Egg-cellence

Our chickens were rock stars yesterday. From 10 chickens we got 10 eggs. That's the first time that has happened since they started laying in mid-November. But it made up for the fact that earlier in the week, on a day when the temperature was a high of -13C, there were only 5 eggs. It's funny the things I can get excited about. 

Olive

In his spare time, Orrin enjoys scanning Kijiji want ads for various things, including livestock. We've collected quite a menagerie here now, in part through his Kijiji addiction, so when he said to me a few days ago, “What do you think about getting another sheep?” I immediately dismissed the idea. We don't need to spend the money, and we've already got three of them, so no need. But then, because he knows me so well (and clearly wanted another sheep), he appealed to the knitty side of me, the part of me that can't wait to learn how to card and spin wool so that I can use the wool off of our own sheep to spin into yarn and knit myself, or sell as one of the products from our farm. He said, “This is a Shetland sheep. The wool is supposed to be pretty soft.” Oh, man. More wool options? And soft, fine Shetland wool? I was doomed. So what did we do today? Drove out past Digby to pick up Olive, a 4-year old Shetland ewe, who is bred and probably due in February. And she IS very soft. Time for me to learn how to spin wool!

Welcome to the farm, Olive!

What's Cookin'?

Happy New Year! So much has happened for us – and we have done so much - in the past year, that I can't imagine what might be in store for us this year.

In theory it's winter around here, but there is no snow on the ground and we have had some gorgeous days lately. Orrin almost always spends the day outside, rain or shine, but I finally braved it too because it was such a glorious day. It was only about 2C but the sun was shining and there was no wind, so it felt warmer. Orrin has been spending a lot of time cutting trees down in preparation for a barn, cutting firewood from the unusable parts of the trees (the non-straight sections of trunks), and making huge piles of rotting logs and branches all over the areas that are to be pasture. It's a 7 or 8 acre area, so it's not insignificant. His thought is that by piling up the rotting wood, it'll make it easier for us and the cows to walk around, as well as promoting grass growth. And we sure need some more grass for those cows! So Oliver and I joined in today, helping to pile wood. Sometimes Oliver was on my back, sometimes on the ground throwing pieces of wood around. It was nice to feel like I was helping out, as I tend to stay inside more with Oliver as it's gotten colder outside. It looks pretty funny though, like there are hundreds of beaver dams across the hillside!

It has now been more than two months since we finished harvesting food out of the garden, and processing it for winter. I thought I would take some time to write out what we are eating these days from the farm, for myself to look back on, as well as for those of you following along who might be interested.

Chicken: We roast a chicken about once every two weeks. We usually roast some potatoes along with it, although they are not from the farm as our own potato crop was not very successful this year. We bought 50 lb of unsprayed potatoes from the farmers market in the fall to supplement our supply. After the first roast chicken meal, we usually have 3 or 4 more meals of chicken (our average chicken was 7.5 lb I think, so these birds have a lot of meat on them!), which we tend to make stir-fries with rice, carrots and kale, or fry up the leftover baked potatoes chopped up with chicken and gravy. Then we'll make broth from the carcass and freeze it. We use the broth to then cook lentils or beans. The broth is not only tasty but very healthy, as it is full of minerals that are extracted from the bones during the cooking process.

Pork: Two weeks ago we had pig #2 butchered, so with two pigs' worth of pork in the freezer, we are feeling pretty rich in the meat department. We eat a lot of pork chops, some ribs (cooked slowly with our canned tomatoes and spices in the crock pot all day), some roasts (either just as roasts or turned into carnitas), and ground pork. The ground pork we like to use in Thai curries or stir-fries, cooked up with onions, garlic, carrots, finely chopped greens and eaten with rice.

Eggs: The chickens have been laying since about mid-November, and we are now getting 6 or 7 eggs on most days. It is a wonderful thing not to have to buy eggs anymore, but to be eating our own. As a result, eggs have become a bigger part of our diet and are one of our main protein sources. We'll eat them fried for breakfast, in baked goods, and sometimes for lunch in a hash with chopped potatoes and onion. Then we'll throw some of our salsa on top to spice it up a bit.

Orrin has built the chickens a coop inside the basement of the other building, using hay bales as walls, branches as roosts, and wooden boxes that he made for them to lay their eggs in. On a warm-ish day like today, we let them outside, so they get to peck at the grass and look for bugs. When they can't be outside, we do a little weeding in the greenhouse and give them the weeds. Giving them leafy greens makes both them and their eggs healthier, and we can see the difference because the yolks go from pale yellow to a rich orange color. That makes them healthier for us, too, giving us extra omega-3 fats.

Squash and pumpkins: Since October, we've been eating a lot of pumpkin, as those are the winter squash with the shortest shelf-life. We've been eating pumpkin pies, various types of pumpkin soup, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin pancakes and of course, roasted pumpkin seeds. We cooked up the last pumpkin at Christmas-time to make a soup, but have a couple large ziploc bags in the freezer filled with pumpkin, so we'll have a few more pumpkin delicacies before the winter is over.

Our most abundant squash, spaghetti, has made for a number of basic but tasty spaghetti meals. We bake the squash (instead of boiling noodles) and make a sauce with our canned tomatoes, our frozen basil, fresh carrots out of the greenhouse, and onion. We also add ground beef, which we have been eating from a quarter of a cow that we bought in late summer before we had pork. We still have quite a few of those types of squash left, so that will continue to be a staple for awhile.

Other squash that we have been eating are buttercup, butternut and acorn. The buttercup are so sweet they remind me of sweet potatoes. I like to bake them, then mash them up with a little butter, and then they really do seem like sweet potatoes. Butternut squash I like to peel and cube, and then throw into a soup with lentils, carrots and onions, and a little bit of Thai curry paste. Acorns are good just baked with a little butter and maple syrup.

Appley items: We've been eating our apple butter and apple syrup on pancakes, although we still use some maple syrup as it is just soooo good. Apple syrup has been a decent substitute for a pancake topping because it came from here, but it still doesn't hold a candle to maple syrup. We also enjoy the occasional apple crisp made from the fresh apples stored in the basement.

Greens: We pick a salad to eat almost every day, out of the greenhouse. Mostly it's arugula, with small amounts of spinach, baby bok choy, mizuna and a little lettuce. We also pick chard and/or kale to eat every day as well. I make a breakfast smoothie of water, kale, apple, blackberries and peaches. The peaches were picked at a friends house, but the other fruit came from here. Greens are so packed with nutrients that we chop them up in the food processor and try to throw them in as many other dishes as we can – stir-fries, scrambled eggs, spaghetti sauce, you name it.

That covers the bulk of the food we are eating, and I'm pretty excited that most of it is from here. Some of the things we eat that we didn't grow this year (or can't grow) are grains (rice, millet, amaranth, sorghum, quinoa), beans (lentils, black, garbanzo – we grew some, but only ended up with a few cups of each), onions (we planted them but they didn't grow in our poor soil), maple syrup, lemons, olive oil, apple cider vinegar (hopefully we can make some another year), breakfast cereal, and of course, chocolate. I'm sure there are other things I am forgetting.

Due to food intolerances to wheat/gluten that all three of us seem to have, we are gluten-free at home (and try to be when we're not at home, too), so that makes baking a challenge. We use a variety of flours with extra's like xanthan gum and tapioca flour to make bread and other baked goods rise like wheat flour does, but I don't think those things are particularly healthy for us. We recently were told about and read a book called “The Resilient Gardener” by Carol Deppe, who has celiac disease (ie she gets very sick if she eats any food that has gluten in it), and she has come up with a variety of different types of traditional corn that can be grown and used for flour to make great breads, without using any fillers. It is inspiring to us, and gives us hope that we can not only grow the grains ourselves to make a decent loaf of bread, but also that we can save money by not having to buy the extra fillers that we thought were just the way it was going to be if we wanted to bake.