Britesea - Living the good life in rural Oregon

[calendula]

Calendula, make sure you do the dehydrating outside or your house will be ...past aromatic.

Thanks for the warning Marianne! I'm thinking I'll probably to my dehydrating in the greenhouse.

 

[lorihadams]

Around here raw goats milk goes for $6-7 per HALF gallon. Raw cows milk is $8 per gallon. Just check around and see if you can find any somewhere else and compare.

 

[Britesea]

I harvested my first broccoli and cauliflower today, plus I got enough peas to give us each a serving. The aphids are still chomping, and no predators in sight, so I mixed up some lemon peel spray (1 pint boiling water and the peel of one lemon, let steep for 24 hours, then strain and spray-- supposedly also deters the ants that milk the aphids). I got some green beans for a decent price here ($.99/lb) so I'm canning up some green beans. My recipe said to figure on 2 lbs per quart, but it seems like half that filled the quarts up very well. I canned 1 canner load of 7 wide mouth quarts, used some of the extra to make more dog food, and I may dehydrate the last of them.

Bad news, our friends can't get the financing for their new manufactured home, so they will have to continue living in the old one. Even though their credit is spotless, the bank wants the land to be worth at least 85% of the loan (not the buildings- just the bare land). This also means I won't be getting the storage building, as they will need it for storage again. *sigh*

I bought a half-gallon of goats milk just to try it out. It was delicious and nutty, and I made some farmer's cheese out of it and added the whey to the dog food I'm making. She's got a couple of young pygmy boer wethers, but she wants $50 for them and that seems kinda pricy for as small as they are. I would rather get a baby standard size wether in the spring and fatten it up over the summer myself.

I have a thermometer hanging in the crawl space under the house, testing the temperature. So far it's been reading a pretty constant 61 degrees. Not as cold as I'd hoped for potatoes and such, but it will be a good space for almost everything else. The tough part is going to be setting things up in there as it's only about 4 feet high, and the access is a small hole in the floor-- I'm trying to figure out how to get lumber down there for shelving.

Unfortunately, we have to put things like food storage and the root cellar on hold for a bit because our car needs new brakes, and property taxes will be due pretty soon; so we need to start putting some by for that. The more I see on the news, the more my sense of urgency grows.

 

[Britesea]

I have been trying to think of small meat animals for our 1/2 acre. Hubby doesn't like chickens, but he will do ducks. He will do 1 or 2 wethers, but that's only about 50-60 lbs of meat each; he doesn't want to be tied down to a dairy goat. I'm trying to talk him into a few heritage breed turkeys.

I'd love to do rabbits, but his family was raising rabbits in a BIG way when he was a teen. Then the Australians started exporting rabbit meat and the bottom dropped out of the market. Rather than sell them at a loss, the family ate all the rabbits. We are talking rabbit EVERY DAY for 4 YEARS. To this day he despises rabbit meat.

We can't really do much with larger stock because our tiny property has the well on one side, and the septic leach field on the other... We can supplement duck meat and chevon (goat meat) with trapped squirrel and quail and dove, crayfish and catfish... Looks like if I want pork or beef or milk I'm gonna have to buy or trade for it; but I don't want us to get bored with the same meat all the time, like his family did with the rabbit.

* * * * * * *

I got some free ladybugs from the community greenhouse. I hope they stick around long enough to eat the aphids and lay some eggs! I also was gifted with some cherry tomatoes, wax beans, zucchini and yellow squash, onions, and garlic scapes. Not enough to put up, but enough to round out a few meals.
I found a recipe for garlic scape pesto that I'm gonna try. The basil in the garden is ready to turn into pesto as well. The plantain is blooming, so it's also time to harvest that and make some first aid salve.

My green beans ended up in: 7 quarts canned, 3 quart jars dried, and the last of it added to the dog food I was making. Now I'm drying spinach and kale leaves to make flakes. I was going to use the blender to make it into powder but I can't find the glass jar!

I'm inundated with tarragon! Wednesday is our local farmer's market so maybe I can get some wine vinegar and make some tarragon vinegar to sell along with the crackers I was going to make.

 

[rathbone]

Tarragon huh? Interesting. I have a daughter named Tarragon. I also have a son named Amarante (Amaranth - a grain if you are not familiar with it). I have never actually tried tarragon. Maybe I will have to try it and see what it tastes like. I only know it is a savory herb.

 

[ohiofarmgirl]

can you tell him that meat chickens are really chicken-like?? they are kinda just like rollypolly meatball-like objects.

;-)

 

[Britesea]

Well, I've been kinda busy here lately. The aphids are trying to take over the brassicas, but they are leaving everything else in the garden alone. I need to get out there and spray again, but I've been so busy with canning and errands I haven't had the time to do much more than keep everything watered and pull the occasional weed.

I have strawberry jam in my pantry now... it's very stiff, I think I used a little too much pectin. The recipe said to use 1 1/2 boxes of pectin, but I think next time I will just use 1 box.

I made some rhubarb blueberry jam, but you can't really taste the blueberry because I forgot I was making a double batch and only used a single batch worth of blueberries

The salsa turned out wonderful not too hot, but very flavorful

I have turned the car into a secondary dehydrator. I have spinach, peppers, and blueberries drying in it. In the house I'm finishing up the batch of cheese I dehydrated, and I just started some plantain for medicinal teas. I also have some plantain in olive oil in the crockpot to make a topical salve.

Today I want to can up the tomatoes (50#s), kiwi jam, orange marmalade (they were 79/lb!), and fruit cocktail. I need to turn the goat milk into farmers cheese; I have some basil to make into pesto, and I noticed the elder tree down the road is loaded with ripe berries so we will be heading there with buckets in hand. We also gave our crawdad trap it's maiden voyage- need to go down to the river this evening and see if we caught anything. Thank goodness DH is on vacation this week-- I couldn't do this all alone!

The pears are still hard, so no pears in the fruit cocktail. It will just be peaches, grapes, cherries, and pineapple.

 

[rathbone]

I am living vicariously through your post. My favorite was the crawdad traps.

 

[hillfarm]

I love crawdad etoufe. I know I totally mispelled that. But Moma always cooked up our little guys when we went down to the pound and cuaght them with bacon on a string. Caught snapping turtles mostly tho. And they werent on the menu.

Post a pic of your trap if you could. i'd love to see it and maybe try and make one for me and the kids to take to the creek.

 

[Britesea]

Well, there wasn't anything in the trap when we checked. After doing some research, DH decided we didn't have the right bait. He used a can of cat food with holes punched in the top. Now he says we need a "bait box" and some pieces of raw fish.

I didn't finish everything I wanted to do... In fact, all I got done was getting the 60lbs of tomatoes peeled, seeded and partly boiled down. Then I had to go water the plants in the greenhouse because the owner wasn't feeling good today (she is recovering from cancer) and that took 2 hours. I also ran into town to buy one of those enameled water bath canners because they were on sale and I've been using a large aluminum stockpot for my water bath canning. I didn't want to cook the tomatoes in an aluminum pot, so I figured this was a good time to get the enameled pot. Unfortunately, the
ones that were on sale were all gone, with no new ones coming in, so I went to another store and bought the last one they had (who would have thought that all the canners in town would be snapped up?). By the time I got home, I was exhausted and didn't want to do anything more. Just managed to spray soap spray on the aphids and that's it for the day. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Hillfarm, I will try to take a pic of the trap when we check it tomorrow!

Oh, we found a wild raspberry plant when we explored the shore for a good spot to sink the trap. They were small, about the size of my pinky nail, but what flesh there was was wonderfully sweet!
The chokecherries are turning red too, as well as the rose hips. Eek! so much to do!