2015 – Page 3 – Peacock Orchard

I quit my day job

I have worked full time for an amazing couple for the last six and a half years. I love my job. It’s varied and interesting. I’m the only employee so I have an amazing amount of freedom to do whichever task I would like to do at a given time. This job has enabled me to buy hundreds of trees and bushes. This job has been something I’ve truly loved.

So, why am I leaving? Our kids. They have been happy in their childcare center and I have been happy with it as well. That is no longer the case. I do not want to move them to a different center. Our oldest will be in kindergarten next year and he does not take to change well. When we weighed our options it became clear that the best thing to do was stay home with our children.

However, I see it more as the eventual career shift we knew I’d be making happening just a bit faster than planned. We always knew that when the farm was stable I’d quit to farm full time. We aren’t there yet. We only have 5 acres planted, so many more to go. My time has been quite stretched though. There were times this spring when I wasn’t sure I could do everything I was doing. I am relieved to know that I will not have to split time between the farm and my day job any longer. I’m also relieved to have before and after school care figured out for our Son.

I’m not all that sure how I will do things yet. Daughter doesn’t much like being outside. I’m not sure where she gets that from. So I’m not sure how I’ll manage all my chores with her. I’m excited to figure it out though. I’m excited to start a new chapter of our life. I’m excited to be able to devote my time and attention to our trees and plants.

She fell in some mud at the barn and was SOOOOO mad!

Things will be slower now. I’ll be growing more from seed. I’ll be grafting from the trees I have established already. I’ll be more restricted with financial resources. I’ll be so freed up on my time though, I think it will even out. I can finally dig that pond we need for irrigation and the pond we want for swimming. I can build more Kraters. I can build a giant hugelkulture to block wind where it’s needed. I can do so many things now.

So this winter I’ll be focusing on the house. It has been sadly neglected and I fear I am going to be purging vast amounts of useless stuff. I’ll be turning our unfinished basement into a winter play area for the kids. I’ll be finishing the kitchen (I hope). I’ll be very busy this winter.

So stay tuned for interesting things to begin happening on the farm!

Also, pig pets!

Mini-Krater gardens first snow.

I’ve been intensely interested in how much snow our Kraters may collect. They’ve done pretty well with rainwater collection and I assumed they’d fill with blowing snow, but wasn’t sure. The results are in after our first snow.

Deepest Krater with pawpaw island. Had about a foot of snow all around.

Largest Krater in circumference. Snow only collected on one side.

Goji Krater, did the absolute best. For some reason this Krater is just in an ideal location. It always collects the most water, the plants here did the best and it collected the most snow. I’ll have to think and observe why this krater has done so well.

Just for fun here are a few more pics of our first snow collection and fun:

This is our newly renovated driveway drainage ditch. Filled about 3 feet with snow.

This is another driveway drainage earthwork and the path from the garage to the ditch filled pretty well with snow. Enough for the kids to enjoy fully!

As you can see from this pic the snow blows and sometimes we will have 0 snow on large amounts of the property as there is nothing to catch and keep it. We experimented with our earthworks, which work well, and also selective mowing of our incredible sweet clover sections. Selective, on contour mowing harvested a ton of snow. It was far from the house, and the kids were happy where they were, so I didn’t get pics of this. I’ll try to later on.

My kids are so adorable!

I convinced them to go to the barn to feed the pigs and they did this while I was busy doing chores.

Our akbash is such a weirdo. He doesn’t know what to do with the pigs. He just stood there wagging his tail and doing this high pitched whine that the pigs didn’t like at all.

Such cute little piggies! Getting friendlier every day.

Meanwhile, thanksgiving dinner keeps threatening me.

How to grow and use lemongrass with a recipe

Lemongrass is such a wonderful plant. It can be used in cooking, to deter bugs, to make tea and medicinally. WebMD even has a page on it:

Lemongrass is a plant. The leaves and the oil are used to make medicine.

Lemongrass is used for treating digestive tract spasms, stomachache, high blood pressure, convulsions, pain, vomiting, cough, achy joints (rheumatism), fever, the common cold, and exhaustion. It is also used to kill germs and as a mild astringent.

Some people apply lemongrass and its essential oil directly to the skin for headache, stomachache, abdominal pain, and muscle pain.

By inhalation, the essential oil of lemongrass is used as aromatherapy for muscle pain.

In food and beverages, lemongrass is used as a flavoring. For example, lemongrass leaves are commonly used as “lemon” flavoring in herbal teas.

In manufacturing, lemongrass is used as a fragrance in soaps and cosmetics. Lemongrass is also used in making vitamin A and natural citral.

How does it work?

Lemongrass might help prevent the growth of some bacteria and yeast. Lemongrass also contains substances that are thought to relieve pain, reduce fever, stimulate the uterus and menstrual flow, and have antioxidant properties.

Source

I wanted to grow lemongrass for a different reason, the oil attracts bees. As you know we built our own beehives. I do not want to buy a package of bees, I’d rather attract a swarm. To do that I needed lemongrass essential oil. Husband has been wanting to try his hand at making essential oil, so I just needed the lemongrass. I went to our local oriental market and bought all the lemongrass they had. I put them in a jar of water until they’d sprouted roots, then I planted them out to the kitchen herb garden. They have really taken off. I’ve harvested some for lemongrass chicken and loved it.

Lemongrass

Thai Basil

Here is Daughter helping me prep the lemongrass. Ok, she’s just chewing on it. She informed me she didn’t like eating grass.

Such a cute face!

Stripped of stalk.

All I did to prep the lemongrass was strip off the base leaves, cut the white base of the stalk off, wash it and chop it up to be added to dinner. The recipe I gathered inspiration from is this one. As usual, I didn’t follow the directions and modified as I saw fit. I used bean noodles, sliced chicken breasts, carrots, and green onions. I did not use fish sauce, cuz yuck! O let me just tell you my recipe:

Lemongrass Chicken with Bean Noodles

Ingredients

1 serving bean noodles
Olive Oil- enough to coat bottom of pan
2 large lemongrass stalks or 5 small ones.
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon dried ginger
10 leaves fresh thai basil
1 carrot sliced thinly
2 Tablespoons lemon juice
1 TB brown sugar

Directions

Cook bean noodles as directed on the package.

Add lemongrass, ginger, oil and garlic to a medium skillet and sauté until fragrant. Add the sliced chicken and cook through. Add lemon juice, basil and brown sugar and coat chicken. Next add the noodles and warm through. Remove and serve in a bowl with carrot curls and green onions.

Add spice, to taste with sriracha or red pepper flakes. My children do not like spice and so we kept it optional.

I think bean sprouts would be great in this dish but I didn’t have any when I first made it and it was still great.

Cooking noodles

Cooking the lemongrass, garlic and ginger.

Browning the chicken.

Delicious!

What really works to control houseplant pests?

That is the question I’ve been mulling as I suffer through pest after pest on my indoor plants. I believe I have spider mites. I know I have aphids, white flies and fungus gnats. Actually, at this point it’s more of a question of what I DO NOT have on my plants. This is so discouraging as my jasmine plant has finally bloomed, and I believe that to be what attracted the aphids. They are fully encompassing my jasmine flowers.

This just won’t do, so I started treating. I happened to have a 3-in-one organic pest spray on hand from previous years. So naturally I used that first. It knocked some of the bugs off but it didn’t kill a single one.

Organic Spray is seen here, dripping off my plant. The jasmine flowers are completely covered in bugs

Next I went out to the chicken run and grabbed some Diatomaceous Earth (DE). If you’ve heard of DE before than you know that people proclaim DE to cure absolutely any pest infestation. This dirt has received so many amazing accolades in the organic/homesteading/permaculture community that I had visions of the bugs flopping over dead on contact. So what actually happened? Well I covered my plants in dust is all. It didn’t have any impact on the pests. Well, I shouldn’t say that exactly. The impact it had on pests is that they’ve moved from on top of the leaf, where the dust is, to under the leaf, where it is not.

Next up is the old rubbing alcohol, soap, water wash. This I figured had to work as you are physically removing the bugs. It does work, you do remove them. However it is incredibly time consuming and you have to continue doing it.

I’m brushing the DE off my plants here.

Wiping the bugs off.

Neem oil is supposed to repel the creepy crawlies so I set about locating and acquiring that next. It has been applied to my jasmine plant and I will let you know if there is any real impact on the pests in my home as this was done very recently and I have nothing to report yet.

Ok. I admit. This was for photo purposes only. I put the Neem oil in water and sprayed in on the plants.

Sevin dust is a last ditch effort for me. I’m not even sure it will work as I used it on my peppercorn plant last winter and it almost killed the plant. If Neem oil and Sevin dust fail me I’ll simply have to throw my plants out to get rid of the nasty bugs. I’d really rather not kill my plants.

Crock Pot Beef Bourguignon with updated review of Chateau Maine D’Arman 2010 wine

One very energetic winter day I looked up Julia Child’s recipe for beef bourguignon. It was a very labor intensive meal taking a long period of time to complete. It was also out of this world delicious! I couldn’t see doing it often though, a shame since it is so tasty. I decided to attempt to modify the recipe. I’ve done so twice, both worked very well. The first was simply taking out some of the prep steps, using only a single pan; the second was using my previous modified version and doing the cooking in the crock pot.

Crock Pot Beef Bourguignon

Ingredients:

1 beef roast of desired size and cut (I prefer tri-tip)
4 slices bacon- cut into 1” pieces
1 medium onion- sliced, or 1 lb broiler onions
2 cloves garlic- minced
8 oz bella crimini mushrooms- sliced
2 large carrots- cut into large pieces
6 potatoes- halved
1 cup red wine (I like to use Chateau Maine D’Arman 2010)
3 cups beef broth
2 sticks butter
3 bay leaves
Flour for dusting

Seasoning mix:

1 tsp sea salt
¼ tsp black pepper
¼ tsp white pepper
¼ tsp ground coriander
¼ tsp caraway
1 tsp rosemary
1 tsp thyme

Directions:

In a medium skillet heat 1 stick of butter over low heat. Add the onion and garlic and saute until the onion is caramelized, about 40 minutes. Add the mushrooms and cook until golden brown.

While the onion is cooking add the potatoes to the bottom of your crock pot, then add the carrots.

Add the caramelized onion and mushroom mixture to the crock pot. Do not mix up. You want the potatoes to remain on the bottom.

Slice the beef roast into large chunks, pat each chunk dry with a towel. Coat the beef in a mixture of flour and the seasoning mix, set aside.

In the same skillet you caramelized the onions in, brown the bacon. Remove the bacon pieces to the crock pot but leave the fat in the bottom of the pan. Add the beef and brown on each side. If needed add more butter to the pan.

When the beef is browned move it to the crock pot and de-glaze the skillet with ½ a cup of wine and add to the crock pot with the rest of the wine and the broth. At this time also add the bay leaves and any remaining butter.

Cook on low 8 hours.

To serve remove the potatoes and mash them with some garlic, onion powder and sour cream. If you prefer you do not have to mash the potatoes. You can also take some of the liquid from the crock pot and make a thicker gravy with it at this time. I do this by adding butter and flour to a saucepan and then adding the liquid, whisking until the proper thickness.

If you do not want to do the cooking in a crock pot I would advise getting a pan like This. Then you can do all the steps in the same pan and cook it in the oven for 5 hours at 325 degrees.

I get a lot of hits for This wine review. It seems a lot of people want to know if this is a good wine and I do not know if my previous review covered it all. So I am going to give a few more thoughts after having tried this wine a few more times.

The wine does have good flavor. We had a glass while eating this dinner and it went very well, quite enjoyable. What I did not like, and I’m not sure it was like this last time, was that it was grainy. You could see little bits of red stuff floating around in the wine and they had an awful texture in our mouths. It was really bad at the bottom of the bottle and I actually just threw that out. I don’t want to have to try to chew my wine. If our previous bottle had been like that I am not sure we would have purchased a second. I am unsure if we will give this wine another try after this experience or not. It’s still amazing in this recipe but, that graininess…..yuck!

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How to ripen green tomatoes

We grew approximately 100lbs of tomatoes this year. I was VERY happy. However, we don’t tend to eat raw tomatoes. I use a lot of tomato sauce, however, so when I picked all of our tomatoes before they’d ripened I had to figure out how to ripen them indoors.

Why did I pick them early, you may ask. Well, two reasons. First, the turkeys figured out how to jump the fence and were eating all the ripe ones. Secondly, our great pyr got mad at us when we went on vacation and destroyed my tomato bushes with his big furry body. /sigh

I originally laid all the tomatoes out on our dinning room table. Unfortunately it took the entire table and we do eat there, so I acquired some brown paper grocery bags from my wonderful mother-in-law and started loading the tomatoes into it. My husband wanted to see which would ripen the tomatoes better, an apple or a banana. So some bags had apples and some bananas. I can now safely say apples do a better job. The banana bag still had a lot of green tomatoes in it.

I wanted to ripen the tomatoes quickly because of space constraints and because I knew I wanted to can all of them. I didn’t want to be doing small cannings for the foreseeable future so I sped up the ripening and canned a massive batch of sauce over an entire Sunday.

I used the roasted tomato sauce recipe I posted about Here.

It took about 2 weeks to get 90% of the tomatoes ripe using the bags. I did check them and remove any ripe tomatoes and put them on the table to wait. I also removed any tomatoes that were rotting at that time. I did not have that many tomatoes rot in the bags and it wasn’t a big issue for me to check them. I will use this method again in the future.

Now, I have 10% of the tomatoes left in a bag and I guess that means I have to do another canning at some point. Save me!