Finding Me

One thing that I had in Alaska was a sense knowledge in everything there was to know about what needed knowing. If I didn't know how to do it, Google was right there to help me figure it out. High speed internet and Youtube videos have been utilized to their fullest extent at our house. You name it, I could do it. Were you looking for someone to do a great repair on your home? I knew the guy. Looking for the you-pick farm and the best deals on produce? I knew where to send you. Looking for that lady who sells hay and straw for half the price of the feed store? I have her number too. Need amazing garlic that grows in Alaska? I have that for you in my gardening lair and I can even teach you how to grow it. There's a lot of pride and joy that come from being a know-it-all and I was that person, full of pride, full of joy and full of know.

That woman is gone.

I mentioned about the woe-is-me-ness in the last post that I wrote. I lost my shoes, I lost my blanket, my home is gone and now me...Me is gone. I miss Me.

I realized something just this week. I need my own home. My own domain where I don't have to be beholden to a property manager to repair the heating ducts or the back door that doesn't close. I need my closet to be just so, so that I actually know where my clothes go because otherwise they get draped on the broken rocking chair in our bedroom. My JOB is being a wife, mother, baker, cook and I have failed miserably in the last 5 months. I have been trying to stay strong in this lovely, cold, bug filled home that God has provided. I know that our 9 person family needed temporary shelter and this home is big enough. But I can't be Me here and Me needs to come back...my family needs Me.

We may be buying a home here in about a month. It's no sure thing, we have been through this once already since we moved here. But I'm hopeful and looking forward to getting back into the swing of things. Having a good oven that doesn't overcook, cooking more meals and possibly doing some canning.

I thank God for this house we are in. I got to mope around here for 5 months, gain a bunch of weight while I sat around eating Doritos and Costco pumpkin muffins feeling sad about missing Me. I want to go home and by that I don't mean Alaska, I mean to a home where my family lives and is content. Where my husband can fix things with out getting permission from the land-lord and he can feel manly and useful and we can be joyful. Where I can re-learn how to garden in a much warmer climate, find a peach farmer, grow a different kind of garlic, buy goat milk from the cool nuns down the road, tell everyone about Gary-the-amazing-plumber and get my head back into the knowledge game.

Me is coming home soon. I can't wait to see her again.

Just lounging on the cool porch.

Stock season

'Tis the season for making stocks. These recipes were created by what I have on hand and what my garden and freezer are spewing out at me. Many recipes call for broth or stock, this is such a great and actually easy and rewarding thing to make. If you're not afraid to pressure can things, it's my preferred method to store it. But you can just make a small batch if you know you'll need it for a pot of soup, or you can easily freeze it in gallon or quart sized ziplock bags.

Vegetable Stock 
yields 7 quarts

basic stock ingredients:
2 large onions quartered, skins on
6 ish medium carrots (and or zucchini or squash, something sweeter)
6 ish celery stalks and leaves
small bunch fresh parsley
1 Tbl peppercorns
2 bay leaves

Optional:
2 sprigs fresh thyme
~20 leaves of beet greens
~20 leaves of mustard greens
~20 medium kale leaves and stems
some people don't recommend kale or cabbage, but others said some was ok, and to balance it out, I was pleased with the flavor.
salt optional, not recommended in stocks where you will salt your dish later
8 quarts warm water

Let simmer an hour or two. Most broths I leave overnight but I didn't see anyone doing that with veggie broth so I only did it for a few hours. Add salt and use in soup or can in quart jars at 10 lbs pressure for 35 minutes.

Beef/Pork Stock

Make this the same way, just with bones. I'm making mine now, it will simmer overnight and I will can it tomorrow. I read that you can substitute squash for carrots and I have a monster zucchini and not as many carrots this year, so I added a bunch of zucchini my beef/pork stock.

Turkey Stock

Later this week I'll make the turkey I pulled out of the freezer yesterday (yes I cleaned out the freezer, thus the stock making rush). I'll combine my turkey bones and my chicken bones that are frozen waiting for stock and can that up as well. I go through a lot of canned stock.

Fish Stock/ Shrimp Stock 
 
I also love making salmon stock, just use all of your excess heads, spines, bones, etc and throw them in with the same basic ingredients. I do the same thing with all of my shrimp peelings, throw them into a broth to extract any nutrients that are left.

 

Cabbage Rolls

The main reason for this post is to keep tabs on the cabbage rolls I made today. Also to show off my produce because it's so pretty and I love looking at it. The kids picked this on Friday for me. I made my Yum Lentil soup and sauerkraut and ate a bunch of celery with peanut butter, good celery!

It's hard to see it but in the back right is a very large cabbage. My husband loves cabbage rolls and I wanted an easier recipe. I found this one and liked the looks of it because the rice goes into the meat with out pre-cooking it. I was afraid she didn't add enough liquid but not only was my rice cooked (I used white rice) but there was some liquid still in the pan. Very delicious! I also used tomato soup instead of the canned tomato puree, because that's what I had. I did lesson the salt too. I also used a can of mushrooms in place of fresh. I did double the recipe, I pretty much have to on everything now, and I used one Savoy cabbage to roll for one pan and a regular cabbage for the other. I LOVE savoy cabbage leaves!!! They are perfectly perfect, come apart easily, and have fewer slugs. Yay!

Just a portion of what our garden grew this year. New for me: celery, music garlic, green beans, multi colored carrots.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,

How does your garden grow?

To be honest, gardening is not my favorite "chore" or hobby. I have definitely gotten better at it over time as I do more research and have found easy methods to get much larger veggies for the time I put in.

When I married my husband, someone gave us a house plant as a wedding gift and it really pissed me off. I really did NOT like plants and I gave it to my sister-in-law as I did not want the responsibility of watering an ugly thing I didn't want.

When we moved out to our neighborhood we live in now we lived in an apartment above the garage of a woman with a very green thumb. She had been my kindergarten teacher when I was little and now was enjoying their "retirement home" with a very large garden, a nice "medium" greenhouse, compost piles, meat chickens, meat rabbits, and dual garage freezers for keeping all of their game and fish. She also had a very large sewing room upstairs in her home where she would homeschool her last boy through his high school years and sew while he would do his work...I'll have to talk about that another day. Her name is, Gloria.

I did not think much of her garden hobby. To me it looked like a lot of work and a lot of dirty dirt.

The first summer we lived there she informed me one day that they had prepared me my own spot in the garden. I said something like, "Oh, no, that's ok, I don't need to plant a garden."

She said something like, "Oh, no, that's ok, Wilbur got it all ready for you."

I replied something like, "Oh, no, really. I don't really want to plant a garden."

She responded something like, "No, really, he already rototilled rabbit manure into it for you, and I have all the starts you need. It won't be hard, I'll help you."

I was trapped, I mean, the man put manure into dirt for me...and how do I refuse?!

That was the begging of the end for me. That city girl had to get her hands dirty and put some plants into the ground. I planted my favorite flower, pansies, at the end of each of my little 4' rows. It was beautiful and I loved it.

Gloria taught me a lot during the four years we lived there. She had raised five boys and no girls. I like to think she enjoyed my company and teaching me how to garden, how to can, how to quilt, how to make the fastest pies, how to make delicious sweet tea and how to sit and visit.

I had a garden every year there after that and when I moved to our new house I built a few garden boxes and put dirt into them. I was NOT going to do a giant "Gloria" garden, but would have my own little "Martha Stewart" garden instead...in pretty boxes in the lawn. I would mow between them and they would look pretty. What I did not have was large vegetables. That was ok, right? We don't like vegetables that much anyway...

A year later we brought in some horse manure, and introduced some naughty weeds that came along with it! The garden boxes did a bit better, but really, not that much. My cabbages were the size of my fist. Gloria's were the size of my head...

Some time after we lived here we got laying hens. After we moved the hens closer to the house, I decided to use their old run as my potato patch. I grew ENORMOUS potato plants and a TON of potatoes. (not literal ton, but a lot!) I was quite excited and realized what I had really known all along but didn't want to face...my dirt NEEDS manure or nutrients to produce large crops.

2008 potato harvest. Great year for potatoes.

2008 picking potatoes in the old chicken run.

I had to get my motivation in order and figure out a way to make this manure hauling thing easier...that's when I went online and found my dream set up. I was determined to build it and I did.

2013 we have the chickens on the left and garden on right.

My dream set up was to place the chicken house in the middle and to build two chicken runs. One for the chickens and one for the garden, then they trade each year. Thus eliminating the need to shovel and amend the soil year after year. The chickens could do it for me. It was much more work to build but oh, so worth it.

I was nervous at first. I had planted sunflowers into straight chicken manure once and discovered that when people say that fresh chicken manure burns plants, they really do get burned. They were GIANT however and I have never since grown such wonderful sunflowers. They did have large brown patches on their leaves. They looked like it hurt.

Here it is in 2010, the year I built it, from behind. I still had a lot of sod to pull (by hand) one side at a time. The first year was the hardest for sure.

Basically the rule of thumb on chicken manure is that it needs to sit at least one year before putting it on plants. I think this is for Alaska, because it's so "hot". The first year I switched them I was nervous for my plants safety, but they did just fine, in fact, they did great! No burn marks and the chickens had only been out of that side for 9 months. I let them into the garden side as soon as I harvest what I want and they clean up the rest. Then that becomes their run the next summer.

Now we even clean out the winter's worth of manure into the run the chickens are in. This year I cleaned it myself and used my little Radio Flyer wagon to bring the manure to different spots all over the 2014's garden (current chicken run). The chickens thought it was Christmas and I felt bad that I didn't see any maggots for them to dig out of the manure like I have found in years past. In only a couple hours they had flattened all of the piles around their run. Warning: the smell is bad, don't do what we did and try to have a bbq with company the next day.

Here are our pullets in their area. the back section between runs we have our pullet house, we raise new hens every year now.

Broccoli down the main row, cabbage on the left. June 23, 2013.

Earlier today: July 25, 2013. Before weeding.

After some weeding later in the day.

I don't remember having cabbages this large before. I bought the starts, maybe it's a giant kind.

The zucchini plants are GIANT this year. We have had a lot of sun and they love the sun and the rich soil.

My garden does not get a lot of my time these days. My sister seems to help me get it planted every year, but I really enjoy when I get to spend time in it and finally weed my carrots. The chickens and goats each got a large sled full of weeds tonight.

Something else I have noticed with doing this flip-flop method is that it has really cut down on our slugs. Last year was a heavy rain year and many people lost much of their garden to slugs. Mine fared very well, and the cold hardy crops did nicely.

Happy chickens earlier today after giving them some buckets of weeds.

At first I was resistant to putting in so much work to TWO chicken runs that they would only use half of. But I realized that a garden really needs a fence to protect it from roaming dogs trampling it, keeping kids out, keeping chickens out (they are the worst nemesis when first planted), goats out and moose out. I get moose in my yard plenty, but they have never jumped into my garden, and I know they can, it's only a 5 1/2 foot tall fence...but apparently if the fenced in space is small enough moose won't jump in for fear of getting trapped, probably need a running jump? Anyway, I figure my garden size is just right, not too big, not too small. I think its about 24x24. There are definitely times I wish it were bigger, but it would take up more time that I don't have now. That is one reason I still don't have a greenhouse.

Giant spinach.

After a day like today where I spent much needed time weeding my garden and putting myself on vacation from my business, it proved for a relaxing evening. I love how gratifying this sort of work is and how non-stressful it is. I wish I had time for less stressing and more weeding.

I'm cheating and adding back in some pics I took in September but never posted. Sep 2013, part of the harvest.

The only picture I can find of our new pasture. Our LaMancha goat chasing after a yummy bush. Sep 2013.