December Farm

Hello, farm friends. Not much happening on the farm these days. December is such a perfect, quiet time in the South. Today was on the warm side -- 72 degrees for a high. It was lovely being outside. Adam is hauling beautiful composted soil to put on my herb beds, fortifying them for the year to come.

He also raked and hauled piles of decayed pine straw for the shade beds beside the house.

Later he'll cover that with fresh pine straw too, and that bed will be tidy for winter too.

I went hunting for plantain.

The warm weather and the hurricane caused many plants to have a resurgence this fall. I picked plantain, dandelion, and yarrow.

 This was early, and they were wet with dew. I dried them on towels.

plantain (left and top), yarrow (center bottom), dandelion (right)

 A blogging friend who is most kind and generous peaked my interest in making tinctures, a natural progression from all the other things I enjoy making. Tinctures are liquors (usually) infused with herbs for weeks and taken in small doses for many ailments. Here, my morning herbs are beginning their close relationship with a quart of vodka. Plantain and dandelion are good for the gut, and yarrow helps prevent cold and flu.

 My friend sent me some tincture herbs, which I used last week to make a tincture of passion flower, kava kava, and skullcap. It's good for anxiety. I turn them each day.

I strolled the farm, the garden. I realized that if you have land, you always have food, if you know where to look. We have greens in abundance on the farm, although they look like weeds. Sorrel, for instance, is a fine edible plant. I chewed on a pretty plantain leaf today to sooth a toothache.

volunteer sorrel in the garden

 All the herbs in my bed could be eaten in a salad. It's a comfort to know that we're not really dependent on WalMart for our sustenance.

I've only seen thoroughly black wooly bears this year, and our squirrels are stealing every available pecan and stripping the pine cones down to their spines. They must be stocking up for a cold winter. Today, it feels so mild. I should've pulled my Christmas decorations from the garage ... I really should've, rather than waiting for a freezing cold day. But I haven't decorated yet. It's a pensive time of year for me still, that autumnal pensiveness, rather than the December feeling of festivity. None of the children are coming here for Christmas this year, and I'm finding it hard to decorate. Well, that ... and the fact that all the stuff is in the garage. I need two Christmas boxes instead of ten, and I need to keep them handy :)

Lady Grey, a silkie

 The hens say hello!

Brownie, Penny, Sylvie, Sheena, and Arthur's tail feathers.

Curing in Autumn

 Adam is making more leaves. These are smoother, with fewer bubbles. Here's the first big one he did, painted.

 

I suppose he has about 15 leaves of various sizes in various stages of development. They should dry (or cure) slowly over the winter. Above you see a Japanese Magnolia leaf. He embedded a hook in the back.
 He smoothed the back of the big leaf. The two green hostas above will have light green veins.
Our new puppy, Trixie, wants to help sort pecans.

 Some friends have said it's too early for pecans, that they won't be fully developed. But from reading on two state extension websites, if the pecans are dropping naturally (not from wind), and the husks are dry and fully open (or off entirely), then the pecans should be fully developed, after curing. Curing, or drying, should take about 10 days.

 Adam dug all the sweet potatoes. Here they are, drying ... curing ... on our front porch, on wire racks.

 Some are tiny. Some are mammoth.

They also cure about 10 days.

And I have a steady stream of loofahs coming through their process of curing, deseeding, cleaning, bleaching.

Our small 2nd crop of white potatoes are coming along. I wasn't going to sneak a peak, but then one potato was showing already ....

 My Blue Lake green bean plants are looking very bedraggled from bugs, but I got another bag of beans today. I've been blanching and freezing them.

 Here's Adam's new compost pile inside the garden fence. Beyond the fence you see the big field our friend bush-hogged for us. It looks so good! 

 All the grass out there will eventually be raked into this pile too.
I have one remaining cherry tomato plant in the garden that's bearing. It was a volunteer, I think. I thought it was declining, but it seemed to get a second wind!

 

It has lots of blooms and green tomatoes, and plenty of red ones too. I picked a handful of about 20 today.

I'll take that! 
I love how the produce of a small farm changes so much from season to season. Some crops come around a second time (since we have a long growing season). Some come in bursts -- like Adam's leaf-making. He can only do it now, when the leaves are mature. In a couple of weeks, all these leaves will be yellow and dying. And elephant ears won't be big again until mid-summer. I like that we live in a dance-like comradery with these seasonal shifts of nature. I love that at any given time I can have eggs and nuts and beans and peas and tomatoes and herbs from my own plot of earth. That is quite rewarding.

Making Soil

Adam loves making soil. Compost is his favorite farm job. This has been "Compost Central" for the last two years:

The bins in the back are not used now. He's moving his soil-making operations into the garden. He's been mowing and mowing! See?

He wanted to scythe all this tall-grassy area in June, but it was too wet. Now the grasses' stems are too thick and hard and damage his scythe, so he's mowing it all with the push mower. (sigh!)

He's saving the mown grass and putting it in piles in the garden.
Here's a cluster of loofahs developing:

Loofah vines from the outside of the garden. Hello there, Ned! (Ned is becoming SUCH a good dog.)

Loofah vines from the inside. So many dangling down. I'm quite excited!!

Horseradish, looking so healthy. I'm not a horseradish fan, myself, but Adam loves it.

Kale. I'll have more this week. It takes a LOT of kale to make one serving. It dwindles to nothing when you steam it for a minute. This doesn't look like my sister-in-law's kale, and I'm wondering if it really is ....

My blue lake beans that the rabbits have not yet found -- I think I do have some insect nibbling on them. Must keep a vigilant watch.

Adam put some nitrogen-fixing plants (just strewn around in the beds) to help our soil. You see them growing here, like weeds. Also in this bed are my garlic plants, coming up. I want lots of garlic and lots of onions, and I want to braid them and gaze at them next summer :)

Baby, posing proudly with one of her holes. Actually, Ned might have done this one too. Hard to say. They do not sign their work.

Remember Adam's many PVC lines, buried for his watering system? She's found it.
In addition, Baby and Beau got in a real dog fight today, near the barn. I had to scream and be quite domineering to make them stop. Beau has been rather subdued since. Baby's twice his size.
I noticed how pleasant it is to read PomPom's blog, because her photos are large and her text is large and easily readable. So I decided to enlarge both here also. Do you agree? With more time on my hands, I've looked around for new blogs to read. (Yay!! I'm able to stay ahead of blog reading now!) I find that blogs with little photos and tiny text are not appealing. Hmm. We will see. 
That's it from the old farm! A 30-second dog fight is about all the excitement we get around here!

Improvements in January

 Did I tell you that one of us stepped right through a thin spot in the dining room floor over Christmas? Yep! Kinda scary, and I'm thankful nobody was hurt. Adam quickly did a patch job.

 But we realized then that the patching work he'd done on the various weak spots on that floor would simply not be adequate; the floor was too thin, too weak.

 We would have to put something on top of it, and we must do it before somebody else puts a heel through it and makes a bigger hole! So we picked out a flooring. Today Adam is starting to lay the pad and the new flooring on top of the old.

Okay, that was two days ago. This has been a challenging project. Adam used the trial-and-error method, putting it down and pulling it up. But he's got the hang of it today:

 Meanwhile, our house generally looks like this:

 That photo is just in case some of you have a false impression of the wonder of farm life.
Guess what? I have cilantro germinating!!

I was so excited, I planted some more cilantro seeds. I want LOTS of cilantro!
Elsewhere on the farm, Adam's compost continues to do its quiet, magical work. BIG compost. He constantly turns it with a pitchfork to keep it moist, and it steams and gets hot as it breaks down into dirt.

 He has a small separate pile of chicken poop/compost especially for the asparagus bed. However, the puppies are always sticking their noses in there. This is why I do not kiss dogs on the face.

 Our five beehives are fine. See those funny stands? Adam used them in a telescope-making class he taught. The poles are in concrete, which is in 5-gallon buckets. He'll bury the buckets out there and build a new, taller bee table on the stands.

 He's marked out the perimeter of the new greenhouse, twice as long as last year's greenhouse. That front black PVC won't be there; it's just marking the front two corners.

 And he bought metal pipes that he'll bend into curves for the dome of the greenhouse. They will be sturdier than the white PVC he used last year. This will be a permanent greenhouse.

Soon Adam will expand my chickens' yard. See the barren landscape in which they must live? Not a green thing. I pick greens and grass and toss it over the fence to them. 

 He will expand the yard to include that overgrown area next to it (the back of the orchard). That will make them happy. He'll simply extend the fence below straight across to the property line fence.

Today is 70 degrees. I put my basil plants on the front steps to drink in the sunshine. What crazy weather we have in the South! Its primary characteristic is unpredictability. I'm sure we'll have some more chilly temps, but I'm betting we have had our one harsh cold snap last weekend. Now we will drift happily into spring. Yes?

All these photos are to encourage you that the wonder of spring and warmth and growing things is just around the corner!