Then shall all the trees of the forest rejoice...

I know I may be prejudiced, but it is my firm belief that this is the prettiest Christmas tree I have ever had. It certainly was the easiest to bring home. It was growing in our vegetable garden area and this summer I knew it would be our Christmas tree. It certainly was a luxury to be able to harvest a tree from our own property. A few steps outside the back door, and half an our later the tree was set up and ready to be decorated. It couldn't possibly be easier.

Decorated simply with cookie stars, apples, candy canes, and grapevine, the tree was ready to celebrate the Lord's birth with us.

I have plans to plant more spruce and fir seedlings so we will always have a supply of Christmas trees in our own backyard.

Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice;

let the sea and what fills it resound;

let the fields be joyful and all that is in them.

Then shall all the trees of the forest rejoice,

before the Lord for he comes, for he comes to rule the earth,

He will rule the world with justice and the peoples with faithfulness. (Ps. 96)

The Christmas Season is just beginning...

Dandelion and Mikey--the haflingers who gave wagon rides at our Christmas party.

Growing up we followed the Catholic tradition of the Christmas Season beginning on Christmas Eve and ending on the Three Kings Day on January 6th. The Christmas Season was a very big deal in our houseful of children. It meant lots of good food, time off from working on the homestead, time to do fun projects, have people over and go visiting. Christmas wasn't at all about presents (with 12 children and no money, lots of presents simply aren't part of the picture!) We spend Christmas Eve decorating, then would kick off the Christmas season by acting out the birth of Jesus, then sitting around the Christmas tree lit with candles and singing Christmas carols.

I'm sure I will always feel that Christmas lasts until January 6th. This year for sure I am going to celebrate the Christmas Season in all its glory. We started it off with a Midnight Mass in our beautifully decorated little country Church.

Then it was home to scrub the house and cook and bake to get ready for a Christmas party for my husband's side of the family/Open House. This was my first party that I have hosted with more then a few guests (who weren't my own brothers and sisters!) and I will confess I was pretty nervous about it. But it went off well and the 50 or so friends and family who came all had fun. It was complete with a big bonfire and horse and wagon rides provided by a local farmer.

Now that the house is clean and decorated and the fridges are filled with lots of yummy left over food, I can sit back and relax and enjoy my pretty little house as we wait for a bunch of my siblings to descend on us later this week.

We finally have the upstairs set up with some furniture and the little guest bedroom has a new wood floor and fresh paint. Be on the look out for some new photos of our home in the next couple of days. I finally feel like I am mostly moved in and no longer living out boxes, even though there are still plenty of things to unpack and lots of work to do on the house.

Merry Christmas Season to all my blogger friends!

Favorite Hangout

Snow Frosting

Just enough snow to make things beautiful.

Snuggles

O Come Let us Adore Him...

Ice Storm

Snowdrift

I think we can safely say that winter has come to Michigan. We had two days of temperatures in the single digits, with fierce blowing winds and drifting snow. Today the sun is back out and the temp is in the 20's. So much nicer!

Frost

House and Hill

"No house should be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so the hill and and house could live together each happier for the other." So says Frank Lloyd Wright.

While not a Frank Lloyd Wright home by any stretch of the imagination, this quote does fit our little house very well. How the house and land go together, was one of the things that attracted me to this house and property. The house blends in with the nature that surrounds it.

A Nurse's Prayer

Watch , O Lord with those who wake, or watch, or weep tonight, and give your angels charge over those who sleep.
Tend your sick ones, O Lord Christ.
Rest your weary ones.
Bless your dying ones.
Pity they afflicted ones.
Soothe your suffering ones.
Shield your joyous ones.
And all for your love's sake. Amen.

(This is a prayer by St. Augustine, and is very much my prayer tonight for the patients I spent time with today).

Chicken update

It is amazing what a little time alone without being pecked on and without having anyone stealing all your food can do.


Our hurt little chicken has regained her strength, energy, and ability to scratch for food, as well as her pretty white feathers. I put her back in the coop despite her protests a few days ago. There is one chicken that is still a little mean to her, but that is wearing off and becoming less and less. I think it helps that I when I see it happening, I will remove the offender from the coop for a little while. Up until this chicken was injured, my little flock of California whites got along really well, as long as there were no new chickens added. These chickens have little tolerance for strangers in the coop or weaker chickens. Unfortunately that tends to be the nature of the a chicken. Wish there was a way to teach them to have a little compassion....

Rosehip Wreath

We have lots of wild roses on our land. The kind with the small single, heavenly smelling white flowers and long vines with vicious thorns that rip your clothes and tear your flesh. It is going to be a hard process getting rid of them. I spent a whole day attacking and tearing out the two overgrown bushes in the flower gardens, then rewarded myself by making a wreath out of the hips.

A Ribbon of Geese

A Morning in the Kitchen

Whole wheat zucchini almond muffins.

It is cold and grey outside, but in my kitchen it is warm and smells yummy. I try to spend at least half a day each weekend cooking so that when I come home from work, all I need to do is warm up dinner. Janet from Meatless Mama blog posted this spinach mushroom soup last week. I finally made it this morning from the last of the wild mushrooms and it is heavenly (you don't have to use wild mushrooms). I want to try her peanut broccoli pasta as well. I bought the broccoli, but can't find the peanut butter. I know I have a jar of peanut butter somewhere. I guess I will have to sift through some of the bins of food I haven't yet put away in order to find it. I'm one of those people who doesn't like broccoli, but this sounds good. And if I don't like, I'm sure my husband will as he loves both broccoli and peanut butter.

Then I tried a kale slaw for the first time. Any time I want a new kale recipe, I head over to Diane's blogs for ideas, one of which is dedicated specifically to extolling the virtues of kale. Again this was very good, and I am sure I will be making it again.

I like the way the kale stays crisp and doesn't get all mushy like cabbage slaw does.

I just pulled a batch of whole wheat Zuchinni muffins out of the oven and have a pot of spanish rice simmering on the stove. I actually do the majority of my cooking without recipes. The muffins and Spanish rice are made from recipes I looked up long ago and didn't save. I use recipes mostly to get new ideas or if I want to try something I haven't tried before.

I am so missing having fall greens growing in a garden and am kicking myself for not having made more of an effort to plant a fall garden. We moved here in time to get one in! I could be harvesting lettuce, endive, spinach, kale, radishes, broccoli, and lots of other greens right now. This is the first time in my life that I have had to consistently buy vegetables. I did get a handful of fresh vegetable from the tiny summer garden I planted, but mostly bought from the local roadside stands where I could see the garden that the vegetable were grown in. In fact the zucchini in the muffins came from one of those roadside stands. Now I am stuck with grocery store vegetables and even if they are labeled locally and organically grown, they still don't taste anything like vegetables that were just picked this morning from the garden. I am so spoiled, I know!

Next fall it will be different! I'm looking forward to spring and summer and getting the new garden plot planted.

Here are a few pictures of my garden last year in Ann Arbor, in the beginning of November.

We've been adopted!

This cat showed up one night and decided this was his new home whether we liked it or not. After a few weeks of trying to keep him out of Nemo's and Blackberry's food, we finally decided to give him his own dish in the little animal barn where he was spending the nights. I find it hard to believe he doesn't belong to someone, since he looks healthy and well fed. (He is free to go back to his former home, if he has one.)

He is friendly and sweet, and doesn't quite yet understand that no, he isn't allowed in the house.
He also has the biggest feet of any cat I have ever seen.
I think I am going to call him Mittens because it sure looks like he has a pair of them on his feet. So that gives us three cats, one for each barn. Nemo is in the long green barn. Backberry is in the big airplane hanger barn, and Mittens is in the little animal barn.

Fairy Factories

Can you picture wizened and sooty little elves working away inside these little smoke stack like mushrooms? I'm sure if you go quietly enough through the woods, you could hear their little hammers and see little puffs of smoke coming from the chimneys.

Smile!

A happy little farm that I passed on my way to see one of my patients today.

Barbed Wire

Barbed wire can be beautiful.

Foggy Morning

More Wild Mushrooms

Wild mushrooms drying on towel after being washed.
I picked eight quarts of Mouse Ear mushrooms today. I'm sure there is more out in the woods. We have lots more pines and oaks to look under and I only covered a small area. If I get home from work tomorrow before it is dark, I'll got and explore a little more. Mushroom soup and sourdough bread for dinner tonight. I think tomorrow it will be pasta with wild mushrooms. I'm going to need to look up some more wild mushroom recipes!

I'm happy to have added another mushroom to my small list of wild edible mushrooms that I can identify (in the past the only mushrooms I have dared to pick are the morels and puffballs). I'm even more happy that this one grows abundantly in our woods.

Mouse Ears

There is a portion of woods on our land that is red oaks and white pine. The forest floor is carpeted with a thick layer of decaying pine needles and oak leaves.
(The chickens love scratching in the soft pine needles.)

A friend of ours who is something of a mushroom expert, told me that this makes for an ideal growing environment for one of his favorite wild mushrooms. Today I was hauling rocks out of the woods to border a new flower bed when I unearthed a pale gray mushroom. With a bit of investigation I found many more like it under the pine needles.
As luck would have it, our friend was here working in the wood shop he is building in our of our barns. He confirmed that the mushroom was indeed the mushroom he had been referring to--Mouse Ears--or in more scientific terms, a member of the tricholoma family. They grow under the pine needles so in order to find and harvest them, you have to carefully rake away pine needles.
The caps are quite fragile and I quickly learned that needed to be very gentle as I sifted through the pine needles.

It didn't take long to harvest enough for a couple of meals.

(I did show my harvest to my friend prior to cooking them, to double confirm that yes, this is the mushroom he was talking about. Yes, he says he harvests these every fall, and just this week gathered a bunch from a woods near where he lives.)

Dinner was ribeye steak covered with mushrooms sauteed in butter with onion. And I also made a pot of wild mushrooms soup. It is so good and full of delicate wild mushroom flavor.

(Disclaimer: This post is for entertainment purposes only. The above photos and description is not meant to help anyone identify wild mushrooms. Check with a trusted resource prior to eating any mushroom that has been harvested in the wild.)

East and West

Our eastern tree line at dawn.

The western sky line at dusk.

My sick chicken and the little animal barn

As fun and entertaining as chickens are, they have no compassion and no mercy when it comes to their fellow chickens and can be downright mean to newcomers and those who are hurt and weak. Not that I am faulting them for it, that is just how chickens are, and as chicken owners we have to find ways to work with them and keep everyone from getting hurt.

One of my hens hurt her leg a few weeks ago and lost a lot of her strength and the ability to scratch for worms and dig in the dirt. It soon became evident the the other hens were picking on her, stealing her food, and chasing her away from the feeder. It got to the point where she would just cower in the corner or limp in the other direction if the other hens even came near. When she started loosing massive amounts of feathers, and was getting weaker, I realized that if I kept in her with the rest of the hens, she would never get the nutrition she needs to heal, and might even starve to death.

New feathers coming in!

So I fixed her up a cozy little spot in the animal barn to sleep at night and let her free range all by herself for several hours each day before letting the other four hens out of the chicken coop to make sure she gets some peace and quiet and the first choice of bugs and kitchen scraps. She perked up in a couple of days after being separated, new feathers are growing in, and her leg has healed enough for her to start doing some minor digging again. She is still terrified of the other hens and runs in the other direction when I let them out to free range.
The little barn. It doesn't look like much on the outside, but it is warm and cozy on the inside.

One of the stalls inside the barn with a warming light.

I thought she might try to roost in the coop at night, but no, she heads off to the little barn instead of going to the coop with the other chickens. And that is just fine with me.

Home Sweet Home

It is good to wake up in the morning and be HOME. I never felt at home during those 9 years I lived in town. When we closed on our new land back in July, it wasn't excitement I felt. It was a sense of deep peace and relief. I finally had a HOME. Not that the home we had in Ann Arbor wasn't nice place to live. We had a nice little house with a big beautiful kitchen and a half acre lot that I turned into flower and vegetable gardens. It was a place that a lot of people would have loved to live. And I did truly appreciate that we lived in a quiet place in town and had a big lot and was able to grow a big garden and raise my little flock of (illegal) hens. If you had to live in town, Ann Arbor was certainly the town to live in. But my heart was not at home there, and I knew it would never be home there. I felt crowded in and claustrophobic and as if I could barely breathe. My heart ached for space and sky, woods and stars. And hills. My heart is at home here, though I know a part of me will always be ache for the hills of upstate New York. But at least I have a few little hills on my 13 acres!

Wood smoke from the chimney on a chilly November morning.


The tree house woods.

The gate to the garden meadow.


My kitchen. This is going to get some major remodeling, hopefully sooner then later. The house has two kitchens. We are living downstairs (it is actually a walkout basement). The downstairs has the nicer bedroom and view, this tiny kitchen, and a tiny bathroom. It also has the woodstove, which was the detemining factor in which level we wanted to live in at least for this winter. (Well that and the fact that the bedroom was a lot nicer then the two bedrooms upstairs!). The kitchen upstairs is bigger and actually nicer, but is very dark and narrow and would be much harder to remodel because of the way the house is laid out. This one at least has a sense of coziness, and should be quite nice when we are done with it.

The pantry. I'm still working on getting it organized.


Because it is a bi-level, the house has some identity issues. This is really the front of the house, and if we were living in the upstairs this, this would be the front door.

But since we are living in the in the walk out basement, the back of the house is the front of the house for us. This can get really confusing when Terry and I are trying to talk to each other about the front yard and the back yard!

We still haven't given our little home and farm a name. I will probably have to live through all the seasons here before I come up with the right name, but I am open to suggestions!