It’s That Time of the Year

January 17, 2013January 17, 2013 / handmadebyjo / Leave a comment

Many people are getting their seed catalogs out and pouring through them this time of year. It’s good to do a little planning and have your seeds ready to go whether you need to start your tomatoes in the house, are sowing some seed in your hot or cold frame or are just thinking about what will go where in the garden this year.

I’m a planner, it’s one of my favorite parts. I plan what I’m going to plant and where it’s going to go in the garden this year. I plan what plants will be next to the others keeping companion planting in mind. I plan different designs because I hate how boring it is to look at a garden with plants in rows. I pour over the charts I’ve kept in past years to make sure I don’t plant the tomatoes and potatoes in the same place year after year.

I work on an order with High Mowing Organic Seeds that I continue to change week after week from October on, waiting until the last minute to place it. I read their website for all the info I can gather about the new seeds I want to try growing. There are always the tried and true to grow like last year’s Gold Rush yellow snap bean. I cannot say enough about this bean, it was prolific. I started picking beans in July and picked them until frost. They weren’t those tough, tasteless beans either. They were tender and tasty until the very end. I lost count of how many pints I canned but I know Sue and I complained towards the end of the season every time we picked enough beans to can once more. Of course now I’m glad I did.

The other plant I grew this year and introduced to everyone I knew was Joan Rutabagas. I grow them every year and was a little in awe at how few people had never tried rutabagas (probably because they are my favorite vegetable). They require a fairly long growing season but are very cold hardy so they weren’t dug until well into October. I fed them to everyone.

Every year I pick one or two new plants to try. Some work out very well like the Gold Rush beans. Some don’t
but I feel like I haven’t given it a real chance unless I plant it a couple of years in a row. Each growing season is so different. Here’s the problem, every year there are more and more things I want to plant but I don’t have the space to plant them all. I have to cut down my list of seeds.

Sad, sad.

There are currently 27 items in my cart. I probably should get rid of half.

What it really makes me do is plan a new garden in another spot on the property. It’s always some nice piece of lawn that Bill has worked on for years. He’s not going to like this.

The Story of Chester, Part One

January 16, 2013 / handmadebyjo / Leave a comment

Chester came to us in a rather round about way. Yes, we adopted him but we didn’t go to a shelter or read about him in the paper. We took him because Nadia ( in the photograph) couldn’t keep him anymore. I asked her to tell me about Chester so it could be the beginning of his story.

Nadia picked up Oreo (his name then) on June 24, 2011 after seeing his photograph in a Craigslist listing for northern VT. The people that had him were about to move and couldn’t take him with them. When Nadia called them they told her they were leaving that day and they were just going to leave him at the house they were moving out of.

They were abandoning him.

Nadia arrived at their house as they were leaving with their Uhaul. She brought him home to live with her and her then boyfriend. She loved him, he was her baby. How could you not?

I first heard about this puppy in July. Daughter Amanda and her boyfriend, Yusuf were wondering about the wisdom of getting a puppy when you’re starting college in the fall. Nadia is Yusuf’s sister. Towards the middle of August I got a text from Amanda telling me that Oreo needed a forever home and did I know anyone that would take him?

Nadia had had a falling out with her boyfriend and came to stay with Amanda and Yusuf with the pup in tow. At some point she decided she was going back but couldn’t bring the dog and wanted to make sure he went to a good home. She really didn’t want to let go but I think she was trying to protect him from an abusive situation, I don’t know, we haven’t talked about it.

Amanda sent me this photograph on her phone with the message, “Isn’t he cute?”.

Sigh.

On August 13 we went boating with Amanda and Nadia who brought Oreo so we could meet him. That night Bill and I talked about how much we like this dog. He was the perfect size and was very sweet but . . . we had two other dogs, did we really want to contribute to the madness we already had?

On August 19th we brought him home.

I’ve had dogs for over 30 years, only one other did I rescue and I lived to regret it. I believe that every animal comes to us for a reason, they have a job to do although we are never privy to what that is. Chester moved through two lives before he came to us. I honestly think he came to Nadia to force her onto another path.

He still loves Nadia. She came to dinner for Thanksgiving this year. Chester was pretty excited about all of the company in the house and all of the potential ball throwers that were gathered in one spot so he didn’t really notice Nadia right away. When he did he practically leaped into her lap wagging his tail in a frantic, crazy way and licked her face. He was soooooo happy to see her.

It always amazes me that they remember so much. I think we dismiss them too readily, we don’t give them credit for how deeply they feel things. People write them off as “just” a dog. I think in some respects they carry around as much baggage as we do but they are much more willing to move on and away from the ills that have befallen them in the past. In some respects they are quite simple, if you love them they will love you back. I have found that just loving a dog can help change a lot of bad things. I think we can all learn a lesson from this behavior. Live for right now, the past made you somewhat who you are but the present can be what you make of it – let the crap go.

What you can do with a little flour and fresh eggs

January 15, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 4 Comments

My sister has quite the flock of chickens that are just beginning to lay eggs (note the rooster in the back over seeing his girls). Last week she brought up some eggs and since then I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do with the motherload of eggs like she will be seeing in the coming weeks. You see, she has 26 very healthy hens. That’s a lot of eggs. Once they are all laying it could be up to 2 dozen a DAY. Hmmmm, what to do with that wonderful fresh egg bounty?

Make omelets, quiche, pudding, angelfood cake? Fry them, scramble them, poach them – aahh, Eggs Benedict. Eat them at every meal, sell them, give them away. The list goes on but how about something a little different?

Saturday I decided to try something new. I’d been thinking about it for a long time. Pasta, specifically ravioli, I was determined to make my own. I scoured the internet and watched way too much Diners, Driveins and Dives in preparation for this new gastronomic adventure. I bought a pasta machine and ravioli mold (all very on sale) as well as a bag of Perfect Pasta Flour from King Arthur. Then she brought up those eggs and I was ready.

After all of that prep I ended up using the recipe on the bag of flour (how can you go wrong with a recipe from King Arthur Flour?). Three cups of flour, four large eggs, very little water. Sue’s eggs are small so I used 5 eggs. Put it all into the mixer with the dough hook and let it mix. Well, for a couple minutes anyway. The dough is so dense that it really requires hand kneading, so I divided it in half and did so. Let it rest for 30 minutes then shape into anything you want.

Now I have to tell you that this didn’t really look like it was going to make much pasta – I had 4 dozen meatballs just waiting to be turned into filling. Sister Sue wanted to be part of this adventure and entered the kitchen in time to help – good thing because this is a 2 man job (they don’t tell you that anywhere). I started rolling out the dough a little at a time and was AMAZED at how pliable a dough this is. Stretches like crazy, does not fall apart. After the first dozen raviolis were made we decided to cut the meatballs in half since the first batch looked more like Chinese dumplings instead of the intended Italian pasta. Perfection!

We made 3 dozen raviolis. I also have a pasta cutter attachment with the pasta machine so we made linguini and then spaghetti. I had no where to dry it so we made piles to freeze. We had a delicious meal with a homemade sauce and put everything else in the freezer. It takes only 4 minutes to cook fresh linguine, the ravioli took 5 minutes and was amazingly good.

The question remains, what are we going to do with all of those eggs because this is what we made with only 5!

Chasing Balls in the Snow

January 14, 2013January 14, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 1 Comment

There is a lot of snow in Rowe, even with the January thaw we’ve been having. Chester has had to retool his tennis ball games because of it. His new game is to hunt for the ball once it disappears into the snowy white unknown. When we toss the ball he keeps his eyes on where he thinks it’s going to land and runs out to find it.

He will root around in the snow until he comes up with the ball.

Then he gleefully returns it and waits for the next toss. He never tires of this game. I’ve seen him go outdoors by himself with a tennis ball, drop it into a snowbank and dig and dig until he “finds” it. If he loses a ball he will stay out looking for it for hours and will not take a new ball. You throw him another one and he ignores it.

Bill may have changed the game a little for him yesterday by accident. He was tossing the ball and with his last toss it landed in the snow on top of the garage roof. Chester looked for that ball for a good 3 hours. Bill tried the substitution but it was a no go. That dog actually came into the house to warm up and went out again to look for that ball. Poor Chester. It looks like an OCD to me.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Illunimation

January 11, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 1 Comment

Christmas Eve always mean fire of some sort to me. Set the table with candles, huge fire in the fireplace, warmth, family, friends, food, bliss.

Sugar

January 11, 2013 / handmadebyjo / Leave a comment

The forecast for the weather today is very mild – they say in the 40’s. When that happens in January I always start thinking about maple sugaring. Bill and I sugar with our friends Russ and Carmen in the next town over. We do it because it is a really fun time (most of the time) and gives you a real sense of accomplishment. Russell and his son started laying the pipeline last weekend. Things will be ready when the time comes to tap the trees.

The photograph above was the sugar house that was in the back of the house in Rowe. There are still remnants of the metal equipment that they used out in the wood lot although I confess I personally have not seen them. I’ve walked to that area a few times but what was once a sugarbush is now over grown with huge pine trees.

In the middle to late 1800’s there was a lot of maple sugar made on Fort Pelham Farm. The first record of it was in the 1860 Farm Census where 700 lbs of sugar was recorded for that year. 1860 holds the record for the most maple sugar ever made in the U.S. One of the reasons being this was the ramp up to the civil war and people were boycotting cane sugar due to slavery. They replaced a lot of that cane sugar with maple. In 1870 they produced 300 pounds and in 1880 they produced 450. I am assuming that pounds of sugar was both syrup and sugar but it may have all been sugar. Until 1860 there were only wooden spouts to tap the trees and iron pots to boil the sap in. The process involved a number of pots at various stages of boiling so instead of having an automated draw down to syrup as we have today they were manually transferring sap from pot to pot until it reach the sugar stage that they were looking for. When I read that 700 lbs. of sugar was made it came as a huge surprise just considering the amount of work that is involve.

So I decided to do some math.

On the average, it takes 40 gallons of maple sap to make 1 gallon of pure maple syrup. One tap hole in each maple tree gives 10 gallons of sap in an average year. So, 4 maple trees, 40 to 200 years old, are needed to make one gallon of pure maple syrup. Some trees have more than one tap but all should be over 10 inches in diameter.

Maple sap is 2% sugar and weighs 8.35 lbs. per gallon.

Maple syrup is 66.9% sugar and weighs 11 lbs per gallon.

One gallon of maple syrup makes 7 lbs of maple sugar.

All I can say is wow. The best year we ever had was 2 years ago because it was a long season. We made 130 gallons of syrup. We had 1,000 taps on pipeline and about 200 buckets. We used a reverse osmosis rig to take a lot of the water out of the sap before we even started to boil it. We burn slabs from a local sawmill and the fire is stoked every 4 minutes – yes, every 4 minutes. I’m not sure how much wood we burned.

They were just using buckets to catch the sap. Each bucket had to be emptied at least once a day by a person, stored and boiled. They must have been boiling 24 hours a day everyday throughout the season. At the time on the farm they had two oxen which I’m sure were worked gathering sap. Fortunately the season is short.

Then I remembered a conversation Bill and I had a couple of weeks ago about the amount of wood it would have taken to heat the house. We figured anywhere from 15 to 20 cord a year. Add to that whatever they needed to make maple sugar and these men had to have been doing nothing but cutting wood year round – with saws, axes and mauls and those oxen. This is why they tell you that you could see to the ocean from Western Mass. Every tree had been cut down and burned by the time 1880 came around, that’s when people began burning coal.

People always ask me why the price of syrup is so high and I always tell them how much work is involved in it. I don’t think we even get enough to justify any of our time, we do it because we love it. I can’t imagine thinking it was fun half way through the season in 1860.

Bunny Tracks

January 10, 2013 / handmadebyjo / Leave a comment

There is a lot of snow in Rowe. Bill plows out paths all over the property with the tractor. I think he does it for something to do more than anything else. This morning when I went out with the dogs there were rabbit tracks everywhere. I started following some of their little trails around and found it amusing that they use Bill’s plowed out roads more than anything else. They will go over the banks to get under something but it appears they’ve turned Bill’s roads into quite the highway.

I love seeing their tracks everywhere, I rarely see one in the winter. It makes me feel a little more secure about have the little dogs running around everywhere, especially in the evening. There were a number of years when we had coyotes in the back forty almost every night. There wasn’t a small critter to be found anywhere on that property. We found the carnage of a deer kill over the bank near the new perennial garden one spring as well. Friends lost their cats. They are quite scary, especially when you know they are there, you hear them but you never see them.

About two years ago I stopped hearing them barking at night. Then the critters started coming back. The rabbits are new to us here. As long as I can remember there were never rabbits in the back behind the barn. Now you see them when you drive in the driveway or go out early in the morning with your coffee and in the winter you see evidence of them everywhere.

Nature’s Easter Eggs

January 9, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 3 Comments

Sue brought up some fresh eggs for me last night, her hens have just started laying. She has Araucanas, Barred Rocks and Buff Orpingtons as well as the mystery rooster. He oversees all 26 hens. He’s a busy boy.

I had two of them for breakfast this morning. I always find it delightful to see that egg stay contained, tightly held together as a fresh egg will. They were delicious. They were also beautiful. The brown eggs are all different shades that tend to the pink side and the Araucanas’ eggs are just a delightful green. I think I want to paint a room one of these colors.

Fannie

January 8, 2013 / handmadebyjo / Leave a comment

It’s seems a little funny to me that the only photograph I have of my favorite teacher of all time is of her as a student standing in front of the one room schoolhouse she attended in Rowe. She’s second from the right in the back row. Her best friend, standing next to her with the blonde hair, is Olive Wright, the last Wright to live at Fort Pelham Farm. This is all coincidental because we didn’t move into the house until 1967 which was the last of the four years I had Fannie von Reuss Chenburg for a teacher.

Rowe is a very small town. When I started school there were 6 of us in my kindergarten class. The next year it dropped to 4 and that’s the way it stayed until I entered a nine town regional in Buckland. Mrs. von was my teacher from the third through the sixth grades. Until the last year she taught it all to all 4 grades at the same time. I’m sure that it took a little different skill set to do this but this is how she was taught so it didn’t really seem that different.

My memories of her are so mixed but I have to say that I loved her. She was well-traveled in exotic places and would tell us stories of her time in the Middle East and Europe. She also told us about her escapades with Olive. I remember how wonderfully she would tell these stories so your imagination would take you to a different time and place. Those stories stick with me still. We did flag drills in Phys. Ed. We drew glorious maps in geography, learned our math diligently and reading was always a top priority. I was writing critical thinking papers in the fourth grade. My most memorable topic being “What would happen if there were too many people?”. She was an outdoors woman walking to school many days and telling us about the otters in Pelham Lake that she would watch on the way in or what birds were at her feeders. I remember her having and teaching an enormous respect for life.

There was the dark side that any of us that had her for a teacher would tell you. I honestly can’t remember what precipitated some of these incidents but I do remember chalk being thrown and yard sticks being slapped on your desk. The sound of the chalk clinking on her wedding ring as she rolled it back and forth in her hands. We always knew she was in a good mood when she wore earrings to school.

We made kites. We would play outdoors for extended recess on those first true spring days when the only place to play was the pavement because the snowbanks were too high. We jumped rope and played rolly at the bat. We played a game, school wide called “Run Sheep Run” which I think was a take on Capture the Flag. She would have us come to her house where her flower gardens were a sight to behold. They must have been pretty wonderful, I still think about them today. We have a peony in our garden that comes from hers. These were all magical moments.

Fannie von Reuss Chenburg helped mold some wonderful people. We all took away a little bit of her. You can see it still in all of us as adults – that love of nature and quiet, that sense of adventure, the caring about each individual. When I get together with the kids in my class, now long into adulthood there is something that we all have in common and I think it’s her.

Poor Sophie

January 8, 2013 / handmadebyjo / 1 Comment

When Sophie is in Rowe the only thing she wants to do is go outside. It doesn’t matter what the weather, if someone is outdoors she wants to be there. When Chester is out there without her she sits on the back of the chair so she can see what he’s doing and what she might be missing. And cries.

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