The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon December 14th, 2009

We’re having an extremely welcome pause in the cold today and tomorrow, which gives us the time to do a bunch of things we really should have gotten to before, but didn’t.  I’ve still got containers out in the garden that weren’t brought in, and fencing to put away, and the last of the root crops to pull (at least the ones not staying in the ground until spring).  Much to do, all of it late – but that’s the story of our life.

The cold weather means moving over to winter management of the animals – we’re starting to dig into our reserves of home-grown feed supplements – sunflower seeds, pumpkins, corn and amaranth go to the chickens, the goats and the turkeys.  We’re not independent of the feed store, but we do what we can to reduce our dependency, and try and buy local and organic otherwise. 

Chanukah started earlier this week, and has been very pleasant.  We were supposed to celebrate Isaiah’s birthday and Chanukah yesterday, but bad weather and a minor (and now fixed) dental crisis involving Eli meants that we ended up rescheduling for next week, at least on the birthday end.  We had a quiet holiday celebration with two of the Grandmas and us and the kids, and it was lovely. 

It has been a busy week getting ready for the holiday and also making the shift over to winter – just over a week ago, it was 60, so many of the last minute winter things involving sealing and tightening really don’t get done until it gets properly cold.   With the start of the new blog and the end of Eric’s term with its flood of grading and exams, last week was rushed and we’re looking forward to a bit more quiet.  I feel like I didn’t get much done last week.

I’m starting to look at the seed catalogs and dream of the next garden.  I’m also plotting a low-budget, minimalist house rearrangement and some paint to pretty up two really ugly bits of my home.  We’ve got a room that has become a junk room, and I’m going to move some bookcases in there, get a couple of big chairs off of Craigslist, and paint it a decent color (I miss Eric’s grandmother, but not her taste in taupe and baby blue home decor ;-)), and make it a more pleasant place to be.  I’ve got bees on the brain and sheep as well, and am mulling over our farm plan. 

Of course I’m not really supposed to be doing these things – instead, I’m supposed to be single mindedly working on my book.  So far, this is not happening . 

Plant something: Nada

Harvest something: Some kale and turnip greens, and a few turnips.  Also rosemary, thyme and oregano from the windowsill plants.

Preserve something: Apple Quince Sauce, froze some fried cauliflower

Waste Not: Tried to make an eggshell menorah out of saved aracauna eggs.  Destroyed eggshells and failed miserably . Otherwise, the usual composting, feeding things to other things, using up scraps…

Want Not: Picked up a big order of wheat, oats and dried fruit. 

Eat the food: Latkes, latkes, latkes – yum!  They are best, IMHO, with applesauce mixed with some quinces for that incomparable fragrance.  We also made sofganiyot for the first time, filled with homemade jam – the raspberry is still the best, but the peach-almond was awesome. 

Build community food systems – still doing a lot of radio interviews for _Independence Days_ – also, working hard on pushing poultry on a lot of people – I’m your poultry pusherwoman!

How about you?

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Sharon December 7th, 2009

I haven’t done an ID update in a couple of weeks because of the Thanksgiving holiday (ie, I was gone for most of a week) and various other things, so this will cover a bit back. 

BTW, some of you may have wandered over from the new site, and be wondering what the heck this is all about – the Independence Days project arose from a quote of Carla Emery’s (she of the awesome _Encyclopedia of Country Living_) in which she suggests that people wanting to grow and put up food do as she does – try and plant something every day in that season, harvest something every day, do a little preserving every day.  We all know we’re not always going to do something every day, but the hundreds of people involved in this project are trying to do a little bit each day or week or month to get them a bit more food self-sufficient. Instead of staying home for a week and canning a truckload of food, and then saying “no, this is too much” we’re all just doing a little bit at a time.  What’s amazing is that it adds up – and here’s where you get to post your update (or a link to your blog) and tell us what you accomplished this week, and let us see how it does add up.

There’s no formal sign up process, you just join in.  We have seven categories, and obviously, not every one will apply in every season or to every person, but you get credit for everything you do:

Plant something: Whether seeds you are starting indoors or fall crops planted in your garden, you get points for everything you grow for yourself.

Harvest something: This covers things from your garden and wild foraged food and things you glean – this the food you take home.

Preserve something: This could mean a pantry full of glass jars, but remember, canning isn’t necessary to life.  It includes the cold spot you put your potatoes in and the sun you dry your strawberries in, the cool place you put up squash and sweet potatoes, the mulch you cover your greens with in the garden, the fresh pickles you have on your kitchen shelf…you name it.

Waste Not: Reducing waste in all its forms is essential.  Did you do something new this week – save something from the trash, reduce your own food waste stream, reduce packaging, mend something, compost or feed a creature with your scraps?  This is important stuff.

Want Not: For those of us trying to build up a reserve of food in case of an extended power outage or an emergency, a job loss or so you can help others, adding a little bit to your pantry at a time is important.  Tell us what you did, what good deals you found.

Eat the Food: What especially yummy ways did you find to eat the products of your garden, your freezer, your CSA, your farmer’s market? 

Build Community Food Systems: Everything from sitting down with your neighbors to talk about storing food to putting in school gardens, bartering in your community, starting farmer’s market, or just telling everyone how great the food is.  The more you do for this, the more resilient the system is!

We’d love it if you’d join us!

Right now things on the farm are quiet – the snow on the ground means a lot less digging around.  We had about 4 inches a few days ago, and we’re still living in fairy-land.  Unlike in populated areas, where the snow turns grey and dingy almost immediately, our area stays stunning until mud season in the spring .

We’re not yet cutting wood, really, which is the big project this time of year - Eric is too frantic with the end of his term for either of us to have time.  The big project is watching for signs of heat on the goats.  Since we don’t have  a buck (and I think a buck is definitely in our future, since this is a PITA with 7 goats to breed), any sign of heat means we whisk them into our car and drive off to our friends with the boys.  We thought that Bast, our adolescent goat, would come into heat this weekend, and had arranged everything to get her there.  She didn’t.  So we’re back to waving the buck rag (a piece of cloth that stinks of boy goat) past the goats every day.  Wheee.

The other immediate project is the butchering of the turkeys that weren’t ready by Thanksgiving.  If anyone in my general area (I’m about 45 minutes west of Albany, and could probably deliver to Albany or Schenectady) is looking for a heritage turkey for Christmas or Chanukah, I’ve got some – you can email me.  They were really terrific last year.

Once the turkeys are out of the barn, life will settle down a lot – 15 turkeys is just too many in a winter barn.  The goat babies are very excited about snow and its capacity for play, and so are the kids.  I’ve bark to collect for my herb projects and wood to cut for next year’s burning.  And once Eric is done with exams, we get to relax a little, clean the house, hang out and think seed catalogs. 

Chanukah starts Friday, of course, but the great thing about Chanukah is that it is a minor holiday.  The kids are excited, and there’s some minor getting ready, plus the kids like the decorations, but it really isn’t even remotely equivalent to the scale of Christmas for most Americans.  We’re having one bash – a joint birthday party for Isaiah and Chanukah party, and after that, we’re going to take most of the rest of December as easy anyone with kids, a farm and a blog can.

Ok, here’s my update:

Plant something: I did plant a few bulbs and a couple of heads of extra garlic I had lying around on the 60 degree day we had last week.

Harvest something: Kale, beets, parsley, sage, chard, arugula

Preserve something: Quince Applesauce, I attempted to mimic these great red cabbage/cauliflower pickles we had at Kathy Harrison’s house the weekend after Thanksgiving.  Time will tell if I have succeeded.

Waste not: Went through the garden looking for hiding carrots and other roots to be fed to either us or the goats or bunnies, sorted through the apple bins and fed the wrinkly ones to various creatures, collected scraps for the poultry, the usual composting, mending, etc… 

Want Not: Added oatmeal and brown sugar to storage, canned up a couple of pumpkins that were being discarded by friends after the holidays, began cutting up old fleece pajamas for a quilting project for the boys, collected Thanksgiving decorations from friends getting rid of theirs – the decorative corn was eaten by chickens, the pumpkins by goats.

Eat the food: Found a lovely spicy kosher sausage, and made a big pot of my favorite Portugese Kale soup with the greens, enjoyed our favorite cranberry-chocolate chip cookies, discovered just how often fresh chevre is with homemade raspberry jam on homemade sourdough. 

Build Community Food Systems: Approximately 47,000 radio interviews for _Independence Days_, agreed to teach a couple of food storage classes, am planning some new projects that will be unveiled soon.

How about you?  BTW, the next post up will have all the new blog info, but ID updates will stay over here, along with the food storage quickies! 

Sharon

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Sharon November 16th, 2009

It was the quiet week in between weeks of chaos.  First I was away twice in two weeks, meaning Eric soloed for 10 days out of 14, or was away himself.  All the travel was good, but it meant a lot of things were up in the air.  Then, finally the travel and the event I ran at our shul were over, and things were back to normal for a week.  Now my Dad is visiting, followed by family friends of his, and Simon’s birthday party (headcount is up into the 40s – lots of family and friends -  which is cool, but requires some advance prep), and the morning after everyone leaves, we’re off to Boston for five days for Thanksgiving.  Getting ready for that is a project in itself – we don’t usually leave the critters with our kind attendants for so long.

So last week was integral – we were supposed to get a lot of stuff done.  Of course, we also really needed sleep, and normalcy, so well, we didn’t.  We didn’t get the barn fully cleaned out (which means we have to do it tomorrow).  We didn’t get the turkeys into the butcher (this wasn’t slacking – they simply aren’t big enough to go – so we’re raising Chanukah/Christmas/Solstice birds, I guess).  We didn’t get new hutches assembled for the new bunnies.

We did, however, get the bunnies.  Michelle, who I met through the blog and classes bartered me four rabbits for one of my classes this summer, and Saturday night, as we drove back through Ida’s torrential rains from my book signing, we arrived to a van full of rabbits.  This was fairly awesome.  We received three cinnamon rabbits and an angora, named Parsley(cinnamon buck), Sage (cinnamon doe), Rosemary (cinnamon doe) and Thyme (french angora buck) by my children. 

My rabbit goals are two-fold – unfortunately, we can’t eat them ourselves (I like rabbit just fine), because they aren’t kosher.  But my goal is to seed the area with rabbit stock and encourage more people to breed their own meat, while also supplying our working dogs and cats with some of their feed.  The angora joins our other angora providing fiber to be mixed in with the wool I get in exchange for letting my neighbor use our pasture.  Now if only I actually had time to spin!  Fiber is building! 

Otherwise – we did clear out the kidding pen (which will be the rabbits’ winter quarters – by the time we need it for goat babies again, it should be warm enough to move the buns out for the season) and put some of the garden beds to bed.  I’ve had the goats eating down the garden wastes, and have a truckload of old salvaged cinder blocks coming sooner or later (another barter) to make new beds in the front.  I’m also collecting stone to do some terracing in the front yard in the spring. 

The rabbits officially belong to the children, and they are enthusiastic about their new jobs of bringing them greens, feeding and watering, etc..  They are also extremely excited because I’ve promised the boys that they can have silkie chickens in the spring, and take both the cinnamons and the silkies to the fair.  They are already debating colors.

Not many eggs these days – mostly because it is November, but also because they are hiding their nests again.  Goats are lowering their production as well as we head into winter – everyone is settling.

Otherwise, not too much to report – still harvesting greens and roots, still putting the last of the harvest up in the form of sauerkraut and kimchi, apple butter and quince jam, but mostly we used last week to recover our equilibrium.  Realistically, given what’s going on, it is just as well we did, since I don’t expect to see it again until December .

Plant something: Garlic, Tulips, a ginger root that was throwing a bud

Harvest something: Chard, sorrel, parsley, sage, beets, carrots, scallions, leeks, kale, turnips, arugula, celeriac.

Preserve something: Apple butter, kim chi, sauerkraut, sauerruben, quince jam, a few eggs

Waste Not:  Usual composting, etc… 

Want Not: Bartered bunnies, cinder blocks.

Eat the food: Root vegetable curry again, yum, stuffed cabbage, other good stuff.

Build community food systems: working on another school garden, lots of radio interviews.

How about you?

Sharon

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Sharon November 9th, 2009

When Indian summer comes around here, you know it may be the very last time, and thus, you have to enjoy it.  It hit the mid-60s yesterday, and is supposed to do the same today.  We open the windows to air out the house, play baseball with the kids, work on putting garden beds down for the winter, and tomorrow will do what may be the last big barn cleanout until spring (we might get another one done in December – it really depends on the snowload. 

It was a good day for planting the last of the garlic and bulbs, for hanging laundry out and for setting the indoor plants out in the sun one more time.  Of course, I believed the weather forecast that claimed that we wouldn’t have frost and left my lemon verbena, citrus and gotu kola out last night, which was, ummm…not wise. The gotu and the citrus should be ok, but I may have just killed my poor lemon verbena.  Oops. 

I spent the weekend at an event at our synagogue – our annual scholar-in-residence weekend, of which I am, for my sins, the chair.  It went off quite well, which is a relief.  It also tied in more beautifully than I expected with my own agendas – Rabbi Jill Hammer, our speaker, spent her last talk on reconnecting people with the agrarian roots of Judaism, something that is obviously, a source of interest to me.

This week should be quiet – and spent, miraculously at home.  I have been away from home 9 nights out of the last 14 (I spent the weekend staying over with friends so that Eric wouldn’t be inconvenienced by my needing to haul back and forth to the event so much – we had a lovely slumber party!), and am looking forward to some comparative peace and quiet before an influx of guests (my Dad’s annual visit to the east, plus other friends of the family), Simon’s birthday, and our Thanksgiving trip to my family hit us. 

The new Adapting in Place book has been more or less completely on the shelf while the fall harvest came in, classes were beginning, I was travelling, etc… so that’s my next project – to get that in order and begin more seriously working on the book.

It looks like there’s a possibility that Eric’s TA may want to room with us, at least for the winter and spring.  Eric is his advisor, and I’m very enthusiastic about this arrangement, since it will give the two of them a chance to get work done together, and also give Eric someone to hang out with while I’m neglecting him for the book .

Not too much else to report here – there’s a lot to do before the shift over to winter, but we can’t do a lot of it until the shift begins – that is, we don’t want to seal the windows and doors up until it is too cold to enjoy casting open all the windows again.  We don’t want to set up the cold frames until the days are consistently cold enough to make it worth the effort.  So we play baseball instead, and enjoy the sunshine.

How about you?

Plant something: Garlic, bulbs

Harvest something: Beets, chard, kale, brussels sprouts, daikon, carrots, parsnips, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, onions, scallions, lime leaves, milk, eggs, ginko leaves, kale

Preserve something: Made a little kim chi, but nothing else.

Waste Not: Collected bagged leaves from the curbs for mulch and compost, picked up scraps for chickens from friends, the usual composting and feeding critters.  Also, a friend gave us a kosher, freezer burned turkey, saying she was going to throw it out otherwise.  Critter made awesome soup, some of which we returned to her.  I don’t think she’ll dump it next time.

Want Not: Nope

Build Community Food Systems: Lots and lots of radio interviews for ID, garden design class.

Eat the Food: Lots of butternut squash – both mashed and as soup.  Root vegetable massaman curry, and laotian turkey soup.  ‘Twas a good eatin’ week.

Sharon

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Sharon November 2nd, 2009

I once read an article that concluded that cats purr because they are happy, of course, but they also derive comfort from purring – that purring is a kind of benign self-stimulus that says “all right with the world – and if not, it should be.”  This would explain why often cats purr even in stressful or even painful situations.  The article proposed that purring may have enhanced the survival of cats in some odd circumstances. 

I was thinking of this early this morning, when I suddenly noticed that Rubeus, the extremely friendly but rather dim little kitten we got when we lost Zucchini,  ordinarily “cat o’ velcro,” had not appeared to settle on my lap or check out what I was eating.  And I heard a very faint mewing. 

It took me a long, long time to find the source of said mewing.  He wasn’t in the attic, or the basement, and I’d seen him last night when I finally arrived home from my trip.  He hadn’t climbed up into the chimney or up the woodstove chimneys.  He wasn’t trapped in a cupboard of a closet.  I could only hear the mewing occasionally, and I was starting to worry, less I never find him. 

I went out to milk the goats, and on my way back in, I finally heard it.  It was coming from the wall of the garage.  Not the inside wall, the outside wall.  At first I thought he had slipped out last night and fallen in one of the gutters, but opening the gutters got only a shower of icy water and dead leaves on my head and a loud scream from me (I knew this would happen, since the only way for me to reach and open this part of the gutter was for me to stand directly under it, but let’s just say it was worse than I’d expected) at the shock of cold.  So I figured he had to have somehow gotten *inside* the roof flashing,.  In fact, I could here him scrabbling around in there.  So I got out the ladder, pried the flashing off with a screwdriver in a way that I hope doesn’t prevent it from going back on, was grateful for the hard frosts, since there were about 100 wasps nests in there, and removed one loudly purring, filthy black and white kitten.

I’m not sure if he was just purring because he was happy to see me, or if he was purring to comfort himself, but being the empty-headed creature that he is, his reaction was not “omigosh, I could have died in there and you’d never have found me” but “what took you so long…is there any food…yes, I know you long to pet me, and what are a few layers of filth between friends…oh, and why on earth are you so wet…that wasn’t very helpful of you.”  It is, in fact, hard (although clearly not impossible) to to be annoyed at an animal that has nestled into your neck  and is vibrating loudly with contentment, even when you are freezing, soaking, filthy and have spent two hours looking for a cat.  Clearly, purring is a survival mechanism.

It has been a week of travel, rather than homesteading, so there’s not much to report here, beyond Rubeus’s touching reunion with his food bowl.  Other than milk and eggs, nothing was harvested, other than an absurdist amount of candy when the kids were trick or treating at my MIL’s.  Eric was abandoned to maintain, and neither of us really do anything much to get ahead when the other is absent. 

The kids dressed as Harry Potter (Asher, who looks disturbingly like a miniature Harry in his glasses and robe), Fred and George Weasley (Simon and Isaiah, who look nothing alike, but who are so much a pair that this seems appropriate) and Ron Weasley (Eli).  Simon’s close friend Kayla was Hermione Granger. 

I had a good trip, and will write more about that very soon.  I am tired and sleep deprived, but the work was the good and the people both fascinating and wonderful.  I read a lot of books on the train, listened to a lot of music (thank you all for the suggestions!), have a lot of new thoughts and learned a lot.

Now I’m back and a host of piled up other projects await me.  Time for the barn cleanout, the root cellar organization, etc…  But first, my weak little report:

Plant something: No

Harvest something: Some greens

Preserve something: No

Waste Not: Actually, we wasted extra – I ate off paper goods when necessary, a bunch of our milk spoiled while we were gone, etc..  Sigh.

Want Not: Eric did have a chance to pick up two bushels of winesap apples.

Eat the Food: I took some good apples and cheese with me on the trip to reduce my exposure to Amtrak’s cuisine, so I guess that counts.

Build community food systems – I’m hoping maybe my trip helped a little bit there.  I think I got at least one person to consider food gardening!

Ok, y’all have to be way ahead of me this week!

Sharon

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