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Hi Everyone,
As I sit here typing at the computer I can look out the living room window and see the sheep grazing in the front yard—and that is a blessing that I will tell you about a little later in my journal.
When last week began I had high hopes of getting snapdragons, broccoli, and parsley planted out in the garden. I also hope to plant some cantaloupe and yellow squash seeds in the garden tunnels and possibly some watermelon seeds. I wanted to start roselle, lettuce, nasturtiums and a few other seeds in the greenhouse—but life has a way of not going as planned.
Is she Pregnant?
Back in January the neighbor’s 8-month old bull calf jumped the fence and attempted to breed one of our young Jersey cows. We were a little fearful of the bull being successful and our cow not being able to deliver such a big calf. So we decided to get the vet to come out and do a pregnancy test. We also were supposed to be selling a bred heifer into Georgia and she needed to have some health test and a pregnancy test done. So, Monday morning the vet showed up just as we were finishing up milking the cows. We gathered all our paperwork and headed down to the cattle pens. Not only did we have to pregnancy test a few cows, but we also had to dehorn a few cows and one of the bulls that we are trying to sell—bulls with horns don’t sell very well. The whole process took a couple of hours, and to our delight we found out that the cow who was exposed to the neighbor’s bull—was not pregnant, and the heifer that we were trying to sell as bred—was pregnant! In the past the vet has always had to pregnancy test by hand, but this time he had a sonogram machine that allowed him to check via a camera on the end of a long “arm” that he could see the results through a pair of glasses that he wore—it was quick and easy for all.
There are dragons in our Garden!
Most people get to “see” what we do, by reading my journal, but every once in a while some people want to see it in real life. We were close to being done with milking on Tuesday when a family who just moved to the Jacksonville area showed up to tour the farm that they had chosen to support—and to meet their farmers (well they had already met Papa, but Mom and I hadn’t met them yet). We got to visit with them while we finished milking and they got to watch the milking process. Then Papa took them on a Gravely ride around the farm, and Mom and I headed to the garden to plant snapdragons—almost 200 of them. I hope that they produce nice flowers—for they have been in the greenhouse way to long. When they have three leaf sets you are supposed to plant them out in the garden, and then when they have five leaf sets you are to pinch them back to three leaf sets. Let’s just say that mine had more than five leaf sets, and it helps to read the instructions before you plant—not months later. Anyway, we planted three different kinds of snapdragons and hopefully they will bloom in abundance and I will get to share them with our customers.
Makenna has a little lamb—whose fleece is black as coal!
It wasn’t five minutes after I sent out last week’s journal that the phone rang and my sister, Nichole, was on the line telling Mom that they wanted the little bottle lamb for a birthday gift for my niece, Makenna—who had just turned 9. Wednesday morning they came over so that Mom could teach Makenna how to mix up the formula and feed the lamb. Then they took her home with a diaper and the children spent the rest of the day playing in the house with the lamb. If you think that two children ages 4 and 9 are enough to be running around the house—add a two month old lamb who just loves to hop and skip and jump. When the day was over—and bonding had truly taken place, the lamb was moved outside to her new home. When my sister was growing up, feeding the bottle lambs was her job—and those lambs became her breeding stock if they were girls, or she got the money from selling the rams for meat. Now her daughter is getting to enjoy the fun of bottle lambs. There daddy says that they have had more fun with the lamb, than they ever had with any puppy or dog.
Showers of Blessings!
I do not know how much rain we got in December, but I do know that between January and February we only got a little more than 2 inches of rain. With the warmer days the last few weeks we have really been noticing the lack of rain. To our great delight the sky clouded over on Wednesday and we didn’t see the sun again until Saturday. It began to rain around noon on Wednesday and I do not know how many times from Wednesday to Saturday that we got wet and had to change clothes. I think that Papa was a drowned rat quite a few times doing his chores and one of those times he even had to work in the freezer. One morning Mom and I ran out to the garden to let down the sides of the garden tunnels because they were filling up with rain. We had one tunnel almost done when the rain started to pour down real heavy. We decided to step inside the tunnel to wait until the heavy showers passed. After a little while Papa showed up to check on us— I think that he was a little worried about us because there had been a big lightning strike and he couldn’t see any movement from us. He didn’t know what to think about us when he found us picking flowers in the tunnel. The forget-me-nots were finally blooming big enough to cut and bring inside to put in the vases in the kitchen window. I tag all the plants that I plant and the seeds that I sow—but I didn’t tag the forget-me-nots and believe it or not, every time we try to remember what they are—we forget! Once the rain had let up Mom and I closed up the other tunnel and Mom headed back to the house where she fixed breakfast and I headed to the milk house to set up the milking equipment—and a change of clothes was in order already before the day had barely even begun. By Thursday night we had received 2 inches of rain, but on Friday the rain came down so hard that by Saturday we had received almost 4 more inches. A total of close to six inches of rain definitely left puddles all over the drive lane and yard, and made the pond a lot bigger. The negative part was that it also made a waterfall in the milk house cellar which needed a bucket brigade to clean it out Saturday afternoon.
Jamming in the Kitchen!
I wasn’t too concerned about the rain preventing me from working in the garden—because I needed to work in the tunnels or from working in the greenhouse—because it has a roof too. In the end though, no one really wanted to work outside in the rainy weather and we had quite a few other things to keep us busy. One of those things was a flat of strawberries. We had bought two last Saturday, and Mom had taken one of the flats and cut the strawberries into slices and added maple syrup and froze them in pint containers. Come Thursday the other flat desperately needed to be taken care of—but we didn’t know what we wanted to do with them. We watched some videos and finally decided to make strawberry jam—we have never had success making jam or jelly without white sugar, but we were willing to give it one more try, and to make this adventure even more challenging—we couldn’t use pectin either. So we spent about an hour slicing strawberries and then Mom mashed them and added lemon juice, the lemon peels, and apple juice and boiled it all away forever. The recipe said to bring it to 220 degrees, or to a roaring boil—so Mom decided to go with the roaring boil and then to turn it down and cook it on medium for about 15 more minutes. An hour or more later we still had juice—not a thick jam, and it was flavorless. So we decided to add a few cups of maple sugar and get out the thermometer and bring it up to 220 degrees again. Well . . . we found out that we never did get it to 220, because once it reaches a heavy boil, it still took a lot longer to reach 220. In the end we had jam and it tastes pretty good.
To Freeze or not to Freeze?
One morning when I entered the walk-in freezer to get some meat out for dinner I was greeted by a waterfall—the water in the defrost pan was pouring over the sides of the pan. Then a few days later a terrible rubber smell engulfed the milk house—the heating element that defrosts the pan so that the water from the defrost mode can exit the freezer had died, and one of the fans had quit working. The freezer goes through a defrost mode about four times a day, but the heater that keeps the defrosted water flowing out the drain pipe is broke and therefore the water in the drain pan freezes and the fan blades get frozen in it. The technician was called in and a new part was ordered—but in the meantime one to three times a day Papa has to go into the freezer and chisel out all the ice from the pan in order to free up the fan blades so that they can keep the freezer frozen. He says that it is a very COLD job. Hopefully the part will come in tomorrow and we get the problem fixed. The freezer keeps everything at the right temp, but it just does not drain the water outside.
A Cook in Training
As I said earlier, my niece, Makenna, turned 9 last Saturday and we wanted to have the family over for a birthday dinner—but I wanted Makenna to come over for the afternoon to help cook dinner and bake the cake. A little before 3:00 Nichole brought Makenna over and we began on the cake. We made an Angel Food Cake (Recipe here), and the first step is to separate about 18 eggs. Makenna had never done this before, and she wasn’t too sure about the mess on her hands that cracking eggs made. I have two egg separators: one is a clay bowl with a slit on one side for the egg white to pour out while holding the egg yolk back and the other side has a pour spout to pour the egg yolk out; and the other is an old Tupperware spoon separator. The Tupperware spoon worked best for Makenna, but o were we ever making a mess. Shortly after we busted an egg yolk into our egg white Nichole decided to show us how to do it by using her hands—a technic I never could master. She did an excellent job—but in the process of successfully showing us how to do it, she dumped the egg white into the egg yolk bowl. We were all dying in laughter over being challenged by the chore of separating egg whites from the egg yolks. My brother David was also in the kitchen and resorted to filming us with his phone—proof that we had truly lost our minds! Once the eggs were done we gathered all the rest of the ingredients and then we started the mixer. The first stage was to get the egg whites to a frothy stage. We told Makenna that frothy looked like a sink of soapy water, but in the end with all the craziness I got a little impatient and I allowed Makenna to go ahead and add the sugar when the mix was just bubbly. Then while the mixer did its magic, I supervised while Makenna made the meatloaf. Thirty minutes later the egg whites were still spinning around in a liquid state. Ugh! Mom began to question whether it would do, and when we felt the mixer getting very hot we decided to start over before it was too late to even make a cake. That meant we had to separate 18 more eggs! Mom and I did this part and got it done real fast—then we patiently waited for it to get frothy. Makenna and I took turns adding the sugar and then we waited for the stiff peaks to form. The best part about waiting for the stiff peaks is that you have to keep putting your finger into the batter to see if the white fluff sticks straight up or droops down—if it droops down then you get to lick the sweet fluff off of your finger. We finally accomplished the stiff peaks, mixed in the flour and more sugar and while I scrapped the batter into the cake pan Makenna spun it around for me in order to spread it evenly around the cake pan. The cake made it into the oven with just enough time for it to be done by dinner, and cooled by the time we were ready for dessert. The meal turned out excellent and Makenna made sure everyone tasted her meatloaf. The Angel Food Cake was topped with strawberries and it melted in our mouths—and disappeared all too fast. Makenna loves dinosaurs—and has since she was a little girl. When you would ask her what she wanted to be when she grew up she would say a Paleontologists (okay I couldn’t even spell the word) and she could say it perfectly and tell you what the person did—when she was only five. Her bedroom is decorated in dinosaurs, and when you ask her what she wants for her birthday it usually has to do with dinosaurs. When Mom and I were shopping for spring décor the other week we found a waffle iron that makes little dinosaur waffles—and yes we bought it. Makenna absolutely loved it, and I was told that she cooked breakfast Saturday morning for her family—and fed them dinosaurs. Have you ever eaten a dinosaur?
Preparing for the Worst
After three days of rain the grasses were lush and green—but the weather forecast was predicting below freezing temperatures Saturday night. Twenty-six degrees would turn all the green grass brown—and we are almost out of hay and the cows and sheep are really ready to eat green grass. For days I was walking around making mental notes of things that needed to be protected from 26 degrees. The strawberries are flowering and producing berries, and the last time it got into the twenties it froze the fruit and the flowers—so I knew that they needed to be protected. The horseradish was just beginning to put on new leaves after the last hard freezes. The lemon trees, fig trees, lime tree, ginger, grapefruit trees and bay trees were all putting on new growth—and since they are young they needed to be protected. The young chickens that had just been moved out to pasture were not big enough to stay warm in the cold—so we had to move them back to the brooder. The young tender plants in the green house needed a warmer place—because the last time the soil even froze in the greenhouse. So, Saturday morning I put all my thoughts on paper and as the day progressed we checked them off one by one. Moving plants here and there, covering up this one and that one was the easy job. Moving the chickens took a little longer and anchoring down the sides of the tunnels took even longer. We had never got the ropes attached to the side of the caterpillar tunnels, so the plastic flapped in the wind—but if you are trying to hold in heat to prevent the plants from freezing you need the sides secured. While Mom and Steve transported chickens and cleaned out the cellar of its flood water, I worked at stringing the rope on the tunnels. Mom showed up to help just as I was tightening the last twenty feet, and then we were done. I covered the strawberries with quite a few layers of frost cloth, and then Papa helped me attach tarps to the ends of the greenhouse to keep out the North winds. By the time we went to bed we knew that we had done what we could—and now we just prayed and asked for mercy.
Rejoicing in God’s Mercy
We slept in this morning since Mom and I were neither one strong enough to get up at old time 4:00 (new time 5:00) in order to milk the cows, and since Papa couldn’t go to church because the freezer needed to be monitored to keep the fans moving and not frozen. Therefore, the sun was up by the time I woke up. I was a little nervous to look out the window, but I finally rolled over enough to pull back the curtain and look out the window. To my great delight there was no frost anywhere! Praise the Lord! That meant that the animals would still have green grass to eat. Instead of getting down to 26, it only got down to about 32. Since the wind was blowing pretty well, no frost landed, but some still froze a little. As the day progressed you could see patches here and there where the grass had turned brown from being frozen, or as I walked through the garden this evening I found half a weed blackened or ten leaves on the fig tree wilted. The damage was definitely a hit and miss, and nothing was 100% damaged. Since it didn’t get as cold as expected, I know that some of the preparations we did were not necessary—but it is better to be overly prepared, than sorry. How grateful we are for the Lord’s mercy. Hopefully we will not frost tonight, and then the rest of the week is warm and we get more rain to turn the grasses green again.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare