Pumpkin Time!

I easliy get distracted from doing things like, oh I dunno, updaiting blogs, when the fall rolls around.  There's just so many things to do before winter, get veggies canned, get the fruit in, and then there's pumpkins.

Like, this one:

That's my kitty Specter by the way. 

I had meant to do an introduction post for all of the cats, and horse, and everyone by now but a few things happened to distract me.  Computers, real life, animals, fruit.

Mostly the animals and fruit... and of course now the pumpkins.




Most people look at pumpkins and see a jack-o-lantern, pumpkin carving, and all of that fun stuff.  I see something else, pumpkins appear in stores or at farmers stands and instead I start dreaming of pies, and cookies, and most importantly pumpkin butter.

Yes, you read that right, pumpkin butter.  Most people haven't heard of this wonderful fall treat, and the ones that have almost immediately start dreaming of it when they hear the name.  But what is it you may be wondering?  It's like apple butter, a creamy fruit spread you can put on anything from toast to ice cream.  I love it on pancakes and french toast.  You can also use it in cooking  in breads and other things like that.  In the case of pumpkin butter it's almost like a pumpkin pie, in a jar.  Just remove the pie shell, and egg, and of course the milk, and just leave being the pumpkin and the spices. 

Sounds yummy?  It is.  The first year I made it, by almost accident, I canned my first batch of 15 jars.  Almost as soon as they were cooled people had bought them up. I ended up doing 3 more batches of 20 jars each that year.  All of my batches take around two days to make, from the time the pumpkin is peeled and chopped, to the time its placed in a slow cooker and allowed to cook over night on low, to the point is canned in jars.  I really do think letting it cook slowly in a slow cooker allows the spices to spread threw the butter a bit better so each spoonful has that glorious pumpkin pie flavor.

I'll stop now before I make myself or anyone who may be reading this hungry.

The point was, it's pumpkin season, and for me that means butter time, which also means my house smells like warm pies for days on end.  Really fresh butter, from fresh fruit are one of the best things to wake up smelling as they cook.

The Birdies (Meet the Cast Part 1)

The Flock, the ladies and their mister.

I have a mixed flock of chickens. My original starter flock was a mixture of Road Island Reds, and White Leghorn-Ameraucana mixes.  A year later I added 10 Road Island Red hens and 3 Brown Leghorns, and this year we added four Golden Laced Wyandotte and an Australorp, along with various chicks I hatched out from our eggs.  We have around 45 hens in my current large bird chicken flock.  

 They lay me a rainbow of eggs, tans, browns, blues, whites.  I love getting the blue eggs from them, packaging them when people tell me they don't care what color eggs they get, then watching their reactions when they see the blue ones.

(The blue eggs don't show up very well in this photo.)

I also have a second group of chickens, my bantams.   I've got a few bantam Cochin of various colors, buff, blue, white.

I also have Raven, seen front and center in this picture.   Raven is a Black Sumatra Bantam, and who we ended up naming our farm after.

Little Dove bird is seen to the right, Dove was a Blue Old English Game Bantam, about the size of an actual dove, and one of the most fun chickens I've ever had the luck to raise.  I've never been outside working on a chicken pen and had a tiny, hand sized chicken fly past my head till she did.  Dove was sadly killed by a fox recently.

 

Also seen is one of the twins, a Blue bantam Chochin, well her back at least, my Cochins don't like having their picture taken.  I have around 6 Bantams, but plan to add a few more in the spring.

Finally, bird wise, and perhaps the most insane out of the bunch, the ducks.

Ducks have an amazing ability, when you change their water and want to get a good picture of them, by the time you turn off the hose, get a camera, and get back outside the water will be a mess again.  It's both rather amazing and rather annoying.

Anyway, this is my flock of nutcases in their baby pen waiting to move to their big kids home.  It's a flock of 9 Rouen and 7 Pekin.  My boy Rouen have just started getting their boy colors in spots, so when they finally get fully pretty I'll post an updated picture.  Of the two breeds I find the Pekin to be more striking of the two, something about snowy white ducks just loses me when I stair at them.  The Rouen are pretty in their own regards, and with the two combined I can find myself watching them for hours if I'm not careful.


The odd scoop and funnel system seen in the picture feeds to a hose that goes into my garden.  When the pools get cleaned the water goes directly into my veggie garden and feeds and waters my plants.  The plants love it, the ducks don't mind, and I don't waste water so overall everyone is happy with it.

The plan for our ducks is to sell duck eggs locally.  No one that I know of around here sells them, and they are simply wonderful in baking, so I have a nitch market almost.  I've mentioned I have the ducks to a few people and almost have a waiting list already.  The flock will be cut down come this winter though, I only plan to keep 3 of the boys with the girls, come spring the ducks will be separated by breed so I can hatch out pure breed babies and increase my duck numbers a bit.

That's pretty much all of the birds we have right now. 

For now at least, there's talk of Turkey in our future so you never know.

So Welcome To the Farm

My husband and I bought our farm about two years ago.  It's about 9 acres, in the middle of farm country in southern Virginia.  We spent the first year getting the house livable as it had been abandoned for some time and needed a lot of work.  The land, an over grown mess needed to wait till we could move into our home.

This year we really started looking into what we had land wise.  The house still needs a bit of work but it can wait, for now we're enjoying see what and all is hidden on our property.

We had known about our apple trees and grapes, much to my joy I found peaches last fall but wasn't in time to do anything with them.  This spring I made sure to be out there in time to cut the wilderness back from the trees so they had space and air to grow.  Then one day, while walking out to our barn I found growing happily under trees and poison ivy a strawberry patch.  Not the wild ones you find around randomly, but real ones people plant for the berries.   Again I was not in time to save the fruit for the harvest, but I can make sure their area is cleared in the spring next year.

Much of the back of our property is over grown, and I can't wait to see what other goodies are hidden back there, waiting to be rescued.