Oregon Berries

If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries,
I would give no man a reason upon compulsion.
~Shakespeare, Henry IV

A couple of years ago I was reading a post by one of my favorite homesteaders, Quinn at Reformation Acres, where she mentioned in passing she was excited that her new property (in Ohio) had a blackberry patch because she had never before eaten one in her whole life. I was floored. I guess the rest of the country is not inundated with invasive wild blackberries like we are here in western Oregon? Other cities do not rent goats to clear acres of them? People actually plant blackberry patches? The Willamette Valley has perfect growing conditions for cane berries, and while the himalayan blackberry is a true problem and will absolutely take over anywhere it gets a hold, many other varieties are cultivated and grown on purpose right here as well.

Prior to moving to our farm, each August I would pick my fill of wild blackberries in my top-secret spot in a beautiful cemetery. But here at Good Gifts Farm I inherited a 30-foot row of marionberries and a 10-foot row of boysenberries and they give me more than I can use, so I have ceased that tradition. 

What is a marionberry? 

The marionberry was created in 1956 at Oregon State University by crossing a chehalem blackberry with an olallie blackberry. It was tested extensively here in Marion County, which is how it received its name.  They are much longer than a traditional blackberry and are known as the "cabernet of blackberries" for their rich earthy flavor. Marionberries are my personal favorite fruit. Oregon produces over 30 million pounds of marionberries annually. They are high in ellagic acid, gallic acid, rutin, anthocyanin (all known cancer-fighters), antioxidants (more than blueberries!), and vitamin C.

All we do here on our property to successfully grow marionberries is prune them each winter and we are rewarded with 100+ pounds of berries. Consequently I have a dream of planting our lower pasture with marionberries and running a u-pick stand out of the lower barn. We have room for parking and it's right along the road. It would be perfect. I think perhaps when you share a dream on the internet it is more likely to come true. Here's to hoping.

Future u-pick marionberries and farm-stand?

What is a boysenberry?

The parentage of the boysenberry is a cross between a loganberry, blackberry, and red raspberry. They were originally cultivated in the 30s by Rudolph Boysen who gave them to Walter Knott (of Knott's Berry Farm fame) to care for and grow. Boysenberries are huge, reddish-purple berries that do not transport or store well, but are juicy and spectacularly delicious. In the 50s, California grew 2,400 acres but that number is down to less than 70 now. Oregon is the largest producer with 600 acres. And I have my very own 10-foot row. I treasure those bowls I collect each July.

When four boysenberries are all you can hold

Boysenberries are high in vitamin C and fiber, with antioxidants almost twice that of blueberries. They also contain ellagic acid and anthocyanin. 

What are my favorite things to do with all these glorious purple berries?

We freeze gallons and gallons of them for smoothies and baking through out the year.

One of our favorite ways to use frozen berries is in Sandi Rose's Blackberry Crumb Cake. It is a fabulous brunch recipe! My only tip is to not use an 8x8 pan - that thing will NEVER get done in the middle. Use an 11x7 pan. My favorite cobbler is this Mixed-Fruit Cobbler, except I don't mix fruit. I use all marionberries because that's what I have, and it's fantastic. I also 1 1/2 the cobbler topping, because you can never have too much cobbler topping.

I can several types of jam each summer, but the only one that everyone in my family wants to eat always, no matter what, is the Old-Fashioned Berry Jam from the 2006 Ball Book of Complete Preserving, pg 22. It has a fairly high fruit-to-sugar ratio (always important to me) and is not overly seedy. I have decided to almost exclusively make this jam from now on. 

This year I also did the Choose-a-Berry Preserves from Ball Book, page 62, and used my boysenberries.

Boysenberry Preserves

I make and can Blackberry Syrup. We love having it on waffles or french toast in the dead of winter - a little slice of summer on a snowy Sunday. Often I will cut it with half pure-maple-syrup and it is amazing! 

A really helpful resource is oregon-berries.com. They have information on all the varietals of Oregon berries and many, many recipes I am excited to try. 

Boysenberry, Marionberry, and Himalayan Blackberry

These berries are interchangeable in all recipes, and to be honest, I love them all. Blackberry-tasting is kind of like wine-tasting. There are subtleties and nuances to the flavors, but at the end of the day, it's all good. And the silver lining to those pesky, invasive himalayan blackberries is that anyone can park on the side of the road and pick their fill for free. So stock your pantry, stock your freezer, and enjoy the fruit of an Oregon summer long after the rain settles in.

Summer Begins

 "It was June, and the world smelled of roses. 

The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside."

~ Maud Hart Lovelace

Summer is here. Real summer. 80 + degree-summer. 

Oregon-strawberry-summer. 

Reading-in-the-hammock-summer. 

The beach-with-cousins-summer. 

Outdoor-chores-and-projects-are-enjoyable-again-summer.

We headed into summer with some excitement. In May, our red Irish Dexter, Nutmeg, gave birth to a perfect bull calf.

Due to some (mis)adventures in cow fertility, it had been 3 years since calving occurred on our farm. Because Nutmeg is small and this was her first calf, I was really nervous about it. Caleb and I came out early one morning to find her in labor. Progress appeared to be slow, so I kept my finger on speed-dial to our farm-vet and eventually Caleb ended up helping to pull the calf out. It made him late for work, but I told him he was probably the only person in his office who had pulled a calf that morning. I love my gentleman farmer. 

3 hours old, just snoozing in the sun

Since the bull was black, we were very pleasantly surprised that our calf was red, or actually more of a strawberry blond. He is truly beautiful.

Our only disappointment lies in the fact that he is a he. Because when you're raising beef cattle the hes don't stick around for longer than two years. Our previous two calves had also been bulls and we longed for a calf we could raise and spoil and name and love and keep. We briefly considered keeping him as a bull, but since his mom is our only female, that didn't make any sense. So Caleb and our neighbor made him a steer, and we will enjoy his cuteness while we can. 

For two years we have fantasized about clipping our chickens' wings. They have 8 acres to free range on but mostly prefer to be all up in our business: dust bathing in the flower beds around our house, eating the plants near our front door, and pooping on our driveway and front walk.

This is an action shot: see the dirt flying?

I'll never forget when we were remodeling our kitchen and our contractor was storing his tall, standing tool box in our garage. One of our chickens was obsesssed with nesting in his box of nails. I kept booting her out and she kept returning. Finally one day he walked into the house with a look of distaste on his face, held an egg out, and said, "It's still warm." I sent him home with a complimentary dozen eggs, including that one, and told him to tell his kids it had been laid in his nails.

I have felt the need for more flower-beauty in my life, but knew I had to ensure the chickens would not dig up my flower beds by first clipping their wings. This would ensure they could free-range in the pastures but not fly up over the fences to be in our yard space. We watched a Youtube video, pulled them off their roost one-by-one under the cloak of darkness, and clipped those suckers. 

Feathers are like fingernails - they have no feeling, so no pain. We just clipped the eleven flight feathers half-way up. It was suggested that just clipping one wing was enough to hinder flight, so that is what we began with. The next day, all the chickens were out as usual, so we snuck back in that night, plucked them off the roost again, and clipped the other wing.

Wing-clipping will likely need to be done yearly, but was so much easier than we expected, and has literally changed our lives with chickens. I have lovely flowers growing near the house, the kids can go barefoot in the grass (watch the dog poop!), and the chickens are relegated to the pasture where they belong. We wish we had done it sooner.

Many summer glories still lay before us: 

Sunshine, 

growing animals,

garden bounty,

 long afternoons.

and a very full bucket list.

(We might be the only family with "dentist" on our summer bucket list.)

We can now scratch S-mores off, but we've still got a lot of adventuring to do. And we're off...

Inscape

"I do not think that I have ever seen anything 

more beautiful than the bluebell ...

 I know the beauty of the Lord by it."

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

Spring will depart in days, and I am looking ahead to summer. It's been a strange year, weather-wise and otherwise. We had the wettest winter on record, which is saying something for Oregon. February and March, when normally we are planning the garden and readying it for planting, were unsalvageable with snow and excessive amounts of rain. April was just as gross. Rosie and I managed to run out in between storms and get some peas planted, which are doing pretty poorly.

 I didn't even look through a seed catalog until April.  

With the constant cold and wet, I felt my zeal for homesteading draining out of me. In contrast, I was putting a lot of energy and attention toward activities that were less farmy in nature, but challenging to me in new and different ways. My favorite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, is best known for his concept of "inscape" - the notion that every living creature has a given essence, characteristics, an essential nature, that tell us about God and His character. I suppose I've used these past months to grow and refine my inscape. 

My best friend Emily and I started a classics bookclub, plus (nerd-alert) I'm reading along with a podcast bookclub; I began tutoring at our Classical Conversation co-op; I spoke at two different events; and I ran a Ragnar Trail relay in Zion National Park. So now I'm actually realizing that this lull in farm life was a gift for this season to allow me to pursue some different, but stretching and worthwhile activities. It's also given me time to really ponder what God has for me in the future and where He wants me to most focus my time and energy. 

   

There have now been a few sunny days and enough beauty to be found that I am again feeling the love and looking forward to the coming season of bounty. 

We have been busy making up for a lost spring. Here are a few snapshots of some Good Gifts: 

There were very few days during bloom that were hospitable to pollinators, so we are hoping our fruit trees will produce. Caleb is enough concerned that he has come around to the idea that we should probably have our own hives. (Woot woot!!!)

We have many new chicken faces (and stories) around here... I'll save those for another day.

Egg production has picked up and my egg business is still not paying the chicken-bills. Haha. 

My kids are wild and free.

We likely have a thriving fairy colony here at Good Gifts Farm.

No matter the weather or the difficulty or the unknowns, I know Him who holds my days in His hands.

 God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. 

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared

with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's 

smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down

things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward,

springs---

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah!

bright wings.

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

The Long Winter

No matter how long the winter, 
Spring is sure to follow.

~Proverb

The title is a bit dramatic if you're comparing our winter to the one in Laura Ingalls Wilder's book by the same name. We are not nearing starvation and we have not suffered blizzard upon blizzard. But we have had four rounds of snow, weeks of sub-freezing temperatures (we had a hen freeze to death), and record-setting rainfall this month. All of it has made for a very un-inspiring homestead winter, thus my longest ever blogging hiatus. Not much to report!

However, since we had not seen substantial snow in three years and longed for it so badly (many prayers were offered up by my children beginning in October), I refuse to "complain" (at least officially), but I will state that we are ready to be done, even as it snowed again this morning. 

At the dinner table we often go around and say the best part of our day, the worst part of our day, and what we're looking forward to tomorrow. In that spirit, I am going to reflect on the best part of winter, the worst part of winter, and what we're looking forward to in Spring.

The Highlights:

The sheer beauty of it all

After we got the cows closed off 

we opened up the pasture and had a fantastic sledding hill right on our own property! 

The goats in the snow were one of the cuter winter sights around here,

Marianne and Elinor staying warm in their thick winter coats.

...as were the cows

The cows really don't seem to mind it. They look very simple as they just stand, staring straight ahead, and get blanketed in snow. 

Brody and I got out on some "farm walks" even in the ice and snow, meaning we walk (or run if it's not too slick) from the house to the barn and back, from the house to the end of the driveway and back, which equals .27 miles. I usually try and get 3 miles in, but Brody-the-behemoth-Golden-Retriever usually poops out about half-way through. 

We completed the annual (dreaded) task of pruning our six apple trees, two pear trees, one plum and one cherry tree. I actually pulled my weight this year and did about half myself.

The Lowlights:

*Having 25 hens and collecting only 1-3 eggs per day. (Thankfully production is ramping back up.)

*Hauling water for the cows from the house to the barn for days on end. (With temps below freezing we have to turn the water off to the barn so the pipes don't burst. Ask me how we learned this.)

*ANNABELLE (see below)

We'd had Annabelle for a year and didn't know what to do with her. She was supposed to be pregnant when we bought her, but wasn't. She was 10, and her heat cycles weren't very regular. She declined to be loaded in a trailer to be taken to a bull last summer so we missed that opportunity. This winter had been hard on her and she was moving slower, not eating as much, and I had seen her fall a couple times. My inexperience with cows did not allow me to know if it was just her age or if she was truly ill. I now believe I should have called the vet. 

The day after we returned home from Hawaii in January with a million other things to get caught up on, I noticed she was in heat and so decided to seize the rare opportunity and called an AI (artificial insemination) tech. She came out that evening and did the procedure. Our plan was to give Annabelle this opportunity to get pregnant, and if it didn't take, to butcher her with her son in April. I loved this cow, but couldn't justify keeping her as a pet. We'd already fed her for a year with nothing to show for it. 

Before we could even determine if she was pregnant, we walked out to her broken body wedged between a tree and fence. It was a bizarre sight that we can't really account for. Somehow she had fallen, though why she was trying to pass through this narrow space is unexplainable, unless she felt like she was dying and was trying to get to a protected place. We think she either broke her neck or suffocated in the deep mud. It was horrific.

I sobbed face down on my bed in a way I hadn't done in years. I allowed myself a good five minutes and then pulled it together. She was the friendliest, loveliest cow I could ever hope to own. She came to me that way and I have no knowledge of how to gentle a cow on my own. But with my girl Nutmeg, I'm sure going to try now. 

Spring Hope:

* I have permission to buy six new chicks - we're just waiting for the weather to warm up a bit since they'll be living in the barn. 

*We plan to raise our second batch of meat chickens - this time in a chicken tractor that Caleb is going to build. 

The garden, which so recently looked like this, will soon (with a lot of preparatory work) be ready to plant.

Nutmeg should be calving sometime in April.

Nutmeg soaking up rays on a recently sunny day

And beautiful sights like this give me hope for the future, no matter what it holds.

If we had no winter, 

the spring would not be so pleasant.

If we did not taste adversity, 

prosperity would not be so welcome.

~Ann Bradstreet