The weather was just wonderful today! Sunny, not too hot, and the wind seems to have blown the mosquitoes away! It was a great day for a mini vacation - in the back yard! Of course, Miss Petunia came prepared with all the essentials for a fun time under the plum tree.
I brought a book to read too!
Take out dinner, books, markers, paper, crayons, a magic wand, and a pink umbrella - just in case - THIS is summer relaxation!
What have you done for a mini vacation this summer?
Sometimes I feel like our garden gets overwhelming. The weeds get out of control, some of the plants don't "keep" in the garden and you have to keep up with picking every day. It is great to have fresh food from the garden every day for supper but the extra time for harvest and processing to keep for the winter can get to be drudgery.
Just look at all those weeds! The about to give up pea plants are in the back of the photo below. In the foreground there are parsnips, carrots, and beets. There are a few more rows to my right. This is one of five garden spaces that we have this year.
Here are Little Miss P's tips to make gardening fun:
1. Wear tights to the garden so the bugs don't bite your legs.
2. Plant picking flowers so that you don't get in trouble for picking flowers in the yard.
3. Take good care of your flowers. You have to dust them with garden dirt and then fluff them with a bit of grass.
4. Use the proper kitchen utensils. This makes the pea shelling REALLY fun. Make sure you have a spoon that is just the right size for ONE pea so that snacking while you work is enjoyable.
5. Plant pink food. It is always fun to have pink food on your plate. Beets are fun because they also turn rice and noodles pink when they are on your plate together.
(I think I weeded most of that light pink variety out thinking they were the radishes that we planted with the beets to mark the row. I pulled a "radish" the other day that I thought I had missed. I bit into it and--- it was a beet. Too bad.)
We have been trying to do better about using all that our garden produces and not let things go to waste. So, after clipping the off garlic scapes I thought we needed to use them instead of tossing them in the compost as we have done in the past. After a little research on the web I found a collection of garlic scape pesto recipes.
I chopped and processed and ended up with some pesto for dinner.
It was good but pretty strong. So strong, in fact, that I had to get up twice in the night to drink water! The rest of the family did not think it was too strong. Next time I make this I'll add a bunch of garden greens before processing to cut the intensity a bit.It is fun to try new things like this. What new things have you tried lately?
We are still having fun with the new chicks. It has been rainy, though, and they haven't had much outside time. We took them out during a dry part of the day today.
We are easily amused.
The big girls come around to see what the excitement is about. They come up on the porch where they are not welcome, and knock things over just to get a better view.
P chose two different pink flowers on different trips to The Potting Shed in town. D planted them in the same pot for her today. She really enjoys watering them. She also thinks it is very funny that those large pink flowers are petunias, as that is her internet code name!!! She never knew she shared a name with a flower!
I didn't order new chicks this year because with all of the other things we had going on this spring I just didn't think we could handle 25+ new chicks.
Well, yesterday B sent me an email telling me that there was someone in Ann Arbor with chicks listed on craiglist. They had ordered fifty!.... I think you know what happened after that. I contacted them and told them I would be interested in five chicks. On the way to town I thought I might get seven. I left their home with ten chicks in a box!
P had been asking about us getting baby chicks again. I do enjoy the fun of the new chicks. It is cool here today but we did take them out for a little fresh air. The big hens, last years chicks, came over to see what all the excitement was about.
And so the cycle continues.
We have some other farm chores in addition to tending the new chicks. I bought a flat of Michigan strawberries yesterday and have started refilling the freezer with strawberry rhubarb pie fillings. Our peas will be ready for harvest soon so we will be having some pea shelling evenings soon. I hope the weather clears off so that we can shell peas in the evening by an outside "camp" fire. Ahh, family time.
The boys are off at the Alma Highland Festival this weekend. I think the House Orchestra has five shows plus the parade! M was also running in the 5K race there this morning. I am sure they will be tired when they get home. Since the weather was so nice and we knew the boys would be away, we worked last evening getting the black beans and corn planted. It goes fairly quickly with three planters. B picks up these planters at garage sales. The area at the far end of the garden is the black bean area. These rows are the heirloom corn.
P loves to help too.
This morning after dropping the the boys at school at the crack of dawn B did a lot of weeding in the fenced garden. This evening we planted some sunflowers. P did a little cake and brownie making too.
We pulled a big bag of radishes that were marking rows of carrots, parsnips, and beets. P and I are the only ones in the family who eat radishes so we shared most of them with the neighbor who will juice them. I have also read that you can pickle radishes. We may try that with the next batch just for fun.
Our lettuce is off to a good start and the first of our peas are flowering.
How does your garden grow?
This seems to really be the week for morels! We have picked several times and had another mushroom feast last night!
Today P and I went out again and found even more that had sprouted since yesterday.
P is good at hunting and picking them.
I think we need to look up some more recipes.
I hear it is a good year for morels around here.
My neighbor and I went foraging and found some.
We actually found quite a few.
Morels seem to be quite the rage with Michiganders and after living here over twenty years I thought it was time to give them a try.
Mother's Day dinner last night included neighbors, a morel pasta dish (fixed by the neighbor), and fresh baked bread. All good stuff.
Don't ask where we found the mushrooms.
If I told you, I'd have to kill you.
Yesterday we had our annual prairie fire. The back field is usually a slow burn. I do enjoy watching the swirling flames.
I find it fascinating to watch the fire crawl across the field. We try to burn into the wind so it stays more in control and burns more thoroughly.
The lower field has taller and thicker grass so the fire here is usually bigger.
It is exciting to watch the fire get to the thickest parts of the dry grass.
The flames can get quite high,
and also very hot.
The fire stops when it gets to the mowed path next to the field. We do have buckets of water and wet towels ready just in case. It was a great day to be outside together.
We are careful not to burn all of our native plant areas in one year. That way we don't kill all of the butterfly eggs and other natural things living there. Now we watch the native prairie grasses and wild flowers grow.
As I uploaded the pictures this morning I was thinking about having the fires every year. D and M have been a part of this their whole lives, as has P but not so long. I think as the boys have grown they have gotten something different out of the experience each year. They have learned a lot about a wide variety of things. Not just how to help with a controlled fire and taking wind and air currents into account but also a lot about why we planted the native plants. They have learned about invasive species, butterflies and ants, pheasants, rabbits, groundhogs and other burrowing animals, hard work and how to work together, how to make work more fun, gathering our own firewood, being responsible, working together, seeds, how things grow, where "amber waves of grain" came from, and lots of other things I haven't thought about.
And to think, we just wanted to grow native grasses and wild flowers. Who knew at the time that we would nurture all that other stuff too?
April showers truly do bring May flowers.We have crab apples, apples, and red bud all blooming now. P is enjoying all the pink.
It was a warm sunny day so I played with my new camera.
I finally figured out the macro setting.
We have made jelly from our crab apples before. It is a lot of work as the fruit is very small.
The apples, however, are used every year.
May brings promises of good things to come.
In honor of Earth Day we had soup last night and used mostly things we have grown and stored here. P wanted potato soup but, alas, we finished the potatoes a couple of weeks ago. She will have to wait until late summer for potato soup. But, when we do have it again it will be a treat. Most of the foods in last night's soup have no miles on them.
Our onions and carrots have been stored in our unheated basement since last fall. The carrots have been in five gallon buckets of moist sand. We just pull them out as we need them. They have started to sprout a little in the dark but are as moist as ever. The onions have been stored in mesh bags or old panty hose. They are also starting to sprout but are still quite firm.
I added some chicken broth and green beans from the freezer and canned tomatoes from the cupboard.
I added a few not from our garden ingredients (beef, barley, and celery) to finish it off but I think we did pretty well to keep it local.
We are well on our way to replenish the food in storage. Our onion plants are in the ground and the carrots have been planted. We already have pea and radish sprouts. I think we will plant the potatoes this weekend.
We have been spending some time in the garden. Last weekend B and the boys tilled and planted peas. Lots of peas. This weekend we added a few more rows to the garden.
We planted carrots, radishes, beets, and parsnips.
Everyone helped.I love that P gets herself "dressed" for all occasions. And yes, her shoes DO match. They are both red!
I am not sure when we will actually see any sprouts.
Today was a snow day. No school - in April!
M's track meet was cancelled for tomorrow- something about snow on the track not being good...
Before Christmas I was looking through my old Threads magazines for something and saw this September 1995 issue with the bias scarf. When the magazine first came out I made a bunch of these scarves from polar fleece. Seeing the cover again, I thought they needed to be made from felted wool.
I immediately stopped my search through the old magazines and pulled out the washed wool bin. Happily, I found fabrics that suited each member of the family. I even had pink wool! How did that get in there? B's is made from an old tartan kilt I had in college and the others are made from thrifted yardage. In a short time I had four scarves made, wrapped, and under the tree.
The scarves can be worn down around the neck or on really cold windy days can be pulled up around the face. P hopes that hers will keep flying snow out of her face when she sleds. We are supposed to get more snow tonight so we may be able to see if it works to her satisfaction tomorrow.B and the boys took advantage of the snow free ground and finished cutting up the fallen apple tree. It will make good firewood next year.
P thinks the chainsaw is very loud.
I never did find the article I was looking for in the Threads magazines. However, I think I am happier now than I would have been if I had found it.It is good to recognize when this happens. Perhaps it will make life's unexpected journeys easier to enjoy. When we are not on the path we think we want to be on, we can still be happy with where we are going.
Our busy weekend also included putting up the lights on the chicken barn. We put them over there so that we can see them from the house.
I am not typically an outdoor lights fan but I do enjoy the warm glow from these through the darkest part of the year. It gets dark so early and these lights make it a little more fun to go check on the chickens and collect eggs.
Today, P and I will start cleaning and moving things to make room for our tree. There is sort of a domino plan to the moving. The guest bed needs to be moved from my sewing room so that my cutting table and P's desk can be moved from the living room into my sewing room. Then, we can move the couch. THEN we will have a place for our tree. The problem is that I am not sure where the bed is going...
We also have high hopes of making chocolate chip pumpkin muffins.
And at some point I need to start some secret sewing. I want to finish this quilt for a certain little person who likes the pink in the centers. She has given me lots of compliments in the top so I thought it should be hers. It will be a good size for her. She sometimes gets tangled in her big quilt. My secret sewing/knitting list is very long.
We had a very busy weekend starting with the cleaning of our extremely rusty well and replacement of the pump. (sorry, there are no photos of this procedure as I was working at the Art Show. I heard that it was very interesting but no one here thought to take pictures.) This was the Hometown Holidays weekend in town there was much scheduled that we did not get to attend. B took P to see the local performance of the Nutcracker while I was manning my booth at Art Show on Saturday. Sunday, the boys had two performances with the local Chamber Music group.
We also had our winter supply of home heating fuel delivered.
We heat our home with corn grown on the neighbors farm. We have a boiler designed to burn pellet fuel and mix store bought wood pellets with the corn to help it burn a little better.
The corn is stored in the old cistern (used to store water many years ago) in the basement. We fill the cistern through the basement window. B put an auger in the cistern that will fill the hopper on the boiler with the flick of a light switch. We fill the hopper every morning and twice a day when it is very cold.
A piece of old metal roofing forms the chute for the corn to get through the window.
I always find the delivery process interesting.
It is still fall but we are really having some wintery weather. I like the snow but wish we didn't have to get out to go to school. B decided that with the predicted low temperatures we should get the rest of the carrots out of the ground. We had been leaving them in the ground as long as possible and harvesting them as needed.
P enjoyed bringing some of the harvest to the house when she got home from preschool.
When D got out of school he helped finish the harvest. We now have carrots in our root cellar stored in buckets of wet (damp) sand. B researched and found this to be the recommended method of storage. We shall see.
Today was indeed the right day for the harvest. It is currently 11 degrees F.
I have mentioned that we grow our own apples and make applesauce. We planted some fruit trees a few years ago but none of those give fruit yet. The apples we use come from old orchard trees.
They are quite old and we have never pruned or sprayed them. They do make good apples. Some years are better than others. This is a good year for the Northern Spys.
The best apples are WAY up in the top of the trees. Our picking method involves spreading a tarp under the tree, climbing up into the tree, and shaking the branches until the apples fall.
Then, we bring them into the kitchen and mix them with apples from the neighboring farm. We are using Jonathans and Ida reds with our Norther Spys.
Peel, slice, cook, and can. Easy, but time consuming.
We planted back in the spring and watched it grow all summer. We worried about it when it didn't rain but there was nothing we could do but wait.
This weekend we harvested. It is slow work. Plant by plant, row by row, we pull the ears off the plant and knock the stalk to the ground. We pile the corn in the back of the pick up and sit on the back porch and pull off the shucks. Then, we are left with all the beautiful ears of corn.
We sort through them and save the biggest and best ears for next years seed. We try to save some of each color.
We sort the pile again and save good looking ears for making corn meal. Will let the ears dry and then shell them and store the kernels until we are ready to make bread. We grind the corn just before we make our Little Red Hen Bread. The rest of the corn is fed to the chickens.
I love looking at all of the different colors on the corn. P has saved two pink ears that she will plant next year. I like the kernels that are striped. The striping only appears in white and red. The burgundy kernels only are in ears with other burgundy or very dark purple. I find it fascinating.
Corn harvest also means the winding down of the fall food frenzy. Now, we wait for the corn to dry.
Still, we are making apple sauce but we see an end to the food preservation.
Harvest time. Yes. It is good to have lots of food from the garden but this is when it gets a little tiring. Some foods like the grapes need to be dealt with in a timely manner. We waited a little longer than we should have this year and ended up with sweet juice. Usually we make the juice before all of the grapes are ripe and the under ripe fruit adds a little tartness to the juice. The sweet juice is good though, and we didn't have to add sugar.
It was cold this weekend so we had a pile of basil from our neighbor to deal with Friday evening before the the predicted frost. B made and froze a huge batch of pesto.
We also made another batch of tomato sauce and two batches of ofapple sauce. All of this cooking helped heat the house a little. We didhave a fire in the wood stove last night so we put the BIG canner ontop of that and canned nine jars at once!
P and I have also cooked and frozen about 20 cups of pumpkin. She likes to turn the crank on the ricer.
She also likes to eat pumpkin muffins so it is good she likes to help.
All this work now will make things easier in the winter. When we are snowed in, we can go to the basement and be able to make a meal from what we have stored. potatoes, onions, garlic, tomato sauce, pesto, applesauce, grape juice, green beans, green peas, strawberry rhubarb pie fillings, peach pie fillings, peach blueberry pie fillings, jam, raspberry jam, pumpkin, blueberries.
We still have a lot more applesauce to make to last the year.
After my retreat in Elk Rapids where I enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere and the whir and hum of 30 sewing machines,
I am readjusting to life at home.
We are a little late getting to our grapes this year.
We picked them last night and made about a gallon of juice.
I have another batch on the stove and a third waiting to be heated.
The raspberries have started producing well so they will be picked again this afternoon as will more green beans.
I think my creative sewing ideas will have to wait.
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