Vintage Home and Farm

It's time to bring out our Halloween decorations, which include orange and black pillows, pumpkins, black kitties, and giant spiders. It didn't take long to put everything in its place. We thought we'd share a few photos and give some updates on how things are going at Vintage Home and Farm. Above, the Jack O' Lantern treat bucket is one Paul carried every Halloween as a little boy. You can also see Gray Guy, our elderly kitty boy, who followed me around as I took photos. Loki kitty also trailed after me, then hopped up on the chair to pose. Below is one of my favorite decorations: a picture of our daughter on her first Halloween, wearing a pumpkin costume. Mojo the farm dog, below, also followed me around for the photos. As you can see, she recently had a haircut. Mojo loves to sleep on the couch, and is known for tossing pillows this way and that as she settles down. Thankfully, all our furniture is quite old, so we don't mind the animals being on it. No sense buy...

About two weeks ago, we picked as many apples as our ladder could help us reach in the old apple tree. I then set about making apple pies, which I froze. I also made and canned applesauce, apple pepper jelly, and apple cinnamon jelly. The two kinds of jelly I made using apple scraps. Then came the apple cider. Paul helped me bring the cider press and apple grinder into the kitchen, which I then cleaned thoroughly. We find it easier and more sanitary to press our cider in the kitchen rather than outside. This time of year, there are too many hungry wasps around to be able to press cider outdoors. Above is the grinder. We bought the apple press and grinder in 2019 and have pressed cider every year since. We bought both from Pleasant Hill Grain, located in Nebraska. The grinder is a Weston apple and fruit crusher, and the press is a Maximizer 36-liter stainless steel fruit press.  Of course, before we could grind up and press the apples, we had to quarter and clean them. I always cut ...

Last summer, we were overwhelmed with the harvest (as usual!), and so rather than canning our sour cherries at that time, we just put the pitted and washed cherries into the freezer, with thoughts of making sour cherry jam sometime during the winter months.  Well, that time has come.  Today I pulled out one of the bags of frozen sour cherries and made jam. In addition to the two bags of sour cherries still in our big freezer (above), there is another big bag in our kitchen freezer.  Plus the bag that I just made into jam!  So many cherries.... Usually I make jam using Pomona's Pectin since it requires a lot less sugar, but today I discovered I didn't have enough of it in the cupboard.  But I did have some Ball pectin that says it's "Low or No-Sugar Needed Pectin".  I hadn't tried this before and don't even remember buying it, but I must have because there it was in the cupboard.  It hadn't even been opened.  Most excellent , I thought, and proceed...

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...

There are numerous old fruit trees on our property, including apple, pear, cherry and plum. The trees' enormous sizes and moss-covered, gnarled branches suggest they are likely at least 40 and maybe up to 70 years old.  Each year since moving here, we have been blessed with fruit from all of these old, beautiful trees.   Yesterday, it was time to harvest the apples and pears. A few of each had fallen to the ground to be consumed eagerly by the deer.  So I took our ladder out there with several buckets and began working my way around each tree, avoiding spider webs (there were several with enormous spiders on them), and using a fruit picker (one of those wire baskets on a broom  handle).  There were only 22 apples on the apple tree, but all were giant-sized.  The pear tree was loaded, however, and generously gave us about 75 pears this year.  I brought the fruit inside and put the two ginormous containers in our mudroom next to the buffet cabinet t...

We were clued in by the deer that it was time to pick our apples. Mama deer was standing on her hind legs knocking 5 to 6 apples down at a time so all the baby deer could feast. To check and see if they were ripe, we ate an apple that very night, and sure enough, our tart and juicy apples were ready to harvest. So I got out there the next morning and picked all the apples from the tree. We are excited this year to make apple pie filling, applesauce and apple cider!  First step today was to make the apple pie filling, which I decided to put into quart jars for water bath canning. I ended up using about a third of the harvest to make 7 quarts of apple pie filling, which is enough for 7 pies. That should leave plenty of apples for applesauce and cider.  Paring the apples is a tedious chore and one I prefer to do with a knife so as to remove all of the tough bits of core.  I soaked the apple slices in a citric acid and water solution to keep them from browning. Here is a link...

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...