Mid-Summer Update

 

July is over, and it has been a good month on the farm.  The weather has been hot, with above average temps near 100 degrees, and, as is typical for our part of the world, essentially no rain has fallen for a month.  So, irrigation and watering has been the name of the game.  Fortunately, with the moderate and wet spring we had, the plants, especially the fruit, has had a strong foundation for facing the summer heat.  So with careful attention to water, virtually everything has thrived.

The fruit trees as doing great, drinking water and making fruit with abandon.  It will be a great fall.

Just one of our apple trees

The little pear tree is bending its limbs with fruit.

 

We're very excited about our plumbs

The garden has indeed been a mixed experience.  Our garlic has been harvested and we're happy with them.  This year we properly cured them in the ground (by drying) so they will keep well.  Our onions have been productive too. Unlike last year we got some full-sized, non-deformed looking carrots.  By "some" we mean 2 carrots.  For reasons unknown essentially all of the many carrot seeds that we planted didn't even start sprouting.  Very disappointing. The real star of our garden has actually been fruit:  our watermelons.  With enough water the watermelons have been growing great-guns.  The melons grow so much each day we almost don't even need a time-lapse camera on them to watch them grow.  It's amazing.  And our in-bed planting experiment has worked out great so far.  In a little while we'll have about a close to a dozen yummy melons. 

Two happy carrots



Just two of our 6 inch diameter (for now) melons

Our berry plants have been dong OK too.  Earlier in the summer the raspberries gave us a large harvest.  We now have a good amount of raspberry jam that will last us for months.  The blackberries, which were such star performers last summer, have struggled.  They fruited but then the plant withered and the berries dried up and stopped maturing.  Only some of the plants did this, others are still healthy and green.  They are well-watered, so it's a bit of a mystery.  


The unhappy part of the plant

The sundry other part of the farm are fun to see develop. Our walnut and hazelnut trees are coming along and the grapes too are developing. All-in-all it has been a fun summer to watch things grow.  Now we are excited for some cooler weather and looking forward to harvest; though we've got a ways to go!

 

 

Little tiny grapes

Racquet-ball-sized weirdo walnuts 

A cluster of hazelnuts, coming along.





 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cherries, Apples and Chick Update

There is no other way to say it; the cherries were a lot of work.  For nearly three weeks we picked, dried and froze for hours, gathering well over 100 pounds of cherries.  Our trees were remarkably prolific and it's been fun to think of all the uses we can have for the cherries. The dried ones are a great addition to cereal and the frozen ones will go very well in ice cream and such.  Despite being so pleased with the cherry crop, when we picked the last one, we were pretty excited.

Our last haul:  you can see how dark most of them are.

One thing that made our cherry processing much easier was our deluxe pitter from Germany.  Many pitters require you place a cherry in a punch or vice-like set up one at a time.  With the amount of fruit we had, this would have taken forever.  So thankfully we invested in a Leifheit Kirschentkerner, which promised it could pit 12 kilos of cherries per hour using its spring activated handle. Not to be a pitch-man, but it was awesome!  

Put the cherries in the hopper, push down on the handle and a metal plunder went through the cherry and...

the fruit rolled happily down the ramp while the pit went in to the clear container. 

Now that we are done with the cherries, we are looking forward to our other fruit trees.  They are all doing great and we are looking forward to a big harvest.

Apples everywhere!

The red delicious already have a nice blush to them.

This is our mystery: this tree never fruited before while we owned it. 
We think they are plums.  Any other guesses?

The pears were some of the first fruit to start in the spring and are pretty large by now.

Finally, our chick is a bit over a month old now.  It is doing very well and seems healthy.  It has developed more mature-looking white feathers, though some yellow chick fuzz is still on its head.  It has also taken to grown up things well:  eating and drinking from the feeders, roosting at night and running around the property with the hens.  It still sticks close to mom hen but you can tell that the gap between it and the hen is widening as it grows up.  It is pretty skittish so the pictures were taken a bit far away, but you can tell the size and color pretty well. It's so cool to watch it grow and know it came from our chickens and one of those eggs.

Taking a quick break with mom and "aunt."

Zoom, there is goes, heading for cover!

A good size comparison:  like a chicken-shaped magpie or so now.

Cherry Harvest!



As promised our cherries came in hugely this year.  Oh, did they ever.  It is fair to say we are awash in them.  Virtually all of the cherries featured in previous posts ripened (nearly at the same time) and without much attrition from birds and bugs.  So we have been picking and pitting wildly.  Despite the tedium of processing the fruit, it is great to see our trees so healthy and productive.

Just look at them all

That is the definition of laden

We have two varieties of cherries.  We are not too good with names, but as you can see, some are smaller and more suited for cooking while others are large and better for munching on.  The smaller variety is extremely prolific with multiple cherries hanging off one "node." (See above).  The other trees have just one or two cherries growing every few feet of branch length.  The amount of each that we are harvesting is therefore very disproportionate.

The differences in color and size are interesting.

The process of picking is tedious but fruitful (pun).  By our guess we will have to pick the amount pictured below 50-100 times or more in order to have picked most of the cherries. There are just so many. 

One trip out to the trees

Washed and awaiting processing



We have decided to process the cherries two ways (other than snacking on them raw).  Cherries don't keep extremely well;  they can oxidize and bruise relatively easily, so we decided to pit and freeze some and pit and dry others.  The frozen cherries will be good for pies and putting in to smoothies while the "raisins" will be good for snacks and for putting in to breads. 

Easily the most labor-intensive part of processing is pitting.  A pitter is a the way to do it but you still end up with sticky juice all over yourself and the surrounding area.

So many more to do. The pitted cherries on the tray are headed to the freezer.

For drying, we are fortunate that our oven has a drying feature that uses the convection fan and low heat (140 degrees) to dry the fruit over the course of 19-24 hours.  If your oven doesn't have this feature you can DIY it by setting the temp on low, propping the door open a small amount, and directing a fan in to the oven to move the warm air over the fruit.  Higher heat can be a double edged sword.  It can dry faster of course but the fruit must be monitored closely;  we have made little cherry cinders already by using too high heat for too long. 

The size of the cherry makes a big difference in drying time. 
You must check them periodically and take out those already done.



The result:  they look funny in pictures but are tasty

Even though we have turned into a cherry factory for now (and for the next week or more), our garden is doing well too.  This week we harvested our first leafy greens:  Swiss Chard and spinach.  In a few days the lettuce will be ready for a first picking too. 

 

Not red but green for once.

We'll let you know if we make it through cherry season!  Hopefully the apple harvest this fall will be as productive. Stay tuned.  

A Chick is Born and Other News

Amount a month ago one of our hens went broody and started sitting full-time on a clutch of four eggs. Since we are having trouble with our rooster (he's a jerk to the hens and is damaging their backs) we thought this would be our chance to see how the chick raising process goes.  So we let her sit on the eggs.  The incubation period is about 21 days, thus we were curious what the hen would do with herself for food and water. At first she basically sat on the eggs without interruption for two weeks.  When we'd go collect eggs from the other hens we'd tap on her back to make sure she was still alive.  Sure enough she'd raise her feathers and squawk a bit.  After the first two weeks she did venture out of the coop to get some food and water on occasion, but after a few days she went back to sitting uninterrupted.

Pretty much right on time we looked in and saw this:

Little yellow face

A little chick had appeared! At this point we were not sure that the rooster or the other hens would be safe for the chick, so we closed up the hen and chick in the coop for a few days so the little thing could grow a bit. The other chickens roosted on top of the coop at night and the hens laid eggs around the property-not ideal but we didn't have another option.  We also waited to see if the other eggs would hatch.  They didn't in the end, which is probably pretty normal.

After a few days we had to move the hen and the chick out of the coop so the other chickens could return home.  At first we tried a cat carrier but that was too small.  Eventually we put the two of them in to a large feeding trough with food & water.  We had to keep the trough covered to keep the cats from being too interested.  (Ironically this is the same trough we use to take chickens to the slaughterhouse).  After about a week the chick is doing well. 

Running around on his little orange legs.

 
The rest of the farm is doing pretty well.  The fruit is doing great.  We've had a bumper crop of strawberries and our trees are doing great.  The cherries in particular are going great guns.

With the large image hopefully you can see all the cherries. 

 With the trees we are trying a system of sticky balls hanging from limbs to catch bugs.  Since we had no fruit last year,  we will have to see how they work this year.

It's not a mega cherry, or a candy apple, but a bug trap.

The garden has been a mixed bag so far this year;  though it is early yet. On the good side the potatoes are coming in well and the Swiss chard is growing strong.  Some of the other plantings are a bit slow.  But we have hope there is much more to come!

Spotty growth in parts.  Lettuce and some spinach making an effort.

Potatoes doing pretty well

The Swiss chard is happy

Planting and Growing Update

This spring in southern Idaho has been quite different from last spring.  Last spring we had a cold snap in April but then it got hot quickly and stayed very dry for the whole summer. This spring has been much more gradual, with slow warming (punctuated by hot and cool spells) and much more consistent moisture.  As we have noted our fruit trees are doing great and we might even have some walnuts to report on soon, but it's too early to know for sure. Even the weeds are different this spring, with more grasses and flowers.

Planting has been easier so far too.  We'll of course see how things grow, but the warm and wet weather has been nice to seedlings.  Already little lettuces, Swiss chard and spinach have come up.  The garlic, strawberries and green onions sprang up all on their own.

So far we've gotten the aforementioned leafy veggies in the ground plus carrots, kale and lots of green onions.  It even been warm enough to plant watermelons and potatoes.  The watermelons are a bit of experiment since we put them in the beds and will prune them to fit the area as the grow.

Now we just got to keep watering.

Look at all the cherries!

Our in-bed watermelon technique.  We'll see if it works.

Growing Swiss chard, before thinning

The beds, with a new fence and the weeds largely kept at bay.

Fruit is A-Coming

As we have noted a few times before, last year our fruit trees suffered profoundly from a late hard freeze and high winds that killed the buds before they could be pollinated. Very happily that did not happen this year and the trees are already producing small nascent fruit.  It's very exciting and we're hoping for a big crop this year.

Loaded with green cherries

Apples to be

And Pears!



And our strawberry plants are coming through too:

We have started our planting with spinach, chard, lettuce and broccoli too so more updates to come.

Small Developments

Spring is moving along nicely.  The weather is getting pretty warm (65-75) in the daytime, but due to our high desert location, we have to watch the over night temps, which usually fall 30-40 degrees from the daytime high.  That means frost is still an issue, though a much decreasing possibility. So we will be doing (and writing about) most of our planting activities soon.

Perhaps the most exciting thing so far, though, has been that our fruit trees are flowering out wonderfully.  As we mentioned last year, our cherry, apple and pear trees didn't produce any fruit because the buds were hit with a hard frost followed by high winds.  Fortunately, this year that hasn't happened and most of the blossoms have been able to bloom and be visited by our bees.  Our bees, by the way, did pretty well through the winter. It's taken them a while to get going, but once the warm weather hit and the flowers came out, they have been active.  In fact, standing under the fruit trees you can hear the loud and steady hum of busy bees.

Our loaded cherry trees

The cherry trees (and beehive) a few days later

The apple and pear trees (plus something else!) just blooming

One other fun farm-related activities we have been doing is baking our own bread.  This, of course, is not uncommon, but the slightly odd thing we do is "grow" our own leavening.  It's a funny thing to leave a mixture of flour and water out on the counter for a week, watch it bubble and then eat it, but that's what we're doing.  The idea is to catch the natural yeasts that are in the air, like folks have done for millennia.  One advantage to doing this is it helps the gut flora be more diverse because the heterogeneous yeasts are caught and form a natural sour dough starter.  Most commercial breads only contain a single strain of yeast, which, research indicates, can quickly unbalance the gut flora.  Another great thing about growing your own starter is you can propagate it by keeping the mixture fermenting in a container between baking.

The bread-making process has been a series of experiments.  Some attempts have been laughable, but over all we think we're getting the hang of it. This loaf, for example, is leavened 100% with "wild caught" yeast and only contains the yeast starter we grew, organic sprouted flour, water and a tiny bit of salt, that's it:

Happy loaf. cooling

First Chicken Slaughtering Experience

This weekend we slaughtered and processed our first chicken ourselves.  All the other chickens we raised and slaughtered were done by a professional processor;  so this was a first for us. Rather than give some sort of step-by-step guide to doing this (there are tons of websites and videos that do this well) we thought we'd just provide a few thoughts on the process of bringing a chicken to the table.

We should say off the bat that we are not in any way morally opposed to eating animals.  We believe that animals are indeed below human beings in value and that human needs can and should be above animal needs.  Furthermore, we believe that animals were created to serve humanity;  this is particularly the case for domestic animals that are entirely dependent on humans for their survival (as chickens certainly are). Although humans can survive without meat, meat provides unique nutritional components that cannot be reproduced from vegetable sources.  This is a need of humans that is superior to an animal's need and life.

This being said, though, we also very strongly believe that humans were created to steward and tend both animal and plant life. That is what husbandmen and farmers do.  We therefore have a responsibility to care for animals and when the time comes to slaughter them, do so humanely and with due respect for the life they give, which transfers energy and sustenance to us.  No animal life should be taken cavalierly, easily or without pause.

These truths came to the fore when I slaughtered our little bantam rooster.  Though I had killed fish before, this was the first animal I had raised and gotten to "know" that then fell under my knife. Not to be morbid, but I very intentionally looked at the rooster's face, into his weird chicken eyes, and deliberately considered that I would close his little eyes for good.  If I could only have killed him because I looked away, or did not fully understand my actions, I would not have been appreciating his life correctly and it would have been a cowardly deed on my part.

The Old Testament frequently talks about the power of blood.  That it contains the animal's life and that atonement is not possible without the spilling of blood.  Often, indeed, the Old Testament sacrificial system seems needlessly bloody and primitive to us.  Why does God need dead goats and bulls, after all?  He doesn't, of course, but Israel did. I think as modern industrialized consumers of food, we miss the importance of blood and sacrifice in two ways.  First, blood is an animal's life.  God was deliberately showing the Israelites that their sin meant death.  When a human slaughters an animal for food, or when a Levitical priest offered a sacrifice,  he releases whatever makes the animal a living thing and turns it into a carcass.  Blood is valuable because it represents a life being lost.  In Old Testament terms, the life of the sacrifice pays for a renewal of the human's life through atonement from deadly sin.

Secondly, I think we moderns have a very hard time realizing what sacrifice means.  Meat means very little to us.  It's what comes in plastic at the store or between buns at a restaurant.  But for a farmer, for an ancient Israelite, that lamb had been cared for, fed at his expense, and would have provided sustenance for the man's family.  By making it a sacrifice to God, he is sacrificing his relationship with the animal, the animal's life, and also willingly giving up the cost of raising the animal and the useful value of the animal to God, thereby acknowledging that God is the source of both life and sustenance.

I valued our little rooster.  I was moved when I slaughtered it.  The sight of living blood brings the reality of meat into focus.  Will I stop eating meat?  No; I will value it more.  From now on every time I have a chicken sandwich, I will remember even more strongly that a death happened for that bit of meat.  It's not morbid to see life in your food. It's valuing justly what is provided for your health and life... whether or not you are grateful for it is up to you.

Spring Work Schedule

As we mentioned earlier, the weather has turned warm pretty early here in Idaho.  In fact we have had a string of fantastically sunny and warm days that are perfect for outdoor work.  And get to work we have.

Since one of the major goals of this season is to be more organized and proactive about the preparation and up-keep items of the homestead, we put together a list of jobs to get done in early, mid and late spring. Keeping on track, making sure elements of the homestead are squared way before the busy times of planting and tending start is a big deal that pays dividends throughout the season.

For example here is our early spring list, which is what we're working on now:

Early Spring (Now-April)

• rake
• churn up beds and compost
• catch early weeds in bed, around beds
• remove/cut down dead weed stalks
• prune hedge away from beds & electric wires
• prune berries
• get chickens in back field to start on insects & goathead
• eliminate grass in unwanted areas
• fix irrigation trench in front to prevent flooding
• Order seeds

 

A lot of these are aesthetic but we found last year that the cleanliness of the property, even if it does not necessary impact growing, makes a huge difference in how eager you are to work on homesteading chores.  Keeping an ordered homestead makes you feel better and keeps bugs and weeds down as well.

 

Even though it has been warm, in our area you have to be ready this early in the season for at least another week of cold weather, probably even in the 20s at night sometime before May.  So a lot of our real growing preparations are going to wait until April.  That is when we'll dig a new double-dug bed and start working on our field crop (which will be mostly clover). 

Only later in May will we start seeds inside and plant some cool weather plants outside.  But we'll get to that when it is time.  For now, it's still grunt work time. 

The raspberries after some intensive family labor pruning and getting rid of deadwood

Our sizable burn piles after pruning the hedge near the beds

Fruit tree leaves ready to be moved.  This area was used as a dog b-room too, so yay.