Quick update

We're coming up on living here a year, and often think about what a lot we've got done. It's too much to catalog now, but some updates, so I don't forget when we got the first green beans, the way I've forgotten just when the first blueberries showed up.

I'm enjoying the greenhouse very much; though ceiling painting is no fun (heat rises!). The plants are thriving in the greenhouse, I'll be happen when painting is done and they can move into the final locations. I found a tiny little tree frog at eye level in the melon plant, which was a treat. Alas, spider mites on the kiwi.

Of the two roosters that showed up in place of the pullets we ordered, one leaked out of a fence, found by Sophie, and died a week later from the injuries. We gave the other to the Hess's (who gave us in return some very delicious blueberries). 12 cornish cross went to Scio for butchering, which went smoothly. We have six cornish left, which we'll butcher ourselves with the Hess's. The 5 turkeys have a ways to go yet. These guys are stuck in the barn stall until we get fencing.... which had to wait until the leftover construction dirt pile was moved... which just happened. So, progress, but unhappy poultry meanwhile. I bring them dandelions and sow thistles, since they've gone through the kale and collard bolts.

We had our first pickings of green beans this week, they have been delicious. I've only seen two cucumber beetles so far, but the second one got away so we're doommed :-). I check tomatoes frequently but nothing has ripened yet. The peppers look small but we do have some eating size jalapenos. Potatoes have started to die back, they potatoes look great. The cucumbers, squash, and melon plants look good. The corn has just barely started to tassle up. We made a second planting of corn, a bit late on July 20, but we will see. Onions are finally getting large. The garlic, which all sprouted in the ground in spring, has been depressing and I've tried to ignore it. Starting to feel the pressure to get ready for the fall/winter garden; need dirt. We haven't had rain for some weeks, the ground surface is pretty dry, the grass is still green. Keeping things watered has been easy (well, with the irrigiation in...). We haven't yet watered the orchard, though I exect to soon; all the black plastic over the grass must be helping a lot.

The new kittens, Greta and Sundance, are starting to adjust. Greta is much braver and will stick around when we are outside, but we rarely glimpse Sundance. Greta actually came up behind the barn yesterday where we were watching turkey TV, in spite of Sophie being with us. Greta followed Buddy and sat down in the dirt along with the other cats and dog. I think she was hungry. Buddy likes the kittens (Greta, anyway), but KitCat has not been himself since they arrived; he's stayed away for long periods and is grumpy when he's around. He hisses at the kittens, if you pick him up, or sometimes when just walking along. But sometimes he comes and sits on your lap, so we hope he'll eventually adjust. Sophie thinks Greta is a squirrel and behaves accordingly. The kittens are very, very cute (well, the hostile expression always on Sundance's face isn't that cute).

Moving gap

It's been a long time since I posted. We moved! 200 miles north, to the cool, moist Willamette valley. Moving a farm is a horrific task, though we sold off the stock and only took a few chickens (besides the dog and cats). But we did bring hayfeeders, rolls of fencing, water tanks, and a small greenhouse with us, we didn't exactly move light.

Starting over again in a new place is not easy; there was nothing here, we've had to put in a garden, fruit trees, and build a barn, and still have some fencing to do. Relying on store-bought food has been challenging. Eating your own food is a pipeline, where you start things at one point, tend them for a while, and eat them much later. But I didn't realize just how long the pipeline is. Some things you get pretty soon - we've had kale and eggs from an early point of living here, plus this place has oaks and acorns to experiment with. But it's been over eight months now, the carrots, parnips and potatoes we brought with us are long ago eaten, we just ran out of onions, and there isn't much to replace it. We're buying most of our food, and the freezer looks bare and empty.

The soil here is pretty good, so we've managed to put in pretty extensive beds and should have more to harvest starting maybe in a month or so. Chicks and Poults are growing fast now in the barn, so some meat's in the pipeline, but we won't be harvesting any lamb until next year the earliest. Unexpectedly we might have a couple of cherry-producing cherry trees (there are any number of fruitless flowering cherries, so sad).

This land can certainly be abundant, the grass is shoulder high and the weeds are lush. So some future point we've have food again. Then we'll have to wean ourselves off bananas and barbecued salmon :-)

People eat a lot: producing more and bigger

It's easy to grow some food, and growing your own makes a big impact on your diet, since you can grow the most delectable and interesting parts of your diet; summer tomatoes, basil, cilantro, green beans. Once you go beyond the glamous stars, and start producing the everyday and mundane, and filling in more of the background, every day, every month, then producing your own food means producing volume, storing, and much more cooking. Maybe I'm a gardener first, but I find producing the food is the fun part, while storing and cooking it is a lot of sorting dirty roots, peeling and chopping, standing over a hot canner of boiling water, and cleaning up the mess. And I don't even want to start on how unpleasant it is to "harvest" chickens.

Coming as I do from a normal backgroud, a fairly small family of light eaters, we'd cook meals that would produce leftovers but still quite modest quantities. I imagine familiies with 5 or more childen or teenage boys would have a very different perspective! One of my challenges has been to "think big". For example, my chili recipe made enough for two meals. But it's not that much more work to double it. Last time I ended up making 3 gallons of chili, which was perhaps a little over the top; 11 people barely ate half of it. But it freezes fine, and it's so nice to have some quarts of chili handy. It was a lot of peeling tomatoes, but with so much it's worth it to get the food processor out for the onions and peppers, and the kitchen only had to be cleaned up once.

The same is true of canning. Much of the work of canning is dealing with the hot water bath. I used to end up canning only a couple of quarts of sauce or quarters, a few pints of salsa. But it's much more efficient in kitchen work to can a full canner load (7-9 jars), or two loads. We got the larger 9-quart size canning kettle this year.

Getting more serious about producing food is the other part (the part that comes first, really). You need to have enough reliable if not exciting producers. I most enjoy growing interesting and exotic heirloom tomatoes, but the interesting colors, odd shapes and shy production just don't work as well for processing. It's been a road to learn to grow a bunch of dull but productive plants to get serious tomatoes, enough to make gallons of chili and gallons of salsa. Giving up growing a few of the intesting ones - but how many interesting tomatoes can you really eat? I'm more of a graze-on-cherry-toms-right-from-plant person, myself. The interesting tomatoes go into tomato juice which seems to even things out, I can even put a few green-when-ripe in there.


Lisa’s Vegetarian Chili

2 tablespoons oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 large red or green pepper, chopped
1 lb.Tofu, frozen, thawed, and crumbled
4 cloves garlic, mashed
15oz can tomato sauce
1 lb. Can whole or diced tomatoes
1 teaspoon salt
black pepper
1 tablespoon ground cumin
2 tablespoons chili powder, or more to taste
A little cayenne flakes, if desired
1 can corn
1 can black beans

Squeeze water out of thawed, crumbled tofu, and mix with part of the chili powder. Add a little liquid from the canned tomatoes and mix well, squeezing to let the spice color the tofu.

Fry onions and peppers in oil until soft and just starting to brown. Add tofu and garlic and cook a few minutes. Add other ingredients and cook for at least an hour, longer is better, until it looks like chili.

Serve over cornbread or rice and garnished with shredded cheese, chopped onions, and chopped jalapenos.

Notes:
- all quantities are general and I use fresh instead of canned when possible.
- Cook beans before adding, and peel and quarter tomatoes, but everything else can go in fresh.
- Using all fresh tomatoes increases cooking time.
- It's important to freeze and thaw the tofu before using, to get the right texture.
- I usually use a lot more chili powder but it depends on the quality of the chili powder you have.

Late in the non-lull of summer

Usually I have a lull in summer, between the time the garden is in and the tomatoes start to ripen. This year that didn't happen; I think knowing there's a lull it gets overcommitted before it starts.

It's mostly been animal activities that took up the slack. We had a batch of meat chickens, scheduled to be full size in the early august part of the summer lull. And they were. We're getting better at butchering, but it's still a lot of work and energy, never mind trying to cram them into the freezer. We were didn't feed them too much, so they ran out and had to wait for morning and evening feed; perhaps as a result, they grew large without any deaths, coming out in the 5.5+ pound range. There are still three left, along with the poor turkey.

We also acquired a ram from Eagle Point, three sheep from Phoenix, and a young buck from another place in Phoenix. Then one of the sheep and the ram turned up with health issues we had to deal with. Calla's been dropping off milk production, worryingly, but Lily did turn out to be pregnant and produced a kid a few days ago.

It was such a late wet spring and cool summer that the tomatoes are still not ripening; usually by this time we're up to our eyeballs... but we just get an occasional one. Very worrying. The peppers also look good but aren't ripe yet. It has been a stellar year for green beans, though; and the spring planted kale is nice looking, which is something I'm not used to in August. The basil that looked so bad in spring is looking fine now... the secret is to plant a lot, since only about a third of the plants survived. I've been better than most years about starting seeds in flats for fall crops; but it's been difficult to find time to plant the seedlings. And the cabbage worms really are hard on tiny little seedlings.

The yellow plums were late, but we got too busy (camping trip!) and missed most of them (the chickens liked them). There are more plums to come, and the apple trees are loaded. The peaches are just gone by, not as many as last year, but Jay and Lindsey enjoyed them a lot (I can't abide the fuzz, myself).

More on wheat

The winter wheat is harvested, and the spring wheat is nearly so. The differences between them are so great I am just fascinated - it's like that time some years ago when I realized that tomatoes were not boring red round bland mushy things but had flavors and colors and complexity. The differences between these two wheats are as big as between Brandywine and Green Grape! Well, maybe not, but that's the idea.

Since on closer look both wheats have awns, I've been calling the shorter many tillered one "East" and the taller, greener one "West". The East was ready first,
and threshed out (with great difficulty, a lot of straw to the amount of grain) to about 4 or so pounds, but the hulls are staying on the grains, so it's likely to go to the animals. The West wheat was/is MUCH easier to thresh; I expect yields will be similar, but we took a big clump for decorative purposes.

Side note: I think the spring wheat is much prettier for display than the West wheat. The spring wheat has a nice light tan color and is nice and fat, while West wheat has darker or blueish tones. The grain head pattern is similar for the spring wheat and the West wheat, with sticking-out awns instead of ones that lay flat; but besides color, the Spring has shorter stalks, and the heads are a fatter. Haven't counted the tillers.

Threshing hasn't become easier; the rubber trug on the porch, and pounding with a 2x4, sift out the straw, wind-winnow the grain, handpick the bits of stem. With the East wheat I did a lot of hand twisting and folding, but the West wheat's awns are too stiff for that, it hurts.

Back to awns; when I grew these wheats out the first time 2-3 years ago, I do remember one of them not having awns. So what happened? I can't believe they cross-pollinated, since each type has been very consistent within the patch. Perhaps a mislabeled jar? I must grow test plots of the originals too!

I've got another grain, presumably one I planted, growing in the circle beds, but I don't know what it is - maybe barley? It looks like something I planted, but I don't remember anything. It has truely naked seeds, not like the wheat that has an easily broken off covering. It could also be kamut, or even rye...

And the oats were harvested and threshed by rubbing in my hands, some work but no stabbing awns... came out pretty clean. It's a long way from dry, though.

On other notes, garlic is all harvested, cabbages are harvested, a new one for us, what fun! and the first tomatoes have ripened (polar baby, of course). Beet seed is ready for harvest, and there could be enough basil for pesto. I'm still fighting the squash bugs and cucumber beetles, but the green beans are already ahead of us. The chickens in the orchard are getting larger by the day, and the freezers are still full so we won't have anyplace to put them. Two more chicks hatched out, and unlike the first three these are very friendly and come running when they see us, which adds greatly to their cuteness factor. The dog had foxtail in her paw, one surgery at the vet, two weeks of swollen paw, another surgery by Lisa to remove the last foxtail, and she's finally better and can get the skunk-smell-removal shampoo that's been waiting for her.