Vintage Home and Farm

Like many other families, we are foregoing the traditional Thanksgiving gathering this year to try to slow the spread of Covid. It's an understatement to say how incredibly hard this year has been on everyone.  Loneliness, fear, sadness, political division -- all common themes throughout 2020, and like you, we are so tired of it all.  We really do need to pause this year to look within for something positive.  In gratitude there is joy. Truly, we are blessed each and every day in all the little things that touch our lives.  To push away the sense of isolation and celebrate the little things, here are 14 things we are doing.  We're hoping by sharing these ideas we can help to inspire you and lift your spirits as well.  Take a walk, breathe in the fresh air, and notice nature all around Learn something new - a craft or skill, or explore a new idea Call loved ones on the phone and talk for an hour Visit with family and friends via Zoom; either separately or ge...

When tied with a ribbon, golden bundles of wheat make a beautiful natural decoration for your home.  Last spring, when there was a shortage of flour in the grocery stores due to the pandemic, we decided we'd experiment with growing wheat.  We came up with the idea when we were cleaning out our pantry and realized we had a small package of Bob's Red Mill wheat berries.  I was curious whether wheat berries that had been processed and packaged as a food product would be viable for growing in the garden.   Turns out, the wheat berries were indeed viable and we had a nice little harvest of wheat in late summer.  But by then, flour was once again readily available in the stores, and in fact we have been enjoying baking with the inexpensive and enormous bags of organic Central Baking Company flour that is now available at Costco.  In learning how to process wheat into flour, we decided that the wear and tear it would put on our food processor wasn't worth it ...

I've been baking sourdough bread with starter for long enough now to have come across what I find to be the easiest, most consistent and tasty recipe. It's time to share! The recipe I'm using started as a dough for making cinnamon buns, which I found on the King Arthur Bread website. But then I altered it (of course!) to make it lactose free, replacing the milk with soy milk and the butter with canola oil.  Then I tried using the basic dough to make not only rolls but also bread, and it came out light, soft and incredibly yummy! In the bread version, I omitted the sugar from the recipe.  I've then used this recipe to make bread that has herbs in it as well as bread stuffed full of roasted garlic.  Then there was the sweet version of the bread that had a swirl of cinnamon, sugar and chopped walnuts rolled up into it.  One day I patted little balls of the dough into rounds and placed them into a greased muffin tin, brushed the tops with a little olive oil and garlic po...

Just the other day we finally determined that all three of our ducks are males, and as fortune would have it, my incredibly resourceful husband then came across an ad on Craigslist for three free female ducks. He was the first to call about them. Yay! Yesterday I brought the new ducks home and put them in our chicken run.  All three are black runner ducks.  I'm still in awe over how quickly we ended up with female ducks! And that there are three of them to join up with the three boys!  The male fawn runner duck has shown great interest in the three females. Normally the three male ducks stick close together all day long.  I've noticed the fawn runner duck breaking apart from the boys to go over and check out the girls. Shall we play a little  Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It On ? Adding the three girl ducks into the fold was easy-peasy.  There was no fuss whatsoever. I was amazed that the chickens seem okay with the addition to the flock. Perhaps the fact that th...

Determining the gender of our ducks has had us confused for some time.  Today we finally managed to settle the matter.  But before I go further, I should explain how it is we came to have ducks with unknown genders.   Right after the Covid pandemic began shutting things down in the early spring, we decided to expand our flock of chickens and try raising ducks. But there was so much interest in raising poultry at that time that we had a hard time finding any. We ended up with "straight run" Khaki Campbell and Runner ducks.  Straight run means that the ducks come just as hatched and the gender of the ducks is unknown.  We went home from the nursery with four ducklings and figured that among those at least one would be female and would provide us with duck eggs. It seemed a reasonable assumption. Sadly, shortly after arriving home with the ducklings, we noticed one of them didn't look so good. It was too quiet and still and it passed away the very next morning...

We almost forgot to plant the garlic! October is the month when garlic goes into the ground and then it is harvested sometime around June or July, depending on your garden zone and how well the garlic is growing in your location.  Last year, our friends Dan and Debbie gave us several heads of garlic from their garden to get us started along with instructions on what to do.  Thanks to their contribution, the garlic did fantastic in our garden.   After harvesting our garlic, we learned that the little "bulbils" that grow on the top of the garlic scape (inside the flower) can be planted as well.  So this year we are going to try planting bulbils as well as full cloves of garlic. Most people only ever plant fully mature garlic cloves, which are the cloves that we normally eat.  Each garlic clove will yield a whole new head of garlic at the end of the growing season.  The little bulbils that are in the flower at the top of the plant can be cultivated as wel...

If you love lemons, then you will surely enjoy this green tomato pie recipe. My mom and I came across the concept of green tomato pie back in the mid-1980s, when I began baking as a teenager and discovered a knack for pies. Who knew unripe tomatoes (also knows as green tomatoes) could be used in a sweet pie?  I was fascinated by the concept and have been evolving our recipe for green tomato pie ever since. Now that we have a garden every year and there's an abundance of tomatoes that will never ripen before the season ends, we're more determined than ever to find ways to use up green tomatoes.  Green tomato salsa (salsa verde) is another option.  But while there are unripe tomatoes, there must be a sweet green tomato pie on our table at some point in the fall. You can use any variety of unripe tomatoes that you have in the garden. The tomatoes that we grew this year were mostly Roma, and unfortunately they were rather small.  Also, any size of green tomatoes works ju...