Just a nice fall day...

Not a real long post today. Just wanted to show a few pictures of the fuzzy ponies and the beautiful fall we're having. Here are "The Boys" Bailey and Little Bit standing by the gate watching me pick the mini's paddock. They are all such good supervisors!


Isn't Yak just the cutest, fuzziest thing ever?! He looks like a hereford/buffalo! I heard once that no matter what size the horse, they all have the same number of hair follicles. If you look at this guy, I'd believe it! I will admit, he IS too tubby, but I swear his winter hair grows straight out like a chia pet! He's such a good little guy too...so sweet and funny. He likes to challenge Bailey across the fence and Bail just looks at him like he's a tiny yappy dog. I guess horses don't know what size they are either!


Here are the four residents of our winter pasture behind our house. This picture is taken out of the sliding glass doors in our office/den. From front to back is Daisy, Lily, Bailey and Little Bit. I love being able to just look out my window and see them there. The downside is that the donkeys know where we live and come yell at us in the same spot if we're late letting them into their cozy stalls!


This is a picture of some of the delicata squash we grew. Last year we ate one of these wonderful squash and liked it so much we experimented by saving some of the seeds and they grew great, as this picture proves! Hopefully they'll last for a while in our unheated shop with our potatoes! We're having some company over for dinner tonight. The menu is: salmon (stuffed with lemons and rosemary) and zuchinni on the grill, and roasted potatoes (mix of reds and sweet and onions and rosemary!). YUM. I'll make an apple-something for dessert; I just haven't decided what yet.

Hope you're having a wonderful fall! It's my favorite season and we've had a particularly nice October with little rain for here in the Seattle area. While I like the rain, too, I'm not complaining about this nice stretch of dry weather!

A couple of 'firsts'!

Yesterday was a big annual event here at Red Pony Ranch. It was the day that the boys moved home from their leased pasture and everyone starting coming into the barn every night for the winter. It's funny, but the timing on this is decided pretty much by me AND the horses. They know the routine and stand at the gate when it's time to come home, rather than by where I give them their grain. Coming into the barn usually coincides with the start of our 'rainy season'. I like them to be able to come in at night and dry off, including their feet, and make sure they each get their hay, grain and vitamins. There is still probably a month or so of grazing in the pasture, so they don't get full hay yet, just enough to keep them busy overnight. Once the winter pasture is eaten down, then I'll start throwing hay out in the morning too.


Bailey loves his stall. I am very fortunate that he is a neat boy in his stall, and since he weighs as much as all the other horses/donkeys combined, his poop is a big portion of my cleaning effort! I weight-taped everyone today and while Bail is too big to hit the weight markers on the tape, he came up at 224 cm around his heart girth. I keep a chart of everyone's weight and make changes as needed.


Yak is almost too small to stick his head out over the door! He's got such a beautiful head, but all that hair makes him look like a little buffalo! Maddie is in the stall just next to him, but I don't think you can see her in the picture. Yak taped at 354 pounds which is way too heavy, so he'll be getting a reduction in his hay. Maddie came in at 318 which is perfect for her size.


Little Bit, also known as Fabio for all that hair and the way he swishes it around, is the least happy camper in the barn. He doesn't necessarily like being inside, and he's not really crazy about hay either. I like to bring him into winter being a little heavy because invariably he drops about 50 pounds over the winter. He's taping at 425 now so that's about right. He will eat some beet pulp and pick on hay, but is pretty much a grass pony. Two years ago I let him get too thin, so now I really keep a close watch and offer him different things to get him to eat until the grass starts growing again in late February and March.


The donkeys LOVE their stall and love being in. They do NOT like rain and when it's raining during the day they hide under one of the big cedar trees with pouty looks on their faces. I would be happy to leave them in more often if they weren't such PIGS in their stall. I hear that most donkeys are neat and go potty in one or two places (which they DO out in the field) but their stall is another matter. It takes me as long to clean their stall as it does the four others combined. Good thing they're so lovable and adorable!


The other first of the day was a little present from one of our new girls. This adorable little egg was the first egg from one of the three young australorp hens we got a few weeks ago. I put a regular sized egg and a school-boy apple in the picture for size comparison. Good girl!! I'm sure the other two are not far behind. Thanks, girls!

Food! I like to make it, I like to eat it!

First off, I truly apologize for not posting again sooner. Sometimes time just gets away from me and it's hard to believe more than a week has passed since my last blog. So please forgive and I promise to be more faithful. Now on to just about my favorite subject: FOOD!!

One of the neat things about living here is all the good stuff there is to eat. Below is a picture of some pies I made with apples from our trees. I forgot how much they cook down and these look a little skimpy to me! I'll make sure to mound them more next time. I have to confess, that while I make most things pretty well, I am NOT good at pie crust, but I am too cheap to buy pre-made crust. The best recipe I have I got from my sister-in-law Lisa but I still think I overwork it or something.


Of course we had to put ice cream on the apple pie. We prefer crumb topping (see previous comment about my poor crust making abilities!) and that crunch goes so nicely with the soft, warm apples and the cold vanilla ice cream. I'll put my two cents here in for Tillamook Vanilla Bean ice cream. It's the best, and pretty expensive in most stores, but my local WinCo has it for about $3.50 which is a miracle. One last thing...notice in the background the blue KitchenAid mixer? This is one of the very few kitchen things I would never want to live without (on this list is also my cast iron skillet and my good knives). I actually named it Julia, for Julia Child, and it gets quite a bit of use as I cook almost everything from scratch and I wouldn't want to be without it!


One thing I make often, both because we love it AND it's cheap, is chicken and dumpling soup. I try to get several meals out of a whole body chicken, so after I cut the good parts off for other things, I boil the carcass then take it out of the water and remove all the meat. You'd be surprised how much you actually get. When the carcass is out of the water, I add celery, onion, carrots, potatoes, some garlic powder, some parsley and of course salt and pepper. When everything is all cooked, I make home-made drop dumplings. YUM!! I have recently found a great recipe for home made egg noodles which are really good too, and while I like to use them in other kinds of soup, I stick with the dumplings for chicken soup. I guess it's a tradition.


Recently I was on the coast and picked up one of our favorite things that, in our opinion, is only best when absolutely fresh from the farmer, and that's OYSTERS. They are something we came to appreciate only recently, but we really love them. They are great left in the shell and put on the grill, then dipped in garlic butter, but in the cooler season we buy them already shucked and pan fry them. I make a mixture of 1/2 flour and 1/2 cornmeal, then season it with some Old Bay Seasoning and some other things then dredge the oysters, making sure to let them sit for at least an hour. This makes the breading stick during cooking. This is a trick the oysterman told us when we were first buying oysters in Oysterville, WA. This is a real place, I promise! So here's a picture of the cooking oysters and the ones that are done resting on the newspaper getting rid of some of the excess fat. We eat these with a squirt of lemon juice and dipped in coctail sauce. YUM!!


I know this picture doesn't have anything to do with this topic, but it just cracks me up. It totally captures Daisy's goofy personality. She is such a good girl and entertaining, too. She's got us laughing all the time. We're coming up on the time when we start bringing everyone into the barn each night, but not quite yet since it's still fairly warm and not raining...but she is certain we are neglecting her and lets us hear about it! Who is in charge here, anyway? Some days I really wonder.

Three new girls!

I wanted to introduce you to three new members of our Red Pony Ranch. Meet Nugget, Patty and Finger, three new Australorp hens. Actually, those names came from their previous owner, and while cute, will not be called that on this farm!


I saw an ad on freecycle.com (a great group to join, by the way) about three very young hens (who haven't even laid yet) who needed a new home. The family lived in Everett and intended to build a coop by winter but just didn't see themselves getting it done, so they offered them up. Well, I jumped right on this opportunity, as my hens are getting to be the age where they start slowing down with the laying. So these great new girls came to live with us. I was a little nervous about them fitting in and maybe that the old girls would pick on them, but they seem to be doing well and have even been out free ranging and gotten back to the coop safely.


Since these girls have no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever, they will henceforth be known collectively as 'the new girls'. They join two other australorps we already have and are a very welcome addition. Colonel Sanders, our rooster, seems particularly smitten with them. The old hens don't even give him the time of day, so he's hoping he can sweet talk the new babes into a little action! It's nice that someone else took the time to raise these hens up and now we get to benefit from their 'cackleberries' as my friend Kari calls them! They just need to get laying! I'll make sure to take a picture or two of their first attempts. Usually they're very small, but still tasty!

Cider Pressing!

Our neighborhood is full of people who have apple trees. We even have two that are very prolific, and it troubled us to see so many going to waste. So I put a posting up on a school bulletin board looking for a cider press to borrow. Our friends and neighbors, Carol and Kirby, responded that they had a press and wanted to make some cider too, so we agreed to get together on Saturday and smash some apples!


So the day before, Frank and I picked all the apples off of our one tree that was ripe already, and also picked apples at two of our neighbor's too (with their permission, of course!). You want a wide variety of apples for the best flavor, and we did a good job filling the van, that's for sure!


Once we got to the site, we dumped apples into a big copper tub and swirled them around to clean them. Then we grabbed each one, inspected it for bad bruises or worms and cut them out if needed. We made sure to get all the apples out of the water before we put more in, as Carol said we didn't want any 'waterloggers'! When we had a full bucket, Frank would take it over to the grinder and press.


The grinder was aptly named as that was the only job it did (other than maul Carol's dad's arm many years ago, but we didn't really want to hear about that!) and it did it well. Once ground up, the apples fell into kind of a bucket made out of slats of wood. This is where the apples would be pressed and the juice would come out.


You can see from this view that there are two receptacles for the crushed apples. When the back one was full, it was scooted forward into the position for pressing. While there was a motor on the grinder, the pressing was done with human power. As the apples were pressed, the juice ran out and into a bucket lined with a screen and cheesecloth.


Once all the juice was out, the press was opened and then the apple squishings were dumped out into the wheelbarrow to get dumped in the woods. Too bad we didn't have any cows or pigs to give them to!


Now the only part of the process I didn't get on film was the 2nd filtering and then getting the cider into the milk jugs. Carol was able to buy some from a local dairy, which was great as it saved us a ton of time and work finding and cleaning our own containers. We ended up with 38 gallons! After setting aside cider for people who gave us apples, we each were able to bring home 10 gallons to freeze (we left the containers looking less than full so they would have room to expand when they froze). It will be so nice to have this wonderful cider all fall and winter, some for cold drinking and some to put into the crock pot with a cinnamon stick or mulling spices!


Lastly, here's our happy but tired Frank after a long day moving apples around until we had sweet cider. The bins are finally empty, the farm van at least 500 pounds lighter, and not only did we bring home lots of cider, but also the satisfaction of doing a job using our own fruit and our own power (for the most part) just like our families have done for 100's of years. Big thanks to Carol and Kirby and Bonnie for including us in their family tradition.

My favorite nephew named Quinn!

Hi Quinn! I told you I would write about you!

To all my blog-reading friends, let me introduce you to my newphew, Quinn. He lives in Oregon about 5 hours drive away from us, which I think is too far as we can't spend that much time together. This guy is great! He's a good student, a good son, and a good athlete now too! Check out his recent birthday present:



Looks to me like they had to order a larger size just to fit that name!! (Boy was I glad to get rid of that thing when I got married!) Quinn is playing football now and wanted a jersey from his (and his Dad's and Uncle Frank's too) favorite team, the Oregon Beavers. I bet Quinn's not hard to spot at practice any more!

We love it when Quinn comes to visit us. He plays video games with us and always brings good movies to watch. And Aunt Jayne loves to make him piggies and whatever else he wants to eat. It doesn't hurt to get spoiled once in a while!

We love Quinn!!

Our Last Introduction....

Well, up to this point we thought we had introduced you to every living creature on Red Pony Ranch (except no picture of Jake the cat yet), but then we realized that the trough needed to be cleaned and we remembered the goldfish! So Frank and I bucketed out the trough until it was about three inches deep, then we went goldfish hunting.


Here's what we found! Actually, we stared with 6 feeder goldfish just about three years ago now, so I guess a 50% survival rate isn't too bad. It strikes me funny that in three years, though, they haven't made any little baby goldfish, unless of course they ate them. I asked Frank the mathematician what the odds were that all three goldfish were the same sex and he said 25%. He knows about this kind of stuff.


Of course we had the usual supervision of field activities, led by Daisy. Momma donkey was watching more warily from a short distance away. I was glad Daisy was content to play with the water out of the hose rather than go bobbing for goldfish in the bucket.


So once the goldfish were securely out of the trough, Frank scrubbed away. We didn't want to use bleach like we do in the barn and more temporary water receptacles for the goldfish's sake, so we went with just good old elbow grease and lots of rinsing.


Once the trough was about 1/3 full, I lowered their bucket in so they could swim out but they seemed to like it in there. So I figured they might like a little shelter, so Frank put a good rock in there and now they have a little fish-cave to play in. Hopefully Daisy doesn't fish it out!!