Today's Take - 6/8/2015

Three out of four of our broody mama ducks finally hatched out their babies this week! Blueberry & Drusilla each had five babies, Kiki hatched out three. Now hopefully they'll get back to laying some of their wonderful eggs for us.

The garden is finally starting to feed us. ;) Peas, lettuce, herbs and raspberries are starting to roll in and we're really enjoying the homegrown salads every night.

For the record -
Chicken eggs - 10
Snow peas - 8 oz
Buttercrunch lettuce - 1 head

BHF ~ Photo of the Day 5/20/15

Clarke's Beltony Blue Shelling Pea blossom

I was getting pretty impatient to finally see a blossom on our peas and today was the day - times three! This is the Clarke's Beltony Blue in flower. We also had a pair of blooms on our He Lan Dou snow peas. Today was a good day in the garden!

Today's Take - 3/14/15

I was beginning to wonder if our Muscovy girls were ever going to give us an egg, when viola!, Bill found a small nest of three eggs in a pile of loose orchard grass hay in the goats' milking shed. The milking shed has been the place that the Muscovies have been hanging out whenever they manage to break out of the duck yard, which is a very regular occurrence. I should have known they were up to something!
Shortly after finding the first three, we found another egg in the duck house. Yeehaw!

The goods!

We're going to try these tomorrow, as none of us has ever tasted a duck egg before. I've been told that frying them is slightly trickier than a chicken's egg, as they can get overcooked and rubbery pretty easily. I think I'll scramble them this first time around. I don't want to take a chance on cooking them wrong and souring us all on eating duck eggs the first time out of the gate.

For the record -
Duck eggs (woohoo!) - 4
Chicken eggs - 6

Frog Song

The frogs in our bog started singing two nights ago. The first night, it was a dozen or so loud individuals. Last night, the full chorus joined in. We're talking thousands, maybe tens of thousands of frogs, all going bananas simultaneously. It can be deafening if you're out in the yard when they start it up, but from inside it's a kind of pleasant white noise.

Updated 2/5/15 - now with audio disguised as video!

I decided to note when the froggies started singing their song this year, to eventually, maybe, try to determine whether or not there is any correlation between last frost dates, average daily temperature, etc.,  and when the frisky frogs fire up their pipes. ;)

Today's Take - 8/13/13

Zucchini - 18 pounds, 8 ounces! (Maybe I'd better switch to picking these guys every day instead of every other?)
Yellow squash - 7 pounds, 8 ounces
Pattypan squash - 7 ounces
Tomatoes - 8 ounces (YAAAAY!)
Blackberries - 2 pounds, 2 ounces
Eggs - 4
Goat milk - 1/2 gallon

I saw that one of my Miriam Edible sunflowers had just begun to open up today - finally. The cantaloupes have set a dozen, maybe a dozen and a half fruits that I can see. Anything smaller that golf ball sized probably won't ripen in time, so if I even end up with 10 or 12, I'll be thrilled.

The pumpkins are still setting fruit, and some of the bigger fruits are probably already in the 10 pound range, easily. I can't wait to see what our total numbers are at season's end. :)

Planning to put up this week/weekend -
Basil (freeze pesto, basil compound butter)
Zucchini (zucchini bread, chocolate zucchini muffins, freeze grated zucchini, freeze sliced zucchini for stir fry)
Blackberries (fruit leather, freeze whole)

Today's Take - 7/21/13

As you may have noticed, daily dispatches have been... less than daily. My record-keeping has never been stellar, but I really was hoping to get a whole month straight of farm product on the official record. Guess not. :\

Anyhoo, today's today's take is even better than usual, because we took the boat out in the salt and brought home a few crabbies. Yum!

Fisherman Bill with one of our soon-to-be tasty crab. 

Red Rock Crab - 3
Goat Milk - 1 gallon
Eggs - 9
Blackberries - 4 ounces
Zucchini - 7 ounces
Yellow squash - 5 ounces
Peas - handful (are these things every really going to take off or not?)
Russian Red kale - 8 ounces
Oregano - 1 ounce

And so it begins...

...one teeny harvest at a time. :) 

Those there 'maters are the sum total of my pickings, (minus one) for the past two days. The tomatillo was accidentally picked by a very eager helper.

We have 30 tomato plants in the ground, 28 of which have only just begun to bloom. According to a few different sites, the average yield per plant can be anywhere from 8 to 20 pounds of fruit per plant. So, if our plant performance only reaches the bottom of that curve, we should still be looking at close to 250 pounds of tomatoes. I know that number should terrify me, but it doesn't, I'm excited!

Talk to me again in 60 days or so and we'll see if my enthusiasm has waned any. ;)

Our First Harvest of Summer 2013!

It wasn't the most exciting or enormous haul, but I'm still glad to be growing (and eating!) my own food again. :)

Today's Take -

French Breakfast radishes, greens included - 5 pounds, 2 ounces
Cherry Belle Radishes, greens included - 6 pounds, 9 ounces

My mighty haul!

The biggest single radish of both varieties weighed in at 7 ounces! These babies were beasts, I tell you!

Garden Update - 6/18/13

Well, things are finally getting going out there!

The radishes are ready to harvest, in fact we had a few in our salad this past weekend. The flavor difference from a packaged salad radish (or for that matter, any grocery store radish) is insane. They are crispy and sweet, and even the greens are good in salad. Hooray for tasty veg that grows in just 3 weeks!

Our lettuces and red kale also are really filling out. It's hard to believe that just a few weeks ago I was fretting pretty hard that we wouldn't get much of anything this year. I'm very glad to have been wrong.

The corn and sunflowers are both about 6 inches high, and still need to be thinned. Same goes for the tomato bed, I need to reduce the plants in there by about half. The zucchini also need spacing out. Somebody went a little nuts and planted like 20 plants. I sure hope the pigs like zucchini!

Several of the purchased tomato plants have started setting fruit, but none are ripe yet. I'm drooling over those Sungolds though - can't wait for them to color up.

Our beets - golden, bulls blood, cylindra and sugar (fodder) - have all grown exponentially in the past week. Which means that I'm going to have to make some goat cheese soon so that we can enjoy a whole lotta beet salad this Summer.

The cantaloupes are still on the fence. They may make it, they may not. I still don't know why they took the transition so badly, but oh well. Maybe next year I'll just wait and direct sow them.

Anyway - overall, things are looking really good! Man, have I missed having a proper garden. Thanks to my boo for busting his booty to build us one this year. xoxo

Today's Take & Seeds Started Indoors - 4/27/13

The first three flats of veggies that I started on the seedling heat mats (tomatoes/tomatillos, peas and lettuces/kale) have graduated off of the mats and are now under the grow lights without any supplemental heat.

In their place on the mats I just started one flat each of German Chamomile, Calendula and Minnesota Midget Melons (cantaloupes). The melons are a big experiment. We've never had much luck with the traditionally Southern, sun-loving crops like melons and peppers, but decided to gamble a whole three bucks on this short-season variety. They're supposed to take just 70 days from seed to fruit, and I figure that if folks in Minnesota can get these badboys to grow, I stand a decent enough chance at having at least a few make it.

As for the flowers - those are primarily for tea and soapmaking. I hope that they both make it, but I'm especially excited about the Calendula. Orange is my absolute favorite color for flowers. I challenge you to look out on a patch of verdant, colorful veggies, surrounded by sunny orange flowers and not feel happy. Can't be done. ;)

On a completely separate note, today was the day that we said goodbye to sweet misses Hop & Hope, Chardonnay's two "big girls".

Liberty & Hope, February 2012

Hop & Barley, February 2011

The girls went together, to a wonderful little family in a home on some acreage. They will provide companionship, entertainment, weed eating services and delicious fresh milk, hopefully for many years to come. 

The gals' leaving us means that we have just two more kids who will be moving on before too much longer, leaving us with our new, lean and mean herd - Blue, Chardonnay, one of Chardy's doelings who is not yet named, Sidney, Sophie and Buckley. We were hoping to sell Buckley, but we've had no interest yet. Maybe in the Fall?

This Spring has been a real doozy, full of goat-centric drama, so as much as we'll miss the sweet faces of our babies that have moved on, we are also pretty relieved to have scaled the herd (and the feed costs) back to a manageable number.

As if all that weren't enough excitement for a single day on the farm, today is also the day that we finally picked up our honeybees!

We now have two hives of Italian honeybees in our waaaaay back forty. Upon installing the bees in their hives, Bill discovered that one of the queens (you get one per colony) had died. Not good. 

We were fortunate that the folks who sold us our bees are good, honest people who stand behind the critters they sell, and had no qualms at all about giving us a replacement queen, which Bill picked up this evening and will install in the morning. The reason that the queen died is unclear, but it isn't a super uncommon occurrence, so we're not going to sweat it. 

So - minus two goats, plus 40,000 (give or take) honeybees and plus three flats sewn of future fruits and flowers. That, my friends, is one heck of a productive day in these parts. Time for farmer Chelle to kick back with a well-earned (in my humble opinion) bowl of ice cream and a Netflix. ;)

Bees!

Meet the newest residents of the Hollow, 40,000 honeybees. :)

We're installing them in their hives now. The rain is not ideal, but we're hopeful that we've made the transition as easy as possible for them. As soon as the weather clears, these gals had better get busy visiting our fruit trees!

Apples & Pears

Today's and yesterday's combined take from our tiny "orchard" -

*Apples - 141 1/2 pounds! (Our previous record was 50 pounds.)

*Windfall Apples for critters - 13 pounds

*Pears - 20 pounds, 6 ounces (Our previous best was exactly one pear.)

Cider Futures :)

We also got -

*Eggs - 10

*Blackberries - 10 ounces

Happy, happy, joy, joy!

Today's Take - 9/2/12

Though I wouldn't necessarily consider it part of today's take, I think that it is definitely worth noting here that between my friend Jen & I, we put up 78 jars of jam today. Whew!

Our fruit of choice this year was a case of lovely "Mountain Jewel" peaches. We turned them in to Spiced Peach, Raspberry Peach and Earl Grey infused Peach jams. Not to toot my own horn here, but our jam came out amazing, especially the Earl Grey.

While I was busy jamming away with Jen, Bill was out at the river, landing two King salmon!

Not bad for a day's work! :)

*Eggs - 7

*Salmon - 21 pounds (9 & 12 pounds, respectively)

Today's Take - 8/29/12

Froo-its! We have all manner of pie and jam fixin's busting out all over just now. :)

This is just the tip of the apple iceberg, and the blackberries don't show any signs of abating soon either. Yay for free fruit!

*Eggs- 5

*Apples - 10 1/2 pounds

*Blackberries - 1 pound, 10 ounces

Today's Take 4/9/12

Hooray for the return of the sunshine!

*Dandelion Greens - 4 ounces
*Dandelion petals - 1 ounce
*Eggs - 21!

Today's Take 4/3/12

Scarlet and I did a little foraging in the yard today. Hooray for Spring!

I was actually a little disappointed with the number of dandelions that I was able to get. I was hoping for a lot more. I guess that this extended Winter has everything behind schedule, including the weeds.

We did, however, find a new patch of nettles growing on the south side of the property. I don't mind having to go and find my food in the woods, but there is definitely something to be said for being able to forage in your own yard!

As for what I'm going to do with these gathered greens, I'm going to use the dandy petals for wine, the greens for salad, and Bill will use the roots for home brewing. I'll also be splitting my nettle haul 50/50 with him, as dried nettles are apparently good for bittering a beer. Who'd have thought?

I had to cut my expedition to the back yard short today, but I plan to go grab up some more nettles tomorrow. You have to strike while the iron is hot! :)

*Dandelions (flowers, greens & roots) - 8 ounces
*Stinging Nettles - 8 ounces
*Eggs - 12

I've been a busy little Farm Girl

Earning my housewifey stripes today, I -

*Knitted a dishcloth and started a set of bike helmet earmuffs
*Turned 15 pounds of "junk" pears into 1/2 gallon of pear cider - which will likely eventually be wine. :)
*Juiced 10 pounds of apples
*Made 4 quarts of chicken broth (thanks, Thunder!)
*Washed 4 dozen eggs
*Am making two loaves of bread/a dozen+ eggs worth of French toast for freezing.
*Wrote two posts

Not too shabbeh! ;)

27 minus 1

Our final chick count was 27 hatched, 26 of whom have survived. Our little one that passed was born with congenital deformities of his legs and feet, and was unable to walk or stand much, and essentially just failed to thrive. I guess that it's a blessing, really, but I always feel bad losing a critter, even if it is for the best in the end.

On the bright side, I got my naked neck frizzle! We have at least one little Turken chickie who is starting to grow some whirly wing feathers. Happy. :)

We discovered my little dream baby when Scarlet and I were undertaking "butt patrol". Pics of the baby (not butt patrol!) are forthcoming. Right now the poor little monkey is rocking back and forth in a corner, actively trying to repress the memories of his first aggressive bum-cleaning.

On the edge of my seat...

waiting for my babies to hatch. They've started peeping well, and so far two have small pips in their shells. I need to go to sleep, but I don't want to miss a thing!

How nuts would it be if I went to bed and woke up to every last one of those 42 eggs hatched?

:)

Today's Take 9/12/11

Chicken ups and downs today. Junebug, the Australorp hen is still unwell. This is day three of her illness/egg binding. Liv and I tried to help her out by oiling her vent to grease the skids a little, to no avail. She is very weak and not eating, though still drinking. She has passed a very small amount of poo, but without much force, leaving her a bit pasted up. I cleaned her when I applied the oil, but overall, I am not optimistic. :(

In contrast to Junebuggy's distress, we had a very pleasant, very surprising gift from Huckleberry the Americauna hen. We found her hidden in the shrubbery on a nest of 18(!) eggs. I also found two more eggs in another nest, so we now have a very full incubator, and a broody hen with a grudge against her nest-raiders. You can read the full story of the unexpected eggs over on Girl Gone Granola.


Behold, our bonanza! :)

Goats Milk, 72 ounces
Eggs, 5 (for eating) 20 (for hatching) :)
Tomatoes, 6 ounces
Handful of sugar snap peas - YUM!