A Little Too Country

Mountain Man came in the other day and said, "Look, I've created the farmer's version of the Baby Bjorn!"

I just love that she's smiling in there!

Introducing...

This is one of our turkey toms...we call him Tighty-Whitey. Uh-huh, I know...I have no idea how the evolution of nicknames ended up here, but it did. Anyway, this is Tighty strutting his stuff. Ain't he purty? Not even a little bit?? :)

Knee-deep in Plums?

We finally got around to picking the rest of our plums off of the trees a couple of days ago. We'd been picking them slowly for a couple of weeks, thinking we'd be able to make a dent in the massive influx of plums, but with the sub-freezing temps approaching, AND the chickens and turkeys having digestive issues (know what happens when we eat too many plums? it just so happens that the VERY SAME thing happens to birds - who knew?), we decided to pick the rest and start the preservation process. So, today, I got to making plum butter. Now, I'm not a big fan of plums to begin with, so the idea of preserving them did NOT make me excited; but, after my first batch(which was actually 3 times the recipe), I had to admit that it smelled REALLY good! :)

But, I'm barely getting started. Today, I did a quarter of a box of plums. That came out to 5 half pints and 4 pints of plum butter. But, THIS is how much I have left:

I actually weighed the 2 gallon buckets to see how much the 18 gallon tub weighs. 126 pounds. Plus the two 14 pound buckets. Plus the plums in the fridge. I am going to have to get a little creative...

Tomorrow after the community garage sale (which I'm so excited for - I went to one today for a little preview. What do you think you would find in a community full of self-reliant people? Hopefully, a LOT of goodies!), I'll try to make some fruit leather, and some different kinds of jam. I tried to make some dried plums, but I may make some more of those as well. Any ideas/recipes you'd like to share with me?? :)

This is going to be what I'm doing for the next...oh...forever...

Another Hen Lost...

Well, as most of you know, we've had a rough couple of weeks. We'll be sharing these posts as well - we'd never intend to include the good stuff and not the bad, but we just HAD to get this one out, so here goes...

We got back from the RenFaire on Sunday night, and here we are trying to catch up on all our chores. Today, we were outside cleaning out the greenhouse to get ready to plant some cold-weather crops, when we started to hear something resembling a crow out in the orchard.

Mountain Man turns to me and says, "Did Game Bird just crow?" Then, we heard a crow again. Nope, it was just Big Boy. And then, ANOTHER crow...it WAS Game Bird!! And slowly, the pieces started coming together...

Game Bird was more colorful than the hens. He was protective of the flock. He was instinctive, and though he wasn't aggressive with us, he was certainly more aggressive with the other animals. He was ostracized from his own group. These are all things that pointed out that he was a rooster. The only reason we never thought of him as one was because he was supposedly 4 months old when we got him. That would have made him 6 months old now, when he started to crow. Either he's a REALLY late bloomer, or the person we got him from didn't actually know his age. In any case, we are excited to have him as a second rooster. Big Boy is beautiful, but a little dim-witted, so we're happy to have a rooster that has a keen awareness of his surroundings. As long as he stays friendly with the children, he'll be fine.

His timing was spot-on, though. Mountain Man was about to start calling him Blondie...

So, we lost another hen today. But, we gained a fine looking rooster... :)