controlling the chaos

Sometimes I just need to say things out loud.


It's been observed that condition of a person's home is a reflection of the condition of their soul. And if that's true (I'm pretty certain it is), then mine is full of good intentions and insanity. Sometimes I do really well at keeping the chaos in check... other days it just seems to have a will of it's own. It doesn't help that the house is daily subjected to a violent "toynado" that rips through with the intensity that only a 1 and 2 year old can achieve. It also doesn't help that all I really want to do right now is be outside - staring at little seedlings and dreaming of their potential, staring at little goatlings and dreaming of their potential, staring at the rabbits and thinking I really need to get them separated because of their >ahem< potential. It gets hard for me to focus on other things, mundane things like laundry and dishes and toys.. oh, the ever-present toys. Some would say not to sweat the mess, and just be happy with the things that make me happy - the seedlings, sprouts, and wee ones of all species, but the mess is making it harder to enjoy said small things. It's canning time, or nearly, but there's just no way I can tackle that job right now - the chaos makes it impossible. I'm itching to bake bread, to make things.. I've got a head full of things I want to get done, but the mess. Oh, the mess. It's days like these when I look at all our accumulated stuff, and I come very close to just chucking it all. One of these days I might actually just do it. I have a feeling that day will be both terrifying and glorious. Until then, I'm trying to work up the energy and focus to tackle the mess and bring it back under my thumb, for the tranquil, blissful 15 minutes that it lasts. Because after that, Maezie will unload her milk bottle on the carpet, Punkin will dump out a box of Cheerios, and Davey will decide that now that the house is clean, it's a great time to haul all the junk in from his car. And so it goes.

Wish me luck, friends, and a healthy dose of grace. I'm 'bout to rassle with the chaos.

Garden update

So much good stuff is growing now! We''ve got vines loaded with plump green tomatoes that should be ripening soon (I'm really curious to try our 'Indigo Rose' tomato - a truly purple variety!), and we've already harvested quite a few peppers, mostly banana and filius blue (a hot, delicious "ornamental"), and squash and zucchini. The peas are going strong after our early spring root maggot setback - I need to go out today and pick a basket of them (glory, hallelujah!), my onions and parsnips are doing great, and the corn is forming up very nicely. The first round will probably be ready to pick right about the time we leave for camp. Again. We planted a late round of corn this past weekend (popcorn and a colored sweet corn called 'Triple Play' that I'm really excited about), and I'll add more beans and squash to the hills as soon as it's up. I also did a small section of bush beans in 4 different varieties.. I'm curious to see what we think of them. I thinned out my carrots this week, and because I can't bear to throw all those baby carrot seedlings away (and only about half of my row of carrots came up), I decided to try my luck at transplanting carrots. I've read that they won't grow as straight, but crooked carrots don't scare me. I also gave up on my celery this week. The plants just never really took off, and the weeds did. I think I started it at the wrong time. It's ok, though. We try again next time and hopefully do better. Still, it hurt a little to watch Davey till them into the dirt. Ouch. But, in happier news, I finally got my herb garden planted - oregano, basil, horehound, dill, fennel, cilantro, thyme, sage, hyssop, borage, nasturtiums, summer and winter savory, pineapple sage, lavender and tarragon so far. I've got room for more, so I'm on the lookout for tansy and any other fun or interesting herbs.  I also started a little flower garden for the girls with zinnias, hollyhocks, sunflowers, cosmos and about a thousand other flower seeds I've had stashed for a while. Many of them might not come up, but they definitely won't if they're still in the package. I pretty much just dumped them all into an empty spot in the dirt. The girls will have fun picking whatever blooms. They love flowers.
And lastly, because I'm an eternal optimist, I started my potatoes. About 2 months too late. We'll see how that works out. OH! And I still need to get my sweet potatoes planted... I never get it all done in time...

Meet Luna!

Hope everyone had a fun, safe holiday weekend. Things were pretty crazy around here. Crazy like good crazy, and not the other kind of crazy. Crazy like we went to the animal sale in Delano, where usually all the really good stuff  is sold by 9:30 am, (oh, and it starts at 9!) and yet, somehow, when we got there at 10:15, there was the sweetest little saanen mix doeling, still waiting for a home (and at a really great price, to boot!). We walked around, looked at everything, talked about the astonishing fact that no one had bought her yet, and how we weren't ready to bring home a goat just now, bought a few other things, and then wandered back around to the corner to see that she still had not been sold. Unbelievable. And then.. and then! Davey (wonderful, wonderful man) looked at me and said... "Well, I guess that's your goat." People, I teared up a little. Not even kidding (haha). I practically ran down the aisle to grab the card from her cage (some other woman was eyeing my goat!) and back up to the table to pay for her before anything could go wrong. I have wanted a dairy goat for so long, and up until recently, I couldn't even get Davey to consider goats, much less actually buy one. We had other plans for our farm money for the year, and goats were further down on the list, after cattle and maybe a greenhouse. But we both thought that it was just meant to be. And, I mean, who could resist that sweet little face?!?

She's still very young, so it will be a while before I get into the milking aspect of having a dairy goat.
I'm also on the lookout for a second goat to keep her company. She's a herd animal, and she needs friends. We learned that lesson the hard way.
For now, though, I'm just enjoying spending time with our new girl. I'm not kidding people, she's like a dog that mows your grass for you. And doesn't try to hump your leg. Love.

fresh strawberries: a love story

Nothing beats fresh-from-the-farm strawberries.

We're absolutely blessed to be surrounded by strawberry growers here. The nearby town of Dayton even has a strawberry festival every year.

This was an especially good year for strawberries. Aren't they just luscious looking?

We finally made it to the pick-your-own farm down the road from us this year. Punkin had a great time helping us pick "apples".

But somehow I still didn't end up with enough strawberries to make any jam. Oh well.. there's always next year!

Mr. Beefy - The conclusion

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Sorry -  I just can't seem to quit talking about this dumb steer. It's pretty much the biggest thing going on around here right now. Literally.



seven cubic feet of Beefy

Oh my, ya'll. Beefy came back from the butcher the other day, all nicely paper-wrapped and stamped. All SEVEN HUNDRED and EIGHTY pounds of him. For the record, that's a serious lotta beef. I'm still a little giddy over it. Our chest freezer proved to be woefully inadequate, only holding a little more than half of it. I spent most of the morning scrambling to throw out just about everything in our other 2 freezers to make room, and we still needed my parents' upright freezer and 3 coolers. We managed to unload about 250 lbs or so on friends, neighbors, and coworkers, but we still have the chest freezer and the upright freezer full to their tiptops with beef! I wish, wish, wish that I had gotten a picture of the back of the minivan (it took 2 of us over an hour just to unload) - the whole back, from the front seats to the back hatch, was stacked 3 feet deep with little paper parcels. Unreal.  I DID think to get pictures of it in our freezers. I only wish I had also driven over to my folks' place to get a picture of their freezers, too. SEVEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY POUNDS.





I had to throw out nearly everything in our freezer to make extra room (but I couldn't bring myself to part with all those chopped bell peppers from last autumn!).





Even Big Ugly had to get in the mix. That's what we call our extra refrigerator. Doesn't everyone have an extra fridge in their kitchen?

There was still an extra couple hundred pounds of meat that wouldn't fit, so we took it to my parents' place, which is fortunately right next door, and filled their upright freezer to bursting, and still had to use 3 coolers to hold it all. That left us with six 2-gallon bags of "dog bones" to do something with. I managed to fit 2 bags of them into 4 soup/stock pots to start cooking down to boullion.  

Doesn't that look tasty?

I'm actually not entirely sure what happened to the other 4. I'm pretty sure one got thrown outside to the neighborhood dogs. I was frankly too tired and overwhelmed to even care about the rest... though now I'm wondering if they're still around and I can make them into broth. I can't help it. I'm hard-wired to find a use for everything.

And speaking of thrifty - I did the math, and at the end of all this, Beefy clocked in at just shy of $1.00 a pound. Shut. Up.

Mr. Beefy - part 4

Our plans to have a neighbor drive Beefy to the processors fell thru, which meant that we had to work something else out, and fast, because we'd had enough damage to our cars already. So. I made some phone calls and did some finagling, and ended up on an early friday morning with 2 friends, a rented trailer, a borrowed truck, and one very suspicious steer. I handed Terry a pitchfork, and Scott a stout stick (you know, to make them feel safer. Ha.) and climbed into the back of the trailer. Beefy really, and I mean REALLY, wanted the grain I was offering, but he just couldn't quite work up the nerve to go for it. He charged and snorted and shied away and came back again for about an hour, strrrrreeeeeeetching his neck into that trailer, until he finally stepped in halfway, and Scott pretty much shoved him the rest of the way in by closing the door on his butt. And then it got really fun. Beefy hadn't been on a trailer since he was a weanling, and he decided it wasn't for him. He bucked and kicked and reared and dang near threatened to overturn that thing. The next 10 miles took us roughly 30 minutes, because the trailer was fishtailing as he threw his weight around in it. Every time the truck came to a stop, he went nuts again, shaking the trailer and the truck. People in the cars next to us at stoplights looked nervous. I think I actually saw someone lock their doors. But, we managed to get him there and off the truck and into the holding pen at the slaughterhouse in one piece.

Now. Right about this time I'm sure that some of you are feeling very sorry for poor Mr. Beefy and all the trauma I just put him through and blah blah blah. So I'm just going to tell you right now: No. He was a jerk. And also to reassure you that he got the last laugh, because when we were done, I had to clean the trailer. 'Cause it was rented, and that's how it works. And oh, people. I wish I had taken photos. I really do. I'm pretty bad about not having my camera around to capture the really great stuff as it happens, or in being just too wrapped up in the moment to think to take a picture. So let me just try to 'splain. There was 2 inches of cow crap all over the inside of the trailer. Have you ever tried to remove a 2-inch thick layer of cow crap from the inside of a livestock trailer with a pressure sprayer? I got cow crap in my mouth! In my MOUTH, people. It was everywhere.  It was so bad that Scott was a perfect gentleman and stood way off to one side while I worked so I wouldn't get any of it on him. And I don't blame him for that for one second. It could have been an episode of that "Dirty Jobs" show. It should have been. In it's own really disgusting way, it was kinda glorious.