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Hi Everyone,
I was sitting in church this morning when the Pastor announced that Christmas Eve was two weeks away. I was totally shocked! That also means that there are only three weeks left until 2024. November and December always seem to sneak up on me and then they fly by so fast. One thing that snuck up on us faster than we thought was the arrival of our new stove. Six weeks ago while we were eating breakfast we heard a loud BOOM in the kitchen. I was in the process of making yogurt when the stove caught fire and burned up the wires to one of the burners—the most important one (the front big burner). When the appliance “mechanic” came out to fix it he told us that more wires were burned than just the one that went to the front burner. Wires in the switch wires were also burned. He was not sure that he could get parts to fix it—and the cost to fix it would probably be as expensive as a new stove. So we went shopping for a new stove and after a few weeks we found out that the coil burner electric stoves were not in great demand and the one and only one that was made was not very user friendly (if you boiled anything over, you couldn’t lift the hood to clean up the mess, instead you had to squeeze your arm in the burner holes to try to wipe up the mess—did it with one stove before didn’t care to do it again). Everyone had glass top stoves—but you are not supposed to can on them or use cast iron on them and if your name is Tiare and your middle name is klutzy it is not a good idea to have a glass top stove because it is guaranteed to have a broken glass top before long. That left us with one option—a gas stove. After hours of looking we finally found one that we liked that had a gas stove, but an electric oven. It was a Tuesday, and they could deliver it to us by Friday. We came home and called the gas company—because our kitchen was not piped for a gas stove, and they told us that they were three weeks out before they could install it. So we postponed the delivery of the stove. Then followed weeks of back and forth with the gas company trying to figure out how to get a gas line to the kitchen. We used to have a gas fireplace in the living room but the heat it put out was a joke, so we replaced it with a wood burning stove. The gas line was still in our attic though—but getting the pipe from the attic to the kitchen was a different story. Friday, December 1 they told us that it would still be a few more weeks before they could install the gas line—so once again we postponed the delivery of our stove which was supposed to be delivered on Monday, December 4. Then last Sunday we got an automated phone call telling us that the gas company technician would be out Monday to install the lines—but we didn’t have the stove! So Monday morning Mom called the manager and no one new why we were on the service call list—but we were not complaining. We tried to get the stove delivered, but they couldn’t do that until Friday. In the meantime, Papa had to take down the vinyl off the porch ceiling in order for the gas company to get to the gas line in the attic. Then after we milked the cows, Mom and I had to make room in the attic for them to work. We took advantage of the time and used it to do some “deep cleaning.” We moved into our house 25 years ago and we figured that if we hadn’t used something in 25 years we guessed that it was a good time to get rid of it. That took a few hours and then it was lunch time—or should I say that it was past lunch time but we took it anyway.
After lunch we headed to the garden to harvest the last row of sweet potatoes. It didn’t take long in digging before we realized that deciding back in November to let that row go another month was a good idea. The potatoes were much bigger—and there were a lot more. We got three five gallon buckets of sweet potatoes from two rows back in November, and we got three five gallon buckets of sweet potatoes from the one row that we harvested last Monday. Waiting one extra month gave us twice the harvest amount as each of the other two rows.
I was so busy Monday that I never got to answer any of the order emails, so as soon as I was done milking Tuesday morning I answered a few emails before I needed to bottle the kefir. Then a man arrived to purchase all our old hens. The 200 new laying hens are starting to lay eggs and therefore are ready to be moved out to pasture in the portable egg mobiles where they roam the pastures following behind the cows and sheep, but before they could be moved the old chickens had to be sold. Thankfully we have a man who for a few years now happily buys the whole flock at one time. When you advertise them they sell one here, three there, maybe ten here and if all goes well you might sell twenty there. When you have over 100 birds to sell that could take months to sell them individually. So I was glad when we found this man a few years back—for the house gets emptied in one day. Now we have to get the compost emptied out and some repair work done before we can put in fresh bedding so that the new chickens can move in. Once the chickens were sold I told Mom that I was unavailable until I had answered all the emails. Mom and Steve went to the garden to weed, and I went to the computer to take care of business. Once the orders were all put together I fixed lunch and finished making the yogurt. Then it was time for the egg party. Thankfully the egg production is increasing every day—we have been short on eggs since last December. Now we have plenty to go around. Once the eggs were packaged Steve and I headed to the garden to harvest the greens for the Jacksonville delivery the next day. The collards and lettuce are looking great—but the slugs are consuming the Swiss chard and the mustard greens.
Wednesday mornings are always crazy as we race against the clock to get all the animals fed, the cows milked, the milk bottled and the orders all packed. The milk has been extremely low of late which makes it very hard to fill orders. I keep teasing people that I am hiring someone to tell all our customers who can have milk and who cannot have milk. Nobody is interested in the job though—and I do not blame them for it is no fun having to cut orders in half or tell some that we have absolutely no milk for them. I would rather just stick my head in a hole until there is a surplus of milk again. We did have another calf born this week—Ana had a little heifer Friday afternoon. That hopefully will mean more milk—that is if we can get Ana to let her milk down and she doesn’t end up with mastitis. We have been given the option to buy back two of the cows that we sold last year—but we have to figure out how to get her from south Florida to here. A ten hour round trip isn’t exactly the easiest for us. It would be a blessing though if we could figure out how to get her here for she would give us more milk.
Anyway, our Wednesday mornings are spent scrambling until about noon when Papa leaves to make the deliveries, and then I get to sit down and relax while I teach my piano student. Then the rest of the day is usually spent relaxing. Last Wednesday I had to do some catch up work. I was a week past due on bottling and making more kombucha, and I needed to make some more lotion bars.
When Thursday rolled around Mom and Papa finally had some time to put the porch ceiling back together—and it didn’t go back on as easy as it came off. While they worked on that I headed to the garden to weed and get a row ready to plant carrots on Saturday. I topped the garden bed with a light coating of composted chestnut leaves and cow manure from last December. Then I gave it a good dusting of wood ash. I then broadforked it, and smoothed the dirt out. Then I dug out the walkways to get them ready for woodchips. After lunch I helped Mom weed the broccoli bed, while Steve filled the five gallon buckets with woodchips. Then Steve would bring me the buckets and I dumped the woodchips in the walkways and spread them out. This was repeated until the walkways were covered—help Mom a little, help Steve a little. That night after dinner I mixed some herbs and oil together so that I could let them infuse in order to make some more Relief Salve.
Friday found us processing chickens again. It has been a month since we last processed chickens and I was having a hard time actually comprehending that we had chickens to process. We process the last batch of the year this Friday. Then we should get some more chicks around Christmas and they should be ready sometime in February. So we will have a little over a two month break before we process again.
The new stove arrived on Friday and by late Friday afternoon it was all installed. I have never really cooked on gas accept during a few visits to family. I have cooked on an electric stove my whole life—and truth be told I have always been a little scared of cooking on gas. I know that I have a major learning curve ahead. I have already learned that noodles will boil over if not cooked on low once they come to a boil. Thankfully I didn’t learn that the hard way, for Mom figured it out before it happened. I am sure that after a week of meals I will get the hang of it.
Thanks to all the garden prep on Thursday and over the last month, I was able to run out to the garden Saturday afternoon and spend an hour planting carrots. I did have to run the tilther over the soil first in order to make the soil soft and fluffy. Then I used the gridder to mark four rows and I planted three types of carrots: a Kyoto red carrot, a Bolero storage carrot, and a good sweet carrot called Imperator. Lord willing we shall have carrots for storage, canning and dehydrating—and maybe some to share.
It was a good week and the weather was very nice—but I think that I may want to hibernate tomorrow for it is supposed to be in the 30’s for a low and the 50’s for a high. I do like the warmer weather with a soft and gentle south breeze, but it is almost winter so what can I expect but colder weather.
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare