For the third or tenth or something year in a row, we are really struggling for flea and tick control. I think I’ve tried every herbal and non-poisonous method out there, and none of it came close to dealing with it.

I grew flea bane in our pastures. I’ve lined the dogs areas with a variety of herbs. I’ve tried DE and garlic and brewer’s yeast.

Then I tried drugs. Every single brand will work for maybe one cycle, and then stops. I have 6 dogs, a cat and sheeps and lots of birds.

We have to rotate them all very early, much earlier than designed, and it’s tricky, because we are poisoning the dogs and it’s easy to do too much too fast. We’ve only had the reaction once, but are so careful to watch for it again.

NH is number 2 in the nation for Lyme’s disease right now. I pull ticks off the dogs and myself every single day. It drives me nuts to see the dogs bothered, so it’s a horrible cycle to get into.

Help!

Well, we finally got seasonable weather again. It’s frozen every night for a week. It was too late for the sap. It never ran, and I pulled the taps yesterday because the two sentinel trees were starting to bud. (The Red Maple was budding on March 23 and I pulled those taps then.)

We had to bring our balcony plants back in. The broccoli-rahb and spinach seeds are under row cover. It got as low as 18, and I fear frost damage when we finally look at it tomorrow. The chickens ate all the lettuce in the garden, and we ate some more chickens, so no frost damage there. The peas are coming up nicely and we’ll see soon if the onion seeds I planted make it. We do have flats of onions and leeks under lights just waiting for planting weather.

The tomatoes are up in the basement, and the first few peppers. Both are last year’s seeds, which doesn’t seem to have bothered the tomatoes. We’ll see about the peppers.

We had eleven lambs from seven ewes, only three white. The two hoggets and June (who is nine years old) had singles, with four sets of twins. We have forbidden them all to die. Having Birch as the ram sure shows this year. So much color, so much spotty flashy patterns, with blazes and different colors on feet and tails. An all black ewe lamb from Venus and a moorit ewe lamb from Selina. No horned girls, though, unfortunately.

I put 150 mixed eggs (Icelandic chickens, Saxony ducks, Midget White turkeys) in the incubator two weeks ago, but skipped last week, when it got down to 18. Goose eggs need a special tray in the big incubator, so I have 9 of them in the little Brinsea. There are three geese and a couple of turkeys setting already. We’ll see how that turns out.

I had to put most of the geese out on pasture sooner than was good for the pasture to keep the ganders from killing toms and drakes that wandered to close to the setting geese like happened last year. They have been quantum mechanically tunneling back through the fence, but so far haven’t been jerks again, so I’ve let them stay.

Bird grain consumption is down by half, as usual. Actually a little better than usual. It usually falls when the snow melts, then rises again until green up. This year it hasn’t really gone back up. The ducks seem to be the limiting factor. The chickens would rather forage, the turkeys and geese would just as soon forage, but the ducks totally want their pellets every morning, no matter how much grass and bugs are available.

The sheep are starting to think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. It’s not, but I’ll reinforce the fence anyway. There’s also still one spot in the back paddock in need of serious repair where hurricane Irene dropped a tree on the fence, but I don’t want them back there for a few weeks yet anyway.

So the whole Spring! Now! excitement was great, but it’s actually kind of nice to have an extra two weeks for spring clean up and fix up before we have to get seeds in the ground or sheep on pasture.

This year we are squeezing two months into one. It is March 21. Last year, this was the day I gathered sap without wearing snowshoes. We deliberately waited until April 1 to start seeds in the basement. Those dates were a little late for this century, but not out of line.

Today, I went into the woods and cleaned the black flies out of the sap buckets, hoping for one last run next week. So far this year we’ve gotten one fourth the syrup we got last year. That’s early.

We planted tomatoes, peppers and cabbage under lights in the basement. That’s quite early. April first is early, to put the tomatoes and peppers out on Memorial day.

We planted peas outside last week, and set lettuce plants out yesterday. Tomorrow we’re thinking of planting more seed outside. That’s crazy early. I’ve spent years trying to keep myself from planting carrots on April 15.

Basically, March and April are happening in March. I keep telling myself we could revert to normal any day. Then every day I look at the long-range forecast and see one more day that we won’t. The weather is still running dry though. We started the year with the soil sopping wet, but it won’t last forever. Line up your irrigation.

Winter veggies are horridly expensive. This is the year to grow your own.

It’s been really interesting to watch Disa raise Gaela. It sure has made it easy to have a puppy, that’s for sure.

When Gaela wants to chase a chicken, Disa will body block then stick a stick in her mouth. Distraction!

When Gaela wants to play tug of war with my sleeves or gloves, Disa will push her off and bring a toy instead.

When Gaela gets a bit too obnoxious with grabbing Disa’s tail or collar as she loves to do, Disa will pin her to the ground until she calms down. Is so fun to watch the interactions.

But heaven help any of the other dogs who might think about doing the same thing to Gaela. Disa will have none of that. Gaela got too close to a Maggie bone the other day and she growled at her, and Disa went ballistic, snapping at Maggie, nearly starting a huge fight. I had to pull her away by her tail, and then Bjarki and Gaela were all getting involved and ugh.

Luckily, that hasn’t happened very often. Mostly having six dogs instead of five has been pretty easy. They are all so happy with this new snow. Better late than never, I guess. They all walk around eating it constantly, and it makes them all act like puppies. So much playing, so happy, so giddy. The Pyrs sleep out in it, sprawled out on top of snow piles, almost blending in. Maggie’s fur has all come back and they are all in their thick winter coats, so snow is a good thing.

I’m not sure what upset Gaela about me plowing the driveway with the tractor, though. Disa and Bjarki bark and follow me all the time on the tractor, so that’s nothing new. But Gaela howled and cried the whole time, kept trying to get up on the tractor with me, but then didn’t want to stay up there with me. This was the first time she’s seen me do it, though, so maybe it was just the newness. Her howl is adorable, though. She does it all the time, at everything. Too cute!

We’ve been having a zone 6 winter this year. I could get into this especially if we get to keep our cool summers. Having mud time for 8 or 9 months of the year is not quite so attractive.

We’ve had a pretty normal amount of snow, but it keeps melting. This is good because it has let me continue to bring in firewood. We’ve been going through a spectacular amount this year because we have the puppy door installed on the second floor. It’s wonderful for housetraining them, and Gaela still uses it. She goes out and piddles probably twice as often as the grownups need to. This way we get to sleep through the night. However, it isn’t really sealed on either side, so there is a massive draft, just where the cold west wind hits the house.

The wood I’m pulling out is slash from the logging three years ago that was supposed to clear pasture for us. Getting the slash off the ground provides space for the grass to grow. I’m also working on clearing a path to two stands of maple that I’d like to tap this year. A quick count estimated 50 taps between the two stands, and I can use tubing.

I’d like to use barrels rather than 5 gallon buckets on the bigger taplines this year. Ten taps on a good day can fill a five gallon bucket in a couple of hours, and I can’t always get back more than once a day. Barrels will require a pump and close tractor access though. Fortunately I have a few more weeks to work this out. The sap is running now down in Connecticut, and chatter on the intertubes says it’s a real run. The way the forecast was last weekend I thought I’d be tapping on Groundhog Day myself, but every time I look, the long range forecast shows colder, though upper 20s (-2 to -4C) is not cold weather for February around here. But there will be no run, which will let me get old tubing fixed and new tubing up.

Anyway, I’m now thinking to put in all my check valve taps on the 15th or so. Even if it is early, the check valves will supposedly keep a tap hole open for up to 12 weeks, which would be May. I’ll still have some buckets, and I’m not about to junk my taps without check valves, so those will wait, unless of course the run really starts.

We’re buying most of our seeds this year from Lisa’s employee garden operation. She gets them in bulk and resells at cost. That also goes for onion plants. We had talked about trying to mass start them and selling them ourselves, but it turns out that Johnny’s is only like four cents a plant if you buy eight bunches, which won’t be enough for her. Still, we have a few items we want that aren’t suitable for beginners.

We want to try again to start onions and leeks indoors, this time with a short day timer so they don’t bulb immediately. It’s also claimed that you can get a crop if you plant them directly in April. We’ll be trying both techniques with both onions and leeks. I’ll give shallots another try. I should have done so last fall, but I didn’t. Lisa will get bell pepper and jalapeno plants, but I’ll be trying New Mexico chiles (Big Jim cultivar) again. The pigs’ tomatillo crop didn’t do well last year, so I’ll try some of those. I know those can be planted outside. If it fails, well, we still have plenty of 2010 enchilada sauce to get us through. Celery and celeriac are both on the ‘keep trying till we get it right’ list. Lisa will have celery plants as a backup.

We finally got a decent sweet potato crop last year. I’ll give them a better bed this year, and mother nature is more than welcome to kick in a better growing season. The same applies to tomatoes. We’ll be starting our heirlooms again. They really aren’t beginner friendly, but once you get them right, you’ll never go back. Last year was horrid for tomatoes, but again, we have plenty of 2010 stuff left.

So much for my plans of cleaning up the basement, and I’m busy enough that my Catholic guilt hasn’t even managed to kick in.

Over the last few years we’ve done a lot of canning, and learned a lot in the process.

First, this is not rocket science. I did actual rocket science back in cold war days, so I know. You can nonetheless kill yourself or your family and friends, so take care in what you do.

Like most everyone else, we started with the Ball water bath canning kit. There’s nothing wrong with this, unless you already have a pot big enough to boil several quart jars in. If so, just buy the Ball Blue Book and the tongs. The included pot is not very good, and the polycarbonate debubbling tool works just as well as a table knife.

The Blue Book will more than get you started. Ninety percent of what you’ll ever want to know is in it. Its’ recommendations do change from time to time, and the real food safety freaks say you should buy a new copy every year. I can’t manage to agree. Ball celebrated its 125th anniversary a few years ago. Any changes now are fine tuning. Every three or four years you’ll have spilled enough sticky stuff on it to justify a new copy.

When you hit that last 10%. there are three online resources — Extension, homecanning.com and The National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Extension is of course your local land grant universty’s cooperative extension service. The national center for home food preservation is run by the University of Georgia extension for the USDA. It has information about all sorts of food preservation as well as canning. It’s a great site.

Homecanning.com needs a bit of explanation. Once upon a time, there were several companies that made and sold home canning equipment. Over the course of the 20th century they went out of business one by one, and Ball bought their assets. For whatever reason, Ball continued to use the Kerr brand name as well as its own, the other names are gone. Ball has always been a glass company rather than a food company. In the 1980s, they were making most of their money doing high tech glass like CRT tubes, rather than canning stuff, which was becoming a distraction. However, the canning stuff was, and is, a reliable cash cow, and a liveliehood for several hundred people.

So being decent midwesterners (Indiana), and smart business people, rather than a private equity fund (Hi Mitt) they set the canning operation up as a separate company named Jarden Brands and spun it off to their stockholders. So basically all the canning hardware in North America comes from Jarden Brands, no matter what the label is. Besides Ball and Kerr, they also make a budget line of canning jars called Golden Harvest. If you heft one next to a Ball jar, you can definitely tell the difference. However, after several years of use, Golden Harvest is quite good enough. The Ball and Kerr jars are simply over-engineered. All canning jars are called ‘Mason Jars’, I don’t know why, and all pieces are fully interchangeable.

Ball and Kerr quart jars have embossing on all four sides, while Golden Harvest jars are only embossed on two. If you are selling honey or maple syrup, the smooth sides are handy for labels, and, since you’ll never see the jars again, the lower cost is money in your pocket. A case of 12 Golden Harvest quarts is about nine bucks at WalMart, the only source I know. Ball or Kerr run about twelve bucks a case. All brands include one-time lids. Plastic maple syrup jugs are about two bucks each. Plastic honey bears are price competitive in large lots.

Ball also sells plastic screw on lids for use when you don’t need a seal. Not only is this good for leftovers, but jars without shoulders are rated for freezing as well. That would be wide mouth pints, and wide or regular half pints. Wide mouth quarts do have a shoulder, and are thus not recommended for freezing, but we’ve done it, and so far have gotten away with it. Still, if it’s my reputation, I too will recommend against it. If you have free plastic from your local deli or Chinese restaurant, go for it, but if you’re looking at buying plastic freezer ware, canning jars are better value for the money, and no BPA.

Anyway, waterbath canning, which simply means submerging in boiling water for a while, is adequate for high acid foods like pickles and tomatoes, and high sugar foods like jams and jellies. Honey and maple syrup are also high sugar. If you are selling, check your state’s regulations, but here in New Hampshire, honey just needs a lid. In New Hampshire, and also in Vermont, the procedure for maple syrup is to put it into the jar at 180F or higher, put the lid on, and invert the jar for a few seconds to sterilize the bottom of the lid. The lid will seal as the syrup cools. I understand that in Minnesotta one must can by ritual in a commercial kitchen. If you want to make good, safe, maple syrup would you ask the Minnesotta or Vermont Department of Agriculture? I thought so.

When you want to can things which are neither acid nor sweet, which would be stock or most vegetables, you need a pressure canner. Yes, it’s basically like a pressure cooker except bigger and powered by your stove rather than plugged in. The principle either way is to be able to heat the food much higher than the regular 212°F/100°C boiling point of water. The blue book has all the recipes The biggest generally available home pressure canner is the 23 quart model from Presto. Unfortunately, it only takes seven quart jars, or a variable number of smaller ones. If you are seriously trying to put away food for a winter, this is a drag. Suggestions solicited. If however you can delay your canning till heating season. you do get a twofer on your energy bill. The canner also make a great stock or chili pot, much larger than you’ll find at most stores.

If you get into canning at all, you will soon get tired of the price of one-use lids at your local store. I bought several hundred on EBay a few years ago for far less. I got a USPS flat rate box carefully stuffed with both regular and wide mouth lids. The only issue is that we have run out of regular lids with almost 200 wide mouth lids left. I suspect this is because we can ridiculous amounts of both citrus juice and stock, and preferentially use regular lids for both. Anything you can can in a regular lid you can do in wide mouth, but not vice versa. Therefore….

This year we have started using the Tattler reusable canning lids for regular mouth applications. We probably still have enough wide mouth disposables for the 2012 season. They cost something like 8 times what a one time lid does, but the way we do grapefruit juice and stock, that’s maybe two years. They are not USDA approved, but so far, I am completely satisfied, and I’m up to 4 uses and counting. I’m not going to use them for maple syrup, because I’m not sure they will seal as well with the quick flip, and I won’t sell them on honey because I don’t feel like throwing away 75 cents, but we can close to a thousand jars a year. I’m comfortable eating stuff canned this way.

A common mistake that I see people (especially farmers) make is trying to participate in social media arenas as an entity (a “page”) rather than as a person with a page. They register as “Awesome Farm” not Jane Farmer who manages a business called Awesome Acres.

It slows down the ability of fans to interact with them. It should be easy to connect, not rely on confirmation from you to accept the request.

If you try to “friend” me as Lisa Richards on Facebook, it can take me days to respond because I’m too busy actually farming to talk about farming. But you can become a fan of Mack Hill Farm whenever you want. I try to link to videos and photos from there as often as I can. I aim for once a day but don’t always make it.

You can watch videos of critters whenever you want on our Mack Hill Farm YouTube channel. No permission necessary.

It’s easier for people to share your stuff, too, because it’s all public.

We still have several Mack Hill Farm 2012 calendars available.

It’s been a quiet Christmas season this year. Not quite our quietest, since we do have five puppies in the living room. We still have one available, along with many Mack Hill Farm calendars. The maple candy and the last of the syrup sold out for Christmas.

Winter weather finally arrived yesterday, despite forecasts of continued warmth. Weather.com missed by 10F yesterday and 15 today. We did get a white Christmas though. We’re burning the hardwood slab from the sawmill these days. Much of it is several years old, and it burns hot and fast. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten that much heat out of the little stove in the bedroom. Between the cold weather and the puppy door in the living room, we need all the heat we can get. The only downside is that it burns out fast, and the stove can easily go out unless one of us has insomnia.

As you can see, I’ve got the LibraryThing widget turned back on. Lisa and I both think it’s kind of fun. It’s only showing our gardening and farming books. By the way, I’m not allowed to ask you to use my site, but I can certainly mention that if you click through somebody’s Amazon.com affiliate icon when you go to place an order at Amazon, that someone will get a roughly 4% commission at no cost to you.

The gardenporn seed catalogs have already started to arrive. It’s time to figure out what and how much to grow in 2012. Danny did a number on all too much of our garden this year, so in large part, I think we’ll try the same things again. Fortunately, 2010 was a fantastic garden year and we still have a lot of it left.

We once again brought our window box herbs into the house, and have them under florescent grow lights. I cannot recommend this enough. We could buy fresh sage and rosemary through the winter, but not oregano or thyme. Fresh vs. dried oregano is day vs. night, and our sage is better than the supermarket stuff too. The electric bill is about six bucks a month, and we get the heat, and a buck or two back in other lights that we don’t turn on.

Just in time for holiday gift giving, we have two items that we have working from our fancy new online store.

First, I put together a 2012 calendar of all the cute critters we have around here. I tried to include everyone, and I tried to make the photos somewhat match the seasons. We sure do have a lot of snowy photos! Here is the set of the photos used in the calendar so you can get an idea. It’s an 8.5 x 11 inch standard calendar that I had made at Staples this year. It’s $17.00 including shipping. [click here to order]

Next, I took three gallons of our lightest maple syrup that we made this year and turned it into maple candy. It’s so good! Addictively so, so please order it quickly so I stop eating it all! Yum. It’s 100 percent pure maple syrup. We are selling two size boxes, one pound and a half of a pound. I made an assortment of shapes, both holiday shapes and ones very New Hampshire-ish, like the Old Man of the Mountain and moose! We’ll mix up the pieces in each box and try to give a good selection. If you want a certain shape, just let me know in the comment section. We include special maple candy boxes perfect for gift giving. [Click here to buy maple sugar candy]

I met someone in the Holistic Farming class I took in Vermont earlier this year whose family has been making maple syrup and maple candy for four generations. I approached her to see if she would let me pay to use her equipment plus help me through the process, and she agreed. It’s going to take a lot of practice to get the hang of it, plus the equipment itself is about $1,400, so this was a great deal for me. Here’s a short little video of how it all works.

And in case you were hoping for a puppy this Christmas, I still have one male who is looking for a home. We’ve become the Puppy Channel here and there are tons of photos in this set on Flickr. This litter will be registered Icelandic Sheepdog puppies with the AKC, since both Reiki and Disa are registered. They are 6 weeks old today and will be ready to go home the week between Christmas and the New Year. Aptitude testing is going to happen early that week, as is their vet appointment. They are adorable, of course, and so smart! I’m really happy with how the last litter has grown up, and part of me only wants to sell puppies to someone who takes lots of photos or brings them by every now and then.

What an amazingly warm fall we’ve been having. (I mean, aside from the few times that we’ve had snow. At least it all melted. Twice.) The ground isn’t even frozen yet, which feels late for us. We’ve had enough rain that it’s like a whole extra mud season. But it still gives us extra time to catch up on stuff. We are perpetually behind.

Maggie continues to heal. She’s not staying in the house anymore. She’ll come in, wander about, and then want right back out again. It’s been so warm that I’m not really worried about the cold, and her fur is growing back at a great clip. We brought out one of the puppies to meet her yesterday and it was just hysterical to watch her. The puppy was afraid of the big wide world, of course, but Maggie was determined to make it all okay. Let’s play!

Speaking of the puppies, they are growing like weeds. Fat and sassy weeds. They’ve got the dog door figured out now and happily go in and out from the whelping box onto the back balcony all day and all night long. Every time I hear the click click noise, I smile. I’m pretty sure they’ll all be potty trained by the time they go to new homes. (There are still two looking for homes! Christmas puppy! How can you resist?!) They are also starting to get afraid of stuff, more aware of their surroundings. I was vacuuming and looked over to see these faces. I didn’t realize they could all fit there still! Poor, scared babies.

They are just starting to realize that there’s a life outside the whelping box. I think we’ve got about 24 hours to figure out a lid or we’re going to have puppies in the living room. I’d like to to that introduction a little more controlled — gradually let them have more access while they learn to find the dog door, rather than having to watch them like a hawk on the whole upstairs floor. I’m still trying to decide how to figure that out. Right now, they all look like they are doing chin-ups, or coming up to the side and jumping. (copying mama!) It won’t be long until they make it over. I’m trying to make being on the balcony fun and interesting — they have lots of food and water, toys, and plenty of space to run. I saw several of them peering over the edge and barking at the sheep this morning, and they played back up barking when the other five adult dogs were harassing a hawk that was looking for a chicken or turkey dinner.

And because we have become The Puppy Channel around here lately, here’s the latest video. Disa plays with them so cutely when she’s not staying away from them so they don’t eat her alive, and you can see several of the puppies going in and out of the dog door.