Long Days of Self-Sufficient Living

Those strawberries have been sitting in the frig for three days and many were pretty ripe to begin with.  We've put four of the flats in the freezer, tucked away in six gallon freezer bags ready for fruit smoothies, but the rest had to be dealt with.  The girls started by pulling off the stems.  They set up work areas at the table and worked upwards of two hours.  I kept strawberries rotating through the wash water and back to my smashing-station before they went into the jelly pot.

After heating the mashed strawberries up, I added pectin, kept heating to boiling, and then added sugar.  When the whole thing was boiling again, I ladled the jam into jars. Fifteen minutes in the boiling water canner and they were done.

While we were working indoors, my husband was working with that little Bobcat to clean up the manure.  This is the second full day he's put in.  It has been a big bigger mess than we realized.

After four or five hours on my feet, going hard, we have 24 jars of strawberry jam to show for our efforts.  Tomorrow when they are thoroughly cool, they'll go into the cupboard.

When it was finished, I immediately started a cheese.  Thankfully, cheese begins with warming up and letting it set for an hour.  But then it was over and time to get up and stir cheese.  

By 6pm I was exhausted and my knees ached, but walking out to check on my husband, I noticed the broccoli was starting to bloom.  Ack!  So I harvested everything and tonight I'll have to blanch and freeze all this.  Oh, I'm so tired already.

My favorite book on self-sufficient living says that this living can make for very long days.  Boy, is she right!

Strawberry Picking

We went to a local U-Pick place for strawberries.  The strawberries in the garden are keeping us in snacks, but we need a lot more. We arrived about 10am and got to work.

It was already hot when we started and the sun was strong.  The field had lots of weeds but sometimes under a big weed I'd find a whole cluster of ripe, large berries.  We picked for over an hour. 

Afterwards, our hands were well stained.

In the end, we had ten flats weighing 93 pounds.  It cost $128.

Although we were all exhausted from the sun and heat and picking, now the next phase of work begins. 

After a nap, I got two flats washed and stemmed and laid out on cookie sheets.  They filled three.  These will freeze overnight and tomorrow I'll put them in bags.  We'll use them in fruit smoothies with Christina yogurt and cream.

Praise God for the Freezer

Christina dries off in three months and it's time to get stuff flowing into the freezer for the dry period.  We'll take two weeks to decrease her milk production down to nothing, then she'll be dry for 8-9 weeks, and then we'll get our first milk about a week after she calves.  I want enough in the freezer for 10 weeks.

Last year we only got cream and milk in the freezer but I don't want to have to buy anything this year.  I calculated out how much cream and milk we'll need, plus butter, fromage blanc, cream cheese, mozzarella, and cottage cheese.  I have a little chart with weekly freezer goals to keep me on track.  I'm freezing milk in washed out vinegar plastic bottles until they run out, then I'll use gallon ziploc bags. 

In the days before refrigeration, I guess people went without milk during the dry period, but cheese and butter preserved a lot of it.

Our daughters found the first ripe strawberry.  They looked it over carefully before sharing it between three of them.  The strawberry plants are full but green. 

The chicks are enjoying their new coop.  This is much more spacious for them, although it will get tight soon as they grow, but then we'll open the door and let them run outside during the day.

For my girl's homeschooling we read a book about the New England summer of 1816 with frost in late June and again in early September, bringing about complete crop failure and impending starvation.  Living this life makes me realize how dependent we are on the weather and how vulnerable we are to a bad year.  The Irish endured four bad years 1846-1850.  People and animals truly did just starve. 

Today's industrial food system ensures a constant supply of food.  Not only can we buy grain year-round, we can buy berries in the January, tomatoes in February, and watermelon in March.  It's a wonderful security that starvation has been completely lifted from our minds.  But it's come at a terrible cost.  Soils are being depleted.  Fossil fuels used to transport those melons in March are polluting the air and warming up the planet.  It's been also pretty hard on the small farmer as large corporate farms and distributors squeeze them with low commodity prices and monopoly-like practices.  I'm glad that people aren't starving from crop failure, but I also believe that we are smart enough to find solutions that don't cost so much.