All-Too-Real Reality of the 2017 Garden

     Today, I am going to be one hundred percent realistic when it comes to our 2017 garden.  For many of you who follow us on Facebook, you might have noticed strategically placed photographs throughout the season, but now it comes down to admitting the all-too-real reality of what happened in our garden this year.  

Spring 2017 Garden

      We had good intentions.  

    We ran our meat chickens and turkeys across the garden in the late-fall and early-winter to help turn up the soil, eat down some of the remaining plants and cover crops, and provide us with some free manure where we wanted it.  By spring we had cover cropped sections in buckwheat, put black plastic down to kill any early sprouting weeds, and laid out rows of fresh transplants with landscape fabric and feed bags to help suppress the weeds as the crops grew.  The Mr. would go out a few times a week with a hoe and tiller and make sure the paths were cleared of weeds, as well as in between the plants.  It looked like it was going to be a very successful year of keeping up with the garden, and keeping the weeds at bay.  

     Then life happened...

     Perhaps we should have heeded the advice of "don't take so much on when you're expecting a baby" and we continued to plant the already growing transplants in our garden, swearing that these easier methods will cut down the workload (and they have).  Perhaps if we had wholeheartedly taken that advice the garden would have looked different, the canning would have been more lax, and the preserving of the harvest would not be weighing as heavily as it is now that I am 37 weeks along, counting seeds for next year's garden, and finally getting around to the dried mint from the beginning of the summer.  

We were fortunate that relatives and friends also assisted with
some of the larger canning loads to get them all done, not to
mention my mother who gave up two days to harvest apples
and peaches with me at a local orchard as I fought through
"practice contractions" for eight bushels of fruit.

     Each year we push ourselves to do better than the previous year, and make the most of our yields.  After all we eat from our garden throughout the year to help offset our grocery bills, and can more food than most people would dream of in a lifetime.  Yet, we were not prepared for how pregnancy would effect my body, nor how quickly the morning sickness would set on and last, and how weak I would still feel.  We were not prepared mid-pregnancy for a second batch of meat birds that needed butchered when the smell of wet feathers would turn my stomach so quickly, even though I had been fine at the beginning of my pregnancy with the first batch of the year.  We were unrealistic when we thought that I could keep up with my regular daily animal chores, and quickly found that along with his own, the Mr. would have to pick up my daily chores, most of the housework, almost all the garden work, harvesting, and soon canning.  

     We had tried our best to "power through" as we did each and every year in the past, gradually adding a little more to our plate with each coming year, but this year it was different.  This year the final straw came the day I was getting ready to pressure can chicken stock, and the exhaustion compounded with the heat of everything going in the kitchen caused my vision to black and I caught myself on the counter before I fell and managed to lower myself to the floor, knocking over a few glass pint jars in the process.  I was okay (and so was the baby), but it was then the full realization set in that I just couldn't do a lot of it anymore, no matter how hard we had tried to scale me back in work.  

     Simply put, the compounding of life has caused us to fall behind as it became unrealistic for the Mr. to work 40-60 hours a week, come home and take care of feeding and changing water for the animals, weeding and harvesting the garden, and tend to the baby chickens and turkeys that needed nursing... all before dinner, which he generally had to also make for us as I was quickly becoming too exhausted to safely prepare the meal.  

     All of this boils down to the picture that shows the all-too-real reality of the present state of the garden...

... underneath all of those weeds lies the garden.  The toppled tomato cages we fight to get the fruits off of the tangled vines once or twice a week.  The potatoes that were overcrowded by the weeds, and now lie somewhere underneath a thick blanket of unwanted growth waiting to be unearthed.  The beans that skipped over their rows and overtook the pathways in between, but at least overran most of the weeds along with the pathways.  A random volunteer gourd plant that clings to the Scarlet Runner Beans.  Sweet corn that is only now starting to tassel alongside the tall blades of grass.  Vines hung heavy with pumpkins and squash, creeping ever quicker into the surrounding yard.  It's all there... waiting for us... taunting us.  

     We've yielded over $800 worth of produce so far off that overrun dream, but still there is more.  There is always more to be done, but there are changes on the way too.  There are new dreams.  There's a little one on the way to keep up with amidst this craziness we call life.  There's a new job that takes us away from this place we've called home for over four years now.  There's a new home being searched for with dreams of animals and gardens, and the stinging reality of whether we can actually get everything we desire on a deadline and a budget as we continue our search.  In the end though, we know there'll be a new garden to lay out in 2018, and perhaps... just perhaps... another chance to right reality again and see what beauty lies in a once-again weeded garden.   

A Taste of Family History

     I recently posted a picture of a "beyond cool piece of [The Mr.'s] family history" on my personal Facebook page, and asked our friends and family to take a gander at what they thought it might be without any additional hints or descriptions.  We got some pretty fun answers in response with a washing machine and bread dough trough ranking among the highest.  I will also admit the "giant mouse trap" and "bathtub for kittens and puppies" were rather inventive, but unequivocally wrong.  

     So we're left with the question that everyone now has, "What is it!?"

     It's a BUTTER CHURN!  The refinished churn still has bits of its original yellow paint clinging to the wooden cracks, and it also still rocks gently back and forth on its homemade stand (as the original one is no more).

     From dimensions and overall design, it's believed to be the Davis Swing (Butter) Churn No. 3, which was patented in 1877 by the Vermont Farm Machine Company. There were twelve available sizes in all, which ranged from 4-gallon capacity for at-home use to 300-gallon capacity that was suspended from the ceiling beams of creameries. This particular size (the No. 3) would have an 8-gallon capacity, and includes a glass peep-hole window in the top, and a drain hole on the bottom. With no paddles or plunger inside, the swinging motion of the whole churn back and forth would make the butter instead. To make the butter churning easier, a treadmill could be attached to the churn so sheep, goats, or dogs could act as the power instead of young children. A new churn in 1889 would cost around $8.00 from the company, a folding frame cost an additional $1.00, and the animal treadmill would be an additional $16.00.

Who Needs A Churn That Big? 

     Why a farm family of course, and on my husband's father's side they were all farm families!  This particular heirloom came from my husband's paternal grandmother's family.

     The Mr.'s Third Great Grandfather Moab H. Showalter (1853-1930) had moved to Washington County, Maryland around the spring of 1888 with his already expanding brood of eventually nine children.  Just a few years earlier, the local newspaper had already begun to run ads for the Davis Swing Churn, which was quickly becoming a labor and time saving device.  It would make sense that Moab, his son Amos Tobias (1885-1951), or Amos' son Paul Daniel (1920-2003) would find a use for such a butter churn on one of their farms.

     Moab owned two farms in Maryland, one being 110 acres and the other 120 acres, living in the area of Marsh Pike near Hagerstown, Maryland.  His son Amos would also eventually farm in the same area.   Although Amos mainly sold Stark Delicious, Grimes' Golden, Stark's Golden, Roman Beauties, Stayman, and Jonathan apples, Irish Cobbler potatoes, and oak lumber in the local classified ads, when he discontinued farming at the old Heilman Farm in 1936, he sold off 50 head of guernseys and cattle, at least fourteen of which were freshened at the time. By 1954, Amos' son Paul had the second highest producing dairy herd average in Washington County at 36.3lbs butterfat.  He also sold off "lots of old milk cans" when he rented his farm out in 1970.

     Until we get more clues from other relatives, any of these three men could easily have been the original owner of the Davis Swing Churn that Great Grandpa Paul had pulled out of the old pig pen on the farm and refinished.  Now, we plan to have it grace our own "farm kitchen."  

Never A Dull Moment

     This mommy-to-be (that's right, if you missed our Facebook announcement, we're expecting!) has already played her entire hand of energy cards today, and I've only made it through morning chores. It all started with the cries of a farm cat coming from the shed. Tiger had apparently fallen asleep in there and been locked in overnight. Don't worry, she made herself at home with the free buffet of open feed bags. 

     As I was searching for her hiding place, I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye by the grill. It wasn't Tiger colored, and I didn't think we could have possibly got two cats stuck in there overnight. Had we locked someone else in the shed? 

     Wait... that's not a cat! 

     CRAP! 

     The meat birds got out of their brooder!!!!

     Yup, that's right the meat birds that have been hanging out in their brooder have made it to the age that they should go out on pasture.  We just happened to be 12-hours too late with our plans for this evening, and the birds managed to fly up and pop the top cover of the brooder and four of the sixteen found their way out into the shed... chowing down in the feed bags, balancing on flower pots, and making themselves a nice comfy roost on a pile of pallet boards.    

     This left the now tired pregnant woman, who hadn't eaten breakfast yet, let alone fed anyone else, a dilemma.  How was I going to get these birds back in?  

     I'd move within three feet of them, and they'd frantically fly looking for a safe place out my reach, and pooping whenever I got close enough to grab them out of fear.  Now they were wedged between flower pots in positions that I could not get to them in, clinging off the spokes of a mountain bike, perched on the windowsill, and one almost made it to the rafters.  

     In the meantime, the birds still in the brooder were trying with all their might to once again pop the top and join the escapees in their perceived freedom.  I refilled their feeders and tossed two boards on top of the brooder to try and hold down the screens that covered it.  

     Defeated, I called my husband for a second time; the first time having been to inform him of the situation that I found myself in ten minutes before.  

     "Do we have a fishing net on a big pole somewhere?"  I asked meekly.  

     "Nope, just the ones downstairs... can't you just corner them and grab them?"

     "I haven't eaten breakfast yet, or even touched the rest of the chores, and every time I bend up and down I get more and more lightheaded," I sighed.  "Could I just put a container of feed and water in the shed for them and leave them for when you get home?"  

     It was a last resort for the now exhausted pregnant lady who could hear the farm cats scratching at the door I had managed to tie shut with a piece of bailing twine.  Purrball was adamant that I was way too late with his breakfast.  Even Tiger seemed to want back in because at least then she'd have her free-choice feed sack buffet back.  I shooed the cats away from the door, and completely defeated and exhausted set out containers of water and feed on the floor of the shed next to the brooder.  It's just four of them, I reminded myself as I went out to finish the chores.  

    Here's to hoping the Mr. has better luck catching "just the four" escapee meat birds tonight so they can head out to their new homes on pasture.  There's officially never a dull moment around here.  

Even Pa Went To The Store

Some of the Mr.'s ancestors working in the field.

     "I want to live off the land, just like my ancestors did."  

     Ummmm... what?  In an ongoing quest to be more sustainable, people often turn to their ancestors to find answers (even us).  Thoughts of their grandparents picking huckleberries and hoeing their gardens during the Great Depression, their great great grandparents camping in covered wagons on the open prairie with hundreds of buffalo off in the distance, and their namesakes in a new world carving a life in the woodlands of the east, come to mind.   Yet, there is something we forget, or maybe our idealistic desires tend to ignore or overlook, the simple fact that even Pa went to the store.  

     I know, I know.  It sounds crazy, but the more I think about this whole "completely sustainable" lifestyle many of us would love to have, the more crazy it all seems.

My great grandmother (the little girl) and her relatives picking beans in 1918.

     Think about Laura Ingalls Wilder, arguably the most famous pioneer in America.  She was born just a few years after the American Civil War, and traveled westward with her family towards Indian Territory.  In her very first book of the Little House series set deep in the Wisconsin woods in Little House in the Big Woods, as soon as the crops came in after the season's sugar snow, the whole family piled into a wagon and made the seven-mile trek to Pepin, and they traded at the store in the chapter "Going to TOWN."  Why?  Because even though the Ingalls family were growing crops, Ma needed calico for clothing, Pa wanted tobacco for his pipe, and the family desired store bought sugar (instead of sugar made from their maple syrup) and tea (not to mention candy for Laura and Mary).  

     By the next book in the series, Little House on the Prairie, they were now in route from Wisconsin to Oklahoma.  After settling in Oklahoma and putting up a homestead, Pa left and made the four-day long 'round trip to Independence in the chapter "Pa Goes To Town."  Why?  Because, once again, they couldn't grow everything they needed on the prairie.  Once again, they were after that store bought sugar among the other goods they needed including window pane glass, nails, fat pork, salt, and cornmeal.

     Once you stop and really think about it, the Ingalls family wasn't really living off the land at all!    In fact, as the books progressed, the family became more and more entrenched in the life of towns, and less and less worried about being completely sustainable.  By The Long Winter, Pa Ingalls and the townspeople didn't almost run out of food because they didn't plant enough, it's because the trains couldn't make it through and therefore there was none to buy.  It left me thinking maybe our ancestors didn't want to be sustainable after all.  Maybe they were trying to live a sustainable lifestyle because they had to.  

My great grandmother and two of her brothers feeding the poultry in 1919.

    So here we all are trying our best, striving to live the way our ancestors did, when in reality, they may have wanted nothing more than to the live the lifestyle we are presently trying to escape.  It certainly makes me think.  What do you think?  Did our ancestors desire to be sustainable, or were they trying to be sustainable because they needed to in order to survive?

My great great grandmother with the family cow in 1918.

Keeping History "Currant"

     To me, today seems like a perfect autumn day, with the geese honking as they fly overhead, the clippety-clop of hooves on the pavement as horses pull a harvest wagon up the road, and the young cockerels getting their rooster crow on, welcoming the dawn.  The falling leaves and gentle breezes of autumn are so welcoming that the windows are opened wide, and the first of our autumn decor found its way out before Labor Day.  Yet with all this beautiful weather, there also comes the dreaded word... work.

     The garden has been long overdue for some tlc since August crept up on us, and the harvest kept us hopping.  Yesterday evening we ignored much of the weedy patches and harvests, only pulling weeds and picking produce here and there, and instead started our garden winterization as the temperatures began to dip, and my nervousness began to skyrocket.  Although the temperatures may return to summer and the 90s next week, it's always good to get a head start on winterizing as we never seem to finish it before winter!  ("Last year" we actually put the garden to bed at the beginning of this year.)

     Our project last night was planting some of our fall transplants.  No, not the broccoli and cauliflower.  They'll be tucked into the greenhouse a little bit later.  Instead, we transplanted our blueberry bushes, soapwort and currant bushes that were taking up much of the greenhouse.  Of these plants, the ones I am most excited and nervous about are the currant bushes as they are literally living "family" heirlooms that I am now charged with trying to keep living!  Yikes!

     As history-people it's no wonder that we like heirloom plants, but when my mother asked if I wanted the currant bushes, I almost jumped for joy!  The currant bushes had originally come from my great great grandparents' farm.  

     Curtis Custer Carbaugh once lived a few miles outside of Tionesta, Forest County, Pennsylvania in the community of Nebraska.  A blacksmith by trade, Curtis and his wife Eva May Whitman raised their nine children - Grace, Viola, Floyd, Emma, Everett, Orion, Harry, Dorothy, and George - on the farm that was once considered one of the best producing farms in the area.  Although the farm is no longer in our family, it is still a working farm (unlike so many other ancestral farms in my line) and now called Pleasant Valley Farm.  

Curtis Custer Carbaugh and Eva May Whitman, lovingly known as
"Grandma and Grandpa on the farm"

     My mother received the currant bushes this summer from her uncle, whose father was a son of Curtis Custer Carbaugh.  Unfortunately, once she got them home, after somehow managing to cram them into the backseat of the car along with all their camping gear, she realized that she didn't have a suitable place to plant them.  It took me a whole month to then decide where exactly I was going to plant them as well!  Now they are happily in the ground at the edge of our garden.  I certainly hope they make it through the winter, and next year, we may be lucky enough to get a few currants from them.  For now, the winterization of our garden will continue as I nervously nurse our new plants.  

Do you have any "family" heirlooms in your garden? 

Canning Season

An evening's harvest

     Things are a little crazy around here as the summer harvest begins to come in, and the deep freezes and canning shelves overflow. We've just entered Week 3 of canning season, and as I was putting away some of the newly canned goods (Sweet Pickles from Week 1, and Bread & Butter Pickles and Sweet Pickle Relish from Week 2), I realized something... 

     No, it has nothing to do with the amount of cucumbers we're swimming in. Well, actually, I take that back, it just might. It also has to do with all the cabbage, tomatoes and peppers, and all the not-so-blank spaces on our canning shelves as we expand to can even more of our own foods each year. You see, we're not going to have enough room for all of our canned goods this year.

     I was concerned last week about running out of freezer space after having to dedicate another compartment to chicken scraps.  (Two whole compartments of one of our 15 cubic foot deep freezes are now almost full with vegetables/fruits for the chickens this winter, and before it's all said and done, a third compartment might be added as well to make sure we have enough for them.)  

     Now, with the lack of space for canned goods, some serious rearranging is going to need to take place, because figuring out where to store canned goods is not quite as easy as everyone thinks as this is our year's supply worth of food essentially being "purchased" at one time.  (Take a look at "You Plan To Eat All That?" if you don't believe me.)  

     Some days a weekend "shopping trip" to purchase this year's worth of food seems more reasonable.  I often wonder why it should take an entire "season" to can everything you need.  Why can't we just all jam it into a couple of days and be done with it all?  

Canning weekend of 2015

     Spoiler: Don't do this.  Once a year I get this brilliant idea and jam peaches, apples and tomato products into one weekend in August just to get them all over with.  Every year I come up for air exhausted and swear I'll never do it again.  This year, I've bypassed most of that stage and am making plans for a "relaxing" canning weekend containing all these products again from the fiery depths of my kitchen in August...

     This early summer has been the year of pickles for me.  The cucumber plants are (for once) doing what they are supposed to do, even though we have an outbreak of striped cucumber beetles to deal with.

Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage
fermenting to make Sauerkraut

     So far we have a batch of Sweet Pickles done, with another batch fermenting.  There's Sweet Pickle Relish canned (recipe here), and also a batch of the simplest pickle I can find: Bread & Butter Pickles.  To top it all off, Sauerkraut is also fermenting alongside the Sweet Pickles right now, and I'm about to have to thoroughly rearrange the kitchen for canning season soon as from here on out, it is expected that I will be canning (at bare minimum) one recipe each week until October.  That's at least twelve weeks of canning (and a lot more than twelve recipes worth of things that will need canned)!

     I'm not quite sure how many more cucumbers we'll need this year, so our chickens might get lucky and have some extra cucumbers to pick at instead of just cabbage heads, broccoli, cauliflower, beet tops and radishes.  I'm sure they won't mind.

The Plymouth Barred Rock also pecking at some Watermelon rinds.

In Other News

Did you say food?  Our Delawares are the least picky
chickens I have ever seen when it comes to food.  

     To complete the cycle of chaos around here, the Delawares are begging for their own pasture (and three escaped their run in search of grass when I went to change out their water the other day, so we really need to get their pasture done).  Chicken chasing is not all that it is cracked up to be.  

    With temperatures climbing into the 90s for almost a whole week now, they and the Plymouth Barred Rocks have been getting mud puddle filled runs to help keep them cool, and they are loving it!  They have also been keeping us on our toes as we change out their water multiple times throughout the day and keep an eye on whether or not they are getting heat stressed.  In all the twenty-two chickens seem to be doing fairly well considering the temperatures.

Baling Straw on July 4th before the rains came.  The Mr. is
sitting out there in the tractor, waiting to get a wagon.

     The Mr. has been helping out our landlord occasionally with the hay and straw harvests this year, and my cousin who was visiting from North Carolina and I got to watch everyone try to get the straw bales in before the rains came on the Fourth of July.  The rains, which were supposed to only arrive in the evening, came early (around 2 p.m.), and sent everyone, along with their wagons, running for cover.   Fortunately, we live in the country, and the July Fourth weekend also gave us 18 different fireworks displays, which we watched from the sand mound.

We will also be working on replacing the greenhouse roof
before winter as a windstorm late last week ripped it to shreds.

     As we started to harvest our summertime produce, we planted a late season crop of Incredible Sweet Corn, and are now planning for our fall crops in the garden.  Just this past week our seed starter trays were filled with Winter Dream Cauliflower, Sun King Broccoli, Red Acre Cabbage, Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage and Blue Curled Scotch Kale seeds.   The seeds are currently waiting out the weather on the porch, where I can keep them easily watered, and will hopefully be moved to the greenhouse once needed adjustments are made to it.  Soon we'll harvest the rest of the cabbage and begin planting some of our fall season seeds.

Crops Being Harvested

July: Black Raspberries, Blackberries, Broccoli, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Cucumbers, Herbs (various), Hull Peas, Lettuce, Mint, Mulberries, Peppers, Radishes, Sugar Beets, Tomatoes, Yellow Squash and Zucchini

Upcoming in August: Blackberries, Broccoli, Cabbage, Cucumbers, Herbs (various) Lettuce, Lima Beans, Mint, Oats, Patty Pan Squash, Peppers, Radishes, Sugar Beets, Sweet Corn, Tomatoes, Wineberries, Yellow Squash and Zucchini

Until next time, Happy Harvesting!

Five Years Ago Today

2011 - The college graduate.

     As I attended my brother-in-law's college graduation last Sunday I started to think back onto when I was walking across the same stage five years ago, and it's hard to believe it's been five years now since I graduated from college, and started a new chapter in my life.  Five years ago today I was excitedly graduating with my dream degree in American Studies, and even had a position in my field as an Interpretive Guide at a Colonial American historic site all lined up for me to start after graduation.  Little would I know then, that today, five years since, I would no longer have that job, or any other job in my field (although I still give historical presentations and study a local region here in Pennsylvania, but it's not really considered my "job" anymore).  

     Over the last five years there's a couple of thoughts that I just can't seem to knock from my mind in regards to my college experience, and what my husband and I jokingly refer to as the "most expensive dating service we could find" (as we met in college, but neither of us have jobs in our intended professions today).  Among these thoughts is that unrealistic thought that most of us have at some point in our lives of "if we could go back in time."  Would I let my newly graduating self know what the future holds, or would she think herself five years down the road absolutely crazy?  So, to my newly graduating self five years ago, I can only say, you have no idea what you're getting yourself into, and if I told you, you'd never believe it...

To the Recent Graduate:

2010 - Getting into character
for a lawn party while an
interpretive guide in college.

     Your life is not going to turn out how you think it is right now.  Future You won't be a museum curator or exhibit designer, or even an interpretive guide.  You won't be living your life in high heels, khakis and dress shirts, worrying about how to reprimand politely, but firmly, some tourist trying to lean against a historic artifact, or another who insists that everything is a reproduction so they should be able to touch it.  (Spoiler: museums and historic sites are not generally filled with repros).  Your days of worrying about black snakes wrapping around your arm during a tour, wearing historic garb as the temperatures climb towards the triple digits, and trying to entertain rooms of school children will be short lived.  Instead something that you never thought you'd be in your wildest dreams is going to happen, and you're going to love it.  Trust me.  

2012 - Overflowing my then-
boyfriend's (now husbands's)
apartment balcony.

     Those fourteen tomato plants that you'll put in next year on your boyfriend's patio, along with a plethora of other vegetables to make him feel a little more at home, will turn into rows and rows of tomatoes once you get married.  (Yes, you're getting married!)  Instead of dreaming of an apartment of your own close to work, you'll begin to realize that life in town/in the city is just noisy, and within five years you'll be listening to the banjo of bullfrogs across the way as you tend to your tomato plants, and an abundance of other vegetables and berry bushes, on a four-acre farm you rent.  

2013 - Farm machinery at work in
the field behind the house.

      You won't be driving over an hour (one-way) to work anymore, weaving in and out of tourist traffic and buggies, praying you don't get stuck behind farm machinery.  Instead home will be your job.  Those buggies and farm machinery that you once dreaded getting stuck behind will constantly pass by your new job.  The friendly faces inside them will wave.  And, you will be stuck behind them, at least every other time you run errands during the week, but you won't be in a rush to get past them as now you realize those buggies and farm machinery are just a way of life.  It gives you time to stop and smell the farm fields - yes, you'll actually like the smell of manure - in your otherwise busy life.

2014 - Mini, Whitey, Gravy and
Skunk hanging out in the mudroom.   

     Your busy life will consist of meetings and Scouting events nearly two hours away a couple times a month, and your attempts to get to church (an equal distance away) at least semi-regularly.  To counter all of the time spent away from home, you'll actually become a semi-morning person so you have time to tend to the huge gardens, cats and chickens.  (Yes, you're going to have animals, but you won't consider the chickens pets.  It's really possible.)  They'll be a lot of work crammed into the six days a week you work, as you'll only take care of the necessities on Sunday.  Yes, can you believe it?  Sunday will actually be a day of rest.        

2015 - Bringing in the first deer.

     Although you think you can easily handle all of this extra work and a job outside the house at the same time because it "doesn't sound like much," I'm here to tell you, it's not possible.  Along with the hour of morning chores, there will be hours and hours of weeding your garden.  (You know, that job you hate?)   They'll be dishes that never get done, and you'll actually wish you had a dishwasher, even though you never once used the one in your boyfriend's college apartment because who needs a dishwasher?  They'll be deer to process during hunting season, cats to fend off when butchering chickens, moldy berries and tomatoes to remove from the good ones when the canning runs behind the rest of the work, and your always-queasy stomach will become a little tougher.  

2016 - Five years later.

      They'll be hard times when money is tight and you're not sure how you'll pay all the bills, but each month when you make it through, standing side by side with your husband, you'll have a different sense of accomplishment than you'll ever know walking across that stage today.  No certificate, degree, trophy or award will ever match this sense of accomplishment you have when you nurse a sick animal back to health, rush to save tomato plants that are blowing over during a horrid rain storm (only to right them and have them fall again, but miraculously still produce), or eat fresh produce you preserved from your own garden in February.  Because although you don't think this will ever be the life you will have, let alone want to have, in five years, you won't want to picture your life any other way.  

 Love, The American Haggard Housewife

March Madness: March Update

Spring is in the air and earth.  The fluctuating temperatures of the month of March brought days in the 20s, to days, like yesterday, where it almost seemed summer was in the air as the temperatures climbed upwards of 70.  With the sour cherry tree about to burst forth in white blossoms outside our living room window, it seems our garden should be fully planted, but since March was a month of madness for us, we lost our opportunity to keep up with the conservative families up the way who already have rows of perfectly planted onions and pristine weed-free peas.  Yes, our garden sits a little vacant, as we seem to be too nervous over these fluctuating temperatures (and chance of snow in the coming week) to break ground too early and destroy our crops.  

That doesn't mean, however, that we are sitting on our hands waiting for the weather to warm.  March has brought plenty of life, and some death, around our place.  

In just a month's time the shelves on our indoor seed starter begun to flood with the sight of green goodness.  From cabbages and marigolds, to tomatoes and peppers, and even some herbs along with other types of green, life is certainly coming into the place.  Each year we figure out, a little too late, that the year previous's seed starting unit will end up being too small.  It's a common occurrence we have year after year, and you think by now we'd learn; however, this year we did learn... only the greenhouse isn't done quite yet, and as it is unheated with these fluctuating temperatures, we will still have to wait a little until we can actually use it.  

You may also notice some green sprouts on the floor down there, which is barley and wheat fodder (well more like sprouts) for the chickens.  Using feed grain we purchased from McGeary Organics in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, we had been a little unsuccessful with our unskilled fodder attempts, but after adding some seed starting soil (that the Mr. mixed himself this year), the green sprouts sprung forth, and the chickens love them!

One can hope that our chickens will continue to love all the green.  Even with the fluctuating temperatures, their egg laying has certainly increased.  All four of the ladies are finally laying now, and not just freeloading off of GMO-free and GMO-free/organic feeds.  We ended up with a whopping 91 eggs for the month of March, which is up from the 49 in January, and 54 in February.  The hens seem to finally be coming into their own, and they are still a little over a month shy from being a year old!  

The hens were also introduced a few days ago to the rooster, and the chicken coop and runs opened up so they have access to both sides.  You may notice that I said rooster, and not roosters.  As I had mentioned earlier, March had brought with it some death around here.  From the beginning we recognized that our chickens were not pets, but rather food.  We treated them humanely, spoiled them with grapes and earthworms, and I would even talk to them in the mornings when I was doing the chores; however, two of the roosters had to go to allow the third one to be kept for breeding, and to maintain the delicate balance of life at the coop.  

The roosters decided themselves who the victor would be after two of them took their job of being the lead rooster a little too seriously, and caused injury to each other.  The injuries, mixed with their personalities, made the decision easy, and that night we butchered for the first time.  As I was a kid who grew up in town, rather than the country, this was not an experience I was eagerly anticipating, and the whole tale can be left for another time; however, I would like to leave you with the warning that YouTube videos do not do the sounds of gutting a chicken justice, and I was so glad that it was after dinner.  Weighing in at 5lb 2oz and 5lb 10oz, they were our two largest (and meanest) of the birds who were constantly battling it out with each other and us.  One of the birds had taken a good sized peck out of my arm, drawing blood, when it was first moved into the coop last year, and what we presume to be the same bird, also ended up spurring my mother when she was feeding them one day.  Thinking back on it... why did we wait so long to get rid of them?  

Now all of the five remaining birds - one rooster and four hens - are happily pecking away and exploring in their enlarged coop.  Even as I write this, the rooster is eagerly crowing in the morning.  We added in some extra features, such as hanging produce baskets, and have temporarily enlarged the coop and run to allow them the extra room until we end up with meat birds (whether we get lucky and a hen goes broody, or we have to buy some to replenish the flock).  

On the few "free" days and evenings we had, we managed to get the plow wire brushed down, and the seized discs on the disc harrow free.  Although all of the implements (aside from the plow) still need a little more work to them before they can be used, we are at least one step closer to getting our garden ready for spring planting.  Even our landlord has once-again allowed us use of his rototiller to ensure we can get the garden in the ground when the David Bradley is being a bit temperamental.  With all that has been going on around here, I am eager to see what surprises April will bring. 

Groundhog Day: Will Winter Stay?

"Groundhog Day - Half Your Hay" -  Old Farm Saying  

     It's February 2nd again, otherwise known as time for that groundhog to do his thing, and hopefully proclaim an early spring!  You see, I'm from the bizarre state that once a year uses one of these rascals to predict the onset of spring every Groundhog Day (or February 2nd).  It's an interesting tradition that hearkens back to Punxsutawney Phil (from Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania) in 1886, and although he is a "beloved" groundhog around those parts... here in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, he's really starting to bother me!    There's lots that I can say about groundhogs.  They do this...

Eating my black raspberries... 

    And this...

Stealing my black walnuts...

      And in the end they also... predict winter.  

     Punxutawney Phil is notorious for this as out of the 119 recorded predictions he's made since 1886, only 17 of those times he actually predicted an early spring.  Therefore this morning, I was not holding my breath that the 130-year-old-or-more Phil (yes, they really do claim he's the same groundhog from 1886 who drinks a special magical punch during the Annual Groundhog Picnic each summer that gives him seven more years of life) wouldn't see his shadow, and give me an early spring.

     The day before, the cats didn't seem to be holding their breaths either, and decided nothing good was going to come of this and they should just go about their daily schedules of following me up to the coop, and scratching on trees while I do the chicken chores, making a single file line back down from the coop, and then playing in the driveway because Momma's slow.  Someone has to become king (or queen) of the board pile, and then everyone eats.

     Oh, and it wouldn't be a morning without Whitey pesting poor Gravy thinking she's the Gray stray (that you see on the right).  What can I say?  He likes to defend his territory (and supper dish).  

     Needless to say, through their mud-covered faces at the breakfast dish, they were awaiting spring to come as much as I was, but it's all up to that pesky groundhog.  With baited breath, I awaited the morning prediction from old Phil...

    Through the glare of media spotlights, camera flashes, and smartphone selfies, he didn't see his shadow.  WHAT!?!?  Glad I'm not a betting person.  I guess that means we're supposed to have an early spring folks.  Perhaps I should get out the shovel from the shed and start trenching the driveway and snow banks for the inch of rain we're supposed to have come with our 50+ degree temperatures tomorrow?  Woo!  No more snow, right, right?

     Here's to the dream!  Does your state or country have any strange ways of predicting the onset of spring?  

Too Many Projects, Too Little Time In 2015

     I can't believe it's almost the end of January and I haven't wrapped up 2015 yet.  We ended our 2015 on more rain than I was interested in seeing, and started 2016 on piles and piles of snow.  The rain certainly was a change from the beginning of the year which was especially hard on our electric bills, even harder than our first one here, and the snow piled even higher.  There's certainly been some changes around the whole place as we're entering our fourth growing season at this home in a few months.  Come take the journey with us over the course of the last year:

Scaredy Cat and Purrball playing snowball ice hockey on
the quite icy driveway in February.

     When we started 2015, we had Momma Buttercup and nine of her twelve offspring running around the place keeping the rodents and bugs at bay for us.  Most of them waited for us on the steps and corncrib each time we returned home from a long mid-week "weekend" at my in-laws, and were full of love and energy.  Unfortunately, since then, we have just six remaining: Gravy and Whitey from the first litter, and Blue Eyes, Little Gray, Purrball and Tiger from the second litter.  The rest, being farm cats, all decided to head out across the fields one day, and we have not seen them since.  Perhaps, like Gravy, they'll come back after an extended absence (her's was only a little over a week), but we are not holding our breath, and instead loving on those we have remaining.

     Due to a break out of eye infections that soon spread across all of our cats, rabies shots, and needing to get a bunch of them spayed or neutered, the cats, to say the least, cost us a bucketful last year that we were not planning on.  Our hope is that we can reduce their medical bills and food bills in 2016, but for now I'm ashamed to admit their cost almost topped that of our springtime project...

     By spring we decided to add some feathery friends to entertain the cats... okay, we wanted eggs and meat, but they do certainly entertain the cats!  Seven fluffy chicks in May turned into four laying hens and three roosters who never shut up!  (Their alarm clocks are clearly broken.)  During this time, we raised them from three days old in a makeshift brooder in the shed, constructed their chicken coop on steroids (i.e. a "pastured poultry palace"), dug over a foot down to bury their main run, and we are now presently constructing their tunnel run and rotating pastures.  As of the end of the year, our stubborn hens have given us 81 eggs in all, and we still haven't come up with the time to thin the rooster flock.

     Their coop, and the whole chicken enterprise, cost us a rather hefty sum as well (more so for the fully enclosed runs and all the hardware cloth than the actual structure).  I'll let you guess how much the going price for "farm fresh" eggs is around here, to calculate just why we need 4,813 eggs to break even.

     The garden was another trial that happened to be occurring right alongside the chicken project.  Our 38' by 78' main garden, paired with the less well-kept upper garden and some random patches about the yard certainly kept us in food this year.  It was the first year we experimented with cover crops and mulching, and the chickens certainly enjoyed buckwheat treats throughout the spring into the early summer.  To say the least, things got a little weedy around the place as the season progressed and we tackled our other projects.

     I'm also happy to say, if you don't calculate the equipment purchase into the garden costs, we actually saved money gardening!  Fortunately, when I make my financial spreadsheet for everything we do, equipment doesn't fall into the garden costs!  However, the equipment set us back a little as well...

     To make things a little easier next year we added yet another project to our list: fixing up the implements for a David Bradley Super Power.  The Mr., with some help, got the Super Power running in early fall.  Now, we should be working on wire brushing, painting and repairing all those implements that we'll need for spring; however, we're working on chicken  runs and pastures and...

     ...started yet another garden project as well.  The Mr. really, really wanted to have the greenhouse up before planting season begun in early winter, so he called some of his family members fairly last minute in December and they  managed to get all four walls, rafters, and eleven of the windows installed in a single day.  Talk about teamwork!  If everything goes as planned, we'll at least have some seedlings growing in the greenhouse, even if the seeds are still started on the seed starter unit the Mr. built for us for this past spring's planting.  (Of course, this was the plan, prior to 30" of snow being dumped on us.)

      As the cats continued to vie for our attention, the crops and weeds were growing, and the chickens needed the permanent home put up, we still needed to do something with all of that produce.  For some reason canning season begun in mid-winter for me this year, and continued through until mid-fall (even though there are still things that need canned down in one of the deep freezes right now).  It was a lot of work to put up all of that food, and I can definitely say that in the next couple of days I'll be inventorying what we still have in stock to start making the final adjustments for our 2016 garden.

     The financial spreadsheet wasn't showing black by the end of the year, and I'm going to write that off on "creating a life we love living" by building up infrastructure, and hope we do better next year.  This is the first year of red, after two years in the black, so one can hope that 2016 we won't be seeing red again.

     Yup, can you believe it?  It's almost February of 2016, and certainly time to start thinking about the garden and projects for next year.  What big changes have you seen around your place this past year?

Double Trouble

     Something was up. My husband started looking at the seed catalogs at the beginning of August with great vigor, when the tomatoes were still green on the vine and the sweet corn was still forming its ears. It was unusual, as the last two years it was in early-winter we looked over seed catalogs quasi-together and he mentioned a couple of things he would like to grow, but most of the garden planning had been left up to me and my inventories and figures of how much we would need of certain crops for the coming year. So I shouldn't have been too shocked when one night he proclaimed, "I want to double the size of the garden." 

     I can’t remember exactly what I said in reply to this other then at first silence, followed by the word “crazy” screamed and uttered a number of times, intermixed with other words of bewilderment, outrage and sarcasm. You have to understand that we have a bit of garden space already (more than I feel we can reasonably keep up with). Our main garden is 2,964 square feet, jammed packed with so many vegetables that a rot-o-tiller cannot reasonably fit between all the rows, so we’re forced to hand-weed nearly everything; a proposition we don’t have the time for.  (Even with the help of my loving teenage cousin from North Carolina who willingly gives up a part of her summer vacation each year for us, we still fall desperately behind.  I think she would enjoy a summer vacation where weeding the garden is minimal and us doing craft projects is a higher priority.)  

A less weedy angle of our main garden in August of this year, around the
time the Mr. started to page through the catalogs.  

     Then, there’s the upper garden, another approximately 1,500 square feet, lined with blackberries, black raspberries and elderberries intermixed with cat nip, spearmint and bee balm (and who really knows what else). The outside edge is overrun with berry bushes who are constantly trying to encroach upon the lawn, but the inside is completely coated in weeds. We exterminated most of the pokeweed in the area the previous year (which we’re fortunate of), but there are so many other weeds, it makes the entire upper garden a mess.  (Note: Taking a second look at that space estimate, with the amount of berries that encroached and firmly planted themselves in the lawn, my guess is 1,500 square feet may be a bit of an underestimate.)  

The Upper Garden before the first round of clearing the brush in the autumn
of 2013.  I hate to say it, but two autumns later it still looks like a hot mess to me.

     Then we have to add an additional 30+ square feet of gardening space in various parts of the yard (not to mention the flowerbeds that are running rampant) to contend with. All together, that makes over 4,500 square feet of garden space we have, in varying degrees of maintenance. That’s all I could think about as my dear husband calmly told me that he wanted to double the size of the garden (note this is the main garden’s size he wants to double of course), with an open seed catalog beside him and a laptop screen showing a strange variety of wheat from the Seed Savers Exchange. 

Actually, we used all the cars like pickup trucks as
sometimes things like the root ball still attached to a blue
spruce for my father's flowerbed just wouldn't fit in the
back of an old Corolla.  We drove over an hour like this
from the garden center to his house, only to find out that
a passing rain shower was going to come through before we
could get it unloaded, so we weighed down a shower
curtain with bricks to protect the car's interior.  Since,
believe it or not, this is actually our good car.  Oh, and
well I'm telling you unbelievable things, apparently the
garden center has seen crazier things done.

     “Seriously?!”  I near screamed as the wheat on the screen caught my eye.  I wasn't quite sure I could believe his idea or his reasoning behind the insanity I still clearly saw. “You want wheat? We have no equipment!”  I was frantic by this point.  Keep in mind, at the time, we borrowed the rot-o-tiller from the landlord for the garden so we didn’t have to hand weed everything, the hand-me-down weed whacker had, and still has, a leak in it that seemingly gushes twice as much gasoline as you pour in (so we’re borrowing one of those from him too), the secondhand riding lawn mower, which has a lawn cart (thanks to the in-law’s Easter Bunny) doesn’t always like to start quite right or stop even when you downshift frantically and steer desperately trying to avoid hitting the car, and the hand-me-down pickup truck was given to us as a gift (and promptly broke down the following week on my husband’s way home from work, but it is once again fixed as I fortunately have a fix-it friendly husband). To say we’re lucky having so many people willing to help us with insane dreams is actually a serious understatement, since without them we'd be stuck back in the days of hand-weeding the garden and attempting to use a Toyota Corolla like a pickup truck.  To say we have no equipment other than a handful of gardening tools (Christmas, birthday and other gifts to us) and borrowed and secondhand power equipment would be a painful reminder to sore muscles that get overused from March to November each year.  (See Our New Farm Equipment as an update to his fix for this reasoning I had.)   

   My reasoning, no matter how frantic, did not seem to dissuade him from this ridiculous idea; not immediately, in the first week, or the subsequent ones. By the evening, his list of crops for the garden took up an entire column of college ruled notebook paper, and then it doubled. Skeptically, I added a few of my own crop ideas for good measure (mostly ones we already had seeds for, or could be multiple season crops like rhubarb and huckleberries that might seemingly be less work?). My husband had other ideas: “We need more dried beans if we don’t want to buy any throughout the year… and some gourds to make into dippers and birdhouses would be good… and we can get strawberries! I can just taste the strawberries now.” I’m pretty sure by this point my face must have twisted something fierce. I could see dollar signs, blood, sweat and tears, and here he is dreaming not only of additional animals someday like pigs and turkeys, but an expanding garden for the upcoming year!  A near future project!  I must have married a crazy man… 

      But as I write this, he must have married a just as crazy wife. 

      After weeks and weeks of strong debate, protest and irrational reasoning trying to convince him of the dozens of possible faults in the idea, here I sit as he gathers stakes and a measuring tape to map the edges of our new enlarged garden to begin prepping for spring.  To say it's a large dream of his is an understatement.  To say I'm not completely on board with the whole idea of what almost 7,500 square feet of garden space will mean for the already-limited vacations, nights to rest, and overall limited breaths we're able to take during spring to autumn, is well, an equal understatement, but his determination to make this work and prove to me that we can handle and need the extra garden space is slowly starting to turn me.

Measuring and staking out the new edges.

     It could, in the end, be a great idea, or it could go down in a pile of dirt as a complete failure, but it's up to us to figure that out, with what I'm still foreseeing as potentially the longest gardening season of my life.

     As we glanced towards the newly-laid out garden that evening, at what could be the beginning of a very long next year, we exchanged our final comments on the subject for the evening.

     Me (with a sense of bewilderment): "Geeze, look at the size of that thing!  We're absolutely crazy, aren't we?"

     The Mr. (with an equal sense of assurance, optimism and adventure): "Think of all the fresh produce we'll get next year.

     Me: "Think of all the work..."