Today I went down to my mom’s house and we put the juice from all those cherries we canned to good use. We made five jars of cherry jam and eleven jars of cherry syrup for pancakes. Wow is it ever good!

Yup, they really are that color of purple. When you bite into them you forget that your bean “should” be green. They have a nice juicy flavor that Lee and I really like. Besides they are green inside.

Much to my surprise I saw that I was behind in gathering my garden produce. This evening I went and picked one row of my beans. Since my canner isn’t coming in the mail until Friday, I decided to freeze them. The beans have the same sort of enzyme and bacteria that is in other vegetable. So to preserve the color, texture, and nutrients, I needed to blanch before freezing. I blanched for three minutes instead of two for the reason of my pieces being bigger. Then I cooled the beans off in cold water and into the freezer containers they went.

In case you can’t get over having your beans purple just cook them. After being blanched for three minutes this is what they look like.

Five and one half quarts of frozen beans later and still two more bean rows to pick. I think I may soon get tired of snapping beans.

Friday morning my Mom, 2 sisters, 2 nieces, my Uncle, and I decided to go cherry picking for pie cherries. In just a short order we had picked a little over 130 pounds of cherries. My Uncle decided that he wanted his 40 pounds of cherries dried in his home made dryer. My Mom, my sister Jessica, and I wanted our cherries canned.

Before we started pitting the cherries, the dishwasher was loaded up with canning jars to get them sanitized.

My Mom started washing the cherries and sorting through them, removing bad ones, stems, and debris.

We opted out of having the cherries pitted for us, since the machine at Deterings Orchard only removes about 50% of the pits. My Uncle has two hand operated pitters that do one cherry at a time. These were set up and cherry pitting commenced.

While my Uncle and I were endlessly pitting, my mom washed the rings and lids for the canning jars in soapy water.

My mom had a trick for making sure the lids wouldn’t glue to each other–she faced the lids together.

The jar lids were put in a pot, covered with water, brought to a boil, and then turned down to low heat. They sat there until we needed them.

The water bath canner was put on to the stove and brought up to a boil. I believe that my mom filled the canner up to the first line from the bottom of the canner.

As the water bath canner was heating up, a sugar water mix was made. We heated water until the sugar was dissolved. My mom used a very light sugar mixture: 1 cup of sugar to 1 quart of water. The sugar water solution helps the cherries stay firmer during canning with better flavor and color.

We put 1/4 cup of the sugar water mix into the bottom of the jar and then added the cherries. We thumped the bottom of the jar a couple of times to settle the cherries and then topped it off about 1/2 inch from the top.

After the jars were filled with cherries, we filled them up with the sugar water syrup to 1/2 inch from the top.

The rims of the filled jars were wiped clean. This is necessary so the lids will seal after they have been canned. Then we placed a sanitized lid on each jar and screwed the ring down tightly.

Mom loaded the canner rack and set it down into the water. She added water as necessary so it covered the jars. With the lid on, we waited until it came to a rolling boil with steam spitting out and set the timer for 25 minutes.

TADA! Our first batch of canned cherries. Now we just repeat, repeat, …

So what did I think about my first “grown up” experience in canning? It was long but exciting. Normally it would go a little faster, but processing over 130 pounds of cherries just isn’t going to be speedy. With all the helping hands we were able to do this all in a day. I would have maybe left some of the cherries until the next day. My Mom said that they start deteriorating very fast so you need to do it all in one day. We did save the juice from the cherries to make into jelly and refrigerated that. My Mom stayed up until 1:45 AM finishing up the canning. The rest of us left as there was nothing more to do.

Not counting my Uncle’s 40 pounds of cherries, my Mom, my sister, and I ended up with 14 jars of cherries each. There were originally 43 1/2 quarts, but a quart jar and a pint jar broke in the canner. My mom said that usually happens if there is a flaw in the glass, and as some of her jars were older than her it is bound to happen. Though two being broken in one canning session was the first for her. The broken jar in the canner made for a later night, as all the water had to be dumped out and then new water had to be heated back up.

Finally I will leave you with a picture of one of the bowls of pits. Yeah, I was just a little bit tired of that job by the end.

Yesterday, when pulling up a turnip and looking at it’s size I decided I needed to do something about them. So today I went out and pulled all of the big ones. It seemed that when they got bigger and tougher the root maggots made less damage on them. That’s my theory at least.

I peeled them and then chopped the turnips into small 1/2 inch cubes. After that was done, I put them into boiling water, covered the pot, and blanched the cubes for two minutes. When the blanching was finished, I dumped them into a pot of cold water for three minutes before placing the turnip cubes into the freezer containers. There ended up being a little over 2 quarts. It’s not much, but it will still be nice come winter time when I make soup.

You need to blanch the turnips so the enzymes and bacteria get killed. Otherwise your turnips will lose their nutrients, flavor, and texture. I knew you were supposed to do this with broccoli but didn’t realize that turnips would need it done also. Thankfully I looked it up before I embarked on freezing them.

Aggie decided that she really liked turnips and got into the bag holding the leaves. By the time she had finished the entire bag was emptied and the contents were all over the floor.

We are gearing up for food storage and preserving. On a trip to our local Bi-Mart we noticed they had sales running on canning jars and plastic freezer containers. So we bought 36 quart and 10 pint sized storage containers. I remember the ones that my mom had when I was a kid. These aren’t as thick but we were still happy to locate some. I didn’t realize that you could still buy them. We were getting ready to make an order at Lehman’s before we found them local. Lee is already itching to buy some more.

I have some mason canning jars that we inherited from the property clean up. So today we only bought three cases. Two of the cases are wide mouth and one case is regular mouth. I really like the wide mouth canning jars better but the lids are more expensive to buy. So Lee is trying to convince me to go all regular mouth. I told him that after I try canning this year then I will have more experience on what I like. That way I can buy more accordingly to my preference.

I can’t believe that I am actually going to try to can this year. As I child I hated helping my mom can. Of course since I wasn’t interested in doing it, and forced stirring was not exciting, I have not a clue on how to do it. Thankfully since my mom is close by I am going to go do some canning at her house. This time I am going to pay just a wee bit more attention.

So what did we do today? Blueberry picking! Lee and I went to a small half acre blueberry U-Pick farm near our house called Greenbrier Farm. We spent two hours and picked 22.5 pounds of blueberries at $1.50 a pound. That sure beats the $4 dollars and up price that you see in the store for a tiny half pint. Not to mention the taste is out of this world good. I had never picked blueberries before though Lee had with his parents as a child.

We got his and her paper bags. Who picked more? I can’t tell you as that is a secret. Though it looks impressive the bags aren’t full. Otherwise they would be exploding blueberries everywhere.

Lee read a recommendation online about freezing the washed berries in a shallow pan before putting them all together in a container. That way your berries don’t get frozen into one giant lump and you can shake a little out as you want some. Another way that you can freeze them without having a solid blueberry block is by not washing them so they are dry to start with. Since we had a lot to begin with I chose this method. Greenbrier Farm doesn’t spray their blueberries bushes with pesticides and only uses Roundup for weed control. We were munching them at the farm and on the way home so unless we keel over I am not that concerned about perceived “dirtiness”. When I get ready to cook with them I will rinse them off. Now if I had bought all this from a store that would have been a different matter….

So after all the munching on the way home how many quarts did that 22.5 pounds of blueberries make up? We ended up with 18 and a half quarts. I didn’t can any of the blueberries but plan on canning other fruits and vegetables later on. Lee is dying for a blueberry pie as they are his favorite from growing up. I’m not so sure about making one as nothing tastes as good as the ones that your mom makes. That and I’m not sure how I am supposed to make a pie without an oven. Not to mention that I refuse to fire up our wood stove in the middle of the summer.

What do dandelion roots, chicory roots, persimmon seeds, and beech nuts all have in common? Their descriptions in a book of wild edible plants will include the phrase “can be used as a coffee substitute”. Of course, none of these plants contain caffeine, that wonderful natural insect neurotoxin produced by Coffea arabica, but when properly baked, ground, and steeped they can produce a liquid that vaguely resembles coffee.

Or, so we are told. Does anybody actually do this?

A few weeks ago, when reading about “Cleavers”, a common weed on our property, I found that phrase again. It was too much. I decided an experiment was in order.

The scientific name for “Cleavers” is Gallium aparine. It’s an annual plant which produces long stringy stems with whorls of tiny leaves. In early June it sets hundreds of pairs of small white flowers, which mature into round seed pods. It’s major distinguishing quality is that the stems, leaves, and seeds are all covered in tiny hooks. These hooks grab onto hair or clothing, allowing the plant to hitch a ride on passing creatures. Gallium aparine is classified in the family Rubiaceae which makes it a somewhat close genetic relative of coffee. My procedure from weed to mug was as follows:

Step 1: When the seeds have sufficiently ripened that they come off the stem with a gentle tug, pick them into a container for as long as you can bear the tedium. I lasted about 40 minutes and had only this small pile collected. Since everything sticks to everything, there doesn’t appear to be any way to expedite the process.

Step 2: Allow the seeds to dry for a couple weeks, and then sort out all the leaves and other debris. This is another tedious step. Perfection is not required, as the whole plant is edible. Total weight of seeds before further processing was 0.8 oz.

Step 3: Roast the seeds in a pan on a low-medium heat for about an hour. The idea is to dry and toast them, not burn them. If you have an oven (we don’t), you can also bake them at 350°F for an hour. The aroma during roasting smells of dark tea and arame seaweed. Final weight after roasting was 0.6 oz.

Step 4: Grind the roasted seeds using a coffee grinder or mortar and pestle. After grinding, it started to smell more like coffee.

Step 5: Brew the grinds as you would regular coffee. Here I’m using my vintage Chemex coffee maker and steeping in just-below-boiling water.

Step 6: Drink it! The result is surprisingly good. It doesn’t taste exactly like coffee, but it’s definitely similar. I thought it was like a cross between coffee and yerba maté. Less bitter but with some dark tones. Robin insisted on a similarity to carob.

Summary: If the coffee supply chain failed tomorrow, I wouldn’t mind drinking ground cleavers seed as a substitute. In reality, would i? Not likely. The effort is far too great for the result. About 2 hours of my time were required produce just 0.6oz of final product. You could improve matters by finding a closely related weed, Galium boreale, which looks almost identical but lacks the gene for the little hooks. This would make the plant easier to harvest and sort. You might also try direct cultivation, selecting for the largest seed heads, but I doubt any of these changes would sufficiently speed up the process.

During times of war and shortage, people have predominately turned to roots, nuts, or roasted grain mixes as a substitute. All of these have harvesting advantages over the tedious little cleavers seed. I’d love to try chicory next, as its tap root can grow to be quite large and only a few would have you set for a week. Unfortunately, it’s a somewhat uncommon weed around here, so I may have to wait until next spring’s dandelion crop before trying a roasted root.

So, since none of these plants contain caffeine, why drink them at all? Perhaps it’s just the pleasant ritual of a warm drink on a cold morning. In Oregon, the mornings are always cold.

Update (02/04/2009): This page describes the construction of a simple feeder from found items. If you are looking for chicken feeder plans, please refer to our more recent post regarding a larger capacity feeder built from wood.

Our chickens have a roosting habit.  Unfortunately, their only “roost” is the top of our mason jar feeders.

When you combine 8-week-old chicken fatties and feeders designed for baby chicks, you end up with this:

We go out at least twice a day to right all the overturned feeders and fill any that are empty.  Otherwise, the chickens stand around hungry.  Actually, a lot of things around a homestead are like this.  You have to just dive in to buying chickens because if you read everything in the book you’ll go crazy.  But then you never seem to have the right gear on hand and it makes your life harder.  The baby chick waterers took a lot of time to clean every day because they kept pooping in their water.  I baulked at spending $40 for a waterer at the farm store, but found a nice one at Premier for a fraction of that.  Since then we only have to deal with chicken watering once a week!

With watering out of the way, fixing overturned feeders became the sore spot.  I had been talking about building one out of scrap wood for a while, but our fencing project has been in the way.  Then, tonight we came up with a quick solution.  When Premier sent us the chicken waterer, they inadvertently sent the top from a discontinued model.  They FedEx’ed us the right one soon after, but we still had this waterer top sitting around.  Take one watering top, drill a large hole to fill with feed, add a cake pan connected by copper wire and you get:

We took it out to the coop and hung it onto a new hook using some scrap chain from the property cleanup.  As always, the chickens were first leary of the new presence:

So we added a little “crack” corn to the tray and they forgot their worries:

We mentioned a tool called a spinning jenny a few times while describing our fence building process.  This is a rotating carriage that holds a roll of high tensile smooth wire so it can be pulled off in a controlled manner.   Without this device, cutting the ties on a high tensile roll would likely produce a 4000′ slinky.

If I was building a lot of fencing (miles?) I would probably just buy one, but I feel like I’ve already bought so many tools for this fencing project that I might as well try building one with scrap materials.  Most agricultural colleges have articles about high tensile fencing, and they all suggest building a simple reel to hold the wire.  So I tried that, and mounted it in the yard cart for portability:

This design doesn’t work. We pulled about 500′ of wire with it and it was obnoxious.  Loose wires come off and bounce around, the weight of the wire roll (100 lbs) rests on the top point of the reel and THUMP, THUMP, THUMPs each time you turn it.

So, I rethought the design.  Version 2.0 needed bigger arms to contain loose wires so they don’t come off and a horizontal design that keeps the weight off the inside of the reel.  The result was this:

This was a major improvement.  Loops of wire don’t come off accidentally.  The only downside is that it’s harder to transport and still difficult to turn (albeit much smoother).  If I had some scrap casters I might consider mounting them on the bottom plate of the reel so they’d reduce drag.  As it is, someone still has to sit at the reel and turn it by hand while another person walks the wire out.

So, moral of the story: save money where possible by building your own tools, but don’t always expect them to work quite as well.

The tomato cages that you can buy in the store are either too small, too shoddy, or too expensive for nice ones. So we decided to make our own tomato cages after seeing similar ones at my sister-in-law’s. We got a roll of rebar mesh at Home Depot along with rebar tie wire.

Lee cut the rebar with his angle grinder into the measurements that we wanted. We overlapped one square of the rebar mesh and wire tied it together at two places in the top, bottom, and one place in the middle.

Then Lee angle grinded off the bottom wire so we would have the spikes to put in the ground. Lee made two of them for me. Only 15 more or so to go.

Two days after the previous steps, our Dandelion petal must was dark yellow and ready to be fermented. In the interim, we stopped at Valley Vintners & Brewer in Eugene. I described what I was doing, and they picked out what I needed for the next few steps (gallon jug, bung, air lock, funnel, yeast). I’ll definitely be going back.

Step 4: Bring the “Dandelion tea” back to a boil. While it’s heating, take 4 oranges (preferably organic) and thinly peel the skins. The objective is to get all the bright orange skin, and very little of the white pith (which will add bitterness). As gremlins stole our peeler, I had to do this with a pairing knife.

Step 5: Add the peelings from the 4 oranges and boil for 10 minutes.

Step 6: Strain the mixture through a few layers of cheese cloth to remove all the petals and peelings. I don’t have a large primary fermentation vessel (aka “food safe bucket”) so I had to juggle a few pots to make this work.

Step 7: Add 3 pounds of white sugar to a pot and combine with the strained liquid. This is the food supply for the yeast. Sugar level now determines alcohol level later (sort of).

Step 8: Add the juice from squeezing the 4 oranges .

Step 9: The recipe called for a “yeast nutrient”, so I added 1/4 cup of Earl Grey tea to provide other compounds for the yeast metabolism. I saw this suggested on the web somewhere. Perhaps this was a bad idea. Perhaps not.

Step 10: Re-hydrate your yeast following the manufacturer’s directions and add it to the mixture (assuming it has sufficiently cooled). The Lalvin yeast suggested by Valley Vintners seems to be intended for this sort of wine. I looked up their data sheet online.

Step 11: Pour into a 1 gallon jug. Fit the bung (rubber stopper) and airlock.

Update (05/13/2009): 24 hours after fitting the airlock I was observing one bubble every 5 seconds. Yay! I didn’t kill the yeast. Within 48 hours this had increased to one bubble every 3.5 seconds. Presently the rate is about one every 6 seconds, although the weather has been colder too and this might be affecting the yeast (our house is basically unheated right now).