Finals week

Do you remember finals week? Do remember trying to cram a semester's worth of learning into your brain for that one final test? Well that is kind of like this week on the farm. This is the final week for the meat chickens that will be butchered on Sunday. We will have a 8-10 people visiting on Sunday and so there are lots of preparations to be made. Trying to cram all the preparation in during the week is a challenge.

So no pretty pictures in the blog this week. Just a down and dirty recap of the last few days.

This past Monday was supposed to be my main chicken crate building day. I had it all planned out. It was my last day off work at the end of my vacation. Perhaps when one goes on vacation, one should not tell people at work that one will actually be at home. First thing in the morning I got called in to work to perform an emergency c-section on a dog. Actually that is not a bad thing. I like doing c-sections especially when live puppies are the result. The problem was that this totally disrupted my chicken crate building day.

Tuesday I work evening office hours so I didn't get home until after 6:30pm. The next batch of day old meat chicks arrived via the US Postal Service. I had to do the finishing touches on getting their pen ready and get them all situated with feed and water and a heat lamp. Then I had to do my regular poultry chores. I didn't get finished with all of this until about 9:15pm. Then I joined Mike and our farmer friend Bill who were having a few brews in the driveway. The net result of all of this was that we sat down to supper at 10:10pm and zero progress was made on the chicken crates.

Wednesday I came home, did my usual evening chores (which take me about 1 to 1 1/2 hours) then started painting the bottoms of the chicken crates. Mike worked in the fields until dark. We ate around 9pm then I went back outside and worked for another hour on cutting lumber for the crates. Another neighbor came by and we talked in the driveway until after 10:30pm. The late hours are starting to build up at this point because I get up shortly after 5am every morning.

Tonight I made a decent amount of progress on the crates, but still not what I hoped for. Decided to come inside early at 9pm and eat dinner and quit for the evening. It won't be the end of the world if I don't get the crates done for Sunday. It's just something that will make butchering day more efficient. I'll post some pictures of the finished project when I get one totally complete.

The boys picked peas today and Mike says there will be peas ready for the markets this weekend. He will have sugar snap, snow and shelling peas. There will also be onions. Broccoli is coming quickly but won't be ready this week.

So that's the past few days in a nutshell. I keep telling myself I just have to make it through butchering day on Sunday.

How does your garden grow?

I finally got a chance to mosey back to the garden and take pictures of the progress of things. I picked two quarts of blueberries to start replacing the ones ruined in the great freezer mishap. That is about all that is left of the early and mid season varieties. One more variety to go. Should be ready to start picking next week. I don't know how many we will have to sell as I need to replace what I lost first.

Mike was busy disking up some ground to get a late sweet corn planting. He always does a small late patch because some years, if we have a late frost, we've been able to pick sweet corn in October.

Now for everyone who is reading this and lives in points south of here, no shaking your head at how small the plants still are the third week of July. This is the frigid north of Ohio after all. We can never plant tender crops until after June 1 because of freeze danger. And this year was really late because of endless rain in early June. But in spite of the late start, everything is starting to really take off in this heat and humidity. So here is a little look see of how everything is looking as of July 17th.

Cantaloupe. Big difference from just a couple weeks ago, eh? Tons of blossoms. I couldn't find any fruit yet, but so far, the melons are doing great.

Green beans. Man, I love green beans. I only have two or three jars of home canned beans left from last year. I just love to steam them when they are fresh the best.

Broccoli. My favorite vegetable. Give me some steamed fresh broccoli on my dinner plate and I am in heaven.

Peas. Not a big pea fan here, but I know a lot of people love them. There is some ragweed growing in the rows, but the cultivator pulled by the tractor keeps weeds from growing inbetween the rows. Remember we are minimal spray farm. We only spray if a crop is threatened and then use the safest product. This is a family run farm. We work in these fields and eat what we grow. So whenever we can, we use the cultivator or grow plants on plastic to control weeds.


Squash. Zucchini and yellow. I love squash too. Can you believe Mike does not like to eat squash? What is up with that? *grin* In typical squash fashion, once these plants start really taking off, they will grow quickly.

Baby tomato! Yeah! I did have to look awhile to find one, but there were a few. Wish they would hurry up because my supply that Mike brought home with him on his last trip to Marietta is almost gone.



Cucumbers. Is there not anything better than a fresh picked cucumber? I can't even believe that I buy those soft wrinkled things the grocery stores try to pass off as cucumbers during the winter. I do though. Just because. But I SO look forward to fresh ones in the summer.


SWEET CORN! WHEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!! Wasn't it only a week or so ago that I posted pics and it was just a little bit taller than the dog? Well the corn is tassling and the ears are starting to form. Just a little bit more waiting. So hard to do.


There's more back there, but that's all the pics for now. The peppers still look a little stressed from the transplanting. The watermelon is starting to grow better. Cauliflower is doing well. Won't be long until we have produce galore. You just have to love summer and its bounty!

Meat: past, present and future

As you can imagine from the last update, meat has certainly been on my mind this week. Charles Dickens may have written about the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, but I am living the story of meat past, present and future.

The meat past is gone. Loaded up for the garbage man to take yesterday morning. Hopefully the 12 pack of beer I left for him softened the blow of how truly disgusting all that rotting meat was. I think the maggots bothered Mike more than me though, probably because every summer I have to treat a maggot infested dog or two or three. I think my response to the disgusted look on his face was "welcome to my world". Veterinary medicine can be pretty gross sometimes. Final count was around 100 pounds of venison and about the same or a little more in chicken. *sigh*

Meat present is just very very odd for me. I have not had to go the grocery store with the intent to purchase a package of meat in probably 5 or 6 years maybe more. Now, I do buy bacon for our Sunday breakfast and once in awhile I buy some pork on sale and I usually buy some steaks to grill to celebrate Mike's birthday every year, but meat is never on my shopping list. It is just truly a weird feeling to have beef or chicken on my grocery list. I feel truly blessed to be able to eat meat that I know exactly where it comes from. The chickens we raise on our farm are out on grass eating bugs and foraging like chickens do. We butcher them ourselves and so I know how these birds are treated from one day old all the way to the dinner table. The next biggest portion of our meat is from deer that live on our farm. I know some don't agree with hunting, but this is a working farm. Deer live here and deer eat our crops which is the money that pays our bills. We don't mind sharing some with the deer, but their population has to be kept in check. As a meat eater, I can think of nothing more pleasing to know I am eating meat from an animal that has lived its life wild and free. If you have never eaten venison, you should really try it. It is so lean and has such a good flavor. When I brown ground venison for tacos or something similar, there is no grease to drain off. When I cook a vension steak on the grill, there are no grease flare ups. And with just a little bit of care and knowhow, they are just as tender and yummy as beef. Living on a farm has truly made me appreciate fresh healthy food.

Meat future is out in the grass as I type. They are looking pretty tasty I think. We will be butchering in about 10 days so at least I won't have to get chicken at the grocery store. Mike has been complaining about the deer eating the vegetables in the garden. This is actually something unusual and I'm wondering if our deer population is still high. Deer sightings were at an all time high last year. 4 deer were taken off the farm last year, 3 of which were mature does. I was reallly hoping that would have put a dent into the population, but perhaps there is more work to be done in that respect. Anyway you look at it, we have to wait until hunting season in the fall to add venison back to our freezer.

We ended up with 1.8 inches of rain this past week and Mike said the plants are really looking good. Tomorrow or Saturday I'll try to get some updated pictures. I cannot wait for produce to be flowing from the garden. My taste buds are so ready.

Of concerts and rain and things that break

Time to catch up on the happenings of the past three days. First up is Saturday. I was fortunate enough to be able to go have fun at the Zac Brown Band/Dave Matthews Band concert in Pittsburgh. I am a huge Zac Brown Band fan so I was in total ecstasy watching them as the opening act. I enjoyed watching DMB, but I just don't get the excitement from them as I do from ZBB. Still, it was a fun trip to P'burgh with family. Live music is one of my favorite forms of entertainment and it was a perfect summer evening. Mike got to work at market Saturday morning. Ah, such is the life of a farmer. He did have something kind of funny happen later in the evening. He went out to feed the laying hens and found a baby possum curled up sleeping in the pen. It must have wandered into the pen in search of food on Friday evening when the doors were open and got trapped inside when I locked the chickens up after dark. So it had been in the pen all night Friday and all day Saturday. Good thing it wasn't an adult because they have been known to kill chickens.

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Sunday. Mike and I get up by at least 6:30-7am every Sunday morning. I do chicken chores and then make us a bacon and egg breakfast. It's a rare Sunday that we skip this routine. Then mid morning, if nothing else is going on, I go back to bed for a couple hours. I call this "sleeping in". I guess most people would call sleeping in getting up at 8 or 9am, but I have animals that need tended to so my sleep just gets interrupted by a few hours of being awake. The net result is the same. Mike went outside to use the tiller to get ground ready for planting more green beans and maybe one last planting of sweet corn. When he left the house after breakfast, the forecast was for zero chance of rain. So a few hours of field work later, he was surprised when he saw lightning in the sky. He was deciding if he should leave the field or not when the tiller made a loud bang and started smelling like something burning. Broken! Well, that made the decision for him. He got inside just before the thundershower hit and the sky dumped a half inch of rain on us. So much for no chance of rain. But we did need the rain and besides, I was happily napping in bed and listening to the gentle thundershower outside the window. Now that is a beautiful feeling.

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Monday. Mike took the broken tiller up to the guy that fixes those things. He brought back the string trimmer that broke a week ago and needed repair. My little lawn tractor that had broke for a second time a couple weeks ago came back to the farm today too. But because karma always seems to want to keep things in balance, the day could not end with one broken thing leaving to be fixed and two fixed things coming back to the farm. During afternoon chores, I walked out to the little out building where we keep our large upright freezer. The thing is older than dirt and we always knew the day would come when it would break, but the way it was found broken today was unexpected. I had not been in that room since sometime middle of last week. Sometime between then and now, the magnet on the door failed and the door swung wide open. Wish I could put scratch and sniff on this post. Just think rotting meat and flies. Yes, it was gross. So after supper, we threw out everything that was in the freezer and cleaned up the mess. We had fun talking about the grossest things we had ever done in our lives. This was not at the top of our lists, but it was up there. So tomorrow Mike gets to go buy us a new freezer. Oh, and we lost probably 200 pounds of meat. All of it was raised on the farm, i.e. nothing store bought. In fact, I buy meat at the store maybe once a month and that is just to buy some pork or other meat that we don't raise. So now I guess I'll be shopping the meat sales at the store. We lost some frozen vegetables too, but not as much. Although I did JUST freeze 3 quarts of blueberries 2 weeks ago. All gone. Such is life.