Category Archives: Farm

Dilly Beans – a family affair

We all worked together yesterday to make a family favorite – dilly beans. They are basically green beans that taste like spicy/dill pickles. They are pretty labor intensive to make, so a cooperative effort is much appreciated. I actually thought I had already done a blog post about them, but a search proved me wrong. So here goes… πŸ‘

We set aside about 7 pounds of the straighter beans as we picked to can or freeze – they fit down in the jars better… (I like the bean tips to all be up so it’s easy to pull them out of the jar.)

Once filled with beans, we added a clove or two of our garlic that has been drying. (It’s pretty potent, so we didn’t put the full amount of cloves in as the recipe says.) Paul went out and picked some of Grandma’s dill heads to add – 2 to 4 heads/quart. Then we added 1/2t of Michael’s ground hot peppers. For the brine, we heated up 3Q+1/2c of apple cider vinegar with the same amount of water. (Wish we could have used our homemade ACV, but we didn’t have enough made.) Stirred in 1.25c of Celtic sea salt, and brought the brine to a boil. Poured the brine over the filled jars to 1/4″ headspace. Had extra brine, and needed 3 more quarts to fill the last canner, so we played with cuke slices and spears, too. Made sure the tops of the jars were wiped clean, placed the sterilized lids on top, tightened the rings around them, and water-bath canned them for 10 minutes. Only had two jars’ lids “crinkle”, so we’ll just use them first. (They DID seal, but I’ll probably just keep them in my fridge.) We normally let them sit in the pantry for at least 6 weeks before we dig into them. 😊

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WELCOME 8th calf – 2014

FINALLY! Got to meet our last calf of the season this morning… Here is Suezy, and her son, JamesMadison:

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Click here to read about her calf last year.

Click here to read about our method for naming bulls this year.

His birth tied up the tally for 2014: 4 bulls and 4 heifers. πŸ™‚

He walked down to the barnyard like a champ. Had to dodge some pretty big puddles and his mama ran him into the electric fence a couple times, but he was able to complete the journey… πŸ™‚

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Was so funny watching last year’s calves follow along the fenceline! πŸ™‚

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The end is near – almost there… πŸ™‚

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Made it! πŸ™‚

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A well-deserved rest… πŸ™‚

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Since we are done milking for today, JamesMadison will stay with his mama until tomorrow morning. With there being a little over 5 weeks between him and the last calf, it creates some challenges with our type of setup.

For instance, the first seven calves are already trained & adjusted to once-a-day feedings, but this little guy won’t be ready for that for a couple weeks… Makes it tricky for afternoon baseball and far-away double headers…

And we need his mama’s milk to help feed all the other calves, so she needs to be able to come into the barn for morning milking… But our barn setup isn’t the best for having a calf running loose in it, nor do we feel comfortable having a calf joining the dairy mamas in a single-wire electric fence as they are rotationally grazed…

So every year we think about experimenting with a “nurse cow” in the field with all the calves, but that isn’t as easy as it sounds either! Hmmmm – not sure what we’ll decide on, so I guess that’ll have to be a future post! πŸ™‚

Thank You, Lord, for all these beautiful, healthy calves!

WELCOME 7th calf – 2014

“ThomasJefferson” was born right before our eyes this evening! πŸ™‚ (Click here to read about how we are naming our boys this year…) His mama is Disco. (Click here to read about her calf from last year.)

We were late in doing our afternoon calf check since we had double header baseball games all afternoon. Truthfully, all we wanted to do was get inside, thaw out, and eat, lol…BUT we also knew Disco was due a couple days ago, and kinda had some signs earlier this morning that today might be her day. Soooo, Mike & I headed up on the 4-wheeler to take a peek…

Found Disco pushing out some feet! πŸ™‚

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I left Mike with her, and drove back down to get some twine in case Mike needed to assist with pulling the calf out. But when I returned, he had already been born! πŸ™‚

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He’s a pretty good sized boy – and his coloring looks neat, too. We are looking forward to seeing what he looks like after he’s all cleaned up. πŸ™‚

He’ll spend the night in the field with his mama and the rest of the dairy girls. It was too close to dark & we were just too tired to walk them down this evening. So tomorrow, I hope to add some more pictures to this post. πŸ™‚

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Updated 4-7-14:
Yesterday was such a beautiful morning!

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ThomasJefferson walked with his mama out of the field, and then she completely left him, lol! She got through that gate, and just started truckin’ to the barn! Well this little guy is NOT SO LITTLE, and needs to grow into his long legs, so we decided he’d get a wagon ride down. He filled up the whole wagon, lol! His markings are pretty cool – and we are debating if we will keep him as a bull. πŸ™‚

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Only one more calf to come! Suezy is due 5-4… We are prayerful it will NOT be as chaotic as it was with her last year. Click here to read about that fiasco, lol… πŸ™‚

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WELCOME 6th calf – 2014

Meet “Pinetar”, lol… Her mama is ScotchTape, whose name category is “adhesives”. So when we were brainstorming for possible girl names, (being the baseball family we are) Pinetar came up! We decided to wait and see what the calf looked like – to see if the name would fit. And it did! πŸ™‚

Click here to read about ScotchTape’s calf from last year. πŸ™‚

When we went up to bring the milking girls down to the barn this morning, ScotchTape was looking longingly toward a blocked off corner of the field…

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Sure enough: her calf had gone under the single wire electric fence AND either through the big gate or through the high tensile fence into an adjoining field!! Probably wasn’t the smartest spot for ScotchTape to pick to have her calf, lol…

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Even though Pinetar ran from us at first, once she got closer to her mama, she cooperated nicely with the trek down to the barn. πŸ™‚

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Some final encouragement from her mama to get through the last leg of the journey, lol… πŸ™‚

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WELCOME 5th calf – 2014

Went for a family walk this afternoon and found this little cutie who walked right up to us… πŸ™‚

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Caramel had her calf – a girl! Last year, she had Winchester. Click here to see that post. πŸ™‚

We decided to make Caramel’s name category “flowers”, so meet: Tulip! πŸ™‚

She made the trek down to the barn beside her mama, and will stay with her tonight. Then we’ll milk Caramel tomorrow with the others. πŸ™‚

Thank You, Lord, for another miracle!

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WELCOME 3rd calf – 2014

Meet Adams. He was born this morning, and his mama is Gluey. (Click here to read about how we are naming our boys this year.) He’s a cute little guy – tinier than his half siblings, Washington and Coco. πŸ™‚

Here he is standing beside his mama, with Tangerine photobombing, lol… πŸ™‚

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Since we already milked today, we decided to bring Gluey and Adams down to the barnyard so she could get some privacy with her little guy. Then we’ll milk her tomorrow with the other two. πŸ™‚

Adams ALMOST walked all the way down… Kinda got tired of walking in the sloppy mud, so he got a lift down the rest of the way. πŸ™‚

Click here to read about Gluey’s calf last year – Xray. πŸ™‚

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After all that exercise and the bumpy ride, it was time to eat again! πŸ™‚

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WELCOME 1st & 2nd calves – 2014

Meet “Washington”! He is our first calf for 2014. His mama is Tangerine, and is dad was Cleatus. It was a joy to see him this morning – healthy and all cleaned up. πŸ™‚

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Washington has a big sister named Banana. Click here for an old post that has links to take you back to her birthday in 2012.

He also has a big brother, Sahara, from 2013. Click here for old posts he was featured in. πŸ™‚

Washington must have had a good breakfast, because he walked all the way down to the barn with his mama. His legs weren’t even the least bit wobbly! πŸ™‚

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Lord, we are so thankful for a new calving season here on our farm, and we thank You for the gift of Washington today! We lift up the rest of our herd to You. Strengthen us to handle whatever situations come before us. May we remember it is Your plan we want – even when it’s hard. We grieve the loss of Pax from last week, but we thank you for the 7 years she milked and had calves for us. May the blessings around us always be more bold than the dark spots. Because the Truth is: This is the day the Lord has made; We will rejoice and be glad in it. (Psalms 118:24 NKJV) Amen

And then, as I’m sitting in my car using the free wifi at the library to upload the pics for this post, I receive a txt from Mike at home:

OreoCookie had her calf this afternoon! Thought I’d include a couple pics of her in this post. More will follow, I’m sure… I LOVE her coloring!! πŸ™‚

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Got home and decided we’d bring Cookie & her calf down to the barnyard, leave them together overnight, and milk her tomorrow with Tangerine. Oh, this little heifer calf is ADORABLE! She was a champ just like her half brother earlier today, and walked all the way down to the barn. Not sure of her name yet… UPDATED 3-22: The Sarver Family has named her Coco! πŸ™‚

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Click here to participate in a Barn Hop! πŸ™‚
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Savin’ the sweet taters

{sigh} Our poor sweet potatoes… They have had to really work hard here this season. Not the actual “growing” part, just the “storing” part…

Mike’s mom was given some starts of a friend’s authentic, West Virginia, sweet potatoes a couple years ago. We all LOVED them! So each year since, she’s grown some starts from the previous year’s crop, and we’ve enjoyed learning how to incorporate them into our menus. πŸ™‚

Last year was another wonderful harvest – I think we measured some in at 6+ pounds! The thing about sweet potatoes, though, is that they need to “cure” before we wrap them individually in newspaper & place them in cold (pantry) storage. Normally, they last fantastically for us – like until May or so… HOWEVER, last year, a well-intentioned helper, decided to WASH the “dirty” potatoes that had been curing on a screen. So basically, that super-important-protective-layer got scrubbed off… Not much you can do to fix that once its happened, so we let them sit a few more days to dry, wrapped them in our newspapers, and hoped for the best. Sadly, we found mold on some in January. But for-the-most-part, most were doing ok. Until yesterday morning. {double sigh} Basement flooded as all our snow & ice has been melting… And if you are too lazy forget to place your precious cargo of wrapped sweet potatoes up in crates because YOU KNOW this has happened before… You get wet wrapped sweet potatoes. DUH. 😦

So yesterday turned into: sweet potato 9-1-1 AND shop-vac the basement day, lol. πŸ™‚

Here’s the crate I filled up of sopping wet taters…

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Took two canning pots & two 8-qt stockpots to fit all of them…

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Fortunately, there were only two small ones that were moldy…

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Next I boiled them for a l-o-n-g time. Like an hour and a half… Didn’t mean to, but I forgot about them as Mike & I were having so much “fun” cleaning up our basement, lol! Didn’t seem to matter, though. They weren’t too mushy to peel & they mashed up really easy… πŸ™‚

I dumped the hot water off and rinsed them in cold. Then I let them sit a bit so I could finish the basement…

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Many people ask us why our sweet potato dishes are “greenish” instead of orange colored. I’ve heard it’s because many confuse yams and sweet potatoes as the same thing… But they are definitely different, lol! πŸ™‚

My yield was five 4c containers and four 2c containers. (Every two cups weighed a little over one pound.) Wish I would have weighed all the potatoes before I started, but I forgot.

The reason I chose those sizes to freeze in, is because our two favorite uses for mashed sweet potatoes are a double batch of “Sweet Potato Puff” {I do tweak it a bit and use evaporated cane juice (ECJ) instead of white sugar, make my own brown sugar using ECJ & molasses, and usually omit the pecans as they are a luxury ingredient around here…} and sweet potato pie. (I sub white sugar with ECJ and my pie crust recipe is in this post…) πŸ™‚

It wasn’t exactly how we planned to spend our day, but it appears as though the rescue effort was a success! And a good kick in the pants reminder to keep valuable items off our basement floor, lol! πŸ™‚

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{This is the first time I’ve tried to “link up” to a blog-hop… For some reason, I can’t get the pic below to link to The Prairie Homestead Blog, but I CAN GET these words to link to it. Sooo, click this paragraph, lol, and you can “barn hop”. Please don’t hesitate to tell me what I’ve done wrong – advice is always welcome!}

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Hodge podge floor lamp

Mike made me this unique floor lamp table for Christmas from scrap treasures he found. His brother was getting rid of a floor lamp with a broken base, so he salvaged it. Then he found an old rusty milk can in the barn, cleaned it up, protected it with POR-15, and gave it a fresh coat of paint. (His mom remembers the milk can from long ago, but doesn’t remember why it was fitted with the spicket on the front. Mike actually attached the lamp to the lid without damaging the can, so technically, it’s still useable…) Then he found an old silo door, cleaned it up, & varnished it. Attached it all together, & “whell-ah”, a new creation. I LOVE IT!! πŸ™‚

Still need to find a lampshade that will work on it… Not having much success at finding physical stores with longer lampshades to look at, in person. Since this lamp is higher than an average sized one, we’re thinking a shade 16-22″ would help to disguise its height. Or Mike said he could make the pole shorter, though he wasn’t too excited about doing that.

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I’m also not opposed to making our own. Found some amazing ideas on the internet – here are a couple ideas…

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Wonder what we’ll come up with & how long it will take us, lol? I’m thinking these wire frames on etsy have a lot of potential…hmmm… πŸ™‚

Any suggestions are welcome… πŸ™‚