A year in the life of a small family farm in America: Day 60 of 365 days on our life and how to preserve eggs with no electric

Day started a bit late today, kids grabbed oatmeal for breakfast while I answered a few hundred emails and got ready to take our pound pup to the vet and get her check out. I worked on the website as well.

I ordered hay today and got wood delivered, forgot we had wood already down stairs, oh well…

Back from the vet and 80 bucks latter, she is heart worm neg, and full of other worms, so I had to pay for a special wormer, poor pound puppy…I am glad she is ours and loves us.

We had steak for supper, yummy, with mash potatoes and corn.

Dreaming of my garden and getting older all the time…I am 43 in the morning…lol

With all the eggs coming in I wanted to share this page of my online book with you all, please know that it is a work in progress and be kind.

For the most part eggs are very hard to store. Fresh eggs from your very own chickens will keep for up to six months with little to no care what so ever. When I save eggs this way the thing I have to watch out for is humidity which in reality is the killer of all eggs. I long term store my eggs in the own fridge set at 50 degrees and place a pan of clean water on the bottom shelf which is changed out with fresh water once a week. This helps to keep the eggs from drying out. Another thing I do is to not wash the eggs; the eggs have their very own natural protection from most germs and bacteria. When store eggs for eating or hatching always store with the pointy end down and make sure your cartons are very clean.
Other method we are using for the first time this year is brining eggs, now this is great if you are living off grid or cannot spare fridge space, but has its own sets of draw backs as the eggs are very salted and are best if used in baking other cooking.
So here is what you will need to brine eggs.

Some clean wide mouth jars, I use half gallon mason jars, but you could use quarts if you wanted too, just make sure they are the wide mouth kind so you can get the eggs back out.
Pickling salt, you could use any none iodized salt that you wanted to including Utah salt and Dead Sea salt to name a few. You will need 1/8 pound of salt by weight, not volume; this is very import and should be done using exact measurements.
A dozen egg really fresh eggs, still warm from the chicken are the best but no older than one day.
A non reactive pot that holds at least a gallon.
A quart of non chlorinated water...if you have well water great!
Now that you have everything, let get started with the pot and heat up the quart of water, now if you are using pickling salt or Dead Sea salt you will not have to heat up the water and you can just mix it in and skip this step.
While the brine mix is cooling down you can get the jars ready with the eggs.
Before I put the eggs in the jars I check them for any tiny crack which could mess the whole batch up. I do this using a strong flashlight in a cardboard box and then candle one more time using a camera with a sepia or negative photo setting. On a negative or even in sepia one can see if an egg is fertile, see tiny cracks or imperfection that would make it unusable.
Now I place the eggs in the glass care with great care, now is not the time to be chasing kids or talking on the phone. Stack eggs to just under the top, the amount of eggs in the jar of course depends on the size of the egg.
Ok we are ready to add the cooled off brine to the eggs by pouring in over the top of the eggs and making sure that all eggs are covered and that the brine goes up to the brim of the glass jar. Next place the clean lid on the top and tighten as normal. With that done you are ready to store your eggs. They should be placed in a cool place and you need to wait three weeks before you can use them, this gives the salt proper time to preserve the eggs. These eggs should last at least 6 months.

http://www.mahanaimfarm.com/how_to_preserve_eggs_for_latter.htm

Now to the hubbies post:

News From The Doghouse and arrest warrant issued for Punxtawney Phil....

Woke up to thunder and lightning early this morning, and went out to toss wood into the woodburner because Elijah was cold, it was 68F in the bedroom, even colder in the rest of the house, and there was ice all over the roof and on the ground....so it must have sleet and or freezing rain, was very surprised and hope it did not kill the blossoms on the apple tree or the pear tree, not to mention the other stuff recently planted in the garden...got that bit of a chore taken care of it and decided to turn on the propane gas heater for the kids room, got plenty in the storage tank 8-P

Did the chores and was freezing again, so I did the pace it out approach, and got a lot of odds and ends done as well...this afternoon after I got all the barnyard chores done, I put the 4 wheels with brand new tires on the horse trailer, and after that picked up some debris from the strong winds we have been having for the last few days...

The Boss got another load of wood delivered, just in case it stays cold for a bit longer than it was NOT suppose to, it was getting to be such nice spring like season weather too...

Turned out the baby duck loose in the barn coop, she was getting too big for the cage on the back porch....we were planning on going to West Plains to the animal swap meet, but now it is going to be too cold, when before it was going to be fairly nice...oh well, probably will be better next weekend anyways, end of the month is usually slow, beginning of the month everybody has money too....