). We enjoy their antics, and have appreciated the steady supply of eggs since they started laying earlier this fall. We help them out with a timed light that turns on before the sun comes up, so that their days don't seem so short.

In 2010 we are hoping to add a little lean-to to the side of the poultry house to provide shelter for a couple of beef steers that we're planning on acquiring in the spring. While the ground is still frozen we hope to drag the turkey shed we built 2 years ago inside the pasture fence to provide a separate house for the turkeys if the female decides to set on a clutch this spring. And also move our garden shed to the other side of the garden to open up a new space, and expand the garden a bit.

We just finished perusing our farm journal and realized that in only a couple of short months we will be tapping maple trees, and starting seeds under the grow lights; the cycle of our growing year starting over again. Each year we build in more of the details of our yearly routine, and make this place more our own.

Wishing you and yours a blessed, bountiful, and peaceful 2010.

Christmas is in sight.

Christmas is just around the corner, and things have really slowed down around here. We are taking a little break before things take off again for the new year. Merry Christmas!

Late Spring = Busy!

I know it's been a few weeks since we've posted last. We been so busy with things here on our little corner plot, we rarely find time to sit down with our computer and write. Since we wrote last the end of April, we've put down flooring in our living room, got our new furniture in, and put our living room somewhat back to normal. We're not done yet though, there's still the stairway to finish, trim to touch up, and pictures and decorations to put on the walls. All of that will happen as we get a rainy evening here and there over the summer.

Outside is where the big things have been going on. Ryan has been working hard to get our fence built, so we can get our grown turkeys and laying hens out on pasture, and hopefully get a couple of calves for beef by next spring. Right now he has all of the steel t-posts in the ground, and only has 7 more wooden corner posts to get in before he can start stretching the woven wire fencing. This past Saturday, Ryan and his brother worked to get the beginnings of our new poultry shed going, so hopefully we'll have a much larger place to house our 2 adult turkeys, 5 laying hens, 1 rooster, 4 turkey poults, and 25 meat chicks.

As you can tell from my listing above, we are practically overrun with poultry right now. We acquired 4 turkey poults the 2nd of May, in case the eggs Esmerelda was sitting on didn't hatch. That turned out to be a good thing, evidentally first time turkey mothers aren't always successful. She ended up breaking most of her eggs, and is now sitting on 9 chicken eggs, none of which are broken. She seems to have gotten the hang of brooding now, we just wish it were turkey eggs instead.

The 25 chicks, well we just decided that since we were growing so much of our vegetables, we try growing some of our everyday meat too. We ordered the chicks through a hatchery, a deal called picturesquely the "Frypan Special", 25 assorted heavy (read old-fashioned)breed chicks, straight run (both male and female) for $17.00. These breeds take a little bit longer to fatten up, but unlike the more modern Cornish-cross meat birds, they tend to be sturdier and better foragers. And if a few turn out to be breeds we like, we can keep them into adulthood, without worrying that at 10 weeks of age they will get too fat to walk or do much of anything besides eat. And we will be watching the young roosters closely in hopes observing a future flock leader. Our current rooster, which we were so excited to get after losing our last one to the neighbor's dog, has turned out to be mean and a pathetic flock leader. What makes a good rooster? A pleasant crow, docility in relation to humans, gentleness with hens, unselfishness, i.e. he will hurriedly check out any food thrown into the pen, and then dole it out to all of his ladies instead of gobbling it up himself. But I digress . . .

Other things going on . . . we have almost everything planted in the garden. Early crops are growing strong: potatoes, onions, spinach, peas, and radishes are green and leafy. We have just put tomatoes and peppers out in the last two weeks. They are recovering from transplant shock well, and are actually starting to grow. Everything else we depend on to sprout from seed, and when it doesn't, we plant it again.

Otherwise, we enjoy the heritage of previous homeowners, irises everywhere. My favorite combination being yellow irises, red-orange poppies and purple phlox, the inspiration for our wedding colors last summer.

Spring is here!

What an amazing weekend weather-wise here in Indiana. We went from having cool high 40's weather at the beginning of this past week to 80 on Saturday and Sunday! With the lovely sunny weather and warm temperatures, wildflowers and plants in our garden have really popped, as the lovely Hepatica picture to the left shows. In the garden, the strawberry crowns have started to leaf out and are peeking out from under their straw blankets. Radishes and spinach are starting to pop and and the onions planted a few weeks ago are going strong. We went from having 1 asparagus stalk poking up out of the ground Friday night, to almost 12 stalks up today, and growing fast.

Yesterday, Ryan and Sarah's Dad installed the laminate floor in the living room. It went pretty smoothly except for the starting point and ending points which required some shimming, and cutting to make sure things fit perfect. The end product looks fabulous, and has really brightened up the room. We will be calling the furniture store tomorrow to let them know that we are ready for them to deliver our sofa and loveseat. Hopefully they will be able to do that this week, as they called a couple of weeks ago to let us know that our order had arrived. We are excited to have everything all put together, and being able to relax a little bit.

Another highlight of our weekend: our Sunday evening meal. We ate asparagus fresh from the garden, fixed in our favorite way: steamed with lots of salt. Then we fried the 3 morel mushrooms we found in Mom and Dad's woods yesterday, and finished off with tortilla chips and salsa made from last year's tomatoes and peppers. Saturday morning, Sarah made rhubarb muffins for breakfast with rhubarb that had been picked that morning.

Spring: the season of hope

It's hard to imagine with all the rain and clouds and chilly temperatures that in a few short months, summer will be in full bloom including 90 degree temperatures and ripe tomatoes off the vine. Right now though, we're betting on that time coming. Yesterday, while the sun shone, and the air was balmy at 60 degrees, Ryan and I planted the earliest of our crops in the garden: potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, and the long awaited strawberry plants and blueberry bushes we had ordered when there was still snow on the ground. We planted onions a little over a week ago, and they are just beginning to sprout.

Other things we're planting hope in: turkey eggs. Our turkey hen, Esmerelda, has been dutifully laying eggs every other day for a couple of weeks now, and when the mood hits her, she will sit on them for a little while. We've saved some of her eggs back, replacing them with camoflauge plastic easter eggs, so that not all of them will have been possibly exposed to freezing temps. She's not to picky about what eggs in her nest look like as long as there are the right amount of them there.

Otherwise, we're trying to get our living room finished. Ryan has been working hard this week to finish applying brick veneer to our plaster covered chimney, and priming stairway trim. All we have left to do is get the floor installed and finish the woodwork and stair bannister. The furniture store called this week, and said that our couch and loveseat are in, we just have to schedule a time to have them delivered. We are looking forward to getting all of this done in time to spend most of our summer outdoors.

Even though its cold and wet today, our garden and animals are not the only things reminding us of spring. The bizillion irises that prior owners planted on this ground, and lilacs bushes that are finally developing buds after being deer eaten for years are abounding. We think it helps to have a watchdog tom turkey that makes a commotion when he hears any kind of movement or sound in his territory.

Spring is Coming!

This time of year, people driving by our house probably say "What in the world are they doing?", mostly because we have a bunch of white plastic buckets hanging on several of the trees in our yard. Besides being delightful shade trees, sugar maples are another part of the farm production at our house. When the weather starts to warm up at the end of February or early March, the sap in sugar maple trees starts to rise, and provides us with the opportunity to tap into (literally) this "sweet water." And while sap from sugar maples has about the highest sugar content you can get from a maple tree, it is still only about 3% sugar. Which means it takes us about 40 gallons of sugar maple sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup! Syrup season has started fairly late for us this year, we didn't tap our trees until March 2 due to all the cold weather we had continuing into late February. The first part of this week, it was cold enough that the sap didn't run right after Ryan tapped Monday evening. On Wednesday, and Thursday it started to warm up, and by Friday, when it hit a high over 50 degrees F for the first time in months, our sap buckets were overflowing. In the span of about 72 hours, we collected a total of almost 20 gallons of sap from our 4 trees!

Collecting the sap is the easy part, waiting on it to boil down is the hard part. Using an outdoor propane burner, and our 5 1/2 gallon pressure canner pot, we have boiled the 20 gallons down to 2 gallons over about 16 hours. Now we have poured the 2 gallons into our stock pot, and are finishing it on the stove, as we don't have enough good light outside right now that we need to observe temperatures and consistency for syrup finishing. When all is said and done we hope to end up with about 1/2 gallon of syrup from this batch. And we hope to get more sap later in the week, after a weather system comes through that is supposed to bring temps back down below freezing, and then send them back up again. That is the best weather for sap runs. We are really glad to have purchased our propane burner; it cooks the sap much quicker and more efficiently than our electric stove, and we don't steam up our house doing it. We eventually hope to get a small wood stove to set-up outdoors for sugaring, then our fuel will be free and renewable, instead of paying to fill our propane tank with fossil fuel.

Besides maple sugaring, Ryan and Sarah's Dad have been working hard to get the living room finished before outdoor spring work, and our new furniture arrive. Thursday evening, Friday afternoon, and Saturday, they worked on installing new trim. On the walls that we painted "apple" green, the trim will be painted white, so Dad picked out some nice #2 pine for the trim. We decided to do wider trim with some beadwork, to go with the age and style of our home.

On the exposed oak wall, Dad made us some trim about of really old poplar that he had savalged from a project a long time ago. After planing and sanding it, it's a nice green color that accents our green paint and the richness of the oak wall. Plus, we love that it's old too!

As you can see there's alot going on in our neck of the woods right now. Besides boiling sap today, which doesn't demand a lot of attention until the very end of the process, we planted pepper seeds in our indoor growing system. It is hard to believe it's time for that already! We are looking forward to a nice spring and summer, and lots of time spent outdoors.