Archive for July, 2008

Preserving Stuff

July 24, 2008 at 12:36 pm · Filed under farm, garden ·Tagged , ,

This will be a quick post – as it’s 75 degrees out….sunny…. and well I need to get to the garden to pick some more stuff!!

It’s time.  Yep!  It’s exciting – it truly is.  It’s time to start preserving all this STUFF growing in the garden.

I’m starting out with pickles – they are in and in abundance!!!  Made 13 quarts today – 6 for the fridge – 7 canned and I need to go out and get more pickles.

Now I will let you all know where I find a lot of my recipes.  Cooks.com  It’s a great site and I can usually find some good recipes there that everyone likes.  I find 98% of my pickling recipes there (even zucchini pickles!!) 

I’m dehydrating zukes as well – with a little salt on top for zuke chips :)   YUMMMM!!!!!  I have 9 trays going right now…. and still have 50 million zukes to deal with!

Gotta run and go get more pickles and see what else is out there!!

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Summer-time & Pumpkins

July 4, 2008 at 8:35 am · Filed under farm

Many of you know we are currently hosting 2 kids from Northern Ireland.  It’s been a fun week honestly and it’s completely different than what we expected.  Ok – 2 - 11 year old boys is very interesting to say the least but what FUN it has been.  Even Joe stated he’d do this again because they seem to just slip right into life.  Now 1 is a city type kids – and the chickens and all that is new you can see on his face.  The 2nd one is just as fun to watch discover and see new things.

Well – we’ll see how much of the pumpkin patch gets done.  The BEST grass grew over last years patch.  Can’t grow grass this good anywhere else on the farm but Joe started plowing it all up yesterday.  We are just so late with everything that who knows how much will go in – but we will try and pull it together. 

At least the veggies are all coming up!  Tomatoes are coming in – peppers are coming in….. everything is coming up!!  What fun!!  And I can’t wait to make pickles - I miss the fresh dill pickles I made last year – I ended up selling them all and I had only I think 2 jars.

Well I was going to butcher chickens today – but it was raining when I woke up.  So it will have to be put off until later this week.  Hopefully we’ll have a full fridge by our “Farm Market Day”

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Childish Email “Threats”

July 4, 2008 at 8:26 am · Filed under farm

I’m going to blog about this because I’m frustrated.  I received an email this morning in an almost threatening tone about our pigs.  I say threatening because they blocked my emails from getting to them!  So they didn’t give me a chance to respond.

Our pigs are ALL finished off on pasture period.  Yes, since our large blacks JUST gave birth for the 1st time our pork hasn’t been born here and I am completely open with that.  We had 7 piglets and hope next year to get more.

The last pigs we got were commercial hogs – weighing in at 175-200 pounds.  They come here and burn off 10-20 pounds pretty fast with all the running they do then they start to gain weight.  They are NEVER taken from the place we get them straight down to the butcher!  I don’t agree with that practice and it’s not what I sell PLAIN AND SIMPLE!! 

I guess what bugs me is that this person apparently talked to the person who raised these hogs up (that takes research) and even found out the weights of the pigs.   Then sends me an email asking about it – yet blocks me from responding.  Give me a break and grow up!  Plain and simple.

If you have an honest question – email it, call, whatever and then let me respond.  I don’t have anything to hide (or else why would I open my farm up to so many people so many times per year?!)

Ok that’s my quick 2 second rant for this morning.  I’ll write a positive email right after this because honestly this one just pushed a button when I couldn’t respond and I needed to get it out.  Poor Joe will have to listen to me in a few minutes as well.

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