Hippie Pickle Weights

05 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by in Farm Life, Farm Produce, Seasons

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I’ve written before how me and my sister became enamoured with and acquired our glass mason jar lids. And how some of the old ones don’t fit today’s mason jars. In what has been an extremely satisfying development, I found a new use for these old odd-sized glass lids today.

I started my first batch of pickles ever this afternoon. Not your standard hot-vinegar canned type pickles, but hippie-style brine fermented pickles. With grape leaves top and bottom to add tannin. The plan is that they will bubble and stew at room temperature, and turn into delicious pickles, and hopefully grow all sorts of happy healthy probiotics along the way.

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Our resident gardener fermented pickles last year. Not only were they delicious, we used the brine as a probiotic electrolytic pick-me-up, like concentrated pickle Gatorade. So this year, after the second big armful of pickling cucumbers hit my kitchen counter accompanied by the usual “veggie delivery!” cry, I decided that pickles were in my near future.

RG shared her online recipes, handed me her bag of pickling spice, her dill and her non-iodized salt and finally, brought me one more armful of pickling cukes.  I was ready to begin.

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It was as I was fitting the top grape leaves into the jars, trying to tuck them in so that, as RG had instructed, they were “like a cap, keeping the pickles totally submerged”, while thinking wistfully about the fancy set of glass pickle weights I had seen in the Lee Valley catalogue, that I remembered those glass lids. They would make perfect weights, if they fit!

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And eureka, they did!

I’m going to have to hustle on back to that place with the whole basket of odd shaped glass lids, cheap because there are no jars they fit, and pick me up a few more pickle weights. A lot better price than Lee Valley, I can tell you that! Probably grab some for my sis and RG too.

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July’s Bounty

29 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening, Seasons

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July’s Bounty

I’ve been reading a barnyard vignette collection set on a small southern Ontario farm. The author is a hobby farming woman much like me, except sheep are her passion not chickens. I can relate to most of her adventures and predicaments, but not what she says about July. She claims that July is a calm, quiet time. A time of nothing-much-to-do on the farm after the rush of spring and before the fall harvest.

I don’t know what planet her farm is on, because around here in July, we’re canning and freezing and drying and jam making like crazy, afraid to slow down lest we stumble and be engulfed in a rising tide of produce.

My resident gardener is mowing and hoeing and watering and serving manure tea and hunting slugs and voles. I am tending the year’s chicken population boom; layers and grow-outs, broodies and their families and the freezer camp boys. The work involved is not insignificant. The boys in particular require extra care to fit them for their life’s purpose, to grace my winter table.

Here in our west coast muddy valley we can eat from the garden year round. “Vegetable delivery!” sings out my resident gardener as she dumps yet another armful on the kitchen counter.

Production really starts building in April and May with rhubarb, peas, chives, kale, chard, arugula, lettuce; then strawberries, garlic scapes, raspberries and garlic in June, and now blue berries, tomatoes, tomatillos, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, zucchini, cucumber and new this year…cucamelons (nut-sized striped melons tasting of mildly spicy cucumber).

We eat as much as we can fresh and prepare the mounds of surplus as quick as we can for the freezer, the dehydrator, the canner or the big sauce pot as required.

We’re watching the figs like a hawk and looking forward to much more deliciousness to come, carrots, grapes, peaches, apples, celery, beets, parsnips, cabbage, onions, leeks, to name a few. Our taste buds are happy, sampling July’s cornucopia, and our fingers busy preserving it.

Oh and the herbs! Cut in the morning for maximum potency, spread on stainless mesh racks and dried thoroughly in the spare room’s light summer air. Then tipped into my wide red fruit bowl, clean and empty at this time of year (because fruit flies). A gift from a young man who knows I love bright dishes, my fruit bowl is perfect for cleaning dried herbs. It offers enough elbow room that I can pull brittle leaves from stems without losing any to the floor, and then scoop them into jars with none left behind.

In July I like to lay in enough fresh lavender, oregano, sage, thyme, mint, cilantro, rosemary etc. to last through until next year’s growth starts. They are all at the peak of perfection right now, and the weather perfect for preserving them.

I empty my spice drawer bottles and refill them with fresh, saving the discards to sprinkle in my hens’ nest boxes. Herbs help to discourage bugs and I think the hens enjoy them too.

The rest of this year’s herbal bounty goes into a cool dark cupboard for now. It’s summer time, and the living is easy. So I’ll keep on wandering outside and collecting what I need for dinner, until I can’t any more. Then I shall crack open my jars, and all winter long, strew July’s savoury scents into rich soups, bubbling stews and homegrown coq a vin.

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Turkey Vultures

11 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by in Chickens, Farm Life, Wildlife

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They’ve since moved on to riper pastures, but back in June we had a turkey vulture situation. Four big bald-headed birds hung around the barnyard for more than two weeks. This time of year when everyone’s raising hungry babies, we get lots of winged predators hoping for chicken dinner. Liza the LGD stays pretty busy barking at the sky. But this was excessive, the fly-overs were non-stop and nerve-wracking, at least at first.

Vulture reconnaissance

I was worried they were after my  chickens, and so was Liza, but the chickens themselves didn’t seem too concerned. “What the heck!?!” I said to DH, “the roosters aren’t raising the alarm when the vultures fly over!” It was very strange, they were usually so good at warning of danger. We were heading into a hot spell, maybe they were feeling languid in the heat? It was troubling, I couldn’t figure it out.

The turkey vultures spent a lot of their time perched on a neighbour’s stump on the far side of the manure pile. They also frequented the tall poplars overlooking the barnyard, and the Douglas firs to the west of us. Back and forth they flew, between those three points, all day. More than once, when bald eagles turned up to the party, I watched the turkey vultures run them off the place. That surprised me too.

The vulture situation, and especially my chickens’ apparent indifference to it, piqued my curiosity about turkey vultures, so I did a little reading. I learned that turkey vultures almost never go after live prey. (Phew!) They don’t have talons, just sharp beaks. Nature’s clean-up crew, turkey vultures are attracted by even tiny amounts of the gases discharged by their primary food source, rotting meat. They live in family groups and have a wide range. They are big, with a six-foot wingspan, but pose zero danger to live and kicking chickens.

A couple days after the vultures arrived, I clued into why they were there (duh! of course!) The smell was heavy in the air as I swung through the gate into the winter field on my way to feed the equines lunch. There must be a carcass nearby, a fast-ripening one. Following my nose over behind the barn and climbing over the manure pile, I disturbed a couple vultures, who leapt into the sky like swimmers stroking for the surface. And there it was, a big buck, deflated, pongy and snuggled up against the vultures’ stump as if he had sought his final shelter in its lee.

Vulture on a stump

Our turkey vultures finished their job and moved on, and that smell is completely gone now. And so is my worry about turkey vultures and my chickens. The internet says they are no threat and, much more significantly, so do my roosters.

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Last Year’s Tomatoes

05 Friday Jul 2019

Posted by in Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening

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I froze about 20 lbs too many whole tomatoes last year. I noted this fact a couple of weeks ago as I was making room in the freezer for a few more bags of 2019 rhubarb and a flat of ruby red local strawberries. Here we were, starting to eat our first fresh tomatoes, sun-warmed and straight off the vines, and a bunch of last year’s frozen ones still hanging around. Hmmmm, what to do with them??

Give them to the chickens was my first thought. It’s handy having a flock of hungry omnivores in the barnyard, nothing even remotely edible goes to waste around here. But I still prefer to feed people food to people first if at all possible. So I pushed the problem to the back of my mind where it could stew for a while, and got on with life.

A few days later, I had it! Ketchup! We were almost at the bottom of our current bottle, so the timing was good too.

I’ve been buying organic ketchup for as long as it has been available. It was the first organic product I splashed out on back in the day. I figure that the tomatoes had best be pesticide-free when they hit the kettle, since any residues would only concentrate during processing. It’s expensive though. So I was pretty chuffed at my genius idea.

Good old Google gave me a million recipes; I combined a couple and after two days of simmering followed by two days of dark closet fermenting I had a nice stash of homegrown organic fermented tomato ketchup.  Full of probiotics and with a delicious zingy taste, fermented ketchup aids digestion too. It even achieved the DH stamp of approval.

My ketchup will keep for six months in the fridge, longer if frozen. One jar for each daughter and one and a half for us is just about perfect. And 20 pounds of last year’s tomatoes transformed into deliciousness is the icing on the cake.

Rant for Canada

01 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in Farm Life

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A recent CBC poll of 4500 Canadians found 52 per cent of Canadians polled either strongly or somewhat agree with the statement: “The government doesn’t do anything for me.”
What the hell is wrong with these people?
They take our country for granted. If you go to the doctor or drive on a road or send your child to school or buy food with confidence that it is as labelled or take public transit or an airplane or feel safe in your home or workplace or plan to collect CPP or baby bonus or disability or put your money in the bank or rely on the fact that you won’t be shot walking down the street, or enjoy any aspect of life in this wonderful, peaceful country of ours, the government does something for you.
Don’t like this year’s flavour of government? Vote for another in our reliable, safe, gerrymander-free elections. Believe me, Canadian political party differences are minimal. No matter who leads Canada, daily life doesn’t change a lot. I am so grateful to live here, to be Canadian. So fortunate, as we all are. Get your heads outta your butts, 52%. You reap the benefits of living under Canada’s stable, freely elected government every day of your lives. Your Canadian government is the envy of much of the world. Those of us who were born Canadian won the birth lottery, those of us who were not strove hard to become Canadian. People die trying to get here. Be grateful. Be aware of your good fortune. Be happy.
HAPPY CANADA DAY.

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Rubber Fruit Jar Rings

21 Friday Jun 2019

Posted by in Farm Produce, Reduce, reuse, recycle

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A few years ago my sister and I found a box of mason jars with the old-style glass seals and extra-wide silver rings at a garage sale. Enchanted by their vintage charm, we bought ‘em, and split ‘em.

Shortly after we had found our first jars, perusing my local grocery store’s canning section one day, I had noticed and bought a little box of rubber fruit jar rings. Mostly because the box looked cool, and partly because I knew one used them with glass sealers.

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Give me modern metal sealers for REAL canning, but for storing dried foods where a good seal is less important, the glass lids are prettier. We both use them quite a bit in the kitchen.

Since then, we have added to our collections from time to time, and last spring we picked up some glass seals for a very good price at a vintage goods store. We soon found out why; the darned things didn’t fit any of the jars either of us had! I slipped one of them into my purse so it would be handy for trying on mason jars when I found them for sale.

Last weekend in Courtenay we found nine milk crates full of mason jars at the Sally Ann. A few even had glass seals. Then I remembered my odd sized seal, pulled it out and tried it on an old jar (1976) and IT FIT! One whole milk crate had these odd sized jars so we each grabbed enough to fit our lids.

Today I packed up my garlic scape powder into a couple of the vintage jars. I remembered the rubber rings, pulled them out and to my surprise, they perfectly  fit those odd sized glass seals . So my 1976 jars from Courtenay, with their lids from Brentwood, and their rubber rings from Royal Oak, filled with garlic scape powder from this year’s garlic patch in Prospect Lake, are stowed away in my dry goods drawer in my kitchen. It’s funny how things can just all fall into place sometimes isn’t it.

 

Scape Season

19 Wednesday Jun 2019

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Garlic scape season and what to do with five hundred scapes, all ready at once?

Other years, I’ve chopped and frozen them in ziplock bags, grabbing handfuls all winter long for stir fries and spaghetti sauce. Or I made and froze pesto in ice cube trays (water based and olive oil based, the water based was better). This year, inspired by my sister who used her dehydrator to make garlic powder last year, I dried them and made garlic scape powder.

It’s really good! A more subtle garlic flavour that, as DH says, “creeps up on you”. I imagine it would be great on popcorn, as well as making a good cookery seasoning. Two big brown paper grocery sacks full made about six cups of powder. That means it takes up WAY less space than my other methods. Plus it doesn’t depend on a freezer. 

And if we don’t get through it all before next spring when the scapes are ready again, it will be great to sprinkle over my chickens’ food as a spring tonic. 

 

Barnyard Under Siege!

08 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by in Chance, Chickens, Farm Life, Wildlife

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K and Liza the LGD left on Thursday for a well earned week off and it didn’t take long for the neighbourhood raptors to figure out that the livestock guardian dog was gone.

We have chicks of all sizes running around the barnyard – it’s that time of year – and lots of predators skulking around the edges too, because who doesn’t love a tasty chicken dinner when they can get it?

 

With Liza and Chance on the job, we’ve enjoyed zero losses for the past couple years. But of course Liza is away, and poor Chance the emo-dog has a bad case of barnyard PTSD due, we think, to a recent wasp encounter. He hasn’t figured out quite HOW the barnyard bit him, but he isn’t looking for a repeat, so he’s avoiding the area as much as possible. When I coax him out there, as I do once a day at least (exposure therapy works for dogs too), he sits and trembles until we let him go back to the house. The poor little guy has absolutely no appetite for guarding chickens. As far as he is concerned, they can fend for themselves.

 

So as far as I’m concerned, they can just stay locked up, unless I can be out there with them. But I do feel bad. Chickens love to free range. The daily happy drama as they burst from their coop, beating their wings and shouting with joy at their freedom, makes it obvious. And at dusk, long after the staid old hens have taken to their roosts, settling down to digest their crops full of green grass and bugs, the teenagers hang around outside, chasing bugs and each other through the gloaming, bumping chests in mock battle, relishing every minute and ignoring their momma’s summons until forced in by the inexorable darkness.

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The raptor populations in our area are thriving too. Lots of bunnies, rodents and chickens to eat around here. At least five of the ten families on our road keep chickens, and we see bunnies everywhere. A group of four turkey vultures has been hanging around our valley for weeks, and one recent morning K was awakened very early when a large young female eagle perched right on top of the coops. The eagle didn’t wake her, but the chickens screaming bloody murder at the monster on their roof did.

 

Eagle thru my binoculars
Eagle, Vulture, Vulture, Vulture

Today a pair of gorgeous bald eagles 🦅dropped by to check things out at the same time as the vultures were visiting and I was cleaning coops. I guess they’d heard about Liza’s holiday. One stayed on patrol, circling so high up it was the size of a swallow, while the other perched regally in one of the tall Douglas firs overlooking the barnyard, ignoring the vultures and reviewing his options.

 

Vulture reconnaissance
Vulture on a stump

The four vultures, who divide their time at our place between a stump behind the manure pile, the poplars south of the barn and the Doug firs, weren’t too happy with their white-headed compatriots, so after about half an hour of uneasy co-existence they ran the eagles off the place. I was surprised the eagles went.

Liza will be home in a few more days, and Chance will slowly get over his barnyard aversion, and the chickens will again run free. But I’m afraid it is going to be a long few days for everyone except Liza.

 

K is talking about getting a pup soon, so Liza, who is nine now, has a few active years left to whip him into shape and teach him her wisdom. Maybe I will get one too, and we can send them both to Liza school. If she can teach Chance to guard chickens, she can teach anyone.

And Chance would be beside himself with joy if I got him a puppy. He loves them almost as much as he loves babies.

 

Another Bit of Detox

29 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by in Equipment, Farm Life, Reduce, reuse, recycle

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Who isn’t more aware these days of toxic chemicals in our environment?  We are lucky to live on an island where the air is fresh and clean. And we make choices like using homemade soap and shampoo bars, eating homegrown, local and organic when we can, repairing rather than replacing, and avoiding buying new when secondhand will do perfectly well.

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Weaning myself off dryer sheets was on my list too, so the other night I sat down to research and then maybe order a set of those wool dryer balls online. Yup, the internet said they would work, especially if I put a couple safety pins in each.  They would shorten drying time, reduce static and pummel the clothes soft – all without coating our clothing and dryer in chemicals. $20 on Amazon, and $15 at Crappy Tire.

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Then I noticed a DIY link, and I was off!

I had a big ball of wool roving yarn in my stash, picked up for $3 at the secondhand store months before. It wasn’t labelled as wool, but a ten inch strand shrunk like crazy in hot water so I was pretty sure. First I rewound it into nine tennis ball sized balls, enough for me and any interested daughters. An old pair of knee highs and some bits of yarn and my balls were set up for felting. Unfelted, they would unravel in the dryer and make a real mess.

I put my wooly nylon caterpillars through our next two or three wash and dry cycles, then deconstructed them and voila. Homemade dryer balls. Pretty ones too, cream shot through with strands of purple and pink.

Well, that was easy. Bring on the next project! Oh, and anyone want a half gone box of dryer sheets?

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The Problem with Birds of a Feather

19 Sunday May 2019

Posted by in Chickens, Farm Life, Seasons

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Three hens sitting on eggs, five raising chicks and more to come. Yup, muddy valley hatching season is in full swing.

My genius plan this year?  Let the hens do the work. How? Each time I move a new broody to a private nest, I throw a few eggs in the incubator. Once her eggs hatch, I add a few more chicks. Chickens can’t count, and that’s what I’m counting on. I won’t hatch 400 chicks like last year – it was too much work anyway.

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Black Silkie has three Cream Legbars and an olive egger. Hers are almost old enough now to go in with the flock. Thank goodness, because I’ll need her brooder for new tenants soon.

Silver Pencilled Rock is an absolute star at taking new babies under her wing, her motley crew of eleven Silkies, Marans, Wyandottes and Easter Eggers ranges in age from three to six weeks – her chicks, my chicks and AF’s classroom chicks.

White Silkie has eleven foster chicks too, a mix of Muddy Valley Farm breeds plus three little imports – Rhode Island Reds from Saskatchewan.

Then we have Brownie the bantam Chocolate Cochin, into her fourth year raising two broods per year. Brownie hatched a legbar girl and a couple olive eggers and received six extra Marans.

We also have two Marans hens quietly getting on with it, due to hatch in a couple weeks.

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And then there’s the Silkie twins. Partridge Silkie One and Partridge Silkie Two are White Silkie’s daughters and first time broodies. Since Silkies are the best broodies on earth I didn’t foresee any issues, but PS#1 surprised me by presenting a new (to me) problem.

She hatched two silkies, white and partridge, and in the evening when I moved her out of her delivery nest and into a private brooder, I added eight little Marans. In the morning when I checked on them, PS#1 was at one end of the coop, her two silkie chicks peeking out from her skirts, while eight sad little black chicks huddled together at the other end. Uh oh.

I was shocked. In all my eight years of chicken keeping, my broody hens had never refused chicks. These birds were not “of a feather” with PS#1’s hatchlings; that must be why she rejected them. Oh dear, do I have an intolerant (alt-right?) hen?? She is certainly on-trend with world events, could it be that the rot is seeping even into our quiet muddy valley?

Gathering the little rejects and taking them inside to warm up under a heat lamp, I pondered what to do next. I could pop these ones under White Silkie and Brownie (and that’s what I did), but how to get PS#1’s family size up? My genius plan depended on more than two chicks per broody!

A day later three silkies hatched, and reasoning that PS#1 might take a chick that looked more like hers, I selected the strongest white silkie and after dark, crossed my fingers and slipped it under her.

In the morning all was serene. Three little silkie chicks peeked out from PS#1’s skirts. That night the other two hatchlings went outside and in the morning five little silkie chicks peeked out…you know the story…

Today six more silkie chicks, all the way from Alberta, hatched in the incubator. Partridge Silkie Two is on day 20/21 (hatch expected any time now). The plan is for the little immigrants to go out to her in a day or two.

Considering recent events, I’m a touch worried. These silkies look a bit different…thanks to their showgirl/silkie fathers, most have naked necks. I hope PS#2 doesn’t discriminate like her sister did. As with all irrationality, one can never tell how far intolerance will spread…fingers crossed that love will trump fear in PS#2’s brooder. And elsewhere.