Summer into Fall
Weekly Photo Challenge : Change
Summer into Fall
Month: April 2013
Food Rant Friday
Farmhouse Cheddar and Apple Pie
There are few things that fire me up more than food. I mean fake food versus real food. I follow a blog called Auburn Meadow Farm. This week her blog brought me to this informative pdf called Food Stamps, Follow the Money by Michele Simon. Take some time to read it. Or you could be like me and be soo angry after the first page that you have to put it down for a little while and come back to it. Do come back to it though because in the interest of being informed on so many levels it is an excellent read.
I’m dating myself here but when I grew up we still had home economics required in high school, cooking and sewing. I also belonged to a number of 4-H clubs including cooking, sewing, knitting, etc. Over the years all of these opportunities for education have gone away. I think some of it has to do with the women’s movement, some has to do with budget cuts in schools and some with the perception that this sort of thing is just old fashioned – why knit yourself a sweater when you can go to a store and buy it right now at half the cost. Home Arts has gone out of style.
As I age in this land of consumerism I fear for my children – all of them – sons, daughters, nieces, nephews. They have grown up in a society that values nothing but money and instant gratification. Instead of going to a market to buy the ingredients for a meal they buy fast food. It has little nutritional value, contains GMO’s, huge amounts of sodium, and a whole lot of things I can’t even pronounce. My daughters do go “shopping” in Rowe from time to time and raid the canned goods shelves. I take satisfaction in knowing when they take that jar of spaghetti sauce off of the shelf it contains grass fed beef and vegatables that I have grown. I am blessed to have that ability and am willing to teach anyone how to do anything from gardening to canning to handwork. They just have to want to learn it.
Going, going, gone.
Sue messaged me on Tuesday to say I wouldn’t believe how much of the snow was gone. Sunday when we left there was just one bare spot next to the patio. This morning all of the gardens are exposed. Things are popping out of the earth everywhere. God I love this time of year. The birds were all singing. The back forty was very, very wet but walkable. The water is rushing through the little brook that exits Hoover Damn (I guess I should write about Hoover Damn sometime).
The garlic is up! That’s very exciting.
And this looks like what will be on the agenda this weekend – burning brush. It seems like this is a never ending chore. It piles up all year waiting for burn season to open in January. Of course in January there is usually too much snow and half the pile is buried so we have to wait . . . and wait . . . and wait. Burn season ends on May 1st so we just finish sugaring and it’s a mad couple of weekends trying to get everything burned. There is also a large pile of logs that needs to be cut and split. And of course Chester has photo bombed another shot. That’s his purpose in life.
Weaving Wednesday 4
Today should really be textile Wednesday. On Saturday THIS was delivered to the house.
I am excited beyond words. This wheel is amazing, so well balanced. It probably took me all of 10 minutes to adjust and then I just was spinning away. This is truly a beauty. The funniest part about getting this wheel was how much Bill complained when I told him I was getting it. He whined about another large piece of equipment coming into the house and where the heck were we going to put it? He was with Russell gathering sap when it arrived so he didn’t see it until it was all set up and going. His reaction when he saw it was “Wow, that’s awesome, it looks like it belongs here!” So instead of it being relegated to another room it may have a home right where it is (unless we have a fire).
Pam drove to Rowe to go through my loom and make some minor adjustments so I could actually weave on it. I started dressing it on Sunday but didn’t have enough time to finish, possibly tonight I will be able to throw a shuttle and see how it all goes. I do love putting on a warp though, I love the counting and focus it requires. It relaxes me. The bonus is how beautiful it is every step of the way.
This is an extra warp I wound in class for the twill towels. I may play with this a bit rather than making just four more towels (although these towels would probably have fewer mistakes). Perfectionism is such a curse. I love the twill stripes on these and the cotton has such a nice sheen.
I went to weaving an hour early last night and was able to finish my summer and winter experiment. I ended up weaving a little over 30 inches in the green and white. I’ll post a photo of it finished once it is. It really is quite beautiful. The photograph just doesn’t do it justice, it’s such a wonderful moss green. Next week I will be warping a 36″ loom for an overshot throw in wool – very excited about this one. Now to shop for just the perfect yarn and color!
Season’s End
Bill, Carmen and Russell gathered sap Saturday morning on what turned out to be a very nice day. The estimate of sap was over 700 gallons. The RO was started and the waiting began. Russell was firing up the rig when we arrived around 3:00.
Boiling sap requires a lot of waiting and watching with moments of intensity. Russ has a lot of new electronic gadgets that we whine about but in reality it does make boiling easier. This year was a stack thermometer that lets you know when you need to stoke the fire.
At the top of the above photo is a piece of equipment that is the automatic draw. This opens a valve on the pan that lets the syrup out into a pail when it’s the right sugar content. A lot of testing goes on when you first begin the process. Once you know the specific gravity of the syrup for that particular day the temperature is set. Russell tweaks it most of the afternoon always going for the best syrup possible.
Bill doing his job as fireman. Poking and stoking. We burn slabs from a local sawmill – it looks like it’s mostly pine and hemlock – don’t quote me on that though. It is HOT in that sugarhouse once everything has been going for a while. The stack thermometer was over 1,000 degrees a number of times.
Waiting and watching. As the syrup is drawn off it is filtered and put into a holding tank. The tank holds about 12 gallons of syrup and has a gas burner underneath it that enables us to heat it up for canning.
Russell is putting the fire out at the end of the boil. There is a stainless tank in the sugarhouse with a clear hose so you can see when you are coming to the end of the sap. You need to get that fire out and stop the process before your sap runs out or you will burn your pan. I always feel it’s a little bit of a panic at the end, you want to boil all you can but not enough to wreck your equipment. Tensions always begin to rise as boiling comes to an end.
As the filtering is done and the holding tank is filled we begin to put the syrup in bottles. It’s not until you’ve canned every drop that you tally up what you did for the day. The old record was 22 gallons in one day, Saturday we did a little over 23. It is also some of the nicest syrup we’ve ever produced. While Carmen and I canned Russ cleaned up. Everything is washed down at the end of the session, it’s kind of a sticky mess but the sugar just melts away with water. We finished everything at 8:15.
Any one interested? Think pancakes, waffles and french toast, yum. Quarts are $16, pints $10 plus shipping. Once you’ve had this you will never go back. We consider ourselves pure maple syrup snobs.
Half a Flock
Many people think of farming in a magical, dreamy way. How wonderful it would be picking your veggies from your perfectly weeded garden, herbs by the back door. Going out in the morning to throw some feed to your flock of chickens then gathering their still warm eggs to make your breakfast omelet. Now that the snow is going or gone and the weather is warming it’s easy to think about how wonderful it would be to live such a bucolic life. Sometimes I dream about that while sitting at my computer at work listening to the air and vehicle traffic that surrounds me.
The reality of farming slapped me in the face yesterday when sister Sue called, crying, to ask me to come down and kill two injured hens. Some predator had killed half of her flock while she was running a road race. Let’s preface this by saying other than mosquitoes I have never killed a thing in my life – ever. I got off of the phone, told Bill who just looked at me with a look that said “absolutely NO way”. Bill handed me my gun case and I drove the quarter mile it is to my sister’s saying a little prayer to give me strength to do this. When I got there dead bodies were everywhere it seemed. Poor Sue cried and cried, she loves her “ladies”. She said the two wounded were in the coop (they had been placed there by two well meaning neighbors). I told her to just go in the house and I would take care of it. I was relieved to see Big Jim, her rooster had made it through the attack although he obviously was missing some feathers. He also tried to attack me as I approached the wounded hens. I brought them outdoors, closed the coop door and shot the two of them (I honestly don’t think they would have lasted the rest of the afternoon, but no animal should suffer like that). I put their bodies over the stonewall, down the bank. Then I went up on the hill to pick up another dead hen so Sue wouldn’t have to do it. This was sad, sad, sad. I went back into the coop to take inventory of who was left – of 26 hens she had 13 left plus the rooster.
I went into the house and said I needed a cup of tea. Sue was telling me that the chickens were scattered all over the place. In trees, down in the center of town, for all we knew there were still some out there. The back of her house has a bank of windows that overlook a large field, a road and another large field. We looked out the windows and down by the road a lone Buff Orpington was wandering about. Sue put on her boots and went down and caught her. That’s a picture I think I may always remember, my sister walking up the hill with that hen under her arm.
Once the hen was safely with her flock we talked about how the rest of the hens just go about living their little lives like nothing had happened. We were wishing that we could do the same.
Weekly Photo Challege:Color
For this week’s color challenge I opted to share some flower macros from gardens past. Hope you enjoy them.
Sophie’s Multiple Personalities
When we got Chester it became clear right from the beginning that Sophie did NOT like him, not one little bit. They initially had a huge fight over food where Chester bit and pierced her ear. It had to hurt but Sophie is such a drama queen that you would have thought she was near death. As the months went on she would continue to attack him for no reason (at least that we could see). I then started taking just her and Chester to Rowe during the week and they seem to have bonded. We’ve had Chester for a year and a half now and Sophie is tolerating him and at times will even play with him. Monday we were driving from Rowe to Enfield and this is what I saw in the back seat. Since it was April 1st I’m thinking this was some sort of joke.
Gratitude
So often we go through our days (and lives) never taking stock of what we are truly grateful for. There is so much around us that we take for granted – blue skies, the flowers always coming out of the ground in the spring, the birds singing. I think it’s really more than that. We need to be thankful for the people around us that have come in and out of our lives at different points. There are things that happen often when people are behind the scenes that you never give a thought to but they have a tremendous effect on who you are. These can be people you have never met but are tangled into life as you know it. Sometimes you are given very special gifts that remind you things are not what they appear to be or there is some great underlying plan. They may seem like grand coincidences but as you delve deeper you find that maybe this was the plan all along.
Someone I have never known said thank you to me yesterday for something I did over forty years ago. It was no small act at the time but I had rarely thought about it from her perspective over the years. They say time heals all wounds and to some extent that is true but sometimes all it takes is a thank you to help someone to fully heal. Look around you at the people in your lives and say a silent thank you or one aloud for how they have influenced your life. Everyone will be better for it.
Boiling Sap
I wish I could send the smell of boiling maple syrup to everyone reading this post. It is truly my favorite part of making it. You are engulfed in maple steam the whole time, it’s wonderful.
Easter Sunday was the first day Bill and I boiled sap with Russell. Bill and Russ had gathered the buckets the day before and the reverse osmosis machine had done its thing while we shared an Easter dinner with family. We lit the fire at about 3:00 and finished at 5:30 making 8 gallons of syrup. Russ says he needs more taps now that he has the r.0. I think he’s right. Having so much of the water removed from the sap before we start to boil has cut the time to make syrup in half. We talked about how boiling used to take us hours. We’d start at 2:00 in the afternoon and maybe, just maybe be cleaning up at 1:00 in the morning.
There have been so many improvements in the equipment over the years that just make it easier than it used to be. When we sugared years ago the men that boiled could tell when it was ready by how it flowed off of their scoops. Now there are so many different ways of measuring the sugar content of your syrup I think the art of making syrup may be lost, now it’s manufacturing. Well, almost. It’s still a lot of work.
So after canning up our hot syrup and taking it away we got a call from Russell telling us he’s picking up all of the syrup we’d brought away with us – factory recall. It was cloudy so it would have to be heated and re-filtered. We were running blind in the filtering department with vague instructions Carmen had left behind when she went to work (she’s the expert). So back it went and our anxious customers will have to wait another week for their dose of fresh maple syrup.
Fort Pelham Farm 