462
Hi Everyone,
Have you ever been grateful that God designed our bodies to heal? Have you ever taken advantage of that blessing? Last Monday I continued with my quest to prune all the roses—well, most of them. I promise you that if you want to surround your property with a fence that will keep out intruders and look pretty at the same time, you should plant a rose border—and don’t get the thornless kind, go for the ones with the meanest looking thorns you can find. We do not have a hedge of roses (thorns), but we do have roses dotted here and there and most of them have the meanest looking thorns. I managed to save the best roses for last—the thornless ones. I do not know why more roses cannot be thornless; it sure makes for easier pruning. By the end of the day my poor arms were pretty upset with the way the roses had treated them—and I felt a little guilty for not taking better care of them.
It has been past time to move the new laying hens out to pasture. Two weeks ago Papa combined the two chicken houses so that one of the houses could be emptied and cleaned up for the new laying hens. Usually we sell the oldest hens, but since we are so short on eggs right now we decided to throw the two year old chickens in with the one year old’s. The down side to that is that the older chickens are the messiest chickens I have ever seen. They always throw their nesting box bedding out, and then bust their eggs and just make a mess of them—and now they are making a mess of the other chickens eggs too. Thankfully the new chickens are very neat and tidy. Last Monday Papa was able to clean out the composted chicken bedding and dump it in our concrete compost bins in the garden. That stuff is pure garden gold and makes things grow real good. Come Thursday morning Steve, Mom and Papa headed out to the Poultry barn and transferred all the new laying hens into their new portable house. Papa put electrical netting around the house, and once the chickens get used to going in and out of the house—and go to bed like good little chickens, then the house will start moving from pasture to pasture following the cows around and letting the chickens roam free chasing bugs, eating grass and weeds, and scratching through the cow manure for fly larva.
It rolls around at different times every year—and some years it seems like it will never arrive. Creaming the milk is something we only do when the cows are producing more milk than we can sell. The cream itself is greatly enjoyed and sells out very quickly—but it means that we have more work to do, and we actually lose money in the process. While a gallon of milk sells for $14, and a pint of cream sells for $15—it takes 2 gallons of milk to produce one pint of cream, which means we only make $15 off of two gallons of milk instead of $28. Then we have to wash all the creaming equipment—close to 80 parts, and Papa has to find the time to spread the skim milk out on the pastures. While skim milk is not healthy to drink, it is full of nutrients that make a great fertilizer for the pastures. Sometimes I make curds and whey with the skim milk—but this time of the year is too cool and the curds and whey do not separate very well. We could make cottage cheese with the skim milk, and other types of cheeses—but that is another full time job that requires time we do not have.
The cream came in grand handy on Valentine’s Day when I made some scrumptiously fudgy brownies. The strawberries that we are growing in our GreenStalk planters are just starting to ripen, so we picked some and sliced them up and sprinkled some maple sugar over them. Then after a delicious dinner of Sweet and Sour lamb shoulder steaks, broccoli and noodles we had dessert. We topped the brownies with the fresh strawberries and a big dollop of fresh thick and gooey cream. O my, were they good—and I wanted to savor every last bite.
When I was in the 10th grade—32 years ago, my school schedule got messed up and they put me in Algebra 2 instead of Geometry. I had no complaint for really it was a blessing to go from Algebra 1 to Algebra 2 instead of having a year of Geometry between them. The next year my parents decided to homeschool me—and I was supposed to do Geometry. I had a friend tell me once that the best way to teach Geometry was in a shop class—where you actually have to use the math. Well, Mom didn’t understand Geometry, so Papa was given the job of teaching me. I am not sure exactly what happened—but after a few lessons we mailed the book back. I have never had a need for Geometry, and have never regretted not being taught it—until last week. Years ago one of our workers built us a triangular wooden dolly to carry our milk tanks from the milking parlor to the milk house. Later we found that a plastic garbage can dolly worked better and the wooden dolly was recycled to move our lime tree outside for the sunshine and rain and inside the garage to protect it from the freezes. That dolly has seen the last of its days and some of the pieces haven’t just rotted—but have disappeared. So it was time to build a new one. The dolly is made up of three triangles. The top and the bottom ones are the same size (2 x 4’s), and the middle one is bigger (2 x 6’s) and is sandwiched between the two. Mom spent hours trying to figure the angles out, and managed to get a replacement made—though not perfectly. We had an orange tree in the garden and we brought it up to the house so that we could take better care of it. The orange tree fit perfectly on the new dolly, but the lime tree’s planter was bigger, and therefore, we couldn’t use the exact measurements from the other one. Mom probably spent an hour trying to figure out the angles before I decided to help her out. We both did a lot of staring and moving wood here and there—but getting nowhere. We had three pieces of wood and we couldn’t figure out what angles we needed to make the perfect triangle to sit the planter on. Mom thought she had it once—but she had managed to make a scalene triangle (no equal sides). I knew that we needed a triangle that had all three sides equal (but I didn’t know it was called an equilateral triangle). I finally decided to put one of the 2 x 6’s under the planter and trace around it. Then we did the same to the other two 2 x 6’s and then we overlapped them and angled them until the half circles made a circle—but it really didn’t make a perfect circle. So I went upstairs to the sewing room and grabbed a big sheet of paper and came back and put the planter on top and traced around it and then cut the circle out and placed it on the wood to make the circle perfect. We then had our perfect triangle. We screwed the boards together and then we got the top 2 x 4’s and placed them where they had to go and secured them in place with screws. Then Mom took a pencil and marked all the angles that needed to be cut on the wood. Then she numbered the pieces—because our triangles were far from perfect and every corner was different. Mom then took it all apart, cut the boards and then assembled our dolly. Once the triangles were put together she screwed some wheels on the bottom and the lime tree was put on the top. Perfect? No! Usable? Yes! All along though I knew that there just had to be some geometrical formula to figure out just how to cut each board to make the perfect triangle. I still do not know what it is, and probably wouldn’t understand it anyway, and that is okay for I do not plan on going into the business of building triangular dollies, tepees, or A-frame houses.
Last month we had a lemon juicing party and three of us ladies worked at peeling the rinds with a vegetable peeler so that I could dehydrate them for lemon peel powder. I got them dried—but I couldn’t find the time to powder them. Last Wednesday I finally remembered and purposed to get them done that day. I put them back on the dehydrator to make them crisp so that I could blend them to powder later that day. There was tray upon tray heaped with lemon peel, and I spent a good hour plus powdering small batches in the Vita Mixer, sifting it through a metal strainer and re-blending what was still large. Powdering lemon peel is much more enjoyable than powdering cayenne peppers. I ended up with two quarts of finely powdered lemon peel and a pint of course lemon peel—great for making teas.
Friday we had a BIG delivery of wood and metal—for this week the builders start building a lean-to on the side of the barn so that we can store equipment out of the rain and enclose a portion of it for a new feed room. I will tell you how it goes next week.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare