Tag: homesteading

Canning Time

Recently there have been a few evenings when I wanted a quick dinner only to realize that there was no more pasta sauce and the only broth was frozen. Last summer was cool and rainy, good for the greens and beans, but not so good for the tomatoes, plus I had planted fewer of them as I was overwhelmed the prior summer. Because the harvest was lighter and more sporadic, I blanched, peeled and froze the tomatoes in vacuum seal bags, instead of canning them into the usual pasta sauce, tomatoes with green chilies and plain tomatoes. Periodically this winter, I have hauled out a few bags and made enough pasta sauce for a couple of dinners, freezing the extra. I don’t like using the microwave, though we have one, so thawing sauce or broth requires foresight.

Today and tomorrow are beautiful early springlike days, highs in the 60s, sunny with the buds beginning to show on the lilacs and forsythia. These are the days when Jim wants to get on his motorcycle and go for a ride. His rides give me time to do crafts or household jobs. I decided early today that I was going to take most of the remaining frozen tomatoes and make a big pot of sauce and can it so that dinner is just a few steps to the pantry, a box of pasta and in the time it takes to boil the water and heat the noodles, the sauce can be heated.

When we killed chickens last fall, we cut some into pieces and as we don’t have a cleaver, we deboned the breasts. That left us with several carcasses with back meat and random other meat scraps on them. They were bagged together and thrown in the freezer with the bagged and sealed birds and parts. This seemed like a good day to take care of them too and to thaw the 2 quarts of turkey broth in the freezer and make pints of broth, also canned to have quickly available to cook rice or as the base for soup or potpie.

Late winter is not the usual time for canning around here, but the empty jars, lids and three large pots were hauled out. Sauce cooked in one, broth simmering in the second and finally, several inches of water started to boiling in the pressure canner.

The 10 pints of tomato sauce have finished canning, 9 pints of broth are building pressure and as soon as the pressure is down enough to open the canner, the last 3 pints of broth will go into the canner for processing.

As a bonus, the carcasses yielded 11 ounces of cooked chicken to add to soup or a casserole. This will make meal prep easier for the remainder of winter and spring until the garden starts giving us fresh goodness to enjoy. It will also let me consolidate the remaining frozen produce and chickens into the refrigerator freezer to let the chest freezer defrost and get a good cleaning before we have more table birds and produce to add to it.

Not a bad day’s work.

Life is always an adventure on our mountain farm.

March 10, 2014
Chick Day

Tractor Supply has had Chick Days going now for a couple of weeks, but they don’t carry the breed that I want. My goal is to keep Cogburn, my Buff Orpington rooster, the two Buff hens and the one Olive Egger Hen and replace the other 6 with 10 more Buff Orpingtons. That will give me 13 layers instead of 9 and will give me a pure heritage flock, except for the Olive Egger, whose eggs are just fun because of their color and easy to identify. Hopefully, this will give me a self sustaining flock as the Buffs make good mothers and can raise their replacements and the table birds. A few days ago, I reconnected with the gal that I bought my two Buff hens from last year when they were about 10 weeks old. She has 1 to 3 day chicks and though I didn’t want to raise chicks again this year, I also didn’t want to pay $20 per bird for ones that are only a month younger than the layers I have since I wanted 10. This morning we made a road trip to meet her in a town about an hour from here and did a parking lot exchange of money for 10 new chicks. We took a towel lined cat carrier to bring the peepers home, with a side trip to Tractor Supply for starter feed as they can’t eat the laying mix for the big girls.

I have to admit that they are adorable at just a couple of days old. However when you buy babies they must be kept warm and after my experience of having the brooder in the basement last year, I don’t want a repeat of that, so they are in a makeshift brooder in the garage with a heat lamp, which I also don’t like to use, but have no other option at this point. Last year I used a large black plastic livestock water trough as a brooder, but it is full of split wood in the garage and I didn’t want to have to empty it. maybe later as they grow. The makeshift brooder is half of a plastic large dog crate set inside a larger wire dog cage with the heat lamp hanging from the wire cage. Pine shavings, a chick feeder and waterer in with them and a blanket over part of it, they are set for a while.

Hopefully, this brood will be a success and in 7 weeks they can be moved outdoors, the 6 hens from my United Nations flock will be moved to the chicken tractor for the young ones to be introduced to the coop. Sometimes this summer, those 6 will go to freezer camp and my egg production will drop until the babies are ready to lay.

Hubby says I have an addiction, but at least I limited my purchase to only the breed I want and only females, so we won’t have multiple pens of different ages, and one of them full of testosterone like we had last spring when I bought 21 chicks over a two week period and had half of them cockrells.

March 9, 2014
The Return of Winter

Spring is coming, we know it is by the flocks of robins, the few springlike days we have had in the past couple of weeks. The past two days have exceeded 60ºf ), absolutely delightful weather. The weather encouraged outdoor time, to clean the chicken coop, to give them free range time, and to allow Jim to take a jaunt on his motorcycle.

Yesterday afternoon it clouded up and by evening, it was a steady cold rain with the temperatures beginning to drop to the current 28º (-2º) and headed for tonight’s 8º (-13.33º).

By the time I awoke this morning, the rain had turned to sleet, then snow. The snow is falling steadily and accumulating.

The weather prognosticators are warning us of 6 to 12″ of snow, depending on which source you choose to believe. I’m hoping for a much lower amount and a return to the weather of the weekend, but it looks like winter is back and here to stay for at least another week. I’m ready to do more than think about the spring garden. Instead, I will knit and spin, make a warm comforting stew for supper and sit tight.

What I’m knitting, Beaucoup in Happy Feet, a light baby sweater for a spring baby, and Honey Cowl of Green Dragon Terminator color is Heat Wave.

March 3, 2014
Easter Egg Hunt

The cold winter has taken a toll on egg production and on the cleanliness of the coop. I use the deep litter method. For you non chicken raisers, that involves starting with a very clean coop, putting down a few inches of pine shavings or fine straw, then piling dry straw, leaves, etc on top and stirring it up every day or so like compost, adding more straw or leaves as necessary. If this is done correctly, there is no odor and in the spring, you have a coop full of hot compost to add to your pile for further decomposing. Because we have hay fields and they are mowed and baled each year, I squirrel away 2 round bales that are stored near my coop and covered with a tarp for use in the coop. I know, you aren’t supposed to use hay, but so far I haven’t had any problems. Because hay generally isn’t as dry as straw, I do have to fluff and turn it daily and keep all ventilation holes open whenever the temperature is above freezing, but because of the cold and snow this year, the birds are spending more time indoors than I would like. As a result, it has been harder to stay on top of the turning and fluffing.

It isn’t spring yet, but I was beginning to detect odor and knew that something needed to be done. Leaving the compost part in place, I removed most of the hay from the coop and threw it in their run. Pulled out the last of one of the big bales that had gotten very dry and added a new thick layer in the coop.

The chickens are very curious whenever I am doing anything inside their coop and they always come to supervise. They lean out the open doorway, peck around in the corners, and get just where I need to be. As soon as I put an armload of hay down, one would push it around and make a bowl shaped nest in it. I would shoo one away to put hay down and another would be there. By the time I finished layering new hay in the floor of the coop and under their perches. Removed and replaced the old hay from their nesting boxes, I had about half of them in the coop making “nests” in the floor of the coop and trampling down the fluffy new hay.

I’m betting that today’s egg collection will be an Easter Egg Hunt throughout the floor of their coop. Funny birds. I just wish spring would come so that the egg production picks up. At least I have gotten eggs all winter.

Live is an adventure on our mountain farm.

March 1, 2014
The Dump

We live a rural life in our retirement, in a county that has only about 15000 residents. Since we bought our property, several suburban changes have been made along the main Route that bisects the county, installing town water instead of wells to most of the residents along that route. To dispose of your garbage, if you live on a main paved secondary road, there is garbage pick up once a week. If you live off of the main route or the paved secondary roads, you still have well water and you pay a mandatory monthly fee for the privilege of taking your garbage to one of 4 collection sites in the county. We fall in the later category.

This is a fairly recent development, within the last decade or two and before that, the rural method was to have a garbage pile on your property or find a place that no one would complain and dump it. Taking your garbage to the collection center is a hard pill for some of the folks up here to swallow and many have the mindset to never throw away anything and to take anything that is free, because maybe someday you will find a use for it. As a result there are properties that regardless of how close their neighbor is, have junked cars, dead tractors, collections of plastic yard toys and yard ornaments, piles of half rotted lumber, barrels and buckets of who knows what, old tubs or toilets, you name it and it is in their yard, creating an eyesore. Don’t get me wrong, that is not the norm. You see many neat well kept farms as well.

Another facet of cattle raising land is the use of old tires to hold down tarps over silage or to line the edge of a difficult to fence area as the cows won’t step inside or over them.

Our 30 acres was used to graze cattle, then miniature horses prior to our purchase. The land had been rented out to various farmers over the years. And our land has a natural sinkhole with a creek running down into it and then disappearing into the a cave. Two edges of the largest hayfield had well over a hundred tires placed in an alternating double row, just in the edge of the woodlot. The sink hole was a repository of many years of dumping, right off the edge of the cliff, so that the junk fell near and into the creek. This wasn’t just cans and bottles, but an old wringer washer, part of a car, an old stove, a water heater, rolls of rusted fencing and more tires. This bothered us, a lot, and every weekend that we could visit our land before construction, we came armed with boxes of huge garbage bags, work gloves and boots and we loaded and hauled sacks and sacks of glass and plastic out of the pile.

Once we brought our trailer up to store, we started collecting the tires and had to pay to drop them off, not at the nearest collection center, but the central one in the county. Each tire costing us $1.50 to leave it.

Two summer’s ago, a neighbor, Jim and I with our tractor and the neighbor’s long steel cable, spent a couple of day hauling the big junk out of the sinkhole and piling it up in the edge of the closest field where one of the local men came and loaded all of the metal onto his truck to take to the metal reclaiming site for whatever money he could get for it.

We thought when that was hauled away that we were done with the worst of it and had done a part to help clean up the environment and local groundwater.

When the leaves fell this fall, we noticed another tire in the edge of the woods, then another, and another. Now that the snow has melted and before we get any more rain or snow, we hooked up the trailer, put on our work clothes and dragged 15 more tires out of the edge of the woods. We are afraid to say that we have finally gotten them all, because that might jinx us and we will find more. For now, the sinkhole, the barn, and the edge of the woods look better. We will never get all of the old rusted cans and broken glass from the edge of the sinkhole, but hopefully, each year, Mother Nature is dumping a new load of leaves to compost over them and they are settling into the earth.

Life is good on our mountain farm.

February 24, 2014
The Calm Before . . .

Again we are being threatened with a winter storm. How many times has that happened this winter and it fizzled? But this time they seem to be serious and instead of adjusting the storm away from us at the last minute, they are giving us more and more intensity. It is to be a snow event in this part of the state. I love snow and snow sports, so I’m fine with it, however, it always requires more effort on our part as we do live rurally in the mountains and heavy snowfall often means loss of power. Loss of power means loss of heat, water and all other conveniences of life, so today, the cold, calm day of azure skies will be filled with the preparations for such occurrence.

The downstairs bathtub must be filled with water for necessary flushing and so the dogs will have water. All of the emergency and camping jugs also filled as to get water when we have no power, we must trek downhill a few hundred yards to the gravity fed yard hydrant from our cistern that is there to water horses and cattle next year after our fencing is done. Trekking down is not difficult, but toting one or more 5 gallon jugs of water back uphill is tough. With enough snow, they can be loaded onto one of the toboggan sleds that we bought for our grands and us to play on in the snow, and dragged back uphill.

A supply of firewood will be brought over and stored in the garage to keep the woodstove and fireplace stoked for heat. The wood is stacked against the end of the huge compost bins by the garden, but who wants to carry wood over in the wet snow when we can just grab it in the garage.

The hay used in the chicken pen and coop needs to be covered as they won’t come outside their coop if snow is on the ground and I don’t want to have to dig the large round bale out and deal with wet hay to get a layer down on the ground for them.

A pot of stew beef that can be finished on the wood stove or the propane camp stove will be started, or a pot of chili made that we can heat on the wood stove or camp stove will be prepped.

The freezer will be rearranged to make sure that there are few air spaces and jugs of ice that I keep in the basement refrigerator freezer when not needed, will be packed on top to keep the remainder of last summer’s bounty frozen.

Some day we might finally get a decent generator, maybe a whole house generator so these preparations will become unnecessary. Until then, time is wasting, I’d better get to work.

February 11, 2014
Another Comfort Day

When we went to bed last night it was snowing and the ground was lightly covered. It was around freezing outside and we had hope of rising this morning to our first real snowfall of the winter. Instead, we woke to bright sun, 17f (-8c) temperatures and 35 mph wind. The snow from last night was piled in neat dunes along the edges of each pass of the brush hog from the last mowing. It is now mid afternoon and the temperature has only edged up to 22f (-5.5c) and not expected to rise further today and the wind is still howling.

When I was a child, on especially cold winter days (I’m from Virginia Beach, so it was rarely this cold), my Mom would make Vegetable Soup. Her veggie soup had a soup bone in it and was made with canned veggies, but it was comfort food. I cook much differently than my mother did, using fresh or fresh frozen veggies and only grass finished, pasture raised meat. Hubby would rather have stew than soup, I prefer the soup. On this cold winter day, I decided that we could have the best of both with a pound of stew meat in the freezer, plenty of our homegrown peas, green beans and tomatoes in the freezer, potatoes, carrots,celery, onions and garlic in the root cellar or refrigerator and dried herbs in the spice drawer in the kitchen. The base for the soup as I make it and the stew are the same and from there I will diverge.

Vegetable Beef Soup

1 lb stew beef (or venison) lightly browned in a heavy stock pot with olive oil

1 large onion coarsely chopped

4 large cloves of garlic coarsely chopped

3 stalks celery with leaves, sliced about 1/4″ thick

1 Tbs dried basil

2 bay leaves

1 quart broth or water plus 2 cups water

1 c peas

2 c green beans cut in 1″ pieces

3 medium potatoes scrubbed and diced

2 carrots sliced

2 c crushed tomatoes

Saute the beef in olive oil til no outer surfaces are pink. Add onion and continue to saute until onion is translucent, add garlic and saute for about 2 minutes, add celery, basil and bay leaves and stir to coat. Add broth and water, bring to a boil and reduce heat to a low simmer for at least 2 hours. Add tomatoes, potatoes and carrots and cook until potatoes and carrots are nearly tender, add peas and beans until thawed and hot through. Serve with bread for a complete comfort dinner.

Before I met my husband (a long, long time ago), I was a non meat eater and owned several nutrition and cook books that have long since passed from my library. One of those cook books, The Vegetarian Epicure, I think, had a recipe for Herb and Onion Bread which became a favorite with my family. It is a quick bread that can be made easily in an afternoon. It doesn’t require kneading, though, I often stiffen it a bit and knead it anyway. It makes a lovely accompaniment to a soup or stew.

Herb and Onion Bread

1/2 c scalded milk cooled to warm

1 1/2 Tbs raw sugar

1 tsp salt

1 Tbs soft butter

1/2 c warm water

1 Tbs dry yeast

2 1/4 c flour

1/2 small onion minced

1 tsp crushed rosemary

1/2 tsp dill weed dry

Dissolve sugar, salt and butter in cooled milk. Dissolve yeast in warm water. Add milk mixture, flour, onion and herbs and stir vigorously with a heavy spoon until smooth. Cover bowl and allow to rise to triple bulk, about 45 minutes. Stir down and beat vigorously. Turn into a greased loaf pan and let stand 10 minutes in a warm draft free location. Bake @ 350f until done. (the recipe said 1 hour, however, I have never with any oven in any location I have lived been able to bake it more than about 45 minutes without it getting too brown and dry, just check it after about 45 minutes and decide).

Tonight we will both enjoy our own version of comfort food, as I will remove the meat and portion of the broth and add about half of the potatoes and carrots to it to cook then thicken for stew and add the other half of the potatoes and carrots along with the other vegetables to make my soup and we will both enjoy the bread. What better way to spend a cold windy afternoon than filling the house with the aromas of homemade soup and bread.

Life is indeed good on our mountain farm.

January 18, 2014
Details

I have posted a number of times about various topics related to the construction of our home on our retirement homestead. The house is a log home, pictured at the banner of this blog at various seasons. The site work, log erection, and rough carpentry were performed by a contractor we hired and later banned from our site. The interior carpentry and stone masonry were performed by our eldest son, his wife and an assortment of “helpers” from grad students at the nearby university to neighbors to me. The finish site work was contracted by us after we had lived here for a couple of years to a neighbor who finally got the drainage around the house right, repaired/constructed a driveway that didn’t threaten the oilpans on our vehicles, and smoothed the septic field so that it could be mowed without feeling that you were about to be bucked off the tractor.

Our son visualized many of the problems that had been wrought by the contractor, some where he blindly followed the blueprints from the log home company without seeing the issues those plans would have caused. Some of these issues were corrected by our son after the contractor was off the site, some are still issues that we can not deal with such as the water pipes in the utility room (last week’s post entitled Deep Freeze and the Thaw) and the water that somehow seeps below the metal roof to run down the logs on the front of the house where the 8 foot deep porch joins the house. Eldest son was a stickler for detail. Several times work that others did was redone by him later.

One of the issues he caught and fixed was that the hall wall made the kitchen so narrow that the stove and the refrigerator would have touched.

He deconstructed the contractor’s wall and moved it over far enough to put a narrow drawer cabinet between the appliances. This also gave us a narrow upper cabinet that is perfect for the storage of oils and vinegars used in cooking.

All of the upper cabinets were hand built by him. My vision was open shelves on which to store the pottery dishes, glass jars of colorful beans and grains, cookbooks and space above for seldom used large objects such as the roaster, wok and some larger pottery pieces. He took my vision and built the cabinets, lined them with cedar, trimmed them with oak and hand oiled them all. The only upper cabinet that is commercial is the one over the microwave that hides the ductwork and provides storage for cleaners that I want to keep out of the reach of grandkids.

Two of his challenges were the dormers and the doors. The house has 3 dormers on the front. The right hand one as you face the house is in our master bedroom, but the other two are off the heavy timber cathedral ceiling in the living room. After all the work had been done installing cedar, pine and log siding on interior walls, we couldn’t bring ourselves to install cheap commercial doors, so he hand built each of the interior bedroom and bathroom doors from a sandwich of yellow poplar, aromatic cedar siding and local red cedar trim. I helped him with the last of these doors and realize what a labor of love they are.

Son is not formally trained in the construction field. He finished high school with honors, entered The College of William and Mary and was graduated in 5 semesters in English, again with honors. He spent the next several years learning construction as a helper then independent contractor and learned the stone mason skills the same way. After finishing most of the house, he enrolled back in college and earned his master’s degree in English and he now working on his PhD working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. He still comes home for parts of summers and holidays to do projects, such as the stone fireplace in the basement prior to the finishing of that area as a recreation room.

And to change out a light fixture over the dining table and installing a fan with light as recently as the past holidays. We wouldn’t have this beautiful retirement home if it wasn’t for his effort and his attention to detail.

Life is good on our mountain farm.

January 13, 2014
Resupply

As I have previously posted, we try to be locavores, living on the produce, eggs and chickens that we raise, the occasional deer taken by our son, or limiting our purchases to the local farmers. That said, there are items that we will not or can not do without. Items that if we were true rustic homesteaders, we would do without or find an alternate solution.

I don’t buy paper products, except for toilet paper and during cold season, an occasional box of tissues. I do make our soap and shampoo bars, but they require oils. We have barn cats, dogs, and chickens and they require at least some supplemental feeding and treats. Hubby likes sodas to drink and I like coffee, so the grocery store does get some of our business.

Prior to the Christmas holiday’s our local grocery chain ran a promotion that if a certain amount was spent during about a month long period, you would get a 10% discount on a single purchase of $25 or more during the first eleven days of the new year. The amount needed to be spent was moderate, just a couple hundred dollars and with son and his family here for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, we managed to barely meet their requirement. Today, we made a careful list of pet supplies, trash bags, dish soap, toilet paper, coffee, soda, a few cartons of broth and soup for emergencies and set out to make the most of the discount. The pantry shelves are stocked and we likely won’t need a grocery store run for quite a while. Don’t you love it when you find a bargain or benefit from a promotion? With the discount, plus using their reward card, we saved about a third of the total pre-discount bill.

January 2, 2014