Todays' Harvest

Today's harvest included 65 Cofra onions to put up for winter, along with 5 Walla Walla Sweet onions which I will dice and freeze (there are 35 more still in the garden!), all the potatoes, which did not grow as well as I'd hoped, they are all of a small size. Next year, I will plant them in raised beds so that I can give them deep soil. The bed they were planted in this year ended up very compacted unfortunately. All the hot weather sure made for more packed soil all around.

These are more of the tomatoes that are pouring out of the garden right now. I'm determined to get a batch of salsa put up today as our friend gave us some of his jalapenos and I've got copious onions as you could see. I don't do cilantro, so I'll add some fresh parsley to it. Perhaps I'll post that later if it's a success.

As you can see above, this is round two of the cukes. I've had a very successful crop of cukes, I froze about 15 of them, we're still eating off the last batch and I'm gonna be pickling these as soon as I'm able to get to that. Salsa first, pickles second.

I've also picked another pumpkin. I just had a hard time believing they were already ready to be harvested. The package said they were about 100 days to maturity. We planted them the weekend after Labor Day. That would be 65 days from when I harvested the first one. And there are many more ready to get off the vine. I emailed High Mowing Seeds(wonderful seeds, wonderful folks) to as them if it's possible that they are already ready to harvest. They told me that because of the sunlight length they get (about 14 hours a day during the summer) and the warm summer, they believe it is entirely possible they are ready to harvest. Their advice? Cut one open and see if the seeds are fully matured. If so, they are good to go. So, I'll be trying that expirement today as well. Perhaps there will be grilled pumpkin on the menu this evening! Yummy!!

We had a bit of a bittersweet day here on our little farmstead yesterday. I found a loving home for Mattie, our Golden Wyandotte rooster. He wasn't supposed to be a rooster, we thought we bought three laying hens. But that happens sometimes. He was Maestro's pet, so we really didn't want him to get eaten, plus, he is a great and gentle rooster, very beautiful and friendly. I posted on facebook that I had a great roo to give away if anyone was interested and a friend of mine from high school took him. He'll have 18 ladies all to himself and all the room to roam. They are nice folks and have two kids that will enjoy him. We just didn't need another roo. Snowball and he were at each other through the fence all the time and our place is just a bit too small for so much machismo. Godspeed, Mattie, we loved you while you were with us.

Peaceful harvest to you all, ~Peacemom

Garden update!

A little garden update for you all.  With a bit of rain and lots of sunshine, it's going bonkers!!  This little planter is a tub I found half buried under our deck from residents prior to us.  The bottom has some holes rusted through, so it just called "planter!" to me.  I like to incorporate herbs and flowers together when I can so here you see the pansies with basil growing in the center.  Pesto, here we come!

This is the new section of the garden.  I will admit, it's looking a little woolly, the aisles anyways.  Music Man was going to weed whack the edges of the beds and mow this past weekend...but mountain bike trails called to him and he took the boys off biking instead.  And I was glad for it even though the garden didn't get it's beauty treatment.  They had a great time and that's more important then a pristine garden path, I reckon.

Bush beans and cukes and pole beans all ready for their trellises.  I know, I should have done them earlier, but time has gotten away from us with an incredibly busy baseball season for the boys.  Next year, I'll be more prepared.

Tomatoes, amaranth and peppers are sharing a bed.  I planted them WAY too close together!

This is a funny story...I planted these amaranth plants thinking they were peppers.  I got them from Laura, she had extras and told me to please take them.  Well, the pots weren't labeled and I forgot that I had them.  The leaves looked vaguely pepper like in shape, so I planted them.  Then, they went NUTS and when she came over, I had to ask her what the heck kind of pepper had these flowers?  She laughed at me and said, "Not peppers, that's amaranth". Oh.  So, now they are totally taking over the pepper bed and I'm not sure how well the peppers will end up doing, but I've been enjoying their drappiness all over the place.  And the leaves, blossoms and eventual grains they will produce are all edible.  Ah, live and learn.

Zucchini is exceptionally happy.  I only got 4 last year because I lost the plants to powdery mildew.  This year, we've not had a recurrence of it (knocking very loudly on wood!), so they are doing well.  I have a couple more that are much larger then this one that will be slated for zucchini bread, I do believe.

The two varieties of onions I planted are coming along swimmingly.  This one is even so happy it became a twin!



The wild and crazy potato patch is also thriving.  I'm afraid to look under the straw as we lost a bit to slugs last year, but the plants are looking quite content.



And this pretty little goldfinch joined our garden a week or so ago.  He's sitting happily in the sage bush.   I think it's fetching, don't you?

How does your garden grow?  ~Peacemom



Carrot Haul

This was the last of the carrot haul from the garden.  Normally, I would leave them in the ground, but in anticipation of moving, we decided to pull them and store them in the fridge instead.  Gonna be a ginger carrot soup in our future!  I've already harvested this amount of carrots, together with these,  from a patch of garden that was about 1' x 3'.  That's really productive for a such a small space!

I prefer to leave them in the ground and harvest them all winter, just put a nice deep layer of leaves on top and they won't freeze.  The longer they are in the cold ground, the sweeter carrots get.  These are very sweet indeed!

On another note, so weird to have the boys out in short sleeves on Nov 20th in NH.  Very discomforting, really.

Wishing you winter stores of your own, ~Peacemom

Can You Smell IT?

I woke up this morning, and autumn struck me.  There's a special smell to the air when it's becoming autumn...clearer, crisper, chillier...I dug out wool socks yesterday and smiled as I pulled them on to sit in our wonderful sun porch and have hot tea, with toasty toes.  It was not iced tea that I reached for as I have all summer, but wanted to hold the mug in my hand to feel it's warmth, to inhale the vanilla goodness, see the steam rising.  Flannel, wool socks and hot tea, perfect comfort are these.

Now, anyone that knows me, or if you've been following my blog for a time know I am totally obsessed with the Fall Equinox season.  There is something very interesting that happens to me during this time of the year.  I don't know how or why, because certainly in this day and age we've got all modern conveniences that basically totally negate this visceral reaction that I have to the cooler temps, the color of leaves changing, the need for another blanket on the bed.  The ingrained sense is this...it's time to get the hunkering down started.  I have a drive to make sure there's wood split, the shelves in the pantry are full of canned goods, the sweaters and wool socks should be in good working order or mended if need be, the fall comforter needs to be hung on the line and freshened up.  All these things harken back to a more basic time, don't they?  But, they honestly do exist in my nature, the drive is there and starting up with full force. 

As I woke this morning to work in total darkness, I noticed that first light didn't arrive in the sky until about 5:50.  At the height of summer, it began getting light about 4:10 in the morning, so oh yes,  the days are definitely shorter.  That's sometimes a bit tough for me being the morning person that I am, I'm ready to go with first light usually.  But when first light doesn't come until almost 6:00am, and I've got to be up at 4:45 to start work...that's a tough one some mornings.  My internal clock pushes out too, and suddenly I should have been up earlier and now it's 5:30, messes up the whole flow of my day.  I don't use an alarm clock, I've got one in my brain.  It takes a little time to adjust to the fact that  I need to get up in the dark rather then the light.  And I've been doing this for over 40 years, you think I would have the hang of it by now!

 I do so love waking to a chilly house in the morning.  It's not yet the cold of winter, it's the feeling of cozy-the feeling of wanting to pull the blanket up close to my ears and rest for just a few more minutes.  That chill when it's not yet time to turn on the furnace, but time to just put on a layer or two.  Cozy is just the right word for that feeling.  And I know I'm in full autumn swing when I reach for the hot tea mug and make that the first beverage break of the morning.  In summer, I have iced tea going all the time, in fact I drink about 2 quarts a day (unsweetened, I don't muss it up with sugar or anything else), but fall/winter/spring it's hot tea all the way.  I'm not a hot weather worshipper, in fact, as you probably know, I really, really dislike being hot.  I much prefer the need to add layers of cozy clothes and blankets then get to the summer heat where there's just so much I can take off an not freak out my neighbors.

This week's autumn preparation will include harvesting the copious apples on the trees in our current yard.  They are spotty, funky in shape and multicolored, but taste great.  So, I'll be saucing and for the first time trying my hand at canning my own apple juice.  My boys prefer it and I figure if I can stop buying the organic kind in the plastic bottles for a while and have a few gallons preserved for them for winter, that's a win-win all the way. 

Wood smoke on the air this morning...can you smell it too?

Wishing you apples and wool socks of your own, ~Peacemom

The Frost Is On The Pumpkin....

Good Morning Good Souls,

Yesterday was a day of work around here. I "put the garden to winter", which means I ripped up a good portion of the plants I spent all summer growing and put them in the BIG bucket for the compost pile. I take off what's left of the produce growing, yank, pull and shake the plants until the beds are just the old dirt showing with not many signs of life. This is a bittersweet task for a lot of reasons.

One is because the marigolds are still going strong. I spotted a bee on one of them. He was lazily making his way around the flowers and I felt a responsibility to leave the flowers for him. If he could still be at his task this late into the season, by gory, I should leave him some pollen to use for himself. The way he was moving was telling me his time was winding down and I felt I should leave him something to nourish his last days. Especially in light of the reduced bee problem going on right now, I felt I wanted to give him every last chance. So, I have left 5 of the marigold plants for him to use.

BUT we've also not had our first frost until last night. This is the reason that I didn't do this weeks ago, I was still hoping those last 5 green peppers were going to turn red on the vine. Unfortunately, that wasn't to be, so they are sitting in a bowl on my lovely granite countertops along with the jalapenos that were left. I actually got enough of those to get one more batch of canned peppers. SShhhhh, don't tell my brother-in-law, but I'm canning this batch especially for him. He is of Mexican descent and LOVES his peppers hot. Well, contrary to most belief, when jalapenos go red, they get HOTTER. So, I've left them on the plant until they are red and I'm going to make him a special Christmas mixture of red and green jalapenos to enjoy. We did not have them go red last year, so when I canned them, they were green. This year, they matured early and some of them went red. Well, I grow these for Music Man, because I don't really eat anything this hot. Somehow his Irish-German palate can stomach that. My Irish-German palate wants nothing whatsoever to do with them. It's a childhood nightmare from a cousin that tricked me into eating a VERY hot pepper as a 5 year old. Since then, no thanks!! But I digress, I was talking about the red jalapeno. Well, my limited pepper experience tells me that when the pepper goes red, it gets sweeter, like bell peppers do. So, when the jalapeno went red, I thought, oh, it will be sweeter. I grew them for making hot pepper jelly. Music Man asked how it would taste, I said I thought sweeter then a green one and so he took a big bite, seeds, ribs and all (that's the hottest part, in case you didn't know that) and he was in some serious pain. Ate a big bowl of yogurt to try to counteract the capsacin in the pepper that makes it so hot. I felt really badly that I was wrong about that heat factor. In any case, I hope my brother-in-law likes these goodies, it will be a nice surprise for him, I'm sure.

So, back to dismanteling my hard work. The boys thoroughly enjoyed being able to pull up plants, stomp through the beds and run around the garden like crazy men. The taking apart for them was a lot of fun, especially helping to pull the beans and vines off the chicken wire trellis. They were very excited when they could pull a big bean off and the browner and squishier, the better. They are boys, after all. For me the experience makes me a bit sad because this is the end of growing our food myself for the season, of fresh veggies for a meal that I can walk out and harvest myself. Of knowing that I grew that healthy, nutritious, organic food to nourish my family, and that's one less factory farmed piece of produce they sell in the conglomerate grocery stores. Plus, heck, it's just a whole lot of fun to grow your own food. To take a plant from a seed and grow it to something that's cut up in your salad bowl is a truly powerful feeling. I still have some lettuce and spinach out there and a few herbs that I'll need to get dried, but all in all, it's the end of the season for us. From here, for local food, I'll need to stock up on butternut squash. This will join the potatoes (of which there aren't many left, they were very good and we chowed down on them!!) I grew myself in the bulkhead. Little Red loves squash, this is his very favorite vegetable and he'll eat it like nothing else, it's his healthy candy, I guess.

I also stocked up on some wonderful cheese I bought from a local cheese producer. This is by far the best cheese I've ever tasted, so creamy and good. Boggymeadowfarm.com. Seriously, if you love cheese, you'll want to get some of this. It's so nice with a few crackers and a cup of tea (or wine or beer if you're so inclined) on a chilly day. Perfection on a cracker, I'm telling ya. You won't be disappointed if you try some of this. And they ship for those of you not near Walpole, NH. I don't normally advocate for shipping food, but if you eat everything else in your life local, make this the one thing you get from away. The farm stand where I purchase this cheese calls me "the cheese lady". Made me laugh when the clerk told me this, because they don't know my name, but since I buy cheese every time I go there (3 last time since they are closing for the season soon, wanted to stock up for winter), they gave me the knickname. And I rave about the cheese to whomever is in line with me, the clerks, everyone. The clerk even told me that the man who makes the cheese came there to check out where his product is stocked and all that good stuff. They told him about me and he was psyched to hear about me, so I sent him an email telling him who I was and that I really think that being able to get such wonderful cheese local is a great treat and blessing. I thanked him for his hard work and making such a high quality food to nourish so many others, and told him how much I appreciate his offering this for my family. It's his herd of cows that give the milk, so he does the whole sheebang. Plus, as a side benefit, it's lower in fat and sodium then most other cheeses, has no preservatives and is aged over 60 days before it is even sold. Just a little miracle, that creamy goodness!

So, after seeing the frost on the grass this morning, or as Little Red calls it-frosting, I am ready to hunker down and set my sites on flannel pants and sweaters and wool socks. I've got a couple good books in mind at the library for long, cold winter days and I'm planning on a few Christmas presents to make. This year is going to be a mostly homemade holiday here since money is tight. We'll buy for the kids, but everyone else is getting what my little hands can create. I prefer this for Christmas anyways, more on that in a later post. It's feeling like the time to reflect and create, just what autumn and winter are all about for me. That and leaf jumping and snowmen on the lawn anyways.

Fresh butternut and local cheese wishes to you, ~Peacemom