Watermelon

The net bag works! Look at this beautiful watermelon growing on the trellis. Unfortunately, the day after I took this picture we had high winds overnight and it blew the watermelon down. 

Fortunately, the watermelon didn't split. 

Unfortunately, I don't think it's ripe. 

I chopped it up for the chickens, ducks, and goats to have a treat. And I guess Jaron too. 😂 He ate the piece he was supposed to give to the goats.

Gerda gobbled it up. The other two tend to be hesitant about scraps we offer.

Goat Milk Cottage Cheese and Yogurt

I took a virtual class on making "wild fermented" products from milk and finally put the information to use. Wild fermentation is just using natural yeast and good bacteria in the air to ferment milk products to get cheese, yogurt, sour cream, and the like. You don't need renet or a starter culture. 

Since we have so much goat milk right now, I started both cottage cheese and yogurt. They are super easy- put raw milk in a jar, leave it on the counter for a period of time, strain it. Done. 

The cottage cheese is yogurt left long enough that the curds and whey separate. Very easy to tell that stage. Yogurt gets paused before the separation occurs. 

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending how you look at it, my kitchen has plenty of wild yeast and bacteria, likely from the kombucha and sourdough I have going. So my yogurt fermented a lot quicker than expected. 😕 

I was supposed to check the yogurt yesterday afternoon, but I missed the window and thought it would be okay until this morning. Nope. It already separated. Guess I'll have to start again. 

Cottage cheese on the left, yogurt on the right. Don't they look similar? Yogurt is supposed to be a thick liquid and no separation of the whey/curds. 

This is the old fashioned way to make cheese/cottage cheese. So that's fun! And I do have more milk to use in the fridge, so the extra cheese is not the end of the world. 

Quest: From the Box Brownies

I love the texture of brownies baked from a box. Horrible for the from-scratch-baker, I know. I've been searching for a scratch recipe for a while and a 4Her had one that came pretty close. Of course I saved the recipe!

It was so tempting to change the recipe... Less sugar, fresh milled flour, etc. But for the first time trying it, I figured I should stay as true as I could. 

I did substitute duck eggs for chicken eggs. 😜

They came together fairly quickly. Not sure about the bake time. I set a timer on the early side and ended up adding minutes until I got to the full bake time the recipe said. 

Cutting them up sure looked like the gooey box mix. 

They tasted great. Still not perfect, but that could be my error. I think I either over stirred or overbaked them. Or both. It's a little strange because the bottom of the brownies has a cake like texture, which makes me think over stirred or overbaked. But the top of the center pieces are verrrry gooey, like it's under baked. So who knows about that. It reminded me a little of chocolate lava cake. The recipe does call for lots of butter and melted chocolate chips, so I wonder if it's meant to be underdone. 

Will I make them again? Yes. Will I tweak it more than I already have? Quite possibly. 

Much Ado about Garlic

The garlic has been curing in the garage for plenty long. Time to finally get it ready for long-term storage. 

Some garlic (soft neck varieties) you can braid and hang. We have a hard neck variety which I tried to braid anyway. You can see how well that worked below. 😅

So I clipped the tops off and the roots for alternative storage.

Then I had the idea of making little bundles to hang up. 

Here they are in the fruit room!

 Cute and tidy!

Got Cabbage?

It's absolutely amazing to me how God provides.

Here I was, subtly lamenting how little produce our garden was producing this year (although also thankful for the lighter workload), telling myself it would be a good year to eat down what we have in the fruit room. 

Then G comes home from the garden center with this: 

His boss/coworker went to an Amish produce auction and came back with humongous quantities of veggies, all at very cheap prices (sold in bulk). Cabbage, cucumbers, beets, green beans, potatoes, sweet corn. 

What was I saying about that lighter workload? 😅 

We plugged in an extra fridge out in the garage and loaded it with cabbage. The heads are so massive only 20 fit. 

This is the entire fridge portion of the appliance. 😂I was able to fill the door with apples, so it's not just cabbage in there. 

G ate the last of my homemade sauerkraut, so I'm due to make more. These will keep for a long time in cold storage, so we'll be able to pull from them for months. If they get a little gross or wilted, just peel off the outer layer!

Potato Harvest

Out of potatoes in the house? No problem! Time to see what's in the potato containers.

G moved them into the garage a few weeks ago once the tops of the potatoes died off. We didn't want the containers to get waterlogged in the rain and rot the potatoes, but we weren't ready to dig them up yet. So they've sat in the garage until now. 

I had to dig down quite a ways to get to the potatoes. 

Not a super gigantic harvest, but the potatoes are much bigger than last year's (for the most part). 

I chopped them up and cooked them in New England Boiled Dinner (cabbage, potatoes, sausage, carrots, water to cover, and salt and pepper to taste). So tasty! I wish I remembered which variety these are... I'd definitely plant them again. 😅

 

Smorgasboard Post- Garden, Mildew, Sybil, Jaron

The soup bean plants have been flowering for a few weeks. G thought they weren't actually going to produce any pods, but Jaron found one. He really wanted to pick it. He's a picking monster. Anything he thinks he can pull on in the garden, he does. 

I thought we had escaped the vining plant mildew this year, but it has appeared. G thinks it's because it wasn't very windy for a number of days so the plants stayed damp. I sprayed them with neem oil, which Google says is supposed to help. 

I did another search and apparently mixing milk with water and spraying it on also does the trick. Hmm... we do have an abundance of milk right now...

Speaking of milk, Sybil has been seen eating in the pasture! She still would rather eat hay from the shed. Her milk production seems to be picking back up a bit. 

For a while, she did not want to put her head in the milking stand; my theory is that it was too tight on her neck. I adjusted the stand- pounded in a fence staple a little further in to give her another inch of neck space- and since then she's gotten a little better about putting her head in. 

Still, for a while it took both G and me to convince her to stick her head through. We actually resorted to using an old sheep halter from my 4H days to pull her head through once she was up on the stand. But, it seems we've turned a corner. The past two milkings G has been able to get her in there himself without help. 

A few fun Jaron moments from the past week: