Scratching around in the dirt

August is harvest month for gardeners! We are getting our fair share for sure, but it is definitely eye-opening to see how much we can actually bring in and how much we need to feed everyone given the space/knowledge/resources we have.

I made a real grocery trip this week. I haven't done that in months. To be completely honest, it feels so bittersweet. I have so much more peace when it comes to a meal time because there is enough food stocked up in the pantry and refrigerator to actually put something together that resembles a meal instead of a plate full of snacks from all of the food groups. On the other hand, it was weird just picking up cheese in a brightly lit deli case and not getting it from a cooler stashed behind a 3 foot table.

 

Carrots have been the prize winning crop for us this year. We haven't bought carrots since... March, maybe? It's been a long long time. They just keep coming! We have chopped, steamed, pureed, stir-fried, or roasted these beauties in at least one meal every day.

 

The cooler days have us back outside playing in the dirt again. We are all really enjoying the lower temperatures. All of us...the people, the poultry and the plants. The naughty-flighty-moody, yet curious and totally quirky, hens are each laying about an egg a day, giving us anywhere from 24-28 eggs a week.

 

We have beets! This was totally an experiment. I had a pack of Burpee's Golden Beets from Seed Savers sitting in my seed box and an empty row between beans and potatoes. The entire plant is edible, which means greens in a stir fry and beets in a salad. I love using ALL of the plant up.

 

The tomatoes are still rolling in, thank goodness. See these two jars of tomato sauce? 23 roma tomatoes. 23.  We are pulling anywhere from 10-15 red tomatoes every night or every other night. We consume them just as quickly as we pull them, so nothing has been canned yet. I froze a couple of jars of salsa and these two jars are sitting in the refrigerator awaiting their fate in a spinach lasagna that is planned for this weekend. 

We visited the Randolph Fair this morning. It was so... magical. I don't know how the importance of the county fair got lost on me over the years, but it is so important. Teaching kids how to care and raise animals should be a required class in every school, in my opinion. I wish I knew half of what older generations know naturally about raising livestock.

August Kitchen

We have been putting our kitchen skills to use this summer. Things we have never made before are turning out so amazing we eat them up before a picture can be snapped (fried green tomatoes).  And some old things we are finally learning how to make taste good. (johnnycakes)

Our canning has been limited to raspberries, blueberries and cherries. We didn't get a single of our own raspberry or blueberry this year so all of our fruit came from nearby farms. (Damn birds) We have stocked up a portion of the freezer with salsa, green beans, peaches and basil pesto. I am still waiting to get enough tomatoes at once to can whole tomatoes and hopefully a few jars of ketchup.

I see us forming new habits in our cooking, eating, buying, and obsessing. For starters, we are fat hoarders now. You heard me. We save all the fat from everything we cook that leaves fat in the pan. We use it over and over. I know that sounds gross, it isn't. It's amazing.

We eat what we pull in from the garden and if we run out then we will hit up the farm down the road.  But, mostly what I'm seeing is when we've eaten up the beans for the week we just stop eating beans and move onto whatever else is in the basket we haul up from the backyard.

We are buying way less. I mean way less. Our freezer is pretty well stocked with cows and pigs that used to live down the road. I am so conscience of how much meat we consume that I am always 'forgetting' to thaw something out, so we have to eat beans again. We are eating either beef or pork about 5 times a week now, that includes all meals... not just dinner.  I still haven't found a meat chicken supply that is local and in our budget, so we eat a lot of (free) eggs!

I am trying not to obsessively say in my head 'I can make that - don't buy it' because really the list of what I can make is growing (yay!) but my allotted time to make those things isn't (boo!).  Honestly, though when I reach the point in my life where I have all the time to make all of the things, I won't have all the people to feed on a daily basis and that is just too sad to think about.
  

fried eggs

rosemary pork with peach chutney and sweet corn

pesto, parmesan and roma grilled pizza

peach pie

The Garden in April

I think I have turned from the person who gardens for fun to the person who needs to garden in order to stay sane. I am antsy this time of year. There is little to do and I am ready to get things moving. The outdoor chores of the day are not as much as I need them to be and the indoors are starting to feel like a very small wooden (or brick, in our case) box.

We are trying to keep ourselves busy by hovering over our indoor seedlings and building raised beds and cultivating as much soil as we can to fill those beds. Kenny Rogers, our jersey-wooly/angora bunny has been producing an ample supply of fertilizer, and the coffee shop has been filling bucket after bucket with serious amounts of coffee grounds. We mulched up all of leaves from fall, tossed in our vegetable scrap compost, and added some red wrigglers in hopes that it will all break down into a decent amount of good soil. I think we are still going to have to pay for some dirt in the end.

Anyway, a few things are moving along. Our garden is a bit scattered about at our homestead. There is an herb garden on the backside of the porch, a two-tiered butterfly/strawberry garden on the sunny-side of the garage, another tiered bulb and perennial bed along the steps that beans and cabbage and corn starts or seeds get tossed in every now and then, and there are curved out spots here and there with various perennials and veggies... and then there are the rows of raised beds that we add to every year. It's chaos that we reign in with no grace whatsoever.

Nearly everything in our herb garden reseeded itself this year. I guess it never got cold enough long enough to truly kill off the plants. We already have fresh dill, parsley, thyme, mint, lavender, and lemon balm to use. Lucky us!

Until the weather becomes a bit more stable I will continue reading farming memoirs and doing the little things that can be done. This morning I laid out the potatoes on the back porch so the eyes can start sprouting. I am anxious to get them in the ground and then onto our plates.

While you are waiting for your soil to warm up here is a list of memoirs that we've read over the winter (or are currently reading) and would recommend if you are interested in some inspiring books about growing & gathering your own food:

The Dirty Life
The Quarter-Acre Farm
A Householders Guide to the Universe
Girl Hunter
The Rural Life
Barnheart
Fat of the Land
Growing a Farmer
The Feast Nearby

Addendum - Cold Frame Repair

I'm not sure how interested you are in the ongoing saga of our attempts to regulate Northeast Ohio's schizophrenic growing season--and I'm fully willing to accept that you're not as invested in it as I am--but in case last night's post about repairing the hoop house cold frame left you wanting some visuals...well, here are some pictures.

 See the roof of the house in the background? 

That's snow--the cold frame did its job last night.

 Here's the ridge along the top. There's a better way to do it, 

I know, but I had scrap wood and limited time, and it works.

Ready for the next windstorm!

Whadda day

Yesterday, the kids and I tromped down to the raised bed to check on our little box of crops inside the hoop house cold frame. We lifted up the plastic and peeked inside to see our carrots, their stalks grown tall and gorgeous; our spinach, green leaves bunched and beautiful; our chives, looking delicious as always. I lowered the structure back over our plants, commented on how great they'll taste at Thanksgiving, and headed back inside.

Then the wind started up. We get a lot of wind up here, so it was no surprise, but I hadn't prepared the hoop house--which is pretty much just a big box kite--for the gusty gales. I checked on it throughout the evening and, despite whipping around, it stayed put for a long time...until it didn't. I handed the baby to my wife, slipped on some sandals, and ran outside in my pajamas to discover a tangle of plastic sheeting and lumber laying in the grass. I sighed, gathered them up, and deposited the mess in the garage. 

It didn't frost last night, though, and I'm in no way ready to give up on that garden bed so, after work, I headed to the hardware store and bought five dollars worth of screws, brackets, and clamps and, upon arriving home, immediately set myself to repairing the thing. It didn't take long, the kids were being okay, and there was still light in the sky, so I went ahead and made a few improvements to boot, most notably adding a beam across the top to firm up the structure and securing it with some stakes and rope to keep it grounded the next time the winds start a-whippin'. Just in time, too, because the evil weather people are tossing around the "snow" word in tonight's forecast.
  
We'd decided to finish off the pasta dough from the other night and, oh boy, it went so much better tonight. Rolled out the dough, fed it into the pasta machine, and cut myself some perfect fettuccine noodles. And, just for the heck of it, I made them crazy long--a few easily measured over two feet long.

Wee!

Our new discovery that homemade noodles make the box stuff pale in comparison held firm tonight--fettuccine alfredo with homemade pasta? Gah, so good.

We grew that broccoli.

 I love this thing.

After dinner, the kids asked me what was for dessert and Carla mentioned that she could go for some cookies. What was I gonna do? Not make those brownies again? We were out of margarine so, with permission, I used the homemade butter, and I added some cinnamon extract to the whipped cream. These little changes created a dessert that was...transcendent? sublime? I can't settle on an appropriate term, but I can tell you it was too good. Too, too good.

This is where the picture of the brownies would be if we 

hadn't eaten them all up before I could reach for the camera.

What a weekend!

See that pitchfork in the header? It's there to do more than just tickle your eyeballs when you hit up this here blog--it's a reference to the fact that our food interests supersede just combining elements to produce mouth-watering (and hopefully photogenic) delicacies. A tomato is awesome, but a homegrown tomato--well, there's nothing quite like a homegrown tomato, is there? So we're growing tomatoes. Well, more than just tomatoes--we're also growing cucumbers, peppers, potatoes, carrots, lettuce, broccoli, spinach, peas, beans and zucchini, not to mention strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, apples, pears and peaches. Here are four vegetable beds which, if my math is right, occupy about 240 square feet of our back yard.

Our climate hasn't exactly accommodated our gardening endeavors this year--the past month has seen multiple dips from the 80's to 40's, and rainfall has been a nightmare for the folks around here who grow stuff in the ground for a living--but we've been out there, shoveling, hoeing, and tilling whenever the sun offered us a few hours of productive time. So we're not sure what we'll actually be harvesting and what we'll be mourning, but we have high hopes, and, if even a percentage of our little backyard farm yields results, we'll be soon be blogging about recipes assembled from homegrown ingredients...and that could take us to some exciting places.

This past weekend handed us two days of glorious sun, and we spent both days out back, adding our sweat to all those pools of rainwater. Today, of course, my muscles scream in protest. It's important to have little joys to anticipate while waiting for basketfuls of larger joys come harvest season, and that's where this cinnamon ice cream with chocolate swirl comes in: It's how we ended our back-breaking weekend of sunburn and strained...well, everything. I grabbed this recipe and layered in this recipe for the swirl.

  Cinnamon ice cream with chocolate swirl (homemade chocolate sauce pictured in jar).