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Muddy Valley Farm

~ Life on a tiny west coast hobby farm

Muddy Valley Farm

Monthly Archives: July 2019

July’s Bounty

29 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by Jodi in Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening, Seasons

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July’s Bounty

I’ve been reading a barnyard vignette collection set on a small southern Ontario farm. The author is a hobby farming woman much like me, except sheep are her passion not chickens. I can relate to most of her adventures and predicaments, but not what she says about July. She claims that July is a calm, quiet time. A time of nothing-much-to-do on the farm after the rush of spring and before the fall harvest.

I don’t know what planet her farm is on, because around here in July, we’re canning and freezing and drying and jam making like crazy, afraid to slow down lest we stumble and be engulfed in a rising tide of produce.

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My resident gardener is mowing and hoeing and watering and serving manure tea and hunting slugs and voles. I am tending the year’s chicken population boom; layers and grow-outs, broodies and their families and the freezer camp boys. The work involved is not insignificant. The boys in particular require extra care to fit them for their life’s purpose, to grace my winter table.

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Here in our west coast muddy valley we can eat from the garden year round. “Vegetable delivery!” sings out my resident gardener as she dumps yet another armful on the kitchen counter.

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Production really starts building in April and May with rhubarb, peas, chives, kale, chard, arugula, lettuce; then strawberries, garlic scapes, raspberries and garlic in June, and now blue berries, tomatoes, tomatillos, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, zucchini, cucumber and new this year…cucamelons (nut-sized striped melons tasting of mildly spicy cucumber).

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We eat as much as we can fresh and prepare the mounds of surplus as quick as we can for the freezer, the dehydrator, the canner or the big sauce pot as required.

We’re watching the figs like a hawk and looking forward to much more deliciousness to come, carrots, grapes, peaches, apples, celery, beets, parsnips, cabbage, onions, leeks, to name a few. Our taste buds are happy, sampling July’s cornucopia, and our fingers busy preserving it.

Oh and the herbs! Cut in the morning for maximum potency, spread on stainless mesh racks and dried thoroughly in the spare room’s light summer air. Then tipped into my wide red fruit bowl, clean and empty at this time of year (because fruit flies). A gift from a young man who knows I love bright dishes, my fruit bowl is perfect for cleaning dried herbs. It offers enough elbow room that I can pull brittle leaves from stems without losing any to the floor, and then scoop them into jars with none left behind.

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In July I like to lay in enough fresh lavender, oregano, sage, thyme, mint, cilantro, rosemary etc. to last through until next year’s growth starts. They are all at the peak of perfection right now, and the weather perfect for preserving them.

I empty my spice drawer bottles and refill them with fresh, saving the discards to sprinkle in my hens’ nest boxes. Herbs help to discourage bugs and I think the hens enjoy them too.

The rest of this year’s herbal bounty goes into a cool dark cupboard for now. It’s summer time, and the living is easy. So I’ll keep on wandering outside and collecting what I need for dinner, until I can’t any more. Then I shall crack open my jars, and all winter long, strew July’s savoury scents into rich soups, bubbling stews and homegrown coq a vin.

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Turkey Vultures

11 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by Jodi in Chickens, Farm Life, Wildlife

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They’ve since moved on to riper pastures, but back in June we had a turkey vulture situation. Four big bald-headed birds hung around the barnyard for more than two weeks. This time of year when everyone’s raising hungry babies, we get lots of winged predators hoping for chicken dinner. Liza the LGD stays pretty busy barking at the sky. But this was excessive, the fly-overs were non-stop and nerve-wracking, at least at first.

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Vulture reconnaissance
Vulture reconnaissance

I was worried they were after my  chickens, and so was Liza, but the chickens themselves didn’t seem too concerned. “What the heck!?!” I said to DH, “the roosters aren’t raising the alarm when the vultures fly over!” It was very strange, they were usually so good at warning of danger. We were heading into a hot spell, maybe they were feeling languid in the heat? It was troubling, I couldn’t figure it out.

The turkey vultures spent a lot of their time perched on a neighbour’s stump on the far side of the manure pile. They also frequented the tall poplars overlooking the barnyard, and the Douglas firs to the west of us. Back and forth they flew, between those three points, all day. More than once, when bald eagles turned up to the party, I watched the turkey vultures run them off the place. That surprised me too.

The vulture situation, and especially my chickens’ apparent indifference to it, piqued my curiosity about turkey vultures, so I did a little reading. I learned that turkey vultures almost never go after live prey. (Phew!) They don’t have talons, just sharp beaks. Nature’s clean-up crew, turkey vultures are attracted by even tiny amounts of the gases discharged by their primary food source, rotting meat. They live in family groups and have a wide range. They are big, with a six-foot wingspan, but pose zero danger to live and kicking chickens.

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A couple days after the vultures arrived, I clued into why they were there (duh! of course!) The smell was heavy in the air as I swung through the gate into the winter field on my way to feed the equines lunch. There must be a carcass nearby, a fast-ripening one. Following my nose over behind the barn and climbing over the manure pile, I disturbed a couple vultures, who leapt into the sky like swimmers stroking for the surface. And there it was, a big buck, deflated, pongy and snuggled up against the vultures’ stump as if he had sought his final shelter in its lee.

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Vulture on a stump
Vulture on a stump

Our turkey vultures finished their job and moved on, and that smell is completely gone now. And so is my worry about turkey vultures and my chickens. The internet says they are no threat and, much more significantly, so do my roosters.

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Last Year’s Tomatoes

05 Friday Jul 2019

Posted by Jodi in Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening

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I froze about 20 lbs too many whole tomatoes last year. I noted this fact a couple of weeks ago as I was making room in the freezer for a few more bags of 2019 rhubarb and a flat of ruby red local strawberries. Here we were, starting to eat our first fresh tomatoes, sun-warmed and straight off the vines, and a bunch of last year’s frozen ones still hanging around. Hmmmm, what to do with them??

Give them to the chickens was my first thought. It’s handy having a flock of hungry omnivores in the barnyard, nothing even remotely edible goes to waste around here. But I still prefer to feed people food to people first if at all possible. So I pushed the problem to the back of my mind where it could stew for a while, and got on with life.

A few days later, I had it! Ketchup! We were almost at the bottom of our current bottle, so the timing was good too.

I’ve been buying organic ketchup for as long as it has been available. It was the first organic product I splashed out on back in the day. I figure that the tomatoes had best be pesticide-free when they hit the kettle, since any residues would only concentrate during processing. It’s expensive though. So I was pretty chuffed at my genius idea.

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Good old Google gave me a million recipes; I combined a couple and after two days of simmering followed by two days of dark closet fermenting I had a nice stash of homegrown organic fermented tomato ketchup.  Full of probiotics and with a delicious zingy taste, fermented ketchup aids digestion too. It even achieved the DH stamp of approval.

My ketchup will keep for six months in the fridge, longer if frozen. One jar for each daughter and one and a half for us is just about perfect. And 20 pounds of last year’s tomatoes transformed into deliciousness is the icing on the cake.

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Rant for Canada

01 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by Jodi in Farm Life

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A recent CBC poll of 4500 Canadians found 52 per cent of Canadians polled either strongly or somewhat agree with the statement: “The government doesn’t do anything for me.”
What the hell is wrong with these people?
They take our country for granted. If you go to the doctor or drive on a road or send your child to school or buy food with confidence that it is as labelled or take public transit or an airplane or feel safe in your home or workplace or plan to collect CPP or baby bonus or disability or put your money in the bank or rely on the fact that you won’t be shot walking down the street, or enjoy any aspect of life in this wonderful, peaceful country of ours, the government does something for you.
Don’t like this year’s flavour of government? Vote for another in our reliable, safe, gerrymander-free elections. Believe me, Canadian political party differences are minimal. No matter who leads Canada, daily life doesn’t change a lot. I am so grateful to live here, to be Canadian. So fortunate, as we all are. Get your heads outta your butts, 52%. You reap the benefits of living under Canada’s stable, freely elected government every day of your lives. Your Canadian government is the envy of much of the world. Those of us who were born Canadian won the birth lottery, those of us who were not strove hard to become Canadian. People die trying to get here. Be grateful. Be aware of your good fortune. Be happy.
HAPPY CANADA DAY.

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