Harvest Basket

 There is an old saying that the best fertilizer for a garden is the gardener's shadow. That's generally very true. Unfortunately, no matter how much time you spend in your garden, you will not cast a shadow if the sun never comes out!
It's been a pretty cool summer and I decided to cut down my tomato plants so they will stop taking up valuable space and to get going on my winter garden plantings. This is the first time in 25 years of gardening that I have given up on my tomatoes before they produced anything. I have had a realization that tomatoes and peppers are a luxury that I cannot afford this year. I am finding that the higher altitude of the Homestead has been a real challenge for these last two cool summers.

 

Cilantro is a cool weather crop and it did really well. It likes to bolt before I can use it all though. A good friend gave me the idea to make Cilantro pesto. I picked what I had and whirred it up in the blender with some mild olive oil.

Now I can put it in my freezer in blobs and pull it out to put in Thai, Mexican and Indian dishes all winter. She's a genius!

 I also like to let a lot of Cilantro bloom for two reasons: the tiny native pollinators absolutely adore the little white blooms and I use the Coriander (Cilantro seed) for next years crop and for cooking.

It is looking like I will be getting a couple dozen yellow zucchini before the rain comes back. I've never been so anxious for zucchini before. I am usually begging people to take them off my hands by now.

There are greens galore and we have been eating gigantic salads and "Eggs in a Nest" for dinner. 

"Eggs in a Nest" is when you put a 1/2 inch of water in a sauce pan and then you put leaves of chard in layers (8 or 9 leaves) into a bowl shape in the pan and then crack a couple eggs into the bowl of leaves. Salt and pepper, a little mustard powder. Put a lid on it and cook over medium for as long as you like your eggs cooked. I like mine to be over easy style, June likes hers hard cooked. It takes about 5-8 minutes.

As far as beauty goes the big hands down winner in my garden was the Speckles Butter Head lettuce and the Lobelia I planted at the end of each row. I will definitely do this pairing on purpose next year.

My baby asparagus is doing pretty good. A few of the roots didn't take. 80% of them are doing good. I think it was because of the state they were in when I bought them. They had been displayed in an open box at the nursery and had been very dehydrated when I brought them home.

 

The plethora of basil seed I planted didn't come up in the cold soil and by the time I noticed it was too late to start any. Desperate for the smell and taste we associate with summer, Buck bought some Basil at the store but we didn't get around to finishing it all. I put it in a glass of water to make it last longer and it rooted. I planted it in the garden and it took off!

I started the seeds for my winter garden the end of July and I am now seeing my sprouts of several kinds of lettuce, chard, radishes, beets and peas.

I feel grateful for what I have. My harvest basket isn't full of tomatoes and melons, but it is full of turnips, Cilantro, three kinds of lettuce, Chioggia beets, Purple Viking potatoes and Five Color Silverbeet chard. These are some of the most nutritious and yummy foods from a garden.

Hay! And seeds a-poppin'

It has been a while since we had our act together enough to buy hay in the summer.  As a result, we get it a few bales at a time throughout the winter, one trip to the farm store after another. 

We did better this year.  Phoebe was inspired one day, got on Craig's List, and sent me a half dozen links.  It was going for $3-4 a bale, a much better deal than the $12-14 each at the feed store.  We narrowed it down to a couple, and gave one a try.  We hauled a ton of it and fed a bit to the horse.  He gave it a B.  Phoebe thought we could do better, so we tried a different place the next day.

Chicken Dinner

As you may remember I placed 10 Cornish Cross chicks under a hen on May 22nd.

Because I had been told that health problems occur in Cornish Cross chickens if you give them free choice food, heart attacks and failing legs among others, the Gigantachicks were fed only as much as they could eat in 10 minutes in the morning for the first 4 weeks. Then their mom would take them out for the rest of the day to forage for the rest of the days food.
Around four weeks, they were so hungry and their mother so tired I began giving them an additional couple of tuna cans of wheat and a little corn in the evenings.
All the rest of their food was gathered by them, lots of grass, bugs and worms.
They were very good at foraging, surprisingly so. They were eating machines. I actually watched them catch flies from the air.

Although they did tend to follow us around a bit. They put two and two together and realized that sometimes when a human came out with a dish or bucket, they got yummy food.

Then they decided to just come to the source.

 

That's when Mr. B's new found herding instincts came in handy.

All in all it was a happy eleven weeks for our free ranging chicks. We had no problems with their health and we did not lose a single one to a predator. They were happy on the farm in their own little chicken cosmos.

One did start to limp the day before we took them in, so it was definitely time.

We chose to make an appointment for our chickens to be butchered at a local, family run business that does poultry processing.
We were told not to feed them for 24 hours before we brought them in (bugs and grass were OK).

We decided it was best to keep them in the pen for the 24 hours so that we could feed the rest of the chickens outside.

I had several bags of lettuce I needed to clean up to take to the food bank, so I kept all the bugs and slugs and put any chewed on leaves into a big basket and gave the meaty chicks a nice last breakfast of salad and slugs. They were very appreciative and stampeded the door. They got out and I cussed, but then they ran in again when I threw the lettuce in. It was very exciting.

The next morning, Buck and I calmly caught them and took them to the processors in two dog crates. When we arrived we were very happy with the cleanliness of the facility and the humane and low stress way that they killed the chickens.

We left a cooler for them to be put in and filled out a card with our instructions- "Keep the feet, necks and giblets."

We left and did a little junk shopping and came back three hours later to pick up our transformed chickens. They all fit in our smaller cooler, which surprised us, and the feet were scalded and clean in a bag. They averaged 4.5 lbs. dressed and it cost $3.50 each to process.

Maybe it was a little short of "homesteading" to have someone else do the butchering, but with Buck on such a tight schedule and the turkey debacle hanging over my head, we decided to take baby steps this time. I do feel like we took a big step forward by raising the meat we eat in a way that was responsible, humane and fairly ecologically sound.
It is difficult to be exact on the costs of raising these birds since we were raising them with all of our Cuckoo Morans (10 adults and 7 growing + the 10 Cornish Cross) and the scraps and feed were scattered for all. We decided to do it this way, knowing that we were probably rounding-up on the costs:
Cost of day old chicks- 19.50
1/2 of total grain- 35.00
Butchering at 11 weeks- 35.00
               __________
                 89.50

As you can see the butchering nearly doubled our costs. Although having to set up and spend a day doing it ourselves right now would have indirectly cost more, time IS money sometimes.

We kept one chicken out of the freezer and the next night June came over for dinner and Buck cooked it on our big BBQ, Beer Butt style.

We have purchased and eaten many "organic, free range" chickens and not one tasted this good. It was the best chicken we have eaten, ever. I am not exaggerating. It was lean, tender and full of flavor.

While we enjoyed our fabulous dinner together we made a point to express our gratitude to the ones who made it possible, the chickens.

Road Work

This is not my usual homestead view.  But for the last several months, it has been as usual as home for me.

I work freelance, on a project by project basis, and this year has been delightfully, exceptionally busy.  So, the whole making money thing? Yep.  Happy homesteading? Not so much.

I am back now, and trying to get into the swing of things here.  I had been practicing a special zen vision technique; I see and appreciate the hard work Phoebe has been doing, and avoid seeing the things I wish I was doing.  Now I need to re-develop the ability to see projects, build some calluses onto my hands and get back to work.

Sigh...

Phoebe has the homestead looking great, with a fabulous garden, happy hives and horse, coffee a-roasting, grass a-mowing, chickens a-raising.  All of my stuff sits as I left it 4 months ago: Wood stacked, waiting to be split.  Pasture almost finished. Old fencing piled up waiting to be recycled.

And, fortunately, the phone continues to ring.

So I need to adopt an attitude of gratitude: to Phoebe for keeping the world spinning, and to the universe for making the phone ring. 

Thank you.

Bees Are So Cool, Er, I mean Hot

Well, it breaks my heart to have to say this out loud but, old timers don't know everything.
I am finding it is tricky to discern what is true about keeping bees, what is outdated information, and what is just incorrect extrapolation, even if it is done by an "expert".

After examining my Hive #1 brood combs and fretting about the empty cells sprinkled around between capped cells, I read an article in the Times about "Heater Bees". There is new information out now that the cells left empty between brood cells is desirable, not the sign of a failing Queen.

Just click for a close up and personal view of the brood comb in the Women's Honey collective.

All the information in my books and on the web show photos of brood frames with empty cells as examples of poor laying patterns by the Queen. They insist this is the sign of needing a new Queen.

Now it seems all this information is incorrect.

In a study using heat sensing cameras it has been found that honey bees have specific members of the colony whose sole job is to keep the brood warm, dubbed "Heater Bees".

As if that isn't surprising enough, they have also ascertained that the temperature a larva is kept at will determine what job the eventual adult bee will perform.

The empty cells among brood, it turns out, are there on purpose so that the Heater Bees can crawl into them and warm up several other brood cells from one centralized spot.

Since the original study is in German I unfortunately cannot read or site the actual paper, but Professor Tautz has a newly translated book out titled "The Buzz About Bees: Biology of a Superorganism" that I have on order. You can check out the British newspaper which has an article on the study at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/7435950/Honey-bees-secret-world-of-heat-revealed.html

You can also go to Professor Tautz's HOBOS project website which is (mostly) translated to English.
http://www.hobos.de/en/teachers-pupils/about-hobos/portrait.html

Professor Tautz's work is also featured on the BBC show "Invisible World"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rqgh4

Don't forget that I have been posting most of my bee shananigans on my other blog homesteader bees.  So if you are interested in the bees, check over there. I usually post there once a week.

Bird Brains

As you might remember, Buck and I had a handmade Christmas this year and what I made was bird and bat houses out of cedar fence panels I had cherry-picked over the summer.
I had an extra bird house left over after the holidays and it laid around unloved until the middle of June when I decided to just nail it up on the corner post of the garden, not even thinking anyone would use it. The post is only 5 feet off the ground and my garden is a lot busier than, say, the 25 acres of woods it sits next to. I thought it would look nice though and I was proud of it.
About a week later I noticed a stick poking out of the door. I went over and peeked in. I couldn't see much but what it looked like was a mouse nest or something. I figured a mouse had built a nest in it while it was laying around and since I didn't think it would get used, I never checked it before I hung it up.
The next day I went to the side and opened the house to see what was really in it. Out flew a tiny bird!
Inside was a loose 5 inch pile of sticks and on top of that pile was a tiny 3 inch nest of fine grass lined with feathers.
For a couple of weeks I could not even get a good look at the birds who had made my humble box their home.
I began calling the male "Invisibird" because I would hear him making his little call all around the garden fence line but would rarely see him. When I tried to take pictures of him he was so gray and unremarkable that even my camera would not focus on him. It was like he had a super power of some sort.
As the week went on the birds became much less skittish and I witnessed the male bringing in food several times so I assume that the female is setting on eggs. I was finally able to photograph him and identified him as a House Wren. At least I think so, I'm no expert.

He is a very happy little guy and sings a lot in between getting grubs and bugs on the ground. He does this great thing with his wings that looks kinda like that trick you can do by twiddling a pencil between your fingers. You know, it makes the pencil look like it's made of rubber. He does that with his wings somehow.

He has also become very used my presence now and lets me watch his antics.

A couple of weeks ago, a pair of Violet-green Swallows decided they liked the looks of Invisibird's house. They kept landing on the roof and peering into the door.
Invisibird basically ignored them and went about his business.
I on the other hand was so afraid the Swallows would chase Invisibird away that I ran from the garden and constructed 3 more houses, which only took a little while since the measurements and construction techniques are indelibly etched in my memory, and nailed them up on the other 3 post.
 

 

 

There was much dithering and house inspecting by the Swallows, but they had seemed to settle on the new house on the same end of the garden as Mr. and Mrs. Invisibird.

Oddly, Invisibird was very interested in the new house too.

He hopped down the fence, singing and twiddling his wings. The swallows stood on the roof of the new house and growled at him. Invisibird just kept singing and twiddling his wings that weird way and hopped up to look inside. The Swallows were completely mortified by this little birds bad manners and complete lack of respect for their privacy and left in a huff.

Invisibird has won the other house with his odd, optomistic attitude and his twiddly wings. He has built another nest in it, presumably hoping to install a second Mrs. Invisibird in it.

Whew, what a busy guy. He now sings a little less and hunts bugs a lot more.

Later, I saw the Swallows up by the Hay House so I moved the two extra houses up to the old Cherry tree. I think it's a good spot. It has a lovely view.

Semi Low Tech Coffee Roasting- Roasting on the Cheap

It is once again time to wax poetic about coffee at the Homestead. Coffee is a big deal here and an ongoing obsession for my brain and palate. We really don't drink that much coffee, once a day, sometimes twice on those days we need to get a lot done.
But we like really good coffee and are more and more reluctant to drink substandard coffee.
Since we are conveniently located in the middle of nowhere and about one hour away from our nearest micro roasters, I am determined to master the full process of our coffee, short of growing and picking, which would be pretty tricky here in Oregon.

In the true tradition of Homesteaders, who roasted their own coffee before commercial entities came on the scene touting their vacuum packed "fresh" flavored coffee in a can somewhere in the early 1900's, I have a passion for coffee DIY.

As you may remember we do most of our coffee brewing in a stove top Moka Pot and I found a very old, hand powered coffee grinder at the thriftstore that does a very good job of getting a nice even and fine espresso grind.


For months I have been researching methods for home roasting and combing the thriftstores for a double paddled bread machine to build a roaster set up like my friends.

 

I had already ordered my green beans from 7 Bridges Organic Coffee in Santa Cruz. I chose a 10 variety 5 lb. sampler for the beginning roaster and I'm really glad I did. It is a nice assortment and it gives me a chance to mix different flavors and at least get a rough idea of what I like before I buy larger amounts. They have a great primer on home roasting coffee on their website.

While cruising the small appliances in an odd little thrift shop, I happened upon a George Foreman Jr. Rotisserie Oven.
"Hmmm" I said as I examined the vegetable basket that came with it. It was $14.99 and looked like it had been used once. My calculations for batch, bean size and temperature clicked off in my head.
This was a definite possibility. I snapped it up.

We plugged it in at home and watched the temperature hover at 325F. That is about 75- 100 degrees lower than I needed.
After a few weeks of cogitating (should I insulate the stove better or override the thermostat or...) I decided that what I needed was the additional heat from a Heat Gun, but not just any heat gun. I wanted one with variable temperature settings, not just "High" or "Low", this was a little trickier since I didn't want to spend much. Once in a while I would do a search of the internets and I could find them but they were "Professional" and cost upwards of a hundred dollars. Until one day I found for a measly 20 bucks ta da ta da da da da daaaa:

After I received it in the post, I realized that I really didn't know how I was going to get the heat of the gun into the closed oven. But where there is a will, there is a way. Or should I say where there is a drill...  

On the right hand side of the oven the rotisserie motor resides. On the left side of the oven there is just a fake plastic grill and beneath that is the metal wall of the oven. I cut out the plastic grill with tin snips and calculated the area in which the gun would not interfere with the pivot point of the basket, but still point the gun at the beans in the basket. I began drilling multiple holes in that general area. When the area had more holes than metal I proceeded to snip the metal left between the holes with my tin snips, making a ragged hole approximately the size of the snout of the gun.

I had to enlarge it a little with the tin snips by cutting little fins around the edge, which turned out to be a great thing. After I inserted the gun, I just used a little ball-peen hammer to tap the fins down tight to the gun snout. It holds it so well I did not want to take it apart to show you. You will just need to surmise what I did from the photos. If by chance the heat gun did not stay put, I was going to use a large hose clamp on the interior part of the nozzle to hold it in place.

If you use this oven method, do yourself a favor and get an Ove Glove. Blistered knuckles over ride all feelings of well being while sniffing your newly roasted coffee.

I trimmed away the plastic until the heat gun could fit all the way in. I did not want the hot metal nozzle to rest on the plastic outer body.

I pounded in the crumpled metal to hold the nozzle of the heat gun tight.

This photo shows where I settled on the heat setting- for now. This will most likely change as experiments progress.

These are the pans I used to cool the beans as soon as they came out of the oven.

Green beans

The stove is a little weird in that it has no "off" button. It uses an egg timer style knob. To roast coffee you just have to unplug it at the right moment when the basket clasp is at the front.

 

Unlike the Bread Machine set up, the oven lets the chaff sift to the bottom instead of flying around plugging up your heat gun intake.

First roast- a nice Viennese

Second roast- a City Roast

Roasts compared

I will not be able to give you real roasting stats for some time, but I will tell you for now that when roasting 1/3 of a pound of coffee (I am doing very small batches to get the hang of it) it takes about 6 minutes to reach first crack and somewhere around 7.5 minutes to get to City Roast +.

My first attempts have been met with very high reviews. I don't know if I hit a very good mix of Sumatra and Peruvian or if there is just no way to mess up fresh roasted coffee but I am very excited to continue the experiments. I bought myself a note book to write down the details.

Now the real fun begins!