We had a little Christmas miracle this morning — a white Christmas. It wasn’t much — just a dusting, but it brought the peacefulness and magic of a special Christmas. And Santa’s reindeer weren’t far behind — grazing in the bushes just behind the picket fence.
Merry Christmas!
We have one fence for keeping things in – and three fences for keeping things out. The fence for keeping things in works well. The fences for keeping things out – not so much. Between deer, rabbits, ground hogs and birds – my gardens seem to be fair game for anything roaming through the property. “Oh look!” they exclaim. “There’s a fenced in garden. Let’s go have dinner there tonight.” And they do.
But not next year. We’ve rabbit proofed our six foot tall fence with chicken wire around the base of it to keep the rabbits out. And we’re stringing fishing line across the top of it to keep the birds out. We’re putting up another six-foot tall fence to protect my fruit trees, raspberry bushes, blueberry bushes and strawberry plants – with enough room left over to plant potatoes and squash and whatever else strikes my fancy when the spring seed catalogs come out. And we’re putting up a picket fence where my “pumpkin patch” will reside.
Now everyone just needs to follow the rules. If you’re supposed to be inside a fence (like Pono), then stay in. If you’re supposed to be outside the fence, then stay out. I’m hoping for a bumper crop next year.
The 2017 garden was a success – the freezer is full to the brim with a rainbow of vegetables – beets, carrots, green beans, squash. Our shelves are laden with jars of sauce, jams, jellies, pickles, salsas, chutneys and soups. The wooden crates in the basement are full of potatoes and squash, and the pantry is full of dehydrated tomatoes, herbs, scallions, onions, garlic.
What did we really get out of the garden? Here it is by the numbers (rounded to the closest pound):
That’s 380 pounds of produce! And that’s not counting the salsify that we’ve just begun to harvest, and all the herbs, and the gourds that were just for decoration, and the smattering of raspberries and blueberries.
What do I want to do differently next year? I think less tomatoes, beets and beans and more garlic (I’ve planted it already!) and onions. The acorn squash doesn’t seem to hold up well in the “root cellar” but the butternut, buttercup and spaghetti squash are doing great – so I probably won’t do acorn squash. I would have expected more zucchini, but the plants got some sort of blossom rot and didn’t do much this year – maybe I’ll try that again next year.
There is a coating of snow on the ground now. All my gardens are blanketed in white, but I gotta go… it’s time to start looking through the seed catalogues for next year!
I enjoy fall decorations. They are up from September 1st until the day after Thanksgiving, and even then, I’m reluctant to give them up. There’s just something about having gourds, pumpkins and bittersweet vines around the house to make it feel cozy as the weather changes. But all good things must come to an end. The fall decorations are gone. And when I say gone — I mean gone!
We had one decent pumpkin from our garden that we harvested probably the end of July. It’s been part of our fall decorations for the last several months, but we chopped it in half and fed it to the chickens. They loved the seeds and the pulp and there was nothing left when they were done with it.
So now it’s on to the Christmas decorations – which don’t stay up nearly as long as the fall decorations — but I like this too.
I may be a week late with this — but this year was a special Thanksgiving. We welcomed a new granddaughter just two weeks earlier! She weighed in at 8 pounds, 15 ounces — our turkey this year was 28 pounds. That means the turkey was 3 times BIGGER than the baby! We are certainly thankful for her healthy arrival and that we were able to spend Thanksgiving with family and friends around our table. In fact, we were having so much fun – that we forgot to take a picture of the turkey — but we got one of our new “little turkey” sleeping off her Thanksgiving dinner. She fit into the roasting pan — with room to spare.
We’re also thankful for the purposeful life we are able to live on this little farm. There are times when we work too hard, get poison ivy, pamper bruises and blisters — but at the end of the day – we love what we are doing. And we love just that little bit of self-sufficiency that this place offers us.
Once we packed away all those turkey leftovers, we settled in on Saturday night with a different dinner – one entirely sourced from our farm. Our neighbor bow-hunts on our property and shares some of the venison with us. Our salsify was finally ready for harvest after a hard frost, and the root cellar still has a BIG supply of squash. While we always have farm-fresh vegetables and eggs – it was a treat to have a complete farm to fork dinner from our farm.
I can’t help myself when I stop at the Amish Market. Everything looks so farm fresh — and if we don’t grow it on the farm, I get it there. The other day they had bushels of apples – and they were cheap – and I got caught up in the fact that it is fall and I should be doing “something” with apples.
I stopped at Walmart on the way home for more canning jars. They were out! Who runs out of canning jars in the middle of canning season! I’d have to make do with the few empty jars I had on hand, which meant I better cook these apples down into apple butter. I diced them and piled them into a roasting pan with a little cider, some brown sugar and spices and let them get mushy, ran them through the food mill and then cooked them in my crock pot for hours – and hours.
It’s thick (thicker than that grape jelly disaster), and creamy and sweet and spicy — and so easy! I filled all my remaining jars.
Our experience with grapes on this property has been a bit sour. First, we planted some grapes and they died. Then we planted some grapes, and they are still alive, but there are no grapes. Then… I found wild grapes! I figured that was the solution — free, wild and growing profusely.
I picked bunches of these tiny gems, washed them, stemmed them, ran them through the food mill to remove their seeds, and made grape jelly! I’ve been making jams and jellies for years — I know how to do it. This batch was a flop. It wouldn’t set up, so I ended up with tiny jars of grape juice.
Not one to give in to failure, I popped open all those little jars of grape juice and tackled making jelly — again — with even more Sure-Jell. It still didn’t set. It’s a little thicker, but still not like jelly; it’s more like grape pudding – which sounds disgusting. Sour grapes.
Every fall we are bombarded with green hand grenades. They fall from the trees with a thud or a thump, and lay on the ground where they become ball-bearings under my feet as I head down the hill to the chicken coop. Then they begin to rot; they squish when you step on them. The squirrels run around gathering the nut from inside the green husks and tap them against the tree trunks with the vengeance of a woodpecker. Yes, it’s black walnut season.
Last year, I called the local extension service to see if there is any place locally that processes these nuts – they never called back. This year, I decided I would take matters into my own clean hands. I put on rubber gloves and gathered four five-gallon buckets of the green husked nuts. Then I spent several hours with a paring knife, slicing into the husk and releasing the nut shell. I ended up with about three trash bags of green husks, and about 7 gallons of hard nuts – and black hands – because the rubber gloves apparently weren’t black walnut proof.
I washed the nuts in a big bucket using a rake to agitate them and get the remaining husks to fall off, drained the black sludge water numerous times, and then put the nuts on the shelves in my greenhouse to dry.
After much research on the web, I settled on “Grandpa’s Goody Getter;” a massive nutcracker with a lever that makes it look like you’re playing the slot machines. With each pull of the handle, I hit the jackpot if the nut cracks cleanly and the nut meat falls out. More often than not, it takes a tiny pair of clippers and a nut pick to coax the meat out of the shell.
Countless hours later, with hands that still won’t wash clean – I have two pints of nut meat. Yes, 20 gallons worth of green-husked nuts gave us two pints of edible nut meat. This IS nuts.
I’ve been researching better ways to do this (and keep my hands clean). I’ll let you know if next year’s nut harvest is less nutty.
We have a tree by the spring house with one limb that stuck out way too far, looked out of place and was casting a shadow where I want to plant my squash next year (because we all know how the squash completely took over my other garden this year!). So I asked Chris to cut it down. And he loves to use his chain saw.
That was until the chain saw got bound up in the tree and stalled out. I thought I was going to have permanent “yard art.” A statement piece; a chain saw sticking out of a tree about six feet off the ground – forever. After some comments that I won’t repeat here – Chris decided a crow bar might work. It didn’t. I decided that grabbing the far end of the limb and pulling it down might release the chain saw. It didn’t.
Then we decided a combination of crow bar and pulling on the limb might work. The limb hung just to the edge of the stream that flows from the spring house. It’s muddy. My sneakers squished in the mud as I grabbed the limb again and bounced it up and down while Chris wedged the crow bar between the chain saw and the tree. With every bounce, he could inch it out a bit more. Until I bounced a little too much, slipped on the slope, and did a face plant in the mud. There were some more comments that I won’t repeat here. But it worked. The chain saw popped out of the tree. And I popped out of the mud.
It’s always after an event like that when I think – we forgot to take pictures. I would have shared one of the chain saw stuck in the tree.
The stone ruins of the summer kitchen are the perfect place for my herb garden. This year, I started them in large pots in the greenhouse and moved them onto the brick floor of the summer kitchen once the weather was warm. It’s close enough to the kitchen door to run outside for a snip of this, or a bunch of that. But now the weather is turning cooler and I know my fresh herbs won’t last much longer outside.
I harvested bundles of leaves, washed them, sorted through them. But drying things takes TIME! I don’t always have a lot of time – so I bought a dehydrator. Chris isn’t the only one that always needs new toys (tools) for the farm. The dehydrator was a new addition for me this year – and I’ve used the heck out of the thing. I’ve dried buckets of cherry tomatoes, some San Marzano tomatoes, a few onions, and all our garlic bulbs. I’ve dried most of my crop of scallions. And now I’ve dried the herbs. I have jars and jars of dried ingredients to use all winter long. Cherry tomatoes and chives to throw into some strained yogurt for a great dip, onions to add to salad dressings, parsley to sprinkle on top of a pot of mussels, rosemary for a Sunday roast chicken, and even thyme. Now I just need TIME because I’m gonna be busy cooking!
No Rhyme or Reason Farm 