This Week at Ramsey Farms

Merry Christmas

Crafting Gifts

Table's set!

We continued and completed our Christmas celebrations this week. There were many wonderful moments & new cherished memories created this holiday.  Decorating the tree and the house with the kids, baking breads, brownies, cookies, and other sweet treats, singing & listening to Christmas songs, watching our favorite old & new holiday movies, making & enjoying hot cocoa drinks and homemade egg nog by the fire, creating a mouthwatering Christmas dinner with everyone, baking cookies with Chloe, Mimi dropping in with a surprise visit & gifts, Santa leaving a few gifts under the tree, and one of my favorite parts of this Christmas, my mom & my sister coming to spend the day, share in our Christmas day meal & wine & revelry, and stay the night! It was a merry Christmas, indeed!

Daughter's Cookie Making Hands

What did Santa Bring?!

Glimpse of Spring

Only 80 days until Spring! Oh glorious! The view from my back window is pretty once again! :) There is not a blanket of brown leaves across the grass and herb garden and everything! The garden is fully mulched in dead leaves, but the view of open grass felt a little spring-like this weekend with the temperatures in the upper 60s and lower 70s.  Also got to taste a little bit of spring in the form of pickled jalapenos and cucumbers I canned last spring and 2012 spring. Those small jalapeno slices exploded with their little taste of spring as I bit into them!

Worms, Glorious Worms!

Worm Hunting

Chris worked really hard to build our first outdoor vermiculture bin. He and our four-year-old found about 25 more worms this week & added to our indoor worm bin. I think everyone including the kids is looking forward to moving the worms into the new bin over the next few days! Hopefully by spring we will have worms & compost available for sale for your vegetables, flowers, &
potted plants!

Notes from the Garden

Harvested  all the cauliflower Monday. I soaked the heads in salt water for about 25 minutes after removing most of the leaves to ensure no worms had bored into the heads (if they had, they would have been expelled into the water. I suppose?) Then I chopped up the cauliflower heads into smaller pieces, removing any brown spots. I put the chopped cauliflower into ice water and stored in the fridge until Christmas Eve (the next day) when I prepared the dish. The cauliflower leaves usually are wasted by commercial growers, I washed each beautiful leaf (the small ones are so tender you can eat them raw!), and wilted the leaves for dinner last Monday.

The largest broccoli plants have a nice 5" head on them now with the others at 3 to 4 inches across. The cold weather has been good to this frost-tolerant plant and they have grown quite a bit over the past week. I'm keeping an eye on the broccoli (now that I have no cauliflower to fawn over) and the forecast for five nights of 25 or below temperatures next week. I'd like to harvest the broccoli when it's at least 6" across but don't want to lose it to excessive freezing and thawing either.

The kale continues to grow and generate new leaves. The garlic all have healthy scallion tops! These plants are mulched in with nearly one foot of dried leaves to maximize soil temperatures. The kohlrabi seems to have slowed down, but most plants are over the 2" inch width size for early harvest. And the cabbage doesn't seem to be doing anything, but perhaps it is just going to take it awhile?  Will wait and see what the coming weeks produce.  When we run out of Christmas leftovers, I'm going to find a nice kale & kohlrabi dish to whip up!

Chris built and installed the 4x8 raised bed that the kids will plant. Our teenage daughter has planned on planting a crop of potatoes with natural insect repelling marigolds.

Not-so-new Bread Techniques

I had two batches of my bread not rise very well in the last couple weeks.  I have several suspicions including the age of my yeast, ingredient temperatures, the leaking bread machine pan,and  too low or too high temperature in the rising process.  I took it back old school and made the bread without the aid of the breach machine mixer. It was actually so easy!

• I warmed the water up to 125 degrees, warmed the bowl and all the ingredients. 
• Added the water, sugar, salt, flour, and yeast to the warmed bowl. 
• Stirred then turned out onto very lightly floured surface (again awesome silicone mat!) and kneaded the dough for about 7 minutes. 
• I put it back into the (cleaned and rewarmed) bowl to rest for 10 minutes in a warm, draft free spot. 
• Turned it back out onto clean, very lightly floured surface. 
• Split into 6 equal sized balls.  Kneaded each ball several times until it reaches the texture of your earlobe (I just read that on the internet this week - perfect description!).  
• Place each kneaded and shaped ball into a greased loaf pan. (I put 2 smaller balls into one large loaf pan, 1 larger ball into a glass loaf pan, 3 small balls into a 9x12 glass casserole dish, and a larger ball into a glass pie pan). 
• I placed 2 dishes to rise in my dehydrator machine set to 110 degrees and the other 2 dishes into the oven which had been set to 170 then turned off. Let rise for about one hour or until dough is doubled.
• Bake on middle rack in preheated oven at 350 for approx 20-30 minutes or  until top is golden tan.

These small loaves all rose beautifully (nearly doubled) and baked up with a nice golden tan crust and the flavor? Stupendous! Why did I think life would be tough without my little old bread machine? Ha!

Enjoy your week and remember to take a moment to celebrate the rising or setting of the sun. Mother nature seems to think it's worthy of momentous celebration each day and each evening, perhaps we should do the same.