Final Blog Post

 This will be my last blog post.  I am ending my blog after 7 1/2 years of writing.  It is for personal reasons, but also in part because I am not happy with the latest blogspot rules and changes.  This site is no longer user-friendly, and there are less choices for customizing my blog entries.  I am also not happy with the stupid and juvenile games required for people to post comments.   It's been a good almost 8 years of writing and I have enjoyed telling everyone about life here in the northern country. My goal in writing these past years has been to show that a simple life, well lived, can be happy and fulfilling.   I am grateful for the many readers over the years, and hope that my articles were found to be interesting and sometimes educational?!

Today it is snowing!  I guess winter is here.  This is what I woke up to this morning: 

I started to do some yard decorations, but the fierce winds and snow of yesterday and today sort of put an end to that!

 

As you can see, not only are the leaves gone from the trees, but the view of Two Squaw Lake is quite wintry!

Harold has a pretty good start on winter wood, but he says he needs to cut a few more cords of wood. 

 

Before the snows hit, we harvested a lot of pumpkins and winter squash, which is now stored on the back porch.  We will give some of it away, and some we will keep for eating, and some will go into the freezer.

This is just some of the harvest of pumpkins and squash. 

Lots of pie pumpkins ready to make pies with!  These are Winter Luxury pie pumpkins.  they make an especially delicious pie. 

A couple weeks ago I made a grapevine wreath with some vines I got from my neighbor lady.  I decorated the wreath with bittersweet flowers I found down the road, and some fabric leaves I made.  I also added a small scarecrow and ribbon, and hung this wreath in my dining room.  I think it turned out quite nice, don't you think?

Every year I try to do something with bittersweet, as that is my favorite wild plant.  This year I made a grapevine wreath and decorated it with bittersweet, which grows nicely about a mile down the road from my house.

My husband took this photo of me just a few minutes ago.   A thankful good-bye to all of my readers.!

Again, I am thankful for all of my readers over the years.  My blog will still be available online in case anyone wants to reference a past article or a recipe.   Things are changing rapidly in this country, and I feel that it is time for me to go in a new direction also.   Harold and I hope to finish all the many projects that have been waiting for more time.  We are also no longer doing the farmer's market booth, which will give us more time to complete projects also.  And our gardens will be much smaller.  It was time to downsize the workload!  We are just no longer as young as we used to be. 

My hope is that the coming year will be better than 2020 turned out to be!   Best wishes to everyone, and God's blessings for a great 2021. 

When The House Becomes A Grocery Warehouse!

 We are in for 3 days of a hard freeze.  Today and tomorrow and the next day temps in the 20's are predicted.  This is damaging to any crops left out in the gardens.  We had no choice today but to pick as much as we could salvage.   Some things can tolerate the temperatures.  The first night the pumpkin and winter squash vines will die, but the fruits will be OK.  However, the following two nights we will have to cover the squash and pumpkins with tarps because the greenery cover protecting them will have died.   This is very early for killing frosts for us!  Usually we have our first killing freeze towards the end of September.  We also picked many tubs and buckets of apples from a friend's tree this morning because the apples were starting to fall off the tree. 

     This will be a very busy week for us, not only because we will be working with honey, but I will also have to sort, wash and price all this produce for market on Thursday.  Harold will be out in the fields helping with the sugar beet harvest on Tuesday and Wednesday.   We picked a LOT of veggies today!  Just take a look:

We picked these onions a few days ago.  They need to dry in boxes.  There are sweet onions, red onions, white onions and yellow onions ready for market.  Thirteen boxes full!

 

Lots of green peppers and hot peppers and snacking style sweet peppers.  Also one of the tubs of apples we picked this morning.

We managed to find two more tubs of nice looking tomatoes for market.

Lots of apples!   The bucket of smaller apples are very sweet and will go into applesauce to can up.  Some of the larger apples will also become applesauce, and the rest will be for eating and for pies!

Here are several bunches of statice flowers that I dried.  They make wonderful winter bouquets and last for years, even retaining their color!  I have a little bit more statice out in the greenhouse that I need to collect and dry.  Soon I will be re-arranging the porch for fall and will decorate with pumpkins and statice bouquets and bittersweet wreaths.

I certainly will not lack for work this week!  Between honey bottling, market day, and canning applesauce that's enough!

Pulling The Honey Supers

 Yesterday we pulled off the honey supers from our hives.  This was not a good honey year, unfortunately.  We only have 10 supers of honey instead of the usual 15.  And some of these supers are not really full.  This was a very windy summer with high winds for days in a row, week after week.  It was difficult for the bees to get out and work the flowers.  And then we also got lots of rain which washed away nectar and pollen from the flowers.   One day we got 6 inches of rain in one storm!  It was also a poor year for the basswood blossoms, which is one of the main flowers that goes into our honey.  But - we will take what the Lord has given to us and be happy about it, and hope for a better year next year.   (Beekeepers are always hoping for a better year!)

We will begin extracting the honey today and all week long. 

Harold poses by one of the hives. 

Harold is spraying BeeQuick on a felt lined hive cover.  This is a strong almond smelling spray that drives the bees down into the bottom of the hive so that we can lift off the top honey supers without having to fight a lot of bees.  He will place the cover over the hive and wait about 5 minutes and most of the bees will have left the super, just a few stragglers.

We stack the supers on the back of our pickup and drive it back to the house.

The supers are stacked on the kitchen table ready to be extracted.

Kraut Making Day

 Yesterday morning Harold and I shredded up 25 lbs of cabbage for sauerkraut.   I usually make a little more than that, but this year's cabbages didn't do well in the garden and I had some kraut left from last year so I made a smaller batch this year.  

We use this antique kraut cutter that I bought at an antique store many years ago to shred up the cabbage.  The cabbage is put into the box, and the box slides back and forth over a container. 

The cabbage shredder can be adjusted to provide whatever size shreds you want.

The blades don't look sharp, but believe me they are! One year I accidentally got my thumb too close to the bottom of the box and the blades and sliced my thumb greatly.   There was a lot of screaming and crying that year! 

Here are a few of the cabbages I used.   The larger cabbages were about 10 or 11 lbs each.  I like to use a variety called Danish Ballhead cabbage for kraut making because it holds up well to fermentation and makes a crisp kraut.

Years ago I bought this great Red Wing pottery crock with handles.  I've used it for kraut ever since.   It is in perfect condition with no cracks.

For every 5 lbs of shredded cabbage I add 3 T of pickling salt.   The salt is mixed well with the cabbage and I let it sit until it gets juicy.

The salt is mixed into the cabbage by hand until well distributed throughout.

I then pack the salted cabbage into the crock, packing down well.

Then a large thick cheesecloth towel is put over the cabbage.

I put a large plate over the cheesecloth. The cabbage needs to be under brine throughout the fermentation process.

Finally a double thickness of kitchen bag filled with water is set over the whole thing.   This weighs down the cabbage to keep it in the brine.  I put the whole crock on a large tray in the basement for about 4 weeks.  After that, fermentation is usually complete, the kraut is done and tasty and I can up the kraut into pint jars.  

 

This year, canning lids are quite precious!  It seems that so many people had gardens this year and decided to try their hand at canning.  The Ball Corp. which makes most of the jars and lids couldn't keep up with the demand.  Fortunately I had "just enough" lids left that I bought earlier in the year to finish all my canning this year.   I have already canned peaches, pears, pickles, potatoes, tomatoes, spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, salsa, jellies and green beans.  Next will be applesauce and this kraut.  My pantry is getting well stocked for winter!

Future Chicken House

Harold has been sawing up black ash saw logs, practicing for when he will saw up boards for our living room floor.  In the meanwhile, he has sawed up quite a bit of lumber to build a chicken house.  This chicken house will be half for the chickens and half for storage for us.   Harold and the neighbors have been keeping an eye out for really good trees, black ash, that will make good saw logs.  He contacted a mill the other day that will take our boards and groove them out, saw them to specified lengths, and kiln dry them for hardwood flooring for the living room.   That will be a next year's project.  Meanwhile Harold is enjoying sawing up some quality lumber from trees on our own 100 acres.  His home-built sawmill works like a charm!

Harold prepares to plane off the outside bark on some lumber pieces.

Evening up boards on the band saw.

Harold prepares to even up several boards at once.

He ends up with a pile of bark pieces, which will be good for fire starting.

Harold inspects some of the wood he just evened up.  You can see a big pile of newly sawed lumber he did yesterday.  How nice that he can create his own quality lumber from our own trees!

Just look at this beautiful cabinet grade lumber!

A closer view of some very beautiful black ash lumber.

Harold sawed some larger pieces, too.  These are 2 x 8 x 15 ft. long

These thicker boards are just as lovely as the 1 x 6's pictured previously.

Black ash has a lovely grain.  Now imagine a whole living room floor with this wood, all finished and seal coated!  I can hardly wait!

A Peachy Keen Kitchen

The last several days I have been canning peaches.  I bought some peaches from a company I usually get for canning, Mrs. Smittcamp's.   I wanted to can up more, but went to another store and they didn't have the brand I usually get, but they had some from a company called Mountain View peaches.  These were huge, beautiful peaches!  Both companies sell Faye Elberta peaches, which are excellent for canning.   The prices were the same for both companies. 

     I love to can up peaches!  It's a simple and relaxing thing to do.   And the peaches taste SO good in the winter when the snow is deep and it's 30 below zero.   We usually just eat them plain as a dessert with our meals, but I often use the canned peaches as a topping for sponge cake or a coffee cake.  When cranberries are in season in the fall, I like to bake butternut squash slices with peaches and cranberries and some pecans or sliced almonds on top.  Yum!  My husband likes to take a pint jar of peaches with him during the sugar beet harvest.   When he is waiting in line at the beet piler, he says the peaches are so refreshing and sweet after a day in the dusty old Mack truck out in the fields.

     I usually can up about 30-40 quarts and about 6 to 10 pints.  This gives us plenty to stock the pantry with for those cold winter days. 

Here I am slicing up peaches into lemon water.

I ripen the peaches under linens.  They come fairly green in the box, and need a few days to ripen.  Keeping the peaches stem side down under linens ripens them nicely in 2 or 3 days.

After 2 days the peaches look perfect, and are not mushy or woody.

 

And here is some of the finished product:

Aren't these pretty?   They look much nicer than what you find in cans in the store.

It's true that canning is a lot of work, and I go through a lot of towels, water, lids, jars, time and ingredients.  But it is so worth it!   I know where my food comes from!  People tell me they can buy peaches "cheaper in the store".  Yes, a person probably could.  But many times the cans come from China or Thailand or the Philippines.  Who knows how they were processed?  I trust my kitchen more than some foreign factory!

     I have already canned up all the pickles I want for the season, and next is green beans.  By the end of October the pantry is full and well stocked with plenty of things to cook with for the winter.  I am also drying herbs right now:  basil, dill, parsley and oregano.

By the way, you may have noticed that the format on my blog is different.   I had no choice on this!  The blogger people decided to change everything and took away my previous layouts and formats.   They claim this is "improved".   I have found it harder to work with, and I am not happy with the choices I have.   Sometimes I wish people would just leave things alone.   I don't like change.  Sigh.....  So until I get better acquainted with how this new blog format works, there may be some errors.

Just look at the size of these peaches! I can hardly hold 4 of them in my hand.

Garlic Cleaning Day

In my last post 11 days ago I mentioned that I harvested garlic.  I hung the garlic in the basement for all this time to cure.  Garlic needs a curing time of 10-14 days and that makes it better for long term storage.  So today I spent the afternoon cleaning it up and preparing it for our market booth this Thursday.   It was a nice cool, low humidity day - only 69 for a high temp.  I took everything out on the porch and spent time listening to all the animal life around the yard.   Birds were singing, the trumpeter swans were honking, the bees were buzzing, the wind was whispering through the trees, and every now and then I would hear the splash of the beavers in the pond.  It was all very relaxing and a good break from worrying about covid and the craziness of the world!

I took everything out on our front porch to work with, as cleaning garlic can be a dirty job. 

I used scissors to cut off the dry stems to about an inch above the garlic head, and used a soft old toothbrush to scrub away dry soil.  Also trimmed the roots to 1/4 inch with scissors.   It took me most of the afternoon to clean over 100 heads of garlic, but it was very relaxing. 

This is what the garlic looks like before cleaning and trimming.

I ended up with a nice big box full of garlic to sell at market.  I usually package up several sizes in a bag to sell, so that a cook has options as to what size garlic to use. 

Fresh garlic has a very mild and mellow taste, unlike older boxed garlic you buy at the store.  Old garlic can have a very strong and pungent taste, sometimes almost rancid.   Fresh garlic is very smooth tasting and quite mild when cooked.    Many supermarkets sell garlic from China.   Please don't buy that!  Be sure to look at the country of origin.  Garlic is very easy to grow, so I am surprised that our country would even import garlic. 
     While sitting on the porch I enjoyed just looking at the scenery.  It is always so peaceful here on the farm.

A view of our pasture land and part of the lower garden and some of our woodland. 

A view of our lake and some of the wildflowers that support our bees, and more of our woodland area. 

I've been picking a quart of raspberries every day, and now there will be another fruit to pick!  Gooseberries!  They are very sweet to eat when they are dark red.

Lots of gooseberries ready to pick.  When the berries turn dark red, they are ready to pick and eat.  One has to be careful picking, though, as the bushes have sharp thorns.   You can see some of these thorns in the photo.   These gooseberries are almost an inch in diameter. 

I used some of the fresh garlic today while cooking our lunch.  We enjoyed baked chicken, a vegetable rice casserole, and some freshly picked yellow crookneck squash cooked with garlic and butter and Parmesan cheese.  For dessert we had peaches with fresh raspberries from the back yard.  Yum!

An Early July Day at Honey B Farm

After all the rain and high heat of the last couple weeks, today was pretty decent.  Harold and I were able to get out and catch up on yard and garden chores, as the humidity was fair and the temp was about 81.  We certainly had some weeding to do!!  Some of the weeds were 2 or 3 feet high!  Yes!  that high.  When the temps were in the 90's and the humidity extremely high there was no way we were going to do weeding.   The other day we actually mowed the weeds with the mulching mower in between the rows. 
     I took some photos of how things are as of today.  Our bees are working hard on sweet clover and trefoil and garden blossoms.  The yard is humming.  Things are growing nicely in the garden in spite of the weeds.   Within the next week we will be eating fresh new potatoes, zucchini, summer squash, peas, peppers, and cabbage.  I have been enjoying fresh raspberries for several days now.  I pick almost a quart a day.  It has taken me almost 8 years to get a good raspberry patch going.   This year the berries are extremely abundant.

Some raspberries I just picked this afternoon.  Raspberries are definitely my favorite fruit.

In a few days we will be eating fresh green beans!   Nothing better than fresh beans.

Today I harvested the garlic from the greenhouse.  I got a very nice harvest of various sizes of garlic heads.  After they dry for about 2 weeks we can sell some at our market booth.

Two full buckets of garlic, about 100 heads.

A variety of sizes in the garlic.  Some heads are really big, some quite small.  I prefer small to medium heads for cooking and making pickles.   Surface dirt is left on the tender heads right now, as taking off all the soil will damage the thin outer coating of the heads and they will not keep as well.  After the heads dry for about 10-14 days, the surface dirt comes off easily without damaging the thin skin of the garlic.   I then trim the roots to about 1/4 inch, and trim the stem to about an inch.

From the amount of weeds in the rows you can see how much weeding we had to do today!  On our hands and knees, pulling and pulling and pulling.....but the peppers and cabbages look good now.

Last week Harold worked on the potato patch, laying down straw to deter the potato bugs.   It looks great, eh?  We can eat tiny new potatoes now, but we will let them grow just a bit more.  Creamed new potatoes will soon be on the lunch menu! You can see our sweet corn is growing well behind the potatoes.

The pumpkin patch and winter squash is growing nicely.  I think we will have an abundant supply of pie pumpkins and squash.  This area of the newly expanded garden used to be a 'farm graveyard' of old tractors and equipment.  A lot of work this spring made it into a usable garden space!  We had to bust new sod and unearth pieces of metal and old machinery parts.

Harold made a rough looking scarecrow in an attempt to foil the deer.  He used one of his old shirts and an old pair of jeans.  From the side and back, it sort of looks like him!  I tease Harold about just "hanging around in the garden".  So far I think it has worked to foil the deer.

My farm cats have had a tough time finding places to keep cool.  The hot sun makes everything boiling.   In the afternoons they hide under tall weeds, coming out only to drink some cool water.

A couple of this year's kittens take refuge in some tall burdock plants.

Here are three more of this spring's kittens hiding in burdock leaves.  Not only does the burdock keep them cool in the hot sun, but helps them to escape the ever present deer flies and mosquitoes.

During the last couple week's hot spell, I spent some time in my basement craft room working on a new quilt.  I am making a bedspread size quilt for our bedroom in a pinwheel pattern.  I love to work with scraps, and my fabric stash is full of a variety of cottons.  Here are some of the squares I have made so far.  I think I need to make about 80 or 90 of these squares for a bedspread size!  This project should really make a good dent in my stash of fabric scraps!

Here are 4 squares I have completed.  The quilt will have light blue sashing and stripping, and I will tie the quilt with blue and white crochet thread.

This is the basic pattern I am working with.  I got the pattern off the internet.  The horizontal and vertical lines will be light blue.  I think this will look charming in our blue and white wallpapered bedroom. It's nice and cool in the basement in the summer, and warm down there in the winter.  So my spare moments are spent sewing.

So far we have escaped all the very bad weather and hail and tornadoes.   We are praying that the rest of the summer will bring us many more blessings.  And we look forward to our honey harvest at the end of August.