Current Crochet Project: A Handspun Hat

I am excited to be working on my current project.  A customer at work saw some of my finished products and requested that I make a custom hat.  They wanted it to be thin but warm, preferably wool and dyed to match his jacket.  Luckily for me I had a couple of skeins of my handspun yarn that just happened to be made from a soft and warm combination of merino wool and tussah silk.

I rolled the skeins into balls so I could crochet from them easily and began to work on a hat.  I used a fairly small sized crochet hook because this yarn is thinner than most of the yarn that you can get at the store.  A small hook means a lot more stitches go into making a project so it can take quite a bit longer to finish a product.  It also means that the fabric it makes is thinner which is what I was going for since the request wasn't for a thick bulky hat.

Once the hat was finished I dyed it dark blue as requested.

I am really happy with the finished product.  My hand spun yarn was just what I wanted for this project and I even got to practice a different dye technique which turned out just the way I had hoped it would.  It was a great learning experience all the way around and I look forward to making more handspun yarn for future projects.

Reducing the Rooster Population

This spring I hatched a small batch of chicks with the intention of using some of them for meat.  Of the four chickens, three of them were roosters.  They were all pretty well behaved and none of them crowed very loud or often.  Some of them were rough with the ladies, but since I had separated the roosters from the hens, most of the hens have recovered from their time spent with the boys.  I could have kept all three roosters to use them in a breeding plan, but the truth is that only one of them really fit what I was looking for in a breeding rooster.  The one I decided to keep was the largest of the three and he crowed less often than the others.  Eventually he will go back in with the girls for the winter just so he won't be too lonely in the rooster pen by himself.

The two roosters that went into the freezer were pretty good sized as they were both nine months old and had definitely reached maturity.  I waited until it was nearly dark outside and the chickens had gone to roost for the evening.  I had no problem catching the roosters and they stayed calm as I prepared them for butchering.  Both deaths were over in minutes and I thanked them both for nourishing me as they passed.  With the most stressful part of the process out of the way I started on the work of cleaning the birds.

The first step in cleaning a chicken is to remove the feathers.  When I set up for butchering, one of the first things I do is set a large pot of water to heat on the stove.  Once it gets to 160 degrees it is hot enough for scalding.  To scald a chicken I simply dunk the freshly killed bird in the hot water and swish it around for a couple of minutes until the feathers start to pull out easily.  Most of the feathers come out by the handful, but the wing and tail feathers can take a little more effort.  Once I got the carcasses as clean as possible I brought them inside and began to part them out.  I usually divide them into leg quarters, breasts, and wings.  I also save the backs and necks for stock.  One of the things that I like best about butchering my own chickens is that I can keep any of the organ meats that I want also.  I usually add the heart, liver and gizzard to my stock and it adds an extra depth to the flavor.

When it was all said and done I ended up with several pounds of fresh home grown meat for my freezer.  These two roosters will provide me many delicious meals and for that I am grateful.  Raising my own meat from chick to freezer is a lot of work, but knowing how my meat was raised is important to me.  I know that these roosters led a good life and the end was quick and as painless as possible.

Late Fall Harvest: Broccoli

Things in the garden have slowed down to a crawl here at the end of November.  There are still a few crops that are happily humming along blissfully unaffected by the low night time temps here.  The broccoli is one of them.  I tend to be a lazy gardener when it comes to some things and I am not very good about cleaning up some crops after I harvest them.  I picked my main harvest of broccoli in September but never took the time to cut down the plants after I cut off the good sized heads.  I was rewarded with a second harvest of side shoots, some of which were making sizable heads too.  I already have plenty of frozen broccoli so I am using this bonus harvest fresh from the garden as I go into winter.  If I can make a little more room in the freezer I may freeze one more round before it gets too cold since I know that these plants likely won't survive the deep cold that is just around the corner.

Gardening will never cease to amaze me.  Even when you think that all is lost with a crop, some times they are tenacious and reward even your neglect with wholesome goodness.  This year I had to replant my broccoli several times and this final planting was from starts that I bought from a local nursery.  It was a last ditch effort that paid off even though they were off to a late start this season.  I was lucky that they didn't simply bolt in the heat of the summer.  I think that our slightly cooler than normal summer and the abundant rainfall helped this crop mature into some beautiful huge heads of broccoli.  I believe that most of my heads were over three pounds each and even these side shoots have become quite large considering that they are mostly an afterthought.  I hadn't paid much attention to them after the main harvest so when I noticed that I was going to be able to add more pounds to my broccoli harvest tally I was very happy.

Whimsical Turtle Hat

One of the fun things about crochet is that you can make just about anything if you put your mind to it.  I recently had a special request for a hat with a turtle theme.  I wasn't sure if I wanted to put a turtle in the pattern or make the hat into a turtle so I started looking at patterns online.  Lo and behold I came across the perfect thing:  a hat that was a turtle.  I downloaded the pattern and got to work.  I used my own color combination for the turtle, and had to adjust the pattern a little to make the hat more hat-like, but in the end I am really happy with how it turned out.

This pattern involved more sewing than I am used to, but I think the details really help add dimension to the hat.  The turtle is looks like a happy cartoon character and that was exactly what I was going for.

Unleashing the Chickens!

The chickens have just spent most of the spring and summer cooped up so to speak.  They live in an enclosed pen with an attached hen house.  I cover the top in the summer to provide shade, but the lower section is open to the elements.  The idea with this pen was that it would be mobile, but it takes two people to move it, so it has become a stationary pen which is not ideal.  I would have liked to pasture them, but unfortunately my yard looked like anything but a pasture when I moved in.  I have attempted to plant some dry land pasture mix but it has come up patchy.  Maybe I can try again next year to see if I can make my yard more pasture like.

The rest of my yard has become garden space which is kinda like a chicken smorgasbord.  This is the other reason I kept the chickens in a pen during the growing season.  It would have been nice for them to do bug patrol duty in the summer, but they would have eaten everything they could get their little beaks on which includes my veggie supply.  Instead they got the gleanings from my harvests: the giant zucchinis and cucumbers that got away, the blemished tomatoes, the ends of beans and peas that were destined for the freezer.  Just because I didn't want the chickens to run amok in the garden didn't mean that they didn't get a fair share of it's produce.

Now that the garden has died back for the winter the time has come to let the chickens do their part to fertilize and till the surface of my garden beds.  The days that I am home and available to "supervise" I open the door to their pen and let them roam around the house and garden.  They mostly stay in the yard for now, but as I continue to clean up the yard, they will have less to scratch and peck at, so I imagine their boundaries will change by the end of winter.  There are still some crops out in the garden that I don't want them to get into, so a simple barrier like a plastic sheet protects my potatoes until I can harvest them.  After I plant my garlic I will cover that bed with a chicken wire hoop to keep the chickens out of it.  I will probably also plant a bed of spinach that will get covered with a low plastic hoop tunnel which should be a nice supply of winter greens for me and the chickens.

The chickens are loving their new found freedom and have been busily cleaning up the yard in their own way.  Since the season is new for them there is plenty of things for them to graze on in the yard and my feeding costs have decreased a bit while their diet has improved.  I have noticed that the yolks of their eggs are a richer orange since they have been doing more foraging, so moving towards pasturing them is definitely on my list.  Having happy chickens is the best way to get tasty healthy eggs for my own diet.

Preparing The Winter Garden

You wouldn't think that much yard work goes on in the winter months, but the weather here is mild enough that I use the winter to catch up on some basic garden maintenance.  Autumn and winter are a good time to go through and clean up the garden beds.  I generally remove the dead vegetation and add amendments to my soil using what I have on hand.  This year I have been burning piles of dead ragweed bushes and will be adding the ash from that to each garden bed to increase the mineral content of the soil.  A friend of mine also gave me bags of leaves which I am mixing into the soil in each bed to increase the amount of organic matter which will also help feed my future crops.

Eventually I would like to move towards a no till approach in my garden, but at the moment I think turning over the soil in the beds is helping to improve the soil.  The first year that I had a garden here, turning over the soil was a chore.  The soil is hard packed clay that is loaded with river cobble.  Using a shovel was tedious, but I felt that I was able to remove more of the larger rocks from the beds using this method.  I have also been trying to plant deep rooted crops like carrots where I can to help break up the deeper soil and help bring nutrients closer to the surface to make them more available for shallower rooted crops.

That first year and even the beginning of the second year I found the soil to be oddly devoid of earthworms.  Finally as I have been turning over the beds this fall I have started finding signs of life in my soil.  I have been adding leaves and grass clipping to the beds both as I turn them over and also as a mulch after the beds are planted.  I think they have helped to improve the composition of my soil quite a bit.  It holds water much longer than the hard dry soil in other parts of my yard and thanks to the mulch it doesn't get muddy when it does get soaked.

This winter I am planning on trying to grow a few overwintered crops in some of my beds.  I always get a bed of garlic planted in the fall so it can come up in the early spring.  I also want to try growing a bed of spinach under a low hoop tunnel and a bed of turnips for the chickens.  Both of those veggies have germinated well for me in the cold in the past so I am going to try to get them planted in the next few weeks to see if they can get established before the temps get too low.

Foe the most part the garden is done for the year.  I still have root crops like my potatoes, carrots and parsnips that are waiting to be harvested, but there is no hurry for those crops since they seem to keep just fine where they grew in the soil.  The potatoes might have to be fully harvested before deep cold sets in, but the others can be harvested as needed all the way through early spring.  The cold weather actually improves the flavor of carrots and parsnips which is another reason to let them overwinter outside.

Canning Tomato Sauce

I finally had a free day to get some needed chores done around the house.  At the top of my list was canning tomato sauce to free up some space in the freezer.  I had four and a half gallons of whole tomatoes sitting in my freezer from this fall's tomato harvest.  I could have had more, but I ran out of room in the freezer and I'm sad to say that many of my tomatoes went to waste.  The chickens have been cleaning up what I couldn't get to in time and next year I will probably plant fewer plants since they are so prolific.

I began by giving all the tomatoes a warm bath to help them thaw and also to help remove the skins before they went into the pot.  I turned on the stove and brought the whole tomatoes to a boil, stirring them up and smashing them as they cooked.  Once they were all cooked to mush I put the sauce through my food mill to remove the seeds and any big chunks that I missed when I was peeling the tomatoes.  The sauce was then returned to the pot where it continued to cook down for several hours.  I like my sauce on the thick side so I reduced it by half to make it the right consistency.  While that was cooking down I prepared my jars and canner for the next step.  The extra skins and seeds went to the chickens who promptly made quick work of the small pile.

The next step was filling the jars with the sauce.  I was canning pints so each jar got one tablespoon of lemon juice before getting filled with the boiling sauce.  I left 1/2 inch of headspace in each jar, wiped the rims and tightened down the lids before returning them to the canner to boil for 45 minutes.  I only ended up with nine pints of sauce this season.  I still had six pints of sauce left over from last year so this small amount should keep me happy until next year.  I don't eat a ton of tomato based dishes, but between the salsa and the sauce I should have plenty to last me.  I am always surprised by how little sauce I get from a huge number of tomatoes.  Perhaps next year I will have time to can a batch of sauce while the season is still going strong so I don't have to depend on how much room I have in my freezer.

The Beginning of Yarn Season

The garden is pretty well finished for the year and all that remains are a few broccoli and cabbage plants that have been happily growing despite the frosty nights here.  I am nearly finished canning garden produce as well, having only the frozen tomatoes that I need to turn into sauce left on the list.  The days now have more time to devote to other things and I have recently begun to crochet again.

My current project was a request from a coworker.  They wanted a thick blue scarf and I had just the perfect bright sky blue yarn just waiting to become something.  I am using a double crochet stitch worked in rows to make a nice thick and even fabric for the scarf.  Once I get it long enough I will finish the edges and add fringe to the ends.  I think its going to be a nice warm addition to a winter lifeguard's wardrobe.

Other coworkers and friends have begun to make requests for hats, slippers and other things, so my project list is growing.  The best part of people making special requests is that I get to make something for someone that is uniquely theirs.  I have never made the same hat twice and now that I can spin and dye my own yarn I can cater to special requests of color or material for a project.  The only real limiting factor is time.  Fortunately with the yard work slowing down to a bare minimum I will have lots more time to devote to my craft.

Last year I completed my goal of downsizing my yarn stash as much as possible.  I made hats with partial skeins left over from previous projects and happily increased my hat inventory with no additional cost to me.  This gives me plenty of space to restock my yarn stash with both store bought yarns and yarns that I spun myself.  I have a feeling that most of my spinning will take place after the holidays when gift requests have died down for the year.  My goal is to finish spinning all of the roving that I have so it will be ready for any projects that I come up with along the way.  I would also like to take my bags of alpaca fiber to a local mill to have it cleaned and made into roving.  The cost for this is a bit prohibitive right now, but it is something that I have been wanting to do for years.  Having the fiber doesn't do me much good if I can't spin it into yarn.

The winter is just creeping in, but with the coming cooler weather comes hours of time for quiet, busy projects indoors.  I have many hopes for what I can make this season, though I know that it won't be long before spring garden planning will begin again.  In the mean time I will use my creativity to share warmth and comfort with the people in my life.