~Spring Mix, We are Lambing Again~

Posted on April 14, 2012 by Callens Honey Farm

Happy Easter!  The year sure went by quickly.  Life on the farm is busy especially since we started lambing.  Those who lambed earlier in the year, I think had it easier, considering how warm it was in March.  The weather can’t seem to make up its mind and it’s been cold and windy up on the hill where the ewes and lambs hang out.  Has anyone noticed how the weather forecasts never seem to be accurate?  If you have never read my post about lambing last year and would like to see what we are experiencing, here is the link for you.     Click on  https://callenshoneyfarm.wordpress.com/2011/04/09/lambing-takes-dedication/ 

 Bella has entered the lambing work force this year.   She has her hands full with the bottle lambs and she loves it!  Even though it means she has to get up early with the big girls!  We just had our 5th set of triplets.  The mother refused the one that I hear making so much noise in the basement.  I just went down and snapped a photo of Bella holding the lamb while Marisa is warming up the frozen colostrum that we saved.

The chicks are hatched out in the basement incubator and it was a delight to hear them cheeping early Easter morning.  Although, the thought crossed my mind that the kids must be crazy starting new layers considering how many eggs we are getting a day. Actually, it’s great that they can think that far ahead.  I believe we are up to 4 or 5 dozen eggs per day.  I’ve been using up eggs very creatively in just about any way that I can.  I’ve pushed the limit in my bread recipes, one batch having had 10 eggs in it.  Boy did they rise high!!  What’s for breakfast?  You dare ask?

Since I started writing this post the other day, I thought I would add, Caleb placed another set of eggs under his favorite clucker!  GOT EGGS?

I think we jumped the gun on our onion order this year.  At the time my married girls and I ordered our plants from Dixondale Farms, we were in the very warm weather pattern.  An email arrived stating that they are shipped so we will all be busy planting those very soon.  Last year they received frost and it never killed them, so we will see how that goes.  The plants this particular company sends are very good, hardy and wonderful.  We still have a large amount of onions stored and they are still crisp and fresh.  If you check out http://www.dixondalefarms.com/ web site, your time will be well spent as “they know onions”.  Prices are very good too.  The more you order the cheaper they get so it pays to order with a bunch of friends and relatives.

We have a new toy on the farm, a Yamaha 4-wheeler. Actually, it’s not very new but was a fair price for a sound piece of equipment.   I never thought I’d see the day, in fact when we arrived home with the unit, even Jessi was shocked.  It will come into good use though and won’t be only for farm fun.  We have used it already plenty to go out on our bee checking expeditions.  Below is the only photo I have so far and that was taken by the kids!

Caleb and I have also used the 4 wheeler to check out our fishing locations as well.  Which brings me to……….the canoe that Uncle Tuna (Charlie) Callens so generously gave to Caleb recently.  It had blown away in a nasty storm and had some major damage, holes or tears in its fiberglass frame.  I think it was left for dead somewhere in Charlies back yard, not escaping the eyes and dreams of a 12-year-old boy!  Well, Caleb has repaired the canoe and he and Peter tested it out last week and they found a couple of tiny holes that leaked a small amount of water.  Thank goodness for the younger folks around here or it would have been me out there in strong Minnesota winds testing out a canoe with no real paddles.  They used the same type we used in the red neck raft post I did last summer!  The canoe testing excursion went well considering the tiny holes and the lack of real paddles.  Today, we finally purchased a set of canoe paddles.  We’ll try the canoe out again as soon as the much-needed rain clears up!  Praise God for rain!

Most of our potatoes are planted in a new garden area.  We completed that project on Good Friday which is a family tradition here.  Even in poor weather we at least try to plant some, but this year we had a beautiful day.  There is a silo stave fence to complete and the other day I was surprised, to see the kids out there building fence while one sat on a log reading out loud a very good book to them to help make a boring job more exciting.  Now that is creative don’t you think?

The guys checked out one of our hops fields the other night and were pleased to find that we did not have a large winter kill this year.  So far so good!  The ones that were dead did not perish this winter, we think last Fall, but there were not that many.  Tomorrow the men are going to get more plants from Brau Brothers Brewery in Lucan, MN.  We will replace any of the dead hops and plant more in another field.  They will install some irrigation as soon as our order comes and they have some free time from their off farm jobs.  It’s always exciting to see new growth come from within Gods good earth.

Maggie is pretty happy to have Frenchy’s old job of feeding, watering and bedding Clayton’s horses that he has in here for training.  Not sure how long that will last but until his new arena and round pen are completed on his farm, we have the pleasure of having him training horses here for a while.   I sure do enjoy sitting on the rail watching him and while I love having him and the horses around, it will be nice to have all the stalls for our use eventually.   Caleb also has a job working for his big brother.  He’s glad to have the extra cash for his trapping and fishing supplies.  He also catches sheep for Luke which brings in a bit of spending money as well.  He’d fish all day and every day if he could!

 

I would like to ask any of you who might be reading this for a special favor.  I’ve got a very good friend who has been diagnosed with rare form of deadly cancer.  She is in great need of a miracle and could use your heartfelt prayers at this time.  Prayers are powerful and I believe in them and have seen how they work.  So if you would please join me and so many others who love this dear mother of 10, her name is Dixie.  Please add her to your prayer lists and ask others who would pray for her to do so.  Thank you, she’s one very special person!

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~Whole Wheat Bread, NO WHITE FLOUR!~

Posted on April 6, 2012 by Callens Honey Farm

Here is a very delicious entirely Whole Wheat bread recipe that I wanted to throw out there for all you bakers.  Kid tested and loved!!! I have had this recipe hanging inside my cupboard door for years.  It was given to me by my friend Gina M.  I used to mix this recipe in my Bosch Universal Mixer, recently deceased.  Both Francesca and I make this by hand though and found it very easy, so go ahead and give it a try.

The wheat is freshly ground within a day, hours and usually minutes before using, which  makes a huge difference in flavor.  I use the Prairie Gold Wheat Berries out of Wheat Montana.  Wal-Mart carries it around here……..but I buy mine from our local CLNF Co-op buying club.    The original recipe from Gina calls for 1 whole cup of honey but we don’t like our bread sweet so only put in 3/4 cup of the honey.  Let your taste decide but honey should not be replaced with any other sweetener in this recipe.  Also you must use butter.  If you make your own butter at home, you can use the buttermilk in this recipe in place of the milk and it does taste really delicious as well.

HONEY WHOLE WHEAT BREAD RECIPE

Whole Wheat Flour    (Mine used a 2# 2.5 oz. coffee can of wheat yesterday.  Approximately 12 cups, start with 10 and keep adding until the right consistency, even if you go over what I suggest.    This was a bit sticky on my hands as I kneaded and rolled it around, but don’t over do the flour or it will be dry.  Whole wheat breads always need to be handled differently than all white flour breads.)

1  1/2 cups of potato flakes

3/4  cup of honey (no less but up to 1 cup if you like)

4 eggs

2  1/2 Tablespoons Salt (maximum)

3 cups warm milk

1 cup melted butter

1/4  cup of yeast  (very level)

2  cups of warm water

Dissolve 1/4 cup yeast in 2 cups of warm water and set aside to proof.

In a large mixing bowl mix well the potato flakes, honey, eggs, salt, melted butter and warm milk.  If the yeast proofed out well, add the yeast/water to this mixture and mix it up.  Slowly keep adding and mixing the wheat flour.  Start with a bunch and watch until it looks like the right consistency to knead by hand.  Turn it out on the table and grease your hands with lard and add flour if needed.  I do not knead it very long. The dough is going to be a bit sticky but don’t worry it will rise nicely and actually dry out a bit.   If you have a Bosch mixer or some other brand, mix on #2 Speed for 6 to 10 min.   After the dough is mixed well, place in a bowl and let rise for at least 25 min or until it looks doubled in size, in a warm place with no drafts.

Grease your trays or bread pans and form into either bread loaves or buns.  I prefer buns.  Let them rise at least an hour, you judge……….then preheat the oven to 400 degrees and bake.  My buns take 15 min. until medium-brown color in my gas oven.  If you are going to bake this I assume you know how to judge your own oven:)  Pan loaves will take longer.  Just keep an eye and nose out.  This is well worth the effort.  This wheat bread is  soft and does not taste wheaty. 

If you want to try this recipe out and don’t want to purchase potato flakes, try your own mashed potatoes maybe starting with a cup and a half.  For your first several times, I would try the flakes, it’s up to you!

From the Wheat Montana Web site I quote:

“This, Hard White Spring Wheat, is the wheat that started a revolution in bread baking. Since we first started selling Prairie Gold® in 1988, thousands of home, specialty and commercial bakers have discovered the unique characteristics of this grain. Its naturally golden color makes 100% whole-wheat baked foods that are lighter and sweeter. It is excellent in all bread recipes, cookies, piecrusts and more”.

I started to write this post last week, (lambing keeps us out of here:) and since then we have become overwhelmed with eggs and so I have been working on a version of the Ciabatta Bread that uses at least 10 eggs!!  I just finished a batch today and it has already received raving reviews from my gang.  Technically it is not even Ciabatta but since I used that as my base, I still call it that.   I may post that eventually after I get it exactly the way I would like it.

Have a great Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter.  Hope some of you are able to get potatoes in today as is our tradition.  We already have planted a bunch of potaotes  a few weeks ago.  We’ve got until 3:00 p.m. at which time we have veneration of the cross at St. Leo.

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~Photos March 2012 and Happy 27th Anniversary~

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Callens Honey Farm

Today is Fred and my 27th Anniversary!

I can hardly believe how quickly the years have gone by.  Seems like only yesterday when my father walked me down the aisle at St. Mathews Catholic Church, lifted my veil, kissed my cheek and turned to Fred and said, “she’s all yours”.  I am very lucky to have such a wonderful husband and father of our children.  I can still remember our meeting and him asking me to marry him in less than 24 hours.  He was on a custom harvest crew and I was working at a US Forest Service station in Colorado.  A chance meeting, the right place at the right time.

Looking back now, we must have been nuts, but it was all in God’s plan for us.  The best thing I ever did was say yes to my farm guy.  I can only hope that he’s as happy with me as I am with him!  God bless all the great husband’s and fathers out there.

We have been busy this week.   It is raining and we are so happy to finally receive some much-needed moisture.  We’ve been really praying for this, and are thankful, but need a lot more!

The wool truck came to pick up all of the wool that Clayton and Luke have collected. We moved the bee hives around and dug two new potato fields among other things.   Hold your mouse over the photos to see what we are up to.  Photo’s are in no particular order!

Life is good by golly!  Have a wonderful weekend!

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~Busy As Bees~

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Callens Honey Farm

Hive inspection, placing pollen patty within.

The weather here in SW Minnesota has been pretty nice, considering it is only March.  It has been a blessing though, allowing us to get caught up on some much-needed work.  We checked over all the bee hives and were very pleased with what we found.  The bees are all doing quite well with good numbers of workers.  We saw no sign of disease and only found one  hive that had died out over the winter.  The hive itself has a very large store of honey so we can only guess at what happened; they were alive in February, but there were not very many bees within at that particular time.  At least they did not starve.

We spent a day painting hives white and I tried my best to free hand the numbers on the hives, not doing such a great job, I must admit.  The brush was flimsy, as good of an excuse as any!  The grease patties were still in the bee hives and we added pollen patties in each box to give the bees a good boost as they come into the Spring.  All the winter tar paper was removed and put into storage for next year.

There is plenty more painting that has to be completed soon.  I ordered more paint from Mann Lake, LTD today.  Plans are being made for bee locations.  We are hoping to rear our own queens this year and have not ordered any package bees or queens.  Not sure how that will all work out for us but it is definitely worth trying and if we fail, we plan on trying over and over until it works!  Fred and my twinnies came up with their own method which I won’t disclose yet, since I would not want to mislead anyone down a road yet unproven:)  Time will tell, so stay tuned.

In between all the bee activities we butchered a hog on Tuesday and turned the entire animal into a variety of sausage.  We made Sweet Italian bulk, Plain Italian bulk, Pepperoni bulk, Breakfast Sausage patties,  Pepperoni Links, Plain Italian patties and Sweet Italian patties.   Everyone was totally exhausted last night and some of us fell asleep during the rosary.  Pretty sad eh?  It’s the thought that counts though and there was much to be thankful for.  We all slept very well, even Fred, who was none to thrilled to have to go into his “real” job today, another sign of Spring!

Fred found time to put a used 1/2 horse motor on our honey extractor.  He removed it from an old fan he had saved as junk.  We had to buy a new $7 belt at Runnings.   It works pretty swell and we shall see how much easier this summer.

Looking forward to a very warm weekend.

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~Clayton Callens And Luke Dougherty, Sheep Shearing Team~

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Callens Honey Farm

One benefit of having a son and son-in-law that shear sheep is that they get our sheep done as soon as we need them.  And a wonderful job they did at that.  Clayton and Luke work together and travel around SW Minnesota and over to SE South Dakota shearing a good deal of sheep.   They do a nice neat job and the customers are pleased with their work.  They get to meet some really nice farm folks as they travel around working, always making it home at night.

This brother-in-law team did all of our sheep this past week after both having done two separate jobs that morning.  They had plenty of spunk to boot when they started ours and of course plenty of people watching.

Clayty warned us to watch the weather closely since it was supposed to snow and rain and the sheep needed to be dry.  We lucked out over night and the precipitation never started until early afternoon at which time everyone headed out to bring in the sheep to the barn where they stayed nice and dry.

Mario was in charge of the  wool packer machine and was sure proud of that job.  He flipped the switch on command quite well.   Caleb and Peter caught sheep for the boys and the girls just looked on filling in empty gaps here and there.

Later some of us had to go prepare a hot meal which consisted of home-made biscuits and chili . ( Later that night, Luke commented that almost everywhere they shear, for those farmers who feed them, they serve either chili, hot dish or beef roast. )  Fred picked up the wool and stuffed it into the packer.  He separated any black wool from the white because the white wool brings a better price than the black, having much more crimp to it.

When the job was finished we had bagged up approximately 10 pounds of wool per sheep sheared.  There were 5 and 1/2 bags of wool, now safely stored in the quonset, ready for shipment back to Ohio.  Not sure when the semi-trailer will get here to pick up all the stored wool from this season that the guys store inside the building, but hopefully he won’t get stuck in all this snow and wet soil.

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~Isabella Angel Had A Birthday~

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Callens Honey Farm

Isabella Angel celebrated her 10th birthday.  What a sweet little girl she is.  Always cheerful, helpful and sweet.  I have upstairs in my treasure box little love notes from her to Fred and I which she leaves on our pillow several nights a week.  She’s a good aunt as well to her three nieces and one nephew.  We had a great time celebrating her day and she was so excited to receive her first real rose from brother Clayton.   Maggie baked her a really delicious crazy cake.

Marisa made a pail of Orange Sherbert ice cream and Silvana made a pail of Cookies and Cream!  Both were simply delicious, made with our own cream and eggs.  We kind of splurged since it was the day before Lent started!

 It was fun to have the entire family over for supper and we had a feast of pasta and creamy meatballs, home-made onion rings and donuts.  The foods don’t really go together normally but after all, it was the night before Lent! 

The grand babies had plenty of extra attention from the Aunt’s.

I’ve been pretty busy lately with school and cheesemaking so I have not had much time to blog.  Yesterday we had the sheep sheared by Luke and Clayton and I will try to update that with some of the photos I took of that procedure.  Hopefully very soon.  Everyone is happy to have finally received a real good snow which probably won’t last but we needed the moisture very badly.   In the mean time, I just had a request for Carbonaro for supper.

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~Building Bee Hives, Boxes Etc.~

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Callens Honey Farm

The colder winter days are useful for getting things done in doors.  Fred and Caleb have been busy building new bee boxes, nuc boxes, telescoping covers, inner covers and screened bottoms.  They used white pine and cedar as the wood source for these.  It takes a lot of time but in the end we will be able to increase our hive numbers slowly with not as much cash input.  

Fred and I have also been doing quite a lot of reading up on the bees this winter.  We enjoy reading books together stopping over sips of hot coffee to discuss what we are learning.  There is so much to learn and I doubt we’ll ever stop that learning process.

The twins found time last week to sand our dining room floor and put three coats of polyurethane on top.  It looks beautiful and I hope it lasts.  We are still working on the dust that seems to keep settling along with the dust of the basement wood stove:)  When I see the kids tackling a project like this, I am reminded of how lucky our children are to be homeschooled which allows the extra time to learn, hands on, what I never had the chance to do having been heavily involved in school.  Same for Caleb and Mario, who gets to work in “shop” under the direct supervision of dad.  What a blessing.  Once in a while they get to go over to brother Clayton’s farm and help with his building of a machine shed, again great opportunity for hands on learning.

Fred took time the other day to take Caleb ice fishing on the Yellow Medicine river and they came home with a bunch of fish.  Caleb was thrilled and so was I until it came time to package the smoked fish.  Yuck……they looked awful and I ended up feeding quite a few to the cats.

I’ve also been working on making my cheddar cheeses and so far so good.  Cheddar is so easy to make and it stores well. Fred helped Luke and Peter butcher a hog the other day as both of them were pretty much out of pork.  It was a young hog so it did not take much effort.  Yesterday they smoked the bacon on our front porch grill and I tell you, it smelled wonderful. They also melted down an entire barrel of wax and Peter made me some candles. 

Other than that, we are spending most of our time doing our studies.  I might mention, part of the studies include behind the wheel driving for my twins who turned 18 and now have their permits!  They get to drive often and I kind of miss being behind the wheel:)  We decided to make them wait on the permits because the classes at the high school are very expensive.

The grandchildren are growing and I love seeing them almost daily.  How lucky can I get? 

Posted in BEE NEWS AND UPDATES | Tagged | 4 Comments

~Life, Down Our Minnesota Dirt Road~

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Callens Honey Farm

 

  

  

  

 

 

Posted in LIVESTOCK | Tagged | 10 Comments