So here we are in the latter days of fall. The year is winding down once again. I have been working on pears, and I purchased a bunch of pumpkins and winter squash due to my absolute crop failure this year. Got them for very little money after halloween.

    Many people don't know how to store squash and pumpkins. They do not store well in a cellar. They need warmer storage than that. The best place to store them is on cardboard, under a bed, in a cool room of the house. However, they must be watched. Speaking from experience, you won't like what happens when you neglect to do so. I have stored some varieties till May the following year this way. Just make sure you store only the ones that have a piece of stem still attached. Otherwise they will spoil quickly. Just use the ones with no stem right away.

   So why bother to store them? Well first of all they are a nutritional powerhouse! They are also just good tasting food. Yes there are all the favorites, pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, mashed, buttered, seasoned squash. However, they are also delicious stuffed with savory meat, baked in chunks with onions, simmered in beef or vegetable stew.

   This week I am going to make a fabulous french soup from an heirloom squash from that region called, Galeux d'Eysines . This fabulous squash is extremely juicy, and renowned by french chefs for soup. Often people call them peanut pumpkins, because of their habit of forming rough warts due to sugars built up in their skins during storage. People buy them often as a novelty for their fall display and miss the fabulous flavor of them cooked.

   In the following link is a pretty good recipe for the soup as I make it. However, I use homemade chicken stock from my chickens, rather than veggie stock. I probably will leave my pumpkin soup chunky as I enjoy something to chew when I eat. The typical french recipe calls for blenders and such, but I like the rustic route better, and it is less work. No you don't get that smooth babyfood quality, but lets face it, I'm no longer a baby! Yummy French Pumpkin Soup.  It should also be noted that this recipe, unlike somes has you roasting the pumpkin which concentrates the flavor, and save a lot of time peeling, and dicing pumpkin.

    So I've been spending a lot of time on fall butchering. In the spring I purchased 50 baby chicks, most of which were roosters. I ended up with about 8-10 hens out of the lot. I have been harvesting them for quite awhile, and I am currently butchering the last of the roosters that I will not be keeping.
    In August, I purchased another batch of 25 chicks that were all pullets. These have been being raised in a chicken tractor, and will soon be moved into the regular henhouse, once the excess roosters are gone. They are so lovely, a mix of Easter Eggers, Barred Rocks, and I think some regular White Rocks as well, though as they came as a mix I could be wrong. I am sure they will go on to be a fine laying flock.
    As I have been butchering my mix of roosters, I have been reminded of why for some years Buff Orpingtons have been my go to chicken breed. They lay well, and do so even in winter. They are quiet and generally gentle. They also make a nicely weighted carcass upon butcher, and pick out clean. They will also brood their own eggs sometimes. Over all, they are excellent chicken, and after I butcher these roosters, I won't have many of them.
    One thing I can say, my home raised, natural, dual purpose chickens far outperform store bought chicken in nearly every respect. Their bones are strong. It takes all my strength to break one of my chicken's leg bones. When I cook them, the bones do not all fall apart, though the meat comes off the bones. My kids have remarked that the meat is a little tougher than store chicken, but to my pallet it is simply meatier, chewing like good steak, with body, rather than turning to mush when boiled. Most of all the flavor is simply so much more chickeny than store chicken. The stock is just to die for!
    One thing I am really looking forward to is a time when my chickens are reproducing themselves. I do not want to have to buy large amounts of chicks, because I do not want to have to butcher this many all at once. I'd like to get to a point where I can walk to the chicken house at any given point and grab dinner. Now that is a proper chicken system, very little storage space needed.

    Today was the first big day in the garden! Winter time is a time of less physical labor. It is a time for eating warming foods, and working on indoor projects. The tasks of winter are not heavily physical. Since I had a case of pregnancy related heart failure in 2006, winter is a time to simply keep warm for me. I have always been a cold-natured person, and since the heart failure, I am more sensitive to cold. Certainly my family notices, always telling me that I want the house too warm.

   The first days of gardening in the spring are a time when my body reminds me that I haven't been doing as much over the winter. Tonight as the result of my first real day of planting, I am aching. However, there are a few things that I do to help the process of returning to the garden.

    One of the first things I do, is purposely start working late in the afternoon. This insures that it is the warmest part of the day, and also that I do not over-extend myself. The sun going down, then becomes my timer.

    Another thing that is important is to stay hydrated. Today, I found myself feeling pretty blah toward the end, and I knew I needed to go drink some liquid. I went as soon as I realized and got a drink. When it is cool out, it is easy to ignore your body's signals for thirst. Cool wind, and late winter sunlight are often more drying that you realize. It is very important to drink enough, even when you don't feel like you need it. Muscles suffering from dehydration cannot carry the load you put on them. So drink plenty of fluids!

   It is also important to eat good meals, when you are asking your body to do work that you haven't done all winter. Today, I was shoveling, hoeing, weeding, and planting. It didn't take long for me to start to feel the effects of this difficult work, which at the end of the summer, is not near so difficult. I had a sandwich before going out, but felt the need for a few carbohydrates, when I cam back in for my water.

   Another thing that is helpful, is to make sure that if you have to cook a family meal after returning to the house, that you have an easy meal to prepare. Tonight, I made the third meal from a 10lb. bag of chicken that I have served. We had chicken tacos.

   The other day I roasted half a bag of chicken for dinner, one night. At the same time I boiled the other half for chicken stock. I took out half the chicken, and made a pot of chicken soup with the help of a few Ramen noodles, and some vegetables for another meal. The remainder of the chicken, I stuck in a ziplock in the refrigerator. I also put several bags of stock in the freezer for future meals. Tonight I used the chicken from the refrigerator for chicken tacos, and fed the four of us that are in the house tonight.

   So tonight I had a good nutritious meal ready within about 15 minutes of coming in the house. The only thing I wish is that the chicken would have been home raised. However, I am still in recovery mode from the great animal annihilation of November 2012. Even so, I've got lovely chicks just doing fantastically, and today we got 5 eggs from our few hens that are just beginning to lay. So grateful for those 5 eggs! Won't be long until we will have beautiful chicken to eat right here on the farm.

Projects And Commentary

Cole Crops Ready For Transplant 2013

Tess's Land Race Currant Tomatoes Rising

2011 Apricots As Pretty As Ever!

Lovely Candied Lemon Peel

  


The preceding are just some homesteady projects of the past and the present:

    So today this blog post is going to respond to the following article: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2012/01/the_foxfire_books_are_modern_diyers_just_play_acting_.html#

       I found the above article quite interesting. I myself have read most all of the Foxfire series! In fact, it has had a distinct effect upon my life. So much so that I doubt that I would be where I am today, had I never been influenced by it, and by John Seymour's "The Complete Book of Self Sufficiency." However, I think the author of the article above, though making some valid points, is really missing some insights.

       Let me start by telling a little of my story. In 1997, my second son, Matthew, was born. The years previous to that had been a real emotional roller coaster. I had had a couple of early miscarriages, and lost two children in my second trimester of pregnancy. Because of my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, I was able to carry on, but not without much sorrow.

      By the time Matt came along, I had been on such a long hormone roller coaster, that I was bound to suffer from the effects of it. So, I went through a postpartum depression, as my hormones were taking their sweet time to level out.

      It was not the first time I had dealt with some postpartum blues. After my first son, Ken was born I experienced some mild depression as well. Enough so that my parents were concerned. Even today, I don't remember it being nearly as bad as they were making it out to be. They recommended some counseling, which I did not find to be very helpful. Truthfully, I was mostly, just grieving over the fact that my parents had moved far away from me, right at the time I became a wife, and then a mother. My Dad surrendered to the ministry, and within a year, I was married, abandoned(conceptually by my mom and dad who were off living their own life, without me), and then became a mother. Actually, I think I did pretty good:^)

      However, what I endured when Matt came along was more severe by far. I got through it, after I discovered what was wrong, by much prayer, Bible study, and singing to Jesus. Once I came to understand just what depression is, I spent my time forcing my mind out of the rut that hormones had thrown it into by changing each negative thought I had into a positive one. It was a painstaking process. So whenever I would feel panicked, or I would have negative thoughts, or be overcome with grief, I would replace it with prayer, or quote scripture, or a spiritual song. In addition to this, I supported my efforts with some mood lifting herbs, and a few vitamins as well. This worked very well!

      When the fog lifted nearly a year after Matt was born, It was like the sun came up, and flooded my life with renewed energy, and an intellectual rainbow of creative thought! It was then, that through prayer, I discovered that God was telling me to stop casting around for what I should do with my life, and focus on what he had already given me to do. He told me to be the best wife, mother, and Christian I could possibly be!

      So I began thinking about how I could do what I sincerely felt, and still feel, God wanted me to do. In my mind I decided on priorities. One of the first goals I set for myself was to raise godly men(and later when Lacey came along, a godly woman). I also began looking at what kinds of food I wanted to give my family. I felt, and still feel that in the area of food, our nation is starving itself.

      How can I say that, living in one of the most over-weight states in the nation? Because being over-weight is a symptom of starvation. What? You say, "How can this be?" I say this, because in most people, not all(everybody is different), a person gets over weight when their body is not getting enough nutrition. The body, starved of the nutrients it needs, desires more and more food in order to get that nutrition.

      Now anybody who reads this section, that knows me, is going to say to themselves, "This woman IS overweight. How can she talk about being overweight?". My weight came along with my pregnancies. In high school to stay thin, I had to eat one meal a day. My metabolism has never been very fast, not sure why. Honestly, I think the starvation of my years in high school, probably assisted my weight gain once I had babies. The body, once denied, works very hard to pack pounds on. Early in my marriage, I seriously did not get near enough exercise. I was busy being a mom.  Believe it or not, I am not a heavy eater. Anyway, ultimately, what got me here is exactly what I am talking about above.

     Anyway, at the end of 1992, I looked at the devolving state of food in the grocery stores, and said to myself this is not good enough for my family. I realized that the food at the stores, were being sprayed heavily with pesticides, and that artificial fertilizers were allowing crops to continue to leach nutrients out of the soil, without adding anything back. Added to that was the appearance on the scene of genetically modified food, which I did not trust to be healthy at all. My instincts were right: Don't Eat GMO Food

     As I was researching giving better food to my children, I stumbled across the Back to the Land movement of the the early 70's, otherwise known as "homesteading". It was then that I read the Foxfire series. Someday, I'll go into how we went from renting a lot, to renting 2 acres, to renting a couple of different 5 acre places, to finally owning 4 acres, and now 34 acres. For now, I'll just say that the people that the guy in this article pokes a little fun at were me at one point or another.

     I went from a lot in the city in southern California, to an on again/off again subsistence farm in Oklahoma. Why on again/off again? Well if there is anything I have discovered, it is that feeding oneself solely from what one raises is HARD WORK!!! There are weeds, predators, disease, weather catastrophes, seed fertility loss, and physical disabilities resulting from injury! It has always been that way too! What person's grandpappy, or grandmama didn't have stories of great crop losses or starvation times on the farm??? The answer to that is NONE OF US!!!

    The man who wrote the article I posted, which is the topic of this post, is right in a way. However, the author misses much of what should be the point of his article! The generations that knew how to truly survive, have died, or are dying! We,  who are left, are trying to revive, or keep alive, knowledge that is rapidly being lost!

    I thank God for Martha Stewart's fancy chicken coop! Thank the Lord, there is somebody out there in the public eye, showing the public that good organic fresh eggs are better for you than store bought mass produced eggs that come from a chicken that has about a foot of space between him and about a hundred thousand other chickens! Because those chickens get no sunlight, nor fresh air, nor healthy bugs or grass, and cannot produce healthy eggs! Martha Stewart is NOT playacting! Martha Stewart is helping families across this nation!

    We need more people, "playacting" at raising their own food!!! We need them, because there could come a time when the house of technological cards we have built, could fall! Some day we may HAVE to scrabble a living out of the land again! Someday, whether we can raise a chicken, or plant a seed, or even own a seed that will grow a non-toxic fruit or vegetable, may mean the difference between life and death for us, or our country, and even our planet!


Britt Peterson, in the article writes:

   "Emily Cook, manager at Virginia’s Farm at Sunnyside, told me she was sick of “farmer groupies” who weren’t actually interested in the real problems farmers are facing. “The discussion needs to move beyond how great heirloom tomatoes are to how are we going to have farmers 20 years from now,” she said. “Our system really needs to change to make farming a viable career to people.”"

    Oh, how much the above line of thinking misses the mark! The idea that we need to make it so farmers can have "careers" on more factory, over-sprayed, antibiotic laden, nutrient stripping farms, is the opposite of where we need to go! Farming was never a career, anymore than being a doctor was a career, or being a preacher was a career! Farming always was, and should be, a calling!

    We need more people! From the smallest backyard enthusiast, to the subsistence homesteader, to the organic grower at the farmers market, to the yuppy CSA, to the small organic raw milk dairy, we need them all!!! Those people, are the security of not only this nation, but the world!

    In the 1920's and 30's a revolution took place in agriculture, called the tractor! It was a miracle to farmers everywhere! It gave them more free time! It made their lives easier. About the same time, another revolution was occurring, a revolution of how farmers thought about farming! Instead of farming being a calling to feed others in their communities, and their families, suddenly farming became a "Business!".

    There were some good effects from the revolution of farming from calling to business, but there were a lot more bad effects! The thing about big technological changes, is that it is like throwing a a big stone into a clear, still, pool. Whatever havoc the stone creates, for good or ill, gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger! Once farming became a business, then businessmen took over our food supply, and it became more about making money than it was about surviving, or health, or even the  happiness of the farmers themselves! This is why since the 1930's we have gone from about 55% of the population owning of being associated with a farm, to 2% of the population.

    What the Foxfire books show is the history of an extremely self-sufficient society, and their remnants who have since died, leaving us with a lack of skills to do for ourselves! Yes, we do have a number of very yuppy back-to-the-land hobbyists, who have very little concept of just what they are messing about with. What blessings they are to the world! For they are the ones awake enough to see we have a problem! They are the beginnings of a new revolution, heading us back toward balance, and stasis until the next stone gets thrown in the pond!

    In the meantime, there are those of us, who are NOT playacting! We are working, and striving, and failing, and getting up, dusting ourselves off, and striving some more! We raise our gardens, milk our goats, and cows, raise our poultry, grow feed crops for our animals, grow orchards, preserve our harvests, spin our yarn, weave, crochet, and all manner of other things!

    To me, all these people, from the child who plants bean in a cup, to an old man who still follows a furrow in spring, to the woman who milks her first goat with one hand while reading about it with a book in the other(like I did myself), to the dairy farmer who has done it all his life, deserve to be lifted up for their courageous actions! They don't need to be discouraged, rather encouraged, and assisted!

   

   

                                          Our Plum Trees Loaded With Unripe Fruit

       Last year at plum season I was searching around for something to do with plums besides jelly(as I have plenty of that from last season), and canned plums which I am not very fond of.  I decided to make a plum sauce for meat. I did not have a lot of time, because I was about to leave for camp. So I made it up, and threw it into the freezer. Last night I finally tried it on pork strips.
    The original recipe I came up with involved running the ripe plums through my food mill, and cooking the sauce with onions, garlic, some vinegar, and sugar, and then blending it all together in a blender. Then I returned the sauce to a pot, and cooked it all down real thick. Then I just tossed it into the freezer, and basically forgot about it until last night.
    Last night I blended some of the sauce with soy sauce, and brown mustard, and added just little bit of pineapple juice. Let me just say, YUMMM! This was a fantastic meal! We had the Plum glazed pork strips,  Roasted potatoes, and onions, and salad with Poppy Seed dressing. It was a very good meal!
    Today I am planting Peas and Fava Beans. This year I am planting Tall Telephone shell peas, and Mammoth Melting Sugar peas, and probably some Super Sugar Snap peas.. I like all the different forms of peas. They each have their purpose in the kitchen. The shell peas make a nice table vegetable, especially with new red potatoes, or in cream sauce with baby onions. The Super Sugar Snap peas are wonderful and a nice fiber vegetable, to serve in butter, or as a finger snack. Most of these get eaten right in the garden(by me!). The sugar peas are really nice when making Asian dishes, particularly in stir-fry.

    I am in the process of writing a book. I am writing a cookbook.  When it is completed, I will be releasing the book on CD-Rom. I plan to enforce a 5 year copyright on the book, after which I plan to allow the book in the public domain. I'm not much of a believer in egregious copyright laws. I think it is more than acceptable to earn some money, and then let it go for the use of others. It is my intent to create a series of youtube videos immediately preceding the release of my cookbook. This will be a fun and educational experience I think!

                        Here is one of my gardens from a few years ago. This was quite a productive garden that year. However, the bean teepee did not do as well. Needed to put the mulch down before I put the teepee in.                                

   

   It has been a rather odd winter. No real cold, very little precipitation. Just an odd winter! I took the above pick in the Fall. I am very ready for spring, and I am hoping the weather people are wrong, and the drought just breaks. I am looking forward to gardening.

    Much of homesteading is educated guess work, and observation. It is watching the times and seasons, and planning based upon experience, but still having flexibility, when created nature is under another plan. Take February, please! Sometimes I'd like to give it away. It is often my most frustrating month garden wise. I am always in a hurry to get started gardening, and February is always in the way:^)

     I never start planting much of anything, except peas, fava beans, and potatoes before the 2nd two weeks of February. The first two weeks of February, are usually quite cold here in Oklahoma. It seems like the first two weeks of February are winter's last gasp, at least usually. This year, I'm just not sure what is happening! I was seriously about to start planting in earnest, when all of a sudden, weather people started talking anew about cold. Bummer! Not only that, but now they are showing clearly cold temperatures until the 3rd week in February! Curses! What is a desperate homesteader to do!

     Last night I went to the livestock auction. I bought two pairs of Silkie Chickens, and one rather nice Speckled Sussex chickens for $62. All the time I am sitting there saying to myself, why in the world would anybody want to spend the kind of money these people are spending on birds of unknown origins?

   If you buy a chicken for $15, at $1.50 per dozen, she has to lay 10 dozen eggs before she pays for herself! If that hen lays 4 times per week, (which I think is a reasonable expectation for an unknown commodity) then it will take her 30 weeks to pay for herself. This is almost 60% of a year, and does not include the feed that she is fed, or any care either! Now since there is no way to be truly sure of the hen's age, this could be a significant chunk of her productive life, and there is no way of knowing if you will receive any profit at all!

   There is only one way that one hen could be made to be profitable in the above case, reproduction! That means that either her eggs need to be incubated by you, or she has to reliably incubate them herself! Unfortunately much of the broodiness has been bread out of the most commercially available chickens.

   This brings me to my reason for being at this particular auction, and also why I spent so much money myself. My goal is to produce a reliably reproductive flock! On the homestead, eggs are not the only reason to raise chickens. We raise our chickens for meat! Constantly having to buy chickens to butcher defeats the purpose! Therefore, we have to come to the point where we have a reliably productive flock, that provides both meat and eggs.

   To my way of thinking, this means cross-breeding! We need to breed the instinct back into our flock, and just regular selection is not fast enough, nor does it return a strong healthy population to our coop! So this is the project I am working on! I am crossing some big chickens to some bantams, and then selecting for size, broodiness, and livability, rather than egg production! My eventual goal is to be able to eat eggs regularly, eat chicken with the family twice a week, and produce enough of my own chicks every year through natural means to make that happen!

     Follow my adventures in the next few years, as I try to reach that goal!

    Pictured above is an unseasonably warm storm that rolled through the other day.

     I am getting ready for spring. I did get a harvest from my fall garden before it got too cold. Some of the plants are still alive down there, though much neglected. Mostly I harvested mustard greens, which I thought was turnips when I planted it! Did I have mustard!!! I ended up traveling for most all of November, and the family used the garden while I was gone. Sadly while we were all away  celebrating my parents 50th anniversary, some one broke into our house, and also a dog came in and killed all my goats, and most of my chickens. Rule #1 for homesteading: NEVER travel!!!

  When I got back, I was so exhausted(and frustrated) that I didn't work as hard, or as fast as I should have to get all the mustard harvested before we had a hard frost! So a lot of it didn't make it! However, the leavings have made good winter food for the chickens(those that remain), who have been snacking on it regularly. So it has been well mowed.
   
   I have been planting my cold crops indoors already. Most came up very well, except the Golden Acre Cabbage. It was bad seed. There is not even one seedling. Going to buy seed to replace it, though it's rather late, so I will probably direct seed it outdoors.

   Next week it is supposed to warm up some, so I am planning to do several outdoor projects. One is to establish a cold frame for raising seedlings. I am also planning to rake mulch I received from a local tree service. In addition, I am going to establish a bed for peas, and fava beans. I probably will also head back down to the pig pen garden, and plant peas down there for spring along the fences.

    Does Mache ever get bigger? It is delicious, and I have been putting it on sandwiches, but talk about tiny! It has made it through the winter though! Also I have carrots that have made it through winter, and am hoping the make some carrots for me!

    Above: My Beautiful Muscovy ducks which made it through the nightmare!

     Anyway, as you can tell, winter has been rather an adventure. However, I am so thankful for a new year, and spring which is on it's way!!! Once again, I get a do-over. Thanks to God, for his incredible wisdom in designing the world and it's seasons!