Cucumbers Today, Pickles Tomorrow

For years I have grown as many cucumbers as I could fit in my garden.  The kids love to eat them fresh, their favorite lunch to take to school (spicy peanut noodles) is loaded with them and they can be magically transformed to a family favorite....PICKLES!!!

Up until this year, I have never made it past Thanksgiving with the pickles made from the summer's harvest.  

That was before the farm.

That was before my garden was this size:

The easy part is planting the seeds.  

Putting up the trellis, keeping them weeded and watering is a bit of a pain.

Picking the cucumbers is an every day chore.  In the heart of the season...now...it's twice a day.

We sort them into:

small (can them whole)

medium (can them in spears) 

large (can them in slices)

jumbo (give them to the hens)

My girls like to make pickles.  Really.  I even hear these words, "Don't make ALL the pickles today.  Save some for me to make when I get home from work."

If you are a normal sized family, it's quick, easy and delicious.  

With us, it's not quick...more like a day-long project, still easy....just never-ending, but always delicious!!

We make a few different kinds, but the spicy ones are always the first to disappear.  

The hardest part is waiting several months to open them for dinner.  Unlike me, the older they get, the better they are.

We call it "Pickle Patience"

Too Cute to Pass Up

CeCe might be the youngest, but she's not about to be overlooked.  She lets me know where she stands on issues.

"I don't want to look at your mad face"

"I want candy....NOW"

"Levi looked at me so I hit him with a shoe"

"Some days I'm a little girl, some days I'm a cat"

"I like your garden, mommy, but the stuff tastes yucky"

She's really fun to tease because she gets soooo mad about the dumbest things.  She calls the old, miniature horse Buck, her horse.  If the kids want a fight, they tell her, "Hey CeCe, mom said Buck is MY horse."  

Drama

She'll often trek out to the pasture all by herself, find that old guy and yell, "This is MY horse".

Like anybody cares.

This day she walked Buck all the way from the far pasture.  A lot of steps for a 4-yr-old.  A very determined 4-yr-old.

Periodically Buck would get stubborn and put on the brakes.  CeCe let him know the rules, "Buck, I'm bigger than you so I'm the boss." (Think she's heard that before?)

She made it all the way to the barn with him.  When I asked if she wanted to "ride" him...aka "sit on him", she said, "Nope.  I'm just going to feed him and boss him around".  Story of her life.

She could have done that out in the pasture.  

I need to teach that girl efficiency.  Looks like I've successfully taught her to be bossy.  She's taught me that little people (mainly her) run my world.

Happy CeCe = Happy Mommy

Calling All Germans

I have German blood in me.  

I really love sauerkraut.  I even like it on pizza.  I just hate buying it.  Last time I checked it was $5/jar.  Ridiculous, but delicious.

I am known around my house to say (on a daily basis), "How hard can it be to make that?"  If we consume/use something often, I have asked it.  

Including:

Laundry soap

Dryer sheets

Salsa

Pickles

Ketchup

Pizza sauce

Baking Powder

Pretzel Bread

Costco's Rotisserie Chicken

Powdered sugar

Brown Sugar

Marshmallows

Shampoo

Chapstick

Lotion

Sometimes the answer is...EASY.  

Sometimes it is NOT EASY ENOUGH

Rarely it is NOT WORTH MY TIME

Luckily, sauerkraut falls into the EASY category. It is just cabbage and salt.  That's it!!!

I (well....Mary Kate) took all the cabbage heads that weren't "customer worthy" and shredded them in my food processor. 

I added a few teaspoons of sea salt per bowl and massaged it creating more "cabbage juice" than you would expect.  I worked it for probably 10-15 minutes until I thought I had enough juice to jar it.

I filled jars with the de-juiced cabbage and topped it with the juice.  I covered it and put it on the cool, dark shelf in my basement storage room.

That's it!  $5/jar for THAT??  I feel like a fool for not doing this year's ago.  Well, I guess I haven't tasted it yet.  Five dollars might feel like a bargain in a few weeks.

Every few days I lift the lid to "burp" the jars.  It just released any gasses built up over the days.  Because it is an experiment for me, the kids are all keeping tabs.."is it working?...now is it working?....now can we have a reuben?"

It takes a few weeks but it must be fermenting because when I "burp" it, it smells like Levi's feet ....

...and he doesn't have an ounce of German in him!!

Pictures Instead of a Thousand Words

I ramble.  I give information that most people couldn't care less about. Today I fill a post with captioned pictures.  

No stories.....just captions....some of them long.

I promise!!

THE PEOPLE:

Eli's favorite farm shirt run over by the lawn mower.  Simon--guilty as charged.

If dogs could speak Jesua would be saying, "Where's Joel?  I can't find Joe.  Anyone see Joel?  I'm looking for Joel!!!!"

Cece's dream job...digging potatoes.  

Hay bales quickly become the new playground.

Looks like more fun than it is.  The car is not about to go anywhere.  The battery is charging in the house:)

THE HORSES:

I NEVER have a day where I ride without CeCe in front of me.  In fact, I'm shopping for a saddle and the "measurement" of my seat has to include her tiny rear end too.

Just a cool picture.

Not a horse..donkey.  Gabby the donkey is a favorite at the farm.  Chunk feeds him anything he doesn't really want to eat himself.  Above is the zucchini bread I slaved over.  Chunk said, "I ate half and Gabby asked for the rest.....plus there were no chocolate chips in it."

THE LAND:

This is our mobile chicken unit for the layer hens....on Google maps!  How funny is that???

This dog has been waiting his whole 8 years of life for a farm.  He constantly jumped the fence at our city house to "roam" the land.  He has been kicked by a horse, scratched by a cat and nearly run over by the ATV.  Still, every morning he waits by the garage door to catch the first "bus" to the farm. 

Pippi is our new filly and, second to the donkey, everyone's favorite.

Joel & his horse, Gypsy.

King Louie really guarded these kittens. We couldn't get him to leave their side.  Once they were mobile, he followed them and tried to play with them.  

Then he killed one....not on purpose, I'm told.  He doesn't know how big he is.

Real name - Molly.  

My name for her - Dingbat Chicken Killer.  You figure it out.

Come visit the farm and take a cat (or two) home as a parting gift.

New Gadget

I am the girl who takes the long road, but also not opposed to shortcuts.

I make my bread, but not with a bread machine.

I make my own pasta, but I use my kitchen aid mixer to turn the rollers.

I make my own chicken stock by cooking it overnight, but I can't claim success...still not very good.

I make my own mozzarella cheese, but I buy the milk and use the 30-minute cheese method.

Bottom line:

I like the results of old-fashioned home cooking, but I'm not opposed to shortcuts as long as the quality of food isn't compromised. 

I am NOT a gadget girl. 

I am NOT a shopper.

Here's how I make a purchase:

--hear about it

--research it for 5 minutes

--make a decision

--tell one of my kids to go buy it/or not 

I bought a rotisserie machine using that very method. 

Second only to choosing a fabulous man to marry, this could go down as my BEST DECISION EVER!!

Following my "Purchasing Guide", I read reviews and decided $100 was a good gamble if the reviews rang true.  I proceeded to step four and told Abbey, "Find and buy this gadget."  She timed it perfectly as it came on the day the chickens were ready to cook.

Back when I used to buy groceries, my kids loved the Costco rotisserie chicken.  I find them too salty and when I quizzed the meat man about their contents, he said they are injected with something off-site, bribed in a solution he could not recall and sent to them in big tubs to cook.   That is exactly why I take the long road.  I can tell you EXACTLY what is in my chicken.

onion powder

garlic powder

cayenne pepper

thyme

paprika

salt

pepper

and.......love:)

Pretty easy.  Rub it, let it sit a few hours overnight and plop it in the rotisserie.  That chicken was over 6 pounds and cooked in 75 minutes.  

Delicious!!

Perhaps it will take longer for a chicken that has visited the freezer.

We made 4 in a row on Saturday.

I didn't brine it, but that's because I was using fresh chicken.  I might try a brine on those I pull out of the freezer in the future.  

Given the fact that I didn't play a part in the buying (Abbey did it), unpacking it (Isaac did it), reading the instructions (Nobody ever does that) or cooking in it (Mary Kate did it), I can't even claim to be a "Level One Gadget Girl".  

Who cares, the chicken was fantastic!!!

All Hands on Deck

Now that baseball is over, we finally get to have major farm project weekends.  

What a productive weekend we just had!!  We successfully cut & baled alfalfa, mulched pile after pile of dead trees, hauled mulch (bucket by bucket) to the newly weeded rows in the garden, mulched our fruit orchard, planted seeds, planted 13 blueberry bushes, erected a new (to us) trampoline and burned the giant tree trunks that wouldn't fit in the mulcher.

The results?  

Over 400 bales of fantastic alfalfa.  More than we need, but we can sell it to area farmers.  Square bales are hard to find and we small acerage farmers prefer them because we don't need equipment to move them around.....just teenage boys.

Beautiful rows.  Too bad my garden is WAY bigger than these pictures show.  We had to return the mulcher on Monday morning so we could only get about 1/3 of the garden done.  What is done is beautiful.  

A shout of thanks to my hard working family...those shown and those with enough sense to not be shown.  

What can I say.....FREE LABOR!!!  

Murder at the Farm

I'm NOT against killing.  Enemies must go and no better person to do the dirty deed than an angry gardener!!  

I have a few enemies at the farm.  Most of them are easily conquered with my "magical" concoction of dish soap and water.   As long as I apply a daily dose, I can usually keep them attacking in small enough numbers that the plant can "outgrow" them.  The adult version of a plant isn't as tasty as the baby version.  They eventuality give up.  

Bottom line....I usually win. 

Here's my hit list:

This bean beetle loves my newly sprouted green bean, Lima bean, dried bean and edemame plants.  Three weeks of daily soapy spray defeated them.

You may have met some of these guys or gals in your baskets.  They love to chew holes in cabbage, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and kale leaves.  If I had a small garden, I would put row covers over the plants when I put them in the ground.  Row covers are expensive and a pain to work with.  I have a few sheets of the netting, but I haven't mastered use of them yet.  I thought my soapy spray would control these worms, but in a matter of a week, they chewed the leaves of the Brussels sprouts and broccoli down to the veins.  Literally, there was NO leaf left on half of the plants.  Yikes!!  Time for plan B.  I found a citrus spray that seems to be working.  There's lots of new growth on all of those plants.  I'm calling that a win.

I remember as a kid getting paid a dime for each one of these Colorado Potato Beetles I picked off my mom's potato plants.  Back then I was sure she did it simply to get me out of her hair for hours a day...well worth the pile of dimes.  I didn't realize how much damage they did to potato plants, but I'm learning.  I started to battle them with soapy spray, but I was only giving a half-hearted attempt.  There is only so much time in the day and the picking/washing/planting and weeding also need to be done.  It seemed like the bugs went away after a few days of spraying.  They didn't. They must have just gone away to get the rest of their family and friends.  The numbers multiplied overnight!!  I decided to fence some of the laying hens in the potato patch to eat the bugs.  I don't know how many bugs they ate, but they flattened each plant out to make a nest in the middle.  Not cool.  We gathered all but one of those gals back up & moved them out to the pasture where they could scratch and peck away.  One escaped and appeared in the garden every few days.  We named her Fugitive.  It took weeks, but Luke eventually caught her in the horse pasture.

As far as the potato beetle....still battling with my soapy water, but the plants don't look nearly as healthy as they did last year.  I suspect my harvest will suffer.  I have found a spray called Take Down Spray, but it may be too late for this year. I'm not calling it a win or a loss....this is a draw.

The squash bug....the Devil.

This guy won our match last year and I thought I'd outsmarted him this year.  

  

Nope. 

I've been inspecting the leaves of the pumpkins, squash and cucumbers for weeks now shouting words of victory.  Then I spotted these:

Squash bug eggs.  Ugh!  No problem.  I removed the eggs and killed any adults I found, sang a little "I'm smarter than a squash bug" jingle and went on my way.

By the end of the day I had one dead zucchini plant.  This is WAR!!!

Next day started with an early morning squash bug hunt.  I geared up in my "squash bug killing" clothes, played some loud Guns 'N Roses music to pump me up, grabbed my duct tape and went into battle.

I found about 40 patches of eggs, many adult bugs and even some of these...

Babies.  Devil babies!!!!  I was severely outnumbered and possibly outsmarted, but I was determined.  After a few hours in my squash garden, I'd gotten every egg, baby and adult I could find.  WELL into the hundreds.

By the end of the day...another dead zucchini plant.

I'm losing, but not surrendering the battle.  I've asked the practically 12-yr-old expert at the extension office.  His advice..."Ma'am, that's what pesticides are for."  Pretty sure my tax money is paying that guy's wage!!

I think I'm going to try to dust the plants with this concoction of ground up fossils.  It is the only thing out there that I am willing to use.  It causes death by dehydration.  

Justice.  

Should sprinkle some on that extension office kid........kidding:):)