mushrooms

We got our first snow fall of the season. It was only an inch or so, but just enough to make everything pretty for a day.  Living in the north woods really makes me appreciate the winter. I love the wood stove heat, the smell of French press coffee, bacon in cast iron and wood smoke. I enjoy splitting wood and the soothing rhythm of the maul going up and down CRACKing the wood. My first couple of fires this year I got too hot and got the house up to 79 degrees. I'm back into my fire building zone. What I love most of all about winter, no snakes and no bugs. As I mentioned before this year was particularly terrible with mosquitoes. 

I taught my first class through community education this past week. It was titled DIY Holiday Gifts. I taught students how to make sugar body scrub, lip balm and soap making basics. Its all part of my effort to find alternate sources of income that still allows me to stay home with my son. I prefer giving homemade gifts at the holidays, birthdays and baby showers. I also really enjoy getting homemade gifts. I won't lie, a gift card to the local coffee shop is really great too. I really hate going to the mall in search of that perfect gift, fighting crowds, traffic and worst of all listening to that mall Christmas music. Since I live in the woods now, the closest mall is an hour away so its even more annoying to go. This means I start compiling Christmas gifts in October. I bake/can items, make soap and try out making new crafts.

This year I have been playing around with home made table center pieces. This one I made out of aspen logs and drilled out the centers for tea lights and my crystal collection. My next one will be made out of birch logs, the white color of them look more winter like.

A friend of mine gave me some shiitake mushroom plugs that she got for free last March. These looked like the wood plugs you get with Ikea furniture with white marshmallow foam all over them. We have no idea if they are still good or not, so we decided to do an experiment. It is not the time of year recommend for shiitake mushroom plugs to be tapped in from what I have been reading. Since all the plugs are free we will not be out anything if they don't grow, plus we are getting our technique down for spring. I had Travis cut down a small oak tree that was growing in too crowed for a space near our house.

My friend came over one Sunday morning with bloody Mary mix, vodka and all the accompaniments. We had a beverage and got to work. We drilled holes the size of the plugs and tapped in the plugs with a mallet. I'm not sure if the some of the plugs were rotten or what, but some just flattened right out instead of going into the log.

After we got all the plugs in I covered them with melted beeswax.

I moved the logs into the woods with walk in access from my house. Part of growing mushrooms is that you need to water the logs. I do not have running water outside of my house, so any watering I do in the spring will have to be by hauling 5 gallon buckets of water. This is why I kept them so close. I'm hoping for a big snow fall and wet spring. When you look at nature mushrooms grow on logs with out being watered by a human so I might end up doing a total hands off experiment to see what we can get.

Enjoy the silence

It's that wonderful time of year again where the days are cool and the bugs have died off.  The wood shed is stocked and the snow plow has been put on the lawn tractor. We have been hunkering down waiting for winter to set in. Fall has been very mild so we have only had to use the wood stove a couple of times. The trees are just skeletons out my window now and without the rustling of leaves it is silent up here. No more summer creature noises in the background, just deafening silence. I can hear the gunshots off in the distance for small game hunting.
We have been looking for ways to cut down on our grocery budget. We thought about alternate sources of meat. Since both of us grew up in the city, our diet growing up was store bought meat with venison once a year from my uncle. My dad is famous for frying eggs and venison into a tough leather like material that was terrible to eat and that made me loath it.  Our neighbor had us over for dinner and served us wood smoked venison and trout. It was wonderful, I even took seconds of the venison. He also took my husband grouse hunting, they only got one grouse. He gave the meat to us. It tasted like iron to me, but I did have a head cold. My husband killed and skinned two squirrels. The first one we cooked on the grill, first seared then wrapped in foil and low and slow. but the kid distracted us and we forgot about it so it got over done. I thought that tasted like iron too. My husband said he loved the way the fat tasted. The second squirrel got simmered in water to make a stock, then the meat was shredded and turned into a squirrel stew that my husband gobbled up. I don't care for the way the squirrel smells but I'm trying to keep an open mind.

Squirrel stew

Raw squirrel before the grill

With the dryer weather and colder air I made my first ever batch of whipped body butter. Its made by whipping shea butter and meadow foam oil and essential oils. Its really great to put on after a hot shower and mine smells like cherry and almonds.

My friend gave me about 20 pounds of apples form her tree. I was busy making and processing crock pot apple butter with Bourbon and vanilla. I made my first batch of apple sauce.

All the squash I got from the farm I volunteer at and a friend who owns a pumpkin patch.

This past Halloween my son and I entered the pumpkin carving contest at our library. I came in second place and my son won first place for his age group. I also entered the pumpkin cooking contest but came in fourth place.

One year!

We have officially lived on our 5 acre homestead for one year! We stayed 100% debt free this past year too. One full year of not owing anyone anything feels good. Work is a lot slower up here for my husband so we had to attempt to stick to a budget. We also managed not to kill each other living in a tiny 400 sq. ft. house over the long Wisconsin winter. (last winter was pretty mild.) Now its autumn and we have to start preparing for winter all over again. This is what the seven trees look like that we cut down last spring to make room for our micro orchard.

My friend Sara and her husband Jody came up for a visit. Jody went wild and started splitting logs and drinking rum and coke. A couple hours later he had everything split and ready to be stacked. This wood will not be ready to burn until about February or later.
We moved the split oak from last year from its curing spot to the new woodshed. This is one oak tree worth of wood and a small aspen. It doesn't look like much but it was a full trailers worth.
We also bought a trailers worth dry wood and will probably have to buy one more. Moving and stacking wood is still hard work.

Finished job. One or two more trailers worth is needed.

My husband got cleaning the stove pipe out from all the soot from last winter's heating. It wasn't as dirty as I was expecting. He did end up looking like Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins by the time he finished.

I killed my first squirrel. I saw this red squirrel in my bird feeder, he was climbing up my siding and clawing up my screen then taking a flying leap onto the bird feeder. I was baking cookies for the Halloween bake sale. I grabbed my .22 and shot the shit head. Next time I think I will try eating squirrel.

Since it cooled off I have been able to start making soap again. This time I made a Tea Tree & Lavender soap. It smells wonderful. I played around with colors this time. I used a purple and sparkly light green. I made plenty of lip balm too.

Some friends of mine and I did some painting. I painted the birch trees in my yard. I'm happy with the way it turned out.



















Fall mushroom hunting has been super fun. I went to a women's mushroom foray hosted by our local mushroom expert Tavis Lynch. 67 women came and between all of us we found 303 varieties of mushrooms. A few edible, 1 that has psychoactive properties and the rest non edible. I also went on a mushroom walk with my son's class and lead a spore print activity with the kids.

The Foray offered wine pairings with mushrooms. It was really cool.

My husband finished drawing Werepugs #2.

 I write it and he draws it. It's about two adorable pugs Frank and Potatoes, on the full moon turn into blood thirty killer midgets that go around their town murdering.

On a sad note, my pug Ewok passed away and got buried.

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.