Vintage Home and Farm

  We had a busy weekend filled with farm activities. This past week, we took care of Patch the donkey while his owners were on vacation. He's a sweet animal. But it did mean a few extra chores every day. Everyone helped and we even managed to get his stall all cleaned out on Saturday before his owners returned. I've spent many hours in the garden, planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting. We also weeded around our hundred or so blueberry bushes (that was a terrible chore). Yesterday, I saw a giant orange and black bumblebee on the blue borage flowers. It was the biggest bumblebee I've ever seen. It was drifting from flower to flower, just like the smaller bees. Above is the best photo I was able to get, but it doesn't do the bee justice. I mean, he was ENORMOUS, the size of four regular bumblebees.   My husband helped me hang a vintage goose tea towel rack my sister gave me ages ago. We had to put a couple of anchors into our lathe and plaster wall, which is why I ha...

One of the questions that I get asked from time to time is how we preserve our harvest.  When we first started preserving food, even before putting things in the freezer, we chose to can as much as possible.  We started off pressure canning, and then later on, I learned how to water bath can as well.  Today, our food preservation includes not only canning and freezing but also dehydrating and curing food. Above, you'll see some of our home-canned food and most of our teas and herbs stored in this hutch that was built by my father-in-law, Richard. We've got both herbs we foraged and those we've grown, dehydrated, and stored in glass jars in the upper part of the hutch. On the countertop, tomatoes are  ripening from our summer harvest. We've also got a tub of quinoa that we harvested and winnowed a while ago. And, of course, in the ceramic jar are bones for our dog, Mojo.  Finally, the wooden chicken holds medicines and supplements for the chickens, ducks, cats an...

The past few weeks have been busy here on our little farm.  We added three female ducks to our mixed flock last fall and with the arrival of spring our male ducks suddenly realized they are male ducks. Those big bad boy ducks have been chasing the female ducks unmercifully, and sometimes they even turn their attention to our chickens.  I started putting containers of water up on the tree so that the chickens can climb up there to drink, which gets them away from the bad boy ducks.  Fortunately there are lots of climbing spaces in their chicken run so that they can get away from the ducks. One funny moment happened in the chicken coop the other day.  Three hens were spotted trying to lay an egg in one nest.  They have many other nests to choose from, but they all wanted the one on the corner. Our garden is filling in.  That's garlic there in the image below.  There are about a thousand heads and bulbs of garlic growing out there.  Every evening I'v...

It's been a few weeks since we had snow, in fact it was on the day of the Winter Solstice (December 21) that it snowed.  The snow was very slow to melt on our property and temperatures lingered down in the low to mid 30s for a week. I took photos at that time of our garden and neglected to post them.  As I was looking through my camera roll this morning, I realized these photos are worth sharing.   I didn't really understand until just last year that certain cool season crops overwinter. This year's fall and winter garden is an experiment, as we are curious to learn how well all of these veggies will do outside on our property.  Our weather here tends to be in the 30s most of the winter, and we'll also get some temperatures in the 20s in late January and throughout February.  So far, the veggies are hanging in there! Lettuce is one of my favorite cool season crops! It's so quick to bolt in the hot summer sun and it also tends to get bitter as the leaves get...

Finding time to harvest and preserve every day is challenging, but during this time of year it's our goal to carve out a bit of time in the schedule each day to do so.  In order to take advantage of all the food growing in the garden, as well as to make sure we have home grown food to last us all year, diligence is required. Doing a little bit each day helps ensure we don't become overwhelmed.   When we first started preserving food, we didn't know what we were doing.  Canning initially seemed to be the thing to do, however, canning is very time consuming. We've come to realize how much easier it is to freeze food and how more nutrients are saved by freezing rather than canning. We still enjoy having a portion of our preserved food as canned for the sake of convenience and because we have limited freezer space.  But at least half of what we save nowadays is either frozen, fermented or dehydrated. I wanted to share with you the ways in which we have been preservi...