Some news

 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. 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/PlayfulPurpose

Canning venison

 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.

Canning meat is a long process, though. It needs to sit under pressure over an hour.  Canning forces a lot of the juices out of the meat so you have broth in the jar. Dump that into a pan with some thickener and you're on your way to a delicious pan of gravy. 

My first skein of yarn

 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.

It is lumpy and not very good but I did spin it entirely by hand. How much is there and what gauge is it? I have no idea which makes coming up with a plan for it tricky. I'm open to suggestions.

Would you like a process video? Links to the supplies I use? Let me know in the comments.

Volunteers

 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.

This pumpkin was one of the only things that grew in my herb garden. We have never grown pumpkins in that spot. We dumped a rotten pumpkin there two years ago. And Herb is the result.

I'm also amused by these tomatoes. I picked them from a plant that sprouted on the edge of my compost pile.

Do you have any volunteer plant stories?

Egg!

 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.

Black walnuts

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:

 I've read that you can pry open the dry nuts with a knife or a screwdriver but I haven't had much luck with that method. Generally, my dad cuts them with his scroll saw and uses the sliced shells for crafts. 

Do you have a trick for collecting these nuts? 

Birdhouse gourds

 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:

There are two piles because they grew on either side of a fence.

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.

Who can say no to free pears?

 We've been buying our apples from the same orchard my entire life, so we already knew the owner fairly well. More recently, we've started growing dill that he sells from his stand alongside his cucumbers. He knows us well now and a stop for apples usually includes a long conversation. 

We stopped yesterday for a quarter bushel of apples, just enough to eat fresh.  As we were leaving, Bob offered us a bushel of ripe pears. For free. Now, we had just been talking about how we didn't really need any pears this year but we'd be fools to turn away free food. Into the truck they went. 

Does it mean that we spent a couple of hours yesterday making pear sauce and the bulk of today canning, drying, and baking with pears? Sure. Do we regret it? Absolutely not.

Cucumber chips

 My Armenian cucumbers have been producing abundantly. I've frozen, pickled, made countless salads, and given them away. And still I have a bucket full of cucumbers. So today I dried some. 

 

just a few of the many

 Dried cucumber slices are crispy and have a surprising depth of flavor. Slice your cucumbers nice and thin (a mandolin slicer helps if you have one). 

 

Lay out the slices on your dehydrator trays and season lightly if desired. I sprinkled a little chili lime on these.

Close up the dehydrator and let it run, usually about 6 hours depending on the thickness of your slices and the humidity in your space. Store them in air tight containers. We always have an abundance of empty glass jars around, so my veggie chips are often kept in old peanut butter jars. 

Pizza sauce

 It's canning again at the homestead today. The garden is probably at peak right now so we are actively harvesting and processing everything we can get our hands on. Today the job was pizza sauce. We use a recipe that my Great Aunt Nellie passed to my mom when my parents were first married.

Start with tomatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers, onions, and garlic.

Chop and boil everything but the tomatoes until it's soft.

Cut the tomatoes into  manageable pieces.

Run the tomatoes and stewed vegetables through the food processor.

Dump it all into a pot with your spices and cook it down to about half. This takes a while. Like, all day basically.

Then it's a simple matter of jarring up the sauce and canning it. 

Pickled beets

 I'm a big fan of beets in nearly every form. But a special favorite is pickled beets. Our beets are ready for harvest this week, so it's the perfect time to do some pickling. 

 

the skinny ones, Cylindras, on top are the ones we'll use for pickles

 We use an old guide that my grandmother gave my mother when my parents were first married.

 

clearly, it's seen a little use

 

It's surprisingly easy to make pickled beets. First, boil your beets around 15 minutes, just long enough to loosen the skins.

Trim and slice the beets and fill your jars. 

 Then add your brine. Ours uses vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and allspice. Top with lids and close with rings. Then put them in your canner, first for 10 minutes under steam, then 15 under 5 pounds of pressure.

And that's it! 9 lovely jars of pickles for winter.

Everything changes

 Today marks a significant change in my homesteading journey. Because today is my first day without a job outside of the home. After some careful soul-searching I determined that the time was right to make a go of homesteading full time. I'll be taking on some freelance work as well, so I'll be sharing what I learn from that as well. 

Wish me luck!

Learning canning

 Growing up, we canned vegetables every summer. If you had asked me I'd have proclaimed with confidence that I knew how to can. And now I realize that I really, really don't. So today I had my first canning lesson. We picked a small batch of green beans, enough for 14 pints, and broke them up into bite sized pieces. Then we divided the beans into jars.

Add a little salt and enough hot water to cover the beans, then top with a warmed lid.

Tighten on rings and stack them carefully in the pressure canner with water in the bottom.

Close the canner and heat it until it starts steaming. Then you add the weight. Bring it to pressure (10 pounds for beans) and cook it at pressure for 20 minutes. Then let it cool until the pressure releases and remove the jars from the canner.

Honey harvesting

 Our bees have been hard at work, so much so that all of the frames in our hive were full. So this weekend was harvesting day. We pulled the honey from one super (a box of 10 frames) leaving 2 supers still on the hive. 

 

a few frames waiting for harvesting

First we prop a frame up on a board and uncap it. They make special knives for this but we just use a big kitchen knife.

 

capped

 

uncapped

As soon as you cut off that wax, the honey will start oozing out. Of course, waiting for gravity would take forever. There are wax extractors but they are pretty costly, so we use a clean putty knife.

Once the honey has been removed, we take the frames back out and leave them near the hive. The bees will quickly clean up any remnants of honey and wax.

One super fills our stock pot with wax and honey. It will need to be strained and bottled, the wax cleaned and refined.

And what do you do with the containers that have traces of honey left in them after this process? We could just wash them but it's far tastier to make honey popcorn first. A batch of hot buttered popcorn swished around a sticky container makes for the best version of kettlecorn you'll ever eat.

And so it begins

 Last year I grew kale for the first time. When the first leaves were big enough to pick I was equal parts thrilled and disappointed. Sure I was eating something I grew myself but it was a small handful. I couldn't imagine that we would be able to freeze any (which had been the plan). I didn't know how quickly kale grows. Or for how long. The rest of my summer was spent trying to keep ahead of the greens.

I planted kale again this year and it's starting to get big enough to pick.

Chicken moving day!

 It's hard to believe it but the chicks have outgrown their home in the lawn mower box. Today we moved them out to the coop. And as we moved them I realized that any one of them would be too big to fit in the box that we carried them home in.

 

Pliny the Elder

 

Chirp Old Bean

 

Ducky Mo Mo

 

Kiwi

 

Milli

 

Vanilli

 

At home in their new coop space

New beds

 Our regular garden spot is pretty well planted and I still had herbs to put in so we worked up a new bed. The bulk of it will get planted with flowers but I claimed the bottom section for herbs. If all goes according to plan we'll have mint, catnip, lemon balm, summer savory, and two kinds of basil.

First harvest

 Here it is, the first harvest from this year's garden:

One sad strawberry. It's weird shaped and undersized because the plants are new and it has been very dry. But it's a strawberry and it was delicious. Hopefully it's a sign of good things to come.
 

Fencing the compost

Last spring we started a compost pile. We've always had a dumping spot for food waste, usually in an unused field, but I wanted to be a little more intentional about it. Until now, it has been a literal pile. It works okay but tends to drift so I thought it was time to fence it in. You can buy all sorts of fancy bins and fence systems but this is the Haphazard Homestead. We're thrifty. And maybe don't put that much thought into things. 

So to delineate the edges of our compost I dug a trench around three sides of the pile (which turned up all sorts of lovely earthworms that I tossed under the rabbit pens so we can compost in place!). To make my fence, I cut the dried out stalks from a bunch of last year's cattails out of a section of swamp on our property. I stood them upright, maybe a hands-breadth apart, and packed dirt around them.

I'll keep you updated on how well that works at keeping the compost contained. 

New chicks!

 When I went to the local farm store to buy feed for my rabbits I found that pullets were on sale. So I bought 6 - 2 each of Buff Orpingtons, Black Australorps, and Jersey Giants. I'm in the process of naming them now. If you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments. 

In standard Haphazard Homestead fashion, they are currently housed in a cardboard box (I think this one held a lawn mower). There's a random dowel threaded through the side to hold up the work light that is serving as a heat lamp.