We be jammin!

With all of our seasonal bounty of produce from our garden, I've been making jams like a mad woman in the kitchen.  I've been experimenting with different recipes to use up whatever excess produce we've have on hand from turning into compost waste.  After several weeks of jamming, we had enough jam varieties for our first sales event. 

Cautious, but optimistic, I set up a table in a tent in my friend's backyard in Warrensburg for the "World's Largest Garage Sale".  This is an annual town-wide event where the town is inundated with tourists, antique dealers, vendors, junk collectors, and hoarders all looking to either sell or score their unique items.  Granted, it was downright miserable weather for a garage sale.  It was cold and rainy the whole weekend.  Straight from Friday through Sunday, it was socked right in.  I was wearing thermals and plenty of layers to stay warm!  Given the poor weather, the event wasn't as well attended as years past. 

We offered free tastings to see what folks liked or didn't like, to obtain general feed back.  I was most impressed with the warm reception of the volunteer tasters with their honesty, kindness, and helpful suggestions.  For instance, this year was the year of the cucumber.  Not sure why, but we've been overrun with them.  Burnt on pickling, I found a cucumber lime jam recipe to try.  I have to say, it's a highly unique taste.  My husband Bob loves it because it's not so sweet, it has more of a tangy limey bite to it instead.  Some of the friendly taste testers offered suggestions to serve it with Caronas (fab idea!) or with tortilla chips (another fab idea!).  I personally was ready to scrap it all together, but after receiving the helpful feedback, I'm going to assume that it just takes someone with a discerning palate to enjoy. 

 More surprisingly, the best selling flavors at the event were the Garlic and Onion Jam, followed by  the Cantaloupe Jam, and then the Bluebarb Jam!  Who knew!  I would have guessed the Raspberry or Blueberry Jams would have been the winners.  Needless to say, I am so grateful to my friends and the generous taste testers and buyers who made A & B Farm's first sales event a huge success!  I am so happy with the results, that I'm going to get jammin and crank out some more and new recipes to gear up for another event in the next few weeks! 

Renovating Old Barns

Old barns are awesome.  There's no other way to describe them.  They are purely functional outbuildings built for agricultural purposes, usually either for livestock, machinery or feed storage.  Touring them, you can almost walk back in history to catch a glimpse of a mostly bygone era.  Most barns aren't pretty, as there are no frills or decoration applied.  It's all about function.  One can view the lofts, livestock pens, and building components to decipher their use.  Unfortunately, barns are often neglected, especially with the advent of industrialization, abandoning the fields in pursuit of a factory or office job.  In turn, some of the old barns were converted into garages or work shops, or quite frequently, junk storage.          

We have four old dilipated barns on our property.....

....and Bob has decided to fix up the one in the worst condition first.  It was a rabbit hutch and chicken coop, or at least that's what we can determine.  It's the oldest, with peg and beam construction.  It's also the smallest one, so you think it'd be easy, right?  Hardly!  Restoring an old barn doesn't seem worth it.  There's so much hard work involved, it'd be much cheaper and easier to just tear them down and build anew.  The wood siding was shot and the foundation, what little foundation there was, needed a complete overhaul.  Literally the front of the barn sunk into the earth as it rotted away from years of harsh Adirondack weather beatings.  Even the front door was immobile because it was embedded in the ground.

There's something to be said for restoring an old barn.  Our society has become such a disposable society, and old barns are more of a rare novelty these days, with "exposed" barn beams all the rage in houses today.  To imagine that people are buying barns for the sole purpose of tearing them down to recycle them into decorative beams, picture frames and you name it, is beyond me.  An old barn, even if it is not on a historic registry, simply can never be replaced.  They are a direct connection to our past and should be preserved for future generations.  And who knows, pehaps someday be used as their original intention. 

Ha!  I say that now, but it's truly daunting how much work needs to be done before we can use this barn as a small livestock barn.  Bob jacked up the barn, dug footers, and got it plumb and square, reframed portions of the beams that were rotted away, installed sill plates, and reframed as necessary.  There were never any eaves on the barn, so Bob extended the roofline and build eaves.  Then there were two sets of siding on the barn.  Beneath the novelty siding, was an older unstained board and batten siding. 

We decided to keep the board and batten underneath and reside over it with tongue and groove siding Bob found at a really good price from a local saw mill. 

 Then we decided to paint it instead of stain. Bob installed the trim before we painted.  We soon realized it would have been much easier to paint the trim and paint the barn, then install the painted trim on top of the painted barn, instead of trying to cut in every trim board.  Lesson learned! 

Next up, we need to paint and install the windows and doors, and then regrade and finish the foundation.  Also we need to determine whether we want to keep the dirt floor or pour a concrete floor.  This is only the small barn!  We have three more to go and this barn has taken us over a year to get this far....  Ahh, but we wouldn't trade a minute of it!  It's satisfying to look at your work, and know that now this barn will hopefully stand for another 100 years. 

Introduction

Welcome to the blog of A and B Farm.  We're excited to share with you our trials and tribulations (and hopefully successes) in pursuing our dream.  Our dream of starting a farm.  My husband, Bob, and I bought an old farmhouse two years ago in the southern Adirondacks.  The farm was not a working farm when we bought it.  The house needed alot of work and the barns (while still standing) were dilapidated and dysfunctional, to say the least.  While working full time, we plan to restore the buildings and land to its previous glory of a working Adirondack farm.   

In the past two years, we've been busy tackling projects.  We painted the house, and replaced the old leaking roof.  Back in the day, the pole that carried the power out to the barns fell down, so there was no power in the barns when we moved in.  Since then, Bob has trenched power out and installed a breaker box in the first barn closest to the house.  We installed a garden, and fenced it in to keep the deer and our gubby dogs out.  

We did almost all of this before and in preparation of our backyard wedding last September.  Because we didn't have a house warming party when we moved in, we were delighted to be able to share our farmstead with family and friends on our wedding day.  A peek of our wedding pics

We hope to continue our project list and get some barnyard critters soon, to be profiled in future posts.  Stay tuned!