today

"So, you guys coming out to play with me or what??" 

You know, keeping our usual school schedule is quite difficult when there's so much snow fun to be had outside.

"None for me, thanks. I prefer being cozy in mama's bed and napping the winter days away myself."

He's old enough for the back carrier, yay! Now I can do more dishes, yay...... wait a minute. Maybe I shouldn't be celebrating. Hmm. ;)

Snowy wonderful wilderness right out my back door. Love!

This is a familiar sight... memories of last winter are all coming back to me. Here is the trail of snow clothes leading in from the back door! I think we may have to create some new habits in the children for when they come in. LOL

Dear God,

Thank you for allowing me to wake up this morning and spend another day on this good earth!

Amen

first snow of the season

The first snowflakes came this weekend, yay! Only about an inch stayed on the ground, but that didn't stop us from celebrating and the kids from making a snowman!

View from the back door:

Which has given us an excuse to fire up our new pellet stove! Here our 7 yr old demonstrates its hiney-warming capabilities. I will feel more secure this winter knowing that when we have power outages, we have the option of hooking the stove up to the generator for heat. Last year we relied on our electric heating system only. The electric heat was expensive and relied on the grid at all times, plus mice loved to use the heating vents as doorways into our home. Yuck! Since we no longer need them, I've duct taped all the vents shut. Take that, pests! I've been at war with those little fuzzy nasties since the moment we purchased our home last year. Poison, spring traps, duct tape, spray foam and glue traps! It's The Great Mouse Battle, roar!

And now back to my canned food organizing adventure.  :)

chilly days, and a granola recipe

Upon moving to north Idaho we were told by all our new, friendly neighbors that it gets cold "right at the end of October". For the 3rd year now, that has been exactly the case! Quite suddenly we have below freezing temps, heavy winds and clouds and cold rains. And it won't be too long before we see snowflakes flying!

It's overcast, brown and chilly out there.

It's official, our pasture grasses are gone. The sheep and cattle are on hay now. 

"munch munch munch"

This is the children this morning. Today is especially stormy outside. A good day for keeping in your footy pajamas and getting dragged around the house!

It's also a good day for granola. Actually I decided to make a batch of granola just after I kneaded our bread dough. It's so chilly that I knew it would have a very difficult time rising without some sort of cozy heat source. "Baking in the oven creates a very cozy heat, let's bake something!"

The dough rising on the oven top:

Here is my granola recipe. I've been making it forever, adapted from the one in a cookbook called How it all Vegan. Since I was vegetarian far longer than I have been a meat eater, I still have more veg cookbooks on my shelf than meaty ones!

  

In a great big bowl, mix:

12 cups oats
2 cups sunflower seeds
3/4 cup sesame seeds
3/4 cup flax seeds
1 T cinnamon
3/4 cup sugar (the original recipe calls for twice that)
1 and 1/4 cup olive oil
1 and 1/2 t salt

Pour it on a baking sheet. I fill 3 baking sheets for this recipe. Bake at 350 for around 10 minutes. Every oven I've baked this in cooks at different times. Check it and don't let it start getting black on the edges. Interestingly, the original recipe calls for baking it for 30 minutes. My very first batch ever was black!

I like to add raisins to mine. The original recipe also called for 3/4 cup chopped almonds to be added before baking, which is really delicious! But who can afford to buy almonds anymore.

Yum!

country kid Halloween

In 2011, on our first Halloween out in the Idaho boonies, I was all discombobulated. "Hmm. I guess we drive into the city for trick or treating then?" (over an hour away) LOL! I didn't realize yet that there is life beyond trick or treating in the city on Halloween. 

One of them is putting bunnies into pumpkins and taking a zillion pictures because it's so cute you can barely contain yourself!!

Ahem. But we also do other things besides play with rabbits. 

Once upon a time we would spend the days leading up to trick or treating at parties with our local homeschool groups. Well, now we live in a village (as my teen likes to call it) that doesn't contain a stop light let alone homeschool parties. And the hike to the nearest house to trick or treat at would make us break out in a sweat. And then their dogs would probably attack us, or we'd see a rifle pointed our way (not that our neighbors are not friendly! They are all awesome, it's just that they don't expect to see a herd of ghouls and weirdos coming up their long dirt driveways in the dark!)..... Anyway, we had to find a new groove. :)

Last year my teen son came up with a great idea. He put together a scavenger hunt for all his little siblings, with hints and candies to find! It was a blast for the kids. I've put together hints for another scavenger hunt tonight. Things such as "the chicken's house is stinky. Go smell it", and "where do you make your toast?". Then there will be another hint (at the chicken coop, at the toaster..), and some candy, to lead them to their next treasure spot. I hope for this tradition to go on every Halloween.

We do crafts, sing the 13 Days of Halloween song (a yearly tradition since my 15 yr old was a toddler), and carve pumpkins. Then costumes, pictures, and the scavenger hunt. And you know what, I don't even miss trick or treating.

Pinning their patterns to their pumpkins:

Checking out the pumpkins in the bathroom, the only dark spot in the house. My teen son created that neat wolf howling at the moon scene on his pumpkin in the background there.

And more CUTE BUNNY!!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN everybody!





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the seasons go round

Heading out of summer and into fall has brought many garden harvests and plans for winter. This will be our 3rd winter in Idaho. Our first winter was spent on our rented homestead, this will be our 2nd winter on our current homestead. One of the many things we learned last winter was - you can never have too much hay! And in fact, we had too little. This year we've already got 9 tons of hay stored up. This is to avoid the stress we experienced last year with too little, and also we want to be sure we get enough hay before it's gone. We've heard worrisome rumblings here & there that we (the U.S) are going to be experiencing a hay shortage this year. That's a scary thing. Even our local farmer, whom we buy our hay from, is already out! Last year he had hay for sale all the way through February!

Here he is delivering a 3 ton load of hay for us.

And here is another 3 tons....

Once he gets his awesome, handy tractor unloaded he always lets the children climb like bugs all over it. :)

Another end of season activity- potato harvesting! Here is a little potato harvester now:

Posing with the 10 pounds they dug up for me this day for canning. I find 10 pounds is just about right to fill 7 quart jars.

A different day's harvest... Here Littlest Farmgirl is helping me wash the dirt off in our milk pails before bringing them in the house for dinner. Notice big dog nose in the corner.

The green hills and valleys sure do go brown fast! Here's our new little Highlander calf in with the sheep. They day he was delivered I (being home alone that day with only my youngest 5 children) discovered that, inconveniently (!) the calf was so small he could walk right through all our cattle fences! Imagine the sorrow I felt at having to admit to my husband upon his coming home after dark that night that I had lost our new calf! We both searched around the land for him with flashlights, but he seemed long gone. I was afraid he had hiked down the road in the direction he came from to find his mother. And assumed he'd get carted off by coyotes whilst on his travels. But! The next morning, there he was right with our other cows again. Whew.

We decided to put him in with the sheep for now, since they're fencing keeps them in and he's about their size. Well, that lasted about one day. He determined that he didn't really fancy being a sheep and so broke right through the barbed wire fencing to go back to our other cows. "Okay, fine!" my husband and I sighed, "You can stay with the other cows, just please stay WITH them and don't continue your habit of walking through our fences!" Since then things have calmed down. Though he could wander out of the pastures at any time, he seems content to stay right where all the big cows are.

While cleaning out beneath some rabbit hutches, Farmgirl discovered gigantic worms!

Our carrot harvest this year was huge! This was me one evening, scrubbing, chopping, shredding, and freezing one batch. Every now and then I'd come across one like this. Some sneaky creature out there is filling their fat bellies for the winter with our carrots! Look at all the munching and crunching of little teeth:

My husband's mighty garlic.

Last but not least, fall brings many birthdays to our family. Our very goofy and smiley 3 year old became Mr. Four year old! As you can see, our sugar-avoiding family does partake heartily in sugars for birthdays. This silly picture is the one I have saved on my phone's lock screen at the moment. It's one of my favorites- his silly face! This is totally his personality.

And! Littlest Farmgirl turned 2! We celebrated with lots of pink, and lots of baby dolls. :) LOVE!

On the rest of today's agenda, I am lesson planning for the next 4 weeks out. Enjoy the rest of your weekend everybody! Our local forecast calls for a wee bit of snow tomorrow. :)




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This morning

Since I am a bazillion years behind in my blog posting and I don't know where to start to get caught up again, I will just jump in with this morning!

Today began as usual, with eggs. Our hens are still laying 1-2 dozen per day which our helpful 7 yr old has begun collecting as part of his daily chores. 

The table scene at 9am. Although normally at his dad's on the weekend, my teen son is home today for a Scouting event this afternoon. Here he sits reading, Husband and three yr old are discussing a bug on the floor, Farmgirl is snacking on apples, Mr 7 yr old is analyzing a How to Draw Dragons book, and Mr 5 yr old is just hanging around on a chair. Missing from the photo is the baby, who is on my hip ;)  , and of course my eldest who, I'm sure, was getting ready for work at her home because, as she will tell you, all she ever does "is work, work, work". 

I am cheating with these 2 photos as they were taken a couple days ago. Baby T is a happy, roley poley 6 month old. And how cute is he!?

Good morning, Grendel! Look at all that frost on the deck. The extension cord leads to the chicken coop light.

This rooster was great. He was taking turns crowing with another rooster on the opposite side of the farm. I think they were arguing. "Good morning! This is MY FARM!" they took turns yelling across the land at each other.

It's autumn out there! Shades of brown, and lots of frost.

Good morning Ms. Rabbit.

These adorable tiny buns were all covered up in their mama bunny's fur to keep cozy on this frosty morning. I moved it aside for a quick picture- because I never ever tire of looking at baby bunnies!

The rabbits have been a common topic of conversation around here lately. It's so often said that they are the "perfect homestead meat" because of their ease of care and small space they take up. Those things are mostly true, however, the cost of rabbit feed is getting higher and higher! We pay about $3 more per bag of alfalfa pellets than we did 2 yrs ago. And it wasn't really cheap then... My husband has done the math and determined that the cost of raising pigs and beef cows is quite a bit lower over all than the rabbits. We are able to buy the various feeds for our pigs, sheep, poultry and cattle from neighbors that grow and mix the feeds themselves and we buy them by the ton. However, we are stuck buying our rabbit feed in bags from the store. We do only purchase rabbit feed pellets from Azure Standard as theirs are non-GMO, and we pay $16-$18 per 50lb bag, depending on the cost each particular month. (The regular, GMO pellets from the local feed store cost the same) We go through many bags per month.

Butchering rabbits also takes a lot of time for the amount of meat we get from them. And they're meat is... okay. It's like a chicken breast, just white and not super flavorful. I use the meat mixed into recipes that use plenty of herbs and flavoring- it makes a nice, filling protien, but the flavor is nowhere near the deliciousness of say, lamb or pork chops. Yum.

But enough about rabbits. Look at that cute Highlander calf! He is 3 months old and looks like a teddy bear. His little "moos" are cute, his fluffy face is cute, he is just too cute!

I am feeling dumb about something. Which is normal for us city folk turned homestead bumkins trying to figure out all this small family farming stuff in a world of industrial farming.... I didn't want our calf, Heidi, to have horns. I had some de-horning paste on hand when she was born 10 months ago. Since I felt no lumps, bumps or hard spots the first weeks after her birth I thought that meant she wasn't going to have horns and so I didn't apply the de-horning paste. Well lo and behold several months later, she began growing horns. And here they are. Hmph. Should I have used the paste anyway? On what felt like her normal bare skin? Are these horns normal sized for a 10 month old calf? Should I expect them to grow into big ol' cow horns eventually?

Good morning sheep. Our little flock now consists of 4 un-named females, and Ferdinand, our ram born here in January. Funny story about living in a tiny town- we had our extra ram lamb listed on Craigslist several weeks ago. A nice man came to buy him to add to his flock of ewes he had recently bought from another small sheep farmer in the area. He had wanted to start a flock on his own new little homestead and wanted the ram to be unrelated to the ewes he had already. Well, being that barely anyone lives around here let alone breeds sheep, we all got to talking and figured out that oops, sorry, our ram IS directly related to all his ewes! They all originated in the same place! Oh well. :p

And here is where Teen Son sits now, in his room with his guitar. A fine beginning to any Saturday.

This was some nights ago. The moon was huge, the coyotes were out singing in every direction- a perfect night for s'mores around the campfire! I am so grateful to live this life!

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