We took another step in our cheesemaking adventure this weekend, as Maggie's Amish friend gave us another couple of gallons of fresh milk. So far we have made mozzarella and paneer, which are sort of free form, soft cheeses made by adding acid such as vinegar or citric acid to curdle the milk. We bought some starter culture, rennet, and a small cheese press to make a hard cheese that can be grated or sliced. We are starting with a simple farmhouse cheddar. This cheese does no

One of our goals this year is to raise chickens for meat. The chicks will be coming later this season as we first want to raise a new batch of laying hens. This gave me time to build a chicken tractor to house them. Our chicken tractor is modeled after one developed by small farm advocate Joel Saladin. The idea is that every day or two, the unit is moved to give the chickens fresh grass. Our version is a little heavy, but it only needs to move 10 feet at a time. The wood was

It has been a long season, and this weekend we pulled the plug on maple syrup. The weather has been a mix of either continuously warm or continuously cold days and nights, which is not conducive to sap flow or storing collected sap. I ended up boiling three times, and produced a little over 2-1/3 gallons of amber gold. I probably could have gone one more week, but the weather was going to once again be mostly warm days and nights, with only a couple of cold nights to stimulat

Even though we do not have a cow (or sheep, or goats), I have been reading up on cheesemaking lately as something to potentially try. This week while Maggie was taking one of her Amish friends shopping, she mentioned cheesemaking. Her friend's family has cows, and gave Maggie a couple of gallons of milk. This created a little stress, as we don't really have any cheesemaking supplies, and now had perishable milk. Maggie did have some rennet she bought for some past project, an