Dairy Daydreams

Remember how last fall I was totally dreaming of getting a cow?

Well, I've recently changed my tune.  

It all started when my friend approached me at church and said she was getting goat's milk from someone she knew but couldn't drink it all and wondered if we'd be interested in any.  

(Actually, her asking was an amazing sign of God's tender mercy for me at a time when I was doubting it--but that's a story for another day.)

I jumped on the opportunity for some fresh goats milk and was insanely curious to try it.  

It was delicious!  And there was a giant seismic shift in my world and--suddenly--I wanted a dairy goat.

Because, guess what?!

Goats cost less money than cows.

Goats cost less to feed than cows.

Goats need less land than cows.

Goats don't take a trailer to haul them around like a cow. (Ye olde standard minivan will work fine!)

And most importantly:

Goats fall into the small farm animal category as opposed to large farm animal category, which means there are a lot more places we could live where we could be zoned to have a goat than a cow.

So I did what every good geek does when honing in on a new "pet topic" (get it?!), I went to the public library and checked out every book they had on raising dairy goats.  

Oh, and it was great, I filled up on all this knowledge that I really hope I get to use one day, and then on my third book, I came across this picture and died:

Seriously?!

I can just see Wyatt driving his own little goat wagon like this!

And there's more:

Two little kids in a wagon?!  I just can't contain myself.  That is beyond awesome.  Apparently Abraham Lincoln's kids burst in on a state dinner on one of these!

So then of course we had to youtube cart goats (well worth your time),  and now I have to figure out how to build a goat-wagon because I'm pretty sure they don't sell those things down at the hardware store these days!

So I've continued my research into dairy goats, but here's the thing--I've researched dairy goats before.  See Jeremy back in the day was all, "We should get a cow some day."

And I was like, "Are you crazy?!"

So I researched dairy goats as a compromise.  But every thing I read said: Goat's milk is naturally homogenized so you can't skim the cream and make butter, etc without buying a ridiculously-priced machine. So that was one of the reasons I was dreaming of a cow--I wanted to be able to provide for more than just our milk and yogurt, but also our cream, and butter, and ice cream. . .

But as I started to look into it more I was hearing plenty of people saying they were making butter from goat's milk.  True the cream takes longer to rise, and there's not as much of it as a good cow will give, but it is there.

So I experimented.

I put two quarts of goat milk in the back of my fridge for two days, skimmed some cream off the top, shook it up in a jar, and look:

Butter!

Crazy thing about goat's milk butter--it's white.  Grass-fed cows' milk is pretty yellow from beta carotene, but goats convert the beta carotene into vitamin A, so--not yellow butter.

And I looked up the cream separator on E-bay, and I can get one for --yes--over a hundred dollars, but still, less than a cow, and definitely worth it's price for the ability to make cream and butter to add to the list of things we would not have to purchase weekly from the store.

One more thing about a goat that's a con and pro, is that goats make a lot less milk than a cow.  But 2-4 gallons of milk a day from a cow is a lot to deal with.  It would require more milking time, and more time to make use of the extra milk by turning it into other dairy products.  So I think a goat would be just right for us.

Not just yet though, so until then we'll just continue our dairy daydreams!

Jonas, not quite sure he wan't to touch them.

Momma goat checking out who has her babies.

Mmmilk! (Actually this one isn't a "dairy" goat--her kids get it all.)

Kid!

Owen'll be a great milker!

Wyatt'll be a great goat cart teamster.

Spring on the Backyard Farm

 Our city farming chores began this spring with re-queening our beehive.  The colony successfully survived it's second winter, which makes us happy, and content with our version of beekeeping that is a little more hands-off than many beekeepers.  However, after the swarming and subsequent self-re-queening that occurred last summer, we ended up with a pretty  grouchy colony in the fall.  Our first attempts to check in on them this spring reconfirmed their general anti-social genepool so we made the decision to re-queen.

We ordered our new queen and tried to keep her alive long enough for it to stop raining so we could do the ol' switcheroo.  What we needed to do was systematically go through the hive to find the old queen, dispatch her, leave the hive queen-less for two days until they were getting nervous about not having a queen around, then introduce the new queen causing a wave of relief amid the bees to increase their likelihood of "accepting" her. 

We don't use marked queens, so in our three seasons of beekeeping, we've only seen our queen one other time, so we knew it was going to be difficult to find her.  Adding to that the grouchy (read: sting-happy) colony, and poor spring weather we knew we were in for quite the needle in a haystack hunt.  But we suited up, ultimately prevailed, and I was the only one that ended up getting stung.  (On my big belly of course, because I couldn't button up my bee shirt over the baby!)  But, the colony is now busily buzzing away for the season.

 The chickens all weathered the winter fine and began laying again mid-February.  But mid-March we went on vacation for spring break.  We were only going to be gone a few days so we simply filled up the chickens' water and food and left.  We came back to a big pile of 14 eggs in the laying box, and thought it had all gone off smoothly.

 Until we realized that the two bantams (our 3rd-year mini-hens) wouldn't leave the nesting box, and had stopped laying their little miniature eggs.  That big pile of eggs in the nesting box made their mothering instincts kick into gear, so all they could think about was raising baby chicks.  So they stopped laying eggs, and would sit all day in the nesting box trying to hatch the (unfertilized) eggs the other hens were laying.

Florence finally broke out of this broody nonsense about 4-5 weeks after we got back, but Gertrude, here, is still going strong in her broodiness.  We may have to take some drastic measures (more drastic than me going out a couple of times a day and just tossing her out into the run off the laying box) to get her to knock it off.

Since we don't know how long we'll be here we didn't get any laying hen chicks this year--but it's really hard to resist those baby chicks at the farm store.   Jeremy decided he really wanted to raise a few meat birds instead.  So we just picked up the one breed our store carried--the Cornish Cross.

We were already a bit morally opposed to the breed (they're the ones that have been bred to grow so quickly that they often die of heart attacks before reaching their 7-week accelerated maturation date because their hearts just can't keep up), but after raising them we are even more certain that we would never buy that breed again.  The crazy thing is, they not only grow too fast for their heart, but I think they grow too fast for their brains too!  They were so stupid--for lack of a better word--but when you thought about it, it made sense because they were really just baby chicks still, but had the bodies of full-grown chickens.

They just seemed a little more sickly as well.  We never put them around the other chickens--there's a risk of the chicks having disease from their hatchery, so since they weren't going to be permanent members of the flock, we didn't risk putting them together.  They had really watery droppings.  But once they got big enough that we let them start wandering the yard a little bit (so they were eating grass and things) their droppings solidified.  That just reconfirmed the validity of some of our chicken-raising practices as well. 

Sadly, (icky real-life stuff ahead warning) we came home from church last week to find the chickens had been attacked.  Our best guess is it was a yappy- neighborhood dog, because it attacked all four of them, they were all wounded on their back-sides (like they were running away from something), but it wasn't actually able to kill any of them--it left that job for Jeremy and me.  So, we processed the birds, cutting the meat away from their nipped backsides, freezing the rest, and making stock from the carcasses. 

One of the saddest things about this is that one of the reasons we raise our own birds, is to give them a less traumatic existence and death than the commercial alternative.  We want them to live happily and die peacefully.  So, unfortunately this was not a calm, humane death for our chickens, we don't know how long they were out there wounded after being attacked.  But, these are the realities of keeping animals, and on a country farm it would just be foxes and hawks we'd be dealing with instead.  This simply is the reality of animal husbandry.

But these experiences do make us feel like we've earned the right to call ourselves backyard "farmers". 

 

And since we have no immediate plans to leave we added summer crops to our vegetable garden.   The peas, broccoli, cabbage, onions, and kale were already doing well, so we added tomatoes, peppers, basil, and some runner beans.  We will still be adding more, but this spring was really crazy.  We got snow 10 days after our "last annual frost date" this year!  So everything is a bit behind.

And who knows with the baby coming (this week, maybe? please!) this may be all the planting we get to this summer.  But, there's always fall crops!

On Working Hard

Kitchen Duties

Last week I spent some quality time in my kitchen with three large bags of peaches.  I was washing them, scoring them, blanching them, peeling them, slicing them packing them in jars.  The jars were boiled then packed with peaches, filled with boiling syrup, lidded, banded, then boiled in a waterbath canner.  

After a few hours of this I thought to myself that the whole process was taking a "long time" and I was ready to be done.  But I caught myself and laughed.  It's laughable that I think that 3 hours of rigorous labor is "enough for this year," so maybe I'll move on to fruit leather and other more "fun" projects.  I had produced enough fruit for us to have one quart of peaches as a family per month until peach season rolls around in 2012.  

WOW!  What a bountiful harvest! 

Not.

I considered the privileged life I live-- that "I'll just pick up some more canned fruit off the overflowing market shelves next time I make a quick stop there!"  I tried to imagine how much work would be involved for me to actually put away enough fruit for my family to have peaches once a week through the winter, and fruit of some kind at every meal. 

I've been reading Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder in preparation to sharing it with Owen.  It's amazing how much people used to work.  Work.  Like rigorous, sweat-causing, get hungry but can't stop yet, wake up in the middle of a night snowstorm to do necessary tasks or else your animals/livelihood will die work.  

And so this weekend I had Owen helping me with the blueberries he wanted to can.  He was interested in the box of labels I had bought.  So, though I bought the labels for jars I planned on giving away as gifts, I said "sure let's label the blueberries."  We had nine jars.  I labeled the first one to show him how it was done, and let him do the rest.  After five jars, he told me thanks, but he was done now.  I laughed to myself about what Almanzo Wilder would think of my son tiring after writing out five labels for jars, when he was expected as a nine-year-old to plant entire fields of potatoes and pumpkins himself. 

I laughed, told Owen I appreciated his input, but he needed to write those last three labels. 

All Natural Bath Products Giveaway

Along with homemaking soap I've been experiementing in homemaking other bath products as well.  My first experiment (before the soap even) was making homemade lotion bars.

Jonas' skin needs to be kept smooth and moisturized to help the excema.  His doctor and dermatologist both recommended Aquaphor.  Truthfully the Aquaphor does a great job of keeping his skin smooth and protected.  The product's main ingredient is white petroleum jelly.  So my problem with using such large amounts of Aquaphor (at least once a day and after every bath) come from more ecologically-minded reasons.

So I started researching alternatives.  For a while we used straight coconut oil.  We also tried using straight olive oil.  Both are great natural moisturizers, but both are liquid in a warm room temperature, so we had some issues with application.  I'd heard of "lotion bars" and decided to research them. 

It turns out that lotion bars (in my recipe) use the two oils I was already using, plus beeswax as an extra skin protectant.  The beeswax is what keeps it in a semi-solid state at room temperature. 

I use 1 part by weight of coconut oil, olive oil, and beeswax.  I priced beeswax at our local craft store, and I was able to get it 1/3 of the price per pound by purchasing it through our beekeeping supply company.  Plus it supported local economy instead of a big box. 

We keep our bars in a little jar, and just turn it out to use it.  It is a great thing for elbows and knees and rubbing good into little dry spots.  The boys love using the little bars as well.  And the baby loves eating them when I'm not looking--oops, at least I know there's no chemicals in them that will hurt him. 

The bars are not the best thing for all-over coverage, so my next experimentation on the radar is for some sort of body butter lotion variation. 

I'm starting to see why people get into selling soaps and bath products as a small business.  It's because your mind is always thinking of "the next batch" and other experimentations.  I may actually dabble in trying to sell some things as well, partially because for Jeremy the idea of designing product labels and packaging sounds just like Christmas. 

But as for today we are simply enjoying using these products as a family.  And I want to give the opportunity to one of YOU to try them out as well. 


A GIVEAWAY! for loyal (and new, and part time) readers of Jeanetics.net You have the opportunity to win:

One 2-ounce beeswax lotion bar (smells delicious), one 3-ounce bar of all-natural fragrance and color-free homemade soap, and one chicken.  Just kidding--the chicken is not included.

To enter just leave a comment on this post and tell me what kind of posts on Jeanetics.net are your favorite.  (a simplified post labels list is in the right sidebar if you need ideas.)

For a second entry:  "Like" Jeanetics.net on facebook and I will automatically give you a second entry into the giveaway.  Plus as a bonus I've posted the picture there of me in my mad scientist soap-making getup--it's totally classy.

This giveaway will end one week from today.  I'll announce the winner Wednesday July 20th.

Atop a Homemade Soapbox

I can identify the exact catalyst for my recent foray into mad science. 

Labor Day two years ago we took a family camping trip.  Just an overnight-er for the fun of it.  But we came back from that trip with Jonas experiencing a horrible flare-up of exzema.  It was really the first time he had had any trouble with exzema--but it was bad. 

It's hard to say what triggered it.  Initially people suggested things as simple as: he was having a reaction to the grass he'd played and sat in while camping.  I wondered about the bug spray we had used--though it was the same brand we'd used before.  We had recently quit nursing (at 18 months) so we later even started to wonder about things like a milk allergy since his cow milk intake probably increased around that time as well.   

For almost a year we treated Jonas with the two recommended products: steroids and a white petroleum-based skin protecting ointment.  It worked out pretty well until our family reunion to the beach.  Even though we bought an expensive name-brand "natural" baby sunscreen Jonas had a horrible skin flare-up as a reaction to it --and I got fed up.     

I reasoned that the current treatment wasn't preventing it was only managing the eczema, and I was starting to feel uncomfortable with the uncertainty of the long-term effects of the treatment.  So I wanted to try my own management.  A more natural management.  I dropped the steroids and swapped the white petroleum skin protectant for olive oil and coconut oil (I've recently upgraded to something a little fancier but that's a topic for another day). 

I started to realize how hard it is to control what's in the products we use when they are all made outside our home.  I need a basic gentle unscented product, for all the products we use in the home.  Any product scent or coloring could aggravate Jonas' skin.   But companies are always adding random things in their products for one reason or another--usually to decrease manufacturing costs or increase "perceived value" (Gee, this is sounding a lot like the food industry as well)--And so I started studying practical home chemistry and the useful chemical reaction of saponification. I checked out some books from the library, bought some supplies and made some homemade soap.

I made these bars with three types of fat:  olive oil which makes a very moisturizing bar, coconut oil which make nice big soap bubbles, and lard which makes a nice firm white bar.  We're almost at the end of our one month cure period which means that the chemical reaction is complete, and so even though the soap is made with lye it no longer contains lye.  It contains a little extra oil from "superfatting" the recipe, a lot of soap (obviously right?) and glycerol (glycerin).  I was interested to learn that commercial soap-makers remove the glycerol to sell it or use it in other products.  My glycerol is still in my soap to moisturize freely.  

I'm excited to have a product for my family to use that is exactly what I want--with nothing that I don't want.  I might try getting into interesting scented bars for myself or friends, but for now I'm satisfied with a creamy white bar of soap that won't turn my baby into a scaly itchy red monster.

City or Country?

Jeremy finishing up his semester threw me into a kind of panic.  All of the sudden we seemed significantly closer to graduation, and "real life".  All of a sudden I felt a desire to re-define where exactly where we were headed.
 

Although the first time Jeremy got some baby chicks (by inheriting them from a highschooler's science project) when he and I were engaged I thought he was nuts--I've grown to appreciate it and desire even more to adopt some of those older practices related to simple living and self-reliance.

If a little is good--then more is better--right?

I love checking in on SouleMama with their move out to the farm this year.  Renovating an old farmhouse, tapping Maple trees, raising chickens and pigs and bees.  There's so much that seems good and desirable about a life like that. 

But lately I've started to feel a lot of pressure about that goal, realizing that we have inconsistencies in our dreams.  Mostly realizing that that dream of living out on a farm and spending most of our time and energy working on providing for our immediate physical needs is not the life that we've been preparing for the last seven years of our marriage.  We've been in school for 7 years, preparing for a profession most-likely located in the urban setting.

And the truth is--there's so much we love about that idea. 

We loved the summer we spent in uptown Salt Lake City.  Jeremy walked to work downtown everyday.  Owen, Jonas and I had two pocket parks within walking distance, and a number of huge city parks within 5-10 minute drives.  We rode the "city train" to the downtown library, to a SLC Real soccer game, and just "around" for entertainment.  We would go listen to free outdoor concerts on Thursday nights at the Brigham Young Historic Park.  We lived above an ice cream and chocolate shop.  We went to the farmer's market on Saturday mornings, and ate at a number of local restaurants.  We loved going to explore and enjoy really well-designed public spaces.  There was also a zoo, a planetarium, a historic living village, an aquarium, splash parks, up to date public transportation, and an airport 10 minutes from downtown.  Remembering all the amenities makes me want to move back there tomorrow!

But the goal of city living doesn't mean I have to give up on all my other goals either.  Chickens are legal in SLC and many other large urban centers as well.  The small amount of gardening we do is possible in a city particularly if we aren't afraid to tear out our front yard to do it.  There are also other opportunities in the city, like community gardens, and supporting local agriculture through a CSA membership or farmers' markets.  And I'm not afraid of urban foraging either.

There's a reason we chose to get started with beekeeping this year, as opposed to getting a goat, or cow or something like that.  Beekeeping is going on in large cities.  When talking the idea of bees over with Jeremy I said how beekeeping seemed like the next logical step for us since we could continue it wherever we go.  It's a skill that we can continue to use no matter where we move next--city or country.

When I told a man at church we were getting bees he surprised me by asking "Really?  Will they be able to make it where you live in town?"  I was surprised because this man is a farmer--shouldn't he know about bees in the city?  But he didn't I realized, because he was a country farmer, and Jeremy and I are city farmers.  They are totally different ideas.  And that was the first time I started to think about my conflicting dreams and which one was really my dream--not someone else's.  

There's a continuously growing group of city dwellers that are interested in being self-reliant, and participating in small-scale production practices within their small lots and neighborhoods.  Jeremy and I have followed a lot of this development--that's why we know all about bees in the city.  The Real Food movement is such a big part of our lives too, along with recycling, reusing, and all manner of "going green".  The sense of community is high and a big motivating factor in a lot of these urban groups, and that to us seems like the biggest difference between city and country--and something we desire.  

It's true, I would love to see my boys running wild and barefoot through the forest.  But maybe my boys will just have to rely on their grandparents for that wild natural play--that's what grandparent's houses and cabins are for right?  And at home my boys will participate in wild urban (or at least suburban) play.  Chickens, bees and vegetable gardens included. And the thoughts of that idea make me truly happy.

All-Natural High

 It's been a little over a week since Jeremy installed our colony of bees.  Jeremy contemplated the task while brushing the sides of the "package" with sugar syrup to calm the bees.  He chose to go suitless and gloveless for the install.  Bees in a package are less defensive than ordinarily because they don't technically have a home to protect, and if you feed them some sugar syrup they feel even better about life.

In a different vein Jeremy wanted to feel "in control" and not clumsy when in stalling the bees.  The gloves particularly make that more difficult.

 I stayed outside to watch Jeremy, along with the baby who would not allow me to put him down after the 6-hour car ride.  We didn't stand too close, but we did send the older boys inside to watch from the window.  Just in case.

 It was a little tough to get the syrup can out of the package, but once it was out bees started flying out.

 We chose the "chicken method" of installing our colony which involves taking out a few of the frames and just placing the whole package of bees inside, putting the hive lid on and leaving them to get out on their own.

A number of people have asked us how you know the bees are going "like" their new home and take to it.  There were two things we did to encourage this.  We installed the package in the early evening when the bees have a natural inclination to want to bunker down for the night as opposed to gather the whole colony to go swarm in a nearby tree or something.  Also we brushed down all the inner frames with the sugar water--and what bee can resist that?

 Jeremy took a few minutes to watch the little bees start exploring their new home just a bit. Then he came inside riding an all-natural adrenaline high.

He paced back and forth in the front room telling me how it felt to be there and open the package with his heart racing.  To have the bees fly out and around, some of them landing on his arms just as curious about him as he was about them.  And to have done it, completed the task, done something real that was a goal we've been scheming about, and supporting a modern idea of food production that we believe in. 

He said this must be why boys these days play video games and jump out of airplanes--they are missing out on the types of experiences that mankind used to participate in simply to provide for their basic physical needs.  People today don't get that rush of exhilaration from interacting with wild but beneficial insects, or hunting down an animal to feed your family, or looking at a shelf full of the fruits of their labor guaranteed to provide for the-as of yet unseen, but guaranteed to come-needs of their family. 

Here's to hoping that our children don't feel the need to seek out man made highs, but that can experience the natural thrill that comes from wrangling nature to directly provide for some of their own needs. 
 

Backyard Beekeeping

At some point we are going to cross the threshold of "weird."  Perhaps we've already done it.

Recently I was talking to Jeremy about "the Bees" and Owen asked, "What bees?"

I said "Oh I don't think we've told you yet--We've going to get a beehive and keep bees."

To which Owen replied,  "Oh, right, because we're farmers now."  Apparently none of this is at all weird to him.  (Also, I wonder what it was that has made us farmers now in his mind.)

I've been interested in beekeeping for a long time.  But it doesn't really seem like one of those things you can just jump in to.  We have some friends that keep bees, and have asked them to walk us through the steps of caring for a colony.  We've also checked out a bunch of books, but getting the assistance of someone with years and colonies worth of experience just gives us the real kick of confidence we need to try it out.

So we've ordered hive components.  Assembled hive boxes and frames, and painted the hive (with leftover house paint in the basement, free = sweet!)

Today we drive to pick up the bees.  It's pretty late in the season.  But there was bad weather in California where the bees are coming from.  This evening Jeremy will install our colony.  (I designated him as head of this hobby.)  And then we will officially become backyard beekeepers.

Spring Additions

 We're adding to our backyard flock this year.  I went to "the farm store" intent on getting some chicks that would lay blue eggs--just for fun of course--but we couldn't get over how cute the little bantam chicks were.
So we brought home four bantam chicks instead.

 Bantams are basically "mini chickens"  Their adult size will be only half or a third the size of our other chickens.

 After a few weeks in doors we put them outside with the other chickens.  They are doing well out there however when we come over they run away like we are their natural predators as opposed to the truth: we are the ones with their food.

Sometimes you can't help but yell, "Oh, don't be such a chicken!"

The bantams all look totally different, from each other and our older three chickens. They add a lot of personality to the flock.

 After checking out our city code we agreed to accept four more chicks last week from an elementary class that "hatched them".  They are the basic yellow leghorn chicks and will grow up to lay white eggs. With a straight run of chicks there's a 50/50 chance of being hens or roosters.  In reality we could end up this year with up to 8 hens or up to 8 roosters (I hope it's the first one).

Our city code actually doesn't forbid roosters like many do.  And there isn't a maximum flock size either.  They simply regulate the position of your coop in relation to the neighbors.  Also, they prohibit letting your poultry run at large through the city.  That may sound like a pretty strict regulation for chickens, but rest assured the code also prohibits letting rhinoceroses, and chimpanzees run at large through the city as well--yes by name. 

I am a little nervous about how many eggs we'll be getting.  We're getting two eggs a day from the older chickens.  If 4 of 8 are hens that will be an additional 4 eggs a day their first year.  Of course the bantams will lay mini-eggs.  So I only think we'll have trouble with too many eggs if more than 4 are hens.

Afterall, I do have three young boys to feed now, so we may be just fine.  I've been amazed lately at how quickly we have been going through food.  Jonas is just really starting to eat more, and Wyatt has recently gotten old enough to start eating some of everything we're having.  We used to be able to snack on a pint of grape tomatoes over the course of a few days.  Now that pint is easily gone in one snack lunch.

That's precisely the reason I like having chickens--If we are going to keep (and invest money into) animals for the fun and entertainment of the family--why not have them be animals that provide for some of the physical needs of the family as well?  Everyone is happy.

Urban Foraging: Spring Dandelion Greens and Jelly

If you've ever bought a bag of salad called a "Spring Mix" you may have noticed something in the bag that looked suspiciously similar to dandelion leaves.  Well, you were right--it was dandelion greens.  Dandelions (yeah--the ones that grow outside) are perfectly edible.  The green leaves can be eaten alone or mixed in with other lettuces.  They need to be picked before the plant flowers for them to be the most tender and the least bitter.  They are still bitter--I won't lie--Jeremy and I were sampling our patch in the backyard yesterday.  But added to a mix of lettuces and with a nice vinaigrette dressing they could make fore a completely edible salad.  And hey--they are free.

You always want to make sure they haven't been sprayed with chemicals or anything, but most places that you see overgrown with dandelions don't have that problem (or they wouldn't be there). 

I've wanted to make Dandelion Blossom Jelly since I first saw the idea a year ago.  (And violet jelly, maybe that's next.)  I love the idea of foraging the unimpressive and turning it into something useful for my family.

 Though I was doubtful--we found enough dandelions in just our yard.  This is great since we know our yard is un-sprayed.

4 cups of blossoms.

Grab the base of the bud. with scissors cut off the top of the dandelion.  This is just petals, let them fall into a bowl and discard the green bud.  You should end up with around 2 cups of petals. 

Dandelion Jelly
3 cups boiling water
2-3 cups dandelion petals
3 Tbsp lemon juice
1 box Sure*Jell pectin
4 1/2 cups sugar

Pour boiling water over petals.  Allow mixture to steep a few hours until it has returned to room temperature and taken on a nice yellow color.  Strain water into a liquid measuring cup.  Add lemon juice and any additional water needed to bring total to 3 cups dandelion infused water. 

Follow directions for making "cooked jelly" from the pectin box for instructions on adding the pectin and sugar and water-bath processing the jars. 

The jelly is delicious.  I've heard it described as tasting like straight honey.  If you've ever eaten one of those flavored honey sticks at the market I would say that's an accurate comparison. 

I took the advice of Marisa and canned the jelly in a variety of jars, so I have different options for presentation or gifting.

I love the sunny color and think the whole project is just perfectly novel!

Cultivating

Our early spring peas are growing well.

It's been reasonably cool and has included a few rainy days--The peas love it.

I can't wait for the peas.  Last year we only had about a dozen plants.  The boys loved eating the peas and pods straight from the vines but we almost had to ration them out to let everyone have some each time.  This year we hope to have less rationing necessary.

Next to the peas I planted two varieties of carrots.  We're still waiting for those to come up (I really hope they do).

I have a cabbage and broccoli plant that actually wintered over in the hoop house.  I planted them late (too late) in the fall.  The plants were really small and I kept them covered in plastic and in the spring they started growing again.  So hopefully there will be something to harvest soon.

Our onions are just starting to come up.  I walked by our neighbors the other day who had a whole plot of 6-inch high onion shoots and was worried--we seemed way behind. But ours have started shooting up this week and they really grow quickly once they break ground--so I'd guess we're only a week behind our neighbors.  Last year our onions were not a successful crop.  We're off to a better start since we didn't even get them in the ground last year until after the baby was born. 

This is simply how gardening has gone for us.  Every year we've had failures and successes.  Every year we've learned more about how we'll do it better "next time".

We literally are cultivating the skills in our lives in order to live in a more self reliant manner.  Self-reliance isn't something you can just buy--like a 72-hour kit.  A big part of self reliance is developing the skills necessary for providing for your own needs.  This takes time and effort.  I cook well not because it was a skill that I was born with, but because it is a skill that felt was important so I have devoted time and effort into learning it. (Most of that being during the last seven years since I have been married.) 

As I have learned basic skills that appealed to me I have found that more areas of self-reliance start to look interesting--the more I'm interested in seeing if I can provide for that need myself instead of depending on someone else to supply it.  I may not choose to always do so, but that can be my choice. 

I want my children to have that choice as well--to have the independence that comes from being able to do many productive things for themselves.  I don't know if our boys will ever need to know how to spin wool into yarn, but they do need to know how to feed their own bodies.  We invite the boys into the garden with us and particularly into the kitchen--teaching them principles and cultivating within them important skills, as well as cultivating within them the desire to provide for themselves.