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!
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Monday, September 23, 2013
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!
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!
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