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Happy New Year! 12 Highlights from 2023

I hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday season. We have, but we have also had a lot of sickness going through the family. If you have a big family, you know it takes a while to go through everyone. We are on round two here, with myself and the 6 youngest sick. Lord willing, this will be the last of the sickness for the winter!

Jay and I sat down in the warm living room by the wood stove yesterday afternoon and talked over our plans for 2024. That is one of my favorite things to do: make plans for improving our place and making good use of what we have and our time. Working towards a goal is always a good thing, and we have some great plans for this new year. Before I get into that though, I thought it would be fun to look back at some highlights from last year. It can be mighty hard to narrow things down to one picture per month, but that’s what I’ve done. I hope you enjoy looking back with me over some of the good things that happened in 2023.

January

We had a lot of piglets born in January! Jimmy’s sow was so tame and friendly that he could go in there and lie down with the piglets while they nursed. This is major fun for an 8 year old boy, especially when the sow and all the piglets belong to him! (Just so you know, this is Not normal, so if you are new to pigs, don’t send your son in with your sow!!) Besides keeping the wood stove stocked and doing school, January was all about pigs.

February

We had a very mild February. Ava had picked to grow the potatoes for the year so she and I got them planted. The soil was deep and soft from years of using our chickens to make good soil, and mulching with grass clippings. That made planting fairly easy and fun! We planted about 30 pounds of potatoes both from ones left from the previous year’s harvest and sprouted ones from Azure. We also planted peas and moved the laying hens out to pasture so we could give their pen a rest before planting it.

March

Part of March was pretty cold and rainy. It seems to be like that sometimes, a warm February and then a cold, wet March. Some of the baby goats came in some pretty bad weather but we kept them in the barn which was dry and warmer than outside. Kidding season is extremely fun! It’s definitely one of the highlights of the year. We had a crazy number of bucks born in 2023, but it was still a good kidding season, full of cute frisky babies. The weather finally did warm up and the pastures started turning green. Our kids spend a lot of their time in the goat field and down at the barn once the babies start coming. That is one of the great things about the goats, they are safe for even the little kiddos to hang out with all the time.

April

I love the Spring! Everything is green and there is new life everywhere. We ate outside continually and let the children run around and play afterwards. It was just enjoyable; that time of year when it’s good to just be alive and breath in the sweet spring air. After being cooped up in a small house in the winter, you can’t keep us in once spring arrives! This is also when we started harvesting peas and new potatoes from the garden. As you can see in the picture, supper is peas, potatoes and sausage from our pigs. At this point, we were able to cut back tremendously from what we were buying in the grocery store. The majority of our meals from this point on have been entirely from our farm.

May

Half the garden is planted in April and half is planted in May. I like to get things in as early as possible but it really depends on the weather. We plant in stages since some things can take cold as long as they have row cover over them for frost protection and other things, like tomatoes, cucumbers, melons and peppers really need the heat. This area here is the chicken pen garden. We’d already hauled loads of soil to the regular garden to build up the beds. The rest of the good dirt we left in place and made up into wide rows for the corn, tomatoes, peppers, cantaloupe and butternut squash. Using the chickens to make good soil is one of the best things we do each year. The benefit in the garden is unbelievable!

June

June was full of all kinds of gardening. That’s what filled ours days almost entirely. We sold goat kids, rotated pigs, worked on fencing and all that good stuff but for the most part, once summer is in full swing, so is the garden and the only way to stay on top of it is to be out there just about daily. At the very end of the month, we dug the potatoes that Ava and I had planted. Digging potatoes is fun, especially when the soil is so easy to work. We harvested a whopping 420 pounds from those 30 pounds we planted!

July

July meant starting a major renovation project in the kitchen. We tore out the old sheet rock and chimney and Jay built a huge pantry cabinet using wood from one of our old falling down tobacco sheds. This was a big project that actually took two months to finish but the improvement in the kitchen was like night and day. This is also the month that we harvested the field of potatoes that LeeRoy grew. He ended up with over 400 pounds and sold many of them to friends. We harvested and canned corn, made pickles, and again spent a majority of our time in the garden. 40 new piglets were born, which was pretty fun. Babies, stressful as they can be sometimes, are sure cute!

August

By the time August hit, we were neck deep in tomatoes! The older girls and I focused on getting them cooked down into thick sauce, and canned. We took a quick trip to the mountains to get peaches, and then canned them, made pies and froze peach pie filling. The men in the family worked really hard finishing up the pantry cabinet and the girls and I filled a lot of canning jars! It was a busy month!

September

September brought the realization that I had done zero school prep for the upcoming homeschool year. Fortunately, I have been at this long enough that I could pull it together in a couple of day and most of the books we needed, I already had. This was a month when we had a break from the constant garden and canning work. It was a month to slow down a bit, remember to enjoy things and not just work hard. The weather turned beautiful and the evenings were once again a great time for the children to play outside in the dusk, after supper. We sold a lot of pigs in September, and after some serious thinking and talking, decided that the kids were never going to make enough selling piglets. It was hard and sad, but the breeding stock was sold. All we had left were 14 feeder hogs, 8 of which have now been butchered. Some of the kids bought into our dairy goat operation with the money they made, and with a lot of talking and planning we all decided to downsize out meat sales and increase our dairy. There was some sadness on the part of closing down the pigs and lots of excitement on the part of adding in dairy cows. The older two kids, under instruction from Jay, started building a cow shed, and in the garden, we finished planting all the fall crops: broccoli, cabbage, peas, lettuce and 14 rows of carrots!

October

Around here, the weather is pretty much perfect in October. Jay and the boys starting bringing in our firewood. We heat with wood only and so getting in firewood is just as important as putting up food! The boys love splitting, and before school every day, they would take a mug of coffee and go out and split for an hour. They got the woodshed filled pretty quickly. This is also the month we got the garden mulched down with grass clippings, even cutting some of the fields with the mower for more grass. We took a load of pigs to the butcher and moved the laying hens off the pasture and onto the new garden site to start working the soil. We also butchered our pastured broilers and started filling up the freezer with meat for the winter.

November

In November, we went up to the mountains and brought back apples! After making applesauce and canning slices, the canning was done for the season: just over 400 jars. I can broth, baked beans and meat year round, but the majority of the canning work for the year was done. The canner was put away, and the last crops, except for the carrots that grow all winter, were harvested. The kids and I hauled truck loads of leaves to the chicken pen so the laying hens could go into their winter quarters and make garden soil. The older kids continued to work on the cow shed, the younger kids and I focused on school, and we took an overnight, two day vacation. The first in many, many years. Thanksgiving weekend was spent with my side of the family up in the Virginia mountains, celebrating my parents’s 50th Anniversary.

December

December rolled in with us going to the mountains again and buying a bred A2 Jersey heifer. The first step in our dairy cow plan. We all came down sick and our van broke down, which meant a few rather difficult weeks. Mid December, we butchered our last Dexter steer. That’s a big job and some of us were not all the way well, but it’s done and we have a lot of beef in the freezer now. We took a load of hogs to one of our favorite butchers in the…..you guessed it!…..mountains. We celebrated Christmas with Jay’s side of the family in NC and then a few days later went to NC again to pick up our two new Guernsey heifers, one bred and one ready to be bred in a few months. Another step in our dairy cow plan. I have always wanted a Guernsey and these girls are very sweet. We are all pretty thrilled to have them and can’t wait for calves to be born!

It’s been a good year. A lot has happened. We’ve worked hard and have had slower times of leisure. Mostly, what we enjoy is working at our place: making improvements, getting our hands in the soil, taking care of the animals and working together as a family. We are thankful for 2023, and look forward to what God has in store for us in 2024.

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How to make Creamy Crockpot Chicken

This recipe, thought up by me and named by the children, is a family favorite. It’s one of the easiest meals we make-if you don’t count raising the chickens, butchering the chickens and cutting up and freezing the chickens!-and so I wanted to share it with y’all because I know the Holidays can be a busy time and an easy, delicious meal can be really helpful!

When we butcher our broilers in the fall, we cut most of them up. Our broilers average 6 or 7 pounds dressed (plucked, gutted etc…..not wearing clothes😉) so we get some nice big pieces of meat. One of the cuts we do is boneless skinless chicken breasts. Depending on their size, we put 4-6 in each gallon bag and freeze them. Those are my favorite pieces of meat to cook, besides maybe bacon.

Broilers raised on pasture with fresh air and sunshine, no chemicals, no hormones and a quick clean butchering method have a completely different flavor than grocery store chicken. You can cook a pastured chicken without putting anything on it at all and it will taste delicious, and be tender and juicy. This is not just me saying this. Over the 15 years we have been raising broilers, we’ve sold thousands to customers and have heard again and again how amazing the meat is. In fact, my sister just called to tell me she recently ran into a gentleman in a distant city who had bought one of our broilers many years ago. Right away, he started talking about that bird he said tasted like it had been infused with herbs. THAT’S how great the difference is between pasture raised and grocery store chicken. If you only eat it once, you never forget the experience. If you always eat it, like we do, then succulent chicken is some of your favorite food.

Okay, now that I have trashed grocery store meat, let me just say, if you are not able to raise your own, there almost undoubtedly is a nice family not too far from you who raises and sells pastured broilers. There are thousands of families scattered across America who raise good meat. I have written a post on how to find them and I will link it at the bottom. Call them, email them, support your local farm family. It will benefit you, them and your community.

I’ll get off my soap box now and get on to the recipe.

After the breakfast dishes are washed, I pull out a bag of frozen chicken breasts and throw them in a bowl of hot tap water.

While the chicken is thawing, I pull out these three ingredients; 1 stick of butter, 1 8oz package of cream cheese and sour cream. These go into the bottom of the crockpot. I don’t cut up the butter or cream cheese. They go in whole. I put in a big scoop or two of sour cream, but not the whole container.

This is about how much I use from a 16oz container.

Once the chicken is mostly thawed, I cut it up across the grain to it will be easy to shred later. I make the pieces about this big and put them all in the crockpot, on top of the butter, cream cheese and sour cream.

Next, I sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper and turn the crockpot on to low. This doesn’t cook all day, so getting it on by about 10:00 in the morning is plenty early enough for a 5:00 or 6:00 supper.

After 6 or 7 hours of cooking, the chicken will look like this, which I have to admit, is decidedly unappetizing. Just hold on though, because it’s going to turn out alright! Take a fork and shred the meat with the back of it. It takes a bit to get all the pieces shredded but you will see as you go that it’s looking better and better, and the smell is wonderful!

Once it’s shredded like this, I let it cook on low a little longer while I cook noodles and butter and salt them. Once the noodles are ready, the creamy chicken can be spooned on top. Very simple and absolutely delicious. If there are any leftovers, they taste great the next day for lunch!

Here are some links that might be helpful

Our Set Up and System for Butchering Broilers

Our Favorite Grilled Chicken Recipe

What I buy in Bulk & How to find Good Meat to fill your Freezer

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How we make Sandwich Buns & Baby Pizza at Home

I want to share how we make our sandwich buns and baby pizza because these are staples in our house. We make sandwich buns a couple times a week and baby pizza once or twice a week, for lunch, sometimes more.

Since we homeschool, all the children are home all week for every meal. Lunch has always been the hardest meal to figure out for me because I am busy all morning teaching the kids. I can’t make a bunch of food or I will be in the kitchen instead of working with them. I have done different things over the years, and some worked better than other. If you homeschool a houseful of kiddos like I do, and you want your kiddos to eat homemade healthy food, you know it can be tricky.

For many years, I had the older kids start school on their own and I had 3 younger kids lined up at the island with their books while I washed the breakfast dishes (we don’t and never have, had a dishwasher) and started roll dough, got laundry on etc. I often think that a homeschool mom with a lot of kids has to be one of the busiest people on the planet! Lol

Anyway, as the kids have gotten older, I have been able to assign some of the household tasks to them to help me out, though generally once our school starts for the day (around 7:00), the kids work hard for several hours, so that they are all done by 11:30, when lunch preparation starts. Afternoons are for their own pursuits and homesteading work. This is how I was brought up and it was fantastic (!) so I am doing the same for my young’uns.

Back to making sandwich buns…..You see, now that I have been making roll dough for so many years, I am Really fast at it (plus, I have the help of my Bosch mixer😉), and, I have the help of my oldest who is fazing out of school. My oldest usually washes the breakfast dishes and throws a load of laundry on before getting her brother (next down in line) to study Theology. This gives me the opportunity to get my little people started and then work on roll dough, while keeping half an eye on them. I really like to sit next to them, individually, on the couch so that’s what I do between steps in getting my dough ready.

The recipe I use every time, is the one I wrote out last year, and it’s quite easy and straightforward. Once you make it for a while (or for 20 years!) you can just about do it in your sleep! Here is the link.

Our (very) Easy Whole Wheat Bread & Roll Dough Recipe

I double this recipe and knead it by hand after the Bosch is done kneading it. I find that with a double batch, it just needs a little more kneading than the Bosch will do. I use 100% whole wheat that is freshly ground (as in, we grind once a week), and we grind hard white. This is not white flour. Hard white wheat is whole wheat, but it’s lighter than hard red wheat, which is almost always the kind of whole wheat sold in grocery stores. When I knead my dough, I put down a layer of actual white flour I get from Azure and I knead with that. Then, into a Large bowl goes that big lump of dough to rise while we do school!

I generally have the dough finished around 8:30 or 9:00, depending on when I was able to start. When I have it finished by 8:30, it will be ready to be made into sandwich buns by 10:30 or so. I usually can get a break for a few minutes then, while all the kids together watch their Vocabulary DVD, which is the high point of their school day! I know, strange……but true. (It’s Compass Classroom Vocab, in case you want to see what they love….and, no, I don’t get paid to say that.😉)

Alright, so here’s what you’ve been slogging through all this homeschool stuff to get to: Making sandwich buns. When my dough has risen to about double, I punch it down gently. I’m always gentle with my dough. I squeeze (rather than pull, don’t pull your dough, break it off so you don’t stretch the gluten) 1/3 off of the lump and put it back in the bowl to make into a loaf. I make the rest of the dough into a big ball, and then set it on the cutting board that I kneaded on and is still floured, and push it out flat. Once I get it started like that, I use my rolling pin to get it about 1/2 an inch thick or a little more. The rolling pin gets the air bubbles out, makes the dough even and makes a nice top to my sandwich buns. Be careful not to roll the dough too thin. Remember, these are going to be sandwich buns, not pie crust! (The dough in the picture is a little on the thin side)

Next, I take my largest biscuit cutter and cut out rolls, careful not to twist the cutter in a circle to cut the dough. Twisting it will seal the edges of the roll and keep it from rising well. If the dough needs to be cut through, I go back and forth with the cutter, not around in a circle. A small detail, but it makes a difference in how the buns turn out.

When the buns are cut, I place them on a greased pan and let them rise, covered, for 15 minutes. All the scraps, I turn into regular round rolls. Some of the kids especially like them if I don’t press them together too hard and they are funny shaped. If there’s room, I put them on the same pan as the buns.

After they rise, I bake them in a preheated 350 degrees oven for 15-17 minutes. If we are going to have sandwiches, I put my loaf of bread in when they come out. If we are going to have baby pizza, the bread has to wait until the baby pizzas are done. I do not have a convection oven (much to my chagrin) but if you do, you could bake everything all at one time.

When baby pizza are going to be made, the kids take it from here. Several of the kids Love them, but some do not. I’m not going to force baby pizza on anyone. Lunch is sort of a free for all. I’m okay with a kid having a roll and cheese on the side, fruit or vegetable and/or some of my homemade baked beans, and a glass of milk (when we have goat milk).

This is what the baby pizza lover do: fist they split all the buns in half and lay them back on the cookie sheet. Then they take some of my good homemade spaghetti sauce that we canned up in the summer and put a small spoonful on each open bun.

Sometimes they use left over sauce we have from a spaghetti night, that has meat added to it. When we don’t have that though, they use sauce straight from the jar. They like that fine.

Next comes a thick slice of cheese. We get our cheese in bulk from Azure Standard and it is absolutely loved by everyone in the family.

Often this is all they put on their baby pizzas. Sometimes we have things from the garden to add but some of the kids just like them plain.

Into the oven they go until the cheese is melted. This is such a simple lunch but the kids really like it and, they make it themselves, which is a huge plus for me.

Sometimes for lunch we have chicken salad. This is from chicken we raised out on pasture during the summer and butchered ourselves. I canned quite a bit of chopped up chicken so it’s ready to go, which is a huge help when we need a quick meal.

I used to make all our chicken salad, but it’s sort of become my oldest daughter’s job nowadays. She has just the right touch. To a can of chicken she adds mayonnaise, mustard, salt and pepper. Very simple but delicious. Everyone loves chicken salad sandwiches, so that is a nice easy lunch that’s quick to clean up from.

Fresh buns like this are soft and moist. They really help make the sandwich just right. Once the buns are a day old, they’re not as soft. They can still be used for sandwiches, but fresh is definitely best. What most of us like to do with left over sandwich buns is to toast them in the oven the next morning for breakfast. They make really nice toast and remind me of an English muffin.

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How to make Soy Candles

Two days ago I made enough candles to last us several months, maybe even a year. It’s been a while since I’ve poured wax, but I used to make and sell hundreds every year. They are so easy and enjoyable to make that I almost wish I still sold them, but the truth is, I just don’t have time to make more than what our family uses, plus a few to give away.

I’m going to show you what you need to buy, and give you a small list of supplies you need that you probably already have. Then, we’ll get to the fun part; pouring wax! I bought some of my original candle making equipment from a company that is no longer in business, but I will let you know where I get some of my supplies now so you don’t have to go searching all over for what you will need. (No one pays me anything for recommending their stuff. Everything I ever write is my own opinion. I don’t earn a red cent.)

You are going to need:
-a pour pot to melt wax in
-wick ( from Lone Star Candle Supply, CD-18 6”)
-wick stickers
-fragrance ( from Candle Science)
-dye (some of mine are from Candle Science, some other places)

-jars & lids(I use square 1/2 pint mason jars from Candle Science and their black jelly lids)
-wick lids (these hold the wick in place until the wax is hard, Jay made these for me by drilling holes in plastic lids)
-scale (you don’t need a scale this fancy, this is one of our meat scales from our farmer’s market days)

-wax: Millennium Soy Wax from American Soy Organics is my absolute favorite wax! I used to buy this stuff straight from the company in huge 50# boxes. When I stopped selling candles several years ago, I tried some other brands of soy wax and none of them were as good as this. I don’t think you can order directly from the company anymore but I was able to get a few smaller bags off of Amazon. Definitely recommend this wax, especially for beginners.

This is what the wax looks like. Other companies sell flakes but I like these beads. They’re pretty fun…..as long as they don’t get spilled! They don’t roll so you have to pick up each individual bead. I have had small kids (old enough Not to put things in their mouth) helping me with wax beads for a long time. We used to fill 5 gallon buckets with them. It’s a great kid job!

Don’t forget your labels! Of course you don’t have to use these but they are fun to make and they’re pretty. If you sell your candles or give them away, a label is nice. I got all my labels at Vistaprint.

Here a list of things you will need that you probably have at home.
-medium size pot
-candy thermometer
-wooden spoon
-wax paper
-paper towels

Now let’s walk through how you actually make the candles. I’m going to write this for one pound of wax, which is one batch and put a double in parentheses. I almost always make a double. One pound of wax makes two 1/2 pint jars, a double batch makes 4 jars.

Turn your scale on and place your pour pot on it. Zero out the scale. Now, fill the pour pout with .94 pounds of wax (double is 1.88 pounds of wax).

Take your pot and fill it about halfway with water and place it on the stove. Place your pour pot in it and turn the pot on to low/medium. Put your candy thermometer in the wax. Let the wax slowly melt until it’s about 180-185 degrees. No need to stir. Just keep half an eye on the temp.

Once your wax has reached about 185, take it off and put it back on the scale. Zero out the scale and pour in .06 pounds of fragrance (double: .12 pounds of fragrance). I am using Love Spell here from Candle Science. It’s one of The Best fragrances, so if you don’t know where to start, start with that one. For me, I do 3 drops of blue dye (double: 6 drops) when I make Love Spell. You can do whatever colors you like. I keep a little notebook with each fragrance written down and the color or color blend I have worked out written underneath it. I have dozens of different ones with little notes like (very good!) or an X if it didn’t sell well or I didn’t like it. Keeping notes really helps so I encourage you to do it. Experiment with colors but just add a drip at a time. It is Very concentrated. When I work out a new color, I drip a little wax on a white piece of paper and then adjust it until I like what the drip looks like. It’s pretty fun. But, write down what your do because I guarantee you will never remember the next time you go to make candles!

Stir the fragrance and dye into the wax slowly. This is another job that is super kid friendly. You know how much kids like stirring things. They just can’t lick the spoon when they’re done!

The wax has to cool for a while, so it’s a good time to get your wick stickers on your wicks, which can be done by a kiddo…..because stickers are so fun!

A note about wick. You have to have the right size wick for the size jar you use. If your wick is too thin, the wax will not melt to the edges of the jar. If the wick is too thick, it will melt too much wax and the candle will not last long enough. I use 6” waxed cotton wick and the size is noted above. This is right for this size jar and it should take about 30 hours to burn.

Before adding wick, wipe the inside of the jars with a paper towel or clean dry cloth. I always wipe new jars too. Any dust in there will keep the wax from sticking to the sides like it’s supposed to. The wick stickers are two sided and Very sticky. I never let the kids actually stick the wick in the jar because they might have trouble getting it centered right and that would really bother me. I do my best to get them dead center by turning the jar over and looking at it from the bottom when I stick the wick in place.

You want your jars to be room temperature, not cold to the touch or the wax will not stick to the sides well and will look funny. While the wax cools, warm your jars.

As your wax cools, you need to keep stirring it occasionally. Hold up your wooded spoon and let the wax run off. Scrape the bottom of the pour pot, check the sides where the wax meets the pour pot. You want your wax to cool to about 95 degrees or so but the best way to tell if it’s the right temperature is just to keep an eye on it. Once you see wax start to harden a bit around the edge or you scrape the bottom and it looks like the picture above, it’s time to pour! If you think you are close, get your jars ready so you can pour immediately when you are ready.

Your jars should be sitting on wax paper so drips are easy to clean up. Slowly, fill each jar to the bottom of the neck. You can always add more if you have extra wax. You want your jars filled as evenly as possible so they look nice together. The reason behind stirring slowly and filling jars slowly is so that you are not adding air bubbles to the wax.

This is a close up of the lids we made to hold the wick in the center while the wax cools. Be gentle putting it through the little hole so you don’t pull it off the bottom of the jar. I have never had that happened but it would be a disaster if it did!

Don’t move the jars or you will make wax go up on the sides. Let them cool where they are. Now you can clean your pour pot and make another batch! Or, if you have two pour pots, like I do, you better be ready because the next batch of wax will be ready for some attention soon. I space my melting wax out enough that my first set of candles had hardened enough I can take the blue lids off right before I need to pour the next batch.

When I was making dozens at a time, I was able to do it all with just the equipment shown here. The two pour pots were all I needed. As soon as I poured 4 candles, I would refill the pot with wax and get it back in the pot of water. Sometimes, I really had to be on my toes because I always had babies and homeschooling and all the regular house stuff going on, but it was lots of fun!

After you let your jars cool overnight, you can clip the wicks to about 3/8” and put your lids on. You can just use regular scissors to cut the wick and you can just eyeball the wick length. No need to measure. If you need to bend the wick over to get the lid on, that’s fine too.

Now I want to share a couple tips. First, let’s talk about scent throw. You have cold throw, when the candle is not lit and hot throw, when it’s burning. Both are good to have. I like my candles to throw a scent across the room when their lid is off, however I will sacrifice a smaller cold throw for an excellent hot throw. Decided what is important to you. Of course experience is going to help a lot but it’s important to know what hot and cold throws mean when you are ordering fragrances.

Alright, remember how I told you it’s important to wait until your wax is cool enough to start to harden just a bit in the pour pot? If you do that, your candles will have a nice smooth finish like the picture above. If you pour too hot, the candle will not cool well and will have a finish like the picture below; still usable but not pretty.

My advice is to put your pour pots away clean and to clean them between each batch of candles if your fragrance and/or color is different. They are easy to clean. Just stick your pour pot back in the pot of hot water and most of the wax will melt quickly. Wipe that out well with a paper towel. If there is still hard wax around the pouring lip, then pour the pot of hot water into the pour pot. Wait a few minutes until the whole pour pot is hot and the wax on the lip is melting. Then, take it and dump the water out in the woods (not down your drain!). Bring a few paper towels with you so you can wipe the pour pot immediately. I clean my candy thermometer and wooden spoon the same way.

Your whole house is going to smell amazing on the days you make candles. There are so many fragrances to choose from (Candles Science is where I get all mine these days). I would start with a few that you think will be sure winners and a few basic colors. Don’t forget black for darkening things up. Just FYI, a good red is very hard to get so I wouldn’t start with that. You don’t even have to put dye in. Plain white is really pretty also.

You can also do layered candles with different colors and fragrances. Those are pretty fun to do too.

Have fun with it and make them just for your family and as gifts………OR, if you are looking for a small side business that the kids can help with and easily fits in around other things (like homeschooling), and will give you a lot of joy to make, then you should think about selling soy candles. I sold candles at the farmer’s market (to make my table pretty since I was selling meat and you can’t really display that……other then a bunch of coolers!) and at the small farm to fork store we had in town. People absolutely loved my candles! I had several regular customers and they just raved over them. People even ordered in bulk for Christmas and drove out to my house to pick up their order. Our town is small and I have no special talents for selling things, but I sold a ton of candles! If people can see and smell their amazing fragrance, they sell themselves!

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How we Made a Firewood Holder

We heat our home entirely with the wood stove so there is a constant amount of firewood going on and off the porch from fall until winter. Jay has been wanting to make something to hold our firewood on the porch for a number of years. We have been just stacking it in a pile but we have new siding on that part of the house and it’s been a big concern of ours that the firewood did not hit it and mess it up. The kids keep us supplied with firewood and I remind them often to be careful, and they have been. No damage on our new porch so far, but we really have needed to do something better than just a pile.

Jay had an idea of what he wanted. A few years ago, his brother made something similar and sent a picture to him. His brother had gotten the idea from somewhere else (not sure where…..) so none of us can lay claim to this bright idea, but we can pass along what we did in case it’s helpful to you.

I didn’t get a picture at the very beginning because I didn’t know that Jay had LeeRoy, our 15 year old son, already going on it. Jay had to repair the fuel tank on the backhoe and I thought the firewood holder was going to wait until he was done. But, nope! One of the benefits of having teens who have been taught how to do things is they can take on whole projects on their own!

This project was constructed with two window well pieces we bought at Lowe’s and some scraps of wood we had around the place. The window wells do not make a complete circle, so he cut pieces of a 2×10 to go between them. Then he built a stand and attached plywood to the back. Lastly, he pained it with flat black rust-oleum that we bought both for this and for the backhoe fuel tank. As a side note, it’s a nice thing to have been homesteading and collecting things for so many years that we don’t have to buy Everything to get a project done!

The back is up. Those window wells are a bit sharp but it’s fine because plywood covers it. The front is rounded.

Our boys are really big on sanding things and making them smooth…..even the back of the firewood holder! After LeeRoy cut out the back, he routed the edge, which makes it rounded instead of sharp. Jay used to be a professional cabinet and house builder so he knows how to do all the things, and he’s taught the kids.

Completely built and ready to be painted. There is a block at the top that he screwed the plywood to, so it’s nice and tight all the way around.

It took two coats of rust-oleum to get a good cover on it.

All finished! This is how the back looks.

And, this is the front.

Close up of how he screwed the window well to the 2×10.

This is how it looks on the porch, nice and neat with a little protection on the side if rain comes from the East. We won’t have to worry about the siding getting cracked anymore!

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Going on Vacation for Pennies & Making Applesauce

Y’all, we have had a lot going on! When things get super busy, I have a lot to write about, but I don’t have time to write! I’ve taken pictures for a few different post and will hopefully get them written and up before long. Right now, the days are perfect for outside fall work, but we are not yet finished with our canning for the year, so we have to make both things a priority.

Over the last few weeks while I have not written a whole lot, we have sold several large breeding hogs and taken several other large hogs to the butcher. We also took one night away in the mountains, which is almost unheard of for us. Whether for lack of a dependable vehicle, or lack of finances or having animals in milk, we have rarely been anywhere but home all of our children’s growing up years. We’re fine with that because we love our farm and don’t feel the need to get away, but this year, I had a fun idea. Jay and I were given a very large empty pretzel jar many years ago and we started putting our pennies, nickels, quarters and dimes in it as a sort of insurance for hard times. When work was bad and we needed money for bills or groceries, we rolled our coins. I can’t tell you how many times we sat at our table while the dreary rain was falling and Jay was out of work, and we rolled money to get by. We always use cash when we buy things so we always have change, and that change, however small and insignificant it might seem, has saved us many a time.

Times have been better for years and we have not needed to dig into our jar of change to pay bills. In fact, that big old plastic change jar filled right on up over several years. I had decided (without telling anyone so no one would be disappointed if it didn’t work out) that if we ever got that thing filled up, we would take a family vacation with the money. Well, guess what? It did! The kids spent days rolling all the change and we took it to the bank in several very heavy loads and came back with cash money…..enough for one night in a mountain cabin that would easily sleep our whole big family.

We visited the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, which is a 2 mile hike around actual buildings from the 18th century that were brought over from Ireland, England and Germany. Of course our favorite part was seeing the American farms from the 19th century that were taken down from other places in Virginia and set back up at the museum. Talking to the interpreters about history and farming just pretty much makes my day. We are a history loving family every bit as much as we are a farm loving family.

Besides visiting the museum, we enjoyed the mountains by hiking a small part of the Appalachian Trail, and stopping by an orchard to buy apples, 4 big boxes of them. I had wanted to get 8 boxes, but the van was already crammed with 4, so that’s what we went with. When I buy apples from an orchard, I always buy seconds. They are usually half price and except for some being small and a few blemishes, I really don’t see anything wrong with them. For us, they are exactly what we need because we make most into applesauce or pie filling anyway. In my opinion, you really can’t have too many apples and I wish we could grow our own, but with Apple Cedar Rust wiping out our apple trees several years ago, we depend on the orchards in the mountains to provide the apples we use.

First thing Monday morning, we started getting on applesauce. I have been making applesauce since I was a kid and except for a couple changes, I do it exactly the same way as I did back then. It’s one of the easiest foods to make and can. I’m going to walk you through what we do in case you have not made and canned applesauce before and you want to give it a try.

Here’s the biggest change of how I do things now, compared to when I was a kid. Back then, I used a potato peeler to peel the apples and then I sliced them up by hand. That is a totally fine way to make applesauce, in fact I made some up real quick like that a couple weeks ago. You probably have a peeler, so you don’t need to buy anything.

However, if you plan to make a lot of applesauce every year, than investing in this apple peeler/corer is worth it. I bought this a year or so after we were married and it’s still in great shape. The only problem is the rubber that was glued onto it to help hold it to the cutting board came off. It slipped without that rubber so we cut rubber out of the side of an old rubber boot, washed it up and have been using that for years. Works great! We do tighten the peeler down with pliers or it slips. If it’s tight, you can peel and core apples really fast…….And, in our family, the kids love using it soooo much, they actually do all the work!

We save all the peels and cores to juice and fill both my stock pots with slices.

As soon as the pots are ready, I get them on the stove and get them turned on to medium high. I fill each pot about 3/4 of the way with hot tap water. The apples will come to a boil and I just let them do their thing with no stirring for a while.

Once I start stirring, they look like this and I turn the stove down to about medium or medium low. It’s really important not to let it burn. Apples in water won’t burn but the closer it gets to applesauce, the more likely it is to burn. Burned applesauce is a real pain to clean off the bottom of a pot. Don’t ask me how I know.

When it has cooked down enough that all the little pieces of apple are soft, I add a couple spoonfuls of cinnamon. Some people add sugar but I don’t. The apples are sweet enough for us and I try to keep extra sugar out of our diet. At this point, if I had an immersion blender, I would use it, but I don’t. So, I put a little elbow grease into it and stir the pot, so to speak, until the applesauce is the consistency that we like. I don’t want large slices but we like chunky applesauce. If you like it smoother, you can cook it longer and keep stirring…..or buy an immersion blender.

Now, it’s time to get my canner going and fill jars. I don’t heat my jars up but they are not cold to the touch. I fill them to about 1/2 an inch or so from the top, run my finger around the rim, and put the lids and bands on.

I have a steam canner, which I love! This takes the place of a water bath canner, not a pressure canner. It heats up fast and is easy to use because I don’t have to lower my jars into a huge pot of boiling water. I have used this thing since I only had two kids (I keep track of everything in life by how many kids I had at the time or who I was pregnant with. Lol), and it’s still like new.

This is what it looks like without the lid on.

This is the huge lid that traps the steam. When it heats up enough, steam will come out the small hole in a steady stream. Once that happens, I turn the pot down from high to about medium or medium high and start my timer. For applesauce, it’s 20 minutes. That’s it! After pressure canning all summer, using the steam canner to make applesauce is like a dream.

I can get 7 jars, one canner full, out of each 12 quart pot, if it was heaped with apple slices. So far, we have 27 quarts of applesauce and 3 quarts of juice. I used my steam juicer to make apple juice with all the peels and cores.

If you would like a how-to on my steam juicer, below is a post I wrote about making wild blackberry juice and jelly.

How to use a Steam Juicer to make Blackberry Jelly & Blackberry Syrup

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Rendering Lard in the Crockpot

It’s been a long time since I’ve rendered lard. I’ve been out for quite a while and even though it’s been in the back of my mind to do it, I just didn’t feel like I had the time during the heavy harvest and canning season. Now that it’s slowed down, I decided that with the price of store bought fat being what it is, I Really needed to make rendering lard a priority.
In the past, I have rendered lard in a big pot on the stove top but this time I decided to render it in the crockpot since I had to run into town for a bit and didn’t want to leave the stove top turned on. Turns out that it was so easy and worked so perfectly in the crockpot that I will continue rendering lard this way.

I’m not going to go into all the health benefits of lard. That’s for another post. Suffice it to say, any fat coming off our pastured hogs, that consume only what they forage and non-GMO grain, is far more healthy than anything I could buy from the store. And, since we get lard back from the butcher, it’s already paid for when we pay for our meat, and the price is much less than the grocery store equivalent. It’s pretty much a no-brainer that I should be keeping us in rendered lard……but somehow, even though it’s not a hard thing to do, in the busyness of raising 8 children and growing a garden and canning and cooking and laundry and a million other things, the lard got left in the freezer……for.a.very.long.time.

Smart Momma that I am though😉, I am now in the process of teaching my teen age son how to render the lard. Maybe, between him and me, we can keep us in lard. Here’s how we rendered it in the crock pot.

Right after the breakfast dishes were done, we got the frozen package of lard into a sink of hot water. All we wanted to do was get the lard loose from the plastic package. Thawed lard is just about impossible to chop so the idea was to keep it as frozen as possible.

Leaf Lard, like it says on the package is the highest quality lard from the fat around the kidneys. You can render fat from other places on the hog but leaf lard is the most pure, and will give the least amount of “pork” taste.

This is where the strong arm of a teen boy is very helpful! So glad I didn’t have to chop that up myself. Yes, I have done it many times but it’s not easy to cut and you can’t be lazy. The smaller the chunks, the better, because you will have more lard and fewer cracklings that way.

I had LeeRoy fill the crockpot right on up. I have a bigger crockpot, but I thought this one could handle the job just fine. Of course as it melted, the level went down.

This is what it looked like at 9:45 in the morning. I left the lid off, turned the crockpot on low and left it to do it’s thing.

Four hours later it looked like this. I had not messed with it at all during that time.

Giving it a good stir, made it look like this. I then left it again for several hours.

After supper, the lard looked like this. It wasn’t bubbling anymore and I decided it was time to take it off the heat. I scooped the cracklings out with a slotted spoon and set them aside.

The liquid lard looked like this.

I used the funnel we have for milk and a milk filter to strain the lard. This was the exact right kind of filter. Lard does not go through coffee filters easily, and you can use several layers of cheesecloth, but I don’t have any cheesecloth! A milk filter worked perfectly.

When lard is hot, it’s this golden color but when it cools, it will turn pure white!

I got 4 1/2 pint jars of pure lard. I wanted them to cool over night before I put lids on so there wouldn’t be any moisture build up on the inside of the lid, so I covered them with a clean dish towel.

The cracklings got dumped back into the crockpot and cooked on high for another hour or two. When I pulled them out, I strained them through a wire colander. They were much crispier than the first time I’d pulled them out.

I let them drip into a bowl for a while and them dumped them out onto a paper towel to get a bit more of the grease off. I got another half pint of lard, but this lard still has little bits of cracklings in it so it will be used first and kept in the fridge. I put the cracklings in a gallon ziplock bag and into the freezer they went. We like to use them on salads and I think the kids will want them in their scrambled eggs.

In the morning, the cooled lard looked a beautiful pure white.

In the past, I have always kept rendered lard in the fridge. It will last a very long time there. However, these days, I do not have a second fridge like I used to. In fact, the fridge I do have is smaller than most regular kitchen refrigerators, which, for our family of 10, can be quite a challenge! I certainly don’t need anything in there that doesn’t have to be in there. Lard can be kept on a shelf in a cool, dry place for up to 6 months to a year. Since our only source of heat is the wood stove in the living room, everywhere else is cool from fall until spring. Therefore, I am keeping my lard in the back closet where it should stay cool for a long time, probably until it’s used up. I would not do this in the summer because we don’t we central air and our house is pretty hot all summer long. For now I plan to render lard in small batches like this so that storage for it is easy to deal with. If I end up with a second fridge again one day, I may do a whole bunch at once and put it in quart jars like I used to.

Altogether, from start to finish, the lard took about 10 hours. I probably could have taken it off the heat a little sooner and been fine. Most of those 10 hours required nothing from me. That’s the biggest difference between stove top and crockpot. Rendering in a pot on the stove requires one to stir often and to generally keep half an eye on it. The crockpot basically only needed to be stirred once about 4 hours in. For me, this is definitely the method to use.

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How to Make No Sugar Protein Bars

This recipe is super easy and is quickly becoming a family favorite. It’s my adaption of the protein bars that Ruth Ann Zimmerman makes from the YouTube channel Homesteading With The Zimmermans.

Some of the ingredients I use are organic and some are from Aldi, because that’s what’s in our budget. I would like to get to where all the ingredients are organic and the chocolate chips sweetened with the herb stevia. Maybe we will some day. For now, this is what I use.

For reference, the quick oats and honey are from Azure, the peanut butter from Food Lion and the peanuts and mini chocolate chips are from Aldi. That’s all the ingredients it takes. I chop the nuts in my Cuisine Art because the kids like it better that way.

It works best to pulse them, rather than just run it on the “on” setting. This is the size I chop the nuts to.

Once the peanuts are chopped I pull out a mixing bowl and put in:
-2 cups chopped peanuts
-2 cups quick oats
-1 bag mini chocolate chips, which is about 2 cups

All that gets stirred together and set aside.
In a new bowl I combine:
-1 cup honey
-1 cup peanut butter

When the peanut butter and honey is stirred together, pour it on top of the dry mixture. The hardest part of this whole thing, is mixing the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients. It takes a bit of elbow grease but it’s important to get it mixed well or the bars will be crumbly when you cut them later.

Once everything is well mixed, press it into a 9×13 pan. This can be a bit tricky because the dough wants to stick to your fingers. It doesn’t have to be completely flat on top, but it does have to be pushed together well. Place the 9×13 in the fridge overnight or for several hours. In this Momma’s humble opinion, it’s not a bad idea to cut the protein bars into the size you want before you set them on the table for the family to dig into……They are good enough that they just might disappear faster than you expected!

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What we grew in our 3,900 square foot Garden, and is it enough to feed our family of 10 for a year?

We are just about to the end of the growing season. I have a few things that will go into the cold weather with row covers, but for the most part, the bulk of the growing season is over. This year, for the first time, I actually managed to keep records of everything we harvested. I have done this sort of half hazard before, but this year, I really wanted to know how many pound we were harvesting and how many quarts we were putting up. We are a big family, and we eat an unbelievable amount of food. Most of that food we produce ourselves. My idea in the garden is not to count seeds (plant so many per person) as some popular homesteaders are saying to do, but rather to grow as much food as I possibly can, doing it well and keeping the garden under control. Believe me, if I grow it, we’ll eat it!

Our garden is long and skinny. This is because half of it is actually the chicken pen. The chicken are in their pen in the winter and out on pasture during the gardening season. This has to be done in a particular way, which, if you have been following me for a while, you know I like to talk about. If you are new, I have several post about using the chickens to make garden dirt, how I deep bed the chickens and growing a garden in the chicken pen. All of that is under the “chickens” tab. Anyway, just for reference, the garden is 33 feet wide and quite long. The garden is divided in two, half being what I call the regular garden and half being the chicken pen garden. Down the center of the regular garden I have a path wide enough for the wheelbarrow. On either side, I have rows that I called raised beds, though they do not have wood around them. Each raised bed is roughly 3 feet wide and 12 feet long. I have narrow paths between each 3 foot bed. It’s not exact. In fact, I have more beds on one side of the center path than I do on the other side.

In the picture, the center path has the red hose lying in it. These beds planted in corn don’t look real high because we have a lot of grass clippings in the paths to keep the weeds down. In reality, these beds are about a foot high, full of good loose black dirt we made ourselves.

You can see the dirt a little better in this picture. This was taken about a week after we harvested potatoes, after the dirt was thrown back up into rows so we could plant our second crop of corn.

We plant a little differently in the chicken pen garden, and that’s partly because we made a massive compost pile for the chickens to go through along the upper side of the fence. We do not have a center path, but instead have longish rows to plant in.

This is what we have out in the chicken pen garden right now, and this is how I keep from having to can a million jars. We eat fresh food for as long as I can possibly work it. Yes, I canned. I put up over 300 jars, but I would have to put up a whole lot more if I didn’t succession plant. I have done a post on succession planting too, but basically what it boils down to, is every time something comes out of the garden, we replant in Something! If you do this, you can grow a Lot of food in a relatively small area. I don’t let my garden be bare anywhere, anytime, except for the dead of winter.

So, for example, instead of planting one huge crop of beans and canning enough quarts to last the rest of the time, we plant several small crops and pick fresh beans from the beginning of June until mid or late October, depending on when the frost hits. That’s 5 months of fresh beans. Once the beans are done for the year, we probably won’t even need to open a can for quite some time because a ton of broccoli will be coming in……and peas, carrots, and hopefully cabbage and lettuce. All of those are cool weather crops and with my row covers, I can take them into December, and maybe even January for the carrots. With all that fresh food still coming in, we won’t have to get into things like corn and beans until the dead of winter. Then, we have a few months when we are hunkered down. Spring peas get planted in February and potatoes in March and by April/May we have fresh food coming out of the garden again. That is how I feed us home grown food in the simplest way I know how. I would a whole lot rather spend my time in the garden growing fresh food, than spending my time in the kitchen putting up a ton of food and then feeding us from that.

Of course there are some crops that have to be put up when they come in and they need to last until the following garden season like tomato sauce and pickles etc. But, even with those, I don’t feed us what I have canned until the growing season is over. We make fresh sauce when we need sauce up until there just aren’t any more tomatoes.

Okay, so now that you understand how I plant and grow my garden, let me get down to sharing what we got out of the garden. Some things are not measured, like the millions of fresh beans and fresh peas we ate. I weighed the big stuff and I did record what I canned. Here goes.

Regular Garden:

-Garlic: not a huge amount but enough for what we want fresh

-Carrots: Spring carrots just gave us a few meals. We have thousands of carrots planted now though that will take us right into winter. We’ll cover them with light loose mulch or row covers, and eat them fresh as long as they last. When the second crop of corn and the sweet potatoes came out, we cleaned up the beds and planted carrots, so basically most of the regular garden is planted in carrots now. That is a Lot of carrots! I have a post specifically on growing carrots in the winter, if you are interested. Carrots grow better and taste better in the cold, especially once there has been a frost or two so this is my main carrot crop. We will harvest as we need them. I don’t “put up” carrots most of the time but prefer to keep them in the ground until we need them.

-Peas: We got a bumper crop of peas in the spring. I plant them mid winter so we have pease at the beginning of May. They can take frost. It actually makes them do better than heat does. We ate spring peas steadily until the first crop of green beans started coming in. We have a small fall crop that we are just about to start harvesting.

-Sweet Potatoes: We planted 40 plants that we sprouted from last year’s potatoes. Our harvest was something over 100 pounds.

-White Potatoes: we planted 30 pounds and harvested 420 pounds. Let’s just say the potatoes did Very well this year! We have a small fall crop of potatoes that we will harvest right before our first frost. The main crop was planted in March and harvested in June. We still have lots of potatoes and I’m hoping they will take us though the winter.

-Strawberries: Gallons and gallons! We ate them fresh, froze them and made 33 pints of strawberry jam and 21 pints of strawberry/blueberry jam. The girls also sold several gallon buckets of them to friends.

-Cucumbers: We had enough cucumbers for fresh eating and we made 20 jars of pickles. Some of those were small jars. I have so many pickles left from last year that we didn’t make cucumbers or pickles real high on the list this year. Next year we will need to again. I actually have some cucumber plants I planted really late just to see if I could do a second crop. We are about to pick fresh cucumbers from the garden again! Crazy!

-Corn: We planted our late crop when the potatoes came out. We didn’t really need to put more corn up and it was pretty full of corn worms so we fed it to the pigs. There was quite a bit so it helped us on our feed bill which was good because the price of feed is high these days.

-Beans: We started eating bean in June from seeds we planted before our spring frost date and covered with row cover. All summer long we planted bean seeds whenever there was empty ground and no other crop had to go in.

-Onions: We planted onions in early spring and got a good crop. We ate them fresh for a bit but once they were harvested, we got them chopped and into the freezer. I have a post on how I freeze onions, if you are interested.

-Cherry Tomatoes: We had 6 Sweet Million cherry tomatoes and they produced Millions of tomatoes!!! These were some of The Best tasting cherry tomatoes I have ever had! We will definitely be growing them again.

Chicken Pen Garden:

-Tomatoes: We planted 30 tomato plants, 10 were Rutgers and 20 were San Marzano. We ate fresh tomatoes starting in July and are still eating them, though they are definitely giving way to disease now. Next year, I want to plant fewer eating tomatoes and more San Marzano, which is a Roma type and great for sauce. We canned 67 quarts of sauce.

-Peppers: We grew just 4 bell pepper plants from seed we saved from last year’s plants. We have way too many peppers with just those 4 plants! The plants are huge and have been producing like crazy for months! We have chopped and filled quite a few quart bags for the freezer, have eaten them, giving them away and are pretty much putting them on the compost pile now. We do plan to save more seeds for next year.

-Butternut Squash: I only had room to plant 4 seeds but we got a heaping wheelbarrow full of squash. In the past I have used cattle panels as a hoop trellis but I didn’t this year because we didn’t have any spare cattle panels. Next year I’m going to use them again. The plants take up less space and I think the squash turn out better on the trellis, rather than lying on the ground. We use butternut squash in pace of pumpkin in recipes.

-Cantaloupe: We tried a new variety of cantaloupe this year and it was a complete flop. The fruit rotted before it even seemed ripe. We’ve grown nice cantaloupe for years, so this was a big disappointment.

-Corn: we grew 6 double planted rows of corn and got a great harvest! We ate lots of fresh corn and canned the rest: 30 quarts & 8 pints. The stalks went to the pigs.

-Beans: We have two double planted rows of beans and have been eating a ton of them fresh. I have canned 20 quarts, some from this garden, some from the regular garden when there were beans over there.

-Broccoli: The broccoli is just about ready to begin harvesting. I have it in different stages so we will probably be harvesting over a long period of time. I don’t remember how many plants I have but I think it’s around 50 or 60. We did get hit with cabbage worms really badly. I spent a lot of time out there squishing worms by hand. It looks like we are going to get a nice big harvest which is great! We are all ready for broccoli!

-Cabbage: I have never grown cabbage before so I don’t have anything to say except that we have 8 plants out there and we’ll see how it goes.

After all the harvesting is over, the chickens will come in off the field and go back into their pen to clean it up, and we will be deep bedding them with leaves.

This summer I canned:
-pickles
-potatoes (most dry canned, some regular)
-corn
-beans
-jam
-tomato sauce
-pickled peppers & tomatoes
-broth (from our pastured broilers)
-peaches (from an orchard in the mountains)
Over 300 jars so far.
I still have apple sauce to can in November.

Hopefully, this will last us through until next spring. I think it will. Of course we have our own meat, milk and eggs that we rely heavily on, so things from the garden are usually sides, not the main part of the meal.

Here’s the million dollar question…..do we think we need to expand the garden? The answer is, Yes. Even if we make it through the winter, I don’t think we are going to have an over abundance. I think we’re going to scraping the bottom of the barrel by the time we start getting the first small harvests in the spring. That means we need more growing space.

After thinking and talking it over a lot, we have decided to chop off the end of the goat field next to the regular garden and turn it into the area where we grow our fruit and the long vining crops that take up so.much.space. This is a really big decision because I don’t want to take on more than I can do well. I have made that mistake before and I don’t want to do it again. We are still figuring out exactly how I am going to turn a field, that was woods a few years ago, into a nice garden with very little equipment. I have some ideas that I will share in a later post and I will definitely take y’all along as best I can to show you how I am doing this. Big plans ahead, that’s for sure!

I will end with a little beauty, because even though the flower gardens are past their prime now, it’s nice to remember that they did look fresh and pretty a few months ago.

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How to Grow Strawberries

Now that it’s finally cooled down, this is the time to prepare your strawberry bed and get it ready for planting. If you plant strawberries now, they will produce in the spring. First year production is not super high but it’s a start. Second and third year plants produce an abundance of berries, if they have been cared for properly. As the plant matures, the flavor of the fruit also improves. This is not to discourage you into thinking that first year plants produce a small amount of less than tasty strawberries! But, it’s just to help you understand that as the plant gets established, it does better and better…..until it doesn’t.

When I was a kid, I had a strawberry field and I replaced plants every two years. Now, I am okay waiting for three years. But at that point, the plants are old and need to come out to make room for the younger more vigorous ones. Really, I think the second year is the strongest one, so you will just have to decide what works for you, but it is going to be important to keep track of how old your plants are.

Ideally, I like to have several beds that can be used for strawberries and that’s how we have it set up in our garden. We have old three year strawberries that are going to come out as soon as the runners are removed. Those beds will be planted with something other than strawberries for a few seasons. We also have beds that were planted in strawberries last fall. They did okay this past spring but we’re counting on them to be our big producers next spring, when they are two years old. We also are about to put in new beds with runners (baby strawberry plants) that we are digging up right now from the old beds. Those beds will be our small producers next spring because they will still be getting established.

So, what you will have is:
-First year plants, planted in the fall that will produce a small but good crop the following spring, then they will put out runners.
-Second year plants that produce an abundant crop with really sweet berries, then they will put out runners.
-Third year plants that are getting old and crowded but will produce well and the berries will be exceptionally sweet. They will produce runners. Then the plants need to come out. The runners can be transplanted to a new bed.

When we plant strawberries, we put each plant about 8 inches to a foot apart. We currently have beds that are 3 feet wide and 12 feet long. We plant three rows of plants in each bed, and then mulch between the plants with pine straw or grass clippings to help keep weeds down. When the temps get down around freezing, the plants get a nice blanket of leaves or pine straw on them. We are in zone 7b and the plants can take the cold winters without dying but they will do much better in the spring if they have been covered with a thick light mulch all winter. When spring hits, the leaves can be gently raked off the plants. Usually, there are very happy, bright green plants underneath! After the plants produce their first crop of berries, they will send out runners and start to fill in the gaps between the plants.

You can see the bigger original plants in this picture and the smaller runners that are starting to fill in. (I took this picture in June, after the plants were done producing.) It’s fine to let the runners just go ahead and fill in how they want to all summer long.

Sometimes runners will look like this with their roots exposed. Usually I don’t worry about it, but you can put a little dirt on top on the roots and gently press the dirt down. Don’t put the dirt up too high. That is the number one mistake people make when they are planting strawberries. (I’ll go over soil depth in a bit.) For the most part, runners should just be left alone to do their thing. If they fill in too much and take over the path as well, you can transplant them once cooler weather hits in the fall. Strawberries transplanted in the summer will almost never make it. Their roots are very shallow and they cannot handle the stress of being uprooted in the heat.

Once the weather cools, though, you can clip baby plants from their mothers as long as they have roots in the ground. Then you can dig them up and move them to a new bed.

I took this picture this evening of one of our strawberry beds. This bed was planted last fall in three rows. See how think it is now?! My oldest girls dug up quite a few plants that had rooted in the path on both sides of the bed. That’s how many runners plants can put out the first year. We are expecting a big crop from this bed next spring. (Yes, there are peach trees in the bed, awaiting even cooler fall temps to be moved.)

In this picture, you can see the three year old plants where the girls are picking. They produced a Ton of berries! Every few days, the girls would pick a few gallons. We made a bunch of jam, strawberry bars, ate them fresh and the girls sold gallons. At the bottom of the picture, you can see the first year plants and how sparse the bed is. Now, it is completely filled in, like the picture above, and the third year plants really need to come out.

The third year plants looked like this mid summer, just a sea of plants! Now, they do not look good and weeds have moved in. We’ll take some of the runners for new beds and pull out everything else.

It really is best to keep up with the weeds. Clearly, we have not done that! We have soft, loose soil because we make our own soil and do not plant in the ground, but rather on top of it, in our rich black soil. That makes pulling weeds pretty fast and doable, even if the beds look as overgrown as this. The girls and I worked together and it didn’t take us long to have the beds looking like this.👇

These are first year plants, starting to fill in.

Now I want to talk about three things that will make or break your strawberry garden.
-soil quality
-water
-planting depth

First, we’ll talk about soil quality. Strawberries are not going to do well in heavy dirt, hard packed dirt or depleted dirt. Their leaves will be small and small leaves mean small berries, or, no berries at all. We make our own soil using the chickens. It’s a simple process of adding an absolute Ton of leaves and old hay and weeds, compost etc to the chicken pen and having them turn it into rich, black dirt over the winter. In the spring, we move the chickens out to pasture and use all the dirt they made. I have several posts under the “chicken” tab of my blog if you want to see how we do this, in more detail. Anyway, what we plant our berries in is very rich, very black, loose, nutrient dense soil. Once we move it out of the chicken pen, plant and then mulch, the soil becomes loaded with earthworms. Earthworms are how I judge my soil. Lots of earthworms, 👍. No earthworms, we have a problem! So, I encourage you to go turn over a shovel full of garden dirt. Did you find a bunch of wriggling worms…..or none?

If you have worms, go ahead and plant in your soil and be sure to mulch. Earthworms love grass clippings, so mulch with grass clippings, if you can, to feed what you have and bring in more. If you don’t have any worms, I would start adding things to the soil and on top of the soil that they like. Somehow, earthworms show up if you put food out, or in(!) for them. They like grass clippings, as I just mentioned, but you can also run over fall leaves with your mower so they are chopped and add them too. Old, rotting hay is good, and of course if you have aged compost that’s great too. Chickens make the best dirt, and I cannot recommend highly enough using them over the winter to work for you in that way, if you have chickens. Of course, you can buy soil, but I am not a fan of that sort of thing when it’s easy to make your own and what you make will be much better quality than anything you can buy. I like to spend as little money as possible when I garden, and buying soil definitely does not fit into that category. It takes a while to build really excellent soil, but you can do it completely with what you have on hand, and if you stay with it each year, your soil will get better and better and Better!

Watering is next and this is fairly straight forward. Your berries need water. We live where it gets very hot in the summer and does not rain enough to supply what the garden needs. If you live in an area like this, water your berries. If they are suffering in the dry soil and hot weather, then the plants are getting stressed. You don’t want them sopping wet all the time, but I think everyone knows that. Usually people don’t over water, they under water. So, give those plants water! They will thank you by having nice bright green leaves in the summer and giving you a nice harvest in the spring. You should be able to tell if they need a drink. When they are setting berries, they need water, though often here, spring rains are enough. Once the berries start turning red, be careful not to water much or at all. Then, pick up your watering all hot summer long. Overhead watering with a sprinkler is easy and works perfectly.

Last, but definitely not least: planting depth. This is vital. And, it’s easy to do wrong. Strawberries have roots, a crown and stems. It feels right to put soil over the roots and the crown, however, the crown cannot be buried. It has to get oxygen. If you put soil over your berry’s crown, your plant will get smaller and smaller leaves and will give a few small berries or no berries. Your plant might even die. That’s how important it is to plant your berries with the crown above the soil. Most of the time, if a gardener is not having a successful strawberry garden, it’s because their plants are planted too deeply. If you are already in this situation, it’s not hard to fix. Just take your finger and scrape away the dirt around your plants until you can see the crown above the soil. If you have planted your plants correctly, and you see one getting smaller and smaller leaves, check to see if the crown has gotten buried from soil moving in a heavy rain or something like that. It happens, but, like I said, it’s an easy fix.

See this runner? It would be incorrect to plant it to the depth of the leaves that are coming out. See the small root? That’s the only thing that should be under the soil. Yeah, it’s small on the bottom and they can sort of tip over when you plant them. You can also see how much they are going to need water when they are transplanted. More roots will catch on and it will be fine, but deal gently with babies and don’t be tempted to plant them too deep, using the soil to hold them up.

This is growing at the correct soil depth. You can even see a bit of root above the soil level. This strawberry plant is perfect.

Okay, I think I covered everything. Please let me know if I left something out or if you have questions. Since many people who read this are local and know our family personally, I want to let you know that my daughters have strawberry plugs for sale: Half a flat (36 plants) for $30. Whole flat (72 plants) for $55.

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Late Summer on our Homestead, 2023

Late summer can be hard. It’s hot and dry, and we’re all tired from working long hours all summer long. August is a month to push through, but when the heat continues right into September, you just have to keep pushing. I’m pretty sure every August when we were farming we’d ask each other, “What are we doing? Can we keep going?” And, every year we did……until after 10 years we didn’t, but that’s another story for another time.

These days we don’t have to push forward with the farm but we are still tired (at least I am!) from the long, hot summer days of work. Everyone’s ankles are speckled with chigger bites, and we are more than ready for the cool, crisp snap that comes in the fall.

Lately, we’ve been cleaning up the garden and putting in fall crops. Fall crops can be tricky because what they want is cool weather and gentle rain, but what they have to started in is extreme heat. We have been watering a Lot to try to keep the plants from being stressed. We still have some heat loving plants out there like peppers, tomatoes, sweet potatoes and cucumbers but we have pulled out and cleaned up areas as well. I’m going to take you through a quick picture tour of the garden so you can see what we are doing to clean it up and get it set for fall.

This is the chicken pen garden (if you are wondering what that means, I have posts all about gardening in the chicken pen). We have over 60 broccoli plants planted where the corn and cantaloupe had been. We took out the old plants, corn going to the pigs, cantaloupe vine going to the compost, threw dirt up into “raised bed” rows and planted them with broccoli plants from our local farm store. Last year, we ate fresh broccoli until December. We should again this year, with hopefully enough to freeze as well.

We have two wide rows of beans that are flowering right now. They love the heat and all the watering they get when the broccoli gets watered. These are also in the chicken pen garden where the first crop of corn was. They are thriving, which is good. I have not canned all the beans that I want to put up this year.

This is where my Rutger tomatoes were. They needed to come out so we cleaned up the row about a week ago and planted peas to climb on the cattle panel. We also have pease that are about a foot tall planted around part of the chicken wire fence on the chicken pen garden. The Roma type tomatoes, peppers and butternut squash are still doing fine so we are not taking them out of this garden yet. My guess is that they will last until frost which should be mid October.

This is a sea of sweet potato plants. I planted them early so they have been in the ground long enough to have nice big sweet potatoes on them. We have dug around a few times and taken sweet potatoes from three plants. We’ve been taking the biggest and leaving a few small ones. This is not a “normal” thing to do, but we have been wanting to eat some and I’m not ready to harvest the whole bed yet.

We planted in really good soil and then mulched the whole area with grass clippings to keep the weeds out. As you can see, the sweet potatoes are nice and big! I don’t really want them to be any bigger than this, but not every potato on each plant is this big. I definitely want the smaller ones to keep,growing. We will probably harvest at the end of September, possibly the beginning of October.

Remember when we planted late corn and I said it probably wouldn’t do nearly as well as our early corn? Well, yup, I was right. The corn had a lot of worms in it and it just wasn’t as robust as the early corn…….so, we decided to pull a few rows at a time and feed it to the pigs. If this was the only corn we grew, we would have cut the worm damage off and eaten it, but everyone was sort of corned out from the early corn and the vote was unanimous to feed this entire second crop to the pigs. When you have animals, there is no loss or waste from the garden.

Every few days, I had these two middle kids pull two rows. I have been going behind them, cleaning out any weeds and getting the rows replanted in carrots…… Lots of carrots! We are a lot of people and we eat a lot of food, so I don’t really think we can have too many carrots though. They grow really well into the cold weather. I have done a few posts on growing carrots in the fall and in the winter, if you are interested. (You can look under the Garden category or do a search)

The pigs love the corn, of course, and any help on our feed bill is huge! We are feeding 100 pounds of feed a day to our feeder hogs right now, so yeah, the more we can grow for them, the better!

Four of these guys are going to be heading to the butcher in a month and a half, and they need to eat all they can before then.

Last picture from the garden. I just wanted to show you how we are mulching with grass clippings around some of the smaller carrot beds. We put the clippings down really thick to keep weeds from growing through them. Once the carrots are a few inches tall, we’ll weed them, thin them if they need it and then carefully mulch them. They can go right into cold weather like that. In fact, light frost will make them sweeter.

Other things going on around our farm in the late summer are, lots of outside play time for the four youngest kids. We do not have TV or any electronics, in fact, the kids don’t even know what electronics are. When they are not helping out, this is what they do with their time. Or, they play with trucks in the dirt or, like this morning, they do puzzles at the picnic table by the garden, and things of that nature.

Life is good for these little guys. By late morning or early afternoon, they are ready to be inside where it’s cooler and we hit the school books, because, like everyone else, we too have started our school year. Our books have to wait for the hottest part of the day though, because we definitely want to make use of the cooler morning temps right now.

Our oldest son, LeeRoy has been bush hogging all the fields to get them cleaned up for the end of the growing year. I suspect, most of the fields will not have to be cut again. He likes tractor work and he’s good at it. It’s a skill every boy should get to learn. In our family, it’s a must. Jay could operate equipment at a young age and so could both of my brothers. In our family, it’s part of becoming a man.

We have just finished selling all the goats we are selling this year. We sold 13 kids and 1 milking doe. Our does are in milk and will be re bred in October.

The kids have had three more litters of pigs and ended up with 32 piglets, which is pretty great from three sows. We cut the males last Saturday. It’s a big job and not our favorite one, but Jay and I have been raising pigs for 12 years and we make a good team. Some parents drive their kids to sport or pay for music lessons…….we castrate their piglets for them, lol. Go figure. Anyway, they have sold the first 6 and are waiting on the next 26 to be a little bigger before weaning them. The pigs have done very well this go around and we are really happy for the kids who are raising them.

Last, but not least, we got our broiler chicks out in the field a couple days ago We like to run broilers in the spring and fall and not in the dead of summer. We used to, but the heat is so intense that we prefer to raise them when the weather is nicer. Hopefully, the heat will break soon and these guys won’t be so hot.

They will be ready to butcher a few weeks into October which is a really great time for it. The days are usually absolutely gorgeous by then and, strange as it might be, butchering just feels right. We have been butchering chickens in the fall for about 15 years or so and I guess it’s just part of what feels like fall time to us. We’ll be filling the freezers up with beef and pork at that time as well, so we’ll be well stocked up for the winter. Until then, we need to just keep plugglung away at cleaning up the garden and fields and fence lines, and hopefully that cool crisp fall air will get here soon to give us renewed energy.

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Harvesting Field Potatoes & Which Potato Patch Produced More

This post was supposed to have been written well over a month ago. The weeks have been very busy with gardening and canning, and I just never sat down to write it back when we harvested. I may be just as well though, because now that some time has passed, I can tell you what we did/are doing with all those potatoes!

After supper on July 21st, we all loaded up in the farm truck and on the four wheeler, and headed out to the back field where LeeRoy had his potato crop. We had to wait until after supper to harvest because it was very hot out and that field wasn’t in the shade until 6:00. We didn’t want the potatoes we dug to sit in the sun……and we didn’t exactly want to work in the sun, when shade was plentiful in the evening.

This is what the largest field (he had three) looked like before we started. LeeRoy kept it hoed for a long time and all the potatoes were hilled. We got an unusually large amount of rain in the early summer, with cool temperatures so the potatoes had great growing conditions in terms of that. It wasn’t until about the beginning of July that the weather really turned hot and dry. I think that’s when the weeds got away from LeeRoy a bit. The ground is heavy clay and it got rock hard.

We had everyone team up with someone and pick a row to start digging in. Jay and I teamed up with the little girls. Jay dug a section to loosen the dirt and then we went through it by hand to pull the potatoes out. That sounds a lot easier then it was!

To be honest, I didn’t think we were going to get much of a crop. I’m not used to growing in hard dirt like that and, even though many of the potato plants had gotten pretty large and they all bloomed, I had pretty low expectations.

What we found was in the middle of the field the potatoes were big and really plentiful! On the edges of the field, they were not! I am figuring that this is because the middle of the field got better plowing and there for also better hilling because the dirt was easier to work with. The other interesting thing we found was on the edges of the field, there was a lot more rodent damage. In fact, there were some areas we dug that had every potato on every plant partially eaten by rodents. That was definitely not good!

The smaller fields did not yield as high as the large field. Again, I’m going to put that down to tougher ground. LeeRoy had plowed it up, but that was rough ground, full of roots and rocks. Definitely not easy to work with. If he plows the same place every year, all the rocks and roots will end up being removed. We got a good start on removing them this year, but it was more than could be done in one season. However, he cannot continue to plant potatoes in the same spot year after year without either improving the soil somehow or using fertilizer. We don’t use fertilizer on our farm, so that option is out.

The kids worked so hard! This was a Massive job!! As you can see the shade has moved quite a bit from when we started.

It took us until dusk to get the first field harvested. It was so hot and we were all drenched with sweat. Every one of us, except the baby, was down in the dirt digging with out hands, which is pretty rough on the hands by the way, and we were dirty! At 8:30, I took the youngest 3 back to the house for baths, cold drinks and bed. Of course the four wheeler ran out of gas as soon as we started back, so we had to walk, heavy baby on my hip and all.

Everyone else stayed out until 9:30 when the job was done. They worked by the light of the light bar on the farm truck. They were really hot and grimy and exhausted! To tell you the truth, I’m glad we don’t usually farm this way, but it was an interesting experience to have and we all worked as a family to help LeeRoy get harvested, and that was a good thing to do.

Since there was no rain in the forecast, no one unloaded the potatoes that night. We just told the kids to get cool showers, drink several grasses of cool water and go to bed. We had brought water out to the field but it was so hot, I just wanted to make sure everyone was well hydrated.

In the morning, I went out to the truck and saw this!👆That’s a lot of potatoes! Everyone made a guess on how many pounds it was, and whether LeeRoy was going to beat Ava’s 420 pounds she grew in the garden, or not………Then, the fun began. Jay and LeeRoy weighed and I wrote down the numbers. You know how many pounds he ended up with? 419! Basically they ended up with the same amount of potatoes. How crazy is that?!

LeeRoy sorted them and then offered some for sale to our friends and neighbors. He has sold over 250 pounds of organic potatoes. Most were sold as 20# boxes, using Azure canning jar boxes we had on hand. The rest of the potatoes have some damage on them or are huge. Those are the ones we are using ourselves. They ones that were badly damaged are being cooked down for the pigs.

Alright, so let’s compare field growing potatoes versus deep-soil garden growing potatoes.

The kids ended up with basically the same yield, however Ava planted about 30 pounds of seed potatoes and LeeRoy planted 50 pounds, so LeeRoy’s rate of harvest per pound planted was lower.

LeeRoy had far more rodent damage, fire ant damage and rot. Potatoes like that had to be gotten rid of. We did cook down partially eaten potatoes and LeeRoy fed them to his hogs, so it wasn’t a total loss by any means. But, the potatoes coming out of the garden only had a couple that were fire ant damaged or rotten and none that were eaten by rodents. Since we are trying to grow potatoes for human consumption (they have to be cooked for pigs to eat them so they are not a good choice for pig feed), the less damage the better.

LeeRoy’s field produced quite a few really large potatoes. We did not sell any of those because I’m not a fan of huge potatoes. We have been using them, and as I thought might be the case, they are too big and unusable in the middle. We can use everything around the middle, but they are definitely not sellable potatoes. With Ava’s, we have only run into one potato like that. Almost 100% of the potatoes that came out of the garden were good to use, or if we were selling them, they were definitely sale quality.

Harvesting the field potatoes was a ton of hard work! It was great to all work as a family and accomplished that really difficult task…….but, would I want to do that regularly? No. Harvesting the garden was a big job too, but the soil was soft and very easy to dig in. We planted the garden potatoes very close together so we had a much, much smaller area to harvest and it didn’t take as long. When we were done, we didn’t feel completely beat like we did on the field potatoes.

Plowing, planting and hoeing the field potatoes is of course on a much bigger scale than the garden. LeeRoy used the tractor to plow and make furrows to plant it. In the garden, I had hilled beds that we made deep furrows in by hand. Planting is planting, but we did plant the garden potatoes very close. I knew my soil could handle that. LeeRoy likes hoeing out weeds and hilling the potatoes, so doing that part was enjoyable to him, until the rain stopped and the ground got too hard to work. In the garden, we did not hoe at all, but instead mulched with old chopped up leaves from the chicken pen. That’s a job, but it’s not that bad if you have two people. Of course, it only has to be done once for the whole season.

I might sounds negative toward field going potatoes. I’m not. I do believe growing them in the garden works better, especially if you have built up the soil over the years like we have here. LeeRoy doesn’t know if he is planning on growing field potatoes again or not. If he does, we are working on getting a spot for him to use that will be closer to the house than the back field. If this is something he wants to do regularly, I want to try to help him figure out how to use the animals to make his soil better, which should increase his yield and made working the ground easier. If he doesn’t want to grow any more, that’s fine too. It was definitely a great experience. He worked really hard and even though he set out to grow them for the family, because we got such a huge harvest from the garden, I let him sell as many as he could so he ended up making quite a bit of money. That’s a good return for his hard work.

Below are two link to posts I wrote about planting and harvesting the potatoes in the garden, in case you want to compare what I wrote about field harvesting.

Planting Potatoes in February

Harvesting 420 Pounds of Potatoes

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Our New Pantry!

I have mentioned in previous posts that our house is not large. With the addition we put on a couple years ago, it’s about 1,500 square feet. We don’t have a basement and we don’t have a garage. We are a family of 10 and sometimes we feel the lack of space, mostly space for storing things…….like food! As you know, we buy our grains in bulk, which means lots of 5 gallon buckets, and I can from our garden all summer and fall. That makes for a lot of food that need to go……somewhere!

This summer, Jay and I decided we really needed to do something bigger and better for our food storage. For years I have used a closet in the middle of the house that was originally built as a linen closet. We don’t have a finished kitchen so that was sort of the only option, even though it obviously was not ideal to keep food that far away from the kitchen. You might be wondering why we have not fixed this problem before now. After all, we’ve lived here for 15 years! Well, the truth is, we have done a Lot on the house. When we bought it, it was abandoned and rotting down. One of the floors was fallen through. It was bad, y’all. But, country people that we are, we wanted Land, lots of land! We were willing to go with a mess of a house (because you can always fix a house) to enable us to get a big ol’ piece of land with springs and creeks, and rolling hills, deep ravines, pastures and woods. We have never regretted that decision. But, it sure has taken us years longer then we thought it would to fix up the house. To be honest, we threw most of our time and money into building the farm…..and having babies, over the years. We couldn’t exactly build the farm, And fix the house, And have a baby every other year. We had to go slow on Something, and…..well, that Something was the house. So, there you have it. That’s my confession on why our house looks the way it does. Now, I’ll show you the fun part; before and after pictures!

The blue hutch holds all our daily dishes because I don’t have kitchen cabinets. Beside it was my desk, because there was no other place to put it. On the other side of the hutch is an unused chimney. We used that chimney for the first few years and then put in a different one. We took the upper part off when we redid the roof a few years ago, but this inside part was still here taking up space that we can’t afford to waste. When we moved here, water would run down that wall when it rained. Jay patched the roof a long time ago and I tried to kill the mold on the ceiling and I repainted the walls but they got water damaged and needed to go.

Taking the chimney down was a big job. It wasn’t easy to take apart and, oh, the mess of black dust!

Seriously, you would not believe the mess…..on the floor and on everything else!

The chimney was full of ashes.

Clara loaded all the junk into the back of the truck.

Then the sheet rock came down and we got rid of the old wiring.

More sheet rock came down and we put in new wiring.

We cleaned out and cleaned up the blown in insulation……

so we could put in new insulation. We insulated behind where the pantry sits, because on the living room side of that wall we have the wood stove. We don’t want the pantry getting extra heat in the winter.

Jay and LeeRoy worked until midnight getting the insulation in and the sheet rock done. I was going to try to stick it out with them but because I get migraines, Jay told me to head to bed…..I was really glad.😉

This is what I came out to Sunday morning. I thought it was Beautiful and so Clean!

After we got to this point, Jay spent a lot of time building the pantry cabinet. Some of the wood (mostly the faceplate and the side that isn’t on yet and the doors that also are not on yet) are from old wood. We have an old tobacco barn that was probably built at least 150 years ago. It’s falling down but we have been able to use the old heart pine flooring out of it. The island top is also made from that wood. It’s beautiful and that old heart pine that doesn’t grow anymore is really something worth keeping. It took a Lot of planing down for Jay to get the rough flooring usable though!

He assembled the pantry in the dining, and then because of his careful measuring, was able just barely to get the huge cabinet in place. Two fan blades had to come off and the guys maneuvered it slowly and carefully and then it fit without a hair of extra space. Pretty amazing!

The kids got the first coat of clear finish on it. They got pretty burned out so Jay did the other two coats……he was burned out too! Between each coat of finish, the whole thing had to be sanded, which is what all the guys are doing here.

With all three coats of finish on it is so smooth and nice. It will clean up well too if there are any spills.

On the left side of this 👆picture, you can see Jay put tongue and groove boards on the wall. A long time ago, when he worked for his Dad who was a contractor, Jay and his brothers actually made those tongue and groove boards, so that’s kind of cool to have on the wall too…….and it sure looks better than the peeling sheet rock that had been there!

We let the finish cure for several day and Justin had so much fun playing in the pantry, I almost didn’t want to fill it with buckets! You can see in this picture that our floor is Very sloped! The cabinet is level……but the floor! Oh well, it’s an old house and the floor adds character.

Happy little guy! That was his favorite spot, where the faceplate is wide so the kitchen cabinets we will one day have can slide up to it.

Today, we filled the pantry and boy, was that fun! You can see on the floor I have boxes of peaches we got from an orchard yesterday. The canning continues and I’m so glad I have a big enough place for it all now.

This is what it looked like when we were done.

I have honey, natural sugar, brown sugar, (olive oil, vinegar & molasses in jugs). Next, I have a whole shelf of wheat berries. On the third shelf, I have rolled oats and quick oats, (coconut oil, salt & brown sugar in small buckets). I also have some of my canning equipment behind the wide faceplate.

On the top shelf I have dry canned potatoes and regular canned potatoes and pickles. On the middle shelf, I have corn, tomatoes & peppers for pizza topping, jams and chicken broth. On the lower shelf, I have tomato sauce, green beans, honey and more jam.

I have more room too which is good because I have peaches to can, more pickles to can, and lots more spaghetti sauce to can. Beans will be in by September and I still have to do applesauce in the fall.

It’s beautiful! I love it! This, right here, represents a whole lot of work that I have done, that Jay has done, and that the kids have done. One thing is for sure, we will not go hungry any time soon.

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Harvesting Tomatoes & Fall Garden Plans

I want to show y’all what my tomato plants look like at harvest. After posting earlier in the summer about my (non) pruning methods, I got several comments and discussions on both my personal Facebook page and our farm Facebook page. Pruning or not pruning tomatoes is a hot button, lol. I knew that before I posted my method but I wanted to share what works for me and why I do it. So, this is basically a follow up to that. If you missed my post about how I (don’t) prune tomatoes, here is the link.

Putting up Trellises & Do I Prune Tomato Plants?

I haven’t done any pruning in the tomatoes since we got them tied up. When we tied them to the cattle panel, I cut off anything touching the ground or close to it and an occasional branch that would just not cooperate with the tying up process. Other than that, the tomatoes have been left to do their thing.

The kids have been doing the harvesting over the last couple of weeks. Usually the boys pick the tomatoes and then my oldest, Mellony, goes through and finds more. Funny how that is. All the kids pick pretty well, but Mel is the one person I can completely trust. If she has picked, it’s as good as if I had done it myself. The other kids will get there……I hope!

On Monday morning the boys picked tomatoes and brought them all up to the house. Mellony and I were working in the kitchen. We looked at each other, knowing one of us was going to have to go check to see if they got them all. It was me this time. I went, and boy and I glad I did! This is how many tomatoes I found, lol.

Okay, so granted, if I had trimmed my plants down to one stalk, the boys would have been able to see every ripe tomato…….but, they probably would have gotten a much smaller harvest because one stalk is not going to produce what my tomato plants are producing. I’m going to run through a bunch of pictures to show you what I’ve got out there.

I took both of these pictures a couple weeks ago, before any tomatoes were ripe. I had some seriously loaded plants!

This👇was Monday morning, halfway through picking what they boys missed. You can see how tall the plants are.

These are San Marzano, which I started from seed back in the winter. They are heirloom and indeterminate. Indeterminate means that they will continue flowering and putting on fruit all season long.

You can see my plants are pretty bushy! The reason the boys missed so many when they picked is because they needed to get down low and push branches aside or cut them out. There were lots of low hanging tomatoes because the first fruit that’s set is low on the plant from the plant blooming when it’s still small.

The plants are super thick with leaves. This is when I keep clippers in my back pocket and clip away leafy branches as I pick.

There is a lot of fruit still being set. I’ve canned 33 quarts of sauce and I’d say we are about 1/3 of the way through our harvest. If I get 80-100 quarts of sauce, that’s all I need.

It’s hard to even see all the tomatoes back there but as they become ripe, I will cut out the leafy branches so we can get at them.

This is the back side of a cattle panel, not the side the tomatoes are planted on. This is what it looked like before I cut out leafy branches and the ends of any branches that were hanging down.

This is what it looked like when I was done cutting and picking. I’m not going for pretty. I just cut out branches where I need to pick. I try not to cut out anything that has tomatoes on it, but I will cut a branch back that is flowering if I need to.

Just to give you an idea, I have 30 tomato plants on three cattle panels and I cut out about 5 piles this size. Next time I harvest, I will probably need to cut out a bit more. When I go down there, I take clippers and just keep them in my back pocket for when I need them. 30 plants might not seem like many, but if I can get all our tomato needs for our family (except for the cherry tomatoes) out of those 30 plants, that works a whole lot better for me than needing to grow and tend 50 or more plants. That’s my main reasoning behind not pruning my plants down to one or two stalks.

This is what my stove top looks like every 3 days or so. This cooked down to 13 quarts, plus a bunch in the fridge to use for spaghetti and pizza. I will link the post I wrote last year on how I make sauce.

How to turn Tomatoes into Thick, Tasty Sauce without using Tomato Paste

Now for a quick run down on my fall garden plans. Mostly what I am trying to get in for the fall are lots of carrots, pease, broccoli and lettuce. Last year, I grew fall potatoes, but this year I have plenty of potatoes already so I don’t have to.

This is the chicken pen garden (I have posts about gardening in the chicken pen) and this is the spot where we had our first crop of corn. This morning, Mel moved dirt over by the fence and planted peas along the side and back fences.

The butternut squash has taken over one of the previous corn rows but the others we are able to replant. Two have beans in them and two will get planted with broccoli next week. I do plan to buy broccoli plants from our local farm store. Those are the only plants I buy, but they do better for me than seeds do. We are mulching this area of the garden with grass clippings now to keep the weeds out and the moisture in.

These are tiny carrot plants. We only have a few rows of carrots planted so far. We need to get more in as soon as we have room. Lettuce won’t get planted until the weather cools down.

We still have sweet potatoes growing. I won’t harvest those until September or October.

As you can see, my sweet potatoes want to take over the corn! This second crop of corn is tasseling much shorter than the first crop and I have seen bugs on it. I know it won’t be nearly as good as the first crop was, but that’s okay. We’ll use it for fresh eating and then the pigs can have the stalks. We also still have peppers, cherry tomatoes, beans (not the ones we just planted, but ones we are harvesting), cucumbers and winter squash. Jimmy just picked the last cantaloupe and pulled out the vine. It’s nice to be cleaning up part of the garden and planting for fall. Our weather has cooled some but I’m looking forward to it cooling more in the next month or so.

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How to Make Thick Greek Style Yogurt

I have been making yogurt since my first baby started to eat solid food, nearly 17 years ago. I don’t really remember if I used organic milk back then, but I know it was not raw because it was from the grocery store. Since then, I have used regular milk from the store, organic milk from the store, raw cow milk and raw goat milk. Raw goat milk is what I am using now, but I want you to know you don’t have to use raw milk or even organic milk. You can use any whole milk. Of course I am a big fan of raw goat milk or raw cow milk for the health benefits, but if you are not in a place and time when you have access to that, you can use any milk as long as it’s whole.

My yogurt making method is very easy. It’s the same one I have been using since 2007. I haven’t changed anything because, if you follow the steps correctly, it works every time and requires very little work or clean up.

Pour milk into quart canning jars. I like using wide mouth jars because my thermometer sits on the rim better than it does on small mouth, and they are easier to wash. Place a wash cloth (or something like that) on the bottom of a large pot and place the jars on the wash cloth.

Fill the pot with water. The higher up the jars the water comes, the better. As the water heats, it will heat the milk and the higher the water, the faster that will all happen. Clip a kitchen thermometer on the side of one jar. Don’t touch the thermometer to the bottom of the jar or the reading won’t be accurate. I’m going to note here that it’s important to treat all the jars exactly the same since you are only taking the temp of one jar. All the jars need to be filled the same amount with the same temperature milk etc. I have often made 4 jars at once and only had a thermometer in one jar. If you treat them all the same, it works perfectly.

Turn the stove on to slightly higher than medium and let the milk slowly warm up to 185 degrees. This is to kill any bad bacteria. Since you will be growing bacteria (that’s what yogurt is!), you sure don’t want any bad bacteria growing too or you may not end up with a finish product that is yogurt.

Once your milk has reached 185 degrees, use a jar lifter and take the jars out of the water. Set them on a cutting board or thick towel to cool. You want them to cool to just below 115 degrees. If you add your yogurt starter to anything hotter than 115, you will kill it. If the milk drops below 95, the culture won’t grow. For yogurt to make, the temp has to stay between 95 and 115 degrees. I usually shoot for about 110. I add 12 drops of liquid stevia to each jar to take the edge off the tartness. You can also add honey or maple syrup, or leave it plain and just add it at the end. My baby boy with Down syndrome eats a lot of the yogurt I make and this little bit of stevia works well for him.

Now you are going to add your starter. You can order yogurt starter through the mail (which I have never done), or you can just start with some good quality store yogurt. As long as it has live enzimes in it, which it will say on the side of the carton, it can be used as a yogurt starter. This is how I always start my yogurt when I need new starter. Usually though, I just save a little yogurt from the last batch I made and use that. It works perfectly! You don’t have to buy any fancy starters, especially once you have your own going, which is really fantastic! The more we can do for ourselves without having to buy things, the better, right?

Stir the stevia and yogurt starter in really well and then put lids on the jars.

Place your jars in a cooler. Yeah, this cooler is a bit on the big size, lol. I usually use a smaller cooler but sometimes it’s unavailable. Fill the cooler with very hot tap water (basically that means water as hot as you can stand to touch) to the rim of the jars and close the lid. Let it sit in the hot water for 4 to 8 hours.

When you take your jars out of the cooler and look in them, the yogurt will look a little watery. It’s alright. Don’t panic. Just put it in the fridge and by morning it should look like this.👆It’s much more solid and can be eaten this way. But, we like thicker Greek Style yogurt and it’s really easy to make.

I’m going to show you two ways to strain the whey out of your yogurt. Once you have the whey strained off, you have thick yogurt that is high in protein and low in carbs. Take a wire strainer and line it with a coffee filter. Set the strainer over a bowl and spoon your yogurt into the filter. Whey will start dripping out immediately.

Let the yogurt sit for several hours, until it looks thick and pulls the edges of the filter up. Then transfer the yogurt to a clean container and put it in the fridge. It’s ready to eat.

I use the coffee filter method when I am just making yogurt for my son because he goes through a smaller amount, but when I need to strain half a gallon of yogurt at a time, I use a thin kitchen towel to strain through. I use the same wire strainer, line it with the kitchen cloth and fill it with yogurt.

It looks like this when it’s done straining.

It’s fairly easy to transfer thick yogurt to a new container. It pretty much just rolls out. The whey can be fed to animals or used in baking bread or other things.

Because the yogurt I make has a little stevia in it, it’s good just how it is, but for a little extra, it’s especially delicious with fresh warm granola and a little drizzle of honey. I actually served that for supper last night because my stove top was covered with bubbling pots of spaghetti sauce I was canning and I needed something fast and simple. The kids thought it was a treat!

Here’s the link to the post with my granola recipe.

Our Favorite Breakfast Foods

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First Corn Harvest of 2023

This week we started harvesting and putting up corn. We’ve been eating it on the cob for a couple weeks, but it was getting to the size that we needed to start canning it. We live in zone 7b, and this is corn that we planted on April 21st. Our frost date is April 16th so we planted very early, earlier than most people do because corn needs warms weather to sprout, but I like to get my corn in the ground as early as I can. If the weather will warm up above 50 degrees at night for a week in the spring, I will plant. (I have a post about planting early, if you are interested) The advantages of planting early are that we are eating corn earlier in the year than we would be if we waited until May to plant, and there are fewer pests to deal with.

I have found over my years of gardening that the later we get in the summer, the more pests there are. We don’t spray or fertilize or do anything that requires going to town and buying something to put on either the plants or the soil in any part of the garden. Instead, we work on getting our soil really healthy which gives us healthy plants. Healthy plants have fewer pest problems. This doesn’t eliminate all the bugs and worms though so doing things like planting crops early is another way we can fight them. As you can see in the picture below, most of the corn did not have any worms in it. Some did, but they stayed at the tip. The damage that’s bad, is when the worm goes all the way down into the ear and we have to cut out a large section. We almost never see that with our early corn. The very small amount of damage in the picture below is what we usually get.

Yesterday I had the kids pick and husk 75 ears of corn. Not all the corn is ready so I told them to get the corn with the brownest silk and leave the rest. We will continue to eat corn on the cob daily and then in a couple days we will do another day of corn canning. This method of harvest and canning works pretty well for us. It boils down to few hours of intense work every few days to get our corn crop in.

After the corn was shucked, the kids brought it in and we washed it to get as much silk off as possible. They make special brushes for this job but I have found washing by hand works just as well or better.

I started cutting the corn off the cob but the kids wanted to cut so I let them and bumped myself back to assistant, lol. Having teens is great!

We just use knives to cut the corn. A long time ago, I tried using a tool that was supposed to make the job quicker and less messy but I didn’t find that it helped. I’m not against kitchen gadgets, in fact I like a lot of kitchen gadgets, but sometimes a good old fashioned knife does the job best…….

While the older kids cut, Ava put corn into the jars. In the past, I have frozen corn in quart bags. That was our form of preservation for years, but this year I’m canning a lot of what I used to freeze. Jay and I feel that we need to be a little less dependent on electricity (because we usually loose power a few times a year from storms and have to run the generator to keep the fridge and freezers cold) and a little more prepared with food that’s canned and ready to eat. Corn does have to pressure can for a long time: 55 minutes for pints and 85 minutes for quarts. Throwing bags in the freezer is faster but I think we are going to like having our corn canned.

We filled pint jars for corn that will be added to chili in the winter and quarts for when we want to have corn as a side to the main dish. Corn is supposed to be filled to within an inch of the top of the jar and it’s not supposed to be shaken for pushed down. It’s fine to add 1/2 a teaspoon or so of salt to each jar but you don’t have to, so we didn’t.

I filled each jar with room temperature tap water, leaving an inch of head space. The canner needs to have the same temperature water in it as the jars do so I used room temp for that too. Then I wiped the rims on the jars and put my lids on. While the pressure canner did it’s thing I cleaned up the kitchen. (I will have posts on using a pressure canner, in the future)

All the cobs went to the pigs. They Love scraps like that! And, I love not wasting anything. From those 75 ears, we got 9 pints, 6 quarts and 12 ears left over. I would have canned those 12 ears but I’m flat out of jars. I had to do shifting around of things in the fridge, like putting pickles in a container and pouring milk into glass jars that I can’t can with etc., just to get the jars I did use. It’s all right though, I have 120 quart jars coming in on the Azure truck on Friday!

With all the help I have these days, it really didn’t take that long to put up that corn. We were done with everything by 10:30, except for cleaning up and letting the canner have time to do it’s thing. We had also milked the goats, fed the other animals, hung out two loads of laundry, cleaned up the kitchen from breakfast and fed the baby…..you know, all the usual stuff a big homesteading family does. I’m just telling you how fast we got it done to encourage you. If you have lots of helping hands, great! Go for it! If you have lots of littles, just do what you can get done and freeze the corn if you need to. That’s how I managed for years and years. We are not all in the same season in life and that is okay.

The day after we canned corn, we got out to the younger corn patch to work on it a bit. It’s in the regular garden, as opposed to the chicken garden where the other corn is planted. ( I have a post all about growing a garden in the chicken pen)

Caroline is standing next to her row of corn. She’s pretty proud of it. This is what the corn looked like. We needed to thin and mulch it. This garden has rows closer than they are in the chicken garden so we are mulching, rather than hilling the corn. Either way is fine, but if you mulch, you need to make it deep. I have mulched corn for many years and it really does great that way. I have not found it to be inferior to traditional hilling in any way.

We thin out corn to about 8 inches apart. Clara is pointing to the corn plant that will come out. All our beds are planted with two rows of corn to give us maximum yield for the space.

Several of the kids have a couple rows of the younger corn, so they got in there and thinned them and pulled off some of the suckers. I took a hoe and bent down the plants that should come out for some of the younger kids so they would know which ones to take. All the corn that was pulled went to the pigs.

We use grass clippings for mulch. Like I said above, it needs to be put on really thick, like half a foot thick. If the clippings are hot, we do not touch them to the plants until it dries out some. Hot grass clippings can burn and even kill plants. If they are hot, we either spread them out for a day or so, or we mulch but we don’t put the clippings right up against the plants. By the following day, they can be pushed right up against the plants with no problem.

I’m pleased with how this second crop of corn looks, but as I stated earlier, late crops tend to have more pest problems. I am not counting on this patch being as good as the first and that’s fine. It’s still definitely worth planting. As a family of 10, we go through a lot of food, so even if the crop is smaller than the first, having a second crop is worth the work. And, we will be happy in the winter because I think we’re going to end up with a lot of corn put up, which the kids will love!

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How I feed my Husband from our Farm while He’s on the Road

(This post is in response to a request I had from a friend to write about how/what I pack for Jay to eat while he’s on the road for days at a time.) When Jay became a trucker a few years ago, I was concerned about how he was going to eat healthy food. As a family, we don’t eat out, and we would especially not want to eat out at fast food places, but, for most truckers, that’s a normal thing to do. Being that we raise most of the food that we eat, it just doesn’t make any sense for Jay to be eating unhealthy junk food.

I will admit, it took me a long time to figure out how to make this work. For the first year or so, the girls and I cooked a huge amount the day before Jay would head out on the road. We packaged everything up in meal size containers and Jay would load up the little fridge in his rig. This worked……..sort of. Jay ate well all week, but I did not feel like what we were doing was a long term solution. Our day of cooking was long and exhausting and when Jay left, all the food was gone, making it necessary for us to cook more the next day to restock what we needed here. Another drawback was the huge stack of containers that needed to be washed when Jay got home. It was just a lot of work and I needed to figure out how to cut down on all the prep time and clean up time, and still send healthy home cooked food for him to eat.

I have figured that out. I have a system now that works for us. It’s not that hard. Mostly it takes planning in advance. I’m going to share what I do with you in case it helps for packing lunches, or for days or even a week of food at a time.

I do want to add here that Jay has to be one of the least picky people in the world. He does like to eat healthy, but he never ever…..and I mean Ever complains about anything I make or send with him. He’s always thankful and always makes it work. He was not brought up on junk food so he isn’t the kind who buys snacks or chips or coke or anything. In fact, the only thing he buys is coffee and that’s not even every day! Honestly, I don’t know how he does it. I know if it was me, I would at least have to buy coffee every.single.day. But, Jay is Jay, and along with not eating junk, he doesn’t spend money, and both of those are good things when you are trying to be healthy and you own your own business.

Now, instead of doing all the cooking in one day, I plan a few days back and make extra, usually of chicken or pork. I’ll cook two chickens down (pasture raised broilers of our own) or I’ll cook a huge crockpot full of ham steaks. Some of the meat will be for our supper and some will be to send with Jay. (Below is a post on how to cook fresh ham steaks, which, oddly enough, is my most popular post of all time!)

How to Cook Fresh Ham Steaks

The night before he hits the road, I will make chicken salad or pork salad up and pack it into a container for him. We make pork salad by chopping up ham steaks and adding salt, pepper, paprika, mayonnaise and mustard. This makes several main meals.

Another regular main meal I send is left over pizza from our weekly homemade pizza night. Instead of packing pizza in individual serving size containers like I used to, I now send one big pizza in slices in one large container. The kids pack this container for Jay when they wash the dishes after our pizza night, so it’s ready to go and doesn’t need any more prep. Homemade pizza with a whole wheat crust and our own meat and vegetables on it is, of course, not junk food.

If we grill when Jay is home, which is not unusual, we’ll grill extra to send with him. If it’s burgers, I just send a container of them along with him. If it’s pork chops or something like that, I will chop the meat into bite size pieces and fill a container with the meat. I usually send a container of ranch dressing for him to dip the pieces into.

These are the main meals Jay eats every week for lunch and supper. Sides include whatever is coming out of the garden that can be packed. We cut carrots, cucumbers and peppers and send them in zip lock bags. Big tomatoes don’t do well, but a bag of cherry tomatoes works great. When they are in season, I’ll send slices of onion and a zip lock bag of lettuce for his sandwiches. The more fresh food the better, so I always pack him as much as he thinks he can eat.

When we don’t have anything coming out of the garden, like in the dead of winter, I will buy organic apples from Azure or apples grown in the mountains from one of the orchards north of us. We’ll wash up and bag plenty of apples to last Jay while he’s on the road.

What about snacks? Every week, the girls make a double batch of chocolate chip cookies. Recipe below.

Our Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookies

When the girls put the cookies away after they cool, they fill a container for Jay so that it’s ready to go when he needs it. Other snacks he has in his truck are store bought and include peanuts, trail mix and organic snack bars. Those are sort of like back up food, and to be honest, he doesn’t go through them real fast at all. If I have sent along enough snacks from the garden, and cookies, I don’t think he really even eats the store bought stuff.

Breakfast can go either way depending on how much time I have for prep work. I buy boxes of organic instant oatmeal from Aldi, and Jay always keeps a few on his truck. Sometimes I will make a cobbler or blueberry breakfast bars like the recipe below.

Blueberry Breakfast Bars

If I make pies for the family, I will make an extra one for Jay to take on the road. I have learned that it works best to put the pie into a 9×9. After it’s cooked, I gently fold the crust down around the edges and put a plastic lid on it. Jay would happily eat pie for breakfast every day, lol. He has paper plates in his truck but I’m sure when I send a cobbler or pie, he just eats out of the dish. It’s easier that way.

Occasionally I will send things like potato salad or pumpkin custard. The girls and I have sent many egg stratas before, though we haven’t done that in a while. All of that food comes from our farm too.

Sometimes, condiments need to be sent, especially if Jay has burgers to eat. I try to send the end of a bottle or just put some mayonnaise in a very small container so it doesn’t take up much room. I do send store bought bread because homemade bread would not stay fresh long enough. I also usually send a block of cheese. I buy raw grass fed cheese in bulk from Azure and repackage it. I put Jay’s in a zip lock bag to make it easy for him.

We have tried several different ways to keep Jay’s food cool while he’s on the road. None of them has been 100% satisfactory, and most of them did not last long. We have gone through two small refrigerators and a plug in cooler. Now, we just use the old school method: a regular cooler with ice in it. When we pack the cooler, we put lots of blue ice in it. Jay uses that as long as it stays cold and then he buys ice to dump in there. I don’t know that we will use this method forever, but it works for now and is very simple.

When he comes home, this is what his cooler looks like. I don’t love washing old containers but it’s really not that bad. Sending a few large containers rather than lots of meal size ones really helps a lot. He also has a crate with all the food in it that does not have to stay cold, and he has water coolers that we fill. Our own well water is a million times better than any water you can buy.😉 Jay has a toaster oven in his truck to heat up food if he wants to. The truck had a microwave in it, but he took it out since we are not fans of microwaves. He also has a kettle to heat water. One of these days we need to get him a coffee maker too.

For the most part, we try to stick with what is simple for Jay’s food because when he’s home we are usually busy working on projects around our place and doing family things together. There is a balance between sending homemade food that’s healthy, and not being in the kitchen the whole time he’s home. After some trial and error, I think we have found that balance pretty well.

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Garden Update, Canning Potatoes & A Project in the Kitchen

The past week has been very busy! And Hot! After a long drawn out cool beginning to the summer, here in southern Virginia we have finally hit the dog days. Jay and I, having grown up mostly without AC, and not having it in our own home until the last few years, consider ourselves pretty tough. Even with air conditioning (which is two window units for the whole house), we still open the windows in the evening and then work it the way our parents did. Windows and curtains get closed on the East side as soon as the sun hits it, with the rest of the house being closed up as the air outside turns hotter than the air inside. Eventually, late morning on the very hottest days, we turn the window units on.

For years I did the windows like this, with no AC at all. Late afternoon, I would open the house up. I canned every summer through the first 6 pregnancies with no air conditioning. Yup, it was HOT. It was hard, but it was doable. Now, I have the option of cooling the kitchen down while I can and I usually do. I’m quite thankful for AC but neither Jay, nor I…..nor the kids! want to get too soft, so we try to use bought air as little as we can without sweating to death. The truth be told, the kids probably wouldn’t turn it on at all, but I sure do enjoy cooling down in the air conditioning after working in the garden. I think being 40 has something to do with that, lol. I don’t want to get too soft, but maybe I already have.
On this fine evening, after sweating it out in the garden this morning, I am enjoying the porch with the fan blowing and it’s not bad at all. So, this is an encouragement to you to turn off the AC, open the windows and enjoy the fresh air. Yup, it’s a lot of work to open windows every evening and close them in the morning when the heat starts coming in, but it’s good for us to live, at least somewhat, in the heat and appreciate the cool when it finally comes…..in the middle of the night, sometimes. An added bonus will be the difference on your power bill!

AC or no AC, the dog days are here, and as often happens in the summer when it’s really hot, we got a severe thunderstorm on Sunday afternoon. It really did a number in the corn.

But, like corn so often does, most of it stood back up again in a couple days. There is some that was knocked too far down to recover, but it’s not actually on the ground and I think we are going to get the corn off of it anyhow. Most of the stalks have two or three ears on them and they are looking good! A week or so, and we will be eating corn on the cob.

The rain made everything explode in the garden. I didn’t go down there for several days because I was canning potatoes, and when I went out last night right before dark, I was shocked!

Some of the onions needed to be harvested. Once the leaves fall completely over, the onions need to come out of the ground. We have been using onions all summer, but now, half the bed needed to be harvested, which Clara did this morning. We got some nice big ones! It’s sort of nice that not all of them needed to come out at once. The ones that did come out are drying on a table under the ceiling fan until we put them up.

I have a post below on how I freeze onions.

This is What I do with my Onion Harvest

We are so close to having ripe cherry tomatoes! Last year Alivia (who was 5 then) sold quite a few. This year, she has more plants and I think she will be selling a whole bunch! There are far more than we can eat.

As you can see, my pruning method does not hurt them at all. These babies are loaded!

The boys Rutgers are looking great too. Each plant is loaded and they have some that are really getting big. Most of their tomatoes are Romas for sauce. They are growing like crazy and I need to get into town to buy more rope to tie them up with!

Like I said in my last post, LeeRoy likes to hoe out weeds so this is his idea of some good garden work. Meanwhile, I was over on my hands and knees this morning picking weeds out from around the lettuce. I would a million times rather do that than hoe out weeds!

It’s extremely unusual for us to have lettuce into July. In fact, I probably never have before. Our summers are just too hot and the lettuce burns up and turns bitter. We have been eating this and it’s not bitter yet, but when I went out to the garden at the end of the day to put down grass clippings, the lettuce looked really bad…..like maybe it’s finished, kind of bad. I’m not too concerned. We have a lot of other things coming in from the garden to eat and everyone is getting sort of tired of salads anyway. We tend to eat seasonally and for us, this is corn and tomato and bean season.

Since I didn’t think we would have lettuce this far into the summer, I had planned on the sweet potatoes taking over the bed I had it planted in. That is exactly what’s happening and I’m fine with it since we probably won’t have lettuce for much longer anyway.

This is 40 plants. How many pounds of sweet potatoes do you think you can get off of 40 plants? I don’t know but I’m willing to wager that in my soil I can get a whole lot more than what I have heard a traditional garden will give. I have heard a pound a plant is good for a traditional tilled, non mulched garden. I’m so curious to see how many pounds we get. I know one thing. We need far more than 40 pounds to get us through the winter! I will definitely keep you updated on our harvest when it comes.

The second crop of corn is up! We are mulching heavily between the rows and then we will mulch between the individual corn plants when they are about a foot tall.

Caroline has her own row and she is pretty excited about that. All the other rows are double planted but hers is single planted. She’s 4, and I love getting my kiddos involved with their own plants and gardens.

We have cured and stored hundreds of pounds of potatoes. All the smaller potatoes got canned. I dry canned 52 quarts. I am new to dry canning so I am not going to do write a how-to. Oh, I could tell you what I did, but I try to stick to talking about things I really have some experience in. It is a pet peeve of mine to look up a how-to on something, only to find that the person who is demonstrating has never done it before either! We don’t need any more of the blind leading the blind than there already is, so my mouth is sealed on dry canning until I have some experience under my belt. Sorry……but, not real sorry, because I want the information you get from me to be real and trustworthy as much as I can possibly make it.

I will tell you that dry canning potatoes is a lot of work because they have to soak and then dry before they go into jars. I could only do three canner loads a day and that was starting the first one as soon as I got up and doing the last one right before bed. Let’s just say that potatoes have been my life for the last week!

I have them done now, as of yesterday afternoon, and that freed up the kitchen for a big project which I am very excited about! Only thing is, I’m not going to tell you what we are doing. Can you believe that, lol. Yup, you can guess but you are going to have to wait until I can show you what we have going on. The one thing I will tell you is that this old, unused chimney is coming out. This is not something we are putting in. Out with the old…..and OH! What a Mess it made! And, in with the……well, you will just have to wait for that!

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Planting a Garden in the Chicken Pen: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

The Good

The good is that you can get an abundant harvest from planting a garden in your chicken pen, if you do it Right! This is the second year I’ve planted in my chicken pen. The first year was 2021. Back then, we planted corn, cantaloupe and watermelon. The corn did great. The cantaloupe did okay, and the watermelon didn’t do anything. Oh, it had a vine, a huge vine but very few watermelons. I’m pretty sure the watermelon did not do well because we were trying to grow seedless melons. That’s my hunch, anyway. I think the cantaloupe only did okay, because we still had not built up enough good soil in that part of the chicken pen. The corn was all planted in the lower part of the pen where the soil was the deepest and best. It showed. We got a lot of corn that year.

Even so, I can tell a huge difference in the soil then, and the soil now. Before we planted the chicken pen the first time, we had built the soil for about a year. After that first planting, we did not plant the chicken pen again (until this year) but just worked on building up the soil A Lot. We hauled in an absolute ton of leaves…..way more leaves than it would seem we’d need. We also mucked out the barn numerous times and put all of that into the chicken pen as well. (That word “muck” can sound like some pretty wet nasty stuff, but we clean the barn out often, before it gets bad. We milk our goats and don’t want them carrying manure on their hooves up onto the milking stand, so we keep our stalls pretty clean. What we brought to the chicken pen was a lot of hay with some goat manure in it.) Then we turned the piles and heaped up the piles the chickens had pulled down. This sped up the decomposition.
I have written several posts on just how we did that and I will link them below in case you want to read through how we make soil, in more detail.

Making Garden Soil and Planting Early Crops

Easy Composting & Keeping the Chickens Busy in the Winter

Preparing the Chickens for Winter

After we had all of those leaves, hay, manure etc turned into rich, black dirt, we hauled most of it out, to build up our regular garden. Then, we did the whole process over again with leaves and mucking out the barn into the chicken pen. The chickens made more soil, and this time it was really deep, much deeper than it was in 2021. Chicken manure is a hot manure but we have so much organic matter mixed in, that we have never had the soil from the chicken pen burn the plants, nor has there been too much nitrogen in the soil. It’s Very Important to have a Lot of organic matter. I cannot stress that enough.

In February of this year, we pulled the chickens out of the pen and moved them to pasture, so their pen could have a few months of rest before we planted it. April 19th was our planting day, and the soil looked like this.

This is where we planted the corn. We also put in cantaloupe, butternut squash, peas, tomatoes and peppers. Not all of that was planted on the same day. Below is a post about planting the chicken garden, as we call it.

Planting Tomatoes & Corn in April

Now, at the end of June, then corn is tasseling. I’m not sure that we are going to have corn on the cob by the 4th of July, but it shouldn’t be too long after that. We don’t use any fertilizer or any sprays of any kind for anything. The good soil feeds the plants. We watered a few times when the plants were small and we hilled the corn, and pulled off the suckers.

In front of where the kids are standing is my butternut squash. This is only 4 plants. My older girls planted a Lot of pumpkins and butternut squash in a field to see how much they can grow. Obviously I don’t have a lot of confidence, lol, because I planted just a tiny bit in the garden in case something happens to theirs. When I planted these 4 seeds, I pulled loose dirt up into a small “raised bed” and planted in that. I pulled weeds twice, I think. It’s very easy to pull weeds because the soil is so loose and deep.

This is what the soil looks like. You can see tiny bits of leaves.

That’s the edge of Jimmy’s cantaloupe. If you read earlier posts, you may remember that he misunderstood me and planted 19 seeds, rather than 9! My original plan was to plant 9 seeds and then to plant more a few weeks later, but I think this is enough.

This morning, a bunch of the kids were looking at his baby cantaloupes.

The tomatoes are loving the heat we’re finally getting. They are going to be a bit later then usually because of the cold that we had for so long, but it looks like we are going to get loads of tomatoes.

When the boys made the rows for these tomatoes, they scraped down to the clay underneath the good soil and put all the good soil into 3 rows. The tomatoes are loving it. They are healthy and growing like crazy. Again the weeds are easy to pull where the soil is deep. In the paths, where it’s scraped down to the clay, the boys use the hoe to keep the weeds out. They like doing that. I like pulling the weeds that come easily by hand. There really aren’t many weeds and we don’t have enough grass clippings to mulch here, so we’re just going to stick with what we are doing. The chickens will be coming back into their pen after the growing season so if we miss some weeds that they have to clean up, that won’t be a problem. In fact, I’ll probably stop weeding a month or so before we move the chickens back in so they have lots of green stuff to eat.

Here are a couple pictures so you can see the layout of the garden from the goat field side. I did not take close up pictures of the peppers or beans but we have a few of those in there too. Our main bean crop will go in after the corn comes out though.


If your chicken pen has been deep bedded and made into good soil, then you have a garden that is already fenced and has superb soil in it. There are probably few or no weeds in it. All you have to do is remove the chickens, wait a bit, make rows and plant. All the hard work of making a new garden has already been done by the chickens, and they added their fertilizer along the way! It’s pretty ideal. Now, let’s look at the “bad”

The Bad

There are three things that come under “bad”, but two of them hardly qualify as “bad”.
First, there is the hard work of deep bedding the chicken pen. To deep bed, you have to put in a whole lot more bedding (Leaves or hay/straw etc) than you would think. I’ve already said that, but I’m going to keep saying it. Put.in.a.lot.of.bedding.

Okay, the reason this isn’t really much of a “bad” is because if you are going to keep your chickens in a pen (instead of a “chicken tractor” that gets moved) then they Need to be deeply bedded. You Can just put up a fence and put chickens in. It will be alright for maybe a year, at the most. After that, it’s nasty. So, chickens Should be deep bedded anyway. In this case, there is no extra work. At least that’s how it is for me. We deep bed anyway. It’s actually easier not to have to deep bed during the summer.

The second “bad” does require more work. If you move the chickens out of their pen for the growing season, then you have to have another place to keep them. This can be another pen you deep bed or you can use a chicken tractor and put them out on pasture. We really like to have our chickens out on green grass when we can, so for us, this is actually a “good”, not a “bad”. However, if you don’t already have a chicken tractor or a second chicken pen, this is going to be the hardest part of the whole thing.

This is our movable chicken coop. If you want to see how we made it, I will link the post below.

Our New Movable Chicken Hoop Coop

The third “bad” is that it’s probably best not to grow root crops in the chicken pen. Okay, to be honest, I’m probably a little extra cautious and it probably would be fine. You will have to make that decision for your own garden. For us, it’s not a problem. I can easily grow my root crops in our regular garden and save the chicken garden for things that will be harvested above ground. Now for what everyone has been waiting for. Hahaha. What could the “ugly” possibly be?!

The Ugly

Here it is, the “ugly” old compost!

I have wire cages that are about two feet tall. We fill them with scraps from the house (that don’t go to the pigs) and weeds. We just layer one and then the other. I have never been picky about making compost. What we do is super simple. Once all of these are filled (and I have more cages) they will sit and wait for the chickens to come back in. When we move the chickens in, I will pull the cages off the compost and let the chickens go through it. Then, I will either haul it out to the regular garden or leave it to plant in next year. We have these cages set at the driveway side of the fence because the chicken pen in on a very slight hill and the best soil always works it’s way down. This area, right here at the top is still clay and needs a lot of help. If you see potatoes growing all around the compost, those will be dug up and cooked for the pigs later.

This is the other “ugly”. The girls mucked out the barn right before we planted the garden in April and put a pile here in the corner. The chickens will go through it when they come back in. For now, we are adding to it with weeds. The chickens are going to have a lot of work to do when they come back in here at the end of the growing season.

Well, that wraps it up. I don’t know anyone else who plants a garden in their chicken pen but, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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Our Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookies

This cookie recipe is very simple and also very well loved. We make a double batch every week for our family to eat as snacks because, with the whole wheat flour and our own farm eggs, I justify in my mind, that they are healthier than store bought snacks. Yes, I’m that kind of Mom who lets her kids eat cookies every single day for snack!

The truth is, I was raised eating these very cookies for snack (except my mother used all-purpose white flour instead of whole wheat). Back then, the recipe was written on an index card and called Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookies, though all of us knew the recipe by heart, just like my own girls do. I don’t know where the recipe originated, I should ask my mother that, but I can tell you that we have helped spread it around by sharing it with many, many friends who have asked for it. Everyone Loves these cookies!

With no further ado, here is the recipe. I will give you a couple tricks to getting perfect cookies, at the end.

-2 1/2 cups flour (I use freshly ground hard white wheat)
-2 cups rolled oats
-2 cups brown sugar (I use really dark, unrefined brown sugar)
-1 teaspoon baking soda
-1 teaspoon salt

Mix all this well. I use my Bosh mixer. My mother mixed by hand.
Add
-2 sticks of softened butter
-2 eggs

Mix well
Add
-12 oz. bag of chocolate chips

Mix well and form into small cookies. These cookies rise well so you don’t need to make them huge. Place them on an un greased cookie sheet.
Bake at 350 degrees. If your pan is light colored, they can bake for 12 minutes. If your pan is dark, bake them for 10 minutes. When you take these out of the oven, they will not look like they cooked long enough. You just need to let them cool and they will be fine. Do Not overcook them! They are supposed to be soft, not hard and crunchy. If you think you did overcook them, remove them from the pan right away so they don’t continue to cook on the bottom. If they are not overcooked, let them cool slightly and gently pop them all loose with a spatula. You can leave them on the pan to cool all the way.

If you are in a hurry, or you are having a youngster make the cookie dough and forming them is a bit more than they can handle, you can press the dough into a 9×13 pan. Press the dough down well to keep them from being too crumbly after they bake. Bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes. These cookie bars are really good fresh and warm out of the oven. For an alternative to brownies and ice cream, you can make cookie bars and ice cream. It’s delicious!

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Harvesting 420 Pounds of Potatoes

In my last post, I said that the potatoes were close to being ready to harvest but they probably wouldn’t die back until the end of June/beginning of July and we wouldn’t dig them until then. Well, I lied. But, it wasn’t intentional! I was going to wait to harvest until I looked at the weather this morning and saw we have rain in the forecast every single day, right on into July. We can’t harvest wet potatoes, so I told the kids, when they were done with their animal chores, we needed to dig potatoes!

It turned out that because this is Ava’s potato patch, she wanted to harvest with me only, no other kids.

Since we had already pulled just about 50# out of this patch, getting new potatoes, I didn’t know what our harvest would be like. Well, let me tell ya, Ava and I got about halfway down the first row, and had to call for backup!

There were five rows, double planted (two rows of potatoes planted in each garden row). Each row was about 12 feet long, so not real big, but planted very densely.

The kids teamed up and started at the end of a row. Ava and I completed a row and then she teamed up with Clara and I went to get the little girls. We were racing the weather and needed all hands!

Right after I said, I don’t harvest into plastic, we needed extra buckets, and harvested into plastic!🤦🏼‍♀️

We harvested into the wheelbarrow too, but were able to transfer those potatoes into boxes up at the house.

It took two hours of hard work to get those potatoes out! We ended up with 420 pounds, including what we took out as new potatoes. We planted about 30 pounds, so we got a return of about 14 pounds for every pound we planted. That seems like a really good return to me.

We are keeping the kitchen as dark as we can and I have the ceiling fan going. I’m not thrilled about using plastic buckets or about having the potatoes so dense. I’m going to see if I can come up with more boxes to transfer some of those potatoes into.

These potatoes are in the dining room, which we are also keeping as dark as we can, with a ceiling fan running. We’ll wait about a week and then go through all of these.

To be honest, this is a much bigger harvest than I expected from the size patch we had. I’m putting it down to the really good soil we planted in and mulched with. I will post when we harvest LeeRoy’s potato field, which is being grown in the traditional way. We are comparing growing methods, which we will share with y’all.

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A Long Potato Harvest & an Unusual way to Cure and Store Them

I want to share with you how we harvest our potatoes over several months. We do not have a good food storage area. We don’t have a cellar or even a basement or garage. Our house is very small, especially for 10 people. This is not because we are tiny house people, lol, and trust me, I would love a basement or a cellar…..or both! When we bought our place all those years ago, we could either go with nice land and a small house, or a nice house and a small piece of land. We went with big land/small house and have never regretted it! We love our land, but the truth is, we thought we would have added a cellar and garage and all that stuff by now. We have not been able to, so storing food is a bit tricky. This is one of the reasons, pretty much the main reason, we harvest potatoes over several months. I do not want to harvest now what we need to take through the winter. Our house is hot in the summer and not ideal for keeping potatoes. So, this is what we do.

The first potatoes go into the ground super early. The last few years, I have planted at the end of February. If snow was on the ground or in the forecast, I would not be planting then, but the weather has been mild here in Southern Virginia (growing zone 7b) the last few years by the end of February.

This year, we got several frosts before the potatoes sprouted. I didn’t worry about that. I did keep a close eye on the weather once they were up and we sprayed them with water before the sun hit them if they got frosted. I have used row cover to keep the frost off in the past, but all my row cover was being used in other parts of the garden, particularly the strawberries that were in bloom. Potatoes do not like frost and we did get one hard one when the plants were about 8 inches high. We sprayed them but the leaves still turned black and they died back some. Within a week or so, you could hardly tell though.

These potatoes started blooming at the beginning of May, and that’s when I went out and dug around with my hand and got our first new potatoes. Let’s talk for a minute about what new potatoes are. These are small, exceptionally delicious potatoes with very delicate skin that you can begin to harvest as soon as your potato plant blooms. You don’t want to disturb the plant because it still has a lot of growing to do, and you don’t want to take too many potatoes from a plant. Very gently put your hand down in the dirt and feel around. If you feel potatoes that are golf ball size or larger, pull them out. If you find tiny potatoes, try not to disturb them, but if you do knock them loose accidentally, you can eat those too. Put the dirt back up around the plant and move on to the next potato plant. I usually take two from each plant, unless there are three nice ones close together. Then I will take all three.

Once I’m able to start digging out new potatoes, I go down to the garden and gather what I need for a meal or two at a time (that’s 5-10 pounds for us, and yup, I have a pretty good eye for potato weight, though I always do actually weigh them too). You have to have a big enough potato patch to handle this much harvest before the actual harvest. If you only have a raised bed or two of potatoes, I would not suggest taking so much before you dig them up at the end of their growing.

We are now in mid June. We have used just about 40 pounds of potatoes from our potato patch so far. The potatoes we are getting now, are not what I would call new potatoes anymore. They are bigger and the skins have gotten thicker. We still eat the skins but they do not wash off like they do on new potatoes.

The potatoes are not ready for their final harvest but they are close. See how the plants are dying back? The leaves are turning yellow and brown and the plants are lying down, instead of standing up straight and tall like they had been.

We won’t harvest the entire patch until the plants look dead. Then we will dig them up and probably replant with late corn within a day. I am figuring this will happen at the end of June/beginning of July. That’s about as late as I want to plant my second crop of corn so we will be digging as soon as these plants are dead.

Once the whole crop has been dug up, I cure and store my potatoes different from everybody else on the Internet. It all goes back to not having a cellar or basement. This is not the proper way, but I have used it for years and it has worked for me.

If you don’t have a great food storage area either, what I do might work for you too. First, I harvest into wooden baskets, not plastic. For lack of a better place, I let those baskets sit in my kitchen for about a week. I don’t want a lot of light on them but I don’t have a dark place to cure them. Technically, potatoes are supposed to cure in a single layer, in the dark, in a cool environment. My poor potatoes don’t get any of that. Nevertheless, sitting in baskets in the kitchen with lots of air flow, seems to work. After a week or so, I go through all the potatoes, with the help of the kids. We take out any that are damaged, either from us when we harvest or from pests. We will eat those first. All the rest of the potatoes we put into paper bags (I buy the bags at Aldi). We sort by small, medium and large and only fill each bag halfway up. Then we fold the bag over, tape it closed with Duck tape and label what size the potatoes are. Once we have all our bags full, we stack them in the bottom of a small “canning closet” we have in the middle of the house. This is probably the coolest place in the house and with the bags taped shut and the door of the closet kept shut, it’s plenty dark. I have found that the potatoes last this way for several months.

To go back to my harvesting-over-several-months plan, we see that I began harvesting new potatoes at the beginning of May and will continue through the end of June. The big harvest will most likely be at the beginning of July. Probably most of July we will use potatoes that have not been stored away. Then, we will start using the potatoes in storage, or, at that point, LeeRoy’s big potato field might be ready for harvest. He planted in April, so his potatoes are blooming now, a month and a half after the ones in the garden. The longer his stay in the ground, the better, because we will have plenty of potatoes to eat at the house and if we can keep from having to cure and store his until the end of the summer, that is going to be a whole lot better for taking them through the winter.

I am not planning on using new potatoes from LeeRoy’s fields. We will just wait and harvest his all at once when they die back. I’m pretty interested to see what kind of harvest we are going to get out there. We have not grown a field of potatoes before so we are still in the learning process on that. Lots of potatoes in the garden, yes, but not a plowed up field with no watering and no mulching!

The last few years, I have grown fall potatoes. They have done well and have lengthened our harvest time quite a bit. Getting potatoes to sprout in the heat of mid summer has been a bit tricky, but once sprouted, they grew quite well right up into the cold weather and produced a nice crop. I wrote a post about our fall potatoes last year. Here is the link, if you are interested.
https://faithandfamilyhomestead.com/2022/11/16/fall-potato-harvest-good-or-bad/

If you have been following my gardening method, then you know I like to eat fresh from the garden for as long as possible. The food is best that way and I don’t have to put as much up. This means, several smaller crops have to be planted, rather than one big planting and one big harvest. This is what we are doing with potatoes too. In fact, I tucked in several little sprouting potatoes in an empty place in the garden today and I hope to get the rest of them planted in the next week or so if I can just find the room. A little basket of tiny potatoes stayed on the porch all winter and I was going to take them to the compost the other day but I found that they have all sprouted! So, into the garden they must go! There is just something really great about continual planting and continual harvesting.

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Putting up Trellises & Do I Prune Tomato Plants?

This has been a week to set up trellises. At least, it has been for the kids. I have been dealing with a knockdown drag out migraine all week, so all the trellis building fell to the kids, which they enjoyed and, it turns out, didn’t need my help for anyway. In fact, my oldest daughter enjoyed making her large cucumber trellis so much, she asked if there is anything else she can build a trellis for.

We will start with the trellis Mel made for the cucumbers. First, let me say, lots of people do not grow cucumbers on trellises, but I always have. That’s how my Mom grew her cucumbers, and to me it makes sense. The vines take us less room and the cucumbers themselves develop better if they are up off the ground. I can’t think of any reason NOT to grow cucumbers on a trellis, except for the difficulty of coming up with a trellis.

In the past, I have used anything from chicken wire stretched between two T posts, to panels (like cattle panels), to A frame trellises made out of scrap wood. It doesn’t have to be fancy. It doesn’t have to be expensive or even something bought. Mel made her trellis out of saplings she cut down in one of the goat fields and she nailed it together with nails I believe were given to us years ago. No expense, just some time and some skill, and that really is the best way.

The first thing Mel did was chop down the small trees and saplings she wanted and hauled them all up by the garden, in the shade under two oak trees. She cut the wood to length, shorter stout pieces for the sides and longer smaller pieces for the cucumbers too climb on. Once she had her pieces cut, she set to work stripping all the bark off with her knife. If the bark is left on, bugs will crawl up under it and eat the wood. No bugs this way, and it looks nice and clean too.

Mel laid out her pieces and then cut a small notch in each piece before nailing it in place. This makes the trellis more stable and helped handle the problem of short nails. One side of the trellis looked like this.👇

Once one side was done, she lined up her other pieces so she could make the second side exactly the same length.

When both sides were done, she stood them up and put these small pieces across each end to attach the sides together and make the trellis stable. I was not out there for any of this. I would just visit and take a picture every day as she made progress, if I felt well enough to walk down to the garden. Don’t ask me how she got the trellis moved over the cucumber bed by herself. It’s heavy and quite sturdy.

We are not growing a huge number of cucumbers this year because we have so many jars of pickles left over from last year. I don’t need to can nearly as many so we only planted 8 seeds, but this trellis, and a garden bed this size could easily handle twice that many seeds or more.

The second trellis that went up this week, was also made by Mellony, for her beans. This is a weird situation because these are supposed to be bush beans. That’s the only kind of beans I grow……but they are vining out! I don’t think they will vine out too far but they definitely need a support. These are called Desperato and I have never grown them before. They must be a bush bean that vines some.

Anyway, Mel cut some posts and pounded them into the ground with the T post pounder. She notched the posts and wrapped twine around them. The notches will keep the twine from slipping. This was yesterday.

I went out today, and found the beans are around winding around the twine. Looks like we are going to get a nice crop.

Let me just mention, this is not our main crop of beans. They will go in once the corn comes out. These beans were planted super early just to tide us over and they are producing just at the right time. We have been eating loads of peas! But the peas are done now and Ava just pulled them out. The last picking of peas was a couple days after the first beans started coming in. That is perfect timing.

Ava pulling out her peas

We have two more short rows of beans that are about to get their true leaves and they look really good. I just mulched them today. And, Ava planted a row of beans next to the chicken wire fence here where she pulled her peas out. All this is to tide us over for fresh eating, until we get the big crop of beans planted in a month or so.

Ava pulled the mulch back a bit and planted beans along the fence

Okay, on to the last trellis. This one was set up by the boys because they are growing the tomatoes this year. I explained to them what they needed to do and told them I would be out as soon as I could to help them. By the time I got out there, they were completely done! Boys are strong and they put up three cattle panel trellises in no time. When I get a migraine (which I do every couple of weeks) they are debilitating and getting down to the garden is a huge (sometimes impossible) task. The kids know this. I have been dealing with these migraines longer than any of them have been alive, and they carry on pretty well even if I am unavailable or slow getting down to the garden.

The trellis is a 16” cattle panel, held in place with 3 T posts. The panel is wired to the T posts with fencing wire.

Anyway, when I did finally get down there, I showed LeeRoy how to gather the main stems and tie them in the square knot to the cattle panel. We use old clothes line for this. It works perfectly and can be untied at the end of the season and reused for years.

Clara helped LeeRoy tie up all the plants and I showed Jimmy how to take off all the branches that were lying on the ground or had leaves hanging down to the ground. We want the plant nice and clean with no leaves on the ground. As I mentioned in an earlier post, leaves and branches on the ground are more susceptible to blight. Cutting all those branches back turned out to be a bit much for Jim, so I took over that job and let him hoe out weeds in the path, which is what he really likes to do.

The question of “do I prune tomatoes” is almost already answered in the picture above. That is just about the extent of my pruning, unless I need to cut more off when I harvest to be able to find all the tomatoes! I have been known to cut quite a few branches at harvest. I also cut out branches that end up on the ground, because tomatoes lying on the ground will not ripen well. They usually rot and attract bad bugs.

Tomatoes are bushes and they want to produce a lot of tomatoes. My mother never pruned and I didn’t for years, until a few years ago I heard that everyone was pruning and that it was the “right” thing to do. It felt pretty wrong to be cutting out so much of my tomato plant but I decided there must be something to this new pruning thing everyone was doing, so I did it too…….for a few years and then I went back to my old ways. Pruning just doesn’t make sense to me. If you could get 100 tomatoes off your tomato plant, why would you trim it down to one stem and only get 20 tomatoes. Now, you have to grow waaaay more plants to get the same number of tomatoes I can get off of 30 plants.

Anyway, there you have it. I don’t like fads and I have rarely done the “in” thing. To me, that’s what tomato pruning is. I stick with the old way of growing tomatoes, just like we grew them when I was growing up. If my plants want to get big and bushy and produce tons of tomatoes, I’m sure not going to stop them.

For those who are interested in numbers, we have 30 tomato plants, most are a Roma type and some are Rutgers. I will use any and all for sauce but the Rutgers are more for fresh eating and of course the Roma type is more pastier and makes thicker sauce. We also have 6 cherry tomatoes in a different part of the garden.

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Strawberry Blueberry Jam & A few Jam Making Tips

It’s that time of year again when I am making jam. The older girls have been growing our strawberries for the last several years and over the month of May, they picked a few gallon baskets every few days.

The girls washed the berries and cut the tops off, and what we didn’t eat, they froze in gallon bags. I like to make a lot of jam at once, so we collect all our fruit and then a spend a day or two using it all. There is another reason I like using frozen strawberries over fresh strawberries, and that is, once the berries have been frozen, they are much easier to mash up for jam, than fresh berries are. Just thaw them and then pinch the bag between your fingers until they are fairly smashed. Then, measure out your fruit. This works a whole lots better than measuring out fresh fruit and trying to mash it up.

Last week, I took out several gallon bags of frozen strawberries and made 33 pints of jam. This week, I took out the rest of the strawberries and a few bags of blueberries and made 21 pints of strawberry blueberry jam. This is one of our favorite jams to eat, but my kids have this funny thing about wanting their jam to be smooth, so I made smooth jam. This is not jelly because jelly doesn’t have seeds in it. This is just smooth jam, and I have to say, I like it better too!

I put strawberries in my food processor and measured out the purée into the pot.

It looks awful, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, as it cooked down, it turned into a beautiful color again. After I puréed 5 cups of strawberries, I puréed 4 cups of blueberries, and then Clara put the pectin in. We were making a double recipe altogether, by making one recipe of strawberry jam and one recipe of blueberry jam. I use regular pectin and unrefined sugar from Aldi in my jam. There are all sorts of alternatives these days, but I use the old standard stuff I have been using for over 25 years.

As soon as one pot was heating, I started puréeing fruit for the next pot. We did three sets of double batches of jam. That is the right amount for the size of my pots and it kept us rolling along. We had one pot we were working with on medium/high heat and another pot on low heat. My recipe doesn’t call for lemon juice, though that can be added to jam. I did add a couple tablespoons of butter into each pot to keep it from foaming.

While the jam was heating, we pre measured the sugar (11 cups for each double batch) and washed and prepared the jars. I fill my sink with hot water and put the clean jars in it. Then I boil a kettle of water and pour that on top. I put very hot water on my lids, as hot as I can stand it, which is much hotter than the kids can take it, lol. Years of washing dishes by hand has given me very tough hands! Preparing jars and bands is one of the jobs that younger kids can help with. They can also help with dumping out the jar and handing it to me when I fill it.

I do like to bring in the little kids as much as I can. Sometimes they just have to watch or stay out of the way, but when they can help, they should. It makes them feel included and it’s so important to pass these skills on to the next generation. The older girls and I were working pretty fast on the first two batches but by the time I was down to just having one batch left, I let them go outside and brought my little 4 year old helper in. She stirred the pot quite a bit and helped with the jars. Once the jam is hot it can plop right out of the pot and burn someone if you’re not careful, so I only let her stir until it was getting close to that point. Then she watched from a safe distance and got ready to hand me jars.

Once the purée or mashed berries, reach a full rolling boil, which is a boil that cannot be stirred away, add the pre measured sugar (carefully, so it doesn’t splatter up and burn someone) and stir it in. It’s important to have the sugar measured out and ready to go so it can be added quickly.

The mixture has to be returned to a full rolling boil and boil for one minute. You have to stir it constantly at this point. Now, the trick to getting your jam to set if you are doing multiple batches is to really get that boil and don’t slack on it. It’s a myth that you have to only make single batches of jam or they won’t set. I have made several batches together for years and discovered early on, that the trick is to boil it every bit as long as the recipe calls for, and then I usually go a bit longer. In fact, I keep my pot on that hot (tuned off) burner while I fill jars and the jam continues to bubble. (Sometimes I do pull it off the burner for a few minutes to let it cool a bit, if it’s going to boil over the side of the pot, and then slide it back on.) I have hot jars, and hot lids and I want my jam very hot. It’s boiling when I put it into my jars with a funnel. I wipe the top of the jar with a new clean wet wash cloth to make sure the lid will be against glass with no jam in between, and then……

Yup, my jars go upside down for 5 minutes. This used to be a common way to seal jam jars and it was listed as safe by the blue ball canning folks. I just looked it up, and now they say it’s an old way that is not safe. You will have to look it up and use your own discretion. I have been sealing my jam jars this way for almost 20 years. They always seal and we have never gotten sick from anything that I have ever canned. I do think it’s important to have everything very clean and very hot. I can big amounts of jam and since this has always worked for us, I’m going to stick with the way the old timers did it. But, like I said, use your own discretion here, and do what you feel safe doing.

Once the jars have been upside down for 5 minutes, I gently flip them over and set them on a folded over bath town to cool on the island. We leave them completely alone until the next day, and then we remove the rings, wipe them off if they need it, label the top and put them in my canning closet. While the jars cool, I clean up the kitchen and listen to one of my absolute favorite sounds…..the bings of canning lids sealing.

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How to make Biscuits from Scratch

I used to be known for my biscuits, back when I was a teen. I think that’s because I made them so much, and because my brothers bragged on my biscuit making ability. Part of me has always wondered if that bragging was for real, or if it was just a way to get me to make yet more biscuits!

Anyway, whatever the case was, I made biscuits just about daily for a few years there, when we were teens. By brothers and I were milling wood with our Dad’s sawmill and building barns (for Dad). We worked Hard, lived on pretty much coffee and biscuits (and the good food Mom made) and had a wonderful childhood! If you think giving your kids a life of ease is giving them the best childhood, think again! But, that is for another post. This post is about biscuits. Now you have a slight history lesson on my biscuit making career, and the truth is, I really never make them without thinking of those good old days.

The biscuit making queen in our family is Clara. She has been making them since she was 9, and she does a wonderful job. Definitely her Momma’s girl! Okay, enough bragging, I’ll get on with it.

First, the recipe (and this is doubled from what I made as a kid, because we are a family of 10, cut it in half if you need to), and then some helpful tips that will make a big difference in getting a nice rise on those biscuits.

Kirsten’s Biscuits
-4 cups white flour (I use organic, all purpose)
-2 tablespoons baking powder
-1 teaspoon salt
-1 1/2 teaspoons cream of tartar
-2 sticks butter
-1 1/2 cups milk (I use our raw goat milk, any whole milk will do)

The first thing you are going to want to do is set your butter out to soften up. Once it’s fairly soft, you can start. Preheat your oven to 375 degrees, and put all your dry ingredients in a mixing bowl.

Cream of Tartar is my secret ingredient, so don’t skip it! This will really help your biscuits rise. I don’t know of any other recipe that uses Cream of Tartar, but I keep it on hand for biscuits.

Strange as it may be, I have always used the tablespoon to stir the dry ingredients together. All the rest of the mixing gets done by hand, so there is no need to get a wooden spoon dirty……at least in my mind. Make sure you mix the dry ingredients well.

Next, add the soft butter and mix it in by hand. I slide my thumb across my fingers to mix until all the flour is mixed into the butter and it’s crumbly, like this👇.

Now wash your hands, lightly flour your surface, get out your pan (don’t grease it), biscuit cutter (I used a drinking glass all my growing up years), and measure out your milk.

Make a “well” in the center of your flour mixture and pour the milk in.

Take your fingers and flick in all the flour around the edge of the bowl. Try to keep your fingers out of the milk as much as possible and mix all the ingredients together. Get every bit of dry flour at the bottom of the bowl by rolling and flipping the dough into one ball. It shouldn’t be too wet, but if you think that it is, add a tiny bit more flour. You don’t want sticky dough but you don’t want more flour in the recipe than you have to have. Less flour will make a better rise. The flipping and rolling of the dough is a slight knead. You don’t want much kneading done at all, and none once the dough is out of the bowl.

Once your dough looks like this👆(And that will take a couple minutes at the most), turn it out on your floured surface and gently press it flat….but not too flat! About 1/2-3/4 of an inch is good. Be very careful not to “seal” the top. Be gentle.

Next, take your biscuit cutter and cut out your biscuits. Don’t twist the cutter, that will seal the edges and keep the biscuits from rising as well. Press straight down.

The best biscuits come from the first cutting. They don’t rise as well once the dough has to be pushed back together and re flattened. This being the case, I get as many biscuits cut out as I can, even if some of them are missing an edge. You will see what I mean when you see the pan full of cut biscuits.

Once you have cut out all the biscuits you can, gather the scraps, press them together and then flatten them back out and finish cutting biscuits out.

It may be hard to see, but some of my biscuits seem to have a clipped edge. That is what I do to get as many cut out as possible. See how some of the biscuits look smooth on top. That is from re flattening the scraps and those will not rise as well.

Biscuits like a hot oven. 375 degrees or even 400 degrees is good. Different size biscuits will bake for different amounts of time. I would start the timer for 15 minutes and then check them. The bottom will be tan when they are done.

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Dealing with Garden Pests, Thinning the Corn & Pruning Tomatoes

This is not the post I was going to write this week, but we have been dealing with an unusually high number of garden pests and so I wanted to share with you how we are handling that. (If you are interested in reading the post I wrote last year called How To Get Rid Of Garden Bugs Without Spraying, here is the link https://faithandfamilyhomestead.com/2022/06/04/how-to-get-rid-of-garden-bugs-without-spraying/ )

The first pest I want to talk about is not what people usually mean when they talk about garden pests, but it is a huge problem nonetheless. That is the Copperhead Snake that was in the rotting wood of one of my garden boxes! Yup, Clara had just picked strawberries right there and then, I was weeding right there. Not safe at.all. I loved my boxes when we first put them in the garden. Everything was so nice and neat!

The wood was old cull lumber that had sat outside for a long time and wasn’t treated, before we even got it. We have used the boxes for several years but by last year, I was getting concerned with how rotten they were becoming. I wanted to replace them with wood from our local Amish sawmill, but we just weren’t able to. This year, I was even more concerned about snakes getting in or under the rotting wood, so I pulled off loose boards and figured that we would have to come up with a plan for the boxes.

Well, let me tell ya, after finding the Copperhead in the wood of one of the boxes yesterday, I had the boys pull ALL the wood out of the garden. They did it this morning, while the weather was very cool so if there was another snake it would be moving slow. See how rotten this wood is?? Yeah, it needed to go. It’s sad a little bit. Maybe someday I will have boxes made out of sawmill wood. For now, I’m going back to how I have always done it and how my mother always did it: raised beds that are mounds of dirt with no wood around them. It works fine, it just takes a little more space and isn’t as pretty. Sure is better than snakes though!!

This is the next thing we’ve had to deal with. Our cabbage and broccoli got really attacked by cabbage moths. With the leaves looking this bad, I figured there would be worms in the broccoli heads. Yup, sure enough, even though we tried to clean them out up at the house, there were just too many.

We had to pull out all our broccoli plants and feed them to the pigs. It was disappointing for sure, but I’ve had a feeling for a while that this was going to be the case. You see, once the weather is warm, the bugs/worms appear. This broccoli (and the cabbage) was very slow to grow and mature this spring and I had a feeling we had gotten too far into summer weather to have a good crop. It’s not the end of the world, the pigs got a good meal. In fact, we won’t have to feed them any grain today which saves quite a bit of money. We will plant a large crop of broccoli and cabbage in the fall when the weather is cool and much fewer bugs are out. Jimmy, who was the broccoli grower, and I cleaned up one bed and he planted beans in it. The other broccoli bed has tomatoes in it and I’m sure getting more space will make them happy.

Another thing we have been dealing with are bean beetles. Last week, the beans looks terrible! We put Diatomaceous Earth on them which is natural and safe. We were careful not to put it on the flowers but only on the leaves that were badly eaten. This is what the Diatomaceous Earth bag looks like. You can get it at most farm stores. (We use this for garden pests and for worming all the animals)

This week, the beans are looking much better. We are keeping a close eye on them but so far, the new growth does not have any bug holes in it. We have tiny beans so that’s exciting! Beans are a pretty quick crop and we plant several times all season long to have a continual harvest.

Some of the sweet potato plants also have holes. I believe these are from flea beetles.

I would say half or less have holes on their leaves. The rest look like this.👇

They are all growing and I’m going to leave them for now and see if they can get past the problem on their own. We only use DE when we absolutely need to. Some years, we don’t use it at all.

Ava’s potatoes have small holes but no potato bugs. One row had a lot of holes in the leaves so we put DE on that. The new growth doesn’t have holes so we are leaving them but checking every day for potato bugs. The shocker was what happened to LeeRoy’s potatoes out in his field!

That, right there is the Colorado Potato Bug larva, and let me tell you, they tried to wipe out LeeRoys’s potato crop! The field he has them planted in is towards the back of our property. It’s not a place we can just walk by and take a look at now and then. LeeRoy has been hoeing his corn once a week and checking it every few days. On Saturday evening, we went out to to check it, not expecting any problems and we found some of his plants absolutely covered with potato bug larva.

We went back to the house, got the Diatomaceous Earth, and went up and down the rows sprinkling it on everywhere we saw larva or eaten leaves. Some of the larva were under the leaves but we just sprinkled on the top and figured we’d get what we could.

This picture is of the damage, after the DE was on and it had rained. You can see the plant looks horrible but it is starting to put out new growth. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday we checked the field again and added DE where ever we saw larva. Every day there were fewer. Today, when we checked, there were only a couple plants that needed to have DE sprinkled on them.

We did see a few (3, I believe) adult potato bugs. They look like this.👇Those are easy to deal with. We just picked them off and stepped on them.

When we put DE on, we put it on thick where the larva were concentrated, but we tried not to get any on the flowers or buds. We also did not put it where it was not needed.

I will use DE when we need it, that is for sure, but I’m not going to put any extra down. I would rather not just wipe out ALL the bugs. We want good bugs to move in. That is exactly what is happening now. This is an Assassin Bug and it eats Colorado Potato Bug larva. LeeRoy saw several of these good guys! Good! This is exactly what we want.

My theory as to why Ava’s potatoes in the garden don’t have any potato bugs, and LeeRoy’s potatoes do, is that we have grown potatoes for so many years in the garden without the use of chemicals and with very little DE and so the good bugs have moved in enough to keep the potato bugs in check. This isn’t to say that we haven’t ever had potato bugs in the garden. We have and we’ve had to pick them off by hand like crazy at times, but over the last few years, we have seen none or very few. It’s really important to have beneficial bugs in the garden to help balance out the bad guys. Hopefully we have reached this point in the main garden with potato bugs.

The good news is, LeeRoy’s potatoes are going to be okay. He hilled a couple rows today and I think we are pretty much coming out the other side of this attack.

Now, on to things that are much more fun than bugs! Let’s talk about corn, and how we are thinning it and removing suckers. I have never taken off the suckers before but I learned from a lady who grew up Old Order Mennonite that this is important because the suckers are just steeling from the main plant and won’t ever produce much. I know that’s a fact, and I like learning from the old timers who have been growing food for generations, so this is what we are doing, starting now.

This corn plant has a sucker on either side.

Just gently pull down to remove it. It may help to hold the corn stalk with the other hand so you don’t hurt it. I had all the kids do this to their rows of corn.

Next, we thinned. We had planted corn about 4 inches apart because we were using old seed. Most of it came up though and we don’t want our corn that close. I went down the rows and knocked over every small plant and every plant that crowded, so the kids could pull them out. The corn is not perfectly spaced at 8 inches. I took out as little as possible, at the same time, trying to give the plants the space they need. This was not a remove-every-other-plant kind of job.

Lastly, the kids hilled dirt up around their corn. Corn roots are shallow and hilling them makes them stronger and less likely to blow over in the wind.

The boys worked on their tomato rows too. I will cover why I prune my tomatoes the way I do in a later post, but for now, I’ll show you how they removed the lower branches.

We don’t want any leaves or branches touching the ground. Leaves on the ground, which is cool and damp at night, will get blight. So, all the yellow and brown leaves which are already getting blight went, along with anything else that was on the ground.

We need to get these trellised, which hopefully will happen soon. I will show you what we are doing for that and go into my method of tomato pruning sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Now that we are in mid May, we are getting lots of new potatoes….

peas……

and loads of strawberries! It takes a lot of feed this crew so I’m glad we are getting back into the abundance of summer food!

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How to Make Delicious Strawberry Bars

My two oldest girls have been growing strawberries over the last few years, and boy, are they getting a big harvest this year! Every few days, they bring several gallons of berries in from the garden. They have frozen loads to make into jam with later, sold some, given some away, and of course we have all been eating them fresh! I’m letting everyone eat as many as they want because organic strawberries are so healthy……and delicious, of course!

However, last week I decided I really needed to be making strawberry things since there seems to be no end of the strawberries coming in from the garden! So, I made a big batch of strawberry syrup for our French toast and I made strawberry bars that were a big hit! I made them again this morning and took pictures along the way so I can share the recipe with y’all. It’s a pretty easy recipe and they are definitely delicious! Even I am eating them, and I usually stay away from sugar.😆

Here is what you will need

-2 cups quick oats
-1 1/2 cups flour (I use hard white wheat that I grind myself)
-1 cup dark brown sugar
-1 teaspoon cinnamon
-1/2 teaspoon salt
-1 1/2 sticks butter

-4 cups chopped strawberries
-1/4 cup white flour
-1 tablespoon lemon juice
-1/2 cup sugar

-powered sugar
-milk
-vanilla

The first thing you are going to need to do, is wash your berries and chop up 4 cups of them.

Put them in a bowl and add the flour, lemon juice and sugar. Stir it up and set it aside.

It will look like this.

Next, get a mixing bowl and put in the quick oats, flour, brown sugar, cinnamon and salt. Melt the butter.

Add the melted butter to the dry ingredients and stir everything together.

Put half of the mixture in a 9×13 and press it with the back of the spoon to make it firm. Add the strawberry mixture on top and spread it out evenly.

Use your hand to sprinkle on the rest of the oatmeal mixture. It will look like this.👇

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Take it out and let it cool completely.

Make a glaze, using about 1/2 a cup (or more) of powdered sugar, a little bit of milk and a little vanilla. If it’s too runny, add more sugar. Glaze the top and put it in the fridge for several hours or overnight. These bars are really good nice and cold!

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How to Rotate Pigs to Improve the Land-Part 2

In my previous post in this series, I shared information and pictures on how we had turned cut over land into lush pastures. If you missed that post, you can find it here 👉 https://faithandfamilyhomestead.com/2023/04/28/how-to-make-pasture-using-pigs/

In this post, I want to go through some of the details of moving pigs so you can use your own pigs to either bring in grass where there isn’t any, or improve the fields you already have.

When you fence in your pigs, you need to keep in mind that they should be moved to a new area every one to three weeks. Moving the pigs every single week can add a lot of pressure to your schedule so, personally, I don’t recommend that. Giving them a slightly bigger area and letting them stay in it for 2 to 3 weeks, takes the pressure off and gives you some flexibility. The reason you don’t want to give your pigs a really large area and leave them on it for several weeks or even months is because they will end up using part of the area too much and some of the area very little. In other words, you will end up with ground that is dug up far more than you want it to be, but part of the area will be untouched. If you continue to leave them longer so that the whole area is turned up and rooted, then they will have been so hard on the part of the field that is their favorite, it will take a long time to recover. That’s just how pigs are. So, it’s best to put them in an area they can work up in 2-3 week, and then move them. Rotating them properly will help grass come in behind them. Leaving them in an area too long will cause the ground to take a long time to recover, which is not good for anyone because, you are going to need to rotate the pigs through that area again and it will need to be recovered by that time.

Just to be clear, you want to move your pigs onto an area. 2 or 3 weeks later, rotate them to the next area, 2 or 3 weeks after that, move them again to a new area, and so on and so forth, on down the pasture/woods. You need to look at your fields or woods before you start, and come up with a pig rotation plan so you are not scrambling every few weeks, trying to figure out where to move your pigs to.

For example, say you have one big field that is surrounded by woods, and you want to start your piglets at one end of the field and, several months later, end with the pigs big enough to butcher, at the same end of the field. What you can do in a situation like this, is to run a straight electric fence down the center of your field, but stop it before you hit the very end of the field. Now, you can rotate your pigs down one side of that line and back up the other side. You can probably do that over and over until they are butcher size. That is where the concept of not exhausting each little field comes into play. If each area is not over worked, it can recover quickly and be ready for the pigs to be put back on it.

Where you live, how much rain you get, how long you leave the pigs on an area all play a role in figuring out how long an area needs a rest before pigs can go back onto it. But, to give you some number to work with, I think generally speaking, a two month rest is good. If you can do longer, great, but if you are careful not to over-root an area and you get enough rain for grass to come back well, then breaking a field into 8 paddocks and moving the pigs to a new paddock every 2-3 weeks should work.

I would suggest fencing in plenty of woods for the pigs along with field. Woods are great for pigs because pigs don’t sweat and they need a lot of shade. There are also lots of things to eat in the deep leaves of the woods, and, last but not least, the pigs will actually make grass start to grow in the woods. This means that the pigs are making your field bigger, which is a huge plus! The picture below is an area that we have run pigs through twice. It used to be a pretty nasty area with a lot of dead wood lying around and no grass. After rotating the pigs through twice, once a year over the last two years, it looks like this now. Much better!

Below is a picture of where we kept several pigs in the woods over a period of time last winter. There was no grass in these woods before the pigs went into them. Now, with one pig rotation, look at it! (It was a very windy day when I took this picture last week, which is why the grass looks blown.)

Below is a picture of the woods right next to where we had pigs. Big difference, huh?

Now, I want to show you some pictures, so you know what to look for. Below is an area where we did not have any grass. The ground is hard and won’t grow anything. It really needed some pig tilling.

The picture below looks perfect. See how the ground is completely rooted up, all the way down the hill? The pigs are ready to be moved off and this area can rest for a good long time. If we leave them on much longer, they will start to dig big holes and hurt the land more than help it. The idea is to disturb the soil, as Joel Salatin says, and then they need to be moved to a new area.

It can be a little scary to put pigs on your nice pasture for the first time. After all, pigs are not like cows and they are not just going to graze. Oh yes, they eat grass some, but for the most part, they want to eat roots and grubs and anything else they can find down in the soil. See the field in the picture below? That has had pigs on it many times! Looks pretty good doesn’t it? To be honest, there are some dips in it from years ago when we left pigs on too long. Now, we (usually!) rotate before the field is damaged.

It won’t take long for the field to look like this 👇. That’s fine. Don’t panic at what they are doing to your nice grass! The rain will help smooth the dirt and the grass will regrow. Once the whole field pretty much looks like this, you need to move them. Part of being a good pig farmer is knowing what your field looks like. Maybe you didn’t fence in enough and you need to move them sooner than you had planned? Do it! Of course as the pigs grow, and they grow fast, they are going to go through an area quicker so you are going to want to give them bigger areas or plan on moving them sooner…..say shoot for three weeks when they are small and two weeks when they are older. But, it’s best to keep an eye on your field, not just your calendar. If the pigs need to be moved sooner, move them. If you think you can get an extra week out of an area, do that too.

You have probably noticed that I have not told you how many pigs per acre you can stock and all that. I do have some numbers like that over on my post called Getting Started With Pigs, but the truth is, so much depends on your situation. Do you have grass, woods or bare land? If there is not much for the pigs to eat, you will have to rotate them sooner. If there is a lot for them to eat, like woods that have not had pigs on them in a year, then they will be able to root for longer. Another big factor is the age of the pig(s). Small pigs are very easy to keep. Big pigs eat a Lot! You need to figure on at least a couple acres if you are going to raise a few pigs and rotate them with long rest periods. I’ll just say here, that a dead giveaway that you are not rotating your pigs enough is if you have Any bad smell around them. Pigs are clean animals and won’t smell unless they are left in an area much longer then they should be.

Okay, a couple more pictures and some encouragement for anyone who feels like they may have already ruined their fields with their pigs. If you have had your pigs in an area so long that they have rooted up big holes and made a general mess of thing, don’t panic. It can be fixed. First, move the pigs off that land. Next, use your tractor and box blade or scrape blade to smooth out the whole field. Now, give it a nice long rest. We had our sows and piglets on a field for longer than we wanted to in the winter/early spring and part of the field was really dug up with huge holes. My oldest son used the tractor to flatten the whole field out and we are giving it a 6 month rest period. This is what it looked like several weeks ago, about halfway through the rest period.

It’s not thick yet, but the grass is coming in quite well! There is also lots of clover. I don’t know why, but clover always seems to come in where we have been running pigs.

This 👇 is our breeding stock. They can beat up the ground quickly because they are so big and strong. Usually, we don’t have to smooth out the ground after we move them, but if the field needs it, we will smooth it with the tractor. Of course the grass is a little slower to come back in where we had to smooth off the ground, but if the pigs are rotated fairly often then most of their field will not need to be smoothed. In the picture, you can see that in this field, we are still dealing with a lot of saplings coming up that need to be bush hogged. This is a field that we took back right before it turned into woods, years ago.

I’ll admit, it looks pretty bad in this picture, but once the field has a rest, it looks like this👇. This picture is just a little further down the hill and the ground has already recovered and greened up nicely.

Improving the land with pigs, is all about timing, which means keeping an eye on the land and being a good manager of, not only the animals, but also the pasture.

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Early Mary 2023 Garden Tour

Today is beautiful! But, the weather has been unseasonably cold for the beginning of May! In fact, we are still burning the wood stove a bit in the morning and evening to get the chill out of the house.

That is not ideal garden weather for all the heat loving crops (like those crops I planted early!😜), however, this is definitely ideal gardening weather for the Gardener! Hot weather is coming. I’m enjoying the cool days, blue sky with no humidity and millions of birds singing.

I wish I could show you a video of the garden. It would be a lot easier. One day, I may be on YouTube, but for now, what I have is lots of pictures! We’ll start where we planted corn in the chicken pen part of the garden.

I don’t know how well you can see it, but the corn is up! We got a couple days of hard rain after we planted, followed by weather that was cooler than corn loves. However, it all seems to have come up great……except for one row! I kept looking at that one row with not one blade of corn in it……and then it hit me, THAT was Alivia’s row (she’s 6) and I never helped her plant it! Oh-wow, big mothering mistake, lol. All the other kids were old enough to plant their corn on their own. Alivia’s is planted now and hopefully won’t be too far behind the rest of the corn.

Next to the corn, Jimmy’s cantaloupe is coming up. So far, I think 11 of the 19 seeds have sprouted. (This is where he was supposed to plant 9 seeds but misunderstood and planted 19……gardening with kids is so fun!)😂

Next, we have peppers, still under jugs to keep them warm. Peas are on the left and on both sides of the chicken wire fence that separates the chicken pen garden from the regular garden. Tomatoes are under row cover still, on the right.

More peas. They are in full bloom and I’m starting to see some nice long pods forming.

The tomatoes are staying warm under the row cover. All of them look good. They have gotten their roots established and are about to put on new growth. If they were not covered, they would not be very happy because we have had very windy days, besides the cool weather!

In the regular garden we have some strawberries. Did I say “some” strawberries? I meant loads of strawberries!

The girls are picking buckets of them just about every single day! It’s not too many strawberries, but they Are taking up too much room in my vegetable garden. They need to be in their own separate garden, which we have just picked out the area for.

They are lovely but they are seriously taking over my growing space and with so many kiddos to feed, I seem to need more and more and more growing space, not less. Working on that new strawberry field is going to be a priority, and I will bring y’all along to see how we do it.

Next to three of the strawberry beds, we have Clara’s onions. I have always grown onions from sets, but this year, we are growing them from plants. Boy, they are a lot more expensive to start that way! I want to see if they will keep better though. That is my reason for trying plants. We’ll see what happens, and I will let you know. Before we go on, see Ava’s potatoes next to the onions?! They are huge, super dark green and very healthy looking! Here is another picture.

It’s hard to catch in a picture just how amazing they look. (See, I can brag about them because they’re not mine, they’re Ava’s.😆) No bugs yet, but we check daily. Potato bugs can be handled by hand if you keep up with them. Healthy plants attract few bugs. We are starting to see blooms, which is great. Mulching with chopped leaves from the chicken pen, has definitely been good for them.

At the end of the potatoes (5 double rows), we have more strawberries, cucumbers that are not up yet, blackberries and blueberries. I didn’t get a picture of any of that. The regular garden has a path down the middle. We have just covered the west side. Now for the east side.

This is my worst looking row. Actually it’s Clara’s row. Don’t tell her I said it looks terrible! The reason for it looking this way is because we just harvested all the kale out of it so it’s sort of bare, and it also has a little of everything in it. Clara has planted more carrots seeds after we took out the kale so this bed now has some garlic, a couple volunteer potatoes, some carrots, more carrot seeds and a couple onions that we couldn’t fit in the other bed. Once the new carrots come up and we get the bed mulched, it will look better.

Next, is the bed with a ridiculous amount of lettuce in it. Because the weather has been so cool, the lettuce is doing great and is not bitter, even though it’s crazy tall. We also have some garlic in this bed.

After the lettuce, we have 4 rows of sweet potatoes, all under cover until the weather gets hot. Some are under row covers and some are under jugs and plastic flower pots. Both kids of covers work great for sweet potatoes. I have planted them early and covered them for years and they do really well.

Next, we have broccoli and carrots. Some of my broccoli looks great, but some plants are still quite small. Not sure what’s going on with that. No heads are forming yet but with the leaves this big, they should be soon.

Next is a very small amount of beans. This is just to give us some to eat early in the growing season. Once something else comes out, we will plant lots more beans. On the other side of the beans are more strawberries and then another row of carrots and broccoli. That’s it!…….except for the flowers! Can’t forget the beauties of the garden.

The flower garden is divided between all the girls and I. We each have our own spot to make pretty, which is fun. Of course we help the little girls. They like to plant seeds and pick flowers and occasionally water.

This is Clara’s rose……

and Alivia’s Clamatis.

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How to Make Pasture using Pigs

See that beautiful pasture? That used to be woods. Several years ago we had most of our land logged. We planted 70 acres back in pine and the rest we left to either grow back naturally or to clean up for fields and roads. Most of the clean up, we did with pigs, though I have to admit, we didn’t really have a plan other than for the pigs.
At the time we were not planning on getting into dairy goats. We had our cows in separate fields and we pretty much were just using the cut over (logged areas) to run the pigs in because that’s what we had. Back then, we had over 50 pigs. We were raising and selling registered Large Black Hogs as well as pork. Using the cut over, gave us lots and lots of land for the pigs to go through and so that’s what we did.
We knew from experience that grass came in after pigs moved out of an area, so we would run pigs and then move them to a different section because we did want grass to come in. Pigs need a lot of shade because they don’t sweat. They can overheat easily, which is why they like a mud hole, but they also need dense shade. Cut over really is perfect for them. We would fence in a large area for about a month and then move them to a new area. We let each area rest for a long time, even up to a year in some cases. That enabled the ground to recover after being rooted up and new growth to start.

I’m going to take you through a bunch of pictures so you can see how we went from a mess of logged areas to a mess of brush to weeds and grass to beautiful pasture that works well for goats. I’m sure you have heard how well goats can clean up an area. Well, I’m here to tell ya, pigs can do it a whole lot better!

One of the great things logging did for us, was give us roads all through our land. This is huge, because we have a big piece of land and though we had made some trails, they mostly were only big enough for walking or driving the 4 wheeler on.

This picture is taken from where our butcher shed stands. The (very overgrown!) garden is on the right hand side of the picture. This is a few months before we started running pigs in the section right in the middle of the picture.

We ran pigs through this area several times. This is basically the same spot are the picture above. The garden is on the right but can’t be seen.

As you can see, this is mostly weeds and small trees. We would leave them on a section until the ground was fairly torn up but before there were holes. Then we would move them off and give the area several month’s rest.

This picture is taken from the butcher shed a few years after the first one. The pig field is still overgrown but mostly what it needs here is a good Bush hogging. We had picked a few trees to let grow for shade and had cleaned up A Lot at this point.

I took this picture from the same place last year. That pig field is now a goat field with nice grass in it. I took you through these because you can see the progress of the same place. Let’s look at the other side of this field now.

This is me getting ready to start running electric fencing. See what a mess the logged area is? That’s what we put the pigs in.

It’s winter in this picture but as you can see, the field is pretty bleak. If you look closely, you can see the pigs we had in there.

We made winter shelter out of truck bed liners. Note the large log they rest on. That is the same log as the picture at the top of this post with the goats on it.

We put piles of hay for the pigs to bed down on and they cleaned those area up really well to make nests. Those are the areas where we have the very best grass to this day!

Put them in an area, let them work that ground hard for several weeks and then move them off.

As you can see, it’s mostly weeds still, at this point, but the more they are put on, and then moved off, the more grass comes in.

Once pigs were moved off an area, Jay would bush hog it and then we could pick up sticks and rocks. This area was fast on its way to becoming good pasture, but then we closed down the farm and had much few pigs. For several years we didn’t run any here or keep up with the bush hogging. That was our big mistake on this field. We had other stuff going on, like a very difficult pregnancy for me and a big career change for Jay. We had in the back of our minds to clean up this field and build a barn for a dairy cow but it felt like that was way, way in the future some time.

Then our little baby was born with Down syndrome and we knew we would need gentle goat milk for him, rather than cow milk, so Jay cut the “field” which had a lot of saplings in it by that time and we started building the barn. Interestingly enough, there were large areas of really good grass with no saplings in them, mostly in the areas we had bedded the pigs down. The initial bush hogging produced a lot of sticks that we needed to pick up and saplings that needed to be hauled to the burn pile. The kids and I did that and then we ran new electric fencing around it. This is what it looked like (the grass beyond the garden).

This is one year later.👇 (same spot)

This is two years later, same spot. I just took this picture a couple days ago.

On the other side of the logging road, we ran pigs fairly continuously since we logged 7 years ago, though each section was given long rest times. For a few years we also did not have a working tractor and couldn’t bush hog. Bush hogging behind the pigs is very helpful and so not being able to do that definitely slowed down the process of turning cut over into fields. Still, we have some Amazing grass that has come in completely from the pigs. No grass seed Ever!

This is how we started them. Complete cut over, nothing green. Obviously on ground like this, once the pigs flipped over the pieces of rotting logs and ate the bugs, there was nothing else for them so they had to be moved often into a new section.

We wintered the pigs like this with lots of hay for them to burrow into.

Such a mess, isn’t it? Like I said above, when the area the pigs are in looks this barren, it is Very important to move them often. That is part of keeping the pigs healthy and of course, if they start to dig holes, that will not make a good field.

We have weeds here, but it’s still looking pretty rough!

This is a couple years later. See the grass coming in? See how it desperately needs to be bush hogged?? And, yes, we are keeping them in with one strand of electric fence here.

See how green it has gotten at this point? It needs to be tamed, but we really have a lot of grass (and weeds!) growing. This is three or so years after first putting the pigs out there.

Same field. I took this picture a couple days ago. We have not bush hogged it in a very long (too long) time. The goats have eaten it down and are ready to move. There is a lot of nice grass in here now and the goats have been very happy. Now I want to show you the new section the goats are about to move into.

The kids just fenced this. LeeRoy is digging in a line to run power to the fence right now. See all that grass??? We ran pigs here, on and off and then gave it a couple year’s rest.

The saplings have grown into nice trees and there is so.much.grass. This is all from the pigs. The areas of the cut over that we did not run pigs in don’t have grass. They have trees and blackberry bushes and it’s so thick, you can’t walk through it. This beautiful area is all the pigs doing.

Okay, this has been a crazy long post! It took me a long time because I had to find old pictures I hadn’t seen in years. I want to do a follow up post with a bit more how-to specifics in it. I’ll do my best to get that out next week!

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Planting Tomatoes & Corn in April

Tomatoes and corn both like hot weather. They do not like cool nights or mild lovely days (what is wrong with them?!😳). We are in Southern Virginia, planting zone 7, and I’m just going to say right off the bat, that this is a little early to plant them. However, we just planted both! I’ll tell you why…..

Honestly, most of it is that I have this thing about planting early. I want to eat out of the garden as soon as possible! I want a nice slice of tomato to put on my 4th of July burger! And, I would like some corn on the cob to go with that burger. However, it’s not just that I want to start getting produce as soon as possible (though, that in itself is enough for me!), but, there are fewer bugs, worms and garden pests earlier in the summer than there are later in the growing season. That is actually the main reason for planting corn early. We have had years with absolutely no worms in our corn ears and that was from getting the corn in very early! We don’t spray any of our garden plants at all so we have to have other methods for beating the bugs. Planting early is one of them. Of course some years this works better than other years. Everything depends on the kind of spring we are having.

Technically, you are not supposed to plant your tomatoes out until it’s 50 degrees or warmer every night. Same thing with corn. Day temps should be warm, night temps shouldn’t drop below 50 and the soil should be about 70. Okay, I have told you what is the “proper way”, now I will show you what we did.

Yesterday morning, the kids made three beds, 16 feet long (the length of a cattle panel which we will add later for a trellis) and 18 inches wide. The path between each bed is about 30 inches. This is in the old chicken pen-see my last post about preparing the chicken pen to plant in.

I made holes every 15 inches for the boys to plant their tomatoes in. When you plant tomatoes, you plant them deep, very deep because that will give them better root growth. We got 10 tomatoes in each bed for a total of 30 plants. 6 plants are Rutgers, the rest are a Roma type called San Marzano for tomato sauce.

While the boys watered their plants, I put fiberglass hoops over each bed. This is to protect the plants from the hot sun for a few days after transplanting, and also to protect the plants during our nights that are still dipping into the 40’s. Tomatoes like it hot, and this row cover captures the heat!

The boys got the row covers in place and the tomatoes did great with no wilting whatsoever. Tomatoes wilt easily so protecting them is a must when it’s as hot and sunny as it was yesterday. This morning, they took the covers off, watered the plants again and covered them back up. The ground dries out quickly under the row covers so they will do this every day until we take the row covers off.

Now, I want to show you what you can do if you don’t have row covers. These are our cherry tomatoes and they are planted in a completely different part of the garden. I have been saving vinegar jugs all winter (we use vinegar for laundry and house cleaning so we go through a lot!) just for this purpose. If you don’t have vinegar jugs, you can use milk jugs. Just cut the bottom off and take the cap off. Water your tomato well and put a jug over it. They will love the heat and humidity!

This morning, we got out in the garden early while it was still cool and the kids got the corn area ready for planting. They went over it again with the hoe and cultivator and then made rows. They Love this kind of work!

I have 5 kids who want to grow corn so I told them we needed at least that many double rows. We ended up with 6 double rows so one of the kids, gets two.

Each bed is a foot wide and has two rows of corn planted in it. We want the plants to be 8 inches apart so I had the kids plant seeds 4 inches apart. Our seed is old and I don’t know how well it will come up, that’s why we are planting close. Once it’s up, we will thin to 8 inches apart if we need to.

We did not cover the corn with row cover because I don’t have that much cover! I’m not real worried though. I usually plant corn early and I’m not expecting problems from it.

The last thing we did, was Jimmy planted half of his cantaloupe. I told him to plant 9 seeds and he misunderstood me and planted 19! That should be interesting! He put in hoops so after tomorrow’s rain, we can cover them. Cantaloupe like hot weather too. I have a different variety for him to plant in May, but um……I don’t know if we are going to need any more cantaloupe than we already have planted!

Boy, does it feel good to have all this in the ground! Everyone has worked quite hard the last few days. To top it all off, we finished our school year today! Time to celebrate!

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Preparing the Chicken Pen to Plant in & Mulching Potatoes

We have been very busy in the garden and working on finishing up our (homeschool) year. There is so much to do this time of year! Fortunately, we will finish school on Friday, which will free up our time for more gardening and homesteading projects. Being done with school will also enable us to get out in the garden while it’s still early in the day. The kids and I kept remarking how Hot it was while we worked out there today in the heat of the afternoon!

One of the things we have been doing this week is preparing the chicken pen to be planted in. We deep bed the chickens all winter (which I have many blog posts about), and then move them out of their pen and onto pasture when the grass is green. Last year, we did not do this and we didn’t have enough garden space. Getting the chickens out on grass is how we really like to raise them so we are back to doing that again, and I am happy to have the large chicken pen to plant in! It almost doubles the size of my garden.

You might be thinking that it would be nasty to plant where the chickens have been but it’s not. We give the chickens so much bedding in the form of leaves and old hay, that their pen doesn’t smell or hold water when it rains. This is actually the method we use to “make” soil for our garden. However, I wouldn’t want to plant where the chickens had just dropped manure, so we move them out in February and give their pen a few months of rest time before planting. We want everything to be nice and clean with NO fresh manure around the food we grow.

Of course giving the chicken pen a rest time of a few months does allow it time to grow a few weeds. We took care of most those fairly easily, thanks to the deep bedding. After we pulled weeds, we raked all the loose leaves up into a couple piles. I used those leaves, that were partially broken down, to mulch the potatoes (more on that in a minute). I’m not real worried about deep leaves where the tomatoes are going to be planted, but anywhere we are going to plant seeds, like corn, we need to remove them. It’s vital that the seeds go into actual soil, not loose mulch or deep bedding! I have explained this to the kids who will be doing all or most of the seed planting.
The boys used a hoe and small cultivator to work the ground and make it loose. No deep tilling is necessary. I don’t want to disturb the ground that much. There was just a need to break it up a bit. The cultivator worked perfectly for that.

This is how it looked when we were done cleaning up this side. Nice soil, nice and cleaned up area, but the chicken house in the middle of the pen has to go!

So…..I got my strong teen age son and he, single handedly, took it out of the pen and stacked it on our old turkey coop. Yes, we are now growing a stack of old, broken down tin and wire coops.😬

Mel forked the hay from the coop onto the hay pile in the corner of the pen. That coop has been moved around the pen regularly but there is still a concentration of manure where it stood and I don’t want to plant there. The hay is picked up now and we will mulch over the area with grass clippings, and let the cantaloupe vines grow in that direction.

You might be wondering what the 5 jugs are. Those are pepper plants set out a bit early and enjoying the heat and humidity of their own personal vinegar jug greenhouse!

At this point, the chicken pen garden is very close to being ready to plant. It’s cleaned up a d the pea plants around 1 1/2 sides are mulched with grass clippings. All we have left to do is run over the whole thing one more time with the cultivator and then mark out where we are planting. We plan to plant several rows of corn, most of the tomatoes, cantaloupe and a couple butternut squash.

As for the partially broken down leaves we pulled out of the chicken pen, this is what I have been doing with them.👇Most of the leaves are going between the two rows of potatoes in each bed.

Jimmy, who loves to hoe, hoed either side of each potato bed and pulled dirt and mulch up around the plants on the outer side of each row. He is such a big helper in the garden!

These potatoes got hit by frost last week but you would never know it now! They were brown on top but have put on so much new growth, you can’t even tell! We have about half of them mulched and the rest will hopefully be done tomorrow. This is the extent of the mulching I plan to do on these. From here on out, until harvest, all we have to do is make sure they get watered if they need it.

Now, I have something new to show you……LeeRoy decided he wanted to plow up a field and grow potatoes this year. He decided this about 4 weeks ago, so we gave him this field to work in. The ground is very rough. This once was woods, then it was cut over and then we started bush hogging it for more cow fields. Since we are reducing the number of cows we have right now, this field is available, and really it was the only place available and unused by animals.

He spent about a week plowing up three small fields, leaving a wide strip of grass between them so they do not wash out. This field is all hill, with a creek way down in the bottom. It’s really a lovely part of our land.

LeeRoy had never plowed before but he has used equipment and he is good at that sort of thing. A few times, a deep root or stump messed up the plow, but he was able to fix it every time. We have very little tractor equipment so everything for this was done with this two bottom plow he found out by one of the old falling down tobacco barns. This is a plow that was used here many years ago when this land was farmed in tobacco.

When he was done plowing, we all went into town and bought 50# of red seed potatoes. You know I save potatoes from last year’s harvest to plant in the garden but those were already planted and we needed a lot more than I had saved anyway! So, seed potatoes it was!

We tried some different methods to make furrows to plant in but none of them worked so we ended up using the plow and making wide paths between each row. Again, not how I do it in the garden, but this is totally different so we are using different methods.

All the kids helped plant, though somehow I only got a picture of Mel. I had to take the baby back to the house for a nap so I couldn’t be in on the planting. We waited a few weeks, and now they are up, millions of them!

It’s going to be really interesting to see how they do. I have about 30 pounds planted in the garden. 50 pounds are planted out in this field. The growing methods are completely different. This is going to be very interesting. I’m thrilled that LeeRoy came up with this idea wanted to take it on. He’s excited about it and I think it’s a great thing for him to be doing.

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Our New Movable Chicken Hoop Coop

During the winter, as I have posted about many times, I like to keep the laying hens in a pen next to the garden and deep bed them. The deep bedding method provides us with lots of good, black soil to use in the garden.

In the summer, I really like to get the chickens out on grass, and this year, we are once again planting the chicken pen to extend the size of the garden, so the chicken definitely cannot be in there!

We have run layers on pasture in various ways over the years either in our Joel Salatin style broiler pens or free ranging them with a movable chicken house. We have had an increase in predator problems over the last few years and can no longer free range, though this is my favorite way to keep chickens. We just simply have too many hawks, and they very systematically take out whole flocks.

So, this year, we needed a new design, which Jay and I came up with by putting our heads together. I looked up pictures of hoop coops on line but I didn’t see anything that would suit our needs. Nothing was quite right and most coops were much too small, or far to expensive. I had a picture in my head of something we could do, with the idea of attaching it to our chicken house on wheels. Jay took my loose description and made it a reality.

I’m going to share what we did, mostly with pictures. I doubt anyone will want to make an exact copy because, like any good homesteader, we used scraps that we had around the place. The only thing we bought was the chicken wire and the hardware. You are free to copy as much or as little as is helpful to you. Adjust what you need to to fit your homestead and the scraps you have around your place.

We made the base out of treated deck boards. The square foot measurement is 10 feet by 16 feet. We had quite a bit of scrap well pipe so that’s what we made the hoops out of. They are about 23 feet long and spaced 2 feet apart.

This is what the corners look like.

The center of one side has a 2 foot framed opening to go against our movable chicken house. The other side has a 2 foot framed opening for the door. There are supports going from both framed openings to help the pipe keep its shape. All of this wood is from treated deck boards.

The kids cut wire 24 feet long to go over the hoops.

The wire was attached to the pipe with zip ties and stapled at the bottom onto the wood. The wire then had to be trimmed to the exact size.

Once the wire was over the hoops, we did two runs of chicken wire on the sides. This is how it looked when we were done with it at the house and ready to take it down to the field to finish up. How did we get it down to the field? Why, Jay and some of the kids just picked it up and carried it! I happened to miss the whole thing, but I would have gotten a picture if I could have!

This is what it looks like down in the field attached to our chicken house. This is the side that we pull the house from. We just hook it up to the 4 wheeler and pull it with that. The dolly for moving the coop is leaned up against the chicken house on the right. I did not get a picture of the dolly up close, but it’s the exact same kind of dolly that Joel Salatin uses for his broiler pens. Years ago, when we were up at his place, we took pictures and measurements and we made ours just like his. That slips under one end of the coop so that end rides on the dolly. The other end of the coop is pulled with a wire…..in our case, well wire.

This is the wire we lift the coop with. We have one to pull the coop with, a sort of handle. And, we have one to lift the coop with so we can slip the dolly in place. All moving is done before the birds are let out in the morning, and because our coop is decent size for 30 birds, it doesn’t have to be moved every day.

We do lock the chickens in every night. This ramp closes up against the house.

This pins the coop to the house. At night it also holds the chicken ramp closed. We have to unpin it and reclose the ramp to be able to move the house and the coop since they are moved one at a time. So nice this doesn’t have to be done every day!

This is how we enter the house. There are nesting boxes and a roost inside. Feed and water are outside in their coop. We just use a smallish trough for water and a homemade bucket feeder for feed. (Maybe I will do a post on how to make a bucket feeder)

This is the door. Jay put a latch at the top and the bottom to make it nice and secure.

Up close of a latch. Jay is going to add a hook and eye to the inside of the door so it can be closed from the inside.

We also have to add a tarp over the top. We are set to do that tomorrow. We want lots of airflow but we need to give them some shade and cover from the rain.

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See what we’ve Been Planting in the Garden

We are less than a month away from our spring frost date (April 16th), and the weather in the forecast is looking pretty mild. Generally, this time of year, if the weather is not super cold, I will plant some things that I want to get in early but that cannot handle frost. At least, they cannot handle frost if they are not covered.

One of the crops we planted today was bush beans. Frost will kill them, but I have been starting my bush beans early for years! We are usually harvesting beans at the very beginning of summer, when not too many things are coming in from the garden yet. I use row covers on cold nights and that is enough to protect beans. The row cover has to be up above the plants, not laying on them or the frost will go right through the cover. Since I do many small plantings of beans through out the growing season, rather than one large crop, I like the get my first couple rows planted as soon as I think I can keep them alive in the weather we are having. Yay, for beans getting in the ground today!

This is what my sweet potatoes look like. I have some sprouts already taken off the potatoes that are growing roots, and I have potatoes still giving off lots of sprouts. I gently twist off new sprouts every few days and add them to the jars of water.

I like to get my sweet potatoes started early because I think they do better. I always get a bigger yield from the plants I got in the ground before the frost date. This gives them a very long growing season, which they like…..a lot. As with beans, sweet potatoes cannot handle any frost on them. It will kill them. But, they do fine as long as there is no deep freeze and you are able to keep the frost off the plants. I have done this with upside down little plastic flower pots, buckets and row covers. All have worked just fine.

I have 4 rows that I am planting sweet potatoes in this year. I am hoping to get 12-15 plants in each row. Today, I only had 10 sprouts with enough root on them to plant out. Every few days there will be more and so I will plant my sweet potatoes over a period of a few weeks. This is just how it works when you sprout your own from last years sweet potatoes and that’s fine. It just takes a few minutes to plant a handful every few days or once a week.

I took this picture so you could see the one row that did not get mulched in the fall. I’m actually surprised that it doesn’t have more weeds in it. As you can see though, the mulched beds have almost no weeds in them. They are ready to plant with almost no prep work. My garden did not used to look like this in the spring, let me tell ya. I used to have to weed an absolute ton before I could plant anything. Now, I am able to go into the winter with the garden weed free and mulched and it makes such a difference in the spring!

This knife is one of my favorite garden tools. I just scraped the mulch away, made a small hole and planted each sweet potato start. The ground was moist enough under the mulch that I did not have to water. It’s raining now, which is perfect……and it’s why I chose today to plant these out.

After I planted the sweet potato starts, I put the mulch right up close to them to keep the moisture in and the weeds out.

Last week, we planted the broccoli out that I had started in the house. They were just the right size and not root bound yet, and the weather was mild. Jimmy is growing the broccoli this year and he had the best time planting them out with me!

The broccoli and carrots are sharing a couple beds because we are a bit short on garden space. I have grown these as companion plants before and they do okay, so that’s what we are doing this spring. We planted each broccoli plant 14-16 inches apart. Two rows of broccoli are staggered in each carrot bed.

After we planted the broccoli, we mulched them with fresh leaves and grass clippings and watered them. We transplanted them in the late afternoon and the following day was cloudy so they did fine and did not wilt.

In the other areas of the garden we have peas, onions, lettuce and kale growing, and oh-joy! The potatoes are up!

I have more to write……over the last few weeks we have been selling lots of piglets, having new baby goats born and we are about to bring new chickens to our farm after our whole laying flock was killed!! We have had Lots going on, so much in fact, that I have not had time to write. I’m hoping to start putting out a post once a week again though!

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What seeds I start inside and what I direct sow in the Garden

This week is slipping away from me but before it’s over, I want to share with y’all what I start in the house and what I direct sow into the garden. I live in zone 7, and this is what works well here. Other areas that have a shorter growing season may be different.

The most important seeds to start inside are tomatoes and peppers. These plants take a long time to mature before they produce any vegetables so they must be started inside a couple months before they are planted in the garden. Both tomatoes and peppers need lots of heat so they cannot even be set out until the nights stay above 50 degrees.

I started my broccoli and cabbage inside just because I thought they would do better and I can space them how I want them in the garden. It’s important not to let these seedlings get too big in the house though. They need to be planted before they are root bound or their growth may be stunted. Since both of these plants like cool weather, I plan to plant them out as soon as they start to put roots out the little holes in the bottom of their pots. I have row cover to put over them if it gets super cold in the garden at night.

Lettuce can be started inside or direct seeded. I prefer to direct seed my lettuce and cover it if the temps drop super low. Lettuce can take light frost and it will grow faster without the setback of being transplanted.

Seeds that can be directly sowed this time of year are:

-peas
-carrots
-lettuce
-kale
-onion sets or plants
-white potatoes (if you can cover them if it frosts)

If I have my seed trays empty, I occasionally start cucumbers and melons inside a couple weeks before they should be planted outside. If you do this, be sure you transplant them out into the garden when the plants are still quite small. Any sort of melon/cucumber/squash does not like it’s roots disturbed, so its important to transplant them before they get root bound, and then to cover them well so the plants have shade. Often, there is little advantage to starting cucumbers and melons inside because they take a while to get over the “shock” and it’s not unusual for a seed directly down at the same time to catch up with the transplanted plant. I have seen that more than once and so I usually direct all my cucumbers, melons and squash.

Seeds that should be directly sown once its not dipping below 50 at night are:

-cucumbers
-melons
-squash
-corn
-beans (These can be planted earlier if you can cover them. Beans like heat but will tolerate cool weather)

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Planting Potatoes in February

We are having a nice mild winter, and from the look of things, that is turning into an early spring. Boy, does that make me happy! I have been wanting to get out in the garden to get potatoes in the ground, but a very long, drawn out migraine and the kids’ sickness has kept me from moving along out there. However, I think we are finally past all that. About time!

Yesterday, late afternoon, I came home from running a couple errands in town and asked Ava if she was up to planting the potatoes. She picked growing potatoes this year, but she was also the last of the kids to be sick. She thought she felt up to it though, so I set her up cutting the sprouted potatoes and setting them in a basket.

A lot of people buy seed potatoes to plant but you don’t really need seed potatoes. They cost a lot of money and they don’t grow any better than regular potatoes. In all the years I have been gardening (and I never skipped a year, even when I was in college!), I believe I have only bought seed potatoes once, and that was just to see if they did indeed grow any better that regular potatoes, and they did not. I am here to tell you, you don’t have to buy seed potatoes! Now that I have saved you a little money, I’ll show you what I do plant.

This is part of a 50# box of organic white potatoes I bought from Azure last month. Despite my best efforts, because we don’t have cold storage, they sprouted. These potatoes will grow just fine. About half of what we planted last year was this same sort of thing and they produced well.

These are potatoes left over from what we grew last year, specifically kept so we can replant them. I have been planting potatoes left over from the previous year’s harvest for many years. It’s kind of cool to do that, and these are our absolute favorite yellow potatoes, Yukon Gold! As you can see, they are just starting to sprout which is perfect timing for this growing season.

Lastly are these weird looking things! I saved these tiny potatoes to re plant, and over the winter, they grew very long sprouts! Strange as all this looks, these potatoes can also be planted and they grow just fine. I have planted shriveled up potatoes with crazy long sprouts on them for years. They’re weird, but fine. Some of these are Yukon Gold and others are some sort of red potato that a friend gave us several years ago. Red potatoes aren’t my favorite, but we always grow a few to have variety.

Once potatoes are sprouted, they can be cut with two sprouts on each piece. If the potato is small or it only has one or two sprouts, we don’t cut it. We had a few partially rotten potatoes from Azure, which we put in the compost. I try to only plant potatoes that look healthy.

Last fall, we covered the whole garden with mulch in the form of dry grass clippings. It’s done a very good job of holding the soil from washing in heavy rains, as well as keeping the weeds out. Ava used an iron rake and raked all the grass clippings off of our rows.

We do not have a hoe right now because we need to replace the one that broke, so we used a matix to make the furrows to plant in. Potatoes need to be planted deep because the baby potatoes will grow above the piece that we plant. Nothing will go deeper than the depth of that potato piece. I am pictured here, but to be fair, LeeRoy dug half of the furrows before he had to go do animal chores. The soil is soft so the furrows were not hard to make. No chopping at the ground required, just a need to scrape the dirt away.

Each garden bed is about 3 feet wide, which will hold two rows of potatoes. One bed was a bit wider so we planted three rows of potatoes in it. I like wide garden beds because we can get more plants in between the paths, as opposed to row, path, row, path, like a traditional garden is planted.

Ava did almost all the planting herself. She planted the potato pieces about 8 inches apart. I helped her a little but she wanted to do most of it on her own.

When we got to the last garden bed, she planted the funny little potatoes with the long sprouts. I carefully untangled them for her so she wouldn’t break them off.

Then we covered them. Ava wanted to cover them by hand. I used the iron rake, lol. That is the difference between age 40 and age 10!

I expect to start seeing potato leaves poke through the ground in a few weeks. Potatoes love cool weather which is why I start mine really early. I want them to grow as much as possible before the heat of the summer. I’m sure we will still get some frost so we will keep an eye on the weather and cover the potatoes when it looks like it will be too cold. Potatoes cannot handle Any frost. A good covering of hay or row covers work well. Last spring when it got really cold for a week, I used hay and row covers. Just for reference, in case you want to plant yours early, our frost date is April 16. It’s quite a ways out, but as long as you can cover them when it frosts, planting early works really well. I am very glad to have ours in the ground.

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2023 Garden Plans & Starting Seeds Without Grow Lights

Here we are mid February and I feel like I have only been giving a tenth of my brain to the garden this year! We’ve had some big interruptions to our regular schedule, such as the water heater going out (and going through a week of winter weather with no hot water…..except what we heated on the stove!). Then the well quit and we had to pull the pump and replace the 300’ wire. Unfortunately, the kids, Jay and myself have all gotten sick too….ugg, no fun. It certainly hasn’t been dull around here, that’s for sure!

It hasn’t all been trials though. We are having an extremely warm winter and it feels like spring. The little kids have been spending a lot of time playing in the warm sunshine, and that is something that makes me quite happy! Our homeschool year is going well, and we are in the finishing stretch! The kids’ 26 piglets are doing great! We combined the three sows and all the piglets into the same field, and they are getting along just fine. We are only a little over two weeks away from selling them, which will be fun too!

So, on to the garden, which I love, but obviously have not been giving enough of my attention to, because I make a really dumb mistake! One that I have never made before, and I didn’t know about until weeks later!

The kids and I always brainstorm sometime after the New Year, thinking of all the things we want to plant in the garden. I write everything down that we come up with and then the kids get to choose what they want to grow. I just read down the list of vegetables, and the kids volunteer. Occasionally I have to tell a kiddo that they can’t grow the whole garden by themselves! That seems to be an ambition of our boys around age 7 or 8, lol. This year, I gave everyone the limit of picking 5 things from the list. Some big crops, like corn, can have several takers. Whatever is not picked, I am responsible for, and of course I know the youngest kids are going to need a lot of help. This is what this year’s list looks like.

Of course, like any good homesteader, I had been flipping through seed catalogs for weeks and I knew what varieties I wanted, so I made my orders and bought all my seeds…..cringe……except I didn’t! I only thought I ordered all my seeds. When I went to start tomatoes at the beginning of February, I didn’t have Any tomato seeds! Yeah, I really don’t know how I could forget one of the Main crops in the garden!!

As soon as I realized it, I sat down and ordered them right away…..and then I planted broccoli. Or, rather, Jimmy planted broccoli because he is the one growing that this year. I assisted. He planted.

Alright, so now that I have admitted my blunder, let’s get down to what you really want to know……If you cannot read the notebook page above, here is a list of everything we are planning on growing this year:

  1. Beans-Provider, Desperado
  2. Broccoli-Green Magic
  3. Carrots-Tendersweet
  4. Lettuce-New Red Fire, Green Leaf Lettuce
  5. Potatoes-Yellow from last year’s harvest
  6. Sweet Potatoes-Sprouts from last year’s harvest
  7. Corn-Peaches and Cream
  8. Cantaloupe-Aphrodite, Ambrosia
  9. Butternut Squash-Waltham
  10. Onions-Red Zeppelin (plants)
  11. Peppers-Seeds saved from last year
  12. Garlic-Saved from last year’s harvest
  13. Strawberries
  14. Tomatoes-San Marzano, Rutgers, Sweet Million
  15. Cucumber-Tasty King
  16. Peas-Green Arrow
  17. Sunflowers-Royal Flush
  18. Cabbage-Katarina

I have been thinking about where to plant everything because I rotate my crops every year. Since our kids are growing (and we have 8 of them!) we need to keep growing more food! Last weekend, we moved the layers out of their pen that adjoins the garden and onto pasture, where we will keep them all summer.

This will enable me to plant their pen (which actually used to be part of the garden) after it has had a two month rest. The crops that will go in the chicken pen are corn, tomatoes, butternut squash, cantaloupe and peppers. I think I can barely squeeze all of that in, if the butternut squash is trellised.

I have had a plan in my head for the rest of the garden so this afternoon I sent one of the kids out to map it out for me. I always plan my garden like this. I need a visual. It can also useful in looking back to see what I planted where in previous years. I keep these things in plastic sleeves in my 3 ring binder, so I can look back to them any time I need to. Because I had a rough idea in my head of where I wanted to plant everything, this only took a few minutes to fill in. This is what the main garden will look like. Can I just say, we have waaay to many strawberry beds!


Here is what we have already planted in the garden. Like I said, our weather is very spring like right now, but I do have row covers if it gets super cold again.

Lettuce, garlic and kale are planted in two garden beds. The garlic was planted last fall. It will be harvested in June. The kale and lettuce can take some cold. I planted a lot so we should have plenty as we come into spring.

Ava planted a little over two rows of peas. I’m figuring we will only get enough for fresh eating but that’s fine. Pease love cold weather and can handle frost. Planting them early like this will give us peas at the very beginning of the summer.

Remember the carrots I planted late fall/early winter and then covered with deep grass clippings and row covers? Well, look what was under all that insulating grass……Weeds!…..and carrots. The tops died back from the hard freezes but they are coming back now.

I weeded out the bed and Clara planted more seeds.

Looks much better now! I have one more bed like this that I worked on today. It’s not quite finished, but close.

We got a small harvest of carrots that were ready to come out. Some look a little funny, but they were good in soup. Most of the carrots are still small.

That’s all we have planted in the garden right now and we only have broccoli and peppers started in the house, because I am waiting on my tomato seeds! It’s too early to start cucumbers and cantaloupe etc. I do want to show you how I start seeds without grow lights though. I don’t have anything against grow lights, in fact, I hope I have some one day. However, I have been starting seeds on my window seat with south facing windows for many, many years, and it has worked just fine. I have one little heating mat that I place under the seed tray that needs it the most (usually tomatoes). I place my seed tray right up to the window on cool days like this. Eventually, the whole window seat will be taken up with trays. I can usually just barely fit them all on.

On warm, sunny days, I take my seed trays outside and leave them in the sun on the deck right outside the windows. Most days are decent enough to take the seed trays out. Part of evening chores is bringing them back inside. It takes a little work but it’s not that bad. This method works well, and my seedlings are hardened off long before they need to go into the garden. So, for anyone who does not have grow lights, be encouraged. You don’t have to spend a lot to get started growing your own seeds!

Okay, there is one other thing I want to show you. This is also to encourage you. This picture is from several years ago. I did not have my garden in “permanent” raised beds, neither did I have a tiller, or apparently the ability to mulch the garden in the fall. This is what my garden looked like every.single.spring. We had to get out there and weed and make rows before we could plant. It was a lot of work. But, we did it! We got the garden cleaned up and planted every spring.

This is what my garden looks like today. Permanent beds, almost completely mulched in fall and hardly a weed in it. This is from years of work, and it’s from having teens who can do a lot! Both things are a game changer. So, if you are just starting out and haven’t built up the soil yet, or you just have little ones, don’t.be.discouraged. if your garden doesn’t turn out exactly how you want it to. You will get there. The little ones will learn to help as you include them, your soil will improve as you build it up organically and you will learn as you go.

My garden is a lot easier to work now, than it was years ago, but I remember what it was like to “take back the garden” every year. And so, to give you a good laugh, I will end with a picture that has become cherished. Yup, all those weeds were my garden…..and those chickens would Not stay in their pen! In my defense, I had enlarged the garden over and over until it was impossible, but we did still get some good vegetables….and, of course, at the time of this picture I was pregnant! Need I say more, lol.

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How to Cook Fresh Ham Steaks

We are taking 6 hogs to the butcher in a few weeks which is really good because we’re almost out of meat from the last hogs we butchered. 2 of the pigs are for our family, and 4 are going to friends of ours. While I was going over the cut sheet with some of our friends, I realized that not everyone is familiar with some of the cuts that most butchers do. One of those cuts is Ham Steaks, also called Country Ham Slices or Fresh Ham Steaks. This meat is from the part of the pig that would be smoked as a whole ham if the butchered had a smoker. It’s just about impossible to find a butcher who cures meat in our area and so one of the ways that the ham is offered, is cut into “steaks” or slices. “Fresh” does not mean that the meat will be unfrozen (we always get meat back from the butcher frozen), but rather that it is uncurled.


Here is a diagram of what cuts come from which parts of the hog. Our butcher offers both the ham in slices (ham steaks) and the Boston butt in slices (pork steaks).


This is what a Pork Steak looks like.


This is what Ham Steaks look like.

Ham steaks are bigger than pork steaks. They have more meat on them and a smaller bone. As you can see, pork raised on pasture is not “the other white meat” as pork has often been called. This meat is nice and red, the way it should be.

I cook pork steaks and ham steaks the same way in the crockpot and I use them the same way once they’re cooked. They are both fine cuts of meat with good flavor, but I prefer the ham steaks because they are bigger.

When I take either kind of steak out of the freezer, I thaw the packages in a sink of hot water. Since we have a big family and I like leftovers, I usually cook several ham or pork steaks at once. It doesn’t take long for the meat to thaw since the slices are only about an inch thick. Once it’s thawed, I rinse each piece off in cool water and cut it like this.

This is a ham steak

Once I have all the steaks cut up, I sprinkle on a good amount of

-salt
-pepper
-onion powder
-garlic powder
-parsley
-Worcestershire sauce
-olive oil

These are pork steaks in a mixing bowl

I put the cut pieces in a bowl to mix all around with the salt, pepper etc. Sometimes, depending on how much time I have, I just throw the cut pieces in the crockpot, sprinkle the salt, pepper etc on and turn it on, stirring it all around later, after it’s cooked a bit. Regardless, all the cup up pieces need to go into the crockpot and be cooked on low all day. By all day, I mean, I get this on after I clean up the breakfast dishes and it’s ready by supper time. Since the meat is cut up, it cooks faster then a big roast does.

These are pork steaks in the crockpot

When it comes out of the crockpot, it looks like this,

Meat from pork steaks

or this.

Meat from ham steaks

Once it’s cooked like this, it can be used for any number of things. Our three most common ways to use the meat are to serve it on the side of a bowl of homemade macaroni and cheese. The kids love it this way!

Another really common way we use this meat it to chop it up and add mayonnaise, salt and pepper and make sandwiches out of it. This makes a really tasty sandwich, especially if there are fresh homemade buns to eat it on. You can make a sandwich of meat only, or add any number of things to it. It’s really nice to have sandwiches meat like this made up and in the fridge for quick lunches.

The third regular way we eat ham or pork steaks is to take all the meat and bones out of the crockpot, leaving the juices in (be very sure you get all the bones out). Then chop up the meat and put it in a big mixing bowl. Add flour, salt and pepper to the meat and stir it up.

Put the meat back in the crockpot with the juices in it and cook it on high to thicken it up. It will look like this.

This is a great topping for mashed potatoes. When I make this, like I did yesterday, I usually make a lot so we can have leftovers the second night…..which we did tonight! Everyone really loves this meal too and it’s not hard to make.

Other ways I use the meat from ham or pork steaks is in bean n’ pork soup or in breakfast casseroles. It’s very tasty, tender meat and I definitely like having plenty of it in the freezer.

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21 Piglets Were Born Yesterday

We had 21 more piglets born yesterday. LeeRoys sow had 9 early Sunday morning, by herself with no problems.

Jimmy’s sow had 12 Sunday night. Jay and I went out in the rain to check her before we went to bed and it’s a good thing we did! There were babies all around her and two were out of the nest, out in the rain, completely drenched. One was good enough to go back with the sow, the other one Jay handed to me. It was freezing cold, wet and muddy and hardly alive. I held it tight against my coat and hunched over a bit to keep the driving rain off of him. The sow was squishing babies and they were squealing like crazy. Jay and I had a time getting them out from under her because there were so many! I guess I handed my flash light to Jay, I don’t remember. I just know I had that baby in one of my arms and with my other hand I was pushing that sow over and grabbing out other piglets. She didn’t mind me or Jay one bit and she wasn’t being a bad mom, there were just a lot of babies and every time she moved, she would start to squish one!

Finally we thought we had them all by her udder and we wanted to get out of there and leave her alone before she started sitting up again. I carried that little wet piglet, my coat getting stained with mud and blood, and the fresh umbilical cord wrapped around my other hand.

Up at the house, Jay undid my boot laces and I went in to start warming that little thing by the wood stove. Jay went to get the box and towel we use for Ava’s piglets. We warmed the towel and put it in the flat box and laid the piglet on it. Then under the wood stove it went. I kept checking it to see it it was getting warm. Occasionally I flipped it over so both sides would warm up and dry off. After about 45 minutes of warming up, we decided the piglet was warm and dry and ready for some milk.

We wrapped it in the towel to keep it warm but unfortunately it squealed all the way down to the field until it was in the heap of piglets. The sow jumped up to see what was going on! Once she saw it was us, she was fine, but oh-she had to lay back down again without killing any babies! Very carefully she moved her snout back and forth moving piglets, then she slowly lowered her great body, stopping halfway down and them flopped over on her side. Immediate squealing! A piglet was stuck between her legs. I pushed her leg forward and got the piglet out. Silence, and we turned to go. Nope! More squealing! Another piglet was stuck between her legs. Got that one out too. All good.

We headed back to the house, praying they would make it through the night which was cold and rainy. Most of them did. We lost one of LeeRoy’s and one of Jimmy’s. The piglet we brought up to the house is the one in the top picture that is all black. I am so glad we checked the pigs before we went to bed last night. We have had 30 piglets born in the last 3 days. 26 of them have made it. Pretty exciting!

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What A Day!

Last week, the kids and I decided that our three gilts (female pig that hasn’t had her first litter yet) were looking very pregnant and it was time to separate them from the boar.

We got him into a temporary holding pen and when Jay got home from work, he moved him over to his own field.

Every day since then, we have been eagerly awaiting piglets!

Early this morning, Ava went out to check the pigs and she came running back to the house. She had seen three piglets outside the hoop house and they did not look good! A bunch of us got on our coats and hats and headed out to see what kind of mess awaited us. First, Ava and I picked up two of the piglets outside the hoop house. We could see that the third was already dead. The piglets we picked up were Very cold and stiff. We quietly walked up to the hoop house and saw that it was Ava’s sow that had given birth. She had 5 babies already nursing. We put the cold ones quite close to her in the hopes that they would be warmed up enough. Sows put off a lot of heat. I put my hand on her udder where we put the babies and it was quite warm!

I had my doubts as to whether those cold babies were going to warm up there, but it was sunny and fairly mild out and I knew it would be best to leave them with her if it would work.

Now that the babies were back with their mom, our next concern was moving the other gilts out of the hoop house and getting them into the holding pen at the other end of the field. Fortunately, our pigs are very friendly and they just followed us up there. Once they were locked away from Blaze and her piglets, Ava and I decided to look around in case there were any more piglets that were not born in the hoop house.

We found one. She was alive but very cold and stiff. I put her right against Blaze’s udder with the other piglets and then we left them alone. Every time we had gone by the hoop house, Blaze started snorting and getting restless. We didn’t feel like she was going to hurt us, but we were afraid that she would get up and then accidentally lie back down with piglets underneath. Getting squashed is a very common death for piglets and we sure didn’t want that to happen!

Back up at the house, I got the kids going with school. There was a lot of excitement so school was a bit hard to settle down to. Especially because, after half an hour, I decided I had better go see if those piglets were warming up or not. One was completely fine by this time, two were not. I picked them up and snuggled them into my sweater. Both were extremely cold and completely stiff. One of them peed on me when I picked her up and I thought she had just died.
Up at the house, I knelt down as close to the wood stove as I could get. I was sweating, lol, but I knew I had to get those piglets warm, and fast.

Amazingly, almost immediately, the piglets started responding to the heat from the stove. They began moving their little heads just a little and making little squeaky sounds. I really was surprised that the one that peed on me was still alive! Ava brought a flat box and we warmed it up under the wood stove while I continued to hold the piglets. Once the box was warm, we put the piglets in it.

The kids watched them and pet them and talked to them. So much for school! It wasn’t long until both piglets were moving quite a bit. I turned them over a few times because I wanted them heated through and through. If we didn’t get the chill completely off of them then it would come back before they could eat and get strong and huddle with the other babies.

We checked the sow and the other babies a few times and they all seemed to be doing fine, so after about an hour of the piglets warming under the stove, I decided they were ready to go back out. It was pretty windy so I carried them in a box with high sides to keep them protected. Ava scratched sow and talked her her and I added her babies back in.

Ah, what a feeling. All good, as long as they eat and Braze doesn’t get up and them lie back down on top of them. We hung laundry, made lunch, ate, put the baby down for a nap, and I took the little girls out to see the piglets. They all looked great, except one. It was by itself and didn’t seem to be able to use its back legs. Ava put it back with the other piglets by Blaze’s udder, but I didn’t know if it was going to make it.f

But, they were set for the time being. We would check back later. In the meantime, we had a huge load of feed to go pick up. Usually Jay picks up our feed order but we were completely out of feed and needed it right away. I took 4 kids and off we went to load far more than a ton of feed into the back of the pickup, by hand. I’ll tell you what, these kids are strong! And, they love loading feed. How nice! LeeRoy and I brought bags to the truck and two younger kids stacked it.

By the time we got home, I felt that everyone just needed a break……and I needed a cup of coffee. I gave everyone an hour to do what they wanted and since the baby was still napping, I sat down with my coffee and some hand sewing, which is my way to relax.

When we got back to work in the late afternoon, our biggest priority was to move one of the hoop houses up to the holding pen we had put the two gilts into. That was sort of a big job. A bunch of the kids helped and we got that thing all set up, nice and secure with t-posts, and plywood to keep the wind off. We filled it with fresh hay and right as we were finishing up, one of the gilts came over and made a very thorough inspection all around the inside and the outside. I am thinking she may be starting to nest. Maybe there will be more piglets in the morning!

Ava checked her piglets several more times and we took some sow feed to Blaze. 7 piglets look great! They are walking around and seem quite healthy. The hurt one is very much alive so she must have nursed. She is warm and staying with the bunch. Blaze got up and got several drinks and lay back down, apparently carefully because we did not hear any squealing.

Right at dusk, I went to check them again and I found that all the piglets were burrowing under the hay to stay warm. Pigs are so smart! They don’t just lie on top of the hay, they get under it.

It has been a long day and I am exhausted! Babies on the farm are so very exciting and so very stressful! I hope there are more in the morning!

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Low Sugar Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cake (or Muffins)

Yesterday, while I was in town, Mellony decided to make our Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffin recipe and cook it in two cake pans instead of muffin pans. This is a very low sugar recipe and it comes out just fine with freshly ground whole wheat flour (We use hard white wheat berries. You can use hard red wheat berries, but hard red make heavier muffins). What saves this recipe from tasting “too healthy” is the chocolate chips. The kids don’t even add butter to their muffins. I rarely eat muffins, but trust me, when I do, there is plenty of butter on them!😉

Anyway, back to the pumpkin muffins in the cake pan. This morning, Mellony and Clara made up a simple cream cheese icing and put a cake together. I let all the kids have some for morning snack during school……because it is very low is sugar, well….except for the icing, but still altogether it’s not that much sugar and there are lots of healthy things, like our homegrown butternut squash (that we use in pace of pumpkin) and our own eggs, whole wheat etc. I wasn’t going to eat a piece, I really wasn’t. In fact, I went out and hung up laundry on the line while the kids were eating their cake. When I came back in, that cake was definitely calling my name though so I cut a small piece and, wow! Just the right touch of slightly sweet but not too sweet. I mean, it was Really good!

And so, I am sharing the recipe with you.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins or Cake
-3 cups flour
-1/2 cup sugar
-1 teaspoon baking soda
-2 teaspoons baking powder
-1 teaspoon salt
-1 teaspoon cinnamon
-4 eggs
-2 cups pumpkin
-1 cup (2 sticks) melted butter
-1 cup chocolate chips

Mix everything and either fill 24 muffin cups or 2 cake pans.
Bake muffins at 400 for 17 minutes
Bake cake at 350 for 25-30 minutes

Icing for Cake
-1 stick of butter (softened)
-8 oz cream cheese (softened)
-2 cups powdered sugar

Beat everything, scraping the sides of the bowl to make sure it is well mixed.

This is such an easy recipe. We make these as muffins quite often all winter long. In the fall, we freeze A Lot of butternut squash (for our pumpkin needs) and this is one of our favorite way to use it during the cold months. Hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

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Winter Projects, Winter Baking and Hitting the (school) Books

We are smack dab in the middle of winter, and even though the weather is quite mild right now, this is the time of year that we really make school a priority. We do have several projects that we are working on, but even with those going on, this is the slow time of year for us. The garden is completely done until spring, the canning has been (finally!) finished after putting up loads and loads of applesauce in December, and the animals chores are pretty simple.

This is not a homeschooling blog, but homeschooling is part of our life so even though I am not going to share exactly what books we use, I will say that we start the day early, work hard, and are done with school by lunch time. By that time, we are all ready to come up for some air! The afternoons are usually filled with some sort of work we are trying to get done, and of course, the never ending cooking that has to be done to feed this crew of kiddos.

Jay and the kids have been working on firewood. Yes, it’s better, much better, to burn “seasoned” wood, but we are just not there yet. In fact, we have not been there for many years. We cut wood and split it and into the stove it goes a week or two later…..sometimes a bit longer…..sometimes earlier! We Will get ahead on firewood at some point, but it sure ain’t gonna be this year.

Everyone loves doing firewood and the boys love splitting. That is definitely a blessing since we heat our home entirely with wood. Jimmy just turned 8 and he probably splits half of all the wood we go through. That amazes me, but he loves to do it and I believe that this sort of thing is excellent work for boys. They need to get outside and use their energy and muscles. Splitting wood makes them feel like men, and it helps them become men.

Another project we have been working on is building new doors for the back of the barn. Jay and the kids built the doors and door jams and the kids have been painting them. One set of doors is hung (we use Dutch doors) and the other set is ready to be hung. Then we are going to add more fill the the bottom of the stalls and re bed them. The mild weather is definitely nice for this sort of work. The goats are still finding grass to eat in their field, which they prefer over hay. We are feeding hay but they spend most of their time out in the pasture instead of up by the barn. While we are working on the back doors, we are just giving them access to whichever stall we are not working on. Right now, our barn only has two stalls, but we hope to be able to add a large lean-to that will close like a stall, before we are into kidding season.

Another thing that we have been working on is getting all of our fields and trails bush hogged. This is a really good time of year to cut the trails that have grown up and gotten out of hand because with the leaves down, it’s easy to see. It’s also important to make sure that all of our fields are cut and ready for spring growth. We will definitely be hurting our grazing ability if we hit the spring without the fields having been cut or anything cleaned up that needs to be, such as a downed tree or something like that. To be perfectly honest, we have not always had the fields ready for a good growing season, but now with a tractor that starts every time we turn the key and older kids who help a lot, we are able to keep up a lot better.

The kids have been working on some clean up around the woodshed and barn area. We have a lot of woods that just don’t have nice trees in them. There are a lot of vines and unhealthy trees. In several places around our house and garden, we have cleared out all the junk and cleaned up around the trees and saplings we want to keep. Everywhere we have done this, the area goes from an awful, ugly, snakey area to a nice area. Winter is the time to do this sort of work, and the kids really enjoy cutting (with bow saws and loppers) and chopping away at the junky trees and vines. Even the little kiddos have been hauling branches to the burn pile. Apparently, they would rather do that than take a rest time in the house, lol.

Last, but not least, the baking and cooking goes on and on! We go through a lot of food, and that’s just how it is. There are a lot of mouths to feed in this family, but I am trying to be better about making nice things, like pies, more often. I don’t want to just set healthy food before Jay and the kids, I want to make fun things too, on a more regular basis. On the other hand, I am not a big fan of sugar so there has to be balance.

I am working on getting back to making more of the bread that we eat. We make rolls or muffins to go along with most of our suppers but we use store bought bread for sandwiches or toast. Freshly ground whole wheat bread is soooo much healthier than store bread, and of course, it tastes so much better! I used to make all our bread and then for years, I could not keep up with the bread and having so many little ones. Now, that I have older kids to help, I would love to be able to keep up with the bread making again. We will see how this goes. Another thing I have gone back to is using honey, instead of sugar, in my bread. Honey costs much more than sugar, even unrefined sugar, so I had stopped using it for baking. Now that I buy bulk honey from Azure, I have decided to start using it as a sugar replacer when I can. The less sugar we eat, the better, and when we do eat sugar, it would be nice if it was something special.

Speaking of honey, my 5 gallon bucket does not stay warm enough in our house and so all our honey crystallized. That is really not a big deal. I don’t use it straight out of the bucket anyway. I fill 3 or 4 quart jars from the bucket and use that until they are empty and then refill them. To get the honey liquid again, I just filled the jars and then put them in a pot of water with a kitchen washcloth in the bottom of it. I turned on the stove to very low heat, and very gently melted the honey back down. This is raw honey and I didn’t want to heat it much, so I turned the stove on and off as I needed to so the water in the pot would only be a bit hot to the touch. Once it’s liquid again, it usually stays that way until I use it up, but if it starts to recrystallize, I just warm it up in hot water again or set it on the mantle by the wood stove.

This is already longer than I planned, but I wanted to catch y’all up a bit in what we are doing. I took the month of December off from blogging because I was quite busy sewing and cooking and having lots of family time. I am jumping back in now though and will hopefully be able to share gardening and homesteading plans with you soon. Until next time, stay warm and eat well!

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Leaves, Chickens, & Overwintering the Garden

I have been wanting to write this post for a while and just have not gotten to it. Tonight, I am going to try to get it done without being too long winded. Thanksgiving week is a big week for all of us, but I want to share a few things with y’all about wrapping up the growing season in the garden and a couple ideas that have to do with chickens for the winter, before we are actually into winter! So, here is my attempt to cover three things quickly, and hopefully this will help answer some questions for those who have been asking me about leaves and chickens and gardens etc.

This is what I will cover:

  • Deep bedding the chickens for the winter
  • Putting the garden to bed for the winter
  • Adding chickens to the garden for the winter

First, I want to talk about deep bedding the chickens with leaves. As soon as the leaves start falling in September, the kids start moving them to the chicken pen. Our goal is to have the whole pen 12-18 inches deep in leaves before winter hits. This gives the chickens lots of dry material to work through all winter long. By spring, they have turned it into dirt and we haul it out and add it to our raised beds. This is such an easy way to make soil! If your chickens are in a pen, I highly recommend deep bedding them like this. No one, not even the birds, like slopping around in a wet muddy pen in the wintertime. Lots of leaves will take care of that problem! No standing water when it rains, no smell, just leaves that are rotting down and chickens that are busy scratching through them. I like to keep my chickens busy. I think it’s good for them😉. If you garden, you are going to be absolutely thrilled with the wheelbarrow loads of rich black dirt those leaves have turned into by spring. I have a whole post explaining the process in more detail right here: https://faithandfamilyhomestead.com/2022/01/20/preparing-the-chickens-for-winter/

Now, let’s talk about getting the garden tucked in for winter. I am just going to start by saying that this is always something I have wanted to do, but until the last few years, I was simply not able to. 6 of my 8 children were fall or winter babies. In the years when I was pregnant with them, just getting to the end of the growing season was enough for me. I had to let the garden go and clean it up in the spring. It can be done. We cleaned up some horrible messes several springs in a row, without a tiller, without letting Jay bush hog it. It is possible to take back a mess in the spring. If you are in a season of life when you need to let it go, then let it go. Don’t stress. You will absolutely be able to take it back.

Having said that, it’s obviously better to get the garden tucked in in the fall. I’m very thankful that I have been able to do that the last few years, but the truth is, even now, I couldn’t do it without the help of the kids, especially my oldest son who is 14 and worlds stronger than I am! The credit goes to him. I directed, but he did most of the work.

This is what the garden looked like after we pulled the pumpkin vines out. Except for what was/is growing under row covers, those vines were the last to go. As you can see, the weed problem is minimal because we mulched (with grass clippings) heavily.

LeeRoy scooped out the paths and put the dirt up on the beds. This has to be done now and then because the grass clippings in the path rot down and turn into dirt. We just pick it up and add it to the bed.

Next, and this was the part that really took some muscle, he took loads of good dirt from the chicken pen and spread them on the beds. He made them nice and high which will be good for root growth next growing season.

Lastly, he has been cutting and bagging and bringing to the garden anything worthy of cutting! I have even sent him into one of the fields to cut grass. I am spreading it out nice and thick, both on the beds and in the paths.

We have a few things happening here. One is that these beds will be ready to plant. It saves soooo much time in the spring if I can just go out and put seeds in, without having to prepare the bed and clean out weeds! Secondly, there are millions of earthworms that are already working though the good soil and eating the chopped up leaves and grass. That means, even better soil! Thirdly, there is no run off from winter rains. The dirt is going to stay put because the mulch will hold it there. And, lastly, there is no mud. I can walk in the garden anytime and not get my boots muddy. That’s a big deal in the spring if I am trying to plant. There have been several springs when people who till cannot get into their garden because it’s too muddy, and so it delays planting. When you mulch and have a no-till garden, you don’t have that issue.

Moving right along! Last, but not least, I want to share with y’all the idea of putting the chickens in the garden for the winter. This would be very helpful for people in two situations, you have an overgrown garden that needs to be cleaned up, or you have poor soil and you want to build it up quickly. In either of those two cases, it would definitely be worth it to put a temporary (or maybe even permanent) fence around the garden. There are several options for temporary fencing but I’m not going to go into that here. The idea would be to get the chickens in there and then deep bed that thing like crazy. If you want to help it along, you can even make some piles and let the chickens take them apart and then do it again. By spring, you will not have anymore weeds, and if you deep bedded it enough, you will have a lot of good soil to work with. I would take the chickens out a month or more before you plan to plant.
I have a post about doing that here: https://faithandfamilyhomestead.com/2022/04/13/making-garden-soil-and-planting-early-crops/

And, another similar post here: https://faithandfamilyhomestead.com/2022/02/18/easy-composting-keeping-the-chickens-busy-in-the-winter/

We have a combination of these three options for overwintering happening on our homestead right now. You saw above the pictures of my regular garden mulched and tucked in for winter. And, you saw pictures of the kids deep bedding the chicken pen. That chicken pen is actually going to be a garden next growing season so, in a way, I have the chickens wintering in the garden too! We have to grow more food for all these growing young’uns to eat! So, the garden size is growing yet again. It will be good and I’m excited about it. For now, the people have done their work and it’s up to the chickens and earthworms to work all winter.

Happy Thanksgiving, friends. I hope you have a blessed time with family and friends.

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Fall Potato Harvest, Good or Bad?

Our weather has gotten cold, really cold, like down in the low 20’s cold. Potatoes don’t do well in weather like that. The row covers I use can protect them down to some pretty cold weather and will keep the frost off but once we hit the low 20’s delicate plants like potatoes, need to come out. I dug the first bed of potatoes about a week ago. I knew it would be the best bed because the plants had been growing the longest, and I had already pulled out about 15 pounds of “new potatoes”.

This is what the bed looked like when I started. I had dug two plants up already so there is a gap there by the basket. The bed is small, as you can see, but the soil is deep and loose and absolutely teaming with earthworms.

This is a nice group of potatoes. Most of the plants did not have this many on them because I had taken so many early. That’s fine. They still had numerous large potatoes and digging them was really fun!

Because the soil was so loose, I dug mostly with my hands. It only took a few minutes to dig the whole bed. When I was done, I had a basket not quite filled up. They weighed in a little over 14 pounds. I figure I already took 15 or more pounds of new potatoes, so although this bed gave us just about 30 pounds of potatoes.

This is what the bed looked like when I was finished getting the potatoes out. Nice soft dirt, full of earthworms. No weeds because I had mulched the potatoes. This is ready to be mulched for the winter and left until spring.

Today, I dug the rest of the potatoes. They were not all in the same place, but altogether they probably equaled about a bed this 👆size or a little bigger. I was a bit apprehensive about digging because some of the plants had not been growing for real long. I dug a number of them up, and only got a few small potatoes off of them. What they really needed was a month or more of growing time but the cold would keep them from thriving and growing, even if it doesn’t kill them for a while, so they had to come out. This part was pretty disappointing!

Other plants had been growing longer and I got some nice large potatoes. Those were the plants I had pulled about 5 pounds of new potatoes from a couple weeks ago, so I knew they were ready to dig and would give us a good harvest. The only down side was that there were only a few like this.

Here is our total harvest from today. Pretty small, huh? Too small! Those baskets came to 10 pounds, plus the 5 I had gotten as new potatoes, for a total of 15 pounds. About half what the other bed gave us.

Alright, so do I consider fall potatoes a success or a failure? And would I do it again? Yes, I will be growing fall potatoes again, but there are a few things I need to adjust. First of all, I did not plant Nearly enough beds! I knew this at the time but I didn’t have any other open places to plant. (This is why we are expanding the garden next year.) Secondly, I learned that the plants that did the best, were the ones that grew the most before frost. That means I really need to plant them earlier next year, like the end of July, rather than the beginning of August. And lastly, I need to try to help these little guys sprout! That took a looong time for some of the plants! I think slow sprouting was a result of planting in the hot, dry summer. My plan, next year, is to plant, water and then cover with row cover until they come up. I think this may help. Once they are up, we are off and running! I just have to water and mulch, but when it takes a really long time for them to come up, that really slows down the whole process, giving us a much smaller yield. Since we are working toward winter instead of toward summer, like spring potatoes do, that sprout time really matters! All in all, I am happy though and will be growing fall potatoes again.

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Apple and Sweet Potato Casserole

I have shared this delicious recipe many times over the years, but since we are getting close to Thanksgiving, I thought I would post it here for anyone who does not follow my Homestead Facebook page. This recipe is a favorite of ours. We eat it all fall and winter, until the sweet potatoes run out. I hope you enjoy it!

Of course it’s nice if you have your own sweet potatoes and apples. We have sweet potatoes but not apples. We have to drive up into the mountains to get our apples. If you don’t grow your own, try to find a local farmer, or get the best quality you can from the grocery store.

Here’s what to do:
🍠Wash sweet potatoes and boil until they are tender. (I often do this part well ahead of time and have them cooling in the sink or in the fridge waiting to be used)
🍎Cut apples into slices with peel on. You will need just under three pounds.
🍠Peel the sweet potatoes and cut them into slices.
🍠Layer sweet potato slices, apple slices, brown sugar, cinnamon, and pats of butter in a 9×13 glass dish.
🍠Do a second layer just the same as the first.
🍠Cover with tin foil and bake for an hour at 350.
🍠When I take it out of the oven, I stir it just a little so any juice in the bottom of the pan gets mixed in.

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Two Easy Ways to Cook Pasture Raised Chicken

Since we just butchered our broilers a few weeks ago, I thought I would share two very easy ways to cook pasture raised meat chickens.

Our broilers usually average 5 pounds, like this one little Ava is holding. That size seems to be good for our customers, but for our family, 5 pounds is not enough so when the birds are this size, I usually cook two at once. I would rather have some leftover than not enough!

That last time we butchered however, the birds were huge! We did not butcher when we originally planned to because of sickness going through our family. This gave the birds extra time to grow, and grow they did! We saved the “smaller” ones for our customers. Those were 6-7 pounds, but for our family we ended up with broilers that were around 10 pounds each! Yup, like small turkeys, and I love it! One bird gives us plenty of meat!

Roasting these birds is so easy! I thaw the broilers out in a full sink of hot water. Be sure to cover the chicken all the way. The water turns cold as the meat thaws and it can sit in the sink for quite some time like this. Once it’s thawed, I put my broiler in a pan and rub it all over with olive oil. This keeps the skin from getting dried out and helps the herbs etc to stick. Next comes a good sprinkling of salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder and oregano, or whatever combination you like. If I have onion and garlic on hand, I put chunks of them into the cavity. I will also often put chunks of lemon or some organic lemon juice in the cavity as well. The whole bird will taste like it’s infused with lemon, garlic and onion if you do this. I put a cup or a little more of water in the bottom of the roasting pan, and then cook it for 20 minutes per pound at 350 degrees.

After your meal is over and you have removed all the meat you can, take the bones, skin etc and put them in a pot (or crockpot). Add water and cook them for several hours. You can get some pretty nice broth from that. And broth from pasture raised chickens is extremely healthy!

The other way I cook my broilers, really my most common way, is to put the whole bird in a big pot of water and cook it down for most of the day. Or, you can put them in a (large!) crockpot and cook them all day, or over night. I know my birds are clean because I clean them myself at butchering time, so I don’t even thaw them before putting them in the pot. The water should come up high but if it doesn’t cover the chicken that’s okay. As the chicken cooks down, it will sink down into the water/broth. I simmer broilers this way for around 6 hours.

Once the broiler has really cooked down, I carefully take out the pieces with a slotted spoon and put them on a cookie sheet with sides. Be really careful because if a big piece breaks off and falls back into that hot broth, it will burn you! After all the pieces are out of the pot, I let them cool for a bit. Then, comes the picking and chopping. I have been doing this for 14 years, so I can pick a chicken quite quickly. If you are new to picking chicken, it will take a bit longer but with practice, you will get fast. The bones can now be put back into the pot of broth to continue boiling for a few hours. The meat is ready to be used! From the 10 pound chicken I just cooked, we made a large chicken casserole and I froze the two bags of meat in the picture above. I love having cooked and chopped chicken in the freezer, so right now I am working on cooking down broilers and filled the freezer with ready-to-use meat and broth.

After the broth has cooked down for a few more hours, I strain it into a huge bowl. The bones go back into the pot to be gotten rid of later and my huge bowl of broth goes into the sink. I cool water bath that thing until it has cooled down enough to put into plastic containers. The containers either go into the fridge to use right away or into the freezer. Don’t forget to leave “head space” in your container for expansion when the broth freezes.

Some people make their bone broth with onion, carrots and celery added. I do not. The bone broth I make is just from the broiler. All the other good stuff gets added when I make the soup. I try to keep things simple because I am a busy homeschool Mom, and making my bone broth like this is one of those things that speeds me up!

All in all, either way you cook the chicken is fairly easy and extremely delicious.

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November Garden Tour and what we are Harvesting from our Fall Garden

I haven’t written a post in a while because I had a migraine for over a week(!), but I want to take some time this evening to show y’all what the garden looks like in November and to share how our fall harvest is going. We had some hard frosts mid October for a number of nights, but since then the weather has been really cooperative for fall gardening. That is definitely a blessing!

We’ll start with broccoli. We had broccoli in three stages of harvest. The first bed just finished up yesterday. We got an absolute ton of broccoli from this bed. We ate all of it fresh, pretty much every day for lunch and supper……and, I even ate broccoli for breakfast some days! Weird, I know. We could just barely keep up with eating it all, which is how I like the garden harvest to be!

The second bed of broccoli will be ready to start harvesting in about a week, and the last one should be ready in a month or so. By that time, I think we will be broccolied out and ready to take a break from eating it until spring!

The carrots are also planted in several harvesting stages. We just finished up the first planting which yielded a nice crop of really tasty carrots. The trick to really tasty carrots is to let them go through a couple good frosts. It will sweeten them right up! Carrots grown in the cold, rather than over the summer just plain taste better, and they seem to be a darker orange, which is nice too.
The first crop just finished. I have no idea how many pounds we got. We pulled 5 or 6 every other day or so for a number of weeks. It was wonderful!

Unfortunately, the next planting of carrots is not ready to harvest yet. I think it’s going to be a few weeks before they are big enough to justify pulling. I would like a continual harvest of carrots, so next year, we will have to work on succession planting a little better, with not so many weeks between getting those seeds in the ground.

Now that it’s getting colder, the carrots are growing much more slowly than they were. Our smallest ones are only about an inch high and it’s going to take them a very long time to mature. I’m trying to decide if I should plant another bed or just wait until early spring. One thing is for sure, I am definitely seeing that I’m going to have to plant a ridiculous number of seeds to keep us in abundant carrots all winter long!

I planted lettuce seeds by sprinkling them in a small area and then transplanted them into these rows. We love salad and are happy to eat it every day when we have enough lettuce. I’m going to keep these covered as it gets colder and see how long they last. I think (hope) we will have lettuce through December.

Kale is for our Kale Soup (I have a post with that recipe) which everyone loves. We will just harvest it as we need it. It should be able to take fairly cold weather.

This is the cauliflower which I am new to growing. If the kids like it, we will grow lots next year. I don’t know much about cauliflower but I think my plants look pretty healthy!

I tucked garlic cloves in between broccoli plants. The broccoli will come out and the garlic will have plenty of space. Even though garlic can take our winter weather, I will still cover it and plan to interplant with lettuce in the early spring. Garlic and lettuce like each other. The garlic will grow all winter a d be ready to harvest the first of June.

Here is a plant I am completely new at growing and I know very little about; brussel sprouts! I am learning as we go on this one and don’t have anything to share except what they look like.

Now we come to the potatoes. These fall potatoes have been doing great but I think the time is about to come to dig them up. We have some very cold (low 20’s) weather coming and, even covered, I don’t think the plants are going to make it. Potatoes cannot handle frost! I want to take them as far as they will go, but once the plants get frosted, we will dig up the potatoes.

We have already dug up “new potatoes” several times, about 15 pounds or so. They are a nice size and of course are delicious. Our big family can really go through some potatoes so I’m thrilled about this fall harvest! Planting potatoes in the early spring and end of the summer for the fall, seems to be the way to go. Potatoes don’t like the heat of mid summer in Virginia. They grow amazingly well in cool weather as long as it doesn’t freeze. The row covers I have keep light frost from damaging them, so for us, two crops, fall and spring, seem to be the way to go.

So, our fall harvest looks like
-potatoes
-carrots
-brussel sprouts
-cauliflower
-broccoli
-lettuce
-kale

We have half the garden planted. The other half, we are preparing for next growing season. But, you will have to wait until the next post to hear about that!

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Our Set Up and System for Butchering Broilers

We raise our broilers on pasture in the Joel Salatin style, moving them every day to new, clean grass and feeding them non-GMO grain. The birds thrive this way!

When the broilers are full grown, which is 8 weeks for these Cornish Cross, we load them into these crates. Depending on the size of the broilers, the crates will hold 8-12 birds. The last thing you want to do is overcrowd them. They will die.

We only have 4 crates so we fill them, butcher and then go back to the field to fill them again. These things are pretty expensive but they are worth their weight in gold! When we started raising broilers almost 15 years ago, all we had was an old dog cage to haul broilers in. You start you where you have to but upgrading to better equipment is so nice!

The broilers had their feed removed 24 hours before butcher time. Trust me, you don’t want them full of half digested food! Please, don’t ask me how I know this!……Anyhoo, moving right along….

This is what the butcher shed looks like before we start processing. Everything is scrubbed down and the chill tanks are filled with cold well water. Starting the from the left: freezer, scalder, plucker, table we clean the birds on and our two 55 gallon drums we use as chill tanks. They have valves on the bottom so they can be easily emptied.

The scalder is filled with soapy water and heated with a small propane tank like gas grills use. The reason for adding soap is it cuts the natural oil on the chicken allowing the hot water to get right up to the skin. The plucker has a hose attached to it. After the birds are plucked, while they are still spinning, Jay turns on the hose valve and it washes all the feathers away. It took us a long time to learn that the birds need to be completely plucked Before that cold water hits them. The feathers only come out well when the birds are warm.

This is called a rotary dunker. It sits on top of the scalder and slowly turns, dunking the birds in and out of the water. Each side holds 2 birds, so we butcher in sets of 4. The plucker is also made to work best with 4 birds. But, before the scalding and plucking, of course comes the…….

need to take the broilers out of the crates and place them in the killing cones. 4 at a time, with buckets underneath to catch the blood and heads. Contrary to what some people do, we cut the heads completely off, otherwise they can get stuck in the plucker and the skin ripped rather badly.

Once they have bled out, next comes the scalding. Jay is the scalder man! He stands there pulling a feather every time the birds come around in the rotary dunker, until the big wing or tail feathers come out easily. Then, he pulls them (usually with the help of one of the kids or me) and drops them into the plucker that is already spinning.

Once the birds are plucked, they go up onto our stainless steel table to be cleaned. Jay guts, the kids help get any feather that are still in, I pull the lungs and go over the bird to make sure it is completely clean. Then I slit the skin and tuck the legs in to make a nice looking carcass.

Back in the day when we only had babies and toddlers, and little ones to help watch the babies and toddlers, Jay and I had to do all the butchering on our own. Nowadays we have wonderful help. In case you are wondering, the kids don’t mind butchering in the least. Some of them even find it fun! It really is a good skill for them to grow up knowing how to do.

Once the bird is clean and the legs are tucked, it goes into the chill tank.

Once we have a barrel full, we empty it with the valve on the bottom and refill it. It is vital to keep emptying and refilling the chill tanks. The broilers have to be cooled down quickly and this is the best way to do it. They also become extremely clean once they have gone through several well water soaks. We want our bagged broilers to look nice, which means no blood!

Once the birds have soaked in the chill tanks for several hours, we pull them out and hang them on this drying rack.

We let them drip dry for several minutes before putting a broiler bag on each one. Then, they are taken off the drying rack, and the bag is crimped closed with a hog nose crimper. If we are selling them, we weigh and label and get them in the freezer. If they are for us, they go into the freezer once they are crimped.

Once the butchering is finished, there is of course, a major clean up and scrub down needed! It’s really not that bad to do, and there is satisfaction knowing we are almost done with a huge job.

With this last butchering we did on Saturday, we left the butcher shed clean and the second batch of birds cooling in the chill tanks while we went in for supper and some family time……also known as our middle son’s 8th birthday!

Jay and I finished up after dark. It was a long day but well spent. You really feel like you have done something good with your time when the freezer is packed full of meat that was alive that morning.

Yeah, he hardly got it all in, but he did!

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How To Make Pudding from Scratch

When I was a kid, my Mom made pudding fairly often. I didn’t even know pudding could be made from a mix. I was 17 years old, on a mission trip with my church to West Virginia before I tasted pudding from a mix. This is not to say anything bad about West Virginians! The camp I was staying at had only a couple cooks and a lot of hungry people to feed. One evening, after getting back from working on the house we were repairing, I went through the buffet line with the other teens and was really excited to see Huge pots of pudding! I put a big ol’ scoop in my bowl…….only to discover that not all pudding tastes like my mothers pudding!

Years later, when I was married, I spent some time trying to figure out how to make pudding like Mom used to. I tried several recipes that just weren’t right. Then it hit me that I needed to look in an older cookbook, not the cookbooks of My generation! I pulled out my husband’s grandmother’s cookbook, and there it was……almost. After a few tweaks, I had it right. This is the pudding I have been feeding to my family for somewhere close to 18 years. I am sharing it with you now. I hope you enjoy it.

Remember, that the recipe is only as good as the ingredients. If you want the best food, use the best ingredients; homegrown when you can, or bought from a local farmer, or at least organic from the store.

Vanilla Pudding

-1 1/4 cups sugar (I use unrefined)
-1 cup flour (I either use high quality white, or freshly ground whole wheat)
-1 1/2 teaspoons salt (I use Redmond’s Real Salt)

Mix these three ingredients together. Continue stirring while you slowly add
-6 cups milk

*If you add the milk too quickly, or don’t stir enough, you will get lumps of flour in your pudding, especially if you use white flour. As long as you stir the milk in as you pour, you will be fine.

Heat on medium/high and continue to stir often enough to keep the flour from burning on the bottom of the pot. Once the milk starts to get hot, you have to stir continuously. I stir with a whisk because I think it helps to make the pudding smooth.

While your pot is heating, break
-3 eggs
into a bowl and beat them.

Once the milk mixture in the pot starts to bubble, remove it from the heat. With one hand slowly pour some of it into the eggs, while you quickly stir the eggs with the other hand. This is where the fun is, lol, and you get to see just how talented you are! I scoop out the hot milk mixture with a small ladle. You need to add at least a cup and a half of the hot milk to the eggs, stirring them quickly the whole time.

Now, return the pot to the burner and turn it back onto medium/high. Slowly pour the egg mixture into the pot while you quickly stir the milk mixture. Again, you get to see how talented you are!…….or you can get someone to help you.😉

Stir the pot continuously until it starts to boil. Once it boils, turn it down a bit so it doesn’t splatter all over the stove, or you! Time it for about two minutes and then remove it from the heat.

Add
-1 tablespoon of vanilla (I either use homemade or vanilla from Azure)

Cool for a while before putting it in the fridge. It’s best if it has a chance to chill in the fridge 12-24 hours before eating.

*The reason behind adding in the eggs like this is to keep them from cooking the minute they hit the hot milk. I have had lumps of cooked egg in pudding and it’s not all that fun. However, if it happens to you, just serve it to your family anyhow. It’s not the end of the world and next time you will probably make nice smooth pudding. It’s all about practice, and even a few lumps of flour or egg cannot ruin the taste……which cannot even compare with store bought mixes!

Chocolate Pudding

Follow the directions for vanilla pudding, except use
-2 cups sugar
-4 1/2 1-oz squares of unsweetened chocolate

This picture is several years old. Even though we make this dessert a few times each year, I do not have a newer picture of what it looks like. These two were obviously having a good time helping me put it together…..and eating the leftover pieces of cake!

If you want an unbelievably delicious way to eat your chocolate pudding, you can make this dessert. Again, use the best ingredients!

Make a dark chocolate sheet cake (I use the recipe on the back of the Hershey’s cocoa can) and cut it into large chunks after it cools. Make whipped cream using heavy cream. I use 4 cups of cream, 3/4 cup powdered sugar and 4 teaspoons of vanilla. In a Huge bowl, layer cake, pudding, whipped cream. Do a second layer and put it in the fridge to cool for several hours. Your family will love you, trust me. There is only one drawback: once you make this once, you will be stuck on repeat at every birthday!😂