Back at Hardeman's

September 29, 2008 - When I was 16 years old I got my first real job - at Hardeman Orchards. John Hardeman has an apple orchard and a little farm market where I first learned to be a cashier, stock vegetables, sort apples, cut and arrange flowers, and dig in the dirt. I spent several years on and off working at this place and becoming good friends with John and his family. You could say it was like a second home for me. Of course I moved on from Hardeman's and went off into the world to find myself. But interestingly, as I find myself back in Red Hook, I find myself back at Hardeman Orchards. John and I started talking in August and he told me that he needed somebody to manage his stand for the fall. Hmmmm.......

My plate certainly felt full at the time, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew it would be impossible for me to refuse. The stand needed some love after a couple seasons of neglect. It has immeasurable potential with it's location and it's beauty, and I couldn't resist the challenge. Plus Joe and I would be needing a market for our vegetables - and more than likely some land to grow our vegetables.

So the first weekend in September I started my second job. Every Saturday and Sunday (and sometimes Friday) you can now find me at the stand, selling apples, peaches, plums, peppers, tomatoes, mums, bread, donuts, jams, eggs, and whatever else we can get our hands on to sell.
You'll see Joe there quite a bit too - he's done a lot of clean up work and some painting, and he has quite an eye for the strategic placement of mums in order to encourage patronage at our stand. :)

So far it's been a lot of work, but incredibly satisfying. Every weekend the stand gets a little bit better and sales get a little bit higher. It's awesome to be interacting with people and getting a better sense of the market for local food in the area. It's also great to be able to put some of my food knowledge together with some of my business knowledge to try to create a successful business for a good friend.

Needless to say, this job together with my bookkeeping work ends up filling up my week, leaving me with little time for our garden. We didn't get around to planting many fall crops, but do still have the goal of planting garlic, spinach, and lots of greens to keep in cold frames over the winter. We'll do the best we can and what we don't do this year, we'll just put on the list for next year.

The summer garden is definitely starting to wind down. We still have tomatoes, but we've sort of abandoned the cherry tomatoes. Joe started letting the chickens into the tomato garden to let them eat all the rotten ones on the ground and start cleaning it up. They sure do a good job of it- I managed to get a bunch of sweet corn from the farm stand right at the end of the season. I took several dozen ears to put up for the winter -

I think I'm about out of vegetables to preserve - which is good, because I am also out of steam for the whole process. It's a lot of fun but it does tend to make you look at the garden as a chore rather than a blessing for a little while.

All in all, we're both just starting to get settled in for the winter. Joe's been spending a lot of time chopping wood to keep us warm. The days are getting shorter and we're spending more time at home in the evenings, reading and catching up on things that have been neglected for the busy summer. We'll start to make our winter travel plans as well as our plans to attend the winter organic gardening conference. I can honestly say that I have never in my life looked forward to winter as much as I am this year - it will definitely be a well earned rest. But don't exect the blog to end! I'm sure there will always be something to write about... it's the nature of our lives.

A Year Ago Today...

September 17, 2007 -

Eating Our First Chicken

September 10, 2008 - Round two for today. Our move isn't the only thing going on these days. There's quite a bit of other stuff for me to share with you today too.

You know by my title that we ate one of our chickens. No, we did not just decided we wanted to taste our little feathery friends. Two days ago one of our chickens was found lying in the yard with a hole in its side - clearly injured. At the time, we didn't know what had gotten to it, but since it was suffering, Joe killed it. A few hours later, a fox was seen wandering through our yard. Pretty strange for the town of Red Hook and there was suspicion that it could possibly have been rabid.

Needless to say, we couldn't let a good chicken go to waste. The fox hadn't eaten any of it - it seemed to have been scared away by something. So Joe plucked the chicken, gutted it, and last night we ate it for dinner (after confirming that it's okay to eat a chicken that was bitten by a possibly rabid fox). I am SO mad that I didn't think to take pictures before this stage because Joe did an excellent job cleaning it - but here he is diggin in to one of our little babies -

This was my first time eating something that I have raised from a baby and it's an interesting thing. On one hand, it was the most satisfying thing in the world. On the other hand, you do tend to picture the living, breathing, clucking thing as you're chewing it, which can be slightly awkward. As for the taste - it tasted like chicken alright, but there were some differences. The legs were extremely chewy - these birds run around A LOT compared to your typical broiler from the grocery store. So she had some serious muscle going on in the legs. But the breast was delicious - juicy, tender, really good. Here's a picture of the bird - a little late, since we had already sliced a bunch off her, but just to give you an idea.

The other thing that was cool about it is that since this was a laying hen, she had a bunch of unformed eggs inside of her. I had seen these before at the farmers market where they sell them in bags. But I never imagined how many there would be. There were big ones, but then there were tons of tiny little ones. They just look like little egg yolks. And yeah, they're tasty too.

Anyhow, the other big thing keeping me from regular blog posting is food preservation. Tomatoes never quit apparently. We've got them coming out our ears and I'm totally sick of them. It wouldn't be so bad if it were all big tomatoes, but it's the cherry tomatoes that we're really loaded down with. I can't do much with them, so all I've come up with is to wash them, cut them in half, squash them down with a masher, and boil them down a bit. Then freeze. I did try this out as a sauce one night and it was pretty tasty, even with the seeds. I have about 10 of these in the freezer at this point. By the end of the season we should never have to buy tomato sauce again.

Because I've also been canning the big ones. With these I do the real deal - peal, seed, dice, boil, and can. Here's a couple jars boiling in the water. And since I'm on the kick I've been going a bit crazy with peaches too. The first time I did peaches I made honey spiced peaches - delicious for a winter dessert. The second time around I just canned them plain, although I used a honey/sugar combo for the syrup. I just tend to think that honey is a little healthier for us. Here are the spiced peaches -I just got finished with another food preservation day today. First, since we had the chicken the other night, I boiled the carcass to produce about 17 cups of chicken stock, which is now in the freezer in various sized containers. Then I blanched and froze 6 cups of sweet corn. And finally, I made 3 batches of pesto from our very own basil. The freezer is already starting to fill up, and I'm just getting good at this stuff! I feel like a squirrel, stocking up for winter and I love it!

Fortunately for me, since I'm running out of hours in the day, some things will keep all on their own. Here is our squash harvest curing in the sun, which should now keep for months if we put it down in the cellar -

We harvested our first eggplant the other day as well. There are only two more out there now - it wasn't a great eggplant year for us apparently. It may not have been hot enough. Or the soil wasn't good. Who knows. I'll be spending the winter figuring out what went wrong this year, why it went wrong, and what to do differently next year. But here's what we DID get and it was super delicious -
The zucchini plants got some sort of disease and/or pest and so we sort of decided to abandon them. We picked everything and then Joe let the chickens in there to have at whatever was in there and dig up the soil. Here's them doing their thing -

Turns out they did a pretty nice job cleaning things up. We're even starting to get some new little zucchini forming!

All in all, we're still eating a lot from our garden. We still have tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, broccoli, cabbage, basil, swiss chard, collard greens, beets, ground cherries, carrots, green beans, and lettuce. We need to plant more lettuce so that we can put cold frames up around it and eat it all winter. The gardening never ends!!!

Jackie and Joe Get A Home of Their Own - With Walls

September 10, 2008 - Yes, it has been a while - again. But the wait has been worth it, because I have a good one for you today. We have finally gotten ourselves a home, and a respectable one at that.

Well... I suppose some people may still consider this living on the edge, but compared to camping and living with a parent, it's heaven on earth. We are subletting this tiny place (I've heard it referred to as 'the studio' as well as 'the gardener's shed' so let that fill in the pictures for you). It's about 300 square feet and consists of two rooms, only divided by a small step up, no wall between. One room is our bedroom, the other is the kitchen and dining room. We also have a bathroom. Spiderman lived here before us with all his spider friends. We were a bit busy for several days scrubbing, vacuuming, and preparing to make this our home. Then we had the big move, followed by hours of shopping by me and my mother.

Here is our kitchen -

Small but absolutely functional. It came with just a small two burner stove with a toaster oven to use as an oven. We were going to make do with that, but we have found a little apartment stove with four burners and real oven that runs on propane, so we will be installing that in the next few days. We brought our refrigerator from our demolished house. The sink leaks if you pour too much water in too fast - a quirk we can live with. There wasn't much storage space but the purchase of an extra white cabinet for below the counter solved that problem. And now I can cook!!!!

Here's our tiny little 'dining room' -

Really it's just a table and two chairs, but it's delightful. And the woodstove is right next to it. Off to the left is the bedroom - but I can't show you that. Afterall, some things need to stay private, right? But it's nice how the woodstove is right between the table and the bedroom - a good central location. We also have a propane heater, and will use that to maintain a base temp and wood to add heat when we're home.

The wood floors are one of my favorite features, and the deck we have out back is nice too. But by the far the best thing about the place is that this is what's out our front door -

That's the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge out there and we are directly across from this path that goes all the way down to the river. There's a little beach, places for campfires, and a little marina of sorts. Absolutely gorgeous. Plus this place is in a little community full of interesting people. We are hoping to make many new friends here.

So our house is not built yet - and I'm beginning to realize that things are just as they should be. We are meant to have this interim experience, for whatever reason.

It ocurrs to me that I started this blog in order to document our farming/house building adventures. But what I'm really doing is documenting our life. Of course I have refrained from discussing personal issues since this stuff is out there for the world to see. But I would like to take just one moment to point out that this is our first year of marriage. Our one year aniversary is coming up - one week from today in fact. And boy have we done a lot this year. Sometimes we look back through our posts and are just amazed at what we have done and that we have survived! It's always easy to paint a pretty picture when you're writing a blog that has, well, pretty pictures. But that's not to say that there haven't been a great many challenges and difficulties along the way. Life really is an adventure. And our first year of marriage has been an adventure. But even though many of the days seemed unbearable - now we look back at all of them with such pride. We have a tendency to make some crazy choices that have at times caused us to live uncomfortably - but at least we really lived. And continue to do so!