Farm Life's Hardest Lesson

If you read any "What I Wish I Would Have Known" articles written by modern homesteader types, one of the first items on their list is always going to be this:

You don't have to do it all at once.

Take it slow, they say. Give yourself grace, they say. Just a little bit at a time and don't overwhelm yourself.

I've read dozens of those articles. And I've always nodded in agreement, as though I've always known perfectly well that that one little bit of advice is absolutely correct.

Except that I didn't.

My best friend and I used to joke that whichever one of us ended up moving to a farm first was going to end up sitting in the middle of her pasture, crying the ugly cry, absolutely overwhelmed by what she had taken on and that the other friend was going to have to listen and comfort and try not to say "I told you so."

Turns out, I was the first one to move to a farm. And that prediction wasn't as far off as I'd like for you think it is. Except that it's snowy outside, so I was sobbing in my bedroom, while staring at my pasture. Which really isn't any better.

I haven't blogged regularly in almost a year. There's a reason for it though.

The past year has been seriously rough. My husband has been working out of town - sometimes out of state - for the past year. He's gone two weeks and then home for a week. That means that two thirds of the time, every responsibility of this property falls on my shoulders. In the past year I have raised a rather large garden, milked two goats and kept another 50 or so animals alive, homeschooled a first and fifth grader, kept a 4600 square foot house clean, raised 700 bales of hay on a 25 acre pasture using nothing but a shovel and some tarps. I've raised and butchered enough chickens to last a year, canned a year's worth of fruits and vegetables and dried or frozen what wasn't canned, cooked dinner every night,  run my kids around to their extra curricular activities, driven an hour each direction every time I needed groceries, hauled horses to 9 gymkhanas and rodeos, and hauled chickens to the county fair. And almost all of this with very little help from The Man of My Dreams, except for the weeks he was able to spend at home.

What I learned is that I really can do it all. I'm working from 5:30 in the morning until 9:30 at night, every single hour of the day, but I can get it all done. Until something goes wrong. As soon as the slightest little thing happens to upset my very rigid schedule, I lose it. I get so overwhelmed that I can't function and all I want to do is give up. Or cry.

The bad part of that, though, is that in this life, something happens to change your plans Every. Single. Day. Nothing ever goes the way you expect it to, or plan for it to. An animal gets sick. A kid misbehaves. A neighbor needs help. A fence needs fixed or a goat gets out or a deer dies in your front yard or your dog gets skunked or the well runs dry (again) and you have to spend an hour hauling water. The list of Things That Can Go Wrong is infinite. And each one of those things is guaranteed to happen when you least expect it. That is reality.

And with a schedule as packed as mine has been this year, and a brain so overwhelmed by constant mental to-do lists, there just isn't time to stop and enjoy all those little things that are supposed to bring me joy. I don't have time to watch my kids play with animals or build a fort or raise a puppy. I don't have time to relax with my husband and just sit and watch the sun go down. I've spent every waking moment just keeping up, keeping my head above water, that I've lost touch with every reason we moved up here in the first place. And that makes my heart hurt.

It's a lesson no one can just tell you and expect you to understand: You don't have to do it all at once.

You have to learn it, first hand. And it's painful. And it involves a lot of frustration and even more tears. But eventually, you take a step back, and you realize what you're doing to yourself, and you decide things have to change. Priorities have to be considered. You have to give yourself room to bend, and time to relax. You have to remember that there are so many years ahead of you to figure this all out and get it all done. And there will never be one single year when you actually accomplish everything you feel like you should. Living this life isn't something to mark off the to-do list. It's a process - a life long process - and it will never actually be finished.

And so, at a time when so many of my friends are moving out to the country and starting their homesteading lives, here is my advice:

You don't have to do it all at once.

Take it slow.

 Give yourself grace.

Just a little bit at a time.

Don't overwhelm yourself.

And when you are sobbing in the middle of your pasture, don't hesitate to give me a call. 

The Inventory of the Cellar

As the harvest/preserving season wraps up for the 2013 season, I organized the cellar and freezer and took stock of how much food we’ve produced and put by for the year. I was a little more detailed in my record keeping this year than I have been in the past, as I work to figure out how much food we actually need, how much it costs and how much I save, etc. 

These records are purely for my own information, but I’m posting them in case anyone is interested (and also, because if they are on the blog, I won’t lose them.)

In the cellar:

246 jars of food (fruit, vegetables, jams, sauces/salsas/condiments, syrups, soups.)

16 delicata squash (each will provide one meal)

6 large pie pumpkins (will equal approx 20 cans of pumpkin)

22 lbs fresh-stored carrots (with more to harvest)

12 lbs fresh-stored beets (I canned half the beet harvest as pickled beets)

17 lbs potatoes (with more to harvest)

? dried beans (haven’t shelled them yet. Maybe 5 lbs? Not much.)

62 heads of garlic (enough for planting this fall, too.)

75 onions

several bunches of dried herbs (dill, parsley, basil, thyme, oregano, lavender)

8 quarts of dried fruit and tomatoes

24 sheets of fruit leather (equals about 96 “fruit roll-ups”)

 

In the freezer:

5 lbs carrots

2 lbs broccoli

5 gallons of soups

4 quarts of chopped green onions

2 lbs chopped bell peppers

7 cups of spaghetti sauce

14 cups of pesto

I chose to can most of our food this year when it was possible, since freezer space is limited.

These totals don’t include the fresh veggies we’ve eaten through the summer, beginning in May and lasting about 5 months. Most meals were planned around what was coming out of the garden.

Meat:

16 chickens

3 turkeys (yet to be butchered)

1 goat (yet to be butchered.)

(hoping this will total about 40 meals’ worth of food, plus broth for soups.)

(There is also hope still for one -or two- elk this year, which would provide a full year's worth of meat, and enough to share.)

Dairy (year totals)

About 50 gallons of milk (I don’t keep daily records. This is a close estimate.)

About 45 dozen eggs (again, this is an estimate. They slow down in the winter, but produce 3-4 dozen per week during the summer.)

I wish I had the numbers to put a value to all of the food in this house right now, but I’m not that organized yet.

But the total cost of all of it?

$175 in locally, farm-purchased fruits and vegetables that I didn’t/couldn’t raise myself.

$60 in garden seeds

$60 in meat birds

Approx $120 in meat chicken feed

Another $120 in egg hen feed (not including the feed cost of the show birds.)

$240 in grain for goats

Not sure of the cost of jar lids, bought about $24 of canning jars this year, plus spices, sugar, etc. that I didn’t keep records of. Estimating about $75 in those supplies.

So total cost for the above listed foods? $824

Also, figure at least 250 hours of work. At least. Honestly, it’s probably a whole lot more, but sometimes it’s hard to decipher work from play around here.

The amount seems enormous, but when it's spread over 6 months or so, it's not terrible... and if I make the effort, I could cut our monthly grocery bill down to about $100 for 5 or 6 months.  That puts us at roughly $233 per month, eating healthy, organically grown vegetables, pastured meat, raw milk and fresh eggs. I realize some folks live on plenty less than this each month, but seriously y'all, we eat really good food!

 

So is it worth it? Absolutely.

 Raising meat chickens is utterly uneconomical, between the cost of the birds and feed, the amount of work required in the raising and butchering of them… if we could find a way to hatch our own meat chicks and raise our own feed, it would make more sense. (I’ve heard you can raise chickens almost entirely on clabbered cow’s milk. I’m not opposed to trying this when our cow is in milk) Turkeys are a much bigger bang for your buck, even when raised from poults. Goats can be expensive, since grain is a requirement, but the milk they provide for drinking, cooking, plus yogurt, cheese, etc. is so worth it… and goats provide a lot of fun, too. (Most people pay more for a monthly cable bill than we do for our goats, and goats are far more entertaining!) We also raise all the hay our animals will use, and they graze pasture during the spring, summer, and fall. This cuts down significantly on the cost of meat and milk production. It’s hard for me to estimate the value of the egg chickens vs. the cost of their feed, since most of our chickens are show-breed bantams that The Oldest raises for fun (and are therefore worthless when it comes to laying.)

The garden is amazing, though. The sheer number of pounds of food produced with just $60 worth of seeds in incredible. Fresh vegetables all through the summer months and well into the fall and winter. The fertilizer is provided by the menagerie in the barns, the water comes from our irrigation, and the man-power is provided by Two Little Girls and myself. (Bonus: gardening and other farm chores also provide a great daily workout, omitting what some folks pay in gym memberships.)What doesn’t get eaten provides extra feed for the animals. 

Are we anywhere close to self-sufficient? Not at all. Until I can grown my own wheat and oats, we'll still be making monthly trips to the grocery store. Though I have started looking into the details of raising sugar beets, just as an experiment...

When I sent Littlest One down-cellar the other day for a jar of pears, she came up with them and said, “Do you know what I thought when I went into the cellar? I thought, ‘I’m so proud of my mom for putting all this food in here for us to eat.’”

So is it worth it? Yep, you betcha. And it's even kinda fun, too. :-)

The Little Things - The Important Things

Ah, what a nice break it's been from blogging! With so much to do, and so little time, writing our little stories has been pushed to the back burner.

If there's one lesson I'm learning from this crazy new life we're living, it's how to prioritize. Children must be taught and fed. Animals must be fed and tended to. The hay pasture must be irrigated and the garden must be planted and tended. Sadly, things like blogging, or knitting, or any of the other little creative bits I used to have time for seem to have been replaced with other activities, at least for now.

Not that I'm complaining. So much satisfaction can be found in the work that makes up every moment of every day. I enjoy it all immensely, and so does our family. What is actually work often feels more like play. I've learned to find incredible enjoyment in my animals, in walking through the sloshy pasture twice a day, and in making cheese and yogurt. Peaceful moments come in the form of enjoying a cold beer on the deck at sunset, listening to the birds singing their goodnights; listening to Two Little Girls making clothespin fairy dolls talk as they adventure through the garden fairy village; watching goats and horses graze contentedly along the edges of the yard.

Not that it's all picture perfect. The never-endingness of it all is constantly overwhelming, and I'm still learning to accept that I'm simply not ever going to have it all done. It goes back to those priorities. Some days school takes priority, and we do a week's worth of math and English to make up for the days we've missed. Other days I realize I haven't shoveled manure in a week, or that the weeds are climbing the pea trellis faster than the peas are. Whatever seems most pressing gets accomplished, everything else is left for another day. I'm learning to remember that it will still be there tomorrow. And some days, play and relaxing and laughing take priority. If they didn't, I'd be a crazy person. And we all know if I'm crazy, my family is too.

So along we trudge, delighting in all The Little Things we do, appreciating the sweet details that tend to fog over the messier big picture. And for now, that's just about perfect.

As life seems to be evening out again, I'm hoping to get back to writing the little stories that make up our little lives... the stories I want to remember, that I want my children to remember, the stories that I hope make a few folks smile once in awhile.

Potatoes: The Treasure Hunt

Some days, it's hard to tell the difference between what is work and what is play.

Take digging potatoes, for instance. Surely smiles like this don't come from hard work...

And laughter of this variety can't come from chores... can it?

Ah, but maybe it can.

There are some wonderful opportunities out there for convincing children that work really can feel like play, if only it's approached with the right attitude. Or if it's turned into a wrestling match for the biggest potato pulled out of the ground.
 
We've never grown potatoes before. This whole Digging Potatoes experience was a splendid one, for all three of us.  It's a veritable treasure hunt, and one that requires Two Little Girls (and their Momma) to be elbow-deep in soil. And any job that involves a good bit of getting dirty is bound to be welcomed.

I'd love to offer you all a few great tips and hints for growing and harvesting potatoes, but I've got nothin'. We're brand new at this, and from all I have read, we did everything all wrong. The skins are thin because you're supposed to withhold water for a couple of weeks (someone should have told that to those rain storms that keep rolling through in the afternoons.) You're supposed to wait until the plants die back after frost to harvest, except that more than half of our potatoes already weighed over a pound and a half each, and I can't see letting them get any bigger. It'll only take one potato to feed all four of us at that rate.

So while they won't store in the cellar long, and they aren't anywhere close to being the perfectly shaped potatoes you find at the store, I'm sure we'll happily be eating baked potatoes and home-fries for a few weeks to come, anyway.

And next year, I'll read about harvesting potatoes before I decide to dig them all out of the ground. ;-)

The Urgency of Fall

I don't whine very often. Or, well, I try not to. I love having a blog filled with cheerfulness and stories of happy and satisfying things. Because really, my life is filled with happiness and satisfying things. And I know I don't have a right to complain. But once in awhile...

Honestly, I don't think it's complaining. It's just stress! There is SO much to do, and so much I want to be doing, and I don't know which way to turn, I don't know which way is forward or which way is backward.

I think feeling the fall in the air is making me feel like I'm under pressure to get everything done. The land around me is sending out it's warning, "You only have a month left to prepare yourself before the ground is frozen solid and it's too cold to go outside!" I hate how gleeful it is in this threat - all those bright, beautiful leaves of flaming red and golden amber, happily announcing that winter is, in fact, just around the corner.

Don't get me wrong, I love fall. I love that the sweltering heat of summer is finally gone, that the air is crisp and we can play outside without risking heat exhaustion. I think my problem is that I love fall so much that I just want to sit outside and enjoy it, instead of all this work I'm doing inside.

I'm to the point where I don't care if I see another ripe tomato as long as I live. Or at least until next July. Pints and quarts of salsa, soup, dried tomatoes, diced tomatoes, pizza sauce, spaghetti sauce... it's all in there, stored up to keep us nourished this winter. And I still have one more box to go. A month ago all I wanted was to be eating raw, sliced tomatoes with a bit of salt and pepper. Well, I'm over that.

School is (somehow) back in full swing. We manage about four hours a day on a good day... which means more like two hours a day on average days. Somehow, getting tomatoes in jars before they rot seems a lot more pressing than learning why Franklin Pierce was a fairly worthless president. Aw, who am I kidding? Even riding the horses or chasing the goats seems more important than Pierce.

The garden is nearing it's end, and I'm encouraging it by failing to water it - ever - and hoping it'll just hurry up and die off. It's done its job, we have veggies in the freezer. Now, I would like a break from weeds and aphids and squash and hungry grasshoppers. I think I'll dig the carrots today. Because nothing is more fun than digging carrots out of compacted clay soil. Really, you should try it.

The house hasn't been properly cleaned since, um... we moved in back in February. Spring came so quickly that by the time we were unpacked, we were suddenly drowning in The To-Do List that comes with trying to learn how to care for a 40 acre ranch. Animals and outdoor work and outdoor play take precedence over house cleaning. I wash laundry, and dishes, and occasionally (if it rains) I manage to dust or vacuum. But this darn beautiful fall air is making feel like I need to be deep cleaning... which is, of course, impossible when one's entire kitchen is brimful of vegetables and fruits that the fruit flies are dangerously close to consuming in their entirety.

It's nothing that doesn't happen every single year about this time. An urgent need to get everything done coupled with an urgent need to sit in my wooden chair on the deck and bask in the beauty of fall.

I think the best remedy for it is to go pour a glass of wine and sit and watch the leaves change colors.

After I finish canning these tomatoes.

Pretty Flowers

I'm not a flower gardener. I have a few plants in a little flower garden, more for the sake of my beauty-loving five year old (who is very much a flower person) than for myself. I grow food. Food sustains us. It is useful, and brings immense satisfaction from the time it begins to grow to the time it finds its way to our table.

That being said, we grew The Prettiest Sunflowers Ever this year.



It's called Earthwalker. The plant is taller than I am, and looks more like a bush than like the usual sunflower stalk. It's covered with dozens of flowers and buds. What's better, the hummingbirds are all over these flowers! When I go out to water, they zoom past my head and make me duck. I only wish I knew if these were heirloom or not- if they are, I'm totally saving seeds for next year.

It's simple, easy to grow flowers like this one that almost make me want to be a flower person. Almost.


Earthwalker seeds can be found at Pinetree Seeds, one of my favorite companies for ordering seeds. Great prices, great service, and a decent heirloom selection. (And they didn't pay me to say this.)

Growing and Using Fresh Beets

I didn't have the pleasure of tasting fresh beets until I grew them in my own garden. Apparently not a lot of people buy and cook fresh beets... probably because (if they're anything like me) they don't know what to do with them. The only way I had beets as a kid was pickled, from a can. They weren't my favorite... though admittedly, no vegetable was my favorite as a kid. I'm not sure what was wrong with me. I'm glad I outgrew it.

Since then, beets have turned into one of my favorites. Who knew such sweetness could come from an ugly ol' root that you pull out of the ground?

And they're easy to grow. I don't think I've ever not had success growing beets. They're relatively insect-proof, they survive if you forget to water, and they can handle both hot and cold temps. Here's what I've learned about growing beets:

*The seed is actually a small pod. When it sprouts, it will likely produce five or six little sprouts. Pull out all but one.
*Plant early. March is good in most areas - about the same time you plant brassicas (broccoli, etc.) If you plant a row every two weeks, you'll have fresh beets all summer (though sprouting seeds is usually hard in the hot, dry months.) If you want to can beets for later use, plant a big patch all at the same time.
*You can eat beets at any size. Golf-ball sized beets are the most tender, but even as much as three inches across, you can roast them and they will still taste great.
*Beet greens are essentially the same thing as Swiss chard. Cut the leaves at any time - the beet root will still keep growing, so long as you leave a few leaves on each plant. Toss the greens with some olive oil and garlic and saute them a bit for a great side veggie. Or, if you're drowning in beet greens, freeze them as you would spinach. They're great in soups and casseroles.

Variety matters. Depending on what you're going to do with your beets, choose a variety that suits your plans. Here are my favorites (I believe all of these are available through Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, and many other places):

*Bull's Blood - a dark purple-red root, this one is easiest for peeling if you're going to be putting them up for winter. It also stains the worst though.
*Golden - these ones are great for serving raw or roasting. They are perfect for messy kids, since they don't stain like the red beets do. They are a bit hard to sprout, so plant a few extra. I think goldens are my favorite, in general.
*Chioggia (candy cane) - If you want to impress your kids, the novelty of having a red and white striped beet is fun. The colors do run together a bit when they're cooked, but that doesn't take away from how pretty they are.
*Detroit Dark Red - if you want a dark red roasting beet, this is a good one. Doesn't peel as easy as Bull's Blood though. It has an "earthy" flavor that some of the others lack, if you like that sort of thing. I love mixing the Detroits, Goldens, and Chioggias when I cook, so I grow plenty of each of them.
*Crosby Egyptian - these ones are neat because they grow very much on top of the soil. You can tell how big your beets are getting just by looking, instead of having to dig around them every so often.

Beets will store For. Ever. Well, not forever. But for a really long time.

*When storing, leave about an inch of the tops and leave the long tap root.
*You can put them in a plastic bag in the fridge for months. Don't seal the bag, they need to breathe or they will mold.
*Try storing them in a root cellar or basement, in a container filled with damp sand. Don't forget to let them breathe. When I tried this, I had fresh beets into February the next year.
*If your beets feel a little soft after storage, put them in the fridge in a bowl of water for a day or two. They will firm back up.
*Beets can be frozen or pickled and canned, too.
*To freeze or can beets, you want to peel them first. Do this by putting them in boiling water for about half an hour. The skins will slip of fairly easily (or very easily with Bull's Blood) and the beet will be fork tender. Then slice, chop, or whatever, and put them by however you choose.
*When canning, a pound of beets is about a pint preserved. A 5 sq. ft. beet bed will easily produce 30 pounds of beets or more, and more greens than you could ever eat. 

Also worth noting:

*Beets will dye things red. This is useful if you have a skein of handspun yarn that you want to be pink or red. This is not as useful if you have a four year old, who will also be dyed pink or red.
*If you're going to can and/or freeze beets, go buy a stack of black kitchen towels. Unless you want your favorite rooster-printed kitchen towels to have a permanent pink tinge to them. 

My favorite beet recipe:

Roasted Beets

Cut the tops and taproots off of enough beets to feed your family. Expect them to eat a lot, so plan accordingly. (Usually 2 medium sized beets per person is good. Or more. They'll probably keep eating them as long as they are on the table.)

Use a vegetable peeler to peel the raw beets. Then slice them into 1/4-1/2" wedges.

In a glass baking dish, toss the beet wedges with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, enough to coat them liberally. Sprinkle with dehydrated, granulated garlic (or garlic powder), dried oregano, and salt and pepper.
 
Roast uncovered in a 400 degree oven for 45 minutes to an hour. Check them every so often and give them a stir to make sure they cook evenly. They are done when they can be stabbed easily with a fork.

The tangy taste of the vinegar mixed with the sweetness of the beets is really impressive. My kids devour these sort of like candy.

===

While it's harder to sprout beet seeds in the summer, August is the perfect time to plant if you want a fall beet harvest. Just so ya know. ;-)

The Giant Cabbage

I've never grown cabbage before. Mostly because it takes up more space than what I had readily available in my garden in The Big City, and also because... well, honestly, I don't really like cabbage all that much. Nor does anyone in my family get particularly excited about it.

But now that we live in The Tiny Little Town, with more garden space than I know what to do with, cabbage made it onto the "To Try" list this year. Really, I just wanted to see it grow.

And it's fun to watch - what start out as a couple of tiny little leaves, in a few months are enormous leaves that spread wide and far, with a little head growing in the center. And that little head, before you know it, turns into a Very Large Head.
 
I should've picked it a long time ago, yes. But I didn't know what to do with it. We've made coleslaw, I'm making Chinese chicken salad for dinner tonight... and that's with the little 2 /12 pound cabbage I picked last week.

This one weighs in at over 6 pounds.


Umm... oops?

Really, it's a shame we don't like sauerkraut. 

My aunt does that - plants things just to see them grow. Then she gives away whatever she harvests. When you garden as much for the fun and satisfaction of growing things as you do for the food you produce, I think that just happens.

I've still got six more cabbages in the garden (the horse trampled the other four. I wasn't happy about it then, but I don't mind anymore.) I guess I better start finding volunteers to take some of it off my hands, because my family isn't going to be impressed if we eat nothing but cabbage for the next month, and I don't think summer cabbage stores well in a root cellar.

A Walk Through the Garden

 I haven't done much blogging or photographing of the garden this year. This is mostly because I'm disappointed in myself for not having as pretty of a garden as I've had in the past. It looks... well, it looks like a first year garden in a new climate. You know, because it is a first year garden in a new climate.


It's about 30 ft by 70 ft. I wanted it bigger, but tilling turned out to be quite a chore, and this was the most The Man of My Dreams could muster the time and energy to do. And now I'm grateful for that, since it's proving plenty big enough for my first year up here.

This picture is of weeds. Yep - that's how bad it is. I pull a wheelbarrow full of weeds each morning and night, but the bindweed and the goat-heads are just awful. Hopefully a few years of diligent weeding will prove successful. Apparently all the tilling The Man of My Dreams did for me ended up spreading the weeds, making them even worse.

Next year, no tilling.


I've also been disappointed because nothing seems to be growing. But what I've come to realize is that everything is definitely growing, it just all ripens about six weeks later that it did when we lived in The Big City. Six weeks is a very long time for a girl who has been waiting all year for fresh green beans and tomatoes. But we're getting there. 

Next year, patience.

 If there's one thing I can say about living here, it's that pollination isn't a problem. Every flower gets pollinated - bees and wasps abound, and they are doing their work diligently. In The Big City, many tomato blossoms would drop before they were pollinated, between the heat and the lack of bees. Not here though - cooler temperatures and an abundance of buzzing insects means plenty of pollination.

 I'm amused at how things that I couldn't grow for the life of me in The Big City are doing so well here. Broccoli never got a chance to develop a head before, because it would get so hot so fast. On nine broccoli plants this year, the heads weighed out at fifteen pounds, and we're still harvesting from the side shoots nearly every other day. I finally pulled out all the spinach - I put by thirty bags of frozen spinach before it bolted. In The Big City, cucumbers would wilt and shrivel in the dry heat if they weren't watered in the middle of the afternoon, and the fruits would be bitter. Here, the vines are clamboring up my pitiful trellis, and baby cukes are everywhere, shaded in the lush plants. The onions are growing nice big bulbs, thanks to less heat up here. They're big enough to be using, and will hopefully store well this fall, as I've got about 120 of them planted.

Next year, more broccoli.


 
The beans are growing, finally starting to flower just in the past couple of days. They quickly outgrew and pulled down the bamboo teepees and stuck out there. The ground is so rocky here that it's hard to get any stakes in deep enough to be sturdy.

Next year, stronger trellises and stakes. 

Littlest One planted corn this year. The only year I tried growing corn at the other house, it was a miserable, earwig-infested failure. I'm not sure this attempt will be any better, but it's fun to see her when she goes out and checks on it. It grows quickly, so she sees the changes often.

 Much of what we planted this year is experimenting - trying out new varieties, and growing vegetables we hadn't tried before. Potatoes and cabbage are both new to us, things we didn't have the space for in the past. The cabbage worms are grateful that we've planted so many varieties of brassicas for them to consume. The cabbage heads are big enough now to harvest, though I'm nervous that there are little wormies living inside there that are going to make us not want to eat it.

Next year, row covers.

 In the foreground of this picture are potatoes. I dug a trench as deep as I could go with all the rocks and boulders underground - about 18". I've since filled that back in and hilled up the potatoes another two feet or so, and they're just going crazy. Not sure if there's anything actually growing in there, but they sure are happy plants.

 Next year, potato crates.

And also growing quite well are the turkeys. I'm still fascinated by what neat birds they are. I'm also fascinated by how much they eat. We keep them penned up and feed them commercial game bird feed, and they go through more than I ever thought possible. I'm afraid to let them free range because I've heard it can be hard to get them to come back.
 
Next year, a moveable turkey pen. 


I have a feeling every year will come with a list of things to do "next year". It's all a learning experience. I'm realizing I need to give up my dreams of perfection in these early years while we figure things out. Nothing is ever going to be perfect, of course - this is farming after all. It will get better though, as experience is gained and routines fall into place. Until then, I will try to embrace the imperfection and learn graciously from the lessons this land has to teach me.

Weeds, Bugs, Snot... and a little bit of spinach.

I did a lot of daydreaming about our garden here when we first moved in. It involved lush, gorgeous plants, rich, nearly-black soil, and no weeds or bugs to speak of.


I'm not sure what I was thinking.


A little bit of mountain-gardening reality: we grow everything bigger up here. Except plants that produce vegetables.


The weeds are amazing. Their roots run a foot or more deep into the ground, they grow at a rate of six inches per day, and they spread like wild fire. And they're not just normal weeds, either - each one is dangerous in it's own way. There are goat-heads, which produce nasty thorns with spikes sharp enough to pop a tire, there are thistles that manage to prick me even through leather gloves, and there is something out there - I've yet to identify it - that causes an itchy red rash if it touches skin.


And then there are all the bugs! I always sort of thought the first year or two gardening in a new place, you got a 'bye' from the bugs. You know, because they hadn't found all your delectable goodies yet. But no, apparently that's just a rule in the city. These bugs know what they're looking for. Cabbage worms, flea beetles, japanese beetles, cutworms, ants so adept at climbing that they can make it inside of muck boots in no time at all. You name it, we seem to have it. And in addition to the bugs that are enjoying the feast I have planted for them, there are the flying, stinging variety too. I've never seen wasps as big as the ones we have up here. As big as the one that stung me in the armpit last week. (Yes, the armpit. It takes a certain amount of talent to get stung in the armpit. Clearly, I'm one talented lady.)


I'm not sure why I thought it would be, but the soil here is no different from our soil in The Big City - thick clay that turns to snot every time you water, then turns to cement when it dries out. Neither snot nor cement are considered ideal planting mediums for seeds, and sprouting is random and sparse. This also means tilling is a heckuva job for The Man of My Dreams, because sadly, using a jackhammer isn't an option when trying to turn over dirt for a vegetable garden. He's managed to get three beds worked up, and I'm afraid that might be it this year. So I've got something like 750 square feet of garden beds to work with right now. Early in the season I was disappointed at this.

In fact, The Man of My Dreams (who is the most logical, realistic man I've ever met) told me, "I think you need to start small." Hmph, I thought, start small? Phooey. I want all 10,000 square feet tilled this year, and I'm gonna plant every last inch of it, darnit! But once again, he's been proven right. Spending an hour out in the garden every evening, I'm barely keeping up with the bindweed that's climbing my onions, the alfalfa that refuses to grow in our pasture but is quite prolific in the garden, and all the dangerous plants threatening to fill my garden soil with pokey, prickly bits if I don't get them pulled right now.

At some point, I was starting to feel a little down about all of this. Okay, no, that's an understatement. I declared, "I am a gardening failure. We will never again eat fresh vegetables. Gardening in the mountains is impossible, and I am giving up."


But them I remembered: even in my little 300 square foot garden in The Big City, it took three or four years for the soil and I to get to know each other and build a real relationship and be able to work together. And the soil in The Tiny Little Town doesn't care how well I knew the soil back in the city, it expects me to start from scratch, introduce myself, and we will slowly get to know each other. That's how soil is. It likes to take things slow.


So I'm letting it go. I'll plant things. Some will come up, some won't. I'll give the soil as much enrichment as I can (which is easy to do with farm animals that produce inordinate amounts of poo.) We'll eat some fresh veggies, and what I can't grow, I can buy. (I like to pretend there is no grocery store to run to when we are hungry. It makes me feel more like a pioneer. But there is, and this year I'm grateful for it.) We may not have freezers full of blanched and frozen garden veggies to feast on all winter, but that's just gonna have to be okay.


I'll learn a lot this year. I'll make notes on how to do things differently next year. I'll fight the weeds and maybe have fewer to contend with in the future. We'll harvest what we can. And I won't stress, because this garden is simply not going to be as lush and beautiful as my garden in the city... at least, not yet.

 And if nothing else, at least we will have spinach.

Garden to Table Challenge: Venison Fiorentinis

"Girls, I'll be right back, gonna run out to the garden to get some food for dinner."

Oh man, I was starting to feel like I might never have the pleasure of uttering those words again. But alas, the time has finally come - we are starting to harvest little bits here and there, and the satisfaction of providing fresh vegetables for ourselves has returned. :::contented sigh::: Granted it's mostly spinach, and spinach isn't my favorite food, but right now, it tastes lovely!

And this means.... I finally have another post for the Garden to Table Challenge!

I have a deep, heartfelt love for hors d'ouevres and appetizers. I will happily read appetizer recipes in cook books, mark them and add them to my to-make list... and then realize we have no social life and I really have no reason to make fancy hors d'ouevres in real life. And then I decided there was no good reason not to be making them every so often for my family, just because they're good and we like them. Every so often, I'll make a plate of some kind of appetizer and serve it alongside baked potatoes or rice or salad. No one has complained yet, so I'm gonna keep doing it.

Tonight's dinner was just that - Venison Fiorentinis. The original recipe, which I changed quite a bit, came from The Colorado Farmer's Market Cookbook, one I suggest for anyone wanting to cook with fresh fruits and vegetables (and you don't have to be from Colorado to enjoy it.)

Venison Fiorentinis
1 lb venison steaks
4 cups fresh spinach
1/2 C grated parmesan cheese (the real stuff, not the powdery stuff.)
15 sheets phyllo dough
olive oil

Step one: fry the steaks in a bit of olive oil until medium rare. This takes about 8 minutes, turning once. Remove from pan and let cool a bit.

Step two: Chop the spinach into 1/2 inch bits. Toss it into a bowl with the parmesan cheese. Chop the steaks into tiny bits and mix those in as well. Season it with salt, pepper and garlic powder. This is your filling.

Step three: Fold a phyllo sheet in thirds, then cut this rectangle in half. You'll have two squares. Brush them with olive oil, then put a spoonful of filling on each square, fold it in half to make a triangle. Fill a baking sheet with these, then bake them at 400 degrees for 8 minutes or so, til the dough is golden.


No joke, these little things are pretty incredible. They even convince little girls to eat spinach without the slightest complaint. And as far as sinful appetizers go... well, there are more sinful things. If course, they're so little and cute that you don't feel guilty having "just one more"... several times.

If you don't have any venison steaks in your freezer, you could use regular beef steaks and they'd be just as amazing, I'm pretty certain.

I've never purchased or used phyllo dough before (I've lived a sheltered life.) It thrilled me more than it should have. As I was devouring these amazing bits of goodness, I was fantasizing about all the different things a girl could wrap in phyllo dough. The possibilities are endless. Go forth, my friends, and start wrapping things in phyllo. You will not be disappointed. Especially if it involves venison and cheese.

A update: It's spring!

Yikes, I haven't blogged in forever. I blame it on our internet service. We have satellite internet here in the Tiny Little Town, and I haven't experienced internet service this painfully slow since dial-up. And to top that off, apparently they have an "upload limit". Once you've uploaded as much as they deem appropriate, they start sending nasty-grams to your email telling you they're going to slow your service even more until you back off the uploads. Essentially what they're saying is, "Crazy woman, you take too many darn pictures." We have a file back-up program that automatically uploads all of the pictures I take to an online server in case of some awful computer crash. (I've lost pictures before. It hurts.) So when I take, say, 60 pictures every day, those all get uploaded. And yeah, our internet service seems to think that's excessive. Anyway, so I'm not allowed to post pictures on my blog or Facebook for awhile, 'til our usage goes down. Lame. The up side is that with terrible internet service, I don't get online much anymore. It frees up a whole lot of time to do other, more productive things.

But anyway.

It's been crazy busy up here at our little farm, with spring in full swing and all kinds of things to learn. The irrigation water started up a couple of weeks ago, and that means we get to learn to irrigate. I have to say, I really find it to be a pleasant task. Remember building dams in creeks when you were younger? It's the same concept, only now they call it 'work'. Walking through soggy hayfields by my husband's side, checking water levels and setting dams and trying not to step in old cow patties - it's a good life. I was thinking to myself one night as I was walking down to where we were working, "Some girls go to the gym and walk treadmills for exercise. I get to tromp through a hay field instead," and was feeling very blessed. We got the pond filled yesterday and started sprinklers on the lawn. It's a lot more work to keep a lawn green up here, and I'm not sure how well we'll succeed, but we can at least try.

The turkeys have grown enough that they spent their first night in the coop last night. It's amazing how fast turkeys grow. I'm still trying hard not to fall in love with them. More curious birds I've never seen. They don't mind being picked up and held, and their little "pip!" noise is utterly adorable. The roosters are escaping the brooder now, and the hens will be soon. Two more rooms to shovel out in the chicken house, and they should be almost ready for their own rooms, too. I should say, for all the utterly pleasant work there is to do on this farm, shoveling years' worth of chicken manure from a chicken barn doesn't make it high on that list. I'm not sure the barn was ever cleaned out, and there is a solid four inches of hard-packed, ten year old chicken poo on the floor in each room. The trick, I learned, is to spray it down with a hose first. Then you get to shovel soggy chicken muck, which is actually more pleasant than the dry, dusty equivalent. But only slightly. And you should know, in case you're ever in a place where you are shoveling chicken muck, that once wetted down it becomes something similar to snot. If you step wrong, you will slip, and you will find yourself landing on your rear end in said soggy chicken muck. Don't wear your good jeans.Trust me.

The garden is coming along ever soooo  slowly. One more month and we should be frost free (but only maybe.) The tomatoes are eight inches tall in the nursery and are more than ready to planted in the ground, if only it would warm up. Planted out so far are peas, lettuce, spinach, kale, broccoli, cabbage, leeks, onions, chard, radishes, beets, and a handful of different herbs and salad greens. Everything is up and growing, though at a snail's pace. When we lived in town, I'd harvest spinach and peas the beginning of May, but not here. Patience truly is a virtue in the gardening world, I suppose. I also completely underestimated the power of bindweed up here in the mountains. We had a bit of it in town, but nothing I couldn't handle. Here, you can hoe it all up one day, and go out the next day and it's all back. I imagine this will be the fight of my life. Anyone with suggestions on how to get rid of bindweed, please do let me know. I'm not enjoying it.

The girls are busy each and every day, doing a multitude of things they find to do around here. Chloe finished her standardized test and so we are taking summer break now. Of course, summer break still involves math, English, and literature. But we're done with that by 9 a.m., leaving our days free for just living, and learning while we do it. Whether it's picking snakes out of the ditch, or catching water skippers from the pond, or chasing the puppy through the hay field, they are getting plenty of sunshine and exercise. I haven't heard "I'm bored" in weeks now, and I imagine I won't until we've been snowed in this winter.

So there's quick update. When the internet service decides I've waited long enough, I'll post more pictures again. I've got some good ones. In the meantime, I hope you are all well. :o)

Garden to Table Challenge: Asparagus

It's Garden to Table Challenge day again! Wow, where did that week go? I wish I could tell you that I've got some great harvest to write about, but all I've got to show for my gardening efforts so far are some spinach seedlings and inch-high peas and onions. With the warm days we've been having, I am holding out hope that some day... perhaps in the distant future... I will produce some food from this new ground I'm working.

In the meantime, I'm still doing my best to make good use of what Mother Nature has to offer. This week: wild asparagus. Picking wild asparagus is an annual tradition around here, and with the warmer days a bit earlier this season, asparagus is already popping up along fence lines.

I've got a fridge full of asparagus spears standing in jars of water, waiting for canning tomorrow. Tonight's dinner was what I'm writing about today though - fish fillets poached in a wine/garlic/butter sauce with roasted parmesan wild asparagus spears alongside.

If I was cooler - and had planned ahead better, I'd have taken a picture. You'll have to use your imagination, but I promise, it was a beautiful meal.

For the asparagus:

Trim 1 lb (ish) asparagus spears. Place them in a shallow baking dish. Toss with a bit of olive oil to coat, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Then sprinkle on about 1/4c. parmesan*. Or a third of a cup... or a half of a cup. I love parmesan. Cover the dish with foil, bake at 400 degrees for about half an hour. Seriously, it's that easy, and it's so good.

*Don't use that grated powdery stuff that comes in the spaghetti aisle. Buy real, grated parmesan. (Or grate some yourself.) It's worth it. I promise.

And in case you're dying for a new, super fast and easy fish recipe:

Tilapia with Wine/Garlic sauce:

Place 6 partially thawed tilapia filets in a shallow baking dish. Put a thin pat of butter on each filet. Drizzle white wine over it all, then squeeze half a lemon over that. Sprinkle with sea salt, dehydrated garlic and dried parsley. Cover with foil, bake about 25 minutes, til it flakes.

So it takes a total of about ten minutes to have this all in the oven. Then you can walk away and feed the baby chickens and turkeys, hoe a row in the garden, and come in just in time to put it on the table with a loaf of bread. Easy peasy.

So there's my Garden to Table Challenge submission for the week. Again, sorry for the lack of pictures. A hungry family sitting down to the dinner table doesn't look kindly upon Mom insisting they all stop eating so she can photograph their plates. I decided to let them eat in peace.

(Almost) Instant Homegrown Pizza Sauce

Pizza is a standard at our house - Saturday night dinners alternate between spaghetti and pizza. Everyone likes them both, and it seems to be a good lead-in to our "family night."

I make pizza sauce by the quart all summer long as the tomatoes are coming in, then freeze them in 1 cup portions. This works great, until I forget to take sauce out to thaw and dinner needs to be on the table in half an hour. So tonight, I improvised, and the result was so yummy I thought I'd share it.

Here's how to have "fresh" from the garden pizza sauce in less than five minutes.

Use half a quart of canned roma tomatoes. (Yes, half a quart is a pint. However, I can my tomatoes in quart jars, so I call it half a quart.) Squeeze most of the juice out. Put them in a bowl, cup, something that you can use your stick blender in.

To the tomatoes, add a couple cloves (or more) of garlic, a tablespoon or so of dehydrated onions, and a good bit of whatever Italian-ish spices grew successfully for you this year. I used dried basil, oregano, and rosemary.

Now mix away with your stick blender until it's pretty much smooth. If it's too thin (mine was) add a small handful of dried tomatoes to the mixture, and blend them in really well. It'll thicken right up, and add really rich flavor.



And that's that. Super simple, and super fast. I think I might actually like this more than the sauce I've been using for the past three years, it was that good.

An actual "recipe":
1 pint canned roma tomatoes, drained
2 cloves garlic
1 Tbsp dehydrated onions
2 Tbsp. mixed dried Italian herbs
1/4 c. dehydrated tomato slices

Blend all ingredients with an immersion blender until smooth.

The Citrus is Flowering!

Each year on our anniversary, I give my husband a gift based on the traditional anniversary gift list. This year, the traditional gift was fruit. I got him a miniature citrus tree - it grows lemons, limes, and tangerines all on the same little tree that fits on the plant stand in our kitchen. Mind you, it's a tiny little thing. But there's one lime on it already, and it blossomed last week:

Isn't it pretty? There's no such thing as fresh citrus here in Colorado unless one finds a creative way to grow it. I figured this was a little more interesting than just a basket full of bananas and oranges, no?

Of course, neither of us have the slightest idea how to actually care for the poor tree. I didn't bother looking up the growing requirements for an indoor citrus plant before I bought it - what fun would that be? So now we get to learn how to hand-pollinate (which will be tricky, since we don't know which blossoms produce which fruits. Hmm...) We're supposed to mist it every day because (ha!) citrus trees require a lot of humidity. Have you ever been to Western Colorado? Our humidity is usually right there at a stable 0%.

I've done a fair job of growing plants outdoors, but indoors it's another story. Our house plants often go two weeks (or longer. Much longer.) before I remember that they need water. This tree came to the wrong house if it needs water on a regular basis. Which of course, it does. Darn tree is more demanding than the dog or the cat.

Anyway. Our citrus tree has a blossom! It's exciting, anyway. :o)

Tonka Trucks!

A gift of toys speaks loudly to children, doesn't it?

I'm not one to buy my kids a lot of new toys. Not because I want them to "do without" by any means - we're just blessed with generous family that overwhelm them with gifts at holidays and birthdays, and those toys keep them entertained for the remainder of the year.

But Two Little girls deserved a reward this fall. They have waited patiently all spring and summer long for the freedom to dig to their hearts' content in the garden. They have the freedom to go in and out of the garden as they please, but they know they aren't to dig it up until the first frost comes and kills off the veggies. So they waited. And they didn't complain.

Now that the garden is empty of all plants and freshly tilled, they could hardly wait to get in there and dig up that fluffy soil. Since they were so patient, I decided a reward was appropriate:



Tonka trucks make for good times! Especially when there is that much dirt to be moving around.



The beauty of having girls: we get to enjoy "boy toys", too.



This should buy me several hours of peaceful baking and knitting time, and should keep my children covered from head to toe in dirt for days to come. :-)

Garden Update: Tending to the Soil

My garden kind of sucked this year.

Well, that's not entirely true. We did at least grow enough vegetables to keep us well fed through the summer, and there is a bit in the freezer, but certainly not what I was hoping for, not as much as what I grew last year.

There are several reasons for this:

*The chickens. Backyard chickens are lovely, particularly when they have a fenced yard that keeps them out of the garden. I had this sweet little dream that the chickens would go along, picking the nasty bugs out of the garden, fluffing the soil a bit and fertilizing as they went. What I discovered was that chickens - even just four of them - are destructive little beasts. They ate my kale to the ground, picked tomato plants clean of any leaves, and slept on the carrot greens, laying them down flat. Of course, they may have been eating bugs, too, but I couldn't tell. So we made them a nice yard to live in, and let them out frequently when there is someone out to torment supervise them.

*My laziness. The best way to grow a great garden is to work hard in it. Somewhere around July, when the temperatures got up over 100 degrees, I lost the motivation to spend an hour each night in my garden. The weeds suffocated some of my plants, I didn't bother fertilizing anything, and it showed in my rather meager harvest. I also lacked any motivation to plant seeds in August for a fall crop, meaning what was planted in spring was all we had.

*Lack of planning. When one is working with very limited space, one must plan to make the most of every bit of space. I seriously failed on this one, just sort of planting things where I felt like it. There were huge chunks of wasted space, minimizing the amount my garden could even produce, and making it look like a hodgepodge of plants, instead of neat and tidy the way I like it.

*The soil. This is the big one. Last year's garden was amazing, producing huge vegetables at a rate we could barely keep up with. It was lush and full and just incredible. I imagine those beautiful plants sucked every bit of life out of the soil, leaving it with pretty much nothing to offer this year. A seed can only do so much with soil that is void of any nutrients. Beets that took two months to grow last year barely produced a bulb after four months this year, despite the same exact watering system. I did toss out a couple of bags of store-bought organic mushroom compost early in the spring, but it wasn't much, and certainly not enough to replenish all that was taken from it the year before.

So we addressed that issue yesterday. I spread a barrel of homemade compost in the worst areas first - composted kitchen scraps and chicken manure, good ol' "black gold" filled with the best nutrients of all kinds. The problem with homemade compost is that you never have enough to really make much of a difference. So we also hauled home a truck-bed load of horse manure. (This is one of the benefits of having a mother who keeps horses. She's always got plenty of poop on hand, and is always willing to share.)



I hauled the manure into the garden with a wheelbarrow and spread it around while my sweet, hardworking husband tilled it all in thoroughly.



And of course, the chickens were expected to do their part.



Only they kept getting distracted by the swiss chard in the cold frame. Man, that stuff sure pleases chickens.

So twelve wheelbarrows of horse manure, a barrel of homemade compost, and a bit of sand leftover from my beet storing experiment last year has been dug into the garden. The soil out there is dark and fluffy, a far cry from the compacted clay we started out with. Hopefully this TLC will give us the best garden we've ever had come spring - if my laziness doesn't get in the way of my success!

Missouri Trip: Bakersville

Blogging trips is so hard to do - we do so many things I want to write about, and take hundreds of pictures, and sorting through it all and finding the words to describe it all can be a daunting task. But I'm at least going to try, for posterity's sake, you know.

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In the beginning of October, the girls and I set off on an adventure. And adventure without The Daddy (gasp!) that included driving 20 hours east. There were many stops along the way, all of which I'll eventually blog about, and ending in a little town called Mountain View, Missouri, deep in the heart of the Missouri Ozarks.

One of the stops we made was Mansfield, Missouri. Our main reason for stopping was to visit the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum there, but discovered another little gem close by: the little town of Bakersville, familiar to anyone who orders heirloom seeds from Baker Creek. We've ordered our seeds from them for years, and I'd always wanted to visit their little town. I had no idea driving through that we'd be right there, but plenty of signs led us right to them. And it was such a treat to visit this place (especially for this avid heirloom gardener.)



The gardens were utterly fantastic, and this was in early October, when they were long past their peak. But still there were bright colors in every shade of red and purple and orange and pink tucked away here and there, and flower gardens still bursting with color. I'm not a flower gardener, but this may have inspired me to become one!



We visited on a Wednesday afternoon. It was super quiet, hardly a soul to be seen, but I think that added a bit to the overall effect of the town. The shops were all void of people, meaning we could walk and look and talk to our heart's content without feeling rushed at all. The folks that worked there were sweet as could be.



There were shelves of jams and jellies for sale, handmade crafty bits of all kinds, an apothecary with jars and jars of dried herbs, books on every subject interesting to folks like me, and of course, seeds. Row upon row of heirloom, antique-variety seeds for purchase. It was a gardener's dream come true.

Not only do they grow heirloom seeds at Bakersville, but they grow heirloom chickens. All shapes and sizes and manner of fowl, really. You'd think, seeing as we have chickens in our own back yard, that coop after coop of chickens would get boring fast to Two Little Girls, but no!



I had to drag Chloe away from them. The kind folks at Bakersville were trying to close up for the day, and my daughter was still cooing softly to a cage of banties, telling them how pretty they were. She left that day utterly smitten, determined to own at least one pair of banties next spring.

Upstairs in one of the shops is a Seed Museum.


Seed catalogs, packets, advertisements and other memorabilia from years gone by. Truly, the folks at Bakersville possess an extreme love not just for gardening, but for the history of it. The girls dragged me through faster than I'd have liked, but it was fun to see all this history collected into one place - and there couldn't be a more fitting place for it.

I am so glad we had the time to stop at Bakersville. It was a lovely surprise to find it so close to our planned route. Some day we'll have to make it back and visit during one of their festivals, and see everything in action, but spending a quiet afternoon just exploring was a great experience in itself!



If you garden - or need inspiration to start - check our their website and ask for a catalog. It's the prettiest garden catalog you've ever seen, and you won't be able to stop yourself from ordering at least a few packets of something interesting to try.


More to come on the rest of our trip as soon as I make it through more pictures. :-)