Cider pressing and fiber messing (aka spinning and knitting)

When we bought our land 16 years ago, we knew we wanted an orchard. So after clearing land, we planted a bunch of little trees: apples, cherries, pears, plums...

You have to be patient with an orchard - it takes a while to establish. But we have been reaping the benefits of our fruit tree labor for a while now. 

Case in point: this year alone, we pressed cider on three different occasions, with hundreds of pounds of apples from our place.

Some of this is getting made into hard cider, lots of it is frozen for juice.

This is a job for a few people at a time: some are picking apples, some are washing them, and some feed the apples into the chute.

Then the cut-up pieces are being transferred into the pressing chamber, and the handle gets cranked.

And then comes the tasting, where people elbow each other out of the way to stick a cup under the steady stream of fragrant cider flowing forth, exclaiming how good it tastes.

Also, enough containers need to be rounded up for fitting all this golden liquid. After filling them all to the brim, there's cleanup.

As it often happens in our wilderness neighborhood on a weekend, people tend to stop by to visit, and of course, they get pulled into the cider making operation, much to the delight of all the little ones.

Come along and see what happens on a day like this!

Picking apples, and getting the ones on the ground before the bear and deer eat them

Washing station

Feeding the apples into the cutting chute

It helps to have willing and enthusiastic helpers

Putting the cut-up apples into the pressing container

Ha! Suckers! You thought you would stop by for a chill visit? Well, so much for leisure and relaxing!

The kids love to eat this foam. Better than ice cream.

Filling the containers

Besides harvesting all the fruit from our orchard, we also got all the food out of the garden. Pumpkins, squashes, gone-to-seed lettuce for the chickens, the rest of the cucumbers... 

Now all that's left is Swiss Chard, Kale, and Collards greens, plus lots of carrots and beets in the ground.

Last week, I put the garden to bed. I really like covering the soil to protect all the lovely soil organisms and micro critters in there, so I either sow green manure or spread straw.  (Not hay, since it has weeds.)

Now that the weather has shifted to almost-frost, rain and storms, the time for hibernation has begun.

Hibernating for me means plenty of knitting and spinning.

I've been on a sock-knitting kick, since it's moderately mindless and relaxing, and oh-so-necessary in a house full of active people who need socks. All. The. Time.

Last week I went to the Northwest Fiber Fusion event and bought a gorgeous batt of wool that made my heart rate speed up when I saw it. I'm spinning it into yarn for a hat and fingerless mittens. I think they will be gorgeous.

Now it's your turn. Leave me a comment in the comment section below and tell me what hibernating looks like for you.

What's going on here?

I am allowed to brag about my kid, right?  Bear with me here.  Because the thing is: My ten-year old has been bringing home the bacon... uhmm I mean... the salmon. He and his Dad sneak out of bed in the wee hours so they can fish at the river just at day break. That's when the salmon bite, I hear. Not that I know anything about fishing. All I know is that the guys come back from some of these excursions with big, bright smiles, and a salmon in their arms. Literally.

Typically, it goes something like this: I sit bleary eyed at the breakfast table with little Eva and our eleven-year old son who doesn't care much about fishing. A car pulls up, the door opens, I jump up to see if they caught anything. If there is a fish, I yell and scream. Lukas always gives his Dad a knowing look and says, “I know she'd freak out.”

Then I run to get the camera, snap a picture, and drill the guys about every detail of their adventure. I'm so proud of those two providers. We've had some good meals lately.

Talking of meals: We smoked our the bacon from our last year's pigs the other day. We've never done it ourselves, and I will write a separate blog entry about how we did it and what recipe we used. The end result was good, albeit a little salty.

We smoke it with alder chips and don't use nitrate, so it's healthier.  Since we don't want to die from the ever so slight chance of botulism, we freeze it after it's smoked.  On the other hand, we might not even freeze it but eat all of it immediately, since our four pigs will get slaughtered on Friday, and we need to make space in the freezer.

Aside from bacon makin', we are free to pursue other interests, since it has been raining non-stop, and we can't play outside much.  That means that this here Mama spends a lot of time in front of her spinning wheel and behind the knitting needles, even when other people in the family do fun things like carve pumpkins.  I'm glad my knitting portable, so I can move where the action is, if I so desire to spend time with my noisy children.

The fiber in the picture below comes from an angora rabbit, and it is softer than a baby's bottom.  I got the fiber from my friend when we visited her last week.  If you want some of her awesome fiber, visit her website here.

While I knit and spin and avoid cleaning the house, my kids spend hours making noise music.  They are getting pretty good and are involving little Eva, letting her take over the microphone every now and then.  Our friends gave us a drum set.  I don't know what I was thinking, agreeing to this.

And Steve?  Well, Steve does manly things, like hoisting a 300 pound cast iron claw foot bath tub up into the second floor window of the new addition.  Or scouting out new fishing spots.  Or cleaning out gutters 25 feet off the ground.  Smoking meat.  Rounding up escaped pigs in the dark.  You know.  Stuff like that.

And you?  What are you up to these days?

I'm leaving you with some autumn-y images.  Stay warm, hear?

Perfect life? Ahem.

Last week, the whole family picked U-pick raspberries at Cascadian Farm. As we gorged ourselves on the sweet berries while also managing to put a few in the bucket, surrounded by gorgeous mountain views and our laughing children, Steve mused, “I wonder if the people who read your blog think we have a picture perfect life”. I almost choked on a raspberry, laughing.Us, perfect?  I have wondered the same thing though. Do you read about our sweet farming life and do you look at all my beautiful pictures, thinking our life is perfect?

The Sahlin's are posing with our harvest

The reward for picking pounds and pounds of raspberries in the heat

The view from our ice cream eating spot at Cascadian Farm

I asked Steve, “What would you want my readers to know instead?” He answered, “Tell them about the dog poop on the carpet every morning.” (Yes, it's true. Our old dog Pluto is having problems at the moment, and every morning we wake up to dog puke or dog poop quietly stewing on the carpet.) He also said, “Tell them about mucking out the stinky goat barn.”

So you see, our lives aren't all sunshine and playing at the beach, smelling beautiful flowers, and petting little baby goats and chickies. Many mornings, I stumble out of bed into dog poop. Many days, I swear at the laundry that multiplies exponentially while I sleep. I am often too tired to do dishes in the evening, and then I wake up to an awful mess first thing in the morning. I don't even want to tell you about the times when I turn into a psycho with PMS, and how the sound of Steve chewing his dinner the wrong way makes me want to stab him with a fork. Then there are the days when Steve comes home from work, and I meet him at the door crying, because Eva's three year old behavior makes me want to take the credit card and fly to Mexico. Alone.

Where you see pictures of my beautiful roses and my vegetable garden, there was a lot of blood and sweat going on behind the scenes. Where you see pictures of thriving pigs, there were days spent schlepping feed to them in the pouring rain twice a day, and them biting a hole through my boot in return. Where you see cute little baby goats, there was a long night spent in the barn, agonizing about a difficult birth with stillborn goats.

But here's the thing: Writing my blog and taking pictures for it makes me put my life in perspective. It makes me step back a bit, looking at my life objectively, and realizing how damn good it is. Sharing my life with you in this way is like therapy for me, kind of like knitting. It calms down my hyper, production oriented self, and makes me focus on the beauty in my life, taking stock of what's real.

So let me show you the beauty of my life this week, knowing full well that it is not perfect, although it may look like it.

We received 63 little chicks in the mail to be raised as broilers.  We participated in two different birthday parties for our friends' kids.  And we ate a lot of food from our garden.  I spun yarn under the cherry tree, while being bombarded with cherries falling down.

Eva greeting a chick after drinking her blueberry, raspberry, and strawberry goat milk yogurt smoothie.

Eva's best friend Vija celebrating her birthday with us,  Look at these gorgeous (gluten free) cupcakes, decorated with freshly picked huckleberries and rose petals from the garden.

Lots of fun at a birthday party for the neighbors' grand kids.  Every kid gets a present so nobody feels left out.  Eva got a princess dress!

Garlic scapes - the garlic bulbs are almost ready to harvest

The blueberries will ripen soon

Borage growing by the squash

Larkspur and nasturtiums growing by the beets

Eva eating nasturtiums

A squash blossom waiting to do its thing

If you liked the last sun hat I knitted, and you want one for yourself, you can get it here in my Etsy shop.  This one is cream colored and turned out lovely.