Nauvoo Markets & Misc

Started at a new market in Nauvoo today. Did fairly well for a first day in a brand new market. I was the only vendor, but I will be able to tell other vendors there is potential there. John Kraft said he would come, but he hasn't been to any markets this week because he's been sick. We now have 2 markets in our tiny little town. You might think that's to many, but the people were all different except for the one friend I called to let her know I had beets. I think it can work!


Paul, a traveling minstrel, stopped by to play his mandalin for us. He was wonderful. He may be back. The market manager, Gwen Hummel, is sitting behind Paul. Give her a call if you'd like to be a vendor. 217-453-6161.

Next week Mark Wheeler will be there to play for us and on the 14th, my brother-in-love, Scott Whitson will be preform.


This is the Winery Farmer's Market on Friday from 3:30 - 5:30 in Nauvoo. The other regular vendor there is John Kraft. He always has lots of fresh veggies! His 94 y/o mom is one of the ladies I buy the black walnuts I use in my muffins from. You can also go into the Winery, tour the mini-museum, buy some of Carol's Pies, some Nauvoo wine and an array of other cool stuff!

Random Pictures:



I'm not sure I've ever seen an albino wooly bear. Dark wolly bears are suppose to herald a cold, snowy winter. Hope this white one is common. We could use a mild winter for a change!



Grampa called me outside the other day to enjoy the antics of the new kittens. Little ones are always such a joy! Life is good!



God Bless You All!

Our New Hired Hand

I got home tonight and found a new farm hand working in the garden.




This guy looks strangely familiar. OH WAIT A MINUTE! IT'S GRAMPA TOM!!!!!!!!!


Last sheering: April 2009


God Bless You All!

Quick Post

Quick post. Had to go to a class for the assessing job last week and it has put me way behind.

Thought I had enough noodles made up for last week. Got home on Thursday. Grampa Tom had sold almost all the noodles I had. Made some more Friday morning and sold out again on Saturday. Made a batch of noodles yesterday and two batches today. Hopefully that will be enough to get us through the next couple of days. There's Avon that needs to be delivered and herb gardens that need weeded again (I don't trust Grampa with these. He thinks all my herbs are weeds. Pant ... pant ... pant ...

Will have to wade in the mud tomorrow morning to harvest some veggies. Rice would have been a good thing to plant this year! Grampa did manage to run the tiller today in the big garden before it dumped on us.

Thought for the day:

We were seriously financially challenged when the kids were growing up. I learned to do a lot of things because I had no money to go buy stuff, things like making noodles and growing my own food. Now those skills developed out of poverty are becoming a source of riches! Cool huh? Reminds me of the scripture that says "He turns my mourning into dancing!"



God Bless You All!

Noodle Making

Lots of people have been asking me about how I make my noodles so I thought I'd blog about it.

One young man picked up my noodles and exclaimed, "Oh these are just like the Amish women make them!" I hope I didn't roll my eyes too much when I replied, " Well, there are still some of us old country women that know how to do this stuff." Don't get me wrong, I think it's wonderful that the Amish have preserved the old country ways and that people are rediscovering these riches through their knowledge, but they aren't the only ones!

Since I am a city transplant, my MIL taught me to make noodles. She learned to make noodles from her mother, who learned to make noodles from her mother, who learned to make noodles from her mother ... who knows how many generations. The one thing I do different, is I use a pizza cutter to cut the noodles while the dough is on the rolling board instead of rolling them up, using a knife to cut them and then unrolling each noodle. This is something I learned from my good friend Gwen, another old non-Amish country woman.

When I first married a farmer, I was given a couple of awesome non-Amish books to help me learn country ways. One was the Farm Journal's Freezing and Canning Cookbook and the other was Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living. Both were very helpful, but Carla's book is the one I refer to most. Carla learned most of what she shares in this book from her family and the older women in her area, many of them Mormons not Amish.

I get such a kick out of my friend Becky! She's been exploring ways to store food on the Internet and a lot of what she comes up with is attributed to the Amish. Becky will share her delight in some new treasure of knowledge she has discovered with me and I will smile and nod my head ... and then suddenly she realizes, "Oh, you already know about this don't you?" There have been a few things she has shared with me that I didn't know about, like canning butter, but not to many.

Anyway ... on to the noodles ...

My first step in making noodles is to make the dough and then refrigerate it for a while.

Free-Ranged Eggs
Flour
Natural Sea Salt
Olive Oil

Add 1/4 tsp natural sea salt for every egg used. Mix in about 1/4 tsp olive oil for each egg. Slowly add flour until the dough is soft and pliable. Put in a plastic bag and refrigerate for at least 1/2 hr.

The oil and the refrigeration make rolling the dough easier.

If I'm not already there, the next step is to get properly dressed. No, I don't put on a cute little Amish dress complete with bonnet. I don't know how they do that without perspiring into the noodles. I know it can be done. They do it, and my MIL usually wears panty hose, a pair of slacks and a short sleeved shirt while rolling her noodles, but not me. The body tends to acclimate to what you grew up with. My summers were spent in bikinis, short shorts and halter tops as a youth. It doesn't make a pretty picture ... a fat old grama stuffed in short shorts and a cami .... so be warned! But, it works for me!




OK, so now I'm dressed and in position at my kitchen table armed with my rolling board (an old piece of shelving covered with contact paper), a rolling pin, my pizza cutter, a large spatula and my flour sifter full of flour. I take a small piece of cold dough, roll it into a ball and roll it in the flour.



Then through a process of flattening, flouring, turning, and rolling, I take this small piece and roll it out into a very thin sheet.



Next, I use a pizza cutter to cut the thin sheets into strips which I lay out on screens, racks, pans and cookie sheets to dry.



I find this faster and less messy than hanging them on the backs of chairs or on rods. They then go in my warm oven or over a fan to dry.


I let them dry at least overnight and then package them in zippies with my cute little labels!


All together, it takes about 2 hours to roll out and package 6 of my small packages. At $2.25 and $2.50, that's not quite minimum wage ... and then you figure in the cost of materials ... but if they keep selling like they have been, I might be able to work the price up to a respectable wage! I just have to have something to do with the weak shelled and odd shaped eggs that we can't sell. I also make banana and other egg rich breads that freeze well with them.

Well, that's about it! Now that you've seen much more than you wanted to -

GOD BLESS YOU ALL!

Red Neck Success

My friends Tom and Barb sent me this picture from the day Shorty and I went visiting. Thought you might enjoy it. Shorty really loved Barb!


We practice intensive rotational grazing for our sheep. We usually have 3 or 4 areas that we fence off and let grow for awhile. This allows us to run a lot of sheep on our tiny farm. BTW, we are taking orders for 1/2 or whole lambs at $4.00/lb. They should be ready in the next month or 2. A dressed lamb usually yields around 60 lbs of meat. We will have it processed and packaged at Webber meats, but you must come to the farm to pick it up.




They tell me you might be a red neck if you have ever used your front yard to graze livestock. We are getting ready to do that now. In the next day or two we will turn the sheep out in our front yard. After a week or two it will be nicely mowed like this:



We were concerned about the economy over the winter. Will people still pay a premium price for our produce and eggs? We just weren't sure there would still be a market. So far this year, we have doubled our egg production and raised the price, but we are still selling out and our income from the farmer's markets has more than doubled! Thank you to all of you who support us local farmers!


It looks like the guineas might stay. The guinea eggs I blew for crafts aren't selling, but I'm hearing enough interest in them that I think I'll try selling a few fresh ones as a novelty egg. They have a very dark yoke so they should be very good. I'm going to have Grampa Tom (the picky eater and egg lover of the family) do a taste test in the next couple of days.

Here's a picture of the eggs for those of you who haven't seen them before. I threw a couple of normal sized chicken eggs in just for comparison. They are a small speckled egg with a very hard shell. Grampa says if I can make money with them, he'll put up with listening to them :)


Jesus was very fond of using common every day things to explain spiritual concepts. This week, I believe He shared 2 of these with me. They blessed me. Perhaps they will bless you too!

1. As I was harvesting lettuce on Thursday, I was finding myself breaking off and throwing away quite a bit of "stemmy" growth. I thought to myself, "There sure is a lot of waste in gardening." Then I realized it wasn't really wasted because I was going to feed it to the chickens, who in turn would make it into eggs and manure for next year's crop. "Waste" is really a poverty mindset born out of fear. "Waste", whether it's a thing, an event or even a seemingly wasted life can be redeemed! In God's economy there is no waste. He takes those things we see as "waste" and uses them for another harvest. Instead of bemoaning the "waste" we see, we should be asking God how He wants to use it.

2. A couple of weeks ago, the rugs at my back door were getting really nasty. I didn't have the time to deal with them, so I threw them out on the garden fence. Today, after they've gone through a couple of rain storms, quite a bit of wind and some beautiful sunshiny days, they were actually clean enough that I thought I could bring them back in. So ... if you're going through some storms and don't feel like you are where you ought to be, thank God! You may just be out on the fence getting the dirt knocked off of you.



God Bless You All!

Grama Sue's Typical Day

Aren't these gardens looking nice? We have been able to get most of the big garden planted, but it doesn't look like much more than a dirt patch right now.

Thought I'd give you a run down of what a typical day looks like for me. It sounds like I'm doing a lot, but if you wrote down everything you did in a day, you'd probably see that you do the same.

Here goes:

5:30 am - Awake. It still amazes me. I used to be awake at this time of the morning all the time. Course I was considering going to bed in an hour or two.

5:30 - 6 am - Make tea, check e-mail

6-7 am - Attend prayer meeting in Texas via gloryofzion.org. Isn't the internet amazing!
Danced with the new worship hoop I made this week.


It is called "The Covenant of Healing". It is a prayer in art that declares I Peter 2:24 "by whose stripes you were healed". There are 39 yellow ribbons with clear beads that represent the 39 stripes that were laid on Jesus' back with a whip that was enhanced with shards of bone and metal. These "stripes" rest on a background of red mylar to symbolize His Blood. I love making these. I've done several different designs in the past. Haven't had much time for it lately. Someone asked me to make this one so I made the time. It is so much fun!

7-7:30 am - Finished checking e-mail and ordered some fence for Grampa

7:30-8:30 am - Dishes. Yes, I'm one of those horrible people who don't clean up the dishes after every meal. And even worse, I don't have a dishwasher to hide them in like the rest of you all! Yesterday, I spent all day outside and making noodles so there was quite the pile.

8:30 9 am - Finally getting around to breakfast.

9 - 11:30 am - Computer work. Updated the check books and our business books. Also did some comparison shopping for egg cartons.

11:30 -12:00pm - Cook and eat lunch.

12:00 - 1:00 pm - Work on Avon business

1:00 pm - Finally change out of my jammies. It looked like it was going to be an all day jammie thing, but I decided I needed to go outside for a bit so I put on a skirt and a cami.

1:15 - 1:30 pm - Take a few pictures and get some things out of the freezer in the garage. Took some pictures of the chicken feet I have hanging in the garage to dry for doggie treats. Was going to post them, but they are just too gross. Say, "Thank you Grama Sue!"

1:30 - 2 pm - Put away laundry from yesterday.

2 pm - Take a few minutes to listen to the rain and thank God for our sweet corn that needed just a little more moisture to help it make a good stand!

2:15 pm - Sun shining. Thought maybe there'd be a rainbow, but I was wrong. I always have to stop and look for rainbows!

2:20 pm - Make ice. I go through a whole lot of ice all by myself. It is one of my bigger daily chores.

2:30 - 3:30 pm - Put away dried noodles from yesterday and do dishes again. Talk to a couple of friends and my DIL on the phone as I'm working. Wally is 9 lbs, 9 oz already!

3:30 - 4 pm - Checked email again. Did you know that the Illinois govenor has proposed a budget that will increase the average person's income tax by 50%??? They are voting on it this week. Made a few phone calls to govenor, represenative and state senator, then forwarded the e-mail to some people I thought might want to know.

4 - 5:30 pm - Assessing work

5:30 - 7:30 pm - Supper with visiting family over at Mom's. Cool! Didn't have to cook!

7:30 - 9 pm - Writing blog. Having trouple getting pics to load. I don't type very fast either.

I still need to wash eggs and work on designing a new menu board for the farmer's markets. Might get to bed by 11pm

This Week's Farmer's Market Menu

Spinach 1/2 lb bag $2.50



Lettuce, Bib & Romaine 1/2lb bag $1.00



Green Onions 10 cents each or $1.00/doz



Chives and Fresh Lemon Balm 25 cents/bundle



Dried Peppers and Lemon Balm 25 cents/ bag



Rainbow Eggs 1 dozen $2.50



Goose Eggs 6-pack $3.50



Hand Blown Eggs $0.50 each



Decorated Eggs $2.00 each



Mini Banana Loaf $0.75



Grandma Whitson's Cookies $2.50



Grama Sue's Home Made Noodles
(Made with whole wheat or unbleached
flour, pasture raised eggs, olive oil and
natural sea salt)

Whole Wheat sm/ $2.25 lg/ $4.50

Unbleached Flour sm/ $2.00 lg/ $4.00



Possibly Swiss Chard and Radishes



We are taking orders for locally grown lamb:
Whole or 1/2 bundles - $4.00/lb
You must come to the farm to pick your bundle up.
1/2 lamb is usually 25 to 30 lbs. of meat.




We also have locally grown chicken in our freezer
for $1.75/lb. This must also be picked up at the farm.