Canning!

As Summer comes to a close the veggies are coming in at the road side stands, farmers market and the farm I volunteer at. Since July I have been going once a week to a community farm to help harvest vegetables that are donated to the local food pantry. The farm is owned by a 76 year old man there are 3 other volunteers that are retired and me. They have the hardest time finding volunteers which surprises me. We are only there for an hour or two once a week. For my time I get to take home a bag of produce. With all this produce I have been busy with my new electric pressure caner. I made sweet corn relish, beets, salsa,  corn in water & sriracha sauce.

With the salsa I start off my charring all the veggies on the grill then I peel them for salsa.

The Sriracha sauce turned out great! I added more garlic than the recipe called for. Chop up all the chilies and the garlic, cook it down until it no longer smells like raw peppers, add in the vinegar, fish sauce, honey and tomato paste, run it through the food mill and can into jars! It's super easy and quick.

 My blackberries came in and I had a bumper crop this year! I made smoothies and a blackberry pie. The pie was less than wonderful, it was all seeds and too crunchy. I make a leaf lard crust and that is by far the star of the show. I will never make a pie crust again without leaf lard.

 I made a special nerdy treat for my husband and son. Chocolate Han Solo frozen in carbonite. next time I will use white chocolate with gray dye.

                                                                                                                                                        

 With the Blackberry harvest I was able to add in my last fruit to my Rumtopf. I have cherry, strawberry, raspberry, blueberry and blackberry. Now it will sit until Christmas. I really love the bright magenta color it is turning.

The mosquitoes have finally thinned out since the flood puddles are drying up and the temps at night are down in the 50s- high 40s. We made a list of all the projects we need to get done before winter. most of which is splitting wood to heat with and getting fencing around the fruit trees.

WE HAVE RUNNING WATER!! My husband got the sink in the kitchen and the bathroom plumbed in. No more heating water on the stove top to do dishes. Now we need to rent a trencher and get the gray water system hooked up. I can't wait to not have to constantly dump the gray water bucket outside. Big projects like this are slow going, we can only work as fast as we have money for.

 

We have been going on many mushroom walks.  We have found several edible mushrooms including lobster, puffball & oyster mushrooms and hundreds of non edibles that just look cool. We have been spore printing caps and just examining them. My son loves finding mushrooms.

The three of us took a relaxing summer vacation to Madeline Island on Lake Superior. I got to pick blueberries in peace and quiet, all alone. Sitting in silence with the smell of pine forest and picking berries was truly wonderful. I'm not sure how many people actually get to sit in complete silence once they have children, I know I never do. I'm pretty sure everyone takes it for granted.  My son loved riding on the ferry from the mainland out to the island.

crazy busy

WOW! This past month has been busy with projects. My husband and our neighbor got the lower siding completed. He measured and ordered the siding and I spent a few weeks painting all of siding, trim and door. I thought it would be best if I painted it before we hung it, so we wouldn't have to go up the ladder again to paint. I am scared of heights and get dizzy on a ladder, then go into a panic attack, so that would not be an option for me. Our neighbor is pretty cool, he taught my husband how to measure and cut the siding. It was quite an adventure for them, the power was out for six hours so they had to run a tiny saw off the inverter from the jeep battery, cutting was a very slow process. They had to fight off wasps, mosquitoes and a bat even flew out at my neighbors head, he managed not to even fall off the ladder. Before and After pictures:

We want to do something different for the top bedroom part we were thinking shakes or something that would add some texture.

We had several terrible storms over the last month. One of which dumped NINE inches of rain in one night and flooded our front yard, tore apart part of our driveway and flooded the low area by the mail box. We still have standing water down there that smells terrible and is hatching millions of mosquitoes. I actually saw a small cloud of mosquitoes swarming around, living in the city I have never seen anything like it before.

To top things off a snake got inside our jeep. ICK! The power went out so I went outside to start the jeep and hook up the inverter, I opened the Jeep door and there was a snake on the drivers side floor by the gas pedal. I shrieked and ran back inside and sat by candle light. I. HATE. SNAKES!!! I had my husband go out the next day to inspect the jeep and he could not find the snake. I can not bring myself to ride in the vehicle until I see the snake being removed dead or alive. If you would like to see how we power our house off of our vehicle during a black out check out Steven Harris' blog. We followed his directions and it works perfectly. "How to Power Your House from Your Car with an Inverter" http://www.battery1234.com/

We hook the inverter up to the battery run an extreamly long extension cord from the jeep to the house. The cord is long enough so it will reach upstairs to power a fan and the noise machine so my son can sleep.


















My husband built a woodshed so we can start the process of splitting and stacking all of the wood from the trees we cut down last winter. He has never built a structure before and neither have I. He read a book that had building plans, purchased all the lumber and watched some videos. He did it alone one weekend and I'm very impressed with it. I know it might not sound like much to some people, but when you have zero building skills and you actually build something its pretty amazing. All of our wood we cut and split last summer for the well drillers to get their truck in, has dried and cured and is ready to be burned this winter. We still will buy a couple trailers full of wood just to make sure we have plenty to make it through the winter and for sap boiling in the spring.

My son has been eager to help our with chores too. He is a toddler so he gets bored after about 5 minutes but at least he is taking an interest. He has his own set of tools including a wheel barrow. He likes to help move wood and debris, he pretends he is a dump truck.

I have been busy in the kitchen. I made a batch of refrigerator pickles and lacto-fermented pickles. I also made a batch of my fermented kimchi.

 I made my first fruit pizza and it turned out extreamly good. It really was a perfect chilled treat on a summer day.









I also took a crack at making Australian meat pies. The pies turned out delicious, not sure what an actual Australian would think, but my family gobbled them up. I started with a steak stew and added shredded cheese. Then I made a short bottom crust and used puff pastry for the top crust finished it off with an egg wash and baked.




I purchased an electric pressure cooker/caner. I got rid of my giant pressure caner when we moved because I did not have space for it. This electric model does not make as many jars but its perfect for when I make large batches of soup or roasts, I just can a couple pints of the left overs and put on the shelf for day I'm not in the mood to cook or to give as gifts. It can be used as a pressure cooker as well, it makes perfect hard boiled eggs and sweet potatoes so far.

tree removal

February: We started cutting down poplar trees to open the canopy for our micro orchard. We are going to plant 4 apple, 2 pear and 2 cherry. Maybe more in the future. 

Delimbing and bucking a tree is a big job. My husband does all the work with the chain saw then I come in and start piling up the branches and get the big logs loaded up in the wheelbarrow and move to the splitting area. My son gets his toy chain saw and helps too.

  It takes us about 1.5 hours to get tree down and cleared. (not including splitting). Then we go inside and eat lunch and take a nap......Well I do. I will say that cutting and hauling trees in the winter is far superior than when it warms up. 

When its hot out its the worst job ever, you are pouring sweat and getting attacked by armies of mosquitoes.

Six poplar trees came down and stumps cut down, and brush removed over several weekends in February, March and April. The beginning of April we rented a wood chipper and chipped up all the slash. We were going to need mulch for the trees any way and around the property if we can afford to get the raised garden beds in this year.

The end of March we preordered our trees from an organic local nursery to save 35%. We wanted to add in plum trees but we simply ran out of money. We chose cold hardy trees for zones 3 to 4. We have Haralred Apple, Prairie Magic Apple,Snow Sweet Apple, Frostbite Apple, Parker Pear, Summerscrisp Pear, Monetmorecy Cherry & Evens Bali Cherry.  We studied the forest around us and looked at the way the trees are in alignment. Nothing is in rows so we decided to plant our small orchard this way too. We staggered the trees, no perfect rows like you would see at commercial orchards.

We were able to fit 8 trees, one boy and two adults in our jeep. Everyone and everything got home safely. We soaked our bare root trees in water for several hours before planting them. We learned something new! Our soil is very rocky and gravely with millions of interwoven blackberry roots. While digging the holes we would have to stop and axe apart these unwanted root systems to make room for the bare root trees.  Digging eight holes was very hard, exhausting work. We were only going to do half the trees and save the other half for the following day but I checked the weather forecast and there was rain in the evening so we muscled through and got all the trees in. We do not have any outdoor plumbing or irrigation so the rain is exactly what we needed for these new trees.

The Pug Life in front of the wood pile that needs to be split.

The weeks following the planting were extreamly dry so we had to haul 5 gallon bucket loads of water to the trees. All of the trees have leafed out except our Frostbite Apple. The branches are still pliable so the nursery said to wait a fee more weeks to see if they leaf out, they still have trees that haven't leafed out.

A friend of mine gave me cuttings of raspberry and currents. We have hundreds of blackberries on our property already so these raspberries and currents are great addition. I can wait for everything to start fruiting in a couple years and I can make rumtopf, The tradition of the Rumtopf in Germany goes back centuries as a way to preserve fruits of the season in booze. I have never made it before but it sounds like it would be delicious. 

A really cool find on our property Oyster Mushrooms. A decaying poplar tree along the driveway started popping out oyster mushrooms after our epic down pour of rain. 

Maple sap boil

Maple syrup boiling season has come to an end. For being my first year I consider it a huge success. I can say that moving forward, I would like to invest in a better boiling set up and possibly a small structure to put it in. I feel like a lot of heat was lost in my open air boiling set up. I chose this set up because I wanted to invest as little money as possible in case I hated the collecting and the boiling of the maple sap.  I purchased a hotel buffet steam tray for $25, 6 cinder blocks for $12, 1 grill grate for $14 TOTAL $51.

It took me about 6 hours to boil down maple sap into syrup. The majority of the boil was done outside. Once the sap evaporated down to half way I would add more and repeat until all the sap was put in the pot.

 

After that when it was evaporated to only a quarter pan of liquid I would get my stock pot ready and filter/strainer and strain it off so it could be moved inside. Its a good idea to strain it now while its hot. There ends up being all sorts of debris such as bugs, leaves, ash or weird bits of grass.  

 

When I got it in the house to the stove I set the stove on high to get a rapid boil. I kept a close eye on it and checked the temp every so often.  

Once it reduced in half again,I knew I was getting close when it started to foam and boil up. I had to adjust the heat and stay right near it,checking the temp more often. 

 

The temp finally reached 7 degrees beyond the point of water boiling. I removed it from the heat and filtered it again through a thicker filter. This process was slow and annoying. Some people use a hydrometer to measure to figure out when the syrup is done. Mine was still packed away in the beer brewing supplies and I was too lazy to dig it up. 

 

 

Now it was time to get the clean sterilized jars ready. I poured the syrup into the jars and placed the lids on. At this point the whole house smelled delicious. 

 

I was talking to an old guy at the coffee shop he was telling me about his sap operation and how he moved up to this area in the late 1960s with just a motorcycle and a tent and was living off grid for many years with his family. A few days later I went back to the coffee shop to find he left me a note to call him asap. He gave me 40 gallons of sap!!! He said he boiled down enough for the year and wanted me to have it. My son and I drove over there and picked it up. He gave us a tour of his homestead and his boiling operation. He likes to build stuff from found objects or junk. He really inspired me to think outside of the box on what I can create without buying everything brand new. Also it was a great lesson on social capital. Meaning its very valuable making connections with people and building a network. Not only did I score 40 gallons of sap but this man offered to mentor me and answer any questions I have.