Resurfacing

Apologies for the long radio silence.  And thanks to those of you who sent kind inquiries about my absence.  All is well at the homestead.  While spring is always a busy season that gets in the way of writing, that's not my excuse this time.  The difference now is that my husband is more or less retired, and thus home all the time.  This is almost entirely a good thing.  The only exception to that is my habit of writing when I have the house entirely to myself.  The writing "mood," as it were, comes to me most easily in solitude.  I find it very hard to reach that state with distractions around me.  So, if this blog is to continue, I'll need to figure out a routine or a method that will provide verisimilitude for being alone at home.  This will probably be a challenge, but I'll work at it.  If I manage to find time to write, it'll probably mean I find a way to catch up with many of your blogs as well.  I've missed keeping tabs on what many of you are up.  There's so much inspiration and so many cool ideas in the gardening/homesteading blogosphere!

In the meantime I should provide some thumbnail sketches of where we're at and what we've been doing.  First off, my husband's "retirement" is really the loss of a job.  Since we've known this was coming for quite a while, we could plan for it, which I know is an advantage many people don't get.  Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.  Our advance notice let us, just barely, pay off our mortgage entirely before his employment ended.  So we are now without an income, but also debt-free.  Mostly that's not scary at this point.  It feels pretty good, I have to tell you.  We've taken a few extra efforts here and there to shave expenses in an already pretty frugal existence. 

We've already hosted a number of WWOOF volunteers this year, and our first one brought with him an impressive amount of construction experience.  He helped us build a new mobile chicken coop to replace our clunky and deteriorating pen and coop system, which served honorably, if inelegantly, these past four years.  The new rig is an A-frame that provides a bit more area to the chickens and should require almost no cleaning, ever, since there's no floor. All the poop ends up directly on the lawn. The girls seem to have taken to it quite happily.  I think it's just about the most awesome chicken coop ever, if I say so myself.  I'll try to get a detailed post on this one up soon.  (Yes, I know my track record with "soon" is execrable.)

Other recent efforts have entailed a lot of digging and planting of rootstock.  The hedgerow project got moved way up the priority list by last year's Halloween snowstorm from hell.  The storm took out a major section of our fence in the backyard.  We're going with the strategy of leaving what remains of the old wooden fence where it is, and replacing what came down with livestock panels and the plants that will form the hedgerow.  Frankly, this looks ugly at the moment, and doesn't provide any of the privacy of the wooden fence.  But eventually, the livestock panels will be mostly hidden by the plants, which will give us privacy, and should look a lot better than the wooden fence.  Should we ever decide to use that space for dairy goats, the dual-element hedgerow will constitute a real barrier to the animals, while looking pretty and offering some browse.  So far our hedgerow plantings include rugosa roses, Siberian peashrub, cornelian cherry, a dwarf willow tree, and a golden elderberry.  It's likely that our black raspberry patch, which sort of backs into the property line, will become a hedgerow element too.  I have three tiny hazels and a ginseng plant that will be coddled for another year or two in containers before being added to the hedgerow.  We lucked out with the goat panels, finding them used for a small fraction of the price for new ones, which is considerable.  Right now a picture of the hedge project wouldn't really show much.  I'm hoping that by late summer or fall a second picture will provide an impressive contrast.  We'll see how it goes.

We also planted several new fruit trees, bushes and vines this month.  We're starting both table grapes and hardy kiwis on trellises, and experimenting with a new growing technique for several fruit trees.  The technique is called Backyard Orchard Culture.  The good folk at Root Simple blog wrote about it, and you can check out a summary at the website of the tree nursery which developed it.  Basically the idea is to cram normal fruit trees into places where they either won't have enough space to develop to their normal mature size, or where such full growth is undesirable.  Then you radically prune the tree as it grows to keep it very small.  Planting multiple fruit trees very close together is another part of BOC.  Doing so forces the trees to compete for resources, which helps keep them small.  While trees maintained in this manner will obviously never produce as much fruit as trees which realize their full growth, there are other advantages.  Having many small fruit trees means you can have a succession of harvests that are each just large enough to keep you in fresh fruit for a fortnight or so, without providing any pressure to preserve the bulk of an enormous harvest.   The six Asian pears and two extra apples we just planted in this way should (eventually) give us modest quantities of fresh fruit over a three-month span from mid-summer to early fall.  (We'd ordered two more apples which would have extended the season through mid-fall at least, but they were sold out.  We may add them next year.)  Since BOC trees are kept very small, maintenance and harvesting are very easy.  There's no need for ladders.  I expect that when I'm another twenty or thirty years older, the ability to do such work with both feet on the ground will be very appealing.

We've got a few broiler chickens going already this year.  My feeling is that last year we let our batch of six go far too long.  I wanted to use up the second bag of feed that I'd purchased for them, and that meant letting most of them live for ten weeks.  It gave us bigger birds, certainly.  But it also meant that by the end I had to move the birds three times per day just to keep them out of their own filth.  The Cornish cross breed that accounts for the vast majority of chicken meat in this country isn't genetically modified, but judging by how fast they grow, they may as well be.  At nine and ten weeks of age, even broilers that were kept on grass, not fed for 24 hours per day, and allowed plenty of space to move around, pretty much couldn't and didn't.  The speed at which these birds grow is an undeniable advantage for those who want to fly under the radar with backyard meat production.  You can finish the birds before anyone notices they're there.  But it's pretty much their only virtue.  This year I'll raise two batches of four birds each, and only until each batch finishes off an 80-pound bag of feed.  I expect that to mean slaughter at roughly seven weeks old.  Thus smaller birds, but more of them as compared with last year.

Finally, we've just started work on a tiny frog pond to be added to the center of our garden.  This is the only suitable spot we could find for it - one that's not on a footpath or directly under a large deciduous tree that will dump too many leaves into it in autumn.  Work sort of stalled with this after the hole was dug, as mild weather brought on many spring tasks very early.  But I want to get this done soonish, so that it can provide many benefits to our growing space this year.  I know for a certainty that adding a bit of water to the garden will bring a great deal of additional biodiversity, which can only be a good thing.  What I'm really hoping for though are some toads, which are supposed to be fantastic for slug control.  The lasagna mulching method I'm so fond of does tend to encourage slugs, though we've had such dry conditions the last couple years that it's sort of been a wash.  The plan is to stock the pond with duckweed for multiple uses, and probably a few goldfish for algae management.  If frogs or toads don't show up on their own, I may go looking for some tadpoles.  I know where to find some of these locally in the correct season, but I'm pretty sure that window has closed for the year. 

Hope spring is treating you all well.  Drop me a line and let me know what's new with you and your garden.

Back in the Loving Arms of the Grid

The freak Halloween storm that visited the northeastern US left us without power for most of the weekend and Monday.  On Saturday we watched as heavy flakes of snow fell, and kept falling all day.  This came just two days after the first light frost of the year, which came more than three weeks later than the historical average first frost date.  We hadn't even had a hard frost yet in this incredibly mild autumn season.  That meant that most of the trees were still fully garbed in their own leaves.  And that meant a large snowfall was a big problem.

On Saturday afternoon we went around outside trying to keep the worst of the snow off our fruit trees, young and old, and also off the plastic sheeting of the still unfinished hoop house.  This was accomplished with brooms and poles.  That went well; we had no damage to those trees or the little hoop house.  But the taller trees were much harder to protect, especially the very large shade trees close to the house.  All through the afternoon we could hear trees and tree limbs all around the neighborhood snapping and cracking; it was like a pan of popcorn popping, so frequent and regular were the sounds.  By noon we had lost power, and the phone went dead a couple hours later.  Outside we watched the occasional flash of electrical transformers exploding, waiting just a moment for the sound to reach us.  The audio-visual show continued well into the evening as the snow continued to fall.  After each nearby crack! I checked in anxiously with my husband to make sure he hadn't been hurt by a limb coming down.

I have to admit that even though we had advanced warning of this storm and its likely consequences, I prepared less well than I did for the hurricanes of August and September.  We skated through those storms with barely a blip.  Not so much this time.  I did make sure the dishes were done and that we had water on hand to flush toilets and for drinking.  I showered on Friday night and even filled our large thermos with hot water so we could wash our faces.  But I didn't gather our oil lamps, matches, and flashlights, and didn't fill the empty space in the chest freezer with bottles of water to move to our refrigerator.  Now we keep plenty of stored water on hand all the time anyway, and we did have everything we needed to weather such a storm and power loss.  The large chest cooler got cleaned on Sunday, loaded up with plenty of snow, and placed on the porch to accept the contents of our fridge and house freezer.  We had heat from the gas fireplace insert that I had carefully laid away batteries for in case of power loss; we had our gas stovetop range to cook on; and we were well supplied with tanks of propane to keep those going for quite a while.  All in all we were fine.  But I still felt as though I'd been caught flat-footed.

The funny thing is that just Saturday, after listening to Nicole Foss's description of how she prepared her family for life after peak oil, I had talked with my husband about getting some deep cycle marine batteries to carry us through a few days of power outage.  Or rather to support the truly essential functions of the house through a power outage.  We had talked about installing some PV panels a while back, and part of that project was to include a battery backup so that we would have power in the event the grid went down.  Given our budgetary constraints we decided that solar thermal was a higher priority, so the PV system could wait.  And when the grid went down this weekend, so did all the benefits of our solar thermal system.  It made sense to me on Saturday morning that we should ensure at least a few days' supply of electricity to at least keep our chest freezer working, to keep water moving through our radiant heat floors, out through the sump pumps in the basement, and also out of our taps.  Everything else we could do without, I thought.  And after 48 hours or so without electricity, I still think so.  Flashlights and oil lamps were no big deal.  It was an inconvenience not to have a working oven, because we were out of bread and couldn't make any more.  But everything else in the kitchen was manageable with no electricity and a limited supply of water and light.  Even if we never scrape up the money for a PV installation, the batteries themselves would provide a large benefit in the case of future power outages.

Although the fallen limbs caused no damage to the house, the garden or the hoop house, that's not to say we came through completely unscathed.  Far from it.  The entrance to our house was a scene of devastation.  The driveway was blocked by two large limbs, with another heavy limb resting too much weight on our split rail fence.  The fence in the backyard fared even worse.  One half of a large split mulberry came down across the corner of the fence, taking out four panels.  At least it spared our newly planted Ashmead's Kernel apple tree.  The trellising for all our black raspberries took the brunt of the fall and is almost certainly toast, but the canes themselves probably don't care about any damage suffered during this time of the year.  We needed to revamp those trellises anyway.  On the other hand, the poultry schooner caved in completely from the weight of the snow.  It was waiting in the garden for the tilling power of the chickens.  Somehow as we were knocking snow off other structures we just didn't pay attention to it sitting out in the open there.  Still, we think it's mostly salvageable, and should be good as new with a few new pieces of lumber.

The thing that struck real fear into my heart during this storm was the massive tulip poplar tree that stands where our driveway meets the road.  This tree towers over our house.  If it had lost even one major limb, chances were good that either the road would be blocked, or our house would be very seriously damaged.  Fortunately I recognized that there was really nothing I could do about it and managed mostly not to worry about it.  We've had the tree checked by an arborist who pronounced it in excellent condition, so we'd done due diligence.  More fortunately still, it took almost no damage at all.  It's rather stunning to compare the damage the magnolia, which stands right next to it, took.  We'll be cleaning up the debris from the storm for the next few weeks at least.

Since I'm currently in a glass-half-full state of mind, I see all the fallen trees as material for a hugelkultur mound or two (something I've mulled before, but we didn't have enough wood until now), and as more sunlight next year in our front yard and the garden too.  We have a WWOOF volunteer arriving this evening who will be able to help us deal with the additional work load.   And we had already planned to replace a good portion of the fence anyway, in pursuit of a slow-moving hedgerow project.  It may be that due to the storm damage, we get a little bit of money towards that effort from our homeowner's insurance.  And of course, the storm gave me a valuable lesson in living in this home without electricity.  No thought experiment or advance preparations were quite the same as actually dealing with no power. 

I hope all my readers in the path of this storm came through without any harm.  If you were affected by it, please let me know how it went for you in the comments.

Giveaway Winner

The randomly chosen winner of the giveaway for The Small-Scale Poultry Flock is Alexis, Baron von Harlot - an Aussie reader who blogs at Lexicon Harlot.  Congratulations, Alexis!  Please leave your contact information in the comment section, and I'll get the book out to you just as soon as ever I can.  Your comment will not be published.

Thanks so much to those of you who entered the giveaway and shared your fantastic frugality and homesteading tips.  I really enjoyed reading them and hearing what all of you are up to.  It's encouraging to hear about so much ingenuity and general thriftiness out there in the big world.  I hope you all have checked out the tips and tricks in that comment section.

Those of you who didn't win, I recommend you find some way to check the book out nonetheless, whether by buying it or asking your local library to acquire a copy for you to peruse.  In the event I don't hear from Alexis by Tuesday next week, I'll generate another number and try with another winner.

Giveaway: The Small-Scale Poultry Flock

As I mentioned in my book review of The Small-Scale Poultry Flock, I received two complimentary copies of this book.  So I'm hosting a giveaway to share the bounty with my readers.  This is a fantastic book for all homesteaders, urban chicken-keepers, and those who have yet to acquire their first small flocks.  If you haven't seen my review of it from last week, you may want to check that out.  By all means, do visit the author's website, The Modern Homestead.  It's full of thoughtful insights and useful information for anyone interested in moving towards self-sufficiency on a small acreage.

I mentioned that there was other news to do with Harvey Ussery.  I was thrilled to hear that he would once again be speaking at PASA's Farming for the Future Conference, which I attend each year in early February.  Hearing Harvey's presentation at this conference  four and a half years ago was what inspired me to start my own backyard flock.  But then, to my utter amazement I got an email from him a few weeks ago asking if I would like to co-present with him during his all day pre-conference homesteading track.  I went through a rapid series of thoughts and reactions, all centering on my paltry amount of experience as a homesteader compared to his two and a half decades in this vocation.  I was floored, honored, uncertain, hesitant, and thrilled.  In the end, I provided plenty of caveats, but ultimately said yes.  So!  I'm going to be presenting at next year's conference if only as a junior member to a seasoned and top-notch speaker.

I've encouraged my local-ish readers to attend this conference before, and I've written up summaries of things I've learned from this event in past years.  Now I can say, come introduce yourself to me at the conference.  Even if you've already read (right here on the blog) much of what I'll be talking about, you will learn a lot from Harvey Ussery, and I guarantee you'll come away loaded with enthusiasm and motivation.

Onwards to the giveaway.   Up for grabs is one copy of The Small-Scale Poultry Flock.  This is not exactly a freebie giveaway; I want something in exchange for your chance to win.  I'm asking for a comment with your best frugality, homemaking or small-scale homesteading tip.  I want to see some creative ideas here, people, not the obvious beginners-level ideas you find in the most simplistic magazine articles.  Tell me your secrets for saving energy, making a delicious meal on a dime, a great gardening trick, a labor-saving tip for any part of the homestead, a special recipe you use for canning, lacto-fermenting, or curing the foods you put up,  or anything else clever you've come up with that fits in a homemaking or homesteading category. 

Tedious stuff you should read anyway:  One entry per person.  Entries for this giveaway will be accepted until Wednesday, October 19th at 6pm, Eastern time.  You must either be signed in to some account that will easily and obviously lead me to a way to contact you, or else leave a means of contact in your entry comment.  Anonymous comments that do not include an email address will not be considered as entries for the giveaway. Winner will be chosen randomly from all valid entries, which must contain the aforementioned tip.  The winner will need to disclose (privately, to me only) full name and mailing address.  I'm opening the giveaway this time to readers from overseas, so get your comment-entries in.  I'll announce the winner by Friday, October 21st.  If I can't reach the winner in a couple of days, I'll select another and try again until it all works out.

Good luck!

Edit 10/19/2011: Comments are now closed.

Rainy Days and Stalled Plans

It seems we're getting all the rain we missed in June and July in August and September.  It's been overcast and rainy here for what seems like weeks.  We have hurricane Lee, way down in the Gulf of Mexico, to thank for this particular storm.  It strains credulity that a hurricane half a continent away could send us this much rain - six inches or so over the last few days.  Given the thorough soaking that Irene left us with not so very long ago, the standing water in the low spots, soggy turf in the high spots, and road closures all over aren't surprising.  The hens and broiler chickens don't seem too happy with the wet ground, though they have enough shelter to keep their feathers dry.  Apparently the Cuckoo Marans hens have the benefit of being bred for fairly wet conditions.  I do my best to situate all of them on what high ground we have, but it's tough when I need to move them every day.  We could use a let up in the rain now.

It's all so frustrating on the one hand - this should be the tail end of the massive summer harvest, and I'm holed up inside instead.  And there's our hoop house project which has been stalled by one thing after another this year.  We've made a start on it, laid out the footprint, built some raised beds, and gotten them mostly planted.  But if we don't actually build the structure around those beds very soon, it'll all be for naught.  The plants won't survive the winter unprotected.  And winter is coming.  On the other hand, I have to admit, it's refreshing to have a weather related excuse for indolence and moping.  There was certainly a dearth of those earlier in the summer.

To top it off, the rain check excuse coincides with a much more serious reason why the hoop house project is stalled: my husband broke his thumb a week ago.  He took a tumble on his bicycle while coming home from work on wet roads.  It could have been much worse; he wasn't hit by a car and he was wearing a helmet and biking gloves.  But he's very sore and his left hand is out of commission for at least the next few weeks.  There's still no firm timeline on when he'll have full use of his hand again.  At least he's right-handed. 

The rest of the hoop house construction really needs two people to complete.  It's far from ideal that we put the beds in before the hoops were in place, but the plants had to be planted at a certain time in order to mature before winter sets in.  That seems to be the way projects go around here - everything done at the last possible moment, and therefore done imperfectly.  We'll see what we can accomplish with three hands once the weather clears up, and then see if we can corral some friends to pitch in with what we can't do by ourselves.  This would be a nice time to have WWOOF volunteers beating down our doors, but I haven't had so much as a nibble in quite a few weeks.

I'll quit moping now, even though it's raining again.  And I'll try to have a more upbeat, more useful post out soon.

The Horse that Threw Me

Sometimes not having posted in a while becomes its own bar to restarting the writing process.  My unannounced retreat from blogging began when two unexpected deaths coincided.  My profoundly mentally and physically disabled cousin died the same day our cat Lucy was hit by a car.  Needless to say, it was a tough time for us and for my extended family.  The memorial service for my cousin took me out of state for a few days, and after that I just needed some downtime. 

Left to my own devices I probably would have hibernated, but prior commitments meant that I've been consistently busy hosting and working with WWOOF volunteers through most of this month.  Occupation is therapy of a sort, I realize, but it left little mental room for posting here.  There's plenty to write about however.  We've gotten some new critters and had the usual mix of successes and failures in the garden.  I'm doing my best to shake off the summer garden blahs that seem to hit me every July.  We're behind schedule with the biggest project of the year, the mini-hoop house.  Deadlines for other projects are on the horizon as well.  I blame it on the outrageous high temperatures we've had and my husband's heavy travel schedule for work.  I beat back my garden doldrums enough to start new seedlings for the yet to be built hoop house, so we're going to have to knuckle down and get it built within the next month.  Besides, the tomatoes are about to come in in earnest.  Tomato crops give no quarter to the unmotivated nor the unprepared.  So I'm going to have to get back on that horse.

While I've been neglecting my own blog, I've also been neglecting many of the blogs I usually read and profit from.  I'm playing catchup with many of your blogs as time allows.  I suspect next week I'll have time and space enough to do some catching up with my own posting.  Hope summer is going well for all of you!

Homesteading Book Giveaway Winners

It's time to announce the winners of the homesteading books giveaway, and I do so with just a smidgen of trepidation.  The delivery date for my books keeps getting pushed back, and I don't have the books in hand as I write this.  Tracking reveals that my package moved from Kentucky to three different cities in Pennsylvania, two of which could obviously have been the point where it was put on a delivery truck.  Then it went to New Jersey.  Now it's back in my neighborhood, but in the city where it first seemed to go amiss before.  There's no telling where it will go from there.  This is all to say, that I'd like to promise to get the books in the mail and sent to the winners right away, but I'm waiting to see what the routing gizmos decide to do with that package.

It was great to hear from so many small-scale homesteaders and aspiring homesteaders.  It struck me that an unusual number of you included blueberries among your productive plants.  I can certainly see the appeal.  We've got seven blueberry plants ourselves, and we hope to see our first harvest this year.

Anyway, without further ado, let's get to the winners  The random number generator decided that...

Copy #1 of The Urban Homestead goes to Melynda, who blogs at Mom's Sunday Cafe

Copy #2 of The Urban Homestead goes to Dea-Chan,who blogs at Craziness and More!

The Backyard Homestead goes to Cindy Naas Stapleton near Minneapolis.

I hope that all three books will lead to more food production in backyards.  Go forth, winners, and feed yourselves!  But first, please leave your full names and mailing addresses in the comments by Friday, March 18th.  Comments will be moderated for the time being, and your information will not be published.  If I don't hear from any particular winner by this Friday, I'll generate another random number and try again.

Confidential to the element near Mpls who entered the drawing, and all the rest of you who are still reading, I would have loved for your number to come up, just so my curiosity could have been satisfied.  Addressing a package to Polonium would have been pretty nifty.  Or perhaps your name is Niobe Copperfield? That your identity will remain an enduring mystery is not an unappealing thought.

PASA Conference Coming Up

Time to put in a plug for the conference of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture.  The Farming for the Future conference will meet on Friday and Saturday, February 4th and 5th, next year in State College, smack in the center of the state.  This is the 20th annual conference for PASA, and the fifth consecutive year I'll be attending.  You can register additionally for a wide selection of pre-conference mini-courses that allow you to explore a single subject in depth.  If you're in the vicinity of Pennsylvania and you eat, I would urge you to check out the conference schedule and consider attending.  I always learn a ton at the conference and come away with a stupendous dose of motivation - very timely for a gardener in early February.  It's wonderful to spend just a couple of days surrounded by people who are passionately committed to ethical, sustainable, healthy food for everyone.  Farming for the Future is a bargain as conferences go.  Register by December 31st for the early bird discount.  I'd love to see you there!

Catching My Breath

It's been one busy blur from late summer to Thanksgiving around here.  A lot has been going on that I haven't had time to write about; projects big and small, major working weekends with WWOOF volunteers, and hosting Thanksgiving for relatives coming in from out of state.  In mid-November it finally felt as though the garden was winding down, though what was ripe/mature and needed eating still pretty much set our diet right up to Thanksgiving.  I pushed myself a bit to keep up with the outdoor work well into fall, and have been rewarded with a mostly clear conscience and lack of niggling thoughts about things left undone.  So as I catch my breath, I'll catch up on some topics I wanted to post about.

I painted the front room, a combination living and dining room, late this summer.  It was an attempt to make the room a little less stark and more welcoming.  We close off that room each winter because it's one of the coldest in the house.  But even in summer time, when that coolness is welcome, we hadn't been using it much.  It was a fair bit of work to get the painting job done, but the room feels very different with the change from stark white to some color.  We also got some decent blinds.  That part of the house dates from the 1870s, when houses were built with a lot of windows, probably because they valued the light in un-electrified times.  The ugly curtains the house came with were so prominent in the room that it was hard to see much else.  The unobtrusive new blinds take the ugly down several notches, insulate a very significant part of the total area of the walls, and also block out a lot of the street noise.  Again, homes built in this area during that time period were built right along the road, so the street noise also kept us away from this room.  Soon we'll close it off again for the winter, but I feel good about having made that room a part of the house we like to spend time in.

This year I made a big effort to be a more responsible gardener and put the garden to bed in a somewhat decent fashion.  Not in a nightcap or anything, but I'm not sending it into winter covered in weeds.  So garden work continued right through this month, and I'm hoping that this will lead to a less stressful spring workload.  It looks pretty decent out there.  Not perfect, but better than it ever has before in November.

I borrowed Tamar and Kevin's ingenious mini-greenhouse idea for my in-ground rosemary plant.  It's made with two plastic window well covers, available at hardware stores.  Mine is a taller version of what Tamar and Kevin built, with a smaller, rectangular footprint compared to their lower and wider version with a circular footprint, 'cause rosemary plants need the headroom.  Here in zone 6 our winters are just a smidgen too cold for rosemary to overwinter.  This is an experiment to see whether a little windchill protection, and perhaps less completely frozen soil, will allow the rosemary to survive.  So far the rosemary has come through some pretty respectable frosts (26F/-3C) just fine.  If it doesn't survive this year in the garden, I'm trying again next year in a more sheltered position.  Rosemary is an herb I most want for cooking winter dishes and for baking breads.  In fact, I practically ignore it during summer.  So I'm determined to find a way to provide myself with a source during bread baking season.

We pressed our apples earlier this month, blessed with an unseasonably warm Sunday and the help of an awesome WWOOF volunteer crew.  Having so many pairs of hands made the job go very fast, and it was delightful to not be freezing our buns off during cider pressing.  The yield was, as usual, depressingly small given the apple tally.  I pitched in earlier this fall to help a small scale local orchardist press her apples into cider at a commercial press.  Her yield in cider was amazing compared to ours, and it's pretty obvious that the advantage comes from the combination of very fine grinding of the apples, and the sheer force of a hydraulic press.  We can't replicate the strength of the press, but with some DIY tinkering we could improve a great deal on the extremely coarse grind we get from a hand-cranked vintage apple grinder.  I've been meaning for a few years now to find the time to convert an in-sink garbage disposal unit to a superior apple grinder.  The finer the grind we produce from our apples, the higher our cider yields should be.  So reluctantly I'm going to add this project to my list of formal goals for next year.

Because our chest freezer was very nearly full before we even pressed our cider, I encouraged my husband to use a good portion of it for hard cider.  He's got four different batches going at the moment in the cellar.  We'll see how they turn out.  Gonna have to work on eating through that chest freezer this winter...

While the WWOOF volunteers were here we made further progress on the lawn eradication front, and set ourselves up well for digging big holes to transplant our hazelbert bushes in about 18 months.  We lasagna mulched a fairly large area in our side yard for the bushes.  This is a narrow and significantly shaded part of the property, situated close to the neighbor's house, and fully visible from the street.  None of the doors of the house open on to that side, so we don't go over there very often, except for my most hated task: mowing the grass.  The lawn eradication was satisfying, as it means that much less time spent on the dreaded chore.  Planting two hazels which will eventually grow into a substantial screen for that area will be equally satisfying.  The lasagna mulching will kill the sod there and, we hope, make the digging of deep holes much easier, while also improving the soil for the plants. So it's nice to look out the window and see the spot prepared so far in advance.

We just hosted Thanksgiving for my extended family, and several family members declared it the best Thanksgiving meal they'd ever had.  My family are mostly quite serious eaters, and none of us blow sunshine up each other's skirts.  Ever.  So this was a serious claim.  Not that I take credit for the success of the meal, because everyone contributed.  But I will say this - the pastured turkey we bought from my farming friend was grilled to absolute perfection by my husband, as the first snowfall of the season came down.  We've been grilling our Thanksgiving birds for quite a few years now.  It's a once a year endeavor, so it's not like he gets a lot of practice.  I had brined the bird for just 24 hours, then aired it out in the fridge for 36, pulled it out of the fridge two hours before cooking began, and iced the breast for the second of those hours.  The ice trick slows down the cooking of the breast so that it doesn't get dried out while the legs finish cooking.  Fresh rosemary sprigs and our apple wood chips were repeatedly laid on the mesquite coals while the bird cooked.  It's easy to overdo this flavoring technique and end up with a resinous, over-smoked bird.  But my husband dialed it in this year.  The bird was moist and beautifully flavored.  The leftovers are like the smoked turkey deli meat of your dreams.  I can only hope our New Year's turkey turns out so well.  The stock I made from the carcass also has a gorgeous hint of apple wood smoke.  It's probably the most delicious stock I've ever made.  And not incidentally, the side dishes were pretty awesome this year too.  I picked leeks and savoy cabbage from the garden on Thanksgiving morning, and cooked them very simply.  Family members brought other vegetable dishes and desserts that were equally good.  A few pints of our elderflower cordial made over the summer graced the table too.  It was a righteous feast.  Then followed the making of turkey pot pies and other attempts at letting nothing go to waste.  Pie of several sorts has featured at breakfast recently.

Image taken from the Remington website

We took advantage of my uncle's presence during the holiday weekend to do some gun shopping with him.  We had only intended to browse and avail ourselves of his vast experience with guns of all types.  He is a competition marksman, certified gun safety instructor, and his part-time retirement job is in a gun store in another state.  He hunted for many years to put food on the table as well.  So he knows his way around firearms.  As often happens, we stumbled into a good sale on the shotgun we were fairly sure we wanted before we even got to the shop.  The family-owned and -operated nature of this local business and its service guarantee impressed us too, so we walked out with a 12 gauge Remington 870, a shotgun my uncle praised for its reliability and versatility of purpose.  Our Christmas shopping for each other is done.  Now we need to find a place and time to practice shooting on a regular basis.  Who knows?  Maybe this time next year we'll go hunting.

There are a whole bunch of crafts and projects and recipes I've been putting off, and putting off while the garden was in session.  Felting a pair of mittens from an old wool sweater.  Duck confit.  A classic English pork pie.  A mosaic decoration on a stepping stone or two for the garden.  Making a variety of filled dumplings.  Hosting a cookie baking get-together.  And a handful of minor DIY projects, which the garage workspace is now usually chilly enough to deter me from even beginning.  I'm hoping that December and January will be slow enough, and my industriousness steady enough to get at least some of the indoorsy things done.

Harvest Meal Index

Just a bit of blog news.  I've added an index page for my harvest meal posts.  I figured there's now a sufficient number of recipe sketches on the blog to warrant collecting them in one spot.  It may be stretching credulity to call it the Recipe Index, but there it is. Maybe this will nudge me to post more recipes, or even more detailed recipes. 

Turkey Update

It's been almost four months since I accepted a three-week-old, one-eyed refugee turkey poult from farming friend.  I thought an update might be in order.  To make a long story short, when the turkey first arrived, it was a pale, shy little thing... 

And now it's grown into a shy, bigger thing that shows the full colors of its heritage breed - Bourbon Red.  (Sorry there's not much there for scale.  It's exceedingly hard to take even a decent picture of this turkey.)  If you want more detail, read on.

We had hoped the suggestive power of the male pronoun would influence it to grow into a large tom turkey.  Turkeys are evidently not biddable that way: it looks as though we've got a hen.  When we called her anything besides "he," we've called her Thanksgiving.  But between her sex, the slow growing habits of her breed, and the fact that she was a runty sort of bird to begin with, she's almost certainly going to get a Thanksgiving reprieve.  We're hosting the high holy day for extended family this year, and there's no way she'll begin to feed the 17-23 people who will likely be attending.

This doesn't mean of course that she's now a pet.  No, the plan is to have her on the table for New Years.  We considered Christmas, but I hold my holiday meal traditions dear.  Very dear.  At Christmas it has to be roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.  That leaves only New Years, which, in our house, to this date, has no traditional meal associated with it.  The problem which presented itself when we realized Thanksgiving wouldn't be ready for Thanksgiving, is where to house her when the weather turns really cold.

The chickens will go into their winter quarters sometime between mid-November and early December, depending on weather, and when we get our act together to rebuild their pen in the shed.  Then we have to decide whether to put the turkey in with the chickens, or keep her out in the cold weather on her own.  I tried a few times over the summer to introduce the turkey to the hens.  She certainly wanted to be near them, and when her pen wasn't in viewing distance of them, she would start up her distress peep, and keep it up for an hour or more.  But the few times I introduced her physically to the hens, they pecked at her viciously and immediately.  So those attempted introductions didn't last more than a few seconds.

But the turkey's slow growth has nonetheless been steady, and just recently I tried introducing one hen at a time into her pen.  The visiting hen immediately tried to assert herself with Thanksgiving, but Thanksgiving is now having none of it.  Up went the tail feathers and out stretched the wings.  Thanksgiving still doesn't weigh very much, but she looks mighty big when she puffs herself out like that, and it doesn't take much to outweigh a laying hen.  She went right after the hen's comb and kept after it as well as a one-eyed turkey can.  (Which is to say, only moderately well. It was actually a tiny bit comical how Thanksgiving would momentarily "lose" the hen anytime the hen was to her left.)  Each visiting hen quickly discovered the utility of hiding under the hanging watering can, and no serious harm was done.  Now that the fear of turkey has been put into each hen individually, methinks that if I do need to house them all together, the hens will have a healthy respect for Thanksgiving.  And Thanksgiving will promptly be a little overwhelmed by trying to track four darting chickens with only one good eye.  That's the hope anyway - that detente will be reached due to instilled respect and a natural handicap.

If it doesn't work out that way, well, something I heard not long ago from a turkey hunter makes me think she might fare outside in the cold weather just fine.  Did you know that hunters aim for the turkey's head when hunting them?  I was astonished and asked why in the world they'd aim for such a tiny target on such a large bird.  Apparently the .22 is the rifle of choice for turkeys, and the bullet cannot penetrate the turkey's feathers.  They act as armor!  Now if I hadn't seen the feathers developing on Thanksgiving as she grows, I wouldn't find this remotely plausible.  They are awfully impressive feathers, thickly layered and tough.  So maybe it's true.  I know there's no logical parallel here, but I figure if those feathers can stop a bullet, they can probably keep a turkey pretty warm through early winter as well.

Anyway, that's the plan: to have a minor turkey feast about five weeks after the major turkey feast.  I haven't decided yet exactly how to handle the slaughtering.  Novella Carpenter swears by branch loppers for the killing, which we have.  On the other hand, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall hangs his birds, both domestic and wild, for up to a week.  As I understand it, a bird for hanging shouldn't have any exposed flesh, which would rule out the loppers, though I could be wrong. I must admit the idea of hanging intrigues me, particularly since it's going to be a very cold part of the year when we slaughter Thanksgiving.  There won't be any flies to worry about, and the outdoor temperature will be roughly that of a refrigerator.  We could hang inside the shed, so no animals to worry about.  I like gamey meats, and hanging is said to enhance the flavor of game, so it all sounds good in theory.  Still, I have no experience at all with hanging birds, which makes me cautious.  I wouldn't want to ruin our very first bit of home-raised meat.  If you have any input about techniques for slaughtering a turkey, or experience in hanging game birds, please chime in with a comment.

Too Busy Doing to Write

With high summer in full swing, I've lapsed on the posting.  This seems to be my perennial conundrum.  When I have time to write, there's not much doing.  And when I'm doing lots of things that might interest other people, I'm too tired at the end of the day to do much writing.  So if pictures are really worth a thousand words, then I figure I can catch up on the writing really quick with the following.

Lasagna mulching.  I don't think the garden has ever looked quite so respectable in August.

Second cold frame.  Recently cobbled together with scavenged materials and ready to plant any day now. (Okay, it's really overdue for planting, but that's gardening.)  Isn't it just darling?  I want to plant nothing but Napoli carrots in it.

Elderberry-pear jam.  These will have to stand in for all the other canning I've been doing lately, including tomato sauce, chicken stock, and grape juice concentrate.  This jam is the prettiest of them all by far.

"Kimchee" made with Tuscan kale (instead of cabbage) and other vegetables from our garden.  Still fermenting, but already pretty tasty, especially the Hakurei turnips.

Homemade ancho chili powder. I may do a separate post on this as there was definitely a learning curve to preparing this stuff.  Smoked over our own apple wood chips, it smells so much richer and fruitier than store-bought.  We use quite a lot of ancho powder.

Solar hot water.  Admittedly, it's not my personal achievement, but it's finally - finally - on-line.  This will heat our house this winter and reconfigure our relationship to washing our whites.  We plan to situate a hoop house over the line that dumps excess heat into the earth - a project for next year.

Bad News - Good News

The Italian bees have gone.  They were clustering on the bottom of their screened bottom board early yesterday morning when I went to tend the hens, and gone by lunchtime. The queen had made her way out of her cage and they had even started to build some comb.  But there were only a few confused and sad looking bees wandering helplessly around the inside of the hive when I checked on them.  Of course I'm disappointed that they chose to leave.  But I wish them well in the world and hope they make it out there.  I attended the local beekeepers' meeting last night, told my sad tale, and begged for any leads on a replacement package.  The experienced beekeepers found my story very odd, and packages are in very short supply.  I may have to try to catch a swarm if I want two colonies, or settle for just one.

On a more positive note, the Russians are doing great.  They have a significant start on their comb building, and very little burr comb (that's "non-regulation" comb - comb built where a beekeeper doesn't want it).  It looks like Izhevsk will be a strong colony.

Another positive note is that I got a bunch of ramps for transplanting.  The few I put in two years ago are still alive, but their numbers don't seem to have changed at all, so I still don't feel I can harvest any.  I'm going to put these new ramps in several locations and see where they do best.  If I manage to make them happy enough to propagate well, ramps could help bridge the garlic gap, which we're facing right now.  No more fully formed garlic from the garden until late June at the earliest. 

Baking Day

I spent Thursday baking.  I'm trying to use up the last of a 50-pound bag of flour that includes the germ of the wheat before spring temperatures help it go rancid.  So I baked up a storm - of flour, that is.  Baking day is messy.  And long.  And exhausting.  It was lights out for me before 9pm last night.  But at least I have plenty of bread to show for it (Acme Bread's fabulous rosemary herb slabs, courtesy of the Artisan Baking cookbook).  There's nothing - nothing - in the world like freshly baked bread.  As another super-special treat that I posted about over at The Simple Green Frugal Co-op, I also made lardy cakes.

Yes, I know, you can't resist the name any more than I could.  Click the picture to see my post over there, which includes the recipe.

In other news, the arrival of our bee packages has been delayed by a week (or possibly two).  This means I can turn my attention to other things for a few days at least.  Such as doing something about the annual garden.  And maybe planting a few seeds.  We're going to go borrow a rototiller from gardening friends tonight or tomorrow.  I swear this is the last year I till that bed!  Also, I pick up three fig trees next Thursday.  So it's time to get their self-watering containers built.  More on that soon.

Happy weekend!

Bits of News

Once again, I have snippets of news to share, but no one item meriting a post of its own.

I'm attending a three-session class on soils given by the Extension Office in my area. Last night was the second class meeting. I'm learning some interesting things. I was surprised to learn, for instance, that the county I live in has 183 different soil types as defined by the US Soil Survey, a higher number than any other county in Pennsylvania. That's a lot of diversity! I also learned that visiting the website of the Soil Survey will give you a fairly detailed report of the attributes of soils in nearly any part of the US, for free. (Even though it's got a "shopping cart" - it's really free.) You can look up parcels by address or by navigating to them by a map. I also learned about Sudax, a cover crop I'd never even heard of. It's some sort of cross between varieties of Sudan grass, and it loves heat. The idea is to mow it several times during the season, so that it sloughs off parts of its extensive root system into the soil, adding organic matter each time. If it's not mowed, it gets tall and almost woody, like corn (maize). We get a free soil test with the class enrollment. Just as soon as the snow cover melts away from the garden, I'll get in there for some samples.

I've started some seedlings indoors. Let me tell you, this is a challenging endeavor with two young cats in the house. I've already chucked a couple of cell packs of tatsoi in the cold frame, figuring they had even odds on surviving the cold nights versus the depredations of two rampaging young felines.

It's that tantalizing time of year when the air is full of promises of spring. Birdsong has returned, the bulb flowers are pushing up leaves, and the dawn is coming earlier each day. As much work as spring is, it's stunningly beautiful, and well worth the wait, in my part of the world.

I've begun my second experiment with home curing. Really, I think I've caught some sort of cured pork bug - the ease and the success of the guanciale drives me to do more. I bought ten pounds of fat back from a grass-based farmer in my area, and I started a batch of lardo last Friday. That's pretty much what it sounds like: cured pork fat. Though in some circles, the euphemism "white prosciutto" is used. Lardo is not rendered fat, despite the similarity with the English word "lard." Lardo di Colonnata is a centuries old traditional product, which was eaten like a lunch meat by quarry workers at the source of Italy's finest marble. In fact, lardo di Colonnata is traditionally salted down in rough hewn marble troughs. Sadly, all our rough hewn marble troughs were spoken for. My lardo is progressing nicely in a ceramic crock pot. I went heavy on the seasonings, with fresh thyme, fresh rosemary, sliced garlic, black pepper, and dried bay leaves. It smells really good. In a few more days I'll remove it from the curing mix and find somewhere to hang it to dry down. I plan to use it in place of cooking oil for certain dishes, especially pastas. As a cooking medium, it will have the benefit of adding a great deal of flavor. It'll probably also grace the occasional homemade pizza. If the lardo works out well, I may try salo next, which is a more simply spiced Ukrainian/Hungarian version of lardo. I'll keep you posted.

Snippets

Some blog-able topics which have been on my mind lately, but that don't seem to merit individual blog posts...

Our new Red Star hens have finally, finally begun laying, or at least one out of four of them has. We bought them as "ready-to-lay" pullets in early October. They should have been laying by mid-October at the latest. Yet we didn't get a single egg for more than a month. Saturday we saw our first egg. The lack of eggs was mystifying since the temperatures here have been very mild for the time of year, and I even took to lighting them starting early in the morning. Here's hoping that single egg heralds a flood of eggy goodness.

We've taken the plunge and decided to go forward with a passive solar heating system. This will cost a lot of money up front, but we'll get roughly half of it back in rebates and tax deductions at both the state and federal level. Not to mention, the price of oil will no longer affect our ability to heat our home. (But yes, in case you're wondering, I'm still deeply conflicted about EROEI, the lifespan of this system, and this sort of spending when we don't know whether or not my husband will have a job after the new year. I just don't see any better options for us.) Work on this project should begin next month. Meanwhile, we've extended the radiant heating system from just the two rooms of the "new addition" on our house (it was already built when we bought it) to the kitchen, which is the central room of the house. These are the only three rooms that will be heated regularly (the last two winters we got by with just two), and we now have programmable thermostats to control each zone of the heating system. So we're fine tuning the heating program to keep the house just warm enough for comfort. My husband has argued me up to a daytime set point of 65 F. After the passive solar is done and inspected for heating, we may look into expanding it to provide for our "domestic hot water" needs - in other words, hot water from the tap.

Our cat is not doing well. I reported in February that she'd been diagnosed with hyperthyroidism. Unfortunately, she also has kidney failure, and has recently developed cancer too. Up until this week though everything looked good. She had a spring in her step and still loved to spend the day outdoors. Given her multiple conditions, the prognosis from the vet, and her age (14.5 years), we decided not to try any costly medical interventions. While her hyperthyroidism is easy to control, it looks to me like either the kidney failure or the cancer is catching up with her now. My gut tells me she doesn't have any better days ahead of her. Having put off the euthanasia decision on my last cat for too long, I'm motivated to not allow her to decline too far before making that difficult call. We'll use a vet that makes house visits when the time comes.

My husband has been working on turning a corner of our basement into a root cellar. Much of the work is already done, but the door is the tricky part. With an old farmhouse, the basement is of course very low, and there's no way we're going to find a door to fit the doorway at a hardware store, much less a pre-hung door. And the space needs to be fairly well sealed in order to keep the temperature low inside. This is especially true since the basement is much warmer overall since having the house air sealed and the insulation improved. We need a good barrier between the root cellar and the rest of the basement. I'm hoping this gets done in time to take some of the cabbages still out in the garden.

Our other fall project is the conversion of a corner of our shed into winter housing for the hens. Their mobile coop and pen provide too little protection from winter wind and really cold temperatures. The unheated shed will at least get them out of snow and freezing winds which could cause frostbite on their combs. We have electricity in the shed, so we can light them in the darkest days, though I plan to throw open the shed doors whenever feasible to give them some natural light too. Unfortunately, the doors face almost due north, so there will be precious little full sun for the girls over the winter. I'll be trying an experiment with deep bedding in the shed, which should allow me to never clean out their stall until they go back to rotational grazing in early spring. As a bonus, the 12" deep bedding that they're on all winter will be excellent material for lasagna mulching, which will come in quite handy for the permaculture guild I'd like to establish around a couple of our fruit trees next year. More details on this in a future post.

I've arranged to offer an introductory homesteading class next spring. I'll be taking a break from my usual cooking classes and trying something new instead. I'm nervous but excited; I feel under-qualified and I worry about taking on so much during one of the busiest times of year. No idea whether anyone will enroll or not, but I feel compelled to try. I'm reminding myself frequently that it doesn't take a certified expert in a subject to teach people things they didn't know before. I fully expect to learn from my students (if I get any) as well as teach them.

I've been supplementing the girls' feed with acorns every other day or so. They love them. I think they're starting to develop a Pavlovian response to the sound of me crushing the acorns in a burlap bag. They make their excited little anticipatory sounds as I go through the acorns just before tossing them into the pen to make sure each one is crushed and open enough for their beaks to get at the good stuff. The acorn meats are bright yellow and surprisingly soft; softer even than a fresh chestnut. The girls devour them eagerly. I find it incredibly satisfying to feed them something I got for free in my backyard. The acorn drop is over, but I really enjoyed collecting the nuts in October and early November. It was like a six-week long Easter egg hunt, and a race with the squirrels, who still got plenty. I may have to keep an eye open for other nearby oak trees next year.

We attended a class for beginning beekeepers and a meeting of our local beekeeper's association. I got the distinct impression that we were regarded as "fresh meat" at that meeting. The average age in the room was definitely over 60, and it was nearly all men. Not only are these people experts, but they want new beekeepers in this area. And the meetings take place pretty close to our home. It looks like we're going to go ahead with adding bees to the homestead next year. It's a vast subject to learn about, and there are so many things that can go wrong with bees. But I'm excited to try nonetheless.

-All the news that's fit to print. What's new with you?

Bits and Pieces

Nothing major to report lately, but lots of minor things in the works.

The weather has turned autumnal. (Isn't autumnal a great word?) That means I'm in the mood to bake again, even though we still have quite a bit of bread in the freezer. I began a sourdough starter earlier this week, since room temperatures are now perfect for sourdough. Not long ago, Hank made me insane with jealousy over his fig "problem." This reminded me that there's a special fig-anise bread in the book Artisan Baking that I desperately want to try, but first I need this starter to be ready to leaven. I also hope to get a very large supply of sourdough English muffins made and stashed away before the real cold sets in. We don't keep our house warm enough for a sourdough starter to be too happy here over the winter. Instead of discarding the majority of the dough with each refresh of the starter-in-progress, I've been cooking it in a skillet and feeding it to the hens. They seem to like it.

Our DIY cold frame, with sprouts of beets, spinach, lettuce, carrots, Tuscan kale and even some all but invisible parsley and scallions. We'll have to thin three out of the four kale sprouts in the top center. This is my first foray into the square foot gardening method.

Seedlings are up in our first ever cold frame. This is encouraging to me at a time of year I typically find discouraging. I love sweater weather; really I do. I just think we ought to have another two or three weeks of proper summer here, especially since the spring was such a bust. We didn't get much of a tomato crop this year, and there are no second chances with the heat-loving plants in the area I live. The cold frame is helping to distract me with visions of fresh vegetables plucked from the clutches of winter. I now have a serious case of cold frame greed. I want more square footage under glass next year. I had expected the soil in our cold frame to settle more than it has by now. We may have only very short scallions and kale.

I have found a sewing mentor. She's even local, and isn't charging me anything, though I'll take her part of the sourdough starter when it's ready. So all of you who have despaired of me ever doing any damn thing about my sewing competence goal for this year may have cause for cautious optimism. I've decided to try replicating Julie's lovely cloth gift wraps, inspired by the Japanese art of furoshiki. I had a bit of a shock when it came to purchasing the fabric. There weren't any cheap $2.99-per-yard, made-in-China bolts at the Mennonite fabric store. These wraps that I had planned to deliver my holiday gifts in are probably going to price out close to what I'd like to be spending on the gifts proper. I'm trying to see the expense as part of a learning process as well as holiday gift making.


In other news, I've been feeding my hens the ripened berries of the eastern black nightshade plant. Who knew that a plant with such a minatory name could produce safe and tasty berries? But beware: the rest of the plant is toxic, and the unripened berries are toxic as well. The ripe ones? They taste an awful lot like tomatoes. But since a handful is all I can collect at one time from the volunteers around the garden, and since my new girls are so finicky about so many other things, I let them have these dark fruits they seem to love so much. Pretty, aren't they?

What's new at your place?

Thursday Meta Post

A few small items to report today.

Yesterday I published my first post over at Simple Green Frugal Co-op. It was a fairly detailed tutorial on roast chicken dinner & uses for leftovers. I'm flattered to be keeping company over there with some very inspiring writers from all over the globe. Though I have to say there is a little cognitive dissonance when reading about in-season melons from an Australian garden while there's snow on the ground.

In further news, my husband has agreed to be a guest blogger for me here sometime later in the month. Recently he built a fantastic sled out of a $5 pair of thrift shop skis, and I would love for him to share it with my readers. He's promised to write up his project and snap some pictures when his schedule allows. We've already given it a few trial runs, and it's really fun. Stay tuned for his post.

News Items

I've been tagged by Undacova Mutha with a Bookworm Award. This is perfect, because I've been sluggish with the post ideas lately, what with holiday and health distractions, and my computer being in the repair shop. The deal with the Bookworm Award is that I grab a nearby book, open it to page 56 and share some text, starting from the fifth line on that page, here on my blog. Then I have to tag five other bloggers and pass the award along.

So here goes with the first part. I've been re-reading some old favorites lately. I swear I'm not making this up. I present an extract from Gene Logsdon's The Contrary Farmer:

Why didn't they go to the country and get a piece of land, Grandpaw would keep asking. It seemed so simple to him, secure in his barnyard with centuries of survival music to assure him: hens clucking, hogs squealing, cattle lowing, sheep blatting, roosters crowing, horses whinnying, bees buzzing, calves bawling, sons arguing, daughters giggling, and Grandmaw calling him in to dinner. If we lived such a dull life compared to our "urban counterparts," as the sociologists (the sons and daughters of those breadlines) say we did, why was my family always singing?

Now for the second part of this bookworm tagging. I hereby tag five other bloggers:

El, at Fast Grow the Weeds
Ali, at Henboggle
Phelan, at A Homesteading Neophyte
Trish, at City Mouse Farm
and,
One Straw, Be The Change

Thanks for inviting me to play along, Undacova Mutha!


In other news, I've been invited to participate over at the Simple Green Frugal Co-op! I'm looking forward to joining a bunch of talented writers who cover a diverse set of topics. I'll be posting there about twice a month beginning in the new year. Have a wander over there and check out some of the great posts.

I may be quite scarce until my computer comes back in working order. I wish you all safe, frugal, and happy holidays!