More Food Than Wrapping

Saturday was warm and sunny so I finished a two-year project: pruning the grape vine.  This vine must have been planted 35 years ago when my in-laws built this house, and it seems like that's the last time it was pruned.  The trunk is big and the tangle of branches seemed endless.  Last year I got half of it pruned and gave up.  But now it is done!  

In an hour I had it cut back hard and ready to grow in a more humane manner. This is a table grape and they dehydrate into very sweet treats.  As I was pruning it seemed that several of the branches had established new roots.  If they start growing, I may dig them up and move them.

We have some herbs that have been drying and drying and it's finally time to do something with them.  I crushed up all the basil and got it in jars.  We definitely need to grow more next year.

I finally made that pumpkin chocolate cheesecake.  It turned out really good.  Actually, I like it better than regular cheesecake.  My husband had three pieces.  And the best part — the kids aren't all that enthusiastic so we might get more than one piece.

My daughter went to a dance and they needed me to chaperon.  As the kids were eating snacks with more wrapping than food and puts lots of energy into being entertained, I thought how different our life is.  We have more food than wrapping.  We have more love than posturing.  And what a wonderful life it is.  All I can think is that God must love us very much to call us to this life.

I Don't Have Patience for Patience

I made that colby with slightly lower temperatures, which means the curds had more moisture, which means they were bigger, which means they hardly fit in the cheese mold.  I careful scooped them in and pushed them down.

The round thing on top, the follower, also got a good pushing to get it into the cheese press.  In the end, the cheese came out larger than normal but looking pretty good.  I wonder if it will be better.  But I have to wait two months to find out!  This waiting months for feedback is tough.  I don't like waiting.

Speaking of little patience, the cows drink out of the hose when we fill their water.  They run up, wanting the freshest water and will stand there and drink out of the hose.  Here is beefy getting his drinks as the water came in.  Even when we were bringing buckets of water, Christina would get right in there and drink out of the bucket as we were trying to pour it. 

Now I know why we like these cows so much, they make sense to us!

A Good Day

We got out the first cheese I made in the new press, a monterey jack.  It is a little more crumbly than we expected, almost a dryness to it, but the flavor is good.  I looked back in my notes and this cheese did get too hot in the curd cooking stage.

We suddenly have more milk in the frig than I expected so I'll make a colby today.  I'll be extra careful not to let it get too hot.

Just a month ago we were getting 0-2 eggs a day.  Now we are getting 5-7.  Plus, I found another bag of eggs in freezer, so we had scrambled eggs for breakfast.  Last summer we had eggs every morning and the kids complained.  Today they wolfed them down and begged each other for more.

The temperature has been low but the sun has been shining.  Yesterday when my husband and girls went out to fill the cows' water, jerky was napping in the sun.  My daughter grabbed the camera and got his picture.  One of my nine-year-old's is working on training jerky to ride.  She leans over him and slowly puts her weight on him.  Of course, the first time he just flopped on the ground, but today she got on him, sitting up, and he took several steps before she got off.

My husband spotted a recipe for pumpkin chocolate cheesecake in our favorite cookbook, Simply in Season.  Yesterday we made cream cheese.  Today we'll bake up some squash.

As I write this we have milk warming on the stove to become cheese, a roast in the crock-pot, squash in the oven with egg shells along side that we'll grind up and give to the chickens.  The older girls are downstairs doing their school work while the twins are at the table reading an Usborne science book.  The little one is helping his Daddy with laundry and then they will read some stories.  The sun is shining into the dining room and we are warm.  What a good day.

The Chickens Lived

As the sun came up we noticed chickens out in their yard.  Uh oh.  We forgot to put the chickies away last night.  Actually, we don't put them away, we just close to the door, but it's important.  That could have been free dinner for a fox.  But they made it.  It's by the grace of God we have any chickens this morning.

With chickens running around at dawn, the girls filled their food and water and the gathered eggs.  One had frozen solid and split. 

There were seven eggs.  Yesterday we had five and today we have seven eggs!  These are big numbers! The books say that egg production is all about light and we sure are getting a good demonstration.  The temperature dropped to 12ºF overnight, but egg production is up.  Praise God for the sun!  Friday we celebrate crossing over into a ten hour day.

With the pots sterilized, I transplanted until I ran out of pots.  Those lettuce and cabbage were full of healthy looking roots.  With plants and dirt all over the kitchen, I used warm water to moisten the soil so it was pretty pleasant.

The plants have plenty of room to grow now and the bench is big enough for all of them.  These little plants are only a month old and looking so good.  It occurs to me that I should get some more lettuce started because a month from now it will might be warm enough to put them in the garden with some black landscape fabric to warm up the soil. 

Not Very Self Contained

Those seeds I started a month ago have grown!  They are crowding each other out, spreading wide but not leggy.  These grow lights are doing the trick!  They are just shop lights with one cool bulb and one warm.  My husband is looking at that lettuce like it's ready, but I told him to stay back and let it grow some more.

It's time to get them transplanted into larger pots.  The first step is to sterilize the pots.  We pulled them out of the barn and put them in bleach water yesterday.  Today I'll scrub them off and start transplanting.

I've been having a little trouble with cheese not knitting together as solidly as I'd like.  It occurred to me that the problem was temperature.  It's only 65ºF inside during the day but at night it drops into the 50's.  I tried something new.  I put a bowl of boiling water in there and then wrapped the whole thing with towels.

Today a fierce storm is hitting large portions of the country with heavy snow, ice, and very cold temperatures.  They predict many will be without electricity for days or weeks.  We are too far west to be effected much, but we are praying for all those who are. 

It got me to thinking about a week without electricity.  We have plenty of food, but our stove is electric.  We have a well, but the pump runs on electricity.  Our heat is electric.  We have a fire place but it's not very efficient at heating.  It's rekindled the fire under us to get one of those new high efficiency inserts in the fire place for heat and to boil water.  We have got to get some home-based generation system like wind or solar to run the pump.  All of these systems could off-set our regular energy usage as well, which does have a positive effect on the planet.  But in a big storm situation, it would have a pretty positive effect on our family too.

A New Schedule

Today is a good day to make cheese, but we don't have quite enough milk.  Jerky's old enough that we decided to milk all four quarters this morning for the extra.   It filled more than a single bucket, measuring out at 3-1/4 gallons.  Carrying two buckets into the house was a new challenge.  I was a little worried how the cows would handle the schedule change, but Christina took it in stride.  Jerky wasn't quite so accepting, but did fine.

I'm out of sterlized milk and it's time to culture a starter. I started by canning quarts of milk.  30 minutes in a boiling water bath and they are sterilized.  Today I'll culture mesopholic for cheese.

We out grew out little cheese frig and got another.  These are wine frigs so we can set the temperature at 55ºF and the racks allow good air movement.  The red cheeses are the waxed ones — cheddar, colby, and jack.  The yellow ones are italians that dry to a form a rind — parmesan and romano.  My husband pointed out that if I want to make more cheese, he could build a rack and stack these frigs right up the wall.

Those cheeses without wax get mold easily.  I'll wipe any mold I find with vinegar.

Today we'll also churn butter, bake bread, make something for snack like zucca bars or brownies, and then we need to figure something out for dinner.   And our newly three year old son starts formal homeschooling.  It's just read an assigned story, listen to a nursery rhyme, and play with blocks, but he likes having a "schedule" like his big sisters.

Little Ones

We're still letting jerky take some milk.  Christina is giving us over four gallons a day so we don't need any more.  Jerky is so big now, but he's still Christina's baby.  It's so cute how he cuddles up to her as he nurses. 

Today our baby turns three years old.  We made cream cheese yesterday that we'll use for frosting.  If you look at the ingredients for commercial cream cheese, you'll find several things besides cream and culture.  Ours is only cream, culture, and one drop of rennet.  It's thick but not quite as smooth as commercial cream cheese.  However, when I get it in the mixer with some powerdered sugar, it whips up smooth and rich.

Today we'll bake a cake and make spaghetti.  And we'll probably finish off a three-pound block of colby.  This is the first cheese I made after Christina freshened (calved) and the last one with the old nasty press.  It looked so nasty when it came out of the press that I almost didn't take the time to wax it.  But even with holes it in and pretty mild from only two months aging, it has good flavor and better texture.  This container was completely full when I cut the block up yesterday and now it's mostly gone.  Our little one turning three has done most of the damage. 

Life Without TV

We are successfully getting water out to the cows with hoses. This is a big improvement over carrying buckets. And with the new stock tank, we only have to fill it every few days instead of twice a day.

When my husband and daughter were filling the water it was just above freezing and overcast.  My husband was dressed appropriately but our daughter's internal combustion must have been working well.  Not only was she wearing only a tank top and skort, but she swung her arms around as she waited.  I remember the days when I could have pulled that off.

Most every evening we pause for reading aloud.  My 9-year old's are studying early American history and we just finished Johnny Tremain.  While I read they take turns churning the butter.

With our evenings full of reading, butter churning, and milking, we haven't watched TV in over a year.  When people hear all that we do on our little homestead, they wonder how we fit it all in.  Freeing up those several hours a day the average person dedicates to TV makes it easy. 

Only a few years ago I was a high-functioning TV addict.  I watched regularly but I still held a job. I couldn't imagine going a few days, let alone a week without TV.  Now that I'm fully detoxed, I have to admit that I don't miss it much.  In fact, I don't miss it at all.  I have time for good novels, for cooking great food, and for doing things with my children.  I'm a little embarrassed to remember those hours of stillness, letting my consciousness be lead around by commercial interests. We still watch movies, but commercial-driven TV is a thing of the past.

Hiding in Plain Sight

My youngest was feeling tired and wanted to cuddle.  We laid down on the bed at an odd angle, he with his bottle and me with my arms around him, and looked out the window.  We had a nice view of our big sycamore.  I rarely look out the window at this angle, but there it was.  It filled the whole view, a beautiful array of branches and stems and leaves.  The breeze moved the leaves in unison like a gentle dance.

Laying there, holding this little one of my heart, and finding such beauty hiding above our heads reminded me of the many ways that God's beauty and presence is all around us, but we just don't look up.

Sometimes in life it feels as if God is distant, or not relevant, or maybe just not paying much attention to me.  But the truth is that God is all around, I'm the one missing it.  That can be an easy enough thing to say, but it's another thing to know.  Looking up at that beautiful tree was a tangible reminder of the ways God hides in plain sight.  That tree had been there all the time, right outside my window, but I was the one who didn't see it.  It was only when I was quiet, some time devoted to nothing other than loving and looking, that I found it.

Just like God, that tree is strong, big, and old.  But also just like God it has thousands of little parts, branching in complexity, bigger than my mind can take in.  That tree has been watching over us, steadfast, surveying the changing seasons and our near constant rushing around.  The tree has been gently just watching even as our busy-ness made us frustrated and was more about experience-gluttony than real need.  But the tree never grew frustrated, it kept standing, waiting for us to notice.

The gentle stillness was like a moment out of time, laying on the warm bed, a sweet little one cuddled up to me, a lovely tree showing off its wares, and contemplating a gentle, persistent God.  After a while of just looking, everything changed.  The whole tree changed color right before our eyes.  The dull brown transformed into a bright orange.  It was the sun breaking through the clouds, each leaf catching the low light like thousands of little reflectors.  The effect was a dazzling orange-red of earth tones like someone had hit "enhance" on the world and the tree itself was glowing.

I asked my little son, "did you see that tree change color?"  His breathy "yeah" was an eyes-wide-open exhalation.  We watched the color fade brown to orange and back to brown and burst back to orange.   It wasn't just the tree that was hiding in plain sight, there was a dynamic vitality there, waiting to be noticed.

In that moment, God wasn't just an idea, a dogma, or a being to study, in that moment God was real, shining light into my life and noticing me.  God couldn't be contained in the metaphor of a tree above, standing still, and strong, God lept into the metaphor of the light, of constantly changing, uncontrollable, and unattainable, the energy source of all life on earth.  And then God waited for me to notice.

Our First Breeding

God willing, we have a knocked up cow.  Today was three days since we gave Christina the shot that's supposed to throw her into heat.  Our poor cow has had to deal with the cow-version of clomid.

Dairy cows run on roughly an annual cycle of calving to keep the milk flowing.  They give the most milk after they calve (freshen) and then it slowly goes down.  After two months dry they calve and freshen again.  If we don't get her pregnant, her milk will slowly go down and there will be no calving to get everything started again.

The breeder guy came this morning.  He brought the semem from a bull named Plus frozen in liquid nitrogen.  It's a two handed job, one requiring a glove to the shoulder, but it was fast.

Afterward she needed another shot.  Thankfully he gave that one to her.  He walked up to her thigh, hit it twice with his fist, put the shot in, gently squeezed it and only then did Christina react.  She stepped away from the shot and onto my husband's foot.  We joked that she was punishing him for letting in that guy with the shot.

Beefy kept trying to ride Christina and getting in the way.  She stepped away from him but beefy was persistent so we tied him up out of the way.  The breeder guy said all that riding is a good sign that she's in heat today.

The breeder guy also said she has good flesh on her.  I think that means she's not skinny.  He said it's not easy to keep flesh on a dairy cow so we're doing a good job.  Whew!

In three weeks we'll watch to see if she goes into heat, although wouldn't it be ironic if she did and showed us?  Not going into heat is a good sign that a cow is pregnant, but if she goes into heat and doesn't show us, how would we know?  I think a vet can check her in two months to confirm she's pregnant, and we might do that, just to be sure.

If everything was successful today, 280 days is Nov. 1st and our time off begins Sept. 1st.  ...hmmm... that's a nice time to travel.