Making Peace with a Mild Winter . . . so far

The past month or two, we've really been struggling here on the farm, to make our peace with winter being mild this year. I'll explain why.

Instead of the lovely inches of snow, solid ground underfoot, and sparkling clear mornings . . . we've got a mud hole for a barnyard, squishy molehills on the path to the barn, and gray, rainy mornings.

We're really big fans of 4 distinct seasons, and when you get one that starts to look a lot like another . . . well it's just not fun. And don't just ask us . . . if I were to share a picture of our steers in all their muddiness, you'd understand that they agree.

With that preface . . . you will understand why I was overjoyed to be able to spend several minutes staring out the window at this:

Yay for snow falling! And for this:

Below freezing temperatures during the day, that allowed the barnyard to freeze up for a couple of days.

And no matter what, a five alarm winter sunset to fall back on isn't too shabby.

On the day the snow was falling, if I had feathers like a bird, I would have probably been out reveling as it seems this cardinal was:

I watched him for a couple of minutes, and he was never sitting on a branch. It was almost as if he was dust bathing in snow. Or maybe he was just happy that the mud was covered too!

For now we just take what we get, and pray that all our critters continue to stay healthy through the crazy up and down temperatures, and hope that come the end of February when its time to haul the steers out, that we can have a good hard freeze to allow easy maneuvering of truck and trailer. 



From 2011 to 2012

The year of 2011 was full of new experiences here on the farm. It was the first year we raised cattle in every season from the below zero temps of February to the 90's of August. It was our first time raising pigs, and boy did we learn a lot, but thankfully we had good natured charges in Runt and Hamball, and lots of good advice from family and friends. It was the first time we have had to purchase green beans to can, and I learned that you never brag on your garden plants in front of them.

As we finish out the year, we find ourselves in the midst of a mild winter, or at least its starting that way. Every time it has snowed, it has mostly melted off before I got around to photos. This is our out the window picture from a few days ago:

We've been amused by the fact of a chicken that lays double yolks, we thought maybe this one was a triple, but was only a double:

Potatoes have been canned, in preparation for those late spring days when all the potatoes in the basement are used up, but there aren't any ready in the garden:

And for now, the garden is asleep. The strawberries and garlic hang out under their blankets of straw. Hard to believe just a couple of months ago this was a crazy mess of green and bugs.

For now, we'll be in these cool, still winter days. Stare at the Christmas tree for a couple of more days, and embrace the new year. Blessings to you and yours!

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.