Our frigid cold temps are seemingly behind us and the forecast for the next 10 days looks spring-like! With temps below freezing at night and up to around 40 degrees during the day, it will be the perfect conditions for maple sugaring. We still have a little snow on the ground too.  Hubby and invited some friends who are interested in learning the ins and outs of maple syrup production on the homestead scale to come join us in setting the taps and sap line for our sugaring. So hubby went out and put in taps with them on the maples at the front of the property, teaching them the dimensions of a tappable tree and important things like how deep to drill the tap hole and how many taps can be put on what size tree. (I stayed either behind the camera, or in the kitchen preparing lunch.) They got the trees on the front of the property done and then came in to lunch.  We had chili with homemade Mexican sausage, and sourdough discard dinner rolls with honey butter. 

This afternoon we went out and tapped the remaining trees on the side of the property. These should start running within the next 24 hours as conditions sound like they'll be perfect.  Its early still as we don't usually start collecting sap until the end of February or beginning of March on some years.  But we don't call the shots here weatherwise.  We adapt and change our game plan to accommodate Mother Nature, and when she says its time, well, then its time!

We put in taps, run food grade plastic tubing to the taps and the other end goes into a 15 gallon food grade barrel.  When the barrel is nearly full we'll start boiling sap on an outdoor wood burning evaporator. It takes about 4 hours of good rolling boil to boil down 40 or so gallons of sap into about a gallon of syrup, depending on the type of maples used.  Sugar maples have more sugar content in the sap so they take fewer gallons of sap to produce a gallon of syrup. Red maples take slightly more sap to produce the same gallon of syrup, but the syrup tends to be a darker more burgundy syrup than that produced from sugar maples. Silver maples tend to have a lot higher water content and lower sugar content so they take longer and more sap to boil down to that gallon of syrup. The sap flows from the trees, through the tubing and into a barrel. We collect the sap and start boiling it down on our evaporator as soon as the barrels start to get 2/3 full.  We'll boil it down to where its nearly finished outside and bring it into our farmhouse kitchen to finish off.  When we've made all the syrup we want for the year, we'll turn a gallon or so of syrup into maple sugar.  What a treat that is! We use maple sugar in oatmeal and other delicious meals. 

Here is a photo run of our process in tapping the trees.  We'll do a post on actual boiling and sugar making later.  Maple sugaring season is always a harbinger of spring, so yay!!

Why we live the lifestyle we do.

 I'm often asked, "Why do you live like you do?"   My answer is usually something like, "Because we love this lifestyle!"  While that's true, I answer that way because in reality, the answer is more complex than you can boil down into a simple reply.  In truth, the reasons we live this way are many.  I was raised this way, as was hubby, although we were raised differently.  Hubby was raised in the gorgeous state of Utah in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (formerly known as "the Mormons") and was raised with a strong conviction on preparedness and food storage. He was taught to can and freeze food, and how to garden at a young age. He worked for a bee keeper and learned from the age of 8 how to keep bees successfully.  I on the other hand, was raised in beautiful, rural New Hampshire on an organic homestead by "old hippies".  My parents were in their mid 30's when I came along, yet they embraced the 70's back to nature lifestyle long before it went mainstream.  I was taught to make bread, cheese and soap as a child.  I was taught to cook, bake and preserve food early on in my life.  We raised livestock for our freezer, had an orchard, bramble fruits and grape arbors and a big garden and an herb garden that provided all the veggies and herbs we ate all winter long. There were 5 of us at home at the time and when we got to be teenagers, even though all girls, we ate our share and then some! We cut and burned wood for heat, having 2 wood stoves and wood burning furnace in our 150 year old cape house. We had chickens for eggs and 2 milk cows we milked. 

    So you can say this lifestyle is really all I know, or hubby knows.  But that wouldn't really be true.  You see, after high school, I joined the Air Force and went off to see the world. Hubby left home and headed to California to make his own way in the world as a young man. He also served a mission for his church.  He had some very lean times in his young adult life. He could have turned back to his family for help, but he was determined to make it on his own.  And for the first time in MY life, I was dependent on the grocery store. I hated it.  I endured and also had lots of lean times.  After my stint in the Air Force, I went to school for nursing.  I married and had two children.  We lived a very suburban life, one I hated.  I felt disconnected from in a very real and strange sense. Fast forward several years and a divorce later, and I'm a single mom with 2 children. At church one day, I met the man who, unknown to me at the time, would be my husband and eternal companion eventually. We talked a lot early on and what did we talk about? We talked about the lifestyle we both dreamed of having.  We schemed and planned on how we would get there. He was a returned missionary and I was a single mother. We married soon after meeting.  We were poor as church mice, both of us as broke as anyone can be.  We had no vehicle and were living in an apartment in town. Both of us hated it.  He walked to work at a factory, and on his way home one day when we were newly married, he spent a few dollars buying a bushel of Grimes Golden apples and carried them on his shoulder home to our apartment.  We spent that evening in the kitchen, drying some, making apple butter and just enjoying ourselves.  I knew I really had found my kindred spirit! We both recognized that we needed to get somewhere else, out of town and into the life we both longed for.  We started doing without while we saved every dollar we could.  I made our bread and made our jams and jellies and canned everything I could get in bulk.  I had a garden on the balcony of our apartment. I had veggies in pots instead of houseplants. It seemed to take forever, but we passed the time dreaming about our future homestead.  

    Eventually, it happened.  We bought a small place and raised chickens and turkeys and rabbits for meat and eggs.  We'd buy Christmas birthday presents with a homestead flavor for each other, like a grain mill, or a gift card to a seed company or a hatchery. We started small and always knew we would build up to our dream homestead.  Hubby eventually got a better job and we sold our little place and moved up to a bigger, nicer homestead where we raised pigs, sheep, a steer and had a milk cow, chickens, rabbits, turkeys and geese. Hubby learned to graft and we put in a greenhouse where he could graft heritage fruit trees for sale. We bought a saw mill so he can mill our lumber. We learned as we went. We celebrated our successes and discussed our failures, encouraging each other to try again! 

    We now can't imagine living any other way.  We teach others to live this lifestyle by hosting grafting classes, teaching beekeeping, orchard management, bread making, butchering, canning classes, etc. We're currently living in Minnesota where hubby has taken a position with the same company he's worked for, for 24 years, as an arborist sales rep. We have 5 acres and have a full and active homestead. Our children have homesteads themselves, both still developing and learning. Its fulfilling to see!

    We believe in self reliance as much as we are able. We're not interested in living off grid.  We like being part of the comforts of the 21st century, but we are prepared to live off grid if we HAD to.   We like to know what's in our food and minimize our ingestion of preservatives and other things we can control.  And there's a certain joy and satisfaction in the doing too!

    This is our homestead the day we bought it. The back part is now pasture and we have gardens and fruit trees as well. 

   

    So you can see, the answer to "Why do you live the life you do?" isn't at all easy.  It's just in our blood I guess!

Bread Baking day!

Its bread baking day on the homestead.  I always have sourdough starter in the fridge when I want some tangy and filling sourdough bread.  I also go through a lot of potatoes making potato starter for sandwich bread. Hubby loves cracked wheat, so I am making cracked wheat bread today for him.  I'm also making English Muffins for myself, as that's my favorite breakfast  in the morning, a toasted English muffin slathered with peanut butter, hot and dripping over the edge, and a small spoonful of homemade jam topping it all off. That, and a cup of Teeccino, since we don't drink coffee, and you can't ask for a better breakfast! And English muffins are so very easy to make.  Every now and then I'll change it up by making cranberry almond yeast bread or cinnamon raisin yeast bread. In midwinter, when the kitchen wood range is keeping the room toasty, I love to set a batch of salt rising bread.  Its a finicky bread to make, but so very worth the effort for something different every now and then. Toasted salt rising bread with butter and homemade apple butter slathered generously on top is a real treat!

I generally bake once a week. I make the bread for the week, usually a sandwich bread, an artisan bread or an Italian bread, and English muffins.  I then take the leftover breads from the previous week, as long as they are stale but not moldy at all, and if I am in need of breadcrumbs (and use a lot of bread crumbs not only for casserole toppings and meat loaf binder, but for old fashioned bread crumb griddle cakes too), I dry slices of bread in the oven and grind them up into crumbs in my food processor or blender. If I don't need bread crumbs, I'll turn whatever bread is left over, even English muffins, into various bread puddings depending on my mood for that week.  Bread pudding is so versatile and forgiving and it can actually be a healthy dessert if you're using wholesome whole grain breads, which is our favorite.  We rarely make white bread, preferring oatmeal, cracked wheat, or 5 grain bread instead.  I usually add flax seed meal, wheat or oat bran and/or wheat germ as well depending on the type of bread I'm making, so our bread puddings are always full of whole grain goodness. Because we raise honey bees, I have the luxury of baking our breads with real honey too. I think our favorite bread pudding is Pecan pie bread pudding.  Decadently delicious!  

As a rule, for health and weight control, we only eat other baked goods on holidays.  So I make hubby a cake for his birthday, I bake an easter cake, we have cookies on Father's Day, cherry pie on the 4th of July, whatever I'm in the mood for on my July birthday, and an all-American apple pie on Labor Day. We'll do fall themed cupcakes for Halloween, snowstorm squash pie to commemorate the first snowstorm of the year, Pumpkin everything (cookies, muffins, pancakes and waffles and of course pumpkin pie) for Thanksgiving week. Christmas is usually traditional New England goodies, like Whoopie pies and Needhams (potato and coconut candies. Delicious!) We generally don't eat desserts other than these, unless the grandkids are having a birthday and we make the drive to celebrate with them (they are 4 hours away, so it depends on what day of the week birthdays land on.)

Bread pudding, usually made with fruit (Apple caramel, Peach praline, and blueberry pie bread puddings) are what we usually eat for weekday dessert if there was any stale bread left after making crumbs for the week.  Some weeks we have no desserts when we eat all the bread or I need a lot of bread crumbs for the coming week's meal plan. I do admit to making extra bread in the hopes of having some left over. If I send hubby to work with leftovers instead of sandwiches, we will most assuredly have bread leftover, so that's often my strategy too. 

Do you bake bread? What's your favorite? Do you have a baking routine, like a set baking day or anything? I'd love to hear it!

This old homestead

     We've been in this old Victorian farmhouse for a year now.  Yes, we moved across the country from the White Mountains of New Hampshire to settle into a new life and a promotion for Karl. We purchased 5 acres with several barns, a large, rather neglected pasture, a very weed filled garden spot, 3 mature apple trees that are in desperate need of attention, and an old Victorian style farmhouse that needed to be gutted and restored. Why did it need to be gutted you ask? Because cats and dogs had lived freely in the house and had used it as their toilet.  It had sat empty for some time before we bought it and cats had been left behind. 

 

    The cats being taken away was one of the requirements of the purchase.  Then, the hard work started once we took possession.  We stayed in the city of Rochester in an Airbnb for a month while we made the daily 1/2 hour drive each evening after Karl got off work, to then work on the house.  We started in the room that was the living room and we took up carpets, underlayment, base molding, and dry wall down to the studs in an effort to get rid of the urine stains that were so evident throughout the room.  We removed the gas fireplace that no longer worked. It was actually lovely, but we didn't want gas with Karl getting so much hardwood for free all the time. So out it came. We washed down everything with Urine destroyer and then used an odor blocking primer on the doors and remaining trim. We then installed new underlayment and hardwood flooring. We scraped the old textured ceiling (after testing for asbestos and getting the all clear!) and sanded it smooth and painted it. We installed new drywall and pained that, installed new lighting, and a wood stove on a tiled hearth in the corner. We then moved into this one room, hung a tarp across the wide double doorway to the rest of the house and called this one room home.  

    Along with the asbestos testing, we tested for radon, as we always do when we move to a new home.  This time, unlike any previous home we've tested, the levels came back high.  4.0 PCi/L is considered the line where you need to consider remediation as prolonged exposure to radon above that level is linked with the development of various lung cancers. Our level in the room we were sleeping on was 14.7 pCi/L. We contacted a few remediation companies and had them all out to bid our job.  We then took the bids into consideration along with the reviews/reputations of each company and finally settled on Athelon out of Rochester MN.  They came out and had the job done in 2 days with zero mess left behind.  Our levels now average around 1.9 PCi/L .  Much better! We did the prep work for them as they are pretty much just installers of the system.  Our old home has a small basement/storm cellar and 3 separate crawl spaces.  Each crawl space needed to be encapsulated separately and have it's own suction point installed as well as one for the concrete basement room. The problem was that the crawlspaces were not only very shallow, but filled with all manner of debris along with a large quantity of cat feces.  

    So, we drafted our Son in law, Will, daughter Sara, and our grandson, Logan, to come up from their place in Iowa and help us clean out the crawlspaces one weekend.  Bless them! It was nasty and dirty work.  Even masks and gloves didn't make it any more pleasant.  We took up the floors inside in one room and we lowered the level of each crawlspace by filling 5 gallon buckets of dirt and debris and dumping it into our utility trailer where it was then disposed of. It was dirty, sweaty work, but with their help, we did it! The Athelon crew was able to come out and put in our remediation system so we could breath easier, literally! 

Over the past year, we have demoed the tiny old kitchen, the dining room, the downstairs bedroom and the 3/4 bath downstairs.  We've put in a new kitchen, remodeled the 3/4 bathroom, installed a laundry room off the kitchen and bath, reclaimed the old walk in pantry, put in a lovely formal dining room, and redid the main bedroom upstairs.  We still have the downstairs bedroom/office to go, another bedroom upstairs and the main full bath and hallway upstairs, but we've come so far! The house no longer reeks like cat and dog urine and it is ever so much more functional.  We've added things to make it perfect for our homestead use, like a kitchen wood range in the kitchen.  None of the rooms are actually finished as they all need some small things still, like some trim work, face plates, paint, etc. But it's feeling good to look at all we've accomplished so far.  

This is the dining room after we completely gutted and restored it. The beautiful old mahogany stained fir trim was so urine soaked and scratched and chewed up from the animals, that there was no saving it without lots of wood filler and then using paint. We kept the old trim and cleaned it with Urine Buster, used odor blocking primer on it and then filled the damage and painted it. We did faux paneling and historic color paint to finish. There's hardwood on the floor. We salvaged what plaster we could, patched with drywall and skim coated the entire wall area with a thin plaster coat before doing the faux paneling.  The ceiling isn't finished yet as it is going to be coffered. 

Then this lower photo is the before picture with the urine soaked carpet, the scratched and chewed doors and trim and the damaged old plaster. Stay tuned for more of our old house restorations!