Canning

I have been canning!  I love canning, it is so fun and gratifying.  As I said before, I wanted to get some homemade ketchup and BBQ sauce canned soon, before the busy summer canning season started.  So that is exactly what I have been doing.

I’ve completed 9 quarts of ketchup and I am now working to complete 12 pints of BBQ.  It will be so nice to have easy access to homemade sauce when we run out, as opposed to having to make a new batch each time.

The ingredients list for this project was crazy.  I pressed 30 cloves of garlic for the BBQ sauce!  And I had to use my ginormous pot, which I am so grateful to have.  I use it for cheeses, broth, soup, and now for large amounts of sauces.

I am trying out something new with my canning this time.  Something I’ve never tried before.  I can’t wait to tell you all about it tomorrow when I have finished canning and know how it worked out!

Mozzarella Mystery

I have been making mozzarella cheese almost every week since the cow came fresh in early November.  I found a recipe that worked for us and we enjoyed the fresh cheese each week.

Then, in early March, I made the cheese and it came out with hard yellowish areas throughout.  It was strange.  I went over the recipe and checked and I had done everything like I always did.  The next week I made it again and again it did the same thing.  Even the areas in between the yellow were tough and inedible (although the chickens thought it was great).  The third week I made it again and that time it turned out fine, but then the next two weeks in a row the same yucky thing happened and ruined the cheese.  I could not figure out what was going on.  I hadn’t changed anything I was doing, and it had worked well for so long before this happened.

I was totally frustrated and discouraged and had wasted 8 gallons of milk.  So I decided I needed a break from mozz making.  I had no desire to try something that sometimes worked out and sometimes wasted a bunch of time and a bunch of milk.  So I didn’t even attempt it for weeks, and we bought our mozz at the store.

But earlier this week I started having an itch to try again.  I wanted the taste of the fresh homemade mozz.  But I still was unwilling to risk the 2 gallons of milk on the fact that I still had no clue what had caused the mishaps.  So I started seeking another mozz recipe and found one I was willing to try on the “Homestead Blessings: The Are of Dairy Delights” DVD.  Here’s an excerpt from that DVD.   We have several of the Homestead Blessings DVDs and really enjoy them.

So I tried their recipe and it turned out amazing.  The texture and flavor are excellent.  We have been enjoying eating it with tomatoes, and on our homemade pizza.

So I was unable to solve the mozzarella mystery, but at least I found an alternative.

The Homestead Library

I am a book learner.  I learn from watching others as well, but when I really want to learn about something in detail I go to books.  Books are how we have learned many, many things that we do at the farm and homestead.

I am pretty particular about what books I add to my library.  I like books that not only teach the basics and a little beyond to a beginner, but also serve as a good resource to go back to time and time again.

I usually utilize our excellent interlibrary loan program in Colorado to access any books I want and am considering owning.  Then, after I have read several books on the topic, I decide which book(s) I think we need to own for continued education and future reference on the topic.

I decided to share what books are in our library (or on our wish list) with you and I will be making a specific page on the blog for them as well so that I can add to the list periodically.

Homesteading:

The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery

This is one of my favorite go-to books for any topic.  It is my starting place.  If I want to learn something I start here and then expand to more detailed books specifically about the topic.  This book covers everything from gardening to keeping all sorts of animals, bees, and much more.  It’s my favorite catch-all homesteading book.

The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals by Gail Damerow

Great book for animal keeping.  Has a good overview of each type of animal and detailed description of raising them.

The Have More Plan by Ed and Carolyn Robinson

This has been a favorite for a long time.  I don’t go back to it often as a reference, however, it was the first book I read on the subject of backyard homesteading and I have loved it ever since.  I see it as inspirational.  I go back to it sometimes, especially when I want to see the big picture of a backyard homestead.  It is an older book, written back in the 1940s, and that is one of the things I love about it.  It covers a large variety of topics from buying land, to building outbuildings, and keeping a garden, several different types of livestock, honeybees, an orchard, and more.

Dairy Cows:

The Family Cow by Dirk Van Loon

Even though this is one of the older backyard cow books available these days, I find it far exceeds the newer ones it its information.  It is not only a great book for getting started, but also serves as a reference to go back to over and over again.

The Backyard Cow by Sue Weaver

This is another good dairy cow keeping book.  It covers everything involved in keeping a cow and is a great reference to go back to when needed.

Home Dairy with Ashley English

This is my favorite book for making dairy products.  I love how user-friendly it is and the pictures are great.  It is both instructive for a first-timer and a great reference to go back to over and over again.

Chickens:

The Small Scale Poultry Flock by Harvey Ussery

What I love about this book is the natural approach to raising chickens.  While we are unable to integrate everything he suggests into our flock, we do glean a little here and there that we are able to put into practice.

Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens by Gail Damerow

This is a great all-round book that covers all the bases in raising chickens.

The Mating and Breeding of Poultry by Harry M Lamon and Rob R. Slocum

Excellent resource we are using for our chicken breeding program.

The Chicken Health Handbook by Gail Damerow

This is a great resource for looking up whatever ails your chicken and finding ideas on treatment.  I find some of the remedies a little outdated from the standpoint of trying to keep things natural and use as few chemicals as possible, but otherwise it is very helpful.  Not to mention staying as natural as possible doesn’t always solve the issue – so we aim for middle ground.

Gardening:

Guide to Rocky Mountain Vegetable Gardening by Robert Gough & Cheryl Moore-Gough

This is a must-have book for people growing vegetable gardens in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho.  It is such a great book.  I love all the gardening information as well as specifics for plants.  I go back to this great resource over and over again.  It has tons of really useful charts.  I use it to help determine when and how to plant each plant as well.

The Complete Guide to Saving Seeds by Robert E. Gough and Cherly Moore-Gough

I have looked at the most popular seed saving books available right now and this one is BY FAR the most user-friendly resource book I’ve found.  It is so easy to look up a plant in this book and know everything you need to know about saving its seeds.  I go back to this book often, especially right now as we are just starting to save seeds.

Square-Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew

This is the book that I originally learned how to garden from.  I don’t follow his procedures exactly, but do like several of his concepts.  I now use it EVERY season because of the awesome charts and plant information towards the back of the book.  It helps me decide when to plant what and how much per square foot.

Cold-Climate Gardening by Lewis Hill

This is another good one for people living in cold climates.  It doesn’t speak as directly to a Rocky Mountain setting and high elevations like the one above does, but it does have a lot of good information that I like.  Most of the information covers techniques and procedures to use in cold weather to lengthen your season and be more successful.  I like the information about greenhouses especially.

Root Cellaring by Mike and Nancy Bubel

This is a great all-round book about root cellaring.  It includes varieties of veggies that are best for storage, planting times for root cellar harvesting, harvesting and preparing your veggies to go into the cellar, and of course all different ideas for building all different types of root cellars.  We will be leaning heavily on this book this year as we do our first ever try at root cellaring!

Raising Rabbits:

Storey’s Guide to Raising Rabbits by Bob Bennett

This is the only book on rabbit raising we have.  It really is very complete and thorough and is a great reference as well.  The basic homesteading books we own do cover rabbits, but this is the one I go to for details.

Heritage Arts:

The Complete Book of Tatting by Rebecca Jones

I really enjoyed using this book as I was teaching myself how to do tatting.  It has great patterns as well.

The Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns by Ann Budd

I use this book so much it is almost falling apart.  It includes pattern charts that include all sizes and all gauges for mittens, gloves, hats, sweaters, vests, and socks.  I love it because I can make mittens (or socks, or hats, etc) for my entire family of 6 in all age ranges using all different yarns using only this one book.  SO handy.  I have used it to make socks, hats, mittens, and vests for 2-year-old children all the way up to men.

The Knitting Answer Book by Margaret Radcliffe

This is my go-to knitting encyclopedia-type book for when I have a question and need help.

Needlework Skills Book 1 by Rebecca Wilson

I love this book.  I used it to teach myself the needlework skills that I hadn’t learned, and now I am using it to teach my kids needlework.  I hope she writes the next one soon!

Farm Kitchen:

The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer

My mother always had this book on her kitchen shelf and it was well-used and well-loved.  She gave each of her daughters a copy for their wedding shower gift.  Mine is just as well-used and well-loved.  It has anything and everything.  It is like my encyclopedia of cooking and I go to it often when I need a recipe or even instructions for a technique.  It is a must have in my kitchen!

The Gluten-Free Gourmet by Bette Hagman

When we first had to go gluten-free in 2006 due to celiac disease I thought we would never taste anything good again (besides fresh fruit and veggies).  But this cookbook, along with the entire Gluten-Free Gourmet series of cookbooks, saved our taste buds.  I love, love, love Bette’s recipes and many of them have become all time family favorites.  This series is one that will always be on my shelves.

The Ball Blue Book

I consider this a must-have for canning.  My current copy is covered in splashes and splotches and starting to fall apart from so much use.  I go to it almost every single time I can something.

Putting it Up With Honey by Susann Geiskopf-Hadler

This is my newest canning book.  I am always trying to feed us healthier and this is my newest endeavor in that direction.  I have only tried one recipe so far, the peaches in honey syrup.  They turned out AMAZING.  I can’t wait to try more, especially jellies since I have heard they can be tricky with honey.

Shared with Simple Living Wednesday

Garden Update

We made great progress on the garden last week and weekend, and we planted on Saturday!!!  It felt so good to have a garden again, the break last season was really weird since we have had a garden for the last 7 years before that.

Here is a list of what we planted in the last few days and how many we planted:

• 812 Garden Peas of two varieties, Dual and Dakota
• 40 Sweet Snap Peas of two varieties, Mammoth Melting Sugar and Sugar Ann Snap
• 90 Turnips, Purple-Top White Globe
• 8 Lettuce, Matina Sweet (will be succession planting and using 3 other varieties)
• 9 Spinach, Gigante Inverno (will be succession planting and using 1 other variety)
• 23 Garlic (will do more soon)
• Onions (didn’t count, and not sure about the variety, it was a storage variety)
• Strawberries, 6 Alexandria and 10 Fort Laramie

My chive and parsley seedlings that were started indoors were supposed to go out as well, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.  I know it sounds silly but I have had such horrible results with starting seeds indoors.  They always die, and if they survive they die when I put them out.  This time I have had excellent success getting them going inside, and I am just not ready for them to die yet.  I have hardened them off for 10 days now, and they are enjoying their time outside and not wilting or anything.  But I am just timid about it.  We are supposed to have our coldest night this week is supposed to be Tuesday, so I think I will bite the bullet so to speak and put them out in the garden for good on Wednesday.  Then just hope it works!  If it does this will open up a whole new aspect of gardening to us.  We’ve never had south-facing windows or a way to successfully start seeds indoors.  Now we do.

This next coming weekend we will be putting in a bunch more seeds, it will be fun!

Candling Eggs

Our incubating is moving along.  We candled the eggs today, at day 5 (day 7 for the surprise eggs), to check for fertility.  We tried to take some photos, they turned out pretty bad, especially compared to some I have seen online.  But I will share a few anyway.

This first pic is an infertile egg.  You can see a lot of light, and the yolk.  You can also see an air sac on the wide end of the egg, but it isn’t showing well in this pic.

 

These two are fertile.  In real life (or in a good pic) you see the dark spot, as well as veins coming out of the dark spot.  You can also see that much more of the egg is dark.  And on the bottom pic you can clearly see the air sac at the top of the egg in the pic (that is its wide end where the light is coming through brightly).

I am hoping to get better pics of the next candling.  We will see.  Maybe our camera isn’t high tech enough to deal with the lack of light and inability to focus properly because of it.

If you are interested in seeing some very good pictures of candled eggs go to this link.

So what did we find?

Of the 7 Brahma hatching eggs that I purchased from a breeder 5 are fertile and currently alive and growing.  That’s 71%.  Not that great of a percentage if they were coming from our back yard, but maybe not bad for shipped eggs?  I don’t know much about statistics on shipped eggs.  Also, I know Brahma roosters are more laid back and docile, maybe that is a good percentage for a Brahma rooster.

Of our friends’ 5 eggs, 1 is fertile.  This was expected since they have 1 roo covering 20 hens.  Plus their hens are not laying well since the bear attack.  So that is 20%.  Really bad percentage, but expected.  There is a green egg in their mix that is really hard to see through, it might be fertile too, we wont know until it grows some more.

Of the 6 supposedly infertile eggs put in there from our hen, 2 were fertile.  That’s excellent considering she wasn’t with an adult roo for 16 days and she was with a young, supposedly immature cockerel – and especially good since we thought NONE of the eggs could possibly be fertile.  However, one of the eggs had an air sac on the side instead of the end.  We noted that on Friday when we candled and found the surprise.  Well today that chick was dead.  There was a blood ring, so we culled that egg.

So that gives us 7 live and growing chicks in the bator right now!  5 Dark Brahmas, 1 cross from our friends’ flock, and 1 surprise egg from our hen, Salt.  Fun, Fun!

We are leaving the infertiles in the bator for now, since we are new to candling I don’t want to throw out anything that we might be wrong about.  I feel like we should know pretty confidently when we candle Tuesday at day 7 (day 9 for the one surprise egg left), but we will probably still wait until day 14 to remove any, just in case.  By day 14 we will know FOR SURE.

The Way Too Long Story

Back at this post about incubating eggs, I referred to a story that was way too long to share about how we ended up with a bunch of “bad eggs” and an unplanned trial-hatch in the incubator.  Well, that long story suddenly became pertinent last night, so I am going to share it.

It is pretty long, so if you are uninterested in something so long I will sum up the moral of the story for you – backyard farming is a learning adventure, and you never know what to expect.

First, let me give you the cast of characters for the story so it is easier to tell and understand.  Pictured below are Salt and Captain Cook.  Salt is the white chicken in the front left of the picture.  She was hatched last July and came to us as part of the Ragamuffin Hen group.  She is a cross that we believe is half-bantam.  Captain Cook is our cockerel from the January hatchery chicks we ordered.  He is the barred bird in the right top of the picture, side-stepping Salt.

And below is Pepper, our rooster.  He was in the same hatch as Salt last July, and came to us via the Ragamuffin Hens last fall.  He was one of the ragamuffin hens…until he started crowing.  There is potential that Salt and Pepper are half or full brother and sister, but we are guessing that at most they are half, since Salt seems to be half-bantam and Pepper clearly has a barred parent.  The farm where we got them had two roosters, a Barred Rock and a Bantam something-or-other.  Which lends itself to the fact that they would be half-brother/sister at most.

If you recall, Pepper had to go to isolation back in April because with only two hens in his pen he was tearing up Salt’s back too much.  He stayed there until the flock integration at which point he was put in the breeding pen.  At flock integration Salt moved out of the breeding pen and up to the big coop because we don’t want her in the breeding program.  The reasons being that she doesn’t have the qualities we are selecting for, except being a good layer, and because she is potentially too closely related to Pepper, our breeding roo for this season.

A little bit after the flock integration Salt began showing signs of being broody.  Because we want to do our breeding program using broody hens as much as possible as opposed to an incubator, we were very excited and wanted to encourage her along.  So we started putting a golf ball in the nest each time we took an egg out, hoping to save the eggs, since they were infertile anyway, but give her something to sit on.  Well, she was having none of that and would lay her eggs in the same nest as the golf balls, but had them in a separate pile from the balls.  So we decided to quit the golf-ball idea and just let her keep her eggs until we decided what hatching eggs to put under her.  I gave her back the two I had already taken.

Meanwhile, we were on the hunt for hatching eggs to put under her.  Since our breeding pullets aren’t laying yet, we weren’t ready with our own eggs, but we wanted to encourage her behavior so we decided we better come up with something for her to hatch.  I contacted our friends who want to be somewhat a part of our breeding program to see what they had.  Unfortunately, since the bear broke into their coop, their chickens hadn’t been laying well.  In addition, they hadn’t separated out their breeders yet so they had 1 roo covering 20 hens, which likely meant low fertility.  She said she would start saving hatching eggs anyway, just in case.

We really wanted Salt to have a good hatching experience, so she would go broody again (I have no idea if successful hatching effects repeated broodiness, but in my mind it makes sense).  And with the probable low fertility of our friends’ eggs we thought maybe we better buy some hatching eggs.  We began contemplating what breed(s) we would like to add to our breeding program before we officially started breeding our own birds and stopped adding new breeds.  We decided on Dark Brahmas because of their cold hardiness, size, and temperament.  We felt they would be a good complement to what we already had and help us towards our goal of what we want in the end.  Plus, we feel like getting eggs from a breeder, instead of a hatchery, would theoretically add better laying conformation to our mix of birds, which is something we are selecting for and is very lacking in hatchery birds.

Since Salt is little, and we wanted to be sure she could cover all the eggs, we ordered 7 Brahma hatching eggs.  Meanwhile, our friends stopped saving hatching eggs for us since she couldn’t set more than that.

Last Saturday, the same day the eggs shipped, Salt gave up on being broody.    Ironic.

So we were trying to decide what to do.  Just trash our hatching eggs when they came?  That seemed very wasteful.  But we weren’t planning on incubating at this point and thus didn’t have an incubator.  Ultimately we decided that it was too wasteful to not incubate the eggs so on Sunday we bought the incubator.  I also called our friends again and said that plans had changed, we now were incubating and had plenty of space if they wanted to throw any eggs in the mix.  They were bummed because they had used up all the eggs they were saving, and they desperately wanted to hatch some eggs since the bear had decreased their flock.  Had any of us known we were going to incubate eggs in an incubator they would have not only saved up eggs, but would have bought hatching eggs of their own.  But now it was too late because our hatching eggs would be going in the bator on Tuesday afternoon.  They decided to save up what they could from their eggs though and hope for some fertility despite their current situation.

Sunday evening I set up the incubator to get the temperature and humidity stabilized before putting the eggs in Tuesday.  I wanted to be sure the egg turner was working and since it is a rolling egg turner it is hard to tell so I decided to put some eggs in there.  I went to the fridge and then thought “this is wasteful, I’ll go out to the barn and get those eggs Salt has been sitting on since they are probably ruined anyway and aren’t fertile.”  I had left them out there just in case she might decide to start setting again.  So I got them and put them in there (there was also one store-bought egg in the mix).  I put an x on one side of each egg so I could tell if they were turning.  They were.

Monday the hatching eggs arrived and we left them to settle for 24 hours.  Tuesday I put the hatching eggs in the bator, including 5 our friends were able to gather from their chickens.  We decided to go ahead and leave the infertile eggs from Salt in there (calling them “dummy eggs”) so that if we needed to take out any eggs that were rotting later we would have extras to put in their spot to keep the heat and make sure that the hatching eggs were getting turned properly.  In our bator each triangle needs to be full to properly turn the eggs.

Left and right triangles directly across from each other are the hatching eggs, top right all brown are the dummy eggs from Salt, white one alone is a store-bought egg.

I had planned to candle at 4 days for fertility (which would have been Saturday afternoon/evening).  But Friday night I couldn’t wait and decided I needed to see if I could see anything.  I took out one of the Brahma eggs and candled it…hmmm…didn’t see much of anything but a yolk, but it could be too soon to tell.  I decided to look at an infertile egg to see if I could see any difference between them and the Brahma egg.  So I grabbed the store-bought white one.  It seemed like the yolk was a bit smaller than the Brahma one, could that mean something?  I wasn’t sure so I grabbed one of Salt’s eggs and candled it.

SHOCK!  There was a chick in the egg.  A for-sure, growing and living, 5-day old chick in the egg.  WHAT!?  How was this possible!?  I grabbed another one of her eggs…nothing..then another…nothing…then another…A CHICK!  Out of 6 of her eggs two of them are fertile and growing.  I checked the calendar.  She hadn’t been with Pepper for 16 days before she layed the eggs I had in the incubator.  That seems WAY to long.  But wait a minute…Captain Cook.  The cockerel was 15 weeks of age when the eggs were layed.  Could he have been fertile that young?  It seems like the only viable option.  He had started making attempts at crowing that week.  They were pathetic dying-cat sounds, but they were crowing attempts.  So I guess that means he was fertile by then.  It seems the only option, even though we have never seen him breed her.  But it seems more viable than Pepper being the sire after 16 days of being apart from Salt.

My mind was reeling with the surprise of it all.  But then it occurred to me – these eggs are two days older than our other eggs.  Will this even work to incubate them all together?  At 18 days of incubation you are supposed to stop turning the eggs and increase the humidity until they hatch around 21 days.  We can’t do that for two different sets of eggs in the same incubator.  We’re not going to risk the large group of purchased hatching eggs for two hatching eggs from an un-planned breeding.  But we also aren’t going to just throw these eggs out right now and not even give them a chance to survive.

So the plan is that we are going to leave them and see what happens.  We will probably put those two in their own triangle all alone at day 18 for them, that will decrease how much turning they get, though it wont stop it completely.  And then we will just see what happens.  Maybe they will hatch.  Maybe they wont.  But it’s worth a try right?

So we have learned a lot from this experience including the fact that cockerels mature early and one should never consider an egg infertile unless there isn’t a male chicken on the property at all.   And by the end of this we are going to learn whether or not incubating eggs that are 36 hours apart in age will work successfully.  Always an adventure around here!

Onion Garden

What is a garden of onions called?  It works to call a garden of strawberries a strawberry patch, or a garden of potatoes a potato patch, but can you call an onion garden an onion patch?

Well, onion garden, onion bed, or onion patch – whichever it is – we’ve got one.

Between the driveway and the main garden there is an area that long ago was landscaped to be a flower garden area.  It was greatly unsuccessful, mostly due to local wildlife using it as a pantry, and it has been decades since it ever had flowers in it.  When we moved in we were not sure exactly what to do with it.  Because of the layout and design it is nearly impossible to fence it from wildlife.  Should we try to plant some flowers that deer don’t like?  We considered that, but ultimately decided to make it productive instead.

There are few vegetables that can be planted outside of fences and not get demolished by deer, elk, rabbits, chipmunks, and the like.  Onions and garlic are two of them.  Enter the idea of the onion garden (patch? bed?).

Garden Enemy #1 – Saw this guy taking an afternoon rest today. I love it when their antlers are growing in and are covered in velvet! Beautiful to look at, bad for the garden.

So we took the former flower garden and we fixed it up a bit.  It is slanted (as is everything in the Rocky Mountains), so we tried to build up the rock terrace as much as possible to help make it a little less slanted (though it still is not level).  We also put in some new dirt/compost mix, and made a small upper terrace.  Lastly we put in a few stepping-stones to make it easier to access everything.  Today, we planted the onions and garlic in it.

Yes, I know that garlic is generally put in the ground in the fall.  However, I have been researching cold-climate, high-altitude gardening a lot lately to try to learn new things and I have found that it is said that in our climate you can plant garlic in early spring and have a nice fall harvest.  So we are going to try it out (not that I consider this “early” spring), and see how it goes.

Again, it felt so great to be out in the sun and warmth today, working to plant food for the family!

Tomorrow we start planting in the main garden!!!  We will be putting in hundreds of seeds of 7 different plants.  I’ll share more details after the hard work is done tomorrow!