I'm back!

Okay, I've actually been back for over a month. What can I say? I need a vacation!  =)

The computer is still awful and hard to work with. But more than that, this time of year it's hard to sit at the computer for hours when there is gardening, sewing, baking, and visiting with neighbors and friends to do.

I realized I'd better post something because a number of possible new readers may be disappointed that I haven't posted anything in over a month. Where would these new readers come from? Well - we're famous again.  Last fall we were interviewed for an article in Minnesota Monthly. The magazine came out a week or two ago and we've been hearing about it from friends, neighbors, and co-workers since then. I finally got to see a copy of it for myself just this morning. And right there in the article they mention my blog! So I guess I'd better get back on track and get blogging again. Here is the article online; the paper issue has several pretty nice pictures of us, and other fellow city gardeners/farmers.

So, what has been up around the homestead? A lot!

• I planted a bunch of seeds just before heading to Kenya and when I returned two weeks later I found a little jungle in the basement. My wonderful husband had remembered to water and care for them so a ton of kale and basil came up. I also planted a load of Calendula and Borage - I got the seeds from my mom.  Why so many flowers? Well... 
• While I was gone Jeremy picked up some bees! Pictures of that hopefully soon. They seem to be plenty happy and healthy and are working away at all that glorious honey.
• So - where to put all that kale? Some of you may remember the boulevard raised bed I've been talking about for a year or two. I finally got that installed and half the kale went there and a few basil. There are also several rhubarb growing there so that spot is very productive now - or at least it will be. Building that bed allowed me to dig extra dirt out of one of the back beds so I could get that ready - and then I put more kale in there!
• At some point I finished moving most of the strawberries over to one of the three beds in the back. I have got to get it all covered up though. We had our first almost ripe strawberry the other day but left it to ripen for one more day. Sure enough, the next morning it was completely gone. Squirrels!! I hate them!! Another strawberry is showing some color so I have to get all my netting up soon - like maybe today!
• The second bed has a large and healthy crop of garlic, a couple tomato plants, and tons of kale. We are going to be eating a lot of kale chips this summer - I can tell you that!
• The third bed has a tomato and a wall of snap peas, the first of which were ready to eat just the other day. Yum!
• In chicken news - we have a broody hen!!! For the first time in three years. It seems like everyone else always has broody hens, and it's pointless since they don't have roosters. But we of course do, so it's possible this Maran will actually hatch something out. Hopefully pictures and more story about that...eventually.
• I don't think I've talked about mushrooms hardly at all. Jeremy is still busy innoculating and is nearing the end. There is a small pile left in the garage. Today he is working on totem innoculations out at the farm. My brother has been visiting us for awhile, so Jeremy has a helper. Yay! Jeremy isn't force-fruiting yet, probably will start that next month, but lots of mushrooms have been growing on their own. Enough that Jeremy has had at least 8 pounds (usually more) at each of the last three farmers markets. That's right: Jeremy is selling his shrooms at the Mill City Farmers Market! 

Hopefully it won't be another month before I get back to some real posting. I used to blog so much more and I really enjoyed it. I guess I still do, but... I've got too much on my plate and something has to give.

Blog switch

Lots of things I want to post about (a yummy shiitake risotto dish we just made, the overachieving plants sprouting in the basement, things blooming and popping up all over the yard, etc) but it will all have to wait.

I'm digging my Vicarious Travelblog blog out of mothballs to, hopefully, blog about my impending trip to Kenya. That's right! I'm going to Kenya in two days! It's for a worldwide conference of Quakers (of which I am one).

In any case, I won't be posting here till May. If I get a chance at all (fingers crossed!) I'll be posting at my other blog.

Noisy girls

We have five nest boxes, but will those girls spread out and use all of them? No. Will they take turns? No. At least they're splitting the egg laying between three boxes instead of trying to get all the eggs in one single box.

And it also seems like at least 10 at a time are feeling the urge to lay an egg which means they need to cluck and screech and carry on. First announcing, "I'm going to lay an egg!!" Then following that up with, "I laid an egg!" It gets kind of noisy around here in the mornings.

Here are several of the hens trying to use the same boxes at the same time:




Jeremy just had to get a white egg layer ("how novel!") so we got these silver leghorns - which I've whined about before. They are very flighty. And they are very noisy. Occasionally I've been coming up to the house and I hear this awful screeching sound, like a child is dying in the alley. No, just one of the leghorns. I managed to catch one on video to give you an idea. This video is nothing compared to when they really get worked up. It gets much worse. They really do carry on about the egg laying.

Happy Easter!

While perusing the internet some weeks ago I stumbled on this way of dyeing eggs. As I searched more, it became clear that I was one of the few people on the planet that hadn't heard of this or tried it yet. But I wasn't going to let that stop me!



First I blew out some eggs, which I've never done before. It is not that easy, especially if you make the tiniest holes in the ends of the eggs because you don't want to have big huge holes.

Anyway, I won't give all the details here because if you just search for dyeing eggs with ties you should find a bunch of people with advice. Martha Stewart apparently started it - or at least got the idea out there.

So you take a piece of silk, which can be from a man's tie or any other bit of silk, and you cut it to fit your egg. Wrap around the egg. Wet it first because this makes it much easier. (I tied the one up in string as an experiment.) You want every bit of egg to be touched by the silk.



There are many variations on the next step. You want to wrap something around the eggs to keep the silk on. You can use strips of fabric (which I did), or stick them in bits of panty-hose, or other ideas. Look at some different blog posts for ideas. I tied the silk on with threads at either end, but I don't think that was necessary; probably just twisting and folding down, then wrapping the cloth strips around would have done it.




Next is to put them in a pot of water, so the water covers the eggs, and add 1/4 cup of vinegar. Now is when you find out that blown eggs don't sink to the bottom - they float on top. So you'll want to weigh them down so they're in the water. I just stuck our colander on top and made sure the water was covering everything.



Simmer for half an hour. When they're done. Take them out of the water and let them sit till they're cool enough to handle. Then unwrap the fabric and silk and, voila!



They look all fancy and complicated, but they really aren't. I found that several had filled with water so I had to blow them out again. But water is easier to blow out then egg whites!







I was going to do a whole dozen, but I came to my senses (after blowing one or two eggs) and only did six. I have some ideas for doing it better next year. Jeremy says he likes the irregularities and spaces where the dye didn't transfer. But I don't. I want them to be perfect! And they will be. Next year.

Happy Easter, and I hope all your egg-dyeing adventures go well!

Booze

Back in December, Jeremy and I were suddenly awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of breaking glass. It's amazing how quickly you can go from dead-to-the-world asleep to extremely awake when you hear a sound like that.
The only sign that we were sleepy and not fully-functioning was that we incautiously turned on all the lights and crept downstairs to see what was going on. As we came down the stairs I began to hear a strange whining/hissing sound. What could that be?
By the time I'd gotten a step or two into the living room, my brain had woken up enough to know exactly what had happened: one of our bottles of cider sitting out in the living room had blown up. The hissing sound? The bottle next to it just getting ready to pop.
There was glass and cider everywhere. Sleepiness returned long enough for me to decide to open that bottle a little to let the pressure out right there in the living room. Very silly. It was a Mt. Vesuvius gusher - I don't know how so much cider could have been in that bottle.
We got everything cleaned up and put the remaining four bottles in the kitchen. It was such a bummer because we had saved those half dozen bottles out for a Christmas present!

When I came home from work the next day Jeremy told me another bottle had exploded during the morning. Cider and broken glass all over the kitchen. (In fact, we're still finding bits of glass around!)
Some night awhile later I vaguely heard a dull thudding sound in the night; but I didn't think much of it. The next morning we saw a tiny little brown glass bottle on the floor in the kitchen. Now how did that get there? It was such a mystery where it came from I was worrying it trying to figure it out. Then I opened the lower cabinets where we keep our booze (wine, whiskey, etc). Ah. There had been one last cider bottle that had only been half full. It took longer for it to explode, which it did, throwing cider and glass all over the inside of that cupboard and breaking some other bottle as well. The explosion must have been big enough to push the door open, and that little bottle had rolled right out.

Finally, the last bottle of cider had broken!  But believe me, this was only the middle of our adventures with cider.

Back up a couple months to October. We'd been talking for some time about making some booze and wanted to start with hard cider. The original idea was to get apples and press them, making our own juice. But I, wisely if I do say so myself, decided that was ridiculous. We didn't know what we were doing and I'd hate to wreck a whole batch after spending all the time making the juice. So we bought fresh squeezed (or whatever they do to apples) apple juice from a local farmer at the farmers market.

We poured all the juice into one of our lovely inherited carboys. I know we added sugar (white and brown) and yeast, but I can't remember now when or how much (sorry - this isn't a recipe!).



I do remember that we didn't water down the yeast enough so it was more like a paste that we were trying to get into that tiny carboy opening. Of course it ended up slathered all around the edges. So I took our tiny rubber spatula and went around the opening to scrape up as much of the yeast as possible so we could get it into the cider.

And then the unthinkable happened. As I was scraping inside the neck, the rubber part popped off and dropped off the stick part and sunk right to the bottom! Oh. My. Word. I had this moment of wide-eyed incredulity before the immensity of this disaster crashed over me. We had been working so hard to keep everything sterile and clean so there weren't any contaminates that would mess with the fermenting and turning all this into hard cider. Well, I'm sure you've all seen the nasty insides of spatulas when the top comes off. Sick. And that was now floating in our cider!

So I berated my incredible stupidity for a few moments, and then we decided on our next course of action. We had to transfer all that cider to the other carboy so we could get that blasted spatula out.



Then cross our fingers that everything wasn't wrecked. So we did that. The next part is to put some vodka in the the little lid thingy (that's the technical name I believe).



You set that on top and wait for it to get bubbling. I believe this little stopper serves to let air out but nothing else in. And if it should suck the stopper in a bit, it just adds some vodka to the cider. Mmm, tasty.

Now I'm a bit fuzzy because I thought this process was supposed to take some time - weeks at least. Maybe it was supposed to be in a certain temperature and light environment. But at some point the bubbles would slow to a halt and that's when it would be done. And that happened for us in less than 10 days. I'm not sure what happened (maybe it was that magical stuff in the spatula) but our cider was ready to go.

Actually, first we back-sweetened it (which means putting some nice sweet apple juice into it so it's not so bitter) and added some yeast inhibitor stuff to stop the yeast from doing it's thing. Then, making as much of a mess as we could, I stood on a chair and held this tube thing while Jeremy filled each bottle. This is a special tube thing that has a stopper on the end so it only fills the bottle while you're pressing the end down into the glass. Or something like that. It's pretty cool.



Then we used our handy new tool and new caps from Northern Brewer to cap the cider.



We used recycled bottles as you can see. This fun experiment netted us 35 bottles!



And it was TASTY! Went down really smooth and then I felt drunk as a skunk after I'd had barely half a bottle. (I am a light-weight of course.)



Jeremy was so excited about our cider he was giving it away left and right to everyone we knew; and before we knew it was all gone!

We got started on our second batch a week later, in early November. This time we did it in a bucket and kept it at the appropriate temperature and light.



This batch stayed in the basement for a month before it seemed ready for the next step. I don't quite get it, but the next step was transferring it to the carboy so we could store it in the back hall and trip over it for three and a half months.







Now, it turns out the bucket is bigger than the carboy so we had extra cider. It was fine at that point (it would just get tastier with this second sit), so Jeremy put the cider into six and a half bottles. (You know where this is going.) I don't believe we backsweetened or put the inhibitor in, so a couple weeks later, after the yeast kept working and bubbling in those tiny spaces, there finally just wasn't room anymore, and CRASH! In the middle of the night. (Why do I feel like saying, "And now you know....the rest...of the story.")

Anyway, this last week Jeremy finally bottled all that cider and there is a lot. We had one ourselves, gave one to a friend who gave us lots of advice, and took one to a party. We're trying to save them a bit now - especially since there aren't any local apples around to make another batch.

This summer Jeremy wants to try making a beer.

And we're dying to get a recipe for Sumac Wine and try making that. We had some a friend made and it was some of the best wine we've ever had.

Yay for booze!

I had no idea...

...that sage was a perennial. I had to look it up in the new herb book we Jeremy got for his birthday. And there it was in black and white: sage is a perennial. Even so, I never would have believed that to be true for Minnesota.

But today I was doing some work in the yard and I looked over to where the two dead, dried-up, abandoned, dead sage plants were... and they were getting green.





I think it must have been our warm and short winter; I can't think of how else a plant like this could have survived. Now I wish I'd left the rosemary and parsley outside too. They probably would have survived - nothing survives living inside our house.

So long Slowpoke

Slowpoke was a chicken, a very slow chicken. If you haven't learned yet, named chickens in our flocks often aren't long for this world. They're only named because they stand out with some problem or another.

Last fall when we received our chicks, we noticed one that was really slow. It slept more than the others, was hard to rouse, didn't seem to eat or drink much. This rooster only made it a few days and then died. Just after he died, I noticed another chicken that was behaving the same way: very slow and lethargic. But this one... lingered, so we christened her Slowpoke. We thought of better names later, but the original name stuck, so we were stuck with it.

Once the chicks went outside, Slowpoke spent most of her time at the feed eating and eating.  She never grew to be more than half the size of her flock-mates. And she never seemed to do the regular chicken-y things - like scratching around in the dirt, looking for things to nibble on. She never at anything other than the grain we keep out for the chickens - no lettuce, no greens, no bugs, nothing else. I guess she just didn't recognize those things as food.

At the end of December we happened to notice she had a damaged toe. She must have stepped on something sharp and cut her toe. We bathed it, put on some antibiotic stuff, wrapped it up, and put her out in the coop. Hours later, I'm sure, we found her perched on a stump with the other chickens pecking at her foot! Those darn cannabalistic chickens! So we cleaned her up again, wrapped up her foot, then wrapped it up in duct tape (hah! try pecking through that!), then smeared on some pine tar (which chickens don't like). Our poor little club-foot chicken! We had her in the coop on and off, but we had to help her up to the roost because she couldn't jump up with the club foot.

Finally we just kept her in the house, in a big dog kennel in the living room. I can't remember how long she stayed inside, but it was awhile.



At one point we thought her foot was clearing up and Jeremy wanted to make sure there was no infection so we got some antibiotics for her. You mix these up in water and down the hatch with an eye dropper. With the first dosage, we nearly asphyxiated her. She was gasping, gurgling, sneezing, dripping, hacking. Oh, it was awful. I thought for sure we had killed her. The only question was if we should put her out of her misery, or see if she survived.



But Slowpoke was a surviver, and she pulled through. We read up more on delivering medicines via dropper and did the whole thing over again the next night. And the same thing happened! As I was holding her on my lap and comforting her, I realized we had done this sort of thing before with no problems. The problem wasn't our technique, but our chicken! Nothing goes right with her.

In any case, she survived again and her foot was looking good, so back out to the coop she went. Some time later it seemed that another toe wasn't looking so good. We put some pine tar on it and put her back in the coop. Then a week or two ago I got a close look at her and almost ALL her toes were in bad shape. Geez! In fact, the mean old Rhode Island Reds were pecking at her toes so much they were bleeding. =(

So back inside she came to be cleaned up and convalesce some more. After a few days she seemed okay, at least no raw wounds, so I put her outside again. A short time later, her poor toes had been picked bloody again. So back inside she came.



By now I could tell her toes were in bad shape. She didn't seem to like walking on them. So we had a choice to make. Do we have an inside chicken from now on, stinking up the house or do we put her out of her misery? She couldn't live with the other chickens anymore because she became instant bottom chicken and was attacked. I think she would have been happy being an only chicken, but I wouldn't have felt right giving her to someone else with her foot problems.

So... yesterday afternoon we finally did the deed. It was very sad and we hated to do it, but I have to say we both felt a sense of relief in the end. We knew that any problem that could happen with a chicken, it was going to happen to her. Out in the wild, she would not have made it this far.

She had a relatively good life and got lots of snuggles and pets from us - which she really seemed to love. Not very chicken-y behavior if you ask me!

So long Slowpoke!