Everyone is Pregnant!

Very pregnant "Frenchy" couldn't fit into the cattle chute.
 

My large animal vet, Dr. Gano from Orchard Veterinary Practice in Wilmington, spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon worming, vaccinating and pregnancy checking the herd.  I am happy to report that all the girls are pregnant.  Valentine and Vera B. seem to be carrying their AI'd calves and should calve March 23 to Burbank.  The others will calve  between March and June with calves from either BTAP Thor or CEH In Focus (Bobby).

Running my animals through the cattle chute is always a difficult process. They all know from past experience that time in the chute means pain and some indignities (pregnancy checking). And too, the chute is a tight fit for my big Limousin cattle.  Yesterday, the chute was too small for several of the more pregnant cows.  French Silk Pie, better known as Frenchy was a case in point. She doesn't have a deep body like Violet and Valentine. Frenchy is round like a barrel and the closer she get to calving the rounder she gets.  She refused to squeeze into the chute and instead tried to do her imitation of a deer and jump the corral. 

Unfortunately for the corral she was too pregnant to make it over. Big tall Frenchy reared up on her hind legs and tried to jump over the corral gate but only managed to get her self hung up on the gate with her pregnant belly holding her back. For about five minutes she teetered on the gate  - which she bent beyond repair, first her hind feet on the ground, then her front feet on the ground, unable to get her belly over the gate. She was cutting off her air and getting panicked. It took three of us to get the corral panels detached from the gate so the gate would collapse and release her.  An 1800 pound pregnant cow hung up on a gate puts a lot of pressure on the gate fasteners, but we finally got her free and she happily returned to munching hay like nothing had happened. The vet assured me she had not damaged her unborn calf.

BTAP Thor, coming two year old bull

BTAP Thor, the coming two year old bull, hadn't been in the chute since he was a calf.  When it was his turn he ran down the runway and into the chute thinking he could run right through it. Imagine his surprise and fury when he was caught in the head gate. He fought the chute like a demon, trying like crazy to get out, but all he managed to do was make a lot of noise and rock the chute from side to side. He got his vaccinations and worming pour on despite all the ruckus. Next year he will be too big for that chute, but next year hopefully he will be living on some other farm!

At the end of the day I headed for the house exhausted and achy from man handling all those 1500 to 1800 pound frightened babies.  The former show girls who had been halter broke were much easier to handle then the general range cattle - like Frenchy - and I renewed my determination to halter break this years calves.  Already ZZ Tom has a major "bull" attitude and little BTAP Zooey, who had her first time in the chute and didn't like shots and ear piercings at all, is as wild as a deer.  As I reached for the Advil bottle I silently vowed to get those two locked up in the barn this winter for some serious manners training.

Garden Gone to Bed

Breaking dawn, about 7:45 this morning. Chores are finished.  Notice the oak tree on the right. It doesn't shed its leaves until spring.

Heavy frosts this last week have taken their toll on the garden. It is almost December after all, but I hate to see the end of the season.  The Swiss chard and the kale are looking very droopy and the cabbage and broccoli haven't grown in a month.  I did manage to find three smallish beets out of the entire beet patch.  Something is not right with my garden and beets.  Perhaps my cow and chicken manure rich compost is not good for them. Time to do some research!

Green Oak Leaf lettuce

I cut the last of the fall lettuce - which was the green Oak Leaf variety. That was the only one of the fall lettuces that grew well. I still have the patch covered with floating row cover but I doubt the plants will put on any new leaves this late in the season.

Round bales of hay, each weighing about 700 pounds. Twenty six of them arrived last Sunday morning. Forty three more to come. We are feeding 25 head of cattle who eat an average of 25 to 30 pounds of hay a day. You do the math!

The calves who live in the field next to the garden stand at the fence and beg for chard, kale, broccoli and cabbage plants.  Everyday I pull three or four plants and toss them over the fence. They are getting a good diet of grass hay and crimped corn (not cracked, which has had the good parts removed) which will help them grow to their full potential, but a little extra vitamin rich greens go down well.

The calves in for their morning feed.

 

 Ghoulish morning picture eyes!  Left to right, ZZ Tom, the Angus heifer and the little Angus bull.  ZZ Tom is twice the size of the Angus bull and he's only three weeks older. If I every questioned my decision to raise Limousin cattle over Angus, this set of three calves shows why people buy my bulls to breed to their Angus and crossbred cows. The Limousin bull calf, ZZ Tom is twice the size of the Angus bull calf and he's only three weeks older! If you are raising feeder calves to sell at six to nin months and you are paid by the pound, which calf do you think you'd want to be selling?  In a year or two the Angus  may be the same size, but that's a lot of time and feed in between.

Drought and Poison Pasture Plants

Poison Hemlock- kill this weed whenever you see it - even use harsh herbicides if you must, it is that bad for you, your children and your pets.

We moved to our farm in 1955 when I was just four years old.  My Dad took his day off from his medical practice on Thursdays and he devoted the day to chores on our farm. He and my mother kept a small herd of Hereford cattle, some chickens and a small herd of sheep.  We kids went with him while he mended fences and walked the fields checking on the cattle. Those trips around the farm are what developed our love of nature. 


Ground cherries, one of the poisonous nightshade family of plants. We love some of the non-poisonous ones such as white potatoes and tomatoes.

While we walked the fields my Dad would pull up weeds, cursing under his breath and naming them as we walked.  Canadian thistles were always a problem and he worked diligently to root them out. But his most hated were things like milkweed, jimson weed and horse nettle, another of the deadly nightshade family.  We learned to pull those weeds whenever we saw them and to never ever put anything we found in the pastures in our mouths.  Dad wanted to keep those weeds out of the pastures just in case a cow or sheep got a hold of one by mistake. They were all poisonous to our livestock. We worked diligently at eradicating those weeds and to my knowledge Dad never lost an animal to poisoneous plants.





We all love to blow these fluffy seeds in the wind, but don't do it!! Yes butterflies like the flowers but the plant is poisonous to livestock and those seeds scatter and grow everywhere.

 



Drought causes most of us some distress because our flowers, lawns and vegetable gardens all suffer from lack of rain.  It causes crop farmers stress because their crops don't grow well or not at all. Livestock farmers worry about our animals having enough pastures grasses to eat, but we also have to worry about  poisonous weeds that may have been crowded out by lush grasses and clovers in good rain times, but thrive when those same grasses and clovers go dormant in drought times. 

This fall my sister lost one of her  sheep to poisonous plants.  Her sheep are very old and don't like to travel far to graze.  When their pastures began to dry out and go dormant in late August, they traveled a little farther afield then usual and found some still green ground cherries and poison hemlock that had snuck into a small, seldom used corner of their pasture.   A trip with one of the sheep to Ohio State Veterinary hospital confirmed the problem.  Blackie died of a lack of thiamine (one of the B vitamins) , a critical nutrient in sheep. The thiamine was blocked from her system by the poison in the hemlock and the ground cherries.  The poison made her brain swell, blocking her optic nerve and causing sudden blindness. Then it went to work on her central nervous system and caused her to loose the use of her legs. A younger sheep might have survived with emergency treatment, but Blackie was over 20 years old and her system couldn't recover.

Needless to say, my sister went after those plants and destroyed them. More drought is predicated for 2013 and you can be sure we will all be walking out fence rows and pastures this coming spring, summer and fall rooting out any of these poisonous plants.

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance.."

"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance, pray love remember", says Ophelia in Shakespear's Hamlet.  

Planting Trees and Harvesting Lettuce

Oak leaf lettuce

By the time I fed and watered cattle last night, it was too dark to plant the white fir seedlings that had arrived from the Arbor Day Foundation on Wednesday, so I healed them in.  That means I dug a shallow trench in one of my garden beds, laid the bundle of trees in the trench, covered the root ends with soil and gently watered them in.  They will keep just fine that way for several weeks, but when I arrived home, once again my mailbox was bulging with a package of Arbor Day Foundation trees. This time it was the package of oak seedlings I'd ordered earlier in the month.

This afternoon was one of those gorgeous sunny fall days with temperatures in the mid 50's and a light breeze.  I put on a cotton turtleneck shirt, a cotton sweater, a scarf and a sweat shirt hoody and my heavy work gloves and ventured out to the garden to plant the white fir seedlings.  First I unearthed the seedlings and stashed them in a big water can full of water.  Then I began working up the soil in a spot where I hope they will be happy.  It didn't take long for me to shed the hoody, the scarf and the sweater. What a great day to work outdoors.  It's definitely going to be an Advil night!

Difficult to see with the straw covering but there are 10 little white fir seedlings planted in this bed.

I spent about an hour and a half digging over and weeding out a large mounded bed of what I think was a compost/manure pile about five years ago.  The dirt was easy to dig and the weeds, with the exception of some poison hemlock roots, came out easy.  It should be good, light soil that will drain well, just right for starting young trees. I'll have to deal with the poison hemlock again in the spring.

One of the white fir seedlings
 

Lettuce under floating row cover. I've used this stuff for years and it works great!

I've kept my fall planting of lettuce under floating row cover since we've had some heavy frosts the last week or so.  The oak leaf is doing great and I cut a big basket of it this afternoon.   I always bring my lettuce in the house right after cutting, fill my clean kitchen sink with cold water, then dump the lettuce in the sink and swish it through the water to clean it of any grit or dirt.  Today, for the first time, I found slugs in the water.  I've never had slugs in my lettuce before and they didn't seem to have hurt any of the leaves, but I picked half a dozen of them out of the water and tossed them in the compost bucket. 

Washed lettuce, blotted and ready to put in the frig.

When I'm finished swishing the lettuce I let it sit for a minute in the water. The lettuce sort of floats and the dirt sinks to the bottom. Then I carefully pick the lettuce up out of the water, shake it a bit and lay it out on a clean kitchen towel - a linen like one, not a fuzzy one. Carefully, I blot some of the water off the lettuce with the towel then transfer it to another towel, wrap it up carefully in the towel, put the towel in a plastic T-shirt bag and store the whole thing in my refrigerator's crisper drawer. It keeps that way a week or more.

This towel will absorb a little bit more of the water off the lettuce and help keep in fresh in the frig.

 

One bag ready for the refrigerator, and one more ready for towel number two. Yum, yum!  I should have at least one more cutting before Thanksgiving and then I'll have to go back to the Swiss chard and kale. The calves, who live in the pasture next to the garden, were begging for something green this afternoon, so I gave them some of the chard and the kale. They really liked it.

Peanut Soup



Outside the King's Arms Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg, VA.

One of my very favorite places to visit is Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. My parents took us to visit often when we were children and I never tire of visiting the craftsman's shop or listening to "Thomas Jefferson" speak on the Governor's Palace lawn.  It's always 1774 there and you can loose yourself in the history of the American Revolution while eating and dining in style and comfort.

There are a couple of good, authentic restaurants in the restored area. I usually try to eat one meal at Chownings and another at Shields Tavern but I never miss visiting the Kings Arms Tavern.  My favorite corn pudding recipe comes from the Kings Arms. My out and out favorite is the Cream of Peanut Soup.

It's a simple enough recipe. You may be thinking Peanut Soup? But just like some folks love Peanut Butter Pie, I love Cream of Peanut Soup. It is a great starter for Thanksgiving Dinner and a serving is a little more than 400 calories, so plan to take a long walk after dinner!

 

King's Arms Tavern Cream of Peanut Soup

 

1 medium onion, chopped                                           2 quarts chicken broth

2 ribs celery, chopped                                                 2 cups smooth peanut butter

1/4 cup butter                                                              1 2/4 cups light cream

3 tablespoons flour                                                      chopped peanuts to garnish

 

Saute the onions and celery in butter until soft, but not brown. Stir in the flour until well blended.  Add chicken stock, stirring constantly and bring to a boil.  Remove from heat and puree the mixture in a food processor or blender.  Stir in peanut butter and cream and blend thoroughly.  Return to low heat, but do not boil.  Warm through. Serve garnished with chopped peanuts. 





Arbor Day Trees Arrive

 

I arrived home late last night to find a package of trees from the Arbor Day Foundation sticking out of my mail box.  Just my luck they arrived on an evening when I was home late, but not to worry.  I opened the package and the trees were in great shape, roots still nice and moist. They will keep that way in a cool place until Friday evening when I can plant them in their nursery bed. 

 

I received a package of lush green white fir seedlings, each about 18 inches tall. I'll plant them in their nursery bed and next fall or the fall after (depending on how well they do this year) I'll plant them along my drive to provide some windbreak. Below is a picture from the Arbor Day Foundations website of a white fir.  These also make a very nice Christmas tree. It may not be too late for you to order some yet this year.  Check it out at www.arborday.org.



White Fir

Abies concolor

• Drought Tolerant
• Silver Blue-Green Needles
• Light Colored Bark
• 50' with 20' Spread
• Zones 4 to 7

Indian Pudding

Indian Pudding with Vanilla Ice Cream. November 13 is National Indian Pudding Day.

My AGA is on the blink.  The hot oven which is suppose to range top to bottom from 400 degrees to about 500 degrees doesn't register above 300 degrees on my oven thermometer.  The boiling plate still boils water but the simmer pad is not heating to its normal heat either.  That means I can't bake too many things since most recipes seem to bake at 350 degrees. It's difficult to find a repair person, but I finally found a company in Cincinnati that says they have techs trained on my style of AGA (which is the real AGA). They had one question for me. They asked if I was cooking Thanksgiving dinner. I confessed that I was not, so they asked if I could wait until November 26th for my service call. I had to agree. Oh well.

www.osv.org

So I've been thinking about things I could bake at these lower temperatures and Indian Pudding came to mind.  I first tasted Indian Pudding when I was about 10 years old at Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, Massachusetts.  Next to Colonial Williamsburg, Old Sturbridge Village is my most favorite place to visit. It's an outdoor living history museum of a country village around 1790 to 1830 and its done just right. You should visit some time. The restaurant is also one of my favorites.

 

Indian Pudding is made with cornmeal (called Indian meal in Colonial times), milk, molasses and sweet spices like cinnamon and cloves. It is not a Native American dish but a colonial American dish. It's made by boiling the cornmeal in the milk and then adding the molasses and sweet spices. It is sort of like pumpkin pie only thicker and creamier and heartier in flavor.  It's culinary cousins is Hasty Pudding which is simply corn meal boiled in milk until it thickens - kind of like polenta.  Both of these dishes  made use of colonial American staples - corn and molasses. I've researched several recipes and I think this one from www.whatscookingamerica.net is the most authentic:

 

3 cups whole milk
1 cup heavy (whipping) cream
1/2 cup yellow cornmeal
1/2 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed
1/2 cup molasses
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
4 large eggs

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 275 degrees F. Lightly grease a 6- or 8-cup soufflé or baking dish with butter (you can use margarine, but DON’T use non-stick sprays).

In a medium-sized saucepan over medium-low heat, scald the milk. That is heat it until little bubbles form around the edges of the milk but don't let it boil.

While the milk is heating, pour the cream into a medium to large bowl, add the cornmeal, sugar, molasses, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and ginger. Add this cream/corn meal/spice mixture to the scalded milk. Cook, whisking constantly, over medium-low heat until the pudding has thickened to the consistency of syrup (about 5 minutes). Remove from heat.

In a bowl, beat eggs with a whisk. Temper the eggs by adding 1/2 cup of the hot cornmeal mixture to the eggs while whisking rapidly. Vigorously whisk the egg mixture into the remaining cornmeal mixture. This helps bring the eggs up to temperature so they will accept the hot mixture with out scrambling. Add butter, one piece at a time, stirring until melted.

Pour mixture into the prepared soufflé dish, and place dish on a shallow baking pan on the center oven rack. Pour enough HOT water into the shallow baking dish to come 2/3 of the way up the outsides of the soufflé or baking dish.

Bake until pudding is set, a tester inserted close to (but not in) the center comes out clean, usually about 2 to 2 1/2 hours. Remove from oven and remove from the water bath and let cool slightly.

Serve warm with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream or heavy cream.

Makes 8 to 16 servings (depending on your sweet tooth).

 

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Winter Reading List

One of my new favorites for my Winter Reading List
 

The publishing world is always touting their summer reading list.  But I think the dark, cold days of winter, when I don't want to be outside doing anything, are the best times to sit by the fire or snuggle under the covers or soak in the tub -  with a good book.

I love medieval historical fiction and mysteries.  One of my all time favorites is Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, a great historical fiction novel which has been made into a very good movie.

My new favorite is by Jeri Westerson and features a disgraced knight who has remade himself into a sort of medieval private investigator.  Ms. Westerson is a medieval scholar of sorts and she peppered the book with many words I've never seen before, which always makes me happy.  I also love her website www.jeriwesterson.com.  She is obviously a very talented and creative lady and I look forward to reading all the books in this series.

Kate Sedley, author of the Roger the Chapman mystery series is another favorite. She was born in 1926 and has been writing for years, so there are a lot of books in the series, which also makes me very happy. 


A long running series and always entertaining as well as informative.

Indian Summer

Look carefully just by the last fence post on  the right of this picture and you see a deer jumping the fence. I see bucks and does all around the house right now but it is rare I have a camera on hand when they are close enough for a good picture.
 

Well, our Indian Summer was short lived this year. I had windows open all weekend, dried sheets on the line in the sun and generally enjoyed being outdoors as much as possible.  This morning the weather is straight out of the south and raining and warm but the temperature is expected to drop into the 20's tonight and be cold most of the week.  The Old Farmer's Almanac says to expect snow at the end of November and December and the beginning of January. See more at www.almanac.com.

Annual Weather Summary: November 2012 to October 2013 from the Old Farmers Almanac.

Winter will be colder and drier than normal, with above-normal snowfall. The coldest periods will be from late December through early January and in early and mid-February. The snowiest periods will occur in mid- to late November, mid- to late December, and early to mid-January.April and May will be warmer and rainier than normal.Summer will be slightly warmer and rainier than normal, with the hottest periods in late July and mid-August.September and October will be warmer and drier than normal.

 

Fried Apples & Smoked Sausage

Sliced Melrose apples cooking over medium high heat with a tiny bit of Canola oil and butter.

My mom used to make us fried apples, or I should say, sauteed apples as a side dish.  She used Jonathan apples usually, for their red skins and good apple flavor. She cooked them over medium high heat in a large well seasoned cast iron skillet.  Jonathon's  hold up well to cooking.  As soon as the apples were cooked through and beginning to brown, she added a couple of tablespoons of brown sugar and a pat of butter and tossed and cooked the apples a minute or so until the sugar melted and formed a syrup. Sometimes she added a little cinnamon as well.

I've turned the apples and added slices of smoked sausage.

The other evening I started to saute an apple to have along side some smoked sausage.  I hate getting two pans dirty so I decided to combine the sausage and the apples.  I had turned the apples once before I added the sausage which was good because since the sausage is pre-cooked it browns very quickly.

Adding brown sugar/dry mustard mixture. The apples could have browned more before adding the sausage.
 

Next I mixed a teaspoon of brown sugar with a pinch of dry mustard. As soon as the sausage and apples were nicely cooked through  I took them off the heat and sprinkled the sugar mixture over all. Then I tossed the apples and sausage together.  The hot food melted the brown sugar mixture and formed a syrup.

Sausage and apples glistening with the brown sugar syrup.

This is half a large Melrose apple with about three inches of Hillshire Farms smoked sausage, a green salad of oak leaf lettuce still good from my garden, walnuts, raisins, Parmesan cheese and homemade lime/honey vinaigrette. You could substitute other types of sausage such as a country style sausage patty with sage. That would be very good as well. 

Green salad and apples with sausage makes a nice lunch.

Change this up for breakfast. Add some maple syrup on top and serve over pancakes or waffles. With a big glass of orange juice, that's a big yum!

Cows Put on Heavy Fur Coats

Here's Thor in his winter coat.

I was looking back through some of the pictures I took last summer of my cattle. They all looked so sleak and healthy.   I took a bunch of pictures of them this afternoon so I could update the website. Gone are the sleak short haired coats, replaced by thick, fluffy ones.  It seems to me that they are wearing particularly heavy winter coats this year.

BTAP Juliette, very pregnant and fluffy.

Considering all the crazy weather we've had around the country lately I think it is safe to predict a cold and snow filled winter.  We used to try to predict the weather by watching the woolly worms' fall color, but you know, I've not seen a woolly worm in years!  Woolly worms and big Black Racer snakes used to be all around our house when I was a kid  We'd pick up the worms and  run a finger gently down their furry backs. They'd curl up in our hands.  And black snakes were everywhere. We'd find them hanging in the pear tree on the east side of the house, hanging from the rafters in the barn on hot summer days, and once we found one draped around the backdoor of the house. When I spotted a big Black Racer under the oak leaf hydrangea bush this summer it was quite an event! I hadn't seen one that big in a good twenty years!

The lack of woolly worms and black snakes makes no sense to me. A good 500 acres of the land around us is organic, so pesticides aren't the problem.  Maybe the increase in crows and hawks and coyotes have something to do with it.  If any body knows, leave a comment.

Here's little and very pregnant Bramble.  She is wearing one of the fluffiest coats of all.

Wild Black Walnuts

Photo by Amy Cowell of Edible Austin, TX

Black walnuts seem to be plentiful in this part of the country.  I have two trees in my yard and there are at least other 25 throughout the farm.  I think black walnuts are an acquired taste. Their flavor is strong and bittersweet - a nice counter point to something sugary sweet. I certainly wouldn't recommend eating them out of hand.

When we were kids my grandfather collected the walnuts on our farm and took them back to his city home to parcel out to his neighborhood squirrels  through the winter. He and my grandmother lived in a little California Bungalow style house in Dayton. The house had a wrap around porch with a porch railing made of brick posts and wide cement railings.  When we went to visit we laid the walnuts out on the railings, then scurried into the house to watch the squirrels through the window. We never seemed to have squirrels in our yard at home on the farm and to this day I associate squirrels with cities.

My grandfather cured a few walnuts for us each year and my mother cracked them for making walnut brittle or a walnut cake.  The bitter flavor is a good counterpoint to the sweet brittle and cake.To make the brittle  Mom took one of her cask iron skillets, melted granulated sugar in it over medium heat, add the walnut meats, stirred and poured the mixture out onto a buttered rimmed baking sheet to cool. Then we could crack it into pieces and eat it like peanut brittle.  The cake was simply a rich white cake with walnut meats added into the batter.  The frosting was either a white butter cream or a carmel butter cream.  This makes a very sweet cake and again, the bitter walnuts were just the right touch.  We also like this cake made with hickory nuts - when we can wrestle them away from the squirrels. 

Apparently, black walnuts have become a foodie thing. Like their English walnut cousins, they are very nutritious. If you Google the words wild black walnuts you will find a plethora of people selling black walnut meats at about $12 a pound, which to my way of thinking is cheap considering how much work it is to harvest them. You can also find plenty of instructions for harvesting your own black walnuts - most of the instructions include a car, wire brushes and rubber gloves.