And the Harvest Continues

I love this time of year when healthy, delicious food comes pouring in our farmhouse door.  Struggling to keep up with the canning is a very good problem to have.  These are the fruits of our labour and I am both proud and incredibly grateful for such a bountiful harvest this year.

Today's harvest:

Daikon radish

Spicy pickled daikon

Puffball mushrooms (again courtesy of the very generous Jefferies family - thank you!)

Potatoes

Grapes

More food today means more work tomorrow; however, I derive such an immense sense of security from having a well stocked pantry that preserving our garden produce is work that I gladly undertake.

A Crazy, But Certainly Not Lazy, Day

After a bit of a lazy day yesterday, we got back on track today and were very productive.  

With help from Farm Hand Emma, we harvested wine caps and weeded the mushroom patch, we harvested mint, hung it to dry and weeded the rhubarb/mint patch, and we picked all the apples and ripe zucchini, squash and beans.

Ian did a few updates to the chicken coop to rat-proof it for winter. It is now Poultry Fort Knox. Fingers crossed that we do not have any more rat problems.

I sold a trio of our Indian Runner Ducks.  These ladies have been lovely pets but given the number of laying hens that I plan to overwinter (plus a gigantic turkey), I need to downsize our total number of birds.  Besides, as much as I love ducks, they are messy animals.  We will only be keeping two ducks over the winter, our half blind duck Kate (Seamus calls her Quack Quack and absolutely loves this duck) and a friend for her.

We had a visit from Barber Jordan for backyard haircuts for Ian and the three boys.  This was Alistair's first cut and he was not a fan but he sure looks adorable with his new big boy under cut.  Everyone wore their masks like a pro.  It is a crazy world we live in when masked mobile barbers are the new thing.

Alistair got into a fight with the door stopper and the door stopper clearly won
(note the huge Bandaid on this forehead).

We also had a quick visit from Ms. Kerry, Jack and Clara who were craving a little donkey love.  They gave Charlie a thorough brushing and then moved their attention over to Ava.  Ava is shedding out the last of her undercoat and she very much appreciated their grooming.  I think we gained an extra dog worth of fur in the heaps and heaps of fluff that they brushed out of her.

Finally, Ian sauted up our this morning's mushroom harvest along with some of our onions.  This will be combined with venison and made into a pot pie for supper later this week.  We also canned five jars of sweet pickled beans, four jars of cowboy candy, four jars of pickled peppers, and two more jars of dilly beans.

Holy smokes it was a busy day and there is still so much left to do!  At least I feel like we got something accomplished today.  With all this done, I feel ready to tackle another busy week of harvesting and canning here on Gael Glen Farm.  

Thanks to everyone who lent a hand today.  Your efforts are appreciated!

What is a Peck?

Apparently there is an answer:

"A peck is 1/4 of a bushel. In dry measure it is 8 quarts. So when Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, exactly how many peppers did Peter Piper pick? It would depend on the type of pepper, so the answer would be somewhere between 10 to 14 pounds." (https://lespetitesgourmettes.com/)

That is a lot of peppers.  We did not pick nearly as many - just a bowlful.  But we do plan on pickling them!

On the other hand, I might have picked a peck of green tomatoes off our dying tomato plants.  I should have weighed them!

A Plum Good Day

It was a busy morning doing livestock maintenance (aka scooping the poop).  It is a bunch of work but it always feels good at the end when you know all your animals are clean and dry, especially in advance of some upcoming foul weather.

On the harvesting front, we picked our plum trees clean.  This is the first year we have gotten any plums off our trees.  

These gorgeous fruits are juicy, sweet and delicious; unfortunately, we are not the only ones who think so.  

The ants and earwigs really like our plums too and are very good at getting into them as soon as they are ripe.  Plums ripen just fine off the the tree, so we harvested all of them (ripe and unripe) and will let them finish ripening indoors away from the very hungry insects.  

I know that there are a lot of them, but I am hoping we can eat all these plums fresh so that I do not have to can any.  It is a very delicious challenge - we accept.

Parsley, You Say?

On rainy days, some people feel like this...

Lucky for us, we are not some people.  

We started the morning with a glorious sunrise.  

The old adage, "Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning" held true; it was a rainy, rainy day here on Gael Glen Farm.

I do not mind a warm, soft rain and very much enjoyed doing morning chores and picking today's harvest.  Today is parsley day and what a harvest it was!  I read that if you do a substantial harvest now, you can get one last crop of parsley in before the snow flies.  I decided to try it out and cut back two of my four plants to see how they fare in the coming weeks.

In addition to hanging much of my harvest to dry,

I also made my family's favourite tabbouleh with almost all homegrown ingredients - our own onions, garlic, cherry tomatoes, mint, and, of course, parsley.  As always, it was a winner.

I also harvested some corn.

Out of the ten cobs, I got one that was absolutely perfect.  Yay!  This will be lunch tomorrow.  What a beauty.

For a rainy day, this one was the best! Ali agrees.

It's Been a Bean of a Day

We had a Monday full of crab apples and a Tuesday full of squash, so, it was only fitting to have a Wednesday full of beans.  We are swimming in beans.  Every year we plant a lot of beans; they are the vegetable with the best bang for your buck.  Bean plants just produce, produce, produce, for weeks on end.  

While I like beans as much as the next person, I do not enjoy harvesting them.  The bending over is hard on the back and green beans are just too difficult to see - now we only plant yellow beans.  Even so, I am very happy to outsource bean harvesting.  I am not even above bribing the boys with "special juice" to help out.   Yes, I might be the trickiest farmer/mother ever - who knew carrot/beet/tomato/apple juice would work so well at motivating children to help with harvesting?! 

We also used the pulp leftover in the juicer to make healthy veggie muffins. I love when nothing goes to waste almost as much as I love seeing my kids devour heaps of vegetables with zero complaints.

Best of all, thanks to Liam and Seamus' bean harvesting skills, we ended up with another lovely batch of beans to pickle into dilly beans.  This was a win-win for everyone resulting in full tummies, veggie juice moustaches and another couple of jars to add to our pantry.

Heart Holder

 I swear, you can't make this stuff up.

It all started as a typical morning with me heading out to milk the goats.  Typical until I grabbed their black food tray off the ground to discover a heart underneath.  Yes, you read that right - a heart.

My heart sunk. "For the love of God, whose heart am I holding?"  I looked up in panic for my goats and to my immense relief I saw all four alive and well, prancing towards me in anticipation of breakfast.  It was at that moment I realized that I was surrounded by a sea of beautiful pure white feathers.  Turkey feathers.  Uh oh.  Ava ate Betty.

I was initially shocked but in hindsight Betty has always been a rover.  In the last two days alone, I had to chase her out of the pig pen and then the garden, off the front gate and then the garden gate.  Unfortunately for her, exploring Ava's paddock was a very dangerous decision and thus, Betty's last great adventure.

Luckily the day improved after this.  Seamus and I made a run to both the grocery and feed stores.  The boys and I cleaned out our huge Long Island Cheese Squash, steamed it, pureed it with the food mill, and portioned it into 2 cup bags that went into the freezer.  We ended up with 18 cups of pumpkin puree in total.  We now have ample pumpkin pie in our future! 

The best part of the day was our first family outing of the year to Ian's deer hunting stand.  I love the short walk in through the woods.  It is a perfect distance for the boys.  

We were especially lucky today as the corn is still in the field and by a totally serendipitous break we happened to spot some cobs growing the Mexican delicacy huitlacoche. This pathogenic, yet deliciously edible, fungus, Ustilago maydis, forms galls on the corn kernels. These mushrooms are eaten as a filling in tacos, quesadillas, etc.

Ian and I have read all about huitlacoche but we have never come across it - until today.  Once we noticed it, it became a treasure hunt for the boys to find more.  They had a blast!  Most of what we found was a bit too mature to eat but we did get enough to eat for supper!  So yum.

So, even with a rough start to the day, we were able to turn it around and end on a high note.  Good thing every day isn't this exciting.  I am not sure my heart could handle it.  Geesh.