It’s Lammas, traditionally a time to celebrate the first harvests of the year, and despite the seemingly endless coldwetwinterspring weather, we’re actually starting to have something to harvest. Bees are enjoying the onions that have been allowed to go to flower: I wonder what the honey will taste like? It’s a great year for some things, like our tart state plant, the Oregon Grape: It’s not actually in the grape family, but it makes a really delicious dry fruit wine. Some year soon, we’re going to have to do a huge field of black oil sunflowers, which are a staple item for our goats and chickens. This is a volunteer, and a spectacular example; I lost count at 27 flowers on this one 6′ tall plant: Most of the remaining garlic and onions were pulled this morning and now hang from the rafters in the living room: I am not recommending this as an air freshener. Especially on a hot day when the windows are closed to hold in the cool nighttime air. Tomato plants are finally setting fruit, and are overflowing the former garlic and onion beds: We planted about 7 different varieties of tomato this year, purchased as small starts from Boondockers Farm, a great place for heirloom seeds and starts near Eugene. Boondockers have been working with several obscure (to me, at least) tomatoes, fusing their goals of preserving heirloom DNA and finding varieties that thrive in our particular climate. Evan, who owns the farm with his partner Rachel, was kind enough to spend an inordinate amount of time educating someone (me) who was only buying one tray of discounted starts. Several of the ones I chose from their almost overwhelming selection are of Eastern European origin, with names like De Barrao Black Ukrainian, Kosovo, and Malakhitovaya Shkatulka. The ones with less exotic names sound no less enticing – Chocolate Cherry, Black Zebra, Chocolate Stripes. I carefully placed little tags next to each start so I could assess the varieties for future planting, but now there are a few mystery plants…the sometimes frustratingly persistent ink of a Sharpie marker has no UV resistance whatsoever =\ I also don’t know what variety of tomato these are; they popped up voluntarily in a compost bin: The first round of potatoes is in, and the yield is not overwhelming but better than my previous efforts. I did not know this before, but “potatoes,” like most of our roots and tubers, are things we plant and care for in order to keep the tunneling moles well nourished. Kidding, but not entirely; I’ll explain in the next post.

“Hard” cheeses such as chedder require a press to expel the moisture – just the right amount of moisture. Too much pressure, and you end up with a concrete block (yes, we have.) Too little pressure, and retained moisture nourishes unwanted bacteria and molds (yes, it smelled like the devil’s armpit.) The cheese press we’ve been using is based on a spring. You turn a handle to put pressure on the apparatus, and when the spring is fully compressed, that’s 50 pounds. For 10, 20, etc pound presses, you guesstimate how far the spring is between fully expanded and fully compressed. It wasn’t working for us. We happened upon this small basket with a disk that fits inside it at our favorite homebrew supply in Eugene:

That is MUCH better than the solid, slightly off-round PVC pipe that the spring press works with! Displayed with it was $200-something worth of fine craftsmanship and clever engineering in the form of a rather complicated lever device. It looks great, but we’ll stick with the $6.95 basket and see what we’ve got. In preparation for such a find, I had already thrift-stored a set of barbell weights in 5 and 10 pound increments…but they are too big to just set on top of the follower disk on top of the cheese. The solution? An empty tobacco can, a stick that was lying around in the yard, and some concrete:

The tobacco can fits neatly on top of the pressing disk, and the weights fit over the post on top. It weighs 4 pounds and will probably get a pound added somehow as cheese instructions tend to be in 5 pound increments. We’ll let you know how it works!

Cheesemaking is kicking into high gear…we’re freezing a lot of chevre to enjoy later when the milking slows down, and here’s the beginning of a farmhouse cheddar:

I screwed up the last batch of beer and foolishly didn’t brew for a while.  Our homemade beer (when it works, which it usually does) is much tastier than what we buy at the store, and ends up costing about half as much. 

Here’s five gallons of soon-to-be-porter bubbling away:

Last year, we got a freeze in early September that took out all the tomato plants, and Teri made a lot of green tomato ketchup.  This year, none of the main (Brandywine) tomato crop had turned red by that point, and my dreams of pasta sauce seemed to by dying…but the past month has been mostly sunny and warm, and we’re bringing in five-gallon buckets every few days. 

Though we aren’t entirely dependent on our homegrown food, it’s probably saving us a couple of thousand dollars a year now, so I have a little more appreciation for how much people doing this in the past were subject to the whims of the weather…and for what a joy it is when one’s hard work is rewarded with abundance:

In a break from my usual “functionality IS the aesthetic” carpentry ethic, I’ve made a tea table to go alongside my desk (I hate having beverages and food on the same surface as my computer).  The top was from a rough-cut slab of some unknown hardwood that I got a bunch of for free because of “imperfections”, and the base is something that was left behind when the electric co-op trimmed around the power lines. 

It’s beautiful wood…but I didn’t know that when I got it, so most of it is incorporated into the chicken coop.  Now that I’ve seen it sanded and sealed, I think I’ll be pulling the rest of it off the coop to make things from (don’t worry chickens, I have plain old fir boards to replace it).  Anyway, here’s the table, which I’m quite pleased with:

Closeup of the wood:

Worky work work!  In addition to all this, there are of course the daily chores such as caring for livestock, cooking, keeping the fire going, earning a living, etc…but some other farm residents have more sensible priorities; I leave you with “Snail Love”:

 

Ten dollars. At a yard sale even further up into the mountains than where we live. Where we also made some cool new friends. Not an electrical part on it anywhere. Completely human-powered. Seems to have all of the important (read: hard to replace) parts; what’s missing or loose can be replaced or adjusted. Don’t know when it was made, but it has a metal plate with a series of engraved patent dates, the most recent of which is 1886. Real wood. Real metal. No plastic in sight. In pretty good condition, considering its age. Beautiful. I’m looking forward to its company on cold winter nights, and am already imagining all of the things I can mend, make or re-make, with its help. But now, I’m off to harvest and hang to dry catnip, oregano and spearmint, check the chicken coop for eggs, and then help Peter put up fencing. My new treasure will wait. Out here, winter work is different than summer work.

  Photo by Teri Next year we expect to produce all of our own milk, cheese, and eggs here on the property, in addition to a much larger portion of our fruits and veggies. It’s also likely that we’ll raise chickens or turkeys for eating, so a while back I volunteered to help with the chicken “processing” (killing and cleaning) at a friend’s ranch, as much to take measure of my own determination as to learn the skills involved. The skills have already come in handy! The Saturday before Thanksgiving, I was perusing the local Craigslist, and found someone offering two free Bronze turkeys. They were aging (the larger domestic turkeys don’t age well), and she didn’t want to kill them herself. The turkeys lived with chickens in a nice place just outside of Eugene. I liked the woman and felt that she cared about their welfare and was a fellow aficionado of “clean food”. These were turkeys I’d feel OK eating…well, one of them. The bigger one was a tom (male), and blind in one eye because chickens can be really mean. He was enormous and healthy, and ended up being our Thanksgiving bird. His name? Thanksgiving. That’s him at the top of the post. The other bird…she’s a sad case. “Improved” (intensively selectively bred) turkeys become so heavy so fast that they are often crippled just by their own weight. “Gimpy” isn’t as big as Thanksgiving (who must’ve been 30 lbs), but she has a deformed right leg and can only get around with a lot of lurching and flapping. The chickens saw this weakness, and began to peck her to death. They removed maybe a quarter of her feathers and left her with a multitude of raw wounds by the time she came to live with us. Our accidental pet turkey looks pretty unhappy in this picture taken the day she came home, but she’s perked up now.   Photo by Teri “Gimpy” originally escaped the butcher block because she just didn’t look healthy enough to eat. But something happened; as our neighbor put it, she “seems to want to live now”, so she’s a resident here for as long as she is satisfied with her life, though determining a turkey’s quality of life is guesswork for us. Away from the hectoring hens, she’s become more bright-eyed and energetic, and every morning we transport her by wheelbarrow from the predator-proofed henhouse to a grassy pasture where she can lurch about, eating bugs and grass and frustrating the hell out of our dog by her inaccessibility. The rest of the post will be about butchering the big male turkey, and you have to click “more” to see it. But here’s how it turned out – home-processed turkey, homemade cranberry sauce and squash from Teri, fresh baked bread, and (of course!) a pumpkin pie brought over by a dear neighbor who we shared the holiday with. Note the “store boughten” beer – something we’re working to phase out, but if you have to buy them, the Deschutes Brewery ones are all really good.   Photo by Peter If you’re a vegetarian, you might find the rest upsetting. If you’re not…well, this is the reality of meat, and it’s far more humane and hygienic than what happened to that “free-range organic” supermarket bird you probably just ate. (more…)