Eggs!

This is a chicken. A Barred Rock hen. I don't think she has a name.

She lays TONS of eggs! Today our 10 hens gave us 9 eggs. They've been laying regularly for about a month. Prior to that, they were molting - replacing their feathers and not laying eggs.

We keep our eggs in order by dating the carton when we fill it....like so:

As you can imagine, with 5 to 9 eggs a day, we're filling cartons and adding dates pretty quickly. Until February, we the last carton we had with eggs in it was dated November. Now, we're filling a carton every two days. Our fridge looks like this:

Soon, hopefully, a few of the hens will decide to go broody and hatch out some chicks, which means a few of them will stop laying for a while. So, we're stocking up!

This is Elvis, our rooster. He doesn't lay eggs.

Pickled Radishes...yum?

In less than a week, we've picked over 11.5 pounds of radishes. It'sa lot of damn radishes. They are totally yum...but really. Eleven pounds is a lot of radishes.

This happened mostly because Bill planted the radish seeds all at once, rather than in two week intervals as recommended on the seed packet. But what does a seed packet know anyway?

There aren't many recipes for preserving radishes. Perhaps because most people read the seed packet and spread out their planting. We did find one old timey canning recipe for pickled radishes. The garden forum where we found it said the recipe is from Colonial times.

2 dozen radishes
1 cup sugar
1 cup cider vinegar
1 tbls mustard seed
1/2 tsp celery seed
2 tsp dill weed

Stem radishes.

Mix all other ingredients in a saucepan. Heat until sugar is melted and mixture is clear. Add radishes to jars, fill with hot liquid mixture.

Keep in fridge, or can in a boiling water bath 20 minutes.

We haven't tried them yet, but the jars sure are pretty. 7 uncut pounds of radishes filled 6 and 1/2 pint jars. I quintupled the recipe above to have enough juice to fill up the jars.

We're going to let them pickle for a week or so and report back on how they taste!

Radishes!!

Tonight we harvested some radishes.

Nearly 5 pounds of radishes.

I had trouble carrying them all in from the garden.

We've got three types. French Breakfast are the oblong red and white ones. They are pretty mild, and apparently grow well even in the heat of summer. We've been eating them for the past few weeks and they are nearly done. The roundish red and white ones are Sparkler Radishes and they were the bulk of this evening's harvest. The typical cherry belles are just starting to be ready to pick.

We've been keeping a garden journal to note our plantings, harvests and plant milestones such as sprouting, flowering and fruit production.

Bill and I had different ideas of how to organize the journal, so we compromised. In the beginning is a chronological list of happenings (for Bill).

In the back is a page for each type of crop (for me). An alphabetical table of contents helps figure out which veggies are on which pages. We (...I) enter some info twice, but I think both organizational schemes have purpose. In future years we can easily see what activities should take place in any given week, and we have easily locatable, crop-specific milestones to refer to. We'll probably get 2-3 years per journal.

I feel like George Washington. It's pretty cool.

Syrup fail.

A few weeks ago, we had maple syrup boiling day. There are a few sugar maples on our property and Bill really enjoys tapping them. While we don't eat a ton of pancakes or waffles with syrup, I was hoping to use the proceeds of maple day as a source of a local sweetener for jams and baking. Alas, this wonky winter had different plans. We collected about 50 gallons of sap, but wild temperature swings in February and March let the sap get too warm. It became cloudy and tasted a little off as sap. Boiling it down concentrated the weirdness and led to unusable syrup.

It was fun to sit around a fire all day, though!

Bill attempted to make bread in his new Lodge Something Dutch Oven with the coal-holding lid that might have been designed by Paul Revere.

He burned the first attempt (having not read the instructions).

The second try was much better.


We'll try again next year, with an earlier boil day. That will probably mean hot chocolate and snowman building instead of a cold beer and book reading, but that's ok!

SQUASH!

Last weekend we dove into our summer squash. We had too much to use effectively for one weekend, so we grated the extra squash, blotted it a little, portioned it into 1 cup sizes and put it in the freezer for winter use.

And we made some zucchini bread. 

 

This acorn squash was ready too. Bill roasted it and turned it into risotto with the chicken broth from our earlier adventures. It was all delicious!

 

 

First Harvest

 

This blurry picture represents a transition of our garden from "place to get snack" to a productive source of food for a time that is not now. 

The radishes will be eaten this week, for sure. I was thinking of getting a brownie from Starbucks to compliment my lunch tomorrow, but instead, I'll have some radishes.

The peas (sugar and snow) have been put in the freezer to be used in stir fry and other dishes. I am not really a fan of cooked veggies, personally, but I believe that being a responsible eater means making a few sacrafices. It is dandy to live in a time when I can get a "3,000 mile" Ceasar salad every day of the week, but if I want to live in what I consider a more environmentally responsible and self-sufficent manner, I'm going to have to eat some damn cooked peas.   

Beans, lettuce and oats are on track to be the next harvest.