Go Local

He who gathers in summer is a son who acts wisely, 

but he who sleeps in harvest is a son who acts shamefully.

~Proverbs 10:5 

One blessing of living in this lush, fertile valley is that whatever we don't grow ourselves, due to lack of space, lack of energy, or a failed crop, is almost always available locally. We have been unsuccessful with blueberries. We will keep trying, but in the meantime, one mile down the road from our house is a blueberry farm where we picked 45 pounds of blueberries this summer. I froze them on cookie sheets and then loaded them into gallon ziplock bags. We will eat them in smoothies, pancakes, and as a plain frozen snack all year long. 

Our strawberries completely failed this year, whereas last year we had a bountiful crop: plenty to eat, plenty to can, and some to freeze. (We have some work to do this winter to get them going again.) Fortunately, we were able to pick at a farm a short drive from us and freeze 20 pounds for the coming year. 

We would like to plant peach trees, but have not yet, so are at least several years out from having our own peaches. Every summer we drive twenty minutes to a local farm and pick by the basketful. 

This year we left with 65 pounds. I canned a bit of peach jam, we made homemade peach ice cream, and ate many plain. But the majority I sliced and froze, with skins on (hate to peel off all those nutrients), to be used in smoothies throughout the year. 

Our favorite smoothie recipe (I triple it for the kids and I):

1 banana
1 sliced peach
1 cup blueberries
1/4 cup plain greek yogurt
1/2 scoop vanilla whey protein powder
1 Tbs almond butter
Almond milk as needed to thin if fruit is frozen

Graham ate his first peach here and is definitely a fan!

At the peach farm, in this very rural location, I was surprised to see an Asian woman on the little wagon taking us out to the orchard. (The orchard owners tired of cars running over their irrigation pipes and so require us to be transported.) She kept staring at us and smiling and I was fairly certain she was Chinese. When we got off at the same stop to pick the same variety of peaches she asked if my children were Chinese. I told her they were and then she hugged me and said, "Thank you." She had a thick accent, but her English was good. We proceeded to have a pleasant conversation in which I discovered she has been here in the States for 6 years and married an American. She hugged me and thanked me no less than three times in our short five-minute conversation. I stressed what a blessing our Chinese children are to us, but she was clearly moved by what we had done. I am always equally moved when Chinese people, who truly understand the desperate plight of the Chinese orphan, share their feelings about our adoptions with us. I believe this moment in a peach orchard in rural Oregon was a sweetly ordained moment by God. 

Though we have six apple trees, we had a very small crop this year. The two that appear to be Gravensteins have only every borne a few apples each season, and the other four (two Golden Delicious and two Red Delicious) were either not pruned enough, pruned too much, or pruned too late in the season. I could tell by the scarcity of blossoms in Spring that we would not have many apples. We also did not follow the prescribed organic spray schedule as we had planned to, so the majority of the apples we did grow were scabby and wormy. Biting into one them was like a game of russian roulette. I would not recommend it. I was able to cut away the yuck and make a fair amount of apple butter, and a few of our Golden Delicious were beautiful for eating. But for the remaining dozens of quarts of applesauce and pints of apple butter, we returned to a place we had not been in a few years: our favorite apple farm, Beilke Family Farms.   

We picked about 70 pounds of Gala, Fuji, and Granny Smith. They were gorgeous. I'd risk biting into one of those any day!  

Last weekend, I got to work, after a welcome month-long break from canning:

I don't think I can adequately express how much of a joy canning on my new stove is, compared to my old, small, ceramic-top stove with a broken large burner, where it would take an hour just to bring my pot to boil.

I wrote last year about my favorite applesauce and apple butter method and recipes and also about the amazing Kitchenaid attachment that makes perfectly textured applesauce. 

We feed the apple scraps to the cows and goats and it feels very satisfying to know absolutely nothing is going to waste. 

I had several quarts of applesauce left from last year, but I opened the last apple butter in July. We shall now make it through another year!

We are very thankful to live in a place where we can so easily live out our beliefs that it is best to buy local, both to support the local economy and also to buy food with the highest nutritional quality (so much is lost during transport and on store shelves) from people who we know are farming their land responsibly. In our VERY modest foray into growing our own (both plants and animals), we are in awe of people who do this for a living. We love Oregon and our local farmers!

                                                                                              

Autumn Wrap-Up

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

Lengthen night and shorten day!

Every leaf speaks bliss to me,

Fluttering from the autumn tree...

~Emily Brontë

With five days left in Autumn, and bare branches and Christmas carols evoking winter, life has settled into a slowed pace here at Good Gifts Farm. The vegetable garden is completely finished and cleaned up. Apples and pears are all harvested or fallen. The chickens put themselves to bed at 4:30, as daylight wanes. In the past month I have read a thick book and knitted a hat, two of my favorite activities that I had not done in months. Before I settle in for my long winter's nap (I have four kids, so you know I am speaking metaphorically), I wanted to reflect on some of the Autumn happenings around here that bridged the gap between Summer Harvest and Winter Rest.

Goodbye Doctor-Scrubs-Green, Forever! 

The previous owner had an affinity for green. The house shutters and front door were sea-foam green, and all outbuildings (two barns, 2 animal shelters, a shed, and the enormous shop) were a green my mom aptly dubbed "doctor-scrubs-green". It was a "not-found-in-nature" green and competed with the lovely God-ordained greens of grass and tree. We quickly painted the front door and shutters black. Next, the shop was painted the same color as our house: Benjamin Moore's "Straw". But the outbuildings remained. I bought several samples of red in the hopes of finding just the right, rusty, old-fashioned barn red. I agonized but finally selected what I thought was the best option. When I went to purchase it at Home Depot, I mentioned to the paint clerk that it was for a barn. He said, "Oh, I know just what you want." He led me over to Behr 5 gallon buckets called "Barn Red". They are the classic, rusty barn red, mixed just for outbuildings, and are half the price of their other paints. I am SO pleased with how it turned out, and I can now check "Have a red barn" off my Dream List.  

My Red Barn

This early riser likes to help feed the cows.

We had a family picture shoot on our property and the new barn made a splendid backdrop.

The lower barn received a red face-lift as well, and the two animal shelters were painted a pleasant, unobtrusive chocolate brown. The last remaining vestige of green was the chicken coop. While we hired a (terrific, hard-working, reasonably priced - let me know if you want his number) man to paint everything else, Caleb and I thought it would be fun to let the kids help us paint the chicken coop. (And by "fun", I mean "extremely stressful". With four kids wielding paint brushes, there were many drips and messes and spills, but I kept reminding myself that it is only a chicken coop. And I also mandated that only adults could paint the white trim.) 

I love how cheerful and bright our yellow chicken coop is.

It just seems to be smiling at me through the apple trees.

Apples 

My favorite canning recipe books

We have six apple trees but only four have fruited the past two years: two Red Delicious and two Golden Delicious. We have managed to use nearly all of the fruit they have offered, with the exception of giving some away, and letting some hit the ground at the end of the season when I was just DONE with apples. The ways we used them:

* applesauce

* apple butter

* apple leather

* dehydrated apples

I ended up with 75 quarts of applesauce and 40 pints of apple butter. I know that sounds like a lot, but  considering there are 52 weeks in a year and my family uses a quart of applesauce in one sitting, it really only works out to about a jar and a half every week. My favorite tried and true method for making applesauce and apple butter was shared with me by my friend Kristina, and it is brilliant. (I know good bloggers would have step-by-step pictures at this point, but honestly, the last thing that crosses my mind when I am elbow-deep in sticky sweetness is getting the camera out.) 

For applesauce: Fill a huge stockpot (I usually have at least two going at once) with quartered apples. Do not core. Do not peel. Cover apples with water and boil about 20 minutes or until they begin to be very soft. Run apples through a food mill. I have this one for my Kitchenaid mixer and it amazes me every time I use it. It spits out all the peels and cores and produces the most perfectly textured applesauce I've ever tasted. I usually add a cup of sugar to the huge pot of applesauce but it is not necessary. I repeat this process a few time throughout the day until I have tons of applesauce that I can at once. 

For apple butter: Fill a crockpot (or two) with peeled, sliced apples and add two cups sugar and 1 Tbs cinnamon. Let simmer on low all day, stirring occasionally. Sometimes I turn it up to high for a couple hours to speed it up, and sometimes I will let it simmer with the lid off to thicken it up. I puree the apple butter in a blender before canning it because that is the texture I prefer, but you can leave it chunky too. I always have apple butter going at the same time I am making applesauce because I throw all the cores and peels into the pot I'm boiling apples in. There is a lot of flesh on the cores and peels that the food mill will pull off. I don't want to waste any of that apple goodness. We use apple butter in apple butter pancakes, apple butter muffins, and by heaping scoops into our oatmeal. 

At the end of this process I have two huge bowls of compressed stems, seeds, cores and peels. We feed them to the cows who go crazy for them. So truly, NOTHING is wasted.

For apple leather: I make applesauce and then Caleb, who is in charge of all dehydrating procedures, spreads it on trays and pops it in the dehydrator for 8 hours. He wraps it in saran wrap and cuts it into strips and rolls them up. They keep for a couple of months.

Dried apples: Caleb cores and thinly slices apples and dehydrates them for 8 hours. We ended up with two huge glass jars full of apple slices that the kids delight to dip into for snacks. I'd estimate we dried around 50-60 apples. 

A note about dehydrators: We own this 5 tray Excalibur dehydrator and it's fantastic. But we have a lot of fruit and vegetables to process, so a friend mentioned that her Grandma was moving into a retirement home and was ready to part with the dehydrator that her son (my friend's dad) had made her 30+ years ago. She said, "It's pretty big, definitely not a countertop operation, but it works great." We jumped at the chance to own something so functional and so completely awesome. It looks exactly like something Mother Earth News would give instructions on how to make. We love the history, the fact that it's homemade, and that it does work great. (It definitely is NOT a counter-top operation. We keep this beast in the garage.) Between the two of them, we accomplish some serious dehydrating.

Pears

We have two pear trees that, though small, produce quite well. Call me greedy, but I also approached my neighbor about getting some of her unused pears. I wanted to make sure I had enough. They were very glad to give us some, so the kids and I walked down to pick. These neighbors are so kind to us. You may remember they called to tell us our cows were too skinny last winter, which we were very thankful to know. They helped us castrate our bulls. They have given countless recommendations and pieces of advice from their decades of experience with animals. They never make us feel stupid or laugh at us. (At least not to our faces and I would certainly not fault them for chuckling at us in private. I would chuckle at us in private.) And they let us pick their pears and then gave us a ride home in their Ranger. 

 The ways we used pears:

* pear sauce - ended up with 15 quarts. It is SO good.

* pear butter - 15 pints. This is my favorite thing I can. I'm not sure I can describe how good it is, but here goes... It is velvety, rich, and tastes more like a pear than a pear, if that makes sense. Pear skins are soft enough that they need not be peeled, making it easier to make and more nutritious. I use the recipe from Food in Jars.

* pear leather - same process as apple

* dried pears - Rosie calls these candy. They are so incredibly sweet and I eat a couple of handfuls everyday from our huge glass jar. Sadly, the jar is depleting rather fast.

* pear vanilla bean jam - recipe from the Food in Jars blog. This is the most amazing jam I've ever tasted 

Cows and Calves

Our pasture stopped growing, turned brown, and died in July. Rather than us buying hay, those kind neighbors I mentioned earlier offered to have our two mamas, Stripe and Splotch, and their two babies, Mask and Goggles, come graze (and live) on their 30 acres. They did not have any cows and their pasture needed to be mowed. It totally made sense for us to do this, but we missed watching the calves grow. The way our properties are situated, we could not see them at all. Our pastures seemed so empty and it depressed me a little. Everything began to green up in September after some Autumn rains and then we purchased our supply of winter hay, so we were able to get them back. We were all happy to see their simple little faces back on this side of the fence. My neighbor blames us, saying that she had to go and purchase two calves of her own because she missed ours so much. They are beautiful boys - the mahogany of their hides is stunning.

Winter, Come 

We are ready. Our barns are full of hay. My pantry is full of canned and dry goods (after my first trip to Bob's Redmill Store in Oregon City - I was in heaven). My cellar is full of butternut squash. My freezer is full of marionberries, raspberries, peaches, blueberries, beef, and many other provisions. We are thankful to God for all of it, for we do not forget the Hand that feeds us. All of these are His good gifts to us. 

Merry Christmas, Friends.