Busy, Busy, Busy

After the panicked peach pitting party (don't you love alliterations?!), I've gotten the canning bug again. Thank goodness! The peak of the season is in full swing and will soon be waning.

And I've been a busy little bee. I was doing the buying for my produce co-op and the produce company had a great deal on local pickling cucumbers. So, I got together with 2 other ladies from church and we bought 2 bushels. Yes. 2 BUSHELS. That was really silly. I guess I really had no idea how BIG a bushel was! Haha! So, we had a ton of cucumbers. And cucumbers are delicate little things and must not be bumped about, be chilled (dry) and then canned right away. Something we learned: water + cucumbers = slime.

So I had my first ever canning bee yesterday. The three of us got together and from 8:30 am to 12:30 pm we canned as much as we could, which wasn't much with one electric stove. I came home and canned the rest of my pickles. I've got spears and chips, and today I'm planning on using the rest of my cukes for relish.

Let me tell you something. There is just something about seeing home-canned pickles in a jar that makes me so ticklishly happy. Maybe it's because they're not neon green. Maybe it's because with all the garlic and dill floating in the brine they look so fancy gourmet and upscale. Maybe it's because when you twirl the jar back and forth the spears look like octopus legs and the dill looks like seaweed and the garlic looks like little white fishes...

Don't believe me?!?

Seaweed.

Little white fish garlics swimming around the octopus legs.

Seriously, I am not crazy. Just imaginative!

A beautiful demure green, don't you think? 

I added peppercorns to a few. :-) How many neon green jars have those?

None.

Beautiful pickles. 

My pickle-loving son sure is happy!

A Crow in the Sunrise

We had a beautiful sunrise this morning and we've had constant flocks of crows lately. This is a shot of a crow in a tree behind our home.

Photography

You might notice a new widget thing on the side bar from RedBubble. I'm a little hesitant about selling or advertising, but I was trying to think of a way to help us save money toward our future homestead from home and one of the only things I can think of right now is my photography. So, feel free to browse, and if you feel so inclined, to purchase a print or some cards. If not, that's okay! Still feel free to look through my photographs of nature and farms and architecture. I like being able to share my photography and to think that others enjoy it as much as I do. Thanks! :-)

Memorial Weekend Get-Away

Barn Kitten

This past weekend my family and I went up to visit a good friend of mine up in New York. I haven't seen my friend, Mairi, for about a year and through letters I've heard so much about the little farm where she lives with her sister Heather's family. So Friday afternoon my husband, our two kids, and I headed up to stay for a few days.

Heather and her family's hospitality was wonderful and we had ourselves a great time chatting, walking and eating. We enjoyed drinking raw milk from a dairy down the road, eating fresh eggs of the chicken and duck variety, wandering the ruins of an old gristmill next door, and meeting their large family of animals in the old barn on their property. Among the animals we met were three sheep whose bleating sounded rather mournful and pathetic (haha!), three psychotic geese who we had to fend off with a stick nearly every time we left the house and ventured toward the barn, a sweet old horse, a dozen little barn cats, and a bunch of chickens. We got a glimpse of the ducks who were a bit snooty and stayed downstream on the creek if we came anywhere near. We also had fun playing with their dalmatian dog Rooster. (I asked if their rooster's name was Dog, but it wasn't. Heehee!)

One of the wonderful things about visiting them was being able to eat some of their local food. It really was such a treat. I went with my friend, Mairi, to go pick up the raw milk from that dairy down the road. It really is such a shame when getting raw milk is reduced to the status of something akin to picking up illegal moonshine at a secret meeting place. I personally don't mind pasteurized milk, but if people want to drink raw milk, why not let it be their choice and to get it if they'd like to?

I realized something important this weekend. We were driving past that "dairy down the road" and I looked out my window to see their beautiful, creamy brown Jersey cows grazing in the pasture behind their old wood slat and stone barn and a thought struck me hard: "There are the cows whose milk I'm drinking." For a suburb girl who's only ever drunk milk bought at the store in plastic jugs, this was really profound. Not to mention I had been eating the eggs from the ducks and chickens I had met at Mairi's house. There is one thing to be eating the food you buy at your local farmer's market, but it's a completely different thing to eat the food that comes from animals you've met or that you take care of, the vegetables you've sweated and labored over in your own garden. It's a whole different level of eating. The satisfaction is immense. I don't know where it comes from exactly, but to be that connected to what nourishes and strengthens my body is a mind-boggling experience. To have that feeling every day - wow. I want that so badly. It's the biggest goal I'm going for right now. And to think being that connected was such an everyday part of life to so many people in the past. I'm glad that so many people today are passionate about getting back to that.

Mairi's sister Heather sent us home with some fresh eggs!
From top to bottom: Chicken egg, Duck egg, Goose egg.
Man, the goose egg looks like a freaking ostrich egg! I think I'm going to manage to make a whole quiche with just that one goose egg. Amazing!

A wonderful gift from Heather:
Washed, carded, and dyed wool ready for spinning (from their own sheep.) Hooray!

Me feeding the horse, Des, a candy cane.
Apparently, he loves these. It was quite the slobbery experience!

My New Friend

It's scratched, dented, with pieces of wood broken off, but it's got a new set of strings and it's all mine!

Photo Surprise

I am just overwhelmingly surprised! Awhile back I had a photo published in the magazine Mother Earth News. Then, in the next issue I was just as surprised to see another one of my photos! I thought, "What luck!" and was just really pleased. And then in the mail I received a package informing me that they had picked a third photo of mine. (These are all in the CU readers' photos section of the magazine.) I was totally shocked! Of course I'm flattered and pleased. It feels good to know photos you took to reflect your love of nature are appreciated by others.

HAPPY AUTUMN!

A picture I took in October 2007.

Chicken & Sheep

I took this amusing picture at an historical village. Maybe it's amusing because I'm not that familiar with the habits of sheep or chickens, but it's still pretty darn cute!

Drying & Stuff

It's official! I am saving electricity!! After seeing our atrocious electric bill for last month (blasted, but wonderful A/C!) I decided to do something drastic. Yes, I turned off our A/C at least some of the time, but I also don't know why I haven't done this before - I bought a clothes drying rack. Now I can dry my laundry in the sun! WOOOO! And it's completely free, free, free, that amazing sun is.

Of course this does mean that I have to rearrange how and when I do my laundry and I'll probably have to buy one or two more racks, but what an awesome investement, don't you think??? One obstacle to clothes drying: I don't like the smell of sun-dried clothes. Call me crazy, but I think it smells weird. And your clothing comes out stiff. However, I heard of this trick. Sun dry your clothes and then toss them into the dryer for 5 minutes (with a dryer sheet if you so desire) and PRESTO! Soft laundry without the hours of electricity burning away. Genius!

Here is a picture of some of my garden bounty. See those tomatoes back there? I grew those!!! (Ignore the avacados. I have no idea how those got onto my counter... but they sure made an amazing guacamole!)

What the Zukes!

So, I was one of the lucky ones to be given some huge zucchini from a friend's garden. I didn't grow any this year, so I was actually excited to get some! Well, after the excitement wore off, those three big dudes sat on my kitchen counter until I could figure out what to do with them. I didn't want to freeze them since we'll be moving soon and that would be a waste or I'd be a 2nd generation giver (heh heh). And right now I'm not that into stir-fry. So... what else do you do with zucchini? I cracked open my Ball Blue Book of Preserving because I was sure it would tell me something I could do with zukes and I was right! It said I could dehydrate them. Wow. Why hadn't I thought of that? It's brilliant! Dehydrated stuff takes a miniscule amount of space to store and they're fast and easy to use. And if the electricity goes out they don't go bad like frozen stuff.

So, I busted out my hand-me-down dehydrator from the '70s, cleaned it out and sliced up those zuke daddies. My dehydrator has about 6 or 7 shelves and it took 2 1/2 of my zucchinis (plus a couple of Bloody Butcher tomatoes)! And I really think I'll be able to fit all the dried chips into one quart mason jar. AMAZING!!!

I love this article in Mother Earth News about drying food. It got me really excited about drying food because usually canning stuff is the star of the preservation show. I am amazed at what you can dehydrate and the fact that you can do it all in the sun (indoors or out!) is even more awesome! I'm really paranoid about running my dehydrator at night (risk of fire???) so it's taking longer than it probably has to, and I'm not too fond of how much electricity it's taking, but I am excited about my proactive streak and not letting the zucchini go to waste. :-)

Small and Large Harvests

So, I finally got to harvest some peas! (About 3 handfuls. Woo!) I'm so glad I planted sugar snap peas because you can just eat them right off the vine and they're crunchy and sweet. Oh! They were so good. I just had them on a salad for lunch too. My Bloody Butcher tomatoes are loving their homemade self-watering bucket. I've noticed that the roots have grown down into the water resevoir. I wonder if that's a good thing... The plant seems to be really, really happy. There are about five or six large clusters of tomatoes. I am really excited! All my tomatoes except one have tomatoes on them. The Brandywines are getting huge! So, a tomato harvest will be coming soon. My goal: to have enough to can some salsa and maybe make some spaghetti sauce. Mmmm! Homemade is the best!

As for the large harvest: my wonderful friend Clair has a cherry tree and was begging people to come pick some because she hated to see any go to waste. Of course I didn't mind at all! I don't know how big a bushel of cherries is, but I think I picked about 2. I canned cherry pie filling and cherry preserves. It took me 2 weeks. (I haven't been feeling well since I'm 9 weeks pregnant!) I still had some left to can and yesterday I bit the bullet, clenched my teeth through the nausea and canned the last of the preserves. Right now I never want to see a cherry again! haha! But I have lots of little jars to give away and enough cherry preserves and pie filling to last us quite awhile. I think in all I canned.... about 3 dozen half pints of preserves and 1 dozen quarts of pie filling. So - Thank you Clair!!!! But really. I don't want to see cherries again for awhile. I saw people selling them at the farmer's market and nearly lost my breakfast. haha!

Garden Update

Herbs, Peas, Lettuce (harvested), Tomatoes & Kale

So, it's been nice not to have to water my container garden very much, what with the crazy amount of rain we've been receiving. It's really making me wish we had a rain barrel. I really think it would be half-way full by now.

Anyway, I have a total of 5 tomatoes growing (finally!), I've harvested lettuce twice - once being an emergency harvest after the hail, and I've gathered some of my purple kale for a yummy kale, onion, and bean sauted salad. The purple is so pretty in a dish! Strangely, my peas have finally flowered, so who knows if my sugar snap peas will ever arrive. At long last, I transplanted 2 of my tomato plants into bigger containers (a.k.a. large plastic buckets with holes drilled in the bottom).

I had one bucket left over and got a little ambitious... And now I have a compost! I have no idea what the heck I'm doing, but I always feel so sad throwing away perfectly good kitchen scraps and grass clippings that I don't use as a mulch cover for my plants. So, I drilled one hole in the bottom of the plastic bucket, chucked in some old dirt, grass clippings and some fruit skins, etc and voila! Compost. I am really excited! I have no clue if it will work. I'll probably have to abandon the noxious mess when we move, but at least I'm trying!

And as soon as I get some more dirt I'll add it and then go buy some earthworms at the store. Unless it rains again and I can pick them up off the sidewalk somewhere. Does anyone know if you have worms in your compost that you don't put a cover on it? I don't want to bake them, but I don't want to attract flies either. I guess I'll find out. Yipee!

2 Brandywines sharing a tub

A Brandywine tomato!

Bloody Butcher Tomato plant and my Miracle Jalapenos
(doesn't "Bloody Butcher" sound awesome for a tomato name??)

The Storm

It's been pretty rainy and cool here in Cache Valley. I am a huge fan of this! However, I've never had a small starter garden in pots before and the last storm that howled through did not treat my little plants very nicely. With the thunder and rain came pea to marble-sized hail. Earlier that day I had harvested some of my butter crunch lettuce. But after the storm, my last two heads were completely thrashed (a great before and after!), my once-wimpy tomato plants were quite wounded as well - limbs sliced off, holes punched through leaves or slightly shredded. My Miracle Jalapeno plants weren't too badly hurt - they're living up to their names. And the peas just look like they layed down for a nap. Strangely, I'm not too saddened by all this destruction. I think the plants will survive. (Though one of my Brandywines keeps aborting its flowers and I don't know why!....) But we are moving soon to where ever my husband's job will take us. If it's long distance, I seriously doubt that I'll be able to take any plants with me. I will miss my purple sage!

Here are some pictures right after the hail had stopped, but with the rain still coming down.

Our yard covered with hail.

My garden after the hail.

A Not So New Way to Recycle

Recycling is a word that makes you feel great or guilty. The word is pushed on us, calling for us to take responsibility for our actions and for our planet. Some people don't care and don't bother. Other people are obsessed. But most people, I think, are an odd mix inbetween - half-heartedly recycling, doing it enough to make themselves feel good without having it become an inconvenience. It's an interesting dance of balance about what you believe and feel comfortable doing and what society expects of you.

What do you think of when you think about recycling? Big blue bins waiting on the curb stocked full of washed out cans and cardboard boxes? How about washing out plastic ziploc bags to reuse them... Am I the only one that does that? It's a pain but so worth it. We save tons of money! Well, anyway, those are two way of recycling, but today I'm here to remind you of another way to recycle - reusing. Yes, washing out plastic bags is one way of reusing. Have you ever shopped at a thrift store or an antique store? Well, then you've reused! I don't think there's anything more fun than finding a sweet deal at a yard sale or a thrift store. Heck, yesterday I went a little crazy because I was feeling the bug. At the thrift store I found: handcranked metal meat grinder - $3, cast iron frying pan in good condition - $5, a heavy duty tub with a lid - $4, a very nice metal pastry blender - 50 cents! Then, at the antique shop I found: a set of 3 cheese graters that my mom used when I was growing up (they ROCK!) - $12 for all 3 (it would cost that much for a new plastic one), and a vintage, beautiful, pale yellow ceramic serving bowl - $9 (marked down from $21!)

As fun as finding all that was, my ultimate reusing feat (heck, they really just call it thriftiness) was reusing an old, despised laundry basket. This is what I did with it:

I cut holes in the bottom for drainage with a jigsaw. Then, I taped a plastic grocery bag to two sides (kind of as an experiment) and the other two sides I covered front and back with clear packing tape.

Then I filled it with dirt! It was the perfect, shallow planter for my lettuce. And it makes me giggle that I can see the dirt through the clear packing tape. :-)

It's a little silly, but I'm pretty proud that I thought to do this with the basket. See, thriftiness is a learned skill. My mom was excellent at it and she learned that from her mother. I used to be pretty good at it, but with a lot of moving around and school I lost touch with my inner creativity and imagination. It feels good to stretch it a bit!

Let me know ways that you have found to reuse things or any amazing finds you've had at the thrift store, antique store, or yard sale. I'd love to hear about them!

Garden, Market and More

Beautiful Local Eggs

Speaking of eating locally... You know how "people" say that it is better for people to eat what is local healthwise because they should eat what grows naturally in their climate? Well, I think there's good points to that, but I don't necessarily want to give up pineapple just yet. Anyway, something weird happened to me when we moved to Cache Valley. I think we had been living here for a month when I started to crave raspberries. Really bad. Okay, so I was pregnant at the time, but it was a different type of craving. It was a deep, subconscious need that was completely mystifying! When I learned that raspberries are a huge crop in this region, it just blew my mind. How did my body know that?? I had never craved raspberries before in my life, and here I was tuning into what was grown naturally in Cache Valley. Strange...

Okay. So, I was getting sick of babysitting my poor little weakling tomato plants by bringing them inside at night. A few nights ago I had had it. I yelled at them through the screen door "If you don't make it through the night, then you don't deserve to survive!" I was pretty darn resolved. Then later, I heard it raining hard and gasped, "My tomatoes!" I ran to the back door where they sat there huddled against the wind and the cold rain. Actually, the wind wasn't that bad - the tomatoes were staked well. And the rain wasn't that hard. It was actually pretty gentle. So I said, "Heck with you boogers. Tough it out!" and walked away. And they've trucked along. There's even a sign of a flower bud on one. I guess you never can tell how much gumption a plant's got until you let it alone for awhile. Pictures of my garden:

Wimpy tomatoes. At least they're green, even if they're a little sunburned.

My two proud Brandywines. Can you tell which one came from the nursery? (Look for the one with the macho stem.) The container is a tub from the thrift store that came without a lid - how perfect for plants!

This jalapeno plant survived a 36º F night and survived like a champ! I call it the Miracle Jalapeno. He has since been joined by 2 others...

My beautiful Purple Kale that I couldn't resist adopting from the nursery.

My happy herb garden. Left to right: Rosemary, Purple Sage (I love this plant!) and Cinnamon Basil (oooh! Fancy!)

Farmers' Market Spoils: Oregano, Butter Crunch lettuce plants, spinach, eggs (aren't they beautiful??) and goat milk soap - Forest Glade scent, mmmmm..... :-)

Farmers' Market Begins!

Today the clouds look like carded wool. The sun is shining and the breeze is cool - a perfect Spring day for the start of the local farmers' market. I love going to the farmers' market, even when I don't buy anything. Like today.

My husband, son, and I got to the park where the market is held a half hour after it started. It was already packed and bustling! I shouldn't have been surprised, but the business made me smile. I think it's so great rubbing elbows with neighbors and fellow Cache Valley residents. And it's grown so much since last year! Buying something from the market always gives me an immense sense of satisfaction. I think it's knowing that someone that lives down the road made the cheese that I bought or spun the wool and knit the shawl that I admired - that buying something there is like buying a piece of my community and I become even more connected than I was before.

But, alas, this time I had forgotten to bring cash! We slowly meandered between the stalls past goat soap, hardy seedlings, 6-packs of hodge-podge colored eggs, fresh crackling bread, and various homemade crafts, and yet I couldn't buy a single thing! We didn't stay too long, but it was good to just feel the companiable vibe in the air, to hear the noisy, happy chatter, to smell the fried onions and perfumed soaps in the air and to feel the sun on our heads.

Even if I had had cash, I don't know if I could have justified buying anything, though. Our fridge at home is overstocked with wilting kale, yellowing broccoli, year-old dates (they haven't gone bad yet!), multitudes of miniscule postions of leftovers, and a variety of store-bought breads. My whole fridge fills me with guilt. Not because it's dirty (I actually cleaned it a month ago), but because I know that I want to learn to eat seasonably, to eat the bread I know how to make but don't, to be so organized that my menu recycles and uses leftovers in clever ways, to be using our food storage so that we don't buy as much at the store, to really cut back on packaged foods (like pasta which I'm confident that I could make), etc., etc., etc!

I long to join a CSA (we're job hunting after just graduating from school so that's not possible), and to know the story behind the food that we eat. Aaah, so many goals and so many frustrations. I tell myself that when we move and are settled, that it will be different. Maybe it will be, maybe it won't. I just need to remind myself to do what I can right now and be content until improvements can realistically be made. And the next time we go to the farmers' market you better believe that I won't forget my money! (And that I'll have an empty fridge.)