So Good Chelsea Buns (For a Frosty Day)

These Chelsea buns are a great treat for a cold morning. We've been feasting on these the last couple of days, but they only last so long! Note: the dough turns out best with the use of a stand mixer.

DOUGH:
In the bowl of your mixer, add all ingredients and with the bread hook, mix for a total of 10 minutes. Dough will be stiff!

6 1/4 c. flour
2 tbsp. yeast
2 c. warm water
1/4 c. sugar
1 tsp. salt
1/3 c. oil

Let dough rise until double.

Cut dough in half. With each half, roll out flat in a 12"x18" rectangle. Spread generously with butter, brown sugar and cinnamon. Roll up tightly on the 18" side. Slice into 8 pieces, about 2" wide. In two greased loaf pans, sprinkle on the bottom of each:
 1/8c. brown sugar
Arrange 8 pieces of the dough in each loaf pan.

Let rise until double in size again, about 40 minutes. Bake at 400oF for 15 minutes or until evenly brown.
Immediately after they are finished baking, flip buns upside down onto parchment paper over a wire rack. Let the melted brown sugar glaze the buns.

Enjoy warm or reheat before serving.

  

Rabbit Update: False Pregnancy!!

Just last week I ran into a dilemma with Marigold. Although she hasn't been with Burgess, she was showing all signs of pregnancy. Most noticeably, she was pulling her hair and making a really comfortable looking nest. Good thing for Google, I was able to diagnose her with a FALSE pregnancy. More and more like a soap opera, I was the one responsible for it all. I make a habit of occasionally taking the rabbits out of their cages for a little walk, and while I had Burgess out, I showed him to Marigold (from the outside of the cage) and said "Look Marigold - this is your husband!" After doing some reading about the rabbits reproductive system, I discovered rabbits ovulate on command, and although Marigold wasn't bred - just seeing the male cause her to ovulate. Her system responded by preparing for babies and that's why she was pulling her hair and building a nest. But just to be absolutely sure, I checked her nest box a couple times to make sure there weren't any extra surprises...

**Note: Hair pulling can be indicative of other health issues. If your rabbit is pulling their hair, do some research to make sure you know what's going on.

Oh Rats!

My months-long struggle with trying to kill a rat has finally ended. It all started when I was out late doing chores, and a rat had come in the chicken door and found a nice snack in the feed trough. I screamed, the rat took off and the chickens were all freaking out. Needless to say, the chicken door didn't stay open past 5pm after that. My next encounter with the rat was when I discovered that he chewed my 3/4 bushel of potatoes to shreds that I was keeping in the garden shed. I mean, they were ruined. Feces everywhere! So out went the potatoes. I didn't see him again for a while except for tracks here and there. But then, yesterday morning I was doing chores innocently enough and out of the poop tray of Marigolds cage came the rat, looking sneaky and guilty as you'll get! Poor Marigold was scared silly up on top of her box. So rat-killing got a bit more serious. I bravely set the rat trap, put it in a well travelled area, bated it with some broken Christmas cookies and left. Later I went to do my evening chores, completely forgetting about the rat trap. I went into the garden shed for feed and BAM! I had caught my much avenged rat! He was large, and no longer in-charge. Im glad I caught him but I certainly don't have the stomach to go near a dead rat! It took all the gumption I had to shovel him up and turf him on the manure pile! Gross! Hopefully I got him before he had a chance to make a family...

Rabbit Update

A big project we took on this fall was building new rabbit cages for the winter. I knew I couldn't leave them outside, so that left the garage or the garden shed. Since everything is already out at the garden shed, that's where we elected to put them. We did some rearranging and measuring and started on our cages. We did 2 cages at 4'x2'x2' that stack onto of each other. We made the back and the two sides from 1/4" plywood. and the front is 1x1 cage wire. The bottom of the cage is 1/2"x1" cage wire  and beneath that is a drawer where the rabbits poop and pee all falls through. One of the plywood sides opens entirely as a door. We built 2'x1'x1' fully enclosed plywood "nest" boxes, with a door for extra shelter on colder days. Im really glad we built them with the drawers beneath, it makes for such easy cleaning. Just slide the drawer out, empty it and replace the bedding. Both the rabbits are healthy and growing. Their temperaments are so nice. Burgess has to have a good head massage every day. Marigold is a really nice rabbit, but she's so curious. She tosses her water dish around, she still spills her food and she loves to chew whatever she possibly can, particularly my mitts. My only big beef is running back to thaw the rabbits waters. It means checking and replenishing their water about 3 times daily. But for such nice critters Im glad to do it :)

  

The Great Chicken Adventure: Settling In for Winter

Even though it feels like I've had my chickens forever, this is really just my first year with them, and I've never even had chickens over winter yet! So far this is what Ive done to prepare them for winter. I cleaned their coop pretty thoroughly. I scraped up all the old bedding and replaced it with fresh stuff. A mix of pine shavings and straw. Now that the birds are older I find they spend most of their time pooping off the roosts, so its really packed at the back of the coop and in the rest of the area its fairly clean. We locked up the little door and nailed a board over the inside to keep out drafts. Ive closed the air vents, except on warmer days I open them for a bit of air circulation. I stopped letting them outside after the days were in the minuses, day and night. The days are much shorter and I find that the birds go to roost around 4:30 or 5pm. Ive been collected from 3 - 10 eggs per day, usually in the lower numbers though. The Buff Orpintons lay a light to medium beige coloured egg but the dual purpose birds lay the most beautiful big dark brown eggs. The only downfall is that they usually lay their eggs on the floor, and not in the nest boxes. I get one huge egg that's even bigger than a turkey egg. If I had a scale Id weigh it. And sure enough that egg is always a double yolk!
Here you can see its size compared to a regular sized egg:

Today when I was doing my chores I watched my birds for a while - they do the strangest things. I bet an animal psychologist would get such a kick out of my flock, because I sure do! If I haven't mentioned this before, Rob is certainly the king. Everyone listens to him. Fluffy and Garden Boy - the other roosters, are subordinate and they obey him. So today I watched Rob do what Im assuming was an election, or a loyalty call of sorts. He went to a corner and faced the wall, and then he didn't make any noise. But all the hens and all the roosters snugged right into that corner with him. They were all crowding to get as close into that corner as they could. There wasnt any food over there, there wasn't anything to scare them to that corner. Ive never seen anything like that before, and Im glad I had my camera.

 
 

FarmSmarts Blog Relaunch

Even though I never went anywhere, Im finally back! The harvest kept going - in more ways than one. Just last week I was canning STILL! I do believe that things have finally calmed down to a reasonable pace (which I never thought would happen). I don't even know where to start. The month of October was kind of a "turning of the page" for me. I made the tough decision to sell Holly the cow. Fortunately my farmer friends where I boarded her wanted to keep her, so that was an easy transition. Sometimes its hard for reality to work its way into your dreams, but once it does you can feel sure of your decisions, and I feel that way about Holly. I certainly haven't given up on someday having a Jersey milking cow, but now is not that time, and it wont be that time for quite a while yet. There was no way I could bring her home to our non-barnyard 1 acre, and I got an extra shift at work, and it was just getting harder and harder to keep up when I was running for chores (as much as I absolutely loved it!). So that was that. Now the critter count is 25 laying hens (seven are the dual purpose layers who have integrated just fine into the coop), 3 handsome roosters - Rob, Fluffy and the Garden Boy. So yes, I didn't have the heart to kill my favorites... And we have 2 rabbits, Burgess and Marigold, and that's it. The typical day for me now is just feeding and watering chickens, topping up their limestone chips (for calcium), collecting about 5 eggs, feeding and watering the rabbits, and changing the bedding in their cages. Pretty much only half an hour of chores per day, helping me to finally focus on housework and keeping a regular schedule of sorts. The garden wrapped up really nice. The "pantry" is full of beautiful jars of canned produce. The pressure cooker served me well - I wouldn't possibly have been able to freeze everything. We would have needed ANOTHER deep freeze!! I dehydrated a lot of produce as well - shredded carrots, berries, apples, onions, tomatoes, herbs... Ive been busy baking off squashes one day per week, they don't seem to be keeping as well as I would like. And I had to put a rush order on canning carrots because they weren't keeping either. Needless to say, Im out of jars and Id say I blew my budget on jars this year too... Maybe Ill have to start a free jar collection campaign next year. But with the end of canning in sight, and being on the brink of Christmas, I can start looking ahead to knitting and sewing projects. I also have several rabbit hides that Im going to tan this winter. Just this week I got my seed catalogue in the mail and since it arrived Ive been having a hard time getting anything done other that dreaming about what Ill plant next year. And believe me - next year Ive got big ideas. Im going to focus on raising things that do well for canning and selling. Now that I know what we need for one year in terms of canning, I can start looking towards selling excess. Plus I want to try growing a cash crop of pumpkins and squashes next year. Ive saved a lot of seed this year, and providing that it germinates, I could put in a lot a cucurbitas! We expanded the potato garden triple the size it was, and was that ever a job to do. I didn't figure it was worth digging by hand again, since time was an extra precious commodity this fall. So we ended up pulling a hand plow with the diesel 3/4 ton and actually had to flip at least half the sod by hand since the truck had to back up over everything that it flipped. Lesson to self: avoid planning a garden where there's very little space for the right equipment to do the job... So the last two months can be summed up by "all work and no play" - but its a good thing we enjoy the work we do!