Canvas Orbital Trails - CodePen

Canvas Orbital Trails - CodePen

Animated Short Movies » Life-Changing Arts

Animated Short Movies » Life-Changing Arts

Slow down punks..., think I saw these at Home Depot

Happy New Year! 2013 is going to be interesting...

Happy New Year!

Our Gardens
The Gardens are done except for some purple kale I'm giving to the rabbits and chickens. The seed catalogs have started arriving, I actually received a couple in mid December.  I haven't had time to look at them in detail yet, soon I hope. 

I found an online program for laying out gardens and raised beds that I will try out this year. You can fine the online tool here:  Design Your Own Vegetable Garden Layout Using our Free "Vegetable Garden Planner" Software! From Vegetable Gardening Online.com



A busy weekend here at the homestead.

Big Freezer clean out:
We defrosted the big freezer Saturday (unfortunately not frost free), over the past 5 years frost had built up on the trays making it difficult if not impossible to add more food.  While it was still cold outside (below 30 degrees) yesterday, and before the late Saturday/Sunday warm up. we removed all the food, chickens, turkeys, hams, and sausage. We put them all into green trash bags and placed these in the snow out in the fenced gardens out back.  About five hours with an electric barn heater in front of it melted all the frost.  All of the food fit into it much easier at 8am this morning (before it started warming up outside). 

Dehydrating all weekend
We used several round dehydrators for years, these did not have thermostatically controlled heat, all the heat came from the bottom and flowed up through the stacked trays. These cheaper dehydrators sometimes burned the produce, particularly frail items like parsley and other herbs on the lowest trays.  Last year we purchased a 9 tray Excalibur dehydrator, it is a thermostatically controlled unit, air from the blower flows over the trays and out the front, a much better design than the round ones although they worked OK for years too. We couldn't be happier with the results from the Excalibur, it really helps with the excess produce and produce sales we hit throughout the year. Dehydrated produce takes up 1/5th or less of the space of fresh or frozen produce.

 Excalibur with a load of fruit.

Temperature control

Vegetables:

Yesterday we dehydrated 10 pounds of vegetables, corn & peas, peas, string beans, broccoli, and a New England medley, (green and yellow beans, and corn). Now completely dried to a crisp these will get vacuum sealed and put away for soups and stews. We put them into baggies initially as we haven't brought the vacuum sealer down yet.

CW from top left, String beans, medley, broccoli, peas, and mixed peas, corn, and carrots.

Fruits:
Today we dehydrated about 5 pounds of fruit from the farm, and some bagged frozen fruit along with a couple canned fruits. Two trays of our blueberries, these bushes are really starting to produce, two trays of our red raspberries James and Jason help me pick every year, a tray of our black raspberries, a tray of strawberries bagged frozen, and a couple trays of experiments... a tray of cling peaches, and a tray of mandarin oranges.  We'll have to see if/how these come out.  I wanted to try some banana too but simply ran out of room.

Chicken soup:
Rose cooked up (3) chickens (ours are still laying so these were store bought) last night for making a batch of chicken soup.  We've stripped the birds of meat, skimmed the broth, all that remains is chopping the vegetables, and adding the pasta, rice, etc. oh, and are putting the pot on the stove tomorrow morning to cook all day.

Beef Stew:
Crock-pot number one is cooking up a large batch of beef stew

Pulled pork:
Crock-pot number two is cooking up a batch of pulled pork.

How was your weekend?