What a snowy, cold winter we have had so far. I remember the forecasters started to predict an unusually long, cold winter around the time the acorns were falling last autumn, so I guess they have been right about their prediction so far and we all have a new phrase, Polar Vortex, to add to our vocabulary! Although we are not quite as active outdoors during this time of year, Dave has managed to take advantage of some of the milder days and accomplished items on the upkeep list. He has taken some of the mowing equipment in for yearly servicing and has scheduled appointments for the tractor and some of the rest. He has continued to take the old fence posts to the recycling center after diligently cutting away the concrete fill.

Other perimeter fencing has needed recent repairs. Sadly, about 18 of our deer fence pickets were recently downed. Yes, the deer found a way in and and we lost two trees this time; one arborvitae and one apple tree. As frustrated as we get by this, we were glad to report that the plant damage was less severe than it has been in the past and this was a fairly isolated invasion. We worry though that the deer are creatures of habit and often travel the same paths with a certain blind regularity. We certainly don’t want them making themselves at home in the orchard so the “Faux Fence” as we call it was promptly re-secured with heavier clamps where possible.

We also had a coyote wandering in the back easement and around our trash can area so I guess they are desperate for food. If only they would concentrate on taking out some of the deer! Farley was quite spooked by the scent of this rascal one night whose tracks were evident in the snow. It has given us pause before letting Farley out without his leash even for potty breaks!

Besides fence repair, we have been working on some other small projects, one of which is kind of embarrassing to write about. In fact, I think of this as the ‘Dirty Little Secret’ of Seven Oaks Farm. Let me back up before I get too defensive. When we moved here three years ago, among the many, many, many items on our to do list was to get a decent compost system going. In fact we drew up plans for an elaborate, three compartment, walled, bin type of compost area that would accommodate a small tractor! This would have been dandy but we didn’t want to build it until we got some other things in position. So, in the meantime, we have been composting in large trash cans with holes in them. This has actually served the purpose to some extent but last summer we started to look for a more efficient, (smaller scale than previously planned) set up to purchase since it was becoming obvious that if we composted absolutely everything, it would be a full time job!  We could not find an adequate solution last summer and of course were so busy that we just kept using our trash can system and our shredder to make do. There were times when we had to be happy with shredding and dumping dead plant material directly back into the fields where it would wait to be plowed under.

So with a little more time on our hands, Dave found an adequate twin compost apparatus that would at least address our kitchen production waste. After much debate about what size to get, we ordered one. The problem with these is that if they get too large, they are too heavy and cumbersome to turn properly. So we got the twin version from Mantis Co. that will allow us to have two batches of decomposition going at different stages at the same time. Each bin has a 12 cubic foot capacity or 10 bushels, or 30 gallons. We hope this will get us started! Happy Early Valentine’s Day to Nancy and Dave!

In other news, we have finally cleared the work bench of the fence posts that were being drilled for the deer fence, so Dave was able to install the bench grinder for our sharpening demands. I bought this at a garage sale last year and we will put it to good use keeping our tools sharpened in house.

Speaking of tools, I’ve been making regular trips to a small, local printer in Webster Groves, Acme Printing, as I work on Kate and Jason’s wedding invitations. I couldn’t resist taking this photo of some of the printing equipment there. Fascinating!

We are also experimenting with some Moroccan cooking in our recently purchased Tagine, which is a type of cookware that is made of glazed pottery and acts as a small steamer. It has a deep bottom and a conical “lid” that has a small aperture in the top to let out a bit of moisture as it cooks. Here is the one we bought.

We made a chicken dish the other night that had all types of unusual spices as well as preserved lemons and olives on top of a thick sauce and we served it over Israeli couscous.

We are getting terribly excited about the coming bee hives. I attended my first monthly meeting of the Eastern Missouri Beekeepers Association last week. I was rather amused that they had a social hour before the meeting started (which I skipped). Wouldn’t you know, as I sat reading my new Beekeeper’s Handbook the next morning, one of the first paragraphs in the book talks about the importance of the social aspect of a bee community…theirs AND ours! So, the social hour was rather purposeful after all! Note to self: be more social.  Here is the text book I’m reading but due to the density of information, I can only plow through a few  pages a day. It is fascinating reading and I’m sure I’ll share more of the details here in the future!

The weather forecasters have been very busy predicting the winter storm and severe cold for this weekend. We have been anticipating it for days. It was hard to believe it was really coming with the sun shining brightly and the thermometer readings of nearly 40 degrees yesterday! We decided to take heed of the warnings since the national news was confirming heavy and drifting snow followed by an arctic blast tonight and tomorrow.

The majority of our trees and shrubs are going to have to fend for themselves. We are hoping that the more established plants will fare well since we are far from spring and in no real threat to the buds. We think that the newest trees we planted are in a dormant stage that will also keep them protected. Our biggest worry is for the specimens that don’t really love the harsh cold but have come to thrive in our relatively light, previous winters. In the orchard, these would be the peach and nectarine trees and in the landscaped front quadrants, these would be the Japanese Maples and Portuguese Laurels.

So we devised a plan to create a wind screen of sorts for the laurels and were able to extend it somewhat to help protect some of the azaleas as well. The Japanese Maples may benefit from some of the wind barrier as well, but frankly, we ran out of time and burlap! Here were some of our essential supplies. Wooden stakes, burlap and a staple gun.

First we hammered stakes into the area in front of the plantings and added some bamboo poles that we had on hand to help for the shield.

Then we attached the burlap to the stakes, wrapping it from pole to pole.

Our arborist, Jon, advised us not to let the burlap touch the plants since the expectation of heavy snow could weigh on the burlap and actually do more damage with broken limbs.

Sure enough, the snow started early this morning and has been steadily falling and accumulating. We have been out most of the morning plowing, shoveling and gently brooming off the snow laden limbs to keep them from drowning in snow. Here are the Boulevard Cypress shrubs, laden with snow that fell in a mere 3 hours. 

Here they are after I managed to broom off much of the snow.

I’m sure I will need to do this several times today, but I may have to quit with the photos since taking my gloves off to use my iPhone proved to be too much for my fingers after a short amount of time. Since this will only get worse, future photos may be taken from the warmth of the doorway!

All this time, Dave was out with the tractor, trying to make a little impact before the snow became too deep and the temps too challenging for even riding around on the machine!

Our new driveway is a dream to clear compared with the former pea gravel.

We have shoveled the front walks several times already so that our short legged Farley can manage to do his business without getting buried! I think I will have to get his winter coats out and let him model some of them in the next few days. For now, he is happily encamped as close to the fireplace flames as he can get and he confirms this by occasionally letting out a little sigh. For once, he is not particularly clamoring to join us outdoors but when he does, he can wear his, shearling wool coat, his down vest or his Gap hoodie!

As usual, I saved the best news for last! Yesterday afternoon I received an e-mail from J&H (it was actually from H) alerting me to a day-long workshop on beekeeping being offered by the Eastern Missouri Beekeepers Association in February. I immediately signed up for the beginner level and will look forward to this educational outing.

We then met long time friends (sounds better than old, eh?) Tom and Joan for a pre-blizzard, post-holiday dinner and we had a little gift exchange. They were right on target with the bee theme…this is what we found in the box for the Sauerhoffs: A pair of gorgeous, goatskin beekeepers gloves and three types of honey (spring, summer, fall?) from local, Clayton, Missouri hives and aptly named ‘Stinger’s Honey’. I will be delving into lots of reading about beekeeping before the workshop and will dream of the buzzing of future hives!

Luckily, I have plenty of knitting to work on in between outings of plowing, shoveling and brooming of plants! 

Oh the weather outside is frightful
But the fire is so delightful
And since we’ve got no place to go
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!!

This week we took a couple of steps forward with all types of fencing at the farm. There are several reasons why this is appropriate work for this time of year.

• One is that the fields and crops are less demanding of our time so we can concentrate on other areas that do not get our attention in the high season.
• Second, the deer are quite a bit more active this time of year and so we are reminded of the diligence needed to keep them at bay!
• Third, the old cyclone fencing that we are tearing out is usually infested with wasps, hornets and other flying menaces but this time of year they are noticeably less active and we can work on those areas.

We have been working with a local company since last July to have our new wrought iron gates and fencing made to order. People wonder why we would use wrought iron to build this since it has maintenance issues over time. Well, for fencing that is nearly 8 feet tall, an aluminum fence would not be nearly as solid of a structure. We learned that if you treat your wrought iron by dipping it in molten, galvanized metal before painting it, that you can avoid the issues with rust for many, many years. So we went this route and after a couple of hiccups, we finally had the gate and fencing installed this Friday after Thanksgiving….black Friday indeed!

Here are the guys installing the gate. They actually welded it on site.

The sections were so heavy that they had a crane to help lift it from the truck. Here it is finished with another side section.

Another guy will come and install the operator mechanism (the motor will be in the garage) which will allow us to open and close this from our cars and also from a keypad.

As soon as they finished with the driveway side, they moved to the other side of the property where we had another long section of fencing installed at the back corner of the house.

We were always a bit curious as to why the original fence had been installed in such an odd formation. But as Robert Frost wrote, ‘Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.’ I think this is a paraphrase from one of his early poems entitled, Mending Wall, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.’ Whatever that reason, it no longer exists and neither does the fence!

So today we had an opportunity to tackle the job of dismantling the old sections of chain link that were no longer needed. Here is what it looked like before we started.

First we used the Dewalt SawZall (reciprocating saw) to cut the upper pipe. (The saw was a Christmas present from Dave to me the first year we moved here, purchased with reward points from one of our credit cards.)  We needed to cut the pieces into sections that would fit in Dave’s truck so we were measuring about 6 foot sections for each cut.

After getting all the pipe cut, we took Dave’s impact wrench (which he bought when he was building pools during his high school summers so it is at least 40 years old by now) and put it to work removing the rusty nuts from their bolts in order to take the whole mess apart.

There were wires for the old electric fencing to deal with and all kinds of gate closures and clamps to remove. These we were careful to not let fall in the grass so that we wouldn’t send flying metal into our windows when we mow the grass!

The nastiest part of the whole dismantling was something Dave and I both had dealt with in an earlier fence tear-out and knew to be cautious of this time. It seems that many of these cyclone fence manufacturers use a fiberglass plank of sorts to hold the woven metal cyclone part taut at the ends of the runs. This is what it looks like.

I guess fiberglass is cheaper than metal and can be very strong. Well, never grab onto a piece of raw fiberglass with your bare hands. The surface of it holds innumerable hairlike fibers that are, well, glass like in sharpness and if you brush against it, you will be feeling those invisible splinters in your skin for a very long time!!!

Here is one pipe with a stinging insect nest inside.

When you remove the nuts, bolts, clamps and such, the fence starts to peel away from the posts.

You can then roll up the woven wire and bundle it away.

We loaded all of this into the golf cart.

And then into Dave’s truck to take to the recycling center in Valley Park called Scrap Mart Metal Recycling.

For our efforts to recycle sheet iron, painted aluminum, and aluminum cans, we received $33.81 and the satisfaction of putting this metal into a recycling program. The payout doesn’t include the posts which we will pry from their concrete bases in the next couple of days. Here is what it looked like after a morning of dismantling the fence.

Other highlights (no pun) of the week included the installation of the lighting for the outdoor grilling area. It is difficult to get a picture of this when lit up at night, but we are very pleased with the atmosphere it lends to the cooking.

The trident maple planting is getting closer to completion. We now have 8 of the 12 trees installed. Here is one side of the driveway just as the sun was going down tonight.

But, I was saving the best news for last! Today I bravely made a cold call on a ‘neighbor’ who lives along one of the streets that I walk on. I have noticed their lovely yellow bee hives as I walk down Taylor Avenue. This year, I noticed they have added a third hive to their collection and after talking with their neighbor and seeing cars in the driveway today, I boldly rang the door bell. After a nice chat and a tour of their bees, they have agreed to come to the farm tomorrow to look at our orchard and discuss our future bee situation. I’m not sure how this will be structured exactly but I’ve decided this is an area for me to be an apprentice to a wiser bee keeper at first. I was so delighted with this development that I nearly skipped all the way home. I will have to give an update after our scheduled meeting tomorrow!

We are delighted to have been given another cookbook by a Seven Oaks fan! This one,  The New Midwestern Table by Amy Thielen, is hot off the presses and features recipes from the heartland. The author hales from the ‘upper’ Midwest, near the mouth waters of the Mississippi in Minnesota.

She has cooked her way from there thru the best restaurants in NYC and back and has produced a glorious book with recipes from her cooking heritage. Most all of the recipes include some history and stories of her connection to those foods. Although there are many tempting recipes to try, (200 in all) we recently tried one due to having the ingredients near at hand.

She plainly calls this: Turnips with Their Greens and Bacon. Well, what can go wrong as long as there is bacon in the mix? My attraction to this recipe was that it used the turnip greens as well as the root. Viola, turnips with their greens!

As instructed, I cooked the chopped bacon slices in a pan until crisp and the fat is rendered. Then discarded most of the bacon fat and kept only 1 TBSP. She says to add butter and sautee the one inch diced turnip root in the fats. This I did, but next time will not add the extra butter. I also did not peel my turnips since they have very thin skins, unlike the ones you get in the supermarket.

So I added the S&P to the pan and cooked the turnips covered as described for approximately 15 minutes on low heat.

I then added the turnip greens, (minus any thick stalks) and then the bacon and cooked until it was all glazed and the greens were wilted.

She added a bit of maple syrup to the mix but I did not do this since my turnips were not bitter and I do not like sweets in my veggies. We loved this dish, but how can you go wrong with bacon?

I served this with a turkey breast I had in the oven as well as our home grown Yukon Gold potatoes (along with more turnips) that I had roasting in the oven while the rest of this was cooking.

In other news, the deer are on the move this time of year. Ugh! We saw a large buck in the front of the property this afternoon and I raced out but did not get any pics since he trotted away quickly. We then saw another one in the neighbor’s yard a bit later in the day. Then Dave came in and told me that our Deer Fence had been compromised in back at a critical junction….a corner. So it involved quite a bit of work to get that back up and functional. We are not aware of any damage to our trees but can definitely see the tracks all around. While taking a ride about in the golf cart, we also saw a red fox scurry off to the north of the property so it seems this is a very active time for critters.

Even though we had a drizzly week last week, we did not get that much total rain. I think our gauge totals were less than an inch for all of the days it rained, even tho we had quite the down pour with hail and high winds last Sunday.

Today’s high was in the low 30s and we got a lot of  work done but are chilled to the bone even with hats, gloves and heavy sweaters and coats. Dave resumed working on the last scab of overgrowth at the rear of the property that is at the base of one of our large oaks. It beat him this time last year with poison ivy and sore muscles but he is determined to win the battle this year and we will keep you posted on the final outcome. When Dave wasn’t working on eliminating the scab, he helped Jon who arrived with the stump grinder early this morning.

Jon went to work to on grinding the stumps out. 

He made enough progress on the grinding and digging, that he was able to make two trips to the nursery and picked up 4 trees in each haul.

They were so heavy and the root balls so large that he and Dave had a mighty fight to get them off the trailer. Jon said that one cubic yard of dirt weighs approximately 2,000 lbs. With the size of these root balls, Jon estimates each tree weighs at least 1,000 lbs! So Jon and Dave used every method available to them to manipulate them off of the trailer, into the ball cart and into place.

Here is what the first ones look like perched in their holes. They will be adjusted for position and actually planted when Jon returns tomorrow to continue wrestling with the rest of them!

The Limestone Saints won today! It was a hard fought battle with the score tied (3-3) after double overtime and so it came down to a shoot off, resulting with a Limestone win over Lindenwood to clinch the championship!  We loved being part of the team’s success this weekend and are already looking forward to hosting them again next fall! (My cousin, the coach, is the gal on the far left.)

This was a fun break from the farm chores today but we have backs against the wall now since the weather predictions are pretty cruel for the next few days and we need to harvest the last of the fall produce and continue to tuck the fields in for the winter. Some are predicting ‘snow showers’ for Tuesday!

We had so much fun today! We hosted the Limestone College (South Carolina) women’s field hockey team at the farm for lunch. My second cousin, Lindsay Jackson, (her grandmother, was my dad’s sister, Peg) is the head coach of this team which she basically started from the ground up about five years ago. They are in town for the 2013 Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) Division II Field Hockey Invitational which is being held at Lindenwood University. Lindsay is an inspiring coach (what a spitfire personality) who has put this team on the map in recent years and has created a rising presence in the field hockey arena. They are currently ranked #9 in the national polls for Div. II collegiate field hockey and have their sights on making waves in the future. Watch out! We hope to get to see them win the championship tomorrow. http://golimestonesaints.com/schedule.aspx?path=fh&schedule=306

We had a drop dead, gorgeous, fall day for this event. The sun was shining brightly with a clear blue sky as the background for the autumn reds and yellows of the remaining tree leaves. Their bus arrived at noon and we were prepared for the team to dig into our lunch fare offerings.

We had three kinds of soup simmering on the stove, salads, sandwich fixings, fruits, snacks and cookies waiting for them. Thanks to Kathy Bussmann for loaning me extra soup ladles at the last minute!

The noontime temps were in the mid 60s which allowed the group to sit on the terrace and enjoy the day.

Farley, as usual, was a big hit with the group and managed to behave himself. Some of the team enjoyed driving the golf cart around and took a tour of the fields. When they picked a nice turnip and large carrot from the field, we promptly washed and sliced them for a raw mini tasting which was also a big hit. What a fun group to get to host!

Wouldn’t you know, this was the same day that our arborist, Jon, arrived to start cutting away the old and decaying river birches from the front islands. He, too, had a gorgeous day to work and made pretty good progress. Although it is sad to see these trees go, they were on their last legs and at various stages of dying.

The last three years of drought have not helped them either. Jon started on the south side and worked his way over to the north end of the tree islands. He has two more to take out and then will have to work on removing the stumps and the ground cover before planting the newly dug Trident Maples. We hope to see him back tomorrow and the next couple of weeks to work on this.

We are also expecting the installation of the new driveway gate and fencing this week. The weather is predicted to be quite cold so we may have to bring in the last of the fall harvest but we hope the tree and fence work will not be affected by the temps. In the meantime, Dave has continued to work on clearing the fields in anticipation of tilling them and putting them to bed for the winter. More on this progress soon.

Limestone field hockey was not the only family related team playing for the money this week. Our daughter, Kate, had a fabulous, season ending, championship win with her 8th grade girls volleyball team last week. They play for Saint Matthew’s Parish in Pacific Palisades, CA where she also teaches biology and earth science to eager minds. Yeah!

There has not been a lot of farming news to report. We continue to get plenty of fall veggies that have been resilient to the frosts we have had. We have been enjoying turnips, carrots, kale, swiss chard, spinach, bok choi and several lettuces. We are hoping to harvest broccoli and cabbage yet but they have not quite developed enough at this point. We have had some nice, light rain the last few days which has kept us from turning under the spent fields. We would like to do this sooner rather than later in order to put those fields to bed for the winter before it gets too wet to work the soil. In the meantime, Dave was able to clean up and remove the trellises for the cucumbers yesterday and put them away to re-use next year.

Although the driveway project is finished, we are now trying to make the repairs to the landscaping that was compromised in the construction process. We got some help from our arborist, Jon Lanaghan, who is helping to prepare the future beds next to the terrace walls. We will plant beautiful crepe myrtles in these next spring.

My sister, Julia who lives in Colorado, serves as the unofficial but steadfast family historian and has a passion for our ancestry. I am always impressed with what she comes up with but I was really excited to see this photo which she shared with us recently. It is of my great-great-grandfather (on my father’s side), Carl Bertz who was born in Darmstadt Germany in 1832 and after emigrating to America, he was, among other things,  a vegetable vendor in Illinois. This photo shows him with a cart full of produce! What an interesting connection I feel with him!

I should also mention that on the Sauerhoff side, Dave’s grandfather, John Emerson Sauerhoff, Sr., sold the basketry that fruits and vegetables were packed in. He had a territory and traveled the Eastern Shore of Maryland supplying these goods.

I would also like to recommend an interesting article we read in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine. Very interesting food for thought, hee, hee, hee! Here is the link, I hope you all will read it with as much interest as we did. If you cannot access the link (I’m still learning how to get this right in the blog-o-sphere) e-mail me and I will share it.

We have tried some new recipes lately. One nice one from the Hetenyis that uses 4 heads of baby bok choi! Perfect for us and tasty too. Here is the link which I found in the Willams Sonoma recipe collection.  http://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/wok-seared-baby-bok-choy-with-chili-oil-and-garlic.html?cm_src=RECIPESEARCH

The other recipe that I tried yesterday was also found in last weekend’s NYTimes magazine. It was a Korean short rib stew that used some unusual ingredients. I had never cooked with jarred chestnuts nor Taro before. I had fun making this and it was tasty although beef short ribs are not exactly a low fat ingredient. It made enough to last for some time and I can see using the basis of this recipe along with some variation of the ingredients in the future.

Lastly, while Dave was in Connecticut last weekend, I had some time to knit. This is a sweater I started some time ago and thought I would quickly finish it up before I get going on the newest one. It is hard to take a good picture while modeling the item. This is an example of a Fair Isle style of ‘jumper’ that is knitted from the bottom up in one round tube and then the armholes and neck line are cut open and then sleeves and collar are all picked up stitches from those edges and knitted in the opposite direction. Oh what a lot of work is involved in this one where there are 15 colors of yarn with one of those colors changing just about every row. One sleeve is nearly completed. I will look forward to modeling the completed sweater!