Spring stillness

The house smells like lemon butter cookies. This is the newest batch of soap curing. I hope it suds up as well as is smells.

  I found a use for that lard in the freezer from our pigs. Traditional soap making is such a fun endeavor. Albeit, a bit frightening when you have to don safety gear, I love following the process from start to finish, one part chemistry, one part following directions, two parts waiting and a pinch of creativity brings some excellent results. And so useful!

  Bill came out to see grass for the first time. It's februrary and I'm not freezig cold. The grass was tall at the end of the year and I didn't mind. It's almost hay-like now, but our new little lamb still sampled it all the same. Murray, his mother on the other hand just followed me around on a shakedown for some grain. 

  Soon there will be so much to do, but for now I will be happy with what little sunlight and warmth these early spring days yield as I plan with precarious patience at the growing season to come. 

Groundhog Day

I love Groundhog Day. Not just the movie, but the holiday as well. A giant ground squirrel is indeed the perfect harbinger of spring. And a shadow is such a telling predictor. It's beautiful.

This is the time of year when winter starts to feel like that bit of sleep in between true sleep and trying to be asleep. Just when you think you might be asleep, you realize you aren't and that frightens you into complete awareness.

Just when you settle into the frigid Ohio cold rituals of scraping your car, putting on woolen socks, scarf, coat, hat, gloves tucked into sleeves and high boots to fight the snow, somehow the weather hints that winter might be just a dream. With eyes half closed, you walk out and the wave of realization falls upon you that it's not cold enough for 2 pairs of long johns. Maybe you were just dreaming.

This is the time when baby goats and lambs appear.


There's nothing quite like the promise of adorable little screaming creatures that make you want to get up early and put your boots on and brave the cold.
I can't tell you how many mornings I've gotten up early just to stare at ewe sheep, fat bellies sticking out uncomfortably underneath winter wool coats, chewing hay as they stare right back at me like they got up early just to see how I was doing that morning as well. They have that blank look like, what?



Exhibit A:

What? How are you doing? You look a bit pudgy with that giant coat on too.

 

This winter has been spring. I'm not sure when the leapfrog of seasons happened, or if we even had a winter but perhaps that's why I enjoy getting my weather predictions from a marmot. I've been doing winter cleanup in a light sweater, which I quickly lose when I really get moving.

The greenhouse still stands through it's first official winter. And I actually read my first Elliot Coleman book (ok, first two chapters) and quickly learned that my frustration with the lack of light isn't an isolated incident but rather a shared frustration of gardeners trying to extend the season.

He explains, you don't garden all seasons. You just figure out how to harvest all seasons. Growing happens when the sunlight allows for it. After that, you just protect your food until you are ready to eat it. Ahh. I see.

 

So now we are in this odd limbo of weirdly warm weather, but not enough light to do anything with it. Pepper and I have enjoyed it though as Frisbees still fly, even when daylight is less than 10 hours a day. And as for getting on the boots to bundle up and check on the sheep, I guess when it's nice out and I'm out all the time, the lambs just happen.

 

 

And when they happen on Groundhog Day, you can't help but name the new little one Bill Murray.

 

 

Storing up for the winter

The wind shifted direction. The dark is creeping in slowly and I don't have much time after I get off work to go outside and get some things done. The summer time in Ohio is great for both weather and the stretching of the daylight.

So like the slowing squirrels scavenging in the lawns, I am trying to put back enough to keep me fed and busy for the winter.

The first thing is, I got out the dehydrator. 

The joy and burden of gardening in season, is the bounty all at once during the growing season, and then the months and months of freezing cold when nothing is growing.

 

So after CSA finished up, I started packing the dehydrator with everything that came from the gardens. I've been focusing a lot on herbs for tea, salad dressings, soup mixes, and spice blends. I have kale rough chopped and in there too. Jason worked up the best paprika ever by dehydrating a bunch of red peppers and then grinding them up really fine. I had no idea how many peppers it took to make a pinch of paprika!

 

While I like almost anything that we are drying, I'm most excited when the whole house smells like tea herbs.

 

While I love freezing, fresh veggies full of water take up a lot of space and use energy. Dehydrating maintains their vitamins while making them easier to store. And bonus when soup season comes around as the flavor punch that dried herbs and veggies adds is a whole new dimension to your favorite recipes.

 

So out from the dehydrator come these great ingredients straight from the garden. I have been putting them in deli containers and labeling them so I know what ingredients I have from our gardens for our spice and tea blends.

 

While I love it for cooking, stripping thyme off the stems is incredibly time consuming. Perhaps that's where it gets it's name?

 

 

My mountain of deli containers is growing and spreading into mason jars, gallon freezer bags, and whatever else I can store things in and label.

 

Once the garden is put to bed, the greenhouse should be coming into production with our cool weather crops so I will have fresh things to try all throughout winter.

 

 

 

And certainly nothing warms up a dark winter evening quite like friends, a cuddly dog or cat, and a hot cup of homegrown tea.

 

The pineapple sage and lemongrass is ready to come out of the dehydrator and stored. Back to the garden for another round. Next up, harvesting oregano to combine with dried meyer lemons, garlic, and shallots for a nice greek salad dressing. Can't wait for recipe perfecting on that so I can share it with all of you!

Modern Barnraising this sunday!

Modern barnraising party this Sunday!

It's finally here. The plastic is ready to be stretched on our 30x72' greenhouse and we need more hands to help! Come by at 1pm this Sunday as we stretch out and stretch on two layers of plastic to extend our growing season to almost year round.

We started last fall with the initial marking of the corners. You need to make sure that your house will be straight or else nothing will work.  

Then in December, as the snow started to fly, we realized that this might be another rough Ohio winter. We tried to make sure our hardware didn't all freeze to the ground, but once the blanket of snow came in, everything was covered for weeks. 

Corina drives the posts in with the carrot canoe in the foreground

Jason finishes up the other side

Then we started laying out the bows for the top. No idea what we were doing so it was a bit of a puzzle, but fun.

The ducks checked our work often on the way to the creek

Grandma also checked our work.

She needed to make sure Jason wasn't doing it wrong.

Then once the growing season hit, we rushed to fill the gardens, get the hops trellis up, put vegetable oil on the apple trees to keep down the bugs, and make sure that all the animals were on fresh grass and well fed.

Now is the time to finish up this project as we start preparing for another Ohio winter. Hopefully this one might be a bit brighter, warmer, and greener. Stretching plastic at 1 (wind permitting) and potluck at 3pm. Volleyball will inevitably follow....

Hope to see you there!

Toby the foster dog love strawberries... a flipbook

Toby says, more please!

Plant sale may 17th 2015

It's the day before the plant sale. There are mountains of things to do on my list. And here we are hiding out in the fish barn next to the mushroom logs, watching the rain.


But that's ok. This is ohio. We relish the rain when it comes as I ponder if the morels will sprout after this cool refreshing rain. I wonder if the rain will soak down through or new strawberry towers. And if it will be on and off tomorrow.

My new foster dog paces. He finds some goose poop and does a taste test, which is gross but means he is taking care of this ragtag flock. He sniffs in the woods and then circles back. And I wonder if his yellow lab face  hides some deeper Anatolian shepherd blood. No chickens killed. No goats agitated. Just nose to the ground and protection mode activated. We will see.

So mowing is out today. We are going to run from the fish barn shelter to the pavilion for a minute and then to the greenhouse to label our little seedlings for tomorrow. We will see what the weather does. We will be out tomorrow, but if the weather doesn't cooperate, there's always next week.

Sketches of spring

I got a new sketchbook. It's a small investment for the world of possibilities it holds. The first few pages are quickly getting filled with line drawings of bunnies and different logo letterings. I'm working on a label for the goat milk lotion my sister has been perfecting. And I like drawing bunnies as they are an expressive yet playful subject matter. I try to draw my dog, but if it's even slightly off it looks terribly wrong as my companions face is so familiar to me that anything else seems bizzare.

Today I am going shopping with my friend B. She's picking me up for what will surely be a very girlie day driving through Amish country to buy dirt and pots and veggie baskets and oil for lotions. My list today is a bit long, but I'm excited to work through it and work you enjoy never really seems like a chore. 

I would like to put another Csa bed in today. The early season always starts out slow so I try to get as much in the ground as possible in hopes of filling the baskets with deliciousness early. The late season tomatoes and squash always fill the baskets easily but the early greens and roots always seem to start so slow. So today should put more onions in the ground and some broccoli romanesco as I'm always trying to get those beautiful fractals to grow. 

I also have some carrots in the ground from last year in a rainbow of colors. While I don't imagine they are still tender enough to eat, I am going to process them to put their nutritional value to use in a lotion by shredding, dehydrating, and infusing them into an oil. Waste not want not. 

And the mushroom logs we cut last week are ready to be innoculated, all 100 of them, which is not an easy or quick task. 

So perhaps my list might be a little long, but I figure if I start with the carrots, I'll at least cross one thing off my list that shouldn't take too long. (Oh how I love the food processor!)

The marginal night weather has the florecent lights back on their timer with the tender tomatoes in the house again. But they are looking very good from their short time in the seed starting greenhouse and we should have quite a nice selection for the plant sale this year. 

Alright, enough if my lounging around. It's Saturday and spring. Time to get something done!