Author Archives: Quail Run

Small Pumpkins

I love variety and beauty. Gardening has always been very satisfying for me because I can experiment a lot with both variety and beauty. I’m always trying new vegetables and flowers, usually mixing the two.

One way I like to bring variety and visual interest to the garden is by vertical plantings.  A couple years ago Mike made several of these four sided trellises in some of the garden beds and I’ve has a lot of fun growing things right up them.  I do a lot of runner beans (they have a prettiest flowers) and cucumbers, but one of my favorites would be mini pumpkins.

I’ve done a lot of mini pumpkins over the years, they are so cute and they kids just love them, they last through fall decorating and when they are done being pretty the chickens and goats enjoy them as an early winter treat. While pumpkins are a vine, they don’t naturally grow up, like pole beans or peas, and they need a bit of help. I like to use strips of cut up cotton shirts, they have a little bit of give in them, so when the wind blows it won’t snap the vine, they are very sturdy, but if one happens to be left in the garden they will break down nicely. They look a little ragged right after I lift the vines and tie them down, but bounce back pretty quickly. They are a fun addition to the garden and growing them vertically not only looks nice, but saves valuable garden space.

This is the mini pumpkin plant about a week after I tied it up, you can see how much bigger it has gotten and how nice and filled out it is.

 

Strawberry Spinach Salad

***This is a post from my archives, I first published it ten years ago when I was doing a series on salads for my personal blog****

This Salad come from a good friend and neighbor of mine. She served it at a little gals night out get together at her house, and it had become a favorite of mine.

Here is our list of ingredients:

Spinach leaves, washed and trimmed (or a bag)
Strawberries, washed and sliced
Feta Cheese, crumbled
1/4 red onion, thinly sliced
Sugared Walnuts (I will show you how)
Brianna’s Blush Wine Vinaigrette


To sugar walnuts, melt equal parts brown sugar and butter in a small sauce pan (I did 2 Tbsp of each), when it is all melted add the walnuts and stir to coat.

Then lay them out and let them cool, and you have sugared walnuts.

I am not a walnut fan, but I love these.

Crumble the feta, I am not a real lover of feta, but there is something about the mix of strawberry and Vinaigrette that makes the feta so yummy.

Make sure to slice the onion really thin. Usually I don’t love raw onion, but like the feta, there is something about the mix of all the ingredients in this salad that makes it so yummy.

Add all your ingredients and toss with the Blush Wine Vinaigrette.

I served this with homemade french bread (thanks Casey) and home made pizza. I thought it made a yummy meal. I will have to be totally honest and say that my family doesn’t really share my love of this salad, Dadzoo mumbles something about hating feta, it has to do with being forced to eat it as a child. All my kids hate the dressing and the onions. So from a feeding the family/kids stand point this salad didn’t go over so well, but I love it, so it will just have to be saved for special occasions (like when I crave it really badly, there are some advantages to being the cook!)

Summer Squash

I know summer squash (a group that zucchini is a part of) is sort of a joke among gardeners  and neighbors in the summertime. They are abundant and prolific and even the most beginning level gardener can be quite successful with them. 

Growing up I swear I ate buckets of zucchini and crook neck squash and I really hated it.  My mom (love you) would boil those babies and they were pretty tasteless, at least in my opinion. Then my younger sister got married and her new husband cooked up a zucchini on the grill with lemon pepper seasoning….And. I. Was. Hooked. Add to that I start getting these seed catalogues, from Bakers Creeks and Johnny’s Seeds that has all sorts of summer squash, different shapes and colors and sizes.  Not only had my taste buds been satisfied, but my urge for fun and variety was being satisfied.

I’ve grown summer squash ever since.  There are so many different ways to cook summer squash, Pinterest is full of great recipes, but I’d like to share my go-to way of cooking it.  My kids even like it.  This year when I served up the first of the squash my 12 year old boy gave a shout and a fist pump he was so excited!

My method is quite simple:

wash

slice it up in whatever desired shape and size

heat up some type of fat (butter, bacon grease, olive oil, etc) until its nice and hot, add the squash

season as desired (we love garlic salt)

cook until soft, but not mushy, and the edges get a nice golden brown color

serve warm.

 

Enjoy!

 

Growing Soil

One of my main jobs here on the farm, my main focus, what everything comes down to is the health of the soil. It doesn’t matter what the freeze dates are, the rates of germination, how many pounds of beans harvested per row if my soil isn’t healthy and nurtured.  I can’t have big harvests, beautiful plants or nutritious thriving vegetables if my soil is dead. I spend a lot of time looking at dirt, putting my hands in dirt, observing my garden beds, analyzing and planning, sometimes for years down the road. I want good, rich, dark soil, full of organic matter and life, worms, mushrooms, mold and microbes. The problem is that we are in a desert and our soil doesn’t come that way naturally, therefore is takes a lot of planning and focused effort to achieve that in an organic healthy way.

The ladies getting to work on a newly built compost pile.

To do this we use many different permaculture methods. One method is the classic composting, nothing organic goes to waste here, from kitchen scraps to weeds, it’s all recycled in some way to help enrich the land. We use chickens extensively in our composting program.  We also compost in place and do traditional compost piles, but the chicken composting is what I’d like to talk about today.

In the chicken yard we make a simple pile: horse manure, goat manure and bedding, old leaves, kitchen scraps, weeds and lawn clippings (be cautious using lawn clipping in compost, if there is any weed killer on it, it can cause problems in the garden, I know I’ve experienced it first hand). We do this for a couple weeks, adding food scraps and weeds, especially those that have seeds.  The chicken then scratch through the pile, mixing it, eating weed seeds and leaving their droppings to further enrich the compost. Every morning when my son goes out to do his chicken chores he rakes the pile up high and the chickens get to work mixing it all up again.

A pullet working on a new compost pile, she will help breakdown all those leaves and hay.

In about a week the pile looks like this picture below, and in two weeks it will be finished and ready to apply to the garden beds.  About 10 days to 2 weeks after  a pile is started I make a new one and so it goes through the season.  Black gold made by my feathered friends and farm hands.

When done right the compost is hot to the touch and steams when the core is opened, this will help kill weed seeds and speeds up the compost process.

Everyone Has a Job to Do

Everything on the farm has a at least two jobs to do.  Sometimes it’s as simple as: provide protection and company, like our dog and cat.  Sometimes it’s more complex: provide fruit, shelter for birds, attract beneficial insects, produce bio mass and shade, like the apple trees in our orchard.

Rabbits happily grazing in their mobile cage.

Even the rabbits have more than one job. Our rabbits are meat rabbits, breed to feed my family, but that isn’t the job I love them the most for.  They are quite efficient at turning grass into fertilizer. One of the benefits of rabbit manure is that it’s is what’s termed “cold”, meaning it’s not so high in nitrogen, like poultry or cow manure that it needs to be composted first, it can go directly on the garden and planted in.  I have some rabbits in cages and when their trays are cleaned I do put it directly in the garden, but this year we experimented with “pasturing” our grow outs. I’ve been so happy with the results.

The path of grazed meadow, this is what it looks like as we move it.

We simply built large, open changes with wire bottoms, to keep the rabbits digging out and predators from digging in.  Everyday their cage is moved to a different patch of ground in the Orchard Meadow, they keep the grass clipped and leave their fertilizer behind.  I’ve been so happy with the results, the meadow has never been as lush and our feed bill is much lower than normal.  We do still give them pellets, the grass isn’t quite enough, but it’s a great, healthy supplement.

Meadow that had the rabbits on it about two weeks ago, you can still see the grass is shorter, but growing in nicely.

 

Roasted Roots

 

This is the time of year when the cool spring vegetables are finished and the warm summer vegetables are on. The beets and carrots are getting just big enough to harvest.  They are small, but I think the small root vegetables are the most tender and sweetest, I’m always excited when I can start harvesting them.

For Sunday dinner I braved the blistering 100+ degrees and trekked into the garden to dig up a few of the bigger carrots and beets that I had left, not taking them to market the day before so we could enjoy them for dinner.  My four year old Jack followed me out and delighted in pulling up the carrots after I loosened the soil around them.  He would exclaim, delighted, every time a long carrot root popped out.

When they are this young young I don’t bother peeling them, the skins are still thin and easy to eat.  I do scrub the dirt off well and cut the tops off, leaving a bit of the stems, I think it looks pretty and it gives the roasted veggie a bit of a sweet crunch.  I cut the beets in half, that way they roast at the same rate as the carrots.  Then I simply drizzled with a little bit of avocado oil and sprinkle with salt.  Then in the oven they go at 400 degrees for around 30 minutes or until they are soft all the way through.

When finished they have a beautiful golden color and the sugars have caramelized, creating the best flavor.  The thin roots at the bottom of the carrots are a bit crunchy and so sweet, my kids love that part the very best.

Baby Day is the Best Day

 

We got our first trio of goats about three years ago this spring.  Our own little heard, one little doe and her two weathered brothers.  From the beginning we planned on breeding our little dolly and building a heard of small dairy goats. Visions of gourmet cheese and rosie faced children with milk mustaches from our own animals danced in my head.

Of course we had to wait for little Dolly to grow up.  In the meantime we fed our little goats, played with them, let them eat weeds and graze the orchard. There is almost nothing more amusing than watching baby goats play.

When Miss Dolly was about a year and a half old it was time to breed her, we found a buck and waited for her to come into heat. I was also very, very pregnant and not so great at getting down to the goat pasture to check on her. We made a couple attempts at breeding, but neither she or the buck were interested and I, hugely pregnant, gave up for that season.  It was probably the best, I was very busy that next spring with a new baby of my own.

Instead we purchased two new wee baby goats.  We named them Billy and Daisy.  Billy is our heard buck and Daisy one of our moms.  That also made breeding Dolly much easier, we just let them live together over the winter and let the breeding happen naturally.

Then one warm Sunday morning in April I got a text just as we were settling the family in their seats at church and the opening song started.  The text said “we have babies!” Clearly I had to go check it all out! Really though, I did feel like I needed to go check on our Dolly and make sure everything went well and see if she needed any help and check on the babies.  When I got there she was proudly cleaning her three little kids, she had those babies without any problems, like a veteran mother! Three little baby bucks (I had hoped for a doe, but I guess we will try again next season). Instead of pulling the babies and milking mom right away we allowed her to raise them, I didn’t want to bottle feed babies or sell them so young and I feel they do better if they are with her.  At around eight weeks old we started the weaning process and I learned how to milk a goat.  That has been an adventure and a story for another time.  It has been so fun to have little goats around again.

 

Leap of Faith

For a very long time I’ve been drawn to the dream and romance of small farming.  I know that sounds a little strange, what is so romantic about smelly animals and hard labor? While that is true, the dreamer in me chooses to ignore that and focus on beautiful baskets of eggs, the glass pitcher of home grown milk and the satisfaction of a garden well weeded.  I also cannot ignore the beauty of my garden at dusk or the thrill of those first pea shoots making their arrival in early spring.

Part of that dream included being able to sell our healthy, local produce and other products at farmers markets.  Not long after we purchased the farm I started looking into what that would entail and very quickly the reality became clear: big markets are not for small farmers.  I know that seems to go against the idea of farmers markets, they are geared toward the small farmer, right? Well, yes and no.  They are geared towards the middle farmer.  It is very difficult for a small hobby farmer, who has a day job to generate enough produce to make a farmers market profitable after booth fees and competing with the bigger producers

Then we decided to try to sell our products right from the farm, using social media we advertised what we had available and took orders for pick up.  We had some success, but not a lot, people didn’t seem very interested in driving our way for produce.  Which is ok, we are all busy people.

I gave up on my dream and decided to just focus on my garden and make it beautiful and not worry so much about sell, turning a profit or even breaking even.  This clearly wasn’t my path. Or was it?

Then another like minded individual decided that my small city needed its own farms market and it needed to gear itself towards small farms and back yard enthusiasts. I watched, then I went and checked it out, then we took the leap.

I am so happy we did.

 

All The Monkeys

Three peas in a pod

I checked the old blog today and realized its been almost two years since there has been a post.  Two years.  Wow.  We’ve been busy with the day to day craziness that comes with a family of eleven. The farm has been chugging along, we haven’t made any major changes there because homesteading is expensive! That being said, the garden is growing, the orchard is getting bigger, the goats are multiplying, the chickens are doing what chickens do and so are the rabbits.

The biggest addition to the zoo would be our littlest monkey, Hazel, who was born December 2017 and made our family complete.  She is what we’ve been missing.

I look forward to more writing and more sharing this year.  I hope to finish my Master Herbalist course and start taking clients along with footzoning. The last two years have been a journey of healing, a journey I’m still walking.  I hope to share parts of that and to help others find their path too.

The newest monkey at the zoo