one of our housemates has a beautiful passionflower plant. I didnt know you could keep one alive in these winters up here! isn't it beautiful?! the blooms are open for only one day. She's leaving for italy in a few weeks and is going to give us her passionflower to keep! so lovely.
This is how we are pasturing our poultry for now. 100 broilers in a domed coop, inside a large deer fenced area. they are let out of the coop in the early morning and we put their feeders under that little rain shelter, then they stay out pecking the grass for bugs and seeds until dark. We move their little coop around every few days as the area inside gets really poopy after a while and that much manure can burn the area. Each "batch" of 100 broilers has its own fenced are to roam in so they don't get mixed up since we have different ages and different breeds on the farm.
Here's the good girl helping me let out another batch of broilers. For the most part she's very calm and gentle around the birds. But sometimes she wants to play with them- which frightens the heck out of them and we have to scold her pretty good.
Today Justin and I lactofermented some of our beautiful bounty on the farm! Lactofermentation is the old fashioned way of preserving veggies- essentially pickling without the use of heat or vinegar which are instead substituted with Salt (to retard bad bacterial development) and whey (to introduce beneficial bacterial growth to break down the veggies). You leave the jars at room temp for 2-4 days and then put them in cold storage (less than 50 degrees - so a fridge in texas, or a cellar up here in PA. but actually our cellar is about 60 these days so maybe mine will have to go in the fridge here too!) for up to 8 months or so. I ate cucumbers that were 6 months old- only preserved with whey and salt that were still very crisp and delicious!!
Here from left to right are
1. carrots with some hot peppers, onion and garlic
2. Kosher dill cucumber slices
3. jalepenos
4. green beans with a tiny bit of onion and garlic
5. dill pickle spears
6. bread and butter spears
He's very excited about the veggies!!
(Janna, he was on the phone with you when I took this!)
This makes me miss your darlin man, Jessie Lee. Such a cute pic of him. The veggies are beautiful! You did all that variety in one day? Does everything take the same whey:salt ratio? So cool. Where/how did you get the whey? Thanks for taking time to let us see some of what goes on in your life. Love you!!
ReplyDeleteok so you need 1-2 Tbs salt depending on the jar size and you need 4-8 tbs whey depending on the jar size. also, fruit is not a good idea. something about the sugars. besides- would you really want to eat heavily salted blueberries or peaches? No thank you.
ReplyDeleteI got my whey by pouring a big tub of plain yogurt into some cheesecloth that i doubled over to make the holes a lot smaller. then i let that hang tied to a wooden spoon over a pitcher in the fridge for about 5 hours. got plenty of whey for my needs for all of that AND the subsequent product of strained yogurt is "greek yogurt!" SO delicious cause it's nearly as thick as cream cheese.