The tale of the potatoes

Last year we received two shipments of potatoes from www.potatogarden.com (who we highly recommend) but both seemed to come to a sad bitter end due to animals. The batch planted in front of the house (including purple viking) where nomed by the neighborhood rabbits (who in turn where delicious, revenge is still best served with potatoes), provided a very small harvest most of which went for seed potatoes for next year. The patch planted in the back of the house grew well but the greens where all eaten by our birds during the hot months and their tale finally ended with the piggies digging them up and eating any spuds that had remained underground after the birds where done. Although we do not know the flavor of the spuds planted in the back, we know the few we where able to eat from the front patch where amazing and far and above beyond the flavor of store spuds.

And here is where their story continues. Rosie was able to plant all of the potatoes today, under the watchful eye of our new task master Ivan (7 months old). We look forward to a good potato year as we hope to mound up the plants properly and get a yield of around 10lbs per plant (that's our hope but we might just end up with more tiny potatoes again). I do hope to purchase more potatoes to plant in the back and hope that with better cover we will have a higher percent of plants survive the chickens, geese and ducks.

A few things we have learned about caring for potato plants;

1) Make sure you mound your plants up routinely.
2) Try not to use companion plants if you are using a raised bed.
3) Good netting, cloth or a plastic cover will do wonders for keeping animals out of your plants.
4) Heirloom potatoes are awesome in flavor and texture.
5) When harvesting your potatoes use your hands as tools can cut and damage your spuds.
6) When planning the next harvest pick the best looking potatoes (no bruising or scars) and set them aside for next years seed potatoes.
7) Never plant your potatoes in the same spot twice, give a plot at least 4 years before you plant potatoes there again. This will virtually eliminate any potato specific diseases from being harbored in your land, learn from the Irish potato famine.

!BACON!

We have finally gotten our small smoker working, it was built from an old wine barrel and placed up on some blocks to allow room for a fire. I had to drill a number of 1 1/2" holes in the roof of the barrel in order to keep the temp low enough and we added a small hole to put a meat thermometer into so we could keep an eye on the temp. To hang the meat a friends daughter Becca helped me forge out some meat hooks that fasten to the roof of the barrel and the bacon hangs freely from the hooks. The overall cost of the smoker was around $0, a broken wine barrel for free and everything else I just had laying around the homestead. I start the smoking process by building a small fire and letting it burn down to coals. While that is burning I crawl inside the barrel and hang the meat on the hooks. In the future I will be adding a door to the smoker. Once the fire has burned down to coals I pick up the barrel and place it over the fire on the blocks and then add hard wood (elm and oak) that has been soaked in water over night to the fire and let the smoking begin. I have to keep an eye on the temp as we are trying to cold smoke our bacon and so you don't want to let the temp go over about 200 deg. When the temp rises up near the 200 deg mark I throw a ladle of water on the fire to drop down the temp and slow the fire. It is not the end of the world if the temp gets up over 200 but then you risk going into a hot smoked bacon which will not keep as long according to some sources (others disagree) but is also very good.

Rosie cured the bacon in a mix of salt, honey and let it sit in that mixture for about 1-3 weeks. Our friend Lisa brought us a couple of infused honeys to try including basil infused clover honey and tarragon infused sage honey, both are very very good. Make sure the the meat is entirely cover with the cure for an even cure and don't be temped to reuse your cure as the salt will be pulled our of the cure as it cures as the moisture exits so the left over cure is pretty useless. When you are curing your meat that is the time to add any spices or herbs to flavor your bacon if you want a more savory or sweet flavor.

The image on the top is the bacon after curing but before smoking, the next image is the bacon after the smoking but before the noming.

Rain

This post has been deleted due to excessive whining on my part.

The goal of our blog is to inspire people to start their own homestead however they can and take control of their food source. What I don't want to do is have people read about me complaining about things I have no control over and that in the big scheme of things just don't really matter.

Sorry for the inconvenience and as way of an apology our next post is about every one's favorite topic BACON!

Fall and Winter

By this time we're normally flooded and have to go out to make sure nothing has been swept away or drowned but this year we've had nothing but cold. This is the start of the second month of freezing temps. Most nights the lows are around 32 but we've had some stretches of 20's and even some teens so that our pipes have frozen more than a few times. The crops are taking longer to germinate with these temperatures. Our wood pile is quickly shrinking and we've had to fill up the propane tank again. We've been here 2 1/2 years and I'm finding it amusing that there is no such thing as normal. What happened the first two winters has not taken place at all. We'll just have to see how things play out to see how this winter treats us.

Waste

I wanted to spend a little time in this new year discussing the topic of waste. Not the waste that you throw into your garbage can nor the normal practices of waste of our modern society, I wanted to talk about waste of land. Rosie and I are working on using the entirety of our property and even with the large number of things we are doing we are really only using about 1/3 of what we have but we have plans in the works for every square inch of our property. In our neighborhood there are a lot of 1 and 2 acre parcels that consist of: A house (1/6 - 1/4 acre), a horse they don't ride (1/8 acre pen) and a whole lot of nothing else (1/2-1 acre). In general people are using about 1/3 - 1/2 of what they own and the rest is being used to keep the thistle and weed population at its current healthy level. Do these people really need 2/3 acres of drive way? Would they not be happier with a mortgage payment much lower than what they have now and a smaller property?

In some cases people have the need to own an animal such as a horse but local laws require such an animal to be housed on a property no smaller than one acre, now the animal does not have to have access to the acre there just has to be an acre some where in the vicinity so a 1/8 acre pen on an acre of land is just fine according to the law. These laws need to be changed, they do nothing for animal welfare and serve only to limit the lifestyle choices of the citizens of the local areas.

In other cases people see a larger plot of land as a status symbol and their need to own acreage stems from a misplaced idea that your possessions dictate the quality of person you are, nothing could be further from the truth. Owning 10 acres of useless land does not make you 40 times better or more important than a person who owns a 1/4 acre of urban homestead. These people have been sadly deluded by our system of copious consumerism.

So you may be asking what my point is, other than to point out how un-cool some people are. If you are interested in our own homestead you can feed a small family on 1/4 acre of land. You can feed several families on 1 acre of land and you can feed a silly number of people on 10 acres of land. Take what you have and use it, use all of it and if you find yourself in our shoes and are still trying to use all you have then open up your land to your friends and family. We are lending out plots of land to our people to use as they wish, grow a garden, raise a goat, build a beehive, compost, grow hops for brewing, start a fish pond, what ever you want to do. We have more space than we can currently use and it would be very wrong for us to keep our land fallow rather than let others develop it into something beautiful.

What do we get out of this? Well other than the obvious benefit of helping people take control of their own food source we will have extra hands on site for the bigger projects. It takes more than two people to build the dairy, and more than two people to drink the milk, eat the cheese, and nom the yogurt that comes from our dairy. Help us build the dairy and you will help us eat the cheese. If your family comes out to plant a field of grain then we can all help to grind the wheat to bake the best bread anyone has ever eaten. Community is more than where you live, it is shared labor and shared triumph, none of our families will starve while we have food on our homestead.

So the offer stands open, if you dream what we dream and want what we want come and do what we do. Share our labors and we will share our land, teach, learn, plant, harvest, raise and slaughter. We have space and if you wish you had a garden or a small farm come share yours with us and we in turn will share ours with you, there is no sense in wasting what we have.