Cow Pies and Song

The pasture finally got cleaned out.  My teenager daughters and husband headed out in the afternoon and didn't finish until almost seven.  They took turns driving the baby tractor and shoveling cow pies.  Using the trailer rather than wheelbarrows meant fewer trips but there was a lot to pick up.  The loads were dumped into the garden in an area that needs organic matter.

As they were working, my daughters started singing, like they always do.  Apparently they were singing "I kissed a girl," when Christina turned around, inspiring them.  They turned it into "I kissed a cow's ass," and a parody was born:

-I kissed a cow’s ass and I hated it
-‘cause it was covered in shit.
-I kissed a cow’s ass and I despised it
-it was so unpleasant.
-It felt so wrong; it wasn’t right.
-Never gonna do it again in my life.
-I kissed a cow’s ass and I hated it.

-This was never the way I planned, not my intention
-I got so brave taking dares, lost my discretion.
-It’s not what good girls do, not how they should behave
-my mouth is so dir-doo, gross, all the way.

Dir-doo is our two-year-old's way of saying dirty.  Between driving the baby tractor and cracking themselves up with their parody, blaming it all on the effects of too much cow pie shoveling, they seemed to have a good time.  They'll never admit it, but when they come inside with smiles and no complaints, I take that as a good time in teenage-ese.

Teenagers are the worst at saying what they need.  They are accomplished at demanding what they want, but what they need is a different matter.  This satisfaction I see in my daughters must speak to a sense of contentment in our lifestyle.  We talk about the industrial food system and contrast the way our food originates.  But I think there is more.  I think they are feeling the sacredness of the land and a sacredness in the food they eat.  It is good to be part of something sacred.

When they came inside, we had dinner ready.  Almost everything was homegrown — onions, peppers, zucchini, corn, tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and broccoli.  Only the meat and spices were off-homestead.  This is one our favorite recipes, Stuffed Zucchini from Simply in Season.  It was a good close to a good day.

Still Harvesting

All summer it was easy to go outside.  An occasional thunderstorm or the heat of the day would drive us in, but we were out every day.  Now in the fall, there are more stormy days than nice ones.  The rain has stopped but now the winds are so high that we don't dare get on a ladder.  The work on the shed will have to wait.

This morning I did some harvesting.  The artichoke plants we started from seed have grown huge and this is our second cutting.  The plants are perennial in milder climates, but I'm going to bury them in mulch and try to keep them over the winter.

Some of those broccoli plants are still producing little heads down underneath the main growth.   There is enough for dinner tonight.

As I was walking through, I noticed some carrots that I had forgotten about.  They have grown huge.  I suspect they are past the the tender/sweet stage, but they'll still be good in stew.  We have a bed of little carrot plants that I'm hoping will get decent sized before they stop growing.  I've heard of people over-wintering carrots in the ground and that they get actually get sweeter as it gets colder.  We're going to give it a try.  So far they aren't big enough to bother with, and I don't know how much growing they have left this fall.

We are three weeks from Christina's due date.  I am nervous about being the human responsible for her safe delivery, but we have the vet's cell phone number and Jerseys are supposed to have easy deliveries.  Initially she will give colostrum, which is only good for baby cows, but we'll milk her anyway.  Jerseys give much more milk than a calf can deal with and it's unsafe for the cow or the calf not to milk her right away.  Inside of a week it will have changed to regular milk.  In anticipation, I got some cheese cultures that were on sale.  I think Christina is anxious to get back to her molasses grain that we only give her when she's being milked, the stuff that we call her candy.

Fall Garden

It didn't freeze last night.  It didn't even nip the plants.  In the last few weeks we've had forecasts for 40F and had light frost.  Last night with a forecast for 30F, we had nothing.  I was just thinking of the benefits we have in modern weather forecasting.  I'm reminded it's not as helpful as it sounds.

I have never grown a fall garden before.  I've read about it, but by August I was so worn out of gardening.  This year, we braved the August heat and put some seeds out.  One of my daughters volunteered to plant a row of turnips.  To my surprise, they germinated in that 100F sun and have grown well.  Many are already four and five inches in diameter.  We'll eat some, but most of them will go to the cows over the winter.  We'll throw some leaves on the plants when it gets really cold, but leave them in the ground. 

Last spring we tilled up a big section of our front yard.  It was all grass and we needed the extra garden space.  This fall that same area sports a large pumpkin patch.  I didn't even think of how good it would look at Halloween, but it sure does.  It would look better with those vines knocked down by a hard frost and the pumpkins sitting there like God had casually sprinkled them around.  Oh well.

My children are heavy into Halloween decorating, a good portion of which is handmade.  I love that my children value their own handmade things.  So much of modern culture devalues anything that isn't store-bought and I'm reassured that they haven't taken that all in.  My nine-year-old made this "witches broom" from sticks she found in the backyard.  I think she did a good job.

After a full morning of homeschooling yesterday, we spent the rest of the day with apples.  Two batches of apple sauce yielded ten quarts of sauce and five packages of apple pulp.  We also got five packages of apples in the freezer for pie.  One-and-a-half bushels done. 

Paralyzed by Rain

It's rainy and cold.  Being from a place with average rainfall of only 12 inches a year, rain drives me inside.  I have a friend who grew up on the Oregon coast and he once commented about how people here are paralyzed by the rain.  It's true!  I'm paralyzed!  We just stay inside and wait for it to dry out.

Except that we can't sit inside!  The first frost is predicted for this evening so we are bringing in the last of the tender harvest — tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, and okra. 

The garage is getting fuller and fuller of stuff that needs attention but we're spending all our time getting stuff into the garage and not any further.  The piles of squash I set out to dry in the sun have been rained on, so we brought them in to dry off.

Because we are from such a dry climate, we call all liquid precipitation rain.  My nine-year-olds commented that we can tell from the chickens how hard it's raining.  They will stay out digging around in drizzle, but when it really starts coming down, they congregate under the coop. Even the chickies know to stay out of the rain!

The apples we have left to can are getting softer and softer.  I'm not yet recovered from last week's canning day, but we have to get going.  Today we started another batch.  It's a lot of work, but we love all things apples — fresh apples, applesauce, apple butter, dried apples, apple pie.  We're going to need more.

This working when I don't want to is part of normal life.  I've been an adult long enough to just plow through it.  It reminds me of God's presence in the everyday, even without the high emotions of mountain-top experiences.  It's easy to sense God in the midst of an intense retreat or an inspiring conference.  But in everyday life, the low emotions of valley experiences, God is just as present.  In these times of working just because it needs to be done not because I want to, I remember how God is with me whether I know it or not.  God is with me whether I want God or not.  God is just with me because of what God wants.

Growing Our Own Grain

We got the rest of the corn done.  It was a much larger patch than we realized and it took a while.  Everybody chipped in.  My husband cut the stalks off at the ground and then kids and I pulled the cobs off.  We threw a few stalks to Christina and beefy because they were hanging around looking sorry, but the rest went into the shed for storage.

I plowed up a few rows to plant some winter wheat.  We don't really have the land to raise our own grain — it's the only real staple that we continue to buy — but I wanted to raise some, maybe only symbolically.  These were the rows that had the onions.  We found this wheel hoe in the barn after my in-laws passed away.  My husband attached the cultivator prongs and I was amazed how effectively it tilled up the area, just as good as a roto-tiller.

I think these old tools are amazing.  They are fast, efficient, and zero-carbon.  I've seen tools like this before, but it feels special that this tool is old and belonged to my in-laws.  I got three rows tilled up in ten minutes.  My bicepts will be sore, but not bad.

For seed we used the organic wheat we bought from the Co-op.  I spread about two cups over the three rows.

As I sprinkled the seed, I thought, "hey, I'm sowing wheat!"  How many times have I read biblical stories about sowing wheat?  How many hymns have I song about "seed, scattered and sown"?  But I've never done it.  It was easy just sprinkling the seed, but because it's my first time, I have no expectation how it will work out.  Will the seed germinate?  Will it produce?  Will we be able to harvest it without losing all the grain?

Jesus told a story of a farmer sowing grain and some of it falls on rocky soil, some on shallow soil, some on good soil, etc.  But he didn't include the grain that falls in the goofy place because the farmer didn't know what she was doing.  Well, I guess there were no goofy farmers; I'm learning things that everybody knew back then.

Jesus also told a story of harvesting ten fold or a hundred fold.  If we just recover our two cups, I'll be happy, but maybe we'll get a hundred fold harvest of 200 cups of wheat — that's enough grain for a month or two!

Harvest

With the last nice days of the season, we are bringing in the final harvest. As I look over the winter squash, like these acorn squash, I am amazed how many varieties we planted.  Last spring when I was looking at squash in the seed catalog, I must have been thinking preettttyyyyy and just ordered them all.  I think we have five or six varieties.

We got two varieties picked and stacked up to dry.  These are called Uncle David's Dakota Dessert.  I sure hope they live up to their name.  We pretty much only eat squash in custard and pie.  Squash custard is easy to make and we eat it for breakfast in the winter — squash, eggs, milk and not any more sugar than the kids would dump on their oatmeal.

We grew flour corn for the first time.  The book said to wait until the stalks dry out or freeze.  This variety is a native of the southwest and is supposed to make a good corn flour.  I think we'll need to let it dry for quite a while still.  If we want to make maza we need go through a hominy step and I haven't decided if we'll go to the effort.  Our two sweet corn varieties had some left overs so we let them dry for grain too.  We should be able to make cornmeal out of that.


After pulling the ears off, we cut the stalks off at the ground, gathered them up, and then stalked them up in the corners of the cow shed.  Corn stalks are decent food for cows.  People who are better at this than me will grind them up and make silage, which sounds like it goes through a fermentation process.  We're just feeding them straight to Christina and beefy. I read somewhere that corn stalks don't have much nutrition for cows, but it's fine in moderation.  So we've been giving them a few stalks a day.  It sure it fun to see them chomping away. 

We dug the last of the potatoes and got them put away in the root cellar.  In the end we probably only got a bushel or two.  I don't think they were too happy with where they were planted because most of the plants didn't produce that much, but then we would find one with lots of good sized potatoes.  My With fresh potatoes, my daughters have been making oven french fries most every day.

At the end of the day, we had a lot to show for our efforts.  We finished harvesting the dry beans.  With maybe only half of the corn done, we had three buckets.  It says that they store better in the husk, so we left them on.  In these last days of the season, the tomatoes are still ripening and we found lots.

Our first frost is forecast for next week.  We've had a few cold nights and some plants have gotten nipped, but the hard frost that knocks vines down hasn't happened yet.  Lots of things don't actually have to come in before the frost, but it still feels like a deadline.

Part of my rush is trying to beat the cold weather.  If it's hard to deal with 70F days, then how will I do with 55F days?  But I know that it'll be good for me to get out in the cooler air and work.  It will help reset my internal temperature gauge and make the cold easier to live with all winter.  I wish I looked forward to things that are good for me.

Education for Fun

We are coming to the end of our three-week homeschool break.  These long breaks are good for the kids and they are good for me.  With four children to keep up with, I miss things in the rush of normal weeks.  These breaks give me time to reflect and redirect.  After nine years of homeschooling, I have grown sensitive to children resisting work.  I used to think it was laziness or being obstinate, but now I tend to think that it's a curriculum problem.  I hate to spend money to replace materials, but it's better than more trauma... and I love to review new stuff. 

Language has been difficult for the twins.  They are such good readers that it seems out of sorts for writing to be difficult.  I got them First Language Lessons and Writing With Ease from an author who wrote a wonderful history series.  It seems simple and easy to do with the potential for really deep learning.  Easy and effective, that's what I like!  I printed out some samples from their website and the twins enjoyed what they did.  So, we dropped the money and got the whole thing.

My older daughters have been using a classroom Chemistry text and are starting to have problems.  I haven't found many options for high school science and have felt stuck with what we have.   But they're having troubles so I searched some more.  I chanced upon a mention of Singapore Science's Chemistry.  We use Singapore Math for younger grades and my oldest used the Junior High level science.  I also found some online video lessons from Khan Academy that we might use to supplement.  We have a cabinet full of laboratory equipment and chemicals, but it seems that whenever we switch, they always need different stuff.  Switching means that I have more homework getting the labs figured out and it's feels messy to me to switch in the middle of the year, but I remind myself that this kind of flexibility is what makes homeschooling so good.  Remember... remember... remember.

The older girls are studying U.S. History with Hakim's History of US.  I've read much of it myself and loved it.  They decided they'd like to add in some additional preparation and get ready for the AP U.S. History test.

As I got the schedules ready for next week, I finally worked in the Kids Greek that the twins have been asking for.

When we started our break, I was so tired and ready to be done with homeschooling for a while.  Now I'm having to exercise will power to wait until Monday.  Watching kids' eyes glisten as they figure something out is one of the most amazing things to witness.   Seeing their look of confidence as they share something they've learned fills me with pride too.  It's so much fun to homeschool!

Wait!  Right before our break, we decided not to start the next read aloud for the twins because it was just beginning the book.  We decided to start it a few days early and be on schedule for the first day back.  I don't have to wait!  We'll start reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond tonight.

(My 13 year old looked over my blog post and said, "Education for Fun!  You call doing a timeline fun?!"  One of the 9-year-olds said decisively, "she calls everything for homeschooling fun!")

Making Applesauce

We had seven bushels of apples in the garage needing attention.  We got through about two-and-a-half of them yesterday making applesauce.  It was a long day — from 9am to 7:30pm with no break.  Even in my working life, I canned applesauce because the flavor is so much better, but it is a lot of work.

We have lots of Cameo apples because that's what they had at the U-Pick place, but they are bland.  We added McIntosh for flavor.

Everybody pitched in — washing apples and running the apple-peeler-corer and food mill.  We sliced up enough apples to fill the four-gallon stock pot and cooked the apples down.  It took about 30 minutes to bring them up to a boil and another 30 to cook down, stirring every two or three minutes. 

After running the cooked apples through the food mill, we filled quart jars with sauce.  The jars boiled in the water-both canner for 25 minutes.  Each batch made seven quarts.  The left-over pulp went into freezer containers for applesauce cake.

After four batches, at about 4:30pm, we had 28 quarts of applesauce and 9 containers of apple pulp.

As she was spinning the handle, one of the twins asked me how people made applesauce before food mills. I had no idea, but I suggested that back then they didn't can in jars either, so everything was different. It got me to thinking about the lives of women who had to do these hug jobs by themselves over a wood stove. I had two or three people helping all day and it was still overwhelming.  It's old fashioned and quaint to us, but I'm so grateful for food mills.

Still able to stand, we made one more batch for apple butter.  After running it through the food mill, I added cinnamon, cloves and allspice and cooked it down for another two hours, stirring every two minutes. The smell of spices and apples in the house was a preview of the holidays.  Tomorrow we'll have some on toast.

Before breaking things down and cleaning up, the twins offered to make pie crust if we'd do some more for apple pie.  It was an easy offer to accept.  At the end of the day with aching legs, back, and arms, two beautiful pies came out of the oven.  One of the twins jumped up to do the serving and I had a piece of pie presented to me on the prettiest place she could find.

These were apples from our area, but not grown on our land.  Next year will be different.  We planted fruit trees that have grown a lot already.  Each of the four apple trees are expected to produce 3-5 bushels when they mature in the next year or two.  Whereas now we are dealing with seven bushels, then we'll have a dozen or more.  I'll put more in the root cellar for fresh eating in the winter.  We'll build a bigger dehydrator and dry more.  I guess we'll have more apple canning days.

But this morning, as jars cool on the counter and containers sit in the freezer, we're not working on apples.   We ate my favorite breakfast, a recipe from my favorite cookbook that requires applesauce — Baked Oatmeal from Simply in Season.  The kids were quiet while it quickly disappeared.  Today I will do Pilates to loosen up my back, attempt some power-rest, and schedule the next canning day.  There are over four bushels out there still.

Sustainable Living

We are halfway through Christina's dry period.  It's been a month without the morning and evening milkings that kept me grounded in the day, a month of making the milk last, a month without learning the next thing to make good cheese.  I'm trying to focus on the benefits of this rest time, but I'm not very good at living without what I want.

Christina and beefy have eaten the east pasture down and we moved them back. It's been four weeks and the west pasture looks decent. Christina knew just what was going on and headed right over; beefy needed a little more encouragement, but they immediately began feasting on the new fresh grass.  It makes me laugh to see cows with heads down, rocking back as they plow through grass.  They are celebrating eating too.

The book says that cows won't eat an entire pasture and don't expect them to.  But our cows do.  Today when we moved them off the east pasture it looked like it had been mowed clean.  The last few days I've seen them out there working even the little blades.  I worry that they're starving, so we check the hay feeder but they have enough.  I think they just love fresh grass and they'll take a little bit as a snack, even while living of the dried stuff.

With them moved, it means that we have to scoop the cow pies to clean out the east pasture.  Ack!  When will we work that in?  My husband's working on building a little harrower that will break up the cow pies and then we won't have to scoop as much.  I wish he'd hurry.

With the fading sun, hanging the laundry requires a new kind of organization.  The trees to the south, that provide such wonderful shade in the heat of the summer, now shade a much larger area, including the clothesline.  With cooler temperatures and shorter days, it takes all day long to dry a load of laundry instead of just a few hours.  We are limited to two loads a day and they must go up early in the morning.  What I miss the most is the smell of sun-dried cloth.

Jerky has become everybody's favorite snack.  My husband is trying to do jerky with some sliced meat, rather than hamburger.  After making twenty or thirty thin slices, he says that hamburger is the better way to go.  This meat will marinade for a day and then go into the dehydrator.

This sustainable living that we are doing sure does take a lot of work, but it feels like such relevant work and it is grounded in relationship.  Thank you God for meaningful work.

Celebrating Eating

Camping has always been something that I enjoyed, but wore me out.  This time was no different.  Hopefully the laundry will be finished by tomorrow.

It is good to be home — I missed the land just like I thought I would — but it's taking a while to get back into the routine.  As it gets colder I find more and more reason to stay inside.  I am a city girl after all, and the outdoors is really only for when it's nice.  "Real" farm people don't let the weather slow them down, I think.

We saved the burn pile for this time of year and I'm glad we did.  It added some welcome heat.   Some of this pile came from our work this year, but most of it has been waiting for many years.  This land we live on was an inheritance from my in-laws, adding another layer to the gratitude I feel for the land.  We joked that we were burning sticks that my father-in-law, gone almost eight years now, put on the pile.  I think it was true.  Feeding only a small amount at a time to keep the blaze safe, it took most of the day to burn it all.

While we were camping, most of the food we ate was "normal" store-bought food.  I not only missed this land, but I missed being fed by it.  There was an empty feeling to eating that made me despondent.  It was similar to the feeling that I get when I've missed several weeks of church.  It made me realize just how much every meal has become a celebration of the way God cares for me and my family.

But today we will eat homemade hamburger buns with hamburger patties from our local beef.  We will add slices of homemade colby fresh out of the cellar and tomatoes from the garden.  A watermelon, cherry tomatoes, and french fries from our garden will round it out.  It is good to get back to God.

Cheese Tasting - Finally

There are boxes and boxes of apples staring at me from the garage.  We went to a U-Pick place and picked over five bushels.  The texture is good, but they are pretty bland.  I picked up some Jonathans and McIntosh at the fruit stand to mix in and beef up the flavor.  We haven't had time to can, so we started with some dehydrating.  My 13-year-old ran the apple-peeler-corer and got a dozen apples done in less than 10 minutes.

I dipped them in water with a little salt and lemon juice to prevent browning and then laid them out in the dehydrator.  Those twelve apples filled nine dehydrator trays, although I probably could have fit a few more in.  After about six hours, they were nicely dehydrated without being crunchy.  They filled a gallon ziploc and I'll store them in the freezer.

It's been two months since I made my first cheese.  Hard cheese has to age for at least two months, four to six is better.  Today we got our first taste of homemade cheddar cheese.  It was harder than I expected and the flavor was mild, but there was a hint of pungent aroma that made me optimistic.  This was my first cheese.  As I gained experience, I learned how to cook the curds without overcooking and that a higher cream content gives the soft texture of cheddar.  Just before Christina dried up, I made a perfect looking block that will be aged to mild in another month.  That's the one I'm looking forward to.

We grew soup beans for the first time this year.  Today we picked another row and were discouraged to find that many of the shriveled pods had gotten wet from irrigation and had the mold to prove it.  Even so, there was still a lot.  It took about two hours for four of us to shell them all.

The beans are a beautiful red.  I had to get after the girls for playing in them while we were shelling.  Because they have too much moisture still, we spread them out to dry for several days before we put them away.

Today we are getting ready to go camping.  We used to camp regularly from spring to fall.  Even though we haven't gone since early summer, I'm hesitant to leave. My hunger for the hills isn't strong.  Camping used to be a primary way that I connected with the earth and with God the creator.  With so much time outside this last year, I feel deeply connected to this land that I'm not enthusiastic to leave it.  Our oldest will stay to care for the animals and all will be fine.  But I'll miss this sacred ground and the animals who live on it with us.

A Good Life

The only thing more fun than seeding a pasture yourself is watching somebody else doing it.  At least, that's what beefy seemed to think.

A year ago this ground was bare dirt, which was a step up from the weed patch it had been.  In fact, I think this exact spot was heavy in goat heads.   We plowed it up and seeded it with pasture grass.  It's doing well, but is sparse in some areas.  Today we overseeded to fill in the holes and added some more alfalfa.

When I did the west pasture, Christina, our family milk cow, was interested too.

I visited an organic farmer once and she said that what farmers primarily do is care for the soil.  It surprised me, but today it makes a lot of sense.  I can do everything else right, but if the soil isn't good then the garden won't be productive.  It's kind of the same with cows.  We need to take good care of the pasture.  A healthy pasture will make for healthy cows. 

Cows are a lot easier to handle when they're halter broken — which means that they'll follow you on a rope.  We started beefy by tying him up to a post for several hours.  After playing tug-a-war with the post for a few weeks, we started walking him.  Now he follows well.  My nine-year-old twins come running when we say it's time to walk beefy.  Christina tags along too, sometimes pushing her way in between.  She is alpha cow, after all.

Christina will hopefully be with us for a long time, but beefy is being raised for meat.  Next year about this time we'll go through the first butchering of our own beef.  We have butchered two batches of chickens in the last year and our children have had to struggle with the notion that being a meat eater means killing.  We had spent our whole lives outsourcing that grim reality.  Now we have to deal with it head on.  I told them, "they are going to die one way or the other, but the question is how will they live."  Our responsibility as their caretakers is to give them a good life.  Today I asked my daughter, “is beefy having a good life?”  She smiled and said, "yeah."

Perhaps that is a good question to take the next level — is every human being in my sphere of influence having a good life?  Perhaps it is the fundamental question for citizenship in the kingdom of heaven.

Urban Homesteading

Overnight those tomatoes shed a lot of water.  One bucket had about five inches of yellow-tinged water but the other had only about a quarter of that.  The first one had tomatoes that had been frozen and the other had tomatoes that we had freshly picked.  Freezing must break down the tissues so they shed water better.  Mental note — freeze tomatoes before hanging.

After dumping the tomatoes in my big stock pot, we brought it up to a boil.  My stock pot is thinner than it should be and food scorches easily.  To save myself stirring constantly, I put the pot in a water bath using my big canner.  It worked.  Stirring every 10-15 minutes was sufficient.  After the tomatoes cooked down, I pulled about half out and ran it through a food mill, getting rid of lots of seeds and some hard spots.

In the end, even with draining all that fluid, the sauce simmered for nine hours to reduce by half, giving us seven quarts of rich, beautiful sauce, just right for spaghetti or pizza.  But my conscience is nagged by running our electric stove so long.

We emptied out the big onion patch.  With four of us pulling, it went pretty fast.  The books say to dry them in the sun for a week or two before putting them in long term storage, so we dumped them out on the patio table.  It looks pretty impressive to me.  The book also says that the ones that still have green tops won't keep well, so we'll separate those out and use them first.

The days are shortening and shade has encroached on the patio from the big walnut trees in the south.  The change in the light takes me back to this time last year.  I wasn't nearly as busy, but I dreamed of this work.  We had spent the summer reclaiming the pasture and garden from the weeds and by this time we had worked up to bare dirt.  Although living in town, we were doing the work of homesteading.  One short year later, God is feeding us abundantly with a heavy garden, milk, and meat and educating us in things that were common knowledge a century ago.

Tomatoes

We noticed a few tomatoes turning red so we ran out to get them before the irrigation comes tomorrow.  Pretty soon the five-gallon harvest bucket was full and we were looking for another bucket.  This is becoming routine — I think I'm going to pick a little and find a whole lot.

I already had a bunch of tomatoes in the freezer, so I couldn't just throw these in the freezer and deal with them later. While my husband and daughter made pizza for dinner, I blanched and skinned tomatoes as fast as I could.  Tomato skins just slide off if they've been in a boiling water for a few seconds.  (My nine-year-old took this gorgeous photo of tomatoes coming out of the boiling water, skins pulled back)

In the past I avoiding making tomato sauce because it had to boil for so long to get rid of the water.  I read that if tomatoes are hung overnight, much of the water will come out.  It's worth trying.  We set up a hanging contraption in the pantry with a milk bucket to catch the drippings.  There's already an inch of clear liquid in the bottom.  Tonight we have two of these large bags hanging.

Just like the peppers, I started a bunch of tomatoes plants last spring, but lost track of which kinds they were.  In June I just threw plants in the ground.  In the middle of the big tomatoes we found arms of cherry tomato vines heavy with fruit.  There's enough for several good snacks.

Lets Start by Mowing

Our last child fell to the stomach flu.  It was another mostly sleepless night, but the main activity has subsided and she is resting now.  I am the only one who hasn't fallen, but today I don't feel great.  A week of less than my share of sleep and more than my share of work has taken its toll. 

At dinner last night there were only four of us — two children gone, one in bed, and one moved out.  One daughter commented on how empty the table felt, "and this is the size of a normal American family."

I love having a large family.  I love that our house is full of energy and warmth.  I love that we are together most of the time, not pulled away to school or the office.  But there is a downside to so much life — illness takes a long time.  This bug that takes a person down for three days has lasted two weeks in our family.

As our daughter lay in her sick bed, we gave her some good news. The injured chicken starting walking.  This is the daughter who named the hen Soody.  Last night we let her into the garden with the rest of the flock and she held her own.  She still kind of sinks sometimes, but she walked around capably and even ran at one point.  Thank you God that we don't have to kill that chicken.

This was a week off of homeschooling.  We had big plans to get some things finished outside, none of which got done.  With the majority of the family recovered, we started by mowing the lawn for the first time in a long while, maybe since July.  When it's hot the grass doesn't grow as much and I congratulate myself at the lower carbon-load by not mowing.  But it's not hot any more and we waited too long.  The kids cleared the lawn off and then watched from inside while I drove the machine. Only once did my husband have to fix it.  The job was huge.  Bags had to be dumped every pass and the blower filled up several times. 

Our compost pile is in with the chickens.  I read that chickens make great compost turners by digging through the pile.  Not having to turn the pile ourselves is pretty compelling so we have given it a try.  At the least, the chickens love the fresh green grass and they do kick it around.  Next spring we will have to move it out for one year before it's used.  I've heard that fresh chicken manure, which they add regularly, needs a year to compost before it's safe to put on the garden.

We feed our chickens a mix of wheat, oats, and corn that we buy at a local grain elevator.  It's cheaper that the pre-mixed stuff at the farm store and I like that it's just straight grain.  Yesterday when I went out to check on Soody, I noticed that the chicken food barrel was almost empty.  I pointed it out to my nine-year old who usually feeds them and she said, "oh yeah, we're almost out."  So yesterday afternoon my husband and I made a unplanned run for grain.  While we were there, we drove past a livestock shed and I noticed ears sticking out.  I looked closer and discovered several large pigs housed in the shed.  I pointed it out, "look, there are pigs right there and you can't even smell them." Hmmmm.......