Harvest Pictures

Some of our pumpkins and winter squash

The last of the basil, which I just threw into a large ziploc bag and froze.

Some of the unripe spaghetti squash (basket), and some small buttercup squash (floor).
The spaghetti squash have since ripened, which we are glad for - we weren't sure they would ripen if picked early.

Oliver with some fermenting cider and winter squash.

Lots of green tomatoes! I'm afraid some of them are rotting already, so I plan to make a
bunch of green salsa today or tomorrow to make use of them.

A full pantry of summer goodies! Canned and dried tomatoes, salsa, pickles, ketchup,
and apple butter.

And we're back to greens in the greenhouse. 

Harvest season wraps up

The harvest is pretty much finished now. Yesterday I pulled all the remaining tomatoes off the vine, and cut the plants down. I picked 15 lbs of ripe tomatoes and another 45 lbs of green tomatoes, which I laid on a table in the dining room to continue to ripen. The ripe tomatoes were sliced and put in the dehydrator. I also picked the last peppers and eggplants and cut down those plants as well. There were 6 eggplants and about 10 bell peppers. I made chile rellenos with the peppers for dinner last night. Not as spicy as using poblanos or anaheims, but still a good excuse for some fried, cheesy goodness. I had cut down the cucumber plants last week and had brought the remaining cucumbers into the house. The greenhouse looks so different now, without the tall tomato plants and cucumbers to fill the space. All that's left is clover that had been underplanted below the tomatoes, and the various types of greens that we've planted to feed us (and possibly to sell) over the winter. All in all, we picked and processed about 170 lbs of tomatoes this summer, not including the two or three that we picked and ate each day in salads. Not too shabby for a couple of ex-yuppies in our first year of farming!

The other day, as I was eating my cucumber and tomato salad for lunch, I realized that it was the last of its kind for this year. We ate a lot of salads like that this summer, and I never did get tired of them. It gives me something to look forward to for next summer.

Today, in the main garden, I picked the various pole beans, which will continue to dry in their pods in a bucket. We will transplant some of the kale and lettuce from the main garden into the greenhouse as well, to fill in the beds that I just cleared.

On Saturday we spent a good part of the day at a neighbors house, picking apples. They have three large apple trees that were loaded with apples, and so we helped pick one of the trees clean. The apples filled eight or nine 50 lb sacks, plus another full bag of damaged apples that we'll give to the pigs. We got to keep half the apples in exchange for them coming over and using the grinder and press. These apples are so tasty, way better than most of the apples on our property. Plus, they're good storage apples, so we can keep a sack in the basement for awhile, to snack on. It was a nice day, with our two families working together and our kids playing together. It made me feel like we're starting to build some community in our little neck of the woods.

It is also time to turn some pigs into pork. We hope to have one of the male pigs, the biggest, slaughtered and butchered in the next week or two, then plan to do the other male in about a month. We are still on the fence about whether or not to keep the female. She is not very big, so it seems a waste to kill her, but if we keep her over the winter then that means paying for grain to feed her. But if we keep her, we may also be able to breed her in the early spring, which would mean not having to buy new piglets. It's a dilemma.

Apple Juicing

Grinding apples

It's a family affair - my dad is helping, along with Oliver and Charlie the Dog.

Even the new pup, Zoe, is enjoying a tasty apple.

Cutie-pie Oliver.

After grinding, you fill the cheesecloth with some of the ground apples.

Add a second layer.

Then fill the second layer with more ground apples.

There are the two layers of apples, ready to be pressed.

The bucket is ready to be filled with juicy apple goodness.

Harvest season makes me happy

Harvest season is in full-tilt right now! It was so much fun to pull all our winter squash and pumpkins in, and weigh them with our new 70 lb hanging scale (it's my current favorite kitchen gadget). We have a whopping 220 lbs of winter squash and pumpkins. The big winners are the spaghetti squash, weighing in at a total of 86 lb! So awesome! I am actually starting to believe that we may feed ourselves this winter. We've picked all our dry beans and have shelled most of them. We had planted black turtle beans, light red kidney beans, and yellow kinearly beans. We realized that we didn't plant nearly enough dry beans, and will probably devote at least one whole row to them next year. We still have pole beans to pick, but they haven't dried yet.

We continue to process tomatoes (we picked 25 lbs more today), of which we are drying some right now, and will can the remaining picked tomatoes tomorrow. There are still a lot on the vine that are ripening, so it'll be interesting to see how long they last in the greenhouse before we have to pull the plants into the house to finish.

We had a surprise volunteer tomatillo plant that gave me enough to make a big batch of roasted tomatillo salsa with, and we munched heavily on that for a couple of weeks. I hear that once tomatillos are in your garden, they'll come up every year on their own – I sure hope so!

Last week my parents were visiting, and while they were here we used a borrowed grinder and press to juice a whole bunch of apples, probably about 1 bushelful. We drank a bit of the juice, but took most of it and reduced it down to apple syrup, which we are now using on pancakes and oatmeal. It turns out that we cooked it down a little too far, and it is more jelly-like than syrup, which just tells us that next time we don't have to cook it as long and should end up with more syrup! It's tasty stuff. This week, we juiced about the same amount again, but put the juice into a fermenter, and are going to try our hand at making hard cider. That requires some patience, it seems, as it won't actually be ready to bottle for 4 or 5 months, and then you have to let it sit for another month or two, I think. I so hope it's worth it!

Also while my parents were visiting, my mom took several of our eggplants and made a big pan of moussaka – so delicious! Food seems to taste so much better when we grow it or know where it comes from. I am so grateful for all the food that we have harvested, and will continue to harvest, and will appreciate it through the winter. 

Welcome to the Farm, Zoe

Originally we'd been thinking of getting an LGD (livestock guard dog) next spring, but after the recent weasel incident, we decided we needed to get one sooner. Orrin found a few different options for sale on kijiji, and went and picked up our new dog Thursday night. She is a Maremma, with natural protective instincts, although we will help her hone them to our particular farm and set of animals. She's 4 months old and white. We will be training her to spend much of her time around the sheep, so that she will align herself with them, and treat them like family. She will also learn the boundaries of our property, or in this case, the workable property (pasture, house, chicken coops, garden) and then will protect everything within the property from predators that might try to come into the area. I wanted to give her a tough-sounding name, as we have high expectations of her protection abilities. So, I thought Xena would be good – totally cheesy, but I never actually saw the show, I just figure the character was tough. Orrin told me that name is TOO cheesy (apparently he's actually seen the show). My second choice was Athena, who was a warrior in Greek mythology. Orrin's choice was Zoe, after the tough chick from Firefly, our favorite TV series. Oliver had to be the tie-breaker – Athena or Zoe? He chose Zoe. Zoe it is! Now let's see what you can do, Zoe.

Weasel vs. chicken

Yesterday we sold the truck, which we'd been trying to do for months. We didn't even get a full day to bask in the euphoria of getting a decent price for it, as we were awoken at 3:30 this morning to the sound of screaming chickens. Orrin raced outside and found that three roosters were dead inside the movable coop. He came back in to tell me and a little while later there was more squawking. He went back out and a fourth bird had been partially dragged out of a small hole between the coop and the ground. At that point he saw that it was a weasel. There were two remaining roosters, plus the A-frame coop that had 14 birds in it (mostly chickens and a couple roosters), so he stayed awake the rest of the night, sitting inside the house and listening for any other sounds from the chickens, in case he needed to run back out there to scare off the weasel. Fortunately, there were no further incidences.

In the morning, Orrin saw the weasel come up from the pond and try to get into the coop again. Apparently, he wanted to finish the meal he'd begun in the middle of the night. We'll probably have to get a trap to catch it, now that it knows there are chickens here. In the meantime, Orrin spent part of the day moving the A-frame coop up above the garden beds in Row B, so that it's now far away from the pond. The pond is a safe place for the weasel, so we hope that by increasing the distance to food, it will decrease his interest in coming after the chickens. Then Orrin added some additional planks on to the bottom of the coop to raise it up about 6”, so he could add another roost. We had to put the remaining two roosters in with the rest, so it's getting a bit crowded. These birds are still quite young (except for the two layers that we'd gotten from friends earlier in the summer), and so the chickens aren't yet laying and the roosters aren't yet agro. In fact, one of the birds that was killed we were not sure if it was a rooster or a chicken, because it was still so young.

This evening, we had the adventure of trying to herd the chickens up from their old area, through the garden and into their new area. As we learned in ultimate frisbee, you can't have a good zone defense without at least 3 players, so we probably looked pretty silly trying to get 16 birds to head in a specific direction. The first time we tried, most of them had peeled off in random directions and we were left with 4 or 5 birds close to the newly fenced area, but we still couldn't convince them to head in the right direction. A second try at herding was also futile. In the end, they all headed back down to their old stomping grounds and, since it was getting dark they were trying to hunker down in the tall grass and weeds. We slowly managed to catch a couple at a time, sort of like this: slowly corner a few, lunge, grab, and if we were lucky, stand up with a chicken. Several times they slipped through our fingers. Plus, they were pretty wound up from us chasing them around, not realizing that we were actually trying to put them in a safe place. You can't say that us country folk don't know how to have a good time on a Saturday night!

While it was crummy that the weasel killed some birds, it was fortunate that it killed roosters and not hens. The roosters would have been dog food anyway, and in this scenario ended up feeding the pigs (also a good thing, because we are desperately trying to fatten up the pigs). And also, by moving the chicken enclosure up to the top half of the Row B garden area, the chickens will help fertilize the soil that we will not have time to cover crop this year. Not such a bad scenario, after all. It also makes us realize that we may have to get a livestock guard dog sooner than next spring.

Now, it's time to go get caught up on my sleep. Orrin's already passed out from being up since 3:30 this morning.

A September Pictorial

Here's a pictorial of the farm this month. I imagine that in future year's the novelty will wear off, but since this is the first year, I'm pretty excited about all the thing's that are growing right now.

Bell peppers in the greenhouse. A little late this year, hopefully
they still have time to ripen.

Our favorite eating tomato (vs canning or drying) - Black Russian.

Whitey in front, Isabel behind. He's up to around 150 lb now we think, hopefully
the 30 lbs of apples we're feeding them will fatten them up a bit. 

Laying hens and soon-to-be layer's. Hopefully the newbie's will
start laying in the next month or two.

One of the apple tree's that Orrin pruned last winter, and has a ton of apples on it.
They're pretty tasty now, almost fully ripe.

Farmer Orrin dumping some weeds onto a compost pile.

Our work so far on Row B. We've completed 7 beds and Orrin
is halfway through Bed 8 (left side). We are cover cropping them and
then putting a layer of hay down on top to mulch each bed.

The lower beds in Row A. Dry beans (lower left) are almost ready to be picked,
and we've planted some new greens in the bare-looking bed (in the middle of the pic).

The upper half of Row A. The tall greenery are cover crops that we'd planted in every
other row this year to improve the soil. There are also squash and pumpkin plants throughout.

The second of our two heads of cauliflower. 4 or 5" across. Not huge, but I'm happy it's there.
The first one was a pretty good size, and downright tasty.

Buttercup squash. So delicious, they taste like sweet potatoes to me.

Spaghetti squash.

Baby Pam Pumpkin

Rouge Vif D'etamps pumpkin. It looks a lot like a wheel of cheese.

Part of the hillside that's been "sheep'ed", ie chomped down to the ground.
And anything they didn't eat, Orrin cut down with his new fancy scythe.

A beautiful Barbarella eggplant. One of the veggie's I have most been looking forward to this year.
We've eaten one so far (a Nadia), and should have 5 more before the season ends.