Seed Starting Time!

As you may have noticed if you read my 2019 Seed Starting Plan post, this post is about 6 days overdue. The main reason for that is that I was experimenting with pre-germinating seeds (which ended up being a bust - more on that in another upcoming post. I'm considering having a "Friday Fail" series, telling about all of the things I've tried that didn't work out - kind of a "learn from my mistakes so you don't have to make your own" sort of thing. Isn't there a Thomas Edison quote about finding 10,000 things that didn't work? Yeah, something like that . . . I didn't screw up, I made progress!!!)

Anyway, this morning I finally decided to give up on that experiment and just plant like I have in the past. This was liberating - I could just go ahead and do it, no more waiting! I actually got up early this morning so I could get started (that's how excited I am - some people get up early for Black Friday, I get up early for Seed Starting Day!) The first thing I did was get out my mixing pan (I bit the bullet and shelled out $10 for a new one this year - I used my old one for feeding the chickens, and now it's in the garden buried under three feet of snow. It was either shell out the $10 or dig around until I found it. I chose the cash. Three feet of snow is heavy!) I used an old plastic one-gallon pitcher to measure out the soil, then added half that much water and mixed it in. I find this 2:1 ratio works just perfectly to prepare the soil for using my soil blocker. I have to say, I love this tool! I first read about it in Eliot Coleman's New Organic Grower, and have been wanting one ever since. I finally bought one last year, and have been kicking myself for not doing it sooner. I can control what's in my seed starting mix; I have better control of the soil moisture level; and I like the little indentation on top that keeps the seeds in place (with the old Jiffy Pellets I often had seeds slipping down the side and growing from the bottom of the peat pot!)

I punched out my soil blocks into a plastic seed starting tray (the kind without holes - that's very important if you don't want water dripping all over the place). It turned out that my tray could fit about 45 soil blocks - about 24 per gallon of soil, so I ended up mixing two batches - which worked just perfectly for the 37 seeds I wanted to start (you can read my 2019 seed starting plan here). After placing my seeds in their little indentations, I put the tray on a seed starting heat mat and covered it with a plastic cover. In a few days, when the seeds sprout, I'll take off the cover and turn on my grow lights.

It's really very easy when you have the right equipment, but don't be intimidated by the cost. Remember, you'll be saving a couple of dollars per plant, so the equipment will pay for itself very quickly. You can also make homemade versions of some of the items, or find them at yard sales or thrift stores (of course if you're in a hurry and it's not yard sale season, you'll have to just bite the bullet and pay the price - like I did on my mixing pan!)

2019 Seed Starting Plan

Although you wouldn't know it to look outside, (as you can tell by Monday's post) spring is just around the corner! Our last frost date around here is May 15th (well, that's a little optimistic, but it usually works out alright), so March 1st is time to start my first seeds indoors (if you have a different last frost date, you can use this chart, too - just adjust your seed starting times back accordingly).

Here's my plan for sowing seeds this spring:

March 1st - start indoors:
5 parsley plants
12 Brussels sprouts
20 broccoli
(these are all cool-season plants, so I'll aim to get them transplanted outside around April 15th)

April 1st - start indoors:
17 tomatoes (to be planted out May 15th)
12 spinach
12 lettuce (I'll plant both the spinach and the lettuce every 2 weeks for a continuous harvest; I'll plant the firsts set out on April 15th)
20 rutabagas (transplant April 15th)
4 jalapenos (transplant June 1st)

April 15th - direct sow in the garden:
peas
lettuce
spinach
onions

May 1st - start indoors:
5 watermelon
5 pumpkins
1 butternut squash
5 cucumbers
4 dill
5 nasturtium
3 hollyhocks
5 calendula
4 borage
1 basil

May 1st - direct sow in the garden:
potatoes
carrots
radishes
swiss chard

June 1st - direct sow in the garden:
corn
runner beans
bush beans

How about you? Are you starting any seeds indoors this year?

The Story Behind Ruth's Homemade

Have you ever read about the health benefits of some herb and thought, "I need to get a lotion with THAT in it!" Or maybe it was trying to find a bar of soap without certain things in it. That was me. The more research I did, the more I wanted products that apparently weren't available. It's getting easier now to find "natural" health and beauty products, but somehow I could never find exactly what I wanted. My kids were little at the time, and I wanted to be sure that anything I put on their skin was also safe for them to put in their mouths (because they would!)

So, since I couldn't find the products I wanted, I decided to see if I could make them myself. First I learned how to make soap (I wrote a post about that here). I experimented with different oils (coconut oil, castor oil - even lard and tallow. In case you were wondering, soap made from home-rendered tallow makes you smell like beef. Your dog will love you!) and I tried different scents - I didn't want to use fragrance oils, which did nothing but smell, and were made of chemicals I wasn't sure I was comfortable with. So I moved to essential oils, only to find that it takes a lot of essential oil to make scented bar soap, and it's questionable if it retains the oil's medicinal qualities, due to the high heat of the saponification process). I even tried different fun shaped molds. Eventually, though, I realized that what I really wanted was just a plain, unscented soap with as few ingredients as possible - my Nothing But Clean bar.

Next came shampoo bars. I'd read about the hormone-disrupting effects of the chemicals in most shampoos, and I knew I needed to keep those off of me and my kids. So I began to experiment. It took a lot of trial and error (no, plain castile soap does not work well for cleaning your hair!) but eventually I found something that would work for my straight, oily hair. Best of all, my husband likes it! He even complains if I use "regular" shampoo - he hates the overpowering scents.

My next product came from necessity. I get cold sores when I'm under a lot of stress, and I read in The Handbook of Vintage Remedies that lemon balm can heal and prevent cold sores. So I found a simple recipe for lip balm and added lemon balm essential oil. It worked! I rarely get cold sores anymore, and when I do it's usually because I haven't been using my lip balm recently.

From that basic recipe, I also made peppermint lip balm. Peppermint is great for clearing your sinuses when you have a cold (think the menthol in cough drops) as well as for easing headaches. Plus it just smells yummy!

The next product was more serendipitous - I read somewhere, just randomly clicking through herbalism websites on the internet, that plantain (the herb, not the fruit that looks like a banana) was helpful for stopping the itch of mosquito bites. It grows like crazy in my yard (most people actually call it a weed), so it was easy enough to pick it, chew it up, and press it onto a mosquito bite or bee sting. But what about when we were travelling, and I didn't know where I could find some; or if I found some, if it had been sprayed with something I didn't want in my mouth? So I started making plantain salve from the "weeds" growing in my yard. I mixed coconut oil, beeswax, and olive oil infused with dried plantain leaves - basically the same recipe I'd used for the lip balm, but this time using plantain. It worked like a charm, and I soon had people requesting some for their families. To my surprise, it worked for more than just bug bites. Friends reported that it helped with a variety of skin problems, from eczema and hives to just plain dry winter skin. It's become my best selling product.

Another product that came directly from one of my family's needs was wound salve. With five active kids in the house, this is the one we use most often. I studied which herbs had the best antiseptic effects, such as tea tree, lavender, calendula, and chickweed, as well as plantain for its soothing qualities, and blended these together. It's been our go-to for minor cuts and scrapes for years.

I first found out about lotion bars when browsing Pinterest one day. I liked the idea of a non-goopy way to keep my skin soft in the winter (Wisconsin winters can be brutal for your hands) without unpronounceable chemicals. I tried it, and it worked great - now I use one every night before I go to sleep (and usually my husband does, too; his hard-working hands need some TLC!)

When friends and family started asking about my soaps and lotions, I realized that maybe I could make a business out of my hobby. Not everyone had the time or inclination to make things themselves - I know that when I started out, I would rather have just bought the products I ended up making. I could save them the time it took me to research and find the recipes I'd gathered, as well as the time preparing the actual products.

So Ruth's Homemade was born. All of the products I sell are made from food-safe ingredients, and are safe for children and pets. I use as few ingredients as possible - and list them all clearly on the label - so people with allergies and sensitivities don't have to worry about what might be hiding in their products.

Since the whole company is just me, I stick to what I know - which unfortunately is not computers! So I haven't set up an official online store - just a simple website listing my products and my email address (the links above are all to that website); if you would like to purchase something, email me your list and I'll happily send it to you. I've figured out how to do Paypal, or I'll also accept a good old fashioned check.

As you may have noticed, I love to try new things, so I enjoy making custom orders - let me know what you'd like, and I'll see what I can do!

So that's the story behind my little brand - just a mom making soaps and salves for her family, and now sharing what I've learned with you. You can be sure that I stand behind every product - because I use them all myself.

It's Gettin' Pert' Near Deep Out There!

Living in northwestern Wisconsin, we expect to get snow. We take a kind of stubborn pride in our hardiness, stoically planning in an extra half hour to scrape off the car before we go anywhere. And honestly, the snow does have its advantages - for a few months, you don't have to worry about potholes because they're filled in with snow!

Being a Cheerful Agrarian, I enjoy the idea that the cold and snow will kill off a lot of the insect pests and dieseases that more southern gardeners have to deal with, as well as the break from the work of planting, weeding, and harvesting in the garden. It's always a sweet thought to think of my garden sleeping under its thick, soft blanket of snow.

But even the most cheerful of us can get sick of the stuff. This February has been one for the record books - as I type this, less than a week before March, our snowfall total is up to 46 inches. That's more snow than this area has ever had in February in recorded history. And there's a possibility of a couple more inches tomorrow, just so we can round it out to an even four feet (we like to keep the numbers easy to brag about, doncha know).

And because this is Wisconsin and we don't do things halfway, it's also -15 degrees Fahrenheit.

To add even more drama to the story, the brakes are going out on our plow truck and my husband left on a business trip to San Diego on Saturday (he sent me a text last night complaining that he had to kill a mosquito in his hotel room - which oddly did make me feel a little better). Thankfully, he had the foresight to make sure we got our snowblower back from his brother before we left, so even though there was a big storm in the forecast, we figured we'd be OK.

And a big storm it was. Church was cancelled on Sunday - which I only remember happening once before EVER - so we had nowhere we needed to be for the day. Mostly we just hunkered down and took it easy (I took the chance to watch Justin Rhodes' The Great American Farm Tour documentary, which just came out this week. You can watch it free on Amazon Prime (here's the link) (if you don't have a Prime membership, you can click here to get one). I honestly love the idea of being snowed in all cozy in our cabin, if not for thought of what we would do if there was some kind of emergency. With five active kids in the house, an accident could happen at any time.

So in the afternoon I sent my 18 year old son Sam out to clear the snow. He started with the truck (the brakes worked enough to be OK in our driveway), but after getting stuck twice trying to move snow higher than the plow, he switched to the snowblower. That seemed to be working fine until I went out to feed the chickens and saw him working on something in the garage. It turns out the clutch cable went out on the snowblower - and of course we couldn't run to the store to get a new one since we couldn't get out of our driveway - but he was able to fix it enough to make it work.

Our driveway basically has three sections. On the north is the parking area near the garage, which is roughly a big square between the garage and the house, with a row of pine trees on the east side and a band of mixed woods on the other. This area was pretty protected from the wind, so he only had to plow the 8 inches that fell that day. As you drive out, you come to a stretch of driveway with woods on either side; this is also pretty protected so the snow wasn't too deep. As you drive out of the woods, you come to the final section, which has open pasture on one side and young pines on the other. The wind had filled in everything that had been plowed the day before, and the drifts were waist-deep. Sam had cleared by the garage and through the woods with the truck, but when he got to the open pasture area, the drifts were too high and heavy for even the snowblower to handle. With the light fading, the temperatures falling into single digits, and the wind drifting the snow right back into the path he'd just cleared, we decided to call it a night and try again in the morning when the wind died down.

We weren't the only ones having a hard time keeping ahead of the drifts. According to the Barron County Sherriff's Department's Facebook page, all but one plow was sent home around 6:00pm so the drivers could rest before going out again at 4:00 the next morning. There have been a lot of long hours for those guys this month!

The next morning we had breakfast and did a quick round of school before heading out to tackle the snow with fresh energy. The wind had stopped, and we were finally able to make some headway. Sam snow blowed a path down to the road, but it was slow going and hard on the snowblower, with a hard crust on the top and drifts deeper than the snowblower's auger. He needed looser, fluffier snow if he was going to keep making headway. So two of the girls and I went out to break up the snow - wading through the snow next to his path to break up the crust on top and spread it out onto the path he'd cleared. Let me tell you, if you're looking for a workout, breaking a trail through waist-deep snow can really get your heart pumping!

Sam's plan worked. By 11am, the driveway was cleared and the girls were able to go to their violin lessons. The roads had been cleared as well, and they had no trouble getting into town.

So what have we learned, boys and girls? #1. Farmers (even Cheerful ones!) have a compulsive need to talk about the weather and #2. PLANT WINDBREAKS! We had talked last year about planting a windbreak next to the driveway, but obviously never got around to acutally doing it. This year, I'm going to make it a priority - and of course, you know me, it's going to be a fast-growing edible hedge (I'm thinking elderberry), possibly built on top of a hugel mound, to divert the spring runoff from washing out our driveway. What do you think?


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!

Stretch Your Dog Food Dollar with Homestead Scraps

As a homesteader, I try to be very careful about counting the cost vs. benefit of all of the animals on our property. Each needs to fulfill a role (or our freezer), at the least possible expense.

So when I was walking through our local Farm & Fleet store the other day looking at dog food, I began to reconsider the worth of our pug/dachshund cross. Is she really worth $30 for a 40 pound bag of Iams? I won't even pay that much for chicken feed - and last I checked, our dog hasn't laid any eggs lately!

My daughter, of course, thinks she's worth every penny; and she does serve as a pretty effective doorbell (a loud, high-pitched, hey-that-scary-car-is-still-parked-in-that-same-spot-it's-been-all-weekend-oh-wait-that's-yours kind of doorbell, but still . . .), small rodent deterrent, spill licker, daughter's-bed-warmer, and general source of amusement. She also sings along with the Hallelujah Chorus, so there's that.

Which means she's staying; but it would be nice if we could somehow make her food a little cheaper. So I started researching dog food recipes.

The first thing I noticed was that most of the recipes I could find were NOT cheaper. Chicken breast, rice, special vitamin supplements - this was definitely not going to save me any money. But every so often I'd find ingredients that got me thinking: Liver - I have plenty of chicken livers from butchering our birds, and even though I still haven't found a pate recipe that anyone but me will eat, I can't just throw them away! Eggs - Wisconsin winters mean cracked, frozen eggs, which I don't let my kids eat, but the dog could; Squash - the garden always gives us more squash than we can handle; Apples - how about that experiment where I turned the leftover apple smash from our cider making into applesauce, but it didn't really taste so good? It turns out, there are a lot of things that would make good dog food going to waste in our house.

So I developed a basic recipe, built off of otherwise wasted foods on our homestead:
1/2 cup squash or carrots
1/2 cup meat (chicken hearts, meat from soup bones, etc.)
 - or - 1 egg (with shell; the added calcium is good for them, but smash it well so they don't cut themselves)
1/4 cup livers
1/4 c green vegetables (green beans, etc.)
1 Tbsp fat (lard, chicken fat, etc.)

This is only a base; we substitute, add, or leave things out all the time. I regularly add bone broth - it's mostly water, after all, so it's cheap, and it's a great source of collagen to help our old dog's aging joints. In the winter, when the pigs are tucked away at freezer camp, the dog gets most of the whey from my cheesemaking, too.

Now, I know what you're thinking - this isn't perfectly vitamin and mineral balanced like the stuff in the bags! There's no veterinary nutritionist overseeing this! But hold on a minute. Look at your diet - do you eat the same nutritionally balanced pellet every day? Or do you prefer a varied diet of healthy foods? And no one is saying this has to be your dog's only food - in our family, we mix a homemade "stew" for our dog's supper, but still give her kibble for breakfast - partially for "nutrient insurance" and partially just because we're lazy. 😉

And if you are lazy like us, you can actually make up a big batch all at once in the fall (or whenever) and freeze or pressure can it. A rule of thumb for canning is that your time and pressure need to be what's required for the ingredient that needs the most - usually the meat ingredient (you can check the canning times for most foods in the Ball Blue Book of Canning and Preserving). That way, you just have to pop open a jar when your dog's meal time comes around, rather than cooking a separate meal for her every day. And if a whole jar is too much for your small dog, you can refrigerate the extra and she can have leftovers the next day (just like your kids!)

So I've found that the key to saving money feeding your dog can be looking at the healthy food you're already raising for your family and seeing what's being wasted. Just like we save our kitchen scraps to supplement our chickens' ration and minimize their feed bill, think about what would otherwise go unused that would make healthy and delicious dog food. And remember, this is an animal that eats chicken poop like it's candy - what seems gross to you might be a gourmet delight to her!


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!

Fresh from the Coop Hard Boiled Eggs in the Instant Pot

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an egg collected straight from the coop and then hard boiled is a pain to peel.

I try to be pretty open and inclusive on my blog, sharing ideas without handing down pronouncements about how your farm SHOULD be run. I'm a firm believer that everyone has different circumstances and dispositions, and so there aren't one-size-fits-all ways to raise your food. But there is one topic on which I will make a clear and and firm statement: Everyone who raises laying hens and enjoys hard boiled eggs should have an Instant Pot.

I know there's a lot of hype about electric pressure cookers lately - and honestly I'm always a bit leery of things that are popular - but the one thing that finally got me to try one was the repeated stories of people raving about their hard boiled eggs. Sure, you can make refried beans from scratch in under an hour, or bake a cheesecake without heating up your house, and even cook a piece of meat straight out of the freezer because you forgot to thaw it out the day before (not saying that from experience, but I've heard it works . . .) but for me, finding a solution to making hard boiled eggs without waiting until they were old - that was it. The holy grail of kitchen appliances.

"But boiling eggs on the stove is so easy!" you say. "They're ready in minutes! I don't have time to do it a different way!" "I don't want to wash extra dishes!" Let me show you how easy this is.

Step 1. Wash your eggs. Unless you're Martha Stewart, there's poop on them. Admit it. Get 'em clean. You'd have to do this either way.

Step 2. Put about a cup of water in the bottom of your Instant Pot insert (you don't have to measure - just make sure there's some water in there). Set the little grill tray thingy in the water and put the eggs on top (see? Easy peasy. You can even use words like grill tray thingy and they'll still come out perfectly).

Step 3. Put the insert into the Instant Pot and close the lid. Make sure the pressure valve is in the sealed position.

Step 4. Set the control to manual and the time to 4 minutes. Then go away until it beeps.

Step 5. When it beeps, set a timer for 4 more minutes. When that timer goes off, flip the little knob to release the pressure (I generally put a towel over it so I don't steam the veneer off of my cupboards).

Step 6. Remove the insert from the machine and put the eggs into cool water. My mom always put them in the sink and ran a thin stream of cold water over them until the water was cold to the touch, and who am I to question my mom?

Technically, they're done now, and you can dry them and put them in the fridge. I like to add one more step (I know, I make things so complicated!) and peel them right away. I like to marvel at the amazing ease and lack of swearing, and also I just find it easier to fit them in my overstocked fridge if I store them in an upright mason jar rather than an egg carton. Fun fact - a dozen eggs fits perfectly into a quart-sized canning jar. Don't believe me? Here's a picture:

Alright, fine, you have to squish that top one down a bit, but you can get the cover on. It's all good.

Anyway, this was not just a shameless plug to get you to click on the link below and buy an Instant Pot (even though I would get a small advertising fee for your purchase, while your price would still be the same). I really think this is an awesome tip, and will make your life that much easier. Anything to reduce swearing in the kitchen, right?

"Unpaper" Towels - or, as Grandma used to call them, "Rags"

It seems all the rage in homesteading blogs lately to post how-to articles about "Reusable Paper Towels" (aka "Unpaper" Towels).
(Don't believe me? Just go on Pinterest and type in "Reusable Paper Towels". See, Mom, these really are a thing!)

Instructions come complete with sewing directions and materials list - presumably you need to go out and buy all new, pretty fabrics - one kind for the front and another for the back. When I see these, I just laugh. I remember my post from back in 2011 about "Pancake Powered Kitchen Appliances", and the revelation that all of these new-fangled, factory produced "necessities" of our lives generally are just cheap (or sometimes not so cheap!) imitations of recipes or tools housewives have made and used for years. Paper towels are no exception. How did our grandmothers clean up spills before the invention of those handy, tear-off, disposable paper towels? (*gasp!*)

They used rags.

That's right - old, used-up, so-worn-out-they-can't-even-be-patched clothing was cut up and given one last use (or maybe more - if they're not too gross, you can wash them and re-use them indefinitely) before heading to the trash can.

A friend once bemoaned the fact that there was no use for her children's holey socks. I laughed and told her I always cut them in half and use them for rags (after washing them, of course). If you have toddlers making holey socks, I'm guessing you also have toddlers making messes that need wiping up!

That old t-shirt? You can get lots of rags out of that! Cut it up, and you have the perfect clean-up tool for when the dog drools all over the floor next to his water bowl. Or one of my favorites - spritz them with a little water mixed with liquid castile soap (here's the kind I make) and use them for baby wipes! Much more gentle for baby's sensitive skin than those who-knows-what-chemical doused paper ones (have you noticed that the "fancy" wipes claim to have a "cloth-like feel"? Why not just use cloth?)

Grossed out by re-using hankies? Blow your nose in an old scrap of sweatshirt, and feel no guilt about throwing it away!

My husband even claims his old T-shirts for use in the garage (do you know automotive stores sell boxes of "shop rags" (click here to see them on Amazon if you don't believe me!) - brand new, perfectly unused pieces of cloth! For rags! Grandma would be appalled!)

So instead of paying good money for something you're just going to throw away (don't even get me started on trash bags!!!), save your hard-earned dollars and give those old worn-out clothes one last good use before you say goodbye.

Sprouted Corn and Soy Free Chicken Feed

Confession time: It's been just over a year now since we moved, and while we've worked hard to make this place our home, I haven't done much to make it a homestead. We have the laying hens, and we raised a batch of meat birds and a couple pigs last year, but honestly I feel like I've been on auto-pilot as far as homesteading is concerned.

Then a few weeks ago I discovered Justin Rhodes' YouTube videos, and in particular the Great American Farm Tour. I've been binge-watching obsessively ever since, trying to stave off cabin fever  by seeing how farmers all around the country manage their farm systems. He calls his videos "edu-tainment", interspersing information about permaculture, seed saving, and animal husbandry with clips of his adorable children and "the Beautiful One" (his wife Rebecca). Even my husband will watch them with me! Mostly to humor me and because the Rhodes kids are so cute, but still . . .)

One of the things in the Rhodes' routine that reminded me of something I needed to start doing again was soaking chicken feed. He claims you can feed 30% less feed if you soak it, due to the higher water content and higher digestibility. While I don't soak/ferment my chicken feed the same way he does, I do like to mix my own corn- and soy-free ration (I posted the recipe here), and this time around I'm stepping it up and doing a four-day sprout on my whole grains.

My Sprouting Station

I re-use old lettuce containers as my sprouting trays, and they work great. On day 1, I put 4 cups of wheat seeds and 2 cups of oats into the container and cover them to about an inch over the seeds with plain water. In the picture above, you can see that I've also been adding some dried pea seeds I had leftover from a couple of years ago - just trying to use them up. I should note that you should only use seed that is meant for animal or human consumption, to be sure that they haven't been treated with chemicals to inhibit sprouting (which of course would defeat the purpose, and also possibly make your animals sick).

On day 2 and 3 I rinse the seeds using this strainer from Amazon, which I bought for straining chicken broth in my Instant Pot (but I use it much more often for rinsing sprouts!) I let them drain out a bit, then return them to the container and put it back on the shelf until the next day. (In case you were wondering, that orange clip is there so that the handle doesn't fall in and stick to the seeds - it just makes things go more smoothly.)

On the fourth day, I pour the sprouts (which have little white seed tails by now) into my feed mixing bucket and add 2 cups of black oil sunflower seeds, 1 cup of ground flax, and 1/4 cup of Fertrell Nutribalancer. I mix it all together and feed it to my birds - 13 old hens, 6 just-starting-to-lay pullets, 1 rooster, and 2 guinea hens. Out of this mix of birds, eating just this home-mixed feed and kitchen scraps, I'm averaging 7 eggs a day, which I think is pretty good for our sub-zero, three-blizzards-last-week mid-February in Wisconsin!

Looking so majestic, standing in his feed trough! Ha!

The links to the seeds above are just for example; this is definitely not the cheapest way to purchase these seeds! I would recommend contacting your local feed mill, buying club, or even Walmart to find what's available in your area. I did buy my Instant Pot and strainer on Amazon, though, so go ahead and get yours there, too. 😉

Also, 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!

A Visit to the Forager's Harvest Store in Bruce, Wisconsin

I was so excited to see that the Forager's Harvest store (run by author and famous forager Sam Thayer, and conveniently located just half an hour from my house) was hosting a FREE Backyard Syrup Making class on Saturday. I'd been meaning to take my youngest daughter to this store for over a year (she's the one who will sit in my garden grazing on wood sorrel, chickweed, plantain, sheep sorrel and other weeds, harvested bags and bags of highbush cranberries for me, and who spent a good portion of last summer making acorn flour - this place is definitely right up her alley!), but just hadn't found a good time to do it. Since we're hoping to make maple syrup this spring, this seemed like the perfect time to go!

Although I'd toured different friends' sugar shacks over the years and read articles and books on the subject, I figured a class (and a free one, to boot!) would still be worth going to - especially one taught by an author I'd admired for so long. I wasn't wrong. The little tips and tricks he mentioned I forsee being a great help this spring, and I definitely think I'll be trying his three-pan outdoor boiling method.

After the class, the girls and I explored the store, limiting ourselves to only buying the second two books in his Forager's Harvest trilogy (I'd given my daughter the first for her birthday last year - as well as the Birds of Prey of the Midwest, Butterflies of the Midwest, and Animal Tracks Midwest Quick Guides that I'd picked up on a previous visit to the store). Perusing the bookshelves, I felt right at home - in fact, other than the two books I just mentioned, I had trouble finding a book I was interested in that I didn't already own! Nourishing Traditions, Putting Food By, The Art of Fermentation, Rosemary Gladstar's Medicinal Herbs, Trout Caviar - we have all of these books in common (and many more, but I don't want to bore you with my geeking out any more than I already have). 😉

I also found out that they sell their maple syrup in glass containers (I hate buying food in plastic!), and for a better price than I've found anywhere else. So if my home syrup operation completely bombs, I know where I'll go!

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A New Adventure

It’s been a while, dear reader (to put it mildly), and so much has happened since my last post! One of the biggest changes is that we’ve moved to a new house. We left our old manufactured home on just under 8 acres and purchased a full-log home with 22 acres - half wooded, half pasture. The kids are loving the woods to roam in, my husband is enjoying the verdant views and wildlife (we've seen whitetailed deer, turkeys, hawks and bald eagles, bear tracks; we've heard barred owls hooting in the night; and a pair of phoebe birds are building a nest above our porch), and I’m having fun trying new things in the house and garden. I’m also enjoying the rich deposits of Obtanium we have in the woods on the property (“Obtanium” is a word I learned from a teacher at the Hay River Traditional and Green Skills Event a year or two ago – the definition being, roughly: “that which is found, gathered, or bartered for - not purchased - and put to good use”. See also “Redneck Recycling”). The fallen leaves, old dead wood, and abundant rocks have all found uses in the gardens - and the morel mushrooms my daughter discovered were a welcome addition in the kitchen!

We moved in mid-February, for which I am heartily grateful. It was a challenge on our actual moving day (I remember temps of -17F as friends helped us transfer furniture from the old house to the new), but after the heavy lifting was accomplished, it was nice to have time to set up the house while the yard waited patiently under a foot or so of snow. We had a late winter (on April 16^th I posted a shot on Facebook of the hill outside the kitchen door where I was planning to put the garden – the yardstick measured a 16-inch snowbank there!) and the snow stuck around until the end of April.

I was very blessed to have a friend who was willing to keep my hens for me during the transition. It’s not many women who will add a friend’s 18 chickens to a coop that previously only held her 7 birds! Obviously, this created a major egg surplus compared to what she was used to, and even supplying us, she was able to have a little fun selling eggs on the side (she bought a dozen or so more chicks this spring, so I think it’s safe to say she liked the experience!)

We finally brought the hens to the new property in May, thanks to another friend who offered us her old coop – which is actually an old pickup-bed camper converted for the job. It works great, and I certainly couldn’t complain about the price (free)!

Gotta love that Obtanium!

We also picked up our new pair of feeder pigs just this Friday: Maple (the brown girl) and Hickory (the black male). This year’s names reflect my hope that I’ll be able to try my hand at smoking our own bacon this fall (I took a class on home smoking at the event I mentioned above, and I can't wait to try it out!)

Little by little, our new farm is taking shape!

Echinacea Lemonade Popsicles

Summer colds are no fun - but popsicles are! Here's a fun way to give the kids' immune system a boost during warm weather.

Echinacea Lemonade Popsicles

3 cups of water
3 bags of echinacea tea
1/2 cup of honey
3/4 cup lemon juice
Steep tea according to directions; discard (compost!) tea bags. Stir in honey and lemon juice. Pour into popsicle forms and freeze.

Tips:
Use echinacea elderberry tea if you have it, for extra immune-boosting power. Or alternately, use elderberry syrup instead of the honey (I like to use my homemade elderberry honey - elderberries harvested from my garden, and honey from my own bees - so I am completely sure of the quality of the ingredients).

The Cheerful Agrarian and the Three Little Pigs

Once upon a time (about 1:30 this afternoon, actually), the Cheerful Agrarian went with two of her children to pick out two little pigs to live in her back yard. On the drive to the farm, she texted her friend Monica, who said she would like Cheerful to raise a pig for her family, too. And so it was that Cheerful brought home not two, but three little pigs.

Now, these pigs do not have houses of straw (it's been very windy here in Wisconsin lately (a tornado went through just two miles south of us last month), so even if a house of straw could stand up to the huffing and puffing of the big bad wolf, I don't think it would do so well against the weather this spring), nor do they have houses of sticks (I haven't perfected my wattle-and-daub technique yet - but it's on my list!) They definitely don't have a house of bricks (have you priced bricks lately? Definitely out of my price range!) Instead, they have a house of fiberglass. An old truck topper, to be precise, that a friend gave us last year ("and please don't give it back!")
The pigs are named Chris P. Bacon (a name that my daughter had picked out last year, but we opted for other names for our two previous porkers, so it was only common courtesy to use it this time around), Alexander Hamilton (he's so popular these days!), and Spot Chop (my 10 year old son named him - I told him to try to think of something that included a reference to his spots and the idea of pork chops. So Spot Chop he became - Spotch for short.)
Weighing in at just 30 pounds each, they are the perfect size to be loved on and adored by the kids (and their mother . . .) They love their new home - before we had even unloaded them all from the truck, Spotch had already started digging holes with his until-now-untried snout. They certainly didn't need to be taught how to root! Four and a half hours later, and they still haven't so much as sniffed at their hog feed. I'm sure that will change pretty quickly, though.

I'm going to try to keep a running tally to see how much it's costing us to raise our own bacon (the two we raised last year ended up around $3.16/lb- $1195.25 total - including on-farm slaughter, processing, and curing the bacon and hams) These pigs cost us $55 each ($165 total), and their first bag of feed (we're going all organic) was $24.88 (65 cents more per bag than last year). So, at 90 pounds total, they've cost us $189.88.

Pumpkin Puffs

. . . because cream puffs are the best dessert ever, and because it's fall, so everything must be pumpkined!

I was reading through a fun book I saw at the library - The Year of Cozy by Adrianna Adarme - and found (among many other things I immediately bookmarked) a recipe for No-Bake Pumpkin Chiffon Pie. The author said she "fell in love with chiffon pies a few years ago; they're wonderfully light, and their texture is silky smooth." Maybe it's just me, but this description immediately cried, "Cream Puff!" in my mind. So I tried it. The original recipe calls for rum, which my kids didn't like, and beaten egg whites for its lightness. So I decided to try it again, after tweaking the recipe to our taste. First step: compare all of the pumpkin pie recipes I could find with all of the Boston cream pie filling recipes I had. So I pulled out my book of family recipes, my Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook, and, of course Joy of Cooking.

The latter was, as usual, the most helpful in "reinterpreting" a recipe - there I found that folding in whipped cream to the the cooled custard would give it the lightness I was looking for. I served them to my kids (and also to my husband, sister-in-law, mother-in-law, and niece and nephews, who were visiting that day - a good excuse, I thought, to try out an extravagant new dessert. Thankfully, they're used to being experimented upon (and when it comes to dessert, they don't seem to mind!) Plus, Debbie brought a back-up dessert of leftover apple crisp, so even if it flopped, we were covered). The verdict: an unqualified success (Debbie even asked for the recipe - and took all of the apple crisp back home).
So Debbie (and everyone else who shares my love of all things pumpkin and all things cream puff) here you go:

Pumpkin Puffs
Puff pastry:
1 cup water
1/2 cup butter
1 cup flour
4 eggs
Heat oven to 400 degrees. Heat water and butter to boiling in a medium saucepan. Stir in flour all at once, stirring until mixture forms into a ball and leaves sides of pan (about 1 minute - I like to use my Kitchen Aid hand blender for this). Beat in the eggs, one at a time, beating until smooth after each addition. When all of the eggs have been added, drop by spoonfuls onto a baking sheet. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes, until puffy and dry. Cool, then cut off tops and scoop out any soft dough remaining inside.

Filling: 
3 Tbsp water
2 tsp unflavored powdered gelatin
1 cup pumpkin puree
1/3 cup heavy cream
1/3 cup maple syrup (honey or sugar work fine, too)
2 eggs
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp grated nutmeg
1/8 tsp cloves
1 cup heavy whipping cream
3 Tbsp maple syrup (honey or sugar work fine, too)
In a small bowl, sprinkle the powdered gelatin over the water and let rest. Meanwhile, in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, mix the pumpkin, heavy cream, maple syrup, eggs, salt, and spices.  Cook until mixture begins to thicken. Transfer to a bowl and stir in the rum and gelatin. Refrigerate. 
Whip the cream and maple syrup. Beat chilled custard to soften; fold in whipped cream. Spoon into prepared puff pastry.  
 

Chilled custard

Blended custard

Folding in the whipped cream

Ready to spoon into the puffs

Chocolate Sauce:
1/3 cup maple syrup (honey or powdered sugar would also work)
1/2 cup butter (coconut oil is fine, too)
1/2 cup cocoa powder
dash salt
Mix together in a double boiler until melted and smooth.

 Drizzle over pastry top.

 Devour!


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