Danz your peacocks are beautiful. I too like to watch mother birds raising their young the natural way, and have found that left to to do it their own way, they are almost without exception excellent mothers. I currently have a bantam cochin raising two turkey poults for me. She overcame the language barrier and they now respond to her calls and she responds to their panicked cries when they don't know where she is. I let them out of their temp pen for the first time yesterday and she showed them quite a bit of the chicken yard over the course of the next 6 hours.
I spent many hours on Friday making pasta sauce. It really made me realize how much we take for granted being able to go to the store and buy a jar of pasta sauce for a couple bucks whenever we need it. I know the big companies make it in huge batches and its all automated so they don't spend the time on it that I did but still….producing one's own food at home takes a lot of time and commitment.
The recipe was simple enough: wash and quarter the tomatoes, cook, process in batches in the food processor to puree, then reduce until the sauce is thick. They also suggested pushing it through a sieve to remove seeds and skin. DH said if I pureed enough he didn't mind the skin and seeds staying in, so suggested I skip that step and I'm glad I did because it would have taken even longer and been even messier if I'd done that as well! As it was, it was a large enough batch that pureeing in batches took a long time and then reducing - divided into two pots to speed it up - took a long time as well. The end result was 8 pints of pasta sauce in the canner to set aside for winter, plus another pint and a half fresh that we will use this weekend. Phew.
I am glad we had enough this year to be able to do this though. It has been my plan for years but for various reasons I haven't been able to grow enough in past years to get to this point. Several years it was too hot for the tomatoes to ripen over the summer and when it finally cooled down in fall and they started to ripen, we had an early frost kill them. The year we moved I didn't get a garden in at all and last year when I finally started the garden, I produced only enough for us to eat them fresh - no surplus. I grew onions for the first time this year and even though I still have a few store-bought onions here, I decided to use my own fresh onions in the pasta sauce. I've never grown them before and was amazed at the difference between picked fresh and sat-on-the-shelf-for-awhile onions! They felt different when slicing and dicing and while sautéing, were so aromatic that even DH called out from another part of the house at how good they smelled. I also used a bunch of my own basil that I grew in the sauce. I sure hope it will be good!
The goats broke through their shared fence into the chicken yard again yesterday. Grrr. The sheep followed and by the time I discovered them, they'd eaten all the chicken food between them. I put the goats back in their pen (DH repaired their break) but let a couple of the sheep stay out and graze. With the rest of the flock still in the pasture, the ones out grazing won't go far, so for several hours they helped neaten up the back yard. My mower is out of commission entirely because DH took the punctured wheel off and it is jacked up waiting to be repaired. Hopefully today. In the meantime, I'm glad to have the sheep helping out with the mowing and fertilizing. I am so over having goats. The sheep are great - never test the fencing and just stay where I put them. The only time they get out is when the goats break through the fence.
