Spring!!!!

Spring has sprung! Things are growing in the garden. None of it is stuff I've planted yet this year. It's all come up from last year.

Elderberry 

 The garlic I actually planted in the planter

 The garlic that escaped getting dug up last year in the old spot.

 The lettuce that reseeded it self from last year.

Keith's favorite chives also survived the winter. 

Spearmint I think. It and the peppermint are running together. Not exactly sure which one is which yet.

 The walking onions. Nothing short of a nuclear blast right on top of them seems to kill them.

 Parsnips. Must have reseeded themselves from last year. I thought I dug all of them up??

  Rhubarb!! So totally excited. All three plants made it through the winter.

 Spinach totally suprised on this one as the entire plants wintered over in temps as low as -20 plus degrees.

 Swiss Chard plants also survived the winter. Not as suprised on this one as they are pretty cold hardy.

And finally I've been busy building raised garden beds from recycled lumber that we didn't use up when we replaced the front porch.  So here are my raised beds that I'm getting ready to plant other stuff in soon. I've got three of them this is just the two I already got settled in and partially filled.

I'm so looking forward to gardening season!

Gagga for Grapes

Sometime last week a big rig broke down with a load of grapes and plums. My boss brought several cases of grapes to work with him. Everybody got what they wanted and that still left a full box that needed to be taken care of. Since no one else wanted it, I brought it home.

This is the box after it was all empty. As you can see it's sitting on a large dog kennel converted to hold our fire wood. This box of grapes weighted between 20-30 lbs. Yea that's a LOT of grapes.

So I spend the weekend juicing up all those grapes and making grape jelly.  I made 27 half pints and 2 pints of jelly. My neighbor came over yesterday afternoon to see if Keith could help him with some wiring on his truck and I passed off a half pint of jelly right away. I'm going to take some back to the people at work, but that still leaves us with quite a bit of jelly.  I guess Keith better start eating more grilled cheese sandwiches since he ALWAYS has grape jelly on the grilled cheese.

Lame Duck Congress is ready to mess with your food

I have heard and had confirmed that Senate Bill S 510 the "Food Safety Modernization Act" is due to go for a cloture vote next week. Cloture can be filibustered, and Senator Coburn of Oklahoma has previously stated that he would do just that....But he will need help.

 In a nutshell, S510 is effectively NAIS for everything. It is a tremendous amount of additional enforcement (fines and penalties, license revocations, further license requirements, control over processes and harvest) are definite issues with the bill as it currently exists. However, not unlike the "Health Care" bill, they will have to pass this to see what it actually does.

 Here's why....In S 510, the FDA is instructed to follow all international agreements. One of the issues with international 'guidelines and standards' is "good agricultural practices". Well those are not necessarily good. Most GAP certifying bodies have checklists about 25 pages long for growers to follow. They all require traceability (ie. NAIS) they also require auditing, verifying and certifying the processes used to produce a consumable product for human or animal feed. Every step in GAP costs the grower of food money and a good deal of paperwork. What happens if you're better at growing food than filing forms? You will be penalized...

.ie more money. Sec 420 is exceptionally dangerous in my eyes. It subjects all farms that 'produce' milk to risk assessment and management...ie. insurance.

 The idea that exemptions will be helpful is rose colored glasses thinking. Exemptions can easily be taken away or modified without Congressional oversight through the regulatory process. Most farmers aren't watching the Federal Register like hawks.

 The FDA has plenty of authority to protect the anonymous food supply already. But they don't. Instead, they put small entities out of business through HACCP (also to be expanded in this bill) and heavier regulations that are not helpful to smaller economies of scale. The FDA inspects less than 1% of imported produce, has performed inspections on less than 25% of processing facilities that they are authorized to inspect (in a five year period) and they ALREADY have authority over live food animals on the farm. The USDA authority is over animal disease.

 Please, call your Senators and tell them to go with Coburn on stopping this bill from coming to the floor. Coburn has a list of objections and concerns with the bill listed on his website:

http://coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/rightnow?ContentRecord_id=8df5cb89-91a2-4ae3-b846-7487db0bd4f0

 Send that to your Senator's office, and tell them we don't need another drop of regulation from an agency who has told us we don't have the right to eat foods of our choice.

 BTW, I am sending this out there asap, and if you want back up on my statements, you will need to download the newest version of the bill from thomas or govtrack and read my articles on newswithviews.com. I'm in a hurry, so please forgive my failure to give you the massively easy button. Here's the switchboard number for the senate:
(202) 224-3121

 Just ask yourself when's the last time the Feds gave highly expansive authority to an agency and it turned out to be good for freedom and good for the economy?

Wood hauling

Well our wood hauling for the winter is now over. We've accumulated approximately 4 cords of wood. We will still have to cut down and split quite a bit, but we already have a good supply split and up in the barn.

Based on the way this winter is going, this 'stockpile' should last us a two full years.  We had to get a new chain saw this year because my old Sthil died.

I got a Husky. I'm still getting used to some of the Mechanical differences between the Sthil and the Husky, and we are still breaking in the Husky but it's not a bad saw.  When we go to gather wood, I operate the saw and cut down all the trees and Keith loads the truck. I usually help with the little logs after I'm done cutting things up.

 Here is our cutting and splitting area. This photo was taken before we hauled in another full chord yesterday so there's even more in there now.

 

This pile is a tree that was greener then the rest and so we split it down so that It can dry faster. We keep it separate so we can put it out in a different area to dry. It will be perfect for use next winter. 

And here is the split and stacked in the barn pile. 

Gardening and Canning updates.

The garden has been doing really well with all the rains. I've been busy harvesting and storing the vegetables left and right. At one point I had an entire sink full of swiss chard and beet greens that I combined and froze. 

I've also had a summer squash overload. I have yellow crook neck squash, light green zucchini and a dark green zucchini. I had so much that even after giving some away, I still had enough to make 5 pints of squash pickles.

I also harvested more than 60 heads of garlic so I'll be giving some away, pickling some and saving some to plant later this fall. 

 All this rain has really helped the garden and I'm hoping we get quite a few more harvests over the up coming weeks.

Garden updates

Well that's just the corn and tomatoes. Kind of looks like a little jungle there HUH? The garlic is hiding on the other side of the corn and it's pretty close to needing to be harvested.

Below is some of the swiss chard and the onions. those are the Egyption walking onions. Let me tell you even if you have a BLACK thumb, these things will grow and grow and grow and grow. Anyone want any? I cleared that onion bed out two years ago and gave a lot away but look at how full it is again.  I've also been harvesting the swiss chard regularly and have frozen quite a bit.

This is the squash row. There is the dark green zucchini, yellow squash and a light green variety of zucchini. I've been harvesting nearly daily off these. I also have a tiny little armenian cucumber still surviving at one end of the squash row. Hope to have some cucumbers soon also.

Pretty sunflowers that look like they might start blooming soon.

Here is a part of the harvest. The squash of course is going strong. We also have the broccoli and even some fresh asparagus spears. Can't believe we are getting a second chance this year for asparagus spears. 

And since it's been raining hard for a couple weeks now and especially ruining my weekend riding plans I've been canning.  A week ago I harvested some fresh spearmint and made some mint jelly. My sister tried it an her response was "It tastes like Gum" lol. I added the green food coloring because I like green.

And this weekend I had a lot of beets to put up. Keith had never had pickled beets until recently at my sisters house. Now suddenly he really likes them, so I made him some pickled beets. I sort of modified some different recipes and added in my walking onion bulbs and some dehydrated dill leaves all from the garden.

Canning

So what do you do when you find AWESOME deals on fresh fruit at the grocery store? I went out and bought 22 lbs of blueberries and 12 lbs of strawberries. The blueberries were the total shocker. I've never seen fresh blueberries that cheap any where here in this state. We don't grow blueberries commercially in this state. They are "imported" from other states. So for the most part blueberries are regularly pretty expensive. I was totally shocked when I walked into the grocery store to see them advertised for $1.00 a lb and in 2 lb packages. We rarely see more than a small pint of blueberries for between $3.00 to 4.00 so Lbs of blueberries so cheap is amazing. That's why I got 22 lbs because I know I'll not see that price again anytime soon.

The strawberries were another story. A refrigerated truck broke down on the interstate and they hauled it into the local mechanic, but they couldn't get it fixed fast enough or something so they sold the strawberries right out of the back of the truck. I only got a case straight off the truck. That equals out to 8 lbs. The local grocery store bought up all that was left after all the local residents got what they thought they wanted and the store was selling them for 75 cents a lb. So I bought 4 more lbs of strawberries.

 Anyway I've been busy since last night fixing up canned and frozen blueberry and strawberry items. 

Blueberry Freezer jam

Frozen Blueberries in snack packs for work and frozen blueberries and strawberries for smoothies.

Canned blueberries look really pretty

I also canned blueberry jam that set up nicely and what was supposed to be strawberry blueberry jam, but it didn't set up. It will make the most awesome syrup though. 

 Then I was also planning on doing some mint jelly with all my mint that's growing like weeds in the garden. But I forgot and used up all the liquid pectin on the other jams and now I don't have any more liquid pectin for the mint jelly. Off to town in the morning to get the liquid pectin and then I'll process up some mint jelly.

Farm and Ranch Related Discussion

If you haven't heard about any of the new food safety bills and their effects on small farmers and ranchers, you should check out this video.

Garden Science

Yesterday I pulled out my soil test kit for the garden and proceeded to test for pH and other nutrients. Living in the Southwest, we always know our soil is pretty alkaline, mine tested out over 8.0. I also tested for Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium. All three of those were really low. So I ran off to the Home Depot yesterday and gathered up some ingredients to add to the soil.

Bone meal is a great source of Phosphorus and  for people interested in organic growing, this is a great source of nutrients without the use of chemical fertilizers.

Blood meal is an organic source of Nitrogen. It should be applied carefully or else you can burn your plants. Both blood meal and bone meal are acceptable for use with Certified Organic Production by USDA standards.

 

Sulphur  is used to help decrease the alkalinity of soils.   Getting my soils closer to neutral and in some individual spots slightly acidic should help with the production of my tomatoes and Saskatoon blueberries.

 

And a few other things to throw in the garden.  I even found some already growing Rhubarb plants. I've had horrible luck previously with keeping the Rhubarb growing and I've tried from roots and from seeds. This time I hope they take.  

Some of my garden is already busy growing. I let some of the lettuce go to seed last year and the seeds are sprouting already. I also left the garlic bulbs out and have quite a bit of garlic growing again. The spearmint and peppermint are sprouting up again. The asparagus is starting to pop up. My spinach is sprouting and the walking onions are growing well.   My apple trees are budding up well, The Asian pear trees look like they are starting to flower and I'm still waiting on the peach, mulberry and cherry trees.

My one lone current bush is  already leafing out and the Elderberry bush is growing strong. I'm going to have to pick up a few more current and elderberry bushes this year. The Saskatoon Blueberry bushes are budding up, but they normally leave out later than most. 

So I'm off to work in the garden for a while then hopefully get in a ride on the Bug before it starts raining again.

A neat giveaway! and other news

Adventures in Self Reliance Blog has a neat give away for a fire starter. I love these kinds of things because I'm out in the nearby National Forest a lot on my rides. These fire starters are great to have in case you get stuck or a little off course and need to stay out over night. They are easier to carry then matches and you don't have to worry about a fire starter getting wet like the matches.

Adventures Blog is full of other great articles and information so drop by over there and check it out.

In other news, Topper's cut is doing well. I've ordered some special wraps for her and I'm getting a hoof boot to cover the whole deal. Still trying to keep the wound clean and dry so that it doesn't get infected. 

It appears that I've so far successfully been able to keep what ever critter away from the chicken pen. I haven't had another dead chicken since Saturday. 

I'm FINALLY able to see bare dirt!!!! We still have a lot of snow, but I see bare ground and I'm really happy about that. Unfortunately the weeks weather forecast includes another chance for snow this weekend. GRRR!!! I really can't wait for spring so I can start working in the garden. I still have almost a foot of snow in the garden, so I'm only still in the planning stages for the year.