Berries, Kefir & Goats

We spend much of our spare time in the summer and fall wandering the forests gathering wild edibles, mostly berries. This is our hobby, our release you could say. We go high into the mountains where nature is still wild and we are free from the things of man. These are the times that one can truly feel alive.

Many hours and days are spent in our secluded haunts finding and picking berries. It can be grueling at times, when fingers freeze in the early mornings or the afternoon heat weighs upon us. But in the end, with freezers full, such days are left to be remembered in the depths of winter when a simple trip to the freezer will supply endless amounts of fruit.

Berries from the garden and forest soon become daily meals that can be counted on to provide health and sustenance throughout the year.

Every other day, we have for breakfast a shake or smoothie made up of these berries and a few other ingredients.

Added to our breakfast drink are honey, quinoa, or flax and something called kefir. The latter is a beverage that is made by adding kefir granules to milk and allowing it to ferment.

Kefir is discussed in detail at http://users.chariot.net.au/~dna/Makekefir.html and I have also found the http://pocketsofthefuture.com/blog/ to be most helpful.

We included the following in this morning's drink - frozen huckleberries, cranberries, blackberries, currants, service berries, Oregon grapes, strawberries, elderberries, and raspberries. We delight in the nutritional value and variety of the berries knowing that if we had to purchase these same foods from the supermarket we could never afford to do so.

Below is a condensed "low quality" and extremely boring video of our summer 2008 berry picking adventures. PS -The kefir didn't come from these goats...they were much too fast for us.

All Cooped Up

This has been a fairly cold winter, the night time temperature has ranged from lows of -10 ° to the high 20's with daytime temps all over the place. Not too cold, but we have received record snow this year. It usually starts to warm up a bit around here come February, so that is something to look forward to.

We are fortunate to have electricity in our chicken house and have been able to keep their sleeping quarters around 35° when necessary. I set up an old oil heater on a stand figuring this would be the safest heating device. The heater is encased in wire so that no members of the flock will try to use it as a personal heating pad. I also attached it to the ceiling with a chain so that it could not possibly get knocked down. So far so good.

In order to keep the outside water dish from freezing my wife picked up a bird bath heating pad that fits perfectly in the bottom of an old metal pot. It works really well as long as I keep the water dish full so that it does not get too warm for them. We leave another water dish in the heated room and it only freezes occasionally. They seem to prefer the ice cold water best.

Even though we have tried to keep it warm the roosters and a couple hens got frost bite on their combs, nothing too serious. We started rubbing bag balm on their combs and waddles during the coldest days and that seems to have helped prevent any further damage.

I could keep them locked up in their sleeping quarters on cold days but instead have given them access to the entire coop. They seem to appreciate this. We built chicken doors with a sliding panel so that they can come and go as they please between the three areas. I have invited them outside on numerous occasions this winter but they have decided it would be best to wait for the snow to melt and have thus far declined my invitations.

I try to keep them happy, healthy, and entertained as much as possible. They receive salads made especially for them every day. Yeah I know, spoiled chickens...but I try to remember that what goes into the birds comes out in the eggs. We grew extra Chantenay carrots, potatoes, and Mammoth Mangles (beets) just for the birds and they are very grateful to receive the aforementioned mixed with any greens that I can find on a daily basis.

Once a week we bring in a few buckets of dirt for them to play in and also provide alfalfa hay.

All of this may seem extreme but it has cut the feed bill in half and also proves most beneficial to us via the healthy eggs.

Leather Britches

Leather Britches - sounds like something out of a western movie, but unlike a robust John Wayne they are just dry shriveled beans. Any beans that we do not eat fresh or allow to mature as dried beans for food

or seed as these Scarlet Emperor and Painted Lady runner beans,

are made into leather britches also called shuckey beans. I take tender young green, yellow, and my favorite purple beans and hang them on the porch to dry. This is done by threading them onto string or fishing line. That is where they stay until we need them for soup dishes. They are also good eaten out of hand as I do upon occasion. Often times I will put a handful in my pocket and snack on them during the day and they are especially good on long hikes as they take a while to chew. Are they any good? Well let's just say that they are not too bad and if you were really hungry they would be pretty darn good.


This is the way some beans were stored before all the modern conveniences of today. I am trying to keep in touch with the old ways in case our modern appliance based system fails. That will surely never happen though, will it?

It's the Compost! Creating Abundance at K-JO Farm

A most amusing yet interesting video on frugality and growing your own food.

A Rebirth In The Garden

A little bit of sunshine is enough to bring about new life under the row covers. This week has been really cold but we have had a few sunny days and it got close to 40° a couple days the week before. There are fourteen of these covered rows and only eight are dug out of the snow. We should have dug them all out the other day when it was warmer because now they are frozen to the ground by ice...oh well. I will have to make do with greens from the others until we get a couple more warm days and I can finish the task.

The larger Swiss chard's have started to rise from a long winters nap.

This fabulous red veined sorrel, that I once bought at a farmers market from a seller of herbs, has always been there for me. It now self propagates throughout the garden and is the only source of vitamin C I will ever need.

Various kale,
mustard, chicory, spinach and mache have also started to come out of hibernation. This is a good thing because a month and a half of pulling greens from the winter garden is starting to take it's toll on the salad population. I always look forward to February because I know that the worst is behind me and life will start to begin anew under the garden row covers and cold frames.

An Eggsperiment

With winter coming on we decided to freeze some eggs while the girls were still laying well. Having never done this before we were sceptical at best. We froze them individually in muffin tins and then transferred them to freezer bags.

Three months later we decided to give them a try. We thought they would be OK for baking or scrambling, but what about fried? We put them to the 'trial by fire' in our trusty cast iron egg frying pan.

It looked and cooked like it was fresh out of the hen house.

Only one test left...the taste test. Our toughest food critic, our 4 year old grandson, agreed with us that it was the best egg ever! The only dicernable difference was that the yolk was never runny - it came out more as over medium rather than over easy.

Although the hens haven't stopped laying and production is now picking up, it is good to know that we have this storage option available.

The Beginning Of Anything

We ordered seeds early this year. I was afraid if the economy worsened there might be a run on seeds. Actually I bought enough for next year also...just in case. Is anyone else nervous about this?

I narrowed my choices down to three companies, Fedco, Baker Creek Heirloom, and Ed Hume. This was done from past experience regarding quality, quantity, and price. These three companies normally meet all those standards. Baker Creek and Ed Hume seeds arrived within days of ordering, both came in good packaging and the full order arrived. Fedco seeds arrived on time and were shipped in proper packaging. The package that items are shipped in is very important when you live in Idaho and sometimes find your deliveries buried in the snow. Anyway, I was not at all pleased with Fedco's individual seed packets this year. Some of the seeds had dribbled out of their packets into the bottom of the shipping box and some of the items were back ordered...not pleased at all.

We save more and more of our seeds every year but are still at the mercy of seed companies for some. Most are stored in various plastic and glass containers. I find that salad dressing bottles work well but we do save a large amount of seed. Small containers such as pill and vitamin bottles or even envelopes work good for lesser amounts. Tomato seeds are dried on small screens and then stored in individual envelopes. I don't ferment them as mine seem to last longer if the outer coating is left on the seeds and they dry more naturally.

Saved seed is kept in a cool back room in various containers that I keep in well marked boxes and totes so that they are readily available.

I won't go into details on how to save seed here as this subject can be quite complex or very simple depending upon what seeds are being saved and a variety of other conditions and factors. A good book for this information is "Seed to Seed" by Suzanne Ashworth and Kent Whealy. Or you can go to one of the best free online seed saving documents I have come across at http://cityfarmer.org/Neighborgardens.html and click on "Saving Vegetable Seeds In An Urban Garden" for a 32 page document on the subject.

One thing I have noticed is that the longer we save certain seeds the better they seem to adapt to our particular environment. For example, my Black Krim tomatoes have become one of my earliest varieties and also one of the last harvested in the fall. When I received my first black Krim tomato plant many years ago (thanks Dorothy) it was a mid season tomato susceptible to blight in the fall...not anymore.

The biggest and a rather unexpected benefit of letting things go to seed has been all the kale, mustard, strawberry spinach, sunflowers, boc choy and others that come up on their own all over the garden. We have not had to plant red mustard or purslane in years.

Below is a red lettuce who's name has been long forgotten but comes up every year all over the garden, as long we allow for it's full life cycle to be completed.

The end goal is to save all of our own seeds within the next 5 years. It is a lofty goal as our environment is not conducive for seed saving. At this point I am able to save all of my "must have" crops, such as beets, parsnips, beans, peas, carrots (a work in progress),

potatoes, squash, turnips, tomatoes, various winter greens, and so on. Hopefully, I will one day reach self-sufficiency not only in food but also seed.

12/16/2010 update:

We now ferment our tomato seeds as it allows for better germination. Also, we have managed to save seeds off most everything we grow now including carrots. That said, I am still working on a good/better system that will allow us to save a diverse variety of seeds from the same plant familys using a 5 year seed saving rotation...more on this later.

Tomato To Tomato

I am down to my last three "fresh" Burpee Long Keeper tomatoes. The last couple of years I have been working on getting my tomatoes to last longer in storage. Saving the seeds of this particular tomato has helped it adapt to our climate and conditions, last year this tomato kept until my first new ripe ones appeared at the end of June. I sat down and ate it with the first ripe one, it was a triumphant moment as I had been working towards this for years.

Unfortunately most of this year's crop ended up as sauce or frozen whole due to much smaller production. We shoot for about 1500 medium to full size tomatoes off of about 45 - 50 plants, and that easily puts us in fresh, frozen, dried and sauce tomatoes for the year, the total for this year was around 600.

When hail and wind storms devastated our gardens in July it was too late to replant tomatoes as we did with many other crops. So We had to cut them back and let them regrow, most of the indeterminate ones survived but only put out half as many tomatoes as normal. Many of our determinate plants died.

Determinate tomatoes, or "bush" tomatoes, stop growing when fruit sets on the top bud. Most of their crop ripens near the same time. Indeterminate tomatoes are vining and will grow and keep producing until the first frost does them in. They will set fruit throughout the growing season, and are our favorite type of tomato plants.

Burpee Long Keeper is a semi-determinate plant. They are of small to medium size thick skinned and orange-red color when ripe. Definitely not the most tasty or beautiful tomato but if you want to have a great keeper this one gets an A+ from me.

If someone else has a good keeper, please do tell?