Pumpkin Bread Season

A pretty chilly start this morning, 36 degrees at barn chore time. Still no frost in the mornings and none forecast for this week. The leaves are really starting to change though, time for leaf peeping and apple picking. It is very overcast and windy so far today, just the kind of day for baking. I just made two loaves of pumpkin bread, the first of the season. The house smells so good and the oven makes it feel so cozy. This is a really simple and straight forward recipe that I want to share. When you smell it baking and taste it warm, you'll know it is Autumn. Served with pumpkin spice coffee it is sublime. The recipe makes two loaves. You can easily freeze one for a later date, it tastes just as good. When my six children were growing up at home two loaves were gone in two days. When I first started making this pumpkin bread, about 35 years ago, I didn't have an electric mixer so I used a wooden spoon to mix the ingredients together. What a luxury it is to have a beautiful red kitchen-aid stand mixer now. Wow, does that make things easier!

Pumpkin Bread

2/3 cup unsalted butter
2 cups sugar

4 farm fresh eggs
1 can (15 oz.) solid pack pumpkin
2/3 cup water
3 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. cloves
1 1/2 cups raisins

Preheat oven to 350. Grease two 9x5x3 inch  loaf pans. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Stir in eggs, pumpkin and water. Blend in flour, baking soda, salt, baking powder, cinnamon and cloves. Stir in raisins. Pour into pans. Bake about 70 minutes or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean.

Carrots and Herbs

My carrots really took off the past couple of weeks. Although I planted them early, they just seemed to take their time growing this summer. I think it was just too cool and rainy at first, but now all at once they are ready. I have been periodically pulling a few out here and there but they were always too small and underdeveloped, now they look like carrots on steroids! I have had good luck in the past with Touchon carrots, a french heirloom variety, so I tried them again this year. Looks like we will have plenty for soups and stews this winter. Carrots keep very well following the methods used for beets and other root vegetables.

Touchon Carrots

 

It is another beautiful day before a showery weekend. A perfect day to pick herbs from the herb garden and begin the drying process for winter usage. My herb garden did really well this year, although I did lose a thyme plant, a dill plant, and a sage plant to poor drainage. Too much rain and poor drainage didn't make for happy herbs and they didn't survive, but the rest of the herbs did beautifully. I only entered a few herbs in the fair this year, parsley, rosemary, lavender, and sage. All received blue ribbons to my delight.

 

The best time to pick herbs for drying is mid-morning after the dew has dried off of them. Find a dry spot to hang the herbs out of direct sun. I dry mine in my attic on a large wooden clothes drying rack. Hang the herbs in bunches using a rubber band, string, or a twist tie. A drying screen, such as a window screen, works perfectly to dry leaves and sprigs of herbs that cannot be bundled to dry. A piece of cheese cloth or muslin placed under the herbs on the screen works nicely. Herbs dry pretty quickly when denied moisture. They are ready when they are totally dry to the touch. Put the herbs in labeled jars (with the name of the herb or herb mixture, and date) and store in a dark cupboard until ready to use. They should remain potent up to one year.

I will be drying parsley, sage, rosemary, oregano, thyme, lemon verbena, mint and marjoram. Next year I am hoping to plant several chamomile plants so that I can dry the flowers for tea, a remedy that always helps my husband when he has an asthma attack.

Keep in mind to only use half of the amount of dry herbs in recipes calling for fresh herbs. Dry herbs are much more potent than fresh herbs.

The Herb Garden at The Farm at Mill Village

 

 

 

Washing Wool

We are having some beautiful weather this week so I have decided to finish washing the wool fleece that was sheared off of my sheep in March. I washed most of the wool at the end of April when we had a stretch of sunny and breezy days, but it was so tiring and time consuming that I stored some of it until a later date when the weather conditions became perfect again. You really don't want to wash it in the humid weather in the middle of summer because the wool just doesn't dry quickly enough. The process is not that hard and it is so wonderful to have wool from your own sheep to work with.
Of course the first step is to shear the sheep. I do not do this myself. I have a very experienced sheep shearer who has been coming to my farm for the last seven years.

 

Sheep Shearing

 

Next comes the most time consuming task, skirting the fleece (removing a strip of dirty wool all around the edge of the fleece) and removing any dung tags and vegetation- such as hay and bedding in the wool. This process can take hours depending on how dirty the fleece is and how many sheep you have. Many sheep owners put thin coats on their sheep year round to keep the wool clean and free from vegetation. This makes this step much easier. Unfortunately, I do not, so this is a lengthy process.

Once the fleece has been picked through you can begin the washing or scouring process. It is easiest to do this in multiple small batches. The wool is washed in very hot water with dawn dish detergent, changing the water and soap several times until the water looks clean. ( It took me three times.) The worst part of this process was carrying huge buckets of hot water from my house to the backyard. Truly back breaking labor!! A lot of sheep owners wash their fleece in their bathtubs, but I thought what a mess that would be to clean up. The most important thing in this step is to handle the wet wool as little as possible and not to agitate it so that it does not mat up. Also keep the temperature of the water the same with each washing. This also helps to avoid matting.

Washing the Wool

 

The next step is the rinsing which is done the same way as the scouring, just soaking the wool in clear hot water until the water looks clear. It took only two rinsings for me. Then after lifting the wool gently out of the water, I placed my now clean wool on screens to dry. It took two days for the wool to dry, and the results were perfectly clean. The wool that looked dingy and smelled like a barnyard was now so white and smelled so clean!

 

Drying the Wool



                                                                    

I stored all this clean wool away until winter when I will card it. Carding is the process of using two wooden paddles with fine metal teeth in them to comb the wool into usable roving ( clean, smoothly combed wool fibers). I will use the roving for needle felting, but at this point spinners would spin yarn.

Antique

Hand Carders

New Hand Carders

(still basically the same)

 

I am taking a spinning class at the Sheep and Fiber Festival at the Tunbridge Fair grounds the weekend of September 28 and 29, so maybe next year I will spin the wool into yarn also.

 

First Frost

It has to happen sooner or later, tonight South Royalton, Vermont is predicted to have the first frost of the season. The weather forcasters are predicting temperatures to be in the upper 20s to around 30 degrees. Don't forget to bring tender potted plants indoors if you want to keep them a little longer. Also, cover any crops you may still have in the garden that you want to prolong the growing season of. I think I will bring in my nearly ripe tomatoes along with the ripe ones and put them on window sills to finish ripening. I have two huge potted herbs in the herb garden, a rosemary plant and a lemon verbena plant, that I will bring in. Other than the tomatoes and herbs, I think it is time to let nature take its course. By mid-September I am pretty tired of being a slave to the gardens. I am looking forward to putting the gardens to bed for the winter, and spending a cozy winter baking, quilting and wool needle felting, all in the comfort of two woodstoves.
The Tunbridge World's Fair is just a memory now, but despite the first two days of rain and mud, sunshine returned for the weekend. I was very pleased to receive blue ribbons for all of the herbs I entered, as well as my huge potted begonia. Our hens, despite their setback from the fox attack in August, received a second place red ribbon for their eggs.

Prize Winning Eggs

Blue Ribbon Parsley

 

The first place blue ribbon for my wool needle felted downy woodpecker and nuthatch was my greatest accomplishment. Although it feels so good to win a blue ribbon for things you have grown in the garden, there is no comparison to the feeling of winning first prize for something you designed and created yourself without the benefit of a pattern or instructions. I am already dreaming of next year's fair and what I can enter. I have never entered any of the vegetables I grow, so that is on the top of my list.

Wool Needlefelted First Place Birds

 

View the rest of my wool needle felting at www.thefarmatmillvillage.com 

 

 



 







Rain for the Fair

The big end of summer event in Vermont is The World's Fair in Tunbridge, Vermont. Gardeners and farmers coddle their best livestock and potential prize winning crops all summer to enter in the fair come September. Even the rainy weather doesn't keep real Vermonters away from partaking in the thrill of winning a blue ribbon for Bessie the cow, or that giant pumpkin that has been fertilized to be the biggest yet.
The fair opened yesterday morning with rain and unfortunately rain is the main event again today. My husband, who is at the fair from 7am until midnight throughout the fair, says you haven't seen mud until you've been to the Tunbridge fair this year. Yikes! The good news is the weekend looks glorious, so I am sure the crowds will be out to eat the food, ride the rides, and pet the farm animals. Even I decided to wait until better weather prevails to see how my entries fared. See you at the fair!

www.thefarmatmillvillage.com

Getting Ready for Hay

It's time to think about bringing home our winter supply of hay and storing it in the barn. We usually go to pick up the hay from the farm where we buy it the last week in September. The farm is about thirty minutes from our farm, which gives us thirty minutes to rest from loading the hay until unloading and stacking the hay in our barn. A huge job! I try to enlist as many family members with pick-up trucks and strong backs and arms as I can for this tiring feat. Having stacks and stacks of hay in the barn always gives me such a sense of satisfaction and security knowing the sheep will be fed throughout the long Vermont winter. Not to mention the pleasure of smelling the aroma from the fresh hay.
So in anticipation of the arrival of the hay, it was fall cleaning weekend in the barn. Rafters, walls and floors were swept, garden tools put back in their rightful places, and summer items stored away to make room for the hay. My husband and I went out to get wooden pallets to raise the hay up off the brick barn floor to avoid any moldy hay. We were lucky to get huge, sturdy over-sized pallets, just what we needed. It now looks like the boardwalk at Atlantic City in the barn without the hay on the pallets, but soon hay will be stacked on them and the pallets won't be seen until spring.

Why worry about hay ?

www.thefarmatmillvillage.com 

 

Fresh Eggs

Yesterday was a milestone in the life of one of our new chickens who came to the farm in April as a baby chick. One of our Buff Orpingtons became a laying hen! She went from being a pullet (that goofy, gawky teenage stage) to a full grown hen by laying her first "tiny" egg. Not much eating out of that egg as compared to the full-sized eggs our three year old Barred Rock chickens lay, but she will soon be laying breakfast sized eggs.

 

 

It is a huge relief to me to see that they are starting to lay, because we lost some of our chickens to a fox attack in the beginning of August. Not only did he dig under the fence and kill chickens, but he severely maimed some of the other chickens and traumatized them so that they have been laying less frequently. I am already planning what kinds of chicks to order in the spring to build up our flock. For now though, I am glad to see they are all happy and safe. Maybe soon we will put up the "Fresh Eggs" sign!

 

Buff Orpington

Barred Rock

Happy hens at their hen house

 

www.thefarmatmillvillage.com

 

 

Farm Visitor

This morning at 6:15 I went out to clean the barns and let the sheep, chickens, and duck out when I had a colorful surprise. In Francesca the duck's swimming pool was a 6 inch spotted salamander peacefully swimming. I went to dump the pool to clean out yesterday's rain and mud and there he was. Of course I looked it up on the Internet to find out what it was. It is just what it looks like a "Yellow Spotted Salamander". Apparently they are common to the Northeast, but this was my first encounter with one. I learned they can live up to 32 years. Amazing! They spend most of their time underground but come out after rainy weather. Well, we certainly have had that. I also learned that in the spring hundreds, sometimes thousands, migrate to mating ponds- that they return to each year. Again, amazing! These creatures hibernate underground in the winter and emerge again in March. I guess my reward for getting up early and doing farm chores was seeing this beautiful amphibian.

 

 

visit us at www.thefarmatmillvillage.com







New needle felted crow

Yesterday and today's muggy and showery weather makes doing anything outside very unpleasant. Even the sheep seem to prefer staying in their fan cooled barn and only going out to graze now and then. The humid weather has driven me to my fan cooled sewing room for my relief from the weather. Fortunately there is always a project that I can begin, so I decided to pull out all my colored wool roving and do some needle felting. I hadn't attempted a black crow or a pumpkin before, so I thought they would be fun with fall just around the corner. It took me about 5 hours to do the crow and 1 1/2 hours to do the "Jack be little" pumpkin. Here are the results.

You can view my other needle felted birds on our website www.thefarmatmillvillage.com
Happy Labor Day to all my readers, and remember fall weather is in the forcast for later this week!