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.

It’s Thanksgiving week, and for the first time I can remember, there are wild ducks in our beaver swamp, and Canada geese all over the village. Non-migrating ‘wild’ geese have of course been a growing problem on the East Coast for thirty years. Ducks have been sticking around too, but being shyer have not been a problem. However, this is Marlow, the “Icebox of Cheshire County” where the school mascot is a polar bear. Our birds may have only flown south to Connecticut, but they have always left. This year, they haven’t.

My understanding is that waterfowl can get through a Zone 6 winter. Colder than that and they need to get out of dodge. Marlow has historically been Zone 4.

In fairness, I must mention something else. The weather this spring was horrid, and many baby birds did not make it. Both the wild turkeys and the geese tried again and there were new poults and goslings in August. The turkeys are probably okay, but an August hatched goose cannot fly to Alabama in October. Geese love their babies. They’ll wait two months and ride south on a Nor’easter if that’s what it takes to save them. On the third hand, there were no August ducklings….

I’m hoping for zone 6. Farming this land in zone 4 is a slow way to starve. Zone 6 works.

I don’t think I remember hearing that any sort of precipitation was on the forecast for today, just wind. We got wind, but we also got snow. Stupid snow. I am so not ready for snow. It’s not going to stick. That’s my mantra.

Maggie is getting better. She spent all day outside and was only willing to come in when it was getting dark. I sort of think that’s okay. The real predator risk is at night, really, and if she’s more comfortable outside during the day, I’m okay with that. I’m just not yet ready for her to go back on duty protecting the farm. Her wounds are healing well. The worst part is that front leg of hers, though, which she has access to worry the most and is looking quite grim today. ugh. Poor baby.

Frank put up some more roosting perches in the chicken coop. We really need a second coop but that hasn’t happened, so we have to figure out how to make enough room in this one to get us through the winter. More places to roost at night is the current solution. They hardly spend any time in the coop at all during the day, so as long as they have plenty of space to roost at night, I think it can last one more winter. But next year, we really need a second coop.

We are going to keep a female from this litter. Laura from Solhunder Icelandic Sheepdogs will get the first pick, and my understanding is that she is hoping to find a buyer in the Toronto area. Contact her if you are interested! None of them have opened their eyes yet, but I am starting to see some tiny little slits appear. I can’t wait to see actual eyes.

I want either the dark brown girl or the brown girl from this litter. I already have a black and white, so having another doesn’t make much sense. Bjarki doesn’t seem to carry the black and white gene, or at least he didn’t pass it along in the last litter. But that way, I’ll have two females unrelated to Bjarki. I’m so enjoying having the puppies that being able to have a litter a year sounds awesome.

If you are interested in a puppy yourself, drop me an email at lisa@mackhillfarm.com.

Having Maggie injured and a new pile of puppies has put a couple of changes into the daily routine, but we are all starting to understand how it works.

We’re keeping Maggie inside overnight, despite her very loud protests when she hears something outside. It’s been clear at night lately and the moon is huge which of course brings all the coyote howling closer to the house. Man is she loud when she barks inside. It wakes everyone up and she is very insistent, but I’m not giving in. She’s in no shape to help, sorry.

But we are letting her out for a bit in the morning. She’s even eating on her own, as long as I remember to knock it onto the ground, the big weirdo. If I don’t, she’ll just guard it forever, not eat it, but if I spill it, she’ll painstakingly clean it all up. In the house, my trick is to walk Disa and Bjarki near where I’ve fed her … just that bit of pressure will convince her to eat. She’s also drinking on her own. So we seem to have finally got that under control. We’ll let her stay outside until mid-morning and then she willingly will come back inside the house. She’ll go out a few more times the rest of the day, but comes right back on her own. She’s still got lots of healing to do.

The puppies are a week old now, and still mostly sleeping. They eat and sleep, eat and sleep, and Disa has them all well under control. Everyone is gaining nicely, all quite evenly. No runt this time. Disa still spends almost all her time with them, though will go outside for 20 minutes or so a couple of times a day. She stays upstairs with them at night and isn’t sleeping downstairs with me, though every now and then she’ll come down for a cuddle, but as soon as she hears them peep, she rushes right back. She’s such a good mama. She’ll also bring me her ball from time to time for a quick game — no keep away now. She’s become quite efficient and dropping it. She’s a working mama! No time for silly keep-away games. Throw it again, fast! (Such a change!) I love to watch her nap with the babes. She’s such a cuddly girl, and so affectionate with them.