We knew Spring on the farm would be beautiful, we just didn’t know how beautiful. Here are some photos to give you a clue.

I was working in this little flower bed and the chickens came to visit me.

How cute can they get?

This one is quite the star.

When it was time to go inside, this little one took to hiding in the plants.

Recently we built a little outdoor chicken cage from scraps around the house. Now we can leave the chickens outside for a long time and Duke can spend his days watching them.

Since we have ducks and we have a pond, Maddy thought the two should meet.

The saying…”like ducks to water” has a much stronger meaning now.

They sure can find a lot to eat in the lovely green water.

And once again, where Maddy walks, the ducks will follow.

I just thought this was a cool picture with the colors and textures.

In addition to the ducks, here are some tadpoles swimming around. This little pond is full of life.

So our horses really have the good life. In addition to this pasture of 30 acres, we just connected to another 30 acres.

Athena taking a nap during a peaceful day.

The road to a new pasture.

I love watching the horses when they go into a new pasture. They run around and explore every corner. Here Athena takes the lead.

It doesn’t take the others very long to follow.

As I was walking along in the forest, I heard something following me.

There they were, the herd of nine.

They are funny looking guys.

But rather cute.

The three little ducklings have become very attached to Maddy and follow her all around the yard. They love to climb on her, pull her hair and earrings. Duke is learning they are our friends, but we’re still watching that licking of the lips.

He’s trying so hard to be good and understand that he can’t put them in his mouth. These are  Cayuga Ducks and will grow up to be very beautiful.

Meanwhile Maddy is enjoying her role as mother duck.

The baby chicks played in the grass today. They are too cute for words. The chicken looking at you with a fuzzy face is a Buff Orpington. The yellow chicks are you basic white chicken (White Rock) and the black chicks are Dominiques.

It won’t be long and they will be wandering all over the place on their own.

So I took Maddy into town for her senior prom, upon my return I entered the house to smells I cannot begin to describe. But the first course of the evening was this:

This soup consists of asparagus, morels, ramps and fiddleheads (I added the fiddleheads to this recipe) . Wow! All of these ingredients grow in the spring, in this area. In principle, we could have gathered them all within walking distance of our house.  The only ingredient that we could not gather was the cream. We need a goat.

While I was in town, Chuck was busy catching trout and making stock for the soup above.

And what became of this trout….

OMG…morels stuffed with fresh trout, complimented by a birthday Savignon Blanc  (thank you Rebecca).

The stuffed morel recipe came from the book “Morels” by Michael Kuo. This recipe is posted all over the internet. The original recipe called for crabmeat. I substituted trout for the crabmeat. To prepare the trout, I just gutted it, wrapped it in foil,  put it on the grill at high heat for 3 minutes on each side.  Then I used the cooked trout as if it were crabmeat.

Living in the country has never been so good.

three ducks in a tub.

Now they are nesting in Maddy’s hair. (Deborah, they can’t wait to meet you.)

We are having a wonderful problem this spring - we are finding morels faster than we can use them! As with all things morel, we consulted the book “Morels” by Michael Kuo. This is a great book. It is comprehensive, well written and loaded with great photos. We got the stuffed morel recipe from this book.

For those of you who are interested in wild  mushrooms, Michael Kuo has created one of the best websites for mushrooms - mushroomexpert.com. But I digress…

There are many ways to preserve them. After consulting the prime directive and lots of googling, we decided to dry our surplus. Amazingly, drying does not remove any of that morel-goodness and it gives the  most options for using them later.

Drying mushrooms is different than drying most other foods in that they are dried at a low temperature; about 100F. For safety reasons,  other foods are dried at temperatures above 140F.

Most store bought food dryers have a wide range of temperature settings. So we could have bought one that would have worked well for mushrooms. But for drying other foods (tomatoes…yummm) these dryers are energy pigs. I am going to build a solar food dryer for those foods.

Building a solar food dryer looks pretty easy. There are lots of plans on the internet. One weakness that all the simple solar food dryers have is that they do not have a way to regulate the temperature and they usually run pretty hot. It is bad karma to ruin several pounds of morels by cooking them to a crisp when you meant to dry them. I have some ideas for regulating the temperature (using solar powered electronics!). But the mushrooms need to be dried NOW. So I do not have time to build a solar dryer.

Other factors: the morel season is short and unpredictable. Every time we find a patch I keep thinking that’s it for the season. There is no surer way to end the season than to plop down $100 in a dryer. We stopped the snow fall this winter by buying snow shoes.

Some people have suggested using the oven to dry morels. Most ovens will not operate at the low temps that are needed, so they solve that problem by leaving the oven door open. They claim that morels can be dried in about 12 hours that way. This solution seemed like a huge waste of energy.  The lowest temp setting on our oven is 160F. If the door is open to try to keep the oven at at 100F, that means the oven heater coils will be drawing a large amount of electricity for every minute of those 12 hours! (under normal operation, once an oven reaches temperature, the heater coils do not draw any electricity for most of the time the oven is on).

What would MacGyver do? Given all the factors above, I set out to make a mushroom dryer out of inexpensive materials that we already had in the house.

It seemed like a good heat source would be a light bulb. Looking around the house, I realized that an ordinary lamp would work well. Especially if I swapped out the 60W bulb for a 100W bulb.

I built a tube out of cardboard (the box that my glass carboys for wine making came in - that’s recycling! ). This tube sits on top of the lamp and channels the hot air that comes off the light bulb.

We had a bunch of bamboo skewers that we use for making kabobs. They seemed like a nice, general purpose, food safe way to hold the mushrooms. To hold the skewers I made a much smaller tube out of card board and just poked the skewers through that.

As the mushrooms dry, they go through kind of a sticky phase. It was important that the mushrooms not touch the cardboard during this phase. So I added some longer skewers on top and bottom to hold the “mushroom tree” in the center of the larger tube.

Voila - an almost free, disposable,  recyclable,  made from recycled materials,  not tested on animals, no trans-fat, mushroom dryer. It dries a load of morels in about 24 hours. We pay roughly 10 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity. So it costs about 24 cents to dry a load.

I have found that the morels dry faster if they are cut in half. Because of the way I plan on using them, I will not need whole dried morels.

One last word of advice - if you decide to dry your morels, make sure to take time to “smell the morels” when you are done. Drying them intensifies that distinctive morel essence.

No, it is not a lamp hat.

Mushroom "Tree" - this is inserted into the other tube.