Yard-long beans and sweet corn

The crazy yard-long beans are ready. Last night we ate our first sweet corn, and although it wasn't as big as store corn, it was very sweet. We also got another silverline melon. This has been such a better year for the garden than last year. Last year we got lots of nice squash and huge pumpkins, but this year everything is sweet-tasting--and there are homegrown tomatoes, too! Last night I had to make an emergency tomato salad, because they are piling up already. It's nearly time for tomato sauce.

The little blueish ear of corn is the dwarf Blue Jade corn. I think we were supposed to wait longer to pick it, but it was very tasty anyway.

Blackberry Ice Cream

We made blackberry ice cream yesterday and it turned out very nice. It's not so hard to make your own ice cream, particularly if you have an electric ice cream maker--although it kind of takes the fun out of working for the treat.

The recipe was:

2 cups of berries

2 egg yolks

2 cups of cream

1 tablespoon arrowroot flour

1/2 cup of honey

We doubled the recipe and it ended up making about 3 quarts. So far it has seemed to store well and has not turned to a frozen rock in the freezer.

First the berries must be mashed. My recipe said to put them through a food processor, which really mashed them up and made the ice cream a pretty purple color, though if I was to make it again I would either strain out the seeds or just mash by hand with a potato masher.

Then the eggs must be separated. Put the yolks into a mixing bowl and beat them up a bit. I save the whites to make meringues. When I make this again I'll add an extra yolk because I think it would make it turn out a little better.

Then add the cream to the eggs and mix them together well.

Next measure the honey and arrowroot and add it to the bowl, along with the mashed blackberries. The honey flavor did turn out rather strongly. The recipe had called for maple syrup, but we didn't have any, so perhaps it would have been a better choice of sweetener, if you don't like the flavor of honey.

Mix everything very well, pour into an ice cream mixer. I think every mixer is different, but for ours you surround the ice cream with crushed ice and salt.

Tomatoes

Sorry, I have to brag about the tomatoes. It's only because last year was such a dismal year for tomatoes, and mine all suffered and died tragically (and I was SO looking forward to tomatoes!).

The little cherries are Snowberries and Matt's Wild Cherry tomatoes. The orange one in front is a Dr. Wyche's orange, the three striped ones are Hillbilly Flame, the one in the back is a Japanese Black Trifele and the pinkish ones are German Strawberries--I think.

Also pictured is a golden-brown Poona Kheera cucumber, three little Richmond Green Apples up above, a yellow Silverline melon (yes, the melons are sweet this year!), and a sweet yellow stuffing pepper in the front.

Rabbits

A neighbor/friend gave us three meat rabbits, including their cages and everything. We couldn't believe our luck with getting them (Thanks Katie!!). So far they just kind of sit around in their cages and eat.

Summer pickles

Here are some pickles I've attempted so far this summer. The top ones are cucumber pickles. First are two pints of dill relish, which I have not tried because they are still fermenting. The large one is dill slices and the small jar on the right is an experiment with sweet pickles. The slices turned out a bit salty. I have not yet had a success with cucumber pickles, for some reason.

The jars below contain watermelon pickles, except lacto-fermented. The thing I thought was a citron was actually a green watermelon, but I sliced it up and pickled it anyway. I'm still sweeping the seeds off the kitchen floor, where they all showered down when I sliced the thing open.

I could find no recipes online for lacto-fermented watermelon-rind style pickles, so I just made it up. Most canned watermelon pickles have watermelon rinds, lemon, cinnamon, cloves, vinegar, sugar and maraschino cherry juice. I adapted the recipe to green watermelon, lemon juice, cinnamon and cloves, rapadura, whey and sea salt. We tasted them yesterday, and they were good.

Blackberries

Here are the blackberries I picked yesterday evening (about 30 minutes worth of picking--there are just so many this year!) with a couple jars of preserves. Today we are attempting blackberry ice cream. We have the eggs and cream for it already.

We butchered a bunch of roosters on Monday. However, Steve is still with us, after being exiled for awhile in the hospital pen while his comb and wing healed (he was attacked by something a while ago--probably a raccoon).

Here he is pictured as he is transfered to the Salatin-style coop full of 20 young Barred Rock pullets. He was happy for the change, to say the least.

He is such a handsome little rooster. His comb is huge and has a very interesting shape. I really love the Silver Spangled Hamburgs, they are just good chickens. All of Steve's babies have also proven to be very clever and vigorous.

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Milk!

Isla is finally weaned, and 5 1/2 months of age. This is seriously long-termed nursed for baby cows. We had wanted to wean her earlier, only Ethan was out of town every week for a month and she just jumped out of the fences we had up. We finally put up top boards and barbed wire to keep her in. She's a huge calf. This is the look calves give you when they're finally weaned.

So now we have milk again! We've gone without milk for about two months. It's been hard. We actually had to buy milk, despite having a milk cow and milk goat who are both lactating. All my cultures were starving.

Between yesterday and the day before we got four gallons of rich, creamy milk--not the watery stuff Honey was giving before (they know to save the cream for the baby). The cream is in the hind milk, and as you milk it into the pail it has a rich yellowness to it. I think I will make some butter, once we are done guzzling quarts of milk to make up for not having any. I have some Fil Mjolk culturing in a cool place, and kefir on the counter. I will try some yogurt today, if I have time. How beautiful milk is!

Berrying time

Our blackberries are ripe! We've spent most of our free time this week picking and picking. We've gotten two and a half gallons so far. There's jam cooking down on our stove and I'm thinking of trying a blackberry chutney ferment or something. And blackberry mead, of course.

The children and I thought of a nice picking rhyme:

Knick knack, berry black

sharp and curving thorn,

Let us pick and let us pass

And let not our clothes be torn.

How our garden grows

Here is a picture of the garden. I didn't include our bean pole failure, however. It looks weedy, but that's because we're trying a natural farming method where you just ignore the weeds. This is where the melons and cucumbers are growing, propped off the ground by old pallets.

Here is a little homegrown bouquet with the day's harvest. We have cucumbers, Roma beans and squash. Luckily it is a here and there harvest still, just meeting our daily needs with a little leftover for pickling.

Here was from yesterday--rabbit food, baby corn, squash and cucumbers--and a citron. The citrons are taking over the garden. We didn't even plant them, they just showed up. I'm thinking of making some lacto-fermented watermelon rind-style pickles.

These are the Tlacolula pink tomatoes--not pink yet, obviously. The tomatoes are all big and green, and we are just waiting for them to start to ripen.

A red amaranth. I planted it near the cucumbers to give them something to grow on.

The flowers I planted actually grew and bloomed this year! I am so please to see how pretty they make the garden.

Here are Picotee cosmos. I grew them in the winter garden and loved how pretty they are.

This is a "Memories of Mona" cosmos. I really love this color.

Our corn is so tall this year!!!! We are so amazed/ surprised. The tallest sweet corn I've ever grown in Florida was only two feet high, with little ears only an inch long with maybe 2 or 3 kernels per ear. We planted this corn in a spot where the goat shelter used to be. All winter long they sat in their shelter, eating hay and pooping.

Our first summer harvest 2010

Today we got milky oats for milky oat tincture, 2 Ronde de Nice squashes, a peach, tomatillos, a Benning's Green Tint squash, a green tomato that I accidentally picked early, a cucumber--presumably one of the Parisian Pickling cucumbers, and an assortment of lovely beans: green Romas, curly green Sultan's Crescents, Tanya's Pink Pod, Royalty Purple Pod, Beurre de Rocquencourt, Yellow Pencil Pod, and Dragon's Tongue--yellow striped with purple. They are so beautiful. I love my garden. Where else can you get that variety?

The garden is better than ever this year. Our corn is actually higher than 2 ft, which is the highest corn I'd ever grown in Florida until now. The squash, unfortunately, was planted in some new ground that isn't very fertile yet, so it's on the edge of death at any given moment. I don't mind--we had a good squash year last year, and despite that we already have 2 round zucchini.

This year looks to be a good tomato year (I'm crossing my fingers). The whole tomato/eggplant/pepper thing just seemed to work out this year. I started them earlier, bought organic starting soil and had a gro-light. They are loaded with green tomatoes of all shapes, and we are just dying for them to start turning color.

We caught a wild rabbit!

For a couple weeks now we've been seeing a baby rabbit in the garden. One of us would startle it and it would dash and hide in the tall oats, rye and barley cover crop. Yesterday it ran straight towards Ethan and he caught it with his bare hands! So THIS rabbit isn't in the garden anymore, at least. It was so cute. I've never seen a wild baby rabbit this up close before.

New babies!!!

The babies are here! This one we called Chocolate. She looks like a little Ellie. We are so proud that Ellie had twins this time. We've been feeding her kelp and dolomite and good minerals, along with all the forage she's getting--and it made a difference! She'd only ever had one kid before.

Ethan wanted to show off that the babies were girls. We are very happy to have two more future milkers!

We let Ellie eat her afterbirth so she can get back the good things in it.

Here are the babies getting their colostrum. It is very important that they get colostrum as soon as possible after birth.

Here is how we found them--Chocolate had just been born and was still all wet.

Here is little Chocolate again. She is the friendliest.

Farm kids and ruminations on herd life

I so love that my children get to spend time out with the goats and the animals and the outdoors. I hope that it will give them a deeper understanding and appreciation of the world and of life.

There is something about sitting out with the sheep, goats and cows that makes me feel more human. I love sitting by them watching them eat and forage or chew cud. They come and nibble on me, smell me. I'm their leader, I lead them to plants they like and hold high branches down for them to browse. They belong to me, but I also feel a sense of belonging to them. They are my source of food, of life, of survival. I have never felt so safe, so welcome, or so communal as I have in the middle of my herd. I watch them and see their interactions, their personalities, and how they are reassured by my presence. They bleat and call after me when I go. They accept me in a way that I have never felt around other humans. At the same time, I can tell what is different about me, what sets me apart, and makes me feel glad to be a human.

Spring and and Easter spread

Some of the winter garden survived. We still have lettuce, collards, carrots and parsnips. I also have been collecting wild sheep's sorrel. I've been reading Masanuoba Fukuoka (whew, I hope I spelled that right) and was inspired by his writings about the seven herbs of spring and the seven herbs of autumn. I think that if I could pick seven herbs of spring for North Florida, I think I would pick sorrel, wild garlic, cleavers, chickweed, smilax, wild mustard and betony, except that leaves out lyre leaf sage, poke, violets, wild lettuce, oxalis and spiderwort.

I gathered these greens for our dinner one night, and it struck me as being Eastery in the old sense--the eggs and rabbit food sort of way.

The blueberries are blooming! At least the earliest varieties. We have several different varieties which bloom and fruit at different times.

Bees!

A few weeks ago we attended a beekeeping workshop with the Urban Homesteading project. Neil Lorenzini taught the class, right next to his beehive, which is located in a nice old Gainesville neighborhood. They whole time the bees were just calmly going about their business, ignoring us. We built a top-bar hive, which looks like a wooden cradle with thin pieces of wood as frames. Popsicle sticks are glued in a groove on each frame to help guide the bees, who draw their own comb. This helps with diseases because the bees draw smaller size comb.



This weekend we got our bees, and they are happily buzzing about, visiting the blossoming cherry and plum trees. Something about having bees makes me feel settled down out there somehow.

http://anarchyapiaries.org/

Isla

Isla has really grown up. Here is a photo of her nursing beside Honey.

Isn't she a HUGE baby? I couldn't believe how big she is. I hope she becomes more friendly before we have to milk her.

The Summer Garden 2010

Ages ago, back in January, I started my eggplants, tomatoes and peppers. This year I didn't try mixing my own potting soil and I had a heat lamp and a cold frame and the seedlings actually survived and grew!

This past weekend we planted our summer garden. I saw among the starts that survived and were planted:

Dr. Wyche's yellow tomatoes, Roman candle tomatoes, Amish paste tomatoes, cherokee purple tomatoes, Tlacolula pink tomatoes, yellow pears, Aunt Ruby's German Green tomatoes, German Strawberry tomatoes, Matt's wild cherries, black cherry tomatoes, white wonder tomatoes, snowberry cherry tomatoes, purple calabash tomatoes, fish peppers, ancho peppers, sweet yellow stuffing peppers, chocolate peppers, fehrozen paprika peppers, Ashe county pimento peppers, louisiana long green eggplants, Listada di gandia eggplant, and Rosa bianca eggplants.

I am so hoping our melons do better this year. I am particularly looking forward to the Delice de la table, the early silverline, prescott fond blanc and the Charantais melons. We are experimenting with 3 different ways of growing and trellising the cucumbers and melons this year. It really is a relief not to be gardening for other people this summer because I don't feel so pressured to succeed. Whatever we grow we'll eat, and hopefully there will be lots and lots!

Our dog Belle

After we sold Java (the donkey who wasn't very happy with us. We didn't have time to pay her enough attention and the treats were not forthcoming enough. We had expectations of her being a guard animal, not a pet, but luckily she was bought by someone who LOVES donkeys, and I'm sure she will be infinitely happier there) we had no one to guard the goats, but as chance would have it our mail-lady raises goats and Great Pyrenees dogs.

So we went to her farm and picked out a puppy, who was named Princess (Rosie still insists that we call her this) but we renamed her Belle, after Belle and Sebastian.

When we first had her in with the other animals there were mixed reactions. Honey wanted to kill her and the goats got together in a little clique and flapped their lips at her. Nougat and Ellie were even doing head slides. They didn't approve at all. The sheep warmed up to her first, probably because she looks like a sheep (big, white and fuzzy). Everyone has mostly gotten used to her, except Honey, who stares at her disapprovingly as she chews her cud and Ellie, who picks on her.

Soon after Isla was born she and Belle became fast friends. They are always charging around after each other. It is so funny to watch because Belle is playing like a dog and Isla is playing like a calf and they are not quite sure what the other one is doing. We just hope that Isla stops trying to mount Belle when she gets bigger, since she is already larger than the dog (that's how calves play). They also lick and groom each other when Honey is being milked. Honey would NOT approve. When Honey is away and Isla is lying down chewing her cud Belle stands over her like she is protecting her. It's very sweet.

I'm not a dog person but I love Belle. She is polite and doesn't jump up on people and she is a great guard dog. Even the tiniest little sparrows aren't allowed to land in her paddock, and if a crow or large bird flies over she runs after it barking her head off.

The Calf is born!

Honey had her baby!!

It's already been about 3 weeks since the baby was born. We were glad Honey waited until the weather warmed up a bit. It was a little girl calf. She was about the size of Nougat when she was first born--a huge baby. Honey did fine, though, and knew exactly what to do.

The calf is light brown with a few white spots. She is fuzzy and soft with funny licks of hair. She has a little white splotch on her side that looks like the letter "I" so we called her Isla (pronounced eye-la), a name meaning island or stream of water, since she is a Jersey cow. She is very, very playful but shy of us. She's been playing with Belle, our new Great Pyrenees dog, who we have yet to photograph and do a post on.

Honey was kind of a pain at first, but now she has settled into the routine of milking and punctually moos at me from the gate when she knows it's time for her evening milking/treat.

We've been milking twice a day and getting about 2 gallons a day. We've got our kefir grains working on a half-gallon right now, and my Fil Mjolk (Swedish buttermilk) culture is doing great. We also made clabber, which is where you just let the raw milk sit out in a warm place (above the stove) and it sours naturally with it's own good bacteria and enzymes. Most people who drank milk a hundred years or so ago in this country drank clabber. It was only recently that we drink sweet (unfermented) milk. The reason the baking powder brand is "Clabber Girl" is because people used to quick-leavened breads by using clabber or sour milk and baking soda.

The clabber turned out to taste somewhere between the kefir and buttermilk. It was very good. My children drank the whole quart in one day. When you let it clabber when it is fresh and at a warm temperature it gets nice and sour. Older milk will taste bitter.