Where Have we Been?

We haven't purposely forgotten to update the blog but lots of things have been going on and time just got away from us. We have been selling lots of vegetables, we have been harvesting and canning for our personal needs in the next year, and our various volunteer efforts have taken a lot of our time.

The reality of how fragile life can be came to us since the last update as well when during a not too severe (seemingly) structure fire a Fire Fighter from another department was trapped and burned to death. I was not initially on that fire as we were only providing tanker support as mutual aid but when my radio went off for an all call and that a Fire Fighter was down I knew it was bad. You know you train and train but sometimes things just happen when they shouldn't and once I got there and looked at the fire it didn't look that bad; but it turned out to be deadly and I think the best thing we can do to memorialize that Fire Fighter is to study and learn from that tragedy.

Next month I start advanced level Fire Fighting school which runs through December and then I am going to continue my EMS training at the EMT level. I find that I gain far more from belonging to the Fire Department than I am able to give and I highly recommend it to anyone who moves into a rural area and wants to give back to their community.

I don't think its a secret that we like old things or that we enjoy hitting yard/garage/farm sales and we scored pretty good a couple weeks ago.

This Huot roller was sitting in the yard of an older couple who were moving to Texas and Holly saw it driving by and so we turned around and checked it out. Everything works on it, the drawers slide smoothly and i got it for $65 which is a pretty good deal as these are highly sought after by shop rats.

This will go up in the pole barn shop and will probably become my socket wrench box and I couldn't be happier with it. The pickle fork on the box was a buck and will be used to replace the steering knuckles on the IH tractor.

And then we saw these two shelving units with boxes of screws, bolts, nails, and electrical connectors and we got the whole shebang for $35. I can now find fasteners and its like having our own hardware store in the garage.

 

On top of everything else the work continues on the Blue Dodge that has now become our daily driver. We put new tires on it so it drives very smooth now and if you have been following the blog you may remember how this front quarter panel was caved in when we bought it but I managed to get it mostly pounded out and it will soon see a grinder and some Bondo.

 

This is a tomato horn worm....

They are big, ugly, and destructive and we kill them by cutting them up with scissors rather than using chemicals. But its gross as they have a green goo for insides and I must confess its not my favorite activity.

There was some angst by folks around here because the Hummingbirds, bees and butterflies were very late in arriving but they are now here in large numbers and we enjoy watching them. Besides Hummingbird feeders we ensure there is a source of water for these creatures and we have flowers and other plants to attract and nourish them.

This was my attempt at taking a picture of a bee in a Hibiscus flower just to prove to the doubters that the bees have indeed arrived.

 

This time of year is great because we get to not only see the fruits of our labor we get to eat pretty darned well too.

We have cured onions and are making onion marmalade this week...

We have eaten and canned lots of beets...

We got a good crop of both Yukon Gold and Pontiac Red potatoes...

And of course its tomato time and we eat them with just about every meal. Unfortunately we sell so many we probably wont be able to can any this year.

Also, the corn is finally starting to show some decent progress

Another week or two and we will be eating fresh corn. Its actually not very cost effective to grow your own corn since you can get it for about $.25 an ear here right out of the field but it sure is satisfying.

 

One of the things you find when you grow your own food is that you have to plan for how your going to preserve it and that isn't as easy as it sounds. It takes planning, a little creativity, and you just have to buckle down and do it on top of everything else. 

We have canned pickled beets, frozen peas and beets, canned relish made with onions, beets and cabbage, made blackberry jam, and canned potatoes.

The old pantry just isn't big enough so we have decided to move the freezer to the garage (on the left in this photo) and put in new cupboards along this wall.

 

So what does canning entail? In this case we decided to show family how we were canning potatoes and I wont be posting a recipe because my personal view is that you need to get ideas about canning from a blog like this but actual recipes need to come from your local cooperative extension office or something like the Ball Blue Book. We are over 1000 feet in elevation so canning times and pressures are different than say someone below 1000 feet and there are other variables to consider. Canning is a safe way to preserve food but you need to follow instructions carefully.

 

In this case we canned a mixture of Yukon Gold and Pontiac Red potatoes. First we wash them thoroughly.

Jars need to be hot but not sterilized since we will be pressure canning and we heat our jars in hot water, some people heat them in the oven.

We have seen people can potatoes with skins still on them but I think your flirting with potential bacteria contamination so we peel ours then wash the potatoes again

Insert smart alec comment about all my time peeling potatoes while on KP duty in the military....or as Holly says...I ought to be good at it.

We keep small potatoes whole and cut bigger ones into what I describe as chunks...I dont know how esle to describe it. Then we cook them for about 3 or 4 minutes but you still want them fairly firm. Notice the yellow pieces in the pot? Those are Yukon Gold and they are the most creamy and tastiest potato around and I think next year thats all we will plant.

You pack the potatoes into hot jars, fill with boiling water, wipe the rims and then put on the lids and rings and place into the pressure canner.

We use a pressure canner with a series of weights to adjust pressure and its pretty straight forward. Lots of people are intimidated by pressure canning but its actually a good way to preserve low acid foods (we can acidic foods with a water bath canner) and come this winter when we open a quart of potatoes we canned and make soup or stew or have fried potatoes we will be glad we made the effort to learn.

 

Judy started some Geraniums by seed and they actually grew and she is proud as punch of them. I guess its hard to start Geraniums from seed but she didnt seem to have much trouble so who knows?

And what would post be without at least one picture of my buddy Bandit

Okay two pictures of Bandit....look at the look on his face back by the stove!

 

 

So that brings us up to date and just about closes a tough month. The weather here has been mild (its gotten down in the 50s several times at night lately), we have gotten some good soaking rain on a fairly regular basis, two of our heifers are getting ready to drop calves soon, and we traded an old golf cart for a couple of sheep....August should be interesting.

 

 

Quick Garden Update

We are in the middle of harvesting and selling and this weekend we start canning. Its a great time of year and there is nothing finer than going out into your garden and harvesting something for dinner.

The corn patch. Its coming along but again due to the weather its later than we expected.

We planted an heirloom variety called "Country Gentleman" which is a super sweet white shoe peg variety and I am not real happy with it. We got spotty germination and it seems to be rooting kind of shallow so its prone to blow down but we will see.

We have sunflowers all over the farm, some planted like these on the edge of the corn patch and others deposited through bird seed and they all seem to thrive.

This type has a red flower and multiple heads per plant but wont give us much in the way of seeds.

We have baby sweet watermelons coming along like this one as well as passion melons, cantaloupe, butternut squash, lemon squash, pumpkins and gourds.

I mentioned last year that we almost cut down these small trees that we thought were weeds until we were informed they were Mulberry bushes. They are loaded with berries and we have found a few more so we may try some type of jam with them.

We have Day Lillies all over and though some have been in bloom for about a month our bigger Day Lilly gardens are just now blooming. Once the bloom is off we will divide this garden and greatly extend it.

The terraced planters we built this spring have done very well and we now have the wood for the third segment. This problematic slope looked barren to us before so we are happy with the outcome.

And speaking of sun flowers, look at the size of this one. Same variety as the ones by the corn patch but this one has the benefit of being in a raised bed and a much more fertile soil mixture.

 

We have enough cucumbers to make pickles but they seem to be hot sellers so we haven't been keeping to many. We have both green cucumbers and a yellow variety and of course no one wants the yellow ones (even though they taste great) so we will probably use those to can pickles and relish. Lesson learned.

Beets, onions, potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, peppers, and mustard greens in this shot.

We find Broccoli hard to grow here and we aren't sure why. We do have some but they don't seem to be the big robust florette's we envisioned so we will replant for the fall garden in a month or so.

This mild weather hasn't helped ripen the tomatoes which need warm evenings and hot days to ripen. Last night, as in the night of 1 Jul, it was 54 degrees here which was a record low. We are still enjoying it though and we know the tomatoes will ripen soon.

We also planted an heirloom variety of sweet peas and again had spotty germination but they have finally come on and are very popular with customers who seem to prefer to come and pick their own. So far, they have been so popular in fact that we haven't gotten to eat any ourselves let alone can any. Another crop we are expanding for the fall garden.

We planted a few zucchini plants thinking it would mostly be just for us as we like breaded zucchini fries (with Parmesan cheese on top right out of the fryer) and we like to use the blossoms for various dishes but we have been selling the heck out of them in the store we contract with...who knew?

The cabbages have done well this year and are steady sellers. We will have enough to make saur kraut but our efforts last year was an epic fail so we aren't sure we even want to try. In the mean time we enjoy a lot of cole slaw!

We sell a lot of beets, we eat a lot of beets, and we are canning beets this weekend. In fact, a couple nights ago we made Borscht in the Ukrainian fashion..good eats. We also grow and sell two varieties of carrots and they are super sweet. We like to actually harvest them a little smaller and then either lightly steam them or use them raw in salads and as an edible garnish.

The sweet onions have been very successful and we sell them as fast as they are harvested but we also like to use them ourselves. They are sweet enough for an onion sand which...and I am not kidding.

And finally for this post, our experiment with growing potatoes in the tires we had in the barn has been a qualified success. They matured earlier (due to the extra heat) than the potatoes that are still in the conventional rows but the limited space they had didn't allow them to reach their full potential. These are Yukon Golds and they too are big sellers but we also really enjoy them so its a struggle to part with them! They are a soft skin potato that is very creamy and I can make a meal just eating them with a little butter and salt.

 

So that is what is happening on the farm garden wise. We work every day selling, harvesting and of course tending to the plants which in my case means weeding. We don't use herbicides in the food gardens and weeding is accomplished by hand or with a weed eater (works pretty good actually) and we just tolerate a certain amount of weeds and don't get too wrapped up in it. But you cant let it go, if we skip a couple days of weeding it goes wild in a hurry.

 

 

Catching Up

It seems hard to believe that we haven't posted since 5 June but we have been on overload. We are in the middle of the season where growing, harvesting, and selling collides with fund raising for the various charities we belong to and just in the last month we have worked a Junior 4H Fair, a draft horse obstacle course challenge, and this past Saturday I got to light off the fire works for the community 4th BBQ and gospel sing. All those years blowing stuff up comes in handy sometimes.

One of the things we have gotten done is some signage for the farm. We have been advertising some, we have brochures published and distributed, and we are now selling from the farm and through a local store. Sales have been slow but steady and our biggest sellers are not ready yet (tomatoes and corn) so it should only improve.

The font is from the 1930s which we thought was fitting.

 

This is a temporary set up and we have the materials to do a sign that identifies specific produce etc. It will be wood and old fashioned.

 

I saw this on a picture from the 1940s and had it reproduced. The signs are aluminum and should last a good while.

 

The new greenhouse is working out well and we now have shade cloth on both greenhouses.

 

We have customers that come and pick what they want and then we harvest it for them. In this case he wanted beets, onions, a cabbage, red leaf lettuce and mustard greens.

We have also had customers ask us to make containers and pots full of plant starts, bulbs or cuttings they purchase from us. They bring the containers, we set them up and give them some tips on successfully growing them.

 

The grape vines should be producing another bumper crop. We have planted some additional vines that will be productive next year and the big outlay for the vineyard will be this fall.

With on farm sales you have to behave yourself because we have a lot of visitors but we live here and from what some people are telling us they like to come from the city and see an old fashioned quiet country farm....and clothes on the line is part of that. We just try not to have anything too risque!

We sell flowers, bulbs, starts, cuttings etc and we have a lot of examples in our own gardens. Color is important to us and we enjoy the flowers for that color and for the beneficial insects that they bring.

This has been a very mild year (it was 54 last night) and we are enjoying it but some of the plants are really almost a month behind. These Lillies should have bloomed at the beginning of June.

Just to show some variety of what we have...

The sweet smell of flowers, when they are outside, is intoxicating to me.

Notice the varied colors, shapes of the petals...

and the incredible variety of pistils and stamens

Even the stark white of this Hydrangea has a particular beauty.

 

But it hasn't been all work and no play. We live a few miles from Route 66 and have an on going passion for traveling that route and seeing all that it has to offer. Traffic is usually light or almost non-existent, and there are still some operating attractions. For Fathers day, Holly and Judy took me to the Wild Animal Safari in Strafford, MO which is on Route 66.

They have two parts to the place, one you do a walk about and see Lions and other animals you can feed and the other is a driving tour where the animals will come up to your car and you can feed them. We thought it would be a 10 - 15 minute drive but it took us 2 hours to get through the thing and it was a blast. This Ostrich stuck his head right in the car and grabbed some feed right out of the bag.

Poor Holly had this Zeedonk chase the car and not let her go. It was hilarious and every time we would stop for other animals he was at her window wanting a treat. We finally got away from him by dropping some range cubes on the ground and making a run for it.

Its a nondescript place and to be honest it looks run down from the road but it was quite nice and a fun place to bring a family.

You would think that living on a farm we would have our fill of animals but ...no.

This little guy seemed lonely and liked to have his neck rubbed.

So that almost catches us up. The three of us like these road side attractions and this one proves you cant judge a book by its cover.