Some of My Favorite Recipes

Last Monday and Tuesday it was raining slugs. That's where they come from you know, they come in the rain. With the lush foliage and the ponds in every part of the Farm I have no shortage of slugs, so I will be very wealthy when they finally discover that slug slime cures seventy-six point four percent of the known diseases and forty-eight percent of the diseases we have yet to discover.

Until then what money the birds haven't eaten, the slugs are mouin down on, so I went out with a cardboard sign and gathered some spare change to make myself up some beer substitute. Not for Phil but to trap the slugs.

Slightly cheaper than beer, just as effective (maybe better, I've never gotten a cup crammed full of slugs) and Dirt isn't freakin' out because I know longer crack open one of his cold ones and pour it in a cup for the slugs to slurp on.

I plunked the cup back down into the hole after I dumped the pile up above and there were still some fellas clinging to the sides, they must have been on their way in.

Mix 1 teaspoon of Brewer's yeast and 1 tablespoon sugar into 1 cup water.

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For a larger batch just multiply it out. I save big juice jugs and put a big batch in the jug to use through out my garden. One of my morning duties while out with my slug scissors is to empty the dead out and refill with more Slug Juice.

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I cut a hole in the ground with my skinny trowel but I make sure it isn't too flush with the ground so the beetles don't fall in. Slugs can climb well enough to get their treat.

Somebody else that needs a little treat but their treat feeds them instead of trapping them are the hummers. And man are they hummin' around here, it is life threatening (to people) sometimes with how crazy they get. I found that the little bottles are better as the syrup doesn't stay in them as long decreasing the potential for uck to grow.

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These came in the house for a quick scrub but most days one of us just totes the water can around the farm and fill the little bottles with this:

One cup sugar in four cups of water bring to a boil and then cool.

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But my best recipe today is my rose and bloomer fertilizer made from five gallons of alfalfa pellets (sold in fifty or twenty-five pound sacks at your local feed stores), half a gallon of fish liquid and half gallon carton of Epsom salt (drug store).

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Put all of this in a big plastic garbage can and fill up eh sorta half way, let it soak over night so the pellets fall apart and you get a sludgy mix like the one below.

This can be used as a side dressing for roses and other bloomers. Or not so much water for a denser mix and use it in the planting hole before setting a plant.

Wine recipes are Dirt's job. So when he finishes up the hatching box and a couple of sheep shearing jobs I'll have him share some of his deep dark secrets.

Have a great night Dear Reader, I am late for bed, nighty night. Off to sleep with the bullfrogs.

Breakfast Anyone?

Monday was a "spare" day for Dirt. He had been able to finish his lawn care duty on Sunday along with a few other things so that left him with the morning to bottle up his wine that sits along the wall in my kitchen in carboys. Carboys are big, my house is small. I look forward to bottling day but then when the carboys and their pretty colored fluids are gone I'm kind of sad. Kinda.


One can't possibly bottle up the wine without a taste so early Monday morning found us sipping away at Dirt's O' Eight Raspberry wine for breakfast and then his O' Eight Apple for brunch.
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Both are very promising. I won't boar you with all the fancy wine talk, okay I really don't know how to "wine talk" even after all my good lessons from Jim, but I think I have a better understanding of it all and a larger capacity for anticipating what the finished product will be. And I am just sure that Dirt's raspberry, and his apple, that he bottled yesterday will be excellent.

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Oh but look, what is that in one of the bottles Dirt was about to clean? And sterilize!

EEK! Its a mouse! Okay calm down it is a thoroughly saturated and deceased mouse. Proof once again that moscato wine can kill. You gotta ask yourself, "how the heck did he get in there!"

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I suppose that this is telling about our life, we don't find a genie in a bottle, we find a moscatoed mouse in a bottle. At least we know the Ratters aren't hanging out in the wine celler, or that may be where those missing bottles went to and how the mouse was able to get in. Martin?...Janie?...

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I have requested and extra sterilizing step or two into the process,

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They said it was a Microbe and a Hotbed of Disease;
They steamed it in a vapor of a thousand-odd degrees;
They froze it in a freezer that was cold as Banished Hope
And washed it in permanganate with carbolated soap.
(swiped from one of my fav's, Strictly Germ Proof, by Arthur Guiterman)

The raspberries on my fence almost got ripped out one year, until Dirt made wine from them. The raspberries had found their destiny! Amazing how the wine making process brought out flavor that was undetectable in the fresh state. Or the alcohol content makes you not care.

Another fruit rescue was also part of Monday's breakfast.

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As a kid I used to sit on my front porch with a big stalk of rhubarb and a bowl of sugar and needed nothing more in my life.

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But lately I've been feeling rather frustrated with the lack of pretty red stalks from my rhubarb plant. I didn't want to have to wait to get rhubarb form my daughter who has nice big fat very red stalks. This was the third plant that I have put in here at the farm and still no red.

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The first was wiped out by renegade swine and the second I didn't bother to rescue from the tree crashing on it. Why would I, like the first one, the second one had never developed beautiful red stalks, just green with a few grains of red but it never "ripened" and then put up a load of flower stalks before I knew it. And now this third one was doing the exact same thing.

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So I went online early Monday morning to see if there was something I could do or was doing wrong, even though all the garden books and info I have read already said essentially if you can fall off of a log you can grow rhubarb.

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I came to a site that claimed there were quite a few varieties of rhubarb and many had different characteristics. Really?! I remember the name of the rhubarb I bought, I wonder what it says about it...

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It says that Victoria rhubarb is green stalked with pink speckles. Nooooo!!

So I made waffles to go under my strawberry rhubarb sauce, through some thick cream and vanilla simple syrup in the whip cream maker thingy and was catapulted into near ecstasy. My life is now complete.

Oh Dear Reader, I know how you love to go to nurseries and see all the beautiful plants. Please don't feel that I left you out of a wonderfully exciting trip this last Saturday, this is the scene just outside the doors at Lawyer's Nursery.

And this is what I bring home. Bare naked sticks. No soil, no leaves, no flowers. Dead looking sticks. Gathered up from big wood bins lined up unceremoniously inside a concrete bunker like cold storage.

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This years collection included very very prickly old fashioned roses. I forgot my gloves, big mistake when getting muddy naked sticks, even bigger when you are getting prickly muddy naked sticks out of big bins.

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I'm still squeezing prickles out of my hands and finger tips, makes typing painful, but your worth it. Have a great night Dear Reader and look in your wine bottles before drinking, mice can get in there you know.

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God bless and have a restful sleep. See you bright and early in the morning.

Did You Know That Story?

Taps has always been a favorite of mine. I suppose it comes from many years in Bluebirds and Campfire Girls then years as a Girl Scout leader and camp counselor. Even as a little bluebird we sang it at the end of every meeting, and what camp would be complete without taking down the flag in the beautiful light of dusk to the sound of taps being sung by a strong group of girls dirty with trail dust, fish slime, and campfire ash, but happy and satisfied?

So those of us here at Vicktory Farms will be joining in the Moment of Remembrance at three o'clock. But at nine thirty we will sing taps as we retire the colors for the day.

In 1862 Union Army Captain Robert Ellicombe was near Harrison's Landing, Virgina. In the evening he heard the moanings of a soldier, so he personally went out into the gunfire on his belly and dragged the wounded young man back to his encampment. When he reached safety he then realized that the soldier who had died was a Confederate soldier, but when he looked at the face he recognized it as the face of his own son whom, as far as he knew, was studying music in the South.

He tried to get a full military burial for his son but because the son was of enemy status the father's request was granted only partial. He was only allowed one bugler and in need of music, the father handed the bugler a scrap of paper from his own son's pocket with a few song notes scratched upon it. Those song notes? The notes of Taps.

That my Dear Reader is the hardship of war; the high price of civil freedom, preservation of unity, and relief of the oppressed.


When you are being patriotic today, please remember some flag etiquette. In a nut shell the flag should not be shown disrespect by touching the ground, being held or flown inappropriately. It nor a facsimile of it should be worn as clothing or carried as a bag. The likeness of a flag should not be used as advertisement, or on napkins, paper plates or such as would be discarded after temporary use.



I find it amazing how many times the flag code is blatantly broken, not just at protests and by unpatriotic citizens but by those who claim to be intense lovers of what the flag stands for. I'm not talking about the hard to remember details like does the union go to the right or the left when hung on a wall, but the stuff that is obvious like clothing, napkins, tablecloths and the like printed to look like the flag. Drove my dad nuts and it drives me nuts, that in our efforts to be ultra-patriotic we end up actually making a mockery of the flag and its beauty. And then by doing so, sully the memory of those who have fought and died beneath its grand colors.

A Good Night Note Dear Reader

We just arrived home from the second night of Mike's Barbeque Trifecta. It's late, I'm going to sleep immediately, the "bedroom" windows are open and I am about to drift off to the sound of bull frogs all around me.

Life is incredibly good.

I hope that you too are able to go to bed listening to such pleasant sounds.

Malus Fusca

Evil (malus) and dark (fusca) seems to be a rather glum moniker for this lovely Pacific Northwest native. Commonly known as Pacific Crabapple. Even crabapple seems a poor autograph for such an ambrosial and faithful vernal season intermediary.

Always to be counted on to burst into bloom and perfume the air once spring is well under way but not yet fully mimicking midsummer days.

It has proved to be a sure phenological event to gage when to plant our squash and pumpkin seeds in the pasture. Though we still chose to put down floating row cover because we were getting some terrential downpours keeping the water level rather high in the pumpkin patch this year rendering the soils a little chillier than in other places in the higher gardens.

According to a visitor to the Farm shortly after Dirt and I arrived (twenty-four years ago), Malus fusca was used by many of the old farmers in the area as root stock on which they grafted their favorite apple trees.

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The frequent afternoon visitor grew up coming to this very homestead with his mother to meet up with Sam Sorenson and ride with him into the tradingpost at the Roy-Y. His advice and story telling was quickly taken as fact by Dirt and I, as he informed us he was Fred Guske who resided "on Guske Road of course."

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Malus is the Latin name for the apple family and therefore Malus fusca can serve as a suitable root stock and this particular malus even more so, because it actually prefers the wet soggy soils we often have in this area.

Upon a first glance and quick sniff, Malus fusca can be confused with another Pacific Northwest native, Philadephus lewisii. Yet a proper gaze and a deep, closed eye, nasal breath, quickly separates the two.

Philadephus lewisii, commonly known as Mock Orange is not fake anything. It is stunningly white, with a deep and quenching fragrance. It blooms just days behind Malus fusca during a warm spring, its buds are pristine white and when the buds unfurl they have only four petals rather than five.

The fragrance of Malus in the damp lands is bright and lively, an interesting contrast to some of our other truly dark scents found there. But very different from the fragrance of our native dry ground loving Philadelphus which can be entirely heady on a good hot late spring day as it rises up to the second story window, intoxicating the breather and sure to cause daydreams and long flights of fancy, cured only by the reality of the day having passed and a motorsickle, with a weary teacher driving it, coming home.

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Besides the dream inducing fragrance and the four petals, our Philadephus friend differs from out Malus friend in trunk and branch.

Our Malus friend's bark is rough and deeply fissured, separating into an intense weave and slub pattern.

And the branches hold what an uniformed mind (like mine) sees as thorns but are really spurs from which come the flowers and then fruit. But unlike the fruiting buds on my friendlier more domesticated malus (Malus domestica in fact) in the orchard, these are hard and sharp so my confusion is understandable.

So I leave you this afternoon Dear Reader to go plant some corn, because my Malus fusca assures me, better than any weatherman, that my corn seed will not rot and so I need to get out and get it in the ground. But I leave you with one more image of Malus fusca, one I messed with (more than the usual light enhancing) on Photoshop. Can you guess what I did to it?

Have a terrific day and I'll be seeing you bright and early tomorrow morning.

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Oops, I nearly forgot, go see all sorts of other beautiful flowers all around the world that God designed at Today's_Flowers.

Time Zone Adjustments

I've been suffering jet lag. I've moved to a time zone four hours earlier. Man is that a hard adjustment. I'd illustrate it with a picture but it's a face even a two year old off-spring can't love. (That is, if I had one at the moment).

Oh, I haven't left the Farm on highway seven o'two. Nor boarded a jet. Let's not panic, or get excited.

I've just switched to my summer hours. I love summer hours, the birds are loud, the fog is on the pond, food tastes better, and the phone usually doesn't ring, but getting here is getting a little harder with each passing year.

I used to be (and this was just six or so years back) the camp counselor that stayed awake for four days straight, slept for a day and then stayed awake for four more. When I superintended barns at the fair or managed the little community fair I could easily manage on about two or three hours of sleep for ten or so days. Not no more I fear.

I was trying to creep into my new hours but when it clearly wasn't working (there was always something more to watch while I worked on the lap top, wee hour programing is so interesting) and in fact was going the opposite way, kinda like a diet, I decided to take drastic measures.

So last Sunday I went to bed at nine, awoke at five and made Dirt breakfast before he left for work at six. Yes, usually for most of the year I don't send my husband to work with a wifely made breakfast. Try not to chastise me Dear Reader, he always says that he actually likes it when he is the only one up, comes from having only one bathroom in the house.

Man, I have gotten more done in the first three hours of work (six to nine) this week than I was getting done in a whole day, not to mention the rest of the day, another reason I love summer hours.

On top of all of that, even though I just recently decried schedules and such on Kannani's blog, I felt compelled, commanded, to do up a schedule of work. Krimanitly this is starting to sound like I might become a grown up soon.

My usual modus operandi with schedules is to make up a terrific schedule, work it for a few days even a couple of weeks, only to have an unexpected, unscheduled happening come along, throw me for a curve and cause me to completely derail from the Schedule ride.

But I've already survived a derailment attempt. My very first day held an unscheduled event and I got right back on and stayed on for the rest of the week in spite of a couple more little unscheduled events.

Dear Reader do you know what I found out when I did up the schedule? I happen to notice that there really isn't enough hours in the day.

But I have actually been so busy that I am starting to feel that I'm not as far behind in life as I felt I was when I did up my to do list and schedule, so I am going to revamp my schedule and actually give myself some reading and writing time,oh the frivolity of it all!

I allow myself to get derailed a lot, from more than just schedules and to do lists. Blogging, as was defined to me at the beginning of my blogging life last May, is making a web log, or a log on the web. I took log as to mean a journal of sorts. This was an intriguing thing to me as I have always been drawn to journalling, as evidenced by the multitude of journals in my storage bench upstairs in my perch.

Those journals are used, well most for about three to five pages some with a dozen more and a few with just a starting date. Like I said, I am drawn to journalling, not necessarily am I a journal-er. The only times I have ever journalled "successfully" was when it was an assignment for school. (uh, that's been about twenty-five years ago).

So the fact that I have kept at this blogging thing for a year now is quite frankly amazing.

But I must admit I came across a fear this week when I couldn't seem to find the will to carve out some blogging (journalling) time in the couple of "free time" spaces in my schedule. And my usual blogging time, just prior to going to bed, found me in a blur and fog. I feared I was derailed.

But my fingers have ached and my brain has nearly exploded due to the lack of writing.

So I will no longer depend on "free time" spaces and instead block out some time to purpose to write, but again there lies a catch. I think of myself as a random fire-er in creativity. I believe that I must feel inspired. However I am beginning to think that may actually be a lie to cover up my pure selfish laziness.

Well Dear Reader I am sorry that there were no pictures this morning but I didn't think that my little story about my personal jet lag wouldn't really take that long or turn into a confession about my short-comings as a grown-up, and there really aren't pictures to go with all that.

I am off to a wholesale nursery that has a retail sale once a year. (Hopefully I will soon change my retail status for things like nursery or food prep supplies.) My oldest three are going with me and Anna is staying with my grandboys to go with Dirt to do some shearing. Oh... I see a tussle over the one camera about to brew. Gotta go plan my strategy, have a great and productive day Dear Reader.

My Daughters Crack Me Up

The other day our youngest Vick Chick, Anna Banana, Peanut Butter, maker of phenomenal pies, bread, dinners and more, all from scratch, was going to make the dinner of her daddy's fond desire, grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. She does the best grilled cheese of anyone I know, it is an art form. That night the sandwiches were wonderful as usual, the tater tots baked to perfection. But the soup? It was a bit strong tasting.


"Anna," I say to her, "What did you do to the soup?"


"I don't know! It's awful isn't it? I even added a little cream to it, and it is still awful."


"What kind of soup did your daddy bring home?" I inquire, knowing that she has on occasion used the store bought tomato soup out of those cool hermetically sealed boxes, but the can she was unfamiliar with.


"It was that nasty canned stuff. I had to use three cans" She says.


"Did you add a whole can of milk for every can of soup?"


"No." She replied indignantly, "It didn't say to."


Knowing that this is also my incredibly impatient child, at times over the top impatient, I asked to see said can because in her favor it may not have been the can I thought it was.


It was.


Give the girl a sack of flour and a couple of apples and she turns out a beautiful pie or with a little yeast a nice crusty loaf of bread, give her a bag of peas and some quick instructions while you work in the garden and she has a lovely hearty soup waiting for when you're done, but she has no time for a stupid can of tomato soup.



Then there is Bettispaghettie, Betti-kins


Betti-kins aka Elisabeth (not pronounced like Elizabeth) is my oldest at home girl.


Sometimes her humor surprises the heck outta me because she is so dog gone quiet most of the time. But her father is rubbing off on her more and more and she is beginning to make up songs about whatever she sees or is doing at the moment.


The other day while she was suggesting to her little (nearly taller than her) sister that the dogs needed tending she came up with this song and it soon became the anthem for the weekend. It is sung with a little western twisted tune (where'd she come up being such a western music person I'm not totally sure but in my need to place blame I might look in a hedgerow somewhere).


Give the dogs food and water,

It will change your life.

Never let your mother or your daughter,

hate your wife.


Now I don't care who you are, but that is downright funny to hear being sung by a gaggle of girls in the back seat of a big fat Ford 350 diesel dually going to the feed store to buy some hay and chicks.


But then if you think about it no truer words were sung. It isn't good for a man to allow his mom or his daughter to have ill feelings towards the woman he is married to.


I think we forget what that word married means. In cooking you can put a stew together hastily and bring it up to a hot and steamy temperature with some quick heat but you will be able to taste the full flavor of the individual ingredients if eaten separately. However, if you take the time to marry the flavors then you could never again completely separate out the different components as if they were separate foods on a plate. They are married, now one, inseparable. The meat essence has oozed from the bits and melded into the softened carrot chunks and the carrot fragrance has infected the potato, nothing can be separated from the other, not completely.


With stew it takes time, but through the miracle that God has created in human marriage it only takes a moment, a moment of a vow, an acknowledgement and the two are one, never again completely separable.


It doesn't take years of dating, a lengthy engagement or a big wedding, it only takes what the community accepts as an understanding of marriage and it is done, forever. One shot. You are married for the length of your life. You cannot get the other out of your skin, children or no children. They, the children, are not how you become one. God proclaims the married as one, not two living together until the children come; they are in fact one, one right now and one forever.


If the mother hates her child's spouse, she hates her very own child, for now the two, her child and another, are one flesh and always will be. The idea of a mother hating her child isn't healthy; for a mother to hate her child's spouse is to hate her child and that is crippling to a mother.


So the husband in Bet's song can't allow that to happen not just because he loves his wife but because he loves his mother and if his mother hates his wife, she hates him and if she hates him she does damage to that thing inside her that is a mother. She would be denying what she was created for, motherness.


When Jesus takes the thou shalt not murder thing to a whole other level with His Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5) he showed how our ill thoughts and words towards another is right in there with murder. Solomon, the wisest man, knew that a mother could never murder her own child without causing herself chaos and degradation. Connect the two.


Somewhat similarly, a daughter cannot be allowed to hate her mother for it will do her damage and her father cannot let that happen for it is the father's job to keep his daughter from harming herself. To hate her mother would do just that, harm the daughter. She came from this woman, she cannot stand in the kitchen with her hands on her hips, level her face to her mother's and scream her hatred for her without causing untold damage to herself. She hates her mother? She may as well hate herself. And as we know from Jesus' lesson to hate is to murder. Self-hatred is suicide. Self-hatred by the way is not the same as self-denial or self-control or selflessness, not in the least.


Need some more dots to connect? Commandment five says, honor your father and mother. In Ephesians it is pointed out as the first commandment with a promise. The promise is for a good and long life; “that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.”


The promise is not just a cookie that God gives for being good but a natural consequence in God's magnificent creation. And we know that a certain amount of time isn't really that same amount of time in God's perspective. Even in our own minds time can change; a good time, a happy and joy filled time is as productive, worthwhile and seemingly long even if it is shorter in actuality than a miserable retched time where regrets and disappointments live at the end.

If you hate yourself by hating whom you came from, who's DNA you have making your hair curly or your eyes green, then you are not going to live a good long life; it will be short and miserable even if you live to ninety-six.


So it may very well have been a silly spur of the moment Bettikins song but it is very, very true.