Mother Earth News Fair

Goodness time flies between blogs!

I was fortunate to attend the Mother Earth News Fair at Seven Springs Resort down near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania this past weekend.

Wow!  What an incredible event!  My brain is absolutely stocked full of information and I feel as if I got my "farming mojo" back.  I think I was getting the seven year itch and getting a little worn by the rounds of chores, successes, and defeats.  But now I'm excited to get back into it again!

Below, I've made a copy of the schedule of workshops for Friday.  Which, on Friday, began at 1:00 p.m. and ended at 6:30 p.m.  Saturday and Sunday's schedules began at 10:00 a.m. and ran until 6:30 p.m.!  

This doesn't even begin to count the couple of hundred vendors loaded with more information and interesting products (I bought two mushroom logs!  You'll hear more about them later) and the off-stage demonstrations (for example, a demonstration on how to castrate a pig)

Friday

Stage Name	1:00-2:00 p.m.	2:30-3:30 p.m.	4:00-5:00 p.m.	5:30-6:30 p.m.
MOTHER EARTH NEWS Stage	Extending the Season at Both Ends Eliot Coleman	A Tiny Home to Call Your Own: Living well in just-right houses Patricia Foreman	New Frontiers in Organic Gardening Barbara Pleasant	Understanding Your Renewable Energy Options Dan Chiras
Grit Stage	Whole Family Nutrition Maureen Diaz	Fruits in the Edible Landscape Michael Judd	The Nature of Power Erica and Ernie Wisner	From Skins to Leather: Home tanning Dennis Biswell
Heirloom Gardener Stage	The Road to Health Is Through Your Stomach Dawn Combs	Mushroom Cultivation for Everyone Tradd Cotter	Grow the Most Amazing Microgreens, Sprouts and Wheatgrass Janet McKee	Herbs for Hens Lisa Steele
Lehman's Modern Homesteading Stage	Common Sense Natural Beekeeping Kim Flottum	Modern Homestead Q and A The Wranglerstars	Simple Small-Scale Tools Eliot Coleman	Preserving Tomatoes Andrea Chesman
The Livestock Conservancy Stage	Hopping for Fun and Profit with Heritage Rabbits Jeannette Beranger	Raising Pigs on Green Pasture Dave Cronauer	Handy Cows: Multipurpose cattle for modern farmsteads Kendy Sawyer	Forage-Based Family-Scale Food Production Shawn and Beth Dougherty
Mother Earth Living Stage	Beauty of Essentials Oils Claire and Rusty Orner	Medicine Making Jennifer Carman	Herbs and Fermentation for Digestive Health Linda Conroy	Herbs for the Mouth: Everyday safe, effective and affordable oral care Leslie Alexander
Organic Gardening Stage	Square-Foot Gardening with Children Joanna Joseph	Guinea-Keeping for Organic Pest Control Cindy Gibson	Vegetable Gardening: Got flowers? Lisa Ziegler	The Herb Lover's Garden Sue Goetz
PASA Stage Presented by Yanmar	Garlic: How to grow, harvest, and preserve it properly Ron Stidmon	Farming with a Single Horse Leroy Keim	Keeping Backyard Bees David Avvisato	Sticking with It: Surviving the '7-year itch' Michael Kovach
Real Food Stage	Preserving Your Garden's Bounty Lorree Cummings	Join the Soda Revolution! Make Your Own Fermented Ginger Beer Rachel Armistead and Luke Flessner	Farmstead Chef: Organic eating on a dime Lisa Kivirist	Healthy Homestead Homebrews Dawn Story and Brian Neitzel
Sustainability Stage	The Woodstove/Off-Grid Lifestyle Roger Lehet	Simple Solar, Your Way Arden Steiner	Extending the Harvest: Creating a four season garden Ira Wallace	Backyard Composting Nancy Martin
Utne Stage	Infants and Toddlers: The mouths of babes Leslie Alexander	Bioshelters: Ecological greenhouse design and management Darrell Frey	Creating Your Own Farm Airbnb Matt Wilkinson	From Fast Food to Whole Food: How to simply and systematically transform your diet Andrea Merrill
Natural Building Demonstrations	Making Cob: How to build with mud Uncle Mud & Family	Cheap Sturdy Buildings from Straw, Clay, and Pallets Uncle Mud & Family	Open Mud: Spontaneous hands-on building demos Uncle Mud & Family	Building with Straw Bales Uncle Mud & Family
Kids' Treehouse Stage	Herbs for Kids Linda Conroy	Colorful Paper Chicken Friends Melissa Caughey	Garbage to Gardening Claire and Rusty Orner	Medicine Making with Kids Jennifer Carman

Here are a few photos.  I sure wish I'd taken more!  Next year I'll overwhelm you with photos, promise!

Pig Castration

Men photographing pig castration - note the very serious faces!

Picture of a slide from "Keeping Your Bees Alive" workshop.

Around the farm we're gearing down for winter.  

The meat chickens have been butchered.  I'll admit that although I can do it, I choose not to do it.  I happily take my live chickens to an Amish person and later in the day pick up coolers filled with processed birds.  

We're trying to get the fences put in for our pasture across the road.  But when the man came with the post pounder, he found that, after a summer of very little rain, the ground is far too dry.  It's like trying to pound posts into solid rock.  So we're waiting for some rain to soften the earth.  

Our horse, Willow, went away for a month of training at Rainy Day Farm.  She's an awesome horse and she and I need some fine tuning to work together.  

The pigs are being readied to go to the butcher at the end of October by being fed good field corn and apples.  

We're bringing in the garden harvest and putting up everything that we can.  Then I'll clean out the high tunnels and put the garden to bed.   

We're cutting wood as often as we can.  

I feel like the ant in the story of "Ant and the Grasshopper"!  

Seed: The Untold Story

This movie is at the top of my watch list:  

Seed:  The Untold Story

Mushy Eggs

Sorry, this isn't a recipe!  

When you buy eggs from the grocery store, you just don't get to see all the many different eggs that are laid.  Anything that is not symmetrical or the wrong size is culled out.  When you have chickens though, you'll get many different variations on egg shapes and sizes.  We've had little tiny eggs no larger than a grape and giant eggs that makes you wonder how the hen even managed to lay it!  We've had long skinny eggs that definitely don't fit the definition of "egg shaped" and very squat eggs.  Sometimes eggs will have a very rough pattern and sometimes they'll have a hunk of calcium stuck in/on the shell.     

And every once in awhile you get an egg that is laid without a shell!  The membrane that's inside an egg holds it together, but no shell.  Hence, mushy eggs.  

I handed this egg to the hubby last night and he was utterly repulsed by the texture.  

We don't eat them because I'm pretty sure the shell is the barrier between nasty bacteria and the inside of the egg and who knows what passed through that simple membrane?  

Pretty freaky, isn't it?