Vintage Home and Farm

We absolutely love home canned tuna and smoked tuna. Every year, my husband would go out fishing 50 miles offshore with several of his friends, and it wasn't uncommon for him to bring home as many as 10 large tuna that we would then can and smoke.  Since we moved, however, it's been a couple years now since he's had the opportunity to fish offshore, and as a result he's been considering whether to simply buy fish for this purpose. On Wednesday afternoon, my husband called me from work to let me know that he'd just arranged to buy 50 pounds of freshly caught albacore tuna from a local commercial fisherman.  The fisherman was going to arrive at our door in a few hours, and so I put together the cash to pay for the fish. The fish we were purchasing was already cleaned and loined.  We've usually had to clean the fish ourselves.  I was really glad that the fish would already be cleaned, because let me tell you that dealing with the carcasses of 10 large fish is k...

This year I gave "Three Sisters" companion planting a try, planting my pole beans in the same row with the corn alongside the squash. The harvest from all three crops has been amazing.  Green beans are growing 8 feet in the air, their vines emerging over the tippy-top of the corn stalks.  None of the plants have had issues with garden pests. The practice  of Three Sisters planting is centuries old and comes from Native American tradition.  I didn't need to use a trellis for the pole beans since the bean vines had corn stalks to climb.  Typically when planting pole beans in with the corn, it's recommended to give the corn a head start, waiting to plant bean seeds until the corn is a few inches tall. I didn't do that. I planted everything at the same time during the first week of May.  Beans and corn sprouted up together simultaneously and as they grew the bean vines wrapped around the corn, climbing up and over it, sometimes climbing out into the air an...

This year's vegetable garden did exceptionally well and I believe that part of its success is due to the presence of so many flowers in the garden.  Not only did I plant a wildflower bed adjacent to the vegetable garden, I also planted rows of flowers in between several of the vegetable beds.  I was able to plant so many marigolds and cosmos due to having saved the seed heads from the prior year -- I had a giant paper bag full of the flower seeds!  Earlier this spring, my daughter and I dumped the entire bag across two long rows in the garden.  We then scattered a package of wildflower seeds nearby. Recently I came across an interesting book that explains the benefits that flowers bring to vegetable gardening, Vegetables Love Flowers: Companion Planting for Beauty and Bounty , by Lisa Mason Ziegler. I had stumbled upon the bounty that planting flowers alongside vegetables brings -- and Ziegler lays out the reasons in her book.  Not only do flowers de...

Every year, I learn something new from my friends who enjoy gardening.  It's fun to discover what grows well in our area and gather tips for organic ways of dealing with garden pests.  With patience and perseverance, we get through each growing season learning a bit more.  It’s usually around mid-August that I find myself ruminating on the lessons learned. This year, I learned how easily the garden grows when the soil has been heavily amended with compost and the empty space in the rows have been covered with mulch. Everything grew enormously. Row covers over the cruciferous vegetables prevented them from getting cabbage moth this year.  It's the first time we've ever used row covers. My husband found the best deal for them on Amazon and helped put in the arches and stakes to hold up the covers. I didn't think I would ever actually be able to grow broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage - and have a harvest - but we did indeed have a small harvest of these wonde...

Clancy from Catelli's Excavation came out today and in three hours removed about 150 feet of overgrown laurel hedge that surrounded our front yard.  We're so excited that the towering hedge has been torn out, as we can now see the front door of our 1940's Cape Cod house. Clancy's mini excavator was perfect for this job. At 8 feet tall, the laurel hedge was a monstrosity blocking the entrance to our front door as well as making it impossible for us to see the barn and mountains from our first-floor windows.  While the privacy the hedge provided was nice, the openness with it being gone is even more appreciated. Laurel grows like a weed with a root system that has to be removed to prevent it from becoming re-established in the future.  Soon, we'll get the tractor out and till a couple feet down along where the hedge has been removed to loosen up the soil, removing any remaining roots as we go. Perhaps a flower bed along the drive will go in its place.  La...

We’re not sure if the names will stick, but we are certain these two little chicks are adorable. They are the first chicks we have had that were hatched by a broody hen here on our farm. Mama hen unfortunately had to go back out into the coop, as she was digging around a lot and trampling the chicks. So the chicks are now under a heat lamp. We had hoped to keep mama and chicks together, since doing so could ease the way for integrating the chicks into the flock once they are bigger. Captain Rooster  was their father. A week after Captain tangled with a bald eagle and perished, the chicks hatched— over Fathers Day weekend, no less, which seems ironic. Maybe one of these little peeps is a rooster?

We came across the perfect solution for painting our house exterior and dealing with severe peeling paint, cracks and holes. It’s working so well that we thought we should share the information. The idea came from my father-in-law, who has been doing his own home improvement projects for years and has a wealth of knowledge to offer. We are in awe of the results.  At first we thought that a special primer called Zissner Bin Peel Stop would provide the coverage we needed after sanding and prepping the surface. But we were disappointed with how much uneven surface could still be seen. The surface, once painted, was still rough and you can see the edges of where the paint had peeled away, even after sanding it and adding the triple-thick primer. No amount of sanding or primer would smooth it out. That’s when my father-in-law suggested using an exterior spackling paste or filler.  We chose to try Dap Platium Patch Advanced Exterior Filler. The exterior filler, combine...