Good News!

I wanted to thank everyone who kept us in their prayers during our dry spell. I am happy to report that we’ve gotten a couple of inches since I last complained, and we are well on our way to a greener world around here!

I have more good news: I finished my Civil War dress! After some recent research I did, I find that it is not at all a period pattern, but it looks good, I think. Claire graciously allowed me to picture her modeling my dress (over an air conditioning vent) for the blog, but she was kind of my dress form through the whole process. :)

This was the pattern I used (Simplicity 4551, view C), and I didn’t have to have anything adjusted! This pattern has the dropped shoulders typical of the period, which saved us from needing to adjust the pattern to fit my broad shoulders. It wasn’t a very confusing pattern (obviously, or I wouldn’t have been able to finish it!), but I took me a while. Also, I changed some the stuff. The trim was supposed to be rickrack, but I wanted mine fancier so I put ribbon on (like you would bias). I also did only three skirt pannels instead of the four; it just seemed like a whole lot less marking (I'm afraid it was driven by laziness =C). The dress is actually quite comfortable, but, allowing room for the hoop, the hem is a bit long! :)I need to make a hoop skirt and an over-hoop-skirt-petticoat thing, but the entire outfit will be done then! Oh, I'm also hoping to find sort of a fancy pin of some sort to close the gap at the collar. Then it will be done! :)

I enjoyed working on this, and am actually eager to get started on Mama’s dress (I agreed to do hers so that it would get done)! Unfortunately for both of us, I only agreed to do it if she would cut it out how she wants it and mark it. I absolutely despise doing those things! There just isn't as much room for creativity on somebody else's dress, but her fabric is lovely! She wants view A, I believe.

Musical memories

I wanted to do this post before I forgot my train of thought.

After several weeks of not playing any music for us, Claire picked up her fiddle and tested the piano again yesterday. This morning she played a song that took me back about three years. She played Fur Elise. I was going through my Elsie Dinsmore books while rocking a baby Luke. I asked her to play other songs that she was learning at the time: Emerald Tocatta, Chariots of Fire, and Prelude in C. Each time I could have almost pointed to the chapter and book I was on at the time she played those most. It happens to me a lot; all I have to do is to hear or smell something and I could tell you what I was doing when a certain memory connected with that happened.

Those couple of months before we moved, and after Luke was born is like a different world, misty-like. When thinking about that time my memory inevitably takes me to the fourth of July 2003. It was days before we were to move, and everything that could be was packed up, but the family was to gather at our house. Right as lunch was being served to everyone, Luke woke up. For the remainder of the meal, I got to hold him. I took my meal afterwards alone. I like remembering those months because, though busy, they were necessarily happy. They were tinged with saddness for leaving the only home we'd ever known, but that only make the time we had more precious. Also during that time, I was Luke's prefered companion. Before Luke was even born is dark, but quiet. :) I hardly remember anything about then, without a promting.

The smell of cinamon and orange rounds and other spices simmering on the stove reminds me of several Christmas's. Fudge and custard takes me back to a couple of birthdays when that was my requested "cake". Seeing dead ladybugs in the window, makes me feel just like I did one year back a Sturbridge. When Kyle bangs out a one-note melody "Ode to Joy" on the piano, it is just like he did it when he was a little thing with huge eyes, running around in cowboy boots. The taste of orange cream cicles reminds me of the caffeteria at the school I attended for kindergarten and first grade. I won't even go into the memories that I see when I think of that school.

I'd better stop or I'll go on forever and ever through the years with this road of memories.

To think, I can do all that, and I'm not even 16 yet! I'd better warn Mama and Daddy not to do this! = D

RAIN! .....and that other stuff

Guess what?!! WE GOT RAIN!!!!!!!! Several days ago, but it was a deliciously wet downpour. It turns out that this blessing puts us over the ¾" mark for the past couple of months! While it was raining we were inside busy canning tomatoes. Could you have ever guessed?! I am guilty; I'm just very tired of dealing with the endless tomatoes!!!!

The day after the rain (you can see how I measure things now) we froze our rather small crop of corn.

Then Tuesday we picked even more tomatoes! Wednesday morning we sat them out on the counter and canned tomatoes, and the tomato paste (it turned out puree) Mama and Daddy made the night before. Canning all that still left us with a whole counter full!

Tomatoes, Beans, and Good Friends

These past couple of weeks have been pretty busy. We canned tomatoes several days ago, and today, but I don't know how many quarts or pints we've done this year.





We've also picked, shelled, and frozen our crop of butter beans. It didn't turn out near as bad as I feared, thank goodness!

We also dropped in on our good friends of Atlanta! We didn't get there in time for worship Lord's Day, but as usual we had great fellowship!

The Weather and a Water Bath

Life in Tennessee is rather unusual sometimes. Just this morning I was coming up to the house from picking the garden wondering how in the world it could be so dry and yet so humid! I don't understand it! We haven't had even ½ an inch of rain total in something like eight weeks! The pastures look awful everywhere around here, and the garden isn't thriving. The squash and cucumbers are drying up, even with the extra watering I'm giving them every couple of days. The tomato plants are even wilting from the bottom up, and we've not even canned any yet!!! Thankfully, the peppers don't seem to be doing too bad. The corn and the butter beans are having the same problem: the fruit is not filling out. The corn already has tassles turning, but the ears aren't even as thick as two of my fingers in some cases! The butter beans are being rather heavily attacked by the bugs; I'm hoping we'll be able to get a fairly good crop before they loose all their leaves! Okay, enough complaining! On to something else.

Well, we canned some bread and butter pickles yesterday. The cucumbers aren't doing bad enough to quit bearing, that's for sure. For all the pictures my sister takes, somehow she managed to forget to get a good finished product picture! The pickles sealed by a water bath, like the cherries, but they are also hot when you put them into the jars.

We discover everytime we can that we love our fryers! We again had two going, and they really make the whole process much faster and more enjoyable. I'm sure we'll be using them again when we can the tomatoes later this week. The tomatoes also use the water bath method too, if I remember correctly.

More Chickens!

Well, lately we've been having some overhead predator problems. The hawks have gotten several of our laying hens and a young rooster (not the Buff). Today Daddy went and got 14 or 15 young hens from a friend who had 50+ birds. They are red and black sex-link, which means you can tell the males from the females when they hatch because they're a different color. We were down to only a few birds and one's a rooster, possibly two broodies, and plenty of hawks to kill the others. We were getting about 3 eggs a day, so we are looking forward to having some more eggs once these start laying.
We've got one of the broodies on a few eggs, and we are hoping that she'll hatch several. Raising our own chicks will be a new experience, and, since it keeps us from being beholden to the hatcheries, a good one I think.

Ten Steps of... Chicken Processing!

Step one: Catching the chicken!!! We brought these stinky things from their tractor out to the barn area, a.k.a., the processing plant, using three large computer boxes and a diesel-powered mule.

Step two: A couple of the boys were especially eager to kill some Cornish Cross birds. I was all for that; it meant I didn't have to do that part (that's a good thing)! We had three traffic cones that the guys putting in our city water had left; we put them to good use by cutting off the tops and hanging them upside down. This was for easier killing of the chicken, and to hold them still while they were bleeding to death!

Step three: "Cut off its head and give the bird to me, please!" Yep, we cut off their heads before we scalded them. We threw the heads into the woods and the cats loved them!
"No! That one's not been through yet! Don't cut off the feet!" We learned that it's very hard to take a chicken out of the scalder without any feet to grab.

Step four: The actual scalding was quite easy. I have never noticed any of that "horrid wet feather smell" I've heard talked about, but they were rather heavy to take out all hot and dripping wet!
Sometimes the tongs worked to take the bird out; sometimes they didn't.I mainly used them to push the bird down in the 150°F water. We kept the birds in the water for approximately one minute, but some required a little more than that.


Step five: The dripping, hot, dead things then went to the chicken plucker. We had a hose person and a switch controller. These jobs were pretty interchangeable, and could be done by just one person if necessary.

There was a problem with the plucker though. Feathers kept getting caught in the belt, causing it to slip off. That is just another thing that probably needs to be done before we use the plucker again: a feather plate guard. This problem can be helped, however.

Claire, who mainly worked the hose, learned to hose the feathers off the plucker really well after every bird. This greatly reduces the risk of the aforementioned problem.

Step six: Once the chicken goes through the plucker, which only takes about 30 seconds on the long ones, it goes to the eviscerating table, a.k.a., the guttin' table.
Since this is the part I absolutely cannot stand, I don't know too much about it.
Throughout this whole process, up until here, the birds can still... squeak, cluck, "beep" (Luke's word), make noise. We are not really sure what to call it. It's a chicken noise, but the bird is dead and the head is cut off. It's really quite funny! We've all had a good laugh over it. The gutting, however, takes the wind pipe out and the dead birds are, therefore, de-vocalized.

Step seven: This step is just a quick, but very thorough rinsing of the bird. For Luke it was a chance to play with and in the hose without getting in too much trouble.


Step eight: We did a bit of extra clean-up and trim work and bagged them. Then we put them in a cooler of ice until they could be taken up to the house and put away properly.

Step nine: The clean-up of the processing site did not take long at all! Everybody pitched in and we got it cleared away pretty fast.

Step ten: Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of this step. This step was the last and probably the most satisfying in some respects. We rotisseried a couple of the Cornish Cross chickens that we killed and had them for dinner last night! We will have to learn how to cook with these birds. I think our motto will have to be, for cooking at least, "a little longer, a little slower". The meat had good flavor, but it turned out a little tough. We're learning though!
Step ten has an amusing story with it. Luke found out we were eating our chickens and he saw some seasoning on a piece he had. He said "I don't think I cleaned this one good enough.", which was absolutely hilarious because he was kind of helping with the cleaning, but, more so, because he was hardly fazed by it at all. He looked like he would have gone on eating even with the knowledge that he hadn't cleaned it very well! He proves, once more, that little ones understand much more than we give them credit for, just by showing us that he knew what to look for while cleaning the chickens!

Hmm... even more canning!

Cherries!!! They were great while still in the pitted, uncooked stage so we're hoping they'll be just as good in the cooked, canned stage, too! We've never done cherries before, and we just followed the directions in Mama's canning book. These didn't have to go in the pressure canner, so that saved a lot of time. We got it all done in about 2 and a half hours; we did 11 pints from four of those bags that you can get at Wal-mart. I love cherries!!! andI can't wait to try these.

More Canning

Beans, beans, beans! You just can't help singing the "Belles on Their Toes" song! Here, instead of baked beans (or whatever they had), are 38 pints of green beans. That makes a total of... a whole lot of beans that we've canned this year. This was our last batch, and with all our other catches , we ought to have enough to last the year!
This morning Mama and Grammy and others canned our sauerkraut. I was outside helping Daddy put up gates and fences. It was hot today! Thankfully it wasn't too humid, but still, it was hot! The ground, too, is suffering from this weather we're having. It's as hard as a rock, and I mean that. When we hit a rock with a t-post it's hard to tell the difference. Daddy and I got up enough fence to get the cattle on better grass. Both our pastures are looking really rough. It's in times like these that you can't help wondering: what would Mr. Salatin do if he were in our situation? I should not complain though, for all I know he may be!