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.......

Clipped Wings

Last spring we got four new chicks to add to our flock.  They have been laying for about two months and finishing their final growing.  They've also gotten strong enough to fly out of the pen.

This morning we found one outside the pen again.  We could build the fence higher, but it's easier to clip their wings.  Thankfully my daughters are able to catch them pretty easily.  She held the chicken while I clipped off the end of one wing.  It's a little creepy, feeling the scissors cut through the feather quills, but it doesn't hurt the chicken any more than clipping finger nails.

Farm animals come with a moral responsibility that gardens don't have. If a farm animal is hurt by me, I feel morally culpable. Since we are raising our own meat, we've had to develop a new morality around caring for animals that we will kill later on.  We've decided that the animal would die anyway, whether we butchered it or somebody else, but that our job is to give it a good life.  Never having worked through this before, I find myself swinging back and forth between too much compassion and too little.

The truth is that all eating comes with moral responsibility.  If the rich man had moral responsibility for Lazarus (Lk 16:19-31), then we have it too.  That is part of what has driven my family back to the land.  What we eat and the way it was raised has implications for the animals, the people, and the land.  And whatever we support we are responsible for.  If you buy your meat at the store, it's no small feat to find out where it came from and how it was raised.  An organic certification helps, but our whole food system has become so depersonalized that it's nearly impossible to track food back to its origins.  At least for the food we raise ourselves, we know the moral culpability we take on.

The sick chicken has been given a reprieve while we recover from the flu.  I noticed last night that she was standing up a little bit.  Maybe she will recover.

The peppers I planted last spring are producing.  I planted lots of different kinds, but many didn't germinate. Things got busy in June and I just started throwing little plants into the soil without keeping track.  Actually, I didn't expect any of them to live, so I thought it didn't matter.  Well, most of them did live and now we have a row of peppers and I haven't a clue what kind they are.  Most of them look like sweet peppers, but I know that I planted some hot ones too.   We picked that row and filled our harvest bucket.  I pulled two off one plant that might be hot.  I'll let my husband try one to tell.

Green peppers are beautiful when they freeze.  I dice them up, just as if I was going to saute them, and lay them out on a cookie sheet.  After freezing solid, I transfer them to a bag.  They freeze as green and perfect as if nothing had happened.

The root cellar book says that if acorn squash turn orange, they won't keep very well.  I noticed that two of our squash were getting orange spots, so I figured it was time for our first squash pie.  After cutting them in half and scooping out the seeds (we'll give those to the chickens), I bake them for an hour or two, until a fork pokes in easily.  I used to cut squash with a knife, but they are so hard that I worried about slipping and getting seriously hurt.  One year I discovered that if I use the little carving saws they sell at Halloween, they were easy to cut.  After baking, I scoop out the flesh and run it through the blender.   Then I cook them up just like pumpkin pie.

Life Goes On

The stomach flu that claimed our nine-year-old daughter last week is now raging through the rest of the family.  Everyone has dropped except me and my other nine-year-old.  I think of this as something to get through, but my twins are excited at the prospect that they are the caretakers of the family.  Before I got up they had already fed the cows and gotten the chickens up.  Since then they've hung laundry, cleaned the kitchen, and folded some dry laundry.

Life does go on, even with so many in bed.  It was bread day again.  I make two loaves at a time and they last two or three days.  When our oldest was at home, they only lasted one day.  My morning began with wheat grinding.  The machine is fast, but every time I use it, I'm reminded how much I would prefer a hand-crank model. 

I make bread by hand occasionally, but it's faster and easier to use the KitchenAid.  In six minutes it's mixed and kneaded.  We were told by KitchenAid not to run the mixer longer than five minutes (although it never said that in their manuals), so we are careful about not running it too long.  After an hour rising in a warm oven, then I put it into two loaf pans, another 30 minutes of rising, and bake at 350F for 35 minutes.  With only two kids eating, I should be able to get the heal before the crowd descends.

It's been two-and-a-half weeks since our last fresh milk.  My days now have fallen into a rhythm with our store of frozen milk, and like most things, it hasn't been simple.  I tried just thawing the milk in the frig but it took five days and then it had a slight freezer burn taste to it.  I found a new way.  The first day that I get it out of the deep-freeze, I leave it on the counter for two or three hours and then peel the plastic bag off.  The second day, I break up the crystal block into a slush.  The third day it's ready to pour and drink.

I miss fresh milk.  I really miss fresh cream.  We are now eating commercial butter and I got some ice cream for pie.  Within two or three bites, I had that old ick feeling that I associate with dairy.  Not only does Christina milk taste amazing, it doesn't make me feel bad.  Not even a little.  ...seven more weeks... my hunger is growing.

Soreness and Surprise

It's cool and rainy today.  It wasn't supposed to be and I had a long list of things to get done outside.  I'm not that disappointed that I have to stay in.

We harvested that surprise broccoli that had been growing on the back side.  Off only six plants we almost filled the harvesting bucket.  After washing them, I looked in the book on how to freeze broccoli.  It recommended soaking them in salt water for 30 minutes to eliminate insects.  Sounds good, so I did that.  Then it was pretty standard.  First I cut them into the sized pieces I'll want when they come out of the freezer.

Then I blanched them.  This old blancher was in my grandmother's things after she died.  It's a pot in a pot.  The inner pot has holes like a colander and nests nicely into the outer pot.  After bringing the water to a boil, I threw it a bunch of broccoli and let them go for three minutes.  After draining, I dumped them into another strainer to drain and started the next batch.  Finally, I dumped the drained broccoli into bags.

It took less than half-an-hour from start to finish.  In the end, we got about a gallon and a half in the freezer.  That's a lot of broccoli when I didn't realize we had any.

That broccoli will taste sweeter because it was a surprise.  And it's a blessing because I'm sore and it gave me something to do today without straining any muscles.

My body has been slow in learning this new lifestyle.  Raising food involves a lot of lifting and physical work.  My body is middle aged and not especially athletic.  Sore muscles have become a regular part of my life.  Last Friday we scooped cow pies and then Saturday I helped my daughter's girl scout troop pick apples, lifting quite a few heavy boxes.  My back is still sore.  But the rain has given me a respite, another day to heal and recover.  I pray that each time I suffer this soreness, God is using it to grow strength in my body so next time won't be as bad.  That's all I can hope for at my age.

Eggs?

Only eight eggs yesterday.  A few weeks ago we were struggling to keep up with a dozen a day, and then suddenly it dropped off.

This happened last summer.   Late one day we discovered that the coop door had accidentally closed.  We open it right up and laughed at the line up of hens at the nesting boxes.  The next day egg production suddenly dropped.

Two days later we found a dead hen in the coop.  The book said that sometimes hens die of being egg-bound.  The hen doesn't lay her egg and it gets stuck.  We think that's what happened, but because we weren't sure, we treated the hen like she died of disease and carefully wrapped the body in several layers of plastic before whisking it off to the garbage.

Afterward, we made sure the flock had lots of good quality feed and slowly the production came back up.  It took weeks, but it did come back.

Now it's dropped again.  We have one sick chicken, although she might be injured and not sick.  But then, how would we know?!  How do you tell a sick chicken?!   They don't have noses that run.  How could you tell if they were pale?  I don't even know how to check for a chicken fever, and I don't think I'm interested in learning. 

Then something else occurred to us.  It's still warm, but we are on the other side of the equinox.  The books say that chickens lay best with 14+ hour days.  By the end of December when we'll have only nine hours of daylight, production will drop by more than half.  In commercial egg farms they take care of that by using electric lights, but we're going to stay with the sun.  Today we have eleven-and-a-half hours.  Maybe our flock is on the normal decline from shorter days.  We haven't gone a whole year with chickens so we are still learning how their normal cycles work.

I hope it's just normal seasonal decline.

The sick chicken is doing the same.  My nine-year-old checks on her several times a day.  This morning she went out to check on her again.  When she came in I asked how Soody was doing.  "The same," she said confidently.  It's been a week with no change.  Then I asked, "do you think she is suffering?"  My sweet little girl dropped her head, leaned against me and and said, "yes." 

Cleaning the Pasture

Today we cleaned the west pasture... okay, we shoveled cow shit.  We moved the cows out of the pasture over a week ago to let it grow while they graze on the east pasture.  If we leave the cow pies where they lay, we're told that the cows will avoid the grass around it for three years.  By scooping them up, we get compost in the garden and keep the pasture at 100% cow food.  Working in teams, one person with a garden fork and one with the wheel barrow, we got it done in two hours, but I feel like I've put in a long hard day.

Cow shit isn't nearly as bad as some things, but it isn't pleasant either.  At lunch my 15 year-old recounted at length how bad the smell was.  But it really wasn't that bad.  The chickens received the benefit of our labor.  Those cow pies are full of bugs and worms.  They swarmed it for hours.

Our sick chicken isn't any better, but she isn't any worse either.  Even if she gets better, she has stopped laying and I don't know if she'll start again.  Unfortunately since we separated her, she has now become special.  One of my twins has given her a name, "Soody."  I can't imagine that chicken is feeling fine and it seems humane to put it out of it's misery, but I care more about the feelings of my daughter than the feelings of the chicken.  We'll wait a while longer.

An important part of the self-sufficient lifestyle is seed saving.  There is strategy and skill to real seed saving, but this year I'm only doing the easy stuff (I have to leave something to learn next year!).  Today we gathered lettuce seed.  I turned the flower heads over into a bucket and gave them several good thwacks to knock the seed in.  We got seed and fluff and little crawlies.  I put a lid on the bucket and set it aside.  Hopeful in a week the crawlies will have all died of old age.

We have been buying our wheat at the Boise Co-Op for a while.  If we had an extra acre we'd grow our own, but we don't.  They carry an Idaho Organic wheat at a pretty reasonable price.  I don't know if the wheat would qualify us for the 100-mile diet, but I decided that I'm going to focus on my state rather than a 100-mile radius.  At least I know I'm buying from people who are paying taxes in my state.  A month or two ago the Co-op was having a *fantastic* sale on that Idaho Organic wheat.  Whereas we normally pay about eighty cents per pound, it was only thirty-five cents!  The fellow said the farmer has a large harvest and they were moving the grain for him.  At such great prices, we bought 600 pounds, enough for a year.  It doesn't seem wise to keep it in the paper bags that long, so we got food-grade buckets and transferred it.  When we were done we had sixteen buckets and a bunch of empty bags to show for our work.

A bucket full of grain, pure and dry, is a beautiful thing.  Sixteen of them sitting in the basement, safe from mold and crawlies, is like wealth and safety.  Bring on the winter!