Pictures from the Farm

Some of our new Araucana (Easter egg) chickens

The green eggs are from the Araucanas and the brown eggs are from our previous chickens.

Teddy, our new buck, is not working out. His days are numbered.

The sweet potatoes have filled in the patch we gave them. I hope we have a good harvest. (they are in between the green bean trellis on the right and the purple hull peas on the left)

The okra is now over my head. We get about two gallons every three or four days. The squash plants are looking rather sad, but still producing. I picked about 10 nice squash yesterday. The potatoes still have not come up. I don't think they will. For those of you following Frank's radio posts, please notice the antenna farm in the background. We have watered it lately and it continues to grow and grow and grow.

The Romano green beans (on the right) have not germinated or grown as well as I would like. I planted them in June and they are just now producing. We will see how they do.

I have picked a few more sunflowers and have them laying out to dry. Now that I have tried my hand at growing them, I will find a source for black oil sunflower seed that I can grow for the chickens and goats. They appear to be very hardy plants and grow very well here. I have really enjoyed growing and learning about them this summer.

I have saved two of my crookneck squash from two different plants for seed. This is easy to do when you miss a couple when you are picking and they get really huge. Then you can pretend your plan all along was to save them for seeds. Anyway, my book indicates that I should let them sit for six weeks before I harvest the seeds so I put the date on them to remind me. 

All is well on the farm and we are enjoying our busy days. Hope your gardens are producing well and life is good.

Until next time - Fern

 

Why Do We Make Cheese?

Making cheese is something I wanted to do for years. I wanted to be able to make my own cheese from whole, natural milk for a good, wholesome food for us to eat. We have long tried to minimize the additives and chemicals in our diet. That doesn't mean we don't like pizza, green bean casserole, lasagna, potato chips and Cheetos sometimes, but as a general rule we try to eat fairly healthy.

After I had made cheese for a while, I decided to research how to make rennet. I knew from some past reading that natural animal rennet is made from the stomach of a newborn calf. Well, I don't have any calves and even if I did, I don't really want to butcher a newborn for his stomach.....unless I really needed to.






This information prompted more research. What I found made me upset and depressed. Almost all (depending upon what you read, about 90%) commercially made cheese in the United States is made from GMO (genetically modified organism) rennet. I was appalled!! Even when you try to buy the most basic ingredients and cook a healthy meal for yourself, you unknowingly get to consume more GMO. 

So, with a little more research, I have found that some companies sell imported rennet that is not GMO based. This is the rennet I use in our cheese. Knowledge gives us more control over our lives and decisions.

I sometimes find it disheartening that our food and water is laced with so many chemicals that have been proven to damage the human body. It is impossible to eliminate them all in this day and time, but it doesn't hurt to try. We find the more we educate ourselves, the better choices we are able to make. And in the process of doing so, we not only take more control of how we treat our bodies, but we take responsibility for the choices we make.

Until next time - Fern

Frank's Green Bean Casserole

You know that traditional green bean casserole that we have all been making for years? Well, a long time ago Frank came up with his own version of green bean casserole. And since he is a guy and has been trying to convince me for years that he is a carnivore (he eats meat) not an omnivore (he doesn't like to eat fruit and vegetables - except potatoes - potato chips and fried potatoes), guess what he added to the green bean casserole recipe? Meat, of course. Just about any ground meat will do, but it's best with sausage. We have never met a man that doesn't like it. So, here is Frank's Green Bean Casserole.

Start with green beans. If you are making a 13 x 9 casserole you will need 4 cans or pints of green beans. I cooked these beans from our garden on Saturday for this casserole. This is the first time I have used our homegrown green beans for this recipe. 

While I am collecting all of the ingredients, I brown the sausage. This is about a pound and a half. We buy two pound rolls from the local kids in the agricultural programs at school. They sell it once a year as a fundraiser.

For each two pints of green beans you use, you need one can of cream of mushroom soup. I have thought about trying to make my own, but have never taken the time. We don't eat it very often, but it is very convenient. We buy the French's Fried Onions in the big bag at the warehouse market. We always used more than the recipe called for so this makes it even easier. Don't even try to read the ingredients.

Remember the squash I canned? I thought it would go well in this recipe, so I added two pints. I didn't tell Frank first, though, because it falls in the omnivore category.

Add the mushroom soup.....

then I fill each can half full of milk to swish out the remaining soup.

Add the squash.....
or not.

Add the meat.....
  
I use this slotted scoop to drain out some of the grease.

To this I add 3 cups of fried onions. 

 
Mix well and pour in baking dish.

 

Put a layer of fried onions on top. This is where you can put as many as you like. 







Bake at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes depending upon your ingredients and how big your pan is. This time I used my 14 x 10 for a large casserole to take to church for our luncheon. So I baked it for an hour.

 

Here is my trusty casserole carrier.

 

This casserole is easy to make, transport and share. We all eat lunch at church once a month right after the service. It is a good time of fellowship and a great place to get new recipes. This time we came home with some leftovers. Sometimes the pan is empty. The squash is a good addition to this casserole. I will have to see what else I can use it in. I am glad I have it on the shelf to add to recipes along the way. It is nutritious and we grew it. That always adds to the flavor. Frank even liked it.

Until next time - Fern

Wanna Be A Ham?

Hello, Frank here.

For those that like to plan ahead, I plan on a series of posts explaining ham radio - equipment, frequencies, bandwidths and information of that nature. I also will be providing information about how to obtain your ham

radio license. All of the information can be obtained online for free, perfectly legal, and you don't need your cousin Billy to do it for you. There are websites that you can also pay to help you get your license, but the only time you need to have contact with a human is when you actually take the test. To the best of my knowledge, these tests cost $15.00. You ask, "Where do I take the test?" I will show you how to find this information and the people you will need to contact.

So, short recap. Ham radio equipment, rules and regulations and how to obtain your ham radio license. Getting your license can easily be done online. A number of years ago someone told me that any person of reasonable intelligence can build a basic house. And I will modify that a little bit and say - Any person of reasonable intelligence can get their ham radio license.

Come back around, and we will get this process started in the near future. If you miss something it will be listed under Frank's Radio Communications. Look for Radio - Ham Introduction. No joke. Getting a ham license is not difficult. You will have to register with the FCC and take the test in a room full of (normally) old men and fork up $15.00. I did it. And if I can do it, just about anybody can do it.




We'll talk more later. 73, Frank 

Back to School

It's time for school to start in our neck of the woods which means I will be going back to work. This will be my 30th year teaching special education in a public school system. My experience covers a wide geography - from urban to remote bush Alaska - and many, many children. Working with these children has taught me much over the years and this profession has allowed us to live in some of the most challenging, adventurous places. I continue to be blessed with employment that I enjoy.

Because of my return to work, our blogging will decrease somewhat, but we will still be here. The usual adjustments are being made around the farm to accommodate more time away from home.

We are drying up one of our does to lessen the milk load. Velvet is producing less milk than One Stripe or Ivory so she was the likely candidate. It has been easy to switch to milking her every other day without any distention of her udder to worry about. Now I will switch to just checking on her to see if I need to take any more milk at all, or if she will just reabsorb what milk she has.

Time to tend to and process the garden will be squeezed in after work. The fall garden will hopefully be able to tend to itself for the most part. The weather is different this year with lows in the 60's in August. It almost feels like winter will come early, which is strange for this part of the world. We usually have temperatures around 100, with lows in the low 80's or upper 70's. If the frosts come early, I will do some more experimenting with the frost cloth I used in the spring for the late frosts. It may extend our harvest of winter squashes.

 

The winter squashes and pumpkins are growing well. I got about two thirds of the corn stalks moved to mulch behind the winter squash when I ran into a pile of fire ants. So the rest of the mulch will have to wait for them to move on after I disturbed them.

 

Today I got the sugar beets planted since the ground finally dried out enough to work. 




 

I tucked the snap peas in between the two volunteer tomatoes and the volunteer
 
  jalapeno on this partial piece of stock panel. It all fit just right. I think I will plant the carrots around the tomatoes after I can till in a few more weeds. The potatoes haven't come up yet. We will just have to wait and see how that goes. 

Like many folks this summer, we haven't had many tomatoes and I haven't been able to try my hand at making tomato sauce as I had hoped. But there will be another time and another garden, if all goes well with the world. We still have some peppers, okra, purple hull peas, squash and cucumbers to pick and process, not to mention the milk and eggs from the goats and chickens, so there will be more than enough to do.

So for the last day of summer vacation, I got some things planted in the garden, canned 9 pints of purple hull peas, made a quart of fresh salsa and cooked up 3 or 4 pints of green beans for a casserole to take to church tomorrow for lunch.

And for everyone that is following Frank's radio communications posts, we will soon be explaining the new radio he installed in the car today. It is the same radio we use for a VHF/UHF base station. This will help standardize what we are using and give me more power in the vehicle to reach home when I need to. We feel effective means of communication are more important than ever.

Until next time - Fern