SUNDAY CANNING.
The Bugtussle family is on vacation! That means we are watching the farm for 10 days - moving the animals, bottle feeding a calf, taking care of Ira's menagerie, and generally being busy! But today. Today, we had an excess of tomatoes and it was just too nice outside to resist. I parked myself in the outdoor kitchen all day long and canned. It was 75 degrees, remarkably quiet with no children or critters around - basically, it was bliss.Canning is normally done in the heat of summer, slaving over a hot stove for hours - and in our case, a WOOD fire! Thankfully, I was able to use the Smith's stove. I read, I watched the hummingbird's on the kiwi vine, I relaxed. We do indeed have a busy 10 days ahead of us, but today was a nice little calm before the storm. Sundays are good for rest, and it is always lovely when our schedule allows them to actually be restful. I hope your Sunday was just as perfect.- Hannah.
NEW FERMENTATION SHIRTS: A GIVEAWAY!
We have new FERMENT shirts in our online store! To celebrate, we are giving away a Fermentation Package - one of our new shirts and a copy of Jesse's book, Bringing Wine Home.All you have to do is leave a comment on this post and we will select a winner next weekend. Tell us about your favorite fermented food, or a story about a weird experimentation in pickling....it doesn't matter, we will be selecting the winner at random. Deadline for entering will be Saturday, September 21 at NOON central time.Also, we tried doing this yesterday through Facebook and everything went terribly wrong.... apparently this is NOT allowed unless you pay lots of money to Facebook. Oops. So, apologies to everyone who entered yesterday!- Hannah.***COMMENTS ARE NOW CLOSED***
The randomly selected winner is:
PJ!
Please email us your information at roughdraftfarmstead@gmail.com
Thanks everybody for all the awesome comments and stories!
AROUND THE HOUSE - POULTRY EDITION.
Although we have a chicken "yard" near the house, the idea of the birds staying inside of this area is laughable. They have usually flown over the fence by mid-morning, turning our homestead into a bizarre parade of chickens. Currently, we have about 40 or so chickens and 5 guineas. The majority of these birds are BANTAMS and are ROOSTERS, so it is a strange-looking and noisy bunch. If anybody wants some friendly, backyard silkies or bantam cochins, let us know. No, seriously - contact us. It is getting ridiculous around here.
BOW AND ARROW.
A friend recently (and generously) lent me a bow and some arrows when he heard I was interested in learning to bow hunt. And then, hilarity ensued. At first I couldn't pull the thing back—being that it was a powerful compound bow—so I had to spend a couple weeks building the muscle. Then, when I finally got to the point where I could draw it back—notably after I learned how to loosen the tension—I started to practice.Practice, however, is a generous term. In reality, I would shoot the arrows approximately nowhere close to the box I'd set up, and then spend the next twenty minutes searching the woods for them. But after a few days I started to hit the box. Then I started to hit the target. Then I started to hit it from further and further away. Suddenly, this instrument which bordered on being a silly toy in my hands when I first picked it up, was becoming a weapon. And as I became more and more accurate—a deadly weapon.The thing is, I want to learn to hunt. Or more specifically, I want to experience the act of hunting. I want to feel what our ancestors felt. I want to feel the nerves and the pain and don't want it to be easy—thus the bow. A gun gives you quite a bit of range (ten times the range in some cases). With a bow, you have to get within forty yards or so if you want a good chance at hitting your target. You have to be quiet, camouflaged, calm. Deer are not stupid, or rather deer have evolved to evade, out run, and outsmart close-range hunters. I want that challenge.However, since I don't feel that simply wanting to "experience" something is necessarily a justification for doing it, I also want to learn to hunt because Hannah and I want the meat. We don't raise any meat animals of our own yet and know this winter we're going to want to have some around. So, I borrowed a bow and arrow, figured out how to shoot it, and soon will start hunting.All I've hit is a box, and I know I have a considerably long way to go before dinner is served. Apologies to our vegetarian followers, but expect a few more posts this winter about my adventures learning to hunt, clean and cook venison––well, hunt definitely, clean and cook, hopefully.- Jesse.