Vintage Home and Farm

It seems like time flies by faster and faster. Our daughter graduated from both high school and community college in June. We are so proud of her! June was filled with graduation-related activities and celebrations to recognize her hard work.  Very soon after, we took a week-long family vacation in nearby Discover Bay. Since the resort was situated right on the bay, we brought our boat along and went crabbing. Our daughter even drove the boat for a while.  Below is the crab we caught in the first trap we pulled in. The crab were fairly large and most of the ones we caught we were able to keep. The bottom shelf of the freezer is now filled with fresh Red Rock and Dungeness crab. We like to live back the crab while still on the boat and then when we get home we clean it and freeze it raw (see my previous post about how to live back crabs ). Below are a couple photos from a night at the resort eating some of the crabs. Since we were dipping the crab in butter (vegan butter for me...

Nine months ago, we offered to become foster parents for the Olympic Peninsula Humane Society. There weren't any foster opportunities then, but we stayed on their list in case they needed help. Then, in mid-July, we got the call. They had a momma cat and three kittens for us to foster. The momma was found in a barn when she was pregnant, and now that she had given birth, the kitties needed a foster family to take care of them. They would be with us for 8-10 weeks, and then the Humane Society takes it from there. It has been a great experience, of course, except I forgot how crazy kittens get when they are big enough to crawl out of their pen. They were only in their pen for about two weeks. Since then, it's been total wild chaos in The Corral, which is the room of the house that they are in. Luckily we have a big enough house that it's not too overwhelming. The kittens love to race like bandits around the room, climbing up the furniture, clawing, and chewing on everything. ...

The blueberries are ripening! We've been picking handfuls of them every day for the past week, and yesterday we picked a small bowl full.  This year our harvest is going to be on the small side since our plants are still young. In a few years, we'll hopefully have a big enough harvest to share some and eventually begin a u-pick farm. The deer have been very interested in the blueberry plants, but fortunately we put netting up that keeps the deer and birds out.  We purchased our netting from American Nettings & Fabric Inc.  located in Ferndale, Washington.  They provide giant rolls of netting for commercial farms.  The netting we selected is a durable white hexagon mesh that is for multi-row purposes and has a 10-year life expectancy.  The size we chose is 17 feet wide by 328 feet long, allowing us to cover 5 rows of blueberries.  We used t-posts to hold up the netting.  On top of each t-post, we zip-tied pieces of foam to make sure that the to...

An opportunity presented itself and we took the plunge: we're starting a blueberry farm! This wasn't an overnight decision as we've actually spent a number of years considering and calculating and planning what it would take.  But the decision to do it now was sudden.  We hadn't even prepared our blueberry field when we bought our first 100 blueberry bushes!  The 3-year-old blueberry plants thankfully aren't root bound, and so they are doing quite well hanging out in the garden enclosure where they are safe from the deer.  Meanwhile, we are working diligently toward getting the blueberry field established. With the disruptions we are all seeing in the food supply chain, local seems to be the best option for food security.  We've been doing all we can to grow our produce right here. This year we expanded our garden and also invited a friend and their family to join us with a patch dedicated to them.  We might even have enough to sell produce to neighbor...