Homestead Holiday Letter 2019

It’s the time of year when cards and letters from family and friends start dropping into our mailbox. My favorite letter each year is always from an older couple who have a hobby farm on the other side of town. We don’t see them often, but we exchange letters every year. What I like best about their letter is that it relates what none of our other friends write in their letters – how their garden did, projects they’re working on, and general home-spun humor.

So, in case there’s another crazy farm lady (or guy) out there who thinks the same, here’s my Homestead Holiday Letter for 2019.

My 2018 garden - adding more space for 2019

This year was our first full year on the homestead. In 2018 we basically had a smaller version of what we’d left at the old house – our laying hens, a batch of broilers, a couple of pigs, and a little bit of a garden (a few cucumbers, a butternut squash, and just enough tomatoes to keep up with what my daughter would grab and eat when she walked through the garden). Most of my energy was spent on getting settled into the house.

In 2019, with the house a little more organized, I got more serious. The fall before, I’d expanded my garden footprint to about three times its previous size by laying down cardboard and covering it with a deep layer of leaves and grass clippings. I let the chickens run through it all winter, so the soil was well fed and ready to plant in the spring.

Planning the 2019 garden

I rebuilt my mini-greenhouse (the flimsy metal frame had crumpled under the weight of the squash I tried to store on it over the winter in 2016) and started most of my garden seeds indoors, since I’d learned that transplants are easier to plant into deep mulch. I’d only done this haphazardly before, starting what I guessed would be a good number of seeds about 6 weeks before our last frost date. This year I took some extra time and planned out how many of each plant I needed for each bed, which companion flowers and herbs would benefit each vegetable, and made a seed starting schedule.  (You can see my basic seed starting plan by clicking here). I really think planning made the biggest difference in the garden this year. It may seem counter intuitive, but my work indoors in January had the biggest effect on my harvest in the fall.

Making maple syrup in the snowy March weather

With my seed schedule set, starting my seedlings was easy, which left time in March for trying something new. I’d taken a class on making maple syrup, and I’d tagged as many maple trees as I could identify in the fall, so it was time to put that information into practice. I set up a little trial-size boiling station in the garden (hoping the ash from the small fires would help fortify the soil even more) and set to work. It was fun to try something new, and a great excuse to sit around a campfire two or three times a week. When all was said and done, I’d made a little over 3 gallons of maple syrup, which was just enough to cover the cost of the supplies I’d purchased. I look forward to making even more syrup this year - now that I know what I’m doing! And this year, it will all be free, since I saved enough making syrup last year to offset the cost of the infrastructure! (You can read about my maple syrup adventures by clicking here, here, here, or here).

Getting the garden ready

Syruping finished up in April, which left a little time for Easter travels before it was time to start garden prep. We needed to mark off the garden beds (I used as many straight(ish) logs from the woods as I could haul over for borders for my beds), scrape the good compost off of the paths and into the beds (it was all one big chicken-scattered bed after the winter), lay down another layer of paper mulch (we’d saved up our feed sacks from the pigs and chickens the year before, so we had a good stash – but even so, we didn’t have as many as we would have liked), cover the paper on the paths with pine needles, and add strips of compost where I was going to be planting seeds (a friend from church brought over a dump trailer full of broken down manure from their beef cattle barn – leading me to wonder what exactly it said about me that one of my most-appreciated gifts of the year was a literal load of crap!)

Apple blossoms on our one year old tree

May, as always, came with a rush – baby bunnies and baby chicks to cuddle and care for, baby garden plants to be hardened off and planted outside, homeschool classes to finish up and field trips to take. It was a wet spring, and the wildflowers were spectacular (the not-so wildflowers on the apple and plum trees were also wonderful). In the middle of all of this rush, I injured myself (not moving logs or hauling feed bags, but moving furniture to wash the living room floor!) I had a herniated disk in my lower spine, which put me out of commission for most of the summer.

Thankfully, my daughters really stepped up and helped out. My youngest daughter, in particular, took on the bulk of the outdoor responsibilities. She fed the laying hens every day, collected eggs, and raised the broilers pretty much single-handedly (and did a great job – probably better than I’ve done!) 

Harvesting wild strawberries

She also took upon herself to forage as much food as she could, hunting out wild mushrooms (after carefully identifying them, of course!), wild strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, elderberries, rose hips, and hazelnuts from our property and along the side of our country road.

My oldest daughter decided that she would be in charge of the tomatoes (which only made sense, since she ate most of them!) We had a little under 20 plants this year, and although she didn’t tend them as carefully as I would have, she did a good job and we ended up canning a good amount (read: it’s almost January and they aren’t all gone yet – a new record!)

My middle daughter took over raising the pigs, which was a major undertaking, since we move our pig pen (four 16-foot hog panels lashed together at the corners, with an old truck topper for shelter) at minimum every 10 days, depending on how much they tear up the ground (toward butcher time it’s almost every day). The pigs ended up a little smaller than usual, but without her help we wouldn’t have had them at all, so I’m very grateful for her efforts!

As you can imagine, with four teenagers in the house (all five will be teenagers this coming year!) we had a busy summer. They discovered sailing, and took their little boats out as often as they could manage. We also took a stay-cation this summer, seeing as much of our little corner of the world as we could fit in over the course of a week. On our last day, a record-breaking storm went through our area, so after our relaxing week we had a week of hard work cleaning up downed trees (a task my husband is still working hard on – turning all of that destruction into firewood!)  

In August, our energy turned to harvesting and enjoying the fruits of our labor. We had enough corn for two big meals of corn on the cob, quarts and quarts of pickles and dilly beans, and just when we thought we could handle the bounty, the apples were ripe. Our own trees are too small to bear (we planted them in 2018 – the first spring we lived here), but friends offered us their surplus and we took advantage of the opportunity. What the kids didn’t eat out of hand we made into applesauce, apple jelly, apple cider vinegar, and apple pie filling  until we ran out of jars, and made the rest into cider. The skins, cores, and wormy apples went to the pigs and chickens to be turned into bacon and eggs.(You can read my post about how many things you can make all from the same apples by clicking here)

Our last harvest of the year was our pumpkins. My middle daughter (who also tended the pigs this summer) always claims the privilege of raising our carving pumpkins every year. They must have liked the mulch, because they were huge – too big to reach my arms around – and prolific – we ended up with about a dozen that size! Needless to say, the kids had a great time carving those giants this fall!

Now the garden is all snug under its blanket of snow, waiting for spring so that the chickens can again clean out all of the over-wintered bugs and add their little packets of fertilizer before I shut them out for the summer growing season. I love how God made all of the seasons so different, so that we can enjoy each one as it comes around again. Each has its own challenges and joys, beginning with hope and excitement and usually ending with an exhausted farmer ready to move on to the next thing!

I’d like to wish each of you reading this a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year – may your harvest be bountiful, your animals stay healthy, and your family grow in love and productiveness!

Drop a line in the comment section below and let me know how your homestead did this year, whether it's a pot of herbs on your windowsill or a farm on 100 acres! I love to hear what everyone is up to!

Easy Onion Chip Dip From Scratch

One of my favorite snacks as a college student was chips with onion dip. My mom had always made it by mixing sour cream with the powdered Lipton mix, so of course that's what I did, too. Until I started thinking about what might be in that package. Here's what I found on the ingredients list:

Onions (Dehydrated), Salt, Corn Starch, Onion Powder, Sugar, Soy Sauce (Fermented Soybeans, Wheat and Salt), Caramel Color (Sulfites), Maltodextrin, Corn Syrup (Dehydrated), Yeast Extract, High Oleic Sunflower Oil, Disodium Guanylate, Disodium Inosinate.

I don't know about you, but I have no idea what "disodium guanylate" and "disodium inosinate" are*, and what I do know about corn starch, corn syrup, and maltodextrin, I'm not really happy about. So for a while I gave up on my favorite snack, until I found this recipe using simple, healthy ingredients (most of which you could grow yourself, if you wanted!) I like to use organic herbs and spices and organic sour cream - but feel free to use whatever you're comfortable with.

I actually served this dip last Sunday, when we had friends over (who asked for the recipe, and inspired this post! So if you like this recipe, thank Monica for making me share it.)

French Onion Dip

2 Tbsp minced onion
2 Tbsp onion powder
1 1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp each dried parsley, celery seed, and turmeric
16 oz sour cream
Blend dry ingredients and mix into sour cream. Can be served immediately, or refrigerate overnight to let flavors mingle.

*So I googled it, and it turns out disodium guanylate and disodium inosinate are food additives similar to (and often used in conjunction with) MSG, with similar possible side effects. No thank you!

Homemade Sausage Seasoning

A friend asked me about making sausage from home-raised pigs, and I realized I hadn't posted my breakfast sausage recipe yet! I've been using it for years, so I can readily vouch that it's been well tried and tested!

This recipe makes 2 tablespoons of seasoning, which is enough for about 2 pounds of sausage. Feel free to multiply or divide it as you like - I usually make a big batch so I always have some on hand.

Sausage Seasoning

2 tsp salt
2 tsp ground black pepper
1 1/2 tsp sage
1/2 tsp marjoram
1/4 tsp savory
1/8 tsp ginger
pinch cloves and red pepper

Mix it all together, and it's ready to use! I generally mix my seasonings in when I fry up my sausage, but if you prefer you can certainly mix it in when you grind your meat, too. 

2019 Chicken Harvest - The Good, The Bad, and The Numbers

I think this was our best year yet raising Cornish cross meat birds (aka "broilers"). The birds grew out well (dressed out weight averaged over 4 pounds per bird) and looked happy and healthy. Best of all, we didn't lose any to predators, weather, disease, or "sudden chicken death syndrome" (AKA "it just died").

As we have for the last few years, we ordered the broilers through our local feed mill, who get their chicks from Sunnyside Hatchery in Beaver Dam, WI (which is about as local as I can get). I've ordered directly from the hatchery before and had them delivered through the post office, but the price is the same, and I like that I can pick up their first bag of starter chick feed at the same time I'm picking up my birds. I bought straight run, which means I get both pullets (girls) and cockerels (boys). Pullet chicks cost less because they don't grow as large or as quickly, which of course means cockerels are more expensive because they produce more meat more efficiently, so straight run seemed like a good compromise between cost and efficiency.  

We kept them in the same old cobbled-together wooden brooder we've used since we got our first batch of chicks years ago (the picture above is of our broiler chicks from last year; the picture below is of our laying chicks from this spring). This year we used wood shavings for bedding instead of the newspaper and paper towels I've used before. It was slightly more annoying because the shavings got into the water fountain and food trough, but not enough to be a real problem. 

At two weeks old, we moved them out into their "halfway house" - an ark-style small chicken tractor a friend gave us a few years ago. This way the chickens had access to fresh air and sunshine in the daytime, but still had a solid wooden covered area for nights and inclement weather. 

At four weeks old the chickens outgrew this pen and went into a rectangular 4'x8' chicken tractor (click here to see how to build your own). This year we switched to white tarps instead of blue, which made my husband happy (apparently blue plastic tarps in the yard look a little too redneck; white plastic tarps are much more classy) 😉. Although these homemade shelters may seem pretty flimsy, we had some major storms in our area this year while the chicks were growing out (there were many, many large trees down across the state from the first storm, and our power was out for five days while the electric company repaired broken power lines and blown-down poles) and even though their only protection from the weather was the tarps (and the fact that their pasture was in a slight depression on our land), the chickens all came through just fine. 

The main difference this year, other than the pine shavings, was that we were able to give them a lot more space to run. We had a 4 feet high by 50 feet long garden fence that wasn't in use, so my daughter claimed it to build a pasture area for the birds.  We moved them to fresh pasture every few days as the grass got beaten down and covered in manure. They still had a chicken tractor in the center of the pasture for protection from inclement weather and for shade from the hot July sun, but for the most part they spent their time outside in the fresh air. This was much more room than we'd been able to give them before (usually we've kept our broilers confined to just two 4'x8' tractors) and it seemed to really make a difference. The birds were much cleaner, and were able to be more active (well, as active as a Cornish cross chickens ever will be . . .)

All well and good, but what about the bottom line? We had happy, healthy chickens, but how expensive was it to raise them this way? Since we didn't have to buy or upgrade any infrastructure (other than the tarps, which were about $2 each), the purchase price of the chicks and the cost of their feed were our only inputs. The chicks cost us $1.40 each, plus a $6 fee for buying less than 50, for a total of $76. They ate 700 pounds in the 8 weeks we raised them, which cost us $380.50, or a little over 54 cents a pound. Those together add up to a total expense of $456.50. Divide that by 50 birds and you end up at $9.13 a bird. They were all right around 4 pounds each when we put them in the freezer, so for an easy estimate let's say that's 200 pounds of meat. A little more simple math, and I figure we're around $2.28 a pound. Not bad for locally-sourced (doesn't get more local than your own back yard!) organic-fed pastured chicken! The closest organic chicken I could find for comparison was over $3 a pound (and that wasn't local or pastured, plus I would have had to pay for shipping). Local, pastured, but not organic chicken was $2.18 a pound. There really is no comparison for meat you've raised yourself, to the standards you want for your family - but it's still nice to know you're not paying much more than you would for second-best!

Homemade Sheboygan-Style Bratwurst

Independence Day is coming up this Thursday, and in true American fashion, we will be grilling out. And since our great state is Wisconsin, what we'll grilling will be brats. If you love brats as much as we do, but also hate all of the MSG, nitrates, etc. in most brats as much as we do, then I'm here to share the joy I've found with you.

I should note that these are infinitely customizable - feel free to add cheddar, jalapeno, or whatever you like. Our local brat shop - Louie's Finer Meats in Cumberland, Wisconsin - offers a dizzying array of specialty brats featuring everything from onion and garlic to cranberries, blue cheese, and wild rice (my favorites are the blueberry and cheddar and the mushroom and swiss).

Homemade Sheboygan-Style Bratwurst

3 pounds of ground pork or beef (include at least half a pound of pork fat in that total)
1 Tbsp salt
2 tsp ground white pepper
1 tsp dried marjoram
1/2 tsp caraway seed
1/2 tsp grated nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1 Tbsp minced fresh garlic
(2 tsp red pepper flakes optional)
Stuff casings according to manufacturer's direction. Can be frozen, or grill and serve.

My husband also likes to "hot tub" marinade his brats before grilling - he puts the brats in a crock pot set to low, then adds a bottle of beer and a sliced onion.

Enjoy your summer cookouts, and have a happy Independence Day!

Our 2019 Three Little Pigs

You can probably tell by the last few posts that I've been very excited to get pigs again this year. Not only are they a source of organic, pastured, chemical-free ham and bacon, but they are a great money-saver for our large family as well. So you can imagine how excited I was yesterday when our "pig guy" called and said he finally had a couple of pigs available for us! Usually we try to get our pigs mid-May, so we're getting a pretty late start this year, but that's OK with me - we'll have more garden produce for them when they really start porking out (meaning we'll save more on the feed bill). We should still have a full four months to grow them out, though, depending on the weather. Our processing date depends on when the heavy frosts set in, since we don't have a heater for their water trough. So when the water starts freezing overnight, it's time to butcher. If we have a normal fall, that will put our processing date in October or maybe even November.

But right now the weather is balmy and beautiful, and we're more than ready to bring some pigs home. We got the call before church, and on the drive home I texted my sister-in-law to ask if she'd like me to pick up a pig for her, too - she'd been toying with the idea of raising a pig, but hadn't decided one way or the other. She didn't text me back before we headed out to pick up the pigs after lunch, so I assumed it just wasn't meant to be for her this year. But when we arrived at the farm, lo and behold, there were three pigs in the pen! A black one, a pink one with black splotches, and a little pink runt. Now, not having heard back from my sister-in-law, and knowing my own weakness, I had only brought enough money for the two piglets I was planning on, plus my emergency $20 I always carry with me. When we got to the pen and I told the kids to pick out the ones they wanted, the farmer said he'd give us the runt for half price. I told him that all I had was the $20 extra, and without a second's hesitation he said, "Sold!" And that's how we ended up with three little pigs instead of two.

Which ended up being a good thing, since I got a text message from my sister-in-law on the drive home saying she'd like one after all! We'll be raising it here with the others, but she'll pay for her pig's feed (plus a little for our trouble) and help with the butchering. My daughter, who's in charge of the pigs this summer, is excited to earn her first "farm money".

So now they're home and all settled in, so we just have to settle on some names! All through lunch the kids were brainstorming names for this year's piggy pair, finally settling on Chris Hamsworth and Tom Piggleston (with my oldest son lobbying heavily for Benedict Baconbatch). The only problem was that when we picked them up, we found out that all three of the pigs are gilts (girls). So of course I suggested that we simply modify the names slightly so we'd have Christine Hamsworth and Thomasina Piggleston (which my daughter would not agree to until I assured her we'll still call them Chris and Tom). The runt has been officially dubbed Eggs Benedict Cucumberpatch (Eggy for short), and is already the family favorite.

And so begins another summer of pig-raising. I have to admit, I've missed having pigs this spring. They're such a useful homestead animal - eating food scraps that are too big for the chickens to manage (not to mention the chicken bones leftover after I make broth), clearing the thorns and thistles out of the pasture, and just generally being their happy piggy selves. Our little farm just feels more complete with them around.

Rhubarb Bread Pudding

There isn't too much ready to be harvested yet on my little homestead, but two things I do have in abundance are eggs and rhubarb. This recipe uses plenty of both, and also got a vote of "yummy!" from all of the kids!

You may think that this looks a lot like my recipe for Overnight French Toast Bake, and you'd be right - it's pretty much the same thing, just with the seasonal addition of a thick layer of rhubarb.

Rhubarb Bread Pudding

Cubed Bread (enough to generously fill the bottom of an 8x8 square baking pan)
3-4 cups chopped rhubarb stems
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg (optional)
1/2 cup ground walnuts (optional)

Layer bread and rhubarb; sprinkle spices and nuts over all. In a separate bowl, mix:
6 eggs
1/2 cup maple syrup (or sweetener of choice plus vanilla)
1 1/2 cups milk (either buttermilk or sweet milk both work fine)

Pour liquid over dry ingredients and bake at 350 degrees for an hour. Serve hot or cold.

This can be made ahead: simply refrigerate after adding the liquid ingredients, then bake at your convenience (I often refrigerate this overnight for baking in the morning).

Once you've mastered this recipe, you can easily change it up with whatever seasonal fruit you have available. I've yet to find a fruit that doesn't work!

Simple Home Smoked Ham

In my previous post I outlined how I make bacon from our home-grown pork; to make ham, I use the same basic recipe, with just a couple of tweaks:

1.Cure the meat for a longer period of time. Since it's a bigger cut of meat, I like to cure it for three days instead of just one, which gives the salt more time to permeate the pork.

2. The other change was for my husband's preference. In my first attempts at curing ham, I followed the bacon recipe exactly, just leaving it in the refrigerator longer, as I said. When I made a pot of potato soup, however, my husband requested that I leave out the maple syrup when I make ham - the sweet flavor just didn't taste right in the savory soup. So I changed that as well, and the recipe became even more simple: just salt and smoke.

Simple Home Smoked Ham

2 pounds pork roast
3 Tbsp salt (I use canning/pickling salt because of the finer texture)
Smoke as in the bacon recipe, again to an internal temperature of 160 degrees. This will take a little longer than for the bacon due to the thickness of the meat.
Feel free to adjust the recipe to whatever size cut of meat you have; just try to keep the same meat to salt ratio.

I should note that the finished ham will be fully cooked in the smoker; no further cooking is necessary, so you can go ahead and slice it for your sandwiches!



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How Much Money Can You Save By Raising Your Own Food?

For many people, one of the main reasons for rasing your own food is to save money. Taking out the middle man, cutting out the costs of labor and transportation - it only makes sense. Add to that the idea that foods harvested right from your back yard can be richer in flavor and nutrients (saving you money in health care costs) - and of course gardening itself can be a great form of exercise (saving you money at the gym, too!)

But how much money can you really save raising your own food? I ran the numbers for last year (which are lower than they'd normally be, since I only had a minimal garden as we worked to set up our new homestead), and found it can be a lot!

Our biggest savings was from our pork. We raised two hogs this year, which we purchased for $100 ($50 each). They ate about 2,125 pounds of organic feed, bringing our total cost up to $1156.28 (this is actually about $300 more than we would usually spend because of an unforseen delay in our butchering date - you can read about that here). We butchered them ourselves and will be smoking all of the meat at home, so the only processing cost will be for the equipment we purchased (this was our first time butchering our own pigs) for $296.20. So our total cost was $1452.48 for 300 pounds of meat in the freezer, not counting the bones (which we'll make into broth) and lard. We'll be making all of this meat into pork chops, bacon, ham, and bratwurst (this is Wisconsin, after all. We love our brats!) From our normal sources, we would have paid around $3,140 for that amount of meat (in those cuts), so by raising our own we saved just under $1,700 (again, that's counting the price of the processing equipment and the extra feed from raising them longer than we expected). If you'd like more information, you can read more about how much we saved by raising our own pork in this post.

We also raised a batch of 50 broilers this year, each bird averaging 5 pounds. Purchase price was $71 ($1.42 per bird), and total feed cost was $458.84 (about $9.18 each). That price is for organic feed, which is generally about twice the cost of regular. We did the butchering ourselves and used chicken tractors we had already built (you can see my post with building plans here), so our total cost was $529.84 (or $10.60 per bird; about $2.12 per pound, dressed).  Our normal source for organic chicken charges $3.50 a pound, which would come out to $875 for the 50 chickens we raised. So our savings was $345.16, or $1.38 per pound.

From those chickens we also made broth (also known as stock). The cheapest source I have for organic chicken broth is Walmart, which charges $2.50 for a quart. I don't usually measure exactly when I make broth, but a conservative guess at how much we made would be a gallon per bird, which would multiply out to 200 quarts a year, or $500. Since I already calculated the cost for the bones in the meat total, there was no additional cost for the broth.

Our free range hens (which we only had from May to December in 2018 because of our move to the new house) gave us 2,235 eggs this year, at a cost of $297 in organic feed.  If we had paid $4 a dozen (the going rate for organic eggs around here), those eggs would have cost us $745; a savings of $448.

So the animals on our farm alone saved us around $3,000. We weren't able to have much of a garden this year, but we did raise about $116 worth of butternut squash (our cost was just $5 for the seedling plant) and $30 worth of mushrooms (which cost $25 for the spawn, but will give us harvests for years to come). I didn't add up how many tomatoes we harvested (the kids ate most of them before they made it into the house!) so I can't calculate the value of those. Conservatively, then, our tiny starter garden netted us only $121, but obviously that number will go up significantly when we're able to garden more extensively this summer.

But what really surprised me was the amount of money our countertop microbial "farm" saved us. We have kefir smoothies every morning for breakfast, using 3 pints of kefir per day for all seven of us. Using a supermarket price of $4 a quart for plain organic kefir ($6 for our 3 pints) times 365 days a year, that would cost us $2,190. Making our own from organic milk that costs us $1.50 a day instead of $6, which saves us $1,642 over the course of a year - all for less than a minute or two of work per day.

We also make our own homemade kombucha (you can find my recipe here). You can get kombucha at Walmart for about $3 a pint, and we make 2 gallons every week. That would cost us about $2,500 over the course of a year. The tea and sugar required to make that same amount at home would cost around $150, for a savings of  $2,350 (we flavor it with raspberries harvested for free from a friend's garden, so that added no extra cost).

When you add those it all up, our total savings, even without much of a garden, was over $7,000. Our total expenses for all groceries over the past year was around $14,000, so we cut our grocery bill by a third! I can't wait to see how we do next year!

How about you? As you can see, some of the biggest cost savings were "raised" right on our kitchen counter (ooh, that reminds me - I didn't count my sourdough bread! I'll have to calculate that out next . . .) How much do you save by raising your own food?

Home Smoked Bacon

I was really wracking my brain to think of an exiting title, but really, what's more exiting than that? Bacon is the product of a kind of miraculous alchemy, a blending of meat, salt, and smoke to make one of the top five most spectacular foods ever created. Knowing how to work that spell and make this magic at home (so you know exactly what is (or isn't) going into your bacon) is one of the greatest homesteading skills you can achieve!

I first heard of this recipe from a class I took at the Hay River Traditional & Green Skills 2018 event. The class was called Makin' Bacon! Home Smoking Basics, taught by Brett Laidlaw, a blogger and author with a cabin in northwestern Wisconsin, less than an hour from where I live (here's a link to his blog, which I encourage you to check out: troutcaviar.blogspot.com)

In his class, he showed us how to choose, cure, and smoke bacon in a cheap backyard grill. The best part? He gave out free samples of the finished product, so we could know if we liked it before we went to the trouble of making it for ourselves at home. Smart guy!

Here's the recipe, straight out of his book, Trout Caviar: Recipes from a Northern Forager:

Home-Smoked Bacon

2 pounds pork belly
1/4 cup maple syrup or brown sugar
3 Tablespoons salt (I use canning/pickling salt because of the finer texture)

Rub the pork belly with the maple syrup, sprinkle salt on all sides, and let cure, covered, in the refrigerator for 24 hours, turning occasionally. For a brown sugar cure, mix the sugar and salt and pat it evenly on all sides of the meat. 

The next day, rinse off excess salt, pat dry, and smoke at 200-220 degrees for 2-3 hours. The bacon will be both smoked and fully cooked. If you are unsure about whether the bacon is cooked at this point, set your mind at ease by placing it in a 200 degree oven for 30 minutes. A meat thermometer inserted into the bacon should read 160 degrees. 

Be sure to sample a small slice of he still-warm bacon straight from the smoker and sweating fragrant fat. You'll see that it's more than worth the small trouble of smoking your own.

See how easy that is? Only three ingredients, and if you use an electric smoker with a temperature probe (here's a link to the one I have), it takes all the guesswork out of it. I just rinse the marinaded meat, pat it dry, and set it on the rack. Insert the probe, shut the door, push a few buttons, and a few hours later - pork perfection.

If you don't have a smoker, he details in his book how to smoke your meat on a regular backyard grill. It's more putzy than an electric smoker, but you can still get the same amazing result.

Either way, it's suprisingly simple, and the results are well worth the effort (I heartily second his recommendation of sampling while it's still warm - and perhaps licking the pan . . .) Make sure to save any drippings; these are great for greasing the pan when frying eggs, etc.


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Spring Planting Signs

Everyone knows that farming is dependent on the weather. Where I live, in hardiness zone 4b, we have short summers and long winters, so we really need to maximize our growing season. We want to get our plants in as early as possible; but how do we know when the ground is ready to plant? Too early, and our transplants won't survive and seeds will just rot. Here in Northwestern Wisconsin, frost-out can vary by weeks from year to year - it seems like sometimes the ground thaws out in March, and other times not until mid-April. So how do you know when it's safe to plant?

If you've read Laura Ingalls Wilder's classic book Farmer Boy, you may remember the scene where Almanzo and Alice are arguing about planting time:

At the end of the row he looked at the ash tree’s crumpled new leaves, and asked Alice if she knew when to plant corn. She didn’t, so he told her. Corn-planting time is when the ash leaves are as big as squirrel’s ears.
“How big a squirrel?” Alice asked.
“Just an ordinary squirrel.”
“Well, those leaves are as big as a baby squirrel’s ears. And it isn’t corn-planting time.”
For a minute Almanzo didn’t know what to think. Then he said:
“A baby squirrel isn’t a squirrel; it’s a kitten.”
“But it’s just as much a squirrel—”
“No it isn’t. It’s a kitten. Little cats are kittens, and little foxes are kittens, and little squirrels are kittens. A kitten isn’t a cat, and a kitten isn’t a squirrel, either.”
“Oh,” Alice said.

Squirrels and kittens aside, there are many signs from nature that give us hints at what's going on below ground. One rule of thumb I've heard is that if the weeds are coming up, cold-hardy plants like spinach, lettuce, and broccoli should be able to grow, too. Makes sense, don't you think? If it's warm enough for the "wild" plants to germinate, our cultivated plants should be able to, too.

A more specific tip I've read is that you should plant potatoes, beets, carrots, and peas when the dandelions start blooming. Now, I have dandelions growing right up next to my house that are about to flower, but I'm not going by that, since they're benefiting from the warmth coming off of the foundation - a very different microclimate than down in my garden. I need to look at the dandelions growing around my garden to see when that soil is ready.

Another tip I've heard is that when crocus flowers start blooming, you can plant peas, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, and broccoli. Or, if you don't have crocus flowers, you can plant these when the lilacs show their first leaves, or when the daffodils begin to bloom. In our neck of the woods, the daffodils are just sending up their first leaves right now, the lilac leaves aren't out yet, and unfortunately I don't have any crocus flowers planted on our new property. So it looks like I have a little time to wait before I should start planting - which I should note for next year, since the broccoli and Brussels sprouts I started indoors are more than ready to be transplanted! Ah, well. I'll know to start my seeds a little later next spring.

For the more tender vegetables like corn and beans, the old-timers said that you can plant these when oak leaves are the size of a mouse's ear - or, if you're more the Alice type, and want to be contentious about what size mouse, you can wait until the apple blossoms start to fall. Another sign is when the daylillies bloom; that's when you'll want to put out your tomatoes and peppers. And when the lilac flowers start to fade, then you can plant your cucumbers and squash.

In our modern, over-scheduled world, this seems very imprecise and hard to plan. I want to know when to start my seedlings indoors so they'll be at the perfect size when planting time comes! But any farmer will tell you, the real world doesn't necessarily run on your schedule. Some years spring will warm up early, other years you'll get snow the first week of June (my dad has a photo of snow on our lilac bush from a freak June snowstorm when I was a teenager). But knowing what signs to look for can help you know when your part of the world is ready to start growing again.

Taking My Piggies to the Bank

So how much did it actually cost me to raise my pigs last summer? To me, it was worth every penny to know exactly how my pigs were raised and what they ate (actually, I think I saw Hickory chewing on a golf ball once - but I was not about to reach around those teeth to try to get it out! I just let that one pass. Literally . . .) As much as I try to find good food, unless you're buying from someone you know or raising it yourself, you just don't know. And I want to know.

But I still have to try to be practical about it. We need to be good stewards of the resources God's given us, and money is one of those resources, just like the land and animals we're here to care for. So here's how our numbers from 2018 broke down:

Purchase price: $50 each; $100 total
Feed: $.4975 per pound; 2,123 pounds; $1056.28 total
Processing equipment: $296.20
Total cost: $1452.48
Weight of meat (added up after butchering; does not include lard and bones): 300 pounds
Price per pound: $4.84

Oof! That feels like a lot. But then I compare it to how much I'd pay for the cuts of meat we actually eat:
(Prices are all per pound)
Organic Pork Chops: $6.21
Conventional Pork Tenderloin (I couldn't even find organic): $10.94
Organic Nitrate Free Bacon: $15.00
Organic Ham: $11.50
Brats (from Louie's - our favorite local meat shop; not organic): $4.79

And of course that cost included purchasing the processing equipment (which turned out to be less than what we'd payed for processing in the past, but still an expense we needed to account for). Without that extra cost, our price would have been $3.85 per pound. I still have to do my own smoking for the bacon and hams, but I actually prefer that, since I have control over what goes into them.

I do wish we'd been able to butcher them on schedule (click here to read all about why we didn't); that would have saved us almost 300 pounds of feed per pig - and judging by previous years' totals, it wouldn't have reduced their weight by very much, so we could have saved another $300 right there.

So, if all goes well next year, based on my last three year's numbers, I can expect to buy around 750 pounds of feed per hog. If the price of feed holds steady and I can still get piglets for around $50 a piece, that should put my average price around $850 for two pigs. I expect to get about 300 pounds of meat out of them in that amount of time, so that would put my price at under $3 a pound - for organic pastured pork. You're not going to find that anywhere!

All in all, I'm very happy with how those numbers work out. As I said, I think raising our own meat is worth it no matter what the price, but seeing the actual amount I'm saving makes it that much more satisfying.

These Little Piggies Didn't Go to Market

Tomorrow we flip the calendar to May first - which around here means it's time to call our local pig farmer and see if he has some weaners for sale (meaning weaned piglets, not hot dogs). 😉 I had hoped to keep you updated on our three little pigs in 2017, but with selling our old house, hunting for our new one, packing, unpacking, and still homeschooling and making three meals a day (mostly) from scratch, my poor little blog got neglected. As far as I can remember, everything went smoothly, and we enjoyed our home-raised ham and bacon.

Fast forward to spring of 2018, as we were still settling into our new house and eagerly watching the snow melt and reveal new suprises on the property (including an apple tree hidden in the woods!) We brought the chickens home, transplanted some blueberry, raspberry, elderberry, and hazelnut bushes from our old house, and even managed to plant a few tomatoes.

Things were looking more and more like a homestead, so much so that in June I decided we could probably even manage to raise a couple of pigs. We almost couldn't find any because it was so late in the year already, but the farmer we'd bought from the year before had a cancellation, and so we we were able to bring home our girls - Maple and Hickory (a hint to my husband that I was hoping to get a smoker for my birthday in the fall). 😉

The summer progressed and the pigs grew just like they were supposed to. Since we'd gotten them late, we would have them longer into the fall, and I was excited to see if we could take a cut out of their feed costs by feeding them products from our new property. One of the first things we used was acorns from the oak trees in our woods. The apple tree we'd found in the spring also bore abundantly that fall, and anything the kids wouldn't eat went to the pigs.

We were very blessed to have friends who were willing to share their bounty with us that summer - at least four ladies called us up and asked if we could use apples from their trees, and were delighted when we volunteered to gather the wormy windfalls to fatten up the pigs. The chickens were delighted, too, to clean up what the pigs left behind - we gleaned so many that our porkers couldn't even eat them all! 

We weren't able to have much of a garden that first year on the new land, but I did manage to squeeze in a butternut squash plant and some cucumbers near the tomatoes. The squash did amazing - we harvested everything that was ripe before the fall frost, and everything that didn't have time to ripen we cooked up and fed to the pigs. And of course if I found an over-ripe cucumber or a tomato too blemished for us to eat, I'd lob it straight into their pen.

A month before our planned processing date, I called the butcher shop, only to find that instead of processing my pigs in early October, as I'd planned, they were booked until early November and wouldn't be able to pick up my pigs until then. I cringed at the thought of feeding two full-grown pigs for an extra month (at that age they're eating a LOT of feed - that extra month would end up costing me over $300), but what could I do?

Then, when butchering day finally did arrive, I was shocked to get a call from the butcher asking when we would be bringing our pigs in. I had specifically asked for on-farm slaughter, since I had no way of transporting them. I explained this, in desperate tones, to the butcher, and he told me he'd see when he could get me on the schedule and give me a call back. 

He didn't call back. 

I called him, daily, and he kept putting me off, while I got more and more desperate.

Meanwhile, friends of ours, who'd purchased their pigs at the same time we'd gotten ours, were planning a butchering party. A member of their church was a retired butcher, and had agreed to show them (and any interested friends, like me) how it was done. I jumped at the chance, and the kids and I spent two days learning just what it took to process a hog.

At that time, we still held out hope that the butcher would pull through for us - my husband really wanted to avoid the stress and mess and just hire out the job. But after the butcher put us off twice more, he finally gave in and said we were going to have to do it ourselves (before we went broke from buying pig feed!)

We headed over to our local Farm & Fleet store and bought what supplies we thought we needed - a pair of gambrels, tow straps, a clean reciprocating saw blade to halve the carcasses, and the smoker I'd been hoping for (a couple of weeks late for my birthday, but I was OK with that!) I was pleased to see that the cost of the supplies added up to less than what we would have paid for processing, so at least we weren't getting any farther behind as far as money was concerned. But we still had a big job ahead of us, and with each purchase the fact became more and more real - we really were going to do this!

Hearing the anxiety in my voice as I told my friends about our decision, they volunteered to help us out. My 18-year old son and his buddy did the actual killing and gutting (his friend's deer hunting experience was very helpful for this), his mother, sister, and my girls helped with the skinning and cleaning, and I got to be manager and facilitator (that's a fancy way of saying go-fer) 😉 for the operation. 

My daughters helping out with removing the hide

We left the carcasses to hang overnight (shooing our kitten out of his normal spot in the garage and locking him in the workshop) and finished processing the cuts the next day. Another friend came to help me with wrapping the cuts in the kitchen, while the rest of the crew did the cutting up outside. The only major hitch they ran into was cutting up the pork chops - we didn't feel like we could do the job safely with either the handsaw I'd bought nor our reciprocating saw, so the chops went into the freezer unchopped, in one big chunk (where they're still waiting to be cut up, almost six months later . . .)

When all was said and done, after two long, anxious days of hard work, we had 300 pounds of organic pork safely stored in our freezers. It was a big job, and one I definitely wouldn't want to do every day, but all in all it went much better than I'd feared, thanks to the help and support of my husband (who financed the whole operation), our kids, and our wonderful friends. 


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2019 Maple Syrup Recap

Last Tuesday I made the decision to pull the taps on my maple trees, which officially ended the maple syrup making season for me - and hopefully explains why my husband found me standing next to the sap-boiling fire belting out Europe's "It's the Final Countdown!" repeatedly throughout Wednesday afternoon. 😄

By all accounts, it was a good year for syrup - the "sugar snow" that fell on the 11th really got the sap moving and lengthened the sap run (one of the only silver linings to be found on an April blizzard). A friend of ours who bottles commercially says they boiled down 120 gallons of sap this year, when their previous year's total was closer to 80; definitely a significant increase!

Obviously I'm not syruping on that scale, but as I mentioned in a previous post, I surpassed my "break-even" goal of 3 gallons, so I'm happy. Our final total is a little hard to add up, since I gave a quart to my parents (apparently you never grow out of saying, "Mommy, look what I made!"), we had family pancake breakfasts twice (5 kids can go through a lot of syrup!), and two Friday "Brownie and Ice Cream Nights" (their Daddy can eat his fair share, too!) 😉

But when all is said and done, we have 3 1/2 gallons of pure maple goodness sitting on the pantry shelf, which is about what we'd usually buy from a local producer each spring for our year's supply - and all from just 16 trees on our little farmstead. Not a bad return for a few afternoons' "work" sitting around the campfire!

You can read more of my maple syrup making adventures here, here, and here.

The Best Laid Plans . . .

In Literature class recently the kids and I were reading poems by Robert Burns, and one of the selections was "To a Mouse." While the kids loved his description of the "wee, sleekit, cowran, tim'rous beastie" (and laughed at my terrible Scottish accent while I read to them), I was sighing in commiseration with the line, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men/Gang aft agley,/An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,/For promis'd joy!"

It seems that all my careful planning back in January might turn out to be a bigger mess than that mouse's nest. April 15th was suppsed to be my first round of putting transplants out in the garden, but this is what the broccoli bed looked like yesterday afternoon:

Obviously, the ground is not warm enough to plant in - even for a cool-weather tolerant plant like broccoli. And the beds, though well mulched with leaves over the winter, need a little TLC before they're ready for the summer.

The other problem was that the garden I laid out on paper, with carefully spaced gridlines and exact spacing for each plant, didn't exactly line up with the more organic reality outside. For example, here's a picture of my asparagus bed (with a wire tunnel over it to keep the chickens out of it) and the wood-bordered raised garlic bed next to it (there's fence wire on top of the garlic bed - also to keep the chickens from digging - and the logs on top of the bed are to keep the fencing down)

The strings show where my carefully planned gridlines say my beds and paths should be - unfortunately, that puts a path straight through my garlic plants, and the asparagus row is completely katywampus to where the strings say it really ought to be.

So there was a little re-thinking to be done. Thankfully, I had plenty of time to stand around and contemplate garden layouts while I was boiling down my last batch of maple syrup, and I think I've figured out a way to make it work. Instead of four three-foot garden beds in the middle of the garden, with two-foot beds along the fences, I have three beds in the center of the original size with a two-foot bed on either side, plus the original fence-edged beds. So I actually ended up with an extra, smaller bed and one slightly shrunken bed - even better than my original plan!

We'll see how this plan holds up to reality as the summer unfolds . . .

Basic Buttermilk Pancakes

With all of the maple syrup making going on, of course the kids have been begging for pancakes. And of course, being a loving mom (and geeking out about the awesomeness of making homemade maple syrup), I've given in and made them once or twice in the last couple weeks. For just a simple, basic pancake to smother in maple syrup, this is my favorite. They're super simple to whip up, they come out light and fluffy, and my kids love them.

Basic Buttermilk Pancakes

1 1/4 cups flour (sprouted whole wheat is my go-to - here's how you make it)

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

2 Tbsp butter, melted

1 1/4 cups buttermilk (regular milk works fine, too - just add 1/2 tsp cream of tartar to activate the baking soda)

1 egg, beaten

1/2 tsp sweetener of choice (honey, sugar, or maple syrup all work great)

Mix dry ingredients, then add liquid ingredients. Fry as desired.

Is Maple Sap Tea the New Organic Gatorade (TM)?

I was chatting with a friend at church on Sunday, and she mentioned that her family's been drinking the sap from their maple trees (they only boil it long enough to kill any bacteria that may have accumulated while the bag was hanging on the tree, not anywhere near long enough to make syrup). Apparently this is a thing - a quick google search later that afternoon pulled up articles from Men's Journal, NPR, and Medical Daily, as well as more wild-food oriented sites like Chelsea Green and Wild Foodism. There are even a few companies that sell maple sap commercially. My friend said her family loves it - "It's full of electrolytes, just like a natural Gatorade(TM)!" She was even thinking about freezing pints of it for the summer, when her husband (who has a very physical outdoor job) will need the nutrients while working in the hot sun.

I thought that was a great idea, and then had an idea of my own - why not add a tea bag when you're flash-boiling a little sap to drink and have a naturally sweetened herbal tea?

I had to try it - and I was very pleasantly surprised. I was worried it wouldn't be sweet enough for my taste, but I tried it with some Rose Hips and Hibiscus tea from Traditional Medicinals, and my cup had just the right level of sweetness. It's also great with my evening cup of Nighty Night tea. I will definitely be making my tea this way whenever I have extra maple sap (but unfortunately I don't think I can spare the freezer space to save some for summertime - I guess it will just have to be a seasonal treat!)

Maple Syrup Making Tips

Today we boiled down our fourth batch of maple syrup, bringing our finished syrup total over three gallons - which means we've officially "paid off" my investment (meaning I've produced enough syrup, in terms of dollars, to offset the money I paid for the equipment. So the rest of the season, as the saying goes, is gravy - costing me nothing but my time and energy (which I really don't mind spending sitting around a campfire with the kids).

While I'm by no means an expert, I have learned a few things in the last few weeks. Most of these pertain directly to the Simple and Inexpensive three-pan boiling system I've been using, but some are fairly universal.

1) Maple syrup season comes just as the snow is leaving, which means the ground will be very cold and very muddy. I like to use kleenexes, newspaper, junk mail, and other "burnable" trash to start my fires (making use of it instead of sending it to the landfill - another plus for this method), but these all tend to wick up water and then not light up. To get around this, I've found it helpful to make a base of small branches under where I'm starting my campfire. This lifts my paper and other firestarting materials off of the cold, wet ground and keeps them dry.

2) Another trial-and-error tip I've learned is that it's helpful to take the time to make sure your setup is level before you start your fire and add your sap. If your pans are tipped, you can't boil as much sap in each pan, which makes the whole process take that much longer.

Catywampus pans - see how one side is full, but the other side has hardly any sap?

3) As I mentioned in tip #1, maple syrup season comes in the early spring, when there is still a good chance of wintry weather. In the middle of my last sap boiling afternoon, the weather suddenly turned and it started snowing. Of course, the last thing you want is more water in your sap! So I pulled out the canopy we'd used for the farmer's market last summer, which worked like a charm (but now smells very strongly of campfire smoke!)

Oh, no! Snow! Time for Sap Camp!

4) After 16+ hours over an open fire, my boiling pans are now very black and sooty. Instead of trying to get all of that grime off of the outside of the pan (I do scrub out the inside, of course), I simply slip the entire pan - once it's cooled off - into a plastic garbage bag. That way they don't make a mess of wherever I store them until the next batch of sap is ready. Each pan gets its own bag, and then I nest the bagged up pans together for storage.

5) It's helpful to have one pot for transferring the sap from the boiling pans into the kitchen, then another ready to filter the sap into for finishing on the stove. You want to be able to preserve as much heat as possible during this transfer to save time and energy boiling off the last of the excess water, so it's best to think ahead and have things ready so you can move quickly.

6) Since you need to make sure your sap gets to exactly 7 degrees above boiling, it's very important to have an accurate thermometer. Unfortunately, I don't seem to have one (the new digital one I bought shorts out from the steam, apparently, and shuts off before it gets up to the final temperature), so I've been depending on the "sheeting" test (which is fine in my situation, since I'm only making syrup for my own family, not selling any).

7) A useful tip I learned at Sam Thayer's class was that you can sterilize your jars of syrup (similar to canning) by inverting them for 4 seconds, as long as your syrup is above 180 degrees. So if you put your syrup in jars right away after boiling, they should be plenty hot (217 degrees here in northwestern Wisconsin). Make sure all surfaces have been touched by the hot syrup so no bacteria remain alive, and your syrup should stay sterile until the jar is opened.

I'm sure there are many more things I'll learn as I go, but hopefully these will save you some time and headaches as you get started.

Those of you who've made maple syrup before - do you have any tips for me?

(You can read more of my maple syrup adventures here, here, and here)

Please note - the links above are affiliate links. If you make a purchase after clicking I will receive a small commission, but your price remains the same. Thank you for your support!