It’s amazing how quick a puppy learns.  Just three weeks ago, our new lab puppy, Spencer, was just a little panting baby.  Now he’s almost house trained, knows all about how to do chores, and even has learned how to bark at deer.  (They don’t pay much attention to them yet.  I think I saw one big doe smirk at him.)

I had put off getting a new puppy because of all the puppy work.  We keep our ranch dog in the house so he learns the ropes.  In time, they learn a whole lot of words, which really helps in the future.  They learn manners and basic commands.  At twelve weeks, Spencer knows how to come, sit and what “NO!” means.  He also knows “get down” and “get your toy”.  He’s also jumping at the door when he needs to go potty.  Usually.

Yeah.  He makes potty mistakes.  And he chews up our shoes, tissues, the toilet paper and almost got my checkbook.  But I knew he’d do that before we got him.  All puppies do.  But we do have dog crates, and brought one into the new greenhouse for Spencer’s “house”.  We keep him out with us most of the time, but when we need to be outside and can’t have him with us, like when we’re operating vehicles in the yard, Spencer’s given a dog biscuit and put into his house.  At first he howled, barked and whined something awful.  But after awhile, with nobody paying attention to him, he finally quit.  Now he’s gotten used to it.  He spends the night in it, then is let out early in the morning to go potty outside.  The crate remains clean and he’s learned to go outside.  It’s a huge help in training a pup.

He tried pullng the tail feathers on one of our turkeys, but I yelled “No!” and threw a feed can down by him and he stopped.  Now he would like to, but doesn’t try.  We don’t want him to get used to harrassing the poultry.  When he gets bigger, he could do some serious damage or even kill chickens.  It’s easier to train him now.

Although he’s still small, he’s growing by leaps and bounds.  He still likes to sit on our laps, but no he takes a lot more space than he did three weeks ago.  David is his special love because he takes time to play with him every day and Spencer really gets into that.  But when he gets tired, he lets David pick him up and lay him on his back on his lap.  It’s great to be a puppy!

Readers’ Questions:

Pickles!

I’d like to comment on an answer you gave to Bernard Falkowski in the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of the magazine. Brined pickles do not need to have vinegar added to their fermentation process. In fact, those pickles he remembers that were fished out of a wooden barrel were salt brined. If vinegar is left out of the fermentation, the resulting pickle will be lacto-fermented, meaning that the brine will be full of those good lacto-Bacillus bacteria. One recipe that I use calls for 6 tablespoons of salt in a half gallon of water for the brining liquid. Use a crock that holds about one gallon total, or a gallon glass jar. Place in it a couple of grape or horseradish leaves if you have them. They keep the pickles crisp. Then add 3 or 4 dill flower heads, 2 or 3 garlic bulbs (that’s whole bulbs divided into cloves, not just 2 or 3 cloves,) and 4# of cucumbers, not too big but they don’t have to be very small either. Pour the brine over all this, weigh it down with a jar filled w! ith water or rocks, and cover with a clean towel. In the summer  these are ready to eat in one week. The downside is that they then  have to be refrigerated to keep for a longer time; I’ve kept mine as long as 6 months. You could also can them after they have  finished their fermentation, but they lose their pro-biotic  bacteria and some of their crispness.

Nancy Starr
West Fork, Arkansas

Yes, some pickles in a barrel were salt brined.  But many weren’t.  We had a small general store when we lived in New Mexico and Bob sold pickles in a barrel that were floating in a vinegar brine.  There are literally hundreds of dill pickle recipes and most of them are great.  Love those pickles!!!

Yes, alum is a mineral and also related to aluminum.  Just type “alum” in your browser and you can find out more than you really want to know about it!  I did and WOW!  (Couldn’t understand a lot of it, but oh well….)

The upshot is that using modern canning methods, you don’t need alum.  Or grape leaves.  I keep my pickles crisp by NOT boiling them.  They’re salad ingredients, after all and you just don’t cook them and expect them to stay crisp.  It also helps to pick fresh cukes and begin pickling them the very same mornin.  I always soak my cleaned cukes in ice water for at least half a day….often over night….before beginning to put them up.  They always stay nice and crisp.  Without alum. — Jackie

Feeding chickens

Thanks for taking the time to answer questions and share your knowledge with all us other homesteaders. I am hoping within the next year to get 5 or 6 chickens. I wanted to know how much corn it
would take to feed 5 or 6 egg laying hens for a year. They would be free range also. The reason I’m asking is to know if it is feasible to raise the corn ourselves. If yes how much space do you think we
will need to do so? Again thanks very much for sharing your know how.

Well, that depends; on what kind of chickens you buy (heavy hens eat more than light ones; light ones lay more eggs but can’t make much meat when the time comes), what else you feed them (you can’t feed laying hens just corn and get lots of eggs; the free range will help, but the need a mixed grain, such as scratch feed to make sure they have adequate protein) and how much space you have available to raise corn (a city lot or a corn field).  I buy my dozen hens, four big turkeys and two ducks 100 pounds of feed twice a month in the winter and once a month in the summer when they are on free range.  My hens are araucanas and mixed banties, so they are smaller hens and are very active.

ANY feed you raise yourself is a great help.  I raise plenty of “livestock” feed in my garden; weeds, spent crops, bad tomatoes, extra squash, carrot tops, corn cobs and a whole lot more.  If you have enough land to raise corn, by all means, do it, even if you don’t raise ALL your chicken feed.  In figuring how much corn you can raise on X number of square feet or acres is impossible, as it depends on what kind of corn you raise, what kind of soil you have and your farming practices.  Each corn stalk will usually produce two good ears under decent growing conditions.  This would feed your 5 “average” hens for one day, provided you also had other feed (free range or wheat/oats/barley) mixed in.

Give it a try and you’ll be pleasantly surprised.  Remember your chickens will also eat your kitchen leftovers, too, further cutting down the feed bill. — Jackie

The last two days, I’ve been going through my garden seeds.  Now to most people, this isn’t much of a problem…maybe a jar or small box full of seed packages from last year.  But for me, a confirmed seed-aholic, it’s actually WORK.  You see, I have over two large sized plastic storage totes plumb full of smaller boxes of seeds in packages, bags, pill containers and jars.  And there are several years’ worth here, too.  Many are old, old time traditional seeds, given to me by folks here and there all across the country who know about my love of seeds.  For instance, I have a bag of perhaps half a pound of large white runner bean seeds from a man in Capulin, New Mexico who found a small pottery container of these seeds in an ancient Indian ruin on his ranch.

He gave some of the seeds to the University, where they were carbon dated back 1,500 years!!!  And, more amazing, he also planted some of them and they grew.  And he’s been growing them for many years now.  My bag of seeds came from those ancestors!  Now isn’t that cool???

Throughout all our moving, my seeds kind of got mixed up, melons with beans, squash with Swiss chard packages.  Last year I sorted them all out and put them in individual boxes.  This year, I’m inventorying them so that I know exactly what I have in my collection, what I need to grow out to have viable seed for the future and what areas my collection is a little weak.  I had to laugh.  Last year when I went to plant my Dragon’s Tongue beans, I could only find one small pack, so I planted those and ordered a half pound this spring.  (I could have sworn I had a big package of them somewhere……)

Well, today I found them.  Two half pound bags, full!  They were in the Pea Box!!!  Tomorrow I’ll have it done.  Whew!  Imagine!  I’ll know exactly what I have in those blue tubs!  I’ve been writing down all the varities in a yellow legal tablet.  Pages and pages worth.  And I’ve also been making notes in seed catalogs of varieties I need to increase.  I didn’t even notice that it started snowing.

Readers’ Questions:

Difference between pressure canner and pressure cooker

Wow this is so great! Being able to ask you a question right here from the Backwoods Home website! Here goes… I’ve been looking at pressure canning, not ready to do any canning yet, no garden yet. My question is, what difference is there, if any, between a PRESSURE COOKER and a PRESSURE CANNER?

Rick Dobert
Rochester, New Hampshire
Lifetime Subscriber! yea!

A pressure cooker is a smaller version of a pressure canner, meant to COOK food in small amounts.  It does not work well as a canner.  First you are limited severely on how much food you can process at a time.  Then there is less room for steam to move about, making the temperature a little questionable on the inside of the middle of the jars.  Because of those reasons, buy a pressure CANNER if you want to begin canning food.  Even though a pressure cooker is cheaper, you won’t get much use out of one. — Jackie

Bleeding out an animal

Can you “bleed out” an animal by slitting it’s throat just as effectively after it has been shot, or does it have to be alive when you do it?

Lisa Light-Abrego
Peck, Michigan

You’re both right in my opinion.  I couldn’t cut a live animal’s throat, although many people do just that, in order to get more thorough bleeding out.  Generally, most people first shoot the animal, then quickly cut the throat.  If this is done quickly, the animal will bleed out enough before it is dead, dead.

What about when you hunt and shoot a deer?  You usually don’t slit the throat on a live deer.  Right?  And the meat is just fine. — Jackie

Canned pickled egg recipes

My mom was wanting to know if you have any good canned pickled egg recipies. All she can find are refrigerated pickled eggs.

Ashley Ritchie
Roseburg, Oregon

Here’s a recipe for your mom: Sterilize quart jars…you’ll need about one jar per dozen medium eggs.  Pack hard boiled, peeled eggs into jar to within an inch of the top.  Add 1 sprig dill, 1 chopped garlic clove,and 1 crushed, dried red pepper if you want spicy eggs.  For every jar of eggs, pour 3 c. white vinegar and 3 Tbsp sugar into a pan and bring to a boil.  Simmer 5 minutes.  Pour over eggs in jar, to within 1/2″ of the top.  Process in a water bath canner for 20 minutes.

Enjoy! — Jackie

Making cat food

Love your columns!! Do you have any experience with making cat food? Have an active kitten, and he almost died from “tainted” top-quality cat food; I want to avoid that in the future. Would appreciate any help.

Gay Cornell
Meridian, Idaho

I would really not want to make cat food; getting the proper nutrition is harder than you might think.  The tainted pet food makes me really, really nervous, as it is only the possible tip of the iceberg.  For instance, how easy would it be for tainted gluten or other products to get into human food?????  Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of choice here; questionable nutrition or possible tainted food.  But as the focus has been strong on pet food safety, I’d gamble on it….at least for awhile.  You can certainly give your kitten some home cooked food, such as chicken, giblets, liver, beef and fish for a portion of its diet.

If you are strongly in favor of making your own cat food, check online.  There are many sites for homemade cat food and you will gather some ideas there.  Be sure that the nutrition is well balanced and your information is from a reputable site. — Jackie

More on my post from January 3 about canning

Jackie, please can you elaborate on this? (Jan. 3 post regarding canning). I’m having a problem with pressure canning broth. I let the canner cool until there is no pressure on the gauge, as instructed, but my problem is that after I remove the canner lid the jars will go from still to explosively boiling, such that hot broth spills out under the lids.

Julia

Broth sometimes does this because it is pretty much totally liquid.  To stop it, first be sure not to fill the jars too full.  Then, when the time is up, watch your canner that it doesn’t go BELOW zero.  They sometimes do that when cooling and it will cause furious boiling when you take the jars out.

No, don’t save the fat!  The reason you don’t leave fat on foods is that while the jar exhaust, some fat can blow out of the jar and onto the rim, preventing a seal.  It’s not a fat-phobia but a real problem.  I don’t remove ALL the fat on my broth; it gives flavor.  BUT scoop off a lot of it because the more you leave, the better chance that one or more jars won’t seal.

The reason you take the jars out of the canner as soon as it returns to zero is so that they go from a very hot environment to a room temperature.  This change helps them seal.  Don’t leave them in till they cool.  I did this once only.  With a whole canner full of corn….and I have a huge canner; 9 quarts and 18 pints, double decked.  It was late and I figured oh, what the heck and did it.  They seemed to seal. I put them in the pantry and two weeks later I checked them and phew!  all of them stunk because every single seal had failed!!!! — Jackie