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.