Hi friends
Things have been in a holding pattern here on the homestead as we wait out winter. I'm hoping to bring you some more projects soon. In the meantime, I do have a little exciting news. I just started and Etsy shop! I'd love it if you took a look around and helped me spread the word.
We don't eat much beef. My dad, mother, and brother all hunt so the only beef we've had in the past several years was gifted to us. Our freezer is stocked with venison steaks, roasts, and burger. It is so stocked, in fact, that we've started running out of room. So when my brother got a deer on opening morning, most of the meat got canned.
Canning meat is surprisingly easy. Take your stew meat and cut it into bite sized chunks. Fill your jars loosely to about an inch under the collar. Add about 1/2 teaspoon of salt to each jar. That's it. Add your lids and rings and pop those puppies in the canner.
I promised it way back in May. I told you a long story about getting rabbits and promised a post about making yarn. This is sort of that post.
I'm not going to go into the details about spinning yet. The fact is, I'm still learning and I'm not very good at it. I can't really speak confidently about spinning. But I finally had enough fiber spun to make this little skein of yarn.
Would you like a process video? Links to the supplies I use? Let me know in the comments.
Let's talk about volunteer plants.
When you have your garden in the same spot several years in the row you're likely to get volunteers, plants that have self-seeded where you did not plant them. Sometimes we treat them like weeds and pull them. This is especially true of vining plants. You don't want squash taking over your lettuce.
Sometimes it's beneficial. This year our kale and dill were hampered by frost and we lost some of the plants. But we lucked out and had volunteers elsewhere in the garden that added to the harvest.
But those aren't the volunteers that interest me the most.
This is Herb.
I'm also amused by these tomatoes. I picked them from a plant that sprouted on the edge of my compost pile.
This is just a quick note to say: the chickens are now laying! The little chicks that I bought this spring have reached the age where they now lay eggs. We celebrated with corn.
We have several black walnut trees on our property. A handful of them grow right along the road, making collecting the nuts much simpler. It was nice and sunny yesterday so we donned our rubber boots and work gloves and set to collecting. We like to remove the husks while they are still fresh. This makes harvesting the nutmeats once they are dry much easier.
Here's our haul:
Do you have a trick for collecting these nuts?
I decided to experiment in the garden this year and planted some birdhouse gourds. I'd hoped to harvest maybe a dozen of them. This is what we got:
Obviously, they won't all dry. Everything I've read says that some of them will rot before they can cure. But we got enough that I think we'll have some for crafting next year.
