Author: Cabincrafted1

Easy Rider

Many, many years ago, I could be seen running madly down the street hanging on to the seat of one of our children’s bicycles until they achieved the balance and confidence to ride away on their own. I am clearly not that young any more. Eldest grandson, living in an apartment on a hilly parking lot in a busy city has been reluctant to learn to ride. He rides with his Dad on the tandem bike, in fact they go many miles to Kung Fu each Saturday, rain or shine and often a couple of miles to guitar lessons on Friday evening with the guitar strapped to his Dad’s back.

Since he is with us for a good portion of this summer and since we are taking him with us to visit his 7 year old cousin in Florida, we brought his bike to the mountains for some lessons on riding before the Florida trip. He has been here a week now and today, since hubby is off on his motorcycle, I decided it was a good day for a bicycle lesson. L was quite reluctant. The school counselor in me acknowledged that he was afraid, but insisted that together we could overcome that fear. Off to the local elementary school we went, as they have a nice flat road and parking area and several gently sloping grassy hills down to water retention depressions. When we got there, he was very oppositional about even trying, but I was as stubborn that he was going to give it a go, a bit of bribery thrown in for good measure. I ran behind him, helping to keep him balanced until I couldn’t catch my breath and decided that the gentle grassy slopes might provide a good place to practice balance.

This gave me a chance to breath as well. He would coast down the hill and walk the bike back up. Once his balance was better, we resumed the running behind a few more times, but by then I didn’t have to hold the seat and handlebars, just the seat. He is definitely getting it. A couple more times of this and he will ride away from me on his own, a new skill learned. I could see the confidence in his face after today’s session and I doubt that we will have anymore reluctance to try.

July 12, 2014
Let the Outings Begin

One week ago, right about now, we left Vienna, VA, grandson, son, daughter in law, and me. We have had grandson solo since Sunday afternoon. His daily routine here requires guitar practice, Kung Fu practice as he is missing those lessons this summer, a writing assignment and a math assignment as practice for weak skills and reinforcement for those skills that he does well. I supervise those practices first thing each morning right after breakfast unless the writing requires a library visit.

We told him that he would have some basic chores to do here at the house each day and for that, we would give him an allowance so that he has some spending money. He can earn extra money by going above and beyond his required chores. He is only 9, so nothing is too onerous or too difficult. We also told him that while he was here, we would do a series of outings and that with cooperation with his practices and chores, he could earn extra outings. Some of the outings planned can be repeated such as the county pool, batting cage, movie date with granddad. Others are ones that will only be done once, such as the one we did today. We drove to Roanoke, the nearest city, about an hour from home, leaving to be there at lunch time. The market square hosts a farmers market many days each week and we caught quite a number of farmers there today. On the market square, there is a hot dog counter and we though it doesn’t stand up to our favorite one from Virginia Beach, it was a delicious unhealthy lunch, followed with healthy purchases of fresh corn, tomatoes, potatoes and a watermelon. One stand had baked goods and we purchased a whole grain breakfast bread full of fruit, nuts, seeds and not too much real cane sugar.

After our lunch and the market we drove a few short blocks to the Virginia Transportation Museum. This was a fun adventure, bringing back many memories for me as I used to ride a Norfolk and Western train from Norfolk to Farmville to and from college. On display are locomotives, passenger cars, cabooses, old wagons, handpump firetrucks, and a trolley car. Inside the museum is a huge O gauge train set up, displays on bus transportation, train history, and air travel. It was a fun couple of hours spent with our grandson.

Back home, the last of the peas were harvested and the vines pulled for the chooks. The peas were shelled and cooked with the corn and some left over kabob beef and pork tenderloin for dinner. Once the clean up was done, some garden weeding and harvest of 76 heads of garlic, now drying for a day or two outside before the stems are clipped and they are moved to the wire shelves of the root cellar to finish drying.

That part of the bed will be cleaned up and planted with a second planting of bush beans within a day or two.

I love when the garden is producing and the local markets have produce that either we don’t grow or don’t have in ready in our garden yet.

I’m loving life on our mountain farm.

July 10, 2014
Pens, Dogs, and Chooks

Yesterday the sky grayed and the wind picked up, cooling the afternoon enough to tackle the outdoor chores. We had purchased a 50 foot roll of welded wire fencing on our way home from errands. One of our only town businesses is a hardware store. When we moved here, it was really aimed at farmers and was more a farm store. The owner sold it to return to farming and the new owner changed the focus to a more traditional hardware store, I guess to compete with Lowes and Home Depot two towns over in Genericia (our eldest son’s name for it). Unfortunately, he couldn’t complete and as he no longer drew the farmers, they went to Tractor Supply or Southern States two smaller towns over the opposite direction, he is going out of business. We got the fencing for a discount.

Once the day cooled, I pounded in the remainder of the T posts, strung the welded wire fence, securing the meat/cull chick pen. The chicken tractor still needs repair. I started installing the T post insulators to string the electric fence, but realized that the welded wire fencing wasn’t tight enough and the 2″ insulators were not long enough to hold the electric wire away from the welded wire fence. This morning, we bought a bag of 5″ insulators but as soon as we got home, the rains started so the installation will have to wait for another day. The rain was very necessary, so I can’t complain. We have had a high percentage chance of rain for weeks, but have gotten almost no rain.

Hopefully these measures will make the chooks secure from the 4 legged predator that got the 3 birds last week. With the freezer camp event on Friday, our egg production is way down, getting only one or two eggs a day until the new girls start laying.

A pen beside a pen and real gates. “Got treats?”

July 9, 2014
The Dentist

Not too many folks are fond of dental visits, unless you are the Bill Murray character in Little Shop of Horrors. My dentist isn’t like Orin Scrivello, actually he is a pleasant young man, but I still don’t like the visits.

My first day in Northern Virginia last week, I broke my left maxillary cuspid. The back of the tooth and the old metal filling stayed in place, the entire front of the tooth broke off. I wasn’t even eating something hard. I called my dentist and since I wasn’t getting home until very late Thursday night and since it was a holiday weekend, I couldn’t get an appointment until this morning. I called my son’s dentist in Vienna, but they suggested that if the tooth wasn’t bothering me, that it would be best for me to wait to see my own dentist as I would have to follow up with him anyway and that would incur double cost. I waited. Bright and early this morning I had my visit, left with a numb top lip, a hefty bill, a tooth that has had the metal filling removed, a tooth colored filling applied and built up to approximate a tooth and an appointment in August to have a crown, my 6th.

I was not blessed with hard tooth genes and unfortunately have passed the soft enamel on to all three of my children. Hubby on the other hand has granite teeth, but none of the our children got his tooth gene.

Since I didn’t eat breakfast due to morning farm chores and the early hour of the appointment, I could eat the couch right now, but I’m afraid I will have to wait a bit more time for the numbing to wear off so I don’t bite myself. I’m not a cannibal afterall.

On a more positive note, our first full day with grandson was full and rewarding. We got him a library card, signed him up for the summer reading club (he is a voracious reader at a level well above his 9 years, going in 4th grade level), we did his summer writing and math practice assignments, he practiced his guitar and kung fu without a fuss. His granddad let him watch part of a movie, they played baseball in the front yard, and they shot off some of the fireworks that were purchased prior to the 4th.

Today’s practices have been completed and we are going to go do some errands. We need a basketball for him to play with, a book in the Seven Wonders series is not in the local library chain so we will buy it for him and the pups need some supplies.

At some point soon, the fencing for the meat chicken run needs to be completed, the chicken tractor repaired from the dog damage and the electric fence extended around all of that. Today it is going up to 90ºf, too hot for outdoor labor. I will tackle some of it after it cools off this evening and work on it some in the morning before it gets too hot. Brown Dog hasn’t been back for more free chicken in a few days, or hasn’t been seen. Either they have him secured or our reinforcements, gates, and taller fence have discouraged him.

July 8, 2014
Sunday Thankfulness and Fun

After two days of hard work with eldest son, as a family we decided that today was going to be a fun day before they caught a 3 p.m. bus back to Vienna, VA, leaving their son, our eldest grandson, now 9 years old to spend most of the summer with us. Summer care for him was both expensive and hard to come by but also difficult to fit with their schedule as our daughter in law leaves for her Art Camp teaching gig at 6:50 a.m. and returns to the house at about 5 p.m., our son leaves on his bicycle to ride to campus at 7 a.m. so that he can make the 45 minute bike commute and get a shower at the Aquatic Center to be at his desk by 8:30 and he doesn’t get off until 5 p.m. and has to make the 45 minute bike commute home. We adore having grand-kids with us and love that we are trusted to keep him until mid August when the Art Camps are over and he and his mom will travel to Virginia Beach to spend a week or so with the other grandparents prior to school resuming for everyone.

For our fun day, we decided to hike to the Cascade Falls, a 2 mile uphill hike to a beautiful view followed by the return 2 mile hike back down to the car. The hike included a swim in the icy water by son and grandson and an extensive trash pick up by all of us that we carried back down in my bag. There were about 45 incoming freshmen from a local university that had hiked up and they seemed to be mostly responsibly for the trash. I gently confronted the group about what we had collected and was met with denial that it wasn’t them, but when they got up and left, they failed to pick up several GatorAde bottles, a gallon water bottle and 25 zip lock bags along with granola bar wrappers, candy wrappers and other debris. We collected all of that also and hauled it back down the trail to the trash cans at the parking lot, collecting additional wrappers on the way down. It baffles me that they could be so inconsiderate and wonder where they thought their plastic, cellophane, and mylar was going to go.

Rhododendron season, these are traditional pink, but most of the ones we saw today were white.

The pile of debris we hauled down from that beautiful falls and stream.

While hiking down, I got a call from our neighbor asking if we saw his big brown dog, the chicken killer down here again. Fortunately, I was a bad chicken keeper today and had left them cooped up when we left for our hike. He apparently walked down looking for the dog and couldn’t find him. Later he texted that the dog was in the house and we let the chickens out.

This afternoon, we put our son and his wife on a bus home and we brought our grandson home with us. He helped me extend the 4 foot fence up to 6 feet by putting a lighter weight garden fence secured with fiberglass poles to the top. This will prevent the youngs from flying out and hopefully will discourage Brown Dog from getting in.

July 6, 2014
Tough week for the chooks

This has been a tough couple of days for my flock. Yesterday morning, a neighbor’s dog who is generally chained up slipped his chain and caused enough damage to the chicken tractor where the culls were for them to escape after which he caught and killed two of them. This necessitated a change of day’s plan and eldest son and I went to work to make the coop pen more secure, start the work to make a more secure cull/meat bird pen with the chicken tractor inside of it, and to start planting posts to run the electric fence not just around the garden, but also around the two chicken pens.

Today was the day we had planned to kill and clean the cull birds, now down from 8 to the 6 we did get in the freezer. They were the original chickens I bought last year before I settled on the Buff Orpingtons and I called them my U.N. flock as there were 6 different breeds represented. We put 18.75 lbs of chicken away today.

After clean up and dinner, we decided to go into town for ice cream and while we were gone, the same dog again got loose and got one of my young Buff Orpingtons. This is now a problem as the dog has discovered he likes chicken and they are easy to catch. I don’t see any damage to the pen, so he can either jump a 4 foot fence or one of the young buffs got out and he caught it on the outside. We hadn’t finished setting the posts for the electric fence yet, so that barrier wasn’t there to deter the dog. The dog’s young owner is upset that his dog has killed 3 chickens in 2 day and I am perturbed about it but only to the extent that the dog isn’t secured well enough to not wander down the country road to our farm and get the chickens. I had thought about some free range time, but can’t do that with the dog in the area.

I don’t know what to do now. Son and I will see if we can figure out whether the dog can get in the pen and I guess I will have to cover more of the top with netting to try to keep the young buffs from flying over the top until they get too heavy to escape.

In our freezer camp event today, we also killed my rooster as he had gotten too aggressive with us and with the hens. This also presents a dilemma as I wanted a self sustaining flock and though the hens lay eggs without a rooster, they obviously won’t hatch, so I will either have to buy another rooster and hope that he is less aggressive or buy fertilized eggs when a hen gets broody to let her sit to hatch. I don’t want to have to keep buying chicks every few years and raise them in the brooder. We already have to deal with the brooder for the meat birds once or twice a year.

We currently have only two mature birds to provide us with eggs. Hopefully the 17 and 19 week old pullets will start laying soon, assuming I can keep Brown Dog out of their territory.

July 5, 2014
Independence Day

Today the USA will celebrate with cookouts and fireworks. Today would be my Mom’s 90th birthday, though she died 27 years ago. She celebrated on that date and always said that was her birth date, but she wasn’t really sure. She was adopted as an infant after the death of her parents in a time where records weren’t kept as a they are now. She knew she was born in Pennsylvania and knew her birth name, but when she went to get a birth certificate for a
Passport, there were no records. Her baptismal certificate said July 4, so that is when she celebrated.

One of our neighbors was a Greek immigrant who had become fairly successful upon coming to America and he too celebrated his birthday on July 4th as he had no idea when his real birthdate was and he wanted to celebrate with the country that took him in and made him a successful businessman. His sons held a huge neighborhood cookout with a spitted lamb, burgers, hotdogs, pot luck side dishes. They had a pool and we spent the day swimming and eating then shooting fireworks over the river.

Last night, I brought eldest son and his family home with me for the weekend and eldest grandson will be spending most of the summer with us. We had some fencing to do, 2 gates to hang, a small wall to construct around the top of the culvert and tomorrow to put 8 chickens in freezer camp.

Plans changed some this morning when a neighbor’s dog got in the cull pen and killed 2 of the hens. We spent a good portion of today reconfiguring pens, hanging two gates and setting poles for more electric fencing around the chickens and the garden. Tomorrow we will have 2 less hens to kill.

Tonight we feasted on steak, corn and peas and came into town to watch fireworks.

Happy birthday Mom, Papu, & USA.

July 4, 2014
Support Services

The blog has been quiet for a few days as I traveled on Sunday to Fairfax County, VA to provide support services for eldest son’s family. T started a new job 2 Monday’s ago at GMU, W started her Art Camp teaching job the same day and that was L’s last day of 3rd grade. This week he had an adventure camp that required drop off and pick up for the camp bus at times they couldn’t possible manage. As I have blogged before, they do not have a car. Between the cost, the traffic, and the availability of public transportation, they generally don’t need one. They get where they need to go by walking, biking or taking Metro system busses and trains. Grandmom to the rescue. Being retired has it’s benefits and since the camp bus drop off point is the direction I am willing to drive, I came up to help. My sole responsibility is getting L to the bus by 8 a.m. and picking him up at 5 p.m. That leaves a lot of unencumbered, unscheduled time for me. I voluntarily fix dinner and keep up with basic chores. I have spent lots of time knitting and reading. My current book is The Goldfinch. Monday I visited a yarn shop we spotted on our way to dinner Sunday evening. They were so welcoming that after buying some yarn, I sat and knitted with them for a couple of hours. It is too hot to work on the wool/silk sweater I brought, so a started a scarf with the new yarn.

With the heat index in triple digits, I haven’t wanted to be outside much, so I have tackled a few chores here. L will be excited to see that Grandmom cleaned his room. He has so many crates of Lego’s and they were everywhere. They are all re-crated, books re-shelved and trash picked up. I sent him upstairs with clean clothes the other afternoon and found them on his floor. I figured it was distracted 9 year old behavior but realized he had more clothes in his dresser than he had room for. I sorted through the dresser, taking out all of the too small clothes, sorted winter from summer, undies and socks from shirts and pants and put it back together minus the out grown clothes, two bags full.

While I am here, Jim is home critter sitting with these dogs and chickens.

July 2, 2014
Olio – June 27, 2014

Olio: a miscellaneous collection of things

The Raspberry jam salvage was a success. It is spoonable, spreadable, and isn’t so sweet it makes me gag. A win. The wild Blackberries are so thick with fruit this year, I have a dilemma. I don’t need any more jam. My daughter who LOVES blackberry jam made a pantry full of Strawberry Jam when the berries were ripe in Florida, so she doesn’t need jam either, but I can’t resist foraging for blackberries on the farm. I can freeze them and use them in smoothies, cakes, and cobblers, but we aren’t dessert eaters unless we have guests and then hubby would rather I make apple, lemon or pumpkin pie rather than cobbler. What’s a girl to do?

The rain held off long enough for me to get everything that wasn’t hayed, mowed. Jeff is coming a few times a day and hauling off 9 bales of hay at a time on his lowboy trailer pulled by the behemoth tractor. There are still 45 bales to go. The mowing was a priority as I am off to babysit for 5 days then bring RT and L back here with me on July 3. We will send 8 chickens to freezer camp, hang a gate, watch fireworks, and feast for the two days RT is here, then he will catch a bus back home to be back at work on Monday. L will stay with us for about 7 weeks of his summer vacation.

The teenager chicks are looking like I may not have to wait until August to get eggs from them. Many of the girls combs and waddles are growing and turning red. It won’t be long before I start seeing wind eggs in the coop and then pullet eggs in the nesting boxes as they figure the process out.

They are hiding from the heat, the culls are dustbathing to keep cool.

I dragged the chicken tractor to a new spot to give the culls something fresh for their last week. Jim will be in charge while I’m gone.

The last of the spoiled bale of hay needs to be moved over to the garden and some areas remulched. We had a chicken escape and they got in the vegetable garden and the new flower bed and made quite a mess. Between that, some thin areas that are starting to show weeds, tomatoes and peppers tall enough to mulch around, I need to get that task done before I leave also. I might actually welcome a rain shower while that is being done to cool things off a bit. The garden is thriving, the kale is winning.

The sink is full, the chickens got at least this much and there is plenty to take to Northern Virginia for them when I go up.

First Tomatillo. Can’t wait for a crop of them.

The peas are almost done. If I cool off enough from working out there, I will pick a meal’s worth for tonight.

It amazing me how quickly the raspberries ripen. I picked the bushes clean yesterday and treated myself to a hand full while I was weeding. I save a hand full to have with my yogurt tomorrow.

Lovin’ life on our mountain farm.

June 27, 2014
Salvage

Each evening as I harvested the day’s produce and eggs, bringing in a half to a full cup of raspberries, I got more frustrated with the results of my batch of jam. The new berries were put in a wide mouthed pint jar and frozen, new ones added each night. The original batch so sweet and so gummy that it didn’t even work well in a smoothie without melting it first. Today’s harvest of berries filled the jar plus a half a cup or so. After some research from various cookbooks, homesteading books, and the internet, I decided to see if I could salvage the batch. Again, down came the pots, the jars and lids. The original 6 jars were warmed slightly to thin the sickly sweet goo. The new fresh and frozen berries crushed in the bottom of the jam making pot with the potato masher. Once they were beginning to cook, the first batch was added back to the pot with a quarter cup of water and a good splash of lemon juice and cooked til a gel test on a spoon showed a product that jelled but didn’t clump. The re-canning in clean jars with new lids has been done. The now 7 jars have all given the satisfying pop as they cool, so they are all sealed. The new process was less frothy looking and the foam easier to skim, so the jars are a pretty ruby color throughout. After they cool and I can do a tip test, I will see if I have 7 jars of jam or 7 cups of raspberry syrup. Hopefully, when I open one, I will have a jam that is spreadable. It tasted better when I checked it. When my peach jam didn’t jell (my fault for using old pectin), I bought liquid pectin and it seems to give a thicker consistency jam which I don’t like.

If any of my readers out there have jam recipes for low sugar (not artificial sweetener, I can’t use that stuff), or have found a good source of recipes for low sugar jams, I would love to have it. It is counter intuitive to me that most jam recipes call for sugar equal to or more than the amount of fruit. That takes a healthy product and makes it unhealthy.

June 26, 2014