Canned!

No, I didn't get fired. You have to have a paying job in order to get fired. Everything I do, I do as a volunteer.

I am trying to work up the ambition to do some canning today. I have a huge amount of green beans that need to be processed. I also have several large cucumbers that I am thinking about turning into relish. They are too big for pickles so dill relish it is. I have eight tomatoes with five or so more that will be ready tomorrow. My jalapeno plant is producing pretty well...for it's size. My peppers were really small plants this year and i didn't get much off them. I think I will have to buy some peppers but I plan on making salsa once my tomatoes really get going. If I get enough, I also want to do spaghetti sauce, tomato sauce and stewed tomatoes. Hrmmm, I might have to buy more tomatoes too, lol.

I had a bunch of peas I was going to can...but I ate them. The corn is alive with bees so we should get a good harvest there as well. My cucumbers are going to go bonkers here in about a week (?). The onions are getting really big too. I am going to have tons of fun with the garden this year. My kitchen is most likely going to look like a war zone from now until November though. Oh well, Hubby will just have to get over it. Think a loaf of zucchini bread will help?

drowning in produce

I never thought I would be growing "too much" food. My radishes are starting to taper off and I am getting ready to plant a second crop. My swiss chard is taking off and I can't eat it fast enough. I can't give it away fast enough either. It is a plant that tastes very similar to spinich. You can use it in a salad, you can put it on your sandwich, you can cook it, (my favorite is to boil it and serve it with a pat of butter and salt and pepper) the possibilities are endless. So is the plant...endless. The more you pick, the more leaves grow to take the place of the ones you harvested. I have a feeling I will be eating more of this plant than I ever thought possible.

My lettuce is also coming in thick. When I buy a head of lettuce in the store, I know I have to eat it within three or four days or it goes bad. When I pick lettuce from my garden, I can have it in the fridge for a week and it doesn't even WILT! It is still as crunchy and fresh as the day I harvested it.

My sunflowers are almost a foot tall and growing like crazy despite a neighbors claims that we can't grow sunflowers here. Because of that prior "knowledge", I planted every seed I had and well over 260 plants came up. I can't wait to invite this neighbor over this fall to see how hard it is to grow sunflowers here, lol.

The onions I planted are just as big or bigger than the onion plants I bought and are growing like crazy. I plan on dehydrating chopped onion pieces this fall to store for the year to come. I am toying with the idea of onion powder too, but we will see just how many we have. I have a sneaking suspicion that it takes A LOT of onions to make onion powder.

My pepper plants are doing good, but not growing much. they seem to have just stalled out and decided to stay this size. I am seeing new growth coming on, hopefully some blossoms in there as well. I would really like to make some salsa this year.

Speaking of salsa, the tomatoes are also doing good and they are actually growing a little taller. We are playing with the water system to fine tune it so that everything gets the right amount of water. The tomatoes seem to like what they are getting so we aren't messing with them much.

The cucumbers are putting out new leaves almost every day and I am looking forward to pickle making this fall. We tried a few new kind of cucumbers and I am hoping they will work well for pickles. We have four bush cucumber plants and four lemon cucumbers along with four pickling cucumbers. (gosh, I hate typing that word)

My jeruselum artichokes are getting really big and I think I will plant them a bit different next year. I want to do something similar to what we did with our potato plants. We have them in a small box that we can add layers to as the plants grow. If you keep putting dirt over the top of the plant, it will be forced to grow ever higher, producing more and more potatoes all the way up the stem.

My peas and beans finally came up (they were the last planted) and are 1 1/2 to 2 inches tall now. I have to figure out what will work best as a trellis for them to climb. Still pondering that one.

The corn is around six inches tall and can now flutter in the breeze. This is the crop I think the whole family is most excited about. We all love corn on the cob and I will also freeze any excess that we can't eat fresh. With three rows of corn, I think there will be plenty to freeze.

The squashes (zucchini, crookneck and pumpkin) are doing well as are the melons. I think those will be one of the more fun crops that the kids will enjoy picking and eating.

I am busy right now dealing with everything that is coming ready and I know it is only going to get worse as the rest of the crops mature, but it is certainly a satisfying kind of busy. And now I have proven to myself that I really can provide for my family. Now if I can only get a deer this year.......

Reaping the rewards

Tonight for dinner, I walked out the back door and picked several of the ingredients from my garden. The lettuce is so tender it rips apart when you try to pick it. I had a very hard time breaking it off near the stalk. The swiss chard is both in the salad and cooked like spinach and topped with butter and salt. I added radishes to the salad that I grew in the garden.

I can't WAIT for the rest of the garden to start producing. I am especially anxious for tomatoes. We bought four more plants today to replace the ones that didn't make it. Our eyes also got a little bit bigger than our plot and we came home with three watermelons, two canteloupe, three pumpkins, a crookneck squash, two zucchini and sixteen (you read that right, sixteen) cucumbers. We are going to have to expand part of the garden for the squashes and pumpkins. I am also giving away four of the cucumber plants. There will be lots of pickles this year!

Garden is producing

So we have been eating radishes we grew in our garden for a while now. Tonight I will fix some swiss chard and a salad with our lettuce. The carrots are coming up quickly, the Jerusalem artichokes are doing very well. I am going to have cucumbers coming out of my ears, but my zucchini and summer squash are still just thinking about coming up. The tomatoes are hit and miss but the corn is 2 inches tall. My peppers and onions are coming around (they were transplanted) but the cantaloupe and watermelon are a total loss. The peas and beans are in the ground so all I have to do is replace the cantaloupe and watermelon. This is shaping up to be a very good garden.

I almost forgot, I also have over 260 sunflowers that came up!! The bees will be very happy!

It's Market time!

I don't give a hoot about April Fool's Day, April showers, blah blah blah. But I'm super excited that today is April 1st! Why? Because that means the Farmer's Market is opening tomorrow!

Our local farmer's market is open Thurs-Sun from April until Oct., and weekends in Nov. and Dec. I'm very excited for all the fresh produce, flowers and meats! Even honey! We have a quite large farmer's market that actually has it's own allotted space by the city, and is housed in an honest to god open air building!

One of the best things about this is that all the local places I would normally go to (or not, because some aren't open to the public) are all in one place! I can get my hand-ground meats, veggies and flowers for my table all in one place! Another good thing is that the majority of the merchants at the Market are small family-owned farms and ranches. They grow as much as they can, and sell what they can't use themselves. Some even have co-op programs, or buy-ins; where you pay a small deposit and two or three payments pre-season and from July through October you have a batch of veggies dropped off on your doorstep each week.

This summer, I'm making a very big effort to eat as natural is possible, with buying as little food as I have to. I don't have my own garden yet, and frankly don't have the know-how to implement a large enough one in the near future. I'm hoping to start small this season, planting some Walla Walla's, maybe some corn, and a few strawberries. Maybe I'll lose my mind and go a bit further, but for right now, that's the general plan. But since there is no way in hell I'll be able to realistically self-sustain the Boy and I this year, I'm going to try to take weekly trip to the market, and hopefully buy anything I need there.

An amazing friend of mine and I had a conversation last night, and we ended up at one point discussing how we didn't want to eat organic, we wanted to eat food that was more then that. Grown by people who grow it because they love it. Food pollinated by bees, and feed by sunlight and good ol' dirt. Both of us are fairly health conscious, and have been slowly moving left on the food spectrum. My friend is expecting her first child, and has even bought a food processor with the plan to make her own baby food, and I don't blame her. With the recent outbreaks of nastiness in everyday foods (tomatoes, peanut butter, pistachios) it's a bit scary to think that basically anything I'm feeding my son can potentially make him sick. I'd rather risk a bit of the "you're losing your mind" and know what it going in his mouth, where is came from, and where it has been.