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!

Pro-GMO or No-GMO? The Search For Animal Feed

"How much feed do you go through?"
"About 100 pounds every two weeks..."

     Yikes!  You can see why this conversation from a few days ago is prompting a post...  A 50lb bag of feed would cost us about $25 every week.  Of course for the individuals we talked to, it was a mere $7 to $12 later, and they're on their way for the week.  The substantial difference in costs becomes a difference by choice, but as we're finding out, one that bears higher and higher price tags.  Thus, we are stuck, once again, in the search for a "cheap" GMO-free feed option in our area that won't cost us an arm and a leg.

     You see, we're stuck with these prices because of the fact, scratch that, the belief we have that GMO-free feed is better for our animals.  We can't prove that it's better for them, but we can't prove "regular feed" is better either, and it seems the argument on both sides of the spectrum is balanced with untested truths that in the end could really go either way.  (And, by "regular feed," I mean the feed you can easily pick up at every feed store between here and eternity that is assuredly laced with who knows what.  Sad that "organic" and "GMO-free" has to bear a title and "chemical-enhanced" feed is left to be the new norm.) 

     We're not married to GMO-free or organic in our own lives, but our opinions are slowly evolving, all due to a bumblebee.  You see, a few months ago I was outside just as the sprayer came down the fields behind the pine trees.  Our tree block appears to block us from most of the spray of the neighboring fields (whoever put it in, may have planted it for that very reason, or as a wind break, which works pretty darn well too!).  That's when I saw the bumblebee come flying in, well more like kamikaze dive bombing from the field to the sidewalk.  On the sidewalk, it buzzed around in a break-dance fashion, unable to regain itself, but trying desperately to fly, then it was still.  It died on that sidewalk, and so did my realization that GMOs don't truly effect us.  

     If GMOs are modified to have the same effect on "pests" as pesticides do, then that little bumblebee was the first of many that are effected in our area.  (And so is the farm cat that ate it off the sidewalk before I could stop him.)  We are actually so effected by the use of GMOs and pesticides in our area that for two years now, I have not seen a single honey bee in the approximately 4 acres we maintain.  Yes, there are a beautiful variety of butterflies, bumblebees, carpenter bees and mud dauber wasps, but not a single honey bee.  I hate to even spray the carpenter bees that hole up in the barn and shed because if I eliminate the "bad insects," I'm seemingly eliminating the only pollinators that are still hanging around the garden.  So they stay, and we continue to have produce in the garden.  

     (Side note: For those of you who are on the "well the cat ate the bee and he didn't die so obviously GMOs didn't effect him" stance, here's my theory.  The cat is not the same size as the bee, so therefore the same amount of poison wouldn't kill him that killed the bee, but if he eats enough bees, and mice, and birds that have all had that same poison in them, wouldn't it build up over time in the cat and therefore kill him?  Now transfer that to a human model:  The first GMO, the Flavr Savr tomato, to hit grocery store shelves in the United States was in 1994.  Since then, there has been a battle over whether or not GMOs effect livestock and humans because of the built-in pesticides in them.  We are the guinea pig generation.) 

     Also, if you subscribe to the belief that "we are what we eat" and "don't feed anything to an animal that you, yourself wouldn't eat," you can see the boat we are now in, and sinking slowly...

The above video, The Organic Effect, shows a family of five who were tested on a "normal diet" and an organic diet for pesticides in their bodies.  Disclaimer: The video was produced by Coop, a Swedish supermarket chain, that is pro-organic diet.  

     We currently drive an hour, one-way, to a feed store that offers GMO-free feed, passing by well over two dozen other feed stores that are closer to us that offer only "regular feed."  I've contacted feed mills, only to find that most of them in our area only have GMO-based supplies because that's what the farmers are growing, and others that won't mix amounts in small enough batches for us.  (We currently don't have a rodent-free location to store bags of feed that is not the house, so behind the recliner in the living room they sit.  I'd say about 200lbs worth is the maximum I can jam back there without it being blatantly obvious that there's feed bags in the living room to everyone that walks through our door.)

     We're researched how to feed a variety of animals on pasture or home-grown crops, but both of these lend two more problems - space and season - into the equation.  As we gear up for winter, I know our feed bills will rise as we don't have the surplus garden crops to feed the animals.  Yes, we have two deep freezes, both of which contain buckets of frozen surplus garden crops specifically for the animals over winter, but no matter how much space we'll allot for the surplus garden crops in the freezers, it will never truly be enough to provide them a well-rounded diet year 'round.

     So, I write this to introduce those of you who don't subscribe to the belief that GMO-free is better for animals the difficulties we have in attempting to search and pay for it.  Keep in mind some basic conversions for smaller animals on an all-feed diet that we've found as you make the choice that is right for you:

For those of you who feed a GMO-free and/or organic diet to your livestock, how do you keep the costs down?  We'd love to hear from you!