summer's end

We made it through summer! and what a summer it was... we had to struggle with the drought conditions, but made it without too much damage.

This fall has already seen the birth of two new calves, a girl and a boy, with one still to come in the next day or two.

At the moment we are in that interval between seasons, where summer production in the garden slows down, and the fall crops are not yet come on. Our new raised garden beds worked wonderfully, production from them was heavy at the peak, and is still happening at a slower pace, with the shortened days after the equinox, and the cool nights. The green beans vines are still blooming galore, their little new beans swing in the air like little green earnings. They taste wonderfully fresh, when I pick them and put them straight in the pot.

Our big apple produced another crazy huge crop, we finally got it all picked, for which we are thankful...please no more apple sauce to can...(just kidding) apple sauce is yummy come mid winter. The pantry overflows with food put up this summer.

While we haven't finished it yet, the pizza oven has a good start, and the indoor market area is much closer to completion, thanks to the help of friends and some wonderful WWOOFers. So much can be done when people work together.

 Fall is a wonderful season, pumpkins, apples, pies, and lots of cheese making with the freshening of three new cows. 

This season we will be making beer, mead, and bread, as well as perfecting our own brand of Tomme style cheese, and some other hard cheeses. The weather is perfect for aging all three things, as well as fermenting  kombucha. 

Hopefully we will have a wetter fall/winter than last, we really missed the wild mushrooms last fall/winter which failed to appear in the unseasonable dry. By November we will know if we will be "shroomin".

We are hoping to find a WWOOFer (s) to help us out starting mid October, who would be willing to stay through mid November and who is into learning how to milk cows and feed calves, among other things. Chris is going back to see his folks in Va. for a week in Oct. We thought we had the bases covered, with two helpx kids, who suddenly up and left three weeks early, fresh from the city, naive about the realities of farm living. Too bad, but oh well. They were our first two helpX selections and apparently into farm living as long as it didn't require actually living on a farm, critters, hay, dirt, calf slobber, manure, spiders ...controlled chaos...you know... the whole catastrophe. 

Some more Farm projects planned for this summer...

Rosie is a Belgian work horse

One of the projects we want to work on this summer is getting our draft mare trained to pull our carriage. We already started her harness training last year, but didn't work her all winter because of the bad weather. The time is ripe for the next phase of her training. She is very sweet and trainable. She is quiet and responsive to positive reinforcements, strong and willing. Her name is Rosie. We also have two young colts, a three and a four year old, who are ready to start, they are Arabians.

Another project we plan for this summer is building a cob pizza oven. We love pizza, and our cheese specialty is mozzarella...a big wood fired pizza oven just makes sense doesn't it? To that end we have already got a big pile of clay, sand, and a piece of expanded diamond lath steel to sift the soil with and a bunch of rice straw, tarps etc., the project is all ready to go, we hope for lots of volunteers who want to help, we already have a few. We've never built anything substancial with cob, but have avidly researched the project and are ready to jump in and get muddy with both feet, on this project. My mouth waters at the thought of wood fired pizza, made with our own cheeses and sausages, organic home grown tomatoes, mushrooms and herbs, garlic, basil, oregano, savory and the like. Here is a link to the prototype we would like to build, with our own variations. We are thinking sometime mid June for getting it started.

yum, pizza!

Then there is the indoor market we are hoping to open around July 4th. We have contracted with a carpenter friend to build the next phase of this. We already have a big metal building/shop. Half of it is to become our future market, "God willing and the creek don't rise". It would be nice to get the pizza oven ready about the same time as we finish the market. We have to build a wall, install french doors and lay a laminate floor, before we can open. It's going to be nice. Out side of the market we will have an awning that will provide shade to the front.

The metal building for the market

Farm Projects Spring 2014...Zone ONE

Summer squashes, just poking their heads up.

Spring is all about planting! This year we are further defining our permaculture zones, and improving them, starting with zone one.

Zone one is the zone a person visits most, where we will be planting crops which must be picked often, in fact this area will have something needing to be harvested everyday.


Those crops will be salads, leafy greens, summer squashes, beans, peas, broccoli, herbs, tomatoes, peppers, okra, egg plant, flowers, and more. The area we have chosen is directly behind our house.

We have already started refining the area. A few years ago we brought in a "bob

green house frame awaiting it's covering.

cat" skip loader, leveled and flattened an area for a green house. Last fall we got the basic structure for the green house up and standing, bought the green house plastic and acquired a big shade cloth to cover it all. We hope to get it covered this spring to house our tomato crop and create a space for starting seedlings and rooting cuttings.

Late last summer, we moved a lot of compost, with the help of a good WWOOf crew and created some large beds, where we grew a late tomato crop and wintered over collards for the table. This spring we have been upgrading those beds to be raised ones with some redwood boards reclaimed from an old

One bed we started last year is now 1.5 feet deep.

deck, a carpenter friend was hired to rebuild. In addition we made some new raised beds, but still have the space and materials to put in some more, which we are eager to do, so we can plant out all the rest of our seedlings. After we finish that we will install a drip tape irrigation system to utilize our water efficiently. A thick mulch of rice straw will cap it all off.

The big apple a few years ago, now it is twice the size.

In this same zone one area we have several fruit trees, mostly apples, which, having past their April bloom, need to have their fruit thinned, so we don't have broken branches, and our apples will be nice and plump. Our largest apple, grown from a seed, has given us around 400#'s of beautiful fruit for the past 4 years, the apples on this tree are delicious, and keep really well. Thinning the fruit is quite a job, apples flower in clusters along the branches, many of the flowers will turn into fruit this year, the trees were so vigorously pollinated by our, oh so, active bees. We thin out the baby apples to one per cluster, and feed them to our goats, who think green apples are a super treat. We get as much as two five gallon buckets of tiny apples the fruit set is so great. Later in the summer, when the apples are getting plump but are still green, we usually have to thin again, up to three more five gallon buckets,

Green apple thinnings, are good for pies!

we use those apples for all sorts of things, pies, making farm pectin to mix with other fruits to make them jell, we dry them which concentrates the sugars in them, Nature's sweet tarts! We have eight apples, and two pears trees, and have already been busy, all, but the big one, have been thinned.

To thin the apples we use a tall orchard ladder, it is fun to climb up into the tree, one feels like a bird up there surveying the surroundings from an airy perch. The little apples pinch off easily, but it is tricky too, not to damage the fruit buds while doing the job. It feels good when the job is done, I'm always relieved, knowing the tree branches won't break under the weight of too many apples.

We are looking to get help on these projects. As mentioned before, to thin the apples we will climb ladders up into the trees, and bit by bit pinch off the extra fruit. 

To build the beds, we will have to do a little light construction, measure and lay out, cut the boards with a saw, assemble the sides, pre-dig the beds and then fill them up with wheel barrels of soil and compost. Then we will lay out the irrigation lines and hook them up to the water, after all that, we will tuck our seedlings in and mulch them. Latter we will be thankful, for tomatoes, and peppers, egg plant and onions. Do I see lasagna & egg plant Parmesan in the future? I hope so...yum! Come and help us eat it!

Tomatoes from last year's garden.

Home made lasagna, its great! 

Tomato sauce made from our own Roma tomatoes!

Egg plant Parmesan, nice and cheesy, like we like it!

We have many projects other happening this spring, but these are the main zone one, activities. There are many seedlings already started for this area, that require daily attention,until they are planted, along with some rooted cuttings of currants we want to also plant out  in our zone one area, and there are lots of potted herb plants too, for one bed we plan to turn into an herb garden nice and close to the kitchen. Every morning and evening they need water, especially now, since the weather has become so warm.

lettuce and other seedlings

veggies and flowers

There are always so many interesting things to do and experiment with on a farm. It is never dull. At the end of the day you feel good, it is nice to take a quiet evening moment, sit on the blue bench and contemplate on how lucky we are to live on this big benevolent Earth, our only home in the vast universe. We feel privileged to be able to live on our little plot and to have the skills and the will to care for it in as responsible a way as we are able. Join us there sometime...

The blue bench

Wwoofing on our farm

 We are a stable couple, into sustainable agriculture & practicing ecologically sound organic farming methods. Our names are Christopher (48) and Rebecca (63), see picture above. Rebecca has been farming for 45 years. Christopher for 20 years. Very occasionally we host 'wwoofers' who seriously want to learn about farming and hone their farming skills (though we did not host any in 2015, due to the California drought). Must be registered with WWOOFUSA.org, and at least 21 years old to apply. 

We are located in the Sierra Foothill country of Northern California, we call our place a "subsistence farm", that is, we subsist on it. It is, at present, economically solvent, we make our total living farming, living close to nature. We sell beef steers and Pure Bred Angus bullocks and replacement Angus heifers, an occasional Angus breeding cow and Duroc weaner pigs, plus veggies and fruit at our farm stand. We are nine years into the process of rehabbing, with limited funds, an old farm into a small, bio-diverse, non-certified but organic operation, moving in the permaculture direction. Sir Francis Bacon said" One can only command Nature by obeying her". Studying the lay of the land and how Nature works on our piece of ground, in order to enhance that, has been like faceting a diamond, employing ART as well as science. There is still much to do. Some times we have opening for registered,'wwoofers' on our farm.

The two of us raise many farm animals, Rat Terrier dogs for organic vermin control. Rats and gophers are a real problem for us as we do not use poisons on our farm. Bees for honey. We usually have a flock of chickens in summer for eggs and meat. We have Duroc hogs (five sows & a boar). We have a grass fed beef program... with 12 purebred Angus beef cows and an Angus beef bull plus calves. We have a dairy operation that pushes everything along, with three Jersey, a Holstein and some Holstein/Jersey cross milk cows, along with

their calves & 3 Alpine dairy goats we milk in summer. We use the milk for our home use, making home made cheese, feeding our calves, pigs and chickens. Chris helps out part time on an exotic animal ranch near-by, helping care for camels. 

The main thrust of our farm development at the present time is soil improvement. Presently crops come and go with varying degree of success, however if the soil is developing in a positive way, crop success is not so important to us. Animal manure is spread directly on the soil or is mixed with other carbonaceous compost components, to be broken down further, until it is ready to become proper plant food.

The compost feeds the soil, the soil feeds the crops, the crops feed us and the animals. We do our best to facilitate the turning of a holistic self sustaining cycle. 

Through the summer (our busy season) we have a small farm stand, in front of the farm, every

Our farm stand

Thursday, where we sell locally grown vegetables and fruits, it starts in Spring and ends when the weather gets bad. The stand is attended by a small, slowly expanding, local customer base. It is exciting to explore anew, old ways of creating legal local community food sovereignty, by working together with other local producers and consumers, in the spirit of cooperation and trust... rather than in the out dated spirit of greed and competition typical of corporate style public food sales...so refreshing. 

This area is very rural, it has a post office and a gas station-country-store-video-combo and that's about it. There is no TV reception here (thank goodness). This is a pastoral foothill country, dry in summer and wet in winter; a classic Mediterranean climate, we can grow grapes, olives and apples, lemons and even hardy oranges. Irrigation water is normally plentiful; (though the last few winters have been exceptionally dry and we have  had drought to deal with in 2014 and 2015) soils are deep clay loam types, very productive. There are tracts of wilderness close by, full of wildlife. There is swimming in wild rivers, hiking and camping within a half hour drive. Grass Valley and Nevada City, Ca. are about 45 minutes away where there are many cultural events every summer...a bluegrass festival, a world music festival, a Celtic Festival, Draft horse show and more. The people in our community are friendly, interesting and generally ecologically minded. There are two award winning olive oil producers, three excellent vineyard w/wineries, and several organic farms, a farmers market, as well as a number of active artists and musicians, in our small community.

In 2011 late winter, our 1st wwoofer helped us for three weeks, which was an exceptional exchange of work and understanding for all of us, we are still in touch with him (thanks Marc).

Our first wwoofer

At this point we have had many wwoofers help us develop different aspects of our farm and are very thankful for the wonderful energy and enthusiasm that they have contributed to making a difference in our lives and on our small farm. We are looking forward to meeting more wwoofers in the coming years. 

Accommodations for 'WWoofers' are very modest. Wifi is available. We have an outside social area, where we hope to build a cob pizza oven/bench come summer (yum pizza). 

We eat healthy, tasty, organic locally grown foods whenever possible, we are not heavy meat eaters ourselves, finding it healthier, we tend to cook a lot of cheese and veggie loaded

dishes when we cook. While we do have family style sit down dinners, once or twice a week, guests will need to be able to cook for themselves and others on a regular basis. We have home grown eggs, farm produced meats (beef, lamb and pork), locally produced olive oil, cornmeal, tomatoes, lots of fruits, leafy greens, beans, home canned goods, salad stuffs, root crops, all in season of course, we buy bulk rice, bulk noodles and bake most of our own bread. Providing food for omnivorous or vegetarian meals is not a problem. 

Depending on the time of year, activities others can get hands on experience with include, garden work, planting, watering & irrigation management, seed saving, thinning and pruning fruit trees, propagating plants, grafting, composting and soil feeding, building and maintaining garden beds, roto-tilling, fence maintenance, daily feeding and caring for the critters,

working with horses, helping birth animals, bottle feeding baby animals, calves and goat kids, pasture management, herding, goat care, daily milking cows, daily cleaning and care of milking machines, the 'ins and outs' of how to daily handle milk for home consumption. Meat processing, sausage making, & in summer weekly farm-stand preparation of fruits and veggies,

packaging farm grown veggies. Then there is, processing and making cheeses, we make various hard cheeses, for home use. Mozzarella, provolone, cottage cheese, feta,& goat's cheeses, you can learn how we do it.

We do periodic soap making, pickling in summer, we dry fruits, mushrooms & herbs, can fruits and veggies, pressure can meats and soups, brew beer all for our home use; we also help our vintner friend make wine and manage his (legal) small vineyard; we make home made breads and more. There are lots of things to do and learn. 

Work can be hard sometimes, moving soil, building fences, etc., when it is, it is that kind of work that makes you feel "good", like you got something done at the end. Days are full... still we do take time to enjoy life, have a beer or glass of wine (in moderation) at the end of the day, relax, listen to or make music, read, do art work, have fun with others, engage in exchanging ideas and developing true friendships. We have found that balancing fun & wholesome play with the effort it takes to do farm tasks, is a big key to living the "good life". 

If you apply for a 'wwoofing' stay our farm and are accepted... we are looking forward to working and playing, together with you, on our farm, should you be our guest. 

                     ~Rebecca and Christopher

  

Milk : Miracle Substance

Milk is amazing stuff. Full of protein as high in quality as any meat, and laden with delicious cream and sweet milk sugars, formulated by Great Nature herself to be a perfect food. Fresh raw milk, the kind straight from a healthy cow or goat, is a true "super food", incomparably better than the stuff you get in a carton or plastic jug, from the super market . 

Fresh milk straight out of the cow, is warm, sweet and creamy, effervescently alive, it comes with it's full compliment of enzymes in tact, to help digest it, plus it is full of beneficial bacteria that protect it, from pathogenic invaders, like a kind of "mini army". If you pour fresh milk, the top of the milk glistens with golden sparkles of cream, when you pour it, the surface literally jumps with energy...bing, bing, bing. The cream naturally swirls on the top in delicious little creamy curls, yum. One sip, and you are hooked.

Add a milk cow or goat to your farm!

Processed commercial milk gets really beat up, long before it gets onto our table. As soon as it leaves the cow, it begins a long journey. First it is pumped from the cow through long lengths of pipe, swirled through an in-line filtering system, on its way into huge storage tanks, where it is cooled and agitated along with the all the other milk, from multiple cows at a big dairy.

There it awaits pic-up by the creamery truck. When the truck arrives the milk is pumped into the creamery tanker, through yet another set of pipes. On its journey to the creamery, it is sloshed along in the truck, then pumped out of the truck once more into an automated creamery system. (To learn about how commercial milk gets to the creamery click on the link below.

http://thedairymom.blogspot.com/2011/11/milks-journey-from-cow-to-table.html

After being tested for purity, the milk is pasteurized in the creamery; a process, designed to kill any bacterial contamination it may have picked up from being exposed to so many surfaces during all that pumping, mixing with other milks, lying in bulk tank storage, & sloshing around in the tanker truck transit (one does wonder how how thoroughly all those pipes, pumps and various tanks are cleaned, personally, I think about the potential human error factor here). This process is quite important to commercial milk production profits, because it extends the sell-able shelf life of commercial milk, well beyond that of natural raw milk, which would sour, rather quickly, after all that contamination. Really, pasteurization is all about making money. 

During pasteurization milk is cooked at very high temperatures, which effect it in many ways. Cooking hardens the milk on a molecular level, it gets chalky, looses it's effervescence, high heat destroys its enzymes and kills any bacteria it may contain, beneficial and pathogenic alike. 

After pasteurization the lifeless white fluid is pumped through a series of pipes again, centrifuged at high speeds so the cream separates out from the skim milk, from there the skim and cream are piped some more, finally, the skim and cream are mixed back and beaten together under incredible pressure to homogenize the milk so that is has a uniform texture. 

Homogenization changes milk structure, in this unnatural process, the fat globules in the milk, get coated on the outside with protein, this is done to make milk texture "look" better and to give it a smooth "mouth feel". Coating the fat molecules with protein allows the cream globules to stick to, instead of repel, the watery part of the milk and thereby stay emulsified in suspension, instead of floating to the milk surface, in a thick layer, as cream naturally does. 

The recombined cream/milk it is then pumped through even another set of pipes, cooled and then its filled into cartons and plastic jugs, which are jostled down conveyor belts, boxed, stacked and tossed onto trucks, bounced down the road for miles, unloaded, put into a grocery store and finally put on the shelf for the milk consumer to buy. We put it in a cart, pay for it, haul it home to our houses and put it in the 'fridge, so we can have it on our coffee and cereal come morning. After all those temperature changes and all the pumping, bumping, whirling, swirling, whipping, cooking, killing & cooling, is it any wonder that commercial modern milk is tasteless, flat and chalky, by the time we drink it, cooked and altered molecularly, as it has been, to the point that it sometimes makes our stomach hurt after drinking it?

Curds and whey, home made cheese in the making.

What is milk anyway? What is it made of, how does it become cheese, yogurt or kefir? Why does it change from a liquid into a solid? 

Milk is composed of water and "milk solids". While we all know what water is; what are milk solids? Milk solids consist of two kinds of protein, known as casein and albumin, plus of course, fat in the form of cream and also milk sugars or lactose, along with various enzymes and micro nutrients. 

A good source of calcium, casein is what makes milk white, it is a flexible protein that becomes harder and tougher with heat. Casein is the main component of your average cheeses, like cheddar, cottage cheese, mozzarella, Monterrey Jack etc.  the word "casein" is where the name "Cheese" comes from. Albumin on the other hand, is the same protein as is found in egg whites, which also turns white and toughens, but only a little, with heat, it is the main component of whey cheeses like ricotta.

 Milk becomes solid when it coagulates, this can happen in various ways, through enzymatic action, by acidification of the milk, or a combination of both. Most cheeses are coagulated by rennet, an enzyme which occurs naturally in the stomach of all mammals, Rennet can also be synthesized from some mushrooms. Other enzymes found in sap of many plants also coagulate milk, these saps are usually thick and white, like in "milk weed" or "milk thistle" or even the fig. Adding these enzymes to milk will cause it to coagulate. Another way to coagulate milk is with acid, add enough vinegar or lemon juice even citric acid will coagulate milk very quickly. The beneficial bacteria in raw milk produce lactic acid, given the right temperature and enough time the lactic acid they put off will also coagulate milk. Cheese makers the world round have learned to combine various enzymes and acids to create the whole range of different tasting cheeses.

 A "broken" milk coagulation, see the yellowish whey in the break?

 From coagulated milk we get both "curds" and "whey". In coagulated milk, separation between the watery part of the milk and the milk solids happens easily. When the solid jell of the coagulation is "broken", the casein proteins naturally draw together with most of the fats, forming clumps which we call "curd", they are isolated into lumps, because where ever the coagulant is "broken" the albumin proteins readily precipitate out, into a watery solution, taking  along with them most of the milk sugars, this forms a clear yellowish liquid called "whey", the "whey" simply leaves the "curd" behind. Little Miss Muffet of nursery rhyme fame, like many children of by gone eras, ate a combination of curds and whey, a very tasty (especially with a little honey), nutritious snack. It was something mothers gave their children, while they were in the process of making their family's weekly staple: farmstead cheese made from RAW MILK they got from their own cow. 

Little Miss Muffet

What happened to that simpler way of living, where RAW MILK was a part of everyday life? My great grandmother was a "Victorian Lady" back in the day, she wore silks and feather hats, yet she had her own Jersey cow, and milked it everyday, or had it milked. She wanted the best quality food for her family. Milking your own cow was part of life for people of the past. Everyone who was "someone" had a good family cow...what happened to change us? Why has RAW MILK been given such a "bad rap" by the corporate media and milk world? Is it really so dangerous as it is made out to be? I don't think so.

Louisa Miller McCarty, my Great grandmother, 
Victorian 'Lady" & a graduate of Vassar College. 

Is RAW MILK dangerous to human health? The answer to this question is: it all depends. It depends on many factors. Cow health, the cleanliness of the milking process, how the milk is handled after it is out of the cow. The speed at which it is cooled, the temperature the milk is stored at, the length of time it is held in storage. All these factors combined, determine the quality of RAW MILK. If the standards governing these factors are kept high, then, no, RAW MILK is IS NOT DANGEROUS to human health, (barring allergic reaction to it), in fact many people experience improved health from drinking it. In fact raw milk is a low risk food, new studies on raw milk bear this fact out. No one denies that milk is an excellent medium for bacterial growth, if it is contaminated with pathogenic ones, they will grow in it, if you consume contaminated milk (raw or commercial), it can make you sick. So if you drink milk, any milk, make sure it is handled properly. Pasteurized milk is actually a better medium for the growth of pathogenic bacteria than RAW MILK, because it lacks the protection of the beneficial bacteria which naturally inhabit milk. More on this later...

Let us recoup. Raw Milk is a quality food. Delicious, healthy, and nutritious if handled correctly. It was an everyday staple of early Americans, and it's unregulated private use is part of our American heritage.

Feeding the calves the extra milk.

Beautiful Bossy, the dairy cow

Our matron cow, Sue, grazes peacefully in the meadow.

What would our farm be without cows? They add so much to our lives, these great teachers, so enhance us with their quiet wisdom. The cow placidly grazing, or lying in the sun, chewing her cud is the perfect example of simple contentment. We love our cows, they give us milk, cream, butter and cheese for our home use. Excess milk feeds calves, our pigs, chickens, to produce eggs, baby goats, which we latter market or process for our own use. All in all they help our farm stay solvent.

Did you know a cow chews her cud about 30,000 times a day? She woofs down her grass, tanking up her preliminary stomach, by yanking off fist full amounts of the course stuff and swallowing it down, more or less, unchewed. After, she lies down, quietly, in a comfy spot, and chews it all, contentedly crunching away the time, until it is all done, then she goes for more, and does it all over again. This is the way she takes grass, yep, plain ol' grass of the meadow and transforms it into milk and cream. By this laborious & monotonous grinding up of this substance, weedy stems of the field, which we can not even begin to digest, into a pulverized pulp, she is able to release nutrients locked in the stuff and make it into milk, it is all that work she does chewing that makes it possible for us to have yogurt, cheese, kefir, butter, cream in our coffee and let's not forget... mozzarella for pizza. It is really miraculous if you think about it.

Some days I get up early before the sun rises, and sit outside with my coffee. I look across the dew soaked meadow, and there are the cows, munching away at the wispy green, in the cool of the morn. As I watch them, I wonder, "will that mouthful be cream for my coffee tomorrow?"

Waiting to be milked

Later they mosey down to the gate, waiting to come across the road, to be milked. Bugling a mooie hurry-up to us if we are late opening the way before their "Majesties". Swinging pendulous bags of milk, they sway across the road to the barn, stopping traffic, heedlessly indifferent, to the rush most people are in. 

Their calves, the night's warm-barn dwellers, greet their stately moms with enthusiasm. "Mooeeee, mooeee, meeee, meee, me..." they say, anticipating throat fulls of warm, creamy milk sliding down their gullets. Yes, with them it is all about "me". The mamma cows, though, know the routine. They slide gracefully into the milking parlor one by one, after waiting their turn. Happily eating a bit of grain for breakfast while they deliver their precious load of milk to us.

We always leave enough for the calves. After breakfast, mamma and babies spend time together, sequestered together in their own little safe haven, till satiation occurs.

Then mamma troops back out to the gate, wanting to re-cross the road, ready to amble among the thick, green Forbes and grasses waiting for her in the meadow, luscious and succulent. Milk in the making.

"Buttercup" peacefully grazing