Older Daughter and I bundled up, took snowshoes and the dog, and went walking in the snow on Sunday.
At first Lydia was wading through chest-deep snow. It was hard going for her -- she's no longer a spring chicken ...
... but after awhile we came across tracks from someone's ATV and the going was much easier on her.
Older Daughter has learned she prefers winters in Idaho over winters in New Jersey since conifers hold snow so much more beautifully than deciduous trees.
We stopped at the viewpoint we call "the overlook," and she plopped down in the snow to contemplate the vista overlooking the canyon...
...which, I'll admit, is a lovely view.
She wanted to get to a point on the trail where a branch bends over the path, so we trekked onward.
There's no question we were in a winter wonderland.
Then we came out of the woods and back onto the prairie.
We stopped on the road to remove our snowshoes, and Lydia was so tired she laid down right there.
Sadly, the next day I had to drop Older Daughter at the airport. (Due to delays, she didn't arrive back in New Jersey until 2 am Tuesday morning.)
After dropping her at the airport, I swung back into Coeur d'Alene to pick up Younger Daughter from her job. The downtown was beautifully lit up with Christmas lights.
It's hard to say goodbye to the holidays and to Older Daughter.
This is Older Daughter's Christmas gift to Don: a magnificent copy of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings."
It weights a hefty 5.25 pounds, and she lugged it in her suitcase all the way from New Jersey.
Tolkien, it hardly needs saying, is regarded with near-awe in the Lewis household. And today is his 125th birthday. Or, as Don put it, his "twelve-ity-fifth" birthday.
Happy birthday, Mr. Tolkien! And thank you for the reading pleasure you've given generations of fans.
I've finally -- finally! -- finished the tomato sauce.
This was a long journey that began in June when we planted 16 tomato plants.
We harvested a few tomatoes here and there, and as I harvested them I used the food strainer to purée them, then froze the purée.
After ripening all the green tomatoes...
...and puréeing them, the freezer was stuffed with purée.
I didn't want to start cooking down the purée into tomato sauce until two things happened: One, all the green tomatoes had ripened; and two, the cookstove was in constant use (as opposed to letting it go out during the day). As December's temperatures dropped and the cookstove was always hot, I started processing the purée.
I defrosted four bags at a time.
By letting the frozen bags defrost overnight, some of the watery portions leaked out of the bag and into the bowl. Just that much less to cook down.
Then it was time to pour it into a large stock pot.
I nested two pots double-boiler style and parked them on the stove. About three times a day, I topped off the water in the lower pot so it wouldn't boil dry. I didn't use a lid, since I wanted the liquid to cook down.
I stirred the purée a few times a day. After one night of cooking, you can see how far down it reduced.
It took about three days for each pot of purée to reduce to sauce consistency.
And while it made the house smell rich and tomato-y during this process, I had to repeat it three times to use up all the purée in the freezer. Nine days of smelling cooking tomatoes got to be a bit much. You can also understand why I wanted to use the passive heat from the cookstove to make the sauce. Nine days of cooking the sauce on our propane stove would have used a lot of propane.
I re-froze the first batch of tomato sauce, figuring I'd defrost and can all the sauce at once; but that was the wrong thing to do since I had to re-defrost the sauce and heat it thoroughly (tomato sauce should be hot-packed), plus I could only process so many jars at a time. So from then on I just canned each batch of sauce after it cooked down and while it was still hot, and this worked out far better.
Tomatoes can be water-bath canned (unless there are additives like onions or bell peppers). I never flavor my tomato sauce because I like it to be "generic." That way I can take a jar and flavor it however I like, such as Mexican or Italian or whatever.
Because the acid content of tomatoes, even heirloom varieties, is never assured, it's necessary to add an acidifier.
In this case, I added a quarter-teaspoon of citric acid to each pint. (I also added a half-teaspoon of salt to each jar.)
Scalding my Tattler lids.
Into the water bath for 30 minutes (actually, about 35 minutes adjusted for our elevation).
First batch, done.
Second batch, processing
By the time the third and final batch was cooked down and canned up, I was thoroughly sick of tomatoes.
Fortunately that feeling is tempered by the utter satisfaction that comes from concluding a project which was home-grown, from beginning to end, on our farm.
North Idaho is wheat country. Take a short drive anywhere beyond our property, and you’ll see vast swathes of cultivated Palouse prairie. In late summer, massive million-dollar combines rumble across the fields, cutting wheat at a precise height, vacuuming up the grain heads, threshing it, and spitting out the clean wheat from one side and the chaff from the other. These machines are awesomely efficient. Whenever you buy flour at the store, or consume pastry or bread products, you can thank the thousands of hardworking farmers who grow wheat for our country.
But what about growing wheat on the individual level? That was what our wheat-growing experiment was all about. Was it do-able from the standpoint of a small homestead? How hard would it be?
We set out to learn.
The first time we grew wheat, we plowed the field once in the fall, then sowed hard red winter wheat. This wheat sprouts in autumn, goes dormant over the winter, and grows again in the spring, then is harvested in late summer. It worked great except for one thing: we couldn’t control the weeds, notably cheatgrass. It’s not like we could plow the weeds under while the wheat was growing. We ended up growing half wheat, half weeds. The experiment was a failure.
So how do commercial wheat growers control weeds? Partly weeds are controlled with sprays; and partly they’re controlled by continuous cultivation. We wouldn’t do the former and couldn’t do the latter (yet).
So we switched to hard red spring wheat which, as the name implies, is planted in the spring. We plowed the field three times before planting: once early in the spring, a second time to kill any weeds that returned, and a third time to kill any more stubborn weeds that returned yet again. This crop of wheat was much more successful. (We may try winter wheat again after several years of weed control through cultivation.)
With the exception of plowing the field, everything else was done by hand. We sowed. We scythed. We raked. We bundled.
While the whole wheat-growing venture was challenging but otherwise fine (and repeatable), it was the threshing that did us in. Threshing wheat by hand, using flails, is inefficient, wasteful, physically difficult, and wildly time-consuming. In this respect, the experiment was, once more, a failure. Grrr.
One of the ongoing things we’re trying to do on our homestead is to figure out what works and what doesn’t when it comes to self-sufficiency. Wheat is an integral part of most Americans’ diets, yet threshing stymied us. We needed to find out how to grow wheat with the less-sophisticated hand-powered methods suitable to a small homestead.
We spent a lot of time wondering what a small family farm could use in place of massive combines. After a fair bit of research, as well as some suggestions from blog readers, we came across a treadle-powered wheat thresher:
So, in an attempt to continue our research, we decided to purchase this thresher and conduct a product review regarding its efficiency. How well does it work? What are its drawbacks? How efficient is it? How difficult is it to use? Can it thresh enough wheat to feed a family from year to year?
These are some of the questions we hope to answer. Backwoods Home Magazine has already expressed an interest in an upcoming article on the subject, and I suspect a number of other magazines would be interested as well.
The thresher we purchased came from a place called Back to the Land Store in Tennessee (which closed its retail location shortly thereafter and has plans to open an online-only store). The gentleman I spoke to told me the machines are hand-made by an Amish family living nearby. He said it will thresh about 1.5 lbs. of wheat per minute (at top speed); and the drier the wheat, the better it threshes. The cost of the machine as well as shipping it to Idaho came to around $1200, so it was not a purchase to undertake lightly and it took us awhile to save up for it.
The thresher was shipped in mid-November and arrived without incident. Right now it is being stored in the barn until we have a chance to put it to use next August.
Come May, we’ll re-plow the same field we used before. We’ll repeat the triple-plowing to control weeds. We have seed wheat ready to plant. We have scythes ready to sharpen. Now we have a thresher ready to thresh.
