You can do it. You can make tasty, healthy bread every week. You can be the busy mom of three or the work-10-hours-per-day dad or the away-from-home-most-the-time couple and STILL have that homemade bread on the table every night.

Let me level with you: I am a wife, a mother of two, a farmer, a freelance designer and a writer all in one day. Once I’m up, it’s GO GO GO until the sun sets. I know how it is. I get it. Having a healthy meal in and of itself is challenge enough without the laborious task of mixing and kneading bread. But last November I came across a recipe and concept that changed our dinner table forever.

One of our favorite magazines published an article about a bread recipe that one could accomplish in 5 minutes per day. Not only that, it would taste like you just came out of a New York bakery. I was skeptical, but eager to be making my family’s bread. The article was talking to the authors of a book called Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. Even though I am going to tell you about the basic techniques in this blog, I highly recommend purchasing the book to learn even more!

From the first batch of dough I made, it was a raving success! I bought the book and continued to learn for the last year. I have made a large batch of dough to last the week and I have not missed a single week (except for a two month period during our harvest season).

You can do this too! I have shared this recipe with countless friends and mothers within my sphere of influence. It is easy. It’s beyond delicious. And the ideas are really fun. Let me take you through my steps. These are little variations that I’ve found work for me and you can build off my experience.

The Basic Dough

This is a basic mix, and I do mean basic. People almost always raise their brows when I tell them the four ingredients that went into it. You can make a lot of different breads from this recipe alone. Pizza dough, cinnamon rolls, dinner buns. And of course bread loaves!

Ingredients

1.5 tablespoons dried yeast
1.5 tablespoons salt (preferably NOT table salt)
3 cups warm water
6.5 cups all-purpose flour

Mixer

I do this recipe in a stand mixer with a dough hook. This is very important to the ease and timeliness of the breadmaking. If you do not own a stand mixer, a food processor might work (have not tried it) or a hand held mixer with a dough hook. If you are serious about getting into baking in general, I highly recommend a stand mixer. I went years without one but now cannot imagine baking sans that stand!

The Water

Pour the three cups of warm water into your 5 quart capacity stand mixer bowl. If you live in an old farmhouse like me, you might want to slosh hot water around the bowl to warm it up first as it will likely have the appearance of frost coming out of the cupboard. Some people are adamant that you have to have a certain temperature in which the yeast will “awaken” and do their little yeasty dance.

Pssshaw! I haven’t used a thermometer yet, and I have never had a bread come out flat. I like to dip my thumb in there, and if it feels comfortably warm, you’re probably good to go.

The Salt

Next, I add the tablespoon and half of salt. In our house, we haven’t used table salt since ... well ... pretty much since I met Andy (the former chef). We buy rock salt, and prefer Morton’s Kosher Salt just because we use so much of it. Otherwise, we recommend sea salt, for those with a higher budget. In general, avoid table salt. Nasty stuff (whole other blog).

We like our bread a little saltier, so I actually now add 2 whole tablespoons of salt. Trust me, this won’t overpower your bread.

Put the salt in first as it has the quality of halting the yeast’s development. It will sink right to the bottom anyway.

The Yeast

It really doesn’t matter what brand of yeast you choose. All you need to know is that buying those little packets will cost you big! Even if you buy the $7-8 jar in the grocery store, it will only last you about a month (if you make bread every week like we do). I poked around online and found bulk yeast at King Arthur Flour in two pound bags (that’s a link there, by the way). I ordered four pounds last November and have half a pound left. Did you know you can freeze yeast and it will be viable for up to two years? I just froze the big bags and dumped a small amount into one of those jars to keep in the fridge. When that gets emptied, I add more from the stock in the freezer. I found that even including shipping, I was saving almost a whole dollar per loaf by purchasing this way!

Gently pour in the tablespoon and half of yeast and it will spread over the top of the warm water.

The Flour

The basic recipe calls for all-purpose flour. This is because unbleached, white flour is the most common flour for baking breads. You can use organic flour or bleached if you prefer. From a health standpoint, the least messed around with flour is the best. I use unbleached all-purpose flour as my base ingredient.

Now, I know there are those of you who are hard-core whole wheat fans. I respect that completely! And I have an answer for you ... later. This is the base recipe to get you started. From my experience in learning to be a bread maker, starting with white bread is the best way to build up your confidence. Whole wheat can be very unforgiving.

Measure the flour cup by cup with a dry measuring utensil. Scrape off the heap of flour so that it is even with the top edges of the cup. I use the back of a butter knife to accomplish a nice even line. I never used to think that packing in the flour made a difference, but it really does. A lot of extra weight is added to the dough if you don’t gently add flour to the cup. It takes a few more minutes but makes for more consistent breads.

Dump the flour into the bowl and place it back under the mixer.

Action!

Turn on the mixer at the lowest speed. It will begin to incorporate the ingredients and slow down. Then turn it up one notch and wait until the dough starts to form a ball and pick up extra flour around the edges. At this point turn off the mixer and remove the bowl. I usually have to scrape some of the dough off the hook, and Elly usually helps me. :-) This whole mixing process takes less than a minute.

Cover the bowl with lid that doesn’t seal completely. Let the dough rise for two-ish hours. It takes longer if you have a colder kitchen and less time if it’s the heat of July. It will about double in size, sometimes more.

Now you are ready to make up to two, 2-pound loaves of bread. The dough is supposed to be sticky like that. In fact, I recommend putting it in the refrigerator for an hour or so to make it more manageable.

No Kneading!

Get your baking containers ready. I use either a pizza stone for rounded, deli-style bread or bread pans for traditional dinner-style bread.

To keep it from sticking, I cover the bottom with cornmeal, flour, oatmeal or even grits! It works just as well as cooking spray and adds a unique texture to the finished bread. Another option that I really like is parchment paper. You just cut it to fit, and it can be reused over and over again. (It can also be found on the King Arthur Flour website ... or any place that sells baking equipment.)

Pull out a chunk of dough in your bare hands. It really helps to sprinkle a lot of flour over the surface of the dough and your bare hands to keep it from sticking too much. I use a simple kitchen scale to get roughly 2 pounds, but if you lack a scale, the dough will be about the size of really large grapefruit or small muskmelon.

Pull the dough together with your hands, making a rough ball and place it into a bread baking pan or onto a pizza peel. The pizza peel should be covered with cornmeal, oatmeal, etc. When the dough is ready, you simply slide the dough from the peel into your oven onto your pizza stone.

Of course, we don’t own a pizza peel. I didn’t even know what one was until I looked it up online. I found that a side-less cookie sheet works just fine in the same capacity.

Once you have the dough ball in the proper baking container, let it rest for 40-60 minutes to warm up. Or, if you did not refrigerate the dough, it is ready now!

Baking It Bread-Pan Style

Let’s say you took the bread pan route. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and place a broiler tray on the lowest shelf. If you do not have a broiler tray (or didn’t know what that was, like me) you can use a brownie pan or a pie pan or any sort of oven safe dish that will hold water.

Take a serrated knife, like a bread knife and cut slashes into the top of the dough. This is not just for aesthetics; it really helps the dough rise in the oven as dough sitting out tends to get a semi-hardened outer surface. If you’ve ever seen or made bread that had an explosion out one side or the bottom, this was because the top was too hard to the bread to push up. Slashing just before it goes into the oven reduces this risk. (Super important when working with hard to rise whole wheat.)

At this point I like to sprinkle some more salt on the top. Just a personal preference and something you might want to try. Or, add another tasty topping of your choice; granola anyone?

When the oven is ready, pour a cup or more of hot water into the brownie pan, being careful not to spill or burn yourself. Then add the bread pan and close the door as quickly as you can.

Set the timer for 60 minutes. I have found that our particular oven requires 70 minutes for a light brown crust. You may prefer a really dark crust and will have to play with timing in order to find what works in your oven.

At the end of the baking time, the water should be about evaporated and your bread should be scenting up your whole house! Take it out and immediately dump it out of the bread pan to cool on a cooling rack. If it gets a little stuck, take a non-metal spatula to the sides and scoop down. The oatmeal or grits should be enough to free the bread from the bottom.

Baking It Pizza Stone Style

If you chose the pizza stone route, preheat the oven for 450 degrees and slash the dough a few times. Then slide the dough onto the stone when the oven is ready. Yes, your stone should have been in the oven as it was preheating. This will assure you an evenly crisp crust. Don’t forget the cup of hot water, and shut the door!

Set the timer for 30 minutes. Yes, half the time to wonderful tasting bread! I have found that 30 minutes is pretty dead on for getting fully cooked bread, but of course you may want a deeper crust. Feel free to play with longer times if you wish.

When the timer rings, carefully remove the bread from the stone. It is so robust, that I just grab it off the stone with an oven mitt and place it on the cooling rack.

Time to Eat!

Now is the time to be patient. You have worked hard and you are pleased with the bread. But it will really cut a lot better when it is cooled down.

But come on, fresh warm bread with butter melting on it? Ok, wait at least 10 minutes so you can hold the bread with your bare hands.

You did it! But guess what? You can do so much more now.

My Variations

Once I got this recipe down, I got a little bored. I wanted to see how far I could push it. There was a recipe for light wheat bread that called for 5.5 cups of all-purpose flour and 1 cup of whole wheat. I liked that option, but wondered how many cups of whole wheat I could do without messing up the recipe.

2 tablespoons salt
1.5 tablespoons yeast
3 cups warm water
2.5 cups whole wheat flour
4 cups all-purpose flour

Prepare the same as the basic recipe. Now you have 40% whole wheat bread for your family!

Then I got a little goofy. Try 2.5 cups of rye flour. Or 2.5 cups of OATMEAL! It works! Try any sort of baking flour in place of the all-purpose up to 2.5 cups. Anything beyond that began to affect the rise of the bread in baking. Get crazy; try corn flour. Why not?

Another fun variation is to add dried herbs to the flour just before it is mixed for an Italian bread. Oregano, rosemary, thyme, or savory are great.

Try one cup of warm milk and two cups of water.

Want more?

I almost forgot to tell you the best part! This recipe can be doubled or quadrupled with ease. In fact, I triple it nearly every time I make bread. With my capacity mixer, I have to do the process three separate times, but then I dump the dough into a medium sized Tuperware container that fits in the bottom shelf of our fridge. It has a flap lid that doesn’t close tight so it’s perfect for letting several batches sit and rise and then refrigerate. (You can see it in the dough rising photo above.)

This dough can be made in bulk and then refrigerated for up to two weeks. In fact, if you let it go even one week, it starts to sour naturally. Imagine, sourdough bread without a starter and all you had to do was let it sit!

It seems like the initial process is very time consuming, but it rarely takes me longer than 20 minutes (with two kids at my feet). Then you have a whole week or two of ready-to-bake bread. You may find that your bread consumption increases, as we did. But that’s the beauty of this recipe. You are saving money in the long run and providing a healthy bread for you and your family. Plus, people love homemade bread as gifts. After trying this recipe out, you can give away six 2-pound loaves at a time and only have to spend about 40 active minutes in your kitchen!

The 100 percent whole wheat recipe is a little more complicated with ingredients, but not in doing. However, I gotta leave some of it for the book! Now, give ’er a try! Make it tonight when you get home from work and put it in the fridge overnight. Then get up an hour early and serve homemade toast to the family when they come groggily into the kitchen.

Use it. Own it. This recipe will empower you to take bread making into your own bare hands!

As usual, I am beginning this blog with a heartfelt apology for not writing sooner. It’s been another month and so much has been going on that it’s hard for me to have the energy and/or time to sit down and put into words all that I’m observing and feeling.

You see, I always have a “blog on my heart” about something or someone here on the farm, but so easily time slips away and there are too many things to take the place of a good, honest blogging session. This time, it’s been the Harvest Season. It has earned capital letters and truth be told, could probably be put into all caps, but writing like that is a pet peeve of Andy’s, so I held back.

Harvest Season. Never in my life have I understood the seasons like I have this year. Living by the seasons and working with nature and God’s design for animals, food and life has never been so real. We began the warm weather (mid-April in Wisconsin) with high hopes and zeal for a bunch of new projects and enterprises. By the time we hit Independence Day, we were in a low spot. Struggles with getting the dairy up and running, getting all the seeds and plants planted, building fences, chasing sheep, new calves, new milk cows, bringing in hay, family stresses and long, long daylight hours combined to bring our spirits low and our zeal down to a minimum. You may recall the “One Step Forward” post that I made on our farm blog.  I concluded that post with a hopeful and positive note that all we were doing was totally worth it in the end. At the time I wrote it, I only half believed my own words.

But August brought a certified dairy, the first bountiful fruits from our garden and the promise of the end of summer. I know that sounds negative, but when you awaken every single day knowing that there are at least 16 hours full of work ahead of you and there’s no weekend to “get to,” those first cold days of September are something of legend.

As we rounded out August and flew into September, I suddenly realized that my summer had, indeed, ended. Now, the days were still warm and balmy, but it struck me one day as I traversed our back garden: the mid-day sun was hitting me at an extreme angle and my shadow extended noticeably to the north. I glanced up and saw that our Sugar Maple had nearly emptied itself of those magnificent red leaves while the Elms were hinting at gold. The lush grasses were a dull shade of green and all around me were tans, golds and browns. The tomatoes were in full swing and so were the peppers, cauliflower, snap beans and herbs. Our apple trees had begun dropping loads of fruit and even our Miracle Pear tree (it’s a wonderful story, please ask us about it) had a few green fruits to be proud of. I was struck with surprise and a tinge of sadness to see it gone so soon. Yet ...

... We had entered Harvest Season. Harvest Season is like a separate part of the end of summer and beginning of autumn. It transcends calendar dates and simply crashes into the shoreline, one crop after another, until a few sparkling frosty mornings call the tide to a halt.

At the beginning, I was so rarin’ to go that I collected all I could and stressed about any single bean left on the bush or any hidden tomato under the foliage. I pushed Bret and Cortnie (our young garden/farm helpers) to get back out there and look for more. We’d collect and pile and stack and bag everything that looked ripe.

Then, we’d share the bounty. Once we had what we needed for each family, we had to step back and see the enormity of the task at hand. How to take all this fresh, organic and BEAUTIFUL blessing of food and keep it until we needed it this winter? So began our legendary days of canning. First, we made Catsup. Our favorite condiment and one so old-fashioned tasty that we had to share the recipe with our friends (via our newsletter). Next we moved on to stewed tomatoes. Such diverse applications in the kitchen and one of the easiest ways to keep those ’maters around. We made a lot of stewed tomatoes. A lot. I mean, A LOT.

Then we had a peck of perfect peppers to deal with. Ok, maybe like 15 pecks! I froze a bunch of them, but you can only use so much thawed pepper over the course of a year, so we turned to our star-player: Lacto-fermented salsa! Thanks to Sally Fallon of the Weston A. Price Foundation and her cookbook Nourishing Traditions, we have a whole host of alternate preserving techniques at our fingertips. The beauty of this recipe is that you use tomatoes, peppers, salt, garlic, onions and cilantro, like any other salsa recipe.

But then you get a little crazy. Instead of cooking everything to a boil, you cut it all up and mix it in a large bowl (In our case, due to the large amount of ingredients, we mixed in two 5 gallon buckets)! Then, instead of taking your mason jar and pressure cooking it for up to 40 minutes, you add sea salt, whey (the actual by-product of making cheese curds, not the powder power-lifter stuff) and close the mixture in.

You let the food do the work. Over the next two-three days, the good bacteria and the Lactobacilli found in the whey work together to eliminate all the bad, spoilage-producing bacteria. Then, the food begins to ferment. This is always a good thing. Fermentation is a documented age-old way of preserving food. This is a thousands of years old way to keep food around, and since the invention of refrigeration and even heat canning, we have lost this amazing art.

Andy and I are just learning. After a few days of fermenting, the salsa is ready to eat. I trusted this recipe enough to take our first mason jar of it to a bridal shower and serve it as one of the treats. It went over great and people had to ask, what gives it this great color and flavor?

Having never been cooked, the salsa looks just as fresh as the day we harvested it. And indeed, the fermentation causes the mixture to be even healthier than it was as a raw veggie. It’s pretty sweet. But be warned, when opening anything lacto-fermented for the first time, realize that the contents are under a lot of pressure. Both Andy and I had to rush to the sink (me at the bridal shower and he here at home) as the salsa came fizzing and sputtering out like a Coke that just took a turn on the Tilt-a-Whirl.

Yes, the fermented salsa comes out carbonated! (see whitish spots in the freshly sealed jar above) But it’s a natural fizziness, not from carbonated water and is the reason our soda beverages are carbonated in the first place. Did you know that original “soft drinks” were made from lacto-fermented ingredients and so were drank with this natural fizz that we encountered? The original recipes for Root Beer, Haymaker’s Tea, Sassafras Beer and others are also found in Nourishing Traditions. These ancient sodas were actually really good for you and restored a lot of lost nutrients and enzymes. But, I digress.

We made 43 quarts of salsa and cleared out our harvest table of the tomatoes and peppers, only to go picking more the next day. We moved on to tomato soup, chili, red sauce and gardeniera (basically pickled veggies, see below just before heading into the canner).

We froze corn, beans, cabbage, cauliflower and peppers. We ground up pears and apples and made Prapple Sauce. Our canning took place in the evenings, mostly after the little ones went to bed so that we both could devote time to putting the harvest up.

So began our late night canning sessions with Nora Jones crooning in the background, and the two of us enjoying a beer or a glass of milk and getting punchy late into the night. Then I hit upon rigging up the lappy as a sort of movie machine and we watched movies while we canned. We watched Hitch and a couple others before one night, when we knew it would be a long one, we popped in the first DVD of The Lord of the Rings. We have the Super Duper Special Extra Long, Director’s Cut Collector’s Edition which means each 3 hour movie turns into a 4 hour movie. In the course of two long nights, we finished the first two movies. We have been working on The Return of the King over the last week or so as our long canning nights have not been so long, or so frequent.

But I must say, I thought I would begin to dread those long nights. When you have small children as we do, there is no such thing as sleeping in. They go down relatively early in the night (between 6-8pm, depending), but they always arise at the same time: 5:30-6:30am. Nothing keeps them from that magical hour. So when you finally rest your tired body on your scrumptious bed at midnight thirty, it is a bittersweet peace. You know darn well that you’ll be up in 5 short hours!

And yet, I did not dread the long nights. In fact, as we fell into a preserving food routine, I began to look forward to it. A few nights into it, and I realized why: Andy and I, for the first time since Elly was born, were getting dates! Now, we’ve been out together here and there, but to know that you will be with your mate one on one for a lengthy period of time, enjoying one another’s presence and mutually bettering the family ... well, that’s priceless.

I will cherish our canning nights. We aren’t done, mind you. As I type, we are silently enduring another late night; Andy making chicken stock from our freshly butchered chickens, me creating this blog and looking forward to the last of the garden harvest the rest of the week. But in a few days, it will all be taken care of. Our lacto-fermented sauerkraut will be stored away, our chicken stock will be canned up, our herbs will be hanging to dry in the basement.

And then we turn inward. Our chores lessen and our home grows warmer. The temperatures plummet and our family time soars. Rain gives way to flakes. Dew turns into frost. Color fades into brown and grey.

And it will come to me, about a month from now, or maybe two. I’ll rush down to the cellar and grab a few items for dinner. It will already be dark, and the wind will be whiping outside. In the kitchen however, the sweet smells of apple cider, slow-cooking roast and mashed potatoes will greet my return. I’ll twist open the jar of Prapple sauce in my hand and all the loveliness of summer will again flow over me. The memories of late nights with my beloved, the hard days of harvest and the wonderful sense of accomplishment placing that single jar onto our cellar shelves had brought me will overwhelm me.

What a wonderful priviledge we have to toil long and hard right up to the end of ourselves. How much greater it is to have another to share that with. What beautiful seasons we have indeed.

That is what Harvest means to me.

Photo Essay: Our September Garden

A family heirloom, this cast iron, hand-crank apple peeler comes from my great grandparents. The base is labeled with the company and the patent date of 1896. I’m not sure it’s actually that old, but I tell ya, this thing does the trick and it’s way fun to use.

I had to show off the plethora of colors and variety of goods that came from our blessed soil.

The kids, enjoying the Sugar Maple leaves (while the rest of the world claims that it’s still summer)!

Just to give you perspective, my mom and Elly stand next to our Harvest Table. The My Little Pony also gives size relevance. No, not really. Elly just insisted that her pony need to go into its “tomato house” and close the door right before I took the photo. Mom is looking for a suitable tomato to be the door. The couch you see behind the table is long enough for a grown man to stretch out on without hanging over. We filled this table three times like this.

Heirlooms galore!

Here’s Elly wearing her “Pepper Cape.” After cutting up 50-60 giant bell peppers, I got a little crazy. Of course, that’s not crazy to a 2 year old. Wearing a pepper clipped on with office clips is totally fun!

One of our new bullcalves, T-Bone. Poor guy, marked from birth!

What you see here are three eggs from our hens. The one on the left is classified as “Large.” The one in the middle would just fit into a “Jumbo” egg carton. The egg on the right would be placed in one of the cartons labeled “Our Hens Can’t Actually Walk Anymore.”

Ethan, after helping me harvest cauliflower one day.

A change of clothes and a flowering cauliflower. Ethan is there for size reference, and for his tactile pleasure.

Both our babes, enjoying a misting morning and an apple and pear for each. Elly actually picked them out for her and Ethan, and another for Daddy and Momma. It’s an understated blessing to have her be so involved in her food.

Thank you Lord, for everything you’ve given us. It’s taken this blog posting for me to truly see the magnificent scope of your blessings.

We know. There's been a lot going on here since we last posted a whole month (!) ago.

• Pasture Walk on the 22nd of August: 70 some folks came for local food, local speakers and a walk through our operations. It was a great day and we raised $76 for the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund with a donation mini farmer's market. Thank you to Boerson Farm and Five Oaks Farm for contributing and for our hard workers Cortnie and Bret who harvested from our gardens.

• Shipped the rams, ewes and half the lambs on the 8th of September. Decided to call it quits on sheep for the time being, as they are just one project too many for us with the dairy about to ramp up with new heifers and calves. The remaining lambs are pre-sold to customers except for about 4 of them. Anyone interested? :-)

• This past Sunday, we decided that we needed a family day. Normally, our Sundays are our only true day of rest, and even that is relatively speaking. The animals are still cared for twice a day, so that leaves Andy with about 3 hours of chores in the morning, church to attend, home for a quick lunch and then naptimes for the kids. By the time they wake up, it's nearing 4pm and time for the second round of roughly 2 hours of chores to get done. Then we are free and clear from about 6 pm to bedtime.

But you see how that schedule doesn't actually ever allow us to leave the farm. Andy and I get time to ourselves, and we truly enjoy that, but unless we want crank-tastic kids, we must remain grounded (so to speak).

So this Saturday, I announced to Andy that we were playing hookie from church on Sunday and having a family outing. He worked extra hard all day Saturday so that his normal chores on Sunday would be even more diminished. He got up really early Sunday morning and had everything done by 8:30 am and by 9 am, we hit the road. Hooray, a trip off the farm! Where would we go? What could we do? The possibilities seemed beyond comprehension, but were quickly narrowed down by the fact that whatever we did had to be within 2 hours and mostly free. (We're farmers you know!)

We went to Fond Du Lac's "Little Farmer." It's a 150 year old farm that is open to the public from August through November and you can pick your own apples and pumpkins, amongst a ton of other family fun things to do. Like feed goats, take wagon rides, do a corn maze, buy things at the craft barn and eat some fresh bakery items from their own full scale kitchen.

Yes. We took the day off the farm and went to another farm. The irony was not at all lost on us.

We live on the west side of a really large inland lake called Lake Winnebago. It's sort of shaped like a finger, really long and narrow, heading north/south. Little Farmer is on the other side of the finger, near the southern end and you can see across on clear days. We got off the beaten path via road construction and were really thankful! We came upon a hill and saw this break in the trees.

A perfect view of Lake Winnebago and the western countryside that we never see. (We normally see the very hills we were driving on that day!) A few more hilly miles and following an enigmatic apple sign and we made it to The Little Farmer. We got there only 45 minutes after it opened, but already the parking area was full of families getting their apples and baked treats.

We parked and loaded up the kids. Elly, as usual, is so excited to see the farm animals that she could only scream uncontrollably until we set out.

Ethan feigns concern, but we know he's just biding his time before he can grab some serious apple leaves!

After learning that the whole "pick-your-own" deal didn't start until next weekend (doh!) we decided to buy a peck of apples and sit down in the shade to eat our packed lunch. It was perfect and relaxing and the apples were delicious!

Here, Ethan discovers the joy of fresh apples. As much as one can gum an apple. Elly ate one whole apple all by herself! (we paid for that the next day...if you catch my drift).

And with the lighting just right, I caught the fam, sitting under a shade tree, wrapping up lunch at another person's farm (let THEM do the work!!) and loving summer life. Beautiful.

• We got a watermelon at the local farmer's market last week and just broke into it. Below is a series of shots as Ethan learns how to chew up some juicy melon. (Elly calls it "water-lemon.")

Love this shot:

And the hand that feeds him...

A moment in time. Just before Ethan decided to eat my face. It's this thing that he does when he's happy to be by me and he happens to be hungry (about 70% of the time.) He'll be sitting there as calm as can be, then just lunge for my face and start sucking on it. It's pretty amusing!

The action shot...believe me, I'm holding him back!

And we have contact! This time he got my mouth. What a goof ball!

Quickly now, I have to get this news in before the little ’uns awaken.

On Tuesday, we had the state dairy inspector come and look over our milking facilities. This is a necessary step to getting our dairy license. One needs a state approved license in order to sell milk commercially.

Prior to Tuesday, we had been working to get that barn up and in order. Over the last couple months, we went from piecing together a milking system to milk Charlotte, to streamlining it with the additions of Tilly, Mabel, Anna and Bea. Then we continued to replace old parts and clean in the milk house and barn.

We pursued several local creameries to pick up our milk and one was very interested in us. We were along their current milk pick-up route, they were agreeable to our small number of cows and their field rep was completely ok with us selling raw on the side. This was Weyauwega Star Dairy. Then we added Leche and Isabelle to our barn.

Next, we had to make some FDA mandated improvements in the milk house. Install a hand washing station. Add a soap dispenser for said station. Have at least three milking claws (the tools used to actually fasten to the cows’ udder and pump milk, and we only had one). Wash the stainless steel pipeline system.

During all of this, we had to get our well water tested for chemicals, metals and bacteria. The field rep came out and took a sample and sent it to Milwaukee to get it tested at a state-run lab. The sample came back positive for coliform bacteria (pretty common in older wells and ours is nearing 100 years) and E. coli. That’s right, E. coli! We had the rep test from another source point on the well and resend it in.

The results were the same. In fact, the lab suggested we stop drinking the water and immediately buy bottled water and get a whole new well dug. My dad looked into cost, and the best case scenario was two weeks to wait and $4800 to dig. Ouch. Plus, we LOVE, LOVE, LOVE our water here. It’s the clearest, tastiest water we’ve ever had and somehow we are in a separate aquifer than our neighbors because they have really iron-y, yellowish water. Anyway, we were aghast. Having E. coli in the water meant that there was some sort of manure leak at the surface of the well that was contaminating the whole thing.

Now here’s the kicker. Knowing what we did, we couldn’t possibly continue to sell our raw milk because the animals drink that water, the equipment is washed in that water, everything touches that water! Then, try telling people that we have E. coli contamination and see them come flocking back to buy an unpasteurized product. We were about to lose our whole business. This was in June and one of the reasons we were so absent from the blog. We were scared of losing everything.

Days passed, and my dad began asking around about independent testing. We have a relative who is a certified plumber, and he offered to take a test up to an independent lab in Appleton. So, without us changing anything, he took water from the same source point and sent it in. We waited a few days. We busied ourselves with farm work. And then they called.

Positive for coliform bacteria. Negative for E. coli. Negative! It was then recommended that we “shock” the well with chlorine to clean it of the coliform. We did that and resent a new sample to the same lab. Two days. Then the results.

Negative in all areas! We passed! Now, what does that mean that one lab passes us and the other spells doomsday for our entire operation? Notice that one was independent and the other state run. We have a feeling, though there are no hard facts to back this up, that the state would like to eradicate all the old wells and bring them up to modern standards. Ours is grandfathered in to avoid a lot of regulations that our neighbors’ wells are not. We believe this is why our water is better tasting; we are at a much shallower level in the aquifer than modern standards would allow. But the water here is great! We are beyond blessed to have access to it for free. It is highly possible for a state run facility to see the age of a well and run some numbers a little high in order to eradicate said old well. We wouldn’t put it past the government, not for a minute.

In this time, we did not tell anyone what was going on. We needed to make sure, and there was no need to freak everyone out. We are so glad we didn’t have to tell them. We weren’t sick. Our animals weren’t sick. We just knew this had to be wrong, especially when we’d had our well tested last summer for other reasons, and it had come up clean and clear.

And this time, it did. We called Weyauwega back, and they accepted the independent lab test. Then they called the state inspector to come see our facilities.

Which brings us back to Tuesday. She came, she saw, she recommended, she passed us! Just like that, in less than an hour, three months of work and worry and testing and building and cleaning and repairing came to fruition. We have a Grade B Dairy License (grade A sells fluid milk, grade B sells milk for further processing, like cheese or candy).

That afternoon, Andy and Dad and Bret worked hard to get the old bulk tank (milk cooler) up and running. By milking time, Andy was milking nine cows with three milking claws into our pipeline system. It went from 45 minutes of milk time down to 15.

And on Friday, the Weyauwega milk truck will back into our driveway and pull the milk out from that tank for the first time in 13 years.

Oh, what a happy week! (And now the kids are up, so I must run!)

Blessings to you all!

Becky

I want to begin by heaving an enormous sigh and taking in a deep breath of rainy atmosphere.

It’s been a bumpy and amazing ride these last two months. I feel like I am just resurfacing for air after a dive to the deep end of the public pool: I can see the wavy light above me, but my lungs are burning for the oxygen promised on the other side.

Whew. It tastes good. Since I last wrote about what was happening here at the farm, we had just remodeled our old pump house into the small, but functional farm store. We have since added some little bits of home to make it comfy and welcoming and overall, our customers like it very much. Since then, we have been really slammed with work here and since we have so many new endeavors this year, everything that happens is like an emergency and must take center stage. To say the least, we have been stressed out.

However, I have uploaded a bunch of photos from the beginning of June until just a few days ago in order to help me keep the days straight. We’ve had so much going on that I need these visuals as much as you do! Here we go ...

Gardens

Below, you see our back field that held the pumpkins/chickens/sheep last year. We have since converted it into a fully functioning garden. Well, about half of it at least. Here, Bret and his mother Rita spent an entire day planting and tilling and planting and watering. We got our garden in super late this year, but I am thankful we have a garden at all. You see Rita and her husband Gale and family of eight kids have pledged time to come out and work the gardens throughout the season in order to have food for both our families. It works out great! Andy and I had high hopes for a pretty large garden this year, but when everything hit with the dairy and raw milk, we just had no time to devote to it. Enter Rita and her two oldest kids, Bret and Cortnie. We have the two of them nearly five days a week now in the summer, sometimes all day and they help with weeding, watering and eventually, harvesting.

And of course, other chores as well. It’s a great blessing to have them here as they can often take over simple duties of feeding chickens, watering animals, picking eggs and my favorite: babysitting! :-)

Lawnmowers

Here you see our rams eating our front lawn. There’s a book called Food Not Lawns (have not read it, but I get the premise) that talks about getting rid of the lawn mower and turning your yard into a garden. Well, we’re a few years down the road from that. However, I had this hair-brained idea to have the sheep graze the lawn way back in February. This June, I got to see it come to fruition. One thing I did not count on was having to “let it go” for such a long time that when the rams were finally let onto it, the area didn’t look like a front yard at all. I was happy to have satisfied my interest in “green lawn mowing”, but I think we need to retool a little bit before we do this again. The front yard now has a bunch of SUPER green circles that stick out like polka dots on a housewife’s dress. Not exactly the sort of lawn you want new customers to see.

But it was fun while it lasted! And with the wonders of temp fencing, it’s like we never had sheep there at all!

Raising Chicks

We got brand new baby chicks in about June 12th. We had these high hopes of helping a heritage breed chicken increase its numbers and showing off our geniune “old fashioned” hens. But apparently, everyone else in this down economy was thinking: I’m gonna lose my job, I better raise chickens to be safe. So the Delaware chickens we had been so carefully researching over the winter did not get ordered in time to beat the rush. We would not have gotten our chicks until this week had we waited! Since half of them would be raised to replace our old, old laying hens, and it takes 5 months to get a pullet to lay a single egg, we needed something a little faster.

So we went to a local hatchery in Beaver Dam and ordered their generic Blacks. 100 straight run chicks for 87¢ each. That beat the Delaware price of $2.09 each, but they certainly lacked the street cred that a genuine, critically endangered animal would have carried! Right?

Boy were they cute!!! As soon as they came, I could care less about their pedigree. These chicks were awesome. Small enough to hold two in one hand and 100 fit easily into Elly’s kiddie pool. This was our makeshift incubator for the first week to ensure they would stay warm and cozy and not get lost. We only lost three from shipping and that was it!

Once you are past the first week, chicks are so easy! Above, the chicks at a week old. Now that they are nearly two months old, we’ve had them free-ranging for several weeks. They are naturals! The little cockerels have turned white and black spotted and the pullets remain pure black. This week or next we will separate them and begin an intensive pastured poultry operation. In the meantime, they enjoy their brooder house home behind our large field garden. (See our posts about getting that brooder house up to standard last fall!) We are going to order more females this winter and raise them to be layers for ourselves and another farmer next May. We might even invest in an incubator ourselves and just take our own eggs when we get the right varieties here on the farm. But I digress...

Shearing

Below is a bunch of our woolly ewes and their lambs. Can you even tell the difference?? They are only a month old here, mid-June, and already over half the size of their mommas. The one in the middle facing away from us was the subject of much curiosity. In the field, he looks like a fox hopping over the grass. We’ve never seen a sheep with this sort of coloration before. He has begun to lighten in color, but still has this tawny, shaggy hide that must be a combination of some serious recessive genes. As you can see, the ewes all have their wool yet and we had already hit the heat of summer. It was just another one of those things that didn’t get dealt with until it was an emergency. We went about three weeks straight with the sheep out every single day.

They were some of the most stressful days we had encountered and we strengthened the fences and gave them fresher grass and checked for shorts and it didn’t matter. They would lift the high-tensile wire with their fully wooled necks and run right through. So we called around and found a sheep shearer about an hour away who would be able to come within two weeks. It was the longest two weeks we’d ever waited! But with a lot of prayer and fence diligence, we made it through with only a few break-outs.

When Courtney arrived, he had this excellent equipment and 30 years of sheep knowledge under his belt. We set up a shearing area and he just dove right in. The follow shots give you a little idea of how smoothly it went. He was shearing the next sheep before the last one was back in the pen. It was amazing and he was a very genuine guy. We had him stay for a country lunch as a sort of tip for his time.

To keep the wools clean, we laid down an old wagon side. You can see this ewe’s lamb watching in the cattle chute. When she was done, we’d lead her to the pen behind the red gravity box and dump the lamb(s) in with her.

Courtney knew just where the pressure points were on the sheep in order to hold them relatively still. They folded and flopped into place just like little sheep rag dolls. We were in awe. Below, my mom Judy holds up a shorn coat. We placed the fully white wool into one bag and the black or mixed colored wool into a separate bag.

The holding pen for the freshly shorn ewes. Now it was even harder to tell the full grown sheep from the lambs! We will never make the mistake again of letting our flock out to pasture with 4 inches of wool around their little bodies. No fun for anyone involved!

The Little Peckers

Not to forget about our chickens, they have been rangin about our sheep and cattle fields since early April. We were moving them about once every two weeks, but found that some sort of varmint was getting the late hens at dusk. We finally set out some traps and moved the trailer about 30 feet and even set up some night vision motion senser cameras to see if we could find what was killing our hens.

All we saw were beautiful shots of the farm during the day and cryptic shots of Andy closing the chickens in at night. :-)

I laugh at the one above. I love Andy’s sense of humor! But we lost about 25 laying hens in two weeks and then the raids stopped. We haven’t had a problem since.

A direct consequence of the stress the rest of the flock felt was a reduction in egg numbers. Couple that with a summer molt, old hens, hot weather, inconsistent watering/feeding and our huge flock was down to about 3 dozen eggs per day. 36 eggs from 180 hens! So we smartened up our feeding schedule, moved them to a short grass, thick clover field and move them nearly every single day to thwart the predators. We are now back up to seven to eight dozen eggs per day and boy do we need it! We have expanded our raw milk sales and the egg demand has gone through the roof! For about three weeks at the end of June, we couldn’t keep a dozen in that store for longer than 12 hours. Above, can you find the ranging hens? This is one of our north fields that face the permanent pasture and the ancient oak trees. It’s a lovely sight to behold!

Mornings

Speaking of sights to behold, the shot below is sunrise over the sheep paddock about a week ago. The freshly shorn ewes have a new found respect for electric fencing and we rest easy at night again. Andy goes out about 5:30am and moves all the animal fencing before rounding up the milking herd. He lets the chickens out, moves the sheep, opens up new paddock for the beef/heifer herd and lets the milking herd into fresh grass. I have often asked him to take the camera to capture early morning life on the farm. On this day, he did!

Moo-calves

Below, some of our scamps nose up to Andy. We have eight young calves now, a direct result of nine cows milking in our barn. Our first cow Charlotte had still-born twins back in April, but the rest of the cows each had one healthy calf. Then our seventh cow, Isabelle, had twin bulls which we named Imis and Ignatio. The last cow to have her calf, just last week, had difficulties in labor and lost the calf to stress. But thankfully she is doing well. Below, from left to right: Tess out of Tilly, Imis out of Isabelle, Alex out of Anna and Barbie out of Bea. Not shown is Midnight out of Mabel, Leeloo out of Leche, Ignatio and Ghost out of Gretta. Ghost is pretty cool. I’ll have to get a shot of him sometime; he’s like a tan/grey Holstein looking little guy. Never seen a calf that color before.

Gardens Again

Back to the gardens, they are growing strong. This shot below shows what has grown in a month in the back garden. My dad Dave takes the disk and kills the weeds in the other area not being used. We are raising everything organically, so weed control is a daily task. Bret and Cortnie step up to the job as well as they can, but there’s only so much work a 12 and 14 year old want to do in a given day. They aren’t here to be slaves, so we don’t push them. I get out there when I can to assess the plants and pull a hand full of weeds or two. We have had serious run-ins with cucumber beetles on our cucumbers and flea beetles on our lettuces. Now we are dealing with cabbage loopers on our cauliflowers and cabbages. I have made some homemade tinctures of garlic and dish soap with limited success. However, the beetles and looper remain. I am going to look into Bt as an option. I need to learn more about this spray to see if it’s right for us. We have a sort of mini CSA going on with two friends of ours and one of the big selling points for them is the organic aspect of the garden. It can be bug eaten but not pesticide ridden. So we’ll see.

On the Dairy

On July 2nd, we got our dairy barn “whitewashed.” This is a process by which barn lime is mixed with water and sprayed over the entire interior of the barn, coating it a pristine white and also creating a natural anti-bacterial shield over all surfaces. In order to ship commercially, this needs to be done once per year. Here I took a before picture (FINALLY!) and below is the same alley after. It’s amazing, isn’t it?!

Our quest to ship our milk with Weyawega Star Dairy, a local cheese plant, is still in the future. We had to get our 100 year old well shocked with chlorine in order to clear out some common bacteria and we are waiting on a follow-up water test. In the meantime, we sell the milk raw (which will not change) and feed it to the calves and collect cream and dump the skim to the chickens or on the gardens. We don’t like dumping milk at all, but at least the excess is being reused in a good way.

Feeling Patriotic

Independence Day came like a breath of fresh air for us. We got chores done early and headed into my hometown of Omro for the highly anticipated festivities. My mother Judy organizes the annual Lion’s Club art fair and this year she participated after a 6 year hiatus. Here is her booth with Andy and Ethan in the corner. My mother does a lot of oil painting, crafting, furniture reclaiming and sowing. She also paints birdhouse gourds and full scale murals. She’s quite the little artist in her spare time! There was also a large parade, in which our little church won Best Of the Parade for all the floats involved! There was a rubber duck race and bands playing and a pie and ice cream social at our Historic Society. (Andy and I are card carrying members, by the way!) At night, the fireworks came, but our little troop went into melt down about 15 minutes before the start, so I’ll have to wait until next year to see the big show.

Here, Elly is being hugged by our friends’ son Haiden. In true Elly form, she simply tolerates it. But the photo was cute, so I had to post it! We spent the afternoon at Haiden’s grandmother’s house for a cookout and games. It was a welcome break from the farm. For reasons completely unrelated, Independence Day is my favorite holiday of the whole year!

The next day, here is Elly and Ethan on the way back from collecting eggs. The walk is about a quarter mile and they enjoy the wagon ride. At the parade, Elly managed to fall THROUGH a park bench and bust open her chin. That is the mar you see on her little face. She came through like a champ, though.

Family Time!

A week after Independence Day, my family from Colorado Springs came to visit us for a few days. You may recall, we drove to CO over Thankgiving to see them and others before Ethan was born. (See: We Went on Vacation.) The next several photos detail our trips to parks and back yards and family time. It was another blessed respite from the intense work on the farm.

Elly hamming it up!

Daddy and Ethan enjoying a beer...well, just Daddy.

Dan and Krista took their girls Silvie (3), Josie (2) and Madaline (1) to Menominee Park in Oshkosh. Me, Elly and Ethan tagged along and Grandma Judy came for support. It was a lot of fun ... Elly on the dinosaur. She looks so big there!

Ethan really liked the baby swing!

So did Elle-belle.

Then all too soon they had to go back home. Elly sure loves her cousins and can’t wait until they move closer to play more often.

Our Life

Back in the real world, Ethan has begun his journey down solid food lane. He took to it like a champ! He just turned five months last week; what a big boy! Normally foods can be started a lot earlier, but with everything going on, I just didn’t get to it. He’s not hurting for lack of solids; he just nurses all the time. So, it’s time to get him on to other things as well as me! Also, Elly has been successfully potty trained since June and Ethan is now exclusively in cloth diapers. It’s a small way we can contribute less to the landfills.

Gardens AGAIN

Back to the gardens, these next photos were taken just a few days ago, showing the progress from a couple weeks ago. Here is our front garden, mostly populated with peppers and tomatoes. (And Ellys!)

We let the sunflowers come up on their own and love the splashes of gold and yellow that they add to the sea of green.

Here is an example of companion planting. The basil in front aids bug protection to the tomato plant behind. For extra security, we stuck an onion in between because no bugs like the smell of onions!

Hollyhocks also volunteered their beauty this year and we have allowed a few to adorn the perimeter of the garden.

This is the back garden again, looking back at the house. Here are our cabbages, desperately needing help from those blasted loopers. Gotta look into that!

My favorite row of crops so far: our lettuces. Aren’t they so pretty? We enjoy the “cut and come again” aspect of greens and have been able to share organic, graden fresh greens with some folks who have never ventured outside the world of Iceburg! It’s been wonderful to see the response and interest generated. Yes, there is life outside the grocery store!

Old is New

Another side project has been getting an antique cream separator up and running. Hank, you will be interested to know that it is a DeLaval Model #18 hand crank stand separator. We got Gale in on the action because he is very knowledgeable and gifted in machinery technology. We got all the parts sorted and clean and realized we were missing one part, a very important bowl separator. I looked online, but am having major difficulty in locating anything resembling a parts shop for something this obsolete. Can any of you help??

Closing Thoughts

Finally, we are up to date. Now we can post non–novel-length blogs in order to keep you up to date on our comings and goings. A parting shot: taken in June, this is one of our eggs cooked just right, broken open on my homemade bread with some salt and pepper. Have you seen a yolk that dark before? We were shocked and had to capture it on film. I’ll never order an egg in a restaurant again! I am ruined!

Thank you all for your support and we’ll flesh out what’s been going on with the marketing side of things in a future post. We have welcomed many new milk members in the last month!

Blessings,

Becky

Many things must happen in order to get up and running with our farm fresh milk. First, the cow. As you well know, Charlotte has been milking for a week now. Next, you need a place to house the milking equipment and cleaning area. This would be what we call The Milkhouse. You've seen it in photos before; that little building attached to the dairy barn with three windows and a door to the outside. It has sat dormant and decaying for the last 13 years. Dust and junk have piled up while the equipment sat waiting to be either consolidated and torn out or sold to the scrap yard.

When we decided to begin milking again, there was a passive effort to get the barn and milkhouse cleaned up. When Charlotte freshened (gave birth), we kicked it into high gear. Dad got a couple milk equipment specialists in there to look at what needed to be replaced. We were expecting most of it, even the stainless steel bulk tank and milk pipe lines as they had never received a proper wash at the end of the last milking back in 1996.

I won't bore you with the specifics, but suffice it to say that everything but a few rubber hoses, some small wiring and a wash controller were in perfect working order. Everything turned on and did what it was supposed to do! God is Awesome!

Cleaning the Milkhouse

So the only thing we had to do was get in there and clean. I regret to say that I did not capture any before photos, so unless you've been in our milkhouse, you can never truly appreciate how good this looks!

Above is the wash area and where the milk piping comes in from the barn. In a larger scale operation, the milk would be pumped in to that large glass orb on the left from the highest pipe and then drained into the milk cooler (below). There is a sink and places to hang the milkers and other equipment. Since we are only milking one cow, we don't use the pipelines to pump the milk through them; we only use the suction that they create. The milk is then pumped into an old-fashioned milk can called a Surge Can. It is a completely closed system from cow teat to milk can to bottle. More on that later...

The view above is standing in the wash area that you just saw. Out the windows you can see our front yard and even the house. Andy took the time to shine up the old milk cooler (it's about 60 years old) with stainless steel polish. It looks great! He and Dad and a cool kid from our church, Bret, spent a whole day taking things out and sorting and throwing away. Again, hard to tell the real difference from an after photo!

Above is the back of the milkhouse as you walk in. To the left would be the wash station and to the right, you can see the milk cooler. Pictured is the "Freheater" which takes the warmed freon after it goes through the milk cooler and passes it through pipes in a water reservoir in order to cool the freon back down. The warmed water is then piped into the water heater. Can you see how this reduces the need for energy consumption? The warmed water takes less time (read: energy) to heat up and the freon takes less time to be cooled for use in the milk cooler again.

Above, Mom shows off her handiwork. She is standing in the vestibule which connects the milkhouse to the barn. After years of non-essential use, it was pretty dirty and paintless. She spent the better part of two days priming and repainting the entire vestibule and the entire milkhouse (including doors, walls and ceiling). As you can see, she is gifted in the arts of detail work and enjoys painting. This is one of her talents and we relish being able to utilize it here on the farm. The whole place positively glows now!

Milking Charlotte

Here you can see the process of actual milking beginning. Andy has placed the milkers onto Charlotte and she stands patiently while they do their work. It's sort of hard to see, but just behind Andy and his mom, Julie, is the Surge can. You can see the hose attached to the milkers that pumps the milk into the can. Then there is a smaller hose that attaches to the pipeline. (it is yellowish and reaches up, out of the photo). That is where the suction comes from. When Charlotte is "milked out," we let her back out to her small pasture and she enjoys the rest of the day grazing and dozing and exploring until about 4:30 pm when it's time to milk again. Below, Andy is pouring the milk from the Surge can into our spigot bucket. He pours through a specialized milk filter to be sure there are no foreign objects in the milk. The spout on the bottom helps us fill our milk bottles cleanly and with as little human interaction as possible. (This helps ensure perfectly clean milk for us and our customers.)

Below, Andy begins the cleanup of all the milking equipment. Using the wash station, he runs super high temperature water into a wash bucket and makes sure every piece, tube, hose and valve get a thorough cleansing. With milk, you can never be too careful.

After a long day of milking (the whole process takes about 20 minutes, ha ha) Andy and Elly head back to the house with the milk from today.

Selling the Milk

Once the milk is collected, it needs to be bottled. We could not find a domestic producer of glass milk bottles (apparently the market for our size dairy doesn't really exist in the US anymore). We found a company in Canada called StanPac that sells half gallon glass bottles with bottle caps and handles. The caps can be put on with a multi-functional bottling tool (our hands) and have tamper resistant seals (so you know when it's been opened). They came three days ago by semitrailer and now sit in our garage, waiting for a home.

Below you see our workshop. This is directly across from the house and has been a tool shed of sorts for the better part of 70 years. Originally built in 1912, it was the first milk- and pumphouse on the farm. The building houses a pump that pulls water from our well either with an electric motor or by hand. (A nice emergency item to have if worse comes to worse).

We needed a place to sell our products that is not our garage (where we currently sell our eggs). This was the perfect fit. It also meant a lot of deconstruction and hauling of heavy tools and parts. The only thing left standing is our trusty old pump. Again, no before photos. Just imagine a building crammed so full of tools, bolts and buckets of nails that you pretty much could not even walk three steps inside. Yeah, still won't give you the impact of these next photos. My brothers can relate, though. And so can Andy's dad! :-)

Below, the view as you step inside. We are currently covering the cinderblocks with insulated wallboard and will then paint those to give it a more welcoming and lighter look. (calling in my mother for that!)

Below you see the well pump and the way back outside.

Another view looking in. The building is small and quaint. Perfect.

Our Own Grocery Store

Above is our own milk, displayed beautifully in our new bottles, with some fresh jumbo eggs from our hens. God is amazing in his blessings.

Making Butter

We were curious what we could do with our unpasteurized, unhomogonized, un-messed-around-with milk. MAKE BUTTER, OF COURSE! Above, I have taken two days worth of seperated cream and beat it at high speed in our food processor. It was the most amazing thing; after about three minutes of the same noise, the processor suddenly made a deeper whirring sound. We stopped it and took the cover off and saw this! Like magic, the butter just formed! I mean, I'd read up on this and knew this would happen, but to see it and experience it for myself ... well, it was just plain cool!

Here I am pouring the buttermilk off through a strainer. The buttermilk is (as I type) being used for our first homemade buttermilk pancakes. They smell great!

After several rinses in cold water, the butter was ready to be squeezed on the cutting board. This gets the last of the water and buttermilk out. It is also the time to add the salt (for taste and preservative). I have included a shot of my homemade bread with butter on it. I mean, come on. Could it get any better than that?!

The remaining buttermilk below.

Finally, two big pats of butter to be refrigerated and used up in the next week. No problems there! It is so good and creamy. And once Charlotte is on grass full time, the butter will be yellower and healthier (with Vitamin A, CLAs, good fats, Omegas, and Activator-X).

Now, it is time to eat our buttermilk pancakes, slathered with our butter and enjoyed with a fresh cup of milk. It's a good time to be a homesteader!

It's 5 am. As I sit here with Ethan in my arms, I know today is special. There is the fact that today is forecast to be 80+ degrees when the surrounding days won't even reach 60. Then, when I stepped outside briefly to see if the thermometer really was reading 50 degrees at 5 am, I heard Reinhold our rooster in mid-crow, announcing the morning to the farmstead. Even more dramatic was the fact that off in the distance, I heard the distinct gobbling of the male turkeys in our neighborhood announcing the same thing. The birds were awake and praising the morning promise, and all around, a sort of pregnancy of anticipation could be felt.

And then I came to it; the reason today stood out for me above all else:

In the midst of the darkness of dawn, the barn lights were on.

I feel my heart leap with excitement. Has it really been that long? Yes, nearly 13 years to the day since the early farm morning was illuminated by those soft squares of light, the old dairy barn is once again animated with life and promise. I can't believe I am affected like this! I had no idea I had missed that part of the farm so much!

Andrew is in that very barn, milking our very first cow, beginning the day with a “chore” that we have been dreaming about for two full years. Today, a big part of our dreams have come to fruition.

This farm is a dairy again.