Sweet Local Farm

Our herb spiral did its job over the winter. The mint, chives, parsley, and catnip all overwintered very well. In a few weeks we will reseed it with basil, dill, cilantro, and sage. Mmm. The rosemary did not make it over the winter. I’ll buy a potted plant from the nursery this spring as rosemary is very slow growing.

Here is the herb spiral now, all cleaned out and fixed up:

See how the spiral looked last summer here.

And click here to learn how to build an herb spiral.

I here by dub this past Sunday…The manliest day of the year.

Why? The combination of two great past times: The Super Bowl and more importantly, Beer Brewing.

I’ve always wanted to brew my own beer. I enjoy a finely crafted beer and have always been curious about what goes into it. My friend and colleague, Adam, has spent a good deal of time brewing his own concoctions. For my first brewing adventure, I figured it would be extremely beneficial to have him show me the ropes. Ben, being a man of many crafts, joined us for the experience.

So, 3 weeks ago, Adam and I had brewed up a batch of what he referred to as a ‘Stoppy’, which I believe is a combination of a Stout and a beer that is ‘hoppy.’ He can correct me in the comments below if I’m off.

Mix in the malt.

Mix in the barley.

Mix in the hops.

It’s a bit more complicated than that. There’s timing, certain temperatures, and an order to everything. Below are the ingredients and the spacing of the different hops. I’ll leave the exact directions to the imagination because I don’t want to spoil any of Adam’s brewing secrets.

Stoppy IPA (American IPA)

Ingredients
5.00 gal Water
8.00 lb Amber Dry Extract
0.75 lb Roasted Barley
2.00 oz Amarillo Gold (60 min) Hops
1.00 oz Cascade (10 min) Hops
1 Pkg Safale Yeast-Ale

To cool off the mixture quickly, we created a closed system that involved pumping cold water through a copper coil placed into the mixture. The water that ran out of the coil was directed back into the water bin it was being pumped from. We used nature’s resources to continually cool the water, hence the mini snowman inside of the water bin.

Straining the mixture into the fermenting container

A few more statistics for the Stoppy IPA (American IPA):

Beer Profile
Est Original Gravity: 1.070 SG
Measured Original Gravity: 1.070 SG
Est Final Gravity: 1.020 SG
Measured Final Gravity: 1.020 SG
Estimated Alcohol by Vol: 6.58 %
Actual Alcohol by Vol: 6.53 %
Bitterness: 61.7 IBU
Calories: 320 cal/pint
Est Color: 26.1 SRM

So this brings us back to Super Bowl Sunday. It was time to bottle. With the two of us working hard, we cleansed and filled just under 50 bottles in 30 minutes.

Sterilizing the bottles

Filling them up

Capping

The finished batch…just two more weeks of bottle fermenting and we’ll be ready to taste.

Simultaneously, we brewed another batch to keep the cycle going. Here are the ingredients and statistics for the second batch we brewed.

Maibock Ale

Ingredients
7.00 lb Extra Light Dry Extract
2.50 lb Pale Malt, Maris Otter Grain
1.00 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt Grain
1.00 oz Pearle (60 min) Hops
0.50 oz Pearle (30 min) Hops
0.50 oz Saaz (5 min) Hops
0.50 oz Pearle (5 min) Hops
0.50 oz Saaz (0 min) Hops
1 Pkgs SafAle English Yeast-Ale
5.00 gal Water

Beer Profile
Est Original Gravity: 1.081 SG
Measured Original Gravity: 1.072 SG
Est Final Gravity: 1.021 SG
Measured Final Gravity: 1.018 SG
Estimated Alcohol by Vol: 7.85 %
Actual Alcohol by Vol: 7.06 %
Bitterness: 29.3 IBU
Calories: 328 cal/pint
Est Color: 9.0 SRM

Oddly enough, we spent so much time brewing and bottling that we caught only the 4th quarter of the Super Bowl. Oh well. If you ask either of us, the time was better spent.

Things have been going pretty well on the Sweet Local Farm Etsy shop. It is really easy to manage and when something sells I just make a quick stop at the post office before work. I tend to use the money I earn on Etsy to buy more things from Etsy though… I bought some organic homegrown lavender oil to scent my homemade laundry detergent.

Recently, one of my pieces was featured in a treasury on SweetBriarBridal’s Etsy shop.

To buy any of these beautiful butterfly pins, click here.

I’ve said this before, but homeownership, or should I say farm ownership, is hard work. If something breaks, you have to fix it. If something needs maintenance, it is up to you to care for it. With this in mind I’ve come up with a list of tasks I’d like to do this summer to the house, barn, and workshop.

1. The gutters on the barn. The back gutters on the barn are wooden and completely rotted away. The watershed of the barn’s roof runs right into the barnyard where the goats and chickens live. This makes for a sloppy, muddy mess. It is also slowly deteriorating the walls of the barn by wearing away the paint and staying moist all the time. In order to fix this we will need a long length of gutter and some really tall ladders.

2. The roof on the corncrib. The corncrib is a two story shed attached to the back of the barn. When the previous owners put a new roof on the barn they did not do the corncrib. It will be a nice “small” roofing project that I’ve enlisted my Mom to come help me do. I’ve seen her up on the roofs of various houses my whole life. She also works at Home Depot and knows a lot about home repair.

3. The broken window. We have a broken window in the barn. My mom fixed our last broken window and now we need to learn how to do it for ourselves.

4. Stain the porch. I stained the front steps this past fall and was very happy with the result. I want to stain the rest of the porch to match.

5. Paint the porch. The white paint on the railings of the porch is flaking and needs to be repainted. I figure I can do the project in a short time without any major equipment. We got a power washer for Christmas so this will be the perfect time to use it!

6. Remove moss from the workshop roof. There is green mossy growth on the north side of the workshop roof. It will eventually eat the shingles and ruin the roof. To save it, we need to spray the roof with a special solution.

7. Paint the barn! For anyone who has seen the barn in person, you know it is a massive structure. It will take a lot of scraping, power washing, repairs, supplies, and time to paint. My goal is to paint one side per year for the next few years. By breaking it down into a manageable task I feel like it is less overwhelming.

Our barn:

And now that I’m feeling thoroughly overwhelmed I thought I’d post some pretty barns I found on Flickr. Did you know our barn was originally painted light blue and had hand hewn wooden shingles? We plan to stick to red, but here are some colorful barns others have posted:

blue barn
yellow barn
red barn
orange barn
white barn
green barn
black barn
grey barn

My mother makes homemade laundry detergent. It is all natural and really cost effective. It works out to mere pennies on the load. She has been supplying me for the past few months, but I finally got the ingredients together to make my own. Here is the recipe I used from The Family Homestead:

Homemade Laundry Soap
1/3 bar Fels Naptha
½ cup washing soda
½ cup borax powder
You will also need a small bucket, about 2 gallon size

Grate the soap and put it in a sauce pan.

Add 6 cups water and heat it until the soap melts.

Add the washing soda and the borax and stir until it is dissolved.

Remove from heat. Pour 4 cups hot water into the bucket.

Now add your soap mixture and stir. Now add 1 gallon plus 6 cups of water and stir. Let the soap sit for about 24 hours and it will gel. You use ½ cup per load.

The finished soap will not be a solid gel. It will be more of a watery gel that has been accurately described as an “egg noodle soup” look.

The soap is a low sudsing soap. So if you don’t see suds, that is ok. Suds are not what does the cleaning, it is the ingredients in the soap.

It keeps snowing and it keeps feeling more and more cozy inside. I’m baking a pumpkin pie to have with some steaming hot cocoa. Mmm.

This time of year people make resolutions. I’m not making a new resolution as much as I am sticking to an old one. Organization!

With a big house, basement, huge garage, barn, and a bunch of people and animals coming and going all the time it is very important to me to stay organized. I use a few different systems to keep me on track. First, Flylady.net. Flylady is a website that breaks your home into manageable zones. Each day the zones are posted on the site along with a list of tasks to complete in each room or area of your home. For example, your entrance and front porch/steps. Clutter and junk-coats, shoes, mail, can accumulate in these areas. Also, you may not think of your entrance when you decide to clean your house. Being prompted by Flylady helps me focus on the areas that I may have overlooked. Some of her suggestions are kinda whack, but I just do what works for me. Try it out!

The other woman I turn to for homekeeping tasks is the domestic goddess herself, Martha. The calendar section of her magazine, Martha Stewart Living, is full of seasonal tasks and suggestions that I do if they apply to my home. For example, the other day it was “clean and organize your utensil drawers”. Truth is, those drawers get dirty and there are tools in there that don’t get used and could be tossed. It took 5 minutes to do. Other than that, I keep a list of major tasks I want to tackle when I have the time.

Ok time to eat pie.

For the past month, we’ve been preparing the Street Attack bus for a tour to Texas. The tour is with the Texas Department of Agriculture and is part of a campaign called Texans Bring It, which is promoting healthy living to a younger generation.

We also built out a website called, My Pyramid Cafe, to continue the experience online. Check it out: Texans Bring It!

With characters like DJ Appleonean, Caulipower and the Berrijuku girls as spokesmen, how can you not want to eat healthy?

When we first moved in we drew out a plan for a huge heart shaped mandala garden. This year we cleared and cultivated about half of that space. So, with the help of our friend Michael, we set out to make the full size garden.

This space will be garden next year:

Luke and Michael measure the length of the new garden:

Look at all the beautiful wild aster behind them:

After the frost hit it was very clear which plants were going to live and which plants were dead. The kale and other brassica, carrots, parsley, mint, and swiss chard all survived. The gourds, peppers, and everything else turned black so we ripped them out.

As we pulled up the vines, we found all these gourds:

Luke in the field:

Look at all the goods!

Our pumpkins didn’t have a chance to turn orange:

Well, one of them did:

After a long day of work in the garden, we built our first fire in the fireplace:

We were so cozy:

On Monday morning we could feel it in our bones. It was so hard to get out of bed. Over the night we had our first fall frost. It seemed to be a pretty hard frost too. When I went out to look at the garden everything was covered in a crispy glistening layer of ice.

It was 32 degrees after the sun rose:

Each blade of grass was frozen over:

The barn’s roof was a frosty silver color:

Some frozen pepper plants:

Raspberry bushes iced up:

Our ceremonial Hopi Tobacco was killed:

The sun still behind the trees: