First Seed Catalog of the 2013 Season

Lookie what came in the mail today!  It's my first seed catalog for the 2013 season.  It is from Seed Saver's Exchange.  I haven't ordered from them yet but spent quite a while perusing their website this year.  Especially during the Glass Gem Corn fiasco earlier this year, lol.  I haven't sat down with the catalog yet and will save it for a special treat when I can sit down with a cup of tea and spend my time browsing.

I told TH that I wanted to grow sweet potatoes next year and he asked if I'm giving up red potatoes or white potatoes to make room for them.  I then told him I wanted to grow yams next year and he kind of laughed and said okay ;).

TH has been reworking our chicken pen today.  We did a quick job of getting them some extra room this summer when they had to be pinned but now that they are able to graze freely, we have the chance to rework things before next year's garden season.

We were talking today about the need to throw the guineas out of the chicken yard once we have it repaired.  They need to live in the goat barn so they can get out and catch bugs for us while the chickens remain penned when we plant the gardens next year.  We have a little bit of time before we have to deal with that though.  If the guineas keep being mean to my chickens, we may be eating guineas this winter!

Corn Sheller At Work

Things have been pretty quiet on the home front.  The guineas are grown now and think themselves barnyard royalty.  They push the chickens around and seem to hate them all except for our old rooster Roy and the hen that raised them.  They truly are the dumbest birds I've ever seen.  They will run back and forth along a fence for 3 hours just runnin' and squawkin'.  For some reason, they forget they can fly and could go over the fence any time they choose.  Sometimes Frank likes to help them remember by spooking them into flight.  I would yell at him for it but after 3 hours of squawking, I'm glad to have them over the fence.

Our momma hen sat one last time a few weeks ago and hatched one more baby for the year.  She and the baby live in the goat barn away from the craziness that is the chicken coop.  I believe we have 4 young roosters running around and we'll have to thin the herd very soon.  I'll choose one to serve along side Roy as he has slowed down quite a bit this past year.  There are two little feather-footed black and gray roosters that I like the looks of but I'll have to see how their temperament is as they get a little older.

The goats are doing well.  Bunny just passed through heat but we didn't have a buck ready for her so we'll be waiting for that to happen again.  When you add a goat in heat to five uppity guineas, you get quite the chorus in the barnyard.

I wanted to post a video on how TH's corn sheller is doing.  He had to tweak it a bit to get it to work but it is much better than using our thumbs to take off every little kernel!

You can see part of TH's woodworking area behind him.  We should be getting out there more as the weather gets colder.  I have lots of things I'm hoping to get built this winter!



TH made our corn crib to be able to roll around the garage floor.  One thing he forgot to build in was a way to retrieve the corn if you just wanted a few ears but he used his "I-Have-An-Idea" super power and came up with this solution:

                                                   Princess #2 thought it was a grand idea!

That'll do it for tonight!  I promise to try and update more regularly.  Thank you all for visiting!

TH's I-can-fix-it Power

I'm very proud of TH tonight.  We had bought an old corn sheller at a flea market last year and TH got it to working tonight.

I'm not sure what all he had to do to it but after he repaired it and attached it to a wooden box, it makes our corn shelling much easier!

Before this repair, we had to shell all of our field corn by hand.  That takes a lot of time and wears your thumbs out!  I was amazed that it is even designed to kick the empty cobb back out.

TH deserves many kudos for this repair!

Harvesting

Greetings from Learn As We Grow!

It has been quite a while since my last post.  We've not been doing too much to write about but I did want to update with some of our harvesting from this week.

Our potatoes did pretty well this year.  The red potatoes yielded more per pound planted but the kennebecs had pretty good numbers even with having to throw several away due to rotting.  Usually moles are the major problem with our potatoes but this year with the long stretches of wet weather, rot was more of a problem.

The decorative gourds did pretty well for the first year.  I have birdhouse gourds, big apple gourds, bushel gourds, and another kind.  I'll be hanging them soon and hoping they cure out over the next few months so I can try  my hand at decorating them.  I had read that you could use wood carving and burning tools on cured gourds so I planted these with that in mind.

I pulled the last of my peppers off today.  Over the next couple of days, I'll dry and freeze some for winter/spring use.  I still have two jalapeno plants to pick from so I hope to have a few more pints of pickled jalapenos soon.

These weeds are Jerusalem Artichokes (or sunchokes).  I planted them last year inside a tire to try and contain their growing area but TH threw out the tire and plowed the area up.  They loved that and have taken over a corner of the garden.  I found some recipes for them in a magazine this month and will be trying them out on the family soon.  I'll let you know how that goes!

Hope everyone is having a plentiful harvest!  We are very blessed to have some food to put away and we are very thankful to God for it.

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!

Guinea babies!

We have teeny, tiny guineas!  The momma started doing the "my-egg-are-hatching-and-it's-very-uncomfortable" squat yesterday morning so I knew it wouldn't be long before little guinea heads started peeking out.

Usually, if I can make a sound similar enough to a baby chick, I can get little heads to poke out from around momma and get a peek.

This picture was while the momma and babies were still in the nesting box.  This morning I moved everyone down to the baby pen on the floor of the coop.  I really should figure out a better method of getting this done but for now a pair of heavy leather gloves is the way to go.

I first took most of the babies out of the nesting box and placed them in the new pen.

Between pecks, I was able to move momma hen down to her babies.  She calmed down once she realized that everyone was okay and even began to teach them how to eat.  

She did have a few eggs that hadn't hatched yet but felt like they may have a chick in them so I let her keep three eggs to see if they would hatch by tomorrow.  I also cleaned out the nesting box she had been in.

Guinea eggs are very pretty and a tad smaller than my regular chicken eggs.

Yesterday was our 11th anniversary.  We celebrated the best way we could.  TH, THB, and MHM went to cut a load of firewood on some property TH used his charm super power to gain access to.  I stayed home and canned 14 quarts of green beans using my new All American 930 canner.  It went much faster than when I would use my Presto and have to do two runs.  After we were done, we took the Princesses to the drive in to watch Brave.  It was a good movie and the princesses love getting out and visiting the drive in movie. 

Everything is still wet here.  The weeds are really enjoying this weather.  Our tomatoes have finally started to ripen.  I had one on the vine that I was saving for today but I suspect THB or MHM was granted access to the garden by TH and I lost that one.  Oh well, one tomato for the help of a load of firewood is a pretty good trade!

Farm update

It's been an interesting few days here on the farm.  We had a thunderstorm roll through that caused some damage to the garden.  Most noticeably to the corn. 

The path of destruction stated with the loss of a cayenne pepper plant that was broken off, went through my pumpkin patch knocking the plants over to one side but thankfully no permanent damage there, tossed around some of the sunflowers, and then pummeled the best corner of the corn patch.  It could have been much worse so we're glad most things bounced back.

We have discovered the best bratwurst topping in the world.  For Independence day, we grilled out and I was thinking how I could sneak some squash and zucchini into the meal.  I brought a cast iron skillet out to the grill and warmed up some olive oil and just a touch of margarine.  To that I added diced squash, zucchini, red onion, a garlic clove, and two sliced hot hungarian wax peppers.  I cooked the brats and the topping side by side and they finished at the same time.  We put the brat in the bun, added a stripe of mustard down the middle, and then loaded the topping. It was UNBELIEVABLY GREAT!

TH says he has eaten a lot of brats from the big cities in his day but that these were the best he had ever tasted.  He ate two and a half and I managed one and a half myself!

We have been picking beans this week.  I received my dream canner as an 11th anniversary gift from TH and am now waiting for the high btu burner we ordered to get here so I can use it outside.  I made the mistake of trying it out on my kitchen stove last night and didn't think I was ever getting to bed.  It was almost 1:30 am when I finally got to lay down after starting around 6:30 pm.  I also ran into the problem of my lid sticking which I already knew was a possibility through my research of the canner.  A slight pry with then end of a claw hammer and the lid popped right off.

We still have two rows of beans to pick and can for this first picking session.