Rutabaga Under Cover

 

I just finished reading this girl Jackie's blog.  She made a commitment to post every single day during the year 2011.  I enjoyed reliving 2011 through her eyes, and was inspired by her writing.  Plus, she's funny!  Why can't I be so funny?  Probably because I write about rutabaga.  There's only so much humor to be found in a root vegetable.  Even knowing I'm unlikely to inspire a giggle, I've just got to show you what was underneath the cloth in the greenhouse.  I hadn't even peeked inside since the middle of August, but I could see leaves practically bursting from the cloth.  What's going on in there? 

Whoa.  I folded back the cloth to reveal a mass of green leaves.  These guys grew with no help from me.  I didn't even water them, so I am impressed with their vigor.  Weeds trapped under the cloth grew to the size of hay.  

I pulled out all the hay, yellow leaves, and a few dead plants to give them some breathing room.  Despite being covered, there were some big striped caterpillars enjoying a free meal, but the damage was minimal.  

Look at that - it's a rutabaga!  A big one!  I should get a small harvest at end of this month.  

I carefully tucked them back into their dome and began to dream up ways to expand the rutabaga operation next year, now that I have a system that works.  Just imagine - I could grow lots of rutabaga and store them in the root cellar.  We would be rich in delicious and healthy tubers!  

Yesterday, after months of riced rutabaga being one of our go-to vegetables, Brandon announced that he was officially sick of eating rutabaga.  Doh!  Of course.  Sigh.       

Shuck Beans and Cabbage

The garden has been overtaken by weeds.  The ragweed is nearly twelve feet tall and has stems so thick they can't be cut with the weed eater, and need to be manually removed before they start dropping seeds.  The squash vines are dead, the cucumbers are buried alive, and who knows what state the potatoes are in - they haven't been seen in weeks.  

In the greenhouse, under domes of cloth, cabbages and rutabaga have been growing unsupervised for nearly a month.  They weren't watered, weeded, or fussed over in all that time. I was afraid to lift the cloth and see what was happening under there.  

But look, the rutabaga are growing!  I didn't get very many of the seeds to germinate, probably because it was hard to keep the soil moist under that hot greenhouse plastic, but once there were plants a few inches tall, I assembled the hoops and tucked them in.  They might actually make a rutabaga!

The cabbages were planted early, and were plagued by caterpillars before I managed to erect some homemade hoops from sticks and cover them with cloth.  I was fearful that they would be ruined.  

They had lots of bug bites on the outer leaves, and a few seemed munched by rabbits, but once I peeled the chewed parts away, I was left with a whole basket of little cabbage heads!  

After I harvested the cabbage, I pulled up all the weeds, sticks, and cloth, and now have a nice place for another crop.  I'm encouraged by the cloth covering.  I think if I put it on before the bugs lay their eggs, I might be able to grow a bigger cabbage head next time.  

A few years ago I met a man named John, who showed me photos of his green bean plants.  They were beautiful!  He had a whole wall of lush green plants and shelves of canned beans.  I've had his green beans in my mind for a long time, and this year I think I may have a trellis and harvest to rival John's.  

I've picked baskets of green beans.  Last night I made a meat loaf and surrounded it with green beans and onions and baked it all together.  The beans cooked in the juices from the meat and were so delicious.  We've saved all the dripping from baked chicken and baked green beans in it too.  So good!

In addition to the trellis in the garden fence, which is sixteen feet long, I planted beans inside a ring of tomato cages.   The beans flourished.  The goats realized they could climb on the cages and knock them over to get the tender vines on the top.  They gorge themselves, crush the cages, and make a mess of the vines.  I was half glad to think I wouldn't have to pick any more beans! 

Brandon helped me pound in some fence posts to prop the cages back up, and I crawled around inside the ring of beans and picked another giant basket full.  I don't think the goats ate enough to hurt the vines at all, and there are plenty of tiny beans still on the vines.  

Picking the beans is the easy part.  The tedious part is pulling all the strings.  

In years past, I've frozen green beans, and they are handy for soups and stews.  This year I cleaned up the food dehydrator and have been drying the beans.  They shrink so much it seems hard to believe it took hours of breaking beans to fill all the trays only to have a few quart bags.  Brandon's mom made the best beans from dried white half runner beans.  I hope my beans will be half as tasty as her shuck beans.   We'll see!

Goats, Carnivores, and Greens

In early May, Peaches delivered two baby boys!  These kids are the third batch since she's been with us, and I'm pretty sure they just keep getting cuter.  

When they were a few weeks old, Brandon and I mustered our courage and cauterized their horn buds with a hot iron.  I almost couldn't bring myself to do it, because I knew they were going to cry. The book said that it would be more traumatic for us than for the goats, which was true.  They did cry for a moment, but then shook their heads and ran to their mother to nurse.  

Following a diagram in the goat book, Brandon built a little box of plywood to hold their bodies with only their little head poking out of a hole.  He let the iron heat up, then held their muzzle with his left hand and applied the iron for five seconds.  Once the iron was heated again, he did the other bud.  They cried.  It smelled like burnt hair and meat.  I closed my eyes and held the box steady.  The horn buds are supposed to fall off and they haven't yet, so I worry that we didn't do it long enough, and they will still get their heads stuck in the fence.  Maybe next time we'll be able to hold it on there for a longer five seconds.  

We built a small fence down by the tree line.  It encompasses a thicket of honeysuckle vines and blackberries.  We don't have a shelter there yet, so I've been leading Little Buck, Donnie, and the River brothers to this area in the evenings, when its dry, so they can browse.  They love the forage, but they don't like the biting deer flies that live in this shady moist area, or the ticks they are picking up on their ears and heads.  I take them back to the barn before dark, and they are always excited to see me coming so they can run back to their cozy barn, where they lounge around and enjoy the hay I dole out.  Why bother to pick your own leaves when Rain will bring them to you, right?  

 

We had another first experience - we butchered one of the goats.  Noobi, Peaches first kid.  She was the scrawniest of the whole herd, and never recovered her good condition following the birth of her set of kids.  It's not possible to keep every goat, I know, and the recommendation is to keep the best and eat the rest.  She wasn't the best.  

We watched many YouTube videos and re-read the butchering chapter in the goat book before we attempted it.  I put a halter on her and lead her to a bowl of treats and retreated with Wendigo.  Brandon did the deed (pow!), and we hoisted her up by her back legs and stripped off the skin and pulled out the guts.  Then we got busy with the bone saw and knives.  I felt like a carnivore, for sure.

The fella whose video instructions we followed was butchering a young boar meat goat, and he made beautiful little steaks and chops.  Our scrawny little Nubian goat didn't really look like the same animal.  We mostly left the meat on the bone in big roasts, and ground up the small bits.  We smoked a leg, shoulder, and a rack of ribs in our backyard smoker, and the meat was tasty but super chewy.  At that point we were doubtful that we were goat meat enthusiasts.  But, I cut the smoked meat off the bones and into chunks, then cooked it with some beans and cabbage in the instapot pressure cooker.  It was really good!  Wendigo got a fair share, and I made some smoked bone stock too.  We haven't tried the ground meat that we made yet.  Since Peaches gave us two more boys this spring, I think we will get even more practice making and eating goat meat in the future.

 

The greens in the greenhouse did wonderfully, and the lettuce that I kept harvesting returned over and over, but now is going bitter and bolting.  We had several batches of cooked radish greens too.  I have baby cabbages in the greenhouse, plus green beans, squash, cucumbers, turnips, and onions in the summer garden.  The rabbits enjoyed the peas and lettuce I planted in the summer garden.  I'm dreaming up a new rabbit proof garden fence.  It's not uncommon to see three or four rabbits in the garden at a time!  

Donkey Manners, Sidewalk, Goat Routines, and Spring Weeding

Yesterday Brandon and I took both donkeys on a walk around the little farm.  Ernest patiently let me put a halter on his face, and walked behind Brandon like he's had some practice using his walking manners.  Rufus was his same old silly self - balking at new objects, bumping into me, pulling ahead, kicking up his heels when asked to walk through a puddle.  Everyone had a good time.  Once the donkeys were back in their little pasture, we handed out some treats and Rufus put his ears back with jealousy and bit Ernest on the side.  This caused Ernest to run and kick up his back legs, which flipped manure onto Brandon's face, and nearly sent him tumbling backward over the water trough.  Ack!  Rufus!   

Check out our new sidewalk project!  One of the things we miss from our old house is the very civilized sidewalk from the driveway to the front door.  Now that we live in the land of clay soil, we understand mud in a whole new way.  

We've been tip-toeing from paving stone to paving stone for several years now, trying to keep our work shoes clean during the mud seasons.  In the summer months the clay soil is so firm setting stones is extra hard work, so Brandon is taking advantage of the soft spring soil and the extend days at home to create a continuous pathway.  Our own little piece of suburban comfort!  

The red bud tree I planted when we first moved to the farm is putting on quite a show this year. 

With the dirt that Brandon excavates for the sidewalk pavers, I'm filling in the herb spiral and re-arranging stones.  There's a few sage and oregano plants still living from last year, but most of the spiral is ready to be planted.  I have dreams of basil pesto.  

I'm making a habit of letting the goats out to graze each evening.  They are funny with their strict routine of where to eat.  They come out of the gate and head for the lush grass behind the tractor barn, then spend some time in the honeysuckle vines on the property boundary before wandering through the front yard to eat the rose bushes and pear tree, then to the bush honeysuckle near the hammock woods, then back to grass where they started.  After an hour of this, they are ready to follow me back to their pasture in exchange for a few treats.  Their chins are green right now from the new grass.  

I'm off to a good start with pulling weeds in the greenhouse.  I have only the center bed planted, and I meticulously pulled every tiny weed from the whole bed, and then transplanted some of the extra lettuce seedlings.  If only I would keep up with the weeding all spring.  Come on Rain, you can do it!  

Greens!  

Peas and onions, too!  

Ernest and Other Big Things

After weeks of phone calls and paperwork, our new adopted mini-donkey, Ernest, is finally here!  Ashley told me that she saw a mini-donkey listed on the Kentucky Equine Adoption website, and when I called to inquire, the only thing they could tell me about him was that he was about eleven years old and fat.  He belonged to someone who let him graze a huge pasture, and obviously made sure he was well fed.  The trainer he went to live with after he was put up for adoption said that she's seen over two hundred obese horses and donkeys, and Ernest took the prize.  She was periodically measuring him with a tape while she put him on the diet, and he's already down two hundred pounds!  

He's got some jiggle in his walk!  He's a sweet guy, and still very shy.   

Despite Rufus interest in getting close, Ernest keeps his distance.  When Rufus sniffs him, he kicks up both back legs and makes a funny snort.  He doesnt't get much ground clearance with his kicks, and makes us laugh. 

Here's a little clip from his first day.  Rufus is the gray donkey, and Ernest is the brown shaggy one.

Brandon and I rescheduled our flights for our big trip for later in the summer.  I don't know if we will be able to take our trip later either, but by rescheduling the flights we didn't loose our expensive tickets when international travel was advised against.  We're glad we didn't go when we said we would - we might of been trapped in a foreign country in quarantine! 

I'm working from home now instead of going to the office, which I find challenging.  It's hard for me to focus on report composition when the spring time bird song and garden chores are calling to me through the open windows.  Brandon and I took a trip to visit our blue bus in the woods.  Small wildflowers were blooming, and the trees were starting to open their buds.

Everything was as it should be there  - quite and peaceful under the trees and above the river.  

The seeds I planted in the greenhouse have germinated, and my plan is to thin the small rows and transplant the extra's to other beds.  I want to focus on greens in the greenhouse, beans and sweet potatoes in the summer garden, and rutabagas and spaghetti squash too.  We're eating a lot of these lately as we focus on our healthy diet.  Since I know I'll be working from home for the next two weeks, at least, I'm encouraging myself to take advantage of this opportunity to control my own schedule.  I'm trapped in self-imposed health camp!  Exercise, sunshine, vegetables!  

I think I can stay home for two weeks no problem, but I bet Brandon has a hard time.  He likes to get out in the world.  He's already planned a full schedule of chores, including working on our paved pathways while the soil is soft, and changing all the fluids in the tractors.  I can tell he's looking forward to mowing season!

Rufus is looking forward to lunch!  

Preparing for Onions and Travel

This is the bag of onions from our last harvest.  They were grown in my plastic green house and then allow to dry out under a piece of burlap.  They have been patiently waiting in the pantry ever since.  It's past time to plant them so they can provide a new crop of onions. 

As I walk to the greenhouse door with my bag of onions, the whole flock of chickens and guineas follows me.  The flock was recently attacked by a couple of dogs.  Over a three day period the dogs killed four hens and mauled Turkey and a couple others before I was able to get my hands on one of them and give him over to animal control.  The owners found their dog at the animal shelter and called to offer payment for our lost birds.  We didn't ask for money, but warned them that our neighbor is a good shot and is on the look out as he lost some birds to the dogs too.   The lady at the animal shelter said that it's common that once a dog learns where to go to chase livestock they will keep coming back, and end up being shot by a farmer.    

Poor Turkey was badly bruised after the dog attack, so Brandon and I butchered her and made over fifteen pounds of turkey sausage and six quarts of stock! 

February is the month I like to plant seeds in the greenhouse, and start some plants to later be transplanted to the summer garden.  I'm having some trouble getting started this year - I'm feeling behind on the garden already!  The time and energy that could be directed toward the garden is probably being used up planning for our upcoming international travel.  Exciting!  After much consideration we've finally committed to a Big Trip, purchased our non-refundable tickets and hotel, and are preparing to travel for over thirty hours to the Republic of Georgia - way over in the Caucasus mountains, on the edge of the Black Sea, right between Russia and Turkey.  Whoa.  

In terms of miles, Japan is the farthest I've been from home, but that was over thirty years ago, when I was nine years old.  This trip will be the farthest from home I've ever been as an adult.  Brandon and I will have five days in Tbilisi, the capital city, and we're looking forward to this new adventure.  We've readied our carry on bags and neck pillows, and are considering the weather and our wardrobe.  We also have to plan for someone else to keep all our critters in food and water while we are away.   

After tidying the greenhouse, I decided to put the flock to work preparing a seed bed before I plant.  I propped the door open and coaxed the flock inside by sprinkling sunflower seeds in the straw.  They worked diligently for the rest of the day, and did a wonderful job spreading the straw and scratching up weeds.  No more excuses Rain, get out there and plant those onions!  

Naps, and Greens with Eggs

I caught Brandon and Wendigo taking a nap in the grass.  They share the ability to catch a nap just about anywhere.  Sometimes I forget how big Wendigo is, and then I see her with Brandon and realize that she is a huge dog!  

I'm pretty sure all my animals nap the whole time I'm at work, and then when they hear my car pull in the driveway they wake up and go into frantic for food mode.  If I didn't know better, I would think they were starving all day long and they barely made it until the evening without wasting away.  They give themselves away on the weekends, because I see them lounging in the sun and relaxing the day away instead of foraging for food.  Their stomachs are on timers, and they know when breakfast and dinner is served.  

The greenhouse greens grew beautifully, despite never being thinned.  I have dense rows of green leaves, and have been able to try cooked turnip greens, radish greens, and even mustard greens, plus lettuce salads with dill, onion, pea shoots, and radish.  

Some of the radishes split in the center, most likely from uneven watering.  The greenhouse gets so warm that the raised beds dry out easily, and then I soak them with the garden hose.  It's funny to me to water the garden while it's raining.  The beds on the side of the greenhouse get plenty of rain, but the bed in the center still needs me to water it.  

The bunching onions that Tamara shared with me have been making tasty small onions for months already.  I've been chopping them for the skillet or a salad.  Tamara, how do I save some bulbs for planting later? 

Isn't the green leaf lettuce pretty?  It's so tender it practically melts in my mouth.  Because the plants are so dense, the under leaves are pale and thin.  I've found a few snails lately, so I'm being aggressive with my harvest.  I don't want to share with the snails. 

My asparagus bed is a weedy mess, and most of the spears have grown into fronds, but I still manage to find a few to add to our garden harvest.  If I pick and prep the food, and have it ready in the refrigerator, we usually find a way to work it into our meals.  We have a health goal of eating six to eight cups of vegetables each day, so we really have to include vegetables in every meal to get it all in.  Breakfast salad is actually pretty good!  

I like to chop a bit of everything...

and cook until tender in coconut oil in an iron skillet...

then add a giant bowl of chopped greens and cook just until it wilts.  I like the turnip greens, but they have stalky stems that I have to remove or Brandon accuses me of feeding him sticks.  The mustard greens don't have the stems, and make nice flat leaves that are easy to stack and chop.  The flavor of the mustard greens if more intense, but we like it.  When I served the first batch Brandon said, "These greens have the taste of the greens I remember hating when I was a kid."  Ha! 

And of course, the final touch is to add eggs and stir until done.  If we don't make a plan for dinner, then it's likely we are having greens and eggs.  Again.