It’s been a while since I wrote about our tiny farm. We continue to work toward growing as much of our own food as we can, in a sustainable way.
This spring was late and wet. We put in most of the plants a full month late because of late frosts and rain. Since we started a lot of them from seeds, indoors, the tomatoes and peppers were pale and leggy after their late start, but they soon caught up. The tomatoes did OK, but the peppers produced wildly. It was also a terrific year for potatoes, carrots, leeks and onions, and most of the greens. The brassicas did poorly, and we only got two decent melons, though everyone around had melons everywhere. Winter squash did well for us, but the yellow and green zucchini plants got eaten every time I planted them. I finally just gave up. There is no shortage of free zucchini in the summer if you know people with gardens. The mild fall meant we had plenty of time to pick all the food we could. Our last batch of carrots and the last of our freshly picked chard were on the Thanksgiving table.
Locally, some fruit did really well too. A friend gave us lots of apples and pears from his untended trees Our raspberries were excellent, and about half the jam I made this year was thickened with fresh raspberries. We have lots of apple-raspberry and pear-raspberry jam. Pears and plums suffered from the late cold, but I was still able to trade for some to eat fresh and some to preserve.
We didn’t raise pigs this year. While they are very useful, we didn’t have a truck to pick up produce from the nearby orchard, as we had done in previous years. My daughter’s significant other left in late spring, and we allowed him to take the truck. So, this year we raised three mixed breed hair sheep lambs. It was a terrific year for grass and pasture with all the cold rain, so they got nice and big and fat. We got them early in March and they were butchered just before Thanksgiving. We have had a long, and fairly mild fall, so they had pasture the whole time.
We are hoping to add some more fence to the lower parts of the field, so the lambs next year have more places to graze, and to control the thistles that grow down there. We have been very pleased with how healthy the pasture looks after a summer of grazing the sheep in rotation. Before they were put in, there were many places where the bare clay earth showed through, maybe with some moss on it. Last autumn and again in February I overseeded the pasture with a pollinator mix of local clovers, flowering grasses, and wild flowers. Half of the pasture is fenced in and rotationally grazed and the chickens put on it now and then, and half is just left unmowed and ungrazed. At the end of the summer the grazed areas were lush and the ungrazed areas still had clay patches. The grazed areas also had blooms of different flowers and green growth until the first hard freeze, but the ungrazed areas were mostly done after a couple of light frosts.
After the sheep were processed, a railroader offered to trade some lamb meat for perch and other Great Lake fish he had caught. Its a nice treat now and then to have fish for dinner. We also raised a couple of turkeys this year for the first time. They got huge, but they ate tons of feed, so I’m not sure they were a good value. They grazed well, but bullied the other birds to get first chance at feed.
The meat chickens were again terrific foragers. They got big and had long, happy, greedy lives. We also had some male ducklings given to us, and in the fall they also went to freezer camp. Sadly, an illness went through our rabbit hutches, and though we quickly quarantined each rabbit, only one survived. Fortunately, it is the rabbit that Grace has made into a pet, so it saved her a little sadness.
Grace’s small Etsy business continues to make her proud. She also inspired me. Since she picks and dries greens all summer for the rabbits, I decided to also pick and dry some wild and garden greens and dry them for our use through the winter. It worked so well, we started drying all those little garden bits that were too little to freeze or can and didn’t get used in that day’s meals. Those bits added up and are now mixed for soups, broths and other foods. The dried greens get used in most everything, even our breakfast smoothies. I think that will really increase our winter vitamin intake simply because it is so easy to add a handful of dried greens or veggies to just about anything. And because of the mild fall, we picked greens until a couple weeks ago.
Again this year we have a large number of winter squash. It is our main winter veggie. Today, I am cooking up the squash that might be getting soft spots. For Thanksgiving I roasted a large blue hubbard. It made six of the nicest pumpkin pies. That sounds good to me today, so some of these might be pies too. Some will be used in the next few days in pancakes or added to meals or smoothies, or just eaten warmed up with butter and honey. A large princess pumpkin that had a suspicious spot got peeled and cubed and jarred, and the jars are in the pressure canner for quick use in the spring or next summer, after the raw ones are gone. Someone suggested in another diary to use the squash seeds, so some are saved to plant, and some are getting roasted. They will get eaten as snacks, put in my daily winter smoothie, and used as crunchy bits on salads.
Today I just got my first seed catalogue of the winter. I’ll take it to work tonight, and start thinking about spring. But it won’t make me forget this feeling- the feeling that our hard work has paid off for the year. Three chest freezers are full of our own food, or the food we have bartered or traded for. A walk-in closet is full of the jams, juices, fruits, meats and veggies we put up in jars. Three big crocks of veggies are fermenting in the basement. The house smells of cooking, and the cupboards are full enough to have plenty to last until next year’s garden and also plenty until then to share. It’s a good, full to the brim, satisfied feeling.