Ripening Peaches

I love to can peaches and always buy the 18 lb boxes of "canning peaches" at the store.  They come from California (Mrs Smittcamp's), and are always beautiful peaches.  But they come green in the box.   About 5 years ago I went online and asked how to successfully ripen peaches for canning.  A peach grower from CA told me about this method, which works great!  He said to put the peaches stem side down on a linen cloth, and set them about 1/2 inch apart, and then cover them with more linen cloths.  He also said not to laugh, but damask linen works best because it has the right "breath-ability" !  Since I am a collector of linens and vintage tablecloths, of course I had plenty of the right kind of linens!  If a person doesn't have linens, they are easy to find at thrift stores, garage sales, and antique malls.  Even at antique stores I usually find them in stacks of 6 or 8 or 12 for just a couple dollars a stack.
      I put the peaches in my basement (the peach grower suggested a cool and slightly humid area).  After about 3 days, they are perfectly ripe and ready for canning.   This method has not failed me for the past 5 years - that peach grower was right!  I bought 5 boxes of peaches today, and so Mom and I will be busy probably by Friday morning.  If any of you ever decide to can up some peaches, I strongly suggest this method to ripen them.

Five boxes of peaches set 1/2 in apart on linen. 

Peaches covered with damask napkins

Pea Pickin' and Pickle Packin'

Today I picked a 5 gallon bucket full of fresh peas and Mom spent a good part of the afternoon shelling them.   That's the entire crop for the year.  I'll put the peas in the freezer.  Some of the peas were a little 'gone by', but I use those for soups.  I won't waste what the Good Lord has given to us!  Also picked some small pickling cukes, and Mom packed them into several pints.   I just love those tiny little dills!

My Mom working on those 5 gallons of peas!

Mom does a great job packing tiny pickles in the jars. 

The finished product!  Polish garlic dills. 

Over the years I have tried many pickle recipes, but this one seems to be the easiest and best.  
                                        Home Canned Polish Dill Pickles
For each jar you will need a couple good sized stems of dill, and 2 or 3 pieces of peeled garlic (Cut large cloves of garlic in half).  Wash the cukes (pickles are best when picked that day), and soak them in cold water for an hour or so.   Pack into jars, tightly, with the dill and garlic.   Make a brine solution of 8 c. water, 1 1/2 cups white vinegar, 1/4 cup pickling salt and heat until the salt is dissolved.  Cool and pour over the pickles in the jar until there is 1/2 inch of head space.   Put on the  lids and rings, and process in a boiling water bath for 15 min.   Let the pickles "age" for at least a month before you eat them.   They are best when you put the jar in the refrigerator overnight to get cold before you eat them.
Note:  Leftover brine is ok to put in a jar in the refrigerator to use the next day or so for another jar or two of pickles.

Trip to Wisconsin

Every year I go to Black River Falls Wisconsin, a halfway point between South Bend Indiana and my house, and meet my sister and Mom.   Then I take Mom home to Minnesota and she stays with me for about 8 or 9 weeks to help with garden produce and the canning season.   This year Harold came with me, and we had a really nice trip.  We always take the back roads in Wisconsin - those roads that have letters on them like highway D or highway P , etc.   Trempealeau County is especially lovely, but pretty much all of western WI is great.   Those little towns are the cutest ever, and that part of WI is hilly dairy farmland.    Here is a photo of my Mom, sister, Harold, and brother in law at the motel we stayed at.   A good looking bunch, eh?

Working in the heat

The past three days, in spite of the heat, Harold and I have been working hard to complete a couple projects.    Harold is feeling better now and has more energy, and so we can finally get some of those projects completed.  We put up paneling on our sun porch (we still have a wall to do yet), and we began building the porch railing on our big deck porch.   We only have 6 more to build, but here's what one of the fences looks like.   We still need to build a top rail, and put everything together.   We will let the wood weather for a while, then paint the porch (they say you need to do that with treated lumber).   Harold and I sweated big time in the 90 + heat and no air conditioning.   But everything will look nice when we get finished.

We used an air staple gun to put up the paneling.

 

 

 

 

 

One rail section, only 6 more to go!  Then put it all together.

Feeding Time

I finally got most of my cats together in one picture, but they wouldn't look at the camera!  Here's 15 of the farm cats.  Three adult cats are missing in this photo.  As you can see the kittens are getting really big now.  I still have not found Daisy Mae's kittens.  She's still nursing 4 of them, but whenever I try to follow her, she runs off someplace else.   Those kittens will be wilder than anything when I finally do find them.   With all these cats on our 100 acres, we certainly don't have any mice!

Feeding time at Honey B Farm

All Day in the Tomato Patch

After almost a month of heat and humidity, and little or no time for weed pulling, I finally got around to fixing up my poor tomato plants.   It has been SO hot and I didn't really want to spend hours out there in the heat.   But weeds always grow perfectly no matter what the conditions.  Today it cooled down into the 70's, and so I spent at least 8 hours in the tomato patch pulling weeds, trimming tomatoes, staking them, cultivating, tying up loose branches, and finally fertilizing and watering.  I started around 8:30 in the morning, and quit at 6:30 p.m.!  Taking an hour and a half for lunch and a couple 15 minute breaks, I figure it was at least 8 hours.  Here's the before and after pictures.   I still have to mow the weeds on the other side of the garden, but that's for another day.  There are lots of tomatoes growing on the plants, and the plants are all about 3 feet high or more.   I have 35 tomato plants, and I always plant open-pollinated tomatoes (non hybrid) called Rutgers Select.

The Before photo - what a mess!

The After photo - All neat and tidy!

The Borup MN 125th Celebration

Today I was asked to play music at the Borup MN 125th celebration.   Borup is a tiny town of only 110 people, but today it was busy and booming!  It was a nice day - but hot, hot, hot - and the town had a great crowd for their event.   There was a parade, a car show, lots of vendors (I bought a cute headband to wear today!), plenty for kids to do, and a great community supper at the fire hall.   Fortunately I played in an air conditioned hall, so that was a blessing on a hot day like today!  Harold and I had a good time, and I got to earn a little spending cash.  While I was playing, a delightful little boy about 5 yrs old danced the whole time.   He talked up a storm and was quite energetic and entertaining as he did "break dancing" to polkas and two steps, and schottisches!  Here's a photo tour of today's activity:

Tiny downtown Borup and a car show

A fun wind tunnel for the kids to play in.

Plenty of vendors and things to buy. 

The little 5 yr old "break dancer". 

The Polish accordionist!

A well packed hall, enjoying the dinner and music.

Farm Market Day

Every Thursday Harold and I set up a couple tables at the Mahnomen Farmer's Market to sell honey and whatever I can find in the garden, plus a few loaves of homemade bread - usually 7-grain honey bread.  Today we had heads of romaine lettuce, fresh cilantro, fresh dill, cabbages, bread and honey.   Very soon we will have green beans and summer squash, plus herbs and snow peas.  We usually do pretty well at the market.   Today we sold a lot of honey.   Our bees better get going, as we only have 2 more cases of honey left to sell!  There are 5 of us vendors this year and we all have our own specialties.  It's hard work to pick and present produce and I'm sure we work 10 times more than we should.   But we are glad to offer folks organic produce and good honey and baked goods with no preservatives.  It's a good social time, too.

Today's set up at the market

Auction Day

Today Harold and I decided to go to an auction!  It wasn't very far away, only a little more than 5 miles down the road, at a cute little place on the lake.   It was a very HOT day, though, and everyone there was drenched with sweat and things went fairly cheap as far as auctions go.   The first thing I bought was one of those interesting little "dollar boxes", where the auction company puts a whole bunch of stuff in a box and you just buy what's in there.   I wanted the brand new 4-sided kitchen grater that I could see was in the box, and some of the Tupperware.  Nobody else bid against me, so I got it for a dollar.   There were some various mugs in there also, and my neighbor wanted one of them so I gave it to her.  Then I bid on a 3-tiered little table for my library.   I wanted something for next to my reading chair.   Had to pay 10 bucks for it, but it's nice and says 'Ethan Allan' on the bottom.

Then I bid on a nice wall shelf with a door, in Dutch blue.   I will put this on my sunporch and fill it with doo-dads (which I love to collect!).  We are in the process of re-doing the sun porch in red, white and blue.   This week we hope to get paneling for in there, and I have made some new curtains for the 6 windows.   This unit will go on the large back wall.

My neighbor bought 4 dollar boxes of linens and she didn't want some of them (mostly tablecloths) and was going to throw them away.   Of course I said no, I'll take them.   Several nice colorful tablecloths in there, plus a large vinyl one we can use at our table at the Farmer's Market because it has fruits and veggies on it.  Harold bought 4 boxes of canning jars and a box with electric fence wire and other kinds of wire in it.   All in all, it was an interesting auction and a good social time as we saw plenty of folks we knew.  I originally wanted to go to the auction because I'm looking for a small floor cabinet for our bathroom.   Still haven't found that.............

Time for some "Cute"

Here's a few photos of some of our farm cats and a couple of the kittens.  We have about 9 or 10 adult cats here on the farm and 7 kittens that I know of (Daisy Mae hid 4 of her kittens somewhere).  There might be more cats, but they have moved elsewhere on the acreage and don't come to the house anymore.  It's so hard to photograph cats - they do NOT cooperate very well!

Feeding time with Barbette, Tippy Girl, Skunker, Catnip, and one of the new kittens LittleBig

Daisy Mae and Spitfire trying to cool off in the shade

One of our formerly wild cats now tame, called FluffyDuff

Hey Granpaw........What's for Supper?

Tonight's supper will be Chef's Salad straight from the garden!  Can't get any fresher than these salad greens just picked from the garden.   Add some sliced hard boiled eggs from our hens, fresh radishes, some homemade oatmeal honey bread, toasted, and slathered with homemade jelly, and add some home canned pears for dessert - now that's some real good down home eating!  Later tonight, on the porch, we will enjoy a bowl of ice cream with some of our chokecherry syrup poured over!  Yum!  Yum! (Kind of sounds like that old Hee Haw show, eh?)

As Of July 1st............

Things are looking great here at Honey B Farm!  The bees are really working now and we're in a good honey flow.  When beekeepers (better known as "beeks") talk about a honey flow, they mean there are enough natural plants out there to feed the bees -  so much so that the bees have no problems putting away honey in the hive.   Right now they are working the birdsfoot trefoil, wild mustard, prairie roses, purple vetch, white clover, red clover, sweet clover and alfalfa.  We produce what we call a 'wildflower honey' here on the farm and there are probably over 20 different plants and blossoms that go into the honey throughout the season.  Before we put the honey supers on the hives, the bees store honey made from dandelions, chokecherry blossoms, apple blossoms, cherry blossoms, and other wild fruits for their own honey.  Throughout the summer the bees also work garden blossoms, like green beans, summer squash, tomatoes and herbs.  Very soon the bees will be working the basswood tree blossoms and that makes for a great tasting honey.  Somehow those bees seem to know just the right amount to mix, and they bring the honey to just the right density and moisture before they cap it.   How amazing those bees are!    How marvelous is the Lord to figure all this out!  We have 10 hives now.  That swarm I wrote about a few posts ago is doing well.   We took that swarm and two others we caught over to Joe Miller's farm east of Waubun.  This way they won't come back here and they will feel that they have truly swarmed.

One of our bees on birdsfoot trefoil (see upper center)

Bee on Wild Mustard (see center)

Purple vetch - another favorite bee food

Harold has been working in the garden and yard today.   He hilled up the potatoes, and cut the tall prairie grasses at the bottom of the yard with the tractor/mower.

Taking a break from hilling potatoes.  Soon we will have creamed new potatoes for supper!

Getting that tall prairie grass mowed.

I took a walk on the east side of our land today.  Yes, I braved the black flies and ticks, only got 2 deer ticks on me.  Hardly anyone drives down the unmaintained part of the road (actually it's not really a road, but has always been known as a "cartway".)  I took a photo of our own personal lake, which we call Lake Harold (not for swimming, though, as it has leeches and snapping turtles in it).  You can't see them in the photo, but Ma and Pa Canada Goose have 6 goslings on there.  The other morning they were trotting around the goslings in the pasture and making a big racket.     And check out my pretty petunias now!  They don't look so scrubby anymore.  There's always something to do or maintain here - we never lack for work.   For us work = fun.  Or is it Fun = work? 

Lake Harold - our big goose and duck and loon pond

The unmaintained part of our land

East side of the horse pasture

Garden looks better every day!

Just look at these gorgeous petunias I started from seed!