Welcome to our farmhouse blog

This spring marks a new chapter in our beekeeping journey as we have welcomed three new single brood chamber honey bee colonies to the farm.  While we have been keeping bees for nearly 14 years, this season feels especially significant after the tough loss of all our hives over the winter.  Losing colonies is one of the most difficult realities of beekeeping, regardless of experience, but it also provides an opportunity to learn, rebuild, and move forward.

The sheep we raise are Katahdin sheep. They are a hardy hair sheep breed, raised for meat. Unlike the better known wool breeds, Katahdins shed their winter coat in the spring, which means they don’t require shearing!! This is one of the reasons we chose this breed, along with their reputation for strong maternal instincts, good milk production, and uncomplicated births - for the most part. Their lambs are quick to stand and nurse from the ewes, which is a huge advantage during cold-weather lambing. Katahdins are also well known for their resistance to internal parasites and certain diseases, unlike many other breeds, which helps reduce the need for the costly vet visits.  Katahdins easy keepers, able to maintain good health and weight, raising healthy lambs on quality hay and pasture without needing excessive grain.  We do offer free choice of a salt lick and loose minerals, especially formulated for sheep health.  We have been working at shepherding for about twelve years now and we still learn something new every lambing season.

Vermicomposting is a type of composting which uses specific varieties of worms, like red wigglers, to break down organic waste  such as food scraps and plant material, into  a nutrient-rich soil amendment called vermicompost or worm castings, a supurb supplement for gardens. Additionally, the process leaches out a nutrient dense liquid called 'worm tea', which can be diluted and used to water plants, both indoors and out.  Vermicomposting occurs in a bin system, speeding up decomposition and producing a highly valuable fertilizer full of nutrients and beneficial microbes, ideal for small spaces and keeping food waste out of landfills.  The worms are much faster at creating compost this way than through the process of managing a compost pile, however, on a smaller scale.  Don't get me wrong, I still compost a lot of other stuff in the good old manure pile at the farm!!

I'm on a bit of a fresh homemade Montreal-Style Bagel kick.  So I thought, why not give homemade cream cheese a try, to pair with it?  Back when we had a family milk cow, I made mozzerella and brie cheeses with great success.  For the cream cheese, I tried a few different methods and ingredients to come up with what I thought made a creamy, slightly tangy, spreadable delight.  It only takes five basic ingredients and most of the time is just spent waiting for it to set up.  To the finished product, which is delicious plain, you can add garlic (raw or roasted), herbs or fruit to make a tonne of variations. 

Tomato passata is a smooth, raw tomato puree made from fresh or frozen tomatoes which have been strained to remove their seeds and skins. It has a velvety texture and is a staple in Italian cuisine, used as a base for sauces, soups, and other dishes. It is sometimes labeled as "strained tomatoes" and differs from tomato sauce because it is generally not cooked down and is thinner.  I use my homegrown Roma tomatoes, frozen and thawed (the freezing process softens the tomatoes and makes processing a breeze). The thawed tomatoes are then passed through a food mill.  Food mills are inexpensive and can often even be found for sale on sites like Marketplace or Kijiji.  The freezing process was super simple, just pick the ripe tomatoes, remove stems, wash and store in reusable freezer bags until needed.  No coring, peeling or seeding required.  Any good paste tomatoes will do, as long as they are very ripe.  If you have the time to roast your tomatoes before freezing, this adds an extra dimesion that is very tasty.  I usually skip the roasting step, beacause harvest time is so busy and I'm often drowning in tomatoes; it's all I can do to just get them into the freezer.  Come later in the fall, it's super easy to make the passata, which I then simmer for about an hour, to develop a richer flavour, before ultimatley adding to dishes, such as my Chicken Tortilla Soup.  The flavour is far and away superior to any store-bought passata I've tried.

A great project for any gardener is harvesting seeds from the curent year's crop and stashing them away until the following spring.  Today, I'm sharing how I harvest and save pumpkin and squash seeds, sunflower seeds, beans and corn kernels.  I also harvest oriental poppy seeds and echinacea seeds.  However, that's for another post. It can be a bit labour intensive to hand pick all the seeds out, but it is very rewarding to see them germinate and grow all over again. . Below are the steps I follow to harvest the seeds and store them, as well as to check for viability, so that I don't store duds!

Vanilla—the warm, comforting scent that instantly calls to mind trays of fresh-baked muffins, cakes, and pastries cooling on the counter. Around here, we use vanilla extract in nearly every sweet treat that goes into the oven. Don't stop there though, vanilla extract also adds depth of flavour to coffee, tea or smoothies.  Thanks to my homesteading mother, I’m lucky enough to have a huge bottle of homemade vanilla extract on hand, plus a second bottle of alcohol available for top-ups.

Roasting a chicken fills the house with the most delicious aroma.  Today, I'm using one of our free-range chickens from this summer's harvest. Once it is roasted, I let it cool, debone it and re-roast the bones with veggies at a higher temperature.  Then, I simmer those in a big pot, adding aromatics, to make the most satisfying chicken broth.  It can be used in soups, stews and even on its own to warm up on a cold day; like today!  This roasted chicken is not a show piece for the dinner table, so there is no browning of the skin while roasting, that happens later in the process, to prevent drying out the meat.  Yes, the chicken broth is truly as dark as the photo, due to the roasting of the ingredients, it is so rich!

Recently, I decided I was tired of my white and beige kitchen.  I hired a local kitchen cabinet company to come and give me an estimate on a kitchen renovation.  The resulting quote was $60K!!  So, I quickly pivoted and thought about how I could mostly repurpose what I alread had.  My existing cabinets were solid wood and in good condition.  My counter-top (tile installed by myself when we bought the farm) was in excellent condition and I loved the fact I could put hot pots and pans directly on to it.  The decision was to paint the lower cabinets out in black.  My husband balked at that initially as it is a dramatic change.  However, I researched it thoroughly and figured it was the right move.  It took about 5 days altogether from start to finish and was a bit awkward cooking and living around the reno, but we made it work.