Picked one of the last buckets of strawberries, froze most of them and made Independence Day dessert with the rest.
Began writing a short story about the afterlife. Have been in real writing funk but was inspired by reading Tobias Wolff’s short story collection Our Story Begins.
Was stymied in my attempts to really get at my garden with continous rain. Realized that it is the slugs and snails who are taking over the world.
Cilantro and Calendula have flowered.
Helped find another employee to hire. Business meeting Monday night at Border’s — always tracking those leads and figuring out good ways to spend advertising dollars. Payroll. Pay bills. Track money in and out.
Complained to the college financial aid department and began finding additional ways to gather monies for eldest son’s 2009/2010 school year.
Softball game in the rain Wednesday night, me in the dugout scorekeeping, husband coaching and daughter doing her best to pitch with a wet softball. Had only 8 girls show up. Lost the game.
Finally opened our above-ground pool. Had to drain it completely and clean it of algae, scrubbing the sides with bleach. Had a terrible problem last year keeping algae at bay (cost hundreds of dollars in chemicals). Draining it showed us we needed to adjust the liner, it was sagging and folding over on the edges (good spots for algae to grow).
Watched the Ortonville Fireworks at our usual place — Brandon High School. Good show!
Had a nice Fourth of July with Mom and Ben and Sarah and Bob. Love you guys.
Inn at Buff Brahma
Caught in the flash inside the nesting box in coop
One of Sarah's favorite chickens, named Hopeful
A head count is conducted each night
Chickens near one of their feeder
Near the bin and stinging nettle
The Yard at Buff Brahma
My husband and daughter ordered 25 pullet run chicks from Hoffman Hatchery. Pullet run means the chicks are female. Straight run means you get what hatched and what they send you. Since, we are raising chickens to be layers, we wanted all femle. Unfortunately, they waited until February to place their order, so our chicks didn’t come until the first week of May. This worked out in terms of the weather here this spring, but it means we won’t have fresh eggs until September/October.
The chicks
Teaching a new chick how to drink water
Chicks come in a cardboard box through the United States Postal Service. When the Post Office called, Bob went and picked the chicks up very early in the morning. We opened the cardboard box inside our handmade brooder box and each chick had her beak dipped into the waterer and the feeder.
- A Dominique
It took a couple of days for the chicks to work out their cabin fever on the bugs and weeds in the garden and we hurried to complete the chicken coop and yard. It was still cold at night, so the chicks had to go back in their brooder box with the heat lamp and with their butts loobed with hot sauce. They moved into their coop on Memorial Day.
Cookie is a 2.5 year old purebred Pug. She too is a misfit.
Cookie has a tracheal tube that collapses into an asthmatic fit when she gets hyper-excited and her allergies are bad. We give her Bendaryl per the vet’s instructions when this happens. She also has an elongated upper palate that reaches down her throat and further complicates her breathing problems.
We bought Cookie at a pet store. My guess is that she was a puppy out of a mill. She is the most wonderful dog and we will never regret buying HER but I don’t advise buying puppies from a pet store, no matter how good the guarantee and how well you’ve checked them out.
Cookie became deathly ill within 24 hours of bringing her home. She had kennel cough, an e-coli infection and another bacterial infection. She had to be hospitalized. She was so tiny as a puppy that she slept next to me with her head and front paws upon the side of my neck. When she couldn’t breathe in the night, as she was recovering, I would rub her chest and back to help her. We are very attached to each other.
Cookie hears for us who do not always hear so well. Pugs cannot smell very well and many times, Cookie does not recognize us from a distance. We have to talk to her and tell her who we are as we approach while she charges us, barking like mad. If she were a big dog, she’d be very frightening.
Cookie is a strong-willed little dog, but very loving. She loves to snuggle with us whenever someone sits down. She also sleeps in. This makes her a great vacation dog.
Since she is a Pug and has her breathing problems, she cannot spend much time outside in weather extremes. If it is raining or snowing, we have to drag her outside to go to the bathroom. Sometimes we have conflicts over coming back inside, especially on cool but sunny days as she likes to sit on the patio in the sunshine. If we know someone is coming over, she has to come inside because she thinks she can take on a motor vehicle.
She is very playful. She loves to play ball and she can hold her own when wrestling with much bigger dogs. When she gets very excited and is playing tag, she scoots around the house in mad circles, her bottom pressed flat against floor. She barks and barks and sticks her curly tail out straight behind her so that it drags across the floor. This is a stunning and amazing event to watch for the other dogs.
Cookie is very good with all of the other animals. She helps to herd the chickens, the turkeys and she visits the rabbit now and again to say hello. She is the best little dog in town.
My summer reading list consists of books that I have either purchased or been given over the last couple of years and are waiting to be read. I picked them up at library sales, garage sales, used book stores etc. I made an agreement with myself that I will borrow NO books from the library until all of these books have been read. After this list, I want to finish reading Robert J. Conley’s Novels of the Real People.
- Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff
- Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
- The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich
- Tendril Poems by Bin Ramke
- Haunting the House of Fiction — Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women Edited by Lynette Carpenter and Wendy Kolman
- Indian Legends of American Scenes by Marion E. Gridley
- The Coachman Rat by David Henry Wilson
- Night by Elie Wiesel
- Eleanor of Aquitaine by Desmond Seward (Eleanor is an ancestor of mine)
- The Human Factor by Graham Greene
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- WLT by Garrison Keillor
- We Were The Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
- Best American Short Stories of the Century Edited by John Updike
- The World of the Short Story 20th Century Collection Edited by Clifton Fadiman
- Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
- The Story and Its Writer by Ann Charters
- Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway
- American Son by Richard Blow
- Mary Cassatt by Nancy Hale
- A Subtreasury of American Humor Edited by E.B. and K.S. White
- Yourself and Your House Wonderful by H. A. Guerber (1913)
- #24, 25 and 26 Tin House
Before I continue on posting about my life on our small family farm, I thought I should introduce everyone.
Why do we call our place Misfit Acres? Well, everyone who ends up here is some kind of misfit, human or animal. Like the misfit toys on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer that stick together and just want to be loved. Misfits welcome here.
We have four dogs. Our youngest dog is our granddog. She belongs to Ben our second child, now young man. We have inside dogs — Cookie the Pug and Lily the Smooth-Hair Collie (although Lily spends more time outside than Cookie) and we have outside dogs — Christy and Sugar.
Christy
This is Christy. She is 9 years old. She does not sit for photographs well. Christy is a lab mix. We adopted Christy for Ben from the K9 Stray Rescue League when she was still a puppy. The rescuers had found her and some of the other puppies walking on the side of a major highway.
Christy is such a misfit that she is lucky it was us who took her in. Ben did not want her for his dog not long after we adopted her. She needed lots and lots of training and he was just a kid, and she would often hurt him — being overly aggressive in play. We built a nice dog yard for our dogs, but Christy was able to climb up the chain link and hop over. So then we had to tie her to a tree inside the yard. Now, this is only for the dogs to spend time outside during the day. Our ‘outside’ dogs always sleep inside and come in at dark (or during bad weather) for family time. One day when I checked on Christy, she was hanging on the other side of the fence from her tie in. I thought she was dead. She wasn’t even injured.
We had to run an electric dog fence around the dog yard and put the shock collar on Christy to keep her from running away. She tested the collar every day and when the batteries went dead, she went for it. Thankfully, she got too fat and too old eventually to even think about climbing the chain link. And she settled down completely five years later when we got Sugar, our chocolate lab. Guess what we found out about Christy? She is a wonderful and loving mother dog. She loves our puppies and cares for them and they love her. All misfits have value and worth.
Sugar always scratching her ears
Sugar is an AKC Chocolate Labrador Retriever. She too is a misfit. She has defective ears. Her ears are chronically inflamed and full of yeast. We keep this to a minimum by feeding only good dog food and regularly cleaning them. But, it is a genetic defect. Her coat really isn’t a good color either, per AKC standards. We cannot breed her. Sugar is a very sweet lovable dog, but very jealous of the new dog, Lily. This is because Lily is a bed dog, and gets to sleep with Grandma and Sugar wants to be a bed dog. But she cannot. Sugar could not learn how not to sleep on human legs when she tried to be a bed dog. Sugar could not understand why the humans did not want 75 pounds of dogs across their legs during the night, and could not understand why they kept yelling at her to move, Please!
Sugar is an outside dog with a severe case of denial. She will whine to come inside when the inside dogs come in during the day, but if she comes in with them she will sit at the door and whine to go back out to the dog yard. She is happy in the dog yard, but doesn’t know it. I think we can all relate to this condition. Being happy where we are in life and never knowing it.
Christy and Sugar checking today's lunch
Sugar and Christy are happy outside in their dog yard and always very excited to come inside the house as dusk settles. Then we can play ball in the house and tug of war with the humans and get lots of love and horrors of horrors, have our ears cleaned. They sleep in their crates at night and Sugar starts whining to go outside as soon as the sun comes up.
In the fall when it starts getting chilly, we surround the dog house with bales of hay and fill the inside with hay. For daytime comfort – but if it is real cold, dangerously cold, they do not stay outside in the winter. This they do not understand. There is a lot of whining on those days. It has been a cool spring and so the hay is still there. Usually, it has been hot and we have removed all of the hay. The used hay makes good mulch except in the gardens — slugs and snails love to live in hay mulch. I learned this the very hard way. We use the hay as mulch down our paths into our woods.
Sugar is a pretty good driveway alarm system. When our township wanted to pass a noise ordinance and give dogs only 10 minutes to bark, I had to write a letter. Sugar barks the entire time the UPS man is here and it can take longer than 10 minutes to get down our 950 foot driveway, drop off the package, get back in the truck and drive all the way out to the street. Sugar needed twenty minutes at least, I wrote and more if someone were robbing the house.
Sugar and Lily
I tried a new recipe for jam the other day. I didn’t want to can any strawberry jam and didn’t want to make alot of it. It is not the big flavor in our house. I will wait for my raspberries to come in and make raspberry jam.
Which reminds me to sign up for the MSU extension food preservation workshops today. It has been a long time since I tried canning. I usually freeze or store. Last year, I tried to can refrigerator pickles (six month life in fridge) and ALL of those failed. Fizzing bubbles in the cans and bad smell. Canning makes me nervous, but I want to tackle it.
This homemade organic strawberry jam is so delicious I have begun inventing excuses to have some. It tastes like jam used to taste when I was a child in the 1970’s. We usually don’t eat jam that has sugar in it, so I lessened the amount of sugar the recipe called for and then further lessened it when I made a second batch. The recipe takes about an hour from start to finish and produces about one cup of strawberry jam that will sit in the fridge for two weeks. This is a good way to use imperfect strawberries. Slice off the imperfections and tops into a container for the chickens and rabbits and slice the good parts into your measuring cup.
From The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook:
4 cups sliced thin strawberries
2 Tablespoons fresh lemon juice (yes, I squeezed a fresh lemon)
3/4 cup sugar (but I reduced this down to less than 1/2)
Put these ingredients in a stainless steel skillet for faster cooking or a pot for slower cooking. On medium heat, stir nearly continuously and keep on a simmer. When strawberries have cooked down to about half their original amount and the concoction looks syrupy and is thickening, take a small spoonful out and put into a bowl that sits on top of ice water in another bowl. If after 30 seconds, the jam doesn’t run when you tip the bowl, the jam is finished. Keep cooking if it is too runny. I cooked my jam much longer than the recipe called for, as I’m not interested in runny jam.
I made a couple of extra batches of this jam out of another bucket of strawberries I just picked for Father’s Day presents.
This is what I picked out of my organic berry patch today. Sarah, 11, helped only until her legs got sore. Berry picking is hard work. This is my second bucket and it is only June 13th. I am predicting I will need to pick at least two more times.
Today, I will wash through them all. The ones with defects, I cut off their tops and the defects and put these in a container. I then slice the remainder of the berry into a 2 cup size bowl and add maybe a 1/4 cup sugar. This will be topping for shortcake and angel food cake, and some of us just eat it out of a dish.
The container of berry tops and bad parts will be shared between the rabbit and the chickens.
A small portion of the rest will go in another container for fresh eating.
Cookie Loves Eating Strawberries
I will freeze the remainder. First, I pull the tops off — not cut them off — then I set them in a single layer on cookie sheets that I’d covered with wax paper. These cookie sheets will be placed in my freezer. In a couple of days, I will then bag the frozen strawberries into freezer plastic bags. Frozen strawberries are used in my house in fruit smoothies, strawberry margaritas and as snacks. All of my kids have always eaten frozen berries as a snack.
My strawberry patch is about 20 feet long by 10 feet wide. It is a raised bed made from recycled railroad ties (recycled in that they were pulled off other people’s yards) and we filled the strawberry side of the bed with sandy soil. My berries are both June-bearing and everbearing and I planted many varieties. I probably have about 150 plants. The spray I generally use for pests is Neem oil or other organic pest sprays and I fertilize my berries using the all natural Spray-n-grow products.
Strawberry and Blue/Black Berry Raised Bed
The strawberry patch is combined with our blueberries and blackberries and it is fenced with also 2′ of chicken wire running along the bottom. Steel hoops were placed over the top and the entire area was covered in a netting that in its former life was used in a pond to keep the leaves out in fall. The netting has holes large enough to allow the bees in and out, but small enough to keep the birds out.
We did run a water line out to the patch, the spigot can be seen in the left front corner. I do water my berries once weekly, if it did not rain enough. It is especially important to keep well-watered new strawberry plants their first summer.
Strawberries are very easy to grow. This year, I grew Borage from seed and placed several of these plants in the strawberry patch to help repel pests. But pests have not really been a problem in the berry patch.
I am making strawberry shortcake tonight — with homemade whipped cream!
I have put Post-Its to A Parallel Universe to rest. R.I.P.
I cannot review anymore books. I have been there and done that and need a new challenge in my life.
Here are some things I learned from reviewing books:
- I can write a synopsis now. Every writer should review at least twenty books and write the review to be read by others. It will change the way you feel about the dreaded synopsis task when querying editors and agents. Summing up a story in a sentence or two will eventually feel like putting on your best pair of jeans, if you review enough books.
- My eyes have been opened to what is still really going on in children’s literature. I am speaking about the prevalent use of negative/demeaning and inaccurate/romanticized stereotypes of American Indians. Thank you especially to Debbie Reese and Oyate for this education.
- For the most part, Americans are apathetic about the issues of American Indians. The racism that still exists today against American Indians does not seem to rouse a single bit of even minor irritation- except amongst my cousins of Native American ancestry. This is very depressing to me. It is as if we cannot see these other people who are living right next door.
- Children still love to read books.
- Never offer to review a book for someone you know until after you have read it. You cannot be honest without destroying the relationship if the book is flawed, so when the relationship is more valuable than producing the review, you will have a struggle as to what to say. Unless you are the smooth salesperson, and then I have my doubts about you.
- Stories have universal value and are far more important to us than we are willing to say. Keep writing.
And speaking of writing, I need to get back to finishing my novel and reading books for review is time consuming. I want to keep writing my blog, and so I needed to come up with a theme. What will my blog be about? How about my blog being about my life?
Do I care if anyone reads it? Yes, but I can’t write for anyone but myself.
Goodbye, Post-Its From A Parallel Universe.
Hello, Life on Misfit Acres.
