I Know What I Did Last Summer...the Final Tally

A few days after my last post we had our first snow here....it snowed for about fifteen minutes one morning, just long enough to glue ourselves to the windows and marvel.  It was gone as quickly as it came; but it was fun while it lasted!

We also had a few more hallmarks of fall this week...bringing the woodbox in and having the first fire of the season, first batches of mulled cider and hot cocoa, and the fields around the house are  being harvested this week.  Corn makes a great privacy fence, I'm a little sad to see it go, but I do enjoy being able to see farther than just the edge of the yard!

I am also done preserving for the year, so we piled all of the canned and dehydrated produce out on the kitchen table and took a tally:

It doesn't look like much n the picture, but the list itself is a bit more impressive.

In the Freezer:

• 6 gallons of sweet corn kernels, frozen in 3 cup segments
• 5 gallon freezer bags sliced apples
• 4.5 gallon freezer bags raspberries
• 2 gallon bags of tomato sauce frozen in 1/3 cup disks in muffin tins
• 2 gallon bags of chopped green peppers
• 2 gallon bags of whole jalapenos
• 1 gallon bag of sliced green tomatoes
• 5 quarts preseasoned spaghetti sauce
• 4 quarts turkey broth
• 2 qt bags of chopped swiss chard stalks, for soup
• 2 qt bags whole pepperoncini
• 1 qt bag whole hot banana peppers
• 9 pints mexican rice seasoning
• 3 messes of cooked swiss chard greens

Dehydrator Goodies:

• 2 gallon of green "shelly" beans
• 3 qts of chocolate mint leaves, for tea
• 2 qts green pepper slices
• 1 qt jalapeno slices
• 1 qt dried cherry tomatoes
• 1 qt mushroom slices
• 1 qt parsley flakes
• 2 c sweet corn
• 1 c pepperoncini slices
• 1 c corn and peas
• 1 c basil leaves
• 1 c thyme
• 1 c sage leaves
• 3/4 c chives
• 1/2 c grated zucchini
• a few tablespoons of dried carrot slices

Canned Food:

• 21 quarts applesauce
• 3 pints apple butter
• 5 quarter-pints apple jelly
• 3 quarts vanilla-cinnamon pears
• 1 pint vanilla-cinnamon pears
• 5 quarter-pints pear preserves
• 4 half-pints vanilla-orange syrup
• 8 quarter-pints green tomato pickles
• 13 half-pints sweet & spicy jalapeno pickles
• 2 pints sweet & spicy jalapeno pickles
• 14 half-pints strawberry jam
• 9 half-pints pepperoncini
• 3 pints pickled pepperoncini
• 1 half-pint green tomato relish
• 3 pints green tomato relish
• 6 quarts green tomato juice
• 10 half-pints tomato sauce
• 14 pints ketchup
• 6 pints seasoned tomatoes
• 29 pints basil tomatoes
• 14 quarts salsa
• 45 quarts plain tomato juice
• 4 pints dilly beans
• 35 quarts green beans
• 2 pints kosher dill pickles
• 1 pint sweet and spicy meat glaze
• 7 quarts chicken broth
• 6 pints sliced peaches

In a few days....reflections on what I learned this year, both in my garden and preserving.

First Frost!

It frosted last night, which finally brings my garden season to an end.  I still have lots work to do in the garden this fall, but none of it is particularly time sensitive.  Now is my favorite time of year, to curl up every morning with coffee and watch the trees slowly cycle from green into all their autumn glory.  This is the time I like to slow down, take a few breaths, and reflect on the year's work and count my blessings, my successes and my failures, and be thankful for the lessons I've learned.

I am so very, very thankful for this chance to live the life I want to live, able to grow my own food and live closer to the ebb and flow of mother nature than I would in a bigger town or a city.  It feels like I've sacrificed a lot to get here, but from where I'm standing today?

It's worth it.

The Daily Harvest

Weeds, Weeds, and More Weeds!

I've been working this week to clean up the garden beds...and it feels like it will never get finished!  For everything I do out there, I always find three more things I need to do...but that's just life!

One of the things that I have needed to do is plant garlic for next year...we could frost now at any point, although summer seems to be clinging hard this year.  It's still up close to 80 degrees during the day, and anywhere from 40 to 60 at night.  I planted ten heads of garlic we saved back from this year's harvest...more than 70 cloves!

If they all grow (or even just most of them) I will have enough garlic for a head a week next year, plus more to plant, and some extra to give away.  Now I'm just crossing my fingers and hoping we don't have our first freeze for several weeks yet, to give it a chance to root.

Now....for something ugly.  I'm almost ashamed to post these pictures, but this is what my garden looked like earlier in the week...are you ready for it?

This is the mulched half of my garden...I'm experimenting with a cross between lasanga-style gardening and the Back to Eden garden method, which are both no-till, and involve layering mulch and compost on top of the soil, and allowing it to decompose without tilling it in.  In the part of the garden pictured here I used triple or quadruple-layered newspaper as a weed barrier, topped with paper I've been saving out of my shredder (finally a good use for all that junk mail!), and ankle-deep straw.  I really liked using this method...once I laid the paper and straw down, my weeding time in this bed was maybe five or ten minutes a week, tweaking up anything that happened to sprout, and laying down a little more straw where it compacted and thinned over time.  I've already pulled out most of the tomato plants in the foreground, but I didn't pull any weeds before taking this picture.  In all, I think this garden bed produced very well this year, considering last year it was part of the lawn.

In comparison, this is what the section of my garden that I did not mulch looked like the same day:

Quite a difference, eh?  This is the east side of the pea fence, which contained lettuce, carrots, and onions.  My onions rotted in the ground because of all the strange weather we had this year.  I planted them on time, but we had several late freezes, followed by several weeks of rain that left them standing in water.  It's no real surprise they rotted, but I was disappointed anyway. I pulled them about the end of July, salvaged what carrots I could, and just let it go.  On the other side of the pea fence was where i grew my bush beans (already pulled), and you can see my broccoli and brussels sprouts.  None of my broccoli, cabbage, or cauliflower plants produced anything this year.  They just grew, and grew and grew.  The seeds are from different stores and different brands, so I'm a bit stumped as to why none of them produced.  At any rate, I left them in hopes that they would be more attractive to bugs than the green beans next to them, which seems to have worked out well.  In the upper right corner you can see my sunflowers.

I mulched on the far side of the pea fence, but I used cardboard as a weed barrier instead of newspaper.  I like it better because I didn't have to weed before laying it down like I did with the newspaper.  It also seems to hold up better to rain and repeated watering, and I can get it easier than I can newspaper.  I planted next year's garlic in this mulched area.

So what's the plan from here?  Well, aside from pulling out the rest of the plants (harvesting anything I can get as I go), I will also pull up the pea fence, and till the unmulched part of the garden for the last time.  Then I will cardboard and straw it to match the rest of garden.  We fought against powdery mildew this year...it invaded the entire yard about a month and a half ago.  All of the tomatoes, the roses, the lilacs, the trees...it's everywhere.  If the plants had been healthy at this point, I would pull them up and lay them across the top of the straw to decompose over the winter, but I don't want to give the mildew or any other disease a chance to work down into the soil below the mulch so they get carted off to the brush pile instead.

After everything is papered and mulched, I will spread a thin layer of fresh horse manure on top, maybe two, three inches thick, tops.  I will also add the leaves I rake up out of the yard, plus grass clippings, and let it sit and work all winter, occasionally spreading thin layers of ash from the fireplace on top.  If possible, I will top the whole mess with another layer of cardboard and more mulch (wood chips this time) to help keep the heat from the decomposing manure trapped in.  If I can't, I will do it in the spring before I start planting.

In theory, this method builds up the soil slowly while nurturing the plants you grow in it.  The goal is to build layers of material of different sizes that decompose at different rates to keep a steady stream of nutrients available to your plants.  The roots of the plants aerate and keep your soil soft and diggable without tilling, and the heavy layer of mulch keeps water in and weeds out--any weed seeds will stay on top of the mulch, far away from the moisture they need to sprout.  It takes at least two years to really get the system going and start seeing the long-term effects of this method, so I'm looking at 2015, maybe 2016 to see results, but that's okay.  Gardening is really a long term process anyway--it's always about next year.  This is just an experiment--if it works I will drastically decrease the work load of gardening while increasing yields, and if it doesn't work I will just scrape off the wood chips and till the organic layers into my garden.

Has anyone else tried something similar to this?

The Week in Progress

Last week was a bust around here in terms of getting things done.  My family was sick, and I was laid up with a pinched nerve that left me unable to use one hand...it was everything I could do just to keep ahead of the dishes!  I did manage to wash some tomatoes and make two pints of kosher dill pickles, but not much else.

This week has gone better in terms of productivity.  I've been slowly going through the last of the garden tomatoes as they turn ripe.  I made a giant pot of spaghetti sauce that we ate then froze the rest, followed by a pot of chili, and then I discovered a really awesome Mexican rice recipe, which can be found here:  http://mexican.food.com/recipe/mexican-rice-117892.  It is easy to make, and I usually have all the ingredients on hand.  I've made it on the stovetop and it was okay, but for really fantastic rice be sure to bake it as the recipe says.

And in other news...we have apples!  We were allowed to pick off of someone's lone tree, so today Mom and I geared up and went out to pick.  For about thirty-five minutes of work we have three five gallon buckets and two printer-paper boxes of beautiful red apples--I think they might be red delicious, but the taste is far and above anything we can get in stores.  These apples were allowed to grow without any kind of spraying, so I don't have to worry to about peeling them either!

My plan for today is to finish working up the last of the garden tomatoes; I am going to blend them with onion and then freeze them in two cup portions for the Mexican rice above.  I also have a bag of jalapenos that is going to be divided between the dehydrators and the freezer today, and I want to get a head start on apple prep.  Most of these apples are earmarked for our year's supply of apple butter, but all of my half-pint and pint jars are already full.  I do still have a fifty gallon drum about half full of quart jars in the barn, so I will can my apples as sauce in quarts, then turn it into apple butter as we need it this winter, a quart at a time. The sauce can also be cooked down into hillbilly apple pies, used as an oil substitute in baked goods, and is generally more versatile than just canned apple butter.  Today I want to wash and dry my apples, and get the jars out of the barn and washed.  These are jars that haven't been used in years, and I'm getting to the bottom of my jar supply.  Luckily the apples are the last of my planned canning, but I may or may not have pears coming in the next few weeks as well.

Tomorrow I will turn my pile of apples into neat, shiny jars of sauce.  I'm so, so happy to get my hands on some apples for this winter!

How has your week been?

The Change of Seasons

Fall is finally here...after a late, hot, dry summer that left us lingering indoors to escape the sauna outside we find ourselves making excuses to go outside in the first place.  The days are warm and breezy without being hot, and the nights are deliciously cool.  I love getting up first thing in the morning and snuggling into a pair of thick fuzzy socks and my favorite flannel shirt.  The corn in the fields surrounding the property rustle all day into the breeze, and I love to just sit out there and listen, knowing that in a few short weeks it will be gone.

This changeover from summer to fall has also changed the intensity of my work, from the frantic bustle of putting-bounty-by before the next batch ripens to something slower, and more leisurely.  My summer garden was very, very late this year.  Not because we set it out late, but because we had several very late freezes that stunted early growth and slowed sprouting, followed by rain that nearly drowned the plants that survived the freezing.

Two weeks ago I was still getting several five-gallon buckets of tomatoes from my garden every other day, worried about the slow encroach of a late season blight before the bulk of the tomatoes even ripened.  This week I decided to cut my losses and started cleaning the tomato plants out of my garden.  I have the last three buckets of tomatoes sitting in my kitchen...a bucket full of red ones, one of green ones, and one mixed between the two.  What I suspect might be the last cucumbers of the year are laying on a counter.  I know I still have apples and pears left to can, but at the moment they feel like they're in the distant future.  I feel that I'm in a lull between frantic bouts of canning...the eye of the storm, if you will.  I want to enjoy it.

I've gotten what I wanted to preserve from my summer garden already, so I'm going to play with what's left.

Those cucumbers are earmarked for my very first homemade dill pickles.

The green tomatoes?  Are going to become green tomato relish, plain canned slices for frying, frozen slices for canning, and just a couple of jars of green tomato puree to play around with as green tomato pie filling.

The red tomatoes....they'll probably just get cooked down into spaghetti sauce for dinner.

Enjoy your week, everyone!

Welcome to My Blog!

Hello!

I'm Amanda, and this is my blog.

Sounds exciting, right?  Well, we'll see.  I intend to use the blog as a experimental journal; a collection of my mostly-random interests organized into an easy-to-access record for myself, a chance to cultivate my writing skills, and maybe something entertaining for the rest of the homesteading community to read.

Why homesteading?  That's a long story...but aren't all of them?  Growing up, my family had a massive garden.  I have lots of memories of eating strawberries straight out of the garden, following my dad around plunking seeds in the ground, and my friends giving me weird looks because we had to go dig up the potatoes for dinner before we could eat them.  Then I got older, and life happened, and my family just didn't garden anymore.

A decade later:  I'd graduated college, but was vastly underemployed.  Money was tight, and my grocery budget didn't stretch very far...I was always tired, a little hungry, and a lot drained.  A body can only live so long on boxed noodles...and then I started turning up sensitive to a lot of the additives in processed food.  With my tight budget, a steady supply of whole foods was out of my reach. So I started gardening again...and loved it!

There's a world of information at my fingertips that just wasn't there when I was young, and I dived into it with both feet.  Permaculture, whole foods, small-scale livestock operations...this was meat and potatoes for my soul as well as my body...which is how I ended up here, with this blog.  Here you will find my experiments in making my world just a little better, one day at a time.  I'm not sure how often I will post, or exactly what I will be posting about, but there will be triumphs and tragedies, humor and bleak disappointment...and hopefully a little fun along the way.

Welcome...and enjoy!