Today's Joke

Oh by the way, here is one that might help y’all have a chuckle. In the coming Year, 2012, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union address will occur on the same day. This is an ironic juxtaposition of events. One involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to an insignificant creature of little intelligence for prognostication. The other involves a groundhog.

The cost of butter.

Bella,our jersey milk cow.

   As a former dairy producer I've always known that dairy farmers get ripped off terribly at the price they are paid for the milk they produce. It has really been demonstrated to me recently. Our little Jersey cow is not a high producing cow. In all honesty, we have had goats that milked almost as much as she does. She has one great saving grace however, her milk is very high in butterfat. We do not "push" our cow to produce more milk or butterfat. She gets a very reasonable diet of pasture in season or good well made hay along with a small amount of grain at this time of year. From this modest feed she gives us around two and a half gallons of milk per day. This is about a fourth of what cows in most commercial dairies are expected to produce but as I said her milk is very rich and creamy.
   Each day Ann places Bella's milk in wide mouth gallon jars. From a day's production we will use about a half gallon after skimming the cream off as whole milk and the cream from it for our coffee,etc. This leaves two gallons which we skim the cream off of and make butter from it. It will produce about a pound and a half of butter. The skim milk is then used to make mozzarella cheese and those two gallons produce about 1 3/4 pounds of fresh cheese. From the whey produced making the mozzarella a whey cheese called mysost can be made which will yield about another 1-1 1/2 pounds.SO.... lets add this up.

   1/2 gallon whole milk.....$2.00                                    Feed for Bella per day
  pint cream......................$1.50                                     hay...............................$2.50
  1 1/2 pounds butter........$5.00                                     grain.............................$1.50
  1 3/4 p. mozzarella.........$5.00                                         total..........................$4.00
 1 1/2 p. mysost...............$5.00
   Total..........................$18.50
 This is from about 20-22 pounds of milk, 2 1/2 gallons. Farmers are currently getting about $17-$18 per one hundred pounds or about twelve gallons of milk.  Convert that using the figures I did for our production and the farmers 100 pounds of milk will yield about $88.00 worth of product. This explains why I no longer farm for a living!
  Please note that I have never seen mysost in a store here so I'm guessing on that price. The other prices are what we have paid though not recently as we don't need to buy any dairy products!

Clothes Drying Rack

Here is a handy easy to make clothes drying rack. It is real handy for drying gloves, mittens, and socks. As you can see from the pic is simply a bicycle rim with every thing removed and then has some type of line strung through the spoke holes. Add a wooden clothes pin on the end of each string. Three strings go to a ring or tie a loop for hanging. We have it along side our wood stove.
  I have seen some made by local Amish craftsman that have a smaller rim inside the large rim to increase the capacity. They also used chain to attach the clothes pins but I thought that was much heavier duty than we needed. It is nice to have dry gloves when you need them and it is a quick,easy, and effective recycling project. 

Foraging 2011

 

      2011 was a good year for us foraging wise. Our year started out with maple syrup season. We cooked syrup from March 15th  till April 15th. We ended up with 9 gallons of syrup so have plenty for ourselves plus some to trade. We have made sugar some years but didn't this year. In mid  May we gathered ostrich fern fiddle heads and Ann canned 56 pints of them. We use them as you would use asparagus. We also dug wild ginger the same day. We enjoy the taste of wild ginger in our Labrador tea. It adds that extra zing. By the end of May we were eating nettle greens which I like better than spinach. It is very good steamed with a little bacon grease and some rice vinegar.
  June  was productive also with our first mushroom find of the year when we got 5 pounds of oyster mushrooms on the 22nd. Wild strawberries were abundant this year but they take so long to pick that we quit after we had a pint and a half. Ramps are easy to find early in the year before a lot of under growth gets going and we picked a couple of quarts on the 20th.
   The foraging year kicked into high gear in July , I had 14 entries in my foraging journal for the month. More ramps and nettle greens start off the list followed by lambs quarter greens, cattail pollen, elder flowers, june berries, wild blueberries, and wild raspberries. I counted up 57 pounds of wild berries in July and the first week of August. We picked some hazelnuts the last weekend of July but sad to say that was jumping the gun and they were not mature yet.
   August started out with 11 quarts of black cherries found when we were scouting wild rice. There was very nice rice on one of the flowages we checked this year although it was tipped in every direction by strong winds early in the season. It made harvesting the rice a little tricky but we are happy with our harvest of170 pounds of dry rice. We still have to thresh much of that but that is another post.
   September turned out to be our best month for mushrooms. We found more oysters, hen of the woods, pig snouts, hedge hog and honey fungus.  All together we found about 12 pounds of mushrooms in September. We also picked about 20 pounds of nanny berries which yielded 25 pints of puree when Ann was done.
   42 pounds of bur oak acorns topped the list for October but the four gallons of hazel nuts , dehusked but in the shell, was a close second. We picked a cup of wild cranberries at our boat landing which got us enthused to go hunting for more the 5th. of November.
   We considered the hunt a success when we brought home 7 quarts of cranberries. We found some creeping snow berry so had to try a tea made with the vine and berries. It was not as good as we had heard it might be. The coup de gras of the season was Ann's. She brought home 8 bushels of black walnuts gleaned  from a neighbors lawn. I just finished a piece of chocolate fudge with black walnuts.

Trailing Arbutus

Epigaearepens L.,Trailing Arbutus is one of the first plants to bloom in our area in north central Wisconsin. This pic does not show it but the blossoms are often a pale pink and they have a beautiful scent. It is a trailing perenial with oval leathery leaves. The tubular five lobed flowers are in clusters. This member of the Heath family contains arbutin which is a urinary antiseptic but it hydrolyzes to hydroquinone which is toxic.

American Indians used leaf tea for kidney disorders as do some folk remedies. It is a plant I always look for as a sign of spring but I have never used it medicinaly and do not recommend it.

Living Simple

Living Simple
  This is a link to one of my former blogs. Same sort of topics. Got busy and didn't update . Started Forest House Farm blog to promote our CSA and I enjoy sharing a little info now and then.

Labrador Tea

We pick Labrador Tea year round if we are out but usually try to pick our years supply in the winter. It is easier since labrador tea,  Ledum groenlandicum, grows in bogs and swamps and it's easier when the swamp is froze over. The leaves stay on year round. It often grows on sphagnum moss humps in association with leather leaf and wild blueberry. The leathery leaves have edges that roll under and the bottom of the leaf is cover with much white to rusty or gold hairs. The shrub is up to 3 feet tall and has very fragrant flowers between May and July. It makes a nice tea with a citrusy, piney, sort of flavor. We like to add wild ginger and either chaga or turkey tail mushroom. Since we heat with wood a pot of it can sit on the stove all day to stay warm. Don't let it brew too long as it will get very bitter. This is a fairly common plant in our area.

Tom, Jerri, and Henrietta

Trio of bourbon red turkeys

 One more piece of the homestead puzzle is in place with the great find Ann made on Craig's List. We picked up this trio for only $50 which is very reasonable considering that day old chicks are almost $10 each.This is a heritage breed and one we have been considering getting. We are hoping that these can breed unassisted since they haven't been "improved" for industrial farming. They are supposed to be much more docile than some of the other breeds. We had a tom turkey once [ not sure what breed] that would chase my daughter when she went to get on the school bus! lol After a while  it was not so humorous and so we ate the turkey.  We have raised the broad breasted whites and had some success but we hope to pasture raise these if we get a hen to lay and set. We are going to get one of those little stryofoam incubators if the hens lay enough eggs to be worth doing it. These are about two and a half years old. Not sure if that is old for a turkey or not. Anyway they are certainly attractive birds so we'll just wait and see what happens this spring.

BACON!

Top picture is bacon hung to dry after coming out of the cure and getting rinsed off. If it is still wet when it goes in the smoke house it gets sort of streaky. Next pic is of bacons after about 4 hours in the smokehouse.
I will smoke these about 10 hours. A internal temp of at least128F. is required to insure that trichinosis will be destroyed.

 I like to use maple wood for smoking hams and bacon. I've tried different fruit woods like apple but they seem to give to heavy of a smoke flavor with my smokehouse setup. My set up uses the wood fire for both the heat and the smoke unlike "modern" smokers that heat with electricity or gas.

Here's a pic of my primitive smokehouse set up. The cylinder to the left is a old water heater jacket which is my fire box. The white box going off the right edge is the smoke house. There is about six feet of heat duct pipe between them. This helps keep from getting it too hot in the smokehouse which will shrink your bacon and cook some of the fat out if it's very high. When I first built this I had the fire box directly below the smokehouse. Bad, bad idea. To hot, fat melts,drips in fire box, smokehouse in flames!
  I will post recipe and instructions on Recipe/Remedy page tomorrow.

Coming to visit,bring your snowshoes.

 This is a pic of the trail into our cabin. It is about a half mile to the road and in the winter there are two options, snowshoes and ski. Well, three if you have a snowmobile, but we don't. If it stays cold enough the swamp will freeze up which will give us a route shortened to about a third of a mile. The swamp trail is much nicer since you are out of the wind most of the way.
  We use those big plastic sleds to haul in what ever we need. They are also handy for hauling firewood to the cabin. A lot of our property is black ash swamp so the only time we can cut wood there and get it out is after it freezes. The weather forecast for the coming week shows night time temps around 5-10 F. so it should start to freeze up. A lake drains through the swamp and running water is slow to freeze.
  I don't have enough fire wood cut yet so it would be good if it does freeze. I try to only cut dead trees or badly damaged trees and most years I get enough fire wood from them. I've spotted several dead elm trees and a couple dead pin cherry to cut. I also have several yellow birch blow outs but they may not be dead yet. I'll cut them but if they are still green they will be next years wood.

How to be self sufficient

Our son, Dane, with trophy size potatoes.

  A big goal in my life since the Y2K scare back in 2000 has been to be really self sufficient. We have a big garden, about a half acre, and raise chickens, hogs, goats, and cattle. We are off grid, heat and cook with wood cut on our property. We do occasionally use a propane stove in the summer to keep from heating up the cabin but my wife is a excellent campfire cook so a lot of meals are cooked outside in the summer. I loath waiting for my coffee in the morning so I often put the perk on the propane stove to get it done sooner but I suppose I could survive without that if I had to!
   So what else can we do to be more self sufficient? We are big bread eaters so raising our own wheat is on the agenda for next year. We raised our own grain corn this year which was a partial success but has room for improvement.Sunflowers, the oil type, are also planned for next year. We use lard from the hogs for some of our needs but don't have enough usually so we want to try extracting our own cooking oil.
  We are still far short of our electrical generating needs. We have a chest freezer for the meat we raise and a clothes washer at my wife's son's house. These are two big power users that I have not figured out how to do away with.  Clothes washing is a big job on the homestead and even with the washing machine it uses a lot of my wife's time. The freezer provides the means of preserving hundreds of pounds of meat , fruit, and veggies that it would be hard to preserve quickly otherwise. We are trying to can more but we already can a couple hundred jars a year. We are also trying to eat more seasonally but we have five months of winter here. Our growing season is only about 90 days. We use a root cellar for a lot of produce too. More on this subject  as the winter goes by.

Butchering Time

 It is the traditional time of the year for us to get our butchering done. This year we butchered a steer and we have three hogs to butcher this weekend. This will be most of the meat two families use this coming year. A few chickens went in the freezer earlier. We will also be able to share some with our adult kids.
  Butchering is one of those jobs that I'm inclined to try to put off but can't. I feel a deep obligation to administer a quick and painless death to any animal I raise for meat.I have had people ask me how I can kill an animal I have raised and then eat it. I wonder how they can eat meat they have not taken responsibility for raising and slaughtering. My animals all have names and are pampered and treated kindly. Being sad that you are ending their life to continue yours is a good thing. Being aware that the circle of life also has death in it is also a good thing. Before any vegans out there get on their high horse, remember that all seeds are alive, actual embryos, waiting to start growing. That bowl of granola ends lots of lives too.