Wherein We Set Up Outdoor "TV"

Yesterday we finished building and installing our "big screen" outdoor TV.  It gets one channel.  The chicken channel. It's our fave!

 

We can also change the channel by picking up our chairs and moving across the street to the big green barn (in the background) they get the cow channel!

Homesteading Question On Emmer Wheat

We have some Emmer wheat seed to plant and need to know when the optimal season to plant is.  Is it a spring planting or a fall planting?  A google search didn't reveal much info.  Anybody have any experience with Emmer?

Happenings Around The Homestead...

This is the first year we have ever grown cabbage.  I love fresh from the garden cabbage but do not enjoy it cooked or fermented.  However, my husband loves sauerkraut so we are experimenting with our first ever batch.  It's sitting on the counter as we speak.  We don't have a crock so we are using (re-using) a Costco pickle jar covered with an old t-shirt rag.  It's high tech, let me tell you.  I may (or may not) try some when it's done.  I know, I know, kraut is supposed to be really good for you.

We have also yet to have a frost in my area so the tomatoes are still coming on strong.  The kids are getting good at prepping the tomatoes for canning.  (Apples too.)  When they start to complain, I simply say, "You like to eat, don't you?"

This is a pic of the bag City Girl whipped up in about 15 minutes.  She wanted a certain size and everything we had was either too big or too small so she went down to our "craft" room and created what she needed.  The body of the bag is a bottom leg of a pair of jeans she had made into cut-offs earlier this year.  She merely had to sew one end shut.  For the handle she made a braided rope made from old t-shirts and sewed it on.  We had some iron-on decals laying around and she embellished the bag with those. (The decals were marketed for the back of jean pockets... who wants their daughter wearing kissy lips on her backside? This is a much more tasteful application.)

There are so many possibilities for this bag.  It is really only limited by your imagination.  It is a quick, easy, and cheap project.  Goodwill stores are great sources of jeans and t-shirts!

What have you all been up to?

Apple Picking On A School Day!

Finally got my pictures from Thursday to load! Here are some...

 

 Us girls. (The boys were getting our buckets weighed.)

 Farmer John's favorite!

 Looking for just the right apples...

 Got one!

 Got a bucket full!

 Baking Apples

Our Haul!!!! Now the real work begins.

Homeschooling In The Orchard!

 

We took our first homeschool field trip of the season today.  We went apple picking at the U-pick farm in Fennville.

 

They had tons of varieties to chose from.  We only got a few kinds. Some for baking, some for sauce and some for eating.  They are so much better then any grocery store apple.  It was almost like eating sweet, crisp candy.

 

I sense apple pie for dessert tonight.  The ladies over at Homestead Blessings are cidering.  What do you like to do with apples? 

 

I'm having some issues with uploading photos right now but if I get it working I have a lot of fun pictures to post.

 

 

 

 

Homestead Firsts- Little Eggs & Skinned Tomatoes

 

My little Barred Rock Hens (and one rooster) that we brought home from the farm store this spring have grown up.

 

 

We are now finding little eggs in the nesting boxes of the chicken tractor.  We even found one with out a shell.  It only had the membrane.  It is fun to hear the hens cluck after they've laid their first egg.

Also for the first time ever I de-skinned tomatoes.  My pretty batch of fresh tomatoes went from shiny and pretty to naked.

I was surprised how easy the skin came off.  Just a 45 second swim in boiling water and they just peel right off.  It was surprisingly satisfying!  I came away with 12 quarts of canned tomatoes with tons more waiting on the vines out in the garden.

I have a love/hate relationship with canning.  It seems like such a hassle and takes such a long time (Especially when you run out of lemon juice and have to wait till your husband comes home from work before you can go get more. Cough. Cough.) But it is such a feeling of accomplishment when you look at the finished product sitting on your counter and down in the larder.

What do you all preserve?

Free Foraged Food & Turning 9

I love nothing more than getting something for free.  It gives me great satisfaction.  My husband surprised me on Labor Day.  He was one of a few managers that had to go to the warehouse to "walk" it and make sure everything was okay since it was closed for the day.  He asked me to come along because there was a lone apple tree on the edge of the property and the apples just fall to the ground each year.  We were gonna pick those apples and make use of them. (We had permission.)

We didn't get too many because we didn't bring a ladder (I had to stand on the hood of the car) but we did get enough for a pie.

One our way too and from the warehouse I pointed out to him every "stray" apple tree along side the road that didn't look like anyone did anything with.  They were stand alone trees at the edge of fields and had fruit littering the ground. I told him we should go ask permission from all those landowners to access the apples.  I had been thinking this for a couple of weeks and John was surprised that I was thinking along the same lines as he was.  What can I say... the budget is miniscule and free food is enticing.

I also pointed out an apple tree on the road by our house on an abandoned bank owned property.  Again with no ladder we couldn't get the good apples but we got a bag full of apples that had fallen on the ground and we fed those to the chickens with the intent to get more if needed.  It takes so little to make us happy.

Yesterday was a day of celebration. Reagan turned 9!  We cancelled school and she chose to spend the morning at the mall with her big sisters, trying on clothes and then spent the afternoon with her dad and brother shooting air guns and bows/arrows.  Oh to be nine and have so many interests!  She is currently latch hooking away on her birthday gift.  Happy Birthday #4 child. We love you!!!!!

Alice Waters Helps Me Sneak Veges!

 Chef Alice Waters is brilliant when it comes to vege recipes.  I've been turning to her book The Art of Simple Food for ideas on what to do with my garden bounty.

Tonight we are using fresh tomatoes and making her Simple Tomato Sauce: 2 lbs ripe tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and seasonings.  And I'm going to sneak in some roasted patty pan squash into it too! (Of course I will also put in some ground beef so that my meat loving son will be appeased.)  Served over pasta it will be simple and yummy.

She also has a recipe for raw tomato sauce.  Fresh tomatoes, basil and olive oil!

 

Last night I used some of my chard for her Chard Frittata.  Chard, olive oil, onion, garlic, seasonings and eggs (from our chickens) served on garlic toast. Yummy!  What I love about her recipes is that they really are simple yet cheffy and taste delicious!

If you are not the best "scratch" cook (like me) I recommend this cook book highly!

Eat This... NOT That!

Eat This!

 

Our tomatoes are finally coming ripe fast enough to warrant a bit of canning tomorrow.  I have already pulled out my trusted Ball Blue Book and will be canning a few quarts of tomato sauce.

 I no longer buy pre-made pasta sauces but in the past I have depended on plain tomato sauce for my sauce base.  What is so bad about that?  It's organic right?  Yep, however the acidic nature of tomatoes causes the lining of the can to leak BPA into the food.  Uncool!

Not That!

My budget is miniscule and I can not afford the premium sauce that comes in glass jars but I am able to make my own! I urge everyone to try canning tomatoes.  They're pretty easy and the taste is awesome! Not to mention kicking one more nasty chemical out of the house.  Hmmm... seems our great-grandparents had it good!

Fall must be on it's way!

Our first pumpkin (and probably our only).

 

We planted our corn, melons, winter squash and pumpkins in another area of our property then our other gardens.  It is amazing how the soil quality can be so different.  Since it was our first year planting we didn't amend the soil.  Most of our gardens did great but the corn, etc. did poorly.  I'm not surprised that the melons didn't do good as our summer was fairly cool and rainy but I'm very disappointed that I didn't get a lot of pie pumpkins. (My husband is sad not to get a lot of corn.)  We picked the beauty above before the chickens could get to it but I'm not seeing many more thriving.  Good thing for farmer's markets.  I will not partake in store canned pumpkin. Yuck!

 

One thing we were very surprised to get was Okra. I didn't think it would grow in Michigan.

 

 

 

 

We also got some broccoli (spelling?). We have never managed to get any before so small victories right?

 

 

Next year we will be laying on the manure and compost and making sure the soil is well amended so everything does well.

 

What victories and set backs did you all have this summer in your garden?

 

 

Surprise, Surprise!

 

City Daughter

Today was a day of pleasant surprises for me:

1. Six people to the dentist with not a one cavity! City daughter does need her wisdom teeth pulled though.

2. I was researching the YA market (Young Adult Books) and found out that the Christian publishing industry is really latching on to YA.  Yeah!  I'm not sure if I want to go Christian or Mainstream when I'm done with The Follower but it is good to know I have more options.

3. My tomatoes are really starting to ripen.  I may have enough ripe to start canning!

4. I remembered I had a Costco package of pork chops in the freezer.  Meat for dinner!

5. Farmer John made it home from Detroit meetings in time to eat dinner with us.

6. City daughter baked my favorite cookies for dessert... chocolate chip!

What a really good day!  Simple things make me happy :)

The Starving Week...

We jokingly refer to every other week in our house as starving week.  I get money to purchase food every two weeks so right before pay day pickings are pretty slim.  Tonight I was fretting over what to make that would constitute an entire meal and was pleasantly surprised with the outcome:

Wonderful rolls made from scratch by the city daughter who loves to bake,

Salad with produce from our garden and from the farmer's market topped with...

Shredded cheese, nuts and bacon,

Water or Milk to drink

It always surprises me how something comes together from seemingly nothing.  God is good to us!

Tomorrow it will be a beans and rice meal!

I was laughing with my mom tonight that we are becoming vegetarians by budget!

I still have two chickens to make into coq au vin too.

What something do you make out of nothing?

Food From The Ground!

My "city daughter" wonders why we can't just buy our food from a store like normal people.  She did not get the "farmer" gene.  I however did and even though my gardens are messy (er, that means tons of weeds) there is just nothing like going out your back door and digging up dinner.  Here is a picture of the bounty we picked just the other day...

 

Zucchini, cabbage, carrots, jalapeno peppers, banana peppers, tomatoes, parsnips, beans, rutabagas, turnips, horseradish, dill, basil, patty pan squash and chard! Oh, and eggs from the chickens! So much more fun and rewarding to harvest your own rather then traverse the tiles of the grocery store under bad lighting!  I was going to say bad music too but then I remembered that the Musak playing now is from the 80's and were talkin' bout my generation!

Do You Know Your Ice Creams?

I was flipping through the new issue of Mother Earth News and found a wonderful article on Ice Cream and I realized I didn't really know the differences between types of "ice cream".  Luckily Tabitha Alterman has set me straight.

Ice Cream is made with mostly cream.

Ice Milk is made with mostly milk.

Frozen Custard is essentially a frozen pudding made with eggs. (It's my fave!)

Gelato is made with whole milk instead of cream and is slow churned so less air is whipped in.

Semifreddo (I had never heard of this one) is ice cream or gelato combined with whipped cream or meringue. It has a marshmallow like texture and is usually served in slices rather than scoops.  It is an Italian dessert and the name means half (semi) cold (freddo).

Sherbet- milk or cream mixed with sorbet

Sorbet/Sorbetto is made with fresh fruit and water. Sorbetto has less water.  They are whipped to be lighter.

Ice- frozen fruit puree (or vege puree)

Granita- Sorbet with larger ice crystals and not stirred but scraped with a fork

For recipes and ingredient ideas check out the Real Food (Eat In Season) section of August/September's Mother Earth News.

Cottage Industry: Back Yard Blueberry U-Pick

Blueberries are currently in season in my neck of the woods!  They are one of my favorite fruits to u-pick.  When we lived in our rental place there were two blueberry u-picks in biking distance. This year I was wondering what I was going to do because I really didn't want to drive the 1/2 hour to go pick.  Low and behold, thanks to the sharp eyes of my parents, when they were visiting, a little sign advertising u-pick blueberries went up only a couple of miles away from home.

I went to investigate and was pleasantly surprised to find a little quaint family farm.  I'm guessing they maybe had 5 acres of land and only maybe 1/2 acre to 1 acre was blueberries.  I didn't get to talk to the owners but it seemed a pretty simple operation and an excellent way to make some $$ from your land. Here's their set up:

 Little sign on the corner of the main road. Not even big or fancy. (Sorry it's not the best picture but we had an impatient driver behind us and didn't have much time to snap a picture.)

 Another sign at the corner of their road.  Pretty simple.

 

Sign with hours and phone number in front of their property.  Again not big or fancy.  Their hours are Monday thru Saturday, 8 to 8.

 

Next they had a simple place for cars to park, marked with another simple sign.

 

 

On their back porch they had their main set up:  A sign with instructions, buckets, scale, money box etc.  Some of the buckets were buckets I've seen at other u-pick operations and others were simple recycled ice cream buckets.

 

 

They've done a really excellent job of "cuting up" the property, making it atmospheric and a visual treat.  Red, white and blue are the décor scheme and every where you look there are festive decorative touches.

 

 

 They had amenities to make the experience a little more pleasant too: A shady spot to sit and rest and a bathroom!

It was just a hop, skip and a jump to the picking field from parking and we were greeted by a friendly farm cat.

 

 

In hindsight the cat may or may not be a good idea.  It was cute and my kept my littles occupied but they were supposed to be picking the fruit, not petting the cat.  The farm would have made another buck or so out of us if Reagan had been picking.

 

 

We had a great time.  The bushes were full, the fruit was easy to pick, the price was wonderful,  $1 per pound, and it is so close to home that we can go back and pick any time during the season.  We ended up with five pounds of berries for freezing and using fresh.  There is nothing better then getting great quality local food and supporting a family farm too!

 

 

 

There was nothing overly complicated about this set up and I went away feeling it was something that any of us could duplicate. We have strawberries and blueberries in our vicinity but I have yet to find raspberries, currants or gooseberries in the area so that could easily be something for my homestead, Creek Cottage Homestead, to capitalize on.

 

If you have a little bit of land, good fruit skills and some creativity this could be a good little side biz. (Of course one would need to check with the local powers-that-be for regulations etc. and I'm sure some form of insurance would be a good idea.)

 

One last tip for you:  Make sure to bring something to take home your fruit in.  They did have bags available but not every operation will.