New direction

The Universe has sent my live in a new direction. After much though I have decided that a new blog would suit me more now and the things I'm interested in. I have started a new blog which you can find here. I hope that anyone that enjoyed reading this blog will enjoy my next one. Thanks for reading!

New beginnings

Its been almost eight months since I last posted here.Our family's life has been turned up-side-down in that time. My husband was involved in a car accident in August which resulted in a spinal cord injury that has left him in a wheelchair. The next few months were hard: intensive care, rehab and the painful choice to leave our farm.

The life we were living was not one my husband could be involved in to the level we both wanted. We have moved back into the city. We feel we can live a life here that is closer to the values that led us to the farm in the first place. We are renting (and hoping to soon buy) a beautiful, open, wheelchair friendly condo that is right downtown. It is within walking distance to our favorite farmers market, a large park and a lot of like minded people and programs. We have opted for a condo over a house right now because we feel that the added bonus of being able to garden would be out-wade by the amount of time a house requires that could be spent with family and friends. There are quiet a few community gardens very close and I hope to get involved with one next year when i'm feeling more settled.

Looking over the past eight months its still very hard to think of what we have lost. I had seen Liam growing up at the farm with a brother or sister and the many projects and things we would do with our life. Since our move I have found that we are still going to be able to find our farm, just not in the way I had thought. It is going to take time and healing but we will learn to find the things we love in a new setting and we are lucky to be somewhere with so many like minded people (like Little City Farm, which is just around the corner from us now) to share with.

Cheers

Its all a bit much.

I have had a very hard time keeping up with the farm chores of late. Liam is determined to not be put down at all and will not nap on most days. Pair that with the start of harvest and the sleep I am not getting and it all adds up to a bit to much. Tonight I'm going to go to bed quite early and tomorrow i'll try to get as much done as I can before it gets to hot and I run out of steam.

We are going away for a couple of days at the end of the week on a bit of a holiday. It will be nice to take a brake for a few days but at the same time I know it will all be waiting for me when i get back, but i'm just not going to think about it.

Anyways on a happier note I got to go on a little visit to a farm two hours away from ours last weekend. I went to Half Caper farm to check out her goats and talk about buying a pair of kids from her next spring. They were so cute; running around the barn and fields. I'm sold!

Planning for next spring gives me the time to prepare without putting the horse before the cart (or goat before the barn). As a bounce she raises geese and rabbits which was great to ask questions about.I have been trying to working on some sewing. I made this banner for my boys. There birthdays are coming up in the next month or so: Matt in August, Liam in September. I got the idea from Amanda Blake from Soulemama. I wanted to make something that would become a tradition for special days rather then just gifts or cake.
The first tomatoes are ripening this week in our garden. But these are not the tomatoes I was looking for! The tomatoes I planted are big and beautiful but very green. We have volunteer tomatoes popping up red and yellow everywhere. On the up side its like a little surprise to see what all the plants are producing and i didn't have to care for them at all (besides not pulling them out). The down side is they did smother my small carrot plants when i was not looking. Oh well, When life gives you tomatoes......make pasta sauce!

Long weekend.

We spent our long weekend Sunday working in the yard. The weather was nice for working outside: warm but not to hot and over cast. We got all the stuff on the list done and got to spend some much needed time together.
We picked all the onions out of our garden. Normally we would not pick them until much later but we had such a warm spring that they were all dieing back already. The shed that we were using to keep the meat chicks in is right beside the the onion garden so we fenced in the garden and let the chicken run around and scratch it up. This will hopefully add some nice nitrogen rich manure to the garden for next years crop. Plus they will eat all the slugs that have been at my basil.
My little guy got very muddy while his daddy and I were picking onions. He had a good old time munching on the onion greens, which did not surprise me as he has taking to eating spicy food with us curries and hot mac'n cheese.
I did a big cutting of our basil plants to keep the chickens from digging them up. I plan to pick the leafs, blanch, chop and put them in the freezer to add to our pasta sauce for the winter. I just finished the stuff from our CSA from last year, which i had turned into more of a pesto with ground nuts and garlic. I liked it but it was more work and I didn't find it any better when it came to putting it in tomato sauce, which is what we did most of the time. We were two months behind in putting in our garden this year so our garlic did not bulb. They look more like green onions that last of garlic. I have not come up with a plan of what to do with them yet but i think i will just leave them in the ground until I need some garlic and then chop them up fresh.

Pickles

I started making pickles with cucumbers from our garden on Friday. I have 5 quart jars so far and the plants show no signs of slowing down. I am using a salt and whey only recipe from a cook book of my mothers called Nourishing traditions, by Sally Fallon. They're the kind of pickles I had growing up: they fizz in your mouth when you bit into them (i know that sounds strange but they are very good), like a nice kosher dill pickle. A lot of books say its not safe to to make pickles without vinegar but people have been making them for a very long time and i think you must use your common sense: smell and look at them before eating.

How i made them:

Place clean quart jars in an 200* oven for 20 min. Carefully remove jars from oven and place in each jar:
-2 cloves of Garlic
-1 head of Dill or 1 tbsp Dill seed
-1 tbsp Mustered seed
-1 tbsp pickling Salt
-1/4 cup Whey*
Pack you cucumbers in the jar so they don't float while leaving 1-2 inches head space. Fill the jar with warm water, screw on lid and shake to help dissolve the salt. Store at room temp for 3 days in the dark and then place in the fridge or in cold storage. They are ready to eat as soon as there cold, but i prefer to eat them when they have started to get fizzy, after a month or so.

* I get my whey from draining yogurt in a sieve over a bowl for 12 hours in the frige. It leaves me with a bowl of whey (which will keep in the fridge for a month) and nice thick yogurt which is easier to feed to Liam and makes a nice spread in a sandwich. If you can't or don't want to use whey just add an extra tbsp of salt.

*** All information is intended for your general knowledge only. Use this canning and preserving information at your own risk.

Hope you enjoy the recipe!

Things I've learned about geese

The geese have become a bit of a pain around here lately. Matt and I have had to show some great restraint in not thrashing them some days. They have become the bullys of the farm as of late and have been getting into everything. They are just smart enough to get into trouble but not much more. We have had to put a baby gate up in the porch to keep them out of the cat food (which they love to eat, who know?) and today I have had to chase them out of the chicken coop and pen three time so far. Most of the cats have learned to stay away from them as the geese will try to take a chunk out of them at any chance they get. They don't seem to like Liam very much but thankfully for them they keep there distance even if they do make a big fuss about him being out in the yard. I'm sure they are eating there fill of grass but it really dose not seam to be making a dent in the yard though you would never know it by the amount of manure they are leaving everywhere.

I don't want to say that there days are numbered because I'm not sure what if anything I want to do about them. One option is to sell them now and try to make my investment back. Another is to wait till around Christmas and add them to the freezer, but I do have people asking to buy eggs in the spring if they start laying. I have read that if you don't have a gander then they might not lay at all and I'm not sure what sex are geese are because I have not had the guts to catch and hold one long enough to find out. For all I know they could be all ganders; then i'm really out of luck. Someone said that if they have brown eyes then they're female and blue eyes means males but they all have brown eyes so I don't know if that means all girls or nothing at all.

I had originally planed to put some in the freezer (for us or to sell) and keep the rest to breed for the spring.

At this point I'm not sure what is going to come first: The freezer or the eggs. I think we will have to wait and see if we can put up with there nastiness. The chance to sell them will be good for some time and I think we will have to get creative as to how to handle them before I give up.

Wish me luck!

Eating it up

We finally had a couple of rainy days this week after a lot of sun. It was not very nice weather to work outside, but it was great in the greenhouse. I had a chance to get down on my hands and knees and take a good look at the plants. I was so surprised to find the plants much further along then I thought. At the end of my time in the greenhouse it was so nice to stand back and look at how nice everything looked after it had been weeded and pruned.
One of my 3 eggplant plants has a baby eggplant growing on it and the other 2 have flowers so hopeful I will be making eggplant parm soon. Its hard to tell from the photo but the fruits almost the size of my thumb.
I had to do a double take when I first saw this cucumber. Its the first one I'v ever grown and the first thing to come from the gardens here at the farm because we are a bit behind this year. I don't know how it got so big so fast. All the other cuc's are itsy bitsy, but this one was a monster. I'm growing them to make pickles mostly so I don't want them to get much bigger then this one did.
Liam and I enjoyed the cucumber for lunch the next day. I had it on toast with yogurt spread and him straight up. I think he enjoyed his first home grown food. I know I enjoyed watching him eat it and I can say it didn't tasted to bad either.