Sugar Creek Farm

There’s a lovely website called 101 Cookbooks, by the equally lovely Heidi Swanson. This past spring she was so kind as to include a link on her site to our site, and that link sends quite a bit of web traffic our way.

Tonight I made the recipe she posted for Chocolate Zucchini Cupcakes. Oh wow. They’re so good I can’t even begin to describe it. You’ll just have to go make them yourself.

I have visions of making hundreds of these things and storing them away in the freezer to get me through to zucchini season 2006. But there’s another truckload of sweetcorn waiting to be frozen, a 5-gallon pail of pickling cucumbers from our garden waiting to be pickled, and a whole lotta green beans waiting to be picked and frozen. So I may have to settle for the 18 I made tonight, along with this superb chocolate zucchini cake.

comes in boxes of 100

We finished out our week of vacation last week with hay making. It’s really a bit late for the second cutting, but the guy that cuts it for us had mechanical difficulties with his cutter and ended up buying a new one.

As soon as the guy that bales it for us got started, we got started hauling it home. The process goes like this: Matt spears a bale on the rear forks for weight. I’m pulling the hay rack (borrowed from my dad) behind the truck. He loads 4 bales onto the hay rack with the tractor, then spears a 6th bale on the front forks. We head for home, him following me because he can’t see ahead or behind him very well with bales on the front and back.

The truck & hay rack

He stacked this batch up, and covered it with plastic tarps on Sunday. 41 bales in all – an excellent yield for a second cutting. (We got 46 bales on the first cutting.)

Friday night we picked corn at Aunt Veronica & Uncle Lyle’s. Every year they plant sweet corn with their regular field corn planter – so this is one huge “patch” of corn – and generously allow friends and family to come and pick what they want.

The plan was to freeze it first thing Saturday morning, but hay making ended up taking precedence. As Matt & I drove in and out hauling hay bales back from the field Saturday afternoon, there was Olivia on the porch husking her little fingers to the bone. Without being asked, even!

She had the majority of it husked by the time we got started with it at 7:00 that night. Good thing – as it was, we didn’t finish until midnight. I can’t imagine what time it would have been if we’d had to shuck all the corn as well. She got her allowance doubled for the week for her efforts 🙂

Put 37 bags of corn in the freezer. Next weekend we’ll do it again.

A few more of my favorite photos from our visit to Living History Farms

The Blacksmith at the 1875 Town of Walnut Hill

A cute little side porch on the 1900 farmhouse

A coat and firewood room outside the 1900 farmhouse. I loved the barn coat hanging on its hook.

I loved the different types of fences, this one at the 1875 Town of Walnut Hill.

and this one at the 1850 Pioneer Farm.

Rafe liked the Indian farm, mainly because of their prolific use of sticks. Several times he tried to make off with a souveneir stick from one of the huts.

Matt’s paternal grandmother was reportedly part American Indian. She would have fit right in these huts, being under 5 feet tall.

The garden on this “farm” was cool, with it’s primitive bean teepee’s. But it was a corn plant shy of a three sisters planting.

There’s no doubt I was born at least a hundred years too late (though I do love my internet). But I’m not sure which one I would choose to live on – the 1850 Pioneer Farm or the 1900 Horse-Powered Farm.

I love the farm buildings of this time. This is the hog house. I wished we could have had a look inside.

I especially loved the chicken house. I took lots of pictures of this for future reference 🙂

The inside of the chicken house

We took a few days vacation this week and headed to Des Moines with the kids. The highlight of the trip, for me anyway, was a visit to Living History Farms.

At the 1850 farm, Rafe was enthralled with the spinning wheel. He cozied right up to the gal spinning and just studied every move that she and the spinning wheel made. And he slyly moved his foot on to the treadle to help her make the wheel spin.

Anyone who knows Rafe knows that anything that causes him to be still for more than 2 minutes is really something.

The 1850 farm was fascinating to me because that’s about the age of our farm. Before this house was built in 1875, there was a log cabin here that probably looked something like this one.

Outside the cabin a man was shaping logs into square posts and beams for a barn.

The pig pen was interesting. It doesn’t look like it would hold our pigs.

Wednesday evening the girls and I headed over to NIACC for the Midwest Environmental Education Conference . We’d been asked to come and set up a display about our farm as part of their “Appetizers and Advertisers” program.

I wish we could have offered samples of our meat, but we are just plain out of everything except for a couple of t-bone steaks. Sorry, Public, but I’m not sharing my last two t-bones with you.

There were not a huge number of people there, and most were not from the north central Iowa area, so I don’t expect much to come of it in the way of new customers. But at least I got a display made that I can use again in the future.

The whole evening was made worthwhile for me just because our table was next to Phyllis and Paul Willis of Niman Ranch. Paul was the first hog producer to sign on with Niman Ranch back in 1995, thus beginning Niman Ranch Pork Company. These are celebrities in the sustainable ag world. And how flattered was I when Phyllis already “knew” us because she’s been reading this blog! And how excited was Matt when I told him she had invited us to come and see their farm! We will take you up on that Phyllis, hope you were serious!

In the end I came away with my enthusiasm restored a bit. A good thing. Lord knows it’s waned a bit lately.

When I said that the dog show was the most exciting part of the fair, I should have qualified that by saying it was the most exciting part for me. Not that it wasn’t exciting for Madeline, but I’ve noticed this week that whenever someone asks her about the fair the first thing she tells them about is the ribbon auction.

Each 4-H’er showing beef, dairy, swine, or sheep is allowed to auction off one of their ribbons on the last day of the fair. Most of the ribbons are bought by very generous grandparents or very generous sponsors – local businesses like the grain elevator, vet, locker, etc.

Madeline took a pen of 3 stocker beef calves. These aren’t shown in the ring on halter, but penned and judged as a group. The main considerations are the daily rate of gain and break-even price. We knew our rate of gain was not going to be stellar. We just don’t feed our beef feedlot-style. We forewarned Madeline that she probably wouldn’t receive a blue ribbon on the project. But we felt it would still be a good experience for her because she would have to explain what we do and why we do it. Something we find ourselves doing quite often.

Off to the fair

She was extremely nervous about talking to the judge. She remarked, “I bet even Grandpa won’t buy my ribbon if it’s a red or a white.” And she had a long day of waiting her turn. The beef show started at 8:30 with the individual market beef animals on halter, then the breeding animals on halter, then the pens of which she was the last to be judged around 1:00.

After the judge was done with her they announced what ribbon each entry received. But they didn’t announce any ribbon for her. “Oh great, I was so bad I don’t get a ribbon.” So they headed over to the 4-H office to find out what was going on. As it turned out, she did get a blue ribbon.

So on ribbon auction day Grandpa started bidding. But the manager of the grain elevator was bidding against him. Grandpa hung in there. As Madeline put it in a cellphone call to me right after, “Jerry kept bidding and bidding against Grandpa, but finally he couldn’t take it anymore so Grandpa won AND I GOT THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS FOR MY RIBBON! I told Grandpa thank-you about a hundred times, and then I bought him a malt.”

I didn’t think she would take a beef project again next year. I think Grandpa just proved me wrong.