Camping at Cape Blanco

Last weekend we set farm work aside to get out for an April camping trip at Cape Blanco State Park. It's a favorite spot of our family's, near Port Orford on the Oregon Coast, and we've gone there the past couple of years to enjoy warm Spring days on the beach. This was not quite the case this year, but we still found plenty to do in the rain. You can read my blog post about last year's fair weather trip on this link here: To the Lighthouse.

We spent one morning exploring the Sixes River. We stopped at a Fish and Wildlife gravel bar access, where we found abundant signs of wild occupants, like beaver...

And raccoon!

We found several active mining claims farther up the river with little campsites at each one. Always on the lookout for good future campsites, we stopped to check some of them out. This one had an old chimney from a miner's shack of days gone by, surrounded by vinca and ivy. This looked like a great spot to have a campfire! They all had signs up saying don't take rocks. This was very hard for me, but I stayed on my best behavior.

We hiked around the New River Wildlife Area south of Bandon, and found this covered bird watching blind on Muddy Lake.

We stopped there for a rest, welcoming shelter from the drizzly skies.

We saw some strange plants beneath the shore pines.

I was pleased to find this Bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) in fruit. The little red berries were beautiful against the shiny green foliage.

Of course, we took some time to play in the mud at the Bandon Marsh National Wildlife Refuge. The kids invented a new activity called "mud skating." I think it has the makings of a great spectator sport.

In spite of being a little drizzly and chilly, it was nice to spend a little time down on the Southern Oregon Coast again. With the green, hilly sheep pastures by the ocean, cranberry bogs, and sparsely populated rural landscape, it's almost like travelling to some faraway place without even leaving Oregon. I'm so intent on putting roots down on this little acre and a half of land that faraway travel has lost much of its appeal for me. I'd take a campfire on the shores of Wickiup Reservoir over a trip to the Bahamas any day. I must say, however, that modern homesteading and camping make for an interesting balancing act. Sometimes it feels like I'm trying to do two completely opposite things all at once. So, with 50+ chickens and chicks, a half-plowed field and a garden to start planting, I am thankful for nearby adventures.

Cute Kids and Blueberry Miracles

On our way home from this past weekend's camping trip (more about soon) we stopped to see our friends Jeff and Taryn on their Siuslaw River homestead and meet all their baby goats. Let me tell you, those were some cute kids all around, and it was hard to resist taking some home with us. We all fell in love with the runt. There's something about tiny little goats that just pulls on your heartstrings I guess.

We all got our goat snuggles.

Spencer really wanted to take that goat home, but we're at capacity with chickens right now.

Taryn had been telling me for a while about her dream to find abundant mature blueberry plants to put all over their sunny hillside. Jeff and Taryn love blueberries more than any folks I've ever known. They were needing to find homes for all these little goats and some of the mamas, and I had made a suggestion they trade their goats for a yurt, which gave her the idea to trade goats for blueberry plants. This morning, I found out that a blueberry miracle had occurred, and they now have 23 blueberry plants that are 3-5 years old! You can read about it on her blog: Miracles Happen! The story of a Blueberry Miracle!

One Proud Mama Chicken

Our little Silkie Bantam hen, aptly named Silkie, has wanted to be a mama for a while now. Over the past year, she went broody about four times, and never at a really good time of year for chicks. We kept taking her eggs because we needed them to eat, but that didn't stop her a bit. She just sat right down on the other hens eggs with ruffled feathers and surly pecks at any hands that came near to collect them. She didn't care whose eggs they were, she was going to hatch out some babies! Sometimes we worried about her when she was broody for a while, not eating, just sitting and looking rather melancholy. Eventually with some cracked corn and coaxing, she always came back around, but we did have one bantam hen give up and die once after a long stint of un-successful broodiness, so we worried about this determined little bird.

Last month, when Silkie went broody again, I said the heck with it, and let her sit on four eggs. I'm not sure whose eggs they were, or what sort of odd breed they would turn out to be with the chicken menagerie we have around here, but Silkie didn't care. She was going to be a mama chicken.

This morning when my son went out to feed the chickens, he found this little face peeking out from under her ruffled feathers. Two chicks had hatched and two more were working on it. Silkie was just sitting there looking proud as a mother hen can be, clucking away and puffing out her soft white feathers. I moved her and her brood into a big dog carrier with food and water to keep the chicks safe from the bigger chickens until they got a little farther along in life. From the looks of it, she's got a Black Australorp chick and an Ameraucana, and one of those eggs looks like it came from our White-crested Black Polish bantam, so it will be a surprise to see what we end up with.

Even chicken dreams come true.

April Showers

April showers are not just the stuff of old sayings this year, and I have been working away on the garden in stolen moments between downpours, and trying not to get too impatient for the field to dry out. I've never checked the weather report so often in my life. I even made it a tab on my browser.

We did manage to work one section on two dry days last week, and I started getting those potato rows hoed before more rain came. As this point, I am planning on getting them planted this weekend rain or shine, soil structure be damned. Potatoes are tough, so hopefully they can take it.

The garden area next to the house is ready to go, and already there are radishes, carrots, kale, New Zealand spinach, beets, broccoli and cabbages coming up.

Pepper seedlings are growing in the makeshift clothes rack/seedling shelf by the window.

Several varieties of tomatoes are soaking up the sunshine in the laundry room.

The greenhouse is filled with salad greens and seedlings.

All the fruit trees are coming along nicely with leaves and blooms. I'm dreaming of fresh, juicy Asian pears every time I spy this one across the yard.

Our 14 meat birds are getting fat and happy in their little brooder bin. It's the first time I've raised Cornish Cross, and these little guys are absolute butterballs!

The "teenager chickens" are out in the pen with the others now, and enjoying scratching around in the straw and congregating at the watering hole.  The pecking order seems to be going smoothly, with our tiny white-crested black Polish hen, Lucy, being the only antagonizer. With the even match in size, I'm not too worried about the chicks holding their own.

There are some colorful characters in this bunch. I'm crossing my fingers that there won't be many roosters in this batch of straight-run bantams. Especially this little gray silkie. I really want to keep it.

And all this time my two little farmers have been doing what country kids do; climbing trees, making mud pies, getting into shenanigans and lending a hand from time to time. I think my son is just about as impatient to plant those potatoes as I am. He asks about it daily. Growing food must be in his genes.

I'm glad to see the Winter passing and jump back into the busy pace of the growing season. It feels really good to apply yourself wholeheartedly to such practical work. Sometimes it gets hectic and crazy, and I wonder what on earth I'm doing, but when I put my own food on the table at the end of the day, it is absolutely worth it.

I'm looking forward to those May flowers.

Ode to the Skunk Cabbage

"Methinks the first obvious evidence of spring is the pushing out of the swamp willow catkins…then the pushing up of the skunk-cabbage spathes…"   ~Henry David Thoreau  (Journal; March 10, 1853)

If you can get past associating its pungent odor with an unpleasant smelling critter, our Western Skunk Cabbage, Lysichiton americanus, is quite the striking beauty in the springtime woods.  Otherwise known as Yellow Skunk Cabbage, Swamp Lantern or Fairy Lanterns, this plant grows in marshy areas along the coast from Alaska to California, and as far inland as Wyoming. This is a plant of many clever qualities, among which are the distinctive strong smell acting as a lure to attract pollinators, and the blooming stem which actually produces enough heat to melt the snow around it. Unfortunately, skunk cabbage has little wild food value with the sharp calcium oxalate crystals causing severe irritation to the mouth, throat and digestive system, but it has a rich history of use as berry baskets, salmon baking wraps, food storage containers and medicine by native peoples. It also makes a good medicinal food for bears, who like to eat the rhizomes upon emerging from hibernation as a laxative.

I don't know about you, but I'm really enjoying this idea of Fairy Lanterns. When their bright yellow flash of color catches your eye on a rainy evening, it isn't hard to imagine that they are little lanterns lighting pathways around the swamp for all the faeries and forest folk.

Custard Pie

Spring brings so many wonderful things, but few can rival the egg. With modern marvels like lights on timers, we can enjoy farm fresh eggs all year, but the Spring is when we look forward to an egg-stravaganza! This is when all those egg recipes come out, and egg salad sandwiches make their way into lunch baskets. As egg production really picks up, we can look forward to selling them and sharing the enjoyment of those dark yellow, free range yolks.

I'm not sure I had ever had custard pie, or given it much thought until I was listening to Led Zeppelin one day and thought that "Custard Pie" sounded like a good thing to make with the extra eggs I had in the fridge. There's the power of suggestion for you. It was such a big hit, that I have been making custard pie as a Springtime treat ever since. Besides being delicious, with all those eggs in it, one can easily justify it as a breakfast option the next day.

Here's the recipe I use from "The Joy of Cooking." I made a gluten-free almond pie crust, but any old pie crust will do. You might want to make two of these, because they go fast!

Custard Pie

Pie crust

3 eggs

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 tsp salt

2 cups milk or coconut milk

1 tsp vanilla

1/4 tsp nutmeg

Bake pie crust in the oven at 450 degrees for 10 minutes.

Beat eggs, add sugar, salt, milk and vanilla.

Pour into pie crust, and sprinkle with nutmeg.

Reduce heat to 325 degrees and bake about 30 minutes or until firm.

Gluten-Free Almond Pie Crust

(from Nourishing Traditions)

1 cup almonds

3/4 cup arrowroot starch

3/8 cups butter softened

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp vanilla

Place almonds in food processor and grind to a meal.

Add remaining ingredients and process until smooth.

Press into a well buttered pie pan.

Here's a little something to rock out to in the kitchen while you try making this recipe.

The song that inspired my culinary curiosity: "Custard Pie" by Led Zeppelin.

Wildwood Flower

Here are a few of the Spring beauties I've spied out in the forest lately...

Pacific Trillium

(Trillium ovatum)

Red-flowering Currant

(Ribes sanguineum)

Round-leaf Violet

(Viola orbiculata )

Indian Plum

 (Oemleria cerasiformis)

Snow Queen

(Synthyris reniformis)

Salmonberry

(Rubus spectabilis)

Pacific Trillium, petals faded pink with age.

Back in the Tent Again

After many weekends of having our plans thwarted by the weather, we finally made it out for our first tent camping trip of the season. Our yurt camping trips in the winter months are a lot of fun, and get us out to the woods and beaches year-round, but there's something about off-pavement camping that feeds the soul in a greater way. No campgrounds, no neighbors, no cars driving by, just a little spot off of a gravel road in the mountains, and the sounds of a crackling campfire, rushing river and singing frogs. There was one such spot down on the Smith River that my husband had in mind, so we packed it up after a busy Saturday around the farm and headed up into the hills. We didn't even leave until 5 o'clock, but we were just happy to be going out camping.

With the Spring runoff, the water level was much higher than we had seen it in this spot before. We watched  the churning, swift river for a while, and decided that it looked like quite a force to be reckoned with, so the kids agreed to stay back from the edges, and play on the big flat sandstone rock just below the campsite.

My daughter occupied herself with the doll family she brought along, setting them up with a little campsite and building a tiny campfire.

We found several of these orange bellied newts by the riverside and many hours were spent building a newt habitat for them in a little tributary stream.

We burned up all our firewood in the evening fire, forgetting that we planned on open-fire cooking for breakfast, which provided an excellent opportunity to call on our collective fire building survival skills. Our kids have been in this great after school program called Coyote Kids, where they learn all about nature awareness, survival skills, lost proofing, wildlife tracking and all sorts of useful things. Even though the woods were wet from the previous days rain, we were not deterred. My husband went out and snapped off some low branches at the bottom of trees with dense canopies and my son talked him through how to set up the charred remnants of the nighttime fire with the dry twigs. I remembered a good friend's advice to look for standing dead alder trees, and after knocking a couple of them over, we had dry firewood and a roaring morning fire.

It was great to spend a night out in the woods and wake up in the morning to all the green leaves unfolding and woodland flowers blooming. Aside from a light sprinkling in the night, the weather held out beautifully and temperatures were comfortable. After breakfast and coffee cooked over our campfire, we spent some time scouting for other campsites along the river. We found a few good future possibilities and at one we encountered a huge Barred Owl. It flew out across the road and landed up in a tree where it sat looking at us for a long time. Having only run across owls in the woods a couple of times, this was a real treat.

We headed for home feeling refreshed and rejuvenated, and glad that camping season has come around again. I have no doubt that it will be another busy season around our little farm, with much to do on the weekends, but we will just do our best to get out in the wilds as much as possible. Those nights spent off-pavement are where it's at.

Chicken Crossing

Goin' to the Hootenanny

Sometimes we all just need to kick up our heels and dance, and that is exactly what we did this last Thursday and Friday. Deadwood Revival, a four-piece, progressive old-time jamgrass ensemble from my hometown came travelling through last week, playing one night at a local watering hole and one night at the civic center in a nearby town. Since moving out into the country, evening cultural activities have definitely taken a back burner in life, which I can accept. I would take quiet mornings and songbirds in my field over living in town and taking in more concerts and shows any day. However, I do love live music, and there are some bands I just won't miss a chance to see. This is one of them. We went both nights. 

Deadwood Revival is made up of Jason Mogi on guitar and clawhammer banjo, Kim Trennery on guitar, Julie Campbell on fiddle and Ches Ferguson on bass ukulele. They play a variety of old-time tunes, folk songs, hoedowns, original works and Grateful Dead covers woven together with string band jams in between. Whether they're playing "Cotton Eyed Joe" or "Brown Eyed Women," they always get people up and dancing. The Friday night show out in the little town of Drain was all ages, so our kids got to dance the evening away with us. The dance floor was a great mix of all those ages, and an old-timer was kind enough to show my son some happenin', foot-stomping moves!

 

Here they are playing a favorite of mine, "Red Rocking Chair" at the Axe and Fiddle in Cottage Grove.

And a handful of links to a few more favorites: Cold Rain and Snow, Little Maggie, and

Fire on the Mountain.

Now, these are some folks who know how to put on a real hootenanny. In case you're wondering exactly what that is, Hootenanny, as defined by Wikipedia means, "an Appalachian colloquialism that was used in early twentieth century America to refer to things whose names were forgotten or unknown. In this usage it was synonymous with thingamajig or whatchamacallit, as in "hand me that hootenanny." Hootenanny was also an old country word for "party". Now, most commonly, it refers to a folk-music party." Since this band does such an excellent job of reclaiming old-time folk and Appalachian tunes and "digging them out of the mud" as they say, I think their shows deserve some fitting terminology. So, I am happily reclaiming the word "hootenanny." Go on and say it. It's a rollicking good time, folks.

Braving Alaska: Food for Adventuresome Thought

I will start of by saying that I've had Alaska on the brain for a very long time. Often I wonder what it is about this far-flung state to the north that captures my imagination so. In my mind, it stands as the last frontier; a rugged, sparsely populated, beautiful and harsh wilderness. I can't help being fascinated by such a place, and I couldn't tell you how many times my husband and I have said, "Let's just move away to the wilds of Alaska and leave it all behind." The more I hear and read about the harsh and extreme realities of Alaskan living, I wonder whether we're cut out of the right stuff, but one day, we might just decide we're tough enough to go for it. I'm not through with big adventures yet, and you really never know where life may lead.

Recently I discovered the documentary selection on Netflix, which has opened up a whole new world of possibilities for family movie nights and stay-in date nights with my husband. A few weeks ago, we found a gem called "Braving Alaska". I knew it was going to be good when I saw that it was directed by Mark Stouffer, brother of Marty Stouffer, our wildlife documentary hero. This 1993 National Geographic documentary narrated by Martin Sheen follows four modern-day homesteading families in the remote Alaskan bush, highlighting the ups and downs, and realities of their rugged lives. I found it fascinating, inspiring and cautionary all at the same time.

Here's a brief summary from a movie website:  "Imagine living hundreds of miles from your nearest neighbor or grocery store and having mail delivered by airplane a few times each year, and battling the long, harsh winters with temperatures that plummet to -51 degrees Celsius. Such are the living conditions chosen by the hearty few who inhabit America's last frontier: the Alaskan bush-a spectacular land of rivers and mountains so remote that you'll enter the lives of four families who have turned their backs on civilization to fulfill their dreams of living off the land. Join the modern day pioneers as they face the daily challenges of survival-hunting for food, staying warm, and fending off grizzlies. You'll experience America's pioneering spirit through these remarkable people who are Braving Alaska!" How could you resist with a description like that?

So, look for it at your library, or on Netflix, or wherever you find your movies. It can also be found in a four-DVD boxed set called "Alaska: Into the Wilderness" which also contains three other Alaskan documentaries. This is a must-see for any homesteader, or wilderness enthusiast out there, right along with "Alone in the Wilderness", also an excellent documentary about Dick Proenneke, modern-day Alaskan homesteader, produced by Bob Swerer. You can read my post about it here: Alone in the Wilderness: The Inspiring True Story of a Modern-Day Mountain Man.

We all need to feed our dreams of adventure, and if yours involves Alaska, this is some mighty good fuel.

Bone Broth: A Homesteader's Staple

The question that has challenged mothers everywhere for centuries; How does one feed a family healthy, nourishing food on a budget? While this is a complicated question that involves many pieces like where to shop, growing your own food, family budgeting, and so on, I would say that which meals are regularly cooked is of great importance. In our single income household, soup plays a key role. I make a big pot of soup once or twice a week and re-heat the leftovers for dinner the following night. We even get lunches for myself and my husband out of it a couple times a week too. While any old tap water will do as a base, I have found that a good broth lays the foundation for soup excellence. When I got my hands on the Nourishing Traditions Cookbook by Sally Fallon last year, I was intrigued by the concept of bone broths. By cooking soup bones down for 2-3 days, all the marrow and calcium are extracted and you are left with a nutrient rich, hearty soup base. Soup bones and stew meat are some of the cheapest cuts you can find out there, since they are considered the scraps, so it's a very economical and sustainable choice for omnivores like myself. Additionally, with two kids who can't handle dairy, it's a good way to give them much-needed calcium.

Soup bones can be found at any grocery store meat counter or  butcher shop for a very modest price per pound. I go to the organic, grass-fed farm down the road every couple of months and buy some lamb and beef leg bone slices to stick in the freezer. Sometimes they come individually packaged like in the photo above, and sometimes I just get a big bag of them. We also got some elk leg bones from a neighbor that worked beautifully, but my attempts at making pork bone broth from our yearly half pig did not turn out so well. The flavor was just not happening for me. I'd love to hear from anyone who has successful pork bone broth stories and see if it was something I did wrong there. I also use the carcass any time we roast a chicken, and cook it down the same way for a chicken stock. It has a different quality than the other bone broths, but is equally nutritious.

So, you take your 1-2 Lbs of sliced up bones and put them in a crock pot full of water. Simmer it on low for two to three days. I check it frequently and add more water to top it off as it evaporates out. It fills the house with a delicious aroma while it bubbles away. This is one of those recipes that takes very little work on my part, so I have grown to love it dearly. When soup night rolls around once a week, I pour the broth into a pot on the stove and add lots of diced veggies and beans, lentils, rice, and maybe some sausages or stew meat if it's in the budget that week. I have also had good luck with coconut milk, which you can read about on one of my previous posts: Soup Secrets.

There you have it. Bone broths are the best! Delicious soup for dinner..and lunch...and dinner again!