Fall berry picking

Since we put out garden and bees to bed we have only been able to produce a few things to eat, and so we have been relying more on buying things from stores. We still have our own milk, which means that we also have cheese, yogurt, and kefir. We are still eating our own eggs, and we also still have a reasonable amount of swiss chard. Swiss chard keeps growing even in the snow at our house.

Last week we made some brie, since Mrs. True was due to give birth to our next child this week. She is not supposed to eat brie when pregnant, so we haven't been making it (even though I love it so much). In a few weeks we will be ready to eat a home made brie again, and I am super excited.

We went out today to pick some wild fruit and berries and supplement the things that we could grow at home. We got a reasonable haul: 2 gallon bags of rowan berries, about half a gallon of miscellaneous berries, about 40 windfall pears from a pear tree that went native in a forest nearby (the thing is so huge that there is no way that the birds can get them all, and they just fall off all fall.) We also got some apples, but they all got eaten as we picked the other things.

The truelets go to this forest to pick pears and apples about three times a week, but when I go with them we end up picking more than just apples and pears.

The rowan berries are not yet ready to eat. They need to be frozen for a few months before they will be ready for that, but the miscellaneous berries are ready right now.

We got four other types of berries. First we got fireberries (or, more correctly firethorn berries), which have poisonous seeds but taste decent when made into a jelly and also provide their own pectin, so they are great to add to other jellies. Last year we made a large batch of hawthorn/firethorn jelly which was very popular with the truelets so we will probably do that again this year.

We also got rose hips because the truelets wanted to pick them. They are high in vitamin c, but they don't taste good. Since I was leading them to pick wild berries, I decided it would be counterproductive to snub an edible berry if the truelets were putting them into the basket.

Third we got oregon grapes (I love them. They taste unique, and very strong). They are hard to pick because the leaves are spiny, and they are pretty sour, but we like them. People plant them all over the place, so they are really easy to find (even in the forest).

We also got common barberries which I have never picked before, but have a good flavor. the oldest truelet said they taste like rose petals, but I don't really think that they do. They are way more sour. They have saw toothed leaves and sharp thorns all over their woody stems. The berries fortunately grow in large clusters, and are easy to remove from the plant. We got quite a few from the large bush that we found.

We will probably pick some hawthorn berries from the park at the top of the hill to round them out, and then make a jelly out of some of the berries, and eat the rest.

Three cheers for a pick!

This past week Mrs. True and I mucked out our goat shed. We use a "Deep Litter" method for taking care of the shed, so we only do this about once a year. It took a few hours, but it was not really that bad (and for us it is way easier than cleaning out the shed every week).

For those that have never heard of deep litter, the method is basically this:

Every day you strew straw over the parts of the floor that have visible manure or are wet. The floor slowly gets higher and higher over the course of the year. Once a year you clean it all out.

This works great in a desert habitat, as the upper layers tend to dry out, so you can't really smell anything. We have been using it for a few years now, and it is really easy.

We have always used an ensilage fork (which are made for this job) and a wheelbarrow (which are made for every job) to clean the shed out, but this time we tried a new tool for part of the job and were highly impressed. The new tool is a rail road pick. They don't look like they would do much, but they are perfect for getting the stuff broken up so that the ensilage fork can easily lift it away.

Instead of taking all day like we thought it would, it took only about 4 hours. I am blaming it on the pick.

We also went on a walk to the woods behind the local park, and found tons of old fruit trees (apples, peaches, pears, and plums). It must have been an orchard before it became a forest.

While we were there we found some Oregon grapes. We have made Oregon grape jelly before and loved the flavor, so we will be back later in the year to pick these ones. if they are still around.

Finally, while we were there I saw some berries that my dad told me as a child were poisonous ("Twinberries" he called them). Since I recently learned that a lot of the "poisonous" berries that I grew up avoiding only were poisonous if you ate the seeds, I decided to look these ones up. They were honeysuckle berries, and were in fact poisonous. Oh well :).