Happy Hallowe’en!

It is a beautiful sunny day and after what seems like a month of rain (not that we can complain) it is so nice to see the sun!

The path from the car to my door is squishy and muddy and we’ve discovered that the door invites a puddle of water to collect right by our shoes.

The kittens have recovered from their spaying operation and they chase each other around the house, bat around anything they can get their quick little paws on. They are particularly puzzled when it comes to apple processing though.

As far as apple processing, we have made some dehydrated apple rings, and our biggest accomplishment to date is 12 litres of homemade apple juice.

Last Sunday we ventured out of our warm cozy house with fluffy kittens, we climbed up a slippery metal ladder, and picked out apples the size of softballs and filled a laundry basket.

Then we peeled and cored them, blended, strained through an old pillow case (which is apple juice stained from last year) and put the big ol’ pot on the wood stove to pasturize. My complaint about processing apples is the damage oxalic acid from the apples does to your hands. Oxalic acid is used for tenderizing meat. My hands are so sore after doing this. My skin is dried out and feels like it is pulling away from under my nails. It is gross.

The second pot you see on the stove in this photo are the tomatoes we picked and were processing into sauce for the freezer. We’ve noticed that the tomatoes we make into sauce are a lot sweeter than the tomato sauce from the store. We’ve tried adding lots of balsamic vinegar and red wine to compensate for this sweetness but I think this is caused by the type of tomatoes we used. Scarlet Heirloom and Roma tomatoes. They are two varieties we are definitely doing next year because they were such good producers.

This is the produce that I gathered from the garden last Saturday. Green beans, zucchini, potatoes, tomatoes, celeriac, tarragon, and basil. I also harvested our lavendar flowers. They are hanging in the “annex” (our back room of the house that acts as our everything room, and cold storage.)

Another exciting thing happening around our place is that Marc is growing mushrooms. Don’t worry, these are the completely legal kind. We have the RCMP over at least once a week (he is a good friend of ours) so we dare not try anything else.

These are oyster mushrooms. He has been working so hard at trying different methods to grow these. Many people grow oyster mushrooms in plastic garbage bags but he didn’t like that idea because it uses a nonrenewable resource. There is a lot of waste in growing mushrooms in plastic bags. These tubes are reusable so we were really hoping this method of growing would work. As you can see by the little clusters, it did!

Growing mushrooms is an exact science. I am so proud of Marc for figuring it out and then following through on it. It involves growing spores, isolating contamined fungus, using a microscope and taking fastidious notes. These are things that are not my forte! Give me stinging insects any day. But eating mushrooms, this is my strength. I’m very pleased with his accomplishment!

That is the farm update for October. I hope you’re enjoying the spookiness today and the surprise sunshine!