Bells of the North Homestead

This morning our family finished breakfast, were engaged in cleaning up and putting things away.  I decided I'd really like a cup of cappuccino before I got moving on making some salsa with some reduced tomatoes from Fred Meyers yesterday.  Suddenly I heard a large bird, I mean really large hit the front window.  I exclaimed loudly "what the heck was that?" Of course my husband Edward just answered "huh? What?  I didn't hear anything"  So I went out to look.  Thank God I did.  Poor Pot Pie, our newest addition who is one of the few that DOES NOT have her wings clipped was hanging out in a pot of dirt at the window.  The poor girl was looking in with desperation, not realizing I was standing on the porch.  I shrieked "Pot Pie sweety, what are you doing here?"  At which point I grabbed her, began walking to the yard where the chickens and rabbits are when I then screeched with a chicken held to my chest "DOG!!!!" Oh no.  A dog was in...

Cornus canadensis. Cornus canadensis  is a slow-growing  herbaceous  sub shrub  growing 10–20 cm tall, generally forming a carpet-like mat. The above-ground shoots rise from slender creeping rhizomes that are placed 2.5–7.5 cm deep in the soil, and form  clonal  colonies under trees. The vertically produced above-ground stems are slender and unbranched. The leaves are oppositely arranged on the stem, but are clustered with six leaves that often seem to be in a whorl because the internodes are compressed. The leafy green leaves are produced near the terminal node and consist of two types: 2 larger and 4 smaller leaves. The smaller leaves develop from the axillary buds of the larger leaves. The shiny dark green leaves have 2 to 3 mm long petioles and leaf blades that are obovate. The blades have entire margins and are 3.5 to 4.8 cm long and 1.5 to 2.5 cm wide, with 2 or 3 veins and cuneate shaped bases and abruptly acuminate apexes. ...

We have been blessed on our property with a large amount of silver birch trees so this Spring time we intend to use some of them. Some will be used in making birch beer for my husband, which I'll write about later, and some will go into making birch syrup.  In the coming years I might make birch wine as well for use in cooking but for now I've got more than enough other projects to work on and I really do not want to bite off more than I can chew. We've actually had birch syrup before but it is most definitely an acquired taste.  It is not quite as sweet, and it is much darker than maple syrup is. Making birch syrup is much more labor intensive then maple syrup is.  Maple syrup typically takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup.  Birch on the other hand takes 100 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of birch syrup. This means we will be cooking down our sap for quite a while. Our first step, will be within the next month, to walk our property to assess whic...