Successes and failure...

I have no photos of my success, because it is kind of gross.  It all started last year when a friend told me her mother would always bury a fish under her fruit trees for fertilizer.  As always, I mulled this information over for awhile then tried it.  It was unsuccessful, because a fox or something came and dug the fish up.  I continued to think about it and read several articles on the internet.  This weekend I successfully made fish fertilizer.  After my fishing trip with the nieces a month ago, I cleaned the fish put them in a five gallon bucket and threw in a carp for good measure.  Most of the articles I read advised to pour some molasses in the bucket and let things stew for awhile.  I also added two gallons of water.  I put a lid on it and stored the stinky mess in a corner of the orchard.  Four weeks later I steeled myself and prepared for a smelly mess.  I was surprised it was actually a nice liquid fertilizer.  It turned out much better than I anticipated.   I was able to fertilize 10 trees, of course I will never be able to use the bucket for anything but fish fertilizer.  

 My other success is the butterfly and bee garden.  I have several grasses and added a bee and butterfly flower mix.  It isn't a lush garden, but it is a very good start.  The bees and butterflies are using it. The concrete rhubarb leaf is filled with sand and makes a wonderful lounge area for the butterflies.  

 My sweetcorn is rocking.  It has never been this tall.  Hopefully it will be ready in a few weeks.  My bees are doing great.  They should produce a lot of honey this year.  

 This is the only planter that has survived.  The deer have munched everything.  Usually the smelly spray works, but this year it rained so much that I couldn't keep up spraying it.  This planter is on the deck.  It was the one place they couldn't reach.  I love the red geraniums and the bright yellow sunflower.  Below is my soon to be giant pumpkin.  It is growing pretty fast.  

My poor peaches and cream hollyhock.  If you look closely you can see the deer stripped every leaf and only left the one blossom  It is doing it's best.  Not only have I had a problem with deer, but the chipmunk population went from 4 to too many to count.  They are everywhere.  So far, they haven't done any damage.  I have noticed the hawk and the neighbor's cat have taken a sudden interest in my yard.   I don't think they have been successful, because I am not seeing a dent in chipmunk numbers.  

 I call the little guy above Rip, because his ear is a bit tattered.

 Perhaps you are wondering about my failure.  Well, here it is.  I spent half an hour trying to get a photo of this zippy little bird.  Finally, I got a photo, but now I cannot identify him.  Any ideas?  I have ruined my bird book pouring through it trying to identify the little bugger.  If you have any ideas could you please let me know.  It is driving me nuts. (Addendum: I believe Charade is correct.  After further research it my be a female redstart.  Now if I could just see a male redstart.)

 That is it successful fish fertilizer and a beautiful bee and butterfly garden, happy bees, a beautiful crop of sweetcorn and a big pumpkin.  To finish it off an unsuccessful attempt at bird identification.  I hope your weekend was also full of successes that outnumbered failures.

We're committed now...

It wasn't a warm weekend.  In fact, it was quite chilly.  That didn't stop me from planting some of my seedlings in the greenhouse.  It is supposed to warm up.   If the temperature does dip, I have a little heater.   I planted tomatoes, pumpkins,  luffas, and a few broccoli plants.   I'm not really that committed,  there are still seedlings in flats and continue to bring them in and out.  There are tomato seedlings coming out my ears. Somehow they seem to have popped up all through my seed starts. The lettuce and spinach I planted is also coming up.  I'm hoping they are staggered enough from the ones that are up already. Last year I had horrible luck with trying to stagger plantings.  It got too warm too quickly and things didn't come up.  My lettuce and spinach was ready in early spring and that was it for the rest of the summer. 

 

 I planted a sunflower with the pumpkins.  My hope is the pumpkins will crawl up the sunflower and out the window.  It has been done before.  Now looking at this photo, I see a little tomato coming up under the pumpkin leaf.  They are determined buggers.

I added soil and seeds to the windmill bed.  A few irises were also transplanted.  I am very pleased with the outcome.  Lawrence County e-mailed this week and my plants were in. Three apricots, 5 lilacs, and 5 raspberries were promptly planted.  My orchard is complete.  It has apples, pears, cherries, currants, gooseberries, buffalo berries, plums, sand cherries, nanking cherries, juneberries, chokecherries, blackberries, raspberries, and grapes.  The only plants that haven't produced yet are the sand cherries, plums, gooseberries, chokecherries, and buffalo berries.  They had a major set back when the blizzard Atlas flattened everything. 

I wish you could see the trees better.  Everything just blends in.  It looks great.  Things aren't leafed out yet.  They are being smart and waiting until the chance of frost is past.

  I have a dream that someday we will have a lilac hedge.  Lilacs don't seem to like it here.  Probably because they need full sun and that is somewhat difficult to find in a forest.  Despite the shade in the picture, this is the sunniest spot on the property.  After planting my little twigs, I surrounded them with wire to keep the deer away.  

Not much else is happening in our neck of the woods.  I was somewhat glad for the cool temperatures.  It helped to motivate me to get a majority of my spring cleaning done.  Are you planting your garden?  Are you done with your spring cleaning?  

An apple a day or is it the early bird gets the worm...

For once my husband and I were patient.  We haven't picked our apples until this weekend.  We are down to one out of the two original Harrelson apple trees.  They were planted the first spring in our cabin.  They have made it through several major blizzards, but the mice girdled one two years ago.  She tried hard, but couldn't recover.  It was a sad day when we pulled her up.  The last one standing had a ton of apples this year.  We didn't even come close to picking them all.  We left the ones that were bruised by hail. 


As you can see below, this isn't our first rodeo.  We had apple peeling and cutting central set up.  We were a well oiled machine.  Kelly used the Lehman's apple peeler and I used the apple corer.  Within an hour we had 5 bags of apple pie filling, two bags of apple crisp, another in the oven, and two gallon jars of apple cider.  We still have a few apples left. 

That wasn't the end of the weekend projects.  My Hindu's Rope plant was in dire need of repotting.  She is 20 years old and beautiful.  I washed her off good and then went to work making a good potting mix.  My poor composting worms get neglected in the summer.  I tend to use the outdoor composting bin.    I drug the worm bin out and cleaned out all of the good compost in the bottom two rungs.  I took the top box and added apple peels, bananas, and some leaves from the outdoor bin.  Those little worms will be happy, as will my poor house plants.

Good compost and soon to be good compost.  Let those little worms go to work.

Well, my weekend flew by.  Sorry if this post is a little choppy.  There seems to have been some changes made to blogger and it is fight to get anything where I want it.  Oh well, what would life be without a little challenge. 

Have you picked your apples yet?  What do you do with them?  What type of composting do you do?  Worms? Compost Tumbler?  Ground Bins?  Which do you like best and why?

Bear Grease and Prairie Grass

I had lots of questions about our bear hunt.  Yes, we ate bear meat.  No, it isn't horrible.  I tentatively cooked up some of the back straps when we got home.  Despite what most people stated, it tasted great.  I'm sure part of that is because I was careful butchering and made sure there was no fat. The meat was marinated overnight, then seared in a frying pan, and slow cooked to perfection.  Bear meat must be completely cooked, so no medium rare.  I can't wait to finish butchering the rest of the quarters.  I am anxious to make summer sausage using casings for the first time.   

Next, I followed our guides advice and rendered the fat to make a type of bear lard.

I took cleaned chunks of bear fat.  I put them in a pot with 1/4 cup of water and put it on medium for several hours.  It slowly became a beautiful amber liquid.  I strained it through cheesecloth and after it had cooled poured it into jars.

After it had cooled more, I put it in the refrigerator and it is now a solid white.  Our guide said it makes the best pie crust.  I will let you know how that goes next week.   I have also learned it is good for waterproofing leather, great for hand lotion, and can be used to make candles.  I will also try a few of those projects later.

  Bear grease wasn't all I was busy with last week. My husband and I recently acquired some land on the Belle Fourche River.  We couldn't wait to see the opportunities provided on the prairie property.   

We were greeted by a newly born lamb in the pasture next to us.  It didn't take mom long to get him cleaned up and moving.  The river wasn't so welcoming.  All of the rains have the Belle at full capacity.  She was roaring.  We did manage to catch one channel catfish.  

Of course, the first thing I had to do was plant things.  It is hard for a girl who spent most of her childhood planting trees to live in the forest.  Here I was right at home.  The first trees in were some little cedars for a windbreak.  Next was an orchard of apricot, current, aronia, black walnut, and elderberry.   Can you tell I love berries?  Part of the draw of the property was the wild buffalo berries, chokecherries, and I also found a huge gooseberry bush.   In the photo below the chokecherry is on the left and the buffalo berry on the right.  Also if you look closely at the picture on the right, you can see hoards of ticks crawling onto my sweatshirt, while it hangs on the steel post:)

 Everything is green and lush.  There are several stately cottonwoods.  I'm afraid there are also a plethora of ticks.  Despite all caution we were inundated with them.  Luckily all were found before they got anchored.  I guess with everything good comes something bad.  

 Well, it was a busy week.  I am excited about our new property and projects.  It is always good to have something to keep a person busy.  Is anyone else having a problem with ticks?  This is the worst they have ever been, both in the hills and on the prairie.

The harvest continues..

I am so excited.  Our two Haralson apple trees produced like crazy this year.  As did the Dolgo crabapple.  I get a few more grapes from my Valiant grape every.  I even got a nice harvest of apples from the wild apple tree on our property.   I'm still getting tomatoes. 

Best of all.....
My potato harvest success.  I tried the method I saw on pintrest, which consisted of a wire cage lined with straw,.  The inside was filled with compost and potatoes.  All I had to do was pick up the cage and the potatoes just rolled out.  That is how we do it in South Dakota, Gene.  No digging needed:) It wasn't a huge crop, because by the time I got my act together to try the project it was difficult finding seed potatoes.

I also harvested the chipmunk's sunflower crop.  I didn't plan a one of those sunflowers below.  Don't worry I'm slowly doling them out to my chipmunk farmer friends.  I never would have guessed I could get such big sunflower heads at this altitude.

 My final project for the weekend was to pull up the corn and use them for decoration.  I also added the sunflower heads.  I'm slowly building my fall display.  Notice my giant pumpkin.  It fell off of the vine.  I'm not sure if it will turn orange.  I have one pumpkin left. 

That is pretty much the end of my garden harvest.  It was a successful year and I enjoyed the challenge.  

Berries, berries, and more berries...

I love berries.  It doesn't matter if they are grapes, cherries, Saskatoon, thimble berries, raspberries, chokecherries, currants, buffalo berries, naking cherries.  They can be wild or domestic.  I will use them to make pies, jam, or wine.  Quite a few just go straight to the belly. 

I am slowly making progress in my orchard.  Last year I just had berries from the naking cherries and currents.  This year I have cherries, naking cherries, currants, raspberries, two little sand cherries, and best of all 5 buffalo berries.  I still need to see progress from the plums, mulberries, black berries, and chokecherries.   It would also be nice if I got more than two sand cherries.  I must say a new orchard is a good way to teach an impatient gardener patience.    

The production from the cherry tree may be the demise of the chokecherries.  We bought the cherry tree on a lark.  I never thought in a million years it would survive much less produce a bunch of cherries.  Chokecherries grow wild here.  The ones in the orchard were only purchased because they were part of the Grandma Jam Pack Plants sold by the local county conservation district.  (I am not a grandma, but I love to make jam.)  The chokecherries may be looking for a new home this fall if I find more cherry trees. 

 I'm not sure what I'm going to do with naking cherries.  Next year I should have enough to really make something, maybe brandied cherries or jelly.   This year I finally had enough currents that I should be able to make a small batch of current jelly. 

Am I the only person bonkers for berries?  Does anyone else have an orchard?  If so what do you plant and what do you do with your harvest? 

apple cider...

I was inspired by one of my relatives and longtime neighbor of my parents, Judy, for this next project.  She has a wonderful orchard and is known for her apple juice.  When I had a chance to buy a basket of apples, I jumped on it with thoughts of apple juice and hard cider in my head.



With Judy's guidance and advice I started the project yesterday. I sliced and cored 4 quarts of apples. I boiled 4 quarts of water with 4 teaspoons of Cream of Tarter. I mixed them all together and let it set for 24 hours. I chopped up the apple cores and gave them to the worms.
  
Twenty four hours later I looked at what I had.  I boiled the apples in the water they sat in.  Then I pureed the apples.  I poured the water and puree through a strainer.  Then reboiled the juice adding 3/4 cup of brown sugar, 1 t. of cinnamon, 1/2 t. nutmeg, and 1/2 t. of cloves per gallon of cider. 

One gallon is going to become hard cider and the other gallon was canned in quart jars for those cold winter days.

While I was waiting for things to set and boil, I worked on finishing up the blocks for my quilt.  I have 4 more blocks to make and then I'm on to the next phase.

I taste tested the cider and it turned out perfectly. I don't think I would have been brave enough to try this endeavor if I didn't have Judy as support. It was fun and I can't wait for company this winter.

 

I haven't figured out what to do about uploading photos, but this time it let me.