It was cold all of the week before Thanksgiving with highs in the 40s lows in the 20s. It just got so cold when I wasn’t looking, I guess. It just seemed like one day, light jacket and next day hat, gloves and heavy coat! That is until Thanksgiving day when it was 66 degrees! What? That’s right, we had a little respite from the cold for that one day and boy was I thankful! It was a bright blue sky with the sun shining and it was warm. I don’t remember what the weather was like last year, but I do remember that it snowed on Thanksgiving two years ago. I remember this because we had just moved into our new house and we had 25 people for Thanksgiving and it was a beautiful sight to see. I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving this year! Since this blog recently has been about change and new beginnings and such, I thought it quite fitting that I buck tradition and not make a pumpkin pie this year. That’s right, no pumpkin pie at my house. Instead I made something new! I made a pumpkin cheesecake with a gingersnap crust with dulce du leche (from just sweetened condensed milk) to drizzle on top! It only took 3 hours to cook and a day to cool and it was amazing (the dulce du leche, not the cheesecake, silly)! You just put a can of sweetened condensed milk in a pot of water and boil it for 3 hours and then let it cool overnight and voila! Don’t worry though, I got my pumpkin pie fix when we went to my parents house for leftovers on Friday which included my mom’s amazing oyster stuffing. It’s really not Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie. While the cheesecake sounded so heavenly, it simply wasn’t. I don’t know if it was me or the recipe, but I have learned that sometimes the traditional things are just better. So, if we are home next year, it will be pumpkin pie! Oh and of course I used our sweet potatoes to make the sweet potato casserole. I know the debate rages every year, but I am solidly in the camp of marshmallows on top of the casserole along with crushed pineapple on the inside. I just draw the line at pecans. No pecans in my casserole. Normally, we go away to a tropical location for Thanksgiving but this year we were home, so it was just the hubs and I for our Thanksgiving meal. We had a nice turkey breast and some venison mashed potatoes, gravy, roasted brussel sprouts with bacon of course, our own green beans and cranberry sauces (one with whole berries and one was jellied). Oh wait, did you notice I wrote venison mashed potatoes? That’s right, you read right! I made a venison roast the week before and it had potatoes with it so we took the leftover potatoes and made mashed potatoes with them just for Thanksgiving! Yummy!! Point being, I am just simply not ready for winter. It’s not that I am not prepared, I am just not ready. Of course as I write this, the weather has been quite warm for this time of year. It has been in the 50s and I believe will be getting to almost 70 by the end of the weekend. Cold or coldish as it is does mean we need to do an initial preparation of the garden for Spring and we have to do a little extra for the ones who don’t live inside our house to make sure they stay comfortable this time of year.
First, the garden. We still have our late planted broccoli in there and so far, even with the frosty mornings we have had it is still kicking! Keep your fingers crossed we will get to eat it! To prepare the garden, we took all of the chicken bedding that we have been composting since last year and dumped that into the garden and spread it around. Then we tilled all the soil up and mixed it in so it can make the everything extra nutritious for the Spring. I cut the asparagus palms down to just below the surface and put a nice thick layer of straw over them for the winter. We should get a really nice crop of asparagus next year! I also killed the grass in the area around the fencing and the 10 feet give or take outside the fence where we are expanding the garden. We learned a lot about spacing this year…we will be spacing things out a lot more next season, thus the expansion. We have decided on what we want in the garden next year as well as how much of it and what we don’t want and where we want to put everything. It is important to rotate where you plant things in your garden each year so that you don’t overplant the soil. Since different plants use different nutrients and such from the soil, you want to make sure you don’t deplete the same area each year with the same plants. We are going to be planting more Swiss Chard, less lettuce (Romain you are out!), fewer green peppers, fewer tomatoes and no eggplant or melons. We will also be staggering the planting of the tomatoes so we have different stages of tomatoes all summer. We will add some spaghetti squash, too. We will be adding chicken wire fence around the rabbit fence since the rabbit fence didn’t do its job. It failed, miserably. It absolutely did not keep rabbits out. But just wait you rabbits! Your meal ticket is gone! I’ll get you, you rascally rabbits! Or at least just keep you out of my garden! We have also been doing a bit of clearing of some trees in a different part of the property so we can dig a pond sometime before Spring. Well, the hubs has been cutting the trees and I have been watching him. I do use the tractor to move the trees to the pile we will cut up for firewood once it dries. There have been some massive trees. He is an amazing lumber jack. I realize this isn’t technically part of the garden, but it’s sort of related…and I just wanted to brag on the hubs a bit!
On to the rest of the beasts we have…the chickens and the bees! For the chickens we put our fall fodder (aka fall decorations) to good use as wind shields around the chicken runs and snacks for the chickens. We put the three pumpkins and the corn cobs in the runs for them to eat. They have certainly enjoyed those pumpkins! It’s really nice to be able to reuse as much as possible so that there is less waste and you get more bang for your buck! We have also covered the windows on the both sides of the house and have closed the chicken door on the north side of the house to keep the wind from blowing through the house to make sure they are as toasty as possible at night. As great as it was for the chickens last year, it wasn’t so great when the dear hubs had to go down and bring buckets of warm water to the chickens each morning because their water buckets were frozen. As a solution we bought a heater that is submerged into the 55 gallon barrel that will keep the water nice and unfrozen. Since we don’t have enough power from the solar panels, we had to run power from the house down to the chicken house which is about 350 feet away. We made a 350 foot power cord that get plugged in at the back of our house. Looks like all of the girls have completed their molt and their combs are bright red again and they have all of their feathers back, so no need for those winter sweaters I knitted for them! No, I really didn’t knit them sweaters….after all, I don’t knit! They do eat more when it gets colder since digestion keeps them warm. During warm weather, one 5 gallon food bucket would last them a week. This summer we added second food bucket to help out our house sitters so they didn’t have to worry about filling up a food bucket while we were on vacation. We have kept both buckets in there and they would empty one bucket in a week and usually only about 1/3 of the other one. Now that it has gotten colder, they are eating the entire contents of both buckets in a week. So with two buckets we are still only having to fill the food once per week. We are using a mixture of regular and higher protein feed. We are getting a little better showing of eggs now…usually 6-10 a day. Considering chickens usually stop laying naturally this time of year due to the lack of daylight, this is great! I finally have extra eggs to sell on a pretty regular basis again. Since the time change we also changed the time on the lights. They now come on at 4:30 a.m. and go off around 6:30 p.m. That gives them a good 14 hours of “daylight”, at least inside the house! Other than that, they will be good for the rest of the winter.
Bees! As you know, I am down to one hive going into winter. While I was able to add the honey frames from the failed hive, this will not get them through winter. In fact, since it has been relatively warm for most of October and November, that means they are more active which means they eat more. I had sugar syrup made in a 2:1 ration of sugar to water up until the last week. This is a thicker syrup than you feed in Spring and Summer so as to take less time for the bees to dehydrate it enough to cap for winter stores. I took it off right before we moved the hive and put it back on again while it stayed in the 60s and upper 50s. That’s the big news people! We are putting some hives in the orchard! We built a hive stand where the hives will get full sun all day long which will hopefully make a lot of difference. Since we are going to fence in the orchard anyway, we thought it would be the perfect spot for the bees. We are also going to do a little something different with one hive, but that is the next surprise! You will find out next Spring! The week before Thanksgiving we went ahead and moved the remaining hive to the new hive stand which allows it to get full sun all day even though it’s chilly outside. We went out when it was dark, closed up the remaining entrance to the hive and moved the hive. I left the entrance blocker in overnight and then took it out the next day and put a leafy branch in front of the entrance. Why? It is supposed to make it more difficult for the bees to get out of the door so they have to leave slower and pay more attention and re-orient themselves to the new location. Who knows…but that is what I did. Ok, back to feeding the bees…I will be supplementing their stores with a sugar block. I mixed together 5 pounds of sugar. 7 ounces of water, 1/2 ounce of apple cider vinegar and a splash of Honey B Healthy feeding stimulant which has essential oils in it. I spread that into a sheet cake pan, scored it to make two blocks and stuck it in the oven with the oven light on overnight to dry. So that was my first attempt. Since it was so warm and I still had my liquid feed on, I put the pan outside on the screened-in porch to make sure it was completely dry. Then it got really warm…mid 60s or so rained and it was no longer solid as there was just too much moisture in the air. It just didn’t work out well. So, I mixed another batch and put it in my dehydrator. This didn’t make nice compact bricks, but made dry sugar blocks anyway. I just have more of them! Once it got down in the lower 50s during the day and below 40s at night, I went ahead and took the liquid off and put a block on. I put it right on top of the cluster on the top bars of the frames so they have direct access to it right above them. I also made a “feeding shim” to put in between the brood box and the inner cover so that the inner cover doesn’t lay right on top of the sugar block. I put the block on the hive last Friday, so time will obviously tell how long the block will last. I will get back to you on that! We will be putting some hives down by the pond this year. If the pond isn’t dug yet, there is a creek there which will eventually feed the pond, so the hives will be by the creek. But hopefully the pond will be dug and they will then be by the pond as it would not be fun to have to dig a pond around the hives!
The next thing to do was decorate for Christmas/Hanukkah! For us, that absolutely cannot happen until AFTER Thanksgiving. Not after eating the meal on Thanksgiving, but it can’t happen until Saturday or Sunday after Thanksgiving. I would really have loved to wait until December 1st, but sometimes that isn’t possible (and for us if it didn’t get done the Sunday after Thanksgiving, I doubt it would’ve happened!). November is the month for Thanksgiving only. December is the month for the rest of the holidays (well, except for Hanukkah which actually fell on Thanksgiving in 2013 but that doesn’t normally happen so I will just ignore that one time and keep to my generalization). We went to see the final installment of the Hunger Games movies, Mocking Jay Part deux on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and then came home and decorated! Love seeing the beautifully lit garland and tree at night. White lights in case you were wondering. So,once the tree is up and the decorations done, it is acceptable for Christmas music to begin. On the radio. Not that I will listen to it or play it, but I give permission for it to be played or listened to by others. You have to draw the line somewhere, people!!! As for part deux, don’t bother. Horrible. There, I just saved you a couple of bucks.
Hey, did I mention I made mini apple pies? I made my own filling but not the dough. I also didn’t grow the apples. Maybe next year. When I say next year, I mean hopefully I will have home-grown apples. I probably won’t ever make my own pie dough and I am ok with that (I limit dough making to certain rolls I make for my Hubs-his grandmother’s recipe). They were so good and so cute! Just enough pie so you get the yumminess without getting overly full! Good things do come in small packages! I have decided that this winter I am going to try to make cheese. Yep, cheese. And maybe some Limoncello. On that note, happy holidays everyone from the homestead and the reindogs!
