Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Catching Up...

Haven't posted in a while.  Things have been wet and gross around here.  Our tomatoes finally succumbed to the blight so I'll be putting those away for the next week.  Pepper plants look awesome and I hope to get lots more of those.
This is a picture of our Victorio Food Strainer in action.  It allows me to process tomatoes without the hassle of peeling and coring.  A spiral forces the tomato pulp through the screen and the left over seeds, peel, and core is pushed out the end.  The chickens really enjoy the leftovers.  Our strainer was a gift from a very dear friend but they can be bought at MyPatriotSupply.com and are worth every penny.  There are additional screens you can buy for berries and pumpkin but we use ours primarily for tomatoes so the screen that comes standard works well for us.

Today I am making Chipotle Bbq Sauce from Jackie Clay's Growing and Canning Your Own Food.  Her description of it sounded so good, I couldn't resist giving it a try.

We have realized a major mistake in our garden this year.  We planted way too many varieties of beans.  I tried to keep up with my garden map but we got off somewhere and it's a huge mess trying to find which bean is where.  Next year we will plant Blue Lakes for our green snap bean and Cherokee Trail of Tears for our dry soup bean.  There is no way to confuse those two varieties.  We have been very frustrated with our beans this year.

Our baby birds are doing well.  We did run into some losses with our guinea babies when the momma chicken that hatched chicks decided the guinea keets were in her way and started killing them.  We separated the momma hen with the keets and they are now living in the goat shed.  They are free to roam during the day and return to the shed in the evening.
The momma hen with the chicks has been able to keep all 12 of hers alive and happy.  It is definitely noisy out in the chicken yard and we'll be downsizing some soon.  We have a few hens that have reached retirement age and are no longer producing.  MHM has asked for them to get his dog used to chickens living at his place again.  We plan to give him the older hens and a young rooster.

We did increase our chicken run by 40 feet.  They love having the new space to run and look for bugs.  I'd say the insect population in that stretch of grass didn't know what hit them that first day.

I'll try to do better keeping everybody up to date on anything interesting happening around here!