I could not resist sharing just a few of these, but I am NOT!~ recommending these as safe recipes in anyway in line with todays recommended canning practices.. This is a walk down memory lane only!
Mom’s Little Garden Update..
So here was what I came home to..
This is what we have two weeks later.. but man am I behind in that big garden!
Mom Update for her surgery..
Well, mom got her staples out and the wound itself looks great..
We found at that she has very extense nerve’s acting up, so we have added in a topic nerve dimmer to the program and that seems to be helping alot.
As you can see the bruising is much better on the leg itself..
We got some excellent results on the tests, great weight bearing, and she moved from her walker to the wheeled walker but we also got a failing grade on a certain area of her range of motion, so we are working on a program to make headway in that area.. One step at a time..
Food Forest-Hiding in plain view..
If you drove by this, would you see anything other than a green jungle?
Currently in that front green jungle there is
- Apple Trees
- Pear Trees
- Plum Trees
- Sweet Cherry Trees
- Sour Cherry Trees
- Mulberry
- High Bush Cranberry
- Honey Berry Bushes
- GooseBerry Bushes
- ChokeCherry Tree
- Chokeberry Bushes
- Lilacs
- spruce trees
- Wild Rose
- Elderberry
- Plant wise there is
- Rhubarb
- Mints
- Horseradish
- Strawberries,
- raspberries
- Black Berries
- Wild alpine Strawberries
- Grapes
- Day lilies
- Milk Weed
- Pig Weed
- Burdock
- Nettle
- dandelion
- Coltsfoot
- Clover
- Wild Violets
- Horsetail
- Annuals currently growing in that area as part of a food forest..
- Six kinds of winter squash
- cucumbers 2 kinds
- Scarlet runner beans
- Melons
- Spinach
- Chard
- Walking Onions
- Green onions
I am sure I am forget things as I am not there to take a walk about and write out more of the wild growing things.. but even when you come into the lane, you can see that there is something cut into and being worked in the rows..
So later this year I will take a walk though it and provide some more photos of things as they are producing..
One of the other things I just adore about my “wild Garden” is that it is such a heaven for the bee’s, as well as for the birds and I love seeing my preying mantis and their babies each year..
Posted in farm, food
Tagged 100 mile food challange, Farm Life, Food Forest, Food Production and Recipes, Frugal, Garden, Greens, Health, Herbs, nature, plants, Soft Fruits, Veggies, Wildlife
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The next part of my Family Milk Cow Journey with Girl
Girl will be two years old in July, and I am so very excited to annouce that yesterday, she was bred, we will of course have to wait a full month to see if she took? or if she comes back into heat, at which time we will have her bred again.
She will be expecting for right around nine months, which means if she caught, I will have a march calf, both a good thing and bad thing.. good because momma will have fresh spring grass for when she comes into milk, bad because it means I will need to plan for lots of fresh sprouting and extra goodies to take her though those last months of the cold part of winter, while she is finishing off the wee one.
I am both excited and to be honest a little nervous, every birth is always filled with both joy an fear as its a risk each time it happens, but also just as thrilled at the idea of having six plus gallons of fresh whole milk for use on the farm (o the cheese’s I have planned to try!) but the idea of being so tightly bound to the farm with that twice daily milking.
I had planned on doing half us and half calf but my reseach is leading me to believe that if she milks right around where I think she will, she will outproduce what her calf will need by a good 60 plus percent, unless I don’t want her at her top production, and allow her to drop that production downwards to meet our needs and requirements. Having said that, at the moment, I am not there yet, I want that milk, for making butter to freeze, my household uses around 40 pds of butter a year, and I want to take it all to homemade.
A little collection of my sweet girl growing up.. first one of her at 11 weeks, second at year and the last one just this past week, looks at her now, no baby left showing in her lovely adult head side profile, o but I can see that the fly’s are bothering her a bit while out on her teather for grazing.. We are trying a new holistic treatment that goes in their food and it seems to be working some but they say that longer term use will work better and better, its a natural dewormer as well.
Posted in Critters
Tagged Family Milk Cow, Farm Life, holistic treatment, Oxen, spring grass
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And a baby turtle added to the mix..
So as you can see, the mudhole is basically done. Had I not dug the post-holes yesterday, it’d be completely dry this morning.
I went down with a bucket and sieve to retrieve what I could out of the post-holes. I clearly did not completely clear the holes, but collected another couple hundred. Scoop in, dump out sludge and tadpoles. Scoop in, dump out sludge and tadpoles. Scoop in, dump out sludge and tadpoles and what the heck was that?
Oh – as can be seen from “tadpole rescue not” – a baby turtle came along for the ride.
Okay. so finish scooping holes. There are still tadpoles in there – so be it. I stick my hand in each hole and fish around for other turtles. Don’t find any. What to do? Guess I’ll stick him in Colony Two – even if he eats tadpoles, there’s far more than he can eat in a day.
Good thing we want those toads for the garden and bug control LOL, and clearly my hubby is just having some fun with this as well, but wow, the baby turtle was a surprise, I know a great turtle pond just a ways from our place that we can release him back into.
Toad Tadpoles-Round three..
Last nights update:
So: Operation “Toads Worry – Be Happy” is underway, in its modified form. The mud hole has two to four inches of water and will be dry tomorrow unless it rains (60% chance, they say – but the radar imagery shows no rain imminent).
No photos. Batteries died again. Definitely buying a charger and rechargeables on Wednesday.
1) I dug further down in one of the adjacent pits, then dumped probably 20 gallons or so from it into the main hole. The water was murky, and the tadpoles are all beached on the edge of the water for oxygen, so it may not have necessarily been in their best short-term interests. Hopefully it settles overnight. Good news is – the water in the pit readily replaced itself, so the water table is not that far down.
2) I took the post-hole digger and punched five holes, about a foot down (until, of course, I hit debris), in areas that had been wet yesterday but were dry today. They promptly flooded. I used the shovel to cut channels to the main wet area. This should, hopefully, provide refuges for those that hang out there.
3) I set up a colony in a blue tote box – mud on the bottom, a few clods with plants that I excavated yesterday, and some loose greens. Took about five gallons of water from the mudhole, then added another five of tap water that I reckoned was about the same temperature. Used a sieve to scoop out around a hundred tadpoles from the main pond and put them in the tote. Covered with an old gate, since one of the sheep thought I was making a water bucket.
4) Set up a second colony in the unused horse trough (I know I said it was not recommended, but…). Added a few plants and dirt. Used remnant water from the water barrels and a bucket of tap water. Moved around two hundred tadpoles to this spot.
5) Filled up four of the big blue water bottles with tap water and set them out to warm up overnight. Tomorrow, I expect I’ll be adding them to the two colonies and transferring more tadpoles into them from what’s left of the pond.
This mornings update:
Well, it only rained enough last night to dampen the ground.
Tadpoles in the horse trough seem alright. Less activity in the tote box, though that may be because it’s harder to see through that water.
As suspected, the pond has basically been reduced to my post-holes, all of which are teeming with tadpoles. Guess I’ll be down with a sieve again after breakfast
My Laugh for the Day..
My mom can tell a good yarn, she is not a gossip but she believes in story telling and does a pretty good job even now and again as stand-up at different events over the years, and to be honest, she has passed on that ability to take something funny and just stretch it a little to make it into side splitting funny.. I had a hard time figuring out as a young child the different between a mom fact, and mom story.. thankfully as a teenager I finally “got it”
So when my mom made a nicely toned dramatic statement that she was breaking out of her “cell” today come heck or high water and that she demanded her “jailor aka farmgal” give her a day pass, I just started to laugh, and its been a running joke between us all day..
So given that she was released, I figured it was a good time to wash the bed, dust and vacoom, fluff the pillows etc.. You see the two guest bedrooms are just across from each other, with the second bathroom right next door, so with the doors open, mom just needs to speak at night and I can get up and give a helping hand, but she didn’t really think about the lack of view out the window etc
So here is her “Little Bedroom Jail”
And here is her day room 😉
And she says that if I don’t stopping being a smarty, she is going to send me to the corner to think about what it, just like this poor little tike LOL (just to be clear that is stuffy toy)
Tadpole Rescue underway..
Turns out that we are not going to have rain for at least a week and that our little “pond” is losing water at an alarming rate in the heat, and DH is quite worried about there being enough water for our tadpoles.. so on sunday he..
“Dug two pits adjacent to the mud hole. Both have crap – wood and such – about a foot and a half down, so somebody must have gone to a lot of trouble to fill the area up at one point. Anyway, got down about two feet in both cases and then the shovel would hit the water table and whoosh – up comes the water, to the level of the pond.
Only linked the pond to one of the new pits, and only at the very top, due to the high sediment load in the pits. I’ll look at doing the other one tomorrow. The alternative is that I draw water from it and pour it in, rather than connecting it.”
That was the first plan, but after a little research, he figured out that the new water pits don’t have anything growing in them for the tadpoles to eat, so giving them water but not food is a problem..
So this morning, he had a talk with Farmer T and there is now a official tadpole rescue taking place tonight with nets and buckets and our tadpoles are being moved over into her big pond so that they have as good of chance as becoming adult frogs as we can make it.. I have asked for photos of the rescue and move..
I just love having my closest neabour be someone who thinks its awesome that we want to save the tadpoles, and is willing to come over and give a helping hand catching them for re-release.. I really do like where I live..
We will need to see if we can make our little pond a bit deeper and bigger so that perhaps this won’t be a issue next year..
Posted in farm
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Just another Day on the Farm 