Church Car Show

Today our little country prairie church had a picnic and car show!  Many of our parish members are car enthusiasts and have nice vintage cars.  So our pastor decided it would be a good idea to line these all up today on a nice sunny day and let the owners show them off!  There were some real beauties displayed here today.   Also some parish members brought their restored trucks - pickups are a staple in the life of a country person - and nobody ever really gets rid of them.  One ten year old boy in our parish has his own truck already!  He loves cars and working with them.  At 10 yrs old he is already a pretty good mechanic.  Someone gave him a 1969 Datsun truck to fool around with and he is restoring it himself!  All in all it was a gorgeous sunny day, and everyone enjoyed stepping back in time to the era when cars were CARS!   I was especially happy to see a 1951 Studebaker in the line up of cars.  Studebakers were made in South Bend Indiana where I was born and raised, and lived there for 23 years.  My own Dad worked at Studebaker on the door assembly line.  I am posing next to a 1951 Studebaker that perhaps my own father put the door on!  Here are photos of the cars and trucks:

A general view of one end of the line of cars.

Another view of about the middle of the car line-up.

There were vintage cars from all decades.

Another view of the line-up.

This fellow is showing off a 1930 Ford.  It has been meticulously restored in every detail and has been the winner of many awards in car shows in the area.

This 1930 Ford had a Rumble seat!

I asked the fellow how a person actually got into the rumble seat.  He showed me the round metal stepping plates on the bumper and fender.  You can see them on the right hand side.  A person had to be either young or very agile to get into and out of those rumble seats!

The back view of the 1930 Ford.

A 1951 Studebaker Commander with the "bullet nose" front.

The interior of the Studebaker.

Here I am standing next to the 1951 Studebaker.  My own father worked on the door assembly line when this car was made.  It is very possible that I am holding the door he once put on.  I think it is amazing to think that 67 years after this car was made, I am standing next to something that my own father had a hand in making!  When this car was made I was only 3 years old.  My Dad probably never imagined that his daughter would be standing next to it, 67 years down the road, at a church car show in Minnesota!

Another 1930 Ford.  The owner of this car is no longer alive, but his family members brought the car to the show. 

The back view of another 1930 Ford.

Here is a 1948 Plymouth

The interior of the 1948 Plymouth.  The owner has purchased the necessary items to finish restoring the inside door panels, but it didn't arrive in time for this car show.   He has a little bit of restoration work yet.  But look at all the chrome on the dash and the radio!!  That radio almost looks like a juke box!

The owner of the 1948 Plymouth.  He is as old as his car, he says.   He bought this car in 1969 in New Mexico when he got out of the service.  It was a rusty thing, and a faded olive green color.   Roger has restored this car beautifully!

This is the 10 year old boy who is restoring this 1969 Datsun truck that somebody gave him to "tinker with".   At 10, he is quite the mechanic already.  He lives in the country near the church and actually drove this truck to church today!! (Yep, here in rural prairieland, driver's license and brakes are "optional"!)  He is working to put brakes on this truck.  Good thing there are only lonely gravel roads around here!  Cody is SO proud of his truck!  He is definitely a future "car show guy".

Cody and his friend Jameson dreaming of the days when they can drive for real.........i.e. legally!  Pretty much every country boy already starts driving farm vehicles when they can reach the pedals!

This 1977 GMC was restored by a 15 year old!  It was a total rust bucket when he got it.  Look at it now!

Not sure of the vintage on this one, but it is from the muscle car era.

I think this is a 1977 or 1979 Corvette.  It was a big attraction for the boys in the parish.

This 1977 Pontiac LeMans is owned by a girl in the parish.  She helped to restore it, with help from her Dad and brother.

A nice trip down Memory Lane don't you think?

Really Good Refrigerator Pickles

I want to share with you a recipe for "the best" refrigerator pickles you will ever make!  I got this recipe from my Mom several years ago, and she got it from a friend.  Good recipes like this one should definitely be passed around!  Even though canned (brined) dill pickles are good, these refrigerator pickles say 'summer' like nothing else.  Even my husband, who is not the greatest pickle lover, enjoys these pickles with a sandwich or a simple meal.   They will last for a few weeks in the refrigerator, and they are very crisp and fresh tasting!  So if you have some cucumbers that are about 4 or 5 inches long and not too thick around, cut them into spears and try this recipe.  You will also need dill and garlic.
     The brine makes enough for 2 or 3 quart jars, so that is enough pickles to share with a friend!

For the brine:
3/4 cup white vinegar
1/4 cup canning salt
2 quarts of water
     Heat the above until the salt is dissolved and set aside.

Also need:  about a dozen or two  cucumbers, small, well scrubbed and cut into spears
dill
garlic cloves


Place dill in bottom of a wide mouth canning jar.  Put in a garlic clove and the cucumber spears.  Then top with more dill.  Pour the brine over the pickles and let stand un-covered at room temperature overnight.  The next day cover with a lid and ring (you can use a used lid for this) and put in the refrigerator for 8 days.  After 8 days it is ready to eat!   Do not eat them before the 8 days is up!    Give them a chance to age the 8 days!  These will last for several weeks if stored in the refrigerator, but they will probably be gone before then!

A jar of refrigerator pickle spears ready to eat.   They are light tasting, crunchy, and just the right thing to go with a sandwich for a quick summer meal.

Tractor Story Update

Hey, guess what?  When the neighborhood guys looked into Harold's tractor they discovered the problem wasn't the clutch after all, but the torque amplifier.   They got the tractor running good and put the loader back on and we are in business again!  No spendy repairs needed!  At least for now anyway.   Someday Harold will have to deal with the torque amplifier, but it isn't needed for now.   When three savvy country boys put their heads together, they can fix anything..............

Some Pictures From Around the Farm

I took a few photos of how things look right now around here.  Things seem to be growing nicely, except for the grapes.  If you recall from a previous post, we were thrilled with this year's grape crop.  However, we got that dreaded fungus on our grapes again.  We have had very rainy weather, in fact way too much rain - and that is responsible for the fungus on the grapes.  

A cluster of grapes with the dreaded fungal disease.

We will still have some grapes, but we have lost a great many clusters due to fungus.  It doesn't help either that the deer have eaten a lot of the grapes also!

We may not have grapes this year, but we will certainly have apples!  Our tree is so loaded with apples the branches are just sagging with the weight.

Just look at how every branch is loaded with apples!  The back side of the tree is just as loaded with apples.   There are hundreds of apples to pick later next month!

The apples are about half the size they will eventually be.

My zinnia patch - so tall and pretty!

This year I also decided to grow statice flowers for dry arrangements for winter.  Next year I will grow plenty of these flowers, as they are so pretty in a container, and dry so well into bouquets for lasting arrangements.

A bunch of statice in an old enamel coffee pot on my porch.  I think they make beautiful dried flowers!

Things are growing nicely in the greenhouse, too.  The carrots on the left will be harvested for market tomorrow, as well as the parsley and romaine lettuce.

After lunch today, we gave the cats the corn cobs to chew on.  They just love it!  They like to eat whole corn, too, when the corn harvest is ready.

Several of the farm cats enjoying some corn.  They love to chew on the buttery bits of corn left on the ears.

Here are a couple of pictures of new farm kittens:

A kitten born in May thinks a cement block is just comfy!

A camera shy kitten hides under the porch.

Earlier this month when my son Kelly was visiting us, there was a big thunderstorm and a deluge of rain.  About 1:30 a.m. Kelly was outside enjoying some quiet country and fresh air after the storm, and heard a kitten crying and crying.  He called me outside to help him find where the kitten was.  So I got dressed and together (it just started raining again), we found the kitten - completely soaked, nearly drowned in a puddle, very cold and barely alive.  I wrapped him in a warm towel and tried to find its mama.  All our mama cats were running around frantically trying to find their kittens.  I put the kitten next to one mama, but she just sniffed him and walked away, so I knew that wasn't the mama.   Nobody seemed to claim him, so I just left him in the warm towel and put him in his cat house until morning.   Next day I expected to find him dead, but he was alive and well fed and dry.   Here he is today.  I call him Thunder, because he had quite a loud voice in the rainstorm!

Here is little Thunder, the kitten rescued from a pounding thunderstorm!

Finally, let me show you what I did to my favorite straw hat.  I have had this hat for about 10 years - it's almost a part of me.  But it was falling apart.  So I sewed some patches on it, and made it look like a real "hayseed hat"!  I even added a daisy for good measure!   Now my hat and me can enjoy a few more years together!

I just couldn't give up my straw hat!  When it started falling apart, I decided to fix it.  Now it's a real "country hat" don't you think??

Busy Country Morning

Things were pretty busy around here this morning!  The day started off nicely watching a bunch of trumpeter swans on Two Squaw Lake around 6:30 a.m.

Here are 9 of about a dozen trumpeter swans on the lake this morning.   They can be pretty noisy, but they are such beautiful birds. 

Then around 8 a.m. Harold had our neighbor Frank over to help him with his tractor.  Yesterday Harold was busy moving dirt and doing landscaping with the tractor/loader.  The clutch had been acting up on his tractor for quite a while now, but it finally went out.  Harold asked Frank to help him get the loader part off the tractor so he could take the tractor to the shop for repairs.   So Frank brought over his tractor/loader to help.

Harold attaches a chain to Frank's loader to steady the loader on our tractor, so Harold could take off the loader part.

While Frank holds the chain taut and steadies the loader on Harold's tractor, Harold un-bolts things.

Frank keeps the loader supported while Harold backs out of the loader on his tractor.

Harold's tractor is now free and clear of the loader attachment.

I asked Harold how come this loader thing had to be placed right in front of the beehives?  This will certainly be a challenge to mow around!

This is the area Harold will be working on!  He needs to replace the clutch plate, pressure plate, torque amplifier, and throw out bearing (all Greek to me, but the neighbor guys know all about this stuff!).  Harold needs to take off all the housing in the middle and some of the hydraulic lines.  Looks like a real challenge!  This is a project he does NOT need!  But he will have help from neighbors Frank and Don.  Harold estimates the repairs will be around $300 for parts.

Before Harold can continue any kind of work around here, he has to fix the tractor, as it is an important item here on the farm.   We use the tractor for so many things - tilling, wood hauling, dirt work, and moving heavy objects.
     Before the tractor broke, this is what Harold was doing.  We still have one side of our house to finish.  It has been a real challenge because that side of the house is steep, the ground is uneven, and there are several huge piles of dirt still left from the original excavation when we built the house.  Shortly after building the house, Harold was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer, and so any future projects were put on hold until he went into remission.  Harold doesn't work as quickly as he used to since his cancer, but we are making progress anyway on home improvement projects!

Harold got about half of the biggest dirt pile moved against the house before his tractor clutch went out.   When he gets the tractor fixed, we will continue moving and leveling the dirt so we can put scaffolding up to finish the siding, paint the house, and also build a retaining wall at the corner.   The tree in the middle of the photo grew up out of the dirt pile in the past 10 years.  It has to go.   This side of the house is one BIG project!!

Later in the morning, about 10:30 a.m., we went to the potato field to dig potatoes for market and for our own use. 

Some nice red potatoes hanging off one of the plants!

A variety of sizes - some big and some small.

Harold did all the digging, but I get to pose with the bucket of potatoes!  We dug up about 25 lbs of potatoes.  We still have maybe 50 lbs left for ourselves.

After all this work, we went home to a nice lunch of meatloaf, corn on the cob, baked beans, sliced tomatoes, and fresh cantalope.

Garlic and Cherries

Over the weekend Harold and I picked 5 ice cream pails full of cherries from a friend's farm.   They have many large cherry trees.  These are sour cherries for pies and cooking.  Cherries are one of my favorite fruits.  So I made 12 jars of my favorite  cherry ice cream topping, and 6 jars of jam.  Today I am using up some in a filling for a coffeecake, and the rest I will try freezing in bags this year.  The cherry season is very short, so you have to work with them immediately as they are quite fragile.   This is why a person rarely sees fresh sour cherries at the supermarket.   Check out these beauties!

Lovely cherries ready to cook with.  It's a lot of work to pit all the fruit, but a cherry pitter makes the work easier.   And even after all the work, it is SO worth it for all the wonderful things you can do with cherries!

Here are 2 of the 5 buckets we picked.

Besides working with cherries, it is time to harvest garlic.  I planted garlic in my greenhouse last October.  It was covered with a heavy layer of straw during the winter.  In April we un-covered the garlic area and soon the plants emerged.  Now that it is July, the garlic is ready to harvest!  I will dry it for a couple weeks, then clean up the bulbs and sell some at market, keep plenty for myself, and also keep some for replanting for next year's crop.   Garlic is so easy to grow that I wonder why more people don't try it.

I am holding a dozen heads of freshly harvested garlic grown in the greenhouse.  I have about 6 times this much to harvest yet.  The smell of the fresh garlic makes my kitchen smell like a real Polish kitchen!  When the heads dry a little, I will trim the roots and cut off the dry stems and store the heads in a cool dark place (like the pantry).

Bounty Everywhere!

So far this summer, everything seems to be growing well.  In fact we anticipate a bumper crop of fruit this year, and honey, too.  Our bees are working hard on wildflowers, and our apple tree is loaded with apples like never before.   The gardens and flowers are also looking better than ever.  We are so blessed!
     We have three apple trees (Prairie Magic, Zestar, and Cortland apples), but only the Prairie Magic tree is putting out apples this year.   But oh!  There are hundreds of apples!

Every branch is just loaded with apples.

Here's another area - look at all those apples!

A close up of Prairie Magic apples.  They are good for eating and for pies.   But they are not good winter keepers, so I preserve them by drying what we don't use, or eat in pies.   This year we will probably sell some at our farmer's market booth.  They are a large apple about 3 or 4 inches across and somewhat tart. 

And our grapes are really prolific this year!  If we don't get the fungus that we have sometimes had in the past, we should end up with about 2 bushel baskets of grapes.   When ripe, they turn a deep purple, almost black, and are somewhat like a Concord grape.  They are called Northern Valiant grapes.  We eat them as is, and also use them for jelly and for grape juice, which I can up.  There's nothing better than opening up a jar of home canned grape juice in the winter time and remembering the taste of summer!

Look how heavy the grape crop is!  They have a ways to go yet before they are harvested - usually mid to late August - but every section of the grape vines look like this. 

We also have gooseberry bushes.  They make wonderful pies and jelly.  Unfortunately the birds love gooseberries, too!   These bushes (4 of them) were given to me by a neighbor.  Since we were busy building our new home and didn't have a place for them yet, I temporarily planted them in a spot next to the trailer we were living in then.   And then, guess what??  I forgot about them for 11 years!!  Yep - I forgot that I had planted them.  The poor gooseberry bushes managed to survive on their own with no care or watering.  I dug them out of the tall weeds and brought them to the yard and they have graciously rewarded me for rescuing and replanting them!  They are doing well, too. 

Gooseberries.  When ready to eat they turn a nice rosy pink and get very sweet.

I don't have a photo of them, but I recently found a patch of wild raspberries on our land.  It is a very thick patch, too, with raspberry canes about 6 feet tall and loaded with berries.  If I can beat the bears to them I will have thousands of berries to pick for raspberry jam!

     Our bees are in a "honey flow" right now, which means they are bringing in nectar by the pounds.   The yard and fields are buzzing with them.  One of their favorite wildflowers is birdsfoot trefoil.  It is a yellow wildflower that grows everywhere here.  And they are working the flowers like crazy!

Here is a great photo of one of our bees with her head in a blossom of birdsfoot trefoil!  She will gather pollen on her hind legs and fly back fully loaded to the hive.

As you can see, birdsfoot trefoil grows everywhere.  This is the path to our pasture land.   This entire area is buzzing with the sound of hundreds of bees.

Another favorite of the bees is sweet clover.  We planted 2 acres of sweet clover and crimson clover and pollinator flower mix in our old horse pasture.  The sweet clover will take two years to go to seed and keep producing.   The clover we planted is up and growing, but will be better next year. 

Another favorite of our bees - sweet clover!  Clover honey is really good.

All the flowers I started from seed are doing so well too!  This year I decided to grow snapdragons from seed.  I am amazed at the lovely colors they are producing! 

Check out this gorgeous snapdragon flower!  Can you believe that all those colors are on ONE flower stem?

The hanging baskets of petunias are in full bloom now.  I started these from seed I saved from last year's plants.   It is so satisfying to know that I can make up my own baskets of hanging flowers without having to buy them from a garden shop!

With all this beauty and abundance surrounding us, we feel like we're living in our own special paradise.  The world may be a crazy place right now, but not here on Honey B Farm!

Harold's Sawmill

Off and on for about 4 years, Harold has been building a sawmill!  It's been a dream project for him for quite some time.    With few funds to work with, Harold gleaned parts and motors and supplies from various pieces of "farm junk" and got a Kohler motor off of an old riding lawn mower.  When funds were available he bought iron pieces, and the band saw blade.   Lots of planning and welding and conversation with the neighbor guys, and today was the trial run!  Harold says there is lots to do yet on this thing - he has to make a governor, a throttle, and some log chucks (no idea what that stuff is, it's all Greek to me) - and he has some other things to make and tweak on it.  But he wanted to see if it would actually run AND actually cut wood!
     We have a lifetime supply of wood to cut on our 100 acres, both dead trees and live.  Plenty of wood to saw up into lumber!  Today Harold brought in a big sawlog of ash wood to try out on the mill.

A piece of long dead ash tree.  Until he can get a better way of handling logs, the old tractor and a chain worked for today.

He lowered it close to the sawmill rails.

The log is in place and ready to secure on the rails.

Harold makes sure that everything is lined up right.  I was in a panic that the band blade would fling off and de-capitate us!  Harold told me not to worry. 

The very first cut, and the sawdust is flying!

A closer view.  Almost through the log's length and still going!

Finished!   A beautiful cut!  The sawmill works! 

A close view of the beautiful grain on the ash piece.

Look at how straight the cut is!  Not a dip or a bend!

A smiling and happy Harold proudly admires his first cut log with the sawmill that he built!!  Way to go, Harold!!

The band saw blade runs on tires that spin.

You can see how much work Harold put into this sawmill and all the welding.  Once he gets it all finished and running perfectly, we can make lumber!   Then we can build that chicken house, and make our own hardwood flooring.   I asked Harold how he plans to dry all the wood that he cuts.  He says dead wood is already dry, and green wood will take about two years to dry with spacers in between the lumber boards, covered.   Or, a person could take the lumber to a lumber yard to get kiln dried.  Anyway, he can now show the neighbor guys that his idea does work - one neighbor was quite skeptical.  When Harold sets his mind to something, he is pretty good at building things!