Strolling Through Our Woods

After church on Mother's Day we took a nice walk around our property.  It was a rather cool afternoon, with a threat of rain and temperatures in just the upper 50s.  We had a very enjoyable little hike, even though we had to wear jackets!

 

These pretty flowers are spiderwort from Mackey Bend, Lisa's homeplace growing up.  Lisa has two big bunches here in the wild garden.  She has several other plants and flowers from her home that reminds her of her mother, but these were the one's blooming when we took the walk.

These gladolia's are from the Mary Castle homestead across the river.  Before she passed away, the new bridge came through and took away all her garden space where they were planted.  She was happy that we were able to re-locate them , along with some of her other plants and flowers, before the bull dozers came through.

  

 

Lisa calls these dewberries.  They are a type of black berry that runs right along the ground.  The berries are among the first to ripen, and are super sweet.  They are better than blackberries or even raspberries!

We have three different varieties of wood sorrel.  I think those above are called violet wood sorrel, due to the purple markings.  The flower also has a violet tint to it.  It is a tasty sour treat on a hike through the woods and helps to quench thirst.

This is yellow wood sorrel.  It does not have the purple markings but tastes the same as the violet sorrel.  There is common wood sorrel that we didn't find on this hike.  We also have several good patches of sheep sorrel around, but we didn't go to them on this walk either.  All the sorrel are high in Vitamin C, good to nibble on, and are good as a tea or to use in salads.  They also contain oxalic acid which is ok, but can be bad for folks suffering from gout, rheumatism, or kidney stones if they consume too much of it at one time. Historically, wood sorrel was used to treat scurvy, fevers, urinary infections, mouth sores, nausea and sore throats.

The above plant is one that Lisa wants to look up.  She thinks it might be Angelica or New Jersey Tea.  We haven't identified it yet.  Looking for and finding plants that she does not know is one of Lisa's favorite things to do!

 I just thought this was a pretty picture looking out across the ravine.

We are very thankful that we have a nice wooded area that we can roam around and explore whenever we feel like it!  Nature is a wonderful place to spend some time!

Home Butchering and Processing by My Country Boys

I am thankful for the meat God has provided for us and I'm also very thankful  for two sons who can do the butchering and processing of said meat!  The past week and a half has seen our table filled with the blessings of fresh venison, chicken and pork. 

It's been deer season and Matthew and Simon both went hunting a little, even though things have been fairly hectic around here.  I did not take the oppourtunity to go hunting this time, but Matthew got a nice doe.  He killed it Saturday, November 10th, the first day of deer season.  Simon saw a deer when he went hunting all by himself Sunday evening but did not get a shot at it.  We ate some of the venison for our Sunday dinner on the 11th and everyone agreed that the way Lisa fixed it was the best venison dish we had ever had!  She rolled back-strap slices in seasoned flour and laid out two layers of them with butter and cheddar cheese between the layers of venison and also on top.  It was delicious!

On Friday, Simon butchered two of our roosters all by himself and we had some excellent chicken-and-dumplings for supper Friday evening and Saturday.  Simon has been around us butchering chickens for years and he had butchered some before when Matthew was with him.  This time, however,  Matthew was out of town, I was still at work, and Lisa stayed in the house.  Simon dispatched both birds and commenced to the plucking all by himself, with no trouble at all!  When I came home from work, Lisa was already getting the meat into a pot.  It was a delicious meal and I didn't even find out that it was not Lisa who did the butchering until a few days later!  It was no big deal to Simon, I guess, but after I realized what he had done, I was very impressed!

Matthew had been out of town last week doing some work at Bob and Brenda's home in Corbin and got home Saturday evening.  He was a bit tired Sunday, but he wasn't going to let a few days work 3 hours away slow him down at all.  He had butchered a number of our hogs in previous years, so I knew he was very good at it.  What I didn't know was that he would feel like butchering a 500 plus pound hog on Monday!  We had decided that we wanted her butchered, and had checked into having it done professionally again like we did back in June.  Appalachian Meats said they were all tied up this week with deer processing and could not get to our hog until December.  When I got home from work Monday, I discovered that Matthew had decided to butcher our large hog all by himself, and save us a big butchering fee!  The tenderloin from this hog was huge and even after I trimmed off all the fat we packed thick tenderloin slices into 7 gallon size freezer bags! We are going to turn a lot of the deer meat into deerburger, so now we can use some of the pork fat in the hamburger mix.  The meat from a deer is very lean, and not the best for hamburger without some fat.  We are going to go for a 80-20 or 85-15 ratio.  We will still have a good amount of fat to render into lard, as well.

I did not get any pictures of Simon with the roosters he butchered since it was all completed by the time I got home, but I took some of Simon working on the deer meat.  I did get home in time to take a few pictures of Matthew cutting out the tenderloin of the hog while it was hanging up.  The dining room table was soon covered with pork, much like the pictures of Simon with the venison, but I didn't think to take a picture of the table with the pork tenderloin.  I'm mainly wanting to show some pictures of the two butchers in the family, anyway.  They both are doing some wonderful work and I am very proud to have two such sons!  (By the way, Christina helped with the skinning of both the deer and the hog.  I didn't get a picture of her this time, but I'm also proud of my country gal!)

2011 Heritage Days At the Mountain Home Place: Day One

Here are some scenes from Day 1 of Heritage Days at the Mountain Homeplace. It was mainly school groups coming on this day, although there were also some tourists from Georgia and several other visitors from the public. I'm only putting up pictures of my family right now, even though there were many more re-enactors present demonstrating a whole variety of old fashioned homestead skills.

Simon played the spoons and demonstrated 1850 style wooden toys, Christina learned about and then showed how to use a spinning wheel and also demonstrated how to make corn-husk dolls, Timothy pitched in all over and looked cute running around wearing his coon-skin cap (but I didn't get a picture of him wearing it), Matthew led the talk about sorghum and demonstration of the cane press, and Lisa helped in the old church and explained about the Underground Railroad quilts. (I was only there for about an hour and a half, so I didn't get to help in any homesteading demonstrations).

I may write more about our experiences in a later post, but for now I'll just let the pictures from Day One do the talking!


















Days Two and Three of Mountain Homeplace Heritage Days coming up!

2011 Pure Water Hollow Garden Tour

Our gardens have occupied a good bit of our summer activities here at Pure Water Hollow, but I have not shared much about them.

We have two gardens once again this year, one up by the house and the other across the road down on the river bank. I call them our "main garden" and the "river garden". We had an incredible amount of rain in May, with about 15 inches, when our average is less than 5! Since things around here didn't dry out until the the first couple weeks of June, we got a late start on the gardens.

We did our main garden first. Lisa planted most of her tomato plants here, along with onions, garlic, potatoes, peppers, corn, zuchini, rhubarb, and squash. This is also where we planted our new strawberry plants and where the struggling blueberry plants are.

Here's the garden gate. You can see our seedless grape arbor to the right. They didn't do real great this year as they were hit with some type of fungus. You can make out the potatoes, beans and some of the tomatoes in this picture.

The potato plants looked really nice, but I didn't get any good pictures of the whole patch. In this garden we used heirloom varieties we bought from Pine Tree Seeds. We're growing Adirondack Red and Blue, Irish Cobbler, Shepody, and Kennebec. Here is a picture of when they were in bloom:



We also planted heirloom varieties of the green beans. We have Pencil Pod Yellow Bush and Giant Stringless Green Bush.





This shot takes in a lot of the tomato plants. This is the second year that we did not buy any plants at the store at all! I am very pleased that we were able to save seed from last year and grow plants from our own seed!



Along the fence Lisa planted the sauce tomatoes. We have about 20 of these plants that will hopefully give us much spagetti sauce, etc. You can see four rows of the other tomato plants. In the first row we have 8 Marglobe plants, the second row has 9 Mountain Pride plants. The third row is 10 Rutgers plants and the fourth row contains 10 Black Prince plants. There are also a variety of cherry, or small, tomato plants placed here and there. We have red cherry, snowberry, and yellow pear.

We'll have plenty of tomatoes soon!



The corn is still small, but it is cool that our saved seed from last year is growing! It is called "Country Gentleman" which is an heirloom variety that we liked very much last year. The first seeds I planted all came up but then the crows snipped each little plant off and ate the seed! It was disappointing to have to replant, but with the help of some fishing line above the plot, the crows left this group alone. Hopefully, they will have time to make us some juicy ears!



In between our corn, Lisa planted peppers and eggplants.




Here are the zuchinni plants that have already given us many zuchinnis! It's amazing how fast they grow!






Here are some bean plants that Debbie Sue had purchased and the potatoes.



Here we have the onions and maybe you can make out the garlic behind them.



In between the onions and garlic Lisa planted her lettuce and Dwarf Pak Choy for salads.



I don't have any good pictures of the sunflowers or cucumbers yet, so maybe I'll post about them later.

On our way out of the garden let's stop by the big grape arbor and check out the grapes.

This arbor has one Niagra (white) and 2 Concord (purple) vines growing on it, and they have produced an abundance of grapes! However, they have been hit pretty hard again by a fungus we think is called "black rot". It is the same thing that hit our seedless varieties by the main garden. I'd say we have probably lost 80-90% of our grape harvest! I have been picking the rotted ones off, but you can see some grapes that have recently fallen to it in these pictures. There is still a very nice ceiling of grapes throughout the arbor, and the grapes that survive will still be good for juice or jam making. But we won't have nearly as much jam compared to what could have been! I will try to post another time about how we can combat "black rot" in the future.





On our way down to the river garden, Christina took some beautiful pictures of things that are in bloom right now.











I thought this was a cool shot, even though you can't make out the bee and spider inside the flower real well:



This isn't a flower, but Christina got a neat picture of our latest baby chick:



On the river bank we have several good spice bushes before you get to the garden. These berries will turn red and when they are dried out they can be ground up and used as all spice!





At the river garden, we have some heirloom corn called "Rainbow Aztec" we bought from Baker Creek last year. We didn't have room for it last year, so I decided to try it this year even though it was so late. Less than half of the seed planted germinated and fewer are still living. I don't know if it will make anything or not this year.



I didn't have any room in the fenced part of the river garden for this corn, so I surrounded it with fishing line on the sides and above it. The idea is that the fishing line keeps the crows out from above because they are scared to get their wings trapped, and it keeps the deer and dogs out from the side because they feel the line when they walk against it. It has not been broken, so it has either worked or no animal has tried to go in it!

Here we are on the outside of the fence getting ready to enter the garden and pick some more beans. You can see our water bottles in the garden cart, which is important during these hot and humid "heat warning" days! You can also see the peach trees inside the fenced area that are part of this spot in the upper right in these pictures. (They did not have much success this year.)





This is a rather long garden consisting of various beans, potatoes, and peanuts.



The first patch of green beans are an heirloom variety called "Black Valentine" that we are trying for the first time. Next are the "Tender Green" beans, both the hybrid and heirloom varieties. The hybrid actually seemed to have more and bigger beans than the heirloom variety, but the heirloom "Tender Green" did great as well! And we will be able to save and re-plant the heirloom beans, which makes them more valuable in our eyes. The last group of beans we've been picking on are our heirloom "Contender" beans. All of these that I mentioned so far are bush bean types.








The pole beans do not yet have any beans on them as they take much longer. This is the first time we have grown pole beans and I think it is really neat how Lisa, Matthew and Simon tied up some bamboo canes to make bean teepees! They are an heirloom variety called Rattlesnake Pole. They seem to be doing very well!




We are also growing kidney beans and soup beans. Here is a shot of the King of the Early soup beans:



I planted our red Pontiac and white potatoes here in the river garden last week as well! I am excited that we were able to save so many of them from last fall. Some of the plants have already started to come up, but I didn't take any pictures of them. If they have time to turn out good potatoes, it will be the first time we have grown potatoes from our own crop of the previous year! Our goal is that we won't ever have to buy seed potatoes in the future because we will have our own that we keep over winter!

We are trying our hand at peanuts this year as well! We had grown them on a small scale years ago and really liked them, but we have never tried to grow enough to make our own peanut butter. It seems that this sandy river soil is perfect for peanuts! We have over 300 plants that look pretty good!




Here are some closeups of the peanut blooms:





We don't really know what we're doing concerning growing peanuts, so we are just keeping our fingers crossed. Lisa read somewhere that we were maybe supposed to thin the plants out, but we can't bring ourselves to do that!

Here is a picture taken from the far side of the garden at the telephone pole. You can see the peanut plants in the foreground and then you can make out all the bean plants going back to the gate. The gate is next to that white garbage bag tied to the fence. You can't see the corn in this picture, but you get a feel for how long this spot is!

As you can see, we have much to thank the Lord for! We have a good harvest, as well as some major work, to look forward to!