musical sit

So Jax starts obedience school this week. He's pretty good at 'sit'... we won 3rd place in musical sit at a fundraiser for the animal shelter! The Jax/Chels team even beat the veteran Dia/Rog team.

Brewing

Roger just finished bottling his first batch of home brewed beer. I don't know alot about it, and Roger has spent many hours reading about it, so here is a very abbreviated, what Chelz understands of the process.

Boil some stuff in a pot. Add some stuff. Boil more.



Pour stuff in bucket. Stick bucket in basement for three days.


Pour stuff from bucket in another bucket. (Bonus points if a dog helps you.)


Pour stuff from second bucket into bottles.


Put caps on bottles.


Store in basement for another week.


Tada! One bucket = five gallons, or 48 bottles.

chicken killer

We caught the chicken killer. Neighbor Bill has been patrolling our barn, and caught a dog coming out of the barn, next to a newly killed chicken. The dog was harassing other chickens. Bill shot it with a BB gun and it ran off. We waited for it that night, and sure enough, he came back. We called it up to the house and it very a very sweet, gentle, well trained dog. He knew 'sit' and 'shake'! He had a collar, but no tags. He was starved and covered in burrs.



He hung out in our backyard that night, and the next morning animal control came and picked him up. We hope he gets a good home. He will be adopted for sure. Very sweet.

On that note, you can check out my fundraising page for the animal shelter and it's annual walk.
http://www.firstgiving.com/chelsearoodemmick

We also caught a raccoon in a trap in the barn. Bill shot it for us with relish. We really hate raccoons. One of our farming friends told us he could give us instructions on how to butcher a raccoon, but I couldn't bring myself to each such a despicable, mean creature.

PS... We were totally right with our CSI-ing of the crime scene!! Dog it was.

Chickens, dog pool, and hops

Okay, good news first. We took the dogs to the 'Drool in the Pool', which is when they open the swimming pool up to dogs the day before they drain the pool. Dia actually got in pretty deep! She hates swimming, but we took her thinking Jax may be into it. Well, Jax had a great time but never got wet. Dia was actually coaxed into jumping into the 3 foot end. She can't resist when her mom is in calling her a 'good girl'. She'd run through flames if I was on the other side calling her a 'good girl'.


Yesterday I was woken up by my neighbor calling my phone every 10 minutes. Finally I got up and answered. Turns out, he had a dead chicken in his front yard. There were spots of feathers everywhere, like a path leading from the barn, around the barn, and ending in his front yard. We examined the body. Then we embarked on solving the mystery:

Something had a chicken dinner.



Okay, so the fact that the body was in the front yard makes us wonder if it could have been coyotes. Coyotes do roam our fields, but would they go that close to the road? We're thinking it couldn't have been a raccoon because the head was still attached, and the body was really eaten up. Raccoon's 'signature' is a missing head. The spots of feathers in the yard were about two feet apiece and a few yards apart. Like something caught it, shook it, and it ran a few yards and then caught again. There were no feathers in the barn or in the chicken yard, which means it was caught outside... sometimes (okay, often) the chickens get out of the fenced in area and do whatever they want. After counting them all, we realized we were missing three... the one body, and two others were missing. The rooster, and a fat feather footed chicken.

I took Dia into the field and had her run around in there... she usually finds dead things in the field. She did not find any chicken bodies. This means if the rooster didn't run off, he was carried off. And he's a big rooster.





We're going with 'wild dog'. Although coyote is still possible. Either way, there must have been at least two of them for them to carry off two huge birds.

We've started locking the birds in the barn. They're mighty mad about it, but they'll get over it, and it'll get too cold to free range soon anyway. We're going to install an electric netting fence.

In other news, Roger harvested his hops. They're growing along the trellis in the back yard. He's hoping he got enough to try to make a batch of beer. He's never brewed before, so this will be an experiment.




Also, the dogs love each other. Love. Here's a video of them making out. This never stops.

Mail box accident

At 7:30am Sunday morning someone woke us up knocking incessantly at the door. Over and over. The dogs were going nuts. We go to the door, Rog in boxers and me in red cat pajama bottoms. There were two deputies at our door to tell us that someone had fallen asleep while driving and hit our mailbox. Really hard. The mailbox and the mail were all over the road. The 4x4 post it was on snapped in half. The woman then corrected to the right, directly in a huge bean field. She drove pretty far into the field too. She was kind enough to call the cops instead of just driving off. She has insurance, so we should hopefully get reimbursed for the new mailbox we had to get.







Then Roger left the mailbox inside while I was shopping and Roger was outside. Jax then ate part of the brand new mailbox and the screwdriver.


In farm news, we harvested the black beans. They're just like regular beans, but you leave them in the pod until they dry. They turn black when they dry. Then you split the pods and pick out the beans.


We also got a pumpkin! It's a bit early, but the vine rotted, so I had to pull it. Not sure what to do with a pumpkin. I've tried making pumpkin bread with real pumpkin before, but it was all stringy.

Jax, the new dog

He may seem excited about something... but it's just how he is. All the time.

We're back!

We're back from vacation and our garden has exploded! Notice in the pics below that the tomato plant is taller than Roger.








The yellow squash in the picture is actually yellow zucchini. We are drowning in zucchini. The people who watched our chickens while we were gone took five, and we still have lots when we came back. I tried a new recipe for zucchini, that is basically fried zucchini cakes. It was really good. Here's the recipe:

1 large grated zucchini
1 cup bread crumbs
half cup Parmesan cheese
1 egg
chopped garlic
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp pepper
form into patties and fry in olive oil



We had lots of very large turnips. Unfortunately, we didn't know that turnips like cold weather. The turnips are very very bitter. Any advice for super bitter turnips is welcome.

Blue eggs and strawberries

Blue egg! We're getting about 4 eggs a day now. This is our first blue egg! Hopefully more will come quickly!

Our strawberry plants are putting out huge amounts of runners! I dug up a bunch and potted them. I had no idea how wild these would go. The runners are these long tentacles that produce other baby plants. Some of the runners made babies that made runners and other babies. One of the pics below is a double runner... a baby making a baby. The other pic is my giant bowl of runners. We'll try to keep the plants alive until the spring and replant them in another bed.



And lastly, just for fun, a couple of pics of Roger and I at the 'Taste of Bloomington' is which a food festival here in town. All the restaurants in town set up booths and sell $2 dishes. So you can go to like, 5 booths over the course of the evening and taste a bunch of food. We ate a lot.

New poll to the right ---->

The risk of pressure canning... Please comment below. Have you ever used one? Weights or gauge? Have you ever had something blow up? Have any great recipes to share? Pros and cons of canning vs. freezing?

storms

Huge storms blew through last weekend. We had a couple tornadoes in the area. I went outside to watch it blow in, and saw the rotating cloud and ran back inside to get the camera.