August Harvest

Hooray for harvesting tomatoes! Biting into a sun-warmed tomato that was seconds picked from the branch is divine! The flavors are so sweet, so complex, it's like stepping into a completely different world of taste that you never knew you were missing. I really don't see how I could ever eat those awful, tasteless store bought tomatoes ever again. I don't know if I'll have a big enough harvest to do much canning, but I do want to make at least a small batch of homemade salsa. Mmmm!

For awhile I had a resident grasshopper in my little garden. He loved hiding amongst the cool sugar snap pea foliage and my lettuce (which is still going strong!). I didn't see that he did much harm, so I left him alone. Then we went out of town and a sweet neighbor watered my plants for me. When I came back and went over to thank her, she proceeded to tell me how she found a huge grasshopper in my plants. Grasshoppers completely freak her out, so she took a big rock and dropped it on the little guy, smashing him. I'll have to admit that I'm going to miss that green hopper, but I suppose it's for the best. I had wondered if he was the culprit for ruining my first ripe Brandywine tomato...

Daily Rythm

The heads of wheat have turned gold in the fields, the days are scorching hot, and last night I had a dream about helping a sheep give birth to twin lambs. I know I want to have my own little farm one day, but I hadn't planned on having sheep for quite some time. It really was a very strange dream... See, my husband (who is very wonderful!) needs to be convinced one step at a time. Oh, he thinks me canning is great, was a little skeptical of my container garden (the initial cost and all) but is now proud of me, and I keep telling him that I can't wait to have chickens. And cats. And ducks. (I'm starting with the small animals.) He cringes when I talk about those, but I'm being persistant!

I'm reading a homesteading memoir right now called A Small Farm in Maine. I am only three chapters into it, but I have been surprised at how sensitive, honest, and insightful the author has been in her memoir about homesteading. She really helps you realize that homesteaders start with so little knowledge and it's building on that knowledge - one skill at a time, one season at a time. It feels like such a slow process! I read a lot of gardening books as a teenager and I thought I knew a lot about gardening - that is until I started doing it myself. Man, what a difference!

I've also realized with my little garden this year that homesteading has to be apart of you. Each step you take, each element that you add to your tiny patch of dirt is something that you have to add to yourself so that it becomes apart of you and apart of your daily rythm; like the habit of watering your garden. When my pregnancy started making me sick I forgot about my garden for two days. My poor tomatoes were keeled over screaming for water by the time I remembered. I was so scared that I was going to lose them, but lucky for me they bounced back really well. This also taught me another thing - that I am completely responsible.

So, I think for now, that it's a good thing that I'm only taking care of plants at this point. I feel the garden slowly becoming apart of the rythm of my day. And when the time comes for chickens, ducks, and cats, taking care of them will become apart of that daily rythm too. I can't wait!

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!

Peas!

Halleluia! I have peas. It seems that they just appeared overnight. It's a good thing our cool weather has been holding out for so long. My cool weather plants are still pretty happy and now I have some hope of a pea harvest, even if it's a small one. :-) I also looked this morning and saw a few jalapeno peppers coming in. That is really exciting! My yellow pear has also sprouted three baby pear-shaped tomatoes. I hope I get to harvest some of this stuff before we move.

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??)

Butter

I finally made some homemade butter thanks to a very descriptive and simple blog post from The Mobile Home Woman. I went over to a friend's so that we could make it together. My cream was about a month over the expiration date, but it hadn't gone bad yet. So, I decided to use it.

We discovered really quickly that it was indeed important to have the cream at a little cooler than room temperature because the butter just would not come while it was really cold. My friend, Clair, had read the instructions more closely and had warmed her cream in the microwave and her butter came really quickly. So, I warmed mine up a tad and it worked like a charm! We used a spoon and our fingers to wash the butter and I think using fingers got more of the buttermilk out. I added salt to mine, folding it in really well on a plate and pouring off the extra water as it came out. This really helped a lot.

Now, I don't know if it was because my cream was really aged, but my butter had a wonderful flavor - nothing like the store-bought stuff. You should give it a try. I spread this butter on a slice of homemade bread and there's nothing like it in the world!

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.