February 2012 Goals Update

Even with the extra leap day last month, February flew by without me even noticing. Some things were finished, others were put on the back burner. I blame Tad and his proposal! How can a girl expect to get things completed when something like that happens! Gosh.

We may have also spent a whole day creating some creepy looking snow-people:


Farm life is busy, you know?

1. Finish kitchen painting

This took way longer than I thought, even though the section was only the small part at the top of the cabinets:


Scraping off wallpaper, which was liberally glued on in addition to the regular sticky backing, is so tedious. The floral/fruit pattern shown above was not really that bad... but there was a lot of it... everywhere.

But, it was scraped, primed, and painted to match the rest of the the kitchen. Pictures incoming as soon as I tackle the dirty dishes that are piling up.

2. Prime 3rd bedroom

This is what it looked like before:


It is all primed, minus the ceiling which is still a fantastic shade of dark blue. Weird, I know. The hole in the wall is in the process of being patched, but at least the room looks less like a bag of cotton candy.

3. Greenhouse/High Tunnel

Not entirely finished with this one yet; the ground has all been tilled, so now we just need to meet up with our neighbors who are helping put it up and get it completed. Hopefully this weekend or next!

4. Start seeds

Bam! All of the spring veggies are growing wonderfully. Onions, leeks, lettuce, chard, kale, broccoli, spinach, arugula, cabbage, turnips, and a smattering of herbs.

5. Keep Egg Count

158. My little ladies are amazing, pumping out all of those eggs when it is still technically winter!

6. Identify and Mark Trees

I... uh... walked around in the woods a little bit?

7. Clean Out Coop

The chickies are significantly less smelly now, and one of our compost bins is now very happy with the addition of the poo.


8. Dessert Once a Week

Tad and I have different opinions about this one. I happily baked some delicious pumpkin muffins three times last month, along with a blueberry cake a few days ago. So I succeeded, right?

Well, Tad argues that muffins are not dessert, because he eats them at breakfast (and really, at all times of the day). My rebuttal is that he eats cookies/cake/pie for breakfast if we happen to have them around.

Next time I think that I will just keep all of the muffin desserts for myself!

9. Fix Shower

Nope. But really, this was one of Tad's objectives. He was too busy eating non-dessert pumpkin muffins to work on it.

10. Prepare for Goat!

Partially. Lots of reading has been done, along with scouting out places to buy some cattle panels to fence them in. We also went over to our friend's house to be introduced to the goats and try and figure out which one we would want to buy. They are all popping out cute little baby goats, so the visit was quite a treat!

We decided we are going to get both a momma goat and a female baby goat. This will let them have a friend around, and so that come next year, both can be bred and we will have two milkers. Bring on the cheese!

All in all, not a bad month.

Gardening Has Begun!

The preparations for the garden began at the beginning of February, when I tried sowing some of my onion seeds from last year. Well, they failed, miserably. Out of the 90 that I planted, a measly three had germinated by last week. Terrible!

Luckily a friend of mine shared some of her onion seed with me and I was able to get those planted, so hopefully onions are still in my future.

The setup that we have now is amazing, compared to last year where all of my little guys were growing in a cramped room with two round grow lights to share between 100 of them:


The shelf was one of Tad's Christmas presents, which came with this handy little plastic cover that zips to totally enclose the seeds. This has been working out great for us, since our cats seem to think they are cows and love to munch on anything that is green and leafy.

We equipped each shelf with fluorescent lights, and hooked them all up to a timer. The seeds were all planted in paper egg cartons, which makes watering them a breeze. I just put the egg cartons into a shallow pan of water, wait for them to become entirely saturated, and voila.

Everything is slowly popping up out of the soil!

Onions:


Leeks:


Swiss Chard:


All of our spring-time veggies have been started! Look at me, not procrastinating with them at all.

It has been so unseasonably warm lately (65 today and 73 tomorrow!) that I am even thinking about starting a few summer vegetables seeds early. I will probably only plant a couple seeds of each, and do a larger seeding at the regular time. If the weather holds out, we will have even earlier tomatoes and peppers. If not, oh well, that just means I lost a couple of seeds.

The Daily Grind

Let us go back in time a few months, to the holiday season.

Our family always asks for a few ideas about what we would like to receive as gifts. Over the past few years, my list of 'wants' has went from the random book or video game to... well, things that get the response of, "A what? What is that?"

Case in point, my new favorite gadget, given to me last Christmas by my brother and his girlfriend:


A hand-crank grain mill!!

They may have looked at me like I was crazy... I guess most people my age are not terribly thrilled by the thought of grinding their own flour... but my family has come to expect such behavior out of me. This bad boy was pricey, and it was not even the most expensive one out there. However, due to some bad reviews of the cheaper varieties, it seemed like the Wonder Junior Deluxe was the most bang for your buck.

It was extremely easy to assemble, and likewise, it is just as easy to take apart for storage and cleaning. To start grinding, all you do is put it together, clamp it onto a stable surface, load it with grain, and start cranking away.


The first thing that I realized when I first began grinding was that I was extremely out of shape. Winter can do that to you, though! I try to look it not as a tedious and laborious chore, but more like an opportunity to work out my arms as well as provide some nutritious, freshly ground grain for my baked goods. Two birds with one stone!

The way that this mill is set up allows you to adjust the courseness of the finished flour; the coarser the setting, the easier it is to grind, and the more fine the setting, the more difficult the grind. For our bread, it takes around 5-10 minutes to grind the necessary 3 1/4 cups of flour that I use in my loaves.

Granted, you can always go for the electric versions, but I liked the idea of being able to use it without electricity.

In time, this machine will end up paying for itself just because wheat berries are cheaper than the preground flour you buy in most stores. For every 1 cup of wheat berries you grind, it equates to around 1 1/2 cups of flour. I managed to snag a 25 lb bag of organic wheat berries for $10; talk about a money saver!


I can use this to ground much more than plain old wheat flour, but unfortunately I have not delved into anything else so far. It came with another set of grinding 'burrs' that are stainless steel and are apparently fantastic for grinding oily things, like nuts, into nut butters. I cannot wait to try that out! I am already drooling over some freshly made peanut or almond butter.

Yum.