With Thanksgiving quickly approaching, I decided I better start planning our menu. Since Thanksgiving is our first big meal after spending the summer harvesting crops, canning and tending to our animals, I think it’s always fun to see how many homegrown things we can use for our meal. Today I rounded up what we have, that way I can make a list and get the things we still need…
The fifteenth of November has become a special day at our house. It’s a day we cook chili, gather around the table and remind ourselves how truly thankful and blessed we are. We reflect how far we’ve come in just the few years we’ve been here, and reminisce about the giddiness and excitement we felt on the day of November 15th, 2011 as we retell the story. The story never gets old, the excitement never dies and the chili always tastes extra good, just as it did on that night.
So, what exactly is so special about that day you ask? It’s the day we moved. But it wasn’t just any ordinary move; it was a very special move ….
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Well, I think winter had officially arrived. The wind is howling and it’s cold out… actually very cold out. We knew this yucky weather was coming so we spent the weekend getting some things done that needed to get done. Luckily we had beautiful, perfect weather over the weekend to do all those things.
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Last weekend we had all sorts of stuff going on. We planned to process chickens and turkeys but it was so cold and windy. When the wind is blowing it’s hard to keep the fire going under the pot of water that we use to scald the chickens, so we decided to wait one more week to process chickens. Since we skin the turkeys, we decided to go ahead and process them.
Michael and Brooke did the processing…
With our first hard frost of fall come and gone, the growing season has come to an end. A couple days before the frost happened, we decided to go to the garden and pick all the ripe and decent sized unripe tomatoes. My mom and kids helped pick and we ended up with several baskets full of red and green tomatoes. I’ve never tried saving green tomatoes before, but my mom has, so she gave me some tips on how to do it. I also looked online and found a lot of different ways to do it, from wrapping each tomato in newspaper and storing in a cool room, to pulling the whole tomato plants and having them upside down in a cool cellar or basement.
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Catching chickens can be pretty tricky. They’re quick, and once they get the sense you’re after them, they make sure to keep their distance and run even quicker. But, with a special tool and some quickness they can be caught. Miley thought it would be a good topic to post about, so she volunteered to demonstrate the best technique on how to catch one.
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Pies…oh how I love to eat them, but when it comes to making them, you can count me out. I’m just not a good pie maker at all; my pies usually don’t turn out very pretty. Plus, pie making is just way too time consuming. By the time I peel and chop up the fruit, mix up the dough, roll it out, try to lift it up to put it in the pan, rip it, roll it out again, rip it again, piece it together in the bottom of the pan, roll out the next half, rip it, roll it out, rip it, and finally piece that one together, I’m just so over the pie that I don’t even want to eat it.
So… when I asked my family what they most wanted made from the apples and they all unanimously yelled “PIE!!!”… I was thinking, “wonderful, just wonderful.”
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Last weekend we planned on getting some chickens and the turkeys processed. After running to town to get ice and a couple of big tubs to put them in, we determined it was too hot and windy to process them, so that will be next weekend’s big project. Hopefully the weather will be cooler then.
Since our apple tree was loaded…
those tubs were filled with apples instead.
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It’s getting to be that time of the year when we start moving chickens to the barn for the winter. Chickens are such creatures of habit, so it’s always a little difficult getting them trained to go to the barn at night. We usually start out by confining the ones we move to a room for a few weeks until they get used to the idea that it’s their new home. Once the few weeks are up, we turn them loose to free range. If they go back to the barn at night, they are considered successfully trained. If they go back to their old coop, it means we have to chase them around in the dark with flashlights and carry them back to the barn. We lock them up for a few more days and try it all again until they learn to go to the barn.
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As we head into winter, we decided it was a good time to sit down, think about and reevaluate the last year. While we feel the year went pretty well, there are a few things we’d like to do differently. One of the biggest changes we’ve decided to make is decreasing the number of animals we keep through the winter. In the fall of last year we had the opportunity to get a really good deal on a couple of feeder pigs, so we got them. In addition to that, we increased our goat herd because we needed a buck for breeding and we added a few boer goats for 4H projects. All was fine until winter hit. It was a tough winter…. long periods of freezing temperatures with several big snowfalls made it difficult to care for them all. While we planned for our feed costs to be higher since the animals have to eat more to stay warm, it ended up being a lot higher than we expected it to be. So let’s just say… we’ve been eating some pretty expensive pork.
Not wanting to make those mistakes again, one of the first things we did was buy a feeder pig in the spring. That way, there’d be plenty of grass to graze and extra produce from the garden to give, in addition to the regular feed. We noticed a huge difference in feed costs between last winter and this summer. Piglet is all grown up now and will be headed to the butcher at the end of the week…
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Humble Little Homestead 