Freedom for the Chicks

We wanted to show you the hilarious "freeing" of the chickens as I promised you I would in my last post.   And here it is.   We are finally letting our fast growing chickens out of their coop so they can explore the grass and forage for bugs and critters like they were meant to do.   Joel ordered this electrified fence to help keep out predators and supposedly to keep the chickens in....at least for now.  Let phase one begin:

 

Joel and I loosely enclosed an area off the back of the chicken coop with the fence by simply pushing the posts into the ground and then he hooked the fence up to the electric source.   Ok, it's now going "hot" as he put it.  

It tickled me to see how excited Joel was to run inside the coop and slide their little entry door up and out of the way.   Now, let's see what happens......hmmmmm, nothing.   Absolutely nothing.   For 10 minutes.   Seriously.   Nothing.    Every once in a while a chicken would go up to the door, look out and turn away.   Really?

And then the girls and boys started to have a conversation among themselves.   This gal kept stretching her neck to see just how far down it really was to reach the ground.   I think she was saying something like this, "Who me?   Are you crazy?"    Five more minutes and still no one wanted to venture outside.

Then, Mr. Macho showed up.   "I'm the Big Bad Rooster."   But, even he wouldn't step outside. 

 "Don't do it Edna!   NOOOOOO!"   By now we were giggling at them.  Don't they look like they are egging one another to jump?   They were all jockeying for space to look out the door, but not one of them wanted to venture outside.

"Oh, no!  What have I done?"   As fast as this one jumped outside it quickly flew back up to the safety of the coop. 

 By now I remembered that the coops I have pictures of on my Pinterest board show a ramp leading from the ground up to the door.   Duh!   They want a ramp!   Joel ran over to the barn and picked up some wood he had lying around and fashioned a makeshift ramp for them.

 Ta-da!  Joel to the rescue.  Maybe this will work.

"Aargh!  This is slippery!"   We got the giggles as they finally decided to venture out but ended up using the ramp like a sliding board.  Several of the chickens actually slid down the board, flapping their wings to maintain balance the whole way down.   What a show!

"Looks like she made it.   Maybe we can, too.  What do you think?   Should we chance it?"

"Let me in.   Step aside, girls.  Let me IN!"

And then five minutes later.......peck, peck, peck.  Yum.   All of a sudden they decided as a group that it was safe to be outside and they started doing what chickens naturally do.  They pecked.  And scratched.   The end.

Yes, they have a quite a bit or real estate to discover.   But they all were still hovering near the coop.

Finally after half an hour all 25 of them were going in and out of their little trap door like they had been doing it all their lives.   These birds have quite the personality and Joel just cracks up watching them.   They're entertaining, that's for sure.  

A few hours later we went down to the coop just before dark so we could put them back inside for the night.  All but one of them was already inside and sitting up on the top roost.   The one that was still running around outside was saying "cheep, cheep, cheep" and ran up to Joel at the fence.   He turned off the fence so he wouldn't get jolted and reached down to see if the chick would let him touch her.   She was happy to have someone familiar near apparently because she was nice and calm.

Joel reached out to pick her up and he said it was as if she was relieved he had finally come to her rescue.   I guess she couldn't figure out where everyone else had gone.   He put her inside the coop and she promptly hopped up onto the roost with the others.  

And now, after a full five days since their first foray into the big, wide world it's like old hat.   Joel puts them out each morning around 8am and brings them in just as dusk is falling at 8pm.   They are all inside the coop by the time he gets there at 8pm and he finds them sitting on the very top roost....all in a row.   How funny!

Gettin' the hang of things now,
Debbie

Garden Update

I'm just going to throw a bunch of pictures at you this morning so you can see the abundance and variety of produce that is coming out of our gardens.   Why not have a cup of coffee and relax a few minutes as you flip through the following images?

I had put a chuck roast in the crock pot the other day and realized I didn't have any carrots or potatoes.....duh!   Then I realized I had some of both in the garden.  A few minutes later I had this small bunch of new carrots.....

and after only a few minutes of digging....

 .....we had a bowl full of beautiful potatoes!  The carrots and potatoes were delicious with the roast.

 Next came the beets which I canned as pickled beets....all ready to make red beet eggs, a Penna. Dutch favorite of mine.

Nothing goes to waste here on the farm....the carrot tops and beet greens went to the pigs who greedily scooped them up.

They sure did enjoy eating our castoffs.

Yup, just a small pile of my canning reference books and jars of goodies waiting to be labeled.   We've got peach honey butter and seedless blackberry jam.

And dozens of jars of sweet, dill and bread and butter pickles.

Next, I have some pics of our fledgling orchard.   We have lost a few trees and some are just leaves because they are too young to produce fruit yet.   But a couple of trees have decided to get a head start on the others.  This apple tree has 9 apples on it.   Woo-hoo!   That won't be enough to make a pie, but we'll enjoy them just the same.

And this baby tree proudly produced one lovely apple.

Our granddaddy pear tree is another story.    He has hundreds of pears all along his many branches.    That's going to be fun this Fall.    Guess I had better start looking up some pear recipes.

The grapes are going crazy on both grape arbors.   The farmer told us he gets 30 gallons of grapes off just this one arbor.   That's a lot of grapes!

This is our lone blueberry bush that sits all by itself in front of the farmhouse.   It's almost as tall as I am and has quite a few berries on it this year.   And they are just starting to ripen.   I'll be putting these jewels in the freezer with their cousins, the blackberries.   We've picked gallons of blackberries so far in the field surrounding our property.

Well, that's what is growing and getting canned this week here on the farm.   Next post I'll show you the latest chick adventure.

'Till then,
Debbie

Sauerkraut

Ok, I think I've jumped into the deep end of the pool now, folks.  Let's just hope I remember how to swim.  The cabbage was probably ready to be harvested a week ago, but hey, what do I know?    Anyway, I took my trusty knife down to the garden along with a large black garbage bag.   The cabbage was really no problem to harvest and I just cut away the leaves that were eaten by bugs and fed those to the pigs.   (who loved them, by the way)

Eventually I loaded 8 beautiful, heavy heads of cabbage into the garbage bag and Jeremy hefted it up into the Polaris so I could bring them up to the house.   Now what?   I guess I had secretly been procrastinating on harvesting them because I dreaded not knowing how to get started making the sauerkraut.   Oh, well, how hard can it be?   (more fits of giggles from my guys!)

Making sauerkraut really isn't that hard....at least according to the cookbooks I've been reading.   First you slice the cabbage in thin strips.   Thank goodness for my old Cuisinart.    What would have taken me an hour or more took only minutes using the handy machine.   

Next the cabbage has to be "worked".   For every 5 lbs. of cabbage one tablespoon of unrefined sea salt is added.   Then, you take your hands and squeeze the cabbage, fold it over and continue to "work" it for 5 minutes until juices start to flow.   Then this concoction is put into the huge crock.
Repeat.   Repeat.  Repeat.   Ok, you get the idea.....this took a while and my arm is still sore from working the cabbage.

Yeah, that's a lot of cabbage to process.  Don't you just love my "counter"?    Yes, we're still working with folding tables in the kitchen.  But I have an announcement to make:   This afternoon we are finally ordering our kitchen cabinets!   Yippee!    I may not have a fully functioning completed kitchen until sometime in October, but at least now it will be in the works.  Let the dancing and celebrating begin!

Just about the time my arm was about to fall off, I finished with the heads of cabbage.   Can you see one of the weights inside the crock on top of the shredded cabbage?   Yes, that's one of the weights that fell off the table 2 weeks ago and hit Joel's foot when he passed out in the kitchen.  No wonder his foot is still hurting him.  

I placed the second weight on top of the cabbage and put the lid in place.    The directions in the cookbook says to put the crock in a cool dark place for 6 weeks.   This space under the only 2 lower cabinets I currently have in the kitchen seemed like the perfect spot as there is an air conditioning vent directly behind the crock streaming cool air 24 hours a day.   Now we just wait and see if this worked.  

Who wants to be my official taste tester?    Any volunteers?    Really, no one????  Ok, I guess I'll have to taste it first and let you know how it turns out.

One more veggie completed,
Debbie

Purpose

Have you ever thought about what gives your life a sense of purpose?    Lately that question has been rattling around in my head and I think I may have come up with an answer.  At least it's an answer that suits the time and place that I find myself in right now....semi-retired, living out our dream in a new state, and post "raising children".   Forgive me if I ramble today as I try to describe how much I am enjoying our new homestead lifestyle.

A few people have asked me why we choose to move to Tennessee.....some of those folks assume that living in Florida means you are constantly on vacation with no cares or worries and spend your days lying on the beach sipping a pina colada.   The truth is, no matter what place you call home, you still have the daily work of paying bills, cleaning house, fulfilling social obligations with family and friends and sometimes have the added stressors of ill health of yourself or aging parents.

The last few years that we lived in Florida I felt like I was marking time......filling my days just for the sake of filling them with no real sense of purpose.  Especially as I look back on them now in retrospect.   After spending the majority of my life raising a family and then caring for my ailing mother-in-law, I found myself at loose ends when those responsibilities ended, even though I have an inordinate number of hobbies and interests to keep me occupied.  (You know that's right!  the number of hobbies, I mean)

Now that we live here on the farm, I know this is where I belong.    I miss my kids, their spouses and the grandkids a lot.....and I hope we work things out so we can visit each other several times a year both in Florida and here in Tennessee.   But if I selfishly just think about myself with no external forces tugging at my conscience.....this is where I long to be.   It's hard to describe how grateful I feel that we've been given the opportunity to be stewards of this chunk of land for a few years.   God doesn't promise us tomorrow, so, I wake up each and every morning and thank Him for giving me another day to enjoy the sights and sounds and work here on the farm.

I've had an interest in gardening for decades and have played with it since I was a young mother with a small back yard garden plot.   Because of some health issues and allergies that developed over recent years, I've become much more concerned about where my food comes from, what pesticides and chemicals are used to grow it, and how nutritious is it for us to consume?   And that, of course, led me to have an even stronger desire to grow as much of our own food as possible so we can control how safe and nutritious it is. 

To that end, we now have chickens which free range and eat what they were intended to eat while basking in the sun and living the life they were meant to live instead of being held in tiny cages and living in horrible conditions which then lead to disease.   No wonder animals that are mass produced need antibiotics.   Our chickens should provide us with plenty of eggs rich in the vitamins missing from birds raised in confinement.   And they will also provide us with meat. 

The hogs we're raising get fed quite well and get lots of fresh air and water.   No antibiotics or hormones to force them to grow at an alarming rate.   We'll just wait for them to fill in on their own so their meat will be healthy for us to consume.    And if we're really lucky, we hope to have a milk cow some day to provide us with milk. 

Crossville has a Farmer's Market every Thursday afternoon and I've been purchasing raw milk from a farmer there.   Each Friday I skim the heavy cream from the top of the icy cold bottles in my refrigerator and in half an hour I have turned it into fresh butter and buttermilk, enough to supply us for the next week.

So why tell you all of this?   It's to explain that in growing our own veggies, raising our own hogs and chickens and buying raw milk I get a deep sense of satisfaction.  Yes, it's that sense of purpose I was talking about earlier.  There is just something magical about putting seeds in the ground, watering them and watching them grow into huge plants that then give you enormous amounts of produce in return.   Then taking that produce into the kitchen and blanching, freezing or canning it so we can enjoy it all year long.   And knowing that when we take pork or chicken out of our freezer deep in the winter months, we will be eating something that has all the benefits of farm raised meat that was lovingly tended, humanely slaughtered and carefully portioned and frozen to supply us with sustenance for many months to come.

I sometimes spend long days in the kitchen, especially now that the gardens are producing so much.   But the sense of accomplishment I get from "putting up" food is so satisfying.   I love pulling butter out of the refrigerator that I made the day before.  And my guys are crazy about homemade pancakes on a Saturday morning made with the buttermilk I coaxed from the heavy cream.   And don't get me started about using that cream to make homemade ice cream.   Sure it would be so much faster to buy ice cream at the store, but it's just not the same, trust me.

My body may give out on me sooner than I'd like it to, forcing me to cut back on the gardening and farm chores.   But as long as I am able I hope to continue this new lifestyle.   Our lives now run at a much slower pace and are tuned to the rhythms of the seasons.  So, please forgive me if my heart fills up with a sense of pride when I view the rows of jewel colored canning jars on a shelf filled with summer's bounty.

Growing and preserving our harvest is a most satisfying endeavor for me.   In fact, it spurs me on to learn how to do more things here on the farm that make us even more self-sufficient.   I've had a couple of friends tell me I have an "old soul"......because I enjoy doing things with my hands and truly appreciate how industrious our grandparents and great-grandparents were at creating something from nothing.   The best I can do is to emulate them and pass along any knowledge I gain to the next generation.

This life Joel and I have choosen to live is most certainly not for everyone.   Many folks get deep satisfaction from their jobs and bringing home a paycheck.   Others, from volunteering.   And others from working with their hands.   Whatever gives you that sense of purpose is worth pursuing.   So, why not go for it?   We are so glad we did!

Should've done this decades ago,
Debbie

Bathroom Cabinet Reveal....Finally

Remember back in late winter when I said we were working on getting some cabinets in the bathrooms?   Well, I had promised that I would post pics of the work after it was done and then I forgot.   Imagine that!  So today I'll show you what we've accomplished so far.

 When we first bought the farm, this is what you looked at when you ....ahem.....sat on the toilet in the master bathroom.   Yes, isn't that lovely?   The hot water heater took up the lower portion of the space that was supposed to be a linen closet.

Since the hot water heater had to stay, we came up with a solution to work around it.   We simply had a cabinet maker build in a cupboard to surround the hot water heater and disguise it behind closed doors.   Ahhh, one problem solved.

For the upper area he made 2 shelves behind the doors and now we have some much needed storage in the bathroom.   One thing this little farmhouse is lacking is storage in the form of closets, so, we are carefully trying to rectify that as we work on various rooms in the house.

The old oak cabinets were so low that it seemed they came up just above our knees.   After putting in new flooring tile and a toilet we had the cabinet guy build a beautiful cabinet that was much higher and had functioning drawers(the old ones didn't work very well).

After adding a new counter and shiny chrome faucet the remodel was almost complete.  We repurposed the mirror that used to be in our dining room and mounted dark oil-rubbed bronze sconces on either side of it for better lighting.

For a small bathroom we got a lot of function out of the few changes we made.   And it's a pretty room, too.   The tub surround is just fine for now, but someday in the future we will remove the tub and put in a huge, mack-daddy shower with tiled walls.

 The guest bath also had a huge space that should have been a closet or storage of some sort, but, alas, it was completely empty.   So, I painted the walls and we installed the same tile as the master bath.  

Wow!   What a difference the new cabinet made!    The lower cabinet has a bottom shelf that is a pull out drawer which makes it so easy to access things all the way in the back.  Then there are 2 more shelves above the drawer.   I decided to put glass fronts on the uppers to keep things open and light.

Now this bath is a lot more cheerful, clean and bright.   I'm especially happy to have this bathroom done as it is viewed from right off the kitchen.   The old cabinet was also really low in here so we had the cabinet maker build a new one like the one in the master bath.   I still need to put some art work in both baths but that will happen eventually.

A new oval mirror and 2 sconces on either side complete the guest bath.   I love the solid surface countertops we choose for both baths.   They are so easy to clean and look really pretty, too.

Now if I could just get some cabinets in the kitchen!
Debbie

Foggy & Hot with a Little Humid Thown In

Today is a weird weather day.   Supposedly a cool front is going to push thru later today, but meanwhile, we have 91% humidity and it was 81 degrees before 10am.   Not especially hot by Florida standards, but for the plateau this is downright sticky.   And as I walked out to the pavilion earlier a fog was rolling in from the lower plateau.   Crazy weather.

Well, it's a good day for Joel to stay inside and rest and continue to rehydrate and recover from his fall Saturday.    I took the pressure bandage off earlier this morning and we both got a look at his gash for the first time since it was sutured.   It actually looks really good, I counted 8 stitches.   He's lucky the gash runs right in one of the creases of his forehead so I don't think it will be very noticeable after it's all healed.  He's still pretty sore and is limping because of his foot but he's so glad to be home on his comfy couch.....watching the military channel.....with the remote in his hand.    For him that is the definition of a perfect day.  

I decided to stroll out to check on the garden since I've ignored it for the last few days.   All the plants are going crazy and seem to grow a few inches each day.   Here are the tomatoes, remember when they were only a foot tall a few weeks ago?   Well, not any more!

Some varieties are already up to the top of the 4' trellis.  And almost every plant is loaded with nice juicy green tomatoes.   And see the acorn squash plants on the left hand side of the pic?    I have no idea how big an area they plan on spreading into.....they're only halfway grown at this point.  

Oh, how I love tomatoes.....these babies are almost 3" across already.    And the plum tomatoes are hanging heavy on the vine, too.

Guess I need to get out there with a bowl and pick some of these snap peas later today.    Our freezer is going to be stuffed by the end of July if these plants keep producing like this!

This is the back side of the main garden with the acorn squash on the right, hubbard squash in the middle and corn on the left.    The 2 rows of tomatoes are behind the squash and corn row.  I'm getting excited now to see how much our garden really produces for us.

It's a good thing I got the new crock, lid and weights for making sauerkraut in the mail last week because the cabbage is ready to be harvested.    Some of them succumbed to the worms but over half appear to be clean as a whistle.   I'll find out as soon as I cut into them.

 And see this nasty looking patch of somethings?    These are the potato plants and as they die off it's the signal to start digging then up out of the ground.   We have a lot of harvesting to do this week!    Holy cow!   I guess that's a good problem to have.

I don't usually feel overwhelmed but this garden is giving me a run for my money.   I feel like I barely figure out what to do with one harvest and then another vegetable needs to be picked and blanched, frozen, canned, or dehydrated.   Whew!    My nights are consumed with looking thru recipe books and canning how-to's for the work that is to follow the next day.   Are you sure you don't wanna come help?    Just kidding.......

By next year we should be old hands at all this gardening-canning business and it won't seem so overwhelming.   At least that 's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Feelin' like a real farm girl now,
Debbie