Almost Wordless Wednesday

Our little house in amongst the green.

A Very Busy May

Of late, we are often found working outside of the house from early morning till dark and truly enjoying every last minute of it. Unfortunately, tending to the numerous duties required if one is to attempt to live a "simple" life makes it pretty darn hard to keep up with blogging...but it is raining today, so I find myself with a bit of spare time this afternoon. We have been very busy with gardening, working on our long term goal of "financial self-sufficiency," and various other projects including gathering firewood in our spare time.

My wife, the dog, our old Ford pickup and I have to make about a 30 mile round trip, give or take a few miles, when we gather firewood. It doesn't sound like that far until you take into account that half of those miles are on heavily rutted winding mountain roads where the un-posted maximum speed is between 5-10 mph. On a good day we can cut and load over a cord of wood into our poor overloaded truck in about 4 hours, snake our way back down the mountain and be home before noon. This has been a great year for firewood as windstorms have blown over so many trees. That said, our goal is to take advantage of this and stockpile a couple years worth of wood.

And to think in days gone by, while living a much different lifestyle, I used to go to the gym and lift weights for exercise...silly me.

I love cutting wood, splitting wood, and heating with wood. I might have been a logger in another life, there is just something about the sound of a saw and the smell of freshly split wood that brings a smile to my face...even on the days that I forget to bring the chainsaw gasoline and have the nasty taste of fuel in my mouth all day from siphoning it out of the truck...yuck.

For an excellent total body workout try hauling just over a cord of wood uphill, by hand. Good clean fun, I like to tell Mrs. H, although at times I think she might not agree.

The best part of a day spent cutting and splitting wood and tending to all the necessary tasks that are involved in ones life when they attempt to live by their own hand is the utter exhaustion that comes at the end of each day. We eat good and sleep good....every day.

Last night we had with our meal the best loaf of bread, my new favorite, and so very easy to make in a snap. You can find a link to this most wonderful and Perfect German Bread at the Metamorphosis blog site. Thanks Silke! We loved it so much.:)


What else?

The garden is finally starting to grow, albeit very slowly as this has been an abnormally chilly spring with record breaking cold and frost. I don't have any pictures but will do a garden update soon. Also, my wife has recently completed her third race, a half marathon. I'm very proud of her and she did great, having advanced quite a bit from the previous year. I'm also very glad it is over so we can finally get back to our shorter more enjoyable runs.

Rowdy, the wonder dog, is adapting very well and thinks of our chickens as his 13 red headed step sisters whom he spends a good part of each day wandering about with while we garden.

That's it for now, time for me to get out to the garden and pick a salad. I'll leave you with a video of our farm animals enjoying their breakfast.:)

In the Greenhouse

I would prefer that this post was titled "In the Garden" but so far much of the gardens greenery still lies within our little greenhouse, a sanctuary from the cold, albeit a slight one at times. Our peppers, tomatoes, eggplants and various other plants including flowers are all doing well but growing very slowly in their little containers....very, very slowly. In less than a month they will have all doubled in size or more and be planted in the garden where they will hopefully go on to produce the fruits we so desire of them.

Squat little chocolate habaneros

Tomatoes

and tomatoes

Notice the white on the leaves of this tomatillo. This was a result of us insufficiently hardening them off and then allowing the sun to beat down on their wet leaves, same thing happened to a few of our tomatoes.

Colorful Coleus

Our eggplants are looking fairly good, we will be growing a few each of Apple Green, Thai Long Green, Long Purple, Black Beauty, and something new to us called Millionaire. It's a hybrid but supposed to be very productive and we do like our eggplants around here. Oh, and lest I forget, an interesting little eggplant called Kangaroo Apple sent to us from a friend in Vermont.:)

Echinacea

The gardens might look barren but they are teaming with life. Carrots, parsnips, beets, peas, fava beans, onions, potatoes, numerous lettuces, endive, and others are all beginning to germinate and grow...slowly. The photo below is of our shady spring salad garden, most of it has been planted although it is hard to tell from the picture. It has been in the low to mid 40's of late with a few very frosty mornings, these conditions are not conducive to a splurge of new growth. Now the weeds, on the other hand, are experiencing expeditious growth.

Some Days Are Better Than Others

...and today was another pretty darn good one, as far as foraging goes anyway.

Planting Potatoes

We finished planting our potatoes the other day and hope to have another fine harvest this fall. I have to admit to having an affinity for potatoes like some people do for tomatoes. I love to try all of the different varieties and have found very few that I don't like, and then it is mostly a performance issue and not taste. This year we will be growing many of the same potatoes as last year with the addition of two new to me varieties, Shepody and Viking Red.

These are the potatoes we saved out for seed and allowed to sprout a bit in a warmer area of our root cellar. We only ended up planting/needing about 2/3 of them.

Shepody is supposed to be a good producer, store well , and be great for french fries. We don't eat too many fries but I thought I would give it a try because of the production qualities.

Viking Red is similar to Viking Purple in that it is supposed to have a white flesh, produce well, and be resistant to scab...we shall see.

I don't have any special way of planting potatoes, we do save most of our own potatoes for seed and have done so for quite a few years now. We simply build a row of loose soil (in a different location every year) full of well composted material, plant the potato deep and pretty much call it good until fall harvest, very similar to the method described here - Modern Victory Garden. Potatoes are possibly our easiest crop to grow and the most productive of all our vegetables providing an immense amount of food for us, our chickens, and even the dog during the winter months.

My very experienced and trusty assistant planting "All Blue" potatoes

Chief Hunter

All work and no play makes Mike and Micki very dull grandparents so we set aside our garden duties and spent the weekend foraging the river banks and forests for wild edibles with the grandson, Hunter. At some point, he decided he was part Indian and asked to be called Chief Hunter ~ I suggested "Chief Dumb Bear" but he did not approve of that title so Chief Hunter it was. Anyway, our first trip proved to be most fruitful as we found numerous asparagus plants beginning to bear, but we were about a week too soon so did not find enough for a meal.

The wild parsley, now easily identifiable, was in its prime.

Just as we were leaving Chief Hunter found a patch of morel mushrooms. "Grandma! He yelled. There are morel mushrooms everywhere!" He was so excited as this was the very first time he found them all by himself...we are such proud grandparents. The boy was able to easily identify old asparagus ferns and the new shoots that accompanied them, sage, parsley, and the mushrooms...perhaps we are rubbing off on him after all.

Today, we ventured into the forests to search a few of our favorite spots for more morels and, although we only found one, everyone had a great time. We thought perhaps our "working dog" should start learning how to become a truffle hound...he loved the idea but bit the top off the first and only mushroom we introduced him to; this new duty might take a while for him to perfect.

Rowdy, leaping across a branch of the creek.

Grandpa following suit...but with less grace.:)

Chief Hunter, sharing a moose hip bone with Rowdy. I don't know? It's Northern Idaho.


Our jeep was a muddy mess so we decided to be lazy and splurge on a car wash...one of Hunters favorite chores.:)

Grandma, scrounging for quarters wondering if she had enough to actually get the vehicle washed.:(

Seed and Seedlings

We collected a bit of seed off wild asparagus a few weeks ago that we found along a river bank. Each asparagus "berry" contains six little seeds that germinate quite readily. They can be gathered off the ferny female plants in the fall or early spring and will store for many years. Also planted were the rest of my 2007 seed that was obtained from the ancestors of my own unruly plants, they had excellent germination. It will take a few years for the plants to become established well enough to produce large spears but time passes quickly when one is patient.

We have been planting apple, pear, apricot, plum, walnut, cherry, chestnut, currant, jostaberry, gooseberry, and raspberries. I must have planted over a hundred of these little starts in our woods and field this past week, all of which were grown from seeds and rooted cuttings started last year. I am hoping that some of the trees grown from seed in previous years will start to bear fruit this summer.

A few one year old apple and pear trees in transit to a new home.

Pots of Josta berries waiting to be planted in perminant locations.

Black raspberries will root anywhere that the stem touches the ground, these ones were tip rooted last fall.

The onion seedlings are only a week or two away from being transplanted...they can't wait to be free of their confines. There are also a few leeks and chives in this bunch but the majority are Yellow of Parma and Jaune Paille des Vertus onions. Both are excellent for storage.

We purchased a few dozen ramps a while back and are happy to see that they have been growing quickly...I'm glad they like the cold as it has been pretty nasty out of late.

Potting Tomatoes and Three Courses of Kale

We started potting our tomatoes and little tomatillos in 4" pots the other day, my wife's an old pro at this, me, I'm very slow. She roughly packs them into the pots with assembly line quickness while I want each one to be just perfect and am so gentle and careful that I am best left to deal with other tasks like making sure she has all the supplies needed for the operation and telling her to be careful with the plants. She assures me that tomatoes are tough and can handle it. She is right, but still...

The root cellar is still full of everything and the garden of greens.

We celebrated kale last night with a veritable kale salad extravaganza. A kale and potato salad, a kale/chicory/celery/root veggie salad, and a warm kale and squash salad. Mmm...Mikey likes kale.