Smokey summer sunrise
What a long hot summer! And now we have smoke!
We have one more calf to be born for 2022. Pippi is getting very close to calving so we will be done well before the cold comes.
We had a full summer with milk co-op people coming and going each day, and 2 teenagers helping Monday - Friday mornings with everything from gardening (yes, lots of weeding as well as grazing the berries!), irrigating (surveying water progress, opening and closing valves), milking and feeding bottle babies, putting microbials on the fields, and cleaning out the silo.
Adding microbials to fields to support organic soil health
A friend wanted to purchase a truck load of grain so we agreed to use our silo to store it. We now have a good supply to decide what to do with!! Maybe broiler chickens or more pigs next year…we’ll see!
We have been sending beef every couple of weeks, so the freezer is well stocked. Call or email to come pick up your year's supply or enough for the week depending on your freezer!
Grain being delivered to our silo.
Our milk co-op has gone well. We will finish the co-op at the end of October. Any of you who have thought about joining you are still welcome.
The membership fee of $197 is not so bad if you get extra milk!! Let us know if you want to get milk to freeze to take you through the winter (yep, probably need to go buy another freezer!! BiMart has a 7 cu.ft. freezer on sale for $199…).
Making a supply of cheese to age or freeze is another reason to get extra milk now. Soft cheese (cream cheese) and mozzarella freeze well. Parmesan, cheddar, and gouda store well if they are waxed and kept at about 50-55 degrees. A root cellar is great, or some folks I know just use the crawl space under their house!!
Our blackberry bushes produced beautiful berries this year.
As I harvest and put up the bounty of food I enjoy these memories from my Aunt, now 95 years young!!
We had that old cellar with the sawdust walls that was well insulated and dark where we stored literally hundreds of quarts of home canned fruit.
We had LARGE crocks where we had cabbage,carrots(some) and potatoes. We always bought Irish potatoes.
I don't know when we bought a freezer..I have a feeling it may have been early 1950's. Of course we had our own bees for several years.Apple butter took less sugar than jelly so that is what was featured more than jelly.
Dad grew lots of grapes and we all drank grape juice, bottled in all sorts of about quart sized bottles. You may still have the bottle capper. It was screwed onto a board maybe 6"x7" For all the times I used it I should remember better.
We had several fruit trees but I don't think we had apples. Too wormy even then. We could get good cull fruit that we made cider from. I can remember them in the bed of the pickup, filled with water and Dad brushing them all with a broom.
We did cure some bacon using some kind of curing salt and there were government bulletins with good recipes.
Corn had to be pressure cooked but fruit was canned in the copper boiler on the wood stove.
Dad made a lath trivet for the quart jars to rest on. On the heat and wood carried in from the wood shed!
Pigs getting their fill!
Picking peaches with my brother Carl
Farm breakfast with my brother Paul
Swimming in the reservoir with Claire and Peter
August Farm Tour
Our sunflowers in bloom!