Merry Christmas!

The Big Canning Post

The goal of our huge garden this year, was to put away as much food for the year as we could. Because I had lots of extra time this year, I canned and canned and canned! When our friend Jesse visited about a year ago, he reinforced our hall closet so that it could support all of our canned goods.


A honey collection, pickled jalapenos and salsa.


Lots of jam, roasted red peppers, apricots, pickled beets, tomatillo salsa, tomatoes


Pickles, salsa, dilly beans, green beans



Jam, jam and more jam


I'm not sure how good it is to have these jars stacked three high...but I'm not too worried about it. The salsa, sauerkraut and peaches are in another area because we ran out of room. I think we need a root cellar.
So I was actually disciplined enough to tally up everything I canned this year. Over 300 jars! We have 4 more gallons of sauerkraut to can, but other than that we're all caught up for the year. We've already been eating from our supply and it is so nice.


We grew the tomatoes, tomatillos, some of the cabbage, beets, beans, peppers and cucumbers.

Canning Sauerkraut

Our sauerkraut was finally ready - 8 weeks after we started it. Aaron declared it was sour enough and yesterday I canned it up.
We did two batches, one of red and one of white. The red batch was one week ahead of the other, so it's still going. I read yesterday that sauerkraut is supposed to be fermented around 65 degrees, it's way colder than that in our mud room, so we may move it inside if it's not ready in a few days.


Kathy's bag o' water method worked great to keep mold at bay. I read recipes that talked about scraping the mold off daily. Ick. So glad we didn't have to question whether it was safe to eat or not. There was about 5 gallons of red.



Ready to heat up.


This was pretty messy business, so I'm glad I did all of it in one day and only had to clean the kitchen once. I heated up about 4 quarts (all I can can at one time) in a stock pot before putting it in hot jars, then processed for 20 minutes. I have never been a fan of sauerkraut, but let me tell you I was eating entire bowls of this. It was delicious fresh, and full of lactobacillus.


Because I did just over half of what we have and got 18 quarts, I put it mostly into mayonnaise jars. We will be sharing much of this, and as you fellow canners know, giving away all that hard work AND not getting your jar back is a real bummer. So I put it in jars I don't care about. I know it won't taste as good as it does fresh, but I hope it's still delicious canned.

Halloween

I've joined a knitting club since we moved out here, and it is full of wonderful women of all ages. It's been so nice to meet them and to get back into knitting! I'll have to share the scarf I'm making, I'm behind in my blogging. Anyway, the Thursday before Halloween we were invited to a party by a fellow knitter. We had not made any plans for dressing up or doing anything, so we had very little time to come up with a costume idea. Friday afternoon, Aaron was in the shower and had inspiration hit him. He made a Care Bear costume about 8 years ago, from a pattern, by himself, with very limited sewing knowledge. I tell you, he can make anything if he puts his mind to it! He came up with the idea that we should make one for me as well. So we headed to Joann's, found the same pattern he had used and got everything to make Cheer Bear. We got it all cut out around 1:00 am, then called it a night.


We got up Saturday, worked on it a bit, met some friends for mushroom hunting and hiking, then came home to finish it up. Aaron did all of the machine sewing, I did the detail work and the hand sewing and we had it finished by Saturday night.


Here we are in all of our Care Bear glory! I sewed Care Bear hearts on our butts, but didn't get a picture unfortunately and they are packed away for next time now. I also added some pink hearts to the insides of my gloves and a tail.
We had a fun night and met some good people!

Custom Coop

Aaron's co-worker asked him if he could build her a chicken coop that looked like a barn. He said that he could and we set to work on making her one. We had a lot of fun building this, but I will say that we got in over our heads. We had forgotten that even though chicken coops are small, they are not particularly easy to build. You have to put a lot of thought into the design if you want it to be optimum for both the birds and the humans.
He framed the basic barn shape, while I got to painting.


Next we added the supports for the roof, added a floor and the nest box area, and framed out the people door. You can see in the background the side walls are completed - painted, windows cut out and hardware cloth in place (the backside is showing here).


Here Aaron is working on the ramp to the roost area. We used 2 x 4s because we are in a cold climate, using a wider roost space allows the chickens to keep their toes warm with their bellies, as opposed to something like a broom handle, where the toes are wrapped around the roost and exposed to cold. We secured one of the roosts, but designed the other so that it could be removed depending on how many birds there are. On a cold night you don't want excess roost space, the low bird on the totem pole won't have the others to help keep her warm. So the other 2x4 fits between two piece of wood sticking up on one end, and the other end has a hole that slides onto a large bolt and can be screwed down with a nut. This project got, um, a little rushed toward the end, so I didn't get good pictures of the inside unfortunately.


The roost area now has walls, and the chicken door opens into a ramp. The ramp is on a hinge and can be latched if you wanted to close the roost area for any reason.


To the right of the chicken door he made a large door that can be taken completely out for cleaning. He also put the inside roost ladder on a hinge so that it folds up out of the way for cleaning. Building in these details was so much easier now that we actually have chickens! The door ramp folds down onto a fixed platform, which has another hinged ramp attached to it. This ramp hinges to make space for a person to stand inside.


This side has the nest box access, the door folds open to three nest boxes, which I painted black to add darkness for the hens, they prefer a dark area to lay their eggs. We purposely made this coop short, so that her little ones could collect the eggs. One of the bigger challenges with this coop was trying to find small enough windows. We went to several places looking for used windows and couldn't find any, so Aaron framed these pieces of plexiglass and made his own. We weather stripped them and added a latch for windy days.


Here is Lexi checking out the new coop, she impressed me with all of her chicken knowledge and had fun feeding my chickens. This side shows the people door and the chicken door. It's not painted, because did I mention this project got a little rushed? Aaron added a tin roof as per the recipient's request, and it looked great.


Here it is all loaded up ready to go. It has a cupola for ventilation and looks also, but it wouldn't have fit out of our garage with it on. We had a great time making this together, I can't wait to build more - especially our dream coop someday with room for lots more chickens!

Gearing up for Winter

We had such a productive weekend - I LOVE that. Saturday was one of those days where you look at the clock thinking it's 4:00 and it's actually 1:00. I wish everyday was like that. We cleared out the garden, brought in all the stakes, pulled all the plants except for some broccoli (it's like its fifth harvest!), lettuce and chard. Put away the irrigation pipes and loaded everything up into the pickup.


Aaron then went to a roll session in our community pool, he's been getting back in the kayak and loving it. I'm pretty happy he's practicing all his rolls so if/when he goes in the river he's prepared to pop himself back up. I picked up all the dropped tomatoes and as many tomatillos as I could to prevent too many volunteers next year.


I made a batch of applesauce with the last of the apples from Harvest Festival. I did a couple loads of laundry. We made some homemade sriracha - I'll give it its own post in a week when it's done. I also used up the last of the apricots I bought in early summer, and made a batch of jam. We started winterizing the chicken coop, I painted panels that we will put up to block the wind. Speaking of wind, holy crap it was windy last night. There were actually branches down everywhere, which doesn't happen too often because we get frequent high winds. It also woke me up a few times even though I turned the fan up a notch.
Olive is going through a hard molt, literally within 3 days most of her feathers just fell out. Luckily it's been warmer, we had some freezing mornings and she would just stand on one leg hunkered down, shivering. I upped their protein so that their feathers will come in healthy and nice.


She looks so funny without a tail.


Last night we went to a homebrewer's club meeting. These guys are pretty serious, but it was a fun meeting. They made a HUGE batch of beer, a pale ale, then everyone hopped it differently. Each person was assigned a single hop, and then the beers were fermented the same temp/time. We did a blind taste test and wrote down what characteristics we got out of each hop flavor. It was good, but by #9 all of our taste buds were shot, and some of us (just me I think) were a little drunk. We're finally starting to meet some people and it's been nice to have a social life again!
Today we cleaned up the garage a bit, took some things to Goodwill and now Aaron is replacing the axle on his Suburu to extend its life past 300,000 miles.

Peppers!

When we first moved here we were shocked by how much more food cost than we were used to. So we had to cut out or watch for sales on some "luxury" items. We frequently buy dough from American Dream and make up a bunch of pizzas to eat and freeze for later. One of our favorite toppings is roasted red peppers. The trouble is, these can be very expensive, so I looked up if it were possible to can these. I found a recipe and triple checked it to make sure it really was okay to can with olive oil - this recipe was approved by some college's extension program (it was a few months ago, I can't remember which one, but it was legit). I'd make a quarter or a half batch, to avoid waste. You don't need much because the peppers pack in the jars really well.
So when I bought seeds in the spring I looked for a red, thick walled pepper with a short growing period. At 61 days Fat N' Sassy was the one. It's now called King Arthur for some reason. This pepper has been fantastic, a 100% germination rate, and each plant has anywhere from 4 to 10 beautiful peppers. When I've grown bells in the past, they are thin and kind of bitter. These are comparable to grocery store peppers. If it had been a normal hot summer, I think we would have had a lot more redness to them. Luckily they are good red and green. I also grew a variety called Mandarin, that is a beautiful orange pepper.


I roasted them under the broiler until they turned black. The blacker they get, the easier the skin comes off - trust me you want this.


Taking the skin off is a bit tedious.


I got in over my head this time - I shouldn't have done this many at one time :/
I did a canner load - mostly 1/2 pints because that is the right size for us. I still had 3/4 of a quart of peppers left and just put the marinade over them and put them in the fridge. We'll either eat them this week, or put them in the freezer. I would have done another canner load but I have used so many jars this year! I don't want to buy more, and they are becoming increasingly difficult to find now that the season is "over".


Here are some from an earlier batch:



We tried some on pizza a few weeks ago - I wanted to make sure they were worth the trouble. They are, they were good!
I'm getting ready to do a wrap up canning post, I canned way more than I thought this year!

Wedding Details: Candles

It seemed only fitting that we would have beeswax tea lights at our wedding, with the honeybee theme and all. I checked around and bees wax tea lights cost $1 - 2 PER CANDLE. That's insane I thought, I can make those! Those are famous last words around here, sometimes we save money and sometimes we would have been better off just buying them in the first place. I won't say this project didn't pay off...but it was not as easy as I thought it would be. Making candles is not hard at all. Making candles that burn properly is.
I bought all my supplies from Ruhl Bee Supply in Gladstone; the little metal tea light forms, metal tabs to keep the wick attached to the forms, 1 pound blocks of beeswax and wick. I did not use beeswax from our bees. That is a whole other process, for one we really don't get much wax from them and two it has to be melted down, filtered and poured into a form. It's something we just haven't tried yet. Our wax last year got moldy because we stored it dirty with bee bread left in it.


Anyway...I got home and tried out my candles with the recommended wick (the sales girl had never actually made candles), and it was a big failure. The wicks would burn down to a nub and then go out. After multiple attempts to make beeswax tea lights that burned well I finally called down to Glory Bee in Eugene and they connected me to a local candle maker they work with. He not only told me what size wick to use ("Square braid size 1 with a 15 mm tab, coated in white beeswax), he also just shipped me exactly what I needed from his personal stock and passed on his bulk rate savings to me. Awesome!
A test run:


Once I figured out that the wicks would work, it didn't take me any time at all to pour all the candles. I think I made around 100.


I think they looked great at the wedding, although I couldn't tell you how they burned...I was a little distracted. There weren't too many guests after dark anyway because it was a Sunday night, but they did get lit. I hope they were enjoyed by someone!

Photo by Honeysuckle Photography

Ruhl Bee Supply also has colored beeswax sheets in one of our wedding colors. I was originally going to cut these strips into bands to use on our cake instead of ribbon at the base of each layer, which I think would have been cool, but we opted for a white on white cake instead. But I did make rolled candles out of them to give as gifts to my super helpers. I dipped the wicks in natural colored beeswax and I like that they turned out yellow - our other color.


All ready to be boxed up



I found some pretty pearly tissue paper and cut up colored tissue paper in strips to add some color and hold it all together.

Fall around the Farm

We are gearing up for winter around here, and enjoying the beautiful sunny (not windy!!!) days we have been having.



I thought I got a good picture of Camilla, she was still and everything - but using my old camera with a small view finder, I didn't realize it was focusing on the grass, argh! Anyhow, she went through a molt a few months ago and grew all those primary feathers back. I saw her rediscovering her wings the other day by flying the height of the fence. Time will tell if she gets to keep those. I'd like to let her, but I don't want her to get out and get eaten.


I've been growing watermelons.


The bees are zipped up for the winter. We medicated for mites with thymol (from thyme plants). Added ventilation to the tops of the hives. Made sure they had enough honey to get through the winter.


We put mouse guards on the front to keep mice out.


We gave both hives upper entrances. This helps with ventilation and gives them a place to fly out of if it snows, or if the bottom gets clogged with dead bees.


Waiting for the rest of the peppers to ripen.


Serranos


So the other morning I woke up to a weird noise. "What is that?" "The chickens." I kind of fell back asleep. But they kept making this noise I had never heard. So I got up and looked out. Buffy and Mabel were in the coop up against the far side acting like something was after them. So I went out and as I opened the door a cooper's hawk (AKA Chicken Hawk) flew out of the tree in their run! Holy crap! It must have been out there a long time to have woken me up, I am sooo lucky no one was hurt or killed. Bert was in the nest boxes - the furthest, safest place (and my least favorite chicken). Olive and Camilla were outside under a blackberry bramble - Camilla barely covered up. I ushered everyone inside, Olive ran into the coop - she is normally wary of me. When I went to close the door, she ran out. Once she realized the door was closing, she was like - LET ME IN. Camilla took some convincing, she was clearly traumatized, but I got her in too and left them inside for most of the day. They just hung out in the corner, shell shocked.
Commence Operation: Erin is a crazy chicken lady.
So to keep hawks out you have to cover the run some how. Our run is 1500 square feet, so netting wasn't really an option, neither was something like chain link. But what you can do is string fishing line all over in a grid. So that is what I have been working on. It's the best I can do, and it can't hurt. I notice hawks a lot more in the winter, in fact I hadn't seen one all summer. So wish us luck with that one.


Sorry this post is getting much longer than I intended...
Bert is going through a pretty heavy molt. She just leaves trails of feathers everywhere. You can see her new, darker feathers coming in.




Buff Stuff is molting slowly, you can see her new bright neck feathers. They are also coming in under her wings.


Can you tell who sleeps here


I have been freaking out about how pretty our popcorn is! I don't know if it will actually pop or not - it's drying now, but it is so gorgeous!



I am trying to soak up these last lovely days of fall. It's perfect for working outside.