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!