On the homestead front, it’s been a little crazy trying to figure out my new schedule and how to balance that with all my farming work at home, but the garden keeps on growing and the animals keep on eating.  I’ve got 50+ peaches sitting on my kitchen table that will hopefully be processed into salsa and whatever else I can come up with today.  Our tomato plants are ripening like crazy.  I have several bags of paste tomatoes in the freezer waiting till I have enough to make sauce.  The heat here has been stifling the last few days, so I need to make sure all the plants have enough water to survive, and I’m rotating the rabbits between a cage indoors and their hutch outside so they don’t overheat.  The tilapia have grown enough now that we can more easily see them in the tank darting around.  I need to start some more plants for the grow bed since we lost most of them while trying to figure out the pump and timing system.  The bigger the tilapia get the more important it is to have plenty of plants in the grow bed filtering the water.

This morning we’re headed to feed the goats and then wash bins for Farmer Joe.

At home, there’s lots of milk to be processed.  I’m thinking goat’s milk ice cream and a batch of yogurt.  I’ve had great success with this recipe for Strawberry Honey Goat Milk Ice Cream.  I’ll probably use another fruit today – maybe cherries or blackberries.

Our fridge is becoming overrun with the glut of fresh produce from our garden and the CSA.  I need to put some of it up – so I’ll be blanching and freezing beans, making preserves with cherries, picking and freezing some blueberries, and maybe some carrot pickles.

The worm bins still need to be emptied and the garden could use some weeding and pruning attention.

And, then, there’s the huge mess in my living room and the pile of dirty dishes….

Yet every time someone sees us eating them and asks if they are edible I get quite strong reactions once they try them.  The taste is a bit on the bitter side.  Someone compared it to a chocolate stout beer, a very robust and unique flavor. Most folks, generally the American born and raised folks, scrunch up their faces and decide to pass on eating anymore.    But a fair number of folks on our neighborhood were born and raised internationally and most of them are as enchanted with the cherries as we are.  Many of them have fond memories of similar cherry trees in their home countries.  I find the contrast in reactions quite striking.  Confirms for me that Americans, in general, have far too much of a sweet tooth.  I have been working on removing the processed sugar from my family’s diet.  We don’t eat a lot of sweets, the only candy is very dark chocolate, and anything I bake I sweeten with honey rather than white sugar. We still enjoy some Ben & Jerry’s now and again.  But I am pleased that EG is able to enjoy these less than sweet cherries.  Makes me proud that she has not gone the way of the typical american sweet tooth.

We also are still having trouble with the grow bed flooding too much.  We added one bag of pea gravel, which meant removing all the plants and replanting them.  We lost a few plants that way who couldn’t quite handle the stress.  Unfortunately, the one bag of pea gravel still didn’t get it to the right level.  So we’ll need to dig up and replant a second time.  I need to figure out how to do it better this time to stress the plants less.

At least, the fish are still very small so the amount of waste they are producing won’t over run the system while we try to figure out how to get it running appropriately.  I probably ought to start some more seeds on the chance we lose too many more plants in the next round of adding gravel.  This round with the aquaponics is most definitely about working out the kinks.  Hopefully we get to harvest at least a few fish and vegetables out of it.  Either way, it’s good learning and we’ll by pros by the end of it.

So, what’s on my list today?

• dig up potatoes
• plant squash and pumpkins
• trellis cucumbers in aquaponics grow bed
• pick blueberries and cherries
• freeze blueberries
• make cherry syrup
• start seeds for fall crops
• clean out warm bins under rabbits
• visit the community garden plot I manage for the church
• gather stones to create a sun catch or the front yard
• add pea gravel to aquaponics grow bed

Around noon on Thursday, the mailman handed this box to me as I was headed out the door.  Although I had been expecting them, I immediately freaked out.  Now what do I do with them!

I opened the box to find 25 swimming fish, all alive.  They came with an instruction sheet and some suggestions on how to help the fish adjust to the new tank.  But it felt very scary to think about releasing all these tiny and expensive fish into our huge tank.  Especially with the current, giant resident.

This goldfish has survived quite a journey.  We inherited the aquaponics system from a neighbor who had moved away.  When we picked up the system, after months of it lying unused, we found this fish in there.  He moved into a goldfish bowl in our house for close to a year.  Once we finally got the system up and running, we put him in there as a test fish.  At that time he was 1.5–2 inches long.  He is now probably close to 4 inches in just 2 months!  I decided to take him out of the tank and send him back to the goldfish bowl until our new fish reach a bigger, less appetizing size.  I don’t like him enough to give him a $100 buffet.

The first step was to float the bag in the tank and allow the fish to acclimate to the temperature.  I had to go away for a few hours, so they got a long adjustment time.  After about 4 hours, they were released into the tank.  It is quite hard to spot 25 less than an inch long silver fish in a 150 gallon tank.  Each day since, I have been scanning the water trying to catch a glimpse of them to reassure myself that they are alive.  Every now and then I see a shimmer of silver and figure it must be one of them.  I can’t wait till they get a little bigger and I can monitor their growth a little more easily.

On the grow bed side, at least one creature is enjoying the system! 

Once I realized that the timer function would turn off the flame, I was able to get the water boiling in no time with zero overheating in my kitchen.  It was a little bothersome going back and forth between the kitchen and front porch with my sterilized jars and then with the filled jars, especially trying to open the front door that has a child proof ring on the knob while holding a rack full of hot packed canning jars.  Overall, the lack of extra heat inside was worth the little bit of extra work.

It seems I overfilled the water in the canning pot and had to let the full rack slide down a bit when placing it back in the boiling water.  I thought nothing of it and EG and I played in the front yard while the water bath processed my jars.  After 20 minutes, I turned off the flame and opened the pot to discover this:

I lost two jars worth of pickles.  I guess the “sliding down” of the rack was more like a dropping and broke the bottom of the jars.  Next time I either need to ladle out some of the water after sterilizing the jars or put the filled jars in one by one with the jar lifter so I can set them down more gently.  Ah well, a lesson learned. 

Our fruit trees having been bearing like crazy for the last month or so.  Once the weather begins to warm, our eyes are always scanning the trees for the ripening fruit – mulberries, service berries, cherries.  With such sweet motivation, EG has become quite interested in climbing trees.  The picture above is her first attempt at climbing in a service berry tree.  I’ve told her I won’t help her get up into a tree because she needs to be able to figure it out herself.  If she can’t get into herself, she can’t climb it.  With the berries calling her name, she usually finds a way!

This past week some figs have started coming ripe.  It just feels wrong to eat fresh figs in May, but not so wrong we aren’t up there in the trees grabbing all we can.  The ripe ones right now are way up in the canopy of the trees.  I’m rediscovering how much fun it is to climb trees.  EG and I are like a couple of monkeys chasing each other up the limbs after the best fruit!

Still, some of the fruit is just beyond reach.  HB has been working on a fig picker for us.  So far we’ve only been able to knock down the ones out of reach which results in a few bruises, but no less sweet of a fig.  But she’s working on a system that will knock loose and catch the fig.

On the farm, as in the household, many of the tasks can easily become “chores.” The laundry is always piling up, dishes have to be washed, the animals (and the children!) cry to be fed, the coops and stalls and cages grow filthy without daily attention, and the goats must be milked twice a day every day. I choose to approach each of these tasks as meditation, to embrace fully what I am doing at that moment rather than worry about what I should be doing or long to be doing something else. These tasks are the rhythm of the life I have chosen.