Welcome to My Farm

Funding for this series has been provided in part by Manna Pro.

As much as we count on them... They count on us all the more.

To nurture their lives... With the same commitment.

Manna Pro -- nurturing life.

And Meyer Hatchery.

Meyer Hatchery offers more than 160 breeds of poultry and carries a full line of feed, supplies, gifts, and decor.

With nearly four decades of experience, the Meyer family is committed to supporting our customers through their entire poultry journey.

Learn more at MeyerHatchery.com.

Finally winter in Maine.

when you live here in Maine, you really have to like the snow.

We don't see green grass from November to April and sometimes even longer, but at least we can always be assured of a white Christmas.

[ Geese honking ] It's the first winter for our new geese and also some of our ducks and chicks that hatched this past spring, but everybody's kind of taking it in stride.

They're not really too keen on walking on the snow until they realize that it's not going anywhere, and then by the end of the winter, they'll all be playing in it.

One thing I really do like to use in the winter is lemons.

They are just so bright and yellow and cirtusy, and they make everything seem fresh and the winter not seem quite so gloomy.

Today on the farm, I have some really delicious lemon recipes to share with you, some fun, practical DIY projects using lemons.

And it's the weekend after Thanksgiving.

It's become a tradition to go to a local Christmas-tree farm.

We pick out our tree.

We cut it down.

I hope we can do it today before the snow gets too heavy.

[ Chicken clucking ] I'm Lisa Steele, author, blogger, and fifth-generation chicken keeper.

I live in rural Maine with my husband, flock of chickens, ducks, and geese, Winston the corgi, and Linus the indoor/outdoor barn cat.

We moved to Maine for the peace and serenity.

We wanted a simpler life and to step back in time where there are still corner stores and your neighbors still know your name.

Welcome to my farm.

[ Chicken clucking ] Hi, guys.

Hi.

How are you?

I'm well.

How are you, Lisa?

Good.

Glad to see you again.

Yeah, it's good to have you back.

I'm excited to pick out my tree today.

You are new owners of this farm now.

We are.

We bought it two years ago and have kind of been learning on the job.

What kind of trees do you grow?

There are the different varieties?

There are a couple different varieties, but mainly we have the balsam fir... Okay.

...which is a native of the state of Maine, so they grow pretty nicely here.

We also have some Fraser firs occasionally throughout the plantation that have been planted over the years.

Our process starts in May, when we first replaced the trees that we'd taken off the previous season.

So if you come up in December and buy a tree, I have to replace that.

It's a kind of recyclable business.

I love that.

So a tree comes off, and a new tree goes into place.

And then we wait in January and February for the snow to start to melt off.

As soon as that happens, we're back in the fields, kind of prepping.

In about mid-July, when things start to harden up, that's when we come out here with shearing knives, and my guys hand-shear all of these.

They go to the tops to make sure that it's got that nice center run that you see that you can hang your angel or your star on every year, and then the prep start for getting ready for people to start coming to the farm.

So, like, this tree.

How old is this tree, roughly?

So, roughly, this is probably a seven-year-old tree.

Wow.

They call it a three-one tree, three years in its first seedbed, it's transplanted, which gives us a more vigorous root system, and then it's uprooted, brought to us, and we plant the roots back here.

And then, in about 6 to 10 years, that's normally when they're harvested, so this one's a 7-year-old tree.

Everybody comes, I think, for the free cider and doughnuts.

However, we do have wreath makers that have already started production for your Christmas wreathes, and we sell a couple thousand wreaths every year, and we have a crew that's been here for about 20 years, making the wreaths.

So all the wreathes are made by hand.

All the wreaths are handmade.

Now, we do have a machine that helps them with the spooling, but each wreath that you get from Piper Mountain is handmade.

Do you want to help me come find the perfect tree now?

I will certainly help you, and I will certainly help you cut one down, but I want you to pick it because everyone that comes out here, they have a different idea of what a Christmas tree should look like.

If you look around, it's like people.

Right.

Tall and skinny, short and a little chubbier, yeah.

Absolutely, absolutely.

So you're gonna see some different trees of all shapes and sizes, just like people, and so what you think is a perfect tree is what I'm gonna help you cut down today.

[ Chuckling ] Okay.

So, to me, the perfect tree, obviously, is really symmetrical.

I tend to like shorter and wider, so it's really wide on the bottom, and then the tallest one I can possibly find.

I see.

Okay.

This is a good one, though, right?

It is.

I like the shape.

Mm-hmm.

Got a little top to prune there so you can find it perfect for whatever ornament you're gonna put on top.

Right.

Timber.

Perfect.

I'm gonna grab right here in the middle... Okay.

...and I'm just gonna toss it back of the truck.

Okay.

[ Chuckles ] We are back from the tree farm, and we got home just in time because it started snowing, so it's the perfect afternoon to bake.

Today, I decided I'm going to make a pound cake.

Traditionally, pound cakes were made with a pound of flour, a pound of sugar, a pound of eggs, and a pound of butter, but I like to make what I call a half-pound cake, which fits into a regular loaf pan.

So I'm using 1/2 pound of each.

So, first, I'm going to add 2 sticks of butter to my stand mixer.

And I'm just gonna get those going.

Then I'm going to add a cup of regular granulated sugar, and I'm just gonna let that go until it's nice and light and fluffy.

So that looks good.

So now I'm going to mix in the eggs one at a time and beat the batter until each egg is incorporated pretty well.

And I'm just gonna scrape down the edges of the bowl to make sure it's all mixed in.

The yolks are so orange.

You can tell which chickens are out there eating all the bugs and weeds and good stuff in the lawn.

And I'm just gonna let that go until it's mixed really well and smooth and there are no lumps left.

And now I'll add some vanilla bean paste.

You can use vanilla extract in the same measurements.

I just like the vanilla bean paste.

It's sort of a thick liquid, and it has flex in it so it really looks like real vanilla bean, but it's a lot easier to work with and a lot more economical than vanilla beans.

I'll add about a teaspoon of that and just mix that all in.

Okay, now for my dry ingredients, I am going to whisk some cardamom into my flour.

I like to substitute cardamom in for cinnamon for recipes.

It's kind of similar.

It's a really warming spice, and it just has a little bit different flavor than cinnamon.

So if you have a recipe that calls for cinnamon, you can sub in cardamom no problem.

So we're just gonna add a teaspoon.

Then I'm going to add a little bit of salt.

Salt in baked goods really brings out the sweetness, so I'll just add about, you know, 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

Then I'm gonna whisk that up.

Then, once that's combined, I'm going to slowly incorporate it into my wet mixture.

Okay, that looks good, and now I'm going to fold in my cranberries.

I used frozen cranberries that I thawed and dried, and then I tossed them with a little bit of flour.

Whenever you're adding berries to a batter, you want to dust them in flour because it helps suspend them in that batter better and not all fall to the bottom.

So I have about a cup of cranberries here, and I'm just gonna fold them in really gently and try not to make the juices kind of run into the rest of the batter.

Now I have a loaf pan that I have buttered and floured, and I'm just going to pour the batter into it.

It's pretty thick batter.

Pound cake is a thick kind of dense batter.

Just kind of smooth that out.

Okay, that looks good, so I am going to pop this in the oven at 350 degrees for about an hour, and it's sort of light, golden-brown on top.

The pound cake is out of the oven, and it's almost finished cooling, so now I'm just going to make a really easy cream cheese frosting for it, and then I'm gonna drizzle some white chocolate on it and get it decorated with some cranberries and fresh rosemary sprigs, and it's gonna be so pretty and festive.

To get started, I'm going to add my butter and cream cheese to my stand mixer.

So that's nice and fluffy, and I'm going to add in my confectioners' sugar pretty slowly.

Make sure it mixes in really well.

Then I'm just gonna add in a little bit of vanilla bean paste.

Next, we'll put the loaf on a pretty plate, and I'll get it decorated.

Want it kind of swirly so it looks like snow.

Now I'm just going to put some of those fresh cranberries on top, give it a little bit of a festive color.

And I have some fresh rosemary sprigs for some greenery.

And then just a little dusting of powdered sugar, and this looks perfect.

It's gonna be a nice, sweet treat to enjoy after we finish decorating the tree this afternoon.

Perfect for a snowy winter day.

I've got all these beautiful lemons, and I can't wait to get started cooking with them.

First up, I'm going to make some lemon fritters that are gonna be a great, sweet ending to our meal.

I'm gonna make a lemon soup that also uses eggs.

I love the zest of citrus, any kind of citrus, but today it's all about lemons.

To get started, I have whisked my dry ingredients.

I've got some flour, corn starch, salt, and baking powder.

Then I'm gonna get working on the wet ingredients.

I have sugar in my bowl, and into that I'm gonna crack four eggs.

I'm just give these a little bit of a whisk.

I'm so glad we got new chicks this past spring because they're the only ones laying right now.

So I had eggs for holiday baking, and now I got all sorts of eggs to use through the winter.

So that looks good.

I'm gonna add in a little bit of vanilla bean paste.

You can use vanilla extract.

Same thing.

Now I'm going to add the juice and zest from one lemon.

This is gonna give the fritters such a nice, bright flavor.

Then I'll just whisk all this together.

Then I'm just gonna slowly whisk in the dry ingredients till I have a nice batter.

So the last ingredient I'm going to add is some ricotta cheese.

I have it draining in a bowl on paper towels to try to get out a little bit of the extra moisture.

And I'll just stir this in until everything is nice and combined and not lumpy anymore.

I'm just gonna whisk it a little bit to get those last few lumps out.

Now that my batter's combined, I'm going to drop the fritters into the oil.

It is up to about 375 degrees.

I like to use a small ice cream scoop for this because it makes nice fritters that are all the same size.

I'm gonna do this in batches because I don't want to crowd them.

So I'm just gonna do five or six at a time, flip them over a couple times.

They don't take very long to cook.

Maybe just two or three minutes.

You just want to make sure that they're nice and golden brown.

Then I'm going to drain them on paper towels on a wire rack.

These fritters look great, and they smell even better.

So now I'm going to roll each one in some lemon sugar.

I just took granulated sugar and put it in my coffee grinder with some lemon zest, pulsed it until it made this nice lemon sugar.

Next, I'm going to make some lemon curd that we can use as a dipping sauce for the fritters.

They're gonna be so good.

Curd can be made out of any type of citrus.

You can use lemons, limes, oranges, even pink grapefruit.

It's sort of like a custard-y pudding kind of thing.

It's great on toast or English muffins.

You can use it as a filling for doughnuts or tarts.

It's gonna be a great dipping sauce for our lemon fritters.

The curd needs to be cooked in a double boiler.

It needs to cook away from the heat at a low heat so you don't curdle your eggs.

So I have a pot of water with a bowl on top of it, kind of a makeshift double boiler, and I've already got my sugar in the bowl.

So now I'm going to crack some eggs into the sugar and whisk them in.

These beautiful eggs are from our French Copper Marans.

They are a breed from France, obviously, and they lay eggs that are almost chocolate brown in color.

Supposedly, French chefs only like to cook with the Marans eggs.

They think that they're superior, but, really, an egg taste and nutritional value is going to depend on how fresh the egg is and what your chickens eat for a diet.

Happy chickens out eating bugs and weeds are going to lay the most delicious eggs with the brightest orange yolks.

So I've got three lemons here, and that's gonna give the curd a really nice flavor.

You're gonna want about 1/2 cup of juice total from whatever citrus fruit you're using.

Blood oranges make a really nice curd, so you can kind of play around with different types of citrus.

You want your curd to get up to about 180 or 190 degrees.

You can do a spoon test also, which I'll show you in a little bit once it does get up to temperature, but this way, I can just kind of eyeball it and see if it's getting close to being done.

So now I'm gonna add my butter.

I've got a stick of cold butter that I cut into cubes, and I'm just add that a little bit at a time and whisk to make sure that it's melted in between each addition.

We are just about at 180 degrees right now, and it's starting to come together, looking like pudding, the whisk leaves trails, and if I take my spoon, you can see that it coats the spoon really nicely.

My finger leaves a path.

So good, so easy, as you can see.

I'm just gonna ladle some into my bowl and then serve it with the fritters.

It's soup season.

There's nothing like a bowl of warm soup on a cold winter afternoon.

This soup recipe is almost just as fast to make as it is to open up a can of soup, and it's so much more delicious.

I love this recipe because it combines eggs and some lemons and also leftover rice.

Who doesn't have leftover rice at one point or another.

So to get started, I'm just going to heat up a quart of broth in a soup pot.

You can use whatever kind of broth you want.

Vegetable, chicken, beef, bone broth.

Just something that's got a little bit of flavor.

And I'm just gonna bring that to a boil.

Now I'm ready to add my other ingredients.

I'm gonna add about a cup of rice.

You can use white rice, brown rice, whatever kind of rice you have, cooked, leftover, even if it has salt, pepper, butter, whatever in it, it's fine.

Just kind of eyeball a cup here.

Then I'm going to add some lemon zest.

It'll give it kind of an unexpected burst of flavor that you don't normally expect in a soup.

Then I'm just gonna add a little squeeze of lemon juice to that.

Brighten it up a little bit more.

Now I've got four eggs in my bowl.

I'm just gonna whisk those up.

It's sort of like an egg drop soup, but the eggs give it, like, nice structure and body.

Then, because I don't want my eggs to curdle, I'm just gonna put a ladle full of the soup in the eggs and then whisk it to combine it but not actually cook the eggs.

I'll do that two or three times just to slowly bring the eggs up to temperature.

Then I can add the egg mixture back into the soup and whisk it and start to cook the eggs.

Okay, then I'm just gonna add some salted pepper... ...and just make sure it's heated through, but I don't want it to come to a boil.

So I just have it on a low simmer.

Alright, so it's just coming to a simmer, so I'm just gonna add a little splash of heavy cream, and it'll be done.

So this will be a really nice lunch for a winter afternoon with some fresh-baked bread and homemade butter.

The air in the house gets really dry in the winter, especially when we have the wood stove going.

So I really love to use a nice, gentle exfoliator.

This lemon sugar scrub is perfect.

So, to get started, I'm going to add a cup of sugar to my bowl.

Then I'm going to add the juice of one lemon.

The lemon juice is an astringent and also will help tighten your pores and even out skin tone.

And the sugar is a gentle exfoliator and helps with circulation.

Next, I'm going to add 1/4 cup melted coconut oil.

This is a great moisturizer, and it also just smells really good.

I like to add some vitamin E to any of the body products I make.

Vitamin E acts as a natural preservative so they'll last a little bit longer, even though I do like to store this in the fridge, but the vitamin E also is an antioxidant.

And then, lastly, I'm just gonna add some lemon zest.

I don't always add the zest, but it just is kind of nice.

It adds a little bit more color to the scrub and a little bit more texture.

And that should do it.

This lemon I'm actually just gonna pop in the freezer.

I like to keep extra lemons, if I buy them on sale or whatever, in the freezer.

So it's all stirred in, and this is what it looks like.

It's sort of pasty.

I'm just gonna set it aside, let the coconut oil cool down a little bit.

It'll turn into something like this, a little bit more sandy, kind of like beach sand.

Stir it a couple times just so it doesn't get clumpy.

I like to put the finished product in these jars.

They're great to give as gifts, and I keep one in the shower.

It's a great way to scrub away all that dead skin and a nice morning pick-me-up that smells great.

[ Ducks quacking ] I shared my favorite lemon recipes today, but, unfortunately, citrus is not good for chickens.

It's one of the few things that they shouldn't eat.

So instead I'm going to show you how to make one of my chickens' favorite snacks.

Especially in the winter when there's not a lot of green to eat, I love to make sprouts for them.

I started these a couple of days ago -- they're lentils -- maybe five days ago, and they're just about ready.

You can see the little green leaves on them.

They're just regular lentils from the grocery store, dry lentils.

You can sprout dried beans or grains or seeds.

Doesn't really matter.

The chickens will love them.

So all I do is take about 1 tablespoon or 2 of the beans, in this case, lentils, put them into a mason jar, and then you're gonna want to soak them overnight to just kind of wake the seed up.

So I just pour in enough water to cover them.

So twice a day, just rinse them.

I usually leave them upside down in the dish-drainer rack to make sure that they're fully drained, and just set them on the counter.

They don't need to be in the sun or anything.

In a couple days, you'll notice them start to sprout, and then in about a week, you'll have green leaves, and they'll be ready.

You want to cover the top of your jar for easy draining.

You can use a piece of shelf liner that you cut, or they do sell metal rings that you can put on top.

I do try to start a new batch every couple days, so I've got kind of a rolling supply of sprouts for the chickens.

They love them.

Sprouts are super nutritious and they're easy and very inexpensive to make as a snack.

So there you go.

I'll serve them up to the chickens.

[ Chickens clucking ] I know I keep saying that each season is my favorite season, but I really do love winter because I don't feel the pressure to be out in the garden or working on the lawn, and, instead, I can just kind of slow down and do some other things.

I admit, it is kind of hard to have so few hours of daylight, and some mornings, I really just want to sleep in, but the nice thing about chickens is they don't wake up until the sun comes up, so I'm not getting up at the crack of dawn, it's 5:00 in the morning.

It's a little bit later in the winter.

Knowing that I have to get up to take care of them, feed them, water them is a really good reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Shoveling paths for them through the snow so they get a little bit more exercise and fresh air is also another way that I get outside and kind of stay active in the winter.

Come on, ducks.

They also love treats like lettuce or cabbage in addition to the regular scratch grains that keep them warm all winter.

This is the first winter for the geese, and they adapted to the snow really well, and they're still wandering around the property, doing their job, guarding everybody, and watching for predators.

Log on to FreshEggsDaily.com to learn more about poultry, backyard-farming techniques, recipes, or anything you may have seen in today's show.

Closed captioning for "Welcome to My Farm" is made possible by Grubbly Farms -- food for healthy pets and planet.

Funding for this series has been provided in part by Manna Pro.

To protecting them.

Helping them grow.

And thrive.

[ Chickens clucking ] Treating them... As well as they treat us.

Manna Pro -- nurturing life.

And Meyer Hatchery.

Meyer Hatchery offers more than 160 breeds of poultry and carries a full line of feed, supplies, gifts, and decor.

With nearly four decades of experience, the Meyer family is committed to supporting our customers through their entire poultry journey.

Learn more at MeyerHatchery.com.