Quote of the Day: Truman Capote
In my garden, after a rainfall, you can faintly,
yes, hear the breaking of new blooms.
We’ve been having a tons of rain here at Chiot’s Run, April showers is a bit of an understatement! We’ve been having so much rain that I haven’t plants peas or potatoes in the garden, it’s simply too wet. They would rot and never show their little faces.
At least all this rain is supposed to bring beautiful flowers. I’m also appreciating that all this rain has been giving me the time to dig up all those saplings to clear that new lot for the garden.
Have you been getting April Showers in your neck of the woods?
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Another Great Reason to Grow Heirlooms
About 95% of the edible vegetables in my garden are grown from heirloom open pollinated seeds. I enjoy growing them because of the history behind them. It’s nice to know that generations of gardeners have grown the same things in their gardens. One of the best reasons to grow heirlooms is because you can save the seeds. You do have to take precautions from cross pollination with some varieties, but with a little planning it’s quite easy. I save seeds from a lot of the varieties of tomatoes that I grow. Saving seeds from the plants that thrive in your garden is a great way to develop plants that do well in your area.
I have some arugula that survived the winter and figured these particular plants were the hardiest ones since they survived when others didn’t. I’ll let this go to seed and plant them again this coming fall. I should have better survival rate than this past winter because the seed was saved from these hardy plants. Next spring I’ll once again save seed from the surviving plants and eventually I should have a hardy arugula that will do really well in my particular climate and soil.
I also have some celery that survived the winter and I’m hoping it will go to seed so I can get a hardier version of it as well. This is one of the many reasons to grow heirlooms! Sure they sometimes don’t produce as abundantly as their younger hybrid versions, but what’s wrong with that? I sure don’t want to be replaced with a younger, faster model when I get old. More isn’t always better!
Do you save seed from any of the heirlooms you grow? Have you ever worked to develop a desirable trait in a plant by saving seed and replanting over several years?
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Friday Favorite: Real Milk
This week my Friday Favorite had to be around Real Milk. For the past four years we’ve been we’ve getting our milk from a little farm nearby. Yesterday, the we picked up our first fresh real milk of the season. We were so excited we got up early and made our trip to the farm before our morning coffee so we could use it in our coffee!
Our friendly dairy farmers have been a wonderful find for us. One of the reasons we love them is because they do everything as nature intended. The cows are out in the sun eating real green grass whenever they can and they are fed hay through the winter – no grain. They’re so intent on doing things as nature intended that they let their cows go dry during the winter. For us that means from January through March we’re drinking real milk that was frozen or buying lightly pasteurized milk from another small local dairy (Hartzler’s in Wooster, OH).
If you’re not familiar with “real” milk it’s milk that is not pasteurized or homogenized. I have to admit that we were slightly nervous when we first “bought a cow” – the only legal way to acquire raw milk in Ohio. As soon as we had our first drink we were converts. It’s so much better than milk from the grocery and so much fresher. The milk we picked up yesterday we milked on Wednesday evening, you can’t get much fresher than that. We love real milk, not only for the health benefits, but because it’s really good. It’s especially good in the spring/summer when the grass is growing. The milk has a slightly “grassy” flavor and the cream on our milk is golden yellow. It’s so yellow that people ask if I color my homemade butter because it’s so yellow.
Now that raw milk is back in season, we’ll be making a lot of butter, cheese, kefir, homeamde ice cream and other dairy delights. And who can forget all those delicious lattes made with those delicious micro-roasted beans from Al’s Beanery – coffee this good deserves the best milk!
Have you ever had raw/real milk?
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Make Your Own: Suet Cakes
I’ve been wanting to make suet cakes for the longest time but I had trouble finding suet for them. Finally I broke down and bought a 5 gallon pail of pastured beef tallow from US Wellness Meats (I know 5 gallon is a lot). We’ll be using some of this in our cooking, and some of it will be added to the homemade pet food. It will also be used to make suet cakes for our little feathered friends. We love providing suet because we get a lot of woodpeckers at our feeder by having it. A lot of other birds love it as well and it provides a good source of fat and energy for them during the cold winter months.
One of the reasons I want to make my own suet is because I try not to support CAFO’s in any way – buying ready made suet cakes supports them. I asked around and none of the local farmers were able to get suet from their cows, so local beef tallow/suet was out. I found a small farm on-line, but they were out and weren’t going to get any in until later this year. Finally I decided to purchase some from US Wellness Meats when they had it on sale. US Wellness now has ground grass fed suet for sale (they were out when I bought my tallow). If you don’t want to go to the trouble of melting suet, you can simply put out the suet as is for the birds, they’ll eat that as well.
Another reason I wanted to buy pastured organic tallow for homemade suet was because birds are very sensitive to chemicals (you know the whole canary in a coal mine thing). If you notice your oven booklet will tell you to remove birds from your home when you use the cleaning cycle. This is because birds are very sensitive to VOC’s – which always makes me wonder why they don’t recommend humans leaving the house? I know that the beef tallow I purchased will not be contaminated with any hormones, antibiotics or chemicals that will hurt my feathered friends and their offspring.
Making suet cakes at home is really simple and surprisingly, even with the cost of pastured suet, cheaper. I spent some time researching recipes on-line and didn’t particularly find any that sounded great, so I made my own.
HOMEMADE SUET CAKES
1 1/2 pound of beef tallow or lard (preferable organic & pastured)
2 cups birdseed mix
2 cups black oil sunflower seeds
2 cups organic whole grain flour
1 cup dried fruit or peanuts (I used dried cherries from my bounty this past summer)
Mix all seed and flour in large mixing bowl while melting tallow or lard in a skillet over low heat. When tallow is melted, mix in with birdseed. If tallow thickens too quickly place entire bowl in a warm oven until melted again. If your house it cold it would be beneficial to warm birdseed mix and bowl in oven before adding melted tallow. Pour into 9 x 13 pan lined with a sheet of parchment paper. Let cool for a few hours. Cut into 6 squares, which fit perfectly into a regular suet feeder.
I put some of this out on Sunday and the birds are loving it. They’ve been flocking to the feeder. I haven’t figured up the cost to the penny, but this suet cost me about $5 for this batch of 6 cakes and they’re larger than the ones you buy at the store. This would be a great project to do with your kids, especially for a handmade gift (time to start thinking about your handmade holidays).
My next plan for the birds is to try to find a local source for healthier organic bird seed. When the new garden area is finished I’ll have some space to grow some grains and sunflowers just for the birds. Then the birds will be able to glean naturally. I’ll be adding a lot of bird friendly shrubs to my new garden area as well, I’ll be talking about that specifically soon.
Do you consider the birds when you select plants for your garden? Do you put out suet?
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Do-It-Yourself
It’s not easy to see through the consensual illusions that buying stuff will make you happy. But the people I’ve met through MAKE have succeeded, to one degree or another, in deprogramming themselves of the lifelong consumer brainwashing they’ve received. They’re learning how to stop depending so much on faceless corporations to provide them with what they need (and desire) and to begin doing some of the things humans have been doing for themselves since the dawn of time. They’re willing to take back some of the control we’ve handed over to institutions. They believe that the sense of control and accomplishment you get from doing something yourself, using your own hands and mind, can’t be achieved in any other way. They make things not because they are born with a special talent for making but because they choose to develop and hone their ability. And yes, some of the things they make are mistakes, but they aren’t afraid of making them, because they’ve rejected the lesson from Bernays school of brainwashing that says handmade stuff is bad because it isn’t perfect.
Mark Frauenfelder (Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World)
I posted a new article on the Ethel Your Day Blog about why I’m a Do-It-Yourselfer. I’ll be doing sister posts here whenever I post over there. You can also see when I post at Ethel on their Facebook page.
If you’ve been reading my blog for long you know that if I can make it myself, I will. I’m a DIYer to the core. It’s not that I was born with the skill to make stuff, I have to study and research before I try something new. I think it’s more about not allowing the fear of failure to hold you back. We live in a world that doesn’t value the importance of failure and the learning that can come through it. As Mark says in Made by Hand: “Mistakes are not only inevitable-they’re a necessary part of learning and skill building. Mistakes are a sign that you’re active and curious. In fact, recent brain research suggests that making mistakes is one of the best ways to learn.”
Mr Chiots and I are willing to try to just about anything once or twice. Sure we’ve failed at plenty of things, but that never holds us back. We have our share of mishaps here at Chiot’s Run, we were just talking the other day about how I need to write more about these on the blog. For example, sadly our bees did not make it through this winter. We’re going to start again next spring with a new type of hive that we’re going to build ourselves. We’re also going to requeen not long after with bees that have been bread to be more hardy in our climate. Our beekeeping wasn’t a failure, we simply learned through the process and next time we can implement the things we’ve learned.
We also had trouble with the fish in our little pond, the ones we got from the pet store didn’t make it, they all got ick. Which I found out is common with pet store fish that are constantly medicated for it. We got some from my parents pond that lived for quite a few months, but they didn’t make it through the winter. We’ll try again this spring now that the water should be much more conducive for fish.
I spend a lot of time reading and researching the things I’m interested, before I start. Usually by the time I’ve started the project I have read tons of website articles and 4-10 books about the project I’m tackling. My next DIY project is to grow my own mushrooms. So I’m reading a 500 page textbook about it and have a few other books waiting on deck. I ordered mushroom spawn for 6 different kinds of mushrooms and started setting up my mushroom growing area in the woods. You’ll be hearing more about this fairly soon.
Mr Chiots and I are also thinking about purchasing a tool that will allow us to mill our own boards from the large oak, maple and poplar trees that we’re going to have taken down on our new lot. With these boards we’ll be able to make a new dining room table and some raised beds. How wonderful it will be to sit at our dining room table made of wood from our garden eating vegetables that grew where the tree once stood. We’re also in the beginning stages of planning a tiny teardrop trailer that we’re going to build for our travels (remember that month long trip out west we’re planning this summer?) I think we’re DIYers because we love to do things for ourselves, we’re not afraid of failing, and the process is definitely memorable – some of our best memories were made while working together on a project!
What is something you’ve always wanted to try to do for yourself?
For further reading on the benefits of doing it yourself check out these books:
Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World
Simply Imperfect: Revisiting the Wabi-Sabi House
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
The Craftsman
Thinking Through Craft
