Curve ball after curve ball after…

As for all of us this year and half has been to say the least unique and to say the most it’s been tragic for too, too many. Here it has been, not tragic thankfully, but one big old curve ball after another. Curve balls coming from a global pandemic, family situations, from personal situations, and even some farm curve balls. Explanations to follow…

This picture below was a help during one of our farm curve balls. We had, and I say had, 8 beautiful laying hens. We had Barred Rocks, an Easter Egger and some Delawares. They were out and about on the farm doing their thing happily and added such a nice feel to the farm and area around our home, not to mention filling our bellies and baked goods with wonderful eggs. We had, what we thought to be a nice tight lock on our coop, but somehow, over the years the spring tension on the lock lost some of it’s tightness and it was just enough for a mink to just barely squeeze through a crack of space on the small pop door that the chickens used to get in and out. That mink murdered every one of our pretty birds. It was, in the biggest of pictures, a small thing, but in the smallest of pictures it was a big thing. Our poor birds were terrorized in their coop by this little Minky monster. Just like that our hens were gone, and no more pretty birds meandering the farmstead and no more eggs on our plates. Well almost no more.

I had given a try at water glassing eggs about 6 months prior when we had an abundance of eggs. Using hydrated lime, also known as pickling lime, one can store eggs for easily a year! Often times birds go through slower times of egg production. This can happen when they are molting, and they are saving the protein to create new feathers, rather than creating new eggs, or it can happen when there is less than 14 hours of light in their day. Some people put a light in their coop during the times of year when there is less than 14 hours of light and some people choose to let the birds rest during the low light times of year. That is a whole other controversy that I won’t get into but we choose to use light and have eggs all year.

During times of less eggs, it is nice to have some back up eggs and that is what water glassed eggs are all about. Eggs have a natural bloom on them which means that they can be stored on the counter not in the fridge. In the U.S. store eggs are washed and therefore require refrigeration because the bloom is washed off of them. If you have ever been in a grocery or market in Europe you will not see eggs in the refrigerated section because they do not wash off the bloom. When you water glass eggs you use eggs that, to the eye look clean, and you do not wash off the protective bloom. They are put into the water with the measured amount of hydrated lime and they can be stored this way for quite some time. I am glad I experimented with this method, as we have had eggs to eat since the mink catastrophe. They are not as great for making fried eggs, but perfect for scrambled, and for baking and the whites whip up especially nice for recipes that require whipped egg whites.

Water Glassed eggs

These eggs will be used up soon, even while using them sparingly, almost ceremoniously, since they are our last. We were not planning on getting chicks this year, since we have plenty of our meat birds in the freezer, and because we had our 8 lovely layers, but after the mink attack I did order 15 chicks for our future layers (that is the minimum). These little chicks would give us eggs in 6 months, so I was looking for a solution to 6 months without farm eggs. Recently, I was told about the app Nextdoor, and so I got on there to see if I could possibly do some trading to solve our egg problem. Wow, did Nextdoor come through for us. I really love our small farming community. I explained our Minky situation and not only did I get heartfelt condolences, but I also got many offers of help. I was looking mostly to find someone who would be willing to trade their eggs for our grass fed Scottish Highland ground beef for 6 months until our new little chicks matured into layers. I did find someone who was very willing to make this arrangement, however, another offer came through and it was perfect. Someone replied who sells large amounts of eggs and gets many chicks each year. She had some 2-3 year old hens that were not laying everyday but every other-ish days. She said she felt terrible culling them since they are still laying, but feeding hens daily when you are running an egg business and they are laying every other day-ish makes little fiscal sense, when you have 1 year old hens that are laying daily for the same amount of feed. The eggs here at our farm are really just for the two of us and for family and friends, if we have excess, so we are perfectly happy with 20 plus eggs a week. We will pick up 8-9 of their 2-3 year old layers in mid June by trading a pound of our ground beef per bird, and we will cancel our chick order. A year from now they will become soup birds and we will work out the same arrangement with them for getting another batch of 2-3 year old layers for the next year. It’s a win win, win. The birds get an extra year to free range on the farm, the other farmer doesn’t have to cull hens that are still laying, we don’t have to tend to chicks, and our soup stock supply on the shelves will get a big boost each year. I have made a short story long, but suffice to say we have solved our problem, and gotten to know more of our farming community in the process.

The early Spring garden is looking good!

This is the other side of the garden.

This was the garden a few days ago. It was warm and sunny out. Then out of nowhere we now have freezing night time temperatures last night, tonight and tomorrow night.

Now I have a bucket garden, and…

…the tomatoes are camping.

The cold nights meant that the wee little piglets needed a hut within their hut to keep warm. They looked pretty cozy snuggled in there together, side by side

Spring pictures…

Beautiful Chive blossoms

Honey berries for the win. I’ve tried other berries and they keep failing. Honey berries survive in Alaska and so I think they can make it in Wisconsin. I will be adding more of these.

The currants are also winners. I added two more bushes this year. These will turn a beautiful red!

The tiny but mighty (not very) high tunnel got an upgrade this year. One of my birthday presents was this wonderful shade cover. It will keep us in lettuce and spinach longer. The spinach in this tunnel grows pretty much year round. In the winter it is covered in plastic. We are eating salads every night between the various plantings of spinach and the romaine that is ready now.
The radishes were replaced with beet seeds and more spinach.

These Shiitakes are not premium specimens. The crackled looking ones alternated between periods of too wet and too dry. We didn’t even realize they logs were producing, or we could have caught that mistake. The potatoes were found when getting the onion beds ready this year. They both ended up on our dinner plates that night.

In the kitchen…

Chive blossom vinegar is great for making salad dressings!

We had a great teacher, (our son-in-law) and hubs learned how to make bratwurst!

When you have a good teacher, things turn out looking quite professional!

I usually use round roasts for jerky, but after processing our large bull, we had so much ground beef that I tried a jerky gun. Turns out it is pretty darn delicious.

Our farm community pulled together so well during Covid. They put together a farm collaboration online ordering system and all I had to do was drive through on Saturday morning and they put it in the back of the car. This dish has Lion’s mane mushrooms and oyster mushrooms from one farm, and micro greens from another farm, combined with wild ramps from our woods, and last year’s garlic and onions from the root cellar and Red Tail Hollow Sirloin Steak. I served it with wild rice that was gifted to us at during the Winter gift giving season. Absolutely delicious!

The other curve balls we will work through, we are all dealing with things we have never dealt with before and will continue to for a while. Our family and extended family are all vaccinated and it is nice to begin to crawl out of our caves and begin to meet and hug again. Every little tidbit of normalcy that returns is greatly valued and appreciated.

AmazingWinter Scenes

Winter has been so beautiful this year. We have had absolutely stunning snowfalls, and additionally we have had some incredible hoar frosts. One week in particular the hoar frost was renewed every morning for about 4 days in a row! I can’t help indulging in a few more Winter photos, so here they come!

Despite that there is a place to duck out of the snow, if they wanted, the Highlands love the snow, and prefer to be outside!

Since it has been since early November that I put up a new blog post, I am going back in time to include a few holidays. This was Thanksgiving. It was a small gathering, just 2 guests whom we “bubble” with, but why not go the whole nine yards? There were loads of leftovers for our guests and also to bring to our elders in town, whom were not able to attend.

Celebrating Christmas in the new room was very special!

Our pigs, were processed in early December. We always wonder how the pork will turn out, once we get the packaged meat back. We were absolutely thrilled with the pork this year! Below are the pork steaks. You will notice, on these steaks, that were ready for the grill, that this is not “the other white meat”. This is a breed called Gloucestershire Old Spot, a heritage breed pig, and was raised on pasture, walnuts, apples, garden food, and organic feed. The color on these steaks speaks for itself and the taste is amazing. It helps that we get our piglets from a pig farmer who raises her pigs with love, and great care.
This year was definitely a win!

Possibly I have mentioned, that I had a granola business for about 6 years. It took me a long time to figure out how to scale down the recipe from where it was when we were producing large amounts. It has been a long time since I have made it, and I think I could have baked it a bit less, but it is nice to have jars of granola on the shelf again!

This is it! After a lot of “pretty good”crusts, I think I have it down now! This chicken pot pie, filled with our own Red Tail Hollow Homestead chicken, was as delicious as it was pretty.

Summer 2020 in a pan. I love how great these veggies freeze, they taste almost garden fresh!

This is a favorite activity of mine, and it comes with rules. It must be done in January, with a fresh layer of snow on the ground, to fully enjoy the process of making seed selections. This year, with our new room done, I have added another rule… there must be a roaring fire, in our new fireplace!

This year being such a strange year, due to Covid, my in-town daughter and I were not sure we would be able to go on our yearly cabin weekend. Thankfully, we were able to do it. The owners of the cabin were very Covid conscious, and sanitized everything before our arrival. It was so nice to get to have this time together. A fresh layer of snow fell while we were there. A Bald Eagle even parked on a tree not far from the cabin for us! These pictures were scenes out our window.
It was a very peaceful stay.

Late Fall

I am starting this post with something that we have never seen so clearly here. This is by far the best rainbow we have ever had here on the farm. Seeing clearly this year has been difficult. It surely has been a hard year for everyone, and harder for many, then others. Searching out the good in this muck of a year has become a focus, for a year called 2020 it seems that clear vision, this year, has been anything but 2020. Perhaps at the end of the rainbow is not a pot of gold but a vaccine that will help life slowly ebb toward a sense of normalcy.

It’s Fall and the deer are out and about in this nice weather. This fellow was out our window by about 20 yards. Funny, we have a hunter, on our land, and he can be in his tree stand all day and see no activity but while I sipped my morning coffee, this guy was looking into our window.

This cake recipe was my friend’s Aunt’s recipe. I am so glad she she shared it with me. It is such a simple treat but is ready to feature seasonal fruits at their abundant times of year. These were apples from our “wild” trees. These trees are all over, some in clusters and some here and there. The clustered trees perhaps one day were an intentionally planted orchard, but the here and there trees, I think we can probably give thanks to the critters for the seed distribution.

This is apple pie filling. I have never made it and frozen it in portions for a pie. It will be fun this winter to make a quick crust and fill it with this sweet delicious filling. It took me forever to get the pie crusts to work well, but I think I finally have it down. This skill also comes in handy for chicken pot pie which is a big favorite here.

Well into late October there were still garden goodies.

These may look like Brussels Sprouts, but they are actually what I call adorable baby cabbages! They grow around the the larger head of cabbage. My fine neighbor informed me that they are actually called lateral shoots, but he agreed baby cabbages was surely the more endearing name.

This is Fall broccoli. Our Son-in-Law gave us some Fall plant starts. I planted them a bit late, but we still had a few dinners with fresh broccoli out of it last week.

This was another Fall start he gave us. I have never grown red Bok Choy before, it was very delicious!

A favorite Fall activity of mine, which I have written about probably too many times, is the High Bush Cranberry picking. We use these for making juice or jelly. This year most of them became juice. Picking these definitely means Winter is on the way. I always leave some of them on the bush. The birds don’t prefer them, but in Winters that are extraordinarily tough, they will eat them. When we notice that they have eaten them toward the end of Winter we know it was a hard Winter for them. Always interesting to learn from wildlife on the farm. Next to the berries is some kindling I gathered down in a low wooded section. It was only enough for one fire but there is more there. As you will see in the picture below….

…I found out that yoga pants are the WRONG pants to wear in the wooded areas. Picking off these little burrs, took a very long time!

These were the last tomatoes of the season, along with lots of our garlic, peppers and onions and herbs. I roasted them for a very long time and then pureed it into a pasta sauce. Wow, so much rich flavor in all these roasted veggies! Happily, there is more in the freezer for another dinner!

Dried red peppers for adding to dishes this Winter.

Winter salad. Our neighbor grows delicious microgreens, and they are what we use for Winter salads. I added some of our last peppers a bit of fermented red kraut I made, and some pickled eggs, from our hens.. Winter salads are delicious and quite different than summer salads. Perhaps appreciated even a little more than the summer salads we have nightly. Fresh salad in the Winter is a huge treat.

There are so many things to ferment at the end of Fall. This is red kraut, green kraut, pickled green tomatoes, and in the tall jar is a mix of peppers, garlic, carrots, onions, dill in a salt water brine. Shown below on it’s own.

After fermenting, this was pureed into a hot pepper sauce that is good on so many things!

Fermented pepper sauce.

We had a huge potato harvest this year. Unfortunately one section of them was a bit of a fail. These potatoes did not have enough mulch on top of them and were exposed to sunlight. They turned green and should not be eaten. Fortunately, I got some advice from another local farm and they said we can use them as seed potatoes next year! Not a complete fail, since we can plant them. I was glad they would not go to waste! Lesson learned!

Our 10 hens are working on overtime! We have been sharing with family and selling some as well. This year I decided to try an experiment. It is an old technique called “water glassing”. See below.

These are water glassed eggs. Since predators can surprise us and get some of our chickens and also because chickens go through a molt and don’t lay eggs when molting, I decided to have some back up eggs. These eggs are in a pickling lime solution, not to be confused with pickled eggs. It’s a calcium hydroxide solution that preserves them. They can be in here for many, many months. They work great for scrambled eggs, and for baking with, but not as good for fried eggs or hard boiling. I hear that the whites beat up into a meringue better than fresh egg whites do! I thought that was pretty interesting!

Move over Pop-Tarts! These are a much better version. Some call them “hand pies”. These were filled with a blueberry jam filling, and were absolutely yummy!

My first stab at granola bars. Turns out that they were more like granola candy bars. Far too sweet. I will try other recipes. These though are a nice little dessert, or grab and go treat.

Hamburger stew has become a huge favorite of mine. When you raise your own beef it is so easy to make a huge batch. If I were buying ground beef at the store I surely would not make a batch this large, as it would be very costly to invest 8 pounds of ground beef into a stew.

Here is lots of Hamburger stew for the shelves. An awesome heat and eat meal on a busier day, or more likely, on a day I just don’t feel like cooking!

The house project is making great strides. We are so pleased with how the stonework turned out.

…and we have a DOOR!

One of the things with Covid that so many of us are affected by is not being able to see our relatives. My 95 year old Dad lives in another state and so we have been video chatting almost daily since March. Amongst the items he saved from his service, in WWII, is his diary that he made daily entries in throughout his entire service. I have the diary here, and during our video chats I read him the entries. It’s been a very special thing for us to share. It is amazing how much of it he remembers so well. He can often expand on the writings by explaining things to me with more details. I can’t wait to see him in person but until then, we will keep video chatting and working our way though 1943 to 1945.

Summer (under the cloak of 2020) and Final Winter Preps

Since I last wrote, a whole Summer has come and is almost gone. The Summer was beautiful, and the gardens have had a great year! I wish I could say the same thing for 2020, which I would like to toss, in it’s entirety, into the compost pile! Trying to keep a good perspective, in this very historical, never should be forgotten, year is not easy. Covid-19 aside, I am hoping this year of unrest is a year of growth for this country. One can only hope. I remind myself to be grateful for any tiny thing that went well in 2020, even if the list is very short and I have to search hard to find it.

The Summer Garden:

This is the first year I finally grew more than enough beans and tomatoes to last until next Summer. I did buy 7 lbs of beans from my neighbor, just in case, but with all the beans I am still getting, I definitely would have been ok without them, but extra is never a bad thing.

The garden at the end of May.

The garden at the beginning of August.

Currently I am in the the last phases of food preservation as we head into Fall. The freezers are almost at capacity as well as the pantry shelves. I am looking forward to the stillness of the cold months and the good food that the many months of planning have culminated into, finally.

After breaking off the stems, I lay them on the sheet pan this way. It makes it easy to grab a pile and slice them all at once into bite sized pieces. The freezer is loaded with beans that will last us until Spring.

The beans that didn’t get eaten or frozen became spicy dilly beans.

This is the first year I canned peaches and peach jam. These peaches will be saved to be eaten as treats this Winter.

I have canned quarts and quarts of tomato puree and I still have so many tomatoes on the vines! By the time that I finally finish canning I will likely have over 40 quarts. I have been selling my tomatoes too, and giving some away to family which totaled about 100 pounds! This has been hands down the best tomato year ever! These jars will be used for a quick tomato basil soup, in beef stews, for making BBQ sauce, ketchup, pasta sauces or other various tomato based soups.

20 pints of salsa should do us for the year!

I love having Hamburger Stew on the shelf. It is loaded with our Highland, grass fed beef, beans, tomatoes, carrots, garlic, onions and local corn. It’s a delicious quick hot meal. Sometimes I add potatoes or pasta when I am heating it up, and occasionally I add a bit of shredded, aged cheddar on top, and it becomes Wisconsin cheeseburger soup!

The apples are just starting! I jumped ahead by getting one batch of applesauce done early. There will be more for sure, and dried apples too!

Just picked veggies are so pretty!

I was thinking that I would have to start soaking some of our shiitake logs soon because we just weren’t getting many mushrooms, and 2 days later I went out and found these! Jackpot! Mushrooms are always a mystery! Most of these got dehydrated for Winter soups and veggie dishes.

We haven’t gotten into growing corn yet, so I stopped at a local farm and picked up about 100 ears, which got blanched, cut, bagged and frozen.

The chicken freezer is full! And guess what the farm is SO much quieter with all those roosters gone. Just 10 quiet hens now. So much more peaceful! We will have plenty of delicious roasted chickens this year.

In addition to the corn, beans, Kale and Chard that are in the freezer, we are also loaded with peppers. I had no idea, till last year, that they freeze fabulously. I let them thaw just a little and then dice them, they cut very easily this way. I use them in all kinds of dishes and soups during the year.

This just pulled garlic is now dried and stored. Now we are waiting for the onions to finish drying and then when they are off the drying rack it will be time to bring in the potatoes to dry before storing.

Tomorrow I will be planting spinach in the tunnel for Fall and Winter eating, and ahead of us still, is cider making, pumpkin puree for pies and breads, more freezing of kale, and chard, and covering the tunnel w plastic for Winter.

It’s been a great year in the garden but I confess I am so ready to wrap it up! Bring on the sweatshirts, the knit hats, the extra blankets and roaring fires in the fireplace. I hear that this Winter will be a hunker down Winter more so than any other Winter, due to Covid-19, so count me in, I am ready for the great hunker of Winter 2020-2021.

All the Signs are Here and it’s all Spring

Since we generally are on the farm and have few reasons to leave, things haven’t changed a lot here with quarantine. It is frustrating and disappointing to not see family, but the most important thing is that we are healthy and the family is healthy and so we are beyond grateful for this. When our state stops going upward in cases, which it has yet to do, I will make a trip to see family and boy do I look forward to it.

Getting Spring supplies, however, was definitely different this year. Even getting seeds and seed potatoes was touch and go. We did in the end get what we needed. This year, now that we will have a root cellar, I will be saving an amount of potatoes for seed potatoes, so that we can supply our own potatoes full circle, from planting to eating to planting again and this will be one more way to rely on ourselves for our food. This year we had some of last year’s to plant but not nearly enough.

Watching the pandemic induced changes has been stunning. We have all seen the empty grocery shelves, the shortages of supplies, the limiting of purchases, and now the meat industry succumbing to the pandemic as well. When it began, people who felt they were food secure found themselves wondering if they really were. People who already felt food insecure felt this compounded. We saw the fragility of our American food system beginning to spiral before our eyes in the early weeks of pandemic panic buying. Panic food buying is simply going to happen when a good portion of the food system is in other hands. If you make your living in a city and even if you are not in a city, sometimes growing your food just can’t fit, and lack of food is scary for anyone.

What Spring brought, secondary to the Pandemic, was surprising increase in direct purchasing from small farms, newbies began raising chickens, people started baking bread, and when yeast was not to be found on the shelves they created sourdough starters. People began to take more hand in their food, even if it was in small ways. Small farms became the safety net for many people who were faced with empty store shelves. I had relatives in downtown Chicago buying flour from small family farms, up our way, who raise their own grain and mill it locally, and a friend who drove up here twice from the city to find farm food that was less available in the stores. We saw more people raising chicks for eggs, planting gardens and frequenting small family farms for porch pick ups of meat and eggs. Additionally, we have never seen such a run on baby chicks, nor have we ever sold so much meat! We’ve already sold one of our Spring pigs and they aren’t even on the farm yet! This has never happened! We sold a side of beef, this Spring, which was new for us because we have only sold retail cuts in the past. It’s been a learning curve for everyone at some level whether it be the consumer finding new avenues for purchasing food, the family that decides to start raising some of their own food, or the small farmers who have done an incredible job of meeting the needs of consumers, in a contact free way, with porch pick ups, drive through pick ups and even deliveries. I even started seeing old War Food Administration posters, like this one, surfacing on Facebook, (shown below) last used during World War II. Hopefully some of the people who sought out the family farms for purchasing food will continue to purchase this way in the future. It’s not just a phrase, “know your farmer, know your food”.

 

Spring on our farm…

There is so much Spring all around us. We have burned the last fire in the fireplace and now we are look forward to outdoor fires some evenings. The following pictures show all the early signs of Spring here as we progressed from early Spring to late Spring.

Starter plants indoors.

Morel Mushrooms!

Baby Chicks in the garage. Most definitely a sign of Spring! These 40 roosters are Red Rangers. We have found them to be a great meat bird, with excellent foraging skills. We let them range freely when they get bigger. This is our third year with the Rangers, they go into the freezer at about 5 pounds each and that is a perfect size we think.

Carrots that made it through the Winter, in the tunnel. They are not too pretty but they are crunchy and a welcome site.

Hostas are delicious! These were sautéed with some green garlic.

Asparagus

Thyme, Lemon Balm, Shiitake mushrooms, Rhubarb, Asparagus, and Lambs Quarters.

The Cattle are back on grass after a long Winter on hay.

As we progressed further into Spring the apple blossoms showed so nicely this year. We had a super cold night during their blossom but we got lucky and didn’t lose them.

The Garlic looks great this year!

This Mama deer hid her Spring babies in the tall grass on this hillside, this morning. She took off for a while, but she came back later for her little twins. It gives the babies a chance to rest, and these little twins couldn’t have been more than a couple days old.

We are just waiting for the sliced potatoes to heal enough to plant. Now that we will have a root cellar, for next Winter, we are planting loads of potatoes. It will be great to have true long term storage for them and for carrots, onions, squashes, and cabbages.

The lettuce in the tunnel garden is looking good and the spinach, radishes, beets, dill and some peas that will soon be climbing the trellis are doing well.

Finally after nursing the baby plants inside since mid March, they are outside! The only plants left inside are the squashes, and they will be planted soon, as well as the potatoes. This means no more plant shelves in the kitchen!

At this point in the Spring the little ones are now up in the Big Coop, so no more garage chickens!!

 

Lastly, of course, I can’t do a post without food pics so here are a few highlights of early Springtime…

Morels and asparagus are one of my favorite Spring dishes!

These amazing looking peppers are actually last Summer’s peppers. They froze so beautifully that when you cook them up you could mistake them for having been fresh ones! Finishing last year’s Fall/Winter veggies is part of Spring.

Lots of eggs are also a part of Spring. This was my first attempt at making egg noodles. I should have used all purpose flour for dusting, not semolina, lesson learned, but they were very good. Next time I will make them one crank thinner on the pasta machine. There’s always room to learn more. The nice part is that once there were done being made I popped them in the dehydrator which left me with this…

…a nice big jar of homemade pasta! I am looking forward to my next batch with less semolina and cranked a bit thinner they should be just right!

Another use for lots of eggs is quiche! This one is headed for the oven and has foraged ramps, and garlic mustard. Once chilled and sliced it makes for an easy breakfast to grab from the fridge and warm up.

Lastly, this pretty dessert, that my daughter made, is a great way to end. It was a really delicious treat!

Finding Comfort in the Kitchen, of Course!

There are so many reasons why people homestead. We are fortunate to homestead because it was a dream and we love it. It’s an amazing thing, to us, to experience eating, for the most part, all food grown or raised on our land. I marvel at our plates actually knowing every thing that went into the process, and the months it took to get it to our plate. The reason food preparation is such a big focus here is because raising enough food to sustain us requires a lot of attention. When you eat food that you grow, raise, harvest, can, freeze, ferment, dehydrate and cook, from scratch, it is a time consuming process but I enjoy it immensely.

Suddenly now I see things through a different lens. We are all experiencing a seismic change on a world level and on our own personal levels. It’s changed everything. Parents are now homeschool teachers, kid’s normal worlds have been squelched with change, most of our elderly parents are in isolation, shopping has become strategic and in the face of all this we can’t reach out to console each other by hugging our friends and neighbors and families.

It brought a new meaning to homesteading for us, we felt the shift. I’ve never sold more meat from our little farm meat business. People are finding stores to be a risky place and in some cases feel uncomfortable going in them. We have been doing porch pick ups. I put the order in the cooler on the deck and they drive up and take their order and leave a check in the cooler. I say hello to customers though the window near the door. Locally our small farmers are banding together and providing food to people by drive through, contact free, pick ups. I feel so proud of our farming community over how they have come together to work through the obstacles so that they can provide safe farm fresh food for people. It’s been amazing watching this community become even closer, ironically at a time when we cannot be physically close.

Here on a smaller scale we have been keeping fed by working through the freezers and making the most of everything we have. Above you see Walnut syrup from the sap I had in the freezer from last year, potato and sausage soup from some shelf stable “Loaded Baked Potato Soup” that I had pressure canned a while back and served with some grilled brat slices (from our pigs) in it. Below in the frame you see our last frozen tomatoes from last year, which became a fresh tomato soup that tasted like summer. The potatoes in the picture were the last of ours from last summer. Our root cellar is not done yet so they were stored in a cold room of the house and made it pretty long. These will end up being planted soon if they stay in condition a bit longer. The canned garbanzos became hummus and the rest of the beans have been great in soups and chilis.

Since we eat mostly our own food, (other than dairy which we buy, because we don’t have a dairy cow) and some from a a few neighboring farms, we are in many ways doing what we always do, but there is a different feel to the way I view our food resources now. We always try to make the most of our food, but we have taken it up a few notches now. Using mixed fermented pickled veggies like cauliflower and peppers on our spinach salads helps to make good use of the fermented veggies in the garage fridge and it helps with the lack of fresh veggies. Pulling out all the stewing chickens for making a large amount of broth, and using the big bags of oddly assorted beef bones to make more beef broth. I have used most of our broth up in the last month, in soups, stews, pot roasts and more. I have also used a lot of the various beans I canned so I will be working on replacing all these things this week, to be sure we don’t run out. The frozen corn, beans, chard, collards, spinach, broccoli and peppers in the freezer, are our veggies nightly with dinner. I am keeping a careful eye to use them at a rate where they will still get us through to the time when the first summer veggies appear.

It’s great that the tunnel made it all winter, so we have plenty of fresh spinach, and some small beets and carrots to add to the dinner table.

I’ve also been making great use of my sourdough discard in the fridge. I sometimes forget about it in there for periods of time, but I have found the perfect cracker recipe using it. They have a really great sourdough taste to them.

Shown above, is my process for making “bouillon”. The first picture shows all the scrapings and juices from a sheet pan that chicken was roasted on, and after it went in the fridge, you can see in the second picture it becomes a little jello patty. Then I heat it up in order to strain out the small pieces that you see on the top in the second picture. Once heated it gets strained through a jelly straining bag. Then into the fridge to turn to jello again and as you can see I cut it in half and stored it for the freezer. I call it chicken gold, and when added to soups it adds so much flavor and also all that healthy gelatin as well!

During these unusual times, sometimes there need to be some special treats, like Sunday morning cinnamon rolls, and these…

…which are one of hubs favorites! Extra pie crust, twisted with cinnamon and sugar, just like his Mom used to make, and they are always a hit. It’s no lie, food comforts us and brings floods of memories with their tastes. We are all appreciating small comforts right now.

I have a few more food pics, because when you have a neighbor who grows amazing food, and gifts you a box of edible flowers, it must be shown off, because, well, they are BEAUTIFUL!

As for the future garden this summer, the starter plants are growing well inside with their crazy pink/blue lights hanging over them. If you look at them too long it makes everything else look green when you look away!! It is nice to see their little heads popping up out of their cups. They look so green and full of hope. I will never stop being amazed at how those tiny little plants will provide 100s of pounds of food.

Garden planning…this picture was taken at a lovely cafe, while waiting to meet my daughter for a lunch date. Such a simple thing, that now seems extraordinary to do. As it turned out, this was my last real outing, apart from 2 days of helping my Dad move out of his house in time for his closing on the sale of his home.

Lastly, many of you have seen the progress shots as the house addition has been progressing. Amazingly, it is completed. We thought it would be much sooner, but ironically it was ready just as the “shelter in place” order was issued, due to Covid 19. We have been spending our nights around the fire and it has been warm and comforting during these unusual times.

Wishing everyone safe passage through all of this and looking forward to seeing people on the other side some day.

Beautiful Winter scenes, and a very late Christmas wrap up!

 

We have been going through some family changes this past year, with parents, on both sides, settling into new situations that are more fitting to their time of life. This has meant sorting through things and passing things on to next generations. This salad bowl, that I saw on my Mother-in-law’s table over the last 35 years, is a treasured item. Many years ago she told me that I could have it and as they pared down their belongings this was passed to me. I love it very much for it’s beauty and for the story that it makes me a part of, as well. This salad was served on Christmas Eve. To my constant amazement the Spinach was from our tiny high tunnel in December! The greens and watermelon radishes were from our small Saturday local winter market.

After Christmas 2018, I went to a quilt shop that was going out of business. The fabrics were 50% off and the Christmas designs were 50% off of that! I purchased a lot of different fabrics and my daughter and I cut them so that this year on Christmas we would not have to use gift wrap, but would use gift bags in lieu of wrapping paper. Well, December rolled around this year and there were all the nicely cut out pieces for the bags that I never made! I got the sewing machine out and for a couple days I just sewed bags. I have literally no sewing talents at all, but I can sew straight lines on a sewing machine, so without pinning anything, or measuring anything I just went at it. I didn’t do a drawstring on them, instead I finished the edges at the top and tied them with some hemp string. It went quickly and I had enough bags to wrap all the family gifts. This year I collected the bags afterwards for a good start on next year’s bags. My plan going forward is that I will make many more bags this year, for all different occasions and then I will always give the bag with the gift, asking that they suggest to others to pass it on as well.

I posted this on a Homesteading Facebook page and was absolutely shocked to see over 500 comments, and 4700 likes! People really liked the idea and many said they too were going to quit buying gift wrap. It also got shared many times. I just wanted to share an idea, and I had no idea how much exposure the idea would get! How cool if a bunch of people do not use wrapping paper next year because of this little Facebook post!

A little holiday bake. Breadsticks for the soup, buns for lunch the next day and a braided loaf for serving with dinner.

This is a 100% grass fed Scottish Highland 5 bone Prime Rib saved for this special holiday occasion. It was as great as it looks! Highland beef is quite special.

I accidentally mixed some of my soft wheat berries with my hard wheat berries, and not wanting to make bread products with a mixed result, and feeling bad for the poor chickens with nothing green to eat, I decided to grow some wheat grass for the chickens. The chickens were at first alarmed by the wheat grass but once one tasted it they were definitely on board! It was nice to see them eating something green!

In order to make room for our pork, we will soon get back from the locker, I decided to use up a lot of round roasts. I thaw them about half way and then slice them thinly. It’s much easier to do this when they are still partly frozen. After marinating the meat overnight I put it in the dehydrator.

Here is just some of the finished product. It made quite a bit!

 

This was a first attempt at a very rustic Summer Sausage. I’ve learned the word “rustic”covers all sins of dabblers trying out new things. Next time I would cook it longer to dry it a bit more. It was good, but was surely a first try. Next time I will do a few things differently and if I really like it, it might warrant getting a simple sausage stuffer for future batches.

…and this just in, we finally, finally, saw some Winter on the farm, and it couldn’t be prettier.

We broke in the new fireplace on New Year’s Eve! There is so much work going on in the addition at this time, that we only used it that one time. I am really hoping for a cold March so that we can get to use it before it gets too warm!

 

Dark Winter

We are now headed into a season that I love. Most people don’t love it. Dark Winter is not technically a season or even a term, (at least not one that I know of), but it’s just one that feels comfortable to me.

March is when seed starting begins, May is when chick raising begins, and June/July is when the hogs arrive on the farm. By the end of November the pigs are to the processor, and the chickens are all in the freezer, apart from our enthusiastic young layers who are laying eggs like crazy! This is when the quiet settles in and the short days, to me, are welcome. It is a time to restore, to do things slower, to cook hearty and warming foods, and to not think of Spring planning till the fire is roaring, the farm is covered in snow and the new year has passed. We are at 9 hours of light right now, and that will decrease a bit yet till it begins to slowly turn around as the new year approaches. There is a feel to these days, that is hard for me to explain, but suffice to say I appreciate it in it’s own right.

We have not had a lot of snow yet, oddly we did in late October, and that is when this snowy cow picture was taken.

Funny, the Highlands could care less about the snow. It piles on their backs and they still prefer to be out in it rather than duck into the the covered area for refuge.

I finished the Sumac project. In my last post I showed the Sumac clusters that my brother-in-law so kindly gathered for me. Here is the powdered Sumac and the remaining seed that was left after the powder was sieved out. The Za’atar seasoning I made with it turned out delicious. It was fun to make something from WI Sumac to give during Winter gift giving season.

I also made these Sumac pickled onions. They are delicious on sandwiches and in salads.

This photo collage was taken on a very cold day, one that was perfect for hiding out inside making “loaded baked potato soup”. I used Turkey broth from the Thanksgiving bird as the base. Then added some of our potatoes, bacon, dried red peppers, garlic, foraged ramps, sage, dried celery and garlic. The fire was going all day, and between that and the soup simmering we were toasty warm inside.

So much Thanksgiving broth!

This is such a good time to fill the shelves. The broth making process warms the kitchen so nicely! I am loving having, ready to eat foods on the shelves. Irish Beef Stew, Loaded Baked Potato Soup, Hearty Hamburger Stew, French Onion Soup, Pasta with Meat Sauce, all kinds of beans and more. The other day I mixed a quart of the Irish Beef Stew with a quart of French Onion Soup, then added a few carrots, some dried celery, some small potatoes and dried mushrooms. The flavor for this beef soup was so rich and good!

This was the very last of the Thanksgiving turkey. It turned out delicious!

Sourdough tear and share rolls. I think I am wearing out my favorite sourdough cookbook! Every recipe I try from it is great!

Nope these are not mini marshmallows. It was a first attempt at making noodles for throwing in soup, but due to technical difficulties on my first batch, I ended up making mini dumplings. They puffed up nicely in the soup.

Beautiful pheasant feathers! Hubs went pheasant hunting last month. He really enjoyed it. Our honey farmer took him with and they did well.

The cleaned pheasant.

Despite the cold the Fall/Winter Spinach is still doing well. Winter salads are a huge treat!

Our new hens are working overtime! In 7 years of raising birds, we have yet to have a double yolk, but in the last month we have had 2 double Yolkers!

Trying to make good use of the eggs while we are getting 40 a week is the name of the game. This week I was able to sell 4 dozen, hardboiled 2 dozen, pickled some of the hard boiled eggs, and then made a large quiche. I am now caught up with production!

Progress shot. The Fireplace is beautiful and the room is really coming along. I believe we actually may sit in there some day!

It is now that season, Winter festivities, holidays and so many delicious goodies. Yesterday was a fun baking day with my daughter. We are ahead of the game this year!

Fall photos and Waking up to Winter Weather!

The collection of photos in this post go back over the last month. This morning looks anything like this one here. We woke up to a couple of inches of snow. First snow of the year! I wonder what type of Winter we will have this year. October is a bit on the early side for snow. The trick or treating kiddos this year will be wearing snow suits over their costumes, in true Wisconsin style, this year!

The project continues to march on like a heard of turtles. It’s looking great! I need to just keep my patience about me!

At the end of the garden, when frost came early, I picked all the peppers. They are so colorful and delicious! I still have some left in the fridge to use up, and loads of them in the freezer for Winter.

I didn’t get as many apples as I had hoped, for dried for winter snacking, but I have access to more of these apples from my organic farmer neighbor, who has started doing some distributing of other local farm’s foods. These were from north of here, and are delicious honey crisps!

I think we have gotten our last flush of mushrooms for the year, looking forward to more in the Spring. These cool weather mushrooms are meatier and quite different than the early Spring mushrooms, and even mid summer mushrooms. It is always interesting to watch them change over the growing season.

So pretty!

These will be used as additions to Winter soups. Mushroom soup is only for mid summer when we are rich in mushrooms. The rest of the year they are great additions to soups and stews.

Think Hershey kisses, but garlic instead. This is frozen chunks of roasted pureed garlic. Once frozen I pop them out of this tray and fill bags with them in the freezer. Sometimes it’s nice to not have to peel garlic for a quick add on to a dish.

I used up the last of the cabbages, they just were not going to keep long with the root cellar not ready yet. Now they will keep just fine. They were added to my ferment fridge for Winter eating.

Speaking of my ferment fridge… This will last all Winter.

These are the last little bits from the garden yesterday. It is officially done, the season is a wrap!

Roasted veggies are so delicious this time of year!

Our new layers gave us our first eggs! They are precocious little hens, they started producing 3 weeks early! We now have an abundance of eggs again, so time to be able to have hard boiled eggs in the fridge again, with plenty left to cook with as well.

This is one very happy sourdough starter and it turned into some very happy…

…sourdough Rye bread!

This is a favorite thing of mine. After roasting a chicken I scrape every bit of it from the pan and put it in a small dish and warm it up so it is easy to strain. Then I run it through a strainer and then refrigerate it. Once the fat has settled on the top if scrapes right off and what is left is the firmest gelatin ever and packed with flavor. I save these in the freezer to add to soups. Liquid gold.

SUMAC! My brother-in-law picked an incredible amount of Sumac for me. He has such a nice patch of it at his place up north. I am working to get as many of the little “berries” off of these clusters and then I will dry them and grind them into Sumac powder. Once it is ground the seeds get sifted out and I will use the Sumac powder to make Za’atar seasoning for holiday gifts.

Other holiday gifts. This Wisconsin Cranberry Apple Jam turned out so good, I could eat it with a spoon, but I try and control myself enough to put it on a piece of warm homemade toast instead.

The squash garden did not do to well this year, but it’s enough to make plenty of pumpkin puree for future pumpkin breads, and the squashes should last a while before we have to use them.

The light is on in the coop. This will keep us in eggs all Winter. Many people choose to let their hens rest in the Winter and don’t use a light to promote egg laying but we have a very well insulated coop, we give them light 14 hours a day, and lots of good seed mixes and black oil sunflower seeds to give them energy and protein to lay in the Winter for us. They don’t seem to mind and the eggs are wonderful to have all Winter.

Now, with today being the first snowfall, these Fall scenes are pretty much a thing of the past. It was a beautiful Fall, but a bit short before we suddenly jumped into Winter early.

 

Our Food Year

September is when we start to really see the winter food coming together. Food growing season actually runs throughout the year, but in very different ways.

January is when the seed catalogs arrive, with their colorful covers and beautiful pictures of vegetables and fruit varieties. I save looking at them for the quiet that comes after the holiday season and this year I will sit by our, soon to be, beautiful new fireplace to look at them. Choosing new varieties and comparing garden notes is always fun. I am getting better at taking garden notes, thanks to a farmer friend who enlightened me. It’s also the time that I look at the chick catalogs and make choices for our meat birds and new layers. January also, brings a bit longer days and the Spinach that is in the mini high tunnel begins to wake up and grow a little faster, by March it is looking beautiful, given that the climate inside there is entirely different than outside the tunnel. February and March is tree tapping season. Although I do it on a very small scale, our syrup needs are not frequent, so it is all we need. Mid-March is seed starting in preparation for the summer garden. I start more plants than I need, in part to be sure I have enough of what I want to have, but also to sell some plants so that I can cover the seed costs. March and April are busy with tending to the seeds, re-potting them into their next size up pots, as they grow, and also enjoying the last of our cool weather, grey skies and cozy time. April is also when our meat birds arrive. This requires lots of attention. The more attention they get, the lower the chick losses. Over the last 7 years, I have only lost a couple! Their temperature must be properly regulated and they get fresh water intermittently all day. This is easier to do when you only have 40 birds. If I had a couple of 100 birds it would be much harder to tend to, especially their sensitive issue at 3-6 days old, which requires getting very personal with their care and cleaning! Mid May is time to clean up the garden and prep for planting. When May comes to an end the garden plants are in, and the chicks (our meat birds), have moved to their big outdoor coop and have left the confines of our garage. This is always a big YAY moment, to regain the use of the garage. May is also Morel mushroom foraging time, often we find pheasant back mushrooms and wild ramps as well (these taste a bit like garlic and onion put together). If there is abundance of these, I dry them for later use. June is generally a quiet time, and it is the last quiet time till October! August is time to plant winter spinach, radishes and carrots in the mini high tunnel, which we cover in plastic in October. August is also the time when we process our meat birds, here on the farm. This year for the first and hopefully the last we took them to a processor because of the building project we are involved in, there just wasn’t time to process them here. July through early October is gardening, canning, dehydrating, freezing, fermenting and of course lots and lots of delicious cooking with fresh vegetables! This year, if it is ready in time we will also add root cellaring to our storage methods. December brings to an end, the pig raising year, and at any given time during the year we process 1-2 highland cattle based on their readiness.

October until February is the reward, in my mind, for a long gardening and food preservation season, allowing more time to read about new gardening, preserving and cooking methods. Now that I have learned pressure canning, I use this time, also, for stocking the shelves with soups and broths, and stews. Canning really heats the kitchen up, so this is the perfect time to do this. Also, finally reading a bit of fiction. I love this time of year. This year it will include a fireplace and so I am looking forward to it even more!

These onions finally dried enough, and with the help of my daughter, they are strung and will be hung tonight in the basement and moved to the root cellar when it is completed.

These potatoes have been stored carefully in boxes and will have to be looked at weekly to be sure one hasn’t spoiled. I guess it’s like the old phrase, “one bad apples spoils the bunch”.

These beans are now frozen in 2 cup portions for serving this winter.

My outdoor refrigerator is filled with vinegar pickles, pickled peppers and some fermented pickles. They last a surprisingly long time in the fridge!

The corn is also frozen in 2 cup units.

Some of the tomatoes were monstrously large this year!

Tomato puree in jars for the shelves. This will get used in soups, stews, pasta sauce, and possibly for making more BBQ sauce this winter.

Fermented tomatoes with garlic and basil. This is a new technique, so the jury is out yet. The recipe says to take the tomatoes and the garlic out of the brine and puree them for a fresh sauce. Fingers crossed this works!

I think I have finally found a good, thick salsa recipe. It could have been a bit spicier but I can amend that when I open them, with a bit of cayenne.

We have been eating tomato salads nightly! They are so good. Tomatoes, cucumbers, feta cheese, herbs and a bit of Italian dressing.

Veggies, veggies and more veggies!

This is a progress shot. We actually have a roof and shingles on it now. It is great to see a roof on, and things are drier now, but I have to say that the beautiful trusses look prettier without a roof!

Breakfast for dinner is always good! Everything on this plate is from the farm. Even the dried sprinkled pepper powder and foraged Lamb’s quarters is from the farm. I never get tired of taking stock of my plate and thinking about the food year that went into it.

Fall will be here officially just days from now, however, when I see an orange pumpkin it’s as good as here to me.