Good Food Down on the Farm

Well, two full days of Thanksgiving celebrations are over and clean-up is pretty well done. We had family Thanksgiving 3 times - once at my mother-in-law's new digs in a retirement home where we could use a family dining room with full kitchen and dining table. Several of us brought food and we ate very well - turkey, wild rice/sausage stuffing, mashed potatoes w/kale (from our garden), butternut   squash (also from our garden) with a brown sugar, toasted walnut topping, cranberry chutney, corn pudding, pecan pie, pumpkin roll, apple-walnut-caramel cake. Then in the evening, went to my mom's  where her caregivers made turkey breast, mashed potatoes, the ubiquitous green bean casserole, and we brought a mincemeat pie and the pumpkin roll. Then Friday, our house was jumping, with daughter and her family, two grandmas, and two friends from out of town who spent the weekend - fresh turkey from the people who process  our chickens, sage and sausage (from our pigs) stuffing, mo...

Oh, my, I cannot believe it has been 3 months since I made time to update this blog! I've been posting items on our Facebook page and ignoring the blog, unfortunately. In the last week, I've made a major effort to get as much in from the garden as possible. Today, I dug the rest of the potatoes, picked kale and steamed it for the freezer, and canned beets. My back is telling me I spent too much time on my feet today! from this to this - love beets redskin potatoes love this beautiful kale - yummy, too! As I was going to pick the kale, I noticed (again) the seed pods on the French Breakfast Radishes that bolted - I never turned them under, so the radishes got huge and gnarly, and the plants grew these amazing seed pods!  Radish seed pods French Breakfast Radishes gone gnarly! Equally amazing to me was finding a secondary head of cabbage on one of the old stalks. It's actually nice and firm, so I cut it off and have it in the crisper.  ...

It almost seems anti-climatic, because you spend so much time preparing the garden, planting, weeding, nurturing those tiny plants, that when suddenly there're many things to harvest, it's almost a shock! We got our garden in very late this year . . . seems odd, but we're actually getting sugar peas in July (and probably now, into August!), because they get morning sun and then are shaded from the very hot afternoon sun by the corn. A serendipitous pairing of neighbors in the garden, I think! Of course, the pumpkins and the squash on the other side of them are trying to overrun them, so it's a race to see how many peas we will get before the pumpkins win . . . beets are just starting, and have been harvesting kale, which makes a fabulous salad (wrote about that before), and, wilted in a little bacon fat is a wonderful green addition to an omelet. Potatoes are close to becoming usable - probably could get some, but I want to make sure the hills are fairly mature before I...

When Darrell recently picked up a small number of feeder pigs, the guy had some gilts that he had gotten from another Berkshire farmer, which Darrell bought to round out our breeding herd. They were supposedly bred - one definitely was, the others we're not sure about. But, Tuesday evening, June 26, the one had 10 little piglets, nine of which survived birthing, which is quite amazing in terms of numbers for a first-time sow. Somehow, four of them got into the sows' mud wallow and Darrell didn't even see them at first - they were not doing well at all, becoming hypothermic, but we washed them in very warm water and dried them briskly to stimulate them, then got them positioned to suckle on their mama. They had not gotten so hypothermic that they had lost the instinct to suck, fortunately, so, amazingly, they survived the night and continue to do well. The photo below was taken a couple of hours after they were born. This morning, we clipped their little teeth (8 per pig) so...

The cold, very wet spring kept us from getting our garden in until just last week. Our garden soil has a lot of clay, so it hangs on to water and you can't till it until it's dried out or nearly so. In previous years, we felt we were "late" with our garden if it didn't get finished up until Memorial Day weekend - this year, in spite of numerous "starts", we didn't get it in until the first weekend in June - yikes! Wonder how many of the tomatoes we'll lose to frost this year? Last year, I had the garden in by mid-May and still lost a bunch of tomatoes to an early frost - rats! Besides tomatoes, we've got corn, red and white potatoes, two types of peas (yes, it's late, but I bought the seeds back in early April!), carrots, beets, two types of hot peppers, broccoli, cabbages, acorn and butternut squash, pumpkins, lettuces, radishes, kale, and spinach. It's going to be awhile before we start harvesting anything, but at least everything...

Our friend Crystal spent the holiday weekend with us, and loves natural "whole" food as much as we do. On Friday, Darrell made his fabulous Stir-Fried Rice with chunks of ham from one of the Berkshires, carrots, peas, and substituted chives and chive blossoms for the normal white onion.  While obtaining the chive blossoms for the stir fry, we were observing and investigating other herbs. The thyme is blooming as well, and we discovered what look like flower bud stalks on the sage. Crystal is an inveterate Internet researcher, so when we got back into the house, she looked up sage blossoms and discovered a delightful site all about "edible flowers", which include chive blossoms, sage blossoms, thyme blossoms, dandelions and many others, including one of my favorite wild flowers, the beautiful little johnny-jump-up. Here's an interesting site to investigate should you be interested in  flowers  as part of cooking. You may be surprised about what's listed the...

It's a good thing they do, because the rest of us are heartily sick of it. We opened up a new pasture area this weekend for the feeder pigs, as they had turned their previous area into nothing but mud because of all the rain and the fact that pigs root constantly. So yesterday, our friend Crystal, who is staying with us for the holiday weekend, took these photos of them turned out on new grass - note the area they'd already started turning up! One of the piggies came over to investigate her boot.